Representations of the Monstrous Feminine in the ...

Representations of the Monstrous Feminine in the F.E.A.R. Trilogy

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Abstract. This paper deals with representations of femininity in the horror themed first person shooter trilogy, F.E.A.R. By relying on post-Freudian psychoanalysis and feminist film theory, I intend to highlight the way in which the representations of Alma, the main female antagonist, reflect a series of dominant patriarchal anxieties. The horror element of each game is based on a particular anxiety, such as the fear of maternal authority or female sexual agency. These anxieties are, however, not independent, since most, if not all of them, can be understood as embodiments of what Julia Kristeva called abjection. Consequently, my paper begins with an exposition of the critical method, and continues with three other sections, each dealing with an instalment of the trilogy. Since my aim is to analyse the visual representations of Alma, considerably less attention will be given to the ludic side of the video games, with the exception of the discussion of F.E.A.R. 3, where the choice of the avatar and player performance influence the outcome of the game and, therefore, have bearing on the overall psychoanalytic implications of the cultural product. Because I do not expect many of my readers to be familiar with the video games, I will provide a very brief synopsis of the plot in each section. Keywords: F.E.A.R., abjection, first person shooter, horror, feminism, psychoanalysis, adaptation, Barbara Creed.

1. Psychoanalysis, Abjection and Horror According to Jacques Lacan, there are three important stages in the psychosexual development: the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic (1966/2006:310). The Real represents the stage at which the child is on a par with animals and nature. His ego not yet formed, it doesn’t perceive itself as being different from those around it. At this stage, the child has needs, which, as in the case of animals, can

* This paper is an analysis of the canonical F.E.A.R. trilogy developed by Monolith Productions and Day 1 Studios. The Vivendi expansion packs fall outside the scope of this paper.

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be fulfilled. Because the Real cannot be encapsulated by the Symbolic order, it resists signification (1981/1988: 53-54) and can be experienced only through psychosis (Macey 324) or jouissance (Kristeva 9). The next stage is that of the Imaginary, which is also related to the mirror stage. Once the child is able to recognize himself in the image of a mirror, it makes a first step in othering itself from those around it. Lacan stresses the fact that the mirror image represents an imaginary ideal image of the self, which entertains the phantasy of wholeness and functionality (1966/2006: 95). Nevertheless the child’s recognition is also one of misrecognition, since the real, natural child is not the mirror image (Macey 255-256) and thus a life lasting negotiation between an ideal image and the reality of the self ensues (Lacan 1966/2006: 95). The Symbolic stage is the one where the subject enters language, the Symbolic Order. It implies thoroughly assuming culture, through language, and repressing nature (Lacan 1966/2006: 277). Having entered the chain of signification, the individual others herself from those around her. The “ideal-I” (95) provided by the mirror image as identification is now replaced by the images provided by culture (Lacan 1966/2006: 99), which nevertheless entertain the same illusionary image-ego identification and alienation. Moreover, the Symbolic order cannot be dissociated from patriarchy, since “it is in the name of the father that we must recognize the basis of the symbolic function which, since the dawn of historical time, has identified his person with the figure of the law.” (Lacan 1966/2006: 278) Julia Kristeva builds on Lacan’s contributions and focuses on instances when nature breaks into the Symbolic. The French-Bulgarian critic asserts that the Real can burst into the Symbolic order in the form of abjection. Abjection can take many forms such as food loathing or the corpse (Kristeva 2-3). Both are abject because their corporeal materiality thwarts the boundary between the Real and the Symbolic. A wound with blood and pus, or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of decay, does not signify death. In the presence of signified death – a flat encephalograph, for instance – I would understand, react, or accept. No, as in true theatre, without makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. (Kristeva 3) The corpse, unlike an encephalograph, is not a symbolic representation of death. Had it been so, there would not be any somatic reaction of repulsion to it. The corpse is more than a symbol, it is a concrete form of death, which represents man’s relation to nature. In a corpse, one sees man as part of nature. Yet, in order for the autonomous self to exist, one must extricate nature and enter the Symbolic. The corpse is, therefore, a form of abjection because it breaks through language


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and blurs the boundary between the Symbolic and nature – hence Kristeva’s rhetorical question: “How can I be without the border?” (4) In her reading of Kristeva, Barbara Creed identifies the mother and the womb as forms of abjection due to three reasons. Firstly, mothers represent the relation of the child to nature due to the fact that the child was one and the same with the mother before birth. Because of this association and the need of the self to authenticate itself by repressing nature, mothers are considered a threat to the symbolic order, therefore abject. Secondly, “[h]er ability to give birth links her directly to the animal world and the great circle of birth, decay and death. Awareness of one’s links to nature reminds man of the fragility of the symbolic order”. (47) This second argument is linked to the idea exposed earlier that concretizations of death are considered abjections. Additionally, birth is always accompanied by much blood loss and it implies an opening of the body, making the interior visible. The Symbolic constructs man as clean and pure, ignoring the insides that are dejected and expelled. (13) This leads us to the third argument, which is the relation between the mother – the womb and the inside – the impure, whose connection seems to have been established by religious factors: “Whereas abjection was formulated in Judaism as a series of abominations external to the human subject, in Christianity abjection is interiorized” (48). 2. F.E.A.R.: First Encounter Assault Recon (2005): The Fear of Matriarchal Authority F.E.A.R. tells the story of Paxton Fettel, a telepathic commander in charge of an army of clones. At some point he is telepathically contacted by mother, Alma, and, as a result, he goes berserk. With the help of his clone troops he starts a rebellion against Armacham, the company who created Fettel and his soldier under the supervision of Harlan Wade, Alma’s father.1 The player’s mission is to track down Fettel and eliminate him. On his journey to find Fettel, the player’s avatar finds out that he himself is the product of the same project that created Fettel, and that both share the same mother. Paxton Fettel is a hybrid character in the sense that, as the latter instalments will prove, his entire life he has been caught in-between paternal authority, represented by Harlan Wade, the head of Projects Origin and Perseus, and maternal authority represented by Alma Wade. As long as he obeys his father, therefore remaining within the Symbolic order, Fettel seems to have a ‘clean’ civilized conduct and the storyworld is in a state of equilibrium. The moment Fettel shifts sides, he relapses into the Real and becomes a cannibal, thus causing a rupture in the state of balance experienced by the storyworld. At work here is the anxiety of the mother as abjection, because she reminds one of the stage in one’s existence when one was part of nature. By obeying his mother, Fettel leaves the Symbolic order and

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Figure 1. F.E.A.R.: Fettel eating the corpse of an Armacham security officer

can indulge in ‘unclean’ habits (Figure 1). Cleanliness, or better yet, its absence, is an important aspect of abjection because according to Kristeva, mothers are associated with bodily dejections since they are the ones who clean their children. (Chaudhuri 93) By way of consequence, falling back into the Real brings along a dirty, abominable gratification of the basic need to feed in the form of cannibalism. However, the relevance of cannibalism for the relapse of the Real which the character experience does not end here. If we are to look at F.E.A.R. intertextually or transfictionally, Fettel’s cannibalism gains new connotations. Besides the many Hollywood horror film clichés and stock elements, the video game entertains a strong hypotextual relation to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness2. The video game updates the story of the novel by setting it in a new spatiotemporal context and translating the major themes and motifs of the novel so as to suite the new cultural frame and the new medium. Consequently, if Heart of Darkness was the story of Marlow who, in the late 19th century, become obsessed with Mr Kurtz, a hybrid character caught in-between western civilization and African pre-modern culture, whom he follows up the Congo, F.E.A.R. is now about an anonymous protagonist who gradually becomes obsessed with Paxton Fettel, a hybrid character caught in-between western civilization (the Symbolic order) and the Real, whom he follows up a river. Shifting to this intertextual/intermedial perspective, we can now draw some interesting conclusions concerning the function of cannibalism in the video game’s attempt to translate, adapt and proximate (or update) (Sanders 19) the rhetorical strategies of othering employed in the novel. To begin with, the issue of hybridity is central to both the novel and the video game. This presupposes two iden-


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titary facets constituted antithetically to one another. In both Heart of Darkness and F.E.A.R. the ‘positive’ identitary facet, defined as endowed with reason, individuality, and so on, is western civilization, or the Symbolic order3, while the ‘negative’, identitary facet, which is usually defined as lacking reason, individuality, and so on, seems to have undergone a more complex process of translation. In the novel, African culture is stereotypically portrayed as communitarian, i.e. Africans lack individuality in the modern sense, underdeveloped relative to western standards, superstitious, and matriarchal. Similar to the novel, the video games maintains the negative characteristics of the pre-modern other, but it naturally cannot afford to rely on racial stereotypes in today’s postmodern landscape. As a result, negative otherness is projected onto imagined, unreal entities such as the clones and fictional supernatural individuals, such as Alma. The clones share the lack of individual identity, reason and free will characteristic of the novel’s native Africans, while Alma adds the matriarchal feature, thus resulting in a negative counterpoint to western civilization. However, the relation between pre-modern African culture, on the one hand, and Alma and the clones, on the other is also overtly expressed by Fettel’s cannibalism, a typically pre-modern practice. By indulging into cannibalism, Fettel couples abjection with western culture’s negative stereotype about African culture and, on a macrotextual level, institutes an interesting dialogue with his hypotextual character, Mr Kurtz. Returning now to Alma, it is worth noting that besides her being the mother of Paxton Fettel, she also takes up the appearance of a child when she telepathically escapes from the vault where she is sealed. If abjection is the uncanny eruption of the Real into the Symbolic order, then children are just as likely to cause abjection since they are closer to nature than grown-ups. The child version of Alma shows up again in F.E.A.R. 3, where besides her appearance in F.E.A.R., she is represented with bloody legs and feet, suggesting menstruation, and a pale morbid dark eye ringed face. Both the display of bodily fluids, and the morbid cadaveric look are instances of abjection because it reminds one of one’s bodily nature, which has been and always will be part of the Real. 3. F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin – The Fear of Uncontrolled Female Sexual Agency The main protagonist of F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin is Sergeant Beckett. The action begins shortly before the final events of F.E.A.R. with the player accompanying his team in a mission to arrest Genivieve Aristide, the president of Armacham Technologies Corporation. Throughout the game, the protagonist finds out that he had been part of a project whose aim was to artificially create telepathic commanders to lead the army of clones. Due to his telepathic capacities, he can be in contact with Alma, who is now telepathically attracted to him. The last interval4 of the game features Alma raping the protagonist who is strapped to a chair.

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Figure 2. F.E.A.R 2: Project Origin: sexualized Alma/cadaveric Alma

Of course, the days when women in mainstream visual culture were represented as merely passive objects of the male gaze and lacked any sort of sexual agency what-so-ever are over. The gradual allocation of agency to women has many factors, the main being the concern with political correctness. However, other reasons may also be taken into account. The advent of modern graphic special effects gave Hollywood the possibility to finally adapt comic books and render their superpowers, while at the same time maintaining the seamless impression of immediacy that has characterized Hollywood from the 1920s up until the advent of the DVD player (Gardner 196). This way, female action heroes such as Catwoman were able to make the screen as active narrative agents contributing to ‘saving the day’. Another reason, which is directly link to the first one, may be considered the strong and persistent tradition of feminist film criticism which has been gradually, even if only partially, factored in by the big entertainment companies. Films like Mad Max: Fury Road, or video games such as Mortal Kombat X, go even as far as to invert the traditional oedipal plot and feature active female agents who steal the spotlight and save crippled, hurt, wounded or immobilized white males. F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin does not go that far. We should not forget that these two examples just given are 2015 releases and I am tempted to claim that what we are facing is an incipient trend in mainstream media. Being released in 2009, F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin is


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far from these stronger feminist undertones, but remains politically correct by having a female character, Keira Stokes, as First Lieutenant and, consequently, leader of the team that Sergeant Beckett is part of. In terms of female agency, the game adopts a sceptical attitude towards it and offers it a stark negative connotation. Consequently, female agency comes down to overemphasizing the sexual appetite of the game’s antagonist Alma who now takes the shape of teenager. Driven by this reckless sex drive, Alma seeks gratification in the protagonist. What is somewhat paradoxical about female agency in mainstream media in general (and female sexual agency in particular) is its relation to the dominant patriarchal culture. Yes, the thorough ornamental passivity and the voyeurism of films such as Vertigo infringe upon our presumably egalitarian western dominant culture, yet agency in women must always be vouchsafed by patriarchal authority. Women are almost always side-kicks, or antagonists who are eventually defeated by male antagonist, and they are hypersexualized. Narrative agency seems to come at a price, which is that of turning into a fetishistic ornamental sexual object who exotically twists, turns and swerves its half-naked body. As a result, it is safe to claim that female (sexual) agency is not a taboo as long as it is regulated, or kept within the limits designated by the dominant patriarchal culture. If the female characters comply, we usually get an action movie (or video game) where the woman is a sexy side-kick. If they choose to exceed the limits, then the genre is horror and the female character becomes an antagonist who has to be defeated by the male protagonist in order to reinforce the Symbolic order. As far as Alma is concerned, we find ourselves in the latter situation. In F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin, Alma’s hypersexuality reverses the patriarchal hierarchy of male sexual agency – female sexual passivity, thus threatening the Symbolic order. Thereupon, Alma needs to be defeated so that the status quo may be re-established. As the game progresses the protagonist often comes across Alma who assaults him, or, to be more precise, harasses him by trying to forcefully kiss him. The player has to struggle to avoid Alma’s kiss which begets instant death. The game takes an interesting turn towards the end, where the final interval does not see Alma destroyed or her sexuality tamed, and thus the Symbolic order prevail; instead, male agency is annulled in the real gameworld (the protagonist is tied to a chair) and transposed to the protagonist’s hallucinations while Alma rapes him. Female uncontrolled sexuality, instead of being annulled, is gratified. Visually Alma oscillate between a sexualized embodiment and a cadaveric one. These two images can be linked to the sex drive, whose procreative incentive makes it an instinct for life, (Freud 34) and with the death drive, respectively, which seeks to bring the organic to its initial inorganic stage. (Freud 32) The random shifting of image suggests the coexistence and struggle of these two drives. In the F.E.A.R. trilogy, Alma is physically dead, yet her psyche lives on.

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Because Alma is basically a bodiless being, her image is a reflection of her dominant psychic state. This leads us to the conclusion that the oscillation between the two images directly reflects which instinct is prominent at a particular moment. Additionally, Alma’s cadaveric image can be regarded as an instance of abjection, if we were to take into account Kristeva’s intimations of the corpse. 4. F.E.A.R. 3 – The Fear of Parthogenetic Birth The central topic of F.E.A.R 3 is Alma’s pregnancy. The player, who can now control either the initial protagonist (aka the Point Man) or Paxton Fettel, is to prevent Alma from giving birth. The game’s multiplayer was designed as a cooperative tactical shooter, which nevertheless presupposes rivalry and competition between the two playable characters. At the end of the game, the player to have obtained the highest score determines the ending. If the Point Man has more points you get the ‘good ending’ in which the Point Man kills Paxton Fettel and saves the baby while Alma dissolves into nothingness. Conversely, if Paxton Fettel has more points at the end, Fettel kills the Point Man and cannibalizes Alma, thus obtaining the ‘bad ending’. If the previous instalment made abjection subsidiary to the issue of unrestricted female agency, F.E.A.R. 3 brings abjection back in the spotlight. Throughout the game Alma displays a bloody and fluid exposing female corporeality in a series of instances: menstruating child, cadaveric teenager and, now also, pregnant woman. Kristeva’s contentions about pregnancy and the abject are telling here, because giving birth always reminds one of his natural (in the Lacanian sense) origins. But the abject side of Alma’s pregnancy does not end here. Alma is not just a mother, she is an “archaic mother” (Creed 54) who does not need a male partner to procreate. (The final cut-scene of the video game features Alma with a humongous uterus, reflecting her overactive, out of control reproductive functions – see Figure 3) Besides the child she is bearing, Alma constantly gives birth to monstrous creatures that the player has to confront. In this sense, it would be wrong to consider the main anxiety of F.E.A.R. 3 to be the fear of birth as an instance of abjection, but rather the fear of parthogenetic birth, which besides the abjection related to birth, incorporates the absence of masculine authority, as well. It is conspicuous how the third and final instalment of the trilogy coalesces the main anxieties of the first two. If F.E.A.R. is about the abject side of motherhood and the consequences it has on the self of the child, and F.E.A.R 2: Project Origin treats female agency beyond or in the absence of male authority, F.E.A.R. 3 couples the maternal abject with the absence of patriarchal control. Creed argues that the audience’s pleasure in watching horror films is derived from seeing the abject done away with and the Symbolic order re-established. (53) As we have seen, F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin offers its players the exact opposite


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Figure 3. F.E.A.R. 3: Alma’s overemphasized womb

in that Alma is not defeated; quite on the contrary, Alma finds sexual gratification, annuls male agency and, far from being extinguished, abjection continues to plague the gameworld with Alma causing paranormal phenomena and giving birth to all sorts of hideous creatures. The ending of the first instalment goes along the same lines. The player is incapable to prevent the regret ridden Harlan Wade to free Alma from her containment, and as a result, Alma is capable to freely and uncontrollably manifest her monstrous powers. F.E.A.R. 3 is the first game of the trilogy to actually render the player capable of bridling Alma and re-establishing the Symbolic order in the ‘good ending’. Yet, as already mentioned, obtaining this ending presupposes either that the player has chosen the Point Man in single player, or that the Point Man in multiplayer performs better than Paxton Fettel. What we are dealing with here is not unlike the covert narrative node branching encountered in hyperfiction. First person shooters usually have an embedded plot that has to be pushed forward by the player’s progress. Although it is up to the player to decide how she will deal with her enemies, the order of the events, the spatial path marking the player’s journey in the gameworld, as well as the cut-scenes that frame the game action, link the levels and cinematically push the narrative forward are the same at each run of the game and cannot be changed by the player’s decisions. This kind of rigid design that embeds an invariant unfolding of the plot makes sure that each run of the game will ‘tell’ roughly the same story. More recently, however, in spite of the general embeddedness of the narrative, many shooters have started to include multiple endings.5 Obviously, the player who plays a game for the first time is very unlikely to know whether the narrative branches into multiple endings, yet what is interesting about F.E.A.R 3 is that, unlike games such as Bioshock where the player is faced with overt ethical choices, F.E.A.R. 3 takes into account one’s performance which is related to gaming competence, experience and, in the

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end, hand-eye coordination. Based on these non-ethical aspects of gaming, the game chooses one of the two opposing highly ethically imbued endings. This way the player may very well be stuck with an ending that may not suite his ethical profile, however, unless you have unwittingly chosen Fettel in the single player mode and are distraught by the ‘bad ending’, the point criterion for the determination of the ending does influence gameplay in the multiplayer mode immensely. Because there is a limited number of opponents that the players have to eliminate in order to get points, the sloppy gameplay that is often fostered by cover based shooters (ducking and waiting for the right time to strike) will prove inefficient and will leave the player adopting it lagging behind in terms of points. Moreover, from a practical perspective, it would have been very difficult to conceive a system of decision making that would imply both players and not lead to a deadlock. Imagine how the game would have been like if the two player were at a decision making point and each of them chose a different option. Let us now turn our attention to the two endings and investigate them from the psychoanalytical perspective. I will first start with ‘the good ending’ in which the Point Man kills Fettel and saves Alma’s child. As already hinted, this ending favours patriarchal authority because it reinstitutes the Symbolic order. After the Point Man takes the baby, Alma shows a face of relief and cleanly dissolves. Cleanliness is an aspect that cannot be overestimated. Alma’s death suggests the prevailing of the Symbolic order since the source of abjection is eliminated. Yet her clean, almost voluntary dissolution turns Alma’s defeat into Alma’s submission. Throughout the entire trilogy, Alma opposes the Symbolic order by relishing in her bodily femininity and the Real. Both F.E.A.R. and F.E.A.R 2: Project Origin are basically about bridling Alma and redrawing the border between the Symbolic and the Real, yet in both cases the attempts are met with failure. Alma cannot be subdued. Taking all this into account, Alma’s clean dissolution is her first clean gesture, which symbolizes her acceptance of the Symbolic order and, consequently, patriarchal authority. Moreover, Alma’s birth giving and immediate death seem to resolve the sex drive/death drive conflict that was prevalent in F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin. Alma has now perpetuated life by having a baby and also returned to an inorganic state. Conversely, the ‘bad ending’ features the defeat of the Symbolic order. Paxton Fettel, the male antagonist of F.E.A.R., kills the Point Man and devours Alma. This time, we are dealing with the end-results of the effects of leaving the Symbolic order and entering the scope of maternal authority. Fettel delves into the Real and by cannibalizing Alma and the baby, he perpetuates abjection. Graphically, the cutscene representing this ending is the opposite of the one described above. Instead of Alma’s clean dissolution, now we see a vicious and bloody scene of cannibalism.


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5. Conclusion This article has extrapolated Barba Creed’s post-Freudian psychoanalytical method in an attempt to analyse the horror elements featured in the F.E.A.R. trilogy. The first instalment, F.E.A.R., portrays the fear of leaving the Symbolic and entering the scope of maternal authority. The dire consequences of this shift on the self are illustrated by the changes undergone by Paxton Fettel, who, once he is contacted by Alma, turns to cannibalism. Although the relation between cannibalism and abjection may not need much justification, I also tried to account for it from an intertextual/transfictional perspective by considering the video game’s hypotextual relation to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and, consequently, Mr Kurtz. Cannibalism is not only abject, but also an overt intertextual link between the negative identitary facets of the two hybrid characters. F.E.A.R 2: Project Origin has the fear of uncontrolled female sexual agency as its main theme. Although popular culture around 2009 did ascribe agency, even sexual agency, to women, there were still some clear limits that female characters were not allowed to exceed. In the second instalment, these limits are exceeded and male-agency/female-passivity dichotomy is turned on its head. Finally, F.E.A.R. 3 couples the abjection associated with motherhood and the fear of female agency beyond the restraints of patriarchal control. The game features two ending: a ‘good’ one where Alma is subdued and the boundary between the Real and the Symbolic is finally redrawn, and ‘bad’ one where abjection prevails. Endnotes 1 Paxton Fettel’s relation to his parents may be regarded as an Oedipus complex gone wrong, yet as the unravelling of the plot goes to show us, if this is an oedipal triangle, it is indeed an overcomplicated one. Harlan Wade is not only the father of Paxton Fettel, but also of Alma. When Alma was impregnated, Harlan Wade used his own genetic material. 2 According to the bonus content in the director’s edition DVD, the game developers initially intended to introduce another male antagonist, Conrad Krieg but later changed their minds and merge Fettel and Kurz into one, keeping the name of the former. 3 I am by no means implying that western civilization is homogeneous and ahistorical. Rather, my claim is that the video game is in keeping with the novel in the sense that both the novel and the video game provide us with their own views of the historically embedded and liquid western civilization. To put it differently, they share the signifier, not the signified. 4 The game is divided in 7 intervals. 5 This is by no means a recent development. For example, the first Silent Hill video game, released in 1999, featured four endings. Nevertheless, it was only later that we can speak of the proliferation of multiple endings in video games.

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