12th May 2010, 6:15 PM
INDEEDY.
Persona is very experimental, there's some hidden messages right from the start. The fact that she's an "actress" (all women feel this way anyway) and loses her ability to voice an opinion, communicate, she's sealed herself up and the uncommon name "Alma" (Final Fantasy Tactics taught me this one) which is sort of like "soul" in Spanish. As the nurse, she is repairing our actress's soul. The hidden story starts getting much more complicated: The opening series of shots is important, it's basically the movie in a nutshell.
Sexuality plays a major role. In Silent Hill: Shattered Memories the Dr. asks you to find the images that are the most sexual to you and then reveals them for what they really are. That you cant love sex without embracing death, since sex is the act of love and life. It's in this movie too, remember how she (Alma) freaks out around sex? A woman with too much on her shoulders and/or trying too hard to ignore who she is will lack her identity and have no clue how to percieve sexual thoughts. Just like children have a hard time trying to fathom sex beyond touching and exploring because they have no idea what they want (and they dont want to get hurt).
Alma is the total opposit, weee sex! and she confesses that she had a hot threesome with two boys, and if i remember correctly she was married at the time, or had a boyfriend.Now in her adult life she is scared of sex, like that child who got hurt. Alma never shuts up either - she's the voice our actress as well as Alma's. Here's where it gets tricky...
The paradigm of the relationship is simple: One girl is afraid of everything and has 'acted' her way through life, never truly experiencing anything. While Alma cant help but be herself, crashing through life and soaking the experiences in. They're literally polar opposites of the same person.
It's the same person with different personas. "When I look in the mirror, I think it wouldn't be hard to be you. You could be me, but your soul is so big it would burst out!" Alma talking to our actress. Alma is so upset about her orgy fun, she thinks she 'ruined' her soul. Then when she's delivering the letters to our actresses distraught husband in town, Alma cant help herself and reads the letters.
"Alma's a lesbian and had orgies." (paraphrasing)
Now the whole film is turned on its ear - Now Alma confronted with her own guilt and the anger towards our actress wants to make her life miserable. After all, she's never told a soul about her past and she could only feel calm enough to do so with a person that, by appearances, has no opinion, no voice. But remember - She's an *actress*
What happened? the personas broke down, this woman's head is exploding with conflict. The film literaly breaks and its essense spills across the screen. (keep the halloween kids in mind). When we come back we're in ghost world because one persona is existing without the other, when our actress makes contact with a crying Alma *ZIP* we're back in motion again.
"I know how rotten you are inside!" AYE? ...AYE? Think of Alma looking at the scars on the actresses face after she threw that water. Alma is looking at her OWN scars.
Remember the husband of the actress, he thinks Alma is his wife. We think it's just because of circumstance, lighting, angles, no sir. And suddenly the husband is doing Alma while wife watches (reverse cuckold?) and the trick that gives it away: The image we see of the actress is becoming blurry.
Alma had a disgusting orgy, getting pregnant and aborting her baby.
The actress was told she had no motherly instinct so she forced a pregnancy with husband, worried about what the pregnancy would do to her life, her body, she tried to abort it but it survived (the little boy and the children in the halloween costumes). Alma was created by the actress as an escape, a life where the child was aborted and had freedom.
"I'm just here to help you!" Alma cries.
In a panic of scenes, the actress becomes insane. Alma gashes at her arms (remember "comparing hands?") Reality is crashing down around them both - When the dizzy of panic is done, Alma leaves and sees the actual film crew filming the movie. Our actress has killed her own persona that she used for protection.
Her protection gone, she is flooded with her impregnable walls, her reality destroyed she becomes catatonic and begins to slip in to a vegetable state. At the hospital, her persona appears again and tells her "Nothing. Listen to me very carefully... nothing."
Our actresses mind is blank, she will live the rest of her physical life in a hospital bed. But her mind is gone... "Good, that is how it should be." The film falls to pieces an destroys itself in front of our eyes.
The husband was real but never physically there, Alma and the actress are the same person re-living her life from the perspective of her 'prison' that she made. To quote another favorite of mine, Barfly, "a prison with golden bars." The child she had, I cannot tell if he is dead, is dying, or was never to be actually seen by the mother. He is horribly thin like death, and we see him in the first opening shots trying to touch his mother in the hospital bed. But is it what our actress imagined, or did it actually happen? The genius of it is that only she knows, her "impregnable" (word play) mind, wont even let her own audience in that far.
Good choice for film, it's even better if you have a little weed and some friends over to discuss it. Too much weed and you'll miss the point entirely but a little bit will relax you enough to kinda absorb it all. It's not a film, or a movie. It's some kind of art, like Kubrick at his best. It's not to 'entertain' you, it's literally a window in to the events of a very shallow and disturbed woman who tried to heal herself in all the wrong ways.
When you beat SM post what ending you got, I wont spoil anything but get ready for awesome real-time gameplay cinematics. Just remember to "Look". ;D
Persona is very experimental, there's some hidden messages right from the start. The fact that she's an "actress" (all women feel this way anyway) and loses her ability to voice an opinion, communicate, she's sealed herself up and the uncommon name "Alma" (Final Fantasy Tactics taught me this one) which is sort of like "soul" in Spanish. As the nurse, she is repairing our actress's soul. The hidden story starts getting much more complicated: The opening series of shots is important, it's basically the movie in a nutshell.
Sexuality plays a major role. In Silent Hill: Shattered Memories the Dr. asks you to find the images that are the most sexual to you and then reveals them for what they really are. That you cant love sex without embracing death, since sex is the act of love and life. It's in this movie too, remember how she (Alma) freaks out around sex? A woman with too much on her shoulders and/or trying too hard to ignore who she is will lack her identity and have no clue how to percieve sexual thoughts. Just like children have a hard time trying to fathom sex beyond touching and exploring because they have no idea what they want (and they dont want to get hurt).
Alma is the total opposit, weee sex! and she confesses that she had a hot threesome with two boys, and if i remember correctly she was married at the time, or had a boyfriend.Now in her adult life she is scared of sex, like that child who got hurt. Alma never shuts up either - she's the voice our actress as well as Alma's. Here's where it gets tricky...
The paradigm of the relationship is simple: One girl is afraid of everything and has 'acted' her way through life, never truly experiencing anything. While Alma cant help but be herself, crashing through life and soaking the experiences in. They're literally polar opposites of the same person.
It's the same person with different personas. "When I look in the mirror, I think it wouldn't be hard to be you. You could be me, but your soul is so big it would burst out!" Alma talking to our actress. Alma is so upset about her orgy fun, she thinks she 'ruined' her soul. Then when she's delivering the letters to our actresses distraught husband in town, Alma cant help herself and reads the letters.
"Alma's a lesbian and had orgies." (paraphrasing)
Now the whole film is turned on its ear - Now Alma confronted with her own guilt and the anger towards our actress wants to make her life miserable. After all, she's never told a soul about her past and she could only feel calm enough to do so with a person that, by appearances, has no opinion, no voice. But remember - She's an *actress*
What happened? the personas broke down, this woman's head is exploding with conflict. The film literaly breaks and its essense spills across the screen. (keep the halloween kids in mind). When we come back we're in ghost world because one persona is existing without the other, when our actress makes contact with a crying Alma *ZIP* we're back in motion again.
"I know how rotten you are inside!" AYE? ...AYE? Think of Alma looking at the scars on the actresses face after she threw that water. Alma is looking at her OWN scars.
Remember the husband of the actress, he thinks Alma is his wife. We think it's just because of circumstance, lighting, angles, no sir. And suddenly the husband is doing Alma while wife watches (reverse cuckold?) and the trick that gives it away: The image we see of the actress is becoming blurry.
Alma had a disgusting orgy, getting pregnant and aborting her baby.
The actress was told she had no motherly instinct so she forced a pregnancy with husband, worried about what the pregnancy would do to her life, her body, she tried to abort it but it survived (the little boy and the children in the halloween costumes). Alma was created by the actress as an escape, a life where the child was aborted and had freedom.
"I'm just here to help you!" Alma cries.
In a panic of scenes, the actress becomes insane. Alma gashes at her arms (remember "comparing hands?") Reality is crashing down around them both - When the dizzy of panic is done, Alma leaves and sees the actual film crew filming the movie. Our actress has killed her own persona that she used for protection.
Her protection gone, she is flooded with her impregnable walls, her reality destroyed she becomes catatonic and begins to slip in to a vegetable state. At the hospital, her persona appears again and tells her "Nothing. Listen to me very carefully... nothing."
Our actresses mind is blank, she will live the rest of her physical life in a hospital bed. But her mind is gone... "Good, that is how it should be." The film falls to pieces an destroys itself in front of our eyes.
The husband was real but never physically there, Alma and the actress are the same person re-living her life from the perspective of her 'prison' that she made. To quote another favorite of mine, Barfly, "a prison with golden bars." The child she had, I cannot tell if he is dead, is dying, or was never to be actually seen by the mother. He is horribly thin like death, and we see him in the first opening shots trying to touch his mother in the hospital bed. But is it what our actress imagined, or did it actually happen? The genius of it is that only she knows, her "impregnable" (word play) mind, wont even let her own audience in that far.
Good choice for film, it's even better if you have a little weed and some friends over to discuss it. Too much weed and you'll miss the point entirely but a little bit will relax you enough to kinda absorb it all. It's not a film, or a movie. It's some kind of art, like Kubrick at his best. It's not to 'entertain' you, it's literally a window in to the events of a very shallow and disturbed woman who tried to heal herself in all the wrong ways.
When you beat SM post what ending you got, I wont spoil anything but get ready for awesome real-time gameplay cinematics. Just remember to "Look". ;D