Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Bioshock's Paternity Problem!

Bioshock is a difficult game to draw conclusions from on a number of levels. Not story-wise. Story-wise it’s nice and straightforward. You’re the genetically engineered son of a business tycoon who built an underwater city, created and imbedded with behavioral conditioning by a gangster for the sole purpose of taking over the city and passing control on to him, but your survival demands that you liberate yourself from his schemes and eventually kill him in order to clear the route to your escape or simply save the inhabitants of Rapture, depending on how you want to look at it. It speaks volumes about the medium that this plot qualifies as “straightforward” by videogame standards, but that’s a whole other essay. Where Bioshock becomes truly interesting, where it begins to ask difficult questions, is in its characters.

None of the characters in Bioshock have clear histories or stories, and none of them possess a moral high ground. All of them are flawed human beings, with both good and evil qualities. Suchong, the amoral, cowardly sociopath he is, is probably the one character who could be described without argument as evil. He’s essentially a Nazi scientist. But the other men and women in Bioshock, those talking heads and figures of fear and authority that guide and shape our journey through Rapture, are wonderfully indistinct and indefinable.

It all begins with Andrew Ryan, however you approach the game. He is the absentee father, the creator of numerous enterprises, both failed and successful, and the blindly enthusiastic man who sees success while the world is crumbling to dust around him. Ryan is the ultimate father figure in Rapture. He is your literal, genetic father, the figurative father of both the city and its guiding ideology. Ryan embodies the traditional father figure, as outlined in modern and pre-modern novels. He is perpetually disappointed in his creations but shifts the blame away from himself in order to maintain a sense of superiority and accomplishment in his twilight years.

Ryan is aloof and, for the first half of the game, our McGuffin. It isn’t much of a stretch to say that we’re searching for Ryan’s approval throughout the early stages of the game: we do all we can to prove ourselves his better, and we are everything he is not. We act directly, quickly and aggressively, we take a hands on role in the day to day events of Rapture and we choose our path through our actions. Ryan remains impotent in his ivory tower, aloof and neutral, choosing to send minions after us in lieu of fighting us directly. Even in his death he requires an external agent: he requires the hands of his son, who he must rob of choice in order to insure his “proper” demise.

If we choose to look at Bioshock as a coming of age story then Ryan-as-father-figure is particularly fascinating: he actively separates himself from his son, never tries to find his child and upon realizing he has met the fruit of his loins becomes nearly catatonic with disappointment, confining himself to his penthouse and committing suicide following his indulging in (and via the tools of) the pass-time of the rich, the lazy and the purposefully removed from society at large. He cannot act, even to save his own life. But his inaction propels Rapture into a state of chaos which forever changes its face and pushes our character into a spurt of growth which finally frees him from both the traditional mechanics of the game and his previous reliance on authority figures. Only after Ryan’s death can we find our own motivation in the game, whether we choose to see ourselves as avenging or guardian angels. Only after the father has died may the child truly become a man.

Which brings us to Atlas and Fontaine. Our more intimate, more immediate replacement father figure, Fontaine-as-Atlas is a shyster doing all he can to shape us to his own selfish ends. He protects us and teaches us, but only inasmuch as he needs us in order to complete a task: the removal and destruction of Rapture’s old father figure so that a new one may rise in his wake.

Atlas represents a caricature of a family man: he is ostensibly loyal, obsessed with his “wife and child,” and singleminded in his pursuit of authority, advancement and power. He is willing to present himself to danger, to be daring and risk physical harm when the rewards suit it, but for the most part he acts from the shadows. He is a coward, oblique, leeching off the accomplishments of his adopted son. He’s a stereotypical step-dad. He gives us just enough assistance to get us through and he purposefully keeps us weak so that we can’t usurp him. He is, in every way, a purposeful failure as a father figure. Even his schemes don’t work out as he’d like. In the end the only thing he’s a part of which is in any way successful is your creation, something that also didn’t work out as he’d hoped.

Once he abandons the mask of Atlas, Fontaine starts to show us more depth. He is still the adoptive father figure, but we see in him a man convinced of his own twisted righteousness. If he wasn’t so dangerous he’d be almost pitiable: a man who, while completely morally bankrupt, believes he is making the world a better place by establishing himself at the top of an hierarchy rather than allowing some other, less competent grifter to take charge. While he is mercenary he is sentimental and infinitely human, given to human weaknesses. He loves us, in a twisted way, but he is incapable of accepting that love and so he lashes out and does all he can do destroy the trappings of it.

His actions here are echoed in his relationship with Tennenbaum. Once he achieved a certain critical mass of power he began to push her away, fearful of her ability to undermine him through his own feelings. Eventually he took this so far as to make it his work to annihilate all that she valued, to completely and irrevocably remove her from his life. There’s a certain sadness in Fontaine’s character when we look at him this way, and we see that this inability to share power, to let others in, is what proves to be his downfall.

Fontaine, in the end, is our more contemporary authority figure: he is mercenary and isolated from the world while completely at comfortable existing in it and manipulating its systems. He is urbane, sophisticated and intelligent, not above direct action but averse to it. He is self-made, but seems to exist entirely within a realm outside of his control, and instead of attempting to reform it or create a new system, the way Ryan does, he simply does all he can to stretch or break the rules so he can climb to the top. He is self-destructive, self-serving and weak in seemingly all the wrong ways and yet when we examine him more closely we see someone with genuine emotions who is terrified of admitting that he has them, even to himself.

In Fontaine we find another authority figure who cannot exist in a real world. His inability to compromise, his rage and greed, the things that give him strength and drive him to succeed are inevitably the things which prove his undoing. Like Ryan, the principles, or more accurately the lack thereof, by which he lives destroy him. His authority, founded on a sort of pseudo-religious fanatacism, cannot be sustained.

At surface level this is simply another aspect of the game’s excoriation of extremes. However a closer examination casts a different light on Bioshock’s willingness to execute the people in charge. Nearly every authority figure in the game dies, stripped of their power. Even Peach Wilkins, who seems as morally and ideologically flexible as anyone in Rapture, is undone by his attempts to control and protect his territory. Cohen, with his meticulous, heavily controlled artistry and Langford with her nurturing tendencies also find themselves destroyed in their attempt to hold on to some scrap of power in the decaying city. It seems as if any character who attempts to control or manipulate their environment in a manner traditionally tied to a parent is undone. The only character who escapes this pattern of violence in Tennenbaum.

What, then, distinguishes Tennenbaum from the other figures in the game? The most obvious answer is her vagina.

Tennenbaum is a woman. What’s more, she’s a mother. She’s mother to an entire sub-race of humanity, personally responsible for discovering the substance tearing Rapture to ribbons and maternal protector to both the tools of its continuation, in the Little Sisters, and its undoing, in Jack. Without Tennenbaum Rapture simply would not be in its current predicament, and she seems to know that and take action to correct it as a result. she seems to be the only female authority figure who both questions her own past beliefs and exhibits feminine traits. The other male figureheads, major and minor, are victims of their own uncompromising visions and their inability to form meaningful relationships without a clear power dynamic in them.

Tennenbaum is the only character who coexists as both an authority figure and a companion. Langford shares her status as a feminine authority figure, but... Langford lives with plants. Plants can’t love her back, however much she might want them to, and she keeps them largely as a means by which to isolate herself. She also domineers over them, literally holding the keys of life and death above them. She has more in common with Ryan and Fontaine in that respect: she finds herself in a microcosm of absolute authority and, as such, when a new figure enters and upsets the balance it must inevitably end with her death.

But Tennenbaum forms friendships with her wards. The liberated Little Sisters are sheltered, protected and no longer exploited. Tennenbaum does not carefully dictate their actions the way other authority figures do with their wards, instead treating them like children: something to be treasured and protected without being stifled, something that must be given a degree of freedom in order to grow. And it seems to be no coincidence that this beatific female authority figure is the only one who offers us a way to survive under the ocean when you investigate the mechanics of the game.

Consider the relationship between the Little Sisters and the Big Daddies. A cursory glance would establish the traditional gender binary, where Big Daddies are towering, deadly authority figures who protect and isolate their Little Sisters, for better or for worse, from the rest of Rapture. They’re dangerous, durable, and killing them is the height of martial accomplishment in Bioshock. In fact, in order to beat them players sometimes have to rely on tactics that feel like cheating, such as popping med kits, freezing them with electrical gel or hurling a mine covered piece of luggage at them. To defeat a Big Daddy is to “win” at Bioshock. It lets you move your character forward, helps to move the story forward, and allows you to usurp the role the Big Daddy previously held, and reinterpret that role however you wish.

But what is a Big Daddy without a Little Sister? There’s no reason to attack them when they don’t have their wards. In fact, they’re a resource given the right plasmid configuration. Without the temptation of a Sister and her Adam they’re just there to be used, to slow down or kill splicers or add a little bit of atmosphere to the game. Without a Little Sister they’re just baseless aggression incarnate, a threat which isn’t worth invoking. Sure, they protect the sister, but the Sisters give them value. Without the Sisters the Daddies wouldn’t even exist.

In fact, when you think about it, the Sisters are the ultimate power in Rapture. In a sense they’re like the sandworms in Herbert’s Dune. The ability to control them is the source of all power and authority in the city. And, like the worms, they’re nigh indestructible. There are certain conditions to this, certainly, and the Sisters will never be found attacking targets of opportunity or waylaying unwary travelers, but the manner in which they savage the dead is deeply unsettling and their burly protectors, completely subservient to them, are the single greatest threat you can possibly face.

In these ways the Sisters are the single greatest authority in the city of Rapture. More so than Fontaine, more so than Ryan, the Daddies, the district bosses or even Tennenbaum. From the Sisters flows the Adam, and whoever controls the Adam controls the city. Paired with their complete dominion over the deadliest denizens of Rapture, it’s not hard to see the Sisters as the highest authority in the game world. They are, after all, the ultimate source of power and, in traditional gaming form, we acquire this power by overcoming and either destroying them or liberating them from their position of authority.

Between the influence the Sisters and Tennenbaum have on gameplay it isn’t hard to see Bioshock as a violently feminist game. The greatest creators and the most effective figureheads of authority in Rapture’s society are all women, and every man who attempts to hold the reins of the city is destroyed for his efforts. Traditional structures and paradigms of authority cannot sustain themselves in Rapture, self-destructing one by one as the game progresses. Even as they rage and vie amongst one another they never grasp the true nature of the struggle in Rapture: the struggle for freedom, something which Tennenbaum, between her time in the camps and the horrors she has both committed and experienced since coming to Rapture, seems to grasp instinctively.

Perhaps if Ryan had come from humbler beginnings or if Fontaine had been held a little more Rapture wouldn’t be quite such a shithole. But the masculine figures we face are so set in their ways, so unable to compromise and comprehend the changing world around them and the emotions which guide their actions that they are undone through their own efforts. Conventional authorities, authorities interested in creating or enforcing law rather than providing protection to a people looking to express themselves and grow, the very things that Rapture was founded on avoiding, are what undoes Rapture.

In the end it requires a woman’s touch to save the city (if that’s how you play it out; otherwise the world ends, which doesn’t seem like the cannon ending according to Bioshock 2) and it requires the aid of female children, the antithesis of conventional authority, in order to achieve your ultimate victory. In order to survive you have to completely invert the paradigm of gender in society and grant authority, if only briefly, to a cadre of young women who have yet to hit puberty.

Bioshock’s concern with Objectivism is all good and well, but hating objectivism isn’t just easy, it’s passé. It’s been passé since Rand’s first tedious sentence was published. So while its thoughtful, provocative counter to Objectivism was interesting and engaging, it couldn’t hold a candle to the inversion of gender politics and commentary on conventional authority structures that the game offered up. To me, Bioshock took the traditional, patriarchal power structure of our society and did to it what Half-Life did to the military industrial complex – tore it down and didn’t try to build anything in its place.