Mashed Brains in Videogames: The Curious Possibilities of The Evil Within and Star Fox 64
Donald Everhart, Contributing Editor
Videogames often traffic in monstrosity. Previously on Gamers With Glasses, we’ve written about everything from Resident Evil’s Lisa Trevor to Super Mario Sunshine’s Phantamanta. Games bring the surreal possibilities of animation and cartoons together with their own possibilities of interaction. It is that kind of connection, the collision of cartoon absurdity and warped terror, that I want to examine following this year’s Monster Mash. And that is why this piece is about Star Fox’s villain, Andross, and Ruvik from The Evil Within. More specifically, it’s about the representation of giant, pulsing, violent brains that float in their own dimensions of space and time.
Fox McCloud, hero of StarFox, battles his way across the solar system. He fights on Corneria, with its blue waters, green hills, and sparkling towers. He flies through asteroid fields, dives into ocean waters to face a bioweapon on an ocean planet, and has dogfights with a symmetrical team of fighter pilots. He’s headed to Venom, a world on which the wicked Andross has been imprisoned. Once there, he faces either a robotic version of Andross or the bioweapon that Andross has become: a giant floating brain with eyeballs that shoot laser beams.
Fox McCloud’s Arwing fires on Andross’ giant brain
Keep the image of this monstrous entity fixed in your mind, and consider the following: Sergeant Sebastian Castellanos is a detective in the Krimson City Police. Together with a small team, he goes to a mental hospital to investigate a series of murders. Somehow, he finds himself elsewhere. He’s chased through a village by a chainsaw-wielding giant. (In other words, he briefly finds himself in Resident Evil 4.) His troubles pile up in the form of a range of themed locations and further monsters bent on his dismemberment. He is chased through haunted houses, sewers, graveyards, slaughterhouses, and mazes of rusted metal and fire. There’s a stalker whose head has been replaced by a safe surrounded in barbed wire that comes across as an even-more-on-the-nose version of Silent Hill 2’s Pyramid Head. There’s a multi-limbed creature named Laura who screams entirely too much and whose design looks as though it’s inspired by Takashi Shimizu and Hideo Nakata (of Ju-On and The Ring fame, respectively). Ultimately, this pastiche of horror is revealed to be the work of the disembodied brain of a person named Ruvik, a mind that has been cybernetically built into STEM, the in-game name for a shared consciousness machine. Castellanos ultimately has to blow up a giant, pulsating representation of Ruvik’s brain. Once he manages to defeat that brain, despite it existing in a mental universe in which it makes most of the rules, he unplugs and crushes Ruvik’s actual-size and altogether less menacing brain-from-a-vat.
Castellanos prepares to fire a a rocket-propelled grenade at a giant brain that is ensnared in barbed wire.
Brains in vats and giant brains. Biomedical experimentation run rampant, resulting in deadly, bloodthirsty machines. Andross’ fleshy form isn’t even revealed to players unless they take the correct route across the star system. Instead, if Fox arrives by another route, he faces a robotic fake. In many ways, the robot is more immediately convincing as a massive target for Fox’s Arwing space fighter. The scale of that fight, similar to the other bosses in the game, at least has the potential to make physical sense. But, in a quirk of visual design that is likely due at least in part to the technical limitations of the Nintendo 64, both Andross’ simulacrum and his massively mutated brain seem to float in a void. This void is also, somehow, contained within the surface of the planet Venom. The opening to this inner sanctum is such that Fox must fly in to face whatever incarnation of Andross awaits him, alone.
The way in which Castellanos is transported between its assorted horror settings is the central mystery of The Evil Within. At first, a lot of this seems to be chalked up to lost time. Castellanos is freaking out. Something is wrong, but he can’t pinpoint what it is. There’s even an element of intersubjective verification of this unreality, as he encounters and then is split from his other team members. This could carry tones of panic or anxiety, but maybe it’s better thought of as a reasonable reaction to unreality. Plugged into STEM, Castellanos’ own mind isn’t operating inside his own body as usual. He is lucid in that his image of his body responds as normal, but he isn’t dreaming. He’s in someone else’s imagination, not even quite in someone else’s dream. To paraphrase The Pixies, where is his mind?
What if the two plots of Star Fox 64 and The Evil Within were pushed together? Perhaps Andross is a mad scientist who is still limited by his desire for dominion in the form of physical armies and accompanying titans. He has apparently remade himself into such a titan. But maybe, just maybe, Andross is thinking too small. The first inklings of this might be present only in that final battle, as he draws Fox McCloud to battle disconnected representations of his face, hands, brain, and eyes. Fox is still able to maintain the image of his Arwing, which, much like Castellanos’ endgame arsenal, is potent enough to throw off the yoke of this control. Why not explain the physical impossibility of the endgame of Star Fox 64 with the same maneuver of The Evil Within? It could be that Andross was building towards a conquest of the mental as well as physical world. All it’s missing is an endgame cutscene of Fox McCloud emerging from a bathtub at the end of the game, clutching a brain in a vat that he then smashes on the tiled floor.
Sebastian Castellanos waking up in a bathtub after releasing himself from STEM.
If everything mental resides within the skull, maybe the skull has to be cracked open and the tissue within needs to be connected with another’s if we’re ever to get out. Science fiction is littered with stories that take that line of thought and play it out to monstrous extremes. The image of the brain in both The Evil Within and Star Fox 64 is one that also represents the mind. This is the enduring symbol of the mind-brain identity thesis, which is ever-present in popular media and science fiction. Some of that fiction flirts with a central problem of that thesis, namely that it can have some horrific consequences for how to accomplish intersubjectivity. Perhaps the answer lies outside of the brain. Ruvik and Andross should get out of their own heads and into social reality.
