Resident Evil vs. Silent Hill vs. Theory

Saving Ourselves: Psychoanalytic Investigation of Resident Evil and Silent Hill ist ein Artikel auf Game Career Guide der den immer wieder interessanten Vergleich zwischen Resident Evil und Silent Hill unter einem neuen Blickwinkel betrachtet, der Psychoanalyse. Ich selbst habe nur die Hälfte verstanden, kann dem Text weder Fehler vorwerfen noch Zweifelsfreiheit attestieren, aber einige interessante Gedanken enthält er schon. Auszug:

We were also quite interested in how Silent Hill 4 plays with perspective. Whenever we are in our apartment (the supposed “real” world-also this reality falls prey to the same nightmarish anomalies as the game progresses), we operate in a first person shot. However, whenever we travel into the monstrous world of the hole, we play from a third-person perspective. We connect this to the confusion surrounding Henry’s subjectivity. In the first person, surrounded by the temptation of mother, his subjectivity is less clear: and players never see him as an avatar. This is emphasized by some of the game’s hermeneutic suspense: for much of the game we are unsure if Henry “really” exists-it is quite possible that he is only a manifestation of the young Walter’s psychotic mind, that he is a ghost-a victim of the psychopathic Walter’s killing spree, or that he is Walter as an adult slowly coming to terms with his murderous childhood (some of these remain possibilities even after we finish the game!). It makes sense, then, that we see from a first person view whenever we are confined to “the room” (this maternal space). We don’t see Henry, rather, we see through his eyes. In the Otherworld, when upholding symbolic order and eradicating the ambiguous creatures that threaten the boundaries protecting both his and our selfhood, he is more easily recognizable as a subject. Hence, we see him from a third-person perspective. It is also worth noting that the movement from the first-person/subjective maternal/”womb” apartment to the third-person Other / Real / monstrous / psychotic / paternal third-person realm takes place through a long, winding, twisting passage that clearly represents an umbilical cord.