COLUMN: 'The Aberrant Gamer': An Evening With Sander Cohen
September 6, 2007 8:05 PM | Leigh Alexander
[The Aberrant Gamer is a weekly, somewhat NSFW column by Leigh Alexander, dedicated to the kinks and quirks we gamers tend to keep under our hats-- those predilections and peccadilloes less commonly discussed in conventional media.]
The following article contains minor BioShock spoilers – there’s no discussion of the ending or of major plot points, but this week’s column focuses on a character who appears about halfway through the game and on the environment in which you fight him.
Still with me?
Andrew Ryan’s ideal for Rapture was a world in which the creative elite, unconstrained by social obligation, were free to pursue their own ends to any extent that their effort awarded them. Everybody came to Rapture thinking they were going to be “captains of industry” – of course, no one realized that “somebody’s gotta scrub the toilets.”
Sander Cohen, musician, artist and composer, was Rapture’s poster child for that creative elite. With Ryan himself as the prime supporter of his arts, Cohen held court in Fort Frolic, his musical scores the toast of the city, his artwork held up as the standard of genius. In his battered suit, his hair a nest of pomade and his face a white pancake mask, holding court now over none but a grim army of plaster-cast statues – the bodies beneath, still bleeding – a city that should have become his joy became his madness.
His mad taunts to the player vacillate between imperious demand, lavish praise and vengeful rage; perpetually unstable, the single-minded viciousness with which he assembles his masterwork, what he calls a quantych (though it’s technically a “polyptych”, isn’t it?) composed of the photographs of his disciples’ bodies, is one of the more unsettling of BioShock’s many tragedies of the human mind’s descent. It’s both repugnant and infuriating, the way he refers to the player character as a “little moth” – and enlightening, too.
After all, the most alarming thing about Cohen is how he still lives in a delusion of his prior grandeur, fancying himself a radiant light to which all things are drawn. Though all but the most crazed of splicers in Rapture have either been killed or perhaps hidden themselves somewhere safer, far out of sight, Cohen remains, lording over Fort Frolic, hosting performances no one will see and continuing to “create” – and nursing a psychotic desire for revenge against his students for slights that were slight, if not fictional.
BioShock’s strength lies in all of the subtle ways that Rapture has become a sort of time capsule for the world it once was. Though Arcadia’s Farmer’s Market is rotting, swarmed with insects, in the scattered bottles of fine wine and the display cases which sometimes still hold faintly recognizable shapes of meat and cheese, it’s not difficult to imagine how beautiful it once was. The “ghosts” the player sometimes hallucinates, one of the myriad side effects of splicing plasmids, tell a story of people who once loved their world. As menacing as the world is, as much as Rapture itself is our antagonist in a sense, even the most grim of its vistas is less a horror and more a tragedy, when we see the tiny details. A burnt-out home that was once someone’s joy and pride; an Arcadia advertisement for pet adoption where, beneath a picture of puppies that wouldn’t be out-of-place in a school library, it reads, “BEST FRIENDS”.
Though, never is the window into Rapture’s past more illuminating, more poignant– and more tragic -- than it is when we look at the world of Sander Cohen. He’s not immediately crafted for empathy, combining egomania with antagonism, the flighty esoterics of an archetypal artist’s worst qualities, and his uncomfortably proximal, demeaning overtures. But then we see Fort Frolic’s promotional posters, for whimsical romantic comedies and musical plays that look quite like something Cole Porter would have come up with (and indeed, Porter’s “You’re the Top” scores a spot on the BioShock soundtrack). Even the way he titles his grim program, “An Evening With Sander Cohen,” makes it sound like the sort of Broadway cassette tapes my grandmother would have loved in my childhood. And so, we are able to get a glimpse of the man he must once have been.
He would’ve been no saint. When we follow Cohen’s coaxing into Fleet Hall theatre, where he’s rigidly critiquing the piano performance of a soon-to-be-very-unfortunate student, his urgent demands, even the way he attempts to vocalize the way the notes should go, make him not so much a psychopath, but a typical acting teacher. The character designers responsible for Cohen’s personality must have been intimately acquainted with theatre people.
Last week, on the topic of choice in games, I offered the opinion that while games provide the structures for experiences, it is the player’s choice to use those structures. That rather than expecting emotional satisfaction for technical behaviors, it’s up to us to take that next step and find a point of empathy with a game. This isn’t always easy, but that it is so limitlessly possible in BioShock is one of its strengths. We gain the most from our experience when we find ways to make a story personal, and it was Sander Cohen, not the Little Sisters, who provided the first in-road to me.
In 2004, I graduated not as an English major, but from a Madison Avenue, New York City acting conservatory, one of the finest in the country. I spent two years there with some of the most archetypal “theatre people” imaginable – black-cloaked, emotional Method actors, flamingly homosexual dancers, proudly egomaniacal Shakespearians, and hysterical, demanding pianists prone to throwing fits. Sander Cohen’s pitch-perfect rant, “my muse is a fickle bitch with a very short attention span!!” Might have been snatched from one of their mouths.
We, the conservatory students, were all the protégés of such, and it was there that I learned a little bit about the nature of acting, about any kind of creative art in general. When done well, it’s driven by a desire to give. But many times (perhaps more often than not), creative types are hunted to the edge of madness by a desire to please, and to be validated. They create not primarily to contribute, but so that they can be elevated socially for their singular achievements. Consumed deep-down with self-doubt, they instead try to earn love and validation from others through art – at first aiming to please, then to impress, then to control.
It’s a tragedy, really; combine creative talent and a simple, human desire for love and approval, and you have a recipe for madness. Rapture promised Sander Cohen a cocktail more fatal than the Moonshine Absinthe of which he appeared to be fond – a world wherein his creativity was his greatest merit, but also a world that constantly wanted more, more. It’s a simple fact of human psychology that the love and approval of millions is not enough. The splicers, at the edge of the end of the world, needed more and more power to feel safe, or to feel beautiful, until it destroyed them. In the madness of Rapture, the same happened to Cohen and his gifts – and in the vacuum left behind by a decimated population gone mad, he began to cannibalize himself.
Many actors, artists and composers later go on to teach, and it seems Cohen undertook disciples also. In a final, absolute rejection of the act of giving, he turns on his own students.
He’s a brilliant character not only for his spot-on characterization, but for the way his endless wrestling with “the muse” is a perfect metaphor for the consumptive nature of Rapture in general. More is never enough to salve the spectre of self-doubt, and when there’s no more to be had, one will take from one’s own mind until one lives alone in a closed world of delusion – contrast Cohen’s sprightly musical posters with his later works, such as the aptly titled “The Doubters”, a grim plaster cast of an entire family frozen at the dinner table, or the insane “Wild Bunny”, in which his inspirational musical works is replaced simply by a hysterical nonsense refrain: “I hop, and when I hop, I can’t get off the ground. I want to take the ears off, but I can’t.”
Contrast this with the later, optional glimpse into the home of Sander Cohen, where sepia-toned portraits of friends in groups, musicians playing piano, and a solitary figure performing on stage, stand as forgotten homages to a life that was once happy, imbued with the joy of performing and the adoration of colleagues and fans.
When in the game Cohen’s masterpiece is at last, as he says, “accomplished,” and he descends the atrium stairs bathed in spotlight, a rain of confetti and canned cheers, waving lovingly to an audience that only he can see, trapped in a lost life, I confess I shed a tear. And that’s the key to connecting emotionally with games – somewhere in there is a point of empathy just for you.
I’m a writer, not an actress today – you may draw your own conclusions about that.
[Leigh Alexander is the editor of Worlds in Motion and writes for Destructoid, Paste, Gamasutra and her blog, Sexy Videogameland. She can be reached at leigh_alexander1 AT yahoo DOT com.]
Categories: Column: The Aberrant Gamer
11 Comments
Heh - I'd guessed he would be your favourite character.
And indeed; though at first I was annoyed at the predictability of the bathysphere being closed off just as I reached it, thus forcing me to explore Fort Frolic itself, I was quickly enthralled by the world that Cohen had created.
However, I don't think the need to be loved was the only factor in Sander's downfall. The corruptive influence of the act of creation is a many-facetted phenomenon, and there are more nebulous forces at work here.
Compare Cohen's story to the film Capote. In his desire to create the ultimate work of art, Capote went to some pretty dark places. Yet he seems to have been motivated more by a fascination of his subject matter, the need to understand Perry Smith's psyche and furthermore the need to turn the whole thing into a masterpiece, than by a desire to be universally loved and admired (though that was certainly a part of it too). Once a genius convinces herself that she is the only one who is in the position to create a certain work of art, it becomes a moral imperative of a sort. In the middle ages it was agreed that the artist (mostly painters) was interpreting the words of God, yet in modern times, the compulsion to create seems to have become no less strong for the lack of a religious aspect.
Sander Cohen was given incredible freedom to create. With Ryan as his mecenas, he quickly became like a God, shaping his world as he saw fit. That's why he turned on his disciples - his own art was the only true thing, and their pale imitations had to be removed to be able to maintain a perfect world. He and Steinmann followed the same path - when "perfection" had been achieved in their creations, they crossed more and more boundaries to still their respective muses, always crying out for more, leading them on with the promise of immortality.
farren79 | September 7, 2007 2:41 AM
It shouldn't be too surprising that Sander was spot-on; Ken Levine has a theater background.
steve | September 7, 2007 9:47 AM
Sander Cohen MADE Rapture real for me and is the sole reason I return to Bioshock.
Cohen has the talent and shear charisma to captivate. Though I am not usually a weak-willed person I found myself pandering to his ego almost gratefully. I was his beagle, and though he did strike me (regularly) I still obeyed his every whim.
I do not believe I am alone in that I found myself literally dancing to Sander's tune when he released hordes of murderous Splicers upon me to the strains of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker. And it was beautiful. It was art.
Kast | December 23, 2007 3:43 PM
Oh, and I was directed here by a link from a Rock, Paper, Shotgun retrospective (of sorts) on Bioshock.
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/?p=794
Chris Fox | December 23, 2007 4:39 PM
Wonderful article
Sander-Fucking!-Cohen
A fantastically crafted character who made BioShock what it is. The Wild Bunny for me was a great insight into his mind. "I hop, and when I hop, I never get off the ground". His constant struggle for the creation of perfect art represented in a fanatical rant of a poem. My favourite character of ANY game, hands down.
Aaron Mcwilliam | February 12, 2008 2:20 PM
I actually found the character of Dr. Steinman more disturbing than Cohen. I remember going into Medical Pavilion and seeing the blood everywhere, including "Above all, do no harm" written in blood. He completely lost it in his desire to make people beautiful. And of course, he wound up like he did in his final scene; stabbing the woman's body he was operating on because he couldn't get her perfect.
I think he and Cohen were actually a lot a like; except Steinman used blood and the human body as his medium to create his art.
The audio logs where he talks about Aphrodite cutting him into a thousand beautiful pieces, and the one where the nurse shouts at him to "stop cutting" were pretty creepy, also.
Matt | June 12, 2008 5:08 PM
Amazing! I love this article which answered all my questions about Sander. Hmm... If only he would have survived for BioShock 2...
Greg | January 9, 2009 6:45 PM
absolutely fascinating!
Russ | January 29, 2009 1:22 AM
Sometimes I wonder if Cohen is a homo-sexual b/c everytime I play that level one of his diciples will call him a "Old fruit" , or a "fruitjob" I can perfectly understand if he is. Because his voice and his makeup. I mean, what guy in the 1960's wears makeup? Cohen kinds remind me of my 6th grade Language Arts teacher, He has the same looks, well besides the mustache and the hairstyle.. but they both kinda sound the same and they both have a creepy side to them.
Heidi | February 6, 2009 5:30 PM
Having one’s email address, IP address and name flashed in chat, threatened with bodily harm along with their children is totally beyond comprehension to me, well, what the F___!! The format is filled with anti-Semites, thugs and drug dealers, and oh I forgot, gang bangers amongst others. I have no problem with that, “whatever”. What I do have a problem with is being quantified, threatened, and harassed with child pornography “It’s an adult game for god’s sake and I HAVE THREE KIDS”! Children should not be in the rooms. The reps that allow small children in the rooms should be severely chastised or dumped completely. There are, as I suspect, codes of conduct. Many “if you have any morality” are being broke!
Tyrant behavior “In any form” is non expectable. The forming of opinions of beings “that your ilk” have limited contact with, is ludicrous. You people don’t know me or have any fringing clue as to what I am about. The fact of the matter is that I figured it out without help or literature, pure brain power “BB” so F them. There comes a point when you stop believing in comradely and do your own thing. Again, everyone should have a voice, as listed in the first paragraph, et al Nazi’s, gays and homophobes.
The information highway is fully loaded with close to home information. Having the ability to single out and follow a single person from IP address to IP address is bull shit! It wouldn’t take much to follow the trail back to the source. Anyone has the right to pursue or speak what they want on the net. That is the way it was meant to be, the creators wanted it that way.
Delusions of granger are not in scope. No malice intended towards anyone! I have invested my entire life savings in the concept “in one shape or another” and wish it the best. Keep making the money for me. Thanks for the forum and fuck BDUP.
zz | February 22, 2009 8:15 PM
Yeah, I think he is homosexual. One of his lines in the game details his meeting of one of his disciples in Marseille. He says something about how the person appreciated his art and that Cohen, in return, appreciated the way this person carried himself. And he says it with an alluding tone of voice.
Cody M. Logeland | May 2, 2009 3:40 PM