Sideblog Hill

Yes, I’m @cleolinda and this is my Silent Hill side blog. It is me, reblogging myself.

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Listen, I just need a place to post things for my Silent Hill 2 project that maybe unsuspecting followers on my main blog @cleolinda don’t want to see. I’m doing a video commentary/text writeup project with my friend Ian and sometimes I need to have a picture of a sassy mannequin and we’re all going to have to deal with that.

[lysimachias]

Not "The Character did nothing wrong" or "The Character is irredeemably awful" but a secret third thing: The Character may display moments of deep love & compassion, may even have a strong sense of ethics, and may also be capable of brutal cruelty that is irreconcilable with those traits. The constant tension between the different sides of The Character's nature is exactly what makes them compelling, and attempting to reduce them down to simply "a terrible person" or "innocent & misunderstood" is missing the point of the questions a media with nuanced characters is asking you to consider

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Otherworld Brookhaven: Patient 0050 and electroshock therapy

I actually did know in advance of commentary 9 that electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is still used today, in contrast to my surprise that some people actually benefited from lobotomies. In fact, I'd read a long time ago that Carrie Fisher had spoken positively of it, and I thought, that'd be a cool fact to bring up, but maybe that's her business and I shouldn't--

Shockaholic by Carrie Fisher

Carrie Fisher regales listeners with her thoughts on self-destruction, death, and delirium in this follow-up to Postcards from t...

Oh. Yeah, the late Carrie Fisher was entirely open about her mental health treatments, to the point where her urn was shaped like a Prozac pill. She did say that she had some memory loss due to ECT, but nowadays, you can decide for yourself if that's a decent trade-off and consent to the treatment. What I discovered is that the reason electroshock therapy was originally so dangerous, though, was because the convulsions could break arm and leg bones. Only later was the therapy "modified" with anesthetics and muscle relaxants. So when I quote Jonathan Sadowsky aloud on the video--

I am a historian of psychiatry, and I have published a book on the history of ECT. I had, like many people, been exposed only to the frightening images of ECT, and I grew interested in the history of the treatment after learning how many clinicians and patients consider it a valuable treatment. My book asks the question: Why has this treatment been so controversial?

Well, the broken bones were part of it, certainly.

ECT was invented in Italy in the late 1930s. Psychiatrists had already discovered that inducing seizures could relieve symptoms of mental illness. Before ECT, this was done with the use of chemicals, usually one called Metrazol. By many reports, patients experienced a feeling of terror after taking Metrazol, just before the seizure started. A Cleveland psychiatrist who was active then once told me that the doctors and nurses used to chase the patients around the room to get them to take Metrazol.

That wasn't great either.

(My offhand claim that Benjamin Franklin "cured a woman of hysterical fits" is not sourced as clearly as I would like, although he did have an electrostatic machine, and this subscription-only book chapter, "Benjamin Franklin and the Electrical Cure for Disorders of the Nervous System," may have more info.)

So modern ECT is very different, the current is much milder, and muscle relaxers are given. I don't know that I would choose to have it (today or ever), but I did have to sit there and ask, I'm bipolar. If I were at this hospital back in the day, what treatment would they have given me? I do think I would have been given electroshock therapy, for better or worse. And that's something I want you to think about, especially if you've been listening to me play Silent Hill tour guide for several hours: patients who were given these dangerous and painful treatments were just like me, just like you. You know, actual people.

(I also mention an anti-seizure drug I take, as it's been repurposed to stabilize bipolar mood cycling. I don't specify in the video, but I've been pretty open about my own mental health treatment over the last couple of decades. It's Lamotrigine, also known as Lamictal, and it's one of the most effective medications I've taken.)

So. In terms of Patient 0050's "puzzle," you have to stumble across a generator and turn it on; I don't think there's actually a clue or hint to do so, except an electrical cord that you might follow out of sheer curiosity. Follow it back to the ECT room--where a table? stretcher?) is standing on end like it's ready to shock Frankenstein's monster back to life--and turn on the machine. Four numbers will appear burned into the stretcher, and that's the code you need for the lock on the right side of the box.

This is one of those Silent Hill Moments™ that's intellectually disturbing, but visually, it's cool as hell. Honestly, it's one of my favorite images in the entire game, especially the way the stretcher looks like it's at the center of a spiderweb. I think, also, that this scene looking so unrealistic and fantastical, especially compared to the historical photos we actually saw, takes a bit of the edge off. It's artistically disturbing, like, something James might imagine in a nightmare, rather than a medical tragedy. I mentioned references to Thomas Harris' works and the show Hannibal in commentary 7, and that TV series got away with a lot of really, really horrific imagery by pitching it at the level of a fever dream. That's the approach in Otherworld Brookhaven, I think.

But we also learn something else, which is: Patient 0050 somehow gave ECT to himself. Unlike the control exerted over Patients 0090 and 0130, Patient 0050 sought it out against the staff's will:

Front, handwritten:

I found 0050 in the ECT room again. This time I checked, he was not appointed for the treatment. How is it possible he got there all by himself? And how would he know how to turn the thing on? Somebody's going to answer for this.

Back, typed:

So close. It will happen. Has to

My feeling is that a staff member wrote the note on the front by hand, obviously, but the typing on the back is more of a psychic imprint or dream image, rather than "Patient 0050 actually ran this sheet of paper through a typewriter." My other inference is that he's trying to electroshock himself into some alternate reality--he might potentially be the same patient who blames himself for his daughter's death, and he might want to be in a world where she's still alive. There's a journal we'll see at the end of the video where the doctor discusses the ethics of perhaps letting "him" (unspecified) be happy in his false reality. And all of this, of course, parallels James and the iteration of Silent Hill he's in, where Mary may (or may not) be real and alive.

Now, how Patient 0050 managed to sneak into the ECT room, put himself on the stretcher, and then also reach the machine to turn it on... I don't know. James himself has at least one imaginary friend; one wonders.

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The secret of the creepy whisper

I remembered this the other day and decided to do a post for it here:

For some twenty years, people tried to figure out what the sudden, rather alarming whisper in Blue Creek apartment 209 is saying. So I googled it--and someone on Reddit had figured it out. In the written commentary:

1:02:50: Apartment 209 with the famous creepy whisper! It’s been preserved from the original game! People have been trying to decode it for 23 years! I am here to ruin everything for you. One redditor sounded it out as "See my dead wife, now come home do some laundry into this evening, take 2 crimes up to some saints." Replies promptly revealed that it’s a sound file (circa 1999, the right time for a game released in 2001) from an audio library: "VB01_66_01 Whisper_Random." Team Silent probably chose it because you can kind of hear "dead wife” in a sort of aural pareidolia, but: yes, it’s gibberish. 

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Otherworld Brookhaven: Patient 0090 and lobotomy procedures

I endured much suffering to bring you this research on transorbital (aka "icepick") lobotomies, because I have A Thing about eye injury--I can't even put in contact lenses--and I do not care for any of this. So underneath the cut, I'm going to have the procedure setup as shown in the game (there's a dummy, not a person), the tools involved (there's some blood), and some article links with information. Again: I'm not happy about this, but this is the attention to detail you can expect from Cleolinda Industries. The video version of this discussion starts around 19:40; and I've set it to that timestamp.

As I mentioned in the previous commentary, we're shown a preview of the Otherworld Brookhaven puzzles, and this is the one corresponding to Patient 0090. So here's the article excerpt I read in the video commentary:

The strange and curious history of lobotomy

It's 75 years since the first lobotomy was performed in the US, but the procedure has an international history.

Surgeons would drill a pair of holes into the skull, either at the side or top, and push a sharp instrument - a leucotome - into the brain. The surgeon would sweep this from side to side, to cut the connections between the frontal lobes and the rest of the brain. [Portuguese neurologist Egas] Moniz reported dramatic improvements for his first 20 patients. The operation was seized on with enthusiasm by the American neurologist Walter Freeman who became an evangelist for the procedure, performing the first lobotomy in the US in 1936, then spreading it across the globe. From the early 1940s, it began to be seen as a miracle cure here in the UK, where surgeons performed proportionately more lobotomies than even in the US. Despite opposition from some doctors - especially psychoanalysts - it became a mainstream part of psychiatry with more than 1,000 operations a year in the UK at its peak. It was used to treat a range of illnesses, from schizophrenia to depression and compulsive disorders. The reason for its popularity was simple - the alternative was worse. "When I visited mental hospitals… you saw straitjackets, padded cells, and it was patently apparent that some of the patients were, I'm sorry to say, subjected to physical violence," recalls retired neurosurgeon Jason Brice. The chance of a cure through lobotomy seemed preferable to the life sentence of incarceration in an institution. "We hoped it would offer a way out," says Mr Brice. "We hoped it would help."

"We hoped it would help" was the idea I wanted to bring us to, because it really, really surprised me that lobotomies actually helped some people. In that article, Hugh Levinson also writes, "Psychiatrist Dr John Pippard followed up several hundred of [neurosurgeon Sir Wylie] McKissock's patients. He found that around a third benefited, a third were unaffected and a third were worse off afterwards." Like, that is wild as hell to me. I had always thought it was a procedure doctors "did to" people, purely as a way of neutralizing "unruly" patients that stopped just short of murder. In the scrapped first take of this commentary, I said that "certainly no one consented to this," but perhaps some of those patients did, hoping for that benefit.

(A quick break for the two famous patients I mention in the video: Rosemary Kennedy and Rose Williams, sister of Tennessee Williams.)

Now, I'm going to quote from Wikipedia here because the "Lobotomy" article has some well-cited information that's not available online:

For medical historian Roy Porter, the often violent and invasive psychiatric interventions developed during the 1930s and 1940s are indicative of both the well-intentioned desire of psychiatrists to find some medical means of alleviating the suffering of the vast number of patients then in psychiatric hospitals and also the relative lack of social power of those same patients to resist the increasingly radical and even reckless interventions of asylum doctors.

So Porter describes both the Brice perspective here, as well as our Director of Brookhaven Hospital, who was mistreating the "three crucial patients" we investigate.

Many doctors, patients, and family members of the period believed that despite potentially catastrophic consequences, the results of lobotomy were seemingly positive in many instances or were at least deemed as such when measured next to the apparent alternative of long-term institutionalisation. Lobotomy has always been controversial, but for a period of the medical mainstream, it was regarded as a legitimate last-resort remedy for categories of patients who were otherwise regarded as hopeless. Today, lobotomy has become a disparaged procedure, a byword for medical barbarism and an exemplary instance of the medical trampling of patients' rights.

And that latter idea is the perspective we get in Brookhaven Hospital. Both Patient 0090 (who is not Eddie, but seems to resonate with him) and Patient 0130 (similarly, "Angela") receive treatments they apparently don't want. Patient 0050 ("James") is a... remarkable exception to that, but we'll get to that in the electroshock therapy post (yeah, we get that too).

So here's what we see in Otherworld Brookhaven:

Note: "The Procedure." Transcript:

oh, how we danced arms flailing, our bodies in perfect synchrony and the music played but in any dance there comes a time one must take the lead and the music got louder and louder pounding piercing and then silence

I believe that the "dance" is between the surgeon and patient. Possibly the patient struggling, "arms flailing," with the staff trying to get him into the chair? This chair, in the next room:

The one who takes the lead would be the doctor; the pounding is the mallet, the "Instrument of Force" that we pick up.

The "piercing" is the orbitoclast: the "icepick" used in the orbital (eye socket) lobotomy, the "Key of Bliss." The "silence" is what happened to the unlucky third of McKissock's patients. As the Wikipedia article phrases it, "many lobotomy patients suffered devastating postoperative complications, including intracranial hemorrhage, epilepsy, alterations in affect and personality, brain abscess, dementia, and death."

Basically, the Patient 0090 "puzzle" is a fetch quest to fight your way past several monsters and find the orbitoclast; once you've obtained it, you go back to that (actual) mannequin in the chair. The one that's shielding its face with its hands, as if saying, Don't do this to me.

I'll bring over what I said in the Patient 0090 post:

I do think that the phrase "Key of Bliss" is meant to connect with the "Bliss" ending, in which James enters the world of a happy vacation video where Mary never gets sick. And that ending does involve, as this lobotomy setup does, a chair. That being said, the last shot of the "Bliss" ending is an empty armchair, suggesting that James has physically left the real world—rather than, say, being left in that chair like the corpse in Wood Side apartment 213, or the lobotomized patient here. I don't want to spoil Shutter Island for you, even after all these years, but that book/movie raises similar questions as to whether it's better to remember what you did or escape to ignorance. I think that's the kind of choice James is making in the "Bliss" ending. The orbitoclast as the "Key of Bliss" adds some subtext to that, in the sense that all the patients may correlate to James in addition to a specific character—but as far as I can tell, Patient 0090 primarily corresponds to Eddie.

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Liminality in Silent Hill

Listen, you could probably do an entire thesis on this; even with my limited means, I'd like to go back to the beginning of the game and walk us to town for about half an hour and talk about this. I wrote a post about Liminal Christmas Eve on my main blog a couple of years ago, and it's my best attempt at explaining liminality, I think:

– You know what “the liminal” is, right? It’s not just the Backrooms and the “liminal internet aesthetic”? – It can refer to thresholds (Latin: līmen) of both time (the sun rising or setting; midnight on New Year’s Eve; birthdays, graduations, even death itself) and space (doorways, crossroads, intersections, international borders; the wardrobe to Narnia, the rabbit hole to Wonderland–you see a lot of these in fantasy media). – And not just specific threshold points but more general times (adolescence/coming of age; long journeys; periods of social instability) and spaces (hallways, lobbies, waiting rooms, airports, bus stations, parking lots, streets, abandoned buildings, ruins). Travel itself, a state of being between one place and another, is liminal. Anything temporary has a liminal quality. A parking lot is liminal in a way that a garage is not, you get me? The liminal is a place you’re not staying permanently, and the time you’re Not Staying in it. – The “internet aesthetic” version also highlights the emptiness of things that may or may not have already been liminal (office hallways, closed buildings, abandoned malls), where an additional aspect is the the explicit unease, the uncanny quality, that the emptiness creates. Emptiness is not requisite, however, and an airport is liminal whether it’s full of people or not. – So we have both specific points of crossing and broader states of between-ness. 

As such, let me hit you with a few screenshots of The Liminal in Silent Hill 2. Which is basically the entire game, but here's what I've got at hand:

I'm not even showing y'all The Longest Staircase in the World, or all the holes James has to jump down in order to get to Toluca Prison at, apparently, the center of the earth. I haven't even mentioned the long walk through the forest to town; elevators and stairwells and looping hallways that always lead you back to where you started; an entire level that's just multi-floor labyrinths; the way that the backyards of South Vale are a throughway to Heaven's Night, which is a throughway to Moonlight Grove, which is a throughway, etc.; the way that James is always fighting his way through one location to get to the next, just an endless chain of forward in real time, never resting.

And the word "rest" Is why I wanted to describe all of that. Late in the Otherworld Brookhaven section, we find a document from the increasingly troubled Director of the hospital, who is (as far as I can tell) a dreamlike projection of James himself:

I won't rest until they are solved I won't rest I can't rest I don't know how anymore

In Angela's final scene, she will say, "Maybe now I can rest." We first met her in the town cemetery--which is a liminal place for anyone who's alive, but graveyards are also where the dead are laid to their "final rest." It's up to interpretation as to whether James, Eddie, and/or Angela (and Laura, for that matter) are actually alive or perhaps already dead, in a plane of existence that's closer to purgatory, or even hell. Or maybe they're still able to leave their personal Silent Hill(s) and rejoin the real world, if only they can face what they've done first. It's intentionally ambiguous, and it's up to you. But I think the word "rest" carries a lot of weight in this game, and I tend to believe that these characters, amidst the liminality of this story, are not unlike "the restless dead."

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"I see you!"

I think it was on one of his streams--Ian pointed out that every time I'd say "I see you!!" to a mannequin, it made him think of The Magnus Archives. The episode in question is #39, "Infestation."

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"I think she might actually be stuck"

I have had a... varying... range of experiences with the Patient 0130 area in the Otherworld.

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Great Moments in Monsters: The Otherworld Brookhaven mannequin feud

Honestly, I'm posting this one for the plot twist.

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Outtakes: The case of the "glitching" ladder

I embarrassed myself throughly in getting lost for 17 minutes on a practice run, and if I did not enjoy clowning on myself so much,

I would never admit it.

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Outtakes: "I'm using glorified tank controls"

It was only recently that I realized why I can't smoothly jog around backwards like all the competent gamers do: I'm using the WASD keys on PC, not a controller. So I want us to all appreciate that I am God's bravest little toaster for figuring out how to maneuver with W + mouse as well as I do (but also, this is why you get some odd movements from me at times).

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Strange Photo: "No one knows"

I'm sure someone on the internet has solved all the Strange Photos. But I want to try to do it my own self.

Y'ALL I THINK I FIGURED THIS ONE OUT

I was recording commentary 9 the other night (so that's done), and I hit this photo in Otherworld Brookhaven room C5, and I'd forgotten to research it in advance. All I could think was, that looks like the corner of a ceiling rather than, say, a floor, and some kind of furniture (turned wood? something?) there at the top.

So. What does "no one know"?

Mild spoilers, not the one I don't give away:

Well, James knows something no one knows (yet)--or rather, even James doesn't know it, because he can't remember it. It's the thing you don't know, because it's the one thing I won't spoil (you probably know it). And room C5 happens to the the one Maria was resting in, and the combination of Maria + hospital beds has some resonances with That Thing. I say on the recording that there's a specific room I need to check, and I'll edit something in after I do.

I wanted to look at Mary's sickroom. Looked at the "Leave" ending; it doesn't show the ceiling. There's a few iterations of this room in the Labyrinth section later in the game, and I do have my first run on video, but I decided to go back to my commentary 3 videos: apartment 201 in Wood Side Apartments. Of course I never thought to point the camera at the ceiling, but if you look at the top of this shot, which I've lightened the hell out of:

It's possibly the knobs of the curtain rods pointing towards the corner of the ceiling that's stained and damaged. I know the way the rods hold the fabric (and the fabric itself) aren't exactly the same, but I honestly don't know what else it's supposed to be. And if there's anything that No One Knows, it's in this room.

[fragranticareviewers]

[cleolinda]

Silent Hill 2 remake gameplay/commentary (New Game+)

Eighth video: Four Goyas, Three Patients, and a Flesh Lip

00:00: Let's talk about the Brookhaven Patients posts on @behind-the-null-moon and why James would see a blood specialist's certification in a mental hospital; GOYAS!!, anxiety, anger management, and what "Araxium" actually is.

Sidebars: Why would a blood specialist be at Brookhaven?; Ataraxics in control

38:29: The story of the clipboard; serious discussion of mental health and hospital horror; LOOK AT THE BIRD'S TAIL! LOOK AT IT!!

Sidebars: Commentary 8: A mental health aside; Strange Photo: "Her Drawings"

1:10:35: What happened to Patient 0090 (sensitive content); Other Games, All the Puzzles, Most of the Foreshadowing, and Black Moon Lilith.

Sidebar: The secret of Maria's bracelet

1:49:50: Hey, let's go check on Maria before we go to the rooftop! I'm sure she's doing fine! Although we also have a busy schedule of diary-reading (sensitive content), floor-falling, and Lip-fighting.

Sidebars: "I'M REELING. SHE'S GONE"; "A Page from a Diary": Mary? 

Full list of videos:

First video: Opening scene to jukebox puzzle reveal

00:00: Opening chat & cutscene. James walks out of the observation deck bathroom and I walk him right back in. Religious graffiti ensues. Twenty-four minutes in, we are still not out of the parking lot.

24:25: We get to the cemetery, meet Angela, pick up New Game+ items, and squint at a church door.

43:26: First combat, time loop theory, and Orpheus & Eurydice.

1:20:34: Out on the town. NG+ clues for getting other endings, highly symbolic scissors, James' amnesia, the sun mural & the Lady of the Light, lots to explore. Afterwards: corrections & additions.

Sidebar: The secret Goya painting in SH2R

Second video: South Vale, jukebox puzzle, ending at Wood Side

00:00: Strange Photos, Time Loop Theory, and combat at the Happy Burger

30:50: Baby theory (confirmed), Grand Market, "The door that wakes in darkness opening into nightmares," and Your New Best Friend

51:10: The Pet Center, the alien gem, and all the records I found at Groovy Music. "If I have missed something, I will shit kittens"

Sidebar: The records at Groovy Music

1:07:40: A Time Loop James (maybe?) tries to help us; the travel agency, (Thomas) Harris Street, and Saul Street Apartments

1:38:00: "IT’S. FINE. I am not deeply upset about this at all. I’M. FINE"; repairing the jukebox, James' memory, the secret in-joke of "Anam Cara," an area I STILL hold a grudge about, and a flawless run to Wood Side

Sidebar: "Magdalene" and "Anam Cara"

Third video: Wood Side Apartments, three coins puzzle, ending in the Otherworld

00:00: My Favorite Monster, mannequin moves, lots of Mary symbolism, and the coin puzzle unveiled.

36:45: James' feud with a grade schooler, decorative storytelling, our first encounter with Pyramid Head, and the scariest scene in the whole game.

1:14:30: Wrangling the party balloon achievement and getting out of "a prison of your own making"; "What is going on in this building! What is happening!" 

1:46:56: Eddie's introduction; a swimming pool full of lying figures and an apartment full of mannequins; "IF WE'RE DYING IT'S AT LEAST GONNA BE SOMEWHERE RESPECTABLE!"; canned juice.

2:26:30: Three Bright Coins in the Five Holes Be; Apartment 107: Laura and Mary; Apartment 201: Mary and James; Pyramid Head and Blue Velvet; we cross over to the Otherworld. 

Extra video: Corrections, additions, and Apartment 213

Fourth video: Blue Creek, the Otherworld, the clock puzzle, Angela, and a Pyramid Head rematch

00:00: Crossing over to the Otherworld (again); the clock puzzle, Remains of the Judgment, Stephen King easter eggs, and The New Damnation.

Sidebar: Misty day, remains of the Judgment 

31:00: "Anam Cara" returns with extra reverb; the radio puzzle, hallway chaos, the bird seesaw, and the Worst Toilet.

1:20:26: Mirrors, knives, "Promise (Reprise)," and camera angles; Angela has been through A Lot.

1:43:20: "Vers la flamme," moth math, green goo, the big Pyramid Head rematch with predictable betrayals; "TRACK AND FIELD LET'S GO!"

Extra video: The best I ever did it: Pyramid Head in less than two minutes

Sidebar: Mary's Silent Hill?

Fifth video: Rosewater Park, "Born from a Wish," and Heaven's Night

00:00: James gets roasted by an eight-year-old who knows too much; Special Places, statues with stories, hidden music, and MARIA. 

Sidebars: Important features of Rosewater Park; The statue of Jennifer Carroll

1:02:33: Nathan Avenue: a Dead James with a safe code, bowling alley easter eggs, the jack handle you pay for, and the Southern Star.

Sidebars: Why Maria used to hate bowling

1:41:30: No-tell motel secrets; Baldwin Mansion and "Born from a Wish"; White Chrism and the secret dog key; a brand-new weapon and chaos in the backyards of Silent Hill.

Sidebars: "Born from a Wish" (2001); "We found it near Katz"

2:24:50: Maria takes us… somewhere; a lost wedding ring, the devil’s chord, and the whiskey of the lotus-eaters.

Sidebars: Backstage at Heaven's Night; James' masculine ideal; and more

Sixth video: Back to the hidden garage, Moonlight Grove, the Reverie Theater, and an hour in Brookhaven Hospital

00:00: Garage secrets (no, new ones), hair corrections, revisiting the Devil's Chord, and leaving Heaven's Night.

Sidebars: New secrets; The Brookhaven Hospital article; Rare alternate dialogue

26:20: Moonlight Grove: That's It, A Garden; The Shadows of the Lover's Tree and the Lady of the Light; the hopes and dreams of the new Maria.

Sidebar: Strange Photo: "Church entrance" solved

48:15: The Reverie Theater: An easter egg festival, Eddie and Laura, crimes against ice cream, the Best Flavor, and a spoiler in plain sight.

Sidebars: Movie posters at the Reverie Theater; Eddie's coldness; "Promise Roger your strawberry kisses"; What James can't remember

1:30:30: Brookhaven Hospital: Nurses, doctors, trees; the Jungian psyche; an enigmatic window; MARIA, GET OUT OF THE WAY

Sidebars: Outtakes (SPOILERS): "I need you to like James"; Worthlessness, comma; Great Moments in Monsters

Seventh video: Honestly just so much Brookhaven Hospital. "There's so much game in this game."

00:00: Everything you never wanted to know about bubblehead nurses while I get my ass kicked; the three crucial patients, the Director, and the secrets of his office.

Sidebars: Master post: the characters of Brookhaven Hospital; The Jacob's Ladder head shake; How old is James?; The Isle of the Dead

39:37: Louise four ever, another hidden Goya, a firearm upgrade, James' masculine ideal, Her Drawings, and Patient 0050 in water behind the Eye; "Ma'am, you're doing this wrong!"

Sidebars: Strange Photo: "Her Drawings"

1:26:45: I wander around ransacking poor Patient 0130's bedsheet tents; I'm sure climbing down between the walls will turn out fine; the Director is on my shit list; a quick chat with Maria. 

Sidebar: Patient 0130, symbolizing Angela

1:55:00: Laura eludes James once again; Patients 0050 and 0090 are not having great days; moldy x-rays and MORE GOYAS; I try to compliment the hospital staff while they're whacking me with a pipe; fighting our way through the garden to drain the pool to get to the Eye; my head skeleton is too tired to combine basic items.

Sidebars: Patient 0050, symbolizing James; Patient 0090, symbolizing Eddie; Why I cannot be normal about Goya paintings in Silent Hill 2

Eighth video: Four Goyas, Three Patients, and a Flesh Lip

00:00: Let's talk about the Brookhaven Patients posts on @behind-the-null-moon and why James would see a blood specialist's certification in a mental hospital; GOYAS!!, anxiety, anger management, and what "Araxium" actually is.

Sidebars: Why would a blood specialist be at Brookhaven?; Ataraxics in control

38:29: The story of the clipboard; serious discussion of mental health and hospital horror; LOOK AT THE BIRD'S TAIL! LOOK AT IT!!

Sidebars: Commentary 8: A mental health aside; Strange Photo: "Her Drawings"

1:10:35: What happened to Patient 0090 (sensitive content); Other Games, All the Puzzles, Most of the Foreshadowing, and Black Moon Lilith.

Sidebar: The secret of Maria's bracelet

1:49:50: Hey, let's go check on Maria before we go to the rooftop! I'm sure she's doing fine! Although we also have a busy schedule of diary-reading (sensitive content), floor-falling, and Lip-fighting.

Sidebars: "I'M REELING. SHE'S GONE"; "A Page from a Diary": Mary? 

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It only took me three weeks this time!

[beneath-the-null-moon]

Commentary 8: A mental health aside

So this is re: my Silent Hill 2 posts over at my main blog, @cleolinda. Commentary 8: the rest of Brookhaven Hospital (finally) will go up later today. In the video, I talk about being bipolar myself in the context of whether the game handles mental illness responsibly (given that it is horror and the devs are locked into the story of the original game: I think it does). And yet, once again, here's a subject where I think I messed up. Over on the main commentary, I direct people here by saying,

The gist of it is, I sit here in the video and say that I'm talking about portrayals of mental illness and mental hospitals in the context of being bipolar myself, and then I immediately back off that by saying I've never had psychosis and you'd never guess I was bipolar, like that makes me better than someone else.

So I'm following up on that here (so it can be an optional read) by talking about being bipolar, and how I wanted so much to sound "credible" that I didn't even really tell you the truth. And honestly, I tried to discuss suicidal ideation on this post, a topic mentioned later in the game/video, and then I just cut all of that out. I'm okay talking about it, but I don't know who wouldn't be okay reading about it. It's a nice sunny Halloween and we're just not doing that today.

For the second mental health section of the video, I discuss wanting people to have the opportunity to try medication while also understanding it's not for everyone.

One more thing: I cannot emphasize to you enough that the material I'm discussing, particularly the Page from a Diary on the rooftop, might be triggering on an emotional level.

[I'm talking about what I say at 1:01:20 - 1:03:17 here, and then picking up again at 2:01:42 - 2:04:30.]

Here's what I moved over from the main post:

1:01:20: Here's first time in this video that I mention being bipolar, and walk straight into claiming to be One of the Good Ones. I had actually just seen a post here about how disgusting it is when people do that, in terms of throwing other mental illness sufferers (experiencers?) under the bus. (I'm not linking to it, because I'm not sending people over to that post.) And that post gave me a lot to think about; it's the subtext of my hedging and hesitation in two different sections of this video—not wanting to speak over or step on other people. And yet, it's also one of the first things I say, even while thinking of that post: no, Dear Listener, you don't have to worry, I don't have psychosis, I'm well-treated. I think there's often an urge to say, "You can trust me because I'm 'stable,' when I try to advocate for people you wouldn't believe." And it's shitty of me to create that distinction, that division, while it's also true that a lot of people don't believe people who have mental illness, and the fact that this is true is also shitty. The urge is understandable, but that doesn't mean you should follow it, you know? I don't say this as an excuse; it's more a necessity of asking yourself, what am I actually doing right now? Who am I benefiting, and who I am hurting? And how would someone else feel about me doing it?

So it's a disservice to the people I wanted to help, bipolar like me. But additionally, you know what? When I say "It can be rough," what I don't say is, "It's also been rough for me, and it will continue to be." In trying to get you to listen to me, I'm not even telling you the whole truth. It's true that I've never had bipolar psychosis—yet. I've got the rest of my life for a medication to stop working, or for the cycling to get worse. I have had extremely deep depression, as may happen when you're bipolar, and, at times, suicidal ideation. [Honestly, I am removing about half of this paragraph. It's not worth the risk to others. Things are harder than I let on sometimes, let's just put it that way.] But in trying to assure random people on YouTube who might stumble across my videos, and haven't read my work for years and don't know me from Adam's housecat, that I am Totally Credible, Of Course I'm Not Crazy—I don't even tell you the entire truth about what I swear I'm telling the truth about. 

But at some points in this video, I'm not speaking to strangers who don't have the full context of me; I'm not even speaking about people who also have bipolar disorder. I'm speaking to those bipolar people—or people with ADHD, or with clinical anxiety (both of which I also have), or any other mental health condition.

2:01:42: So, by the time I get to the diary that says, "The meds made me feel sick today" on the rooftop, I've had time to think about how I might have fucked up earlier. I find myself hesitant to say that medication does work—rather that it can, though not for everyone. I try to separate "concerns about real side effects" from "social stigma and scaremongering," so as not to invalidate people (including me) who have experienced real, negative side effects. I just also know that multiple people have told me that talking about my experiences trying and adjusting medications helped them be less afraid of trying things that ultimately improved their quality of life a lot. But I also know people who tried certain medications and did not feel that meds were worth it. I have heard both sides of the situation in real life, and "You won't know until you try!" (at least I didn't say that) is just too flippant for the real downsides for some of these medications. I just... I don't know. (I stop and start and say that a lot in the video itself.) The side effects in those diary entries are realistic, and some people do experience those. I just wanted it to be said that, here in the present day, some people can benefit from medication.

You don't have to take meds. I'm not pressuring you, or saying that you're remiss if you don't. There are plenty of valid concerns about pharmaceuticals, either in the abstract, or about a specific drug on offer. I just want to encourage people to look at the same real concerns I had to consider (nausea, dizziness, drowsiness, weight gain, dry mouth, "brain zaps," scalp tingling—temporary back pain for one medication), rather than just hear other people tell you that "you won't be your real self anymore," "drugs will turn you into a robot," "doctors will lock you up." Nobody locked me up, I still have a full range of emotions, and I got to find out who I was under a fog (I'm not trying to be cute) of disorders once medications helped lift a lot of it. And it did take a lot of work and some suffering to get the doses right. But it turns out that I like who I am when medications carry some of the weight for me, and I feel like the benefits outweigh a lot of side effects for me. If the stigma had been too intense for me to try medications at all, I never would have found who I can, at least sometimes, be. That opportunity is all I want for anyone else. 

At any rate—the thing is, I have pretty extensive notes for these commentaries, but I don't read from a script (clearly). I feel like I sound more engaging when I speak off the cuff, but sometimes, that bites me in the ass when I don't express things as precisely as I could. And you know what? What I wished I'd said might still be offensive! I don't know! I just know that I did exactly the thing I hadn't wanted to do, straight off, which is say, I'm one of the good ones.

On the other hand, you might sit here and say, Cleo, you don't have to browbeat yourself like this. I don't see it as punishing myself, though? When I suspect I've messed up, I look for an opportunity to say, listen, I don't like what I did here, and let's talk about why it wasn't great. Maybe we can find something valuable in that. 

[beneath-the-null-moon]

The clipboard in the doctors' lounge

I'm giving this bit a post of its own, because I now think it can refer to all three of the Brookhaven patients. The video above is from the final commentary 8 video, but for this clip, I've also edited in the actual Brookhaven article we see in the South Vale garage. Screenshot and transcript of the clipboard below the cut:

This case bears a disturbing similarity to a situation that took place in the facility a few years back. The patient was admitted on a court order, but with the consent of his remaining family. His condition appeared to be improving for the first few weeks. The administered medications paired with individual sessions with a psychologist and art therapy alleviated his avolition, anhedonia, and social withdrawal. There was no reason for concern. They didn't even know anything was wrong until the night guard reported one of his keys was missing. When they found him, it was already too late.

When I wrote the "Patient 0050" post, I made a fairly good argument that the case is meant to be "reminiscent" of that patient. But the more I thought about it—I nearly titled this clip "(It's not who you think)," because I think it's "about" all three patients. I think the clipboard story is giving us a framework to imagine what happened to each of the three patients—again, to review what I wrote after I recorded:

Something catastrophic happens that ends up with patient committed.

This may have involved the patient hurting or killing a family member, due to the phrase "remaining family" (much the way Angela killed her own father, for example).

The patient was doing well in various types of therapy (when I say "art therapy seems gentle for [a murderer]," I mean "at a hellhole like Brookhaven, so I might not be right about this," not that it should be harsher).

But then, the staff let down their guard (or perhaps staff layoffs meant there were fewer employees in general).

The patient obtained a key, which could have been a key to an internal room (Patient 0090 will be my example here) or to the main entrance of the hospital to leave. And we know there's a main entrance key, because it's the last item we find in Brookhaven Hospital. 

By the time staff located the patient, "it was too late" to prevent... something, most likely the patient's death given how ominous this sounds, but possibly injury to the patient or someone else. I forgot to mention this in the video, but we're going to read in Otherworld Brookhaven that Patient 0050 managed to run electroshock treatment on himself—even the staff can't figure out how—so that's a non-fatal example. 

Re: point #4: I bring in the Secret Garage article about Brookhaven, and I've actually edited in a clip from commentary 6. Basically, we're told that staffing shortages may be putting the patients at risk, and the community fears the repeat of an incident that happened "a couple of years ago." I think the clipboard patient is that incident.

There's something else I need to be a little more sensitive about here: I'm still assuming that the patient in the original case, or any case, might have "escaped the hospital," that whole trope, and killed or injured someone else. I think that "too late" implies that something happened, but it could have been that the patient hurt themselves out in town and "the community" was horrified on the patient's behalf. And I think the vagueness of the clipboard case is to allow us to reinterpret the basics of that story however we want for each of our three patients. 

[beneath-the-null-moon]

"I'M REELING. SHE'S GONE"

This is a very simple cutscene that reveals that Maria got her ass up and left while you and James are out fighting nurses, but I'd never seen it before, and I've never seen any other streamer get it. For all you know, you left Maria here to take a nap and then she randomly shows up in the Otherworld several hours from now. But no! She GOT UP and LEFT! And I'm just cracking up in retrospect because you can hear me gasp at the beginning of the scene, and I am so rattled that I wander around saying, "JAMES WHERE ARE WE? I'M REELING! SHE'S GONE!"

(Side note: This means that James knew Maria was wandering around alone and unarmed through a monster-infested hospital, and he's STILL like "oh well anyway I'm glad you're okay I guess" when she finds him again. JAMES.)

[beneath-the-null-moon]

Something I noticed while reviewing the new recording: James originally marked this room on the map with an M for Maria. In red felt-tip pen, it looks like, which isn't exactly something that erases or comes out. But after this cutscene, the marking has disappeared.