Freedom and Failure in BioShock

Welcome to Rapture

Today, I want to ana­lyze two inter­re­lated themes found in 2007’s first-person-shooter BioShock.  BioShock is hands-down one of the best games (and cer­tainly one of the best FPSs) of the last nine or ten years, and if you have not already expe­ri­enced it, I would sug­gest rem­e­dy­ing this with some mea­sure of haste.  The game has its flaws (and its detrac­tors) but few would argue that its char­ac­ters, con­cepts, and atmos­phere are any­thing short of superb.

It’s the sort of game that has already had a fair amount writ­ten about it, espe­cially its mid-game plot twist, which is impor­tant not only to the story of the game, but calls into ques­tion the player’s psy­chol­ogy as he or she plays any lin­ear game.  (It cul­mi­nates in a cutscene with a bril­liant use of “dis­tance,” as dis­cussed by myself in one of my previous columns, but that’s a con­ver­sa­tion for another time.) That and the fact that it serves partly as a rebut­tal to a Randian notion of utopia have fueled the dis­cus­sions of BioShock for some time.

But I’m not par­tic­u­larly going to focus on either of those things today, though they will both undoubt­edly come up.  Instead, I wish to dis­cuss two par­tic­u­lar themes: that of free­dom, and that of fail­ure, by look­ing at three of the char­ac­ters in BioShock: Dr. J.S. Steinman,Sander Cohen, and Andrew Ryan him­self.

Note

I have not played BioShock 2 or read any of the sup­ple­men­tary mate­rial.  Thus, if I say some­thing that con­tra­dicts some­thing said in one of those sources, don’t point it out to me, because I don’t care.

Let’s Get This Paper Started

Ryan declares, in his open­ing mono­logue, that he built Rapture to be a city “where the great would not be  con­strained by the small.”  His pur­pose is to build a city far away from the “vul­tures” in Washington, Moscow, and the Vatican, a place where true geniuses in art, sci­ence and indus­try would not be con­strained by “the cen­sor” or “petty moral­ity.”  (Andrew Ryan, “Welcome to Rapture.”)

But in so doing, he has already become self-defeating, for the great do not need to run away from the real world.  Rapture does not attract those who are actu­ally great, but rather those who think they could become great, if only they could escape what­ever is hold­ing them back in the world on land.  As Sartre would say, one is not a great nov­el­ist until one has writ­ten a great novel, and I would posit that no one who has writ­ten a great novel is likely to run away from his or her suc­cess to an iso­lated utopia beneath the sea.

In this way, Rapture attracts those who have expe­ri­enced fail­ure in the reg­u­lar world, and desire Rapture for its free­dom, under the mis­taken impres­sion that free­dom will inevitably lead to suc­cess.  If only they can escape the gov­ern­ment, or their fam­i­lies, or reli­gion, or their eco­nomic struc­tures, or the fall­out from the Second World War, then they can come down to Rapture and make names for them­selves.  Rapture is thus full of failed “poets, artists, and ten­nis play­ers,” look­ing to find suc­cess in the free­dom Rapture offers.  (Sullivan, “Smuggling Ring.”)

Each of the three char­ac­ters I will here dis­cuss embod­ies dif­fer­ent aspects of the themes of fail­ure and free­dom, and from them, I believe I can deduce one of the major points that BioShock is try­ing to com­mu­ni­cate, that ulti­mate free­dom breeds only fail­ure.

Dr. J.S. Steinman

Steinman is a (pos­si­bly the) plas­tic sur­geon in Rapture, and is one of the first mad­men the player encoun­ters.  In game terms, he is a minor obsta­cle, as he owns a key to a locked door Jack needs to get past, but he serves in the game’s greater pur­pose as an illus­tra­tion of the sort of per­son who is attracted to Rapture.  He was not par­tic­u­larly impor­tant in Rapture’s rise or fall: he is one of the com­mon peo­ple of the city.

We never learn exactly what it is that attracts him to Rapture, but it is the com­bi­na­tion of ADAM and the free­dom offered by Ryan’s phi­los­o­phy that makes him stay.  Steinman rants that before ADAM and Ryan, he had spent his “entire sur­gi­cal career cre­at­ing the same tired shapes, over and over again,” and rejoices in the fact that ADAM gives him the means to cre­ate new shapes and new modes of beauty in the human form.  (Steinman, “Surgery’s Picasso.”)  With ADAM “the flesh becomes clay,” and with Ryan’s gift of free­dom from “phony ethics,” Steinman can “sculpt, and sculpt, and sculpt, until the job is done.”  (Steinman, “Higher Standards,” “ADAM’s Changes.”)

But when faced with this lim­it­less free­dom, Steinman finds he can­not mea­sure up to his own aes­thetic visions.  What he per­ceives as the unlim­ited power granted him by ADAM causes his imag­i­na­tion to run wild, giv­ing him visions of per­fect, abstract, Picasso-like shapes.  Eventually, how­ever, his skill fails him: while ADAM might the­o­ret­i­cally allow him to do any­thing he might imag­ine, his own fail­ures in skill and unrea­son­able expec­ta­tions cause him to rail against his aes­thetic imper­a­tive (anthro­po­mor­phized in the god­dess Aphrodite), scream­ing that his cre­ations (the corpses of women on whom he has oper­ated) are “too fat,” “too tall,” or “too sym­met­ri­cal.”  (Steinman, “Medical Pavilion.”)

Steinman thus rep­re­sents the fact that per­fect free­dom does not guar­an­tee per­fect results.  Before ADAM, Steinman was renowned as an incred­i­bly gifted plas­tic sur­geon, able to “turn a real cir­cus freak into some­thing you can show in the day­light.”  (Steinman, “Higher Standards.”)  But now, faced with the abil­ity to sculpt human flesh as clay, he comes up against the lim­its of his own abil­i­ties, and goes mad, forever able to see Aphrodite’s promises, but never able to ful­fill them.

Sander Cohen

One of BioShock’s most endur­ing char­ac­ters is Sander Cohen, the insane artist who func­tioned, while Rapture stood, sort of like Ryan’s Goebbels, cre­at­ing pro­pa­ganda (most notably the Rapture anthem).  Few of the details of Cohen’s life are made known to the player, but it is clear that he thinks of him­self as an artist of great tal­ent and impor­tance.  He has at least dab­bled in musi­cal com­po­si­tion, paint­ing, prose poetry (“I want to take the ears off!”) and play­writ­ing, as well as some truly bizarre “sculp­tures” (after he has gone insane) con­sist­ing of dead splicers cov­ered in plas­ter.

We don’t know much about Cohen’s life pre-Rapture, but a few things can be deduced from some of his com­ments.  His ref­er­ences to “the Doubters” in “the gal­leries in SoHo” and “the Lyceum” indi­cate that he had stud­ied art and attempted to show his work, but was received pri­mar­ily with skep­ti­cism and/or dis­dain.  (Sander Cohen, “The Doubters.”)  Furthermore, we may assume that he was not expe­ri­enc­ing suc­cess in the out­side world by the fact that he is in Rapture at all.  As men­tioned above, a suc­cess­ful artist or musi­cian has lit­tle rea­son to run away from the world in order to become a cel­e­brated artist under the sea.  He is seized by an almost parox­ys­mic fear of “the Doubters,” attribut­ing to them the down­fall of Rapture, and rant­ing, rav­ing and try­ing to mur­der Jack when he fears Jack dis­likes his ulti­mate “mas­ter­piece,” a ter­ri­fy­ing quad­tych com­posed of more “sculp­tures” and pho­tographs of corpses.

Cohen’s fear of fail­ure is exem­pli­fied in his var­i­ous “dis­ci­ples,” ex-students of his whom Jack must hunt down and kill to gain Cohen’s help.  The first of these, Kyle Fitzpatrick, is shown play­ing a com­po­si­tion of Cohen’s on a piano (rather well) in a the­ater while sur­rounded by dyna­mite.  While Cohen shouts instruc­tions to him over the radio and grows more and more furi­ous at what he per­ceives to be Fitzpatrick’s mis­takes, Fitzpatrick grows more and more upset until he stops play­ing and shouts that Cohen has no right to treat him thusly.  Cohen responds by det­o­nat­ing the dyna­mite.

Finally, his fear of fail­ure is shown in the incred­i­bly vio­lent response to the suc­cess of oth­ers.  Another well-reviewed Rapture artist, Anna Culpepper, pro­vokes first a vit­ri­olic let­ter to the edi­tor call­ing her “deriv­a­tive,” “bor­ing,” “obvi­ous,” “dan­ger­ous,” and her lat­est offer­ing a “musi­cal insult.”  (Sander Cohen, “Musical Insult.”)  Eventually, when her suc­cesses grow to be too much for him to bear, he has her mur­dered through his con­nec­tions with the Rapture police.  Similarly, while Cohen claims to kill Fitzpatrick for his fail­ures, there is noth­ing obvi­ously wrong with Fitzpatrick’s piano play­ing.  Indeed, if I ever play the piano half so well, I shall con­sider myself a suc­cess.  It is thus per­haps true that Cohen kills him not merely for not liv­ing up to his ide­als, but for being a threat to his own genius: when oth­ers suc­ceed, Cohen assumes he fails.

Cohen is so afraid of fail­ure in his own life that he takes it out on him­self (see The Wild Bunny), his com­pe­ti­tion, or his stu­dents.  In short, Cohen came to Rapture hop­ing that its lack of cen­sor­ship or estab­lished artis­tic author­i­ties would allow him to truly blos­som into the genius he felt he could be.  Instead, he pro­duced pro­pa­ganda for Rapture’s leader, and a series of mediocre works (every other char­ac­ter who men­tions him calls him a fraud or a lunatic) and finally descends into a plasmid-fueled mad­ness.

Andrew Ryan

Last but not least, no dis­cus­sion of any­thing in BioShock is com­plete with­out a look at Rapture’s founder.  At first, it must be said that Ryan does not seem to have been a fail­ure on the sur­face world: he did, after all, make enough money through his indus­trial work to have been able to build a city on the bot­tom of the sea.  But clearly some­thing drove him away from the world of the sun.

Some clues may be found in an exchange he has with Jack when the lat­ter comes across Rapture’s under­wa­ter forest, Arcadia:

“On the sur­face, I once bought a forest. The par­a­sites claimed that the land belonged to God, and demanded that I estab­lish a pub­lic park there. Why? So the rab­ble could stand slack-jawed under the canopy and pre­tend that it was par­adise earned. When Congress moved to nation­al­ize my forest, I burnt it to the ground. God did not plant the seeds of this Arcadia– I did.”  (Andrew Ryan, “Arcadia.”)

Turning from a world where he was “con­strained by the small,” Ryan iso­lated him­self from the rest of the world with a com­mu­nity of what he hoped were like-minded peo­ple, in a grand attempt to plant the seeds of Utopia.  But it didn’t work.  His ide­ol­ogy was flawed, and he clung to it at the worst of times (refus­ing to reg­u­late plas­mids, the ADAM-in-a-can ton­ics that let peo­ple shoot fire from their fin­ger­tips) and com­pro­mised it when things became too des­per­ate (using mind-controlling plas­mids to direct the cit­i­zens of Rapture once things got bad.)  Ryan hoped that by cre­at­ing a land of per­fect free­dom, he would cre­ate a land of per­fect suc­cess, yet in the end, it was char­ac­ter­ized only by fail­ure and mad­ness.

It is worth men­tion­ing, how­ever, that Ryan’s life ends with per­haps his great­est tri­umph: faced with his own anni­hi­la­tion and a man he will not harm (as Jack is sort of his son), he sticks to his prin­ci­ples and chooses the man­ner of his own death.  (If any­one finds a bet­ter video of that, please let me know.)  As his utopia col­lapses around him, Andrew Ryan dies like a Man.

In Conclusion

BioShock is about many things: fear, gov­ern­ment, sci­ence, run­ning from large men in div­ing suits.  But one theme which runs through all of its many sto­ries is this rela­tion­ship between free­dom and fail­ure.  Steinman found that upon achiev­ing ulti­mate free­dom of power, he could no longer be sat­is­fied with the work his hands could cre­ate.  Cohen learned that even per­fect free­dom can­not make up for a lack of tal­ent.  And Ryan dis­cov­ered that per­fect free­dom with­out restric­tion leads only to chaos and death.  Though Ryan may have ended on a tri­umph, it is the kind of per­fect, unqual­i­fied tri­umph that only comes with self-destruction.