The Stillness Of Silent Hill

 I’d use the word “still” to describe the town of silent hill. I’ve known about the games for as  long as I’ve known about video games. I got into them through one of my other obsessions as a preteen with loads of time and not as many friends, horror. I spent most of my time on the internet reading creepypastas, short stories and watching Youtube videos discussing horror. The title “silent hill” itself has been stuck with me ever since I first heard it. With all that being the case, I’ve finished Silent Hill 2 for myself, only recently. I’ve never had a console before, you see and it is only now that I have access to a pretty good computer. And playing it for myself after watching multiple let’s plays throughout the years, was an experience I hold dear. I’ve mentioned Silent Hill’s, specifically the second game’s atmosphere before but what I missed during that, which I realize now with having played the game for myself, is what I described with the very first sentence. A stillness. The very first scene itself is an ample instance of this. The iconic mirror scene. A slow, calm and almost trance-like sequence with James’s face plagued with pools of shadows. The way he moves his hand along his face, perhaps, grazing it ever-so-gently and afterwards, rising up and exhaling deeply, with the terrible voice dubbing cutting in unnaturally has a particular dream like calm to it. The slow reveal of the dreary town followed by James’ unusually calm reveal of the fact that he’s here to look for someone who has died 3 years ago, all veiled with an aggressive, and an unexpected serenity. Although the ending of the game may not be very obvious for people who’ve never heard of the game or its premise beforehand, this opening is surprisingly open about what it is. This game is not going to make you feel good. This game is ugly and it knows it. This game, is.

 And it has been, ever since it was released. There hasn’t been any other game that gives you what Silent Hill 2 does. I mean, yeah most good games are like that. They carve special spaces out for themselves in our cesspool of media. Some may even say, this is what makes them good in the first place. What I mean with Silent Hill 2, however, is that it simply is different to all other good, hell, great games. The best game that I’ve played, in my humble opinion, is the original Dark Souls. Although I’d say that there is nothing like Dark Souls and that if you want the experience, all you can do is play it, I’d mostly be writing with boatloads of subjective fanaticism for the game. Dark Souls 2 and 3 exist and they, although having their own spins on it, are still Dark Souls. There is Bloodborne and Elden Ring, both of which have their own things that they do better than Dark Souls does. Would it be very accurate to say that “you can’t get Dark Souls anywhere else?”. Maybe not always in one game but in a few games. Hell they may even be better at what Dark Souls does than Dark Souls. There are new Souls-like games coming out every month! But Silent Hill 2 remains the only thing resembling what it is. There may be other games that give off Silent Hill vibes or ones that talk about trauma but Silent Hill 2 still remains exceptional.  This is why, when talking about the franchise, 2 takes on a leading position. The first Silent Hill is incredible, the third one’s very good too and I’ve heard people say the fourth one is very underrated as well but Silent Hill 2 is lightning in a bottle. There is no other Silent Hill 2 game that gives the town such a visceral atmospheric presence. Silent Hill 2 is a Silent Hill game. 

Of course it’s not perfect. It is slow and kind of obtuse to play. The controls are VERY dated and the mechanics can get tedious. And the voice acting, although spine-chilling at times, is less than desirable at most others. The eddy boss fight is one of the worst experiences ever and I wouldn’t wanna fight him ever again. The whole mechanic of chasing him around through a freezer full of hanging meat, and then stopping and then aiming is just the most bullshit ever. The double pyramid head fight, too, was frustrating but not quite as much as Eddy’s. But of course, the boss fights aren’t exactly what Silent Hill 2 is known for. The perfect example that is a good microcosm for the aesthetic marrow of the game would be this little sequence in the wood side apartments, where James jumps across through this window, into another apartment. The whole scene possesses the aforementioned enigmatic stillness. The utter dream-like nature of it is imposing. James’ floaty movements along with bizarre and quite impossible camera angles help add to this calm. Then there is the very fact that the whole space itself should not exist. Two apartment complexes cannot be built this close by. Even if you don’t know this fact, it’s not very hard for you to feel uneasy due to the utter claustrophobia this scene induces. Furthermore, this stillness is what lends Silent Hill its horror. Firstly, this stillness is interrupted only by James’ radio which flares up when there’s a monster nearby. Making each monster encounter feel a little jarring. Most of the gameplay in Silent Hill contains James walking up and down hallways, methodically trying closed doors. Some open while the majority stay locked. The locked door sound feels like a nail sticking out. It’s imposing and rough compared to the game’s normal soundscape. A soundscape made of these uncanny but weirdly soothing tracks. This imposing stillness also makes its way into all the cutscenes, including the iconic maria cutscene. The whole scene is supposed to be shocking. Maria’s supposed to be dead. We literally just saw her getting killed by pyramid head. What she has to say in the cutscene, too, is supposed to be an exclamation point. A complete utter derailment of all that we have known till now. And yet the game itself treats it with indifference. The camera movements, methodical and slow. There is no background music whatsoever and the conversation between the two is cut together in a way that can be described as anything but natural. The pauses between every sentence, James’ lack of any real concern over what the hell is happening and the uncanny rendering job of that time. None of this is and ever will be “natural”. Maria’s voice actor alternates between what seems like two versions. This is especially apparent when she says “I'm not your Mary” in a tone that sends megatons of shivers down my spine. This switch is as jarring as it is because of how the game treats it with a lack of surprise. Furthermore, James’ willingness to jump down dark holes that go deeper and deeper without any inquisition or any second thought, AND the games unwillingness to punctuate this nonchalance accentuates the “stillness” I've been writing about. A feeling that is filled with the seemingly narratively contradictory style of the game. James should be freaking out. He shouldn’t be jumping into deep dark holes, one after another. The game itself should be freaking out. Why is it so still? And what does this stillness entail? Why is it there? To answer that question. We need to take a detour.

“A dream picture: it must produce such a stillness that one would be awed by a knock on the door.”

This Is how the Swiss symbolist painter Arnold Bocklin described his world renowned painting, ominously named “The isle of the dead”. Symbolist painters were interested in exploring the relationship between an idea and the image used to represent it. Another one of Bocklin’s famous works is this self portrait alongside “death playing a fiddle”. Symbolists labored to convey emotion and the vibes through symbols which did not necessarily go along with naturalism or realism. Take for instance, Bocklin's famous self portrait with an addition of a skeleton playing a fiddle at his shoulder. Anyways, The Isle of the dead is exactly as Bocklin describes it. Looking at the mysterious, dare I say, ominous islet with the tall cypress trees surrounded by the rigid stone cliff which blankets vague traces of architecture beneath, all in the middle of an ever expanding ocean fills me with a peculiar feeling of dread. Then of course there is the tiny figure in white with a coffin, approaching the islet in a little boat with an oarsman. The entire scene feels vaguely devastating and yet motionless and quiet. The painting itself is unmoved by what is happening, and what is happening looks to be full of such pathos that the uncaring nature of the painting itself becomes unnerving.  But more than the painting itself, there is another aspect to it, namely its history that interests me very much. You see, Bocklin has painted and repainted a total of 5 versions of the Isle of the dead. The first two in 1880, only months apart. It has been recorded that originally, Bocklin’s painting only contained the isle itself with the boat devoid of its main attraction. But upon the request of a patron, one Marie Berna, Bocklin added the white figure and the coffin to the boat scene on the second version which was done on a small wood piece. He then proceeded to do the same with the first version as well. As to why Mrs. Berna requested such an odd addition is, with a certain amount of speculation, because of her husband Dr Georg Von Berna’s death. She was getting re-married that year and perhaps wanted to mourn her late husband. Moving on, three other versions were painted by Bocklin over the course of six years for varying reasons, each version containing a certain nuance to it that distinguished it from the others. The last version painted is the darkest and the most obscure out of all, with the white figure rigidly bent forward as if in a sort of pain, whereas the third version being the clearest out of all of them. Although the fourth version was destroyed in a bombing during the second world war, the rest remain still in various museums across the world. What’s another fact about this painting is that many notable people have owned it or a copy of it. Hitler once had bought the original third version of the painting. Lenin had had a reproduction of the painting and Sigmund Freud also reportedly had had one in his office. The painting was even quite popular with common folk too, with Vladmir Nobokov stating that it “could be found in every home in Berlin”. Psychoanalysts of that time also claim that many of their patients report seeing the imagery of the painting in their dreams. What was it that this painting had that had made it so that, its dream like nature, its imposing stillness made its way into everyone’s unconscious? Why had everyone built such a personal, subjective connection with this image? Even for Bocklin himself, the image stood for a deeply personal trauma. The cemetery within the isle itself being modelled after the cemetery his infant daughter Maria was buried in. Maria being one of 8 children Bocklin would lose in his lifetime. Hence the painting has become a sort of “collective dream”. Not belonging to anyone in particular, but able to manifest the inner worlds of those who gaze upon it. Now that finally, is starting to sound similar, isn’t it?

The town of Silent Hill manifests your traumas or whatever it is. It’s “your personal hell” as it is often repeated to a fault. The monsters of each Silent Hill game differ according to the protagonist. The iconic pyramid head is a manifestation of James’ inner urge for punishment as well as his sadism. This is common knowledge to the Silent Hill fandom. But let us take a look upon this concept more carefully. Silent Hill as a town and as a concept is what you may call the embodiment of the psychoanalytic theory of dreams. According to Lacan, what we perceive and think about in our daily lives isn’t really reality. Instead it is a mixture of the “symbolic order” and “the imaginary”. Both of which are constructions. Rules and concepts that we construct ourselves in order to live out our lives. They form “our reality”. The Reality on the other hand is like the sun. We may be able to take a quick glimpse or two at it with our naked eyes but looking directly at it for any longer than a few seconds can be very dangerous for our eyes. Hence we need some sort of protection or mediator like sunglasses. The sunglasses here would be our reality. A layer of fantasy coated over so as to avoid staring into the traumatic Real. Dreams are often described as “not real”. But since we have established that our reality isn’t really The Real but a fantasy and hence our reality is akin to fantasies, dreams must be akin to The Real. This is why Freud placed great significance upon dreams, even writing a nerdy book about interpreting dreams. Dreams are able to show us the traumatic capital R “Real”. They show us what’s buried deep within through symbols. And thus it is not that dreams are for those too afraid of reality, but that reality are for those too afraid of dreams. Silent Hill’s monsters and constructions are the very same thing at its core. And thus I describe Silent Hill as an embodiment of the psychoanalytic concept of “Dreams”. Everyone has them and everyone can visit the town. However each person’s dreams are deeply personalized and subjective in the same way that everyone’s Silent Hill is deeply personalized and subjective. If it were a town you could go to, you may even find it a cozy little place according to who you are, who knows? The very same thing applies for the Isle of the dead, doesn't it? Everyone manifested their inner selves unto the painting resulting in people with vastly different and even conflicting means of thought, taking a liking to the same painting, from a grieving widow, a fascist dictator to the “everything-is-penis” man. And perhaps it is this quality that oozes the “imposing stillness” I've been going on about this entire video. The town and the painting are uncannily still and unmoving that you move for them… 

This can be seen weirdly realized by the Silent Hill Fandom. You see, this concept of Silent Hill being something that manifests your trauma provides us with a weird conundrum. Because looking at this from a meta level, we are accessing the town of Silent Hill through the main character, in the case of Silent Hill 2, dead wife man James Sunderland. And so there can be seen a sort of a dialectical relation between the two facts, that one, Silent Hill manifests the perceivers' trauma, and two, for the player, Silent Hill only manifests James’ trauma. And what happens when these two contradict each other? Well.. you get…

“The situation is over with and shouldn't be brought up anymore because Silent Hill has so many great things about it and this isn’t one of them.”

This is the first sentence of one of the last paragraphs ever written during one of Video Gaming most glorious internet meltdowns in history. And what it is, is a despotic move to censor and brainwash the masses. An attempt to silence the tired voice of a man sworn to reveal the truth. To cast away the blinding darkness that was deliberately shed by those in power to mislead the common people away from the horrifying reality.

One day in early December of 2015, the then moderator of the Silent Hill wiki, AlexSheperd would, from out of seemingly nowhere, add multiple editions to the Walter Sullivan character page on the wiki. His editions heavily referenced circumcision and speculation on how the character was circumcised at birth. 

Walter Sullivan is a character that’s mentioned through newspaper clippings found throughout the town in Silent Hill 2 and an actual significant character in Silent Hill 4. But as you may be wondering, no. There are no direct (or really any indirect) mentions of circumcision pertaining to the character. When met with some criticisms as to his actions, AlexSheperd would speak out against them, quite aggressively. 

This tirade would then be met with disapproval from the other moderators who would constantly remove the editions made by Alex. 

Alex would also provide “evidence” to support his theories. 

Alex also compares circumcision, or “baby genital mutilation”  as he’d later use in his tirade, to the literal holocaust. 

Alex would continue to link circumcision to dark occult rituals and government brainwashing conspiracies. He’d also heavily advocate that circumcision does serious psychological damage to the babies and that those who disagreed were wrong and were brainwashed by the government or the occult.

And to justify as to why he’s even doing all of this, he said: 

This insane saga would end with Alex being stripped of his moderator status through a poll voted on by others of the community. And as of now, the entries stand for a somewhat obscure, but not really, silly little part of the weird and wonderful world of the Internet. I’ll link some sources from which you can find more about this incident if you are interested as I did skip a lot of the insanity Alex had gotten up to in the span of a few days. Voidburger on twitter is responsible for documenting the entire thing as it happened and without their efforts, the whole thing would be completely forgotten as the entire log history was moved to a different address which is no longer accessible. Anyways, it is very easy to look at AlexSheperd and laugh. It was totally ridiculous behaviour that was entirely unsolicited. The whole thing was so extremely stupid that the entire internet of the time came together to laugh about it, with a New York magazine even writing an article about it based on VoidBurger’s twitter. Now, I can only speculate (as if there wasn’t enough of that already), but Alex obviously seems to have some kind of a traumatic experience with circumcision. Obviously I can’t and don’t want to know if he himself is circumcised or not, but my point is that he seems to have a deep personal connection, a negative connection at that, with the topic at hand. After being kicked from the Silent Hill Wiki moderator team, he’d join the Xenogears wiki and restart his thing with circumcision (although not to the same extent as Silent Hill’s wiki). Although not every Silent Hill fan is as unhinged as Alex here, I do think that Alex, to a certain extent, represents an exaggerated version of every player’s experience. Since, as I said, one cannot access Silent Hill purely because of the fact that the act of gaming requires a mediator, that is, the protagonist, the player grafts on their own trauma onto the video game Silent Hill 2. This is what had happened with the circumcision incident. We interpret Silent Hill as our own embodiment of trauma. Again, I'm not making an argument akin to “we interpret art subjectively”, as although it is true, it's doubly so in the case of Silent Hill because of its very concept. Hence why “your personal hell” is truer than one realizes, because it truly becomes your, not just the protagonists’ but also your personal hell. This tendency can be seen in the trainwreck of a video game.. Or interactive entertainment that is Silent Hill Ascension. Ascension gives a weird amount of emphasis on player personalization. One of its selling points that it wears so proudly in its marketing is that of choice. The community chooses what happens. Then is also the promise of a player made character being put into the story. All of this is a result of the said relationship between the two contradicting ideas surrounding Silent Hill as a video game. So initially, the quality of the object in question, Silent Hill, is that it embodies the perceivers' trauma. But looking at it through a meta lens, we find that the player can only access it through James or Heather. Hence the circumcision incident occurs where a player forcefully projects his trauma onto the game. In this final movement, the player is responsible for the town’s manifestation of his trauma. Alex is responsible for making Silent Hill all about circumcision. The community is responsible for making Ascension into whatever it is. You are responsible for making Silent Hill what you think it is.  But when you look back, wasn’t James always responsible for the town embodying his trauma from the very beginning? Didn’t he willingly go to the town? Didn’t he commit the actions that lead to the trauma in the first place? In other words, aren’t we responsible for our dreams? Not only do we willingly lay down to sleep, but also in that whatever we see in our dreams, we are responsible for. And it is this responsibility, or the weight of this responsibility, that is at the core of Silent Hill. This is the stillness that possesses the town of Silent Hill. The game is unmoving and uncaring of the freaky stuff that’s going on, because it isn’t responsible for it. This uncanny realization that’s left unspoken, but is there. This is the stillness that's so still in the isle of the dead that one would be awed by a knock on the door. This is the stillness of Silent Hill.