Creature Feature: “Isaac” from The Binding of Isaac
Nathan Schmidt, Contributing Editor
“Yet anguish is a dangerous affair for the squeamish.” – Søren Kierkegaard
You know what’s an objectively great Halloween-time band? Ghost—the Swedish band with the over-the-top Satanism gimmick. Some folks woke up one day and said, “Hey, remember all that bullcrap they said about metal and D&D and Satan in the eighties? What if we just…did that?” Then they planted their tongues as firmly in their cheeks as possible and created this Satanic anti-pope character who sings about ritual sacrifices and faith in the Devil while surrounded by guitar-wielding faceless ghouls with horns. Some of it even sounds just like Hillsong, the band that is arguably the apotheosis of the post-U2 evangelical worship aesthetic.
All those trappings of Goth-horror campiness are the wrapper around a kernel of profound observation: Satan has a really important job. He provides a name for The Worst Thing. This is why he keeps coming up in right-wing conspiracies like QAnon. The whole point of “Satanic panic” is that it allows the fear of the Other to be psychically transferred onto the readymade tabula obscura of Satan and his “followers.” But if it turns out that The Worst Thing is actually something you can make art about, something that rolls over rather than biting you when you poke at it—if, Lucifer preserve us, The Worst Thing is merely a phantasm—all that rage and panic would be misplaced and meaningless. That, my friends, is the repugnant glory of the monstrous in The Binding of Isaac ( Edmund McMillen and Florian Himsl, 2011), a game that makes the disgusting, the distasteful, and the Satanic something you can play with.
The Binding of Isaac is a rogue-style RPG shooter about poop, blood, and piss—basically imagine The Legend of Zelda’s bad trip on bath salts. It draws from the same source material as Kierkegaard’s existentialist classic Fear and Trembling: the Genesis 22 story in which God tells Abraham to offer his son as a blood sacrifice. It’s all just a ruse to “test” Abraham, of course, but it leads both Kierkegaard and Isaac’s creators Edmund McMillen and Florian Himsl to ask: “What if somebody believed with all sincerity that God was telling them to kill their kid, and they acted on that belief?” That’s exactly what happens to video game Isaac’s mom in the opening cutscene, which is how he ends up in the basement where all the dungeon-crawling begins. Kierkegaard actually says that it would make a pretty good, kind of funny novel, that “the comic and the tragic [would] converge on each other here in absolute infinity.” For Kierkegaard, the tragicomedy leads to a ruminative and profound meditation on the relationship between absurdity and faith; in The Binding of Isaac, the tragicomedy is about the absurdity of the things we choose to fear and tremble over.
The game is a ludicrous carnival of things that anyone with even a tangentially fundamentalist Evangelical upbringing will instantly recognize as verboten: tarot cards give you extra powers, popping random pills can give you combat advantages, and so forth. Then there are the items that actually change Isaac’s body, like “stem cells,” which increases your max hp and makes a little fetus grow out of your skull, or “the blood of the martyr,” which puts a little crucifix-style crown of thorns on your head and gives you the power to shoot blood out of your eyes. Like Kierkegaard said, the infinite convergence of the comic and the tragic. All this is in service of killing bosses that are, say, fleshy bags that belch flies at you or goopy meatpiles with devastating barf attacks, until you face your mother, and, finally, your “pure” mirror image as you appeared before all this nasty stuff happened to you.
Isaac turns out to be one of the most compelling monsters in the game. As his disfigurement increases, his encounters with taboo objects like ankhs and pentagrams and the Anarchist Cookbook make him more and more suited to face the things that are really trying to kill him. The game has its limitations: the goofy B-movie gore can be eyerolling, and its cartoonish Oedipal gender politics glibly choose shock over reflective critique. But this game about fear and revulsion actually has a much more straightforward moral to it than faith-bait games like the guy from Five Nights at Freddy’s used to make: stop being afraid of yourself.
Because, when I play The Binding of Isaac, the real monster is…me. Like Arthur Chu aptly suggested a few years ago, the game is basically an id-simulator for an imaginative little evangelical kid: you plow your way through the subconscious of someone who is always hopelessly trying to stay “clean” in a totally polluted world. It reminds me of when I would get scared to poop because I was afraid that God would think I was dirty. It turns out that a religious ideology based on keeping yourself “clean from every defilement” (see 2 Corinthians 7:1) is the Super Mario green-pipe shortcut room to Self-Loathing Land. But in The Binding of Isaac, I become the corrupted beast that wallows in my own pukey detritus. In that stomach-churning goo, I revel in the body horror that makes my very own meat the site of an abject carnality that I can’t clean up. In the blood and shit and mess that comes with touching all those untouchable things, I am the monster, I am The Worst Thing, and I celebrate myself.
In Doré’s brilliant depiction of John Milton’s Satan encountering the newly created world in Paradise Lost, the sun’s rays and a lush forest rise to greet the Archenemy. Satan is probably supposed to be consumed with infernal jealousy over such perfection or some crap like that, but I wasn’t there to ask Doré what he was thinking when he drew this elegant landscape from Milton’s poetry. I can only tell you what I see when I look at it, and in this image I see a hint of a world without the psychotic void that The Very Worst Thing fills. When Satan himself is allowed to be at peace with who and what he is, there’s no longer any shadowy specter at the center of everything working to undermine everything good. Weirdly, this is the world I imagine as I wander The Binding of Isaac’s in all its luridness—a world where even the Devil has a time and a place, because there was never anything to fear and tremble over to begin with. I am the monster, and so are you. Somewhere, there is a world with space in it for us to be monsters together.
Interested in more monsters? Check out our other October “Creature Features,” like “The Promise of Monsters” and Chris Breu’s essay on Resident Evil.
References and further reading:
Arthur Chu, “A defense of Binding of Isaac from a former fundamentalist Christian,” on Polygon, https://www.polygon.com/2015/1/26/7907061/binding-isaac-fundamentalism.
Gustave Doré, “Now to the ascent of that steep savage hill / Satan hath journey’d on, pensive and slow,” from Milton’s Paradise Lost; Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=678038.
Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling.
