When departing from convention in storytelling, there are still a lot of requirements for making something truly oppositional to the status quo. Along with recognisably new if not unique characters and story, a changed structure unblemished by the ideological complicity of existing works that support harmful, dominant attitudes is needed. It’s always been my understanding that sci-fi is the genre most suited to go beyond those rigid boundaries of acceptability our earthly culture institutes, having no necessary allegiance to the world as it is but rather the world as it should be.
Recent offerings, however, have left me feeling trapped in a mechanically lazy doubling down of cynicism and pretentiousness that offer condescension rather than hope. In Man of Steel, a bleak tone and style are used too legitimise a non-sensical dilutionof the purest embodiment of heroism. Even the TV revolution of the last decade has brought only the repetitious Heroes that failed under the weight of its own visibility or the misleading Lost that hid it’s poor plotting and irresolution behind it’s dynamic characters and manipulative score.
Thankfully and in true sci-fi fashion, developments in our viewing technology and industry have landed us the Netflix Original Series Sense8, one of the most genuine attempts at starkly oppositional sci-fi I’ve seen in a long time. Transmuting Heroes’ disinterest towards innovation into a disregard for basic dramatic principles and transferring Lost’s sympathetic confusion between audience and viewer, Sense8 summons an engrossing, wild eyed storm of sensation that makes the experience of watching the series its central, gripping conceit.
Resulting in something of a blend between the vulgar angst of Misfits and the brain breaking incongruity of From Dusk till Dawn, the real challenge of watching Sense8 is deciding how far it is artful in its lack of convention rather than being completely without craft. Where any viewer falls in this divide will come from their reaction to the series’ premise, pace, characterisation, tone and editing scheme. To help the adjustment process, I’m going to share the mental compromises and distortions I’ve made in my desperate attempts to identify and accept Sense8’s approach to revealing a unifying, optimistic and inclusive human experience.
The agonising suicide of Angelica in a burned out church disturbs the lives of 8 people across the globe. Rebellious but compassionate Chicago cop Will Gorsky experiences vivid dreams of powerlessly watching as a strange, tortured woman shoots herself in front of him. In San Fransisco, transgender hacktivist Nomi Marks sees Angelica in a Pride stage show, eventually collapsing from the shock as the hallucinations become more and more vivid. In Mexico City, secretive action movie star Lito Rodriguez begins spouting lines that aren’t in the script and seem to belong to someone else. Isolated London based DJ Riley Blue is mentally transported across continents during a drug trip that goes from euphoric to dangerous as soon as she returns to reality. Hedonistic Berlin safecracker Wolfgang Bogdano’s career defining heist is interrupted as he hears sirens from police cars thousands of miles away. Conflicted bride-to-be Kala Dandekar feels rain on her skin in place of the summer sunshine of Mumbai. In South Korea, violently frustrated businesswoman Sun Bak sees live chickens inexplicably appear and disappear from her desk. In Nairobi, good natured bus driver and Jeanne Claude Van Damme worshiper Capheus develops a fearlessness that opens up new career avenues, as morally questionable as they are well compensated.
Despite their disparate lives, they are all no longer simply individuals; they are now part of the same Sensate Cluster. Along with the inconvenient mental and emotional side-effects of their attachment, the Sensates have the ability to psychically ‘visit’ one another while remaining invisible to those around them and ‘share’ their skills and knowledge when required. The difficulties and intimacies the group now have beyond their own struggles leave them under threat from a shadowy corporate entity.
What seems like a relatively simple premise is almost immediately hampered by the pace of Sense8 and it’s ambitious but frequently tangential cast of characters. Checking back and forth between characters as well as delving into both their dreams and childhood memories, any binge-watch potential is quickly depleted by the sheer mental exertion of keeping up with this baffling, at times boring, blend of stories.
While it asks a lot of it’s audience, this is the first of many instances of Sense8 trying to have it both ways in its approach to spiritual subject matter. Without the heavy handed narration of Heroes reigning it in, Sense8 derives a halting but all consuming energy from its lurches between character’s stories. This allows for energised action sequences to be carried along by the Sensates ‘share’ power but also abruptly tense or dialogue based interludes as they ‘visit’ each other at particularly inconvenient or emotionally vulnerable downbeats. Corresponding with it’s premise, the pace of Sense8 incorporates the electrifying mood its ambition creates as well as acknowledging and co-opting its inherent dramatic failings into the lives of its distinctive characters. Even so, the momentum derived from Sense8’s subject matter struggles to bond with the Sensates themselves. Once again stifled by the size of the cast, there is an alienating imbalance in the amount of time that can be spent with each of the Sensates to maintain the shifting pace. The dramatic consequences here take shape in a distance between viewer and Sensate, switching from one story to another for such long periods in a way that leaves them seeming dithering and weak willed. This is all the worse when these interludes come after a character is faced with a major decision.
However, these slumps in characterisation too fit into the ebb and flow of the series premise as well as its global scope. Moving beyond the early cultural stereotypes of the Eastern nations, the time taken for the Sensate’s to reappear or make choices when off screen reflect an almost tidal meditation and emotional reality as they withdraw from the Cluster and return to their family, professional or hedonistic lives outside of their cross-continental connection. These languid retreats produce a real time, emotionally genuine and tidal interiority and consequence to whatever tragedy befalls them and each course of action they take.
The audience is then rewarded for noticing the inner lives of the characters by the energy it produces, especially when we return to less frequently featured characters after they’ve just had sex or are winding down with some recreational drug use.The fluidity of the characters stories and interactions along with Sense8’s increasingly giddy approach to spiritual unity through introspection, sexuality and drugs that pervade the Sensate’s individual stories stops its stodgy, dragging weakness in a way that is not only refreshing but also disarmingly up-lifting.
Did somebody say trans-continental psychic sexy time?
Along with the heights of emotional intimacy it often reaches through it’s characters inner lives, the true frenzied nature of Sense8 comes full force with it’s tonal shifts between gritty spiritual drama and bawdyfarce. The easy dictum of ‘visiting’ and ‘sharing’ is largely a carry over from the series’ equally out-there movie precursor Cloud Atlas and its accessible dictum of human destiny being shaped by both their ‘cruelty’ and their ‘kindness’. As the Sensate’s powers get progressively more conditional and complicated, though, just such an easy dictum of ‘visiting’ and ‘sharing’ loses its clarity and leaves us awash in the tempest of Sense8’s ambition without an anchor once the pace picks up.
High fantasy...
For those not already consumed by either its tides of energy or drowned by the dragging currents that its adjustments demand, the spiritual springboard of Sense8s premise is buoyed by gross-out humour. While these tonal changes push the mayhem of the series into an overdrive bordering on outright dysfunction, it sharpens the stories messy energy into a system of thinly contained bounces between a sucking mire of dangerous and isolated discontent to the freeing stratosphere of collective empathy. With it’s character’s interiority and each extreme of the outside world, the individual plot threads in Sense8 span a convincing, if chaotic, environment for it’s adventures.
...bowels of reality
Bringing it all home is the challenge Sense8 poses to it’s editor, tasked with marshalling this messy but exhilarating maelstrom of variable pace and tone in a way that is seamless and consistent. A major strength of Cloud Atlas was it’s ability to maintain the audience’s connection with it’s six stories taking place over six different time periods through riveting climaxes and consistent focus on characters that are variously reincarnated in each story. While this editing scheme helped elevate the effective if not incredibly deep message of individual and collective responsibility, Sense8’s long form narrative doesn’t allow for such rapid cutting as a result of it’s attempts to bring such an attitude to the multicultural present.
The editing staff of Sense8, in line with the deceptive prescience of it’s writing, bring out the truly gripping core of the series with their own subversions. Rather than editing around action sequences too chaotic and far between to be impactful or around more languid ‘visits’ which despite their spiritual clarity only occasionally shine with wisdom, the balance between stories instead focuses on involving the viewer in the very confusion the series’ distortions bring on. Noticeably jarring but nonetheless effective, our shifting between the Sensates struggles to reconcile their isolation, connection, sexuality, morality, responsibilities, loyalties, identities, memories and origins mirrors the experience of watching them do so.
Hearts away from home
Assaulted on all sides by the slippery, sporadic sensory overload of Sense8, reconciling with Sensates who have withdrawn from proceedings in whatever state of distress or undress they appear in as well as noticing consistent motifs across stories at last becomes welcoming rather than rejecting. The forceful suggestion that these 8 people are related beyond simple narrative convenience then pulls their disparate realities of disgust and serenity together. Having adjusted our brains to accept identification with these characters, so too can we learn lessons of loyalty and co-operation across the globe thanks to the unifying human spirit unearthed in this optimistic and wonderfully diverse series.
'Yes, no more boob window! What an amazing outfit, the stars and the shoulder pads and the cape and the...diamond butt cleavage? *sigh*'
Should I really have spent £200 on a Wii U specifically to subject myself to yet more internal conflict with Bayonetta? In attempting to achieve any kind of stability or justification for my financially and emotionally expensive commitment to playing Bayonetta 2, I first discovered that it's humanly possible to lament it's continually exploitative gameplay and cinematography that have passed from the first game with not one sign of reconsideration. Still, this possibility doesn’t provide the certainty I was hoping for, since critical reactions to the series as a whole is as conflicted as I am. If you ask Polygon reviewer Arthur Gies, I'm struggling to make the 'mental compromise' to enjoy the game despite the egregious sexualisation of it's female lead for an assumed audience of horny mid-adolescent men. If you ask Ria Jenkins in The Guardian, my fragile masculinity is being threatened by an image of a self-loving, hyper-feminine ideal that is ‘presented as about and for women'. As much as I want the series to change to definitively be one of these, I still want it to stay exactly how it is and not to fit into either.
Bayonetta herself comes up against just such a desperate and unresolvable duality and becomes a more balanced individual over the course of the story. Seeing her take this strain with characteristic swagger, I realise the closest I can get to a clear, certain reaction to this series of games is how close I feel to her as a character. However, if I and other male players are expected to find some level of maturity alongside Bayonetta, the developers need to fully commit to these joyously flawed creations in all their convoluted, baffling glory to maintain their dissonant chaos and relevance to their changing audience.
*spoilers to follow*
Bayonetta's Christmas shopping is interrupted when air show jet fighters are set upon by flying angel horses with dual sabres and gigantic, golden, razor taloned sky serpents. Even paying them in kind for cutting her out of her dress with her quadruple, jewel spangled pistols (one in each hand and one on each high heel), she is then confronted with a baby faced stone colossi with a solitary spiked tentacle on it's left side. Thankfully, the beast falls before her glamorous guns before being sent careering into a high rise tower block and being eaten alive by a dragon demon summoned by her magical hair. Then things get weird.
There's barely enough time for Bayonetta's hair outfit to re-cover her (yes, that's still a thing) as the ‘Gomorrah’ breaks free of it's trans-dimensional portal and claws at it's conjurer. Out of nowhere, Jeanne, Bayonetta's sister-in-witchiness, takes the hit instead. The blow separates her body from her soul, leaving her essence to be dragged away by the opportunistic and hands-y demons of Inferno. As Bayonetta quests to save Jeanne's spirit before it is completely absorbed into the mires of hell, she is joined by Loki, a young androgynous amnesiac wielding a magical deck of cards and one of the least convincing performances by a voice actor I've witnessed in recent memory. Promising each other co-operation on their journey to the revered arctic mountain of Fimbulventr that grants access to either Paradiso or Inferno to whoever scales it's heights, the snarky distance between them slowly levels into a respectful unity as they set about saving Jeanne and, eventually, THE WORLD ITSELF!!!!1!
The supposedly unprecedented change in the balance of power between the angel controlled Paradiso, the human world of chaos and Inferno that caused Bayonetta’s summon to go out of control has surprisingly little impact on the early gameplay, which is almost identical to that of the original Bayonetta. Even four years of production and the massive unlikelihood of a sequel even being funded hasn't dulled the inspiration of the game's heroine from those pens you turn upside down to make the cartoon woman’s clothes fall off. Even with the addition of the Umbran Climax special moves that can bring screen filling, sin coloured griffons and demonic toad gods into your battles with the heavenly hordes and hellish hosts, completed combos always end on a close up of a scantily clad Bayonetta. Frustrated with this and the off-putting proximity of the in-game camera to Bayonetta’s ass outside fight sequences, Gies notes that 'the on-screen chaos you can wreak through skilled play is infinitely more satisfying' than these 'prurient rewards'. He remains at a loss about why this feature (that I have expediently dubbed 'strip summons') have found their way into this sequel. Gies begrudgingly recommends the game after committing to a 'mental compromise' on the basis of this distracting appeal to the male gaze throughout Bayonetta 2.
More of this shit?
However, talk of this 'mental compromise' is also an analytical compromise on Gies' part which devalues or ignores the humanising aspects of Bayonetta that have been achieved, as I wrote not too long ago, by her appeal to a female viewer being not only a defining aspect of the first game but also an inherent part of her character. While Gies sees no reason to think about strip summons beyond their appeal to an assumed male-only audience, Jenkins’ perspective would diagnose his compromise as Bayonetta's 'overt sexuality, her acceptance and love of her own body' making Gies and many of the men playing ‘uncomfortable’. With the agency afforded to Bayonetta in the series previous instalment, such overt expressions of sexuality can be seen as serving her gratification. With this in mind, just as the sexualised gameplay is carried across from Bayonetta and into Bayonetta 2 so is her body positivity in the story cutscenes. At one point early in the story, she poses to admire the reflection of her butt, that she is presented as enjoying as much as the assumed male audience is supposed to, in a shop window. Her self-admiration is treated less like a subversion than in the original game but remains completely in character.
Considering Jenkins perspective, the positive representation of sexual agency in Bayonetta 2 makes the position of Scott Nichols at The Daily Dot that Bayonetta's attitude is diluted for the younger demographic of Wii U users in a way that leaves her overshadowed by Loki's story utterly baseless. In their first meeting, Bayonetta sneaks up behind Loki after he dispatches a small group of angels so that once he jumps aside, as Jenkins identified was the case in Bayonetta, the camera is left to linger on her crotch and leave her defiantly 'thrusting her vagina into the face of the player'. From there, Bayonetta constantly holds her own against Loki's chides by refusing to call him by name and justifiably mocking him for being a bratty, annoying kid. As Loki fails to defend himself from angel attacks and a masked, homicidal ‘Lumen Sage’, Bayonetta then negotiates their co-operation deal and commits to protecting him as she did Cereza, her surrogate daughter and past self from the first game. Later, as her strength and support in pursuing his lost memories gain his respect, Loki eventually puts his own quest on hold to help save Jeanne from Inferno. Pairing her sexual self-assuredness and heroics, Bayonetta is dominant once more. Here, the mental compromise and perceived passivity of Bayonetta 2's heroine is contradicted by humanising attitudes that are carried over from the story of the original game.
Your parachute pants impress no-one!
While Jenkins' perspective renders Bayonetta's characterisation in a more nuanced way than merely serving the gratification of the straight male player, she gives near total agency to a fictional character as to her own depiction, ascribing agency only fleetingly to the developers. Not only does this potentially undermine the defiance she assigns to the many crotch, ass and boob shots that litter the story sections of Bayonetta 2, this chaotic meeting of real world and fictional agency reveals a frustrating division of purpose, especially in how contradictorily certain narrative events are framed. Accompanied by the removal of agency from Jeanne and other female characters, these choices make Bayonetta’s ambiguously positive sexualisation an agonisingly visible limit on Platinum Games’ claim to subversion that Jenkins credits them.
As Bayonetta frees Jeanne from the glass womb of hell queen Alaruna's spider boss-form, she loses more and more of her aloof attitude. Progressively unable to treat the rescue as repayment for Jeanne's rescue of her in the first game, Bayonetta begs that she isn't too late to revive her sister. Realising the strength of their relationship only when she thinks she has lost it and showing her vulnerability rewards her as Jeanne reawakens. Expressing this sensitive side in opposition to her domineering throughout both games gives Bayonetta enough dimension to dispel some claim that her sexualised power that leads many to dismiss her as a sexualised object for male consumption is definitive.
In a dauntingly contradictory twist, Alaruna is punished for attempting to rid Bayonetta of Jeanne and the opportunity to be more vulnerable by being reborn as a whip, a literal sexualised object, by Bayonetta's demon arms dealer Rodin. With this almost painful swerve from rewarding Bayonetta’s vulnerability with humanising value and punishing Alaruna’s vulnerability with sexual objectification, we get an insight into the unique dissonance that is the source of my obsession with the Bayonetta series. This confusion as to how aware PlatinumGames are to the criticisms of objectification levied against them take on a new tension as Jeanne’s role as the damsel in distress, her rescue from a hostile womb and Alaruna’s punishment brings out Bayonetta 2’s central themes of disempowerment and rebirth.
Punished for sharing Bayonetta's stage?
When the thematic concerns and sexualising gaze of Bayonetta 2 meet in the game’s finale, how and if Bayonetta herself will be reborn turns the wheel of mutually detracting tension that we’ve come to expect. As clunky and convolutedly as in the last quarter of Bayonetta, it is revealed that Loki is one half of the god Aesir, the god of chaos who created the magical Eyes of The World that allowed humans free will. His evil doppleganger Loptr, jealous of the Sovereign Power to be reborn into the future that Loki stole when he divided their identity, set a plan in motion to reclaim this power as well as the Eyes. Murdering Bayonetta’s mother in the Witch Hunts and sending her father, the Lumen Sage and keeper of the Right Eye of The World Balder after Loki and Left Eye of the World Bayonetta, he succeeds in getting all the power he needs in one place as they arrive at his palace on Fimbulventr. Draining Bayonetta of her power as Left Eye and casting her aside, his monologue continues as Bayonetta looks shocked while lying on her side at an angle to give another completley jarring ass shot. In another sadistic display of dissonance, the audience is expected to take as much pleasure in Bayonetta’s disempowerment as we did her sexualised dominance early on. If Loptr is to be believed, this anachronism represents the ‘chaos’ that humans (ie. the audience) desire and so must be regimented under the consistent regime of divine subjugation. A good part of me, frustrated with the suggestion I need to see yet more of Bayonetta’s butt to stay engaged with the story, was inclined to let him win.
Save us, Doctor Manhattan!
As disempowerment in the context of Bayonetta 2 is accompanied by some kind of rebirth, though, Bayonetta and Balder settle on the idea they have been made more human by the loss of their special status as Eyes of The World and their true power is that of being able to choose free of Aesir’s direction. Since it’s still a video game, the two exercise their power of choice by punching, kicking, slashing and stabbing the shit out of the second God allegory the Bayonetta series has offered us. Loki then disempowers Aesir by using his control over ‘nothingness’, the core of chaos, to delete the Eyes of the World from existence. Aesir is then left powerless and naked enough to be sent flying off the mountain and eaten alive by a Gomorrah summoned by Jeanne (fully clothed) on a nearby fighter jet. Gratifyingly, Jeanne’s inclusion and lack of strip-summon points towards an inclusion of more introverted sexual expression. This final blow leaves the ending to Bayonetta 2 free of the need for equivocation or compromise and utterly satisfying as a result.
Further positive potential for a future Bayonetta game flourishes as the room made for Jeanne is again expanded to include Bayonetta’s vulnerability free from sexualisation or contradiction As Aesir’s spirit attempts to escape his ruined body, be reborn into a new time period and keep on his megalomaniacal rampage, Balder dives in front of the escaping ghoul and becomes possessed by it, weakening Aesir in the process. Although Nichols believes that this self sacrifice and Bayonetta’s agreement to refer to Balder for the first time as ‘Daddy’ as he is cast back in time to the events of the original Bayonetta infantilises her, it is in fact the beginning of her maturation. Having rejected Balder as the cartoonish patriarchal villain he was in the first game, she has over the course of Bayonetta 2 learned more about him, realised she cares for him and then loses him as she feared she would Jeanne. This development closely mirrors the move past a kind of adolescent angst and into the sobering growth that grief brings.
As Balder is reborn as a throwaway villain, Bayonetta is reborn as a vulnerable but more mature heroine. After Loki’s spirit returns to the aether to be reborn as someone new and Bayonetta returns to the New Years sales, one of Loki’s magic cards drops from a baby’s pram. She stops, contemplates and smiles just as another horde of angels sets upon her and Jeanne as the credits roll. Here, she recognises that her need to protect children and her vulnerability outside her standing as a sexualised power fantasy for the audience (and perhaps herself) will invariably resurface and prepares to face it in the same way she does the physical threat of the angels.
*Casablanca reference*
As much as I’ve now come to appreciate the fragmented, convoluted dissonance that Platinum Games seems to value in the series, I’d happily have taken any damage to the story’s pace that having Jeanne’s adventures in Inferno could have offered here. What was Alaruna’s plan in digesting Jeanne? Why did she turn up in Alaruna’s lair instead of some other hellscape? PEOPLE NEED TO KNOW.
Not only would a future inclusion such as this show an allowance for Bayonetta’s welcoming Jeanne into her newly secure vulnerability by sharing the spotlight and practicing what Platinum preaches about the value of choice, it would give an even greater contrast since Jeanne’s sexuality is expressed less overtly. This would help the series to gain appeal while and remain relevant to a developing audience along with showcasing Bayonetta’s transition from ‘strong female character’ archetype into a more mature, developed heroine and by instructing that dividing her sexualisation as ‘for men’ and her humanisation as ‘for women’ weakens her as much as Loki did Aesir.
As with all my reactions to this series, though, my faith is divided. Considering the inconsistency in Bayonetta 2’s presentation of vulnerability and Jeanne’s sidelining being perhaps motivated by her introversion in comparison to her ‘sister’, the possibility of returning to drooling over Bayonetta’s distancing, limiting sexualisation remains. This choice would diminish Platinum Games’ claim to depicting chaos if the audience can always expect the same.
My demand in short is thus: give me a baffling, insulting, exploitative mess of a game with more resonant, gratifying and creative developments in it’s characters and world that I’ll continually fail to properly express my feelings about.
More of this shit!
References and research: http://www.polygon.com/2014/10/13/6957677/bayonetta-2-review-wii-u - Arthur Gies 'Bayonetta 2 review: Heaven and Hell'
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/aug/05/lara-croft-bayonetta-female-games Ria Jenkins 'From Tomb Raider to Bayonetta: what is a strong female character?'
http://www.dailydot.com/geek/bayonetta-2-review/ Scott Nichols 'Gameplay shines in Bayonetta 2 but it's heroine falls flat'
Some blogs I looked at concerning a woman character saving a damsel or 'badass in distress':
http://maybegenius.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/damsels-in-distress-legend-of-korra.html Damsels in Distress: Legend of Korra and Tomb Raider by published author S.E Sinkhorn
https://girlslikegiants.wordpress.com/2013/06/26/a-survivor-is-re-born-or-playing-tomb-raider-after-anita-sarkeesian/ A Survivor is (Re)Born or Playing Tomb Raider after Anita Sarkeesian by Brian Psiropolous
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/video-games/columns/experienced-points/10266-Lara-s-Damsel-in-Distress 'Lara's Damsel in Distress' by Shamus Young at The Escapist
So, the male gaze in film. In her seminal essay ‘Visual
Pleasures and Narrative Cinema’, Laura Mulvey points out that in classical
Hollywood film, women fill the role of passively accepting male views and desires.
This leaves them as simple supports or rewards for men, as they are 'controlled
and fetishized' over the course of the story. Since I seem to have
subconsciously made the choice that this blog is going to be mostly about video
games now, let’s think about the male gaze in a medium where control over any
playable character is a defining feature. In one of her outstanding series of videos 'Tropes vs Women in Video Games', Anita Sarkesian points out that, from the introduction of the first
up-right arcade console in the 80s, the fetishization of women has been a
recurrent theme of advertising games to a straight male audience. Models in these adverts are mostly shown pushing
themselves up against the peripherals in whatever skimpy gear was most thematically
suitable (leopard skin bikinis for jungle adventures etc.). Sarkesian says that, just like the games, the women are presented in a way that suggests they are there for men to play with.
Without more complex representation within the game or wider culture generally,
women, regardless of race or sexuality, are made to identify with this dehumanizing
perspective before interacting with the machine itself, however temporarily. Even when women are the
game’s protagonist, their first order of business is to sexually appeal to male
players, whether in leather cat suits, breast plates that are more breast than
plate or whatever personal peccadillo the game developers want to take for a
spin.
Few examples of the hyper-sexualisation of female characters in video
games are as fitting as Bayonetta.
While she is ludicrously objectified from the very start of the game, a
bizarrely significant effort is made to humanise Bayonetta herself. The
balanced competition between performing for and being empowered under the
male gaze by the game’s end results in a unique resonance between two characterisations
that conventional wisdom would suggest are at fundamental cross purposes.
Taking my lead from the acrobatic star of the show, I’ll try and manoeuvre out
of the blind alley reasoning of whether or not Bayonetta’s sexuality ‘belongs’
to her that dominates discussion of this game and pick out what made this cheese-y, convoluted and poorly scripted action game have such an unexpected effect
on me. From there, I’ll make the point that Bayonetta’s
primary provocation is directed towards making space for
characters that are sexy, human and, an added twist, female.
*Spoilers to follow*
As much as I love Bayonetta,
I still have to bend over backwards to set up a coherent plot synopsis for it
(the game itself cuts through any primers as quickly as possible to get to the
boobies it takes such pleasure in). Bayonetta is the last survivor of the two
hundred year-long Witch Hunts throughout Europe. The hunts came about from a
schism within the controlling forces of the world, the Umbran Witches and the
Lumen Sages. The pact of non-interaction between women whose power comes from
the demons of Inferno and men whose divine energy comes from the angels of
Paradiso was broken when a witch and a sage had a child together. The ensuing
battle for total control of both omnipotent gems known as the Eyes of the
World, one trusted to each clan, resulted in the witches’ near extinction. 20
years later, Bayonetta survives on a new pact with Inferno. In exchange for
information of her forgotten past, she guards freshly buried corpses and kills
the angelic host that come to claim them for Paradiso, leaving them up for
grabs by the hordes of the underworld. When she finds out that both Eyes of the
World are under the Lumen Sages control, she must fight through redoubled
onslaughts of angels to prevent the puritanical priests from recreating the
world in their image.
Writing out the plot, accurately or otherwise, makes Bayonetta sound much more complex than
either the box art or gameplay suggests. From the start, the experience of this
game can be described as, in Sarkeesian’s glorious estimation, a choose
your own porno adventure. All the potential for Bayonetta as a
character is boxed in by hypersexuality. The Umbran Witch power of acrobatic
untouchability is expressed by her doing stripper moves, leaning back and
wrapping her legs around switches as she pulls them. Being kick-ass and
physically domineering mean she is a dominatrix, complete with full-body
leather cat suit and overuse of the word ‘naughty’. Her knowledge of Umbran
lore means she’s a sexy librarian, complete with British accent and constant
salutations to glasses fetishists. What results is an odd combination of the
epic, gripping presence of Storm from X-Men
and the maniacal and innuendo obsessed bartender Mad Moxxi from Borderlands.
Even so, three fetishes just weren’t enough for PlatinumGames. To regain health and attack or defence power, Bayonetta sucks
seductively on lollipops. More egregiously, completing attack combos
successfully forms ‘Wicked Weaves’; anthropomorphic limbs made up of
Bayonetta’s hair that erupt from demonic portals to knock murderous angelic
choirs for a loop. Since Bayonetta’s outfit is also made up of her hair
(seriously), the summoning of these limbs cause most of her clothes to
temporarily come off (SERIOUSLY). Sarkesian points out that the player, testing the boundaries of freedom
offered by the game, is indirectly encouraged to literally strip her. Still not
satisfied, any of Bayonetta’s other special moves end with her in a sexualized
pose followed by the snap of a camera lens. Without contest, the gameplay of Bayonetta is the domain of the male
gaze.
What's interesting about Bayonetta comes later, when the focus is on what isn’t seen. Bayonetta’s witch powers
make her invisible to humans. Also, avoiding being hit or touched by angelic
enemies over the course of combat fill her magic gauge to power Wicked Weaves
and special moves. While the player is again privileged by always having
Bayonetta in sight and grasping the controller is closer than most the angels
will get to touching her, the first subversive edge to the game is revealed
once Bayonetta takes too many hits and ‘dies’. Choosing to quit the game causes
Bayonetta to regain consciousness and scream in terror just as she is dragged
to Inferno by thousands of grasping demonic hands. Contrasting this with her
swaggering confidence during gameplay shows her as a fetishized object that
welcomes and enjoys the male gaze but who does not want to be touched.
Bayonetta’s invisibility can then be seen to place her
outside the patriarchal double bind of female sexuality. This contradictory
social structure says that ‘pure’ women must not draw heterosexual male
attention and must dress modestly and reject any sexual contact. However, if
women reject men’s advances, they are equally disgusting as ‘impure’ women who
welcome the male gaze and have many sexual partners; those that touch them in a
way that the rejected man feels entitled to do. In the context of this game, women
operating under either of these categorizations render them visible to humans
by this virgin/whore dichotomy. Outside the social structure of the human world
entirely, Bayonetta cannot be seen or touched by anything other than angels and
demons. The power of the Umbra Witch is to resist simple, sexist
categorization by men outside of her realm of influence.
From here, the potential for Bayonetta to actually be an positive representation of womanhood starts to slowly rise, subverting her objectification and showing her
dominance. This growth is shaky at first, overbalancing from the lack of world
building. Vigrid is a much less stable location for the off-hand
references to fairy tales as well as Dante’s Inferno inspired theology. As a
result, it’s never clear whether Cheshire, the male secondary protagonist of
the story, is a regular human or the human form of The Cheshire Cat from Alice
in Wonderland. His insistence on being called ‘Luka’ suggests the former. Since
there’s little evidence for the latter, I’ll assume he’s just a regular
womanising photojournalist with a cool scarf from here on. Pursuing Bayonetta
for killing his father (his mother is never seen or mentioned) after he freed
her from her amnesia inducing nap at the bottom of a lake, Cheshire seeks to
capture her on film to show Vigrid the witch hunts aren’t over. He continualy fails to manage this, since Bayonetta’s ‘true form’ doesn’t show up on his camera and she is invisible to him unless she wants to be seen. This failure of
men to capture Bayonetta under the gaze that cameras represent then subverts
the special move snapshot animation that objectifies her. Whatever sexual pose
she strikes is neither recorded nor all of what she is. Her performance for the
male gaze in this instance is fleeting, as her resistance to sight and touch
returns when she throws herself back into combat.
You can't see me
While this choice could just priviledge the player's constant sight of Bayonetta through the fluid camera work of gameplay, their discovering of her 'true form' is also fragmented by the style of the game's cutscenes. Taking place over comic book like frames of 35mm film with constantly moving surroundings but stationary characters, a narrative space almost devoid of the male gaze performance of gameplay is opened up. These scenes construct Bayonetta's past, with each scene giving more of her backstory as rewards for clearing gameplay sections. The essential seperation of story and play in games are used together to show Bayonetta's 'true form'.
The resonant balance between male gaze and female
empowerment that makes Bayonetta so
fascinating takes full shape with the inclusion of Cereza, who contributes even
more to the convoluted story, its exaggerated structure and the thematic undercurrent of agency that the game unexpectedly makes its focus. After her introduction as an translucent, human-realm dwelling shadow in the game's early chapters, Cereza, a five year old girl who can see and be seen by the human, hellish and heavenly worlds is saved from angelic execution by Bayonetta. She instantly assumes this makes Bayonetta her ‘mummy’. At first unloading the child on Cheshire
to maintain her adventurous manoeuvrability, Bayonetta is convinced of Cereza’s
worth after she applauds and cheers mummy’s ability to kick divine ass. Cereza’s
identification with and appropriation of the male gaze centred combat brings her more into
Bayonetta’s world, resulting in two escort missions where Cereza’s continued
safety leads the player through check points. The most interesting of these
missions comes as you escape a sinking plane after a battle with Jeanne,
another hypersexual Umbra Witch who works for Paradiso and the Lumen Sages.
Assaulted by angels on all sides, Bayonetta casts a spell that places Cereza
into an opaque shield that the angels cannot break. Here, Bayonetta protects Cereza
from the angel’s onslaught and from the dehumanizing male gaze of gameplay
sections while still allowing her to watch her own performance for it. In doing
this, Bayonetta admits the appeal of
identification of the male gaze to a female observer and creates a safe space
for their pleasurable watching as well, complicating the simple titillation
that pervades the gameplay.
This unexpected self-awareness charges Bayonetta’s narrative with a pro-feminist energy that fully allows an
overlooking of its confusing story. In a rush of clunky
exposition, it’s revealed to Bayonetta that not only has she been carrying one of the Eyes of the World all along (safely secured in her boob window) but that Cereza is her past self : the child whose birth broke the truce between the
witches and sages. Returning Cereza to the past (somehow, magic I guess), a
refrain of ‘Fly Me to the Moon’, used in gameplay to highlight Bayonetta’s
untouchability and freedom takes on a sad, vulnerable tone as she sings Cereza to
sleep. Here is where Bayonetta gains
most all its feminist credentials. Cereza, witnessing the sexist human
world of the virgin/whore dichotomy and Bayonetta’s joy outside of it but not the fact Bayonetta is her future self chooses
to follow in her mummy’s pistol stiletto footsteps. Bayonetta realizes that the
choice she made to be an Umbra Witch to avoid the in-game marginalisation of mothers means she is forever at a distance from
being able to care for and nurture another as a mother would. The player watches
this dominatrix/stripper/sexy librarian connect with a deeper, non-sexual part
of herself and so, in turn, do we. Even under the male gaze, Bayonetta not only makes its central character’s
agency part of its overall make-up but also presents admiration by a female observer as more genuine and humanising than that of the male gaze in revealing Bayonetta's 'true form'.
The structure of the game then takes this affecting message and
exaggerates it in a way that counter-balances the objectification of
its start. The end of the final ‘chapter’ of Bayonetta trails off into a down note where our sexy human hero is
captured by final boss Balder (also her father…I don’t care, I’m invested) who
will use the newly active Eyes of the World to rebuild the universe according
to his perspective. In the ‘Epilogue’, the player takes control of Jeanne, betraying Paradiso to
save Bayonetta and stop her being forced to create life she has no say in.
Swapping the tying up of loose plot threads with the final climax of the game,
the exaggerated structure of Bayonetta
builds to a critical mass of positive representation. In response, Bayonetta herself swaps the
passionate but marginalising vulnerability of motherhood that is cut off from her
with the equal, mutually protecting companionship of her ‘Umbran Sister’ Jeanne. Within
themselves and between each other, agency and sexualisation go hand in hand.
The landing has finally been stuck on a perfectly balanced glut of dehumanizing
male gaze at the start of the game and humanizing female agency at the end,
leaving Bayonetta left with nothing
but the curtain call.
No butts before besties: Jeanne's agency and sexualisation balancing out Bayonetta's own
This grand finale reveals the tension at the very centre of Bayonetta’s resonant (or is it
dissonant?) heart. Not only are we treated to Bayonetta pole dancing over the
credits, she also performs a post-credits burlesque show. This post credit
sequence, headlined by Bayonetta and Jeanne’s vanishing clothes, leaves us
wondering whether the amount of character development they went through can
justify this either freshly dehumanizing or emphatically empowering end.
This final split
comes down to the dissonance of the male gaze and the extent to which
audiences, of any gender, identify with it. Given it’s underscoring of
Bayonetta’s choice to express her sexuality so overtly and making the power she
gains from it an explicit part of gameplay, I felt more than happy to indulge
in this performance. Thinking more about it though, there’s no way my reaction
is universal. Those who suffer objectification in the wider world and are alienated by it's constant presence in games have been made to wade through this same objectification
before Bayonetta is humanized. It would have been simple, if less structurally interesting, if her agency were highlighted from
the game’s beginning.This latter perspective tips the balance I thought the game had settled on into
a less than complete victory for women in gaming.
Still, I don’t feel Bayonetta
has completely failed in its goal because of this imbalance. Instead, its two
pronged provocation of the male gaze makes a challenge to the cultural problem
of objectification and sexualisation in general. This game, with a contorted,
hypersexualised woman on its front cover, still found space to humanise her. The suggestion that
sexualisation and empowerment work independently as well as in tandem would be
well learned by wider media. If there were more representation of women
humanized by their choices, their consensual sexualisation or both at once, the
unsteady friction of this final performance would be of little concern. Further, Bayonetta's seperation of narrative and gameplay shows that humanization can be shown independently of sexualization as well as resonate together as Bayonetta and Jeanne's sisterhood shows. In a
culture and industry that struggles to represent or imagine women outside of their
appeal to men, Bayonetta makes room
for both appealing to the dehumanizing male gaze while also counteracting it.
All that follows is for more games to follow suit.
Hey, developers? She’s looking at you.
Some references and further research:
‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ by Laura Mulvey:
should be widely available to most and I imagine will make an appearance in
most feminist film criticism 101 books
To see the male gaze in action, watch Alfred Hitchcock’s
masterpiece Rear Window. Notice how
all the unsuspecting women under Jeffries’ camera are defined by their body
parts?
*EXTENSIVE SPOILERS FOR BIOSHOCK, BIOSHOCK INFINTE AND BIOSHOCK BURIAL AT SEA.*
I set this March aside for replaying the entire Bioshock series, anticipating the
release of the final DLC which would signal the end of not only my favourite
game franchise but also Irrational Games, their creators. As I say goodbye to
the story of two cities filled with horror, corruption and infinitesimal yet
irrepressible hope, I realise how it, more than any other media I’ve experienced,
contains and defines the human experience. In exploring what I found in these
games, I hope only to share these practical lessons with you.
Above all else, the Bioshock
series is a master class in world building. The ceremonial unveiling of the
underwater city of Rapture in the first game, with its neon billboard studded high
rise towers glowing eerily both from within and from the spotlights dancing
over the external structures remains the most overwhelming sensation I’ve
experienced playing any game.
The grip on the player this revelation takes never ebbs due
to the city’s distinctive history. Andrew Ryan, the founder of Rapture, sought
to escape the post World War II nuclear arms race by building his underwater
utopia and inviting the finest artists, scientists and doctors to live under
the rule of ‘enlightened self-interest’ whereby they are free to live any way
they choose without any kind of governmental restriction. The scientific miracle
discovery of the ADAM stem cell that grants Rapture’s residents the ability to
teleport, move objects with their mind and fire lightning from their hands made
the city the progressive ideal Ryan wished for. The side effects of the drug driving all who
use it homicidally insane brings a new arms race to Rapture, with all of the
cities progress ceasing while each resident hordes more and more ADAM to
increase their power and destroy their competition in a brutal class based
civil war.
As your imagination is flooded by Rapture, your moral
character is also tested.So as not to
be wasteful, orphan girls implanted with the sea slug which secretes the stem
cell patrol Rapture syringing ADAM from the corpses of citizens who didn’t last
under the cities Social Darwinist demands. Forced to horde ADAM to survive your
imprisonment in the city, you are given the choice to give these children back
their wills for only a small ADAM return, or to ‘harvest’ all the reserves these
‘Little Sisters’ carry, killing them in the process.The cut scene that is cued by choosing the
latter is so traumatic that a player feels like they’ve lost a piece of their
souls within this broken, isolated city.
Pragmatism at a price
While it could be broadly identified as a ‘dystopia’, the
detailed atmosphere of Rapture built by audio diaries recording people’s
experiences of the city, the uniquely off-putting ADAM advertisements and
propaganda announcements over tannoy systems make it a dystopia like no other.
Evolve today!
Developing beyond the unique creation of Rapture, Bioshock Infinite, the third game in the
series, offers the flying city of Columbia; a utopia with a dystopia hiding
inside of it. Through the eyes of
desperately indebted private detective Booker DeWitt, the player explores the
floating paradise held aloft by atoms suspended in space/time which was founded
by Father Zachary Hale Comstock in order to spread America’s message of freedom
and peace amongst men throughout the world. Being a symbol of American
civilization in 1912 unfortunately means that Columbia is also founded on
vicious white supremacy, with the city elite building golden statues of John
Wilks Booth and mythologizing his brave, necessary assassination of Lincoln who
was misguided enough to abolish slavery.
'What did the Great Emancipator *really* emancipate the Negro from?' - Father Comstock
Pulled apart by this outlandish ideological contradiction,
tears in the fabric of reality appear all over the city that can be opened by
Elizabeth, the young woman imprisoned in an angel statue that Booker is charged
with rescuing.
Escaping the city involves traversing these tears, allowing
you to see the city from both the perspective of the oppressed class of black
and Irish workers known as the Vox Populi and the tyrannically bigoted ruling
Founders. The corruptions and hypocrisies of Columbia in true Bioshock tradition come to indict the
player themselves, as Booker’s uncovering of the city’s secrets only bring out
his own brutality and destructiveness.
As much as these cities are characters in themselves, it is
the unforgettable people that make these places their home that secures Bioshock’s prestige. Along with the cruelly indifferent Andrew
Ryan, who taxes the oxygen produced by the trees in his underwater park, Rapture
swarms with enemies who could easily support their own horror movies. Among the
most distinct are Doctor Steinman, the plastic surgeon turned vivisectionist
who seeks the perfect human face with the supernatural powers of ADAM at his
fingertips and Sander Cohen, the frustrated performance artist who takes to encasing
his protégés in clay to express his muse.
'ADAM denies us any excuse for not being beautiful' - Steinman
It’s insubstantial to talk about these characters as end of
level bosses, since the fights against them involve little differentiation from
coming up against normal ‘splicers’, the aforementioned psychotic ADAM addicts
that make up Rapture’s population.The terror
felt when facing enemies in Bioshock
is always subordinate to tragedy; you aren’t fighting criminals, aliens or
zombies, just people who have ended up destroying themselves in the pursuit of
absolute freedom.
While BioshockInfinite exhibits the same level of
detail in exploring the impotent, self-congratulatory despot Father Comstock,
the affable slave tycoon Fink and the righteous but sinister Vox Populi leader
Daisy Fitzroy, it asserts itself as my favourite game of the series (and of all
time) for introducing me to Elizabeth. Both inquisitive and soulful while plagued
with uncertainty, she repeatedly questions the barbarism Booker commits while
trying to escape Columbia, at one point knocking him unconscious with a wrench
once she realises his selfish motivations for freeing her.
'Are you real?'
The exemplary human tragedy of the Bioshock series flows from Elizabeth, having the freedom to change
reality around her but being forced to ascent to Booker’s violent and myopic
view of the world to prevent her being dragged back to her tower by Songbird,
the giant mechanical bird that was her jailer.
Stripped of her innocence and her optimism, Elizabeth
nonetheless asserts herself as dominant once she gains full control over her
powers after destroying the tower that was her prison. Accessing every
viewpoint in the multiverse, she discovers that Booker and Comstock are the
same person, with the only difference between them being which of them believes
they deserve salvation of the atrocities they committed in the Boxer Rebellion
and Battle of Wounded Knee. Drowning
Booker in a baptismal lake, Elizabeth, the damsel in distress freed from the
bonds of this overused trope by Bioshock
Infinite’s metaphysical subject matter, saves the game’s hero and kills its
villain at the same time.
The stunning twists in the Bioshock series come as a direct result of the intimate worlds they
create. In the first game, you are lead to comprehend Rapture and its history
by your guide Atlas, a socialist organiser who takes on the role of your
shoulder angel to Ryan’s shoulder devil, each hacking into your remote radio at
different intervals. Taking on the task of avenging Atlas’ murdered family by
killing Ryan, the kind of brute logic the action genre take as read, proves to
be a part of Atlas long con to control Rapture himself.
Rapture’s ability to reveal the hypocrisy and incapacity of
its citizens extends to the player, as killing Ryan has indicted them in the
corruption that defines the villains of the game. Defeating Atlas isn’t the end
of this moral scrutiny, as the player’s treatment of Little Sisters determines
whether you leave the city in peace or bring the Rapture nightmare to the world
above the waves when the splicers fall under your control.
The ending of Burial
At Sea, so richly complex it can be defined as the fourth and final instalment
of the Bioshock series culminates all
the particulars of its predecessors to deliver a mournful but inspiring end to
a series that characterises itself in those exact ways. Elizabeth, trapped in Rapture by a
recently deceased alternate version of herself, realises that, as a result of Bioshock Infinite’s twist ending, she has been brought into the cycle of
violence and revenge that defined Booker’s hypocrisy all along.
Unlike the murderously egotistical members of Rapture’s
undersea criminal underworld who only serve themselves, Elizabeth realises that
sacrificing herself to eventually free all the Little Sisters, a choice left to the player in the first Bioshock,
is the only way to produce anything good from the Rapture disaster. Freeing
Atlas from jail and putting his plan to take over Rapture into motion before
dying by his hand, Elizabeth’s corruption is washed away and the purity of her
sacrifice sings in time with the closing credit rendition of ‘La Vie en Rose’.
Elizabeth, in her final moments, mirrors Irrational’s position, leaving us with
a pristine, intimate, closed story and bowing out before greed can consume them
as well.
Even with Bioshock
finishing and Irrational Games closing, for me the series will never truly end.
Whenever I realise my own hypocrisies and inadequacies, I will plunge from the
clouds of Colombia back into Rapture, to have my self-satisfaction washed away.
No longer blinded by self-interest, I will escape the Rapture state of mind by
treating others the way I did the Little Sisters; benevolently allowing them
opportunities I could have just as easily taken away. This pattern being an
inescapable cycle of human nature, the Bioshock
story, for those who played it, will never truly end.
