Giygas, Zizek, Lynch: interpretation of the horror of Giygas
by Erostratus
Before I begin my interpretation, I´d like to say a few points. First, I´m not a native English speaker, so, if my grammar is incorrect while trying to explain these really obscure and abstruse matters, I apologize. And, second, since this interpretation tries to use some psychoanalytical and philosophical notions, I am aware that these don´t pretend to be the absolute truth behind the game and are more symbolical than literal, so I´ll take any critique as long as they are aware that I´m only trying to render an interpretation that may be imperfect. Third, to the guys who like philosophy or psychoanalysis: anyone who disagrees on my reading of Zizek here, all critiques are welcome: I´m only a student of literature. And also, I might add that I am by no means a materialist as Zizek (I like more Schopenhauer than Hegel), but I believe his analysis bring a new light in matters like popular culture, theology and Capitalism (that is, the strong materialist subjects).
Well, I came up with this interpretation because I saw the disturbing deleted final boss scene of Mother 3. Even if I consider no one can make a definitive theory about how this would fit in the storyline, I was fascinated merely because of the form of the deleted boss, the presentation of this hidden battle, since it reminded me strongly of the original horror felt while playing against the Mother 2 Giygas. I kept looking for theories and I just read the topic about the “baby” issue in Giygas and the Itoi reference about Giygas concept and lines coming from his traumatic childhood experience of entering the wrong movie and seeing a rape scene. I read the interpretations made about this topic and the arguments against them, and I will like to give a little critical hint on Giygas figure which may be useful. Why is he so terrifying? I´ll risk an approach based on the philosophy of Slavoj Zizek, which is a (perhaps problematic) re-reading of Hegel and Lacan. I know it sounds pretentious, however, I´m deeply striked how these notions clarify the idea behind the game witouth falling in cliché symbolisms or “deep” meanings which say nothing. What one sees in Giygas (or on the deleted battle scene of Mother 3) is, immediately, the pure horror of what Lacan called “The Real”, that is, all which resists being symbolized or interpreted. It is the secret core of our being, but remains unknown and it is impossible to give account to it in a symbolic form. It is a traumatic secret, something very dark which troubles and torment us. An example of the Real is what is called the "real real", that is, the things that convey horror, like in horror films.
In the case of Earthbound, Itoi himself said the Giygas scene was based on a traumatical experience, well known by we all, which kept in his mind while writing EB lines: “In other words, there was this sense of terror having atrocity and eroticism side-by-side, and that’s what Giygas’ lines at the end are. During the end, he says, “It hurts,” right? That’s… her breast. It’s like, how do I put it, a “living-being” sensation”. So, in the first place, we have a brilliant fictional render of the encounter with a “Real”, a traumatical horror. Now, it would be too obvious and rather useless (and definitely tasteless) to point the classical psychoanalytical notions here: that Giygas is really the symbol of a primary scene trauma (that is, the kid watching adults making love and trying to explain this shock with a fantasy about his own origin, etc), and that the symbolism of the baby forming becomes clear and “Mother” is just an obscure reference to the character edipical search for his own origin in the form of a quest to banish the original evil, etc… Even if there could be some truth in all of this, it becomes too obvious this is the case of a “bad” interpretation, since it relies on a pseudo Freudian sexual symbolism that has been shown to be outdated and a misinterpretation. I´ll better like to stress how Itoi is playing with our player minds here at it´s deepest level.
In the figure of Giygas we deal with the idea of “The thing”, the alien, the all mighty entity which tries to enslave humanity and take possession of everything with it´s incredible power. It is a kind of absolute substance which ultimate form is horror. But why, beyond its enormous power, this “all-mighty idiot” remains so disturbing, more than any other boss in a videogame? As the philosopher Slavoj Zizek would say, the fear that comes from this “thing from outer space” is, paradoxically, because it is a “thing from the inner space”, something deep in our minds. But what is this thing? The notion that helps us to understand the idea of absolute horror rendered here is the Freudian notion of Tanatos, death drive, which is NOT the will to destroy everything, but the will to persist eternally in a drive or desire even if what remains is a naked impulse to live deprived of everything else. Think about “undead”, zombies: the zombie is not life or dead, but something like life , deprived of all except for the drive to move and consume, the life at it´s naked dimension, the undead life that is eternal. Tanatos is the will to persist in life even beyond the destruction of the subject. That is, immortality as the ultimate horror. But this energy of undeadness is precisely the core of our psyche. As Zizek says in his analysis of “Alien”: “There´s a fundamental imbalance, a gap, between our psychic energy, which Freud called Libido, that endless, undead energy which persists beyond life and dead, and the pure finite mortal reality of our bodies. The lesson that we must learn and that the movies try to avoid is that we are the “aliens” controlling our bodies: humanity means the “aliens” are controlling our animal bodies. Our ego is an alien force controlling our body.” What has this to do with Giygas? What we see in Giygas is the core of our very subjectivity as players, our “Real”. These horrible face is the very secret of our psychic energy, the core of our “will to play”, the naked incarnation of the input we put in a game and that comes from our inner dimension (beyond us as individuals). This energy corresponds with the Libido Zizek talks about, not merely as a “sexual energy” but as the psychic energy in general, the psychic input of all our activities. Ever wondered why EB´s PSI powers are so peculiar, so different from the powers and abilities in other games? Because they come from the very character, from his own hearth and his mind, it is not the usual “external” power up, but something that comes from his own being. Tim Rogers has stressed how the central notion that we find in Itoi´s games is the problem of "game input". The psychic energy we put in a game is the very impulse that exists in our hearth, even beyond time and death, to keep playing. Haven´t we all felt the drive to immortality, the lust of eternal gaming? That is Giygas: he is our own gamer Tanatos. That´s the reason why only our hearts, our decisions (not the hero´s attacks) can kill Giygas: because he is what we are beyond life and dead, he is the alien, the naked Libido, the thing from inner space. This Gap or cosmic imbalance is compared by Zizek to the the hegelian "night of the world"
The human being is this night, this empty nothing, that contains everything in its simplicity—an unending wealth of many presentations, images, of which none happens to occur to him—or which are not present. This night, the inner of nature, that exists here— pure self—in phantasmagorical presentations, is night all around it, here shoots a bloody head—there another white shape, suddenly here before it, and just so disappears. One catches sight of this night when one looks human beings in the eye—into a night that becomes awful, it suspends the night of the world here in an opposition. In this night being has returned.
(from the Realphilosophie manuscript of 1805–06)
This night is the empty core of subjectivity, the zero ground of the subject, the pure void or absence which that which Hegel or Lacan call a subject stands for. Giygas is the gap where the face (the horrible face) of this monstrous undead power which surpasses us appears. But, in the game, we can prove ourselves that we are beyond this immortality and end the game. So, Earthbound is the only game where we face the very embodiment of our dark side as players, but not in the rather obvious and tasteless twist of battling against a dark version of ourselves (Dark Link, etc), but by fighting the immortal part of our being, the very core of our being. Maybe that´s why when Giygas dies it is like a TV going off: it is not only a brilliant and meta-fictional metaphor for the end of a game, but the very ending of our own monstrous, “undead” player dimension. The end of a game is our triumph over our own and virtually infinite power, the “alien” within us.
Think what happens in the other Mother games. What we have in both is a confrontation against an enemy that happens to share a very deep and strange link with the protagonist, but remains strange, unsettling, “alien” to you. For example, the first Giygas was raised by your great-grandmother Maria and the song you use to defeat him was its lullaby: there´s a very deep link between Ninten and Giygas, as if they were symbolically “brothers”: you defeat this monster by triggering it´s deepest feelings with a song (like killing a brother). In Mother 3 the final battle is in fact the highly catartical struggle of an "undead" boy, your brother, to overcome this monstrous Tantatos (the will to persist beyond life and dead) and embrace his own dead. The whole Giygas like stuff (the unused frames and all that) fits perfectly with this interpretation. What I mean is that there is a very important link between the three major EB final enemies, in all of them we find a mix of tenderness and pure horror and a symbolical identity between hero and villain (Ninten is like a brother of Guiege, Ness IS Giygas, Lucas IS Claus), and the source of this identification is the fact that the hero is not facing an enemy, he is facing himself in the undead, Tanatos dimension of his own being.
To clarify the horror that this facing against our own death drive conveys I compare the effect reached in these EB scene to the one in the ending of “Inland Empire”, by David Lynch. The ones who saw this film´s ending remember this horrible character that the protagonist (Laura Dern) meets in a ruined house, a man with a lightbulb in his mouth, which really shocks her (and us). In the end of the film, as she approaches to the room with the rabbits, she meets him again, and the protagonist shoots him. Suddenly, this guy´s face suddenly transforms into the protagonists face (shockingly deformed), and, in a second glimpse, the eyes of this face are empty and they start to bleed.
David Lynch, Inland Empire
Mother Games
This scene is a true nightmare. It can be interpreted as the protagonist dealing with the traumatic dimension of her own desire (this movie deals about some kind of imaginary or real adultery), her inward dimension. The difference between, let´s say, Inland Empire and Mulholland drive is that in the second the protagonist never faces the weird, horrible figure that embodies this dimension of pure horror, that is, the bum behind Winkies, and so the character persists in her desire and dies (in the last scene of the film, after Diane´s suicide, we see the face of the man behind Winkies). In Inland empire, the protagonist finally faces the true horror of herself, this horrible face which eternally bleeds (that is the core of our being) and so she reaches delivery in the beautiful final sequence. The symbolism of a deformed mock, or, more horrible even, an empty face that bleeds forever is the very incarnation of this Tanatos that is in ourselves, the undead in ourselves. The encounter with Giygas is very similar to this (remember, in Mother 3, the red, suffering and horrible face at the end of the unused boss), but in the dimension of videogames, a gamer´s Tanatos, as I have said before.
In brief: Giygas is, as all true aliens, is a “Thing from inner space”, which embodies the secret impulse to the Absolute which dwells in us (which, as immortality, is pure horror), Libido at it´s purest, the night of the world; the only way to overcome it is the player´s most epic, ethic decision: end the game. Earthbound is the only game that portrays in such a shocking way the very input we put in it, all which we go trough in it returns in the form of pure horror and that is Giygas. I believe this, among other reasons, gives Earthbound a different status among videogames, because it deals with the very problem of our deep relationship with the very idea of gaming. No one has done this yet apart from Itoi and frankly I believe only EB deserves this kind of attention in it´s analysis, not only as a part of the large phenomena of gaming, but in the deep, materialist analysis of the forms and experiences that a form of expression can contain.
) so it should be a pretty fresh experience.
There's some hex editing involved for me, but newer flash cards shouldn't have any problem. Original hardware > emulation, every time.
