Post-War Disjunctions in Domesticity
Posted by Stuart Lindsay on April 19, 2010 in Blog tagged with
Post-War Disjunctions in Domesticity: America, the Family and Gothic in the Bioshock and Fallout Videogame Series
The distinctly American notion of Homely Gothic has been the subject of constant revision, adapting to the shift in where and how people live, and the way in which they defend this bastion of safety and symbolism. From Nathaniel Hawthorn to Cormack McCarthy, the American family has always been the subject of assault, invasion and violation, from both without and within. The modern American family, a symbol of the nation’s purity and assured future, has its origins in the Post-War era of nineteen-fifties suburbia, a time of re-settlement and socio-economic optimism. Videogames, in their re-staging and transplanting of historical period, have returned to the aesthetics of this era, creating imagined horrors with which to superimpose upon the American family: its evacuation of a disaster-ridden area or its substitution by a monstrous double.
The architectural elements of nineteen-fifties Post-War America have been rendered by these game series as a paranoia-inducing Gothic plan. Fallout and Bioshock selectively recycle telltale period imagery and ideas: retro-futurist town planning, a fanatical fear of both Communism and U.S governmental intervention, taking these recognisable Post-War problems and placing them within the games’ own unique post-disaster science-fiction settings. Both games suggest, through their presentation of purposefully antiquated in-game soundtracks lifted from the jazz and music hall of the twenties and thirties, a loss of social innocence found in these earlier times: where the now Post-War America cannot shed the spectre of war and warfare, where the persisting military-industrial complex now influences the technology of the home and its role in serving the family. Fallout 3 suggests a world where before its nuclear catastrophe, miniature tank-like robots operate household electrical machinery: sweeping carpets and mixing cocktails, draining the human capacity for self-rule and instead promising housewives an almost Stepfordian existence. The technology of war is endlessly reconfigured, finding an outlet in every aspect of Post-War family life: from Bioshock’s finger-pointing fire Plasmid useful for lighting cigarettes and gas hobs, to Fallout 3’s simulation of a Chinese Communist invasion of the U.S, which presents instructions on how to survive such an attack. Similarly, Bioshock’s underwater world of Rapture consists of the exploratory ideals from the twenties and thirties, corrupted by the Post-War need to suburbanise its population through military science. The architecture of Rapture, a combination of Art Deco and Jules Verne-inspired Steam Punk has been ruined by the military industrial regulation of the family, producing monstrous role models through the combination of advertisement and its Plasmid economy (a sort of period version of Deus Ex’s biomod system), disrupting the normative relationships between family members through genetic augmentation.
“Are you as good as my daddy? Not if you don’t visit the Gatherer’s Garden you’re not!”
In Fallout 3, the American family has been substituted by the products of the military industrial complex entirely. Set in and around the iconic American city of Washington D.C, familiar locales such as the Library of Congress, the White House and the Washington Memorial stand amongst a city abandoned in the aftermath of nuclear war. The suburban home, endlessly idealised and romanticised by the in-game television and radio broadcasts is itself left in similar ruin, the irony of a dream undone by the very promises of symbolic and economic safety it offers. Into Fallout’s disjunction between family ideals and realities is the player, a wasteland wanderer in search of his father. Beginning in the womb-like safety of the underground Vault 101, the game’s ultimate task is to venture topside and reunite with your father, to reclaim the family you were once part of. The first years of your life, played in a flashback of sorts, document defining family events: your first baby steps, your twelfth birthday, and the bonding of American father and son over a game of baseball. After leaving the vault, it is revealed that other topside survivors are doing the same: attempting to re-establish the ideal family upon the wasteland surface. The Brotherhood of Steel, suited in wartime metal suits, but with the superhero optimism of Post-War children’s fiction (think Superman or Buck Rogers), have carved out temporary safe-zones in D.C through military domination and occupation, as interim bases before full topside re-colonisation can begin. Lacking both the protection of the mother and the instruction of the father, the Brotherhood of Steel are an unguided force, childlike but with immense power, a monstrous double of the American family they are attempting to re-create. This rapid and often violent sense of re-creation and re-attainment is only partial: the stitches in the social network reveal its monstrous omissions. Democracy, the system which elects the leaders of the nation, is now not regulated by the electorate, the family members whom it supposedly represents and serves, but instead by a full-blown militaristic uniform, devoid of the hierarchy of these very family members themselves.
Fallout 3
, much like Bioshock, demonstrates how the excesses of America’s wartime Military Industrial Complex overflow into Post-War family life. These videogames show how militaristic science, in its social and commercial guises, either distort or double the family. Through their use of the first person perspective convention, they put the gamer in the shoes of the orphan, the figure with the absent father and the mother that died before they knew her, representing the violation of American domesticity through technology.
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Hi Stuart,
I think this is another really interesting blog on gaming culture. By total coincidence I played Bioshock2 for a while a few weeks ago having been seduced by the Steampunk-esque quality of the imagery.* It isn’t a very satisfactory game though and I found it all a bit style over substance to be honest.
Anyway, I can’t comment on Fallout but it seems to me that Bioshock’s ‘first person perspective’ doesn’t work in quite the way you suggest. I don’t think you’re necessarily wrong in your conclusion that the game offers an uncomfortable look at the nuclear family. And I’m absolutely sure you’re right about the game’s focus on the ‘economy’ of the family and its link to production and consumption. However, I see the game offering purely fictive roles through the avatars of ‘Big Daddies’ and ‘Little Sisters’ and so on. In Bioshock one doesn’t ‘play’ the part of the orphan, rather one exploits them and literally uses them as an analogue of the productive worker: they are useful because of the excess production they embody. The exploitation of the ‘profit’ and capital they generate is how one advances in the game.
So, rather than seeing the game as offering a critique or analogue of the family, I really see it as flagging up something about consumerism, production, the cost of profit and so on. It’s possibly a very fine distinction, and, like I said, I don’t think I’d go so far as to suggest your point of view was invalid. I’m certainly going to read it again and have another think.
Meanwhile, you might like to look at the Sandman Mystery Theatre comic book series if you don’t already know it. It features a lot of the aesthetics that things like Bioshock depend upon and comes from a similar alternate timeline.
http://www.ghoulgear.com/shop/components/com_virtuemart/shop_image/product/801385d48fe60b738716f0125fb3c26e.jpg
*I’m not sure Steampunk is really the right word for 1920s-1950s alternate pasts but aestehtically I think the imagery works the same way as steampunk’s Victorian conventions do. Perhaps we need a new term?
What I find interesting with the Little Sisters is their resemblance to the vampiric “Little Sisters of Eluria” (Stephen King). I am not aware if Ken Levine, the writer of the Bioshock story, had read this short story but there seem to be similarities. As he explained in an interview, the original “gatherers” were slugs, but because such creatures werent very emotive, they changed them into short and fat humanoids with mutated faces, uniforms like a gas station attendant’s, and a hose with which to extract fluids from corpses. Another version was an emaciated dog with crippled legs.
The final version included in the game is the one of the little “pallid” girls “with a defeated, hopeless demeanor”,genetically altered and conditioned to extract from dead men the substance adam/ red-like fluid. What these different versions and transformations have in common is the vampiric/ sucking qualities of vampires. I am not sure, but would be intrested to know whether more examples can be found in the game that can testify to vampirism.
Hi Andrew! Yes, I think perhaps the first person perspective doesn’t really elaborate upon the role of the orphan, at least not in Bioshock 2. It’s more of an exercise in familiarity to get gamers playing. What it does do, and it’s interesting that you should use the word ‘avatar’ here, is that it simulates the role of fatherhood through technology at the level of repeating experimentation, much like a game itself. The fact that as a Big Daddy you can choose to adopt a Little Sister shows that you’re a surrogate, an engineered replacement in the absence of real parenthood. What I think the First Person Perspective does, especially in immersive gaming like in Bioshock, its predecessor System Shock or even a more action-orientated game like Half-Life, is cast you as an observer and an actor of the social processes and drama that the game presents. What I think the focus here is, which you’ve outlined already, is the machinery of the family, the artificial relationships of its members, and how these connections are mediated by Post-War commerce and technology. Bioshock, rather than presenting actual domesticity, uses technology and perspective to constitute, drain and re-constitute the family. I think you’re certainly right about the period setting; it’s a lot harder to define than Fallout’s (think The Jetsons meets Mad Max). The combination of Rapture’s Art Deco, Noveau, Noir and Steam Punk is a product, I think, of Post-Modern Gothic’s melting pot of time and history. I’ll look into that link you posted: I think graphic novels, like games, are pretty successful when it comes to the hybridisation of period styles.
Hi Aspasia! Yes, there’s definitely something vampiric going on with the Little Sisters. I’m not familiar with The Little Sisters of Eluria, but given the literary references all throughout Levine’s writing, and the similarities you point out between it and Bioshock, it seems very likely that he was influenced by it. One thing that certainly does strike me as vampiric, is the monstrous dependency of the Little Sisters, and the artificial fatherhood of the Big Daddy you play as in Bioshock 2. It kind of reminds me of the relationship between Claudia and Louis in Interview, where a curse or addiction forces artificial or interim families. While there’s always been a sense of vampire/victim as technological/economic transaction, I think Bioshock demonstrates the complete pervasiveness of science in mediating relationships between characters or society in Gothic fiction. Andrew Ryan, underwater Rapture’s founder, talks about the parasites of topside America: government, church and so on; where these traditional invasive or infectious forces towards the American family are now perceived as a corruption against his own ADAM-fuelled family. While totally oblivious to the irony of his own domestic monstrosity, he uses the image of the parasite, the suckling, something akin to the sea slugs which power his people, to characterise these American institutions and define them as an enemy of Rapture citizenship. If you’re interested in Ken Levine, you should check out the other games he’s been part of if you’re not already aware of them: the Thief series, and the System Shock series, both of which are particularly Gothic in their own ways.