The PS2 raised me: Silent Hill 2 will always look like this. As James Sunderland swam through fog so thick you can barely make out his face, saying things you'd never hear anyone say outside of a dream, I fell in love. It's impossible not to fall into this for decades. You can strain to make sense of it, join forums, trade theories, but the fog is always there.
Silent Hill 2 has been discussed for 20 years for a few reasons. For one, as Ed laid out in his opening piece for this month, it's really fucking good, the best self-contained work in a brilliant run of three (or four!) games. For another, its mystique has never been dispelled, not by movies or sequels or lore. Playing Silent Hill 2 inevitably provokes the player to think about what they’re seeing.+ Everything is a descent, a plunge. Why? The threads soon untangle; the player follows the game’s cues and considers every aspect of its art as a component of a larger thematic project—and then, presumably, moves on to pestering the game's beleaguered art director to validate her theories.
Everything James sees in Silent Hill—his “otherworld”—is dredged from his mind. The same goes for fellow lost souls Eddie and Angela: Eddie’s otherworld amplifies his body dysmorphia and his anger at the people who bullied him all his life, while Angela’s otherworld is a hideous outgrowth of the sexual abuse she’s lived with for so long that the addition of actual flames to her personal hell barely registers.
This means Silent Hill, in this second game, can't be read as a simple supernatural judicial system. It manifests and magnifies a person’s feelings toward themselves or others, feelings like survivor’s guilt, rage, and sexual inadequacy—or sexual desire. Thanks to the aforementioned Masahiro Ito’s grimy, symbolically loaded creature design, the sexual dimension of James’s version of Silent Hill is obvious—but, I think, underexamined outside of listing a nonspecific "sexual frustration" among James’s motivations for killing Mary.
Maybe James did resent his wife for forcing him into the role of caretaker rather than lover—Maria’s relative sexual openness, the brutal, priapic physicality of the “red pyramid thing,” and the latex-bound, fluid-smeared designs of the creatures James encounters in the town are all generally cited to support this reading. For reference, we know James is an alcoholic and resents Mary for “taking away his life” because he says so. James tells himself one thing; the abject discharge of his subconscious tells us another.
The abject (as defined by Julia Kristeva) disturbs categories of order and identity; it negates and opposes and fascinates. James's Silent Hill vomits forth what he does not want to know and yet cannot stop thinking about. He fixates on the paraphernalia of medicine and sickness—nurses, bile, pustules, contagion, and amputation all figure in his psychosexual delirium.
James, in short, is obsessed with physical illness—an abject desire that always has a flip-side of repulsion. He repeatedly murders the projections of his own fetishes and is pursued by a hulking, sexually violent executioner with a frightfully big sword. He externalizes his fascinated disgust with his wife’s sick body as fuckable, Hans Bellmer-esque dolls of rotting flesh. No matter how many of these apparitions James beats into the ground, they keep coming: they chitter like roaches, they twitch and spew bile. James can only answer his desire with annihilation. He hates it; he's at the mercy of his perversion, not self-possessed enough to make sense of or outgrow his blind urges.
Maria, Mary’s malleable doppelganger, is cast in the image of straight male fantasy. She makes conventional sense as a figure of erotic torment. The restrained, deformed bodies of the monsters that wander James's Silent Hill reflect Mary’s terminal immobility, a helplessness which bleeds into and is indistinguishable from more stereotypical sites of sexual fixation like legs, lips, and breasts. James doesn’t just resent his wife’s illness—he wants to fuck it, and is disgusted by his own desire to do so, but still, and on and on and on. The first creature James comes across in the town is the “lying figure": teetering on platform heels, it struggles against a straitjacket made of its own mottled flesh. The “bubble head" nurses' bulging cleavage and latex-wrapped heads allude not only to James suffocating Mary but imply, too, that he liked it—that he derived sexual pleasure from killing her. The staggering, broken-limbed nurses may as well have condoms stretched thin over their baby-doll faces; James weakly swats them away, attempting to restore dominion over the purulent discharge of his fantasies.
After James watches a videotape of himself smothering Mary in the Lakeview Hotel, after finding his way into the naked core of his psychosis, his projections peel away and he finally sees the town as it is. Only through the act of watching himself kill Mary can he finally accept the truth; only by playing voyeur to a murder he committed can he conceptualize it as real. Georges Bataille wrote about the killing of Christ as a wound inflicted both by and on humanity: “The guilt is a wound lacerating the integrity of every guilty being," he said, a preordained sin whose “loathsomeness” taints every person and yet unifies them with God.
Thus, in James’s fantasies, Maria dies again and again; even the woman he created for himself cannot be spared from his pathetic, annihilating desires. James sees himself dead from a gunshot wound to the head, a punctuation mark from another world. He lumbers through a nightmare woven from the fabric of his fetishes, his sins, his repression, his rote stupidity—constantly confronted with holes, sticking his arm into holes, jumping into holes, finding only more depravity beyond. The guilt is a wound; the guilt is a hole.
Mary’s full letter, read over the game’s credits, reveals the depths of her love for James. All she wanted was for him to move on after her death and be happy. Mary blamed herself for the illness that destroyed her body, calling it a “terrible thing” she did to him. She waits, “wrapped” in her “cocoon of pain and loneliness,” for death. But it was her husband she wanted. She wanted him to embrace her, to stay by her as she faded away.
Instead, James kills her to free himself, and retreats into the fog of his self-loathing. He keeps probing the wound. He fetishizes the act itself, the illness, the hospitalization, all of it metastasizing into a tumorous labyrinth to house his sin. The incarnation of Mary-Maria that James ultimately finds on the hotel roof is a saint of suffering, wearing a filthy habit and crucified upside-down like Peter in a metal cage, swarming with moths in her resplendent decay. The flower of James’s sin blooms in her; here is the full weight of his perversions, immobilized, fetishized, willful and yet an object, dead and yet forever in pain.
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+ A twist ending helps :)
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Astrid Anne Rose is a former full-time game critic and long-time contributor to Bullet Points. Currently she writes and edits horror fiction & co-hosts the podcast Live at the Death Factory. She co-wrote the videogame Roman Sands RE: Build. Follow her on Twitter.