hellscape (n.)

I’ve been thinking lately about hellscapes.

While use of the word “hellscape” goes back as far as the 1880s, I think it’s safe to say it’s had something of a resurgence in an era of, among (many) other things, climate change, postmodern fascist politics, and the internet’s memeification of the works of Hieronymus Bosch.

Caleb Madison, The Atlantic’s crossword editor, has written about the word’s previous heyday in the mid-20th century as a way to describe the heinous wastes wrought by modern wars and in particular the various attempts artists and writers have made to render them. The roots of “hellscape,” are aesthetic: a portmanteau essentially conjuring the idea of a landscape painting, but, you know…hell. The Dutch painting-derived suffix “-scape,” cognate with the English “-ship” that appears in such words as “relationship” or “hardship,” eventually came to connote, as Madison writes, “an expansive view of an environment, from a cityscape to a skyscape to a moonscape.”

The mediated quality that “-scape” adds to “hell”, makes “hellscape” an apt word for describing what Madison calls a “perspectival relationship to chaos,” a way of relating to hell as “a backdrop to our daily lives” through “the mediation of our screens” rather than as something we are immersed in. Perhaps this is one of those distinctions without a difference.

Still, the interpretation hits on something vital in the way a lot of people—or is it just me?—use the word. When I gesture vaguely around myself while I’m talking and qualify something with the phrase “in our capitalist hellscape,” chuckling ironically and dying a little inside, I’m talking about a set of material conditions—the “way things are”—as seen from inside it, from which perspective those conditions appear all-encompassing and, if I’m honest, too overwhelming to contemplate directly.

A few games and books I’ve encountered recently have trafficked in the aesthetics of the hellscape, and two in particular—Signalis, a poetic cyber-horror fever dream, and Blasphemous, an alt-Catholic medieval fantasy pilgrimage—raise questions about surface versus depth in the genre(?) of hellscape.

Both games are beautiful, brutal, symbolically dense and deliberately obtuse works of art. Signalis inhabits the amnesiac perspective of the cyborg Elster as she wades through an Inception-like nightmare labyrinth looking for her dying human lover, flesh and machine mutually devouring their past before and behind. Blasphemous follows the Penitent One in Silence as he slays his way through the post-apocalyptic land of Cvstodia, a realm cursed by the Grievous Miracle to experience guilt as a physical aspect of material reality, one in which all are doomed to suffer in ever more monstrous forms of flagellation, devotion and torture in the pursuit of penitence.

Blasphemous, while consistently impressive, comes off as playing amid its symbols and signs to little purpose other than to be edgy. The game’s Spanish creators have said that the game was inspired by the prolific Catholic heritage, art and architecture of Seville (“It’s part of our idiosyncrasy; it’s within our cultural DNA.”). But, while jaw-droppingly rendered and satisfying to play, Blasphemous’s remix of visual ideas from the likes of Goya and Bosch, its magniloquent pastiche of quasi-biblical dialogue, and relentless play on the theme of guilt and penitence begin to ring hollow after a dozen hours of play. Cvstodia’s hellscape is defined precisely by the self-cannibalizing nature of its empty signification: a land in which penitents slaughter each other repeatedly in penitence’s very name, only to be pointlessly reborn, each time uglier and more savage, all guilty of a sin so absolute that it remains unnamed. I suppose the nature of the guilt becomes irrelevant when nature itself becomes its expression.¹

By contrast, Signalis grounds its equally elusive symbology—poetic and mythic quotations, an admixture of English, German, Chinese and Japanese scripts, cryptic found documents, tarot cards, dream sequences, oil paintings—in a material context: a futile space mission administered by a calcifying, totalitarian, post-revolutionary regime reliant on the exploited labor of obsessive-compulsive cyborgs (replikas), whose minds are built on the neural imprints of their human (gestalt) originals. Even while Signalis romps playfully in the mire of a symbolically dense plot that you are likely never fully to comprehend,² the basic material context of the wider world that play reveals is enough to understand the narrative as the tragedy it is. Signalis’s hellscape is small, but all the sharper for it, occupying the relationship between a handful of people sharing a terrible nightmare in which memory is both elusive and threateningly ambivalent.

A hellscape has no entrance. You can’t see it coming. It’s impossible to observe its beginning directly, if it even has one. As with the protagonists of both Blasphemous and Signalis, a hellscape is something in which you simply wake up and find yourself one day. A hellscape thus has no clear origin and, by extension, no clear outer limit. A hellscape is painfully vague. A condition of anxiety. In this way, narratively speaking, a hellscape is different from a dystopia, which tends to contain a cause, a beginning, an explanation which a protagonist typically, inexorably, discovers in a movement from ignorance to knowledge.³ A proper hellscape, it seems to me, defies and complicates any attempt to rationalize it. As a hell-scape, it exists for its own sake.

I suppose Blasphemous turns out to be the greater hellscape, thus defined. It’s hard not to appreciate how well it paints (ha) a suitably bleak and captivating metaphor for our own peculiar capitalist hell: overwhelming and brutal, its hollow, upturned bell tolling the doleful nostrums of its inescapability.

In that light, I prefer Signalis’s hellscape all the more. At least where amnesia renders the world indecipherable, there remains the hope of learning again the truth of the world, that the way things are is not the way things have to be.

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1  The opening cinematic declares this as the game’s aesthetic conceit: “And thus, guilt, repentance, mourning and every pain of the soul of all kind were visibly and tangibly manifested, everywhere and in all of us.”

2  Not that comprehension can ever be “full.”

3  Which is understandable for a form that is ultimately didactic. Any given dystopia is really a kind of lecture, isn’t it?