John Haskell, Blow Me Away

This essay is in our Media Club series, an ongoing series of essays on visual media. More details here.

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Blow Me Away

John Haskell

(This essay is reprinted from John's new book, Trying To Be, recently published by FC2. Order it here.)

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Michelangelo Antonioni, still from Blow-Up, 1966.

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At the end of the last century an orator named F. M. Alexander codified a way of understanding, or at least thinking about, the body. It’s called the Alexander Technique, and it’s about aligning the body, or realigning it, taking it apart and thinking about how it might fit back together. The problem he found with the body was the way we imagine it. Or really the way we fail to imagine it, letting our bodies adapt to habits we don’t even know we have. We tell our bodies to disregard imbalance. If there’s pain, we say, ignore it, turn away, which leads to what Alexander called debauched kinesthetics, or erroneous perception, the idea that we have certain sensations—the information we get from the eyes, nose, muscles, et cetera—and then there’s perception, what the mind does with those sensations. Let’s say that when I stand, with my feet on the ground and my eyes facing forward, the right side of my body is slightly shorter than the left, as if I’m holding a weighted bag in my hand and the weight of the bag is pulling me down, curving me over. Instead of standing with the verticality of a plumb line, there’s a slight arc to my torso. And however I came to this posture, via trauma or repetition or necessity, over time I’ve made it my history. It’s how I perceive who I am, and the longer I live like this, holding the weight, the more the curve gets embedded in my flesh, memorized by the fibers of my mind and muscle, and more than a habit, it gets like a fact, and it is a fact, a fact of my body. The imbalance, caused by the weight in my hand, works its way up my arm to the muscles of my shoulder, my scapula pulling my neck, my neck pulling my clavicle, my clavicle pulling my ribs; and then my spine has to compensate. As does my mind, normalizing itself by convincing me that I’m standing as straight as an arrow. And even if I release the weight and allow my shoulder girdle to reposition itself, letting my psoas relax and my rib cage realign, although I might be standing verifiably upright, it feels weird. I’d painstakingly built this posture and now, being used to it, even without the weight in my hand, my body keeps holding the tension of holding the weight. Which is why Alexander looked at himself in mirrors, to see his body as if from outside, as if from God’s eye, as if God had an eye, and he did it because he didn’t trust what his body was telling him.

The movie Blow-Up was made in 1966, and like any movie, it’s partly about the time it was made, about the attitudes and assumptions that existed then, and were normal then, and now it’s like a documentary, showing how people used to live, how they stood and walked, and how they tried to be with other people. It begins with two wannabe fashion models knocking on the door of a famous photographer. They’re wearing outfits popular at the time, bright sleeveless dresses, hot-pink pantyhose, long bangs, wide eyes, and because it’s 1966 they’ve been reading Tiger Beat, watching Ready, Steady, Go! And wannabe wasn’t a word back then but what they want to be is clear. They want to be seen. That’s why they knock on the door of the photographer, and that’s why they audition for him. In the movie he sits in a big leather chair, twirling a coin between his fingers, not really paying attention to them and that’s when they notice, behind them, a rack of clothes, the latest styles from Paris and Milan, and suddenly they feel giddy. Are we allowed to try them on? Giddy literally means possessed by a god, and when they slide their arms into the silky material it’s hard to tell if the feeling they have is excitement or anxiety. Or confusion. Or all three. Later, the talkative one will get famous for singing songs in French with a Frenchman, Serge Gainsbourg, but now the younger version of who she’s going to become is still learning the ropes. That’s what they call the rules of the game, and in 1966 people talked about changing the rules, about shedding inhibitions, which is why she unzips her brightly printed dress, letting it fall to the floor, letting her half-naked body be pulled to the room where she tries to follow his directions, trying to hear what he wants her to do but the music is loud and he seems to want something sexual, for her to be sexual. Orgy, the word, meant something different back then, implying not debauchery but liberation, and self-determination, and during the scene he takes out his camera to capture her, posing her in front of a colorful roll of unfurled paper they used to call seamless, a neutral background that had no context but now she can see what the context is. Power. Who has it, who wants it, and who can you trust with your body. I’ve always felt that my body, being distinct from other bodies, separated me from other people, and protected me. My body is here, and other people have other bodies, in other locations, and the idea that bodies can live together is something I’m still getting used to. That’s why, watching Blow-Up, I identify with the model, Jane Birkin. I see myself, not quite naked, but standing in front of the neutral background and letting myself be photographed, letting myself be told what to do, how to stand, how to be, and later, looking at the photographs, I can see what’s happened to my body. My shoulders. They aren’t completely level. One side is slightly higher than the other, the one holding the bag, and the bag is the same bag I’ve carried my entire life, the one the photographer called diabolical, and although he meant stylistically, it makes me think about what a bag like that can do to a person, and did do, to me.

The screenplay for Blow-Up was written by Edward Bond. He was an English writer for the theatre and years ago, when I was an actor, I played a part in one of his early plays. Saved. It’s about a group of young men, a gang, who end up killing a small child, a baby in a pram. The cause is partly accidental but also, according to Bond, aggression is a natural outcome of an unjust society. Violence is a response to the fact that some people have power and privilege, and some people don’t. His early plays were famously violent. I was living in London when I saw his play Lear. I was staying in Hammersmith, camping out in a derelict factory, and the story is based on Shakespeare, about a king who spends his capital building a wall, what he imagines will be a force for order and goodness. And when it becomes the opposite, he tries to tear it down. But it’s too late. And the tragedy of the play is the question left unanswered. How do you tear down what you’ve painstakingly built? The version I saw was produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company, and the night I saw it, when I got back to my hovel by the river, apparently, while I was gone, thieves had come, ransacked my carefully concealed hiding place, stolen my rucksack and my sleeping bag, and I remember the king in the play, mad with grief, talking to his dead daughter. She’d been lost, and now she was dead, killed for fighting injustice. Her body was lying on a long wooden table, center stage, and from where I sat in the audience I couldn’t see the wound they’d made in her belly but I remember the actor playing Lear, like a surgeon, dipping his hands into the middle of her being, into the bowl between her ribcage and her pubic bone, and although it took a few days, that image eventually lodged itself in my body. Since I didn’t have a place to stay I spent my time wandering London, stopping at bookstores, and in one of them I found a copy of the text of the play. It was a blue paperback with a photo of Bond on the back cover. I read the play, then read his introduction to the play, then I found his essays about his other plays, and about writing, and socialism, and he seemed to be someone who felt the effects of injustice, who saw how power deforms our social interactions, turns them violent, and instead of running away he pointed it out to the rest of us. My tendency was to turn away, to run from what I didn’t like, whatever felt uncomfortable or dangerous, and he seemed to say that running away is fine, if that’s what you want, but it isn’t necessary. When you are frighted of the dark you do not make it go away by shutting your eyes. In his writing about theater, Bond often used the word rational like someone else might use the word fair or just or common sense. It’s commonsensical to open our eyes and see that we don’t have to hurt each other. That’s what I took him to mean, and what I wanted to ask him wasn’t rhetorical. I really wanted to know. How do you acknowledge a corrupted history and still have pity on the people who carry that history in our bodies?

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John Haskell’s books include I Am Not Jackson Pollock,  American Purgatorio, Out of My Skin, and The Complete Ballet. He has written plays, catalogue essays, dance reviews, food histories, and film criticism. Fiction and nonfiction pieces have appeared in variety of publications, including BOMB and A Public Space, magazines where he is a contributing editor. Haskell has performed his work on stage, and on radio shows like The Next Big Thing and Studio 360. He has been awarded fellowships in Europe and America, received NYFA grants, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and has taught in Los Angeles, New York and Leipzig. For more about him hit up his website.

Dec 25: Will Slattery, Pray and Work

Pray and Work

Will Slattery

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When setting out to find a topic for this year’s Advent Calendar/Media Club essay series I noticed that the 3 most aesthetically rewarding games I’ve played over the past half-decade—Disco Elysium (a post-Soviet, Marxist humanist cRPG about an alcoholic disaster of a police detective), NORCO (a point-and-click cyberpunk Southern Gothic bayou-noir fever-dream “search for a missing brother” visual novel—incidentally also recently discoursed and Advent’d by Ander a few days ago here on Essay Daily), and Pentiment (a narrative adventure game involving interlinked alpine murder mysteries in Reformation-era Bavaria) —share a set of common features: intricately detailed settings & a protagonist-detective (professional or ad-hoc) investigating the contours of those settings. This piece is set to complete our annual Advent series (a daily-posting conceit in imitation of a liturgical calendar) on Christmas Day (a central Christian holiday) so it seems only fitting to dive into the pages of Pentiment, a remarkable game with unparalleled poly-vocal poly-textual poly-textural poly-typographic depictions of the relationship between religion and daily human life.

In its most basic sense Pentiment is the story of Andreas Maler, a 16th Century journeyman limner & painter from Nuremberg who finds himself trudging through a series of contracts at a scriptorium (a monastic workshop where priestly scribes copy and decorate manuscripts; by the time of Pentiment the scriptorium is nearing obsoletion and facing replacement by secular urban workshops) in the double Abbey of Kiersau, home to a set of Benedictine monks and Benedictine nuns in adjoining cloistered buildings. The abbey houses both the scriptorium and a small relic site for pilgrims, and it sits atop a high hill adjoining the town of Tassing, an isolated but important mountain pass stopover town in the Bavarian Alps.

Kiersau Abbey.

Andreas is a temporary visitor to Kiersau and Tassing, and in several ways his life in rural Bavaria kind of sucks. He needs to finish a masterwork to move upwards in his artists' guild, but he gets very little time to work on his own projects in the scriptorium. As a site of production, the monastic scriptorium is dark, cold, isolated, under-resourced, backwards, a dying economic model & a thoroughly strange place for a modern, educated, urban artist like Andreas to end up. Everybody else who works in the scriptorium is a priest with Benedictine garb & the deliberately unflattering clerical haircut we call the tonsure. 2 of these priests are kindly but age-hobbled; 1 of them is a young Burgundian seething with omnidirectional resentment at the prospect of spending the next 40 years of his life hunched over an easel, drawing margin decorations in one of the continent’s last scriptoriums (imagine, for modern comparison, a young man from the Bay Area whose family sought to get him an internship but instead locked him into a lifelong contract designing rotary phones). Elsewhere in the abbey the abbot is a dick, and the head of the priory is a dick. It is 1518 A.D., one year after Martin Luther begins circulating his 95 Theses, and so all the clergy and the educated strata of Bavaria are mired in contentious theological debates that Andreas struggles to sidestep. To continue moving up in his guild Andreas also needs to acquire a good Christian wife and produce a good Christian child. His family has already arranged a marriage to solve the first of these, and the uncertainty that shrouds his fiancée and future marriage is a constant source of stress. The townsfolk and peasants who live near the abbey are sometimes friendly, sometimes not, and each down to the last faces or participates in the dramatic, violent social upheavals that will later be known as the Protestant Reformation and the German Peasants’ War.

Poor Andreas!

The scribes at work.

Amidst all these grim personal conditions, Andreas Maler finds himself forced to play detective for multiple murder mysteries in Kiersau Abbey and the town of Tassing. Andreas’ murder investigations become an occasion for us, the players, to investigate the historical and social conditions in which the monks, the nuns, the townsfolk, and the rural peasants navigate their lives. In his life Andreas solves (or tries to solve) mysteries and as a vessel for us he opens the mysteries of 16th Century life.

In that bigger sense Pentiment is many, many things: a fictive documentary about late-medieval and early-modern manuscript production; a series of micro-portraits of grief and loss; a tableaux of priestly personality types; a nun-heavy sex comedy; a collection of manual-labor-themed point-and-click mini-games; a debate over the metaphysical nature of the Eucharist; a set of small-town Bavarian romances; a snapshot of the formation of a new European middle class which will eventually wreck feudal systems and transform them into a new political order; a psychological profile of an anchoress who bars herself up alone in a room to spend the whole of her life apart from the world contemplating the divine; a revenge tale about the demise of a baron rapist; an archaeology of Roman settlement in southern Germany; a lament for the suffering of the peasanty; an ode to peasant revolts; an anecdote about a near-blind nun who can tell her neighbor-artists apart by the scents their preferred pigments and paints leave behind when smeared on their hands and clothes; a chronicle of a clandestine gay affair between monks; and an investigation into a small town's sense of public memory.

Pentiment affords so many rich and diverse readings because of the density and specificity of textural details about 16th Century Bavarian Catholic life it provides. The game's visual style and user interface recall the manuscripts and woodblock printings of the late medieval and early modern eras (consider for reference the late 15th Century Nuremberg Chronicle, not coincidentally also the location of Andreas' hometown). Reproducing the style, the coloration, the line work, the position and spacing between text and image, etc of the period's major works in the game's interface allows us to feel embodied in that world of text and image in a way that reproduces some degree of what a real-life Andreas would have felt.

Andreas' in-progress masterwork.

The Fifth Day of Creation in the Nuremberg Chronicle.

In lieu of voice acting Pentiment offers a system of typographical characterization. Each time a character speaks you hear the onomatopoetic scritch-scratch of a writing instrument and see the letters of their reply fill in left-to-right one by one. Every character uses an individually modified version of a different typeface which reflects both their social standing, their educational background, and their relationship with the written words of this world. Shop-keeps and craftsmen use a simple, quick, efficient scribe script. Farmers and day-laborers dash off text that sometimes features phonetic spellings or hasty re-corrections. The learned clergy, steeped in centuries of manualist-scholastic tradition, favor a slow, dense, spacious Gothic blackletter font whose level of ornament is sometimes difficult to read. Educated city-dwellers like Andreas, influenced by the new learning of the Renaissance, use a sleek, precise script with elegant i and j dots. All this script play isn't just novelty. It's an essential representation of the relationship between each character and the intellectual forces of their world. Each time they speak they re-inscribe on the page the superstructures of education, theological tradition, and social position that locate, categorize, and specify them in their world. For a more detailed account of the creation of these typefaces, take a look at the creators' account here.

The major script types.

Monastic gothic script.

Andreas' Renaissance-influenced humanist script.

The most stunning moment of typographical characterization in the game comes when you first meet Claus Drucker, the town's modern, warm, reform-minded-but-not-radical printer and pamphleteer. His text renders through a different, very fast process--you see a row of inverted characters and a flash of dark squares and then his statement appears all at once rather than letter-by-letter, mimicking the physical process of mechanical type stamping ink down on a page.

Pentiment's gameplay zone is a 2d plane framed by the user interface as a text (with zoom-out marginalia, of course) and it uses this frame to provide instructive-but-not-didactic contexts on the game's deep historical content:

Sometimes this plane reproduces historical sources, as when Claus comments on the 12 Articles of the Peasants, a list of theological, political, and economic demands circulated during the German Peasants' War which Andreas will eventually find himself swept up in:

Andreas' interior states are given textual and painterly representation in the same manuscript plane. From time to time he drifts off to a Memory Palace/Court of the Mind, where he meets personifications of the various virtues of his age in figures recognizable to his cultural and intellectual background: Prester John (a mythic Christian king associated with bravery and heroism), Dante's Beatrice (emblematic of Christian grace, kindness, and charity), Socrates (philosophic wisdom and higher learning), and St. Grobian (a fictive folk saint of the coarse, the vulgar, the rapscallions, the thieves, and the fools of the world). From time to time these figures sound off in his head, offering advice or reproach, representing the push and pull of different influences from all the images, texts, and traditions colliding at the specific historic coordinates of one Andreas Maler.

Holding court.

Grobian and his ship of fools.

The court at work in Andreas' mind.

Sometimes the manuscript plane becomes a shared mental or cultural space. Sister Illuminata, one of the librarians at the abbey, wants to confiscate and burn a certain heretical text that has been banned for years by at least 3 different bishops. Andreas has the chance to plead with her on the book's behalf, and the conversation expands to one in which Illuminata and Andreas discourse the role of women in Catholic tradition and the legitimacy of ecclesiastical authority over texts. Illuminata's positions don't parse neatly into modern equivalents (she gives a moving account of the plight of women in the patriarchal feudal system and rejects the historic tendency to demonize women as seducers, as weak, as prostitutes, as the source of sin--but she also sincerely and enthusiastically supports the authority of the bishops to ban and burn books). As they talk Andreas and Illuminata slide in-and-out of the manuscript planes of the exemplar texts they discuss.

A scene from the Aeneid

Andreas and Illuminata enter the text.

Illuminata on the role of women in Catholic life.

Illuminata on literary depictions of women in the West.

Illuminata is no fan of chivalric romances.

Illuminata and a willful Andreas.

No tolerance for heresy.

A small but marvelous sequence of shared cultural space involves Brother Sebhat, a priest visiting from Ethiopia who is drawn with different proportion, shading, and outline than everyone else in the game. 

This is because Sebhat is drawn according to the artistic traditions of Ethiopian manuscript art rather than the Western traditions Andreas participates in. (For a more detailed account of the stylistic differences please consult this excellent article by art historian Blair Apgar).

Sebhat teaches and comforts the people of Tassing by preaching of two miracles: the multiplication of the loaves and fishes to feed many thousands & the raising of Lazarus from the dead. These are familiar stories to the people of Bavaria--they represent in plain, literal, undeniable terms Christ's victory over hunger and Christ's victory over death. As Sebhat preaches, the Bavarian Christians find themselves stepping into a visual story at once both familiar and different, as the miracles are rendered in an Ethiopian manuscript style:

Brother Sebhat preaches of Christ multiplying loaves and fishes.

Brother Sebhat preaches of Christ raising Lazarus from the dead.

The abbey is a repository of learning, and a site for the production and reproduction of beautiful and sacred texts. It is also, in the context of the pre-modern feudal Bavarian economy, the literal landlord to most of the town. The clergy as a class, in addition to having the privilege of compelling certain rents, tithes, and forms of labor from the townsfolk, are ensconced in symbiotic political and economic relations with the armed nobility who use brute, physical force to maintain social order. When Andreas isn't diving into the pages of illuminated manuscripts in the library or scriptorium he has more immediate tasks at hand: namely, solving time-sensitive murder mysteries whose repercussions will affect the entire social order of Tassing and Kiersau. Pentiment constructs an interesting and essential counterpart to all the lofty intellectual and textual history we see above. It uses the same detective-investigating-historical-conditions conceit and the manuscript plane of game space to illustrate the quotidian economic realities of life and labor for the villagers and peasants down the hill who support the abbey's way of life.

Life in Tassing and Kiersau runs along the rhythms of the Divine Office, a set of structured prayers (lauds, matins, vespers, etc) said at specific points in the day. The Divine Office isn't quite a clock, but it determines what times of day are used for what tasks in both the abbey and the town. The structure of the day and the passage of time in Pentiment are illustrated with a revolving wheel showing the sections of the Divine office.

The Canonical Hours

In order to solve his murder-mysteries Andreas has to use his limited free time to investigate clues and speak with possible witnesses and suspects. This usually takes the form of tagging along while a villager either completes their daily labor or eats their daily lunch in order to pepper them with questions and hopefully get useful answers and clues. Andreas participates in the daily toil of the village alongside the workers while chatting with them and at mealtime he shares in whatever sustenance they have to offer. Both the process of work and the lunches themselves are rendered in the 2d manuscript plane in ways that highlight the textures of daily life with the same depth and richness that the manuscript plane uses to depict intellectual and spiritual life via illuminated texts. Working with the blacksmith is loud, fast, energetic, busy, buoyant, propulsive, a proto-industry; working with the women to spin thread is slower, more communal but strictly gender-divided (Andreas, as an unmarried man, must stand outside the room of weaving maidens and work in tandem while chatting through a window), a space to share gossip and news, but it also requires immense dexterity. If you visit the wealthy semi-feudal semi-bourgeois miller he invites you to go hunting with him (game hunting in the time period is a rare right, usually reserved for the most elite, forbidden by law to the peasants) and up in the mountains he unspools a set of loathsome, rapacious monologues that make it clear why the other townsfolk hate him. The lunch sequences require you to click through various foods that show what the daily bread of that character's particular class might be. All of these serve to ground the game's intellectual and theological content and remind us that the systems that produce manuscripts, theology, time for clerics to contemplate the divine, etc, are dependent on the daily labor of countless working people.

A modest lunch of bread, cheese, and almonds.

Working together to spin thread.

Andreas struggles with spinning.

The motto of the Benedictine orders (to which the nuns and monks of Kiersau belong) is "ora et labora", in English, pray and work. This seems a fitting note to end on, given that prayer and work in 16th Century Bavaria are what Pentiment so excellently explores. The traditions and rhythms of the abbey govern life in Tassing, but Tassing is not without change. The game takes place over several decades and no matter how you resolve the mysteries by the very end, past the Peasants' War and deep into the Reformation, time will mark itself not by the Divine Office but, for better or worse, by a new mechanical clock:

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An Advent Coda: thank you all, dear writers and dear readers, for writing and reading our annual Advent Calendar. This is the final piece for this year, but we plan to continue our Media Club series into the next year. Feel free to find Will or Ander or both over to the right and send an email if you'd like to pitch us a piece. Happy holidays and Merry Christmas from Will, Ander, and all of Essay Daily!

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Will Slattery helps curate things here at Essay Daily. He tweets on very rare occasion (wjaslattery) and posts sundry personal content on Instragram (wjasity) rather frequently.

Dec 24: Geramee Hensley, Digital Mind Wave

 

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Digital Mind Wave

Geramee Hensley

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"Too much hope is the opposite of despair... an overpowering love may consume you in the end." —Vincent Valentine, Final Fantasy VII 

(Note: Spoilers for Final Fantasy VII)

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Searing through the sky, a terminal diagnosis burns red, blue, purple, pink. The third act of Final Fantasy VII begins after the heroes fail to stop the end of the world. Sephiroth, the antagonist—you’ve probably heard of him, even if you never played FFVII—summons a giant meteor. A calamity so large, it consumes the screen’s periphery as you zoom around the overworld in the airship you stole from the Big Evil Corporation exploiting the earth. Later, an inconsolable dirge supplants the optimistic and adventurous main theme you’ve been accustomed to so far. 

Memory is an image rendered by electricity and seen by the heart alone. The cosmology of FFVII states the planet itself has memory. All living things die, and their spirits return to the planet as currents of beautiful wispy green waves swirling under the dirt. An individual’s memories don’t die with their body; the planet folds them into its own. 

The Big Evil Corporation, Shinra Electric Power Company, constructs massive reactors to extract and process the lifestream into a usable form of energy. Shinra promises big dividends and jobs to the lifestream-rich towns who agree to the construction, and towns who don’t consent befall sudden and “coincidental” tragedies. Towns who do agree watch the landscape wither, drained of its memory and spirit. 

An act of ecoterrorism ignites the plot of FFVII. You are Cloud, an ex-SOLDIER. SOLDIER is a class of supersoldiers—the true elite of Shinra’s military. So, Cloud defects; he becomes a mercenary; and a childhood friend—Tifa—reconnects with Cloud and recruits him into a little terrorism. You have to blow up a data center—I mean reactor. 

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When I was eight years old, my parents took me to see Moulin Rouge! in theaters. Satine, the heroine played by Nicole Kidman, falls in love with the penniless poet and hopelessly idealistic romantic Christian. Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman really bring their A-game to the zany, tragic, campy, garish, all-over-the-place script but nothing, nothing, nothing outshines the music and their vocal performances.
     The Duke of Monroth arranges a contract to bind Satine to him in exchange for funding the Moulin Rouge’s extravagant theater production—a mise en abyme. In a silly little mix up, Satine mistakes Christian for The Duke, falls in love, and this error threatens the lives of our protagonists and the financial solvency of the cabaret. Very early on, the film establishes that Satine has consumption. She coughs blood into a handkerchief, and a terminal diagnosis burns red, blue, purple, pink. 

Satine tries to destroy Christian’s love for her to save his life. She picks The Duke, tells the writer to get lost, and she ultimately fails, when at the climax, Satine and Christian reprise the only original track written for the movie, "Come What May," in an utterly heartwrenching, effusive duet. Satine and Christian reaffirm their love; the ideals of the Bohemian Revolution—beauty, truth, freedom, and love—emerge victorious. The owner of the Moulin Rouge punches The Duke, and a gun flies out of The Duke’s hand, leaps out a window, and cartoonishly sails through the sky and ricochets off the Eiffel tower. 

Amor vincit omnia. The curtains fall. Satine, overcome with her illness, dies in Christian’s arms as he weeps helplessly into the cold and sweaty air. 

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Ten years pass, and Square Enix releases a prequel to FFVII—Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII. In Crisis Core, you play as Zack Fair, an excitable 2nd Class SOLDIER who aspires to reach the highest rank, 1st Class, like his mentor Angeal. All of the 1st Class SOLDIERS look like J-pop artists. They are boiz who like to hang out and get all sweaty together training including Sephiroth, who has not yet gone full-genocidal, but is a respected war hero—so still a bit genocidal.
     Final Fantasy VII as a series, like Moulin Rouge!, knows when to not take itself not-so seriously. Outrageous humor lines the impending doom of all you know. The original game features a cross-dressing minigame to break into a brothel-keeper’s den. Crisis Core goes into detail about Sephiroth’s hair care routine to achieve his luscious silver locks.
     Crisis Core also introduces a gameplay component called the “Digital Mind Wave.” The DMW represents Zack’s memories. It’s a slot machine spinning in the top-left corner of the screen with pictures of everyone you meet throughout the story. When the numbers stop and line up, you level up, get a temporary buff; or, when the faces match, you revisit a scene with that character then channel their memory into a devastating attack themed after who you remember. 

A hidden equation in the game’s programming forces its hand on the scale. Progress through the game, and your chance of leveling up increases. Meet a new character, and the game adds their portrait to your DMW. A plot point occurs with specific characters and the likelihood of seeing their face rises. At times a robotic woman’s voice announces “MODULATING PHASE” as the game zooms in on the DMW and you watch the pictures align—sometimes in a dramatic fashion: the slot machine is one off, and then BAM, it snaps-to and forces the reels to match.

During the most tense moments of the story, the DMW goes into a state of heightened emotions. The blue-ish green outlines turns yellow and red. The wheel accelerates, sparks fly, and memories cut into gameplay. Triggers, triggers, triggers. While you fight, images of your friends flash on the screen then fade to signal what’s going through Zack’s mind. Modulating Phase. The recurrence, the bright sounds, the flash—the player’s lack of agency in all this heightens the emotions for them, too. 

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In 2025, I began EMDR therapy. EMDR introduces a gameplay component called “bilateral stimulation,” which in my case meant holding two buzzers like controllers that would alternate with vibrations in my hands as my therapist walked with me through my memories.
     We outlined my life. 

We identified moments of heightened emotions. 

I was told it was like a train ride. You travel the path, and things zip by you. You notice. You keep going. The slot machine spins. Sometimes it spins faster. Images flash. Bright, beautiful things. Your therapist asks what do you notice? 

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Moulin Rouge! transformed me at an early age. Unasked, it loops and reminds me of my mother. The movie made me more like her—a penniless poet, a hopelessly idealistic romantic. A slot machine with the faces of everyone I love spins in my head.

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I replayed FFVII a month after my mom died. Act 2 of the story closes with the death of one of the main characters, Aerith. It’s one of the most famous deaths in all of video game history, making 11-year-olds cry everywhere. Before this death, you leap on stones making your way to an altar. Leap on the first stone, and you can’t go back.
     You can’t go back, and if you’re replaying this game you know what’s about to happen. A terminal diagnosis burns the sky. 

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In Crisis Core, your mentor Angeal does not shut up about protecting his honor, which is dubiously defined, but seems to mostly mean “follow your heart.” This honor—the heart—has a visual representation in Angeal’s “Buster Sword,” an iconic weapon fans know well as what Cloud will wield in the next game. When Angeal dies he bestows his honor, his dreams, and his big-ass sword to Zack, who must wield this honor as well as he can fight. 

Zack is an idealistic, devoted, energetic dude. We may as well call him a penniless poet. He earns the nickname “Zack the Puppy” from those less enthused by his energetic attitude. His last name, “Fair” is a direct foil to Cloud’s—”Strife.” Cloud, in Crisis Core, is a lowly infantryman who Zack befriends quickly through their shared childhoods in backwater towns—both sites of Shinra reactors.
     Because Crisis Core is a sequel, fans come in knowing how it all ends. Sephiroth loses his mind, conflagrates Cloud’s hometown, and Shinra rebuilds the town, pays a bunch of actors to inhabit it, then acts like nothing happened. Zack and Cloud are imprisoned, experimented on with weird alien magic by a mad scientist, and held in stasis for nearly four years, until Zack busts them out and hauls Cloud’s catatonic ass far-far away.
     Aerith, the one who dies in FFVII, is Zack’s girlfriend. She lives in Midgar, a huge city where Shinra keeps its headquarters. On the outskirts of the city, Shinra tracks you down, and you confront their entire army. 

You cannot go back. You cannot win. You fight infinite nameless soldiers, and don’t you dare bargain with infinity. While you fight, the DMW spins on. The faces of those you know slowly erase—white silhouettes spin outside memory’s sight. The battlefield narrows. Zack is strong, but he’s traveled a long way. Exhausted. Worn down. Memories loop and bust. They flash on the screen, interrupted by gun shots and gameplay. The DMW stutters. It rewinds. One face remains—Aerith. The DMW eats the screen, and memories cut in between your last breaths. The reels jam. The whole thing seizes, refusing to play the next memory. You hear her voice hellooooo, and then a final gunshot as green tessellation burns then fades to white. 

*

One month before my mom dies, she sits on my bed. She asks are you ready for what's about to happen?
     Looking at the memory together my therapist asks do you feel negative, positive, or neutral?
     A terminal diagnosis—

*

Zack dies but succeeds in rescuing Cloud. Cloud’s brain is fragile from mad scientist experiments and the trauma of seeing his town and nearly everyone he knows and loves mercilessly slaughtered by a super soldier. Cloud holds Zack as he dies, and Zack passes down the sword. He tells Cloud to protect his honor and his dreams. Protect your heart. You’re my living legacy. 

Through a complicated cocktail of alien magic and PTSD, Cloud’s mind absorbs many of Zack's memories and persona. Cloud forgets himself; his identity collapses into Zack’s; and, in the next game you become Cloud, who is kind of Zack until the end of the third act. In this act, you, the player, become Cloud’s best friend, Tifa, who, through means of the lifestream—the literal totality of all living memory swirling beneath the planet—travels into Cloud’s psyche to help him remember who he truly is.

Tifa guides Cloud through his memories while a massive transparent image of himself writhes in the background. You, the player, you, the Cloud, you, the Tifa. Tiny little buzzers in your hand vibrate. All versions of yourself collapse in on one another. Cloud remembers who he is. Do you? Does this make you feel positive, negative, or neutral?

*

Two years before my mom died we started working on a book together. We never finished it, but me and the version of her I hold within myself—a version both wholly her because the only version of people we get to hold of anybody is our version, and a version not wholly her—we will finish it. She worked on it until she couldn’t. The last full sentence she said to me was write it how you remember me. I remember. The slot machine accelerates. You’re my living legacy. I pick up the sword. 

*

I talk about EMDR with my partner. Or, I try to. I offer half a sentence. They invite me to say more. The slot machine jams up. The faces on it stutter.
     They are so patient with me. They place their legs across my lap and look at me with eyes that help me see myself better. In these tiny moments, I understand the kind of love that inspires people to have children despite the meteor igniting the skyline. I push through the memory, and love forces its hand on the scale.
     With tenderness, they look at me and ask would you like more coffee? 

*

Geramee is a penniless poet and a hopelessly idealistic romantic. They are in love.