I love some gore. Peter Jackson’s 1992 gross-out flick Braindead is my number one zombie movie. The Thing is one of my favorite films ever. I’m currently being delighted by the absolutely horrific goings on in season four of From. Please know that when it comes to grisly violence, I’m no prude. Yet, when I watched last night’s lengthy reveal of Insomniac’s Wolverine, I emerged exhausted and disappointed by the bloodshed. And I think I know why.
Like most sentient people, I’ve long admired the films of David Cronenberg. To be overly obvious, The Fly is my favorite of his works, but the reasons I bring this up apply to many of his extraordinary movies: He uses gore like a virtuoso musician uses crescendo. The majority of Cronenberg’s output is an exploration of the horror of flesh, but it finds its way to this topic via spectacular paths. The Fly‘s incredibly grisly scenes as Jeff Goldblum’s Brundlefly body begins to break down are deeply earned, and extremely meaningful given the humanity with which he’s been imbued (primarily via the extraordinary performance by Geena Davis).
Even a film as wonderfully stupid as Braindead doesn’t reach its pinnacle, the lawnmower scene, without building to the point where its hilarious grotesquery feels deserved. We may want to watch these moments through our fingers, but they’re the fulfillment of narrative promises.
It was surprisingly early into the Wolverine trailer shown during last night’s State of Play that I found myself feeling demoralized by the violence. In fact, I’d say it was the second kill just a minute in that did it. Two guards, presumably terrible people for working for…I dunno, the baddies, are viciously slaughtered by the hero’s finger-blades, one stabbed through the back of his shoulders, the other lifted over his head by blades through her belly and then brutally skewered by his other hand through the side of her face, splattering Logan in a thick coating of human blood that he’d continue contributing to non-stop for the next six minutes.
I know who Wolverine is! I know the comics, even some of the movies, are often like this. I know that James “Logan” Howlett is a devastatingly broken man, monstrously experimented on by the Nazi-like Weapon X program and then left to face little but abject misery and pain for the rest of his long, long life. This is often conveyed through the ways in which he cares so little about the consequences of his violence, and the ways in which it horrifies those with whom he aligns himself. This is not me arriving at Insomniac’s latest game and going, “Hey, I expect this company’s games to be family friendly!”
Instead it’s me saying, “This doesn’t feel at all earned.”
Those first two killings, in isolation, are horrific. But they’re not in isolation; rather they’re just the first of dozens, and not the most grisly we’ll see by a long shot. That repetition is supposed to have a diluting effect, letting us sit back and enjoy the violence rather than be upset by it. It’s like that inherent irony of cinema, that we can have one film that’s compellingly about the consequences of a single murder and another in which our hero uncaringly kills hundreds of unnamed enemy henchmen and not feel the contradiction this creates. This was most notably called out by those incredible flashbacks in the original Austin Powers, in which we’d see upsettingly humanizing moments of the anonymous cronies who’d just been killed. When I saw, in the Wolverine demo, those two people just standing idly on the back of a truck, unthreatening and uncontextualized before they were brutally slaughtered, I couldn’t help but have that same reflection. Who were they? What have they done? What did they do to deserve such a murder?
What they’d done, of course, is be party to the kidnapping (and presumably far worse to come) of some Mutants, and Wolverine does tend toward Magneto’s philosophy of “us or them” rather than Prof. X’s likely more naive hopes for equality. This will be his rationale. But generally, when this is portrayed in other media, the work makes at least a token effort to have us raise our eyebrows in reaction. Just a faint, hanging question over whether, perhaps, wanton mass murder might not be the ideal solution. That’s entirely absent in this footage. Wolverine goes on to kill another 21 people similarly violently before the end of that scene.
Kick the copycat
To be abundantly clear, I have no concerns that the violence in Wolverine will cause any actual harm to anyone. There is no evidence whatsoever that violence in video games leads to copycat violence in real life. I’ve spent my 25-year career reading the studies, sorting the scientific from the poorly disguised religious propaganda, and while some respectable investigations have shown the very mildest possibility of slightly raised levels of aggression, none has come close to showing that it could cause actual real-world violence. So no, playing Wolverine will not cause anyone to start stabbing strangers through their heads with knives. Nor am I even concerned that such ubiquitous blood-soaked combat will cause a person to become “desensitized to violence,” as so many love to claim without evidence. Heck, I’ve played video games for over 40 years, from Doom to Soldier of Fortune to Manhunt to Dead Island 2, and the fact that I found the footage of Wolverine shocking would suggest that getting desensitized isn’t happening for me.
It’s also vital to note that Insomniac has stressed that there will be extensive ways to reduce or remove the excesses of Wolverine‘s gore. Speaking to Eurogamer, Insomniac explained that not only can you switch off the fountains of blood, but also remove moments of limbs being sliced off, and it’ll even offer to blur when Logan does the gruesome uppercuts. That’s great, and if I end up playing the game when my kid’s watching, I’ll flick those toggles. Such options are a pragmatic choice, making the game more appealing to a wider audience, rather than excluding the squeamish or those—and I think these people are far too often dismissed—who just don’t want to watch stuff like that.
It’s actually incredibly reasonable to not want to watch people’s bodies being sliced open, or knife blades emerging from their eye sockets. Me, personally, I love that stuff in the right context, but my wife finds it viscerally unbearable. She empathizes against her will, feels their pain, and cannot tolerate watching it. She’s not in any way failing at something with this reaction. In fact, it’s really rather normal. (It’s why, from a purely financial perspective, I was pretty surprised that Sony figured this was a good way to open the State of Play.)
My issue in this specific situation, with those seven minutes of Wolverine footage, is that it just felt cheap. It didn’t look cheap! The game looks incredible! But it felt unearned, just an easy schlocky way to show off, to “get people talking,” and to be performatively edgy. It didn’t deserve it yet.
Soldier of Misfortune
It takes me back to the 2000 first-person shooter Solder of Fortune. I think that was the last time—and we’re talking 26 years ago—that I had a similar reaction to footage of a game. Raven Software went out of its way to boast of the horrendous nature of that game’s violence which, for the first time in a game, enabled you to shoot an enemy in the knee, or the elbow, or the foot, and have them react appropriately to such an injury. The game’s GHOUL engine sectioned every character into 26 distinct “hit zones,” and they would be wounded and dismembered accordingly. This became a huge part of the game’s marketing. And the reaction was…weird. People kind of realized they didn’t want it. Games had been becoming increasingly violent toward the end of the ’90s, especially with the advancements in 3DFX cards and the tech available, and it’d had been a lot of fun. But in Soldier of Fortune, it suddenly felt quite a bit less fun. It felt pretty awful. There seemed to be something of an industry reaction, a stepping back from such violence in response, as if everyone felt a bit shellshocked by it all.
I don’t think Wolverine will cause something similar, but I do suspect it might lead to some reflection.
Speaking to Eurogamer, Insomniac’s Marcus Smith says the game’s mature rating means “we can delve a lot deeper into emotional darkness and ambiguity and conflict and whatnot,” which for them “was really exciting.” That sounds great, especially since the Spider-Man games had such fantastic narratives but were limited in emotional scope. But I do worry that the keyword in that response might be “whatnot.” His colleague Mike Daly follows this up, spookily echoing the hype for Soldier of Fortune, saying, “We wanted regional accurate body damage so enemies can get big tears, big chunks, lose parts of their armor, have their suits torn open, and see gashes in their torsos.”
I just struggle to see how a game that wants to opt in to cheap, gore-drenched violence and spectacle also thinks it can achieve a deep, emotional exploration of the nature of Logan’s internal darkness. Asking us to hoot and holler in delight at the outlandish gross-out antics, but then enter a reflective frame of mind over how Wolverine’s incapability of avoiding revenge-driven cruelty destabilizes his ability to form meaningful relationships, seems contradictory and perhaps even hypocritical. If that violence were depicted as unbearable, if we actually saw the enemy’s suffering, and it felt bad and wrong and still unavoidable, it could be extraordinarily interesting. But as it is, I am unable to see how the game can create the necessary pathos for anything to be meaningful. I’m desperately hoping to be proven wrong.
You’ve gotta earn it
But in the end, the issue for me comes down to the failure to earn such extraordinary displays of devastating violence. The scene in which Wolverine’s claws enter a person’s chin and emerge from their forehead should be a moment of huge significance, whether it’s to elicit gasps of laughter or disgust. It should be provocative, compelling, almost unbearable to believe he could do. But here it’s clearly just a “move.” It’s one of maybe 17 ways Wolverine can finish off an enemy, or a throwaway gimmick in a dozen cutscenes. It’s that cheapness that bothers me. It’s the undeserved display that leaves me feeling kind of repulsed.
I’m sure, over the course of the game, I’ll quickly become inured to it. It’ll become “normal,” just another encounter among hundreds. And more than anything else, this is what’s bothering me. Not because of some fearmongering nonsense about it having a negative impact on me as a player, but because it’ll strip such moments of any impact. I want moments of revolting violence to be purposeful, impacting, consequential, whether it’s because they’re shocking or hilarious. I don’t want them to exhaust me in the course of a seven-minute trailer.
