The Shadowy Corners

Imagine an abandoned building — let’s say a ruined apartment. Somewhere in that building is a stairwell that leads to the basement. Wander through that lightless place until you see an old rusty grate in the floor, and pry it open. Go down the ladder until you find yourself in a small sub-basement full of old rotting boxes and broken tools, and find a little closet at the far end. There’s a busted water heater stuck in the corner, but around the side of it you can find just enough room to squeeze in. Don’t mind the little puddle of grime on the floor: it’s been there longer than you have. Congratulations, you’ve just found a Shadowy Corner. They’re special places, imbued with ancient secrets and a mystical je ne sais quoi, and they scare the hell out of me.

Half-Life 2's Subway

As it happens, I’ve written a lot about Fallout 3 on this blog, but there’s a good reason for that. In addition to being a great deal of fun, there aren’t many other games that allow you, for instance, to descend down four levels of abandoned military complex only to arrive at a door that opens into a forgotten subway, which then leads down farther still into the blighted marrow of the earth. Fallout, and a handful of other remarkably dark games, show us that the deep dark is virtually limitless, and it is full of shadowy corners. They are invariably dark, eery, lonely places. Often small, but not always so (and not exclusively the purview of video games, either: I am reminded of the Great Hall in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, which echoes a size verging on infinitude, but which is all shadowy corners and labyrinthine adjutments of wall, bleak and colorless throughout), these places resonate with the subterranean aspect of my soul, and call out to me even as they threaten to scathe and torment me.

There is a virginal, immaculate quality to being above-ground. We surface dwellers embody a symbolic order of life — sun-drenched and bright-eyed, we perambulate the crust and think it is everything, when it is only the most superficial of things. The real world is deep, and lies below-ground. Of course there are funereal echoes in this, but it goes beyond a simple allegory of life versus death. There are profundities that do not only presage our mortality. There are wells that carry our voices beyond sound, and do not return our breath to us. They are conduits that can whisk us away, but never back (or back, but never unchanged — the rabbit hole in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland is deep, deep, and long, and though Alice returns she is an Alice shrunk, grown, and remade). Always those things that convey us below the earth also speak to us of the frailty of our flesh. Again, a hint of death, but also of the agonies of life sullied and scarred.

…we are called to them…

I am reminded of the torture scene in Rob Reiner’s the Princess Bride, where Westley, strapped to a table, is rigged up to a water-pumping machine with yellowed tubes that attach to his head. Westley endures a torture that has always struck me as the most memorable (and disturbing) scene in that film. Why? Its visceral nature. Watching that scene as a child I felt a strong empathy with Westley’s pain, like my skin had been rubbed raw with sandpaper. I shuddered and looked away. I felt a powerful connection with the idea of his soul being drained. When the movie explained that he had lost a year of his life, I did not for a moment doubt it. Everything about the torture screamed the exposure of something frail and smooth to the harshest, most abrasive elements.

Left 4 Dead

The shadowy corners produce the same effect on me. Only, unlike torture (which is singularly abhorrent), they are both alluring and terrifying. They are profoundly uncomfortable; they, in fact, defy comfort as if endeavoring to be its antithesis. To reference my previous article, they are unhomely. One cannot enter a shadowy corner without hastening the breath, or shivering, or clutching desperately at some talisman (a weapon, or a shield, or even a flashlight) to guard against a searching horror. Contrary to what one might think, these places are not difficult to find: I believe strongly that we are called to them, but so long as we remain day treaders we will not go. We close them up and seal them away, but without them our dreams (and likewise our distractions) would have no substance. These places are the dimensionality of nocturnal thought.

…there are things far worse than death.

Games provide us a rare and precious opportunity to explore our relationship to the shadowy corners. We can delve into them as deeply as we like from the security of our computer chairs. The dangers of urban exploration (the closest real-world analog) are gone. Though so too are some of the rewards. For example, a friend of mine has explored the Catacombs of Paris, and by that I don’t mean the well-lit tourist paths, but rather the three-foot deep trenches of bones that snake below even the metro lines, and criss-cross for kilometres in every direction under the city. He has seen, smelt, touched and lived the shadowy corners (and fortunately for us, will be recording his experiences in film: check out Miles Finlayson’s upcoming A Place Without a Postcard).

The free game Penumbra

We less intrepid folk can still explore the deep and distant places of our video games, like the flickering engineering tunnels of Half-Life subways, or the sundered tenements of Left 4 Dead. We can sail to the farthest reaches of the galaxy in Mass Effect and lodge ourselves in the cleft of a dark room in some woe-begotten science facility; or we can crawl through a ventilation shaft on board a festering alien spaceship in Crysis. Regardless of our choice, we will find ourselves alone. And when the light goes out, and our flesh begins to crawl, remember: there are things far worse than death.

Photo: The free game Penumbra.