Let the beatings begin

This here blog has been so neglected. Time constraints don't really allow me to produce involved posts anymore. I therefore have gone for something smaller and sillier. If you want the violence to continue, go here. 

xoxo final girl 

Typing of the Dead

Was replaying Typing of the Dead. Combining my absolute and pure love for it and words, bellow yee will find an ode to beautiful phrases featured in the game. This is total stupid celebration. 

IN-GAME WORDS & PHRASES

'Pink tofu'

'Do not operate the flamethrower' 

'Stock options have been very good to me' 

'Why can't I use a toilet?'

'Sphincter' 

'Food nuker' 

'When in doubt, consult your inner child' 

'Hit with a jawbone of a donkey' 

'Large piece' 

'Just looking at you hurts more' 

'Easy as twisting a baby's arm' 

'100% odour free'

'Legwarmers' 

'No. 1 in Asia' 

'Enormous hair' 

'Leave flowers in the boudior'

'Borscht'

'Save the vampires' 

'Finger of scorn' 

'Proletariat'  

'Ka pow!' 

'Organ concerts' 

'Hate the bitch' 

'Which hole?'

'Beefy hands' 

'Highly carcinogenic' 

'Limp-wristed' 

'Domiciliary visit' 

'I just stopped eating globs of paste' 

'Attractive armpits' 

'Hitch one's wagon' 

'Rice blight' 

'Hit by the recession' 

'Bar to my happiness' 

'Wear some makeup, please' 

'Uranium in a bucket' 

'Allergic to zombies' 

'Prize-pony thing' 

'Animation nerd' 

'I'll take him for 8 dollars' 

'Burned ligonberry pancakes' 

'Facial defects' 

'Do-si-do' 

'Communist' 

'Amitosis' 

'Doggy bags shaped like swans' 

'Professional yo-yo-ist' 

'MasterBlaster' 

'A handy tote hag' 

THINGS I WOULD LIKE TO TYPE AT THE DEAD

'The badger is lamenting' 

'Butthole'

'I'm going to be a snake milker when I grow up' 

'Do you have any jam?'

'I like tickles' 

'Proctologist now' 

Thank TOTD. You honed my secretarial skills. This should be played in schools. 

xoxo Final Girl 

NOTE: I wanna play with twitter (possibly check if anyone has ever read this too). So why not tweet @ me suggestions for stupid phrases you would have liked to have seen in Typing of the Dead. 

Suggestions to - @finalfinalgirl (don't forget to #tweetingofthedead)

My, what lovely insides you have...

After extensive True Blooding and experiencing ambivalence towards the sexual content I keep returning to a couple of scenes. Really beautiful scenes. Really visceral scenes. And having missed the tactile quality of special effects ardently for many years I wanted to wax nostalgic over guts of glory and how they go all over the place. Below is a list of the holy entrails... and in no particular order, just appearing as they fall out. 

TRUE BLOOD

Impressive return to the sticky substances in HBO uber popular vampire romp. Unlike the conventions that the televisual medium has developed of vamps evaporating into dust, True Blood gets in your face, your hair and even your cleavage. 

The first vampire slaying takes place on top of Sookie Stackhouse. She has just been attacked by Longshadow and Bill stakes him from behind. He erupts. Spewing blood and coating Sookie before imploding. His sticky remains splashing to the ground. The gelatinous mess insultingly splatters Sookie, who is completely bathed in blood. There hasn't been quite such a proudly scarlet woman since Carrie went to the prom. 

True Blood is a truly joyous change in vampire slayage. 

HELLRAISER

The resurrection scene has never been equalled.  The reverse animation is a clunky, gooey delight. The timing is perfect. It's horrifically, unjustly long. Slowly liquescence seeps through the floor boards in the attic. It pools and gathers gradually gaining form. The anticipation mounts as the liquids turns to substance, the substance solidifies and the solid mass begins to build a body. The physical form  is ambiguous for a while, just dripping body junk. The figure is rising. Your spine tingles and your tendons twinge. Your body physically trying to comprehend the reconstituting body before your eyes. Until finally we have glorious skinless meat. This scene raises hell and the hairs on your arms. 

WIZARD OF GORE

Hershell Gordon Lewis pioneered the effects of splatter cinema. Low low low budget and low low low brow, his ketchup and sausage approach to guts is the happy antecedent of many contemporary mess makers like Tom Savini. When the wizard drills through the centre of his glamourous assistant her collapsing torso spills an impossibly thick substance. He then proceeds to fondle the spaghetti stand-in for intestinal strands whilst the offal of some unfortunate beast literally sits on her obviously unscathed stomach. Wizard of Gore is crude by todays shiny standards of simulation effects but that is its appeal. The absurdity stands out, but there is also the sense of discovery in watching HGL films as you realise that this was the moment when body based horror cinema realised its own disgusting potential. 

PLANET TERROR 

Robert Rodriguez's homage to 'grindhouse' cinema is perfectly putrid. It's an insane and exceptional addition to the saturated  zombie genre. It is incredibly self-aware and relentless in its violence. Memorable scene's include Tommy's death. The doctor Block's son shoots himself in the face with the gun his mother has given him, after the stern warning 'you could blow your head off!'. Cue the release of his brain matter across the screen and dash. It's not often you get to see kids die and it's timed so perfectly that its that awkward combination of pleasure that horror plays with. You knew it was going to happen, it had all been set up, but you know its morally dubious. The scenario gratifies your anticipation and then makes you deal with it. 

The stand out and recurring theme however is slime. Everything oozes in Planet Terror. Everyone is just a huge pustule waiting to pop. The badass Dr Block takes a hit to the face, slime from his patient smears his glasses, drips dangerously towards his mouth and refuses to move. It's the kind of tacky gore that won't quit. It strings and sticks everywhere, evoking these beautiful disgusting words from Sartre: 

'the slimy appears as already the outline of a fusion of the world with myself... Only at the very moment when I believe that I possess it, behold by a curious reversal, it possesses me... I open my hands, I want to let go of the slimy and it sticks to me, it draws me, it sucks at me... That sucking of the slimy that I feel on my hands outlines a kind of continuity of the slimy substance in myself. These long, soft strings of substance which fall from me to the slime body (when, for example, I plunge my hand into it and then pull and then pull it put again) symbolize a rolling off of myself in the slime'. Sartre 

Planet Terror is a mess that you can't get off of your skin our out of your head. Simply remarkable interiors. 

EVENT HORIZON 

Aside from being genuinely compelling science fiction, Event Horizon provides some wicked gorey motifs. Whilst I want to rant regarding time paradoxes, sexual space bending and FUCKING HELL!!!! I'll just stick to the subject. The are two outstanding visceral images for me. Firstly the ghost ships beautiful bodily decoration that would make Ed Gein weep. The deck is hung with skeletal remains and draped with organs. The effects is hauntingly beautiful. 

Secondly, Enucleation has never really been in vogue but is horrifically stunning in Event Horizon. The crew are haunted by ghosts with no eyes. It's so subtle but effective. They open their empty sockets and you can glean into their bloody heads and beyond to the absence of their souls. 

DRAG ME TO HELL 

Sam Raimi's much awaited return to horror comedy is hard to swallow. It is incredibly cinesthetic working on the disgust provoked by the ingestion of perceptibly foul things. Main protagonist Christine suffers a strew of oral abuse. She is macked by a slobbering old witch, swallows a fly, is vomited on with insects, pukes blood, just to name a few. The idea being that we physically respond to the presentation of gross ingestion and projection with our own senses. We are able to imagine these substances entering or exiting ourselves and it's massively effective in its massive quantities.  

xoxo Final Girl 

... this topic will continue as I revisit my favourite body horrors. 

Legions of the Avatarial Undead

Avatars are really fucking obviously zombies. Evidence to follow. Thank you. 

 

Lets define the undead, boring but necessary task. For Zizek the undead are the 'inbetween', they are neither concretely living or dead, hence the middle term 'living dead'. These are creatures that exhibit the markers of life, walking or talking, yet have returned from the beyond of death. Vampires and Zombies fit into this 'non-category' but it may also be the best term for discussing the nature of the avatar. The simulated representational body on the screen indicates life through body form, motion and speech without ever being more than a computer generated object. It is not definitely living or dead and so falls under the type of undead. Aside from the ontological issues the avatars purpose in the game often further determines their undead status. Avatar death is something of a regular fixture in games, occuring when the avatar sustains too much damage but there is an internal mechanic for dealing with avatarial death - the extra life. The avatar can always respawn at one point in the game. Avatars die and are resurrected. In games death is certain but its finality is not and so the respawn or continuance becomes part of the undead discourse of the avatar. 

 

The undead being an indefinite category to which the avatar fits, has further sub-categories into which its figures may sit. In light of the avatars indefinite title the puppet metaphor as well as the player’s relationship to the avatar might be nuanced to assume the roles of zombie and necromancer respectively.  Ewan Kirkland concludes his pronunciation of ‘dead’ game bodies with an illuminating statement; ‘the zombie may be a metaphor for the process of videogame engagement, representing the avatar without player, the computer-controlled figure, without the human soul to make it truly alive.’ (Kirkland: 2009). By way of unpicking this statement the avatar will be constructed as zombie (or zombi) in two ways; firstly, through a physical and behavioural resemblance that pertains to media representation and secondly in metaphorical terms determined by a history of folklore.  

Zombies Behaving Badly 

Perhaps the most notable and popularized depiction of the zombie comes from the visual style of George A Romero, a style that has been repeated and elaborated on since his zombie debut Night of the Living Dead (1968). These zombies are distinct creatures, slow and shambling, unable to negotiate obstacles, bent in posture with arms upraised, glazed emotionless eyes, the zombies are soulless beings motoring on primitive instinct alone. Such behavioural qualities can be seen in avatarial animation in games.

Consider the motion of avatars in the gamespace produced by remote input by the player. The directional controls (analogue stick, wii mote, six-axis or arrow keys) do not produce fluid movement when provoked. Even directing your mini-ninja, lego character or avatarial camera down a straight trajectory can produce jagged movement when trying to align. wobbling and jerking down a path appears illogical, like a zombie uncertain of its motivation. 

In Zombie Zone, whatever avatar is selected, the poor rendering and control design produce zombie-like effects in the execution of certain moves. For instance the 'jump attack' requires precision and control and its direction is inalterable after the command has be executed. The speed with which this attack needs to be performed against numerous enemies often sees the avatar hopelessly jumping and slashing at the bare floor, hitting nothing like the zombie hoards banging at the door of potential prey in Night of the Living Dead. 

Romero invented the contemporary principles of zombie’s destruction as a blow to the head. Horror films often have carnage riddled depictions of zombie slaughter, with their bodies suffering massive violence without halting them.  The zombies physical threshold for damage is reflected in the health meter of games. This facility allows a certain amount of harm on the avatar before a game life is lost, it is a system disproportionate to expected biological norms. Zombie Zone’s avatars have a particularly high damage threshold, signified by the health meter in the lower left corner of the screen. When an avatar takes a hit the screen is splattered with red representational blood and the avatar is stunned momentarily, briefly freezing the controls. the only evidence of the depleting health of the avatar is blood on their body that can be rinsed off with ‘cleansing gems’ that rejuvenate the avatars health also. The persistence of the avatar’s body despite representational harm is a behaviour like the zombies of Return of the Living Dead part II, in which shooting or stabbing them has no effect on their animation, they keep on moving. Even severed limbs and heads don’t stop these zombies they slither and crawl, like so many hits that do not stop these avatars.  

The first-person shooter BioShock, as well as many others, features zombie maneuverings although they are perceived from a different perspective. The mazelike design of the game requires turns in motion often, the sensitivity of the controls however produced jerked movement that often passes the intended point. Couple this directional severity with motion and the commands may produce an unintentional diagonal straif or direct the avatarial camera directly into a wall. Once the avatarial camera is confronted with the wall there a two ways to right the positioning that appear awkward and illogical; the avatarial camera can be motioned backwards gradually creating space for the avatarial camera to be directed elsewhere, or by pressing forward the avatarial camera will slide down the wall until reaching its end. Crashing into things and awkward movement is reminiscent of the zombies irrational motion, ‘twitchers’ thrashing in fountains in Dawn of the Dead (2004). 

In Metroid Prime 3: Corruption (2007) is anther first-person shooter in which the characters hands serve as the only physical presence in the game.  Collecting items, viewing computer log data, and activating buttons are a common feature I the game that utilize the avatarial hands. If the distance from the object is too great or the angle off the hands will swipe fruitlessly in the direction of the object. The repeated attempt to hit the target produces an affect not unlike a zombie grappling for flesh. 

Zombiisms 

The second aspect in determining the metaphor of the zombie avatar pertains to a specific folklore, descending for Haiti. The zombie has evolved in fictional depictions but the zombi traditions of Haitian voodoo represent the nature of the avatar as well as the relationship between player and avatar.

Boon continues to divide the zombie into seven types that might better assert the avatars analogy to the zombie. The zombie invokes many types and has numerous connotations, and the zombie that the avatar is best likened to is a specific model – the zombie drone. This zombie differs somewhat from the popularized ‘zombie ghoul' represented in contemporary horror and defined by the films of George A Romero. This is the earliest type of zombie to enter into western folklore, dating from the American occupation of Haiti from 1915-1934. Tales circulated of bodies raised from the dead to serve in labour. This reanimation is performed in with Haitian voodoo practices. William Seabrook defines their appearance, conjuring and purpose in Dead Men Working in the Cane Fields:

The zombie… is a soulless human corpse, still dead, but taken from the grave and endowed by sorcery with a mechanical semblance of life – it is a dead body which is made to walk and act and move as if it were alive. People who have the power to do this go to a fresh grave, dig up the body before it has had time to rot, galvnize it into movement and then make it a servant or slave, occasionally for the commission of some crime, more often simply as a drudge around the habitation or the farm, setting it dull heavy tasks, and beating it like a dumb beast if it slackens.

(Seabrook in Boon: 38)

The zombie as worker shares function with the avatar. Like the drone the avatar is mechanized. Coded with finite capacities, animations that simulate life and numerous predetermined actions that would constitute their labours. The avatar is put to work in the game by command of a remote control, performing the tasks it is commanded to. The avatar is enslaved in that it cannot disobey, it has no volition of its own to go against the input of the player. A glitch is not disobedience as that would endow the avatar with consciousness, nor could the ‘idling’ poses and cut-scenes of a videogame constitute actual volition as they are predetermined animations. When the avatar performs badly in a game, or ‘slackens’ - regardless of player culpability - they receive corporal punishment. This may take the form of gibs, dismemberment or even temporary life loss to be brought back into the game and the same zombified state.

Peter Dendle’s (2007) cultural analysis of the zombie also concentrates on the zombie drone, though without recourse to the term coined by Boon.  Dendle’s essay The Zombie As a Barometer of Cultural Anxiety, considers the zombie as tied up in a metaphor for the economies of labour, beginning with the Haitian lore and progressing through to consumer capitalism. Essentially Dendle sees the zombie engaged in themes of subservience, from the othering of ethnicity in White Zombie, the dominated women in The Stepford Wives to the mindlessly consuming mallrats of Dawn of the Dead – ‘the zombie is a soul-less hulk mindlessly working at the bidding of another… the essence of the ‘zombie’ at the most abstract level is supplanted, stolen, or effaced consciousness; it casts allegorically the appropriation of one person’s will by that of another.’ (Dendle: 2007, 46-47). What seems to be key to this particular zombie type is the control that is assumed over the undead body. This is reified in the relationship between player and avatar as the player commands (x,o, up, down on the keypad) and the avatar responds. The way in which the control over the avatar is performed might best explain the relationship at work between player and avatar. Taking the puppeteering analogy with a nuanced perspective relating to Haitian zombification lore, the player can metaphorically become the necromancer.

xoxo Final Girl 

CandyGothic

My attraction to the 'gothic cute' has always felt like personal even defining interest. Blythe dolls, Gothlolita attire and games like Gregory Horror Show are constructed of converse stuff, exhibiting more aesthetic sweetness than is safe to consume and at the same time are haunted by typically bleak and morbid gothic tropes. Their curious compatibility is alluring and subject of today's post. As to the title I have pouched the term 'CandyGothic' from fred Botting for repurposing, as the obvious connotations are unacknowledged in his definition. Here the CandyGothic is about the melding of cute and creepy into objects designed purely for mass mass consumption. Yes this is more apt. 

The doll as object always belongs in some respect to the gothic. It is the empty and cold shell of a beautiful body that is at once life-like and dead. Blythe dolls are the quintessential gothic cute, however you dress them up. Blythe dolls encourage customization. Their eyes, hair and cladding is entirely changeable. The wide-eyed Blythe is always so obliging in the horrific scenes of costume change, popping her eyes out to replace with a dazzling emerald, ripping off her wig to implant another tone. This is the element of play offered by the Blythe doll. As a piece explicitly for exhibition play occurs in the inbetween acts of creating gothic identities for the dolls that might be finalized in ironic narrative photography. Gina Garan re-popularized this practice with a series of photographs that capture the gothic in their bodies irrespective of the context. The film captures not only the 'dead moment' synonymous with its medium, but the deadness of these sweet bodies. 

There is little attempt in the design of the doll to approach realism. Their features are, according to S. Masubuchi, definitively cute with their huge eyes and disproportionate bodies that connote naivety and innocence. Their figures are a slew of paradoxes, tiny and large, innocent and sexual, sweet and creepy, all positioned for photographs in live environments that foreground their rigid or reposed bodies.  In many ways the Blythe doll suffers the inverse crisis of the cyborg, not emitting the signs of uncanny life but of empty identity. 

Blythe dolls represent the commodification of the gothic culture, offering ownership over a sub-cultural form that predicates itself on 'not belonging'. Like the punks of Returning of the Living Dead this sub-culture comes to belong absolutely.  Yet there is a production element to these toys and themes that allows the consumer to create identities through making practices. The making of clothes and accessories is a large part of the doll ideal and while the identities imposed onto the doll and reinforced in the practitioner are essential bought, they are worked for at the same time. And through this production the purchasing is sutured over. 

Gothic Lolita fashion extends the gothic doll discourse as well as the commerce. The culture of gothlolita is grounded in an advanced level of making for the purpose of wearing. A premium is set on the appearance of what is produced. Magazines and blogs share patterns and perpetuate the craft of the sub-culture. One applies the doll dress to their own bodies producing an uncomfortable appearance of cuteness on the developing female form. The soft white meringues that flutter around the body, the luxurious black velvets and the complicated knots, buckles, twists and metals that garnish the typical outfit are young with a disturbing edge of age inappropriateness. Projecting what is perhaps a female gaze onto the gothlolita one is struck by the uncanny spoke of by Helen Cixous. Speaking against Freud's interpretation of ETA Hoffmann's The Sandman, Cixous claims that female terror in the story is derived from the idea of becoming a doll. The figure of Olympia represents the objectified woman. Yet the gothlolita girl quite consciously operates within this frame. Beholding the girl of a certain age that has willingly become the doll, however gothic the resonance and willingly transgressed to good ideas of innocence unable to shed the sexuality, is inherently confusing and converse.  

This is probably a draft. 

xoxo Final Girl 

Dolls and Dead Bodies: metaphors for games

There is a trend in games studies to liken the avatar to the puppet, the player 'pulling strings' and making it dance. Under and by this influence the player/avatar relationship is constructed as uncanny and gameplay can be perceived in terms of performance. The entire discourse of the former is invested in a 'lifeness' of the puppet or avatars body in performance, but the animation of these bodies cannot be separated from deadness that precedes it and haunts through it. I want to unpick the living dead object of gameplay. 

Welcome to the Dollhouse

While dolls remain distinct from puppets, Steve Tillis claims that a puppet can be a doll but a doll cannot assume the role of puppet (Tillis: 57), the difference seems to be one of performance and play, both elements that both hold fast in the study of games. The puppet may be a vessel for theatrical or virtual performance and the doll a figure for play, but both are pliable bodies. The doll rather than the puppet is subject to more macabre readings that lend to the darker more cynical construction of an alternate ‘virtual puppet’ theory. 

In her book Critical Games, Mary Flanagan uses the dollhouse in reading The Sims. The games replication of a domestic environment in a virtual space is prefaced with a macabre overview of the changing nature of doll play as a socially constructed form. Using both Freud and Foucault, Flanagan suggests that playing with dolls takes a shift from the expression of domestic ideals to more sinister forms under repressive social times.  Referring to Victorian doll play depicted familial discord and doll abuse, the use of dolls to emulate crime scenes and train criminal investigation as well as grotesque doll creations of the surrealist movement, Flanagan introduces the idea of ‘unplaying’. This refers to subversive play actions such as doll mutilation and the acting out of taboos, actions that are aligned as opposition to socially enforced repressions, from sexuality to oppressive regimes.

Unplaying, manifests in children abusing their dolls, “killing” them, or some other revision of the “care giving” framework of expected play… While at first the gruesome act of killing dolls was seen as subversive, parents eventually encouraged doll death ceremonies in order to instruct girls on family funeral etiquette.

(Flanagan: 33)

The doll may have as weighty a connection to the avatar as the puppet, though Flanagan does not pursue the negative connotations of unplaying in games, the play element available in avatarial control can carry over the doll rhetoric into gameplay. Unplaying is reified in the montage film of Brody Condon, Suicide Solutions (2004). This is a collection of gameplay footage from 50 first and third person shooter games depicting avatarial suicide, player’s killing their avatars. Perhaps considered aberrant in terms of the game texts set imperatives the possibility for intentional avatar death certainly sits within the frame of unplaying, and broader play than it does performance.  There are numerous ways to intentionally kill the avatar in Halo 3, allowing the avatar to be shot by various weapons, falling of high platforms, jumping into water, inverting and reverting gravity.  The player can chose to play with the avatars death, this may take the form of walking into enemies in Sonic the Hedgehog, provoking a witch in Left 4 Dead, getting infected in Zombie Zone. As it has been stated throughout this thesis, games often offer ways to ‘die’ and playing with the avatars death seems to invoke the morbidity of Flanagan’s doll play. The unplaying with avatarial death in videogames does not perhaps carry the political and psychoanalytical context of Flanagan’s dolls, but the specificity of this avatarial play is indeed deathly doll like.

While the puppet performance seems to be championed in terms of life giving performance the doll is more open in play and imbibed with darker process of meaning production, one that Flanagan’s discourse finds inseparable from cultural contexts of repression and obsessed with death. Deaths connection to the doll is not at all unwarranted and the play of ‘killing’ dolls might have a more direct relationship to the doll itself.

Freud’s notion of the uncanny is formulated in regard to his other theories including the ‘return of the repressed’. For Freud the uncanny emerges from a literary text that forces the reader to address what was once repressed. Working from Jentsch’s formulation of the uncanny which conceives of literature that confuses the animate and the inanimate, Freud explicitly apposes the doll’s inclusion in he nuanced formulation on the grounds that it does not invoke the Oedipal complex. He writes ‘the theme of the doll, Olympia, who is to all appearance of a living being, is by any means the only element to be held responsible for the quite unparalleled atmosphere or uncanniness which the story evokes; or indeed, that it is the most important among them’.

Eva-Maria Simms contests that the doll be included in relation to both formulations of the uncanny by virtue of its deadness. Reading the uncanny representation of dolls in Rainer Maria Rilke’s writing, Simms observes a persistent theme of confusion between the toy and the corpse.

There is a… connection between the doll and death, one which we have hinted at and which is so obvious that it is easily overlooked. The doll is a dead body, an inanimate child, an unresponsive rigid corpse.

(Simms: 81)

Proclaiming the doll a dead body, or dead object allows it to infiltrate the Jentsch’s form of the uncanny as it animates with play, but the deathly doll as represented in Rilke allows it to permeate Freud’s model in context. The dead doll, through its association with female innocence and play in childhood evokes a repressed developmental stage. For Simms the dead-like doll relates with the infantile mind that at one stage could not distinguish between life and death and thus provokes a return, an uncanny impression. The deathly connotations carried by the dolls figure may explain the fictional tradition for expressing the scenario - when dolls come to life.

 

Killer dolls

Victoria Nelson’s The Secret Lives of Puppets is a cultural historical analysis of the representations of puppets through literature and entertainment with recourse to their uncanny, supernatural and more sinister manifestations. Nelson’s approach does not differentiate between puppets and dolls in terms of performance and play, rather the approach is progressive looking at the perceived ‘life’ present within constructed bodies from puppets and toys to cyborgs and avatars. 

From the twentieth century, according to Nelson, two schools of thought regarding the puppet asserted themselves, the first perceiving an uncanny soulless body and the second regarding the puppet (and its like) as a ‘Neoplatonic ensouled idol’. The uncanny school perceives the puppet as a lifeless object, born of the hand of man and equally controlled by him. Whereas the Neoplatonic school is evident in twentieth century science fiction, emerging as tales in which the makers and supposed controllers of the puppet are rivalled by them. Terming these puppets ‘divine machines’, Nelson is referring to mechanised human simulacra’s. The anxieties of the divine machine, that somewhat resemble those of cyborg rhetoric, are exhibited in films like Terminator, Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell. What follows the thematic tension of machines returning on humans is a specific representation termed ‘killer puppets’. Taking the deathliness of dolls and dummies, Nelson observes a trend for horrific filmic  depictions of the puppet turning on its master and this scenario set forth might best describe the playeravatarial camera relationship at work in first-person shooters.

Nelson’s supernatural approach to the puppet mythos leads her to speculating on ideas of possession. Referring to a possession of the puppet object, not ownership, but demonic devilish possession. This theme is discussed in particular relation to a set of films that depict the doll or dummy endowed with volition without the use of strings or direct handing from another body, that is achieved through dark or evil forces. Films like Dead of Night (1945), Puppet Master (1989), Dead Silence (2007), ‘The Puppet Show’ episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Childs Play series (1988-2004) all feature possessed dolls.

In both Dead of Night and Puppet Master the puppets are victims of manipulation by an evil master but eventually gain control destroying their operators. In the latter Toulon craves immortality and brings his puppets to life in order to kill people as part of his quest. Eventually the puppets gain autonomy and take vengeance on their master. 

In no time the Divine Machines were casting off their now-superfluous human agents, acquiring supernatural powers along with their freedom. Over and over the old roles were reversed as the newly independent and increasingly omnipotent simulacra first surpassed, then dominated, their human masters.

(Nelson: 258)

For Nelson this type of killing doll is motivated by vengeance, giving deserved death to a cruel master that made them perform murder. There is a second type of killer puppet however, completely autonomous homicidal maniacal dolls.  Chucky, the ‘good guy doll’ from the Childs Play series for instance bares the soul of the ‘Lakeside strangler’, transferred at the moment of his death. The doll kills at random in the quest to reacquire a human form. For Nelson this depiction is a contemporary reflection on the nature of the soul and supernatural alignments with evil. Our inability to determine the existence of the soul whilst desiring it produces paradoxical representations in the form of the killer doll. The supernatural taboos mingle with desires for the spirit and, after life, return as Chucky. 

It is according to Nelson’s account of the representation of the killer doll that the design of the first-person shooter is perceptibly analogous to the killing doll in three specific ways, the positioning of the players representative body on screen, the games required performance and the games rejection of the player.

The first-person shooter does not feature an avatar, but the player is positioned in ‘first-person’ assuming the position of the eyes of a playable character often with an arm wielding a gun being the only physical representation on the screen. In this sense the player occupies the body of the invisible avatar, like chucky, they are possessing it from within. The visual field, in place of a visible body as a players presence in the diegesis is a more suitable analogy than the puppet. The marionette for instance would be more suited to ‘top down’ gameplay in which the avatar is seen from above. There are no visible strings, the players hand is not directly implicated in the motion of the doll but remotely, and the player cannot perceive the physical motion of the body that they command, the position is transferred to an embodied vision of the possessed doll or puppet. In Gaming Mind, Gaming Body Bryan Mitchell-Young uses a particular form of phenomenology to formulate the player’s embodiment in the first-person shooter game. He claims that the players own body disappears in game play, merging with the ‘absent body’ on-screen, leaving only the mind, effectively producing a Cartesian spilt between mind and body. While Angela Ndalianis suggests that the ‘gameplay logic is that the player’s own body, which exists beyond the computer screen, “fills in” the remainder of the protagonists [avatars] body.’ (Ndalianis: 100). Perhaps this is why Nelson refers to avatars as ‘ethereal Neoplatonic daemons’, the player orienting their consciousness and physicality into the absent avatarial body in the game.  

Gameplay in the first-person shooter genre is consistently about killing enemies and the body possessed in the game is controlled with the specific role of killing. The first-person shooter is survival based, set in labyrinth environments that must be negotiated through whilst under enemy attacks. House of the Dead 2 and Left 4 Dead enemies are a variety of zombie characters, BioShock features mutant enemies, Rise of the Triad consists of Nazi enemies and monsters, and in every case the game imperative requires the elimination of the enemy for the played character to survive and progress forward in the game. The impetus on killing in the genre situates the avatarial camera as the possessed killer doll, motivated by the possessor (the player) to kill on command.

However there comes a point in the game where the possessed body seems to turn on the player. The first-person shooters in-game death will occur from a failure to kill enemies, in Left 4 Dead this moment shifts the first-person perspective. If the playable body is ensnared by the tongue of a smoker enemy the avatar body is exposed, dragged forward appearing in the diegesis. The separation from the position of the avatarial camera is a loss of possession and the player is no longer effectively controlling the killer doll or making it kill, it is getting killed. Similarly in House of the Dead 2 the in-game death occurs when the player fails to kill an enemy, the poor possession of the killer doll becomes an equally poor performance of the killer doll manifest on the screen in the conceding of attacks by a non-player character enemy. When the attacks results in in-game death the player loses control completely and is faced with a death animation in which the avatar swoons to the ground like a puppet or doll without a master steering it. At this point the relationship that the player/possessor has to the avatar/killer doll is broken.  The killing performed through the avatar as motivated by the player results in the death animation that signifies the avatars revolt on player as the avatar body is revealed in the death moment and the connection between them is severed. Like the puppet master, the possessor has had a hand in their own death, brought about with their connection to the control of the doll. Taking up the position of possessor in the game is as fated as the supernatural connection forged by Toulon in Puppet Master.

Playable character death in the first-person shooter BioShock takes another form of representation, though its results are ultimately the same as the other two examples. When the character dies the avatarial camera flips simulating a falling body whilst audio and visual feed for a few moments before fading to a menu screen. In these moments the player looks helplessly out of the invisible avatars unblinking eyes without control of it.  Like the Divine Machines, the programming and animations of the games design see that the killer puppet can always turn on its master.

xoxo Final Girl 

FIRST BLOOD: teenage girls that bleed and feed.

In preparation for a lecture on film psych 101 and the up-and-coming release of trash horror Jennifer's Body (2009) I reprised a forgotten love of Ginger Snaps (2000) and visitations to the beautiful and monstrous allegories of the female transition and the importance of first blood. 

The physicality of the horror in such movies is metaphor. A monstrous interpretation of the physical changes incurred during puberty manifested as psychoanalytical archetypes, a context that such films find hard to escape in criticism. What I am interested in is the oh-so-female specificity that sees teenagers bleed and feed beyond the hormonal. This entry will look at the reason these girls transition to monsters and not women. 

Barbara Creed writes of the 'monstrous feminine', a psychoanalytical reading of monstrous female depictions routed deeply in the abject.  The emphasis is heavily on gender and Creed unpacks the ways in which the patriarchal gaze of the cinematic apparatus doubles with Freudian fears to produce beastly women. 

Teen Wolf (1985) follows the adolescent emergence of the wolf in the male. This is non-violent. The change is hereditary, a familial right and rite of passage that the male passes through relatively unscathed. There is no blood and no body count. Yet from beginning to end the context and classification of the female beast in her becoming is quite different, it is born in the non-consensual spilling of blood and it ends that way too. 

The premise of Jennifer's Body sees a teenage girl come cannibal after a sacrifice gone awry. The satanic ritual calling for virgin blood fails because of Jennifer's experience and a daemon takes possession of her dead but rockin' bod. Similarly in Teeth (2007), the character Dawn suffers assault on her way to alterity. Proudly abstinent, Dawn's body reacts to the men in her life that try to coerce her into sex - her vagina bearing teeth. The bloodshed in death upon the alter and the loss sustained in hymen rupture serve the same function - they instigate radical physical change. 

From here each girl possesses a unique but monstrous power over the men in their worlds. Jennifer seduces and slaughters her way through the school, hungry for the flesh of boys who betrayed her. Dawn also grows an appetite, albeit from the nether regions. Having been used and manipulated for sex she harnesses her inner monster seeking out predatory men to dismember. Both characters vengeance is based on consumption. They consume, take into themselves the blood of the gender that drew it first. Sex is the semenal act in both cases, literally enacting the castration that their fair sex symbolizes as a sanguine solution to their original lack. 

The allegory at work in Ginger Snaps operates differently to that in either Jennifer's Body or Teeth , rather than biblical it's biological. In this tale of two sisters Ginger reaches sexual maturity signaled by the commencement of menarche. Out playing a prank Ginger gets the 'curse', blood drips down her leg. Following the discovery of first blood she is bitten by a werewolf and the transformation begins, substituting womanhood for monstrosity. Ginger pays the price for the bloody breach, the exposure of red taboo and the penalty is monstrous. Ginger undergoes full metamorphosis over the months lunar/menstrual cycle. She becomes the embodiment of feminine taboo. She becomes sexually active passing the Lychan infection to her male partner, inflicting him the undesirable essence of the monstrous feminine. She begins to physically regenerate, and with her wounds healing she becomes the impenetrable woman. Furthermore she grows a tail and claws that make her explicitly penetrator. 

Briget the younger of the sisters is trying to rescue her Ginger from taboo. Culminating in the chase scene that has Briget bowing before the transformed Ginger lapping from a puddle of the leading mans blood. She is coerced to consumption by her sisters guilt and the man who came between them is a binding banquet shared.  

Vengeance is in the blood and these girls take back the blood that is spilled, into themselves. In blood these tales begin and so they must end. The woman that bleeds transfuses herself out of the accepted gender role into something other. Thats why these girls bleed and feed. 

xoxo Final Girl 

 

NOTE: The above is what comes from an academic with a hangover up all night with the complete works of De Sade, a copy of Bataille's Solar Anus and some Sutter Cane on her bedside table. COMBO.