(TW: rape, violence)
This is something about Hotline Miami 2. There are more passionately-argued, cleverer pieces out there - and, given a week or so, there will probably be more. Still. A bit of a personal exorcism, this one.
In the opening to Hotline Miami 2, you are wearing a pig mask. A tutorial guides you through a building as you kill a couple of blank looking men, at first with your hands, then a blunt instrument, then a shotgun. You do a lot of this sort of stuff in Hotline Miami, the predecessor, a game that emulated the mood of the Nicolas Winding Refn film Drive, which in turn was blindingly close to the noir novel of the same name by James Sallis. Drive paints a canvas of neon-soaked violence, leaving just enough room to question whether or not it’s all worth it. In Hotline Miami, after you clear each stage, you’re forced to retrace your steps in almost-silence, trudging through the gore-strewn corridors. This is after you’ve spent hours angrily mashing buttons, cursing the pixels on screen to hurry up and die already. The game makes you party to its bloodlust, then lays bare the horror once it’s all over. I quite liked it. In fact, a lot of people did.
Hotline Miami 2 diverges from this template in its opening moments. After the first couple of murders, you shoot a woman, then rape her as everything else fades to black. Then the lights come up, and it’s revealed that you’re on a film set. The murders were not real. The rape was not real. You are given tips. Be more aggressive. To the girl: be more girly. It’s played tongue-in-cheek - a pastiche of the Michael Bay-esque director who’d play things purely for the sake of their gratuitousness.
Here are some things you can’t argue about this sequence if you enjoyed Hotline Miami:
- This is too violent. In terms of sheer extremity, this is not new. In Hotline Miami, you slice people’s throats open. You beat them to a pulp with a baseball bat. You lop their heads off with a samurai sword, and this is only beginning to touch on the depravity involved. In terms of the act itself, rape is not worse than mass murder.
- Making it metafictional makes no difference. The protagonist of Hotline Miami has an unreliable memory, and it’s integral to the plot. Here, the vague idea is that of a slasher movie being acted out, and there’s some of the blasé attitude of certain cheap horror filmmakers in the director we see. This is not being played straight.
- You can’t do something like this, because someone with PTSD might see it. Although this probably needs qualifying, there are plenty of people out there who develop PTSD after seeing extreme violence of a non-sexual nature, and the first game would be just as likely to trigger flashbacks and panic attacks for those people. I know someone who served two active tours of duty at the age of 21; now, around thirty years later, he still can’t watch action films because the sound of gunfire in any context gives him really bad anxiety. It’s a harsh truth, but personal responsibility has to come first when it comes to the media we consume.
But. What comes first is not an interesting or all that important conversation. It’s a bit like the mayor of Chicago responding to gang violence by advising young people to not get shot. Fairly sound advice, but not exactly useful.
By virtue of its existence, Hotline Miami 2 is a cultural product. It doesn’t exist in a vacuum.
Part of that culture is one that reacted with horror to I Spit On Your Grave not because of the awful rape scene it depicts at the start, but because the girl chose to enact her revenge in an extremely violent manner. Another part is that somewhere between 20 and 25% of women will be sexually assaulted at some point in their life, and the overwhelming majority will already know the perpetrator. Another part is that the US Army is currently in full-on damage control after the sexual assault of women was described as an “institutional epidemic”, and the two men in charge of complaints of that nature ended up being arrested for exactly the sort of crime they were supposed to be preventing.
Another part is that the film industry, which this is giving a knowing wink towards, and the burgeoning video games industry have so far buried this narrative in favour of a much simpler one - the masked villain, out to ruin everyone’s day. It’s cheap. It’s easy. It requires very little creative investment in the victim.
This is not innocuous.
What it is is harder to define. Games where shooting a thousand men serves as an endgame do not, presumably, turn us all into mass murderers (or, if we want to adopt a more reasonable-sounding word, soldiers). But then, we have already more or less decided as a society that killing people is wrong.
As for sexual assault… one needs a little moderation here. Asked bluntly if rape is a bad thing, the vast majority would presumably respond with a resounding yes, but everything surrounding that is a lot murkier. The victims of the Steubenville rapists were openly described by classmates as having acted irresponsibly, publicly shamed and vilified by both the media and the local residents while we heard the sob story of two young men whose lives would be changed forever. Playing college football apparently makes you more sympathetic when you’re on trial for destroying someone’s life.
But it’s everything leading up to that, too. A culture that mandates what women should and shouldn’t be wearing, how they should or shouldn’t look, down to surgical precision. One where we pour so much effort into advising women how to keep themselves safe (something, by the way, we should continue to do if only by necessity) while spending very little time educating men on how to act. Even now, there are large swathes of society that think of “feminist” as a dirty word or, at best, something to be smirked at and quickly dismissed.
The point of all of this is that we’ve sacrificed so much for the sake of drama when it comes to depicting sexual violence, and our culture has played right into the hands of a society that has some warped views when it comes to rape. I’m not saying that culture has to be the great Truth-Wielder - if that were the case, the fun, stylised violence of a game like Borderlands 2 wouldn’t exist, and the entire Saints Row franchise would have to be shredded - but if every take on a certain act plays into the dominant ideology, then creative work isn’t doing anything. It’s holding a mirror up to the world, with zero interest in whether or not people are going to contemplate their reflections.
Back to Hotline Miami 2. It worries me, because the hierarchy of meaning here seems out of sync. First, there’s the shock value. Hotline Miami 2! You thought you’d seen it all - oh wait, no you didn’t!
If you’ve got this far, I don’t need to tell you that that’s cheap, stupid, and not deserving of the dense narrative of the original game.
Second - the joking nod to B-grade slasher flicks. Here, for me, is where it falls apart. The lines of the director, the clear contrast from the nightmare of seconds before - it’s intended to be funny. It’s a joke, primarily at the expense of the people who made those films. But it’s a throwaway moment. It’s by no means an elaborate deconstruction of a harrowing scene. Let me just state that on its own.
There is so much tied up in sexual assault - culturally, socially, morally - and this eschews all of that in favour of a knowing nod towards Hollywood.
For me, that’s not really offensive for the obvious reasons. I am jaded by now when it comes to violence against women. It’s omnipresent, and I don’t have the energy in me to be in a state of constant outrage - though I live in constant admiration of the fierce, brilliant people who somehow manage it. It’s offensive to me because it’s lazy storytelling. The violence in Hotline Miami was in service to some disturbing, often labyrinthine philosophical questions. Here, the rape of a woman is in service to a quip.
By the end of the game, it could be something equally deserving of the title - we are, after all, talking about the first seven minutes - but this feels like a step down. There is a colossal level of naïveté involved in thinking that, because it rivals murder in physical extremity and immediate horror, rape is a perfectly equivalent game mechanic. But last time I checked, one in five people were not shot multiple times then shamed into never speaking about it or identifying their assailant. Because that would be insane, and if it were the case then we’d have to do a lot of serious work before trivialising it in a video game. That’s what they’re dealing with, here. Or, rather, not.
