Hans Bellmer’s work is, in any case, not an easy work, but a disturbing and sinister one, very close to an erotic conception with that fusion between sexual climax and death, that is to say, a notion of ecstasy coupled with pain and destruction. Descriptions and characteristics completely familiar to the Survival Horror videogame published in 2001: Silent Hill 2.
We start the game with James Sunderland, our protagonist, who has recently received a letter written by his wife Mary waiting him in their special place, something completely strange as his wife passed away three years ago due to a terrible illness. From here on, we take control of James, who, overcome with nostalgia and curiosity, decides to enter the town of Silent Hill in search of an answer.
Silent Hill is a place that psychologically invades the minds of the protagonists, showing their darkest thoughts, manifesting them all over the place in the form of creatures that will want to attack us until they kill us.
James on the other hand is a disturbed and repressed character, who through his unconscious will create sensual, but at the same time grotesque creatures, being these the reflection of his true feelings towards his deceased wife. What does it mean? In short, at the end of the game we are treated to a scene in which the protagonist is shown brutally murdering his wife as she lies in bed, sick and helpless. An act that would traumatise James in an irreversible way, forcing him to repress the memory. The creatures that James sees throughout the game are a reflection of his unconscious, reflecting the protagonist’s sexual frustration, the most notable being Pyramid Head, which is totally tied to James’ subconscious, reflecting the anguish, anger and desire for self–punishment for the death of his wife.
In an exploration of the limits of desire that could only conclude with the certainty of the impossibility of jouissance, in one of the first appearances of Pyramid Head, James can contemplate the executioner having intercourse with some Mannequins who end up dying shortly after the act is over. A symbolic representation of James killing his wife.
It is at this point that one of the creatures that was the motivation for this writing appears.
Mannequin is a common enemy of the game, which can be interpreted as representing Mary as a woman who reflected innocence and helplessness in her illness, being abused or otherwise destroyed by an oppressive male force; James.
The enemy was designed by illustrator Masahiro Ito who seems to take inspiration from one of artist Hans Bellmer’s most famous works La Poupée, however—despite the similarities—Ito has explained that the development of the enemy is inspired more by Japanese folklore.
Coincidence or not, something interesting about this Silent Hill enemy is the story behind the La Poupée character and how it indirectly relates to the main plot of Silent Hill 2.
Hans Bellmer’s first dalliances in the art world, the preambles to his doll, coincide with a biographical episode replete with drama and loss. Margaret Schnell, his first wife, lives with difficulty after the medical diagnosis in 1931 of her fatal links to the disease we know as tuberculosis. Or should we speak of poisoning? Tuberculosis can be understood metaphorically as intoxication, as a lethal transformation caused, infected, by an invisible bacillus, hidden from our eyes, which decides to take up residence in its victim’s lungs.
Bellmer’s own obsession with this same theme appears explicitly in the reflection he makes on his work in Anatomy of the Image, in which he takes up the Freudian theme of the eye as the double of the condemned image of sex, a scene that reminds us of the event in which James shoots Pyramid Head from a cupboard.
Bellmer, like James, turns his tragedy into a story, a way of coping with death caused by illness. Bellmer depicts in his photographs of decapitated mannequins a melancholy for lost childhood, his broken toys, which in the future would turn into the erotic tension of the doll becoming a game with which to prevent it from looking back at us, to make of it an absolute object, incapable of transcendence, that is, of freedom, of life and death.
But the disconcerting perversion of the creature created by Bellmer lies in the effort to present the obscenity of this abandoned, humiliated and dismembered girl in a plausible way, something that allows her to appear more as an object of desire than as a fetish. The same thing that James creates within his unconscious by making Mary an object of frustrated desire.
The doll is not only a fetish, but also an object of desire and, as such, the incarnation of the impossibility of jouissance, of capturing that Sartrean transcendence through the very sensuality that is discovered to be perverse. In his magnificent essay Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes pointed out that one of the elements that resulted from the punctum — that partial feature, that detail that punctured its discoverer and turned the photograph into an expansive reflection and the immortal exception of everything that is contemplated with eyes closed — was the blind field. In a photograph everything is in sight, everything is petrified in the image it contains; the punctum reveals the detail and, thanks to it, one can escape from the closed and ready–made to an invisible reality, to the blind field, to that which is intuited and which allows the digressions of the possible. This same notion can easily be applied to language: the blind field of a word is the figurative meaning, the metaphor, its otherness while retaining its original (signifier) aspect. In conclusion, Silent Hill 2 is a video game that has gone down in history for being one of the most original of its time, influenced mainly by psychoanalysis and surrealism, which have been the basis for the creation of characters and monsters that carry with them a very strong symbolic charge. In this sense, Bellmer’s work indirectly complements the essence of the enemy created by Masahiro Ito. A female creature that is fragile and weak, which for both James and Hans Bellmer represent the death of a loved one, manifesting it through the creative unconscious of their own universe.
