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The Philosophy of Silent Hill 2 – Wisecrack Edition

Mar 26, 2024
Hi Joke Michael, here and today we are talking about an almost 22 year old game that still gives us nightmares, the PS2 horror classic Silent Hill, often ranked among the best games ever made, not just in horror, but It is also influential for other games. movies too, even guillermo del toro confesses to being a fan because it's one of my favorite game franchises in storytelling franchises, so what makes it so great and why did its successors, who draw so much inspiration from it, not give in the White? a lot to do with the psychological part of its psychological horror, so turn on your radios and grab a wooden board for this joke about the psychology of Silent Hill 2 and spoilers for an old video game.
the philosophy of silent hill 2 wisecrack edition
Let's do a quick summary. Silent Hill 2 is the story of widow James Sunderland who arrives in the titular town of Silent Hill after receiving a letter from her wife Mary asking him to visit her, but Mary has been dead for three years. The dead person cannot write a letter. Mary died of that damn disease three years ago. years ago, so James is understandably confused and decides to investigate. When he arrives, a pretty bad fog appears, hiding some grotesque monsters and drawing distances. He soon realizes that the city is almost empty, save for Nightmare's fuel. However, she knows some normal people, well, somewhat normal. an idiot with a stomach bug, the lost and erratic Eddy, Angela, and the really unpleasant girl, Laura, none of whom are interested in hanging out or being particularly helpful, such as when Laura locks James in a room to die. .
the philosophy of silent hill 2 wisecrack edition

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the philosophy of silent hill 2 wisecrack edition...

Laura, what are you? You also witness the main episode. antagonist of the game everyone's favorite geometric ghoul Pyramid Head doing something: two pairs of legs sewn together look, we'll get to that anyway, then he meets a woman who looks identical to his wife Mary but is strangely named Maria and accompanies her hoping to escape. the city after exploring a hospital with questionable health standards Maria is killed by Pyramid Head only to be inexplicably found alive a little later James further explores Silent Hill repeatedly rescuing Maria and watching her die rescuing Angela watching her die trying to help Eddie and having to kill everything while that little idiot Laura keeps trying to kill him, this all culminates when James confronts his past, it turns out that he euthanized and murdered his wife while she was wasting away due to a terminal illness, It put her out of her misery and so he could move out.
the philosophy of silent hill 2 wisecrack edition
Moving on with his life Depending on how you play James can leave Silent Hill with his double wife Maria, leave the city with Laura, revive his dead wife using the city's evil power, or take his own life after being torn apart by guilt. Hill 2 is as tragic as it is terrifying, sure the lighting and isolating atmosphere make wandering the empty streets eerie and yes, waiting for your radio to fill with static as another shambling nightmare approaches can be unbearably tense, but it's James' tragic backstory that makes Everything So Bleak To understand how the tragedy and scares worked so coherently that we have to turn to Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, a former student of Mother Love and Sigmund Freud.
the philosophy of silent hill 2 wisecrack edition
Jung believes that human neuroses arise from the subconscious that is influenced by our desires. He thought of this subconscious desire as a type of energy, a kind of driving force that he referred to as libido. This was different from Freud's definition, which was explicitly sexual, like everything in Freud, as Jung put it, libido. denotes a desire or impulse not controlled by any type. of Authority Moral or other libido is appetite in its natural state. Jung believed that our psyche was a self-regulating system and our libido is a part of them. Our libidinal energy or drive simply knows where it should go to help the psyche, likening it to the water of the libido.
It has as if it were a natural tension, it is like water that must have a gradient to flow but just like water it can encounter resistance and recede, for Jung this is what depression is a kind of obstruction in our libido so our desires or libido shows us where to go, but we have to do the work to remove that obstruction. This concept is the first step in understanding the main premise of the game. Most people rightly wonder why James would go all the way to creepy Silent Hill in the First place, when he knows damn well that his wife is dead, you know, because he killed her, we might as well wonder why so soon as he sees the first half melt, that figure moved to attack him, not just turn around and run back in the same direction.
After all, in some endings he simply walks back out of the city, with no locked doors behind him, no fallen rocks blocking his path, he even has an abundant supply of maps, instead James stays because of his wishes. Subconsciously, his desire to know who sent the letter, but mainly his desire for forgiveness, this is James' libido in action pushing him in the direction towards what he desires most and encouraging him to overcome the traumas that obstruct the natural flow of his libido and which starts before you even set foot in the city, once you're there Jungian psychology kicks into high gear Not long after you reach the city through a tomb area, my father James encounters a walking monster on two legs but without arms or face, although it must have a mouth because it likes to throw.
Another type of monster you know has two pairs of legs sewn on top of each other, an anatomical oddity that in any other setting might seem silly rather than terrifying. Part of the terrifyingness of it comes from the way they are presented along with the rising star. from the Silent Hill franchise Pyramid Head while searching a hallway, James hears a commotion in one of the rooms, runs in and then ducks into a closet where he looks through the blinds to see what's going on and what's going on, Damn, when the pyramid heads don't terrify. You're sticking a long spear, a huge sword into women's bodies and yes, you can probably see where we're going with this salad.
L2 is full of the types of symbols that a Jungian psychoanalyst would love to decode. Jung's theory of symbolism was that certain primary energies such as love and fear manifest in our psyche as symbols, sometimes these symbols are specific, a hammer that you hit your thumb with could become a symbol of your pain. or stupidity, but sometimes these symbols are shared among all people and are as primary as the energies they represent, Jung. He called these types of symbols archetypes, a phrase he may have heard before. Patients suffering from delusional episodes often focus their paranoia on an external tormentor, usually one who fits Jungian archetypes.
These archetypes represent figures and characters that we see throughout history in different cultures and civilizations for the young mother. is an archetype in all cultures and in most religions around the world that symbolizes fertility, earth and compassion, while he saw the archetype of the wise old man as a similar symbol of wisdom and guidance of the age in many cultures. Now it has been asked if these symbols are really universal. questioned, but we are simply sticking to Jung's model for this video, whatever form they take, these symbols express a fundamental aspect of our psyche that we have trouble consciously articulating when we are young.
Every psychological expression is a symbol if we assume they are states or mean something else. and aside from his self, which alludes to our current knowledge in the case of Silent Hill, we can diagnose a lot of what's going on in James' head simply through the symbolism in the game, although some of these symbols are obvious, others are not so much. Let's all go Jungian and psychoanalyze James and apologies in advance, this may get a little graphic, don't blame us, blame Konami, let's start with the most obvious symbol, Maria, she is an exact likeness of James' dead wife, but she is dressed more seductively and aggressively flirtatious. endgame James confesses that he was frustrated and angry with Mary because he wanted to move on with his life instead of having to take care of her the truth is that part of me hated you for taking my life so when James arrives in a haunted town and He meets his wife's almost identical twin with a similar name, who is more assertive and sexually attractive.
We begin to realize that she represents not what she was his wife, but what he would have wanted her to be. Knowing this, we have realized that James' libido could be just as sexual. As Freud believed after all, if Maria symbolizes the frustration James felt during his wife's long illness, that puts into context many other symbols he encounters throughout the game, like the Pyramid Head, for example, James says at the end of the game, that's why I needed you. I need someone to punish me for my sins, suggesting that he or the city created Pyramid Head in an attempt at self-flagellation, but while that could be the monster's purpose, what it symbolizes relates to James' sexual frustrations, as when we see to the muscular and unstoppable power stabbing his wife's gaze. -Same with a huge long spear and look guys, we don't want to get demonetized, but you know what we're talking about, this kind of overt sexual symbolism is consistent throughout the game's scene in the nurse at the hospital wearing inexplicably revealing outfits. are those strange sets of women's legs that literally attack you with their well, you get it and it's not just the monsters, nor is the image in the frame when you see Angela for the last time a corrupted representation of a naked female body before You Find her in a room that has walls apparently made of meat.
There are also holes above your head with cylinders that repeatedly slide in and out. At other times the monsters symbolize a less sexual version of James' guilt. The first monsters you meet look like a person in a straitjacket. This is before you find all the notes about the violent patients at the asylum for James, who we learn felt trapped in his marriage to a dying woman. The symbol of a visibly bound creature attacking him can be seen as a symbol of the restrictions he felt while he cared for. For his wife, the game's final boss amounts to a surreal nightmare version of Mary or Maria, depending on how you played the game, tied to a bed hanging over James.
This image of a woman tied to her bed floating above him, literally hanging over her head. since it hurts him it symbolizes what James felt for his wife while she was dying, an oppressive presence that follows him wherever he wants to go and that ultimately ends up destroying the other people driven to the city by his libidinal energy. . They are fighting their own demons too soon. in the game James reads a note that says I saw those demons, they were there I'm sure, but my friend says he didn't see anything, if that's true does that mean what I saw was an illusion the more we talked to the other characters ?
Especially Eddie and Angela, we realized that they could see things that we don't see and vice versa, not only do the characters not see what you see, but they mention having seen the pyramid of their own visions. I know what you're talking about, honestly I saw some strange looking monsters. They also exhibit strange behavior that is best explained by experiencing some other reality. Eddy, who admits to maiming a bully and killing a dog before he attacks you, seemed to be nonchalantly eating a pizza at the beginning of the game, right after you found him throwing up in the toilet.
Angela who we find out killed her father in self defense when he assaulted her, go ahead and say it or you could just force me to go back and forth between barely noticing you and being terrified, she even mistakes you for her mother if she was looking for you but before she disappears. the flames she says you see it too for me it's always like that all their strange behaviors hint that these characters are also going through their own traumas, implying that Silent Hill could be manifesting each person's own demons just like James, they have a libidinal desire that has been obstructed by the trauma of their past and has brought them there to solve these problems, but since we play as James we do not know exactly what his traumas or desires are and we can only see what he sees, but how does it work? all this psychology?
It also makes it so scary that there aren't really any jump scares in the game, these symbols just show you what's going on in James' head without the need to explain it and that's why many of the more recent games and the movie in particular are they lost. The point, instead of exploring the psychology of their main characters, they simply recycle the images from Silent Hill 2 that have no relation to the protagonist, which means that they do not symbolize anything, they are so scary but they have nothe same effect or meaning. In the film, Rose's character is searching for her adopted daughter who is lost in Silent Hill.
Well, you could argue that the creepy baby monsters could be some sort of symbol of Rose's maternal instincts. What does Pyramid Head symbolize or the sexy nurses that Silent Hill 2 is still about? On the contrary, it is so rewarding because of another of the young psychological processes that he called the cathartic method, it is the method of becoming aware of repressed feelings or traumas through retelling or reliving them, also known as abreaction, then confessing to heal. and move forward like Jung. As described, the objective of the cathartic method is total confession, not only the intellectual recognition of the facts with the head but also their confirmation with the heart and the real release of repressed emotion.
It's this form of catharsis that Silent Hill 2 captures perfectly. After James watches the videotape of him suffocating his wife, the player finally understands his guilt, the traumatic traffic jam that his libido drove him to the city to fix. firstly and the meaning behind all the sexy and disgusting monsters, no matter what ending you get, is satisfying because they all feature a confrontation with his memory of Mary and a reading of her last letter to him explaining her feelings before she died. I feel so pathetic and ugly here waiting for you that only when James confronts these symbols of his guilt can the game finally provide a kind of catharsis for James and, as a result, the player.
This is why Silent Hill remains a horror classic, not only because you probably played it when you were too young, but because it uses real psychology and Jungian psychoanalysis to get inside your head, the city scares its characters. by understanding what drives them there in the first place, their libido, which forces them to face their past traumas. about those fears and traumas and because we have come to sympathize with James and the code throughout the game, it also scares the player, taking what James is already afraid of and representing it symbolically so that one of the inner and outer demons is defeated or not depending on your choices in the game.
James' story is a cathartic experience about closure and acceptance of loss and sex. Much of it is about sex, and in short, he takes this Oscar Wilde quote literally. Each of us is our own devil and we make this world our own. Damn, but what do you think? Let us know in the comments. Many thanks to our amazing sponsors for supporting our podcast and channel. Go ahead and hit that subscribe button and as always, thanks for watching, no nightmares, pranks, peace.

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