Enter your email Address

ENTROPY
  • About
    • About
    • Masthead
    • Advertising
    • Submission Guidelines
    • Info on Book Reviews
  • Essays
    • All Introspection
      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      Side Effects May Include Monstrosity

      February 25, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      WOVEN: Bruises Around the Heart

      February 24, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Radio Days

      February 23, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      The Birds: The Old and the Flightless

      February 22, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Radio Days

      February 23, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Daddy Rocked the Baby, Mother Said Amen

      February 20, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: The End of the World

      February 9, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: I almost lost my calloused skin

      February 2, 2021

  • Fiction
    • Fiction

      BLACKCACKLE: Cain, Knocking

      February 24, 2021

      Fiction

      The Birds: A Bird Heart for Forgiveness

      February 19, 2021

      Fiction

      New Skin

      February 17, 2021

      Fiction

      The Birds: Skittering

      February 17, 2021

      Fiction

      Variations on a Theme: Larger Than Life

      February 6, 2021

  • Reviews
    • All Collaborative Review Video Review
      Review

      Review: To Limn / Lying In by J’Lyn Chapman

      February 25, 2021

      Review

      Review: Nudes by Elle Nash

      February 22, 2021

      Review

      Burials Free of Sharks: Review of Xandria Phillips’ Hull

      February 18, 2021

      Review

      Review: Censorettes by Elizabeth Bales Frank

      February 4, 2021

      Collaborative Review

      Attention to the Real: A Conversation

      September 3, 2020

      Collaborative Review

      A Street Car Named Whatever

      February 22, 2016

      Collaborative Review

      Black Gum: A Conversational Review

      August 7, 2015

      Collaborative Review

      Lords of Waterdeep in Conversation

      February 25, 2015

      Video Review

      Entropy’s Super Mario Level

      September 15, 2015

      Video Review

      Flash Portraits of Link: Part 7 – In Weakness, Find Strength

      January 2, 2015

      Video Review

      Basal Ganglia by Matthew Revert

      March 31, 2014

      Video Review

      The Desert Places by Amber Sparks and Robert Kloss, Illustrated by Matt Kish

      March 21, 2014

  • Small Press
    • Small Press

      OOMPH! Press

      February 24, 2021

      Small Press

      Dynamo Verlag

      February 17, 2021

      Small Press

      Abalone Mountain Press

      February 3, 2021

      Small Press

      Gordon Hill Press

      December 8, 2020

      Small Press

      Evidence House

      November 24, 2020

  • Where to Submit
  • More
    • Poetry
    • Interviews
    • Games
      • All Board Games Video Games
        Creative Nonfiction / Essay

        HOW VIDEO GAMES MADE ME BIOPHILIC

        February 12, 2021

        Creative Nonfiction / Essay

        How Zelda Saved Me: The Inspiration, Feminism, and Empowerment of Hyrule

        November 2, 2020

        Board Games

        Session Report: Victoriana and Optimism

        December 14, 2019

        Games

        Best of 2019: Video Games

        December 13, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Victoriana and Optimism

        December 14, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: Lady of the West

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Paperback and Anomia

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: The Real Leeds Part 12 (Once in a Lifetime)

        November 10, 2018

        Video Games

        HOW VIDEO GAMES MADE ME BIOPHILIC

        February 12, 2021

        Video Games

        How Zelda Saved Me: The Inspiration, Feminism, and Empowerment of Hyrule

        November 2, 2020

        Video Games

        Best of 2019: Video Games

        December 13, 2019

        Video Games

        Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is the Spirit of Generosity

        December 31, 2018

    • Food
    • Small Press Releases
    • Film
    • Music
    • Paranormal
    • Travel
    • Art
    • Graphic Novels
    • Comics
    • Current Events
    • Astrology
    • Random
  • RESOURCES
  • The Accomplices
    • THE ACCOMPLICES
    • Enclave
    • Trumpwatch

ENTROPY

  • About
    • About
    • Masthead
    • Advertising
    • Submission Guidelines
    • Info on Book Reviews
  • Essays
    • All Introspection
      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      Side Effects May Include Monstrosity

      February 25, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      WOVEN: Bruises Around the Heart

      February 24, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Radio Days

      February 23, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      The Birds: The Old and the Flightless

      February 22, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Radio Days

      February 23, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Daddy Rocked the Baby, Mother Said Amen

      February 20, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: The End of the World

      February 9, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: I almost lost my calloused skin

      February 2, 2021

  • Fiction
    • Fiction

      BLACKCACKLE: Cain, Knocking

      February 24, 2021

      Fiction

      The Birds: A Bird Heart for Forgiveness

      February 19, 2021

      Fiction

      New Skin

      February 17, 2021

      Fiction

      The Birds: Skittering

      February 17, 2021

      Fiction

      Variations on a Theme: Larger Than Life

      February 6, 2021

  • Reviews
    • All Collaborative Review Video Review
      Review

      Review: To Limn / Lying In by J’Lyn Chapman

      February 25, 2021

      Review

      Review: Nudes by Elle Nash

      February 22, 2021

      Review

      Burials Free of Sharks: Review of Xandria Phillips’ Hull

      February 18, 2021

      Review

      Review: Censorettes by Elizabeth Bales Frank

      February 4, 2021

      Collaborative Review

      Attention to the Real: A Conversation

      September 3, 2020

      Collaborative Review

      A Street Car Named Whatever

      February 22, 2016

      Collaborative Review

      Black Gum: A Conversational Review

      August 7, 2015

      Collaborative Review

      Lords of Waterdeep in Conversation

      February 25, 2015

      Video Review

      Entropy’s Super Mario Level

      September 15, 2015

      Video Review

      Flash Portraits of Link: Part 7 – In Weakness, Find Strength

      January 2, 2015

      Video Review

      Basal Ganglia by Matthew Revert

      March 31, 2014

      Video Review

      The Desert Places by Amber Sparks and Robert Kloss, Illustrated by Matt Kish

      March 21, 2014

  • Small Press
    • Small Press

      OOMPH! Press

      February 24, 2021

      Small Press

      Dynamo Verlag

      February 17, 2021

      Small Press

      Abalone Mountain Press

      February 3, 2021

      Small Press

      Gordon Hill Press

      December 8, 2020

      Small Press

      Evidence House

      November 24, 2020

  • Where to Submit
  • More
    • Poetry
    • Interviews
    • Games
      • All Board Games Video Games
        Creative Nonfiction / Essay

        HOW VIDEO GAMES MADE ME BIOPHILIC

        February 12, 2021

        Creative Nonfiction / Essay

        How Zelda Saved Me: The Inspiration, Feminism, and Empowerment of Hyrule

        November 2, 2020

        Board Games

        Session Report: Victoriana and Optimism

        December 14, 2019

        Games

        Best of 2019: Video Games

        December 13, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Victoriana and Optimism

        December 14, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: Lady of the West

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Paperback and Anomia

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: The Real Leeds Part 12 (Once in a Lifetime)

        November 10, 2018

        Video Games

        HOW VIDEO GAMES MADE ME BIOPHILIC

        February 12, 2021

        Video Games

        How Zelda Saved Me: The Inspiration, Feminism, and Empowerment of Hyrule

        November 2, 2020

        Video Games

        Best of 2019: Video Games

        December 13, 2019

        Video Games

        Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is the Spirit of Generosity

        December 31, 2018

    • Food
    • Small Press Releases
    • Film
    • Music
    • Paranormal
    • Travel
    • Art
    • Graphic Novels
    • Comics
    • Current Events
    • Astrology
    • Random
  • RESOURCES
  • The Accomplices
    • THE ACCOMPLICES
    • Enclave
    • Trumpwatch
ArtGamesVideo Games

Hobby Horse Anatomy: Bawdy and Body in The Binding of Isaac (Ch. 2)

written by Jace Brittain June 17, 2015

In the previous installment of Hobby Horse Anatomy, I proposed The Binding of Isaac as a kind of repository for the repressed and excised content from The Legend of Zelda and other games. Isaac revels in the supposedly low genre conventions of video games and treads into the murky, phantasmagoric waters of abjection.

It’s late but necessary to mention: Isaac’s main weapon in the game is tears shot from his perpetually crying eyes. What causes Isaac to possess such a potent surplus of tears is not simply exposure to an excess of shit, but rather a fatal submersion in the abject. Again, Binding of Isaac’s chaotic dreamscape so wildly obscures the boundaries that the topic of abjection becomes complicated by the sheer availability of grotesque buzzwords. Among the menagerie haunting the phantasmagoric basement scenes are corpse fetuses, deformed or partially amputated Isaac twins, reanimated afterbirth, and laser-blasting vaginal cyclopes. Among Isaac’s upgrades, some objects that make his tear attacks stronger or his movements faster: Mom’s lipstick and heels, a Celtic cross, and stem cell injections.

Julia Kristeva explores the definition of the abject in her essay Powers of Horror: “[Abject] is death infecting life…something rejected from which one does not part. … Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us. It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order” (Kristeva 4).

blood tears

The setup of the game ostensibly stages the upgrades and enemies as dialectically opposed: Isaac’s mommy-drag and Christian trinkets against maternal expulsions and deformed demons. Yet there are jarring overlaps in the imagery of these apparent opponents. As Isaac consumes upgrades, the stacked effects warp his appearance. The drag elements mix with religious and medical—a combination of the upgrades mentioned above would result in a high-heeled Isaac with bad-Botox-lips, a saintly aureola, and a partially enveloped fetus in fetu growing from his forehead—and Isaac’s fate (here, actualized: a fatal sentence from God) expresses the entire temporal spectrum of itself upon his present identity. His potential for infanticide, incest, deformity, and queerness all surface through these upgrades (five to ten of which, from hundreds of possible trinkets, might appear in one play through), and more and more, Isaac embodies the figures of abjection he attempts to defend himself against.

Identity, particularly in terms of queerness and gender, has bizarre and fascinating mutant potential in The Binding of Isaac and makes apparent the revolutionary identity politics available and possibly inherent to video games as an artistic medium. Isaac’s memories of bullying and child abuse are made most explicit in the animated stick-figure dream sequences that occupy the time between basement floors. In one, Isaac is given a female wig as a gift and bullied relentlessly by his mother and friends upon wearing it. In another, Isaac is pantsed while approaching a female peer, who points at and mocks his penis relentlessly alongside Isaac’s friends. In a third, two friends take turns projectile defecating on Isaac’s head. Although these visions seem extraneous insofar as they operate as flashback reruns of what the basement’s intrinsic traumatic qualities already imply, the visions read as satirical confirmations of societal norms in light of the player’s ostensible goals of normalization and rejecting the abject.

Isaac’s humiliation becomes final in his escape. Upon defeating Mom and returning to the womb, then destroying it from the inside, Isaac finds a small chest overflowing with blinding light. When he opens the chest, his face seems, for the first time, momentarily happy as male, female, and gender-neutral haircuts flash over his head. His hair returns to normal, he enters the chest, and he closes the lid behind him, isolating himself again from all that he’s repressed, from the abnormal abject.

ending

This satire of normalization, the total and impossible rejection of the abject, is trenchantly rendered as game victory, an end to the spastic horrors of the basement. “Christian humiliation is only an episode of the impure against the pure…it is as if society, conscious of its own intolerable splitting, had become for a time dead drunk in order to enjoy it sadistically” (Bataille 127).

Elsewhere in Georges Bataille’s The Notion of Expenditure, the author describes the inherent hypocrisy of the bourgeois culture, which delineates permissible forms of shameful expenditure. Video games, the assumption goes, are childish diversions of light¹ entertainment, and Mom’s efforts to purify Isaac by removing his toys, clothes, and playtime seem to follow from this thinking to the extent that this permission can be taken away. The player understands that Mom, a Christian caricature, must have declared Isaac’s entertainments to be the variety that safely skirt the issues she has worked carefully and brutally to suppress. The irony, then, of Isaac’s descent is that Isaac is able to confront his repressed thoughts, escape his fate, and still return to a “pure,” original state, one that is, in many ways, the assumed static state of video games in general: safe, familiar, normal.

 

 

¹ There always seems to be a lurking pun when movies, television, or video games are slapped with this descriptor

Hobby Horse Anatomy: Bawdy and Body in The Binding of Isaac (Ch. 2) was last modified: June 10th, 2015 by Jace Brittain
Abject ArtBakhtinEdmund McMillenindie gamesJulia KristevaThe Binding of Isaacthe grotesquevideo games
0 comment
0
Facebook Twitter Google + Pinterest
Avatar
Jace Brittain

Jace Brittain lives in Los Angeles. His writing has appeared in the Destroyer, Sleepingfish, Fanzine, and Deluge. He is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Notre Dame.

previous post
Wednesday Entropy Roundup
next post
Poetry from Maggie McGuinness

You may also like

HuniePop: Considering proper context and mechanized dating

February 12, 2015

The New Comics: Rachel D. L.

June 27, 2019

Session Report: Greenland and Simulation

May 30, 2015

Tears, and More Tears: Toward a Theory of the Crime-Show Mom

September 3, 2020
Facebook Twitter Instagram

Recent Comments

  • furiousvexation Loved this. Killer first line and such a painted picture. Bravo!

    The Birds: a poem ·  February 17, 2021

  • Deidra Brown Wonderful, moving work!

    The Birds: a poem ·  February 15, 2021

  • Ceres Growing up in a rural area, I've observed first-hand the disparate outlooks between urban children with environmentalist parents and children raised in the country. Modern agricultural practices...

    HOW VIDEO GAMES MADE ME BIOPHILIC ·  February 13, 2021

Featured Columns & Series

  • The Birds
  • Dinnerview
  • WOVEN
  • Variations on a Theme
  • BLACKCACKLE
  • Literacy Narrative
  • COVID-19
  • Mini-Syllabus
  • Their Days Are Numbered
  • On Weather
  • Disarticulations
  • The Waters
  • Session Report series
  • Birdwolf
  • Comics I've Been Geeking Out On
  • Small Press Releases
  • Books I Hate (and Also Some I Like)
  • The Poetics of Spaces
  • Tales From the End of the Bus Line
  • Fog or a Cloud
  • 30 Years of Ghibli
  • Cooking Origin Stories
  • YOU MAKE ME FEEL
  • Ludic Writing
  • Best of 2019
  • The Talking Cure
  • Food and Covid-19
  • Stars to Stories
  • DRAGONS ARE REAL OR THEY ARE DEAD
  • Foster Care
  • LEAKY CULTURE
  • Jem and the Holographic Feminisms
  • D&D with Entropy

Find Us On Facebook

Entropy
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Instagram

©2014-2021 The Accomplices LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Read our updated Privacy Policy.


Back To Top