bookwarmgames Guest Lecture

Untitled Edith Finch Essay – Guest Post by Dylan Mitten

Courtesy of the inimitable Dylan, whose work has enriched The Community School Game Jam and Mobius Shark Tank at the Spokane Central Library, and whose Hello Kitty Zen Garden graces the unpublished manuscript of TCS: The Book (working subtitle, albeit cliched, heartfelt: Building the Beloved Community School), here is a deep dive into a game I’ve only watched streams of, and yet can hardly imagine the games landscape without: What remains of Edith Finch. Dylan has also presented this as part of the Games Studies wellness, meeting W/F afternoons at TCS. Drop in when you’re in town, just sign in at the front office.

Annapurna Interactive, via WIRED

What remains of Edith Finch is a first-person narrative game where you play as – you guessed it – Edith Finch. Edith is the last living member of her family, and after the death of her mother, we follow her through her childhood home and watch as she uncovers secrets about her family that were buried. Some in walls, others, under beds… you get the idea. Let’s briefly go through the game, and then talk about the pressing issue of the game.

We start the game on a ferry. When we look down, we can see that our character has a cast on their right arm, and that they are holding a journal with “Edith Finch” written on the cover. When we open it, we hear the namesake of the game begin to narrate the writing. She talks about how, at 17, she is the last remaining member of her family. When she gets into the monster of a house that the Finch family home is, we start to learn about all the different members of her family – and moreover, why she is the only one left. 

We learn that in 1937, in an attempt to escape the curse that had claimed his wife and newborn son, Edith’s great-great-grandfather Odin Finch emigrates from Norway to the USA, setting sail with his daughter Edith (Edie, or  Edith Sr. as she’s referred to by Edith), and her husband Sven, as well as their newborn baby, Molly. He uses his house as the raft, but unfortunately, it seemed as though the curse was coming for him too. The wind picked up and a storm broke out. A wave unfortunately took Odin under, swallowing the house with him. Edie and Sven, along with baby Molly, made it to Orcas island safe. Their first order of business? Building a cemetery. 

Of course, this isn’t some happy ending – Edith had to be the last remaining Finch somehow, right? I’ll briefly go over the deaths. 

Edith Sr. ended up having five children with Sven, including Molly. She gave birth to Barbra, twins Sam and Calvin, and Walter. Edie initially believes they’ve left the curse behind, but of course, it’s never that simple. 

At 10, Molly dies from ingesting fluoride toothpaste and holly berries after going to bed without eating. At 16, Barbra is murdered after an argument with her boyfriend over her long-gone stardom. Walter hears all of this happen, and believes it was a monster. After spending 30 years hiding from this monster in the bunker of the house, the day he decides to leave, he is struck by a train. Calvin dies at 11 after swinging too high and flying off of a cliff. At 49, Sven dies from falling off of the house’s roof whilst building a slide.

Sam lives into adulthood, and marries a woman and has Dawn, Edith’s mother, and Gus. Later, he marries a woman named Kay, and they have Gregory.  Dawn is the only one to make it to adulthood. 

At 13, Gus is crushed by a totem pole during a storm. Gregory drowns at 22 months after being left unattended by his mother in the bath. Sam, who at this point is divorced, dies at 33 whist on a hunting trip with dawn. Dawn shoots a buck and Sam wants to take a picture with it and her. Whilst posing for the photo, the buck thrashes and pushes Sam off of a cliff.

Traumatized by all of this, Dawn moves to India, where she marries a man named Sanjay. Together, they have three kids. Lewis, Milton, and Edith jr. 

Sanjay is killed by an earthquake, so Dawn moves her and her kids back into the Finch family home. At 11, Milton mysteriously disappears seemingly out of nowhere, making Dawn become paranoid. She seals all the doors of the rooms of deceased family members. Edie drills peepholes. Lewis, after battling drug abuse and mental health struggles, commits suicide during work. This is when Dawn decides it’s time to leave. She arranges for a nursing home to pick Edie up, and packs the belongings of her and Edith. They leave that night, with Edie meant to get picked up the next day. She doesn’t make it to the morning. Edie is found dead after ingesting alcohol with her medication. Years later, Dawn succumbs to an unspecified illness, leaving a 17 year old Edith to inherit everything. 

In the final scene of the game, we kid out that the character on the ferry with the cast is Edith’s son, and it’s revealed that she died during childbirth shortly after we see her learn of all the secrets of the house. We see her child place flowers on her grave.

That’s the very bare bones of the story. Is there more to explore? More to dig deep on? Yes, of course, but I simply want to talk about my personal opinion with the curse. 

I think that during my first playthrough of the game, I did indeed think there was really a curse – a monster, even, as Walter puts it. He’s convinced that a monster killed Molly, since that’s what she talked about in her journal entry not long before her passing. It was also likely the monster that killed Barbra, since Walter heard it himself!

I definitely believed this theory at first – but the more replays I did, the more I understood the real story, which is the one I placed out for you earlier. I don’t think there’s a monster, nor a curse. I think it’s a bunch of wacky coincidences. Let me explain; I think that the “Curse” is simply a self-fullfilling prophecy, a mindset where you, or someone else, believes that something will happen in the future, and because of that, your actions are affected by that hypothetical event, and eventually, that event happens because you influenced it to!

I think, that given the fact that Edie had recently seen not only her mother and young brother pass away, but also her father while trying to escape the “curse” that supposedly followed them, that she made this connection in her brain that she and her kids were living on borrowed time. I think that this belief made her act less rationally when it came to taking care of her kids, and therefore, the only kid she had that made it to adulthood and had their own kids unintentionally instilled that into them, too. Leading to one of those kids growing up and maybe trying to break the “curse”, but only leading to curiosity about it rather than education about what it truly is. 

Finally, Edith, deciding to find out about the secrets her family holds, died tragically in childbirth in what I believe to be a sad and cruel coincidence. 

So, no. I don’t believe that the Finch family ever had a curse. Instead, I think that the game represents a very straightforward story of generational trauma and how it affects a family. I think that the fear that death was creeping closer resulted in much of the Finch family acting in reckless ways. Some acted as if every day was their last, or didn’t seem too concerned with the danger of it all. Others hid away, or became over protective of themselves and possibly their kids. 

What Remains of Edith Finch is a beautifully dark and morbid game. And I know that at least for me, it allowed me to gain a whole new perspective of what it means to be alive. It gave me an appreciation I didn’t even know I had for life. I think also, that its story about death, highlights just how important it is to cherish every moment, but to also not be afraid to express yourself and do the things that might be a little risky. Enjoy yourself! Don’t be afraid of some silly curse.

Thanks again, Dylan. We look forward to your future endeavors, including the follow up on Little Nightmares and a generation of young players impacted by it!

bookwarmgames Games in Literature

What Remains: From the Poems of Hannah Arendt to What Remains of Edith Finch

Illuminations and ruminations on what remains at the end of the week, the game, the century.

When I go looking for one thing and come up with another, and another, and… well, after awhile I almost can’t carry it all; I have to call it a day (a week, etc.), throw it together as best I can for the moment (see the present post), and let it go back out into the world, hoping another will find it as well–and will find it interesting, with any luck. Or at the very least, I’ll circle back to it one of these days to contemplate it anew in all its rich associations and, with the benefit of this open-ended time to come, will understand it a little better at last.

For example, the original point of departure here was meant to be a passage in Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History, placed at the end of Illuminations, a volume of essays and reflections edited by Hannah Arendt:

The story is told of an automaton constructed in such a way that it could play a winning game of chess, answering each move of an opponent with a countermove. A puppet in Turkish attire and with a hookah in its mouth sat before a chessboard placed on a large table. A system of mirrors created the illusion that this table was transparent from all sides. Actually, a little hunchback who was an expert chess player sat inside and guided the puppet’s hand by means of strings. One can imagine a philosophical counterpart to this device. The puppet called “historical materialism” is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight. (253)

Of course this passage leapt out at me, as it has for countless readers, for many reasons. Marxists of the Frankfurt school and AI prognosticators, Christian apologists and modern-day techno-charlatans alike, in all their combinations and permutations, will find in Benjamin a provocative thought partner. In my case, the drawing together of the imagery of play and theology makes for an endlessly fascinating analogy. I am a poor chess player and a slovenly scholar, but I do love to “imagine a philosophical counterpart” to games, and particularly love to wax philosophical about the ways in which their mechanics interact with their stories.

As for this particular image of “The Chess-Playing Turk,” its “story is told,” among other places, in a section bearing that name in Philip Pullman’s little-known early novel, Galatea:

In the next room were a number of curious automata, such as the famous Chess-Playing Turk designed by the Baron Von Kempelen, which sat cross-legged at a cabinet too full of intricate machinery to conceal a person, and which had defeated the finest chess-players of its time. There was also a machine called the Temple of the Arts, consisting of an automated view of Gibraltar, with moving warships, a platoon of tiny soldiers marching up and down, and a band of mechanical musicians, playing suitable tunes. There was an orange tree which blossomed and bore perfect painted fruit in less than a minute. There was a duck which quacked, breathed, ate and drank. There was a life-size automaton fluteplayer made by Jacques de Vaucanson which, according to its label, performed so realistically that many learned men had thought that it was human. (211)

Advertising poster for a show of Vaucanson’s automata (wikipedia)

Though written in the ’70s, Pullman’s unsuccessful novel, with its shades of magic realism and its author’s avowed admiration for the mystical quest narrative of A Voyage to Arcturus on full display, remains prescient for its surfacing of the question of the role of “the work of art in the age of mechanical [and electronic] reproduction”.

Add to this the fact that the title of Benjamin’s book is also that of Rimbaud’s, and then of Britten’s song cycle based on Rimbaud’s Illuminations, as I learned when I went looking for the searchable text on archive.org (and the search terms threw up the EarthBound player’s guide, somehow, as well. As ever, EB is in good canonical company–though maybe that’s just based on my own search history).

As the program notes have it:

Britten was deeply affected by the emotional intensity of these prose poems and decided to set them to music as soon as he had read them.  As the soprano Sophie Wyss, the dedicatee of the cycle, recalled:  “He was so full of this poetry he just could not stop talking about it, I suspect he must have seen a copy of Rimbaud’s works while he was recently staying with [W.H.] Auden in Birmingham.”

Britten chose a sentence from one of the poems as the motto for his cycle:  “J’ai seul la clef de cette parade sauvage” (“I alone have the key to this savage parade”).  This sentence also provides the “key” to Britten’s view of Rimbaud’s poetry:  only the artist, observing the world from the outside, can hope to make sense of the “savage parade” that is life.

Having just played through the end of the first disc of Final Fantasy VIII, with its own “savage parade” and botched assassination attempt on the Sorceress, I can well understand the impression produced by being “so full of this poetry [I] just could not stop talking about it”–podcasting about it, in my case, with my friend Alexander Schmid. But I draw the line at this notion of being alone in having the key; for it is only through our dialogues, on the contrary, that I feel like I begin to be able to process the meaning of such a densely woven text.

I certainly don’t have a clue about what Rimbaud might be up to, and lovely as Britten’s songs are, I doubt he is the first or the best interpreter of the poet, either in terms of music or meaning. If, as the program notes say, artists alone think themselves able to interpret the world, so much the worse for them; though we may benefit from the confidence embodied in such art as they are thereby moved to produce, it sounds like a terribly solipsistic and lonely activity. To observe the effect of such a belief in the case of Rimbaud’s life, it appears to be part of what drove him to seek exile and enterprise in the desert, giving up poetry for salesmanship.

Klee’s Angelus Novus, Benjamin’s “angel of history” (wikipedia)

Though you never know. Lost poems may yet come to light. Or like Kierkegaard’s knight of faith, perhaps Rimbaud carried the heart of his poetry with him through a superficially ordinary life of infinite resignation. My own opinion, to which I stubbornly cling with a fierce devotion, is that these knights are inside us all, hidden better than the chess-player theologian under the mechanical turk’s table, and opening us like the Silenus of Socrates in The Symposium (and memorably related in Rabelais’ Prologue). When the time is right, we are all “found to contain images of gods”. In that light, the speaker of Rimbaud’s line may well be this precious cargo, and his famous line “I is another” can be brought to bear in this connection as well. In which case I heartily agree: no one else could possibly hold the key to the “savage parade” of life.

In dusting off these reflections years later for a belated spring break post in this year of myth in games, I was actuated by another chance discovery: one of my favorite podcasts, Backlisted, just released an episode discussing What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt. Give it a listen! Arendt, besides editing the collection of Benjamin’s essays, is the author of more than one of the 20th century’s classic works of philosophy, and has bequeathed us the clearest and most cutting precis of her time: “the banality of evil”–though, as the podcast mentions, its meaning, and the work in which it is formulated, Eichmann in Jerusalem, is contested.

I can’t be the only one to have noticed the resonances of What Remains of Edith Finch in the title chosen by the editors of Arendt’s poetry, and echoes of Osip Mandelshtam, of Reginald Gibbons, of Hölderlin and Heidegger…

Last but not least, in the spirit of Dirt newsletter’s weekly tab round-up, since I was recommending they look at Backlisted, too, here is a bit of what remains in my browser:

The Digital Antiquarian, recommended by Dylan Holmes, is well worth a read. Mixing up What Remains of Edith Finch (which I did watch a full playthrough of) and Dear Esther (which I didn’t yet, though it’s the one Dylan actually wrote about and recommended in our conversations), like “memory and desire” in April, “the cruelest month” to Eliot’s speaker, perhaps, though that title by common consent is given to March here in Spokane, I finally sat down to read what he had to say about JRPGs and was captivated as much by the comments as the articles’ content. Posters suggest links to a number of papers on localization, games as carriers of Japanese culture and values and cuteness, as locus of reflections on design and affect, and in a wonderful bit of synchronicity, to Beyond Role and Play, a book on LARP including a chapter that riffs on Don Quixote. There’s also a FF series retrospective for the completionist.

What else? I still need to submit a proposal to this CFP, and break down and buy MJ Gallagher’s book, and maybe this one on “Deep Games” by Doris Rusch, and actually read some more Arendt, including her poems—

This is the arrival:

Bread is no longer called bread

and wine in a foreign language changes the conversation.

–and the rest of Kentucky Route Zero, and Dear Esther, and the use of an invented Latin-ish language in FFVIII. I should submit a question for The Bible Project on the Tao and the Exodus Way. I should write more about Philip Pullman, the wheel of fortune as game show and ancient motif, saving as economic and theological image, Christmas subsumed, the spectral in Marx and the invisible hand in Smith…

Or what about this strange constellation of Benjamin’s bon mots on the theme of “backdrops”:

On the other hand, this heaven is only background; to explore it according to its own laws would be like framing the painted backdrop of the stage and hanging it in a picture gallery. (121)

 In his “Salon of 1859” Baudelaire lets the landscapes pass in review, concluding with this admission: “I long for the return of the dioramas whose enormous, crude magic subjects me to the spell of a useful illusion. I prefer looking at the backdrop paintings of the stage where I find my favorite dreams treated with consummate skill and tragic concision. Those things, so completely false, are for that very reason much closer to the truth, whereas the majority of our landscape painters are liars, precisely because they fail to lie.” (191)

?

Let it be said of me, as Arendt does of Benjamin in her introductory essay: “Well, he did not succeed in consolidating anything, and success would hardly have been possible.”