In this excerpt from his book The Otherworld: The Mythic Dimensions of Christophe Gans, author and RogerEbert.com contributor Scout Tafoya gets into the French director’s parallels to the great Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky and the video games that inspired his work.
First person POV camera was de rigueur in Japanese games by the time Team Silent’s “Silent Hill” was released in 1999 for PlayStation. Its visual language is distinctly Tarkovskian, with its floating ‘camera’, fogbound abandoned buildings, and creatures suffering from what appears to be radioactive fallout (pale white forms with the skin conditions of the first crews sent to fight the fires at Chernobyl). The idea of a shapeshifting landscape as exploration of a fractured conscience/consciousness is the throughline of the “Silent Hill” games. In “Solaris,” a phantom alien planet (possibly a lifeform) starts playing havoc with a crew of orbiting astronaut’s sense of reality. When Kelvin (Donatas Banionis) is sent to take stock, the planet begins changing his perception of the world and introduces him to the invincible ghost of his deceased wife (played by Sergei Bondarchuk’s daughter Natalya). Like the protagonist James Sunderland in “Silent Hill 2,” he’s ‘searching’ for his wife and finds her ghost. In “Solaris” the ghost is a projection beamed up from the planet of the title. Not a ghost, but a psychic apparition, which is practically speaking, the same thing (though the orthodox Christian Tarkovsky surely knew which one he believed). So the hero of “Solaris” must decide if what he’s seeing is his mind’s work, a planet’s work, or god’s; a million miles and years from home, where religion is only represented in the natural world he chooses to leave behind. In saying goodbye to the earth’s corporeal suggestion (people, grass, birds, family, art) for the last time on his way into orbit around Solaris, he’s rejecting ‘god’ for science (Tarkovsky himself grappling with it in being a filmmaker constantly filming art and the creation of art as an antidote to war and austerity – the long drive back to the city in “Solaris” his best impression of a world without god), only to discover they can’t describe each other. And film thus is the only way to question god’s absence. What would Tarkovsky have made of a video game like “Silent Hill,” about the search for god in an artifact of pure scientific construction? As “Stalker” has it: “Don’t hope for flying saucers, that would be too interesting.”
On the 21st of May 2020 Team Silent designer Masahiro Ito took to Twitter to answer a question that’s plagued many a fan. “”Solaris” is one of novels which inspired the story of SH2.” Seems the loneliness of the COVID pandemic and the closeness we came to apocalypse finally convinced him to open up. For a moment the whole world was in The Zone. “Silent Hill” the game is an even stranger reckoning with the idea of god. If a movie is the obvious representation of a camera’s viewpoint (canted however the story or project deems fit), a video game like “Silent Hill” suggests that even the camera’s viewpoint is “god’s” viewpoint. A camera left in a field will collect data of the thing that passes before its gaze, including the time that elapses. Time and space in a video game are manmade. A digital time piece is never far from the menu options in a game, to tell you the speed at which you completed it, but also as a way to nudge the player towards the sum total of the work. Never mind a completion of the narrative but a proper showcase for all the work that went into making a sky a sky, and a man a man beneath it. When you have effectively mapped a whole world (a ‘zone’ of bottled incident and an internal clock) why wouldn’t you encourage your ‘user’ to explore it all? And then the game’s interaction with a user creates its own dialectic. God has made the game, but it’s now god with the controller in her hand. So who is in charge?
Tarkovsky died before Chernobyl, missing the fulfillment of his prophecy. The Soviets never got close to succeeding in their mission to impose state atheism on its people, you can’t do it when people already know what belief can mean. For the record a state without religion is the only sane option. People are religious, but a government is not and shouldn’t be, tautologically and morally speaking. People look to the state as the characters do in “Solaris”. To provide answers and get them out of tarrying in the real world. A state cannot be possessive of anything, let alone belief, so the lies are insurmountable before the starting gun has gone off. Further down the line Tarkovsky missed his aesthetic upholstery and theological yearning becoming the centerpiece vassal for a new hierarchy of artistic expression. Between “Crime & Punishment” and “Silent Hill” lay “Stalker” and “Solaris”, and a representation of the moral condition of being alive in a post-theist industrial present (the future, we can safely say, has arrived) is copied and copied and copied. The games have been remade and turned into films which spawned sequels. A manmade god being reproduced by man and vice versa all the way down.
To play “Silent Hill,” about a man’s search for meaning in a zone of his own (split into components: the ‘Fog World’ and the ‘Otherworld’, hell and purgatory; heaven out of reach and beside the point), created by designers as a reflection of an aesthetic philosophy born of an existential condition, is to enter a cinematic dialectic. “Stalker’s” script tells one story, the camera another, and the scenery yet another. All of them wrap around the intangible of Tarkovksy’s terror at God’s silence, per Bergman. “Silent Hill” the game can only be a reassuring riff on Tarkovsky because the world is demonstrably a creation, and creating a world for your users is itself an act of faith. The town of Silent Hill is ‘built’ for each of its protagonist’s individual journeys.
In “Return to Silent Hill,” Gans adaptation of Silent Hill 2, the journey through the radioactive fallout and the warped territory in James’ (played in the film by Jeremy Irvine) recollection, marries “Stalker’s” existential searching (the act of looking replacing decisive action; a country’s ruin as a fantastical dimension where hope can infect one like cancer cells or a drug, depending on one’s outlook), Mirror’s floating continuity of sense memory stitched together through his father’s poetry, and “Solaris’” deranged heartache syndrome at the corridor of experience, guilt, and bargaining. Gans works hard to earn close-ups like those of the gaunt heroes and fulsome wives and mothers in Tarkovsky, whose heroes don’t have control, but are at the Otherworld’s mercy. In Solaris a widower is powerless to stop inviting his wife’s ghost into his bedroom. In “Mirror” a dying man looks back at an active past in which he cannot participate. In “Stalker” a man is addicted to the toxicity of “The Zone”, the colorized netherworld brought about by extraterrestrial intelligence attached to the monochrome real of ‘modern’ Russia. All three films predict Chernobyl (an obvious model for Silent Hill’s noxious barometer); worlds undone by regret and mad science. The personal and political entwined like lovers in reverie. Like James and Mary. The fallout and its ashen skies are always a few hours away.
Perhaps it’s because the Japanese spent the 20th century tallying the cost of material absolutes and demented moral abdication (in World War 2 alone: kamikaze pilots [“The craziest thing about World War 2” -My 9 year old nephew, unprompted], cannibalism and mass suicides in the South Pacific, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the Rape of Nanking, Kuril Island, Unit 731), Team Silent needed a model for a psychic intangible like Stalker outside of their own. By 1999 a huge part of Japanese culture had been adduced through American example, as carried over by their conquerors in the years after the Emperor surrendered. American gangster movies, westerns and war movies, jazz, comic books – as when Yasujiro Ozu saw “Fantasia” and declared the US the victor in the war well ahead of schedule, the certainty in a conflict must have spoken to a people who’d had the iron jaw of nationalism wedged open by the crowbar of capitalism. America demanded to be treated like they were at the top of the food chain. And while you can make a good first-person shooter out of that attitude, there’s little philosophical breathing room.
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