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April 24, 2013 - Davis Aurini
29:12
Bioshock: Infinite - A Literary Review

My novel: http://www.amazon.com/Walk-These-Broken-Roads-ebook/dp/B009RZYO2O/ My blog: http://www.staresattheworld.com/ My Twitter: http://twitter.com/Aurini

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Every so often, you get a work of cultural significance that's either so influential or so well done that I can justify talking about it on a channel that's mainly about history, politics, philosophy, and theology.
Bioshock Infinite, the game that was released just last March, is both of those.
I'm going to be doing a literary review of it for you guys.
I'm not qualified or competent to talk about gameplay mechanics, so I'll be reviewing it the same way I'd review a book or a movie.
But before we go into that, a couple of caveats.
First of all, spoilers lie ahead.
If you really want to play the game without spoilers, you should turn off the review now, go download it, and come watch this after you're done finishing the game.
That said, spoilers shouldn't matter with most forms of art.
Murder mysteries can be ruined with spoilers.
Something like The Sixth Sense, which is an hour and a half long gotcha, can be ruined by a spoiler.
A game like this, though, although there are a lot of unexpected twists and turns, I think that knowing the plot allows you to appreciate it more going into it.
So, up to you.
I recommend the game.
Go play it if you don't want spoilers.
Otherwise, keep listening to the review for now.
Second of all, cultural Marxism and the hidden messages in most of our entertainment.
This is something that really bugs me, and I've commented upon this before, that the reality that we're taught is very, very manufactured.
Most of the history that people learn is, at the very minimum, it's a twisted version of events, if not outright fraudulent.
There are so many myths and exaggerations that the mainstream media constantly pumps out to us, certain standards that you're not allowed to know about, so that people have a distorted view of reality.
This drives me up the wall, and I do comment on it frequently.
And in fact, I was expecting to hate this game for precisely those reasons.
But I don't.
I love this game.
I love this story.
And we'll be coming back around to that in a little bit to explain why this is not a case of cultural Marxism.
Not at all.
So with that said, let's start with the plot synopsis.
And there's a lot to this, so I really need to go through it.
The world of Bioshock Infinite starts with the Latouche twins.
Actually, it starts with one of them.
She discovers the many-world interpretation of quantum mechanics very early on, in the 1880s, essentially, and winds up developing a relationship or falling in love with, it's never completely clear, with her twin, a male twin in a different universe where he is also an expert at quantum physics.
And they wind up forming some sort of very close relationship.
So following off this many worlds interpretation, we have Booker DeWitt.
He's the main character, and the big reveal at the end of the game, he's also the main antagonist.
So Booker DeWitt committed some atrocities at the Battle of Wounded Knee that stuck with him and haunted him.
And finally one day, he was faced with a decision.
Does he become baptized and born again?
Or does he walk away from the Christian ritual and say it's all bullshit?
In one world, he gets baptized.
And in that world, he changes his name from Booker DeWitt to Zachary Comstock.
He goes on to become a very powerful politician in the late 19th century America.
And this is where he runs into the female Latouche.
He finds out about her technology, which allows her to see into not just parallel dimensions, but also see into the future, as well as to develop the technology necessary to have the giant flying city that all of this is set in.
And so he becomes a huge proponent of her.
And the two of them managed to, in the 1893 Chicago World Fair, establish Columbia.
Columbia is supposed to be the end goal of America, the perfect version of America.
And it's this flying city set in the clouds, which is all rah-rah pump, America's number one jingoism and manifest destiny cranked up to 11.
At the same time, ever since his baptism, he's considered himself a prophet.
And he views this combined with the technology as the perfect crystallization of American values.
But then things start to go wrong.
In 1900, during the Boxer Rebellion, Colombia, the flying city, which is also a heavily armed military establishment, attacks China to free the Americans.
The U.S. protests this, and so they secede from the Union.
So you get this society that's supposed to be a crystallization of the best parts of American society, but it winds up becoming this extreme version of white-bred America, extremely nationalistic, jingoistic.
They end up deciding to declare war on the rest of the earth.
Instead of freedom of religion, they have absolute theocratic tyranny in Colombia.
Following this, Comstock starts losing his way.
He, with his perfect theocracy, with his perfect snow globe society, he starts bending his own morals to do whatever is necessary to maintain this idyllic appearance.
So they attack and kidnap a whole bunch of Irish and blacks to be lower class slaves in the society.
There's a conversation where everybody in Colombia expects to have the perfect world.
They expect to have this easy technological, beautiful, perfect world, and that we need servants to supply this world.
Meanwhile, at the same time, he starts selling out to business interests.
There's a major moneyed interest, Fink Industries, that gets most of their technological whirl-majigs from the technology to see into the future.
And he winds up selling out the society to Fink for these purposes.
Because as long as Fink can produce all the beautiful, wonderful goods that keep people happy, and nobody notices the black and Irish slaves that are underneath all of this, then we still have this appearance of the perfect society.
I'm still the prophet leading people to this glorious future, and I can justify a war upon the rest of the sodomites on the earth below.
So, the Luteces, the twins, the sister and brother, the lovers, whatever they are, are both living in Colombia, and they're beginning to have their doubts.
The one thing that Zachary Comstock notices, he looks in the future and realizes, or is convinced by his ministers, is that he needs an heir.
That, unlike George Washington, who, after battling George III, refused to be George I, is that Zachary Comstock does want to start a theological monarchy in Colombia.
But the problem is, because he's been using this time travel technology so much, he's been rendered infertile.
So, this is where the player character comes into play.
See, the player character is the one that turned down the baptism, and he wound up becoming a private eye whose wife died during childbirth and racked up huge amounts of gambling debts, resorting to alcoholism to deal with his regret over what happened at Wounded Knee, as opposed to Comstock, who believes that he was washed free of all of his sins by the baptism.
So, the Luteces are coerced into going to this alternative reality and buying his daughter from him.
And this is a man so deep into the booze, so deep into the gambling debts, that he eventually gives in.
But when Comstock brings this daughter, that is technically his biological daughter, but from an alternate reality, his wife doesn't believe it at first.
She accuses the Lutece female of being the mother.
And the Lutece female finally opens up and tells her the truth of where this girl came from.
Comstock claimed it was a miracle from God that the two of them had a child without her being pregnant.
She didn't quite believe it.
And so then Comstock resorts to murdering his wife, murdering the two Luteces, as well as blaming the murder of his wife on their servant, Daisy Fitzroy, a black woman who winds up leading the rebellion against them.
Except the thing is that he didn't actually kill the Lutece twins.
The way that they killed them using their magic bullshit machine, they wind up becoming part of the multiverse, not really existing in time.
And knowing what Comstock is doing, like where his society is going to lead, eventually in 1984, it leads to your daughter being the grand general behind the bombing of New York City as she rules over a completely destroyed and broken civilization.
They try and stop it by enlisting you.
So you, Booker DeWitt, show up in this 1912 flying city full of the most idyllic perfect Americana to go and rescue a girl who you don't know as your daughter because time or reality traveling messes with your memory.
And in the process you have to completely tear apart 1912 America and free the Irish and free the black slaves.
So that's the plot to the game.
It's a little bit complex.
And you can going over that quickly like that, you can understand why over on Stormfront, they said, quote, the Jew Ken Levine is making a white person killing simulator, end quote.
No word on whether that member of Stormfront was an undercover member of Mossad or not.
If that's all you can see in the game, then you can't see very deep.
Because this game is absolutely phenomenal.
Let's start with the basics.
Your enemies in the game, this society, Comstock, etc., these are not my people.
This is not real America.
One of the early events in the game is you win a lottery.
This is actually the ending of the tutorial stage.
You win a lottery, and they bring an interracial couple up on stage, and you get to be the first one to throw a baseball at them.
Comstock has more to do with Islam than he does with Christianity.
This people might resemble America.
They might have some of the same traits as America did in 1912.
But these are not Americans.
Manifest Destiny, although you can certainly make some arguments against it, was not this overweening urge to dominate and brainwash the entire world.
And quite frankly, just because you criticize our modern interpretation of history, well, the thing is that reversed stupidity is not intelligence.
The current view of history is idiotic and inaccurate and ahistorical.
But turning it on its head and pretending that there were no abuses, that there were no mistakes, is equally idiotic.
This society that you find up on top of Columbia, flying around in the sky, completely blind and zealotous, it sort of looks like 1912, but there's an eerie quality to it.
There's something that doesn't quite fit.
It's unnerving.
And it's not the way that the real 1912 would be unnerving.
Certainly there was more casual racism at the time.
There was more segregation into classes at the time.
And that's the stuff that stands out to us.
But it was still a functional society of healthy people that believed in freedom and individualism.
It was a very proud experiment back then.
What you find in Colombia is creepy and frightening.
This is not Christianity.
This is a cult of personality.
And I don't care if these are people of white ethnicity that you're fighting during the first half of the game.
They're still monsters and enemies of civilization.
Really, what you get in Bioshock Infinite is that there is a struggle going on in this society.
On the one hand, you've got the ultranationalists, the theocrats, with their manifest destiny.
And on the other side, the rebellion, the vox populi, led by Daisy Fitzroy, you've got anarcho-communism.
Neither of these are groups warring in present-day society.
These are anachronistic, forgotten in the dust of history ideologies.
So don't mistake Bioshock Infinite for a metaphor about modern politics, because it's a completely different animal.
And so you start off, you're warring against the nationalists.
See, Comstock has foreseen that his twin from the ultimate reality is going to come and steal his daughter from him.
So you have been pre-labeled as the false prophet, the one who will lead the lamb into sin.
And the whole society turns against you.
You're forced into war with these people.
But then the game starts progressing.
You're kind of forced into an alliance with the Vox populi.
And from the get-go, your character doesn't trust them.
With good cause.
After hopping reality a few times, you wind up in a reality where you did ally with the Vox Populi.
And it turns out that Daisy Fitzroy, this poor working-class girl with noble aspirations, trying to free the poor underclass of Colombia, is as much of a monster as the people currently in power.
So at first you're allied with these people, and you're running around, you're fighting off the official government soldiers, part of a ragtag army.
And then eventually you run into Daisy Fitzroy, and she says, you died in this society, and quite frankly, I was just using you as a pawn anyway.
And the upper class, the founders of Columbia, they are like weeds.
If you don't completely rip them up by the root, they will keep coming back.
They are subhumans that must be exterminated.
And at one point in the game, you catch her.
She finds that industrialist, who is this extreme version of the robber baron mythos.
He's the incarnation of a myth that was partly founded in reality.
He is it to the extreme.
And she murders him in cold blood, and then she's about to murder his eight-year-old son right before you stop her.
So, yes, the white people in this game are quite evil, but then so are the black people.
They wind up going on this killing rampage against the upper manipulative elites, destroying everything in the game.
Everything, men, women, children, burning down buildings, and Fitzroy, who seems like this freedom fighter at the beginning of the game, is just another monster.
If this game's about anything, it's about a society tearing itself apart.
It's about a man who is so arrogant as to build a society upon his dream, that everything must align with his belief, that he's going to use rule of the sword to coerce people to obey him and be a part of the society that he dictates.
And such an artificial structure is not going to last.
It's anti-human.
It's completely anti-what the United States was founded upon.
You wind up with these patriot robots.
And on the side of Comstock, they have the faces of the Founding Fathers.
On the side of Vox Populi, they have Abraham Lincoln's face with devil horns.
The Founding Fathers were very clear about not being worshipped as deities, and yet that's exactly what the society does.
And so this man's hubris winds up creating such a backlash that it completely tears the civilization apart.
By the end, it's just terrible.
One minute you're fighting Vox Popli.
The next minute you're fighting Comstock's men.
And the whole time, you know, men and women are dead in the streets, poor and rich alike.
Buildings are burning, and there is going to be no coming back from this.
This civilization has just been rent asunder.
First by Comstock's arrogance, and then by Daisy Fitzroy, the monster that he created.
There are no good guys at all.
Not the Irish, not the blacks, not the white pseudo-Christians.
There are no good guys in this story to be found.
The next point I'd like to discuss in this game is the ultra-violence.
There have been a lot of commentators, and I'm not talking about school marms or censors.
I'm talking about, you know, guys that like video games commenting that this game is extremely violent.
It's disturbingly violent.
And the whole time, you're dragging around your 17-year-old daughter, and she's witnessing all of this violence.
Penny Arcade put it that you're basically chopping a guy's head and face in chopping a guy's head in half.
You're taking this dull spinning hook and ripping off half his skull or tearing his chest in two, and then you look over and there's a Disney princess there.
It's quite unsettling.
And it's supposed to be.
See, one thing about Comstock Society is because he has the perfect truth.
It's a millennial form of Christianity, that they have built heaven on earth.
They've got all the solutions.
So no matter any amount of violence that they engage in is acceptable.
Two of the bad guys that you fight, one is the handyman.
It's a guy that got injured in an industrial accident, you know, an industrial accident because they don't care about the workers, which they don't, and got rebuilt into this terrible techno-man body.
He's a cyborg, but he suffers every single moment.
Massive headaches, inability to sleep, but just keeps functioning and never dies.
That's one of your opponents.
Another one is called the fireman.
These are soldiers that committed some great crime, some great sin, and so the fire vigor, there's one of the magic spells essentially, absolutely consumes him.
He's locked up in a diving suit, constantly burning on the inside, with the ability to do major fire artillery.
These people, because they have the perfect truth, care nothing about suffering.
It is total war.
No rules of warfare.
And so you are killing people with this dull saw blade in your left hand.
You're throwing napalm at people and burning them to death.
You're summoning a crowd or a murder of ravens to come peck them to death.
It is absolutely over-the-top violent and extremely exhausting emotionally.
Just playing through the game, it's fun and it's engaging, but at the same time, you can't help ignore how much violence you do to other people and even how much violence you suffer.
At one point in the game, you get a knife shoved through your hand, but manage to keep fighting for the next two-thirds of the game anyway.
This is the point.
I mentioned the Disney princess, that you're doing all of this with a 17-year-old girl wandering around next to you.
The very first time she sees you get into a firefight, she runs away from you for being a monster, and you have to go chasing after her.
Because you do have to be a monster to engage in this much violence.
And then, and this is the really painful part, I mentioned Daisy Fitzroy, right as she's about to kill the eight-year-old boy.
You can't do anything about it.
You have to boost your 17-year-old daughter through an air vent so that she can stab her through the back with a pair of scissors before she kills the boy.
And the look on her face after she does such an act of violence is just terrible.
Yes, this is an extremely violent game to point out how dehumanizing this level of violence actually is.
Next point.
Let's go back to Christianity and the final baptism in the game.
The game resolves itself when the only way to stop Comstock, to stop the bombing of New York in 1984, to eliminate all the innocents that died in this process, like all the suffering, all the needless violence, the society rent asunder, the only way, ultimately, is to go back to when you, Booker DeWitt, first became Comstock.
And every multiverse version of your daughter shows up to, instead of baptize you, drown you.
Now, rather than being anti-Christian, this is actually a very Christian ending, if you think about it.
Sorry, Christianity is not down with you get baptized so you're now a prophet that gets to dictate your theocracy.
That's not Christianity, that's Islam.
But at the end of the game, you don't commit suicide.
You don't engage in a mortal sin.
Rather, it's your daughters doing what is necessary to kill you.
And thereby, it creates, basically, they completely eliminate all the universes where Comstock's empire existed.
And it's by doing so that you actually do wash away your sins.
You wash away the sins of Comstock and his monstrous society.
But Booker DeWitt, the man that sold his daughter because of gambling debts, you also wash away his sins.
And at the very ending cinematic, it goes back to the night that you would have sold your daughter.
And she's still there.
And so you've washed away your sins.
You're still not a perfect man.
You're still a man with a drug addiction, with alcohol addiction, with gambling debts, but you're also a man that loves his daughter.
And you're not going to sell her into slavery.
You have a second chance to do things right.
It's not a perfect ending.
It's not a happy ending.
But it's an opportunity for a good story to finally happen.
One without this suffering and misery and death in it.
And finally, if nothing else, Booker DeWitt is a man's man.
He is a badass.
He has, yes, he's brooding and he has a dark history, but he knows he can deal with tough situations when they come along.
But on top of that, he also dresses well, and he's extremely courteous.
One of my favorite bits in the video game was when Annabelle, she kind of throws you ammo or health items during combat.
She'll shout at you, hey, hey, I've got this for you.
You hit the button to reach over and she'd toss it to you.
You'll go, much obliged.
That's what a man needs to be like.
Not a simpering beta.
Not apologizing for things he shouldn't apologize for, but also owning his guilt and the things he is guilty for.
So those are my thoughts on Bioshock Infinite.
Absolutely amazing game.
I'm probably going to be playing it again.
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