The title "Resident Evil" as a localization which came about from a pre-existing copyright conflict is so eerily apropos, for in some ways it's even more appropriate than the original Japanese title "Biohazard".
Biohazard, of course, accurately summarizes the literal events of not only the initial, but each following entry. In the original, the title is even something of a spoiler. With Resident Evil you know you're in a house with zombies, and the discovery that it's a viral leak on the site of a hidden lab is something of a reveal. If you're an American player in the 90's you see killer dogs and the undead and night ravens in a gothic manor and you're liable to assume the possibility of something darkly fantastical. (The remake even hams this up by cryo-freezing a dangerous but too-precious-to-liquidate prototype specimen inside an underground vampyre crypt out in the crumbling 18th century graveyard which is literally suspension-chained over an altar and can only be unlocked with death masks.) If you're a Japanese player, you're seeing the same stuff, but aware of a rational, material cause, unless you would like to take the title in its grandest estimation to see all biological material -- and therefore life itself -- as constituting a hazardous contagion.
With "Resident Evil" we're using the subtleties of the English language to both redirect and obscure the central thematic preoccupation of the series. (For the sake of argument, let's assume the central RE games constitute a work of art in which each entry builds thematically and psychologically off their predecessors, responding -- and sometimes degenerating -- in complexity and nuance much like the gameplay mechanics themselves, cause uh... that's what they are.)
Once again, the original title can describe the literal evil of a house, as the game takes place in a secluded mansion. However, we're aware this title is subtly punny in an almost meaningless way because it could very easily just stop there. If you wanted to go any further, you'd have to risk being accused of looking too deeply at a mystery in plain sight, as though a glass onion doesn't infinitely refract when held up to the light.
When a North American hears the word "Resident" they don't only think of a home -- a residence -- or a person who occupies a home -- being a resident -- they also think of how the term is used as a adjective, as in Resident Doctor (again subtly pushing medical associations, hinting at a pharmaceutical reveal, but preserving the mystery while not really at all, if you're keeping your eyes open). That is, a resident in the sense of being a person who lives on the site of his job. Aha. Now we're getting somewhere. The title "Resident Evil" doesn't only function as something of a tabernacle where the nature of its occupant remains obscured, but it proposes the residence itself is that tabernacle, and a residence (a place one occupies -- occupation too having many broader connotations) too is something which is more encompassing, such as the nature of a home is not so much literal as felt. Thus, the residence of one becomes the city of two, which by the end of three is a warzone on the brink of annihilation.
Hence (all this preamble, I am not sorry to say, being necessary) the title Resident Evil functions as something of a cultural diagnostic. Resident Evil is about how corporate entities bring about the destruction of our homes. About how we give themselves to them willingly. About the mutations we induce in ourselves, the subtle yet intense dehumanization we accrue, the violence we inflict not only on our own bodies but on our families and our land -- by being unable to separate our toils from our labors or our homes. Resident Evil is not only describing and demonstrating how the work/life imbalance agitates into a cancer which is all-consuming, but how this cancer was manufactured in a lab.
Having said all this (outlined a theory you might say) I now wish to prove it by saying the thing I had initially popped in to say, and truthfully the only thing which really matters to me (if you've read this far, you've done well and you're being rewarded with my heart, for all that jargon being necessary to tie my thinking to a living will, it functions too as something of a smokescreen -- against who or what I do not know; perhaps only some veil through which my eyes might gradually well to take in the light) which is that RE2 has haunted me for years, for rather than being a crudely-voiced work of melodrama performed by low-resolution digital marionettes, I consider it a profoundly enduring familial tragedy.
I could always feel. In my heart, and in my bones -- that Annette Birkin truly loved her daughter Sherry. The problem was ... she simply loved her husband more. Sherry was simply the product of their shared passion, and of course she cared for her as an extension of that passion, but you see... Annette and her husband were working on something together. Annette worships her husband. The note of not only despair, but reverence -- as though she were more his prophet than his wife -- when she howls into the void, that the G-virus is her husband's legacy.
Yet she could never stop being his wife.
Even as William continued to mutate, self-inflicted by his own viral load, to the point his head is pulled down into his chest -- his face a wound over his heart as he sprouted a new brain, a second brain; new arms, new eyes, taking on the silhouette of an avenging angel -- she can't accept that he's dead. The man she loves. He's right here.
She looks upon the monster he's become and is so happy his heart still beats for her, she addresses him as though he is a cognizant being seconds before he mauls her. Only this rude awakening (in that timeline) is enough to induce the sobriety necessary for her to explain to Claire how to manufacture the G-virus Antidote (DEVIL) to neutralize the embryos her husband shot into their daughter. (Yes.)
It's as though Annette simply never could become a mother. It's as though she's always running around in a trance. It's as though she has no awareness she even has a daughter... until Claire brings her to her attention. Annette Birkin, simply put -- could never love her daughter in the way she needed (though the love was real) simply for she was too internally divided. She was already so consumed by her work, she could never separate herself from it long enough to build a family.
Maybe she was fooling herself. When you think of Ada holding Sherry's pendent and the family photo swings away to reveal the concealed phial of G-virus, the implication seems to be the family was only ever a front. For the business. For the warfare state. Was Annette then -- her frank love -- simply a pawn at the mercy of whatever hunger drove her?
And what of William? Did he think anything of her? Does he ever regard her? In any way? When Annette finds him wounded by machinegun fire, she runs to him. Hold on, darling. All she can think of is caring for him, and he... he does not wait. He injects the virus into himself. Does he know he's on the brink of death? Does he know his poor foolish wife can't save him? Was she only ever a glorified lab assistant whose desperate need he could easily maneuver into a sham marriage and the guilt load of a neglected daughter? Was he truly married to his work, and his only love his precious G-virus? Did he feel so cucked by being gunned down by masked goons from his own corporate sponsor, he now needed to fuck them all in a violent bloodbath of his own unfiltered becoming?
Annette strikes me as the type of person so desperate to be loved and with so much love to give, but who has never been in a position where it was safe to love, though also ... her psychosis could have very easily been recent. Not only the grief of losing her husband, but the reality of being in a survival scenario with grotesques of unspeakable chimerical form. She could have simply been a cold, weak-willed nerd with delusions of grandeur who attached herself to likewise and couldn't control her horniness. Is that fundamentally rational? Why would anyone do that? To what degree is baseline sociopathy instilled and artificially propagated by corporate cultures? What effect does this have across generations?
Is it strange the only one who ever showed any concern or affection for her daughter was another young woman who was also basically an orphan? Who put herself in this desperate situation, only looking for her brother, who is saving her simply for she has the strength to love?
I never played the one where you hooked up with Wesker's bastard.
Theoretically, it sounds cute. More than likely, it's fucked.
