Silent Hill: Darkness and Love

As a fan of Silent Hill, I was excited to hear a second movie, Silent Hill: Revelation, was coming out. I hesitated to watch it, however, because of the drubbing it received from fans and critics alike. Which is too bad. When I finally watched it, it opened up a key element of the series for me: the role of love.

The protagonists of the games and movies often go to the mist-shrouded town of Silent Hill and brave its horrors to find a loved one: a spouse, a child, a parent. In the first movie (trailer), Rose (Radha Mitchell) goes in search of her daughter Sharon and must face twisted monsters, psychotic cultists and Dark Alessa, the seriously wicked little girl who is Silent Hill’s nastiest denizen.

In the sequel, Sharon (Adelaide Clemens) now goes by the name Heather. She and her father Harry (Sean Bean) have been on the run from the cultists, who want Sharon back so they can place their god in her. When they capture Harry, she returns to Silent Hill to save him.

 

What struck me as I watched Silent Hill: Revelation, was how the series is, at bottom, about love. Playing the games, the survival-horror aspect always commands the most attention, but Revelation highlighted the determination and courage Silent Hill protagonists must have to face the small town’s horrors.

Saving loved ones is hardly unique to Silent Hill as a plot driver, but what Silent Hill has isn’t merely love in the face of danger, but love walking into the jaws of some truly evil shit. There are armless men who vomit poisonous gas, attack mannequins with their limbs all wrong, shapeless gargantuans stumping through the fog, and--a classic and personal favorite--zombie nurses wielding rusty surgical tools.

Meet the Janitor:

 

We all know love can lead to some dark places--obsession, low self-esteem, infidelity, fights, divorce and worse--but Silent Hill is not about that, it’s about something brighter: the strength of love in facing darkness. In Revelation, despite numerous warnings from her father and her friend Vincent, Heather never blinks in the face of old and new horrors. She must help her father, and in doing so she faces newbies like the Mannequin-Spider as well as old veterans like Pyramid Head:

 

Not true to life? No, very true to life. Is it not for love that we take a demeaning job to feed the family? Or face nights caring for a sick and vomiting child? Or visit a grandparent with severe Alzheimer’s who raves unintelligibly? That we drive past the sign that says “Welcome to Silent Hill”? Or search for a way toward the inhuman moans? Or advance into the dark where something is definitely going bump?

The terrors of real life are the horrors of Silent Hill, with one crucial difference: the former are real and can hurt you.

And yet we face them.

Sure, the thrill of Silent Hill is largely the horror, but the series would not be lasting--so far it has had a moderate run, lasting since 1999 through nine video games, two movies and other assorted media--without this simple but powerful kernel of human truth about love in darkness, facing all the demons, opening all the doors, exploring every corner, and fighting all the monsters until they’re dead.

Or you are.

The Silent Hill movie franchise is said to be up in the air, but Revelation ends with Sharon’s father returning into the mist to find his wife Rose. Wouldn’t that be a fitting way to finish a trilogy?

 

The Pre-Raphaelites and the Apostate I Have Become—Spider-Woman (4)

(continued from “Really Living”)

The artists of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood are known for their lifelike portrayal of models rather than representations of ideal human beauty. John Everett Millais’s model for Ophelia was fellow artist Elizabeth Siddal and it is hard when looking at the painting not to see a woman who actually existed rather than the character from Hamlet.

 

This corporealness, this earthiness, this this-worldliness pervades even the holiest of subject matters. According to the exhibit text, this was scandalous to Victorian England. Gabriel Dante Rossetti’s Mary in Ecce Ancilla Domini is--with her flushed lips and placement in bed--erotic.

 

Which reminds me of writer Brian Michael Bendis and artist Alex Maleev’s 2009-2010 Spider-Woman series. The covers had an eye-catching style, and as I read, I was struck by how lifelike Jessica Drew/Spider-Woman was. She looked like someone I had seen standing in line at Safeway, jogging by the waterside or reading in the park. Or at least like someone I might see doing those things.

 

 

It was no surprise then when I noticed the comics credited actress Jolynn Carpenter as Maleev’s model. She has stunning looks, but they are a real person’s looks--which is to say they are imperfect and unique--and the effect on a medium dominated by cookie-cutter features is an artistic statement. Emotionally, it makes the character more human and easier to identify with. Physically, it emphasizes the flesh of the real woman behind the image, which is both enticing and unsettling.

Using a model for a superhero may not appear to have much to do with religion, but the Victorians must have experienced an analogous frisson when seeing the Virgin Mary painted with such earthly candor as in Ecce Ancilla Domini. As with Maleev’s Spider-Woman, the Pre-Raphaelite painters idealized the real instead of denigrating the real as a poor copy of the ideal, and their art benefitted from it.

The women in the Pre-Raphaelites’ works occasionally have their eyes turned toward Heaven, but the painters themselves had their eyes fixed on earth and its inhabitants. I am not sure to what extent the Pre-Raphaelites were Christians, but I think the controversial turn in their work serves as a good indication of where we should focus our attention. Enough looking for the divine in the otherworld. Seek the numinous in this one.

 

The Pre-Raphaelites and the Apostate I Have Become—Really Living (3)

(continued from “Human Drama”)

What began with a quote about how the Pre-Raphaelites viewed the Bible as a source of human drama soon became a theme when I saw the following depiction of the story of Noah’s ark, titled The Eve of the Deluge and painted by William Bell Scott:

 

We see Noah and his crew in the lower right-hand corner boarding the ark while a prince at his leisure gazes on and a storm brews in the distance. The typical interpretation of this story is one of smug, sometimes also sad, condemnation of the worldly for their wicked ways, followed by triumphant declaration of their impending doom.

As I gazed on this work, however, I found that I was more sympathetic toward the prince and his hangers-on and even found something admirable and noble in them. If the purpose of existence is not simply living on but really living, then I would rather be up with the heathens, where there are creaturely comforts and time for reverie.

By contrast, Noah and his family are an indistinct crowd slogging through a cloud of dust to board the ark for what is sure to be one long, miserable hiatus from the world. Their wretchedness, their suffering, puts me in mind of the dying masses who reap death as the deserts of sin in Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s painting The Triumph of Death, as well as of those whose portion the Book of Revelation says is “in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur.” (Revelation 21:8, ESV)

 

In this light--the light of some freewheeling associations--the heathens in The Eve of the Deluge represent a higher type, those who refuse to grovel in religious terror. For me, the wicked have become the godly while the righteous are now the iniquitous.

How’s that for a neat series of moral inversions?

 

The Pre-Raphaelites and the Apostate I Have Become—Human Drama (2)

(continued from "The Lady of Shalott" )

The works of the exhibit “Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde” were arranged in categories. One sentence in the commentary at the beginning of the religion section jumped out at me:

“To the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the Bible was a treasure house of human drama in which to seek not theological but literary and poetic meaning.”

This struck me as a refreshing way to read the Bible. I know ways to read the Bible. You can view every jot and tittle as literal truth, absolute and eternal. You can figure the Bible is all true somehow--if not literally, then metaphorically. You can mix and match as suits you. You can roll up your sleeves for the historical-critical method. You can ignore the Old Testament for the New and look for moral instruction: “What would Jesus do?” You can mythologize it. Or demythologize it. Really, you can do as you please, but I get a little weary of all that.

So how about just read it like a story?

I’ll admit, the Bible soured for me when I realized the idea on which it was founded and the assertion it was designed to promote--the existence of God--was a fantasy. Nonetheless, there are some deep characters there, some fine dramatic action, and plenty of literary merit. As the years pass, certain stories from the Bible will come to me, and instead of those stories shining light on my experiences, my experiences shed light on the stories. I think, “Ah, this is the point of the story!”

The Bible can, for all its uselessness as a textbook of facts, provide insight into the human spirit--our emotions, our travails, our moral dilemmas--and do so in a profound way as a work of art. The way Anna Karenina does. Or The Satanic Verses. Or DOA: Dead or Alive. We all get something out of stories even when we know they are fiction.

I suppose it encourages me to think that such eminent artists and thinkers as the Pre-Raphaelites, kindred spirits to a certain extent, could have the clarity of vision and boldness of spirit to approach the Bible this way over a hundred years ago in Christian and Victorian England. It’s an approach that affords a kind of truth, just not the kind that will make me go to church.

I am, after all, an apostate.

 

The Pre-Raphaelites and the Apostate I Have Become—The Lady of Shalott (1)

Under tower and balcony,
By garden-wall and gallery,
A gleaming shape she floated by,
Dead-pale between the houses high,
      Silent into Camelot.

--"The Lady of Shalott," Lord Alfred Tennyson

When I heard that the Mori Arts Center Gallery in Roppongi was having a Pre-Raphaelite exhibit, I didn’t so much find time as make time to see it. “Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde” is on loan from the Tate Gallery in London and features 72 works, primarily paintings. I can’t imagine a better way to spend one of those free days circumstances occasionally turn up.

I first encountered the Pre-Raphaelites when the poster fair came to my college and I bought English painter John Waterhouse’s The Lady of Shalott. Its almost photographic realism, the mythological subject matter and the damsel’s intense sadness made an incredible impression on me. Only years later would I learn that John Waterhouse was a later and lesser known artist of a school known as the Pre-Raphaelites.

 

The Lady of Shalott dates to 1888, 40 years after the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was formed by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Paraphrasing the exhibit text, the Brotherhood’s members were tired of the strictures of the dominant artistic styles of the day, which saw the works of Raphael as their highest expression, and instead turned to artists pre-dating Raphael for inspiration even as they introduced their own innovations.

Most widely known as painters, the Pre-Raphaelites were also poets, manufactured textiles, and printed books. William Morris even wrote some of the earliest modern fantasy fiction. Occasionally, their works find their way into my collection: poetry by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his sister Christina Rossetti, a copy of The Canterbury Tales illustrated by Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris, and Morris’s The Wood Beyond the World on my iPhone.

All these years, the Pre-Raphaelites’ style has remained one of my favorites from the history of art, but there is no doubt that I experience their works from a different perspective today. Having abandoned the airy faith of my youth for robust atheism as an adult, my reactions to the exhibit paintings depicting religious themes was surprising even to me.

 

This post is a little short, but it's really just an introduction to a short series of posts in which I'll go into this a little further.

Human, All Too Human: Man of Steel

“Meditating on things human, all too human . . . is one of the means by which man can ease life's burden.” --Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

 

To my mind, if director Zack Snyder has a film that approaches the elegance of Watchmen, it is Man of Steel (trailer), his reboot of the Superman movies. Watching it recently, I started thinking about the nature of Superman, human nature and freewill.

Man of Steel begins on the planet Krypton at the time of Kal-el’s birth. His parents send him to Earth to save him from the planet’s impending doom due to overharvesting of the planet core. Later, we are treated to a portrait of the superhero as a young man named Clark Kent working odd jobs and trying to keep his powers secret. When prison escapee and surviving Kryptonian General Zod shows up and threatens to destroy Earth unless Kal-el turn himself over, Clark must decide where his loyalties lie: Krypton or Earth?

This is the quintessential Superman dilemma. Like most superheroes, he is a walking identity crisis, but unlike other superheroes, he is not merely torn between two personal identities, but between two races light years apart. The movie points out through Jonathan Kent, Clark’s father on Earth, that Kal-el/Clark is both Kryptonian and human. That’s fine, but it seems more appropriate to me to say that he is neither. After all, Superman is defined by his super powers, which neither humans on Earth nor Kryptonians on Krypton have. Either way, his situation is an unsettled one.

And in this, he is essentially human in the broader existential, as opposed to racial, sense. He finds himself in an exaggerated form of the human situation, asking all those questions we humans must: Who am I? Where am I going? Why am I here? German philosopher Martin Heidegger would have said that he--like all Dasein, the only being that questions itself--is uncanny, never finding himself quite at home in the world.

Like the rest of us, Superman must exercise his free will in determining his place. At least as best he can.

For the most part, that isn’t particularly new or insightful, but it occurred to me while watching the film that Zod, while he is Superman’s enemy, is merely the other side of the human coin. Whereas Superman is able to choose who he will be and what he will do (and has been blessed with two sets of parents who went to great lengths to save that privilege for him), Zod possesses no free will. Like all other Kryptonians save Supes, Zod was genetically engineered and grown for a specific purpose in life. In the words of the general himself:

“We could have rebuilt Krypton on this planet, but you chose the humans over us. I exist only to protect Krypton. That is the sole purpose for which I was born. And every action I take, no matter how violent or how cruel, is for the greater good of my people. And now, I have no people. My soul, that is what you have taken from me!”

This, too, is the human situation. Far from being free, we are limited by current circumstances, our background, our genes, and much, much more. The history of science and ideas since the Industrial Revolution has introduced a string of determinisms that have steadily chipped at free will until there is little room left for it at all. The curtain has been drawn back to reveal not a man working a machine, but just a machine carrying out its functions.

It isn’t a very flattering way to think of ourselves, but it is part of who we are as human beings.

If there is an inhuman character in Man of Steel, it isn’t Zod but his steely sidekick Faora. Zod elicits some sympathy because he is, after all, trying to save his people, but not so Faora. She is less intent on saving the Kryptonian race than she is on destroying the human one:

“You are weak, Son of El, unsure of yourself. The fact that you possess a sense of morality, and we do not, gives us an evolutionary advantage. And if history has proven anything, it is that evolution always wins.”

This is another kind of determinism, but an evil one. Her philosophy has less to do with biological evolution than social Darwinism and the eugenics of Nazi Germany. These are, admittedly, human philosophies, but ones that we can only describe as inhuman.

Just as we are all Batman (blog), so are we all, by virtue of our human quandary, Superman. And that should come as no surprise, because they were created by us to express our human, all too human concerns.