{"id":3974,"date":"2013-08-20T11:00:33","date_gmt":"2013-08-20T15:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/?p=3974"},"modified":"2020-12-07T20:50:49","modified_gmt":"2020-12-08T01:50:49","slug":"met-the-beauchamps-bioshock-2007","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/?p=3974","title":{"rendered":"Mr. and Mrs. Beauchamp of Olympus Heights (Bioshock, 2007)"},"content":{"rendered":"

The following is a guest post from Zach Whalen\u00a0Assistant Professor of English, University of Mary Washington his teaching and\u00a0research\u00a0focuses on the critical study and practice of digital media in a variety of genres, including video games, electronic literature, comics, and transmedia. You can find him on twitter @zachwhalen<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

In the underwater city of Rapture, in the exclusive Mercury Suites neighborhood of Olympus Heights, there lived a \u201cMr. Beauchamp.\u201d There, with his wife and three daughters, Mr. Beauchamp sought to build a life under the sea. But alas, as readers will no doubt already have guessed, things do not end well for the Beauchamp family, for at some point prior to the arrival in Rapture of a mysterious man named Jack, the Beauchamps sought to escape the horror around them through a red bottle of poison \u2014 what must have seemed like the only option. Like their neighbors\u00a0Anna Culpepper<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Brigid Tenenbaum<\/a>, the Beauchamps own a television, and this is where we as players of\u00a0Bioshock<\/em>(2007) encounter them \u2014 arrayed near their TV set in a grisly domestic dioramatic presentation of mass suicide.<\/p>\n

\"diorama\"<\/a>
The Beauchamps of Olympus Heights.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The Beauchamps and their apartment play no role in the plot of\u00a0Bioshock<\/em>, and unlike some other tragic subplots (the\u00a0Lutz family<\/a>, for instance), there are no audio diaries to explain what happened. But their presence, appearance and arrangement raise some interesting questions, and seeking answers to those questions through some analysis of their formal material composition illuminates\u00a0Bioshock<\/em>\u2018s implicit critical use of media history. Therefore, I want to show how a close reading\/playing of this video game space can reveal nuances of larger themes in a game.<\/p>\n

To begin with, the name I am using for this family is not visible anywhere in the game. Neither is it arbitrary, however. All one sees upon exploring the second floor of Mercury Suites, across the atrium from Tenenbaum, is an apartment with an obscured nameplate hanging above its door. SinceBioshock<\/em>\u00a0for PC is built using the\u00a0Unreal Engine<\/a>, every planar surface is an image stored somewhere in the game data in a more or less standard format. Using the\u00a0UModel tool<\/a>\u00a0to explore the data for Olympus Heights (the package named, \u201c6-Resi.bsm\u201d), I eventually discovered that the nameplate above the door is an object called \u201cplaquedirty,\u201d and after some trial error with the UModel tool, I managed to export its two texture files into bitmaps of reasonably detailed resolution. I noticed that the traces on the \u201cplaquedirty_normal.tga\u201d image bore the appearance of letters, and after confirming that the other address plaques use a bold, embossed\u00a0Palatino<\/a>, I can assert with some confidence that the original text on the plaque, though it appears mostly erased and obscured, originally read, \u201cC Beauchamp.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>
The address plaque as it appears in the game, the texture file ‘plaquedirty_normal.tga’, “C Beachaump” set in Palatino Linotype, and the latter two combined.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As far as I can tell, there is no \u201cBeauchamp\u201d in Bioshock lore. There are no search results on the exhaustive\u00a0Bioshock Wikia site<\/a>, at least, and none of the game\u2019s credits indicate that it might be the name of a programmer or artist. If this is an Easter Egg, in other words, it\u2019s quite an obscure one. My best guess, and it\u2019s a stretch, is that this could reference photographer Anthony Beauchamp.1<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

So lacking a definite reference, what else can be said of this \u201cplaquedirty\u201d? Typographically, its use of Palatino, an oldstyle serif font by Hermann Zapf, is period-appropriate for the 1950s. One could speculate reasons for its being \u201cdirty\u201d: on one hand, a level artist given the task of adding plausible detail to the game\u2019s diegesis without also inventing unintentional toe-holds for new story material created instead a record of inscription and erasure. But on the other hand, within the game, this means that the world of Rapture includes a family or individual of such affluence as to live among the city\u2019s elite, but with such noteriety, infamy or perhaps banality that their name and all reference to them has been blotted out of existence.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>
The Beauchamp girls. Are they triplets, or was the Little Sister the only character model available?<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"The<\/a>
Mr. and Mrs. Beauchamp<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n



What else do we know of the family themselves? Arrayed on the couches are five figures: two adults and three almost-identical little girls. These girls might be triplets, or it might simply be that they all share the body model of a Little Sister as she appears after being rescued. The adults are splicers in an early state of decay, but the girls are relatively pristine and mannequin-like. The girls corpses are searchable (they have candy), but like the furniture and the bottle of poison on the coffee table, their bodies are impossible to pick up with telekinesis or to move in any other way. The adults, on the other hand, can be manipulated just like any other splicers. This difference raises a question: are these actually the girls\u2019 parents? For that matter, are these really the little girls that used to live here, or are they dead Little Sisters, as their character models suggest, that someone has posed here for some reason? Indeed, the staging of this well-preserved domestic tranquility is somewhat reminiscent of the macabre vignettes created by one of the Beauchamp\u2019s other neighbors, Sander Cohen.<\/p>\n

Of course, because it\u2019s a space in a game level, this\u00a0is<\/em>\u00a0a vignette composed in order to make a particular impression on its viewers, and as such, the Beauchamp\u2019s living room touches on a handful of cultural references. The half-full cups invoke the horror of the Jonestown mass suicide, for example, and the television set might be based on an RCA model. If it is, there is some uncanny resonance in RCA Victor\u2019s\u00a0\u201cHis Master\u2019s Voice\u201d<\/a>\u00a0logo, since at the time the player will encounter the Beauchamps, Jack\u2019s health and power are being damaged by voice commands issued from Frank Fontaine.<\/p>\n

\"tvs\"<\/a>
Left: A 1950 RCA \u201cFairfax\u201d Right: The Beauchamp\u2019s TV<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

What I\u2019m more interested in, though, is how this scene depicts 1950s domesticity with TV at the center, and moreover how this scene communicates what a contemporary game designer and audience expect of a 1950s domestic scene. In this sense, the Beauchamps\u2019 living room calls to mind the living room diorama in Disney\u2019s Spaceship Earth, an attraction where the progress of communication technology looks forward (and backward) in ways that reflect the dominant paradigms or even corporate perspectives of the present.<\/p>\n

Currently2<\/a><\/sup> Spaceship Earth\u2019s family of mannequins are watching the moon landings from the stylish comfort of a 1960s living room (below left), but an older version (below right) places them floating in darkness, their gazes fixed on the TV in front of them while disembodied screens of televisions future and past float into view on a wall to their left like a gentler, blander version of aNam June Paik installation<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"adf\"<\/a>
Spaceship Earth\u2019s family watches the moon landings.
[CC licensed image by Flickr user Elizabeth\/Table4Five<\/a>]<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"A<\/a>
A 1980s version of Spaceship Earth\u2019s TV Watching Family. (image source<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n


A link between\u00a0Bioshock<\/em>\u00a0and Disney may actually be productive for several reasons \u2014 Andrew Ryan does somewhat resemble Walt Disney, key scripted events often occur while the player watches from behind glass or while forced into a track like on a Disney ride, and much of the character movement in the game has an artificial, animatronic feel. In\u00a0Bioshock 2’s\u00a0<\/em>version of Disney Land, “Ryan Amusements,” the house of horrors, “Journey to the Surface” even includes a television as the focal point of one scene of domestic security<\/a> that is obliterated by the visible hand of “the parasite.”<\/p>\n

But Spaceship Earth\u2019s 1960s living room locates its family in a historically and culturally specific moment, and as such provides a nice example of what Lynn Spigel\u00a0has written of<\/a>\u00a0as the postwar emergence of the television as the central figure in popular representations of family relationships. Not only is the family brought together by television, they are brought together in a special room designated and arranged specifically for this purpose.<\/p>\n

Spigel traces a link between domestic interiority and media technology that begins in Victorian drawing rooms, but more recently,\u00a0Erkki Huhtamo connects<\/a>\u00a0this emergence of private media apparatus \u2014 the modes of looking, hearing and participating imposed on the user \u2014 to video games, arguing that their arrival in homes of the 1970s first required a space for them to occupy, and that this space has its origins in the 19th century. Furthermore, for Huhtamo, the domestic ideology of private media use has a gendered orientation that relies on a construction of masculinity as the one who provides his family with knowledge of the world in absence of their ability to go out and experience it directly. Michael Newman\u00a0picks up this thread as well<\/a>. It is the father who works hard all day to bring home a zoetrope or new stereopticon slides for his family\u2019s amusement and education, just as it is the young boy who enjoys his mother\u2019s failure to master Space Invaders. Video game advertising from this period is also filled with examples of families gathered around screens, combining the metanarrative of the television at the center family relationships with the socially constructed togetherness of the family game night.<\/p>\n

\"Gather<\/a>
Gather the family, it\u2019s time to play video games!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

So what do the Beauchamps argue about domestic media ideologies of the 1950s or about 2007\u2032s perception of those ideologies? The television set anchors the design of the room, and its gently flickering screen draws the players eye open first entering the apartment. But the two couches are arranged in parallel, facing one another across a coffee table with the TV off to the side. This is a space designed for conversation, not consumption, and with two occupied couches, the Beauchamp family is drawn into a complete domestic circle. With the exception of one girl\u2019s blank stare in the TV\u2019s general direction, the family looks inward. There\u2019s even a lamp on the table near the TV that casts glare on the TV\u2019s screen, obscuring whatever imagery might ordinarily appear there.3<\/a><\/sup> In a contrasting arrangement, Anna Culpepper, who presumably lives alone, hides her TV away in a dedicated media room. There, her furniture is situated to face the screen directly.<\/p>\n

\"Anna<\/a>
Anna Culpepper\u2019s media room.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

From all this evidence of togetherness, one might conclude that the Beauchamps were a happy family, but I don\u2019t think this is the case. Their TV is more likely an attempt at keeping up appearances than it is a genuine focal point of interest. According to a source Spigel quotes, an average television set would have cost around $238 in the mid 1950s. So while it\u2019s still a major purchase for the Beauchamps, a TV is a solid upper middle class status symbol, especially for a family that can afford the rent at Mercury Suites. (The specific model for the Beauchamp\u2019s television is conveniently labeled \u201cHigh_Rent_TV\u201d.) Also, the Beauchamps have even upgraded their TV with an enhanced sound system; note the ornamental speaker horns positioned above it that, again, reinforce a possible association with \u201cHis Master\u2019s Voice.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"ad\"<\/a>
Another view of the Beauchamp’s “High_Rent_TV”<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

For the Beauchamps, I suspect all this is for show. Mr. Beauchamp is a splicer of the\u201cBreadwinner\u201d<\/a>\u00a0model, which in other cases is generically characterized through his unsuccessful, megalomaniacal capitalist ascendancy. Mrs. Beauchamp, on the other hand, is a\u00a0\u201cLady Smith\u201d<\/a>model, a stereotype of white upper-class privilege prone toward racist and classist remarks. It\u2019s not hard to imagine that Mr. Beauchamp is a failed businessman, and that Mrs. Beauchamp now sees her marriage as a move in the wrong direction on the social ladder. Despite their charming family room, well-applianced kitchen, and beautiful children, I think the Beauchamps ultimately saw their lives as a metaphorical cell within their underwater prison of Rapture.<\/p>\n

Despite all this, I must admit that I find the Beauchamps oddly sympathetic in their macabre tranquility. Amid the chaos of the Mercury Suites level, their deceptively peaceful togetherness and the horror it hides struck me in a way I wasn\u2019t prepared for as I replayed\u00a0Bioshock<\/em>\u00a0this past spring semester with one of my classes. As a father \u2014 two girls (4 and 2) and a 1-year old boy \u2014 I guess I can\u2019t help but respond emotionally to suggestions of violence toward children. This is part of the reason why this scene, probably designed as an afterthought or space filler, manages to be affective and interesting, at least for me. Beyond that, though, it\u2019s a model of a media-historical moment, since it\u2019s created at a time when the fundamentals of that apparatus \u2014 the single cathode-ray screen \u2014 have transitioned into obsolescence through the proliferation of large flat-screen TVs and smaller, personal viewing devices.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, the Beauchamps leave several important questions unanswered: what was Mr. Beauchamp\u2019s line of work? What sort of programming did they watch on their TV? Why weren\u2019t the girls converted to Little Sisters, or were they? Did the parents poison their girls out of mercy, and if so, did the girls know they were drinking poison? Did their mother serve it to them before drinking her own dose, or did they all drink at the same time? I suspect the answers to these questions are not forthcoming in the Bioshock canon. Perhaps the best we can do is, for a time, follow the Beauchamp\u2019s TV\u2019s invitation to \u201cPlease Stand By\u201d and reflect on what their lives and deaths have to say about domestic ideology, obsolescence, and representations of media history in video games.<\/p>\n

\n

[1]<\/a> Anthony Beauchamp was a well-connected photographer (he married Winston Churchill\u2019s daughter) who captured several famously sexy images of Marilyn Monroe in the early 1950s. Bioshock\u2019s \u201cC Beauchamp\u201d lives among Rapture\u2019s elite, including the celebrity performer, Anna Culpepper, and there seems to be a concentration of camera equipment in and around the Beauchamp\u2019s apartment, including a camera and some film in their bathtub. Also, according to\u00a0this article<\/a>, Anthony Beauchamp committed suicide in 1957, not long before C Beauchamp would have.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> I have not personally experienced Spaceship Earth in many, many years, so my knowledge of its current content is just based on what I could find or guess at on Flickr.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Mass media of some form exists in Rapture, since there are references to theater and film and at least one newspaper. It\u2019s not clear if television programming would have been completely locally produced or if they would have been allowed to receive broadcast signals from the world beyond, but since Rapture is in the middle of the North Atlantic, my guess is it\u2019s probably out of range for most over the air broadcasts.<\/p>\n\n\n

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The following is a guest post from Zach Whalen\u00a0Assistant Professor of English, University of Mary Washington his teaching and\u00a0research\u00a0focuses on the critical study and practice of digital media in a variety of genres, including video games, electronic literature, comics, and transmedia. You can find him on twitter @zachwhalen. In theContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":4014,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"coauthors":[313],"class_list":["entry","author-whalen","post-3974","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-articles"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/08\/the-parents-focus.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3974","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3974"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3974\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7334,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3974\/revisions\/7334"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4014"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3974"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3974"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3974"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcoauthors&post=3974"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}