Playing the Good Mother in Amnesia: Rebirth
Roger Whitson, Managing Editor
WARNING: Spoilers for Amnesia: Rebirth
The first of many utterable gasps that Amnesia: Rebirth earned from me came when the protagonist Tasi Trianon stumbles upon the corpse of her husband and learns that she’s pregnant. Rebirth reminds the player again and again how little control they have over their bodies and the events surrounding them. The game limits interactions to lighting torches and solving puzzles, with no defenses when ghouls (the game’s monsters) inevitably show up. Tasi’s body is slowly mutating, which threatens to change her into one of the ghouls that hunt her. Several of the game’s levels feature hallucinatory-like vistas with a giant unborn fetus floating in the placental background. Amnesia: Rebirth positions Tasi as a body more acted upon than acting. As Emma Kostopolus has argued, Tasi is overwhelmingly maternal in the game: “[i]f she ever relinquishes care of the child, even if that seems the best thing for the child, she is branded a poor mother by the game and receives the commonly-accepted bad ending.” Yet, the story of Tasi’s pregnancy is also told through the horrors of the game, constructing an ambivalence towards motherhood that grates against the messages we receive about Tasi’s maternal nature.
Amnesia: Rebirth encourages you to play a mother who would sacrifice everything to save her child. As a male-identifying yet gender nonconforming person, I found the game’s simulation of the embodiment of motherhood unlike anything I’ve experienced in a game. One mechanic enables you to feel your pregnant belly, hear the heartbeat of your child Amari, and reduce your fear in the process. It is hard to overstate how much of a relief it is to hear Amari’s heartbeat in the middle of a dark cavern, especially when hiding from a lurking monster. Towards the end of the game, Tasi is given a moment to breastfeed her child. I’ve never seen a game depict breastfeeding, let alone allow someone to experience it from a first-person POV. These powerful mechanics and scenes underscore the game’s valorization of the good mother. As I approached the end of the game, I felt the overwhelming urge to inhabit the good mother role which required me to rescue Amari from the antagonist Empress Tihana, sneak around her boss room while quieting the baby’s cries, and shut off the substance keeping Tihana alive. Alas, I was discovered and my baby taken from me. I woke up a snarling monster, Amari gated off from me — as if Tihana was some mystical version of social services.
Poor mothers are inhuman monsters, the game seems to be saying. I’m reminded of Maggie Gyllenhall’s film The Lost Daughter, in which the central character abandons her children. In a review of the film, Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett says that mothers who dislike motherhood remain controversial “because now, with our greater understanding, we know just how close so many mothers have come to being driven mad by [ambivalent feelings toward children]. Perhaps, we worry, our own mothers were.” Tasi clearly wants her child, and we’ve yet to experience a game that gives players the ability to experience an unwanted child or maternal ambivalence. Still, Amnesia: Rebirth reveals Tasi’s struggle with being a good mother through a series of flashbacks that visit her when she arrives at various parts of the Oasis. Aside from watching her friends die one by one, Tasi also experiences the sudden death of her first daughter Alys. Like a patient suffering from Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), Alys slowly loses the control of her limbs and senses before dying. This has caused some fans to speculate that the symptoms resemble Tay-Sachs disease: a rare, terminal neurodegenerative disorder in which patients lack a certain enzyme to break down fat cells accumulating around their neurons. The accumulation of these fat cells results in the slow degeneration and gradual destruction of the central nervous system. Children are often diagnosed around 6 months of age, start having seizures around age 2, and die by the age of 5. Tasi’s traumas include watching her child die slowly, and the depiction of the good mother in the game is impossible to understand outside of this context.
Amnesia: Rebirth also depicts the moral compromises good mothers are pressured to make in order to save their children. The Empress Tihana is, herself, a poor mother: an alien tyrant who has tortured millions of her own people to gain a substance prolonging her life called vitae. She suffers from an unknown affliction that has destroys her womb along with her ability to have children. Tihana lures the crew of the Cassandra, including Tasi and her husband, to the Oasis in order to obtain Tasi’s unborn child. Many of the horrific events of the game occur because Tihana cannot accept being a “poor mother.” Even so, Tihana appears to want to help Tasi throughout the game. In one complicated scene Tihana claims that Amari is suffering from a disease and urges Tasi to extract vitae from human beings trapped in the lab. To do so, Tasi must torture them. It becomes excruciatingly clear that, in order to save her child, Tasi must be complicit with Tihana in turning human beings into ghouls. In another scene, Tasi has a flashback in which a member of the Cassandra crew chastises her for not giving Tihana her child in order to save the rest of them. To be the good mother, Tasi betrays the crew of the Cassandra, while collaborating with an otherworldly genocidal tyrant and torturing her fellow human beings.
Courtney Patrick-Wilson points out that pregnant mothers are asked to subsume their identity in their unborn child — their “identity and value now rests in the being growing within them” (50). Amnesia: Rebirth repeats this message throughout the various endings offered to the player in which success is tied to rescuing Amari from Tihana. Yet, the nature of the choices Tasi makes during the game also draws disturbing parallels with the torture and murder Tihana was also willing to make in order to gain a daughter of her own. In this, Amnesia: Rebirth seems to both reward its players for being good mothers and ask them — was it worth it?
