2013 in Shit: Conservation of Shadows

The stories in Yoon Ha Lee's new collection Conservation of Shadows are the oily smog that the machine of genre endlessly vomits forth; they are the sunset-beautifying pollution that is expelled after the marketing department and the genre gatekeepers have had their say. They are the material and energy that, deemed in excess of the goals of production and reproduction of genre itself, are loosed to slowly replace the atmosphere itself. Anyone who knows where to look can see the many ways that the conditions of the factory are changing, from little zines like Expanded Horizons to massive autophagic displays like Oblivion to new genre configurations like The Weird; but as important as those are, a factory is never anything but an aspect of a larger ecology.

That Conservation of Shadows begins with the story "Ghostweight" seems, once the reader has delved further into the collection, a strange decision. "Ghostweight" is exactly the sort of science fiction that, while playing with the genre's recognizable tropes, is so thoroughly grounded in the epistemology of the genre that, no matter its variations, cannot possibly be other than science fiction. At every moment the reader knows everything that there is to know, and the discoveries in no way function to fill in gaps. There are no gaps to be filled; new knowledge is always only knowledge that we already had. This isn't to say, of course, that you'll see the twist coming; just that the way it comes isn't as revelation. It was there from the beginning, but in the form, not the content.

As the collection progresses, this epistemology is thrown into question; not, as one tends to expect, in the way that unreliable narrators or strategically withheld information often does, but by consistently using the actual stuff that provide the material and ideological basis of the genre of science fiction as themes within the stories. From colonial subsumption to language that acts to paper and ink themselves, Conservation of Shadows suggests that how we know what we know, in the context of the fantastical genres, is always only ever by way of the real stuff that conveys it.

This materialist critique of the genre is more than just the rhetorical flush of "meta" finding its way into genre from the mainstream. The ampersands in China Miéville's Railsea or the thought experiment presented in Crossed Genres' anthology Menial: Skilled Labor in Science Fiction never ironize or objectify the positions out of which they arise. Instead, they effect an implicit recentering from within; it is no longer tenable, at this moment in history, to simply elide the conditions of production of the text, any more than it was in the 70s to imagine that science fiction could continue to ignore "[P]ollution, the finite bounds of fossil fuel, or foreign wars it was possible to lose."

What this thematizing does is to generate a critique of the political economy of science fiction; by using the genre's tools to foreground its own material basis, what Lee allows for is, rather than more emphasis on an abstracted "craft" or a nebulous sense of social responsibility, a broad comprehension of how the production of presence and absence within the genre is manufactured through both scarcity and sociality. To say this another way: Lee's stories, especially presented together as an anthology, change the face of science fiction. Not by way of polemics, but simply by way of existing, and doing so beautifully.

"Blue Ink" is Yoon Ha Lee's Final Battle at the End of Time story, sharing a sort of uneasy closeness with things like Greg Bear's 2008 The City at the End of Time; it is also his story that is most easily read as a realist narrative. The frame opens with the narrator describing that the story itself has been written in the titular substance; what follows almost requires itself to be read as a faithful psychological rendering of an extended procrastination fantasy. The narrator is whisked away to the generic postapocalyptic final stand, is humanity's last (worst) hope, and tricks the messenger (who is herself in the future, of course) back to change this awful present by refusing the battle to begin with.

The sfnal errata of the story is important, if not especially pleasurable or exciting to read; the rat with mechanical hands who gives the narrator an A-OK gesture is a decidedly science fictional repurposing of an animal associated, through Lovecraft and Jacques' Redwall series, with horror and fantasy. Rats themselves are almost entirely absent from SF, especially in the popular imagination; there is a reason that the trash compactor scene in Star Wars functions so well as a standalone vignette. It borrows the language of horror, briefly, and interjects it into the slick, well-lit corridors that science fictional futurism obsessively depicts.

But Lee's rat is on the side of the humans, at the end, just as the genres are; even Lovecraft, noted misanthrope, ended his life arguing for a sort of humanist socialism. All the baggage that rats in fiction carry, from the Pied Piper and the Plague on down, is forgotten in a gesture, with a little help from science fiction.

But the realism of "Blue Ink," accessible through its It Was (Probably) All Just A Dream frame narrative, complicates the seeming science fiction triumphalism of this gesture. It comes back to epistemology: SF functions by having everything always already be known; as soon as that isn't the case, it becomes hybridized, most commonly with detective fiction. With the dream frame, everything is both known and unknown, all at once and with no possible reductive explanation. Stable objects force the reader to interrogate them metaphorically; character development is no longer coherent and objectively different from plot; narrative valorization becomes silly and untenable as the text itself refuses to couch it. Thus the claims of laziness; readers quite like to valorize narrative, and many, when this is not allowed, feel cheated.

The real critique of the political economy of science fiction, however, is not this deeply embedded symbolic joke at the expense of genre triumphalism, but the use of the substance that titles the story. The blue ink is marked because it is a break from the protagonist's habitual practice; "Jenny Chang usually writes in black ink or pencil," the story informs us after divulging that the blue ink itself is "more than a fortunate accident." This nonhabitual, incidental detail preemptively fractures and fractalizes through the story itself, as a small prologue informs the reader to see in the color "the antithesis of red shift; the color of uncut veins beneath your skin." In his author notes, Yoon Ha Lee mentions that the story itself was typed, and not in blue; this is not, in other words, some sort of magical incantation but a serious, if playful, closed system in which material conditions (the pen that creates the world) shape and order what is constructed out of them. Against the propagandistic declaration that SF is the "literature of ideas," then, "Blue Ink" presents a pleasant little tale which argues the opposite; Science Fiction is a literature of stuff. And crucially, not just any stuff, but specifically the stuff which provides the conditions of its own possibility.

Much of this critique takes the shape of Lee's engagements with colonialism, an integral and often ignored constitutive condition of the kinds of futures that science fiction is able to consider. He does this not through didacticism but, again, by extrapolating on the material conditions of the medium itself. "Iseul's Lexicon," the only original story to appear in this anthology, is described in the author's notes as a story about "tactical linguistics;" and again the fantastical elements are both born out of, and provide a particularly clear lens into, the very material through which the story is built in the first place as well as the traditions which organize it into a conceivable, marketable identity. In Conservation of Shadows language is magic, and magic is materialism.

The success of the worldbuilding in "Iseul's Lexicon" relies on its historical analysis of power. The story revolves around the protagonist's effort to thwart the remnants of an old, defeated colonial power even in the midst of the advances a new one, and to do so she must employ the techniques of the old colonizer against them. This will, in turn, shift the balance of power in the ongoing war in an indeterminate manner. The "tactical linguistics" of the story revolve around the ways in which the universe's magic is itself a product of language; the Genial Ones' (the name given the old power) attempt to reassert themselves into the political realm (or at least take revenge on the humans who usurped them) is by way of a certain magic that can erase a language itself. The protagonist turns this around onto the Genial Ones' language and, in doing so, erases the source of all magic.

In a traditional genre story, this would be fairly straightforward; the protagonist would, despite having all the cards stacked against her, pull off a daring feat that simultaneously cripples both of the enemy forces at once, and in doing so save the world, albeit possibly costing something of herself. But because Lee sets up a relatively complicated history of power within the region, and declines to valorize this destruction of magic except as an unavoidable act of self-preservation, the story sets itself up against the tendency, fostered by its status as genre fiction, to be read primarily through the lens of moralism, and instead suggests that the interplay of objective, historical systems of power determine the condition of possibility for the ability of language to function not just as representation, but as action. Because Lee uses language not as a vessel but an organizing principle of the story, or a theme, it is implicated on both levels: as a component of a well-drawn regional colonial history, as well as what that history, ultimately, is made of.

"Effigy Nights," an earlier story in the anthology about "Imulai Mokarengen, the city whose name means inkblot of the gods," and whose inhabitants are "connoisseurs of writing," picks up on a thematic thread suggested by the origami weaponry of "Ghostweight" but left relatively undeveloped there: the primacy, not just of language in the creation of the fantastic, but of the material on which it manifests. The story focuses on an ongoing military occupation of Imulai Mokarengen, chosen because of its love of writing, and a fantastical resistance in which a surgeon is called to excise the city's legends out of the books in which they are written to create volatile paper heroes to resist the occupation. Like in "Iseul's Lexicon," an obvious narrative progression is suggested here, in which, to only slightly oversimplify, the good guys beat the bad guys, with a little pyrotechnics courtesy of the fantastical. Instead, Lee has the effigies immolate because of shoddy magical practices, and refuses to shy away from the deaths of the inhabitants of the city as much as the occupying army. And, in the end, a city of words and paper that weaponizes the paper by way of the words is, fittingly, a city that dooms itself to be destroyed by its own resistance.

A story like "Flower, Mercy, Needle, Chain," in which each word in the title refers to a different magical gun, seem initially to lie outside of this paradigm. Shapeshifting small arms that do things like erase all memory of the wielder (the Needle of the title) or kill the commander of whoever is shot (Chain) don't, apparently, thematize the stuff of the story in the story itself. And the ostensible theme, a riff on the idea that determinism could run backward from a terminal effect around which all previous cause and effect chains are organized, seems like a mildly novel take on a physical law extrapolated into a story. Which is to say that, for all intents and purposes, "Flower, Mercy, Needle, Chain" appears to be a relatively conventional hard sf story, albeit with the fantastical cranked up a little high.

But where most SF would put the Chain at the center, Lee places the Flower; the protagonist of the story wields a gun which, once it is fired at someone, erases their ancestry. Having fired it once, she is now something like a ghost, as the victim traced their ancestry back 857 years. Having erased the better part of a millennium, she wakes up in a world where her language, her people, and her technology no longer exist; but this is only the backstory. The concerns at hand are of an AI to hire the protagonist to use the Flower to erase its maker from the timeline.

The story, out of context, would provoke an obvious question: why 857 years? Why not the first evolved human, or even all the way back to the first life form in this universe? The answer, as Lee observes in the author's note, is not in the story itself; and yet, for a story which clearly signals itself as science fiction, the absence of surprise at this particular omission speaks volumes. This is the effect, I am arguing, of the fact that by the time the reader has gotten to "Flower, Mercy, Needle, Chain" in the collection, their fundamental understanding of what science fiction itself entails has been changed; it is no longer possible to miss that the particular way in which stories are constructed is at least as crucial to the results of these stories as are the ideas which motivate them. And so a gun which murders ancestry by way of genealogy, rather than, say, genetics, makes perfect sense.

Rereading "Ghostweight," once the reader has absorbed Lee's unique reworking of the genre, proves an entirely new experience. Rather than a beautifully-rendered, if ultimately ordinary, sfnal tale, what is on offer is nothing less than a total epistemological break from the history of science fiction. What reads initially as rote is, in light of the ways that words and paper are figured throughout the collection, indescribably strange. And those opening paragraphs, whose poetic beauty seems at first to stem from their ability to estrange a familiar affect with a unique juxtaposition, are finally revealed as they are. For in Lee's stories the technological novum is not the various fantastika present or the mathematical rigor of structure, but the factory of genre itself, its endless production of texts that serve to reproduce itself; and the importance lies not in the fact itself, but its effects.

9/16: minor fix

2013 in Shit: Menial: Skilled Labor in Science Fiction

My actual review of Menial: Skilled Labor in Science Fiction was published in Strange Horizons in June; this post is basically a bit of errata and setting the stage for tomorrow's review, which will be another piece of fantastical materialist theorizing. Tomorrow's basically the sequel to my review of Menial, at least as far as I am concerned.

I think my review of Menial is the most I've ever drafted anything. It went through at least a half a dozen, all of which were effectively first drafts. I had a really hard time deciding on an argument, some of which is probably still recognizable in the finished product. I think it ended up in a good place; I really did want to highlight the work of the construction of the anthology, and how that played into the idea of political economy. I tend to be less interested, personally, in doing the close textual analysis bits, since I find them mostly unhelpful personally, but I know the opposite is the case for a lot of people and I'm pretty good at it, when I want to be, so I did it.

I don't know if I should try to produce another argument, so I'm going to try to talk about process a little. One of my early drafts, I think, was basically just a couple thousand word riff on this sentence:

The flashback [in "Didibug Pin"] takes a slightly Proustian form, an unbidden and irresistible flood of memory triggered by a simple object; unlike Proust's narrator, however, Lize is swept into this memory not by the sensual object but the economic object.

I really enjoyed "Didibug Pin," but that was a much weaker argument than the one I ended up adopting (which, I assume, won't have convinced all that many folks anyway) about structure. Probably the most useful point I made was that

A genre is only as vital as its canon is contested.

The question of canonicity, especially in genre, has been popping up throughout my work recently, especially in pieces I have written for publications. I think it's something worth considering seriously, as one vector of the ongoing struggle within the community.

Fantastical Idealism (or: To The Moon as Psychological Horror)

Fantastical materialism treats fantastical tropes as technologies themselves. That is, it takes the stuff of genre, those metonymic objects capable of signifying a whole genre simply by their presence[,] and upholds the dialectical tension between the signification and the stuff.

There are, to my mind, a number of ways that a text can move within itself. With regards to To The Moon, a 2011 independent adventure game made in RPG maker, the one I’m most interested in is the idea of “collapse.”

The major collapse in the game, the one that pushed it out of the “interesting and cute, if not all that great” territory and into the “fuck this game” territory, for me, is the one that’s antonymic to the “uphold” in the above quote; when the game decides that the “dialectical tension between the signification and the stuff” needs closure.

To make this claim with less abstraction: in To The Moon, there is a visual/narrative motif of a lighthouse. A lighthouse is the game’s emblem; it features heavily as a slight, ongoing mystery, mostly by being simultaneously a visual and topological anchor. It’s where you find an origami rabbit whose significance hovers in the background throughout the game; it’s what the initially-mysterious name “Anya” refers to; most importantly, it looks good, and seems to touch obliquely on something without necessarily signifying anything.

And then it does.

That’s where the collapse happens. When the fecund image of the lighthouse, seeming to open possibilities, is suddenly given a singular, concrete narrative impetus. When the game decides that that its story is not just holistic, but utterly indifferent to anything except its characters.

I think this sort of move, which might be most visibly tied to those subgenres called “Psychological X” (“Horror” or "Thriller" being the most obvious values for X), stands directly against what I earlier tried to trace out as Fantastical Materialism.

Fantastical Materialism is, if anything, necessarily a mode of reading, and not of writing. It’s an attempt to draw out a certain mode of valuing texts based on how they treat their material, against how we are generally lead to believe they ought to be valued; in this sense, it is a sort of counter-ethics of reception. We are - or at least I was - taught that the value of a text is found in certain writerly conventions, ways of constructing meaning or experience reliant on the weaving-together of certain abstractions through other, privileged abstractions, all of which together produce either meaning or experience. There’s a reason that “text” works across forms. The model remains textile.

Which is all well and good for aspiring authors, I suppose. But I am finding more and more that it glosses over most of what I am interested in as a reader.

So; provisionally, I’m going to talk about the aforementioned tendency exemplified by “Psychological X” stuff as a sort of Fantastical Idealism. Against (and preceding) Fantastical Materialism, Fantastical Idealism would be the tendency to, in the last instance, insist that the “stuff” of a text is determined exclusively by those privileged abstractions mentioned earlier. To The Moon and most other Psychological Horror/Thriller media use character as their focus, but it’s not the only one; in, for example, the Fairy Tale, the idealism is very straightforwardly in the moral, which is to say that the focus is the meaning. In the broad “experimental” genre that encompasses many forms, there are many, many examples of this same focus being on form as an abstract ideal. Generally, I think, whenever an experiment with form has as its goal an unveiling (or even breaking) of what is taken to be The Truth of the Form In Question, a sort of Fantastical Idealism is taking place. Criticism gets in on this too, and very often.

In a Fantastical Idealist text like To The Moon, then, the persistence of a symbol is not a testament to its strength, but to a justification, via (biographical) abstraction, of that symbol within the text. What this does, in short, is to force the reader away from reading the oikos (a house, as well as the root for both economy and ecology) and towards focusing exclusively on how it constructs interiority. The reader is forced to invest not in the world of the text, but exclusively on the characters. And, for whatever perverse reason, instead of seeing this as a reductive move that significantly cheapens both world and character, it is instead heralded as a triumph of characterization.

Backing up slightly; To The Moon is a science fictional game, in which the player takes control of Dr. Neil Watts and Dr. Eva Rosalene, whose work for the Sigmund Corporation involves some sort of machine that allows them embodied access to a patient's memories; with this, they enter the minds of terminally ill (and sufficiently wealthy) patients to rewrite the memories such that, in the instant before they die, these patients can remember having lived out their life long dream. The player is made to understand that this procedure has a cost; the cognitive dissonance of supplanting a whole lifetime's worth of memories is huge, which is why it is only performed on patients in the last moments of their life.

The patient in To The Moon, Johnny, has as his last wish to go to the moon. The dramatic tension in the game initially extends from the fact that, presumably unlike other patients, he has no idea why he wants this. So the doctors must first determine the why, before they can, in his memory at least, alter Johnny's life path in such a way as to accommodate the how.

The gameplay of To The Moon takes place entirely, excepting the introduction and a brief interlude, within Johnny's head. The doctors travel backwards through Johnny's memory by way of certain consistent objects; a stuffed platypus, for instance, links shows up consistently throughout Johnny's memories. So the doctors use it as a gate through which to step into further and further pasts, to determine where Johnny's dreams of lunar adventure arose. To do this the player makes them wander around and collect a set number of orbs to "unlock" the gate, at which point the player must solve a simple block-flipping puzzle before stepping through.

There are two things in my synopsis that are relevant to the collapse into Fantastical Idealism that ruins To The Moon; the first is that the game's narrative frame & hook holistically justify it; the second is that the game's stuff (like the stuffed platypus) and the mechanics associated with it point tantalizingly away from it.

The narrative frame is the reason that the Psychological Horror genre makes sense as a comparison, even though To The Moon is most comfortably situated in SF and either the adventure or RPG genres; the main thread that differentiates psychological horror from other kinds of horror is exactly that it structurally accounts for the collapse into character biography/narrative. That is, it turns holistic textual readings into a kind of explicit solipsism, positioning (usually retroactively, often as a "twist" ending) the textual material as a specific kind of diegetic projection.

To The Moon, to its credit, immediately sets itself up as a text that privileges this solipsistic construction; it is literally a story about being inside someone's head. I am not arguing that the collapse is unjustified diegetically or that it doesn't work. The hugely positive way in which the game was received is testament to that. Neither am I particularly interested in illustrating the ways in which the game is actually not "well written;" while there is definitely a space and a use for valuing writing in that way, I tend to think that space is primarily in writing workshops. As I've said, Fantastical Materialism is about reading, not writing; it is about contending with things as they are, not formalizing new ways in which to create things. To The Moon is, under perfectly valid rubrics, a well written story (even if the sentence-level writing is often abysmal), even, for the form, perhaps greatly written; what its particular collapse does, however, is to shear off all of the "stuff" of the text, which we might also call its possibilities (or which a different value system might call its fat), in favor of that idealist abstraction of character.

To add to the already overwhelming pool of genres I'm claiming To The Moon draws from; where it goes wrong, I think, is in assuming that all generic objects operate like they do within the Mystery genre; that is, it fails to recognize that the repetition of objects in genre is an end in itself, and not a means. Generally (very generally) speaking, the use of repetition in a Mystery, where the reader's pleasure hinges on apophenia, is sufficient cause for speculation and suspicion. Whether this suspicion plays out as the reader expects or at all is one of the possible joys of engaging with the genre; but regardless of how it ends up, the repetition itself is necessarily charged in a way that it isn't in other contexts. Repetition in SF, for instance, isn't structurally apophenic; it tends more towards consolidation (still very generally), in which things which are initially unknown (made up) are integrated into the texture, or world, of the text.

To The Moon initially seems to share this sfnal approach, or at least it did to me; despite the way the text is set up for solipsism, the generic trappings of SF seem initially to override it. And the way the objects are treated seems to support this, from the beach ball rock onward; there is a certain irreverence that points to the idea that while the lighthouse and the platypus and the origami rabbit and the jar of pickled olives can be treated as clues to unlocking the character's interiority, this isn't categorically what they are. There is a strong textual (and even stronger paratextual) suggestion that, as much as the player is in the head of the individual, the oikos is being pointed to.

Which is all just to say: there is a dramatic arc here, for sure, but the interesting stuff is the worldbuilding! Until you find out: whoops, nope. There's actually no worldbuilding going on here whatsoever. Just the melodrama imposed onto space.

More, perhaps, than anything else, this collapse strands those elements of the game which might be thought of as its overt mechanics. The collection of memory orbs and the completion of puzzles works exclusively because they "uphold the dialectical tension between the signification and the stuff;" as actions themselves they are fucking boring. The puzzles suck and the collection of memory orbs is some terrible hybrid of pixel hunting and walking around looking for hidden items in every house in an RPG village. Even as sfnal objects they are weak; if this is really the process that needs to be undertaken every time someone wants their memory rebooted just before they die, there are presumably a hell of a lot of failures. Which isn't even going into the nonsense science of the whole scenario in the first place. The sense it makes is totally conditional on the understanding that these are productively liminal objects - not quite real and not quite signifiers - which is why they can be manipulated within these mechanical abstractions.

But then, of course, it turns out that they aren’t actually liminal at all. They were pure signifier, object of pure interiority. And even though, as the game progresses, these overt mechanics sort of slowly fade away until the player is basically skipping them altogether, the retroactive sense of annoyance is fully justified. Narratively, the mechanical aspect still (sort of) functions; it’s quasi-magical SF, and the unlocking is a sort of scientistic veneer, a metaphorization of the neuronal coding of memory. But what little there is interesting about those acts has everything to do with how they suggest that metaphorization. It’s in the way that they seem to open outwards, to allow themselves to be read, to create space for interpretation. But instead the narrative progresses, the author checks off a box for each, proclaims the correct reading, and they sit there, husks.

2012 in Film: Silent Hill: Revelation 3D

Okay, so it is maybe a bit unfair to lead off with this one. Particularly because I just had a review of it published over at Strange Horizons. But, it being my favorite movie that I saw this year, and since it seems to be in an accidental intimate dialogue with most of the things that fascinate me these days, I am going to suggest that those of you who are interested take the time to read that review, because what I am going to try to do here is draw out some of the stuff I found interesting about the film that I didn't talk about there.

So to begin, the stuff about video games. Specifically how games themselves are structured to absent the protagonist. There are obvious echoes here with my concept of Fantastical Materialism, and the way in which Miéville treats his generic creations with a materialism generally absent even from things like "hard sci fi" and how it then results in an absence of interiority in his characters. An easy reading of this would then be to say that all video games are therefore Fantastical Materialist, and then (hopefully) to throw the idea out altogether, given how video games actually act (both formally and culturally; either way one doesn't tend to see much materialism (except maybe in the moralistic sense) therein). There are other consonances; video games tend to be difficult, if not impossible, to allegorize -- even games like Eternal Sonata, whose premise boils down to "yr anime chopin" (also it is a wonderful game) or Bioshock, with its preachy boring anti-Randian premise saturated through its whole structure, aren't in practice reducible to these meanings -- as well as tending to require, for reasons both formal and of perceived consumer prejudice, much more clearly defined internal worlds & therefore fidelity to what occurs within them. They also almost never indulge in the "it was all a dream!" frame, which, despite being almost exclusively thought of as a form of lazy writing, is basically a way of conflating content to form by breaking the frame. Because the dream-frame is predicated on the idea that the text is a product of a specific interiority, and video game protagonists must be stripped of their interiority, the frame doesn't fit; the few counterexamples I know of, where a game does do this, perform it for much more material purposes than it gets used for in film, as in the end of Super Mario Bros. 2, where the game itself was a reskinned version of a non-Mario game and as such had almost nothing to do with the previous game, even in terms of mechanics, and so the dream-frame presented in the credits offered more of an excuse/apology to the player, a "get out of canon free" card, than a way of pretending that Mario is well-developed enough as a character to have a subconscious. That Silent Hill provides one of the only other examples is also telling, given that it is one of the only video games that engages with interiority whatsoever.

Of course, what these consonances achieve in video games is basically the opposite of what they achieve in Miéville's novels; instead of reconfiguring the ideological base of the form in which they act, they serve to lubricate the transferance that gamers like to call "immersion," which is itself the primary ideological vehicle of the form. The player doesn't need to have an objective interiority structured for him; this is the primary material difference between a player and a reader. The gamer is immersed exactly to the degree that her subjectivity can be made to fill the void that the character/protagonist creates; where the reader identifies, the gamer inhabits. Both are implicated in the production & reification of bourgeois subjectivity, because of the difference of form.

I should note here that I am using too broad a category for the thing I am describing. This obviously breaks down in a lot of places; for our purposes, though, I suppose I am using "video games" as shorthand for the "narrative component of character-driven video games."

All of this, of course, is an extrapolation on my claim that what Silent Hill: Revelation 3D does is to invert this relationship, in the same way that the Silent Hill games do. Which is to say that instead of operating in a form in which idealism & bourgeois subjectivity are predicated on the creation of a central character as void to be occupied, it operates in a form in which the central character produces these same ideological effects by presenting to us a subjectivity which is in the process of being constructed, and uses our and their visuality to short circuit the viewer into identification. By basically not having any characters, and by treating the plot as a paranoid conspiracy/mythological structure become material, it recreates the sensation of estrangement from form that makes the games as effective as they are.

Also, I don't really know where this fits but the video game-y stuff in the movie is so good, Heather checking her inventory in the motel room especially, oh my god that made me real happy.

Now that I have said something that makes this seem like a review or whatever, lets telescope back out and talk briefly about how this lack of characterization intersects with the fact that this is a movie in which the both the protagonist and antagonist are not only women, but the same woman; the villain is also a woman; the main infodump is given by a woman; and the men are either dudes in distress (Harry), totally ineffectual afterthoughts (Vincent), creepy stalkerish detectives (that dude who was a creepy stalkerish detective), or dumb fucking monsters (Leonard, Pyramid Head). Like how the romance arc ends with Vincent awkwardly kissing a really distracted and at best vaguely interested Heather, who isn't necessarily repulsed by him but is a bit busy living out her recurring nightmare, and even the way the scene is shot seems to be aware that this is more them enacting certain social assumptions than True Love.

The question, to which I have no answer, is how treating a film which is ostensibly in the horror genre and which is stacked with female characters as a shining example of an approach toward genre that moves away from the centrality of characters, might create apace for that wretched form of academic misogyny that hides behind interpretive frames to perpetuate male supremacy. Because Heather does spend an inordinate amount of time yelling "dad" into the haunted corridors of the town, and the climactic fight scene does involve a dude (albeit a monstrous one) stepping up to protect a woman from another woman (albeit a monstrous one) & ultimately decapitating her. So while there isn't so much of the shitty moralism of a slasher film, the problem is still very much there, and I worry that claiming the actors aren't characters as such could be used to justify them.

That the film simultaneously reifies & (possibly) subverts social roles, then, is an argument that is not so much in its favor -- even those moralizing slasher films often do the same thing, and whether we take this as a horror or weird film, the sexual politics of the genre provide a legacy which requires much more critical engagement.