In going into that hallway to prepare for battle again and again, I find myself fascinated by the video that the first couple of times around well serves to shock and strike such fear.
It is unreal, a monstrous halfway-human form that’s struggling with a double legged mannequin in a somewhat perverted-looking dance. But that’s the key–it is unreal; these creatures are not human thus we can accept whatever it is they’re doing, and also true, no one expects, I’m sure, for the reader/user to be spending so much time in there watching it again and again until it’s clearer.
But how much worse, McCarthy’s Harrogate, and his affinity for a field of virgin melons? This thought occurred to me as I left Silent Hill 2 and faded into a calming break with Suttree. Then I flipped back a bit to the beginning, and reread this episode, here which I’ll excerpt just a bit:
He knelt in the rich and steaming earth, his nostrils filled with the winey smell of ruptured melons. To steal upon them where they lay, his hand on their warm ripe shapes, his pocketknife open. He lifted one, a pale jade underbelly turning up. He pulled it between his knees and sank the blade into its nether end. He shucked off the strap of his overalls. His pale shanks kneeling in a pool of denim.
Harrogate is a fictional character, but is so much more closely related to us, so much more the reaction to his act. Is this what draws the line in visual graphics? Will this be something that is allowable in a virtual world someday? Movies had to slowly run the course from their conception to where they stand today; from fadeout hints to showing all, and the inception of a rating system as a guide.
And can video as well infuse Harrogate with the sympathy and humor as McCarthy gleans from us? His words produce a sharp image, and our response is one of wha….? to shock perhaps as the dawn hits, to one of outright laughter if we find it funny, and God help me, I sure did. Can this be duplicated or replaced satisfactorily in remediation? Or do words sometimes, when skillfully used, have a power that is intrinsic to their nature alone.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology