Would You Kindly? aka My BioShock Life

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about my life and especially how I interact with others.  Some people that I’ve known have said, “Don’t worry about the past; it’s behind you.”  While I agree with the statement to some degree, most of the things that make me who I am come from that past, especially my childhood.  You’re probably wondering what BioShock has to do with any of this.  The more I think about it, the more parallels I draw to my growing up, and that’s what I’m going to talk about in this post.

While I absolutely hate doing this, I’m going to throw up a <!!>SPOILER ALERT<!!> since there are things I’m going to be talking about that involve a major theme in the game, and the reasoning behind it isn’t revealed until the end.

Everyone not wanting to be spoiled gone?  Good.  Let’s begin.

So a bit of brief back story to give some concept of what I’m talking about.  The game opens with the main character, which you play in first person, Jack.  Jack is on a plane that goes down in the Atlantic.  As the only survivor, Jack manages to swim to a tiny island. (If you’re playing it right, that is.)  There’s a small building on the island, and as you explore, you discover it goes down and down.  There are all sorts of phrases on the walls about human excellence and a big bronze statue of a guy. At the bottom, you discover a bathysphere that takes you to the underwater city of Rapture.

The idea behind Rapture is that it’s a place isolated from the rest of the world to allow for society’s elite to flourish on their own.  There’s no mistake in how the founder, Andrew Ryan, sounds a lot like Ayn Rand because that’s exactly the philosophy behind Rapture. And that, dear readers, is the metaphorical house that the people who raised me built. Looking back, just about everything focused on me doing well in school. Not to say that I didn’t participate in activities outside of school, but I don’t feel like my social life had any real importance.  I didn’t get along with a lot of the kids in my classes, and I spent a lot of time playing out in the woods by myself.  So what happens when you focus on the intellectual over the emotional?  Rapture proves it nicely: Things fall apart.

Now, I’m not saying I had to fight with Splicers or Big Daddies or Little Sisters, but I did have to contend with many things against me.  While I doubt a majority of my peers really had it out for me, I didn’t exactly have any friends among them.  Sure I had some people I hung out with occasionally, but it didn’t last.  There’s only one of the kids I knew growing up that I still sort of keep in touch with.  When Jack gets tossed into this alien world with all sorts of rules that don’t make sense and people out to get him, I completely understand what that feels like: lost and alone in a nightmare where you just can’t wake up.

BioShock also explores the idea of control. When Jack arrives at Rapture, he is greeted by a mysterious figure over the radio calling himself Atlas. At the beginning, the player is led to believe that Atlas is a friend and trying to help Jack to survive the chaos that is Rapture. Over the course of the game, the player learns that this is definitely not the case. Jack is a weapon being used to take down Andrew Ryan, and the phrase “Would you kindly” is a trigger to make him do whatever the speaker asks.

I’ll admit that this isn’t an exact metaphor for my life, but it comes close.  Granted, I could choose my actions instead of being forced into them (and I’d never been ordered to kill someone), but I had certainly been conditioned to act a certain way.  The weapon of choice wasn’t “Would you kindly.” Instead, I got a lot of passive-aggressive shame and disappointment that caused me to feel guilty all the time.  Mistakes I made that probably shouldn’t have been a big deal became giant disasters.  “Talk to me about anything” became “Don’t come to me about something unless it interests me.”  I fell into a Catch 22 with my peers; they made fun of me for doing well and laughed at me if I failed.  Like Prometheus’s liver, it’s very hard to have any sense of self-esteem when everyone who surrounds you picks at it all the time.

I’m not going to deny that being raised like this still hurts.  At one point in my senior year of high school, the female figure threw up her hands and declared that she just didn’t know what to do with me anymore.  She didn’t understand, couldn’t understand, the pain I’d been going through for almost thirteen years.  When I tried to explain how I felt, it was like the walls went up, and the fingers went in ears.  Though I ended up going to therapy, it didn’t help.  It took me a long time to realize that I wasn’t necessarily the problem.  I had simply grown up with the barest amount of compassion for being different.

It would be easy to blame my guardians for everything. They never really bonded with me, and though I know they care about me, they don’t really love me, just have convinced themselves that they do. I know a large portion of the problem is that they didn’t exactly have the best lives at home growing up either, so when it came to raising a child, they floundered. However, the biggest stumbling block is that they can’t admit that they made, and continue to make, these mistakes. That’s a lot of the reason I don’t interact with them anymore. If I’m ever going to heal, I need to cut the negative influences out of my life.

I know BioShock’s main theme is to explore the problems with Randian objectivism philosophy, and I’m not saying that I intend to play out Jack’s journey in my real life. Part of that is because I never actually finished the game myself. Still, I see other symbols in what Ken Levine set up. When you’re trapped in a hostile environment manufactured by people who intended it to be the pinnacle of exceptionalism, when you’re forced to be someone you might not otherwise be by outside influences, you’re probably going to break. I know, because it happened to me in my own so called life.

Don’t cry, Little Sister; I won’t be coming for you today.

* The “Would You Kindly” image is courtesy of cdgallahue.wordpress.com through a Google image search.  It isn’t mine; I don’t want to claim it as mine; I just thought it really fit what I’m trying to say. I borrowed the other images from the BioShock Wikipedia page.