“No matter how pretty the bunny, it’s just a lump of meat when it’s skinned.” Kyoko Okazaki, Helter Skelter
“But abjection is not something of which the subject can ever feel free - it is always there, beckoning the self to take up the place of abjection, the place where meaning collapses. The subject, constructed in/through language, through a desire for meaning, is also spoken by the abject, the place of meaninglessness - thus, the subject is constantly beset by abjection which fascinates desire but which must be repelled for fear of self-annihilation.” Barbara Creed, The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis (2007)
Depictions of the masochism inherent in the construction of femininity is common, utterly prosaic by this point: traditional beauty standards and the rigours of archaic gender roles are rhetorically disowned by any number of media and speakers, although they of course remain fully in practice in more-or-less covert and diffuse forms. What is more interesting, and more often left unspoken and unstudied is the sadism which follows as a natural and inevitable by-product: this is most often left to the marginal and hysterical genres of exploitation, and, thus, safely relegated to a category of “unserious” and dismissable art, supposedly defanged of its imagistic power and social relevance. Yet, in the best examples of these genres (arguably “body genres”, per Linda Williams’ definition, par excellence) that which is depicted takes on an ecstatic, excessive quality which brings the threat of abjection to the fore and bursts, overripe, with the meanings that are relegated to the category of the unspeakable. Punchline’s 2006 game Rule of Rose, drawing contrapuntally on both the lurid excesses of this tradition and the oxymoronic active tedium engendered by its ludic qualities, reconstructs a distinct (and socially embedded) image of the monstrous feminine as its locus.
Acculturation into femininity is psychologically and literally violent. Rule of Rose’s most prominent cruelties are those done by girls unto other girls, and the diegetic logic set forth by the Red Crayon Aristocrats for what they do to Jennifer and make her to do others is that she has been a “bad girl”, a term which is deliberately infantilizing, rhetorically regressing the 19-year old Jennifer to its speaker’s state of pre-adolescence and thus suggesting the possibility (and need) for her re-education in femininity, to become a “good girl”, a complete woman. The leader of the Aristocrats, disguising herself as a boy and thereby embodying a power both patriarchal and inextricably feminine, tells Jennifer, “this is YOUR life, but you’ll be playing by MY rules” and suggests that you ought to agree that bad girls need punishment**.The ludic aspect of the game, before this confined to its most minimal aspects, blossoms as the expression of an individual sadomasochism, driven by disallowed and abjected (because lesbian) desire, and social expectation of feminine submission to pain (later expanded into the willingness to inflict pain to enforce those expectations). This pain is deliberately codified in prurient or otherwise abject terms: one girl lifts her skirt too far up when curtsying as an expression of power, another at the bottom rung of the hierarchy, given the opportunity to torment Jennifer, rubs a rat tied to a stick on her face. Women, specifically their sexuality and particular deformations of their bodies join Kristeva’s other “polluting objects”* as the explicit elements of horror in Rule of Rose.
However, the game is also a canny inversion of the Lord of the Flies narrative: here, instead of descending into the symbolic (and racially-coded) “primitive” state of man, left to form their own society the children reinvent the then-decaying social order of the European aristocracy and the emerging capitalism which supplanted it. This is reflected in the game’s systems, in which to gain the healing items required to survive the clumsy, unfair, and sometimes sexual violence of the combat sequences one is required to undertake the arduous, repetitive task of using your companion, Brown’s, tracking abilities to find a number of useless and discarded household items. These items, including socks and clothespins, besides clearly evoking domesticity and thus the specter of (maternal) domestic work, can be exchanged for life-saving food when gathered in sufficiently (that is, absurdly) large quantities through tedious and repetitive mechanical engagement. That is to say that the labour-value of your work is extracted by the unseen and anonymous representative of the social order and in exchange you are granted a pittance which is barely enough to continue living: the orphaned children have reinvented patriarchal capitalism and intend to enforce it a farcical parody of the violent indulgences of a bygone aristocracy. The first-level relationship of the game to the traumatic construction of femininity at the individual level, which is reminiscent of any number of exploitation films focused on hysterically-pitched female relationships at the taboo boundary between sororal and sexual, through its interaction with the peculiarly ludic elements of participatory tedium, transforms into a mythic abstraction of that trauma into class allegory a la the spacy vampiric psychodramas of Jean Rollin.
Rule of Rose’s mythic intents, too, are peculiar, in that it presents itself as an elliptical, temporally confused, and epicyclical fairy tale, ultimately in service to its study of the psychogeography of feminine violence. The game’s narrative proper begins with an exhortation by a child for Jennifer to read him a story, and the storybook he hands her metatextually encompasses the game’s backstory and progressively comes to encompass the entire narrative arc. The action of the player in the game-world is an ellipsis, an interruption that completes an oral recitation of trauma mythologized. The actual space of the airship on which it predominantly takes place, sprawling yet confined, making itself novel through the changing relationship to Jennifer by which parts become relevant, are accessible, and present a threat, remains fundamentally laborious and familiar despite this. One frequently encounters new storybooks and documents, new fables of order and disorder under the titular Rule of Rose (including other instances of frustrated lesbianic desire) outside Jennifer’s experience which seem to intrude upon the individual recollection of trauma, characters who you are forced to beat to death later return to life, and yet the levels themselves are rather shockingly linear, almost railroading you through to their conclusions with the simplicity of the puzzles and their interaction with Brown’s abilities. This is the paradox of childhood trauma (a set of contradictions which it shares with myth): it is collectively shared and utterly individual; its individual moments are synchronic and thus linearizeable but to make sense of it it must be understood in diachronic relationship to an entire life; and, in time, it becomes so, so boring, rote, and familiar despite its inherent melodrama.
What Rule of Rose does that sets it apart from any number of numbingly familiar texts on the abjection latent in femininity is to set it in perspective(s). Rather than a floating and weightless recounting of individual pyschodrama it is weighted down by its mechanics and dragged steadily back to the earth where everything happens in a context; rather than a dry and functionalist theoretical account of femininity-as-construct (equally rote at this point and containing an often-unacknowledged element of extradiegetic sadism in its reduction of female characters to bullet points in a manifesto) it witnesses the horror and abjection of that construct in an intimate and (beneficially) exploitative way. The exploitation brings us closer, maybe, than we’d like to be, and the drudgery pushes us away: this is what it’s like to be a woman.
* “sexual immorality and perversion; corporeal alteration, decay and death; human sacrifice; murder; the corpse; bodily wastes; the feminine body and incest” (Creed, 2007)
**This connection between patriarchal abuse and female sadism is expanded upon in a later chapter, where the apparent leader of the girls and directrix of many of Jennifer’s torments, Diana, is implied to be a victim of sexual abuse by the headmaster of the orphanage. In the preceding scene, as well, there is a boss encounter with a girl, explicitly an object of Hoffman’s abuse, bound by her legs and moved along by a system of pulleys to attack Jennifer, sobbing and vomiting. This girl, Clara, is otherwise passive and not a participant in the tortures of the Red Crayon Aristocrats. The message is clear, blunt even: these girls are responding to the violence (particularly masculine and often sexual) of the world around them, imitating and ameliorating their own traumas by traumatizing others. The children notably humble and debase their captors in the psychic space of the airship, binding the lascivious Hoffman and (apparently) sending him to attack Jennifer, and the man who tries to raise Jennifer as a son becomes the “Stray Dog,” who Wendy (in her masculine disguise) keeps as a pet and sends to slaughter Jennifer and the orphans.