Silent Hill 2: Deconstructing Daddy

Content warning: body horror, sexual assault, blood, child abuse

Silent Hill, in its ponderousness, its slow reveals and heavy themes, is more like a guided tour through an art installation than an actual town, labyrinthine rooms filled with performance artists, surreal sculptures, and musical experimentation. Nowhere is this more true than in Silent Hill 2 (Team Silent, 2001), which evokes a gallery of atmospheric pieces tortured by grief, the violence of unexamined masculinity, and the death of women. Through the lens of a curated gallery, I’ve tried to invert both the gaze of the game and the lavish praise given to the cisgender male artists so often brought up as “obvious influences.”

Just as James Sunderland spends the whole of Silent Hill 2 looking for a woman he killed, Linda Nochlin asked “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” some FIFTY years ago, in her essay dissecting the creation of art culture as a patriarchal lineage which deliberately impoverished opportunities for women. While these artists are and have always been with us, western imperialism and capitalist judgement have prevented us from even knowing most of their names.

The point of this exhibition is pain. The pain of shifting focus as an observer. The pain of how, after so many decades of feminist analysis, I can read fifty articles about how modern art and film are just like Silent Hill 2 - full of conjecture about art that looks similar by important cisgender men - and not see any of the works by artists I know are direct aesthetic parallels. Here are a few of them.

Room 1

You enter a short corridor. At its end, side-by-side, the exhibition opens with two framed maps from 2001. On the left, the map to Silent Hill that James Sunderland retrieves from his car at the beginning of Silent Hill 2. Beside it is a drawing by Louise Bourgeois, Map of Connecticut and Long Island.

The drawing comes as part of Louise Bourgeois' late series of maps associated with memories, places that mean something. Circled in red several times is her family’s property in Connecticut. James Sunderland is drawn to Silent Hill looking for the “special place” mentioned in a letter he received from Mary, his late wife. As he explores, he marks routes and locations of importance on the map in red marker.

Map of Connecticut (Louise Bourgeois, 2001)

Room 2

You turn left into a room lit by the works within.

Silent Hill 2 is a game about bodies and metal; about plastic and disgust at women, at femininity. It is a game about blood. It's the first discomfort James Sunderland comes across in Silent Hill. Blood and then a shadow that makes him investigate further.

In 1973, Ana Mendieta made a film called Moffitt Building Piece/People Looking at Blood, Moffitt, a collection of shots of the sidewalk, focused on the closed door of an apartment building. Under the door blood and viscera seem to have spilled. Passersby observe the red puddle briefly, if at all, and walk on. Then the camera focuses on the blood, zooming in tightly, as you, the viewer, are made to be the one who must observe, though all around did not.

Moffitt Building Piece/People Looking at Blood, Moffitt (Ana Mendieta, 1973)

James walks through the streets of Silent Hill much like this. If he sees blood he's compelled to follow, though he’s not looking for the source of the blood directly, just as in life we have to be moved to act on curiosity. Moffitt Building Piece, contextually, responded to the rape and murder of Medieta’s fellow student at the University of Iowa. Meditating on the visibility of gendered violence, one that we all know of but refuse to acknowledge is a problem, Ara Osterweil reflects in Artforum:

“If a woman is killed and nobody stops to notice, does it still matter? Mendieta insists that domestic forms of violence are perceptible—if anyone is willing to look. The failure of the passersby is our communal failure to acknowledge and address the suffering of those made invisible by their difference."

The games industry permits such violence as gristle for the machine, both in its workplaces and the stories of games themselves. Silent Hill 2’s narrative puzzle is about appeasing the violence of tortured masculinity, James reckoning with whether those who kill or commit violence can find resolution, and whether the stranger, Maria, is enough like Mary to be her equivalent. It is a game where two tendencies clash, where the blood is followed but towards the man’s goals. James is joined in Silent Hill by other actors of guilt, notably a considerably more tortured woman in Angela Orosco, whose escape from domestic violence never leads to the escape from Silent Hill that James has a chance at.

If James is inhabiting a world made up of monstrous associations with tortured relationships and gender dynamics, we can call to mind further work by Louise Bourgeois as direct comparison. The first artist I connected to Silent Hill 2, Bourgeois’ sculptures often directly contort the human form and it's gendered associations into meshed together flesh, domestic fabrics, and metal configurations.

A major representation of this tendency in Silent Hill 2 is its creature design, famous in the iconic image of “Pyramid Head” and which continually delivers a collection of tortured bodily meldings. The “Abstract Daddy,” a figure representing Angela’s abusive father, looks as though its back and head has been pushed through a fabric stretching frame, a genital-like mouth the only thing to make it through. Its psychoanalytical origin parallels the installation of Bourgeois’s 1974 sculpture (a year after Mendieta’s film), The Destruction of the Father.

The darkened space, lit with reds, centers an altar-like slab on which an assortment of fleshy nodules rise, abstractions of body parts both outer and inner. Surrounding this, the flaw and ceiling bulge with large protruding mounds of similar material. An artist distinctly interested in psychoanalysis, many of her works take on this approach to familial dynamics, externalizing the internal imagery these relationships evoked for her.

Destruction of the Father (Louise Bourgeois, 1974)

Silent Hill 2 is itself distinctly based in Freudian repression manifesting in physical space. With both the game and Bourgeois creating visions of the father as a rectangular flesh pile, the connection between them feels incredibly close. I was surprised when Masahiro Ito, the game’s creative director, told me that he hadn't heard of Bourgeois until I'd mentioned her. When asked if her installations had inspired the game’s design, I was at least glad he reckoned the works’ “amazing.”

Room 3

Walking into a smaller, brighter space, you see a painting hanging on the far wall. As you approach, the title card comes into focus: Rheumatic Pain I (1948) by Remedios Varo.

A portrait of a checkerboard hall of vaulted columns, a woman in a one shoulder silver gown is chained to the foreground column by her arms, back towards the viewer, a knife sticking through an exposed shoulder, her head against the column. The image trails off into a fog of pink clouds.

It mustn't be ignored that, from a disabled perspective, Silent Hill 2’s narrative follows the trend of associating chronic illness with suffering so strongly that it centers it as the motivator of events. It is similar to how one of the few women canonically recognised as a Surrealist, Frida Khalo, has become so associated with her chronic pain that her other works are now abstracted by interpretations based only in an ableist perception of what being ill is and means. Being disabled is neither a godlike quality nor a burden on the world. It is just life, yet something that in shackling you, does so mostly not through pain but in the knowledge that that pain will be used to make you less than human.

As a disabled person, and for the women of Silent Hill 2, this painting is here as an insistence on an encounter with ourselves as whole people. And yet, like the blood outside the Moffitt building, it is also meant to exemplify the experience of power dynamics and of patriarchal society’s ability to ignore pain (the exact things which create James Sunderland’s psychodrama).

Room 4

The next room is based on how exhibitionism and childhood haunt James. Lakeview Hotel - an important space in Silent Hill 2’s interior architecture - becomes a stage for the VHS shown to James of him killing Mary, as well as where he reveals this to Laura, the young orphan friend of Mary who antagonizes him throughout the game.

Moving clockwise, you first see two paintings by Dorothea Tanning. The first, Children’s Games (1942), depicts two young girls ripping wallpaper in a corridor as another’s legs poke out from the bottom of the frame. The torn wallpaper reveals flesh, into which one of the girl’s long hair is caught, vortex-like.

Children’s Games (Dorothea Tanning, 1942)

This painting is accompanied by Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (1943), perhaps the most recognizable work by Tanning and in my opinion one of the most unsettling paintings ever made. It depicts the same themes as Children’s Games, with two girls encountering a monstrous sunflower head at the top of a set of hotel stairs. One of them stands in bliss by a doorway, clutching petals from the flower, while the other’s hair reaches up, defying gravity. Down the hall a door is cracked open, a light left on.

Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (Dorothea Tanning, 1943) — *Eine Kleine Nachtmusik* (Dorothea Tanning, 1943)

These are works that Tanning herself reflects on as being inspired by psychoanalytic thought, and the idea that what she once believed to be knowledgeable assertions about the reality of the world were in fact childish dreams filled with sexual symbology. To me, they represent the immense uncanny power of Surrealism, teetering between the flawed yet compelling nature of psychoanalytic interpretation and the unexplainable, powerful forces of the world which haunt that interior.

Red Room, child (Louise Bourgeois, 1994)

These paintings are followed by the bedroom installations, Red Room (child) and Red Room (parents), both from 1994 and part of Bourgeois' Cells series, a major series of installation works led by a psychoanalytical approach to defining spaces of entrapment. These two bedrooms are similarly claustrophobic spaces, smothered with the rich color of danger in the sheets, fabrics, and even the finish of their walls made of wooden doors. The parallel of child and parent is present, too, in the hotel room that James is led to. While his relationship with Laura isn’t a parental one, his attempts at caring for her and Eddie - the other child in the game - are filled with violence because his approach to them looks past their obvious inner complexities and the bloodiness they show him, until eventually he is able to see them as persons.

Red Room, parents (Louise Bourgeois, 1994)

Turning to leave, you encounter framed extracts from Sarah Kane’s play, Blasted (1995), set in a hotel room with an increasingly violent conflict taking place outside spilling in through a hole blown in the wall. It concerns a couple, the toxic power imbalance between them, a sudden interruption by a soldier from the war, and a rescued baby. As increasingly disturbing violence explodes from the actors, the play builds to a famously controversial scene in which the child is eaten.

Both Blasted and Silent Hill 2 offer an image of a relationship ending with violence in a hotel room. The radical difference is that there is no redemption in Kane’s work, no resolution between the man and the child he is given to care for, nor in Kane’s narratives in general. They defy the idea that toxic masculinity and violence are inherently the same in a way that men must learn to control, instead focusing on the deep social constructions that lead us to this assumption. To Kane, acts that create such guilt do not resolve themselves in the way James’ story might.

Room 5

You arrive at the final room. At its center is the work which first connected Silent Hill 2 and Bourgeois in my mind: Spider (1996), from the Cells series. Both in the way everything in the 90s seems to have been covered in chain link fences, but also by presenting a psychological drama in which perceptions of a tortured woman are both inside and outside of a cell. Spider is a holding space, a chair within a cage adorned with textured and stitched fabrics, guarded by the many legs of a metal beast. Silent Hill 2’s scenes of Maria talking to James through the bars of a cell can be imagined as taking place in this space that Bourgeois has created. Her own otherworld.

In the final act of the game, there is a confrontation with either Maria or Mary. Waiting on a bed in a burned out space with metal flooring, the woman transforms into a monster, tied into a hanging metal frame which lashes down with a long, inhuman limb. It was here that I saw the Spider, with each of its legs as another flash of the whip that punishes James in its last moments.

The spider, perhaps the most iconic symbol associated with Bourgeois, has come to embody a certain type of femininity in her work. Her rending of uncanny, long limbed, exoskeletal metal women is undeniably evocative of Silent Hill 2, both depicting a horrific femininity but for vastly different goals.

That was the image of Silent Hill that I wanted to show you.

Addendum

There are many other works that could go in these rooms, and nothing confines this idea to physical space like a typical white gallery. An alternative exhibition would divest from exclusively women’s art, be set in a dockside warehouse, and feature a performance of The Powers That Be (2015) by Cassils, a nude one-person combat dance surrounded by cars with their headlights on and radios running. Other works would include Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas’ furniture based installation, Yayoi Kusama’s huge, red fabric work My Flower Bed (1962) behind them...and so on…so many more configurations. So much else...so much art.

Oma Keeling (they/them) is a game designer, artist, and writer interested in the history of games and the social impact of games culture. They make games on itch and are on Twitter @OKthanksgames.

If you enjoyed this post, consider sharing it with a friend. If you'd like to help keep the lights on you can buy me a Ko-Fi.