(originally published in Brazilian Portuguese in https://blog.retinadesgastada.com.br/2010/10/juiz-de-si-mesmo.html)
James Sunderland is a man torn between love for his late wife, Mary, and the avoidance to confront the circumstances of his death. Silent Hill 2 will place you inside the skin of this tormented hero (?) As much as is possible in any other audiovisual experience. As if the synesthesia of this event was not a challenge enough, this journey will lead you both into the basements of the human mind, deeply distorted (or translated) in the form of the grotesque ghost town of Silent Hill. There are monsters, there are enigmas, there are battles and desperate runs amid dirty and degrading scenarios. But do not be fooled by the false appearance of this locality and this game. Silent Hill 2 is a sad game, the saddest game I’ve ever gone through.
The crossing begins in front of the mirror. Without prologues or contextualizations, James appears before his own perplexed face in a disgusting bathroom by the side of the road. He has not yet reached Silent Hill, but the city is already there: on a billboard on the wall, in the filth and in the purpose that moves him. James received a letter from his wife, his wife who died three years ago, inviting him to a special place, for the return of a happy time impossible to be relived. As in a dream, or hallucination, you do not know who they are, what they do or where they came from. You do not know how it got to that point or what happened in the past, but in a few seconds the trail is already extended, literally and figuratively, a narrow line leading from the last bastion of civilization, an empty gas station, to the limits of the city of judgment. What James still has not realized is that there will be no turning back. Not for him. Not for you.
We Are All Victims
What did James see in the mirror? What did he want to see? Subjectivity is the rule of the game and throughout the playthrough we will find four other characters, four other perspectives of self-inflicted suffering: Angela Orosco, Eddie Dombrowski, Maria and … Laura.
Angela Orosco has a terrible past of childhood abuse and crisscross the city oscillating between suicidal tendencies and apathy. Martyred, she can not shake off her blemishes and walks to destruction with a vacant look. As James Sunderland, there is nothing the player can do to recover her from her stupor and even heroic acts have no effect. For all intents and purposes, Angela is doomed. For a crime he may not have committed, but judged with extreme harshness by his own unresolved sense of guilt.
Eddie Dombrowski balances on the thin blade between the executioner and the victim. His paranoid motivations make him both a pitiful individual and an enemy to be defeated, he reacts to the trials imposed with increasing fury. Eddie sees threats and humiliations everywhere. And, like Angela, it is not possible for the player to try to remove him from his delusions or bring him back to reality. Unfortunately, in Silent Hill there is no more the “real thing”. Or, if it exists, it fits like a glove to the tormented mind of its visitors.
If Angela and Eddie are imprisoned in their private Silent Hills, why should the player believe that the vision of James Sunderland is correct? Should not. But that’s all the game offers, so we assume that our protagonist is trapped in a city besieged by monsters and an omnipresent mist. We assume that his wife expects him somewhere, that the interference on the radio signals the approach of the aberrations. But the letter, that original letter is fading. The more James gets into the streets of Silent Hill and remembers how his beloved died, the fainter Mary’s letter becomes. Poor James. There is not much that the player can do to save him either.
Maria is an exact copy of Mary. No. Maria is a different copy of Mary. The mini-game “Born from the Wish” delivers the truth already in its title, something that James himself doesn’t realize until the end: Maria does not exist, she is but a ghost generated from a desire of the hero (?). A fetishistic version of his beloved. Available. Sexy. Alive. But doomed to die endless deaths, to repeat endlessly the fate of the true Mary. Does not Maria exist? But she thinks, she loves, she wants, she gets angry. Unaware of its origin, awakening in a nightclub dressing room, like a moth without its light, it longs for life. Her fate depends on almost imperceptible player decisions. However, none of the alternatives is promising.
And Laura? Laura is the great mystery of Silent Hill 2. To some, the little girl is a guiding thread, a start engine of events, a tool or Ex Machina of the city itself, its existence crossing the lives of all the characters. For others, Laura is real, an innocent visitor who can walk through the damned streets because she does not bring stains or doubts and, to their childish eyes, the urban landscape would be uninhabited. And there are also those to say that the little girl is of the same substance of Maria, a mental construct shared by all the victims and that represents their last chance of redemption.
Waxworks
Whatever James saw in the mirror, it gained flesh and blood in Silent Hill. Organic abominations without purpose or, in some cases, definite form, their repressed nightmares wander the streets and dark corridors awaiting the right opportunity to attack. Here lies another merit of the game: such monsters are not gruesome masses of tentacles and horns and scaly skin or any other cliché of the genre. They are artistically shaped to be different from almost everything most players have ever seen, beings of deep strangeness, of faltering movements, faceless and deprived of emotions, endowed with a false aura of fragility.
Fragility. Yes. On seeing the pathetic creatures-mannequin walking in the mist, I could not help feeling a curious mercy. Not by chance, each of them needs to be finished with an aggressive final blow or a cowardly stomp on their inert bodies. In delivering each of these attacks, the feeling that impresses the player is a mixture of disgust, supremacy and commiseration. Like someone who crushes a cockroach. Or sacrifice an agonizing animal.
It is no wonder that such monstrosities also work to introduce Pyramid Head, the iconic villain of Silent Hill 2.
In a scene that produces terror and disgust in the voyeur/player, in an already classic scene that emulates the sexual act, the unfortunate creatures are brutalized before the protagonist. Pyramid Head appears as a reflection of guilt, James Sunderland’s desire for punishment and, at the same time, his misogynist attitude. He is what James keeps the worst and, therefore, his defeat can not be achieved before a total catharsis of the character. In this way, the terrible executioner with no face or speech enters the History as one of the most disturbing symbols present in an electronic game.
At the other end of the equation are the Nurses. If this opponent, in other appearances in the series Silent Hill, is a representation of a real person dragged to the horror of Silent Hill, here it gains a new dimension, joining to the army of lusts of the confused mind of James. They are a symbol at the same time of his repressed desires and the long agony of his sick wife. Sex and death, again.
The Sixth Character
It’s impossible to talk about Silent Hill 2 and not talk about the city and its mystery. Unlike traditional horror stories, where Evil manifests itself with all its letters through some force endowed with name, form and purpose, in Silent Hill this does not happen. We do not quite understand what happens in Silent Hill. We do not know what happens to its inhabitants while we are there, we do not know if the city exists or if everything is born in the mirror and flows into a dream. Even after the end of the game, there are no explanations. Clues scattered in various locations try to paint a bigger picture than we can see: insane diaries, medical reports, a past loaded with punishment and tragedy, messages painted on the walls, secret passages. Where are the demons? Who controls this Hell? Where is God? Who can save us from ourselves? Silent Hill remains silent, detached from reality by deep abysses and taken by a mist that hides secrets.
At this point, the second chapter of a long franchise dares to break their ties with the original game. Satanic cults? Sleeping Gods? Conspiracies? None of this happens in this new Silent Hill, this scenario set up specifically for five characters, this nightmare shared without meaning or escape. If the first title was (unfairly) accused of being a Resident Evil derivative, this chapter plunges everything seen before into an ocean of questions. What was explained becomes metaphorical, which had a goal becomes dreamlike. Its creators take on a formidable survival horror game and turn it into something close to the art of a David Lynch movie or the surrealism of a Grant Morrison comic book.
Silent Hill is more Purgatory than Hell, a place of waiting where we are confronted with our weaknesses and we can achieve or not forgiveness. It does not exist on the map as in other games or can be reached by highways. Silent Hill vanished from the surface of the planet and was swallowed up into a parallel reality where perception is more important than facts, where the real is replaced by the unreal, where the flesh is replaced by the wax, where the light is suffocated by the mist. It is a abnormal state of mind solidified in the form of streets, apartments and objects.
Playing Silent Hill 2 in these conditions is an exercise in interpretation, of reasoning and feeling mixed. Your decisions, even the most trivial ones, will be absorbed by the brilliant judgment machine created by your developers. This colossal and ruthless urban court will ultimately determine the fate of James Sunderland and all the others. To the player’s sadness, however, the sentence may not be agreeable. And it will be perpetual.
