Videogames & Storytelling (Essay)

“Videogames are an under-explored area in academics” (Evans, 2014, p. 1). However, the proliferation of the industry throughout the past two decades and, more specifically, “the vision of the videogame as a storytelling platform” have garnered the attention of various scholars who have recurrently investigated and categorised videogame narrative structures (Picucci, 2014). As videogames have become increasingly challenging and their narratives have evolved to better appeal to the standards of players (Evans, 2004, p.1), they have thus evolved into “multimodal genre experience[s]” (Cășvean, 2018, p. 58) that transcend the limits of other preexisting mediums. Indeed, “literary and film studies now seem at the mercy of videogame developers who are able to achieve creative goals of which authors and filmmakers have only dreamt” (Jones, 2008, p. 20).

To better understand what makes videogames excel at storytelling, one must look no further than the very nature of the medium in itself. “A videogame is a game which we play thanks to an audiovisual apparatus and which can be based on a story” (Esposito, 2005, p. 2). The first two concepts amalgamate into the gameplay, “which is the human element of games as it involves player interaction and game rules” and a major catalyst for the narrative (Evans, 2004, p. 1). Zimmerman describes a game as “a voluntary interactive activity” which follows a set of rules that inevitably enact “an artificial conflict that ends in a quantifiable outcome” (2004; cited in Esposito, 2005, p. 2). Furthermore, videogames evaporate the distance between the player, or gamer, and the media text’s protagonist as it exists in (for instance) books or films (Veale, 2011) thus entrusting the gamer with agency through “the gameplay logic” (Jones, 2008, p. 21) and a subjective, affective-immersive experience (Veale, 2011).

While both these components are at the core of a videogame, this essay is more concerned with the other two components outlined by Esposito. The “audiovisual apparatus” refers to the physical electronic system used by the gamer to interact with the game (Esposito. 2008, p. 3). Impulsed by “the conflict between the quest for cool graphics [versus] the lust for [profit]”, the game industry has progressively developed its various platforms (consoles, computers, mobiles...) alongside the games’ mechanics and design (Veeder et al., 1995, p. 486). However, it is the story, or the videogame’s capability for storytelling, that constitutes the central pillar of this entire industry, and this essay’s object of interest. Therefore, this essay will subsequently explore this concept below, in an effort to ascertain how relevant the potential for storytelling is to videogames altogether. In doing so, this essay must thus consider what storytelling provides to modern videogames and its many forms, whilst addressing some key debates in the field, such as the dichotomy between narratological and ludological approaches.

Diane Carr (et al.) defined a videogame’s story as “the general plot, setting, and action of the game”, which utilises the game’s discourse, or any factor used by the player to advance the storyline, as the foundation for the game’s architecture (2006; cited in Evans, 2014, p. 3). This foundation is not only inherent to videogames, much like the existence of thematic genres that employ the narrative to categorise the many texts produced for a medium. Hence, “videogames use resources from the fertile field of popular culture, exploiting models, pre-worked materials, well-known heroes, stereotypes, and myths” (Cășvean, 2008, p. 57). Cășvean further argues that a videogame’s category thus becomes an identifier, a “playing contract” passed from producers to players that ensures the latter recognise the game’s genre, thus shaping their expectations of what the game will be like and acting as a sort of marketing tactic (2008, p. 58).

These typologies can often be lacking in clear defining criteria, but the industry’s fast-paced developments have “led to an expansion of the genres of videogames and their overlapping '' (Cășvean, 2008, p. 58). The criteria used to classify videogames often refer to qualities such as the number of players, the type of reception or the platform the game uses (Bezchotnikova, 2018), although descriptors relating to the gamer’s experience with the gameplay and narrative are also useful for fully understanding a game. However, as mentioned beforehand, modern videogames have become “multimodal genre experience[s]” and thus games with multiple descriptors and genres complicate the categorising process (Cășvean, 2018, p. 58). Bezchotnikova argues that to solve this, game criticism must focus on the dominant genre, or the game’s constitutional figure (2018). For instance, ‘Halo’ (Bungie, 2001) is simultaneously “an action game” and a first-person shooter (“FPS”) with occasional "third-person” driving and components of “puzzle and strategy” (Aarseth, 2004, p. 363).

As Todorov surmises, "it is not the ‘genres’ that have disappeared, but the genres of the past have been replaced by others" (1976, p. 160; cited in Cășvean, 2008, p. 58).

Nonetheless, a videogame’s narrative themes and genres do not embody the entirety of its storytelling capability alone. In reality, “storytelling has become the art of world building, as artists create compelling environments (...) bigger than the film, bigger even than the franchise” (Boni, 2017, p. 11). Worldbuilding is generally regarded as very relevant to storytelling practices (Ryan, 2013; Lavocat 2010; Besson 2015; Alexander, 2013; cited in Boni, 2017, p. 12) since building and visiting imaginary worlds have always had its place in human history, to the point of serving “an evolutionary purpose” (Wolf, 2012, p. 3). Storytelling in videogames thus combines the world built specifically for them in which a particular story is being told with its narrative, from the perspective of the protagonist who is controlled by the gamer. Subsequently, they are considered to be the ultimate “storytelling platform” (Picucci, 2014).

Puccaci further argues that a game’s architecture is established by intertwining the game’s storytelling and its narrative structures, meaning “the methods and techniques used by game designers and allowed by the medium to deliver the story content throughout the gameplay in collaboration with the players'' (Picucci, 2014). Thus, Picucci (2014) establishes four main frameworks towards understanding how game developers and AI employ narrative structures that shape the game and the player’s experience of it, according to “pre-established narrative structures” (completing checkpoints throughout the game to reveal more story sequences), “discovery narratives” (relying on players to explore the game for more information), “sandbox narratives” (a highly interactive, loosely story-based narrative) and “computer-based narratives” (maximising simulated randomness in the absence of a story). Conclusively, games reconstruct narratives to tell their stories according to these main frameworks which are generally shaped by the producers’ awareness of the medium’s limitations. Said limitations have changed drastically throughout videogames’ existence, expanding the creative possibilities of storytelling in videogames.

The broadening of these creative possibilities has resulted in the emergence of many different modes of storytelling, which differ in the type of space employed by the game, the relationship it forms with the gamer and its outreach or “transmediality”, etc (Thon, 2009, p. 1); thus these modes have become the object of increasing levels of academic attention. On the basis of “spatial storytelling” (Hameed et al., 2018), Fernández-Vara proposes a mode of indexical storytelling inspired by Carson’s concept of environmental storytelling (2000; cited in Fernández-Vara, 2011, p. 3). Whilst environmental storytelling “is infused into the physical space” and requires the player to find and decipher the information throughout the game’s space (Carson, 2000; cited in Fernández-Vara, 2011, p. 3), indexical storytelling creates involuntary stories from the traces left in a game’s environment by either producers or players (Fernández-Vara, 2011). However, modes of storytelling can also be established depending on the player and their experience throughout the game. The increasingly high expectations of players on the freedom allowed by games have fostered interactive storytelling (Delmas et al., 2009), which in turn has evolved “the direct relationship [of players] to the consequences of their actions [in-game]” (Veale, 2011, p. 41). This interactive relationship provides the necessary bases for the player to become fully immersed within the game, enabling them to be subjected to an interaffective mode of storytelling that bestows the player with a responsibility unique to this medium (Veale, 2011). Lastly, there has been much academic meditation on the evolution of digital storytelling as defined by the employed platform, which is integral to the videogame industry (Padilla-Zea et al., 2012). Although, in recent years, “transmedia storytelling” has emerged as a collation of “communicative practices [and] business opportunities for the entertainment and cultural industries” that continuously span multiple platforms and genres (Jenkins, 2003; cited in Sánchez-Mesa et al., 2016, p. 10).

“Transmediality'' signifies one of the most relevant trends in modern media production (Eder, 2015, p. 2). It refers to both the maximisation of content by “giant media conglomerates, [who] ‘stream’ their ‘content’ across as many ‘platforms’ or ‘media’ as possible” and by the participation of fans in the creation of media texts related to a given fictional universe (Eder, 2015, p. 2). Consequently, many modern franchises group media texts that all contribute to the same story but span multiple mediums and texts. For instance, massively popular franchises such as ‘The Matrix’ and ‘Star Wars’, which similarly originated from prominent cinematic texts, grew to encompass “commercially successful computer games'' as well (Thon, 2009, p. 2) thus the full story conveyed in a specific game is often broader than the game’s own horizons. The player must choose whether to engage with the game’s fictional world or to “refuse the invitation and still play the game” (Juul, 2005; cited in Thon, 2009, p. 2). In the case of hugely popular online videogames, for instance ‘Apex Legends’ (Respawn Entertainment, 2019), this transmediality somewhat extends to the “affinity space” surrounding a game, wherein a gamer can “improve their skills within the game [looking up] tutorials online [on Reddit and Youtube and watching livestreams] on Twitch [or] make friends and connections [with other fans on Discord]” (Darras, 2021, p. 17). It can be thus argued that the advancements of the gaming industry have massively evolved the way storytelling takes place, since now stories transcend individual media texts and platforms, even seeping into and being deployed through real-life platforms like social media or the Internet, which are the main sites of fan participation and interaction.

Nevertheless, storytelling cannot be relegated, much like the recent trends in game production and distribution, to just a maximisation of content streamed across a vast diversity of platforms in order to boost media conglomerates’ revenue. The (game’s) story is still unequivocally at the centre of any storytelling purpose or process. Hence, many a scholar has turned to the dichotomy between narratology and ludology, that is a building block of critical gamestudies, in an effort to understand how the now-transmedial constituents of videogames have evolved to better fulfil their social purpose. Firstly, narratology is a scholarship troubled with the study of narrative elements (Mateas et al., 2005) independent of “the medium of representation” (Frasca, 2003, p. 2). Secondly, ludology establishes gameplay, structure, mechanics and game design to be the more relevant aspects to gamestudies (Frasca, 2003). In some games both the narrative and gameplay are intertwined. However, some games “have characters and a story that feel out of step with the actual gameplay” (Nottingham, 2021). For example, ‘Valorant’ (Riot Games, 2020) employs gameplay that involves a tactical 5v5 conflict between attackers and defenders who are mirrored versions of the same playable agents, but this only hints at the two Universes’ worth of significant events and stories held within the game’s lore and overall, transmedia storytelling process. This rift between the narrative and gameplay is what videogame developers call “Narrative Dissonance” (Riot Games Devs, 2021) and it suggests that the average gamer possesses enough media literacy to choose how much of the storytelling process they want to engage with (Juul, 2005; cited in Thon, 2009).

Nevertheless, neither of these scholarships carries more weight than the other in terms of their relevance to gamestudies. Therefore, both a game’s narrative and its gameplay structure are fundamental to build its storytelling capabilities, and narratology and ludology have a symbiotic importance to gamestudies, which is the general consensus to which ludologists seem to have come to in regards to this relevant, yet stale debate (Mateas et al., 2005, p. 2) which “never took place” (Frasca, 2003, p. 1). Indeed, both of these frameworks are also essential towards understanding what videogame storytelling can fully accomplish.

This essay has hence illustrated how storytelling is deployed through videogames and the evolutions, genres and modes of storytelling that span the entirety of the videogaming industry. This can be especially illuminating when attempting to delineate the full capabilities of what videogames can accomplish. Videogames, through forcing a player into a first person perspective of a story, can develop “knowledge acquisition” and further “identity and performance [through] representation” (Shaw, 2010, p. 404), whilst serving as an interaffective immersive medium that greatly fulfils the social need to build worlds that can convey complex stories (Wolf, 2012). Videogames are also a medium that is incredibly adept at depicting or situating stories that span worlds too large for a single media text, in comparison to other mediums like film or literature, lending to a surge of transmediality (Thon, 2009) in recent times and proving again that gamers’ ever-increasing expectations of agency and stories to consume can indeed be met through games with a firmly established architecture. It would seem that videogames are a medium with infinite storytelling capabilities, but this is far from the truth.

Game developers are highly aware of the limitations of their medium (Picucci, 2014), which are determined both by the scope of their project and by the restraints imposed by the technological resources needed to properly develop the vision for their game. Thus, games are developed with specific narrative frameworks and game (spatial) design in mind by the developers (Picucci, 2014), who must create the world the player will inhabit and the way they will interact with it. Therefore, the storytelling capabilities of videogames are not infinite and game design must be detailed and methodical to produce games that are complex, aesthetically pleasing and playable to appeal to the demands of gamers. This is why some games employ “Narrative Dissonance” (Nottingham, 2021) to bridge the gap between the fictional world as the gamer understands it and the reality of what the game developers can produce with the resources at hand. In conclusion, the storytelling capabilities of videogames are not only incredibly relevant to videogames as a medium, since the entire process of game development is both driven by and determined by the characteristics of the story the game will tell; but also to explain why videogames are such a popular, ever-evolving medium at the present time, due to the agency and responsibility they bestow on the player who will form interaffective relationships with gaming texts on account of their immersivity whilst further engaging with the story in gamer affinity spaces (Darras, 2021, p. 17). It is this relationship between the gamer and the game’s story that is unique to the medium, and that ensures that gamers keep consuming gaming texts, thus cementing the validity of gaming as the “storytelling platform” (Picucci, 2014).

‘Raw’ & Queer Becomings (Essay)

It is widely accepted that horror as a cinematic genre is intimately tied to both implicit and explicit embodiments of queerness (Cooper, 2018). This bodily genre of excess suggests that “the body of the spectator is caught up in an almost involuntary mimicry of the emotion or sensation of the body on the screen” (Williams, 1991, p. 4), thus enabling horror audiences to empathise with both on-screen victims and perpetrators. These “body-[centred] conventions” often allow the genre to be considered through a queer lens due to the way in which horror regularly navigates sexual desire and by the genre’s ability to depict “characters who are often coded as or depicted as openly queer” (Cooper, 2018, p. 2).

For the purpose of this essay, the term ‘queer’ will be employed as an umbrella term, applying to all types of non-normative characters, bodies and actions that are demonised by the “heteronormative majority” since they pose a threat to “heteronormative society” (Cooper, 2018, p. 3).

The refusal of this imposed normativity, this visible queerness, resonates with a fundamental facet of Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze’s works. “Deleuze and Guattari (1987) want social identities to be liberated from ‘the great dualism machines’ such as man/woman, rational/irrational, masculine/feminine, mind/body, adult/child, and so on” (Jackson, 2010, p.582). Guattari and Deleuze thus offer their idea of ‘becoming’ in response to Western philosophy’s over-reliance on stable identities or “universal characteristics to group” that differentiate binary social categories (Jackson, 2010, p. 581). For them, ‘becoming’ is a non-linear process that moves away from sameness to create something new, albeit “immanent to (not outside of) the social field to which it applies” (Jackson, 2010, p. 581). Thus, the Deleuzian-like concepts of “becoming-woman” (Jackson, 2010) and of “becoming-animal” (Bruns, 2007), when applied to cinema, can epitomise a character’s metamorphosis into a queerer, freer, more fluid state of being.

Julia Ducournau’s daring feature debut Raw (2016) arguably illustrates said notions of “becoming-woman” and “becoming-animal” more acutely than the average coetaneous horror film. This essay seeks to argue that Raw’s main character Justine (Garance Marillier) undergoes both “becoming-woman” and “becoming-animal” as stepping stones in what can be ultimately be considered her “queer becoming”.

Raw is the story of 16-year-old Justine’s metamorphic experience during her first year at the veterinary school her parents formerly attended, where her sister Alexia (Ella Rumpf) is also enrolled. Thrust into a reality far away from her vegetarian nuclear family, Justine and the other rookies must adapt to the hierarchical “food-chain” (Naqi, 2019, p. 17) imposed through hazing by the veteran students. The rookies are also coerced into parties where they are encouraged to have sex and abuse substances. Justine is immediately perturbed by the hazing, suffering a bad bodily reaction after being forced to eat a rabbit’s kidney. The skin she painfully sheds from the resulting rash symbolically marks the beginning of her ensuing transformation.

Justine grows increasingly unstable. On the surface, she is struggling with academic pressure, coping with the veterans’ strict rules and fitting into the gendered social performances that are expected by her peers. She wrestles with the typical teenage sexual frustration and with (a lack of) social interactions, almost exclusively being herself with Alexia and with her gay roomate Adrien (Rabah Nait Oufella). However, she also begins to secretly grapple with an animalistic appetite for meat. She ends her lifelong vegetarianism by attempting to steal burgers from the cafeteria and skipping school to devour shawarmas with Adrien. She develops a taste for raw chicken and after a horrific accident whereby Alexia cuts off a finger trying to wax her vulva, Justine ends up eating the finger and trying her first real bite of human flesh. Alexia, the sole witness, seems to fully understand how similar she is to her little sister for the very first time as her finger disappears down Justine’s throat.

Alexia blames the family dog Quicky for the eaten finger, allowing Justine some more time in the ‘cannibal closet’. Then, she causes a car crash to procure some meat for both of them although Justine runs away, still unable to fully give in to cannibalism. Consequently, her withdrawals worsen as she starts fantasising about tasting Adrien. At a party, Justine is doused in blue paint and shoved into a room for forced sex with a guy dripping in yellow paint. Inevitably giving into her primal desires, Justine rips off a chunk of the guy’s bottom lip. Her debauchery continues after an intense sexual encounter with Adrien, which he regrets after witnessing her feral behaviour throughout it. At another party, Justine unsuccessfully attempts to find someone else to bite until Alexia takes advantage of her inebriated state to humiliate her in front of all the veterans by holding a dead body’s arm in front of her like a dog treat. After Adrien shows Justine a video of that night, she physically fights Alexia in front of their entire campus. They both power-struggle, biting and scarring each other, until they eventually let go and hobble away, supporting each other despite the horrified onlookers.

In Justine’s room, Alexia apologetically bandages the hole she bit onto her sister’s face. Justine sleeps with Adrien in his bed, only to wake up and discover that he’s dead: the now catatonic Alexia stabbed him in the back with a ski pole and devoured one of his thighs. After an initial emotional meltdown and an unsuccessful attempt to impale Alexia with the ski pole, Justine exonerates Alexia scrubbing the blood off her skin in the shower. Finally, after Alexia ends up imprisoned for her crime, Justine’s dad reveals to our protagonist that the cannibalistic urges within her are inherited from her mother (and clearly shared by her sister), by opening his shirt to expose the bite marks and scars that score his chest. After smashing Justine’s perception of her entire upbringing until that very moment, her dad eerily consummates this film: “I’m sure you’ll find a solution, my love” [1:32:41].

This essay will therefore argue that, throughout Raw, Justine becomes queer (in the Deleuzian notion) by constantly evolving as a person due to her coming-of-age experience and through the processes of “becoming-woman” and “becoming-animal”.

“Becoming-woman”

Deleuze offers his notion of “becoming-woman” in response to the apparent gendered inequalities of the Western world (Batra, 2012). He argues that “Western thought has been structured around the focal point of the white rational man”, which in turn restricts its society on simultaneously socio-political, individual and subindividual levels (Batra, 2012, p. 1). Thus, in the Deleuzian sense, “becoming is always molecular” because it entails escaping the subjectivity of the imposed order (Batra, 2012, p. 2). If the male figure is to be assumed as the reference point for “the Norm '', then the woman is automatically othered (Braidotti, 1993, p. 46). But “becoming-woman” is more than simply stepping into womanhood: Deleuze argues that any process of “deterritorialization” (Pullen et al., 2017, p. 107) involves the state of “becoming-woman” and thus it is “the necessary starting-point for the whole process of becoming” (Braidotti, 1993, p. 46). Therefore, through becoming one can alleviate themselves from their subject position within the binary, heteropatriarchal structure of gender. “Becoming-woman” thus becomes a political tool towards “the development of new concepts of man and woman” (Grosz, 2005, p. 5), a dissolution of gender-based roles/rules that could potentially free any individual from the restrictive nature of the gender binary. Furthermore, Deleuze argues that, for women specifically “becoming-woman” is a subversive process, whereby they “should (...) draw on the multi-sexed structure of the subject and claim back all the sexes of which women have been deprived”, thus developing a consciousness outside of the specifically feminine in an effort to topple the established hegemony (Braidotti, 1993, p. 47). Eventually “the elimination of the gender structure would truly be revolutionary, as it would mean a transformation in Western thought and being at the deepest level” (Batra, 2012, p. 2).

Naqi examines how Justine is transformed, from “adolescent to a woman and (from) human to animal” (2019, p. 3). Justine first comes face to face with the implications of “becoming-woman” the second she is left to fend for herself at the new school. Before this, Justine was quite shy, cheerful yet slightly socially awkward at times. Her anxieties are made to appear relatable, due to her young age, pushing the audience to identify with her. Nevertheless, her anxieties over starting at a new school are soon made immaterial by the traumatic initiation rites enforced by the veterans. During her first weeks at the school, Justine and her fellow rookies are forced to act and suffer like herd animals, forced to eat rabbit kidneys and coerced into attending drug-fuelled raves, all while being expected to keep up with academic standards and their social lives. Plus, the female rookies are submitted to another dimension of gender-based humiliation. This becomes apparent, for instance, when Justine is stopped in a hallway by a veteran and ordered to change into revealing clothes like the rest of the female rookies, or when she attends a veteran party and she is shoved into a room with a stranger, forced to have a sexual encounter with him with no regards to consent. The combination of Justine’s burdens rapidly snowballs into a deep-rooted anxiety that plagues her day and night, a grim antecedent of the changes still to come.

Justine turns to Alexia, borrowing her clothes to aesthetically fit in with her peers, thus finally allowing herself to try to live by the school’s rules with Alexia’s help. As the sisters grow closer, with each other and Adrien, Alexia’s dauntlessness emboldens her to start taking agency of her own life and to revel in the freedom of making the necessary choices to survive. She wears her sister’s clothes and even attempts to “[conform] to a beautification process such as waxing” to comply with her flourishing womanhood (Naqi, 2019, p. 14). She begins exploring her sexual urges, practising kissing and dancing in the mirror, arguably becoming “self-aware” in her reflection, meeting her budding sexuality half-way (Naqi, 2019, p. 7). She also continues exploring her newfound hunger, (although this could be considered less of a choice and more of a necessity due to the bodily withdrawals she gets if not ‘fed’ properly). As Justine briefly grasps her identity and consequent womanhood, it can be argued that her “becoming-woman” is fully underway even if to her it (momentarily) means adhering to the enforced gendered roles. In line with Deleuze’s thinking, Justine’s “becoming-woman” is the precondition necessary for her overall (queer) becoming to occur. This process arguably becomes subversive in nature, since it enables Justine to redevelop her self-confidence and to reconnect with her ferocity whilst still under the school’s regime, exhibiting developed behaviours atypical of her previous self and effectively “[claiming] back all the sexes of which women have been deprived” (Braidotti, 1993, p. 47).

“Unbecoming”

Just as Justine is about to achieve her “becoming-woman”, however, the film subverts the general expectation of her coming-of-age encounter, which “as opposed to her first wax, is her first taste of human flesh” (Naqi, 2019, p. 14). This moment marks the beginning of Justine’s transitional stage, or “unbecoming” (McCallum et al, 2011, p. 1), between her “becoming-woman” and her eventual “becoming-animal”. Throughout this, Justine is aware of her hunger and of the moral implications of satisfying her appetite, thus initially she attempts to restrain herself from fully giving into her primal urges. For instance, when Alexia causes a car crash right after being hospitalised for her castrated finger, Justine runs away from the crash site and refuses to consume the victims. However, her withdrawal symptoms greatly corrupt her and she is unable to stop herself from fantasising about flesh. Naqi asserts that what differentiates humans and animals is “the ability to restrict oneself from indulging in the act of consuming another human” (2019, p. 4). Therefore, Justine’s attempts at restraining her desire for human flesh can be argued to represent her last attempts at preserving her own humanity, although her urges are exacerbated over her growing fascination with her best friend and roommate Adrien.

Adrien is overtly homosexual from the beginning, which Justine realises after walking in on him receiving oral sex from another guy. At one point, he even yells at Justine after a not-so-whispered argument in class: “I'm gay. OK? If I spent 20 years hiding, it's not to fuck girls now, OK?” [1:12.10]. It could be that his unapologetic attitude about this somehow inspires Justine to delve into her own urges, much like Alexia seems to influence her as well. However, Justine’s fascination with Adrien seems more like the obsession of a predator with incredibly elusive prey than an intense platonic or sexual bond. It could well be that his own queerness, which makes him virtually unaccessible to Justine, is what makes her “become infatuated” with him (Naqi, 2019, p. 9). But Adrien is coveted for his flesh, and thus becomes a commodity or a fetish that Justine cannot stop wanting to indulge in. Both sisters gradually befriend Adrien and seemingly compete for his favour despite both of them knowing of his homosexuality. But Justine and Adrien have a unique bond due to them being roommates. More importantly, Adrien seemingly always wants to understand Justine and to defend her from any harm. He demonstrates his loyal friendship on countless occasions, notably by worrying about her being forced into sexual encounters at the hospital party and by showing her the video of Alexia teasing her. Adrien is more empathetic to Justine than Alexia,

seeming to recognise himself and potentially identify with the deep-seated queerness within Justine from the very beginning. It is this empathy that ends up resulting in his undoing, foreshadowed by him pitying Justine enough to have sex with her once, resulting in her first ‘positive’ sexual experience (due to her masochism and his bewildered kindness throughout it). Even though Adrien later regrets the encounter, it arguably constitutes a key moment for Justine whereby she completely gives in to her feral side and climaxes. It could be argued that Justine becomes increasingly addicted to the thought of reindulging in her sexual-cannibalistic tendencies and climaxing again, finally entering the mindspace necessary for her to “become-animal”.

“Becoming-animal”

Leonard Lawlor states that the world has been “enclosed within a globe”, inside which humans remain dominant over all other animal species (2008, p. 169). He postulates, based on Cartesian and Kantian notions of humans being self-ruling, autonomous animals; that humans’ autonomy and self-presence grants them “a dignity that far surpasses that of animals” which acts as the justification for said human domination (Lawlor, 2008, p. 169). Still, Deleuze and Guattari promote a model of “becoming” that is transgressive, that goes beyond the limits of a threshold (Lawlor, 2008). “Then after becoming-woman we must ask, ‘what next?’” (MacCormack, 2006, p. 351).

According to Guattari and Deleuze, ageing is the ultimate agent of the molecular changes in “becoming” (Lawlor, 2008). Ageing preconditions a “desubjectification” that allows the individual to “shed the form of an adult, [and...] to become something other than an adult man”, free to “become-child” and rid themselves from the enclosures of the adult form (Lawlor, 2008, p. 173). Desubjectification thus allows for a person to reflect on others’ sufferings, allowing for “the affects of love and shame [to] motivate one to become other than man” (Lawlor, 2008, p. 178). “Becoming” is not defined by “a final form” or a process of imitating (Lawlor, 2008, p. 175), therefore after “becoming-woman” (Braidotti, 1993; Batra, 2012; Pullen et al., 2017) and “becoming-child” (Lawlor, 2008), the final frontier to transgress would be that of “becoming-animal” (Bruns, 2007). The anarchy of “becoming-animal” has an asocial significance (Bruns, 2007, p. 705), insofar that it contradicts “the negation of nature, the prohibition or abjection of animal functions and, indeed, the repression or exclusion of the entire ontology of the flesh” that is “becoming-human” (p. 707). This dichotomy imitates the distinction between body and flesh: the body being a self-transcendent object of regard whilst the flesh is passive, “for eating and being eaten” (Bruns, 2007, p. 707).

“The paradox of being human is that only human beings are capable of transgressing the boundaries that determine what they are; moreover, these transgressions are not (just) accidents- moments of weakness or failure of spirit- but in fact take the form of a festive return to nature, that is, to the border or originary scene of self-creation. (Bruns, 2007, p. 708)”

Justine’s “becoming-animal” process is initiated after she ingests the rabbit kidney, but only fully realised when she actively chooses to consume Alexia’s finger . If “what distinguishes human from animal is the ability to restrict oneself from indulging in the act of consuming another human” (Naqi, 2019, p. 4), then Justine’s ultimate decision (to consume) constitutes her giving into “becoming-animal”. But the finger incident only heightens Justine’s hunger. She starts showing psychosomatic and withdrawal symptoms from her appetites and fantasising about biting people, specifically Adrien. She becomes increasingly feral as she has her first sexual experiences, ripping one guy’s lip off with her teeth at a party and later sleeping with Adrien whilst possessed by a ferocious, animalistic spirit that she appeases by biting down on her arm. The last party that Justine attends (a stark contrast to her first one) allows her the chance to finally act out the epitome of her “new ‘liberated’ self” (Naqi, 2019, p. 18). She sits atop a counter surveying the room, stalking out her prey before stumbling around attempting to kiss multiple people, of different genders. Alexia drags her off before she can cause any more trouble, after which she is publicly coerced into acting like a rabid dog by the former. “Here, Ducournau reveals to us Justine’s final, raw, unrestrained, cannibalistic self” (Naqi, 2019, p. 18).

Therefore, Raw underpins Justine’s cannibalistic tendencies as a reflection of the inner animal within every human individual. Away from the human who would never unleash the restraint on their inner animal, the cannibal deterritorializes the human body by rehashing the middle ground between human and animal (Naqi, 2019, p. 13). In Ducournau’s own words:

“[the cannibal] it’s too present in us. Because the animal inside our bodies can’t escape, it’s here, on many levels, still inside us. That’s why we would rather treat cannibals as if they don’t exist and are outside of humanity. It’s too close. ” (cited in Shepherd, 2017)

In conclusion, Justine’s final self completely trumps “the negation of nature” (Bruns, 2007, p. 707) typical of “becoming-human”. Undergoing processes of self-discovery and explorations of identity and sexuality leads her from “becoming-woman” to “unbecoming” herself, to finally “becoming-animal”. Justine finds herself perpetually in transitional stages throughout Raw, thus one can argue that her diverse “becomings” reconcile with her new, fluid state of being. Certainly, this aligns with the Deleuzian notion of “becoming-queer”, whereby “selves are constantly changing, always in process, and never able to arrive at a coherent identity” (Walker, 2008, p. 3). Justine’s rejection of “normality, coherence, convention, or assimilation into some kind of liberal subjectivity” postulates her as “a stunning monstrosity” (Pasquesi, 2013, p. 120). This kind of monstrosity indulges in what bubbles “beneath dominant institutions and their conventional life narratives” (Pasquesi, 2013, p. 120) and thus, it is often depicted as queer in horror filmmaking due to the threat it poses to a heteropatriarchally structured society. Justine becomes the ultimate threat to this society by unleashing her restraint on her true self, and as her father’s concluding statement [1:32:41] warns her, she will have to reconfine her inner animal “to remain human” (Naqi, 2019, p. 18). This will prove, without a doubt, a colossal task.

‘The Matrix’ & Film-Philosophy

“The Matrix” (Wachowski & Wachowski, 1999) “is, at its core, a film with a moral plot” (Vasiliou, 2005, p.2). It follows the story of Thomas Anderson (Keanu Reeves), or Neo, as he discovers that the world around him is a simulation governed by machines who breed humans as energy sources. Neo is recruited into a rebel group by Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) where he meets Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss), Tank (Marcus Chong) and Cypher (Joe Pantoliano), amongst others. The rebels’ goal is to wake up all the humans still trapped in the simulation and to end the reign of the antagonists, the AI Agents led by Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving), shutting off the Matrix and freeing humanity.

“The Matrix films are arguably some of the most philosophical films to ever confront mainstream movie audiences” (Lawrence, 2008), which explains the wide scope of academic discourse on the film(s). This essay aims to draw from said discourse and to engage with the field of film philosophy. The aim is to prove that films can engage with and/or be philosophical, employing The Matrix as a case study in critical philosophical interpretations of film. The scene wherein Neo is firstly relayed the entire truth by Morpheus, who shows him the reality of the Matrix through the rebels’ computer loading program ‘The Construct’ [00:39:23-00:43:56], will be forefronted in this case study as an exemplifier of how this film performs philosophy, although some reference to other scenes in this film will be made as well.

Preceding ‘The Construct’ scene, Morpheus decides that Neo is ready to learn the truth of the Matrix (00:38:45), so Trinity thrusts a connection cable through his head making him scream (00:38:57-00:39:18) and Tank loads him into ‘The Construct’ (00:39:22). Our scene begins with Neo’s horizontal face occupying the whole screen (00:39:23) until he opens his eyes: the pain is gone. The camera pans backwards and simultaneously spins counter-clockwise, revealing the liminal space he is standing in and that his appearance has reverted to his Matrix persona (00:39:24-00:39:27). As he looks around, the camera circles him to reveal Morpheus behind him (00:39:28-00:39:31): “This... is the Construct”. He explains how it can load anything the rebels may need (00:39:32-00:39:48). The camera then circles Morpheus, who is now standing next to some armchairs and an old-fashioned TV (00:39:50). Neo approaches him, symbolically starting to internalise the truth, and touches the armchair on the right while asking “This isn’t real?” (00:40:09-00:40:15). Morpheus retorts “What is ‘real’? How do you define ‘real’?” (00:40:16-00:40:20). He points out that it is “simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain” (00:40:21-00:40:28) and then clicks the remote control and says to Neo: “This is the world that you know” (00:40:29-00:40:35).

The TV is now showing images of the Matrix (00:40:36-00:40:39). Neo ‘s eyes are glued to the TV and Morpheus starts explaining how it is a “neural-interactive simulation” to a rattled Neo (00:40:40-00:40:51). “You’ve been living in a dream world, Neo. This is the world as it exists today” (00:40:52-00:41:00).

The camera pans into the TV, as the screen is filled with a vision of a ruined city, before it nosedives into the ground, where Neo and Morpheus now are, armchairs and all, as the latter welcomes Neo “to the desert of the real” (00:41:01-00:41:20). Morpheus explains how humanity arrived at this point (00:41:21-00:42:16). As he looks up at the sky, which turns red, this fades into the head of an embryo with a metal plug in its neck (00:42:17-00:42:27). Morpheus explains how the machines turned humans into energy sources as the camera pans away from the embryo to reveal it is inside an egg, which is itself attached to a sort of tree (00:42:28-00:42:40). From the tree, the machines are plucking and consuming eggs through their tentacles as the camera continues to pan upwards, revealing the “endless fields where human beings are no longer born” (00:42:41-00:42:58). As Morpheus recounts when he first woke from the simulation, the camera follows a surge of black liquid flowing towards an intubated baby (00:42:59-00:43:16). He explains that dead embryos are liquified to feed the live humans as the camera reveals the baby is inside a sack, amongst other baby sacks (00:43:17). The camera pulls back further, exiting the TV, as Morpheus concludes by stating that the Matrix is “a computer-generated dream world built to keep [humans] under control in order to change a human being into [a battery]” (00:43:18-00:43:38). As he holds up the battery, the camera reveals Neo’s nauseated expression (00:43:39-00:43:43). This truth proves too much for him, as he starts screaming to be let out of the program (00:43:44-00:43:56).

When Neo wakes up in the real world, thus signalling the ending of our scene, he physically fights back against the rebels, still unable to accept the truth, and he panics until he eventually vomits and collapses, thus ending this sequence with a fade to black (00:43:57-00:44:22).

To understand whether The Matrix is a philosophical film or not, we must first contextualise it within the field of film philosophy. Sorfa argues “that cinema can do philosophy in a way that is unique to the medium” because of cinema’s ability to present complex thought experiments and its capacity to depict philosophical concepts, thus film “is philosophy itself” (2016, p.3). A film conveys its philosophy through its “cinematic attributes'', namely its visual and narrative elements, therefore offering a philosopher “the full expressive power of language” which is invigorated through cinema’s visual language, deeming film an exceptional vehicle for philosophical thought and for the dissemination of it (Karofsky et al., 2015, p. 4). For instance, The Matrix proposes a key philosophical dilemma for its audience by forcing viewers to adopt a “God’s eye perspective” (Vasiliou, 2005, p. 2) of the ontological dichotomy of the dystopian reality of The Matrix’s world versus the world that humans experience in their simulated reality. This juxtaposition is reinforced visually through the key differences in both these worlds: Neo’s appearance within the Matrix is quite polished but in the real world he looks ghastly; and the Matrix world itself is vibrant and lively whilst the real world is sunken in darkness. Vasiliou also argues that The Matrix’s dilemma can be utilised to ask similar questions on the reality of humanity, since humans are constrained by our physical needs and limitations, and “have longed to ‘break out’ of this reality, to transcend the imposed limitations on their physical being” throughout history (Vasiliou, 2005, p. 2).

The Matrix’s subtext foregrounds philosophical concepts and dilemmas that have been plaguing philosophers since the dawn of what we now understand as philosophical thinking. Within The Matrix, “Platonist, Cartesian and Hegelian ideas are clearly recognisable” and the film’s plot progresses through said ideas (Milidrag, 2013, p. 268).

Firstly, Milidrag argues that Morpheus is a “Platonic philosopher”, signified by how he initially approaches Neo and asks him to choose between the red and blue pill (between the truth and ignorance, respectively) (2013, p. 269). Both these options are antithetical, such as the Matrix and the real world are segregated, leaving “no doubt [as to] which world is ‘true’ and which one is ‘illusion’” (Milidrag, 2013, p. 269). Morpheus never once doubts that he “knows what the truth is” because of his Platonic disposition, and this is further conveyed in ‘The Construct’ scene since he maintains the Socratic notion that Neo must see the truth for himself to properly learn it. Simply doubting the validity of his senses and the existence of his body within the Matrix is not enough: “You cannot ‘wake’ from the world with the aid of [Cartesian] hyperbolic doubt; for that, you need someone who has already ‘awoken’ – like Morpheus” (Milidrag, 2013, p. 270). Additionally, Plato’s ‘Allegory of the Cave’ can be used to illustrate how the Matrix’s world of illusions is used to conceal the truth, which is that humans are enslaved by machines and trapped in “a prison for [their] mind” (00:27:54). In Plato’s cave, the prisoners are chained and forced to watch the illusions casted on the cave wall, believing this to be their reality since they have never lived otherwise (Plato, 1941). Eventually, one prisoner discovers the illusions and makes his way outside to discover the real world, only to return and be blinded by the sunlight, which leaves the other prisoners in fear of the outside world (Plato, 1941). In The Matrix, Morpheus is akin to this particular prisoner, as the first to ‘wake’ from the Matrix and the other prisoners are represented by characters like Cypher, who knows the truth but grows jaded of reality and thus chooses to betray the rebels and return to the Matrix.

Milidrag also argues that The Matrix presents several Cartesian motifs, even if the aforementioned hyperbolic doubt does not fit this specific film. Firstly, The Matrix establishes Cartesian dualism, or the body and the mind to be completely separate, through Morpheus teaching Neo martial arts in a separate scene within ‘The Construct’, “to teach [him] that the body in (...) the Matrix is not a body at all” (Milidrag, 2013, p. 271). The mind can be purified by erasing the “teachings of nature” (Manley et al, 1996; Milidrag, 2013, p. 271) within the necessary, substantial union of mind and body (Seager, 1988). This separation of body and mind is necessary for the existence of free will, since the preconceived ideas that stem from the body can obfuscate our judgement (Milidrag, 2013). In ‘The Construct’ scene, Neo struggles with accepting the truth due to his ‘corporeal’ experience within the Matrix, although he eventually accepts it towards the end of the film, effectively separating his mind from the iteration of his body within the Matrix.

Thus, Neo’s mental liberation is limited in nature. His “mind is free but [he] is still not (...) affirmed in such freedom of his because (...) that freedom is not also the freedom of a true body, freedom in the real world” (Milidrag, 2013, p. 271). Milidrag relates this to Hegel’s stoicism, arguing that “Neo finds himself at the Stoic position of ‘subjective reconciliation’: he is free from the Matrix, but he is still free only within the Matrix” (2013, p. 272). Thus, Neo conveys the Hegelian notion of “unhappy consciousness” (Milidrag, 2013, p. 272), whereby he is aware of the self-contradictory nature of his mental liberation versus his continued physical entrapment (Farivar, 2018).

Regardless of the “deep philosophical prejudice against the visual image as an avenue to philosophical enlightenment” (Falzon, 2002, p.4), Falzon dismisses the notion that films lack the capacity for philosophical thought (Wartenberg, 2006, p. 19). He argues that images are inherent to philosophy itself, highlighting the role of “the philosophy we can discern in the image” (Falzon, 2002; cited in Wartenberg, 2006, p. 20). However, film is more than a mere illustration of philosophy, it is also “a site of deep thinking” (Wartenberg, 2006, p. 30) that invites the audience to question analogous systems of oppression in our society. If the Deleuzian model of the “brain as the screen” is to be believed (Flaxman, 2000, p. 23) then cinema is certainly an apparatus of philosophical thinking for the masses to engage with. More specifically, “the science-fiction virtual-reality genre” in which The Matrix exists is ideal to introduce philosophical skepticism, or the questioning of the validity of the senses, to its audience (Karofsky et al., 2015, p. 34). The Matrix also raises questions on the nature of free will (Kale, 2014), presenting an anti-capitalist critique that is akin to the Wachowski sisters’ politics. Thus, the interpretation of their work is reactionary: “a liberating act” (Sontag, 1966, p. 3) much like The Matrix’s climax is liberatory in itself.

In conclusion, films are arguably philosophical because they simultaneously illustrate, practice and disseminate philosophical theory due to cinema being a “mass art” (Adorno, 1966; cited in Hansen, 1981, p. 186). Philosophy is conveyed through the visual and narrative languages of cinema, and through subtext and overall themes. The Matrix’s language spells out a cautionary tale for the future of humanity, highlighting the oppressive systems imposed on humans during late-stage capitalism and the dangers of over-relying on machines for our survival, tinged with anxieties over the technological superiority of AI and over the ignorance and apathy resulting from a world of illusions. In ‘The Construct’ scene, Neo fully grasps the scope of the philosophical dilemma immediately apparent once one has ‘woken up’ from the Matrix for the first time: this is Neo’s key lightbulb moment even if he is unable to see or accept it at the time. This scene spells out the dangers of Enlightenment, the pain of possessing sentience and free will in a world with strict rules to follow. Ultimately, this feeling is so inherent to human existence that by conveying it, The Matrix may offer some empathetic comfort to its audience in the form of a communal experience of said feeling. After all, there is nothing more human than simply wanting to “transcend” (Vasiliou, 2005).