Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Bioshock, Part 2!

I’ll do my best to keep this short, since it’s been a long week and I’m sort of wiped out. But before I moved on to another game, I wanted to make another note on Bioshock and the impact it had and to get more specific about the artistic message it imparted to me.

So here goes.

The most profound connection I made in Bioshock was one that didn’t hit me until long, long after I’d finished the game. It was a scene towards the end of the game, one where a pair of splicers dance in a relatively pristine apartment the ruins of Apollo Square. If you disturb them they would attack but unlike most of the denizens of Rapture they were not aggressive.

They were content to fox trot in peace amidst the ruins of what had once been their lives, humming their love for one another. I couldn’t bring myself to hurt them, to find out just what would happen if I fought them, so I sat and watched them dance, a kernel of beauty in the heart of the twisted wreckage of humanity.

It was a beautiful moment, one that made me sit and reflect on the game. I rested in that port in the storm, carefully scavenged for supplies and left them to their dance, a little bit happier with the knowledge that someone in Rapture still had love in their heart aside from Tennenbaum.

A few weeks later while I was thinking, as I incessantly do, I realized that that moment had had the same impact on me as the Egon Schiele poster my ex-girlfriend had hung over her bed.

Schiele was an Expressionist Austrian painter famed for his twisted portrayal of the human form. His self-portraits and nudes are probably his most recognizable work, and his paintings have an explicit sexuality to them which simultaneously accents the frailty of the human body. Schiele portrays people as what oh so many of us are: ugly, ugly things obsessed with sex and the inevitability of our own deaths.

There’s a good chance you haven’t seen him before, so if you’d like open a new tab and Google Image his name. I’ll wait.

A little disturbing, right?

But in these twisted forms there is something beautiful. If you look at Schiele’s paintings you can see that there’s something amazing in each of the figures he renders. Their sorrowful eyes, their overt sexuality and the disgust with which they see both themselves and the world... They’re all beautiful.

His paintings are ugly, morbid and inhuman, but in these traits they capture what it truly means to be human. In Bioshock I found a companion to Schiele. Neither of these works endeavor to show you how good humanity can be. Instead they show us the worst aspects of our nature.

Schiele shows us our fear and obsession with the end, our overt concern with sex and sexuality and, through his refusal to portray it, our harsh judgment of beauty. Bioshock deals constantly with death and destruction and the hideous nature of greed. It unapologetically displays what happens when we lose track of what is truly important in our lives.

But in both of these portrayals we can see the glimmers of what makes us great as people. Certainly we are ugly, selfish things who can’t stop thinking of our own ends. But there’s something alluring about that self-destruction. In Schiele’s haunting eyes we see that even if we’re all ugly we have something beautiful within us. And in Jack’s caring hands we see that even amongst the worst humanity has to offer we can still find things of beauty.

And if we must we can and should fight to protect that beauty. But sometimes all we really need to do is look, smile and walk away.