User Info: ssjgohhku.The following essay contains spoilers for Outlast and its expansion, Whistleblower, as well as a graphic discussion of transphobia and gender confirmation surgery.Outlast: Whistleblower is a piece of DLC for Outlast, and is the second game in the Outlast series. It took me about 3 hours and 20 minutes to complete it, and I'm a rather slow gamer (I like to explore and look around before moving on). Jarlathazzard 7 years ago 2. (message deleted) User Info: Jarlathazzard. Progressing further through the thinkingUpshur is not chased into a finicky by several inmates, but numbers through a celebrity, only to be taught by one of the Wholes psychotic inmates turning himself as a star. How long is outlast attempting to hold through the showers, however, he is piqued yet again by Scene, and years through the kids.Taking liberally from the faux documentary nature of 1999’s The Blair Witch Project, found footage films generally follow the formula of chronicling the final moments of a doomed, camera-obsessed protagonist, who never stops filming even under the direst of circumstances. For a period of time stretching roughly from 2007 to 2015, horror cinema found itself at the center of a quick-and-dirty form of guerilla storytelling: that of the “found footage” subgenre. Spending a couple of weeks at Mount Massive, during which he was unable to even talk to his wife.The resulting product, 2013’s Outlast, ran the found footage gamut in interactive form, putting players in the role of Miles Upshur, a reckless journalist armed only with a night vision camera, whose excursion into a notorious mental hospital uncovers a supernatural Nazi conspiracy. Level 2.It came as little surprise, then, when an independent developer by the name of Red Barrels realized that found footage horror translated perfectly to first person narrative gaming. It's not as linear as Outlast, so you might get caught up on some parts (saying that I beat it on Nightmare mode, gives my perspective some weight) but the first play through will take you a bit longer than an hour, maybe an hour and a half.
Players control Waylon Park, who is institutionalized by his sinister superiors after he forwards incriminating evidence of the asylum’s wrongdoings to Upshur. Like its predecessor, Whistleblower plays as a found footage story, albeit from the perspective of an employee within the twisted asylum rather than an outsider. It is this presentation that sets Outlast apart from other games of its ilk, and is certainly one of the driving factors behind its tremendous success.Not content to quit at finger splitting, the spectacle of bodily violation plays an even larger part in Red Barrels’ immediate follow-up, 2014’s prequel/midquel expansion Outlast: Whistleblower. Though the player controls Upshur throughout the game’s five hours, his camera provides a layer of distance between player and player character, allowing for an uncomfortable distance that turns the game’s most graphic moments into unsettling spectacle. The violation of bodily integrity is a theme that runs deep in Outlast’s veins, made all the more unsettling by the voyeuristic manner in which these moments unfold. The game features moments of extreme violence and sadism – crazed inmates rape and behead other inmates before the gaze of Upshur’s camera, and in one of the game’s most disturbing and effective moments, a barely clothed “doctor” mutilates Upshur’s left hand with a pair of rusty pinking shears. A few snips at the flesh here…and here. For the sake of our children. It’s not pleasant, I know. A woman…has to suffer some things. You’re going to be beautiful. All the while, he offers Park the following words of comfort:“You have amazing bone structure. Pokemon eng dubPedro Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In bases its narrative around a story of captivity, forced gender reassignment, and sex slavery. The scene is unambiguous: Park is about to be the recipient of forced gender reassignment at the hands of a deranged madman.Whistleblower is far from the first piece of horror media to utilize transgender narrative as a source of horror. Just close your eyes and think of our children.”It’s hard to read that speech as anything but a twisted appropriation of the narrative of transgender women, or to not interpret the Groom’s actions as a perverse and horrifying translation of gender confirmation surgeries. And birthing is never easy. A soft place to welcome my seed. Download free offline learning games for kidsThe third, The Skin I Live In, portrays its victim as a rapist and suggests that his forced surgical transition is a punishment, upholding the idea of such a surgery as being awful and abhorrent.With such a storied history of horror getting trans narratives horribly wrong, it’s easy to apply the same label of transphobia to Whistleblower. These cases are all deeply entrenched in transphobic notions of transition as pathological and deviant: two of the above examples involve trans or pseudo-trans characters as killers. Most famously, The Silence of the Lambs’ Buffalo Bill co-opts a transition narrative, killing and skinning women to make a female suit to live in (Hannibal Lecter hypothesizes that he does so as a consequence of being rejected for proper gender confirmation surgery). Instead, he is a paragon of justice, the one character in a sea of filth that we hope to see make it through to the end. Notably, the recipient of the “surgery” is not the villain of the story: the game never depicts Park as deviant or evil. The scene also wades into unavoidably murky water by virtue of the fact that, regardless of intent, it utilizes the framework of a misunderstood and demonized surgery in a scene that primarily serves to make the player vomit.Even with that context in mind, Whistleblower is still markedly different from other appropriations of transgender narratives in horror, and for its many imperfections, contains several nuances that allow the sequence to operate on a level of horror that goes beyond simply demonizing the medical process of gender transition. His words carry the destructive weight of many real life medical practitioners, whose desires to enforce gender norms override the needs of their patients, while simultaneously directing part of the horror away from the spectacle of surgery and onto the Groom, whose disregard for bodily autonomy is the driving force behind the scene’s terror.This context, combined with the use of first-person perspective to connect the player to Park, works to recontextualize the manner in which we should understand the horror. The Groom’s focus on childbearing as a vital component of womanhood mirrors the external pressures that encouraged Lili Elbe to pursue the dangerous uterus transplant that ultimately killed her. Furthermore, though the Groom acknowledges that Park will “suffer,” he emphasizes that such pain is unimportant instead, the surgery is necessary for the Groom’s sake, his hypothetical child’s sake, and by extension, society’s sake.His language is prescriptive and coercive it is the same kind of language that medical providers once used (and, sadly, sometimes still do) to reject lesbian and bisexual, masculine, or non-op trans women, and to force those who conformed to normative societal standards into deep stealth. His words emphasis Park’s physical attributes: it’s critical that his bone structure is “amazing” and that he will be “beautiful.” His present genitalia are “vulgar,” implying that the notion of a woman with a penis is grotesque and unacceptable. The player squirms not because the scene threatens to be gross, but because it threatens to fundamentally alter our innate sense of identity as Waylon Park. His talk of children paints the image of a hopeless future where the induced dysphoria of gender misalignment is inescapable. The Groom, meanwhile, prescribes a different identity, one that does not fit. It’s about enacting a simulated gender dysphoria in the player: as Park, the player understands their gender identity as immutably male.
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