CHAPTER THIRTY
Brenda S. Gardenour Walter
Since its release in 1999, Konami’s survival-horror digital game, Silent Hill, has become a pop-cultural universe with a dedicated transnational fandom. In Silent Hill and each of the eight subsequent games, the player takes on the role of a main character who has experienced some horrific trauma, including the violent death of a loved one, sexual abuse, or PTSD from military service. As the story unfolds, the player-character begins to “slip” from his or her quotidian life into an inverted world of madness personified by the town of Silent Hill, a duplicitous realm of repression and dissociation. At once real and unreal, populated and abandoned, the spatial construction of Silent Hill is a projection of the haunted body, a ruined world of skeletal buildings that appear to be dead but whose basement-bowels and fetid hallways are alive with nightmarish beings, writhing in the dark.1 Through the lens of the main character, the player explores this slippery mindscape of animated corpses, entering into these decaying body-buildings to discover repressed fragments of the forgotten self, all while being stalked and tormented by traumatic memories in the shape of monsters who attack without warning. Thinking only of survival, the character must act in the moment to defeat each monster-memory and collect clues, shining like fragmented mirrors in the gloom, that facilitate a narrative of self-disclosure.
The therapeutic process that unfolds during gameplay in Silent Hill is multivalent, in part because “the player inhabits a twilight zone where he/she is both an empirical subject outside the game and undertakes a role inside the game.”2 The player not only witnesses the traumatic past and present of the main character, but also experiences the shocking recovery of those memories as the main character. The player’s interpretation of this dual experience is shaped not only by personal history but also by the often-slippery construction of mental illness and its treatment within his or her culture. For example, an American player might find slipping in and out of Silent Hill 2 (2001) and Silent Hill: Shattered Memories (2009) to be fluid and uncanny. Located somewhere in the American Northeast, Silent Hill’s architecture and signifiers, as well as the tropes of haunted asylums, “madness,” and therapy, are familiar narratives in American popular culture. These themes are woven like a thread through H. P. Lovecraft’s weird tales, films such as Session 9 (2001), the television series American Horror Story: Asylum (2012), and “reality” shows focused on pop-psychology, such as My Strange Addiction (2010) and Hoarders (2009). While individuals suffering from mental illness, especially those who manifest unpredictable or violent behaviors, continue to be stigmatized in daily life, the narratives of mental illness and its myriad treatments are prolific and very public discourses in American culture, and the processes of psychotherapy are well-known. In Japanese culture, on the other hand, mental illness and its treatment remain taboo subjects. Despite horrifying rates of depression and suicide, hospitals rarely have psychiatric wards, and mental institutions are sparse and often located in remote and unmarked buildings. Those who suffer from mental illnesses are expected to do so in silence, lest they lose their jobs and bring dishonor to their families.Because of this, the terrifying experience of slipping in and out of Silent Hill might prove far more complex for the Japanese player. In Japan, to play Silent Hill is to take on the “sick” role of the main character, to enter into a world of “madness” and asylums, and to risk abject contamination by the “other,” permanent stigmatization, and loss of identity. Western models of psychotherapy that demand direct confrontation with the past and a willingness to openly “own” one’s mental illness are likewise problematic for the Japanese player. The gameplay narrative of Silent Hill 4: The Room (2004) speaks to Japanese cultural concerns with mental illness and its treatment, offering a different and distinctively Japanese approach to posttraumatic care, known as Morita Therapy, which focuses not on remembering the past but on transcending it through mindfulness in the present.
Confronting the Past: Western Therapies in Silent Hill: Shattered Memories
To slip into Silent Hill is to cross a sacred boundary, to enter into a “magic circle,” a playground with “forbidden spots, isolated, hedged around, hallowed, within which special rules obtain.”3 “Temporary worlds within the ordinary world,” digital games serve as warped mirrors with the power to reflect deep cultural concerns, such as mental illness, back out to the player and beyond.4 To cross Silent Hill’s magic threshold is to dissociate from the present-self and to associate with a delusional and terrified other, to wander through a digital hardscape that reflects that character’s mental state.5 For the Western player, the exploration of the game’s physical ruins, including abandoned homes and hospitals, is an autopsy-like journey into the corpse-bodies that harbor monstrous secrets in their darkest recesses. As the building-bodies are excavated and the monsters revealed, so are the game’s narrative and the character’s memories. This process of discovering locked chambers long hidden in the mind and opening them to release forgotten memories, known as cryptonomy, serves as the narrative foundation of Silent Hill 2 (2001).6 In this game, the player identifies with James Sunderland, an at-first sympathetic character, who arrives in Silent Hill after receiving a letter from his dead wife, Mary, who tells him to meet her in their “special place.” For James, the town of Silent Hill acts as a memory theater; as he moves from space to place, he uncovers painful memories buried in his own mindscape. James navigates much of the ruined town in isolation, with the exception of a suicidal young woman searching for her mother in a graveyard—an allusion to James’s hopeless search for Mary among corpses—and a psychopathic teen, who represents James’s repressed rage. Another recurring character is Maria, a more promiscuous version of Mary, who leads him to slowly uncover the clues that ultimately expose his horrible and half-forgotten secret, that he killed his wife. The only other character in the game is a little girl named Laura, who doesn’t think that there is anything wrong with Silent Hill and doesn’t see any of its monsters. Laura, who acts as a sort of control in the gameplay experiment, confronts the player with the possibility that Silent Hill’s nightmares exist only as delusions in James’s mind, and that the player has been battling those delusions from behind the eyes of a madman.
The informal therapeutic process of cryptonomy in Silent Hill 2 is formalized as clinical psychotherapy in Silent Hill Shattered Memories (2009). Unlike James, who journeys to Silent Hill of his own volition, the main character in Shattered Memories, who is not revealed until the game’s ending, is drawn back to the town under the guidance of a therapist. The game begins in first person perspective, with the player in a clinician’s office awaiting a therapy session. Upon entering the room, the therapist looks directly at the player, saying “I’m glad you came. Just showing up shows your commitment to the process … we take this at your pace. No notes. No drugs. No theories. We go back to the start. Understand what happened.” In this first session, the player is required to fill out a basic personality inventory; in subsequent sessions, he or she must color a picture, sort images, fill out forms, and answer the therapist’s probing questions. All of the responses provided by the player are used to shape the physical environment, events, and recovered memories within the game, as well as the ultimate ending of the narrative itself. In Shattered Memories, the character slips into Silent Hill as flashbacks; gameplay takes place in the patient’s memory theater and in a distant past. In this respect, the game being played has already ended; it is a haunted magic circle. The flashback sequences follow Harry Mason as he searches for his young daughter, Cheryl, in the ruins of Silent Hill. Unlike James in Silent Hill 2, Harry has no weapons and cannot fight any of the monsters that assail him as he attempts to solve the puzzles of the past. He can only wander helplessly through a nightmare of frozen madness, hiding from monstrous memories and waiting for them to crawl back into their crypts. Again and again, the player slips out of Silent Hill and back into the therapist’s office in an attempt to piece together the shattered memories of game’s the title. The game ends with the psychiatrist enraged at his patient’s lack of progress, throwing his glass against the wall and yelling, “I’m spelling it all out for you … eighteen years of repression … blind children clutching photos in the dark … the dad walking around in your head isn’t even a ghost. He never existed!” In this chilling moment, the player realizes that he or she has not been playing the character of Harry in Silent Hill, but of Cheryl’s haunted memories of her father that exist only in her own mind. For the first time, we see the patient, Cheryl, a delusional teenager on the edge of adulthood, trying to cope with a lifetime of abuse and loss. Looking at her father’s ghost, she reaches out to him, “You’ve been with me so long.” The moment is cathartic for both player and character, a hard ending to an arduous process.
As both James in Silent Hill 2 and Cheryl in Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, the player slips into a Silent Hill shaped by the mental illness of the main character. In this role, the player explores the ruined pasts and shattered psyches of the protagonists as they seek to uncover lost memories, and with them, clues to their identities in the present. In both games, “reality” and “delusion” are fluid categories, allowing the player to identify with the isolation, confusion, and terror of dissociation, if only for a time. Shattered Memories intensifies this experience, introducing the player to psychotherapy, the power of clinicians, and the distrust of that power on the part of some patients. The game comes with a “psychology warning” stating that “the game psychologically profiles you” and uses this “knowledge against you, creating your own personal nightmare. The game plays you as much as you play it.” For many players, it is their first experience being closely analyzed and feeling as though their every thought and action is being judged. It is likewise terrifying because it expands the magic circle outward; the rules of the game are no longer bound to the game, but slip into the player’s world and back again.Despite its potential for emotional trauma, the narrative of therapy is a familiar one to the Western player; surviving mental illness means directly confronting the past and openly acknowledging dysfunction in an attempt to find closure. In the words of James Sunderland, “I don’t care if it’s dangerous. I’m going to town either way.”
Suffering in Silence: Silent Hill 4, Mental Illness, and Therapeutic Experience in Japan
The narratives of mental illness and the therapeutic processes that shape the digital magic circle of Silent Hill are experienced differently across cultures. While the American player might find such discourses to be delightfully dangerous and perhaps strangely comforting, the Japanese player might find the experience of slipping into Silent Hill to be one of abject horror. In Japan, the very discussion of mental illness is taboo, and psychiatric care is never discussed openly.7 Treatment facilities are often located in remote areas in unmarked buildings; patients are seen on a walk-in basis, assessed by a physician, prescribed medication, and dismissed without lengthy conversations, let alone psychotherapy. This invisibility of mental illness and its treatment in Japanese culture is bound to ideals of self-control and self-cultivation. Any external signs of depression or psychosis suggest that the sufferer has neither sufficient self-control nor the discipline required to develop it. Because of this, an individual who experiences mental illness is expected to suffer in silence, maintaining an outside face, or tatemae, of quiet confidence while hiding an inside face, or honne of despair and dissolution. This denial of mental anguish complicates Western approaches to psychotherapy; for the Japanese patient, confronting the past or recovering lost memories serves no practical purpose, and the very act of remembering might cause significant suffering in the present. From a Japanese perspective, then, the ghosts buried in the mind-crypt are best left undisturbed, as awakening them might curse the patient and further stigmatize his or her family by revealing the truth behind their collective tatemae.
Confronting and remembering a long-buried past are the very foundations of gameplay in Silent Hill. For the Japanese player, the dangers inherent in these therapeutic processes are intensified by Silent Hill’s setting in a ruined American town, a truly foreign place where things are not what they seem. Swallowed by the town of Silent Hill, the Japanese player makes a terrifying journey not only into his or her own haunted mindscape to recover lost personal memories, but also into his or her cultural past, excavating the horrors of nuclear holocaust and the American occupation, as well as the present traumas of a global economic crisis that has deeply wounded Japanese masculine culture.8 Since the mid-20th century, Japanese cultural expectations of success have demanded that young men endure an intense educational process with grueling exams in order to be admitted to the best universities and procure high-paying jobs in business as sararimen. Economic decline in the 1990s followed by the economic crash of 2008 have made high-paying jobs increasingly scarce and the attainment of previous levels of financial success almost impossible. In recent years, many individuals who have lost their positions have chosen to disappear into Aokigahara, the Suicide Forest outside of Tokyo; for some, dying in anonymity is preferable to facing public failure, enduring the onset of shameful depression, and bringing dishonor upon their families. A concomitant phenomenon is that of the hikikomori, typically young men between the ages of 15 and 30, who see no hope of employment or future success and have chosen to withdraw into their bedrooms to live a virtual life of digital gaming and electronic communication, never to emerge.9 Supported by their parents, the hikikomori live between worlds; both alive and dead, they haunt the family home like ghosts, strange presences with no future, hidden away from public view.
The Japanese construction of mental illness as shameful, the dangers of remembering, and the phenomenon of hidden suffering, particularly in the form of hikikomori, are all evident in Silent Hill 4: The Room (2004). The game’s narrative centers on Henry Townsend, a painfully shy 20-something who lives alone in a rundown apartment in Ashfield, a town adjacent to Silent Hill. The player slips into Henry’s world in first-person perspective, awakening in bed blurry and disoriented. An investigation of the apartment reveals that the character-player is locked in, isolated from the outside world and several neighbors who know that Henry is missing but are unable to or uninterested in connecting with him. At first, the apartment feels safe, like a cocoon; through Henry’s eyes, the player sees other people through the window, a peephole, and a crack in the wall, but no one—not even the player—can see Henry himself, who remains invisible. Despite this initial sense of insular isolation, Henry discovers that this apartment is not a safe haven. Following a fetid tunnel that erupts in his bathroom wall, Henry slips into the nightmarish world of Silent Hill, where gameplay is experienced in the third person. There, he uncovers the secret history of his apartment, which was once occupied by a serial killer named Walter Sullivan, all while being attacked by monstrous beings and engaging with people who may or may not exist. After each revelatory journey through Silent Hill, Henry awakens in his bed, only to discover that his apartment is now haunted, infected by a past that is actively destroying the present.10 With each return, the apartment, which features the game’s only “save point,” becomes increasingly dangerous. The duality that marks gameplay across the Silent Hill franchise takes on new meaning in Silent Hill 4. The player-character is torn between two horrible choices: either remain isolated in first-person perspective in the now-toxic room and suffer madness in silence or escape into a dangerous third-person world of vicious monsters and unpredictable people. Withdrawal or engagement are both fraught with the risk of failure and potential death—a conundrum faced in modern Japan by the hikikomori and those who suffer from anxiety in perpetual silence while painting a placid “outside face.” For the Japanese player of Silent Hill 4, stepping into Henry’s character means taking on the sick role and entering into the isolating and slippery experience of mental illness—a process fraught with risks of contamination by association.
Silent Hill 4 not only illuminates issues surrounding mental illness in Japan, but also suggests a therapeutic approach different from the memory-obsessed western models of psychotherapy that dominate gameplay in Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill: Shattered Memories. The therapeutic experience in Silent Hill 4 is rooted in a Zen Buddhist-based therapy, pioneered by Shoma Morita in the early 20th century, which entails a rejection of the past and a focus on the present. Morita therapy is divided into four phases, the first of which requires that the patient be kept on absolute bedrest and remain silent for about a week. In the second phase, the patient engages in physical activity while remaining mostly silent; the third phase continues with increased physical activity while allowing for conversation. While having been granted permission to communicate with others, the patient “should not explore his fears, worries, doubts and anxious feelings, but leave them as they are.”11 In the fourth phase, the patient is integrated back into society, but is “not allowed to talk of his internal problems” and “encouraged to talk only of external conditions.”12 Unlike western psychotherapies, which require continual discussion and an obsessive examination of past events, Morita therapy ignores the past in order to focus on mindful activity and to transcend anxiety in the present. In Silent Hill 4, Henry is stalked by events in his own and, by extension, his apartment’s past; the more he learns about that past, the further he is drawn into Silent Hill’s maddening maw. His only hope of survival is to focus on myriad seemingly menial tasks that will ultimately allow him to kill Walter’s ghost (a literal destruction of the past) and escape from the haunted room that holds him captive. For the Japanese player—as for the hikikomori—each task accomplished might be viewed as a discrete event, a single step on the stairway away from isolated anxiety and into the integrated and active present.13
A Shared World
Like an unfolding lotus, the complexities of Silent Hill, including its construction of mental illness and the myriad cultural experiences of its therapeutic dynamics, persist beyond the magic circle of digital gaming and into the world of transmedial and transnational storytelling. Silent Hill has not only inspired two feature-length horror films, but also created a dedicated global fandom who interact through social media such as message boards, YouTube, Reddit, and Tumblr, as well as local and international cosplay conventions. Through interactive role playing, fans slip into myriad transnational interpretations of Silent Hill over and over again; in the process, they act out individual and collective traumatic memories, bringing them to life, confronting them, and ultimately experiencing a shared therapeutic transcendence that defies categorical boundaries. In the virtual and physical Silent Hill fandom, individuals from around the globe participate in an active dialogue about mental illness—including the experiences of dissociation, isolation, and stigma—from multiple narrative perspectives.14 In the freedom of the magic circle, the culturally-imposed boundaries of “internal-self” and “external-other” become blurred, allowing for increased empathy and compassion, as well as connection, healing, and transcendence.
Notes
1. Consider the nature of mental illness itself; the sufferer might seem “fine” on the outside, but his/her calm veneer belies the pain and suffering roiling just below the surface. In Japan, this duality manifests as the “inside face” and the “outside face.”
2. Jesper Juul, “Games Telling Stories?” Game Studies: The International Journal of Game Research 1:1 (2001). Retrieved at: http://www.gamestudies.org/0101/juul-gts/.
3. Johann Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston: The Beacon Press, 1985), 10; For digital game as magic circle, see Jan H. G. Klabbers, The Magic Circle: Principles of Gaming and Simulation (Dordrecht: Sense Publishing, 2006).
4. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 10.
5. In “Ruin, Gender, and Digital Games,” Evan Watts argues that ruined structures and degraded environments represent a destruction of the present and greater freedom from cultural restraints. Women’s Studies Quarterly 39 (2011): 3–4.
6. On the archaeology of memory in forgotten places, also known as cryptonomy, see David Punter, “Spectral Criticism” in Introducing Criticism at the 21st Century, ed. Julian Woffreys, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002).
7. Shuntaro Ando, Sosei Yamaguchi, Yuta Aoki, Graham Thornicroft, “Review of Mental Health Related Stigma in Japan,” Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences 67 (2013), 471–482.
8. John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: Norton Publishing, 2000).
9. Maggie Jones, “Shutting Themselves In,” New York Times, January 15, 2006.
10. Upon awakening, the first-person blurriness intensifies, an experience shared by those suffering from acute mental illness in Japan. On his near overwork to desperation, depression, and near-suicide, a man named Karaoshi recalled, “I couldn’t tell what day it was or which season. I could not register the scenery around me. Everything was blurred.” Syota Nakahara https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKjgta8RDeQ.
11. Ken Takeda, “Morita Therapy,” Journal of Religion and Health 3:4 (1964), 335–344 [340].
12. Takeda, 343.
13. Fumiko Maeda and Jeffrey H. Nathan, “Understanding Taijin Kyofusho through its Treatment, Morita Therapy,” Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 46:6 (1999), 525–530.
14. Kai Mikkonen, “Graphic Narratives as a Challenge to Transmedial Narratology: The Question of Focalization,” American Studies 56:4 (2011), 637–652.