"My name is Alice ... and I remember everything."
I have to admit that I'm a little intimidated in writing this particular blog entry. Forgive the hyperbole, but I'm actually trying to be brave in writing it. Of course, being brave is relative, as I've said throughout this blog. But this blog also represents my honest feelings, and so I'm putting out those feelings here and now: I'm feeling a little scared at pouring out all this stuff for so many reasons.
It might seem strange that writing something about a fictional character could possibly be intimidating, but there it is. Likewise, it might be hard for you to believe there could be such a thing as needing to be brave to write a post on a personal blog- but it's not about the act of writing it, some fear of typing - but, intead, it's fear about confronting things in myself and putting them out on the internet where almost anyone can read them, no matter who they are in life, no matter how scary they, themselves, might end up turning out to be.
I've had 3000+ hits on my blog, though I have no idea how many different people that represents. I've seen people visit from Germany, India, France, Japan and many other locations. The idea that my words, my thoughts about my trans childhood and my heroes is getting out there like that - to whatever degree - is, in itself, pretty intimidating despite the excitement I feel at the hope that my words might inspire some transgirl who is in the position I was in earlier in my own life.
I've had 3000+ hits on my blog, though I have no idea how many different people that represents. I've seen people visit from Germany, India, France, Japan and many other locations. The idea that my words, my thoughts about my trans childhood and my heroes is getting out there like that - to whatever degree - is, in itself, pretty intimidating despite the excitement I feel at the hope that my words might inspire some transgirl who is in the position I was in earlier in my own life.
And that's a big part of if - that this is my life I'm writing about here, putting together a weird sort of piece-by-piece biography around the central element of heroic & important women who've gotten me where I am today. Ultimately, I'm telling my story. And that's scary, I'll admit.
Also a little scary is the fact that this piece represents the first in a group of articles I've imaginatively subtitled THE WOMEN OF RESIDENT EVIL, covering a variety of characters. There are multiple women I see as heroic in the series. Because the characters' histories are often so interwoven over movies and games and other media, I figured it was a good idea: since I'm going to be covering them anyway, and because the women of the series have been such a big part of my life, why not a series of articles that cross over a little bit with each other - especially if it means I don't have to cover the same ground over and over again in explaining how I got to know the characters in the first place?
Likewise, I've put this particular piece off a few times because of where I need to go in my own history to get to why the character matters to me, and that wasn't something I wanted to do, for those very same reasons.
There's a part of me that wants to keep as much of this blog as positive as possible, because the blog's about inspiration. I don't want to talk about being down, depressed, failing to live up to the sources of my inspirations as I have, as everyone does from time to time in their own lives with their own heroic ideals.
Unfortunately, dwelling on these failures to some degree is necessary to introduce where I was when I found the inspirational characters in this series of articles. But that doesn't mean my brain hasn't tried to offer up excuses for me not to write it. Believe it or not, this piece was actually intended to be the first for the blog. And then the second, and so on.
But, yeah, I'd find myself sometimes thinking, eager to somehow justify those failures, I'll write it soon, but I'm just not in the mood to go to such an unpleasant part of my history. Not today, anyway. That's cool, right? Just go with the flow until I'm in a good enough mood to write about that time.
No. No, it's not. Facing and confronting fears is a big part of what this blog is about, right? Even if they're silly fears from one's own past that have no modern relevance.
Unfortunately, dwelling on these failures to some degree is necessary to introduce where I was when I found the inspirational characters in this series of articles. But that doesn't mean my brain hasn't tried to offer up excuses for me not to write it. Believe it or not, this piece was actually intended to be the first for the blog. And then the second, and so on.
But, yeah, I'd find myself sometimes thinking, eager to somehow justify those failures, I'll write it soon, but I'm just not in the mood to go to such an unpleasant part of my history. Not today, anyway. That's cool, right? Just go with the flow until I'm in a good enough mood to write about that time.
No. No, it's not. Facing and confronting fears is a big part of what this blog is about, right? Even if they're silly fears from one's own past that have no modern relevance.
But also concerning is that this particular entry is about a character who is one of my favorite characters in any media - a heroic character who I look up to and who I found not in my childhood but in my adult life, a source of strength and inspiration for the very adult who writes right now - an immediate sort of connection, not the fond nostalgia of remembering the rosy past.
Why would that be difficult to write? It's because I want to really do justice to the character and express properly how she's helped me get through those really bad times.
Plus, it keeps all the bad stuff behind a mental fence.
Further, another reason has to do with how that inspiration also came to me when I desperately needed it on a number of psychological levels, at a time when I was feeling a serious lack of enthusiasm for the conditions in which I was living. Because of that, it's a little intimidating to think back to those times because of how mentally-unpleasant they were, how much I find myself embarrassed that I allowed myself to sink into daily monotony in a way I simply do not accept.
It may seem an overstatement, especially in light of how bad some people's situations in life can turn out to be, but the banality of what I was experiencing had a profoundly negative effect upon my psyche. But I recognize that writing all of this is good for me, and putting it out there into the world is also a way of purging it from myself - of maintaining the strength this character helped me find.
I was working in a horrible dead-end job in a retail environment (my least favorite kind of environment to work, as well as my least favorite environment in which to be). You might say that going through my day made me feel kind of like a zombie.
The monotony had gotten to me, yes, but worse was how I'd compromised so many of my deeply-held convictions about what I'd do with my life, how I wouldn't hide who I was. The desire for financial security had gotten the best of me. I'd let fear get the best of me, too, and was so concerned about those finances and maintaining my job that I endured a workplace where my co-workers were mostly people just out of high school.
Rude adolescent comments about people of color, minorities, women - it was a commonplace occurrence there. It hurt, but I put up with it, tried to ignore it. And that was part of the problem.
For all that the words hurt, worse to me was that I had resigned myself to my conditions, having graduated college but having been unable to secure any kind of reasonable employment - probably due to my fairly-useless Bachelor of Arts in English, a subject about which no one cares. See what I did there?
Yeah, it'd be incorrect to say there weren't benefits to be had. I was living in my own place with my best friend, but that didn't change the fact that I felt like I was spinning my wheels in terms of my own development, sort of maintaining a stasis while trying to keep my sanity beneath fluorescent lights. Anyone who's worked retail knows that such a path isn't easy, although I recognized to be thankful for having ANY job, a place to live.
Yeah, it'd be incorrect to say there weren't benefits to be had. I was living in my own place with my best friend, but that didn't change the fact that I felt like I was spinning my wheels in terms of my own development, sort of maintaining a stasis while trying to keep my sanity beneath fluorescent lights. Anyone who's worked retail knows that such a path isn't easy, although I recognized to be thankful for having ANY job, a place to live.
Still, I was only just barely making enough to keep myself afloat. And the work was in no way fulfilling and offered me no mental stimulation to me whatsoever, and that was beginning to drive me more than a little bit out of my head.
I kept thinking every day, over the buzz of florescence: I need inspiration. I need some kind of long-term goal - any goal.
More than anything, though, I was thinking: I need to evolve.
And that's when the world of RESIDENT EVIL came into the picture. That might seem like a strange connection on the surface, but it's actually key to how I got out of the rut I found myself in, and stayed out of it.
It wasn't the RESIDENT EVIL film series, though, that I discovered first. Those movies hadn't even come out back then. Rather, it was a game that led me into that world - specifically, the game RESIDENT EVIL 2.
It wasn't the RESIDENT EVIL film series, though, that I discovered first. Those movies hadn't even come out back then. Rather, it was a game that led me into that world - specifically, the game RESIDENT EVIL 2.
I fell in love with RESIDENT EVIL thanks to that game, in the year 1998.
I was 26 years old at the time. Now, those of you who've been regular readers of the blog know that as a young transgirl I enjoyed activities that were not stereotypically recognized as things that were "for boys," and that I still enjoy many of those activities today.
Perhaps, the less open-minded among my readers might at this point be expecting that my now-disclosed enjoyment of video games means that as I got older I wanted to play games that looked like the image below this paragraph.
You might think that, and I'll forgive you for indulging in stereotypes this one time if you promise to pay closer attention in the future and be less judgmental. Yeah? Yeah. So let's move on from that kind of stereotyped thought processes. Let's continue to evolve. Hey, there's that word again.
While the above kind of games weren't my interest, it's fair to say that the picture just above does represent what I'd thought "next-generation" gaming was like, having lived a gap in my video game consumption between the ATARI 2600 and the next-gen consoles.
So, on my 26th birthday, when my folks got me a PlayStation and a copy of RESIDENT EVIL 2, I discovered that games weren't exactly like that. "Modern" games had byzantine plot lines. They also had complicated multiple-button functions. They also had ... stories characters. Wait, what?
At this point, I think it's a good idea to address something I'm sure some fans of the blog will be thinking, or might possibly bring up to me. Yes, I understand that RESIDENT EVIL - in all its myriad forms - is very problematic. I get that. I appreciate it and I criticize it. I could write an entire blog on the problematic nature of the series in its various incarnations. But that isn't what I'm trying to get across here. What I'm trying to convey here is that this game came to me at an important time and helped me in positive ways.
I've heard it said before that women have so few fictional mainstream heroes that we make them out of less-than-desirable characters when we find them, even when the sources are problematic. That's certainly true with me. I've found heroes in sources I recognize are troubling and have incorporated the "good parts" of those characters into myself while leaving out the things I consider to be problematic. That's why, for instance, I might speak out against gun violence, but allow it as acceptable in the "right" (to me) context. It's why I love horror movies for their empowering of women while at the same time recognizing that they can be viewed as misogyny by many, and that there can be strongly misogynistic elements in a number of them, depending on how they're viewed.
So I know these issues are complex. I have my own viewpoint that I feel is an informed one. It's not the purpose of these pieces. If that's your purpose in reading this blog, I'll try to be helpful at least by saying that if you'd like to read a brilliant and fascinating analysis of the issue of gender and horror, read the book in this picture. I believe you'll be glad you did.
I don't expect you to conform to my opinions about these issues, or even the characters I profile here if they seem problematic to you. Rather, I ask you only to accept that they're heroes to me, that they mean something significant to me. If you see a character here who's violent or portrayed in a misogynistic fashion in some circumstances or who suffers from being presented with sexist imagery or treatment, feel free to let me know. I don't want to disregard those feelings in other people. If this offends you, say so. Feel free to comment. But know and recognize that these comments won't change history - they won't change the fact that the characters were important to me, and still are. The bottom line here is that I love RESIDENT EVIL and these characters are sometimes heroes to me.
One of the best parts about playing RESIDENT EVIL 2 was that it was the first modern video game I had ever played where you could choose between a male protagonist who was his own unique character, or a female protagonist who likewise had her own story and character. Previously, there were sometimes options in the prior era of games to "choose" the gender of a character but these usually had little-to-no impact on the game play or "story," mostly because both were so ridiculous in terms of how primitive they were.
When there's no story to speak of, how can there be variation? But I enjoyed the chance to be Claire Redfield in the game, especially as her character grew from uncertainty to confidence as the story progressed.
When there's no story to speak of, how can there be variation? But I enjoyed the chance to be Claire Redfield in the game, especially as her character grew from uncertainty to confidence as the story progressed.
Her growth as a character over the course of future games and appearances in other forms of the RESIDENT EVIL story has mirrored in a way my own growth in terms of confidence. I may not be out there fighting B.O.W. monsters, but I've come a long way and Claire has been there.
But this article isn't about Claire. She'll get her own article, like I said in the paragraphs above.
This is an article about a character who is known to millions for being part of RESIDENT EVIL, but who as a character hasn't appeared in any RESIDENT EVIL video games.
This is an article about a character who is known to millions for being part of RESIDENT EVIL, but who as a character hasn't appeared in any RESIDENT EVIL video games.
This is an article about Alice Abernathy. For those unfamiliar with the film series, that's her on the left, in the movie poster featured just above this paragraph and the sentence before it. In the poster (as in the movie), Alice is portrayed by the inimitable Milla Jovovich. On the right on that same poster is Michelle Rodriguez as Rain, a security agent for Umbrella, the bio-weapon manufacturing corporation that poses as a benevolent manufacturer of healing pharmaceuticals and other commodities of peace. Rain's a complex character who will likewise be getting her own article despite only appearing in two movies in the film series.
The Umbrella Corporation is the main antagonist for much of the RESIDENT EVIL series and all the movies. The stories of the games focus on the struggles of a select few individuals as they fight against - what else? - zombie monsters while also trying to survive the onslaught of Umbrella's efforts to control the creatures and silence anyone who knows about their true motives and actions.
The Umbrella Corporation is the main antagonist for much of the RESIDENT EVIL series and all the movies. The stories of the games focus on the struggles of a select few individuals as they fight against - what else? - zombie monsters while also trying to survive the onslaught of Umbrella's efforts to control the creatures and silence anyone who knows about their true motives and actions.
RESIDENT EVIL was adapted into the movie described in the above movie poster; it came out in the year 2002. That year is significant for a lot of different reasons. But what you need to really see there is that I talked about discovering the world of RESIDENT EVIL while in a dead-end job and described that downward turn in my mental well-being as having occurred back in 1998 on my 26th birthday.
Despite my need to evolve, and despite all the evolving going on in these video games thanks to the T-Virus (and all the myriad other viruses), I was still in the same dead-end job four years later. I still dealt with the humiliation every day.
And the attacks on the World Trade Center by organized terrorists had happened in the meantime. I don't say that coldly, or simply to punctuate this part of the piece, but rather because it's essential to knowing where I was at this time in my life, at a point where I reached rather suddenly the nadir of my sense of loathing my own personal condition and served as a defining moment when I extended that loathing out toward the rest of the world, too. It's important to mention because it puts this all into a broader cultural perspective, but it also ties in with what happened in my own mind with regard to how I saw myself and other people. Because, at that point, in that moment in the year 2001, any sense of optimism on my part just outright went to pieces. My I grew to feel contempt for not just myself, but toward everyone. I began to regard the world as a hideous place, an ugly place full of multiple sides in pointless conflicts attacking each other, and saw it as a condition I expected to continue and continue with no sign of it stopping.
In short, I started thinking real people were in some ways acting even worse than fictional zombies. Zombies did what they did out of some kind of mindless instinct. People in the real world had turned even worse than the worst horror monsters - they were killing each other and cheering, everyone - in my perception. I had to watch people in my own family change into people I didn't recognize. I had to see neighbors change into people I didn't know. I couldn't handle it and it was mentally destroying me.
Of course, I knew then and know now that the attack on the World Trade Center by terrorists isn't as easy to understand as the American media tried to make it out to be. But that's not what I'm trying to say here. What I'm trying to say is that the way the ugliness of the world became so pronounced, so much a part of my existence, so in-my-face - I couldn't handle it. I just couldn't. Worst was the subconscious realization that these people were not changing because of how they were reacting, but rather revealing their true selves as I saw it. Vicious racism flourished in America, and I understood with depressing sobriety that this wasn't a case of people becoming racists, but rather embracing the racism inherent in themselves, embracing their hatred toward another to build themselves up into false pride. And that, in turn, convinced me at the time that, in America, there could never be tolerance toward people like myself, because the hate toward transwomen
See what I mean about not wanting to revisit this time in my past? It makes me think of a time when I'd basically given up on most other people. And through all of this, there was also a sense that the heroes who had guided me through so much of my early life were somehow totally muted by where the world had gone, as if their relevance had faltered.
I, too, was in a downward spiral where I was abandoning my friendships and isolating myself, living online, avoiding dealing with the horrors I had to hear about day-to-day. I had even stopped doing the most rudimentary things for enjoyment - I wasn't even playing video games. I spent all my time either working at my drudgery-level job or sitting online at home, reading nonsensical fan fiction - anything to avoid coping with real life.
So, when I heard about the adaptation of RESIDENT EVIL coming out as a movie, I wasn't really all that interested at first, despite my love of the series. I had, for the moment, abandoned heroes. I had no stomach for going out in public or being with other people. I had determined that my belief that the world could evolve into a place where human beings restricted violence to fiction wasn't even remotely possible in any time, much less my lifetime.
Even when I read in a positive newspaper review that Milla Jovovich, a woman I respect and admire as an actress to quite a degree, was playing the lead character, I couldn't drum up the optimism to go see it. Even though it was, really, just a movie, I was in a place where any disappointment was magnified a hundred times, to the point where the slightest negative event felt like a weighty crisis to me. That's one of the definitions of depression as I understand it: the slightest efforts or obstructions feel like life-destroying events. But then a weird thing happened.
Like a viral outbreak, I started hearing from people I hadn't talked to in a long time - people who knew how crazy I was about RESIDENT EVIL. Also, my co-workers who knew my fondness for the series were telling me I should see the movie, should get out of the house because they could tell I was suffering so much on a mental level.
In short, people who I had either written off or ignored were contacting me - out of concern for me, I suspect - encouraging me to get out and have some fun, do something - anything - to get myself out of the house. For a long time, I didn't even reply. I felt like I didn't have the ENERGY to reply. But, over time, I was too worn out even to argue with people trying to help me keep from being so worn down in the first place. So I managed to work myself out of the house, to convince myself to mumble that I wanted a movie ticket, to interact with a crowd in the sense of sitting in a theater and burying myself in a theater seat, feeling totally alone but also feeling totally surrounded.
I want to make it clear here that I'm not trying to suggest that RESIDENT EVIL cured me of my depression. It didn't. I did that. But what the movie did do was serve as the first time I'd gone out to the theater to see a movie in years, and also of course the first time I'd willingly gone out into the sphere of any public event where others were involved in years. And the fact that it was a positive experience? Well, that was just extra icing.
And then, there's Alice.
In the movie, Alice's name isn't even uttered by other characters. She has no memory when the story begins - she's a blank slate. But that worked for me. I was feeling a similar state of disorientation in my own life. I felt blank a lot of the time, unsure of how I'd gotten to where I was.
In my case, I had reacted by turning inward on myself, by refusing to interact, by refusing to take steps to acknowledge others. I'd felt tortured by an overt, autistic sensitivity to events that were beyond my understanding and control in the world. And, as a result, I'd buckled.
Alice didn't buckle.
Alice's life, world, existence - it's all torn to pieces over the course of the film. She finds out that everything she believes is false, that the people she trusts can't be trusted, that the life she created is a lie. I understood that as I was watching. I got that. I'd felt that, myself. But then, I got to watch this character, portrayed by this amazing actress, react to all that by fighting back, by learning to trust someone new, to fight for herself and others - to find the strength to lead other people even though she wasn't even sure of herself as to who she was when that leadership was required.
Here's the ending of the first film, summing up a lot of what Alice is experiencing - the disorientation, the isolation - and her absolute and total refusal to surrender under those conditions.
And as that ending scene hit, I felt a surge of energy flow through me that I hadn't felt in a long time - and it was inspiration and looking forward to something. Sure, it was just a movie. Sure, it was just a zombie horror film. But I found myself anticipating something, and that was a change. I was anticipating another adventure with Alice Abernathy fighting the good fight against the hordes of evil, against Umbrella. And it was enough to get the ball rolling. I was anxious for something in my future for the first time in a long time, instead of being anxious ABOUT my future.
The fact that my depression was caused by a very real sequence of events and circumstances, versus finding inspiration in total fiction, was actually vital to the entire situation. By finding that inspiration in a fiction, I was able to soothe myself without ripping off the scab that had formed on my psyche. It was a different world, a different universe - with different rules. And the movie changed my attitude enough for me to seek out real life healing. The fiction created the spark. But, like Alice, I had to fight through my real world agonies to find hope again.
And when that new adventure for Alice came in the year 2004, I found myself having no trouble going to the theater to see it. I'd worked out those problems. Trouble was - I got physically ill when the second movie came out and wasn't ABLE to go see it due to physical issues that kept me at home until the movie had left theaters. So I had to wait for it to come out on DVD. But not even that caused me any problems psychologically - I knew I wasn't staying home out of a choice to avoid people. I was staying home because I had to. Just knowing my willingness to go out into the world compared to where I was a few years before helped me feel proud - and Alice was a part of that, if not the actual cause.
And as my own confidence grew in my own life, Alice grew and changed, too. She developed powers and abilities that have come and gone in the series, thanks to her unique status as the one person who properly bonded with the T-Virus, but more so is her evolution in terms of developing as a character from that blank slate whose life was revealed to be a lie all the way through to her decision to bring down Umbrella and rescue the world from the monsters threatening to destroy it. It's silly, high drama - but Alice's over-the-top exploits and refusal to surrender followed with my own dramas in my own life as I refused to surrender to depression and anxiety.
She wouldn't quit as her own body became changed by the effects of the T-Virus, and I too refused to quit as I dealt with a long-term illness I have since defeated.
But in a strange parallel, we both had to deal with coming to terms with these differences in ourselves - albeit in no way connected to each other. It was a "Huh" kind of thing, an interesting coincidence - and it made the chance to feel inspiration from the character a little more profound on my part.
Even by 2007, after many trips to the hospital on my part because of the same issues that kept me from seeing the 1st sequel in the theater, I refused to give in, kept fighting back to recover in my own real life situations, and went to see the 3rd movie in theaters again at a time when I had just gotten over my latest bout of the illness.
And as the drama got weirder and more bizarre in the series, Alice kept on fighting back, changing form a broken individual in part 1 to a courgeous warrior in part 2 to an outright supernatural, psychic superhero by part 3.
I followed through it all as my own life improved even as the world of Alice's movie heroics got worse and worse.
Of course, there had to be a cliff-hanger ending there, too, and one that brought the series to a whole different level as far as leaving me wondering where it was going to go. And it went there.
By the time the fourth movie, RESIDENT EVIL: AFTERLIFE came out in 2010, Alice has become the impossibly unstoppable hero of legendary proportions, in the sense that she's become an entirely adaptable character to a variety of stories the way only classic action heroes can: by that film, she's a psychic ninja assassin with an army of superhero clones and can periodically warp reality while hacking machines with her mind. It's totally ridiculous, but I've loved Alice's evolution to the ultimate movie superhero beyond the boundaries of any reality because Alice has become one of those legendary heroic characters who can be anything, do anything, much as I've recognized I can be and do anything. Alice, you see, evolves. She's not defined by what she was in the last movie. She's not just "a woman super hero" - she's a super hero. She's joined the ranks of the everyheroes of endless male-dominated action pictures, and done so without her gender being the focus of that inclusion. She's not being included as a token woman or to make some kind of social commentary on gender. She's just a hero.
She's simply awesome. And that's enough.
What's also awesome in this movie series is the way Alice's opponents aren't simply trumped-up male archetypes of aggression for her to knock down.
To be sure, there are plenty of those, but the series also features strong female adversaries and allies for Alice to work with and against over the course of the films, as the ending for the fourth film illustrates.
And they, too, are all awesome.
So Alice has continued to evolve, and I continue to evolve in my own life, as well. She moves into the venue of 3D, I get over my own afflictions in my own life to a point where I'm now aware of what was wrong and have taken steps to fix it. But there was a time that seems like fiction to me now where I didn't think it was possible.
I didn't think I could work at the job I do now, but I do - and I'm financially comfortable and live in an environment of mutual respect with co-workers who know me as I am and understand me and treat me accordingly. I'm financially stable. I'm no longer depressed and I have the confidence to put my words out there online and live in the real world at the same time (though this piece has eaten a lot of that real world time over the last few days).
But I did all those things. I accomplished every goal I've set out to so far in my life, but there's always another hill to climb and I'm honestly thankful for that. I couldn't live in stasis. And I need my cliff-hangers in real life, to a degree.
What's also part of the evolution of Alice's character from the first film to the most recent comes in the form of increasingly intense combat sequences that spotlight the character's prowess in a way that's not based on gender the way you'd see it in, say, Zack Snyder's SUCKER PUNCH.
Rather than hypersexualize Alice, the films portray her as if she were any other action hero. And it's a good thing, too, because she's had to become rather skilled at handling zombies by the fifth movie. Seeing Alice presented in a way that isn't specific to her being a woman is inspirational in an abstract way, because it indicates actual progress.
I'll let the scene below illustrate.
Notice how this long action scene is shot - it's filmed the same way you'd expect to see these incidents depicted in, for example, one of the films in Jason Statham's THE TRANSPORTER series. There's not an excessive focus on making Milla pose in particular ways at particular angles that have more to do with titillation than with filming the action the way that makes the most sense for the sequence. Even a few scenes featuring nudity throughout the series aren't sexualized. It's a welcome relief for me.
Now, supposedly, there's going to be only one more RESIDENT EVIL movie featuring Alice. The cliffhanger ending of EXTINCTION sure makes that seem likely, aside from being insanely epic and ridiculous. Notice the parallels to the ending of the first movie - but see how much it's evolved into something so totally and completely insane.
That's the fun of the series, watching it grow and thrive and watching Alice become a legendary heroic character in the same fashion as so many classic movie heroes, defined by her actions and not her identity as a woman. It's a positive change, seeing a woman play the role of action hero without that gender-bias that alters the material so profoundly. To me, it means that our subconscious perceptions have, in one way at least, evolved. Evolution is the key. I can't wait to see how the sixth movie ends Alice's story. And in my own life, I can't wait to see what happens to me next.
In short, people who I had either written off or ignored were contacting me - out of concern for me, I suspect - encouraging me to get out and have some fun, do something - anything - to get myself out of the house. For a long time, I didn't even reply. I felt like I didn't have the ENERGY to reply. But, over time, I was too worn out even to argue with people trying to help me keep from being so worn down in the first place. So I managed to work myself out of the house, to convince myself to mumble that I wanted a movie ticket, to interact with a crowd in the sense of sitting in a theater and burying myself in a theater seat, feeling totally alone but also feeling totally surrounded.
I want to make it clear here that I'm not trying to suggest that RESIDENT EVIL cured me of my depression. It didn't. I did that. But what the movie did do was serve as the first time I'd gone out to the theater to see a movie in years, and also of course the first time I'd willingly gone out into the sphere of any public event where others were involved in years. And the fact that it was a positive experience? Well, that was just extra icing.
And then, there's Alice.
In the movie, Alice's name isn't even uttered by other characters. She has no memory when the story begins - she's a blank slate. But that worked for me. I was feeling a similar state of disorientation in my own life. I felt blank a lot of the time, unsure of how I'd gotten to where I was.
In my case, I had reacted by turning inward on myself, by refusing to interact, by refusing to take steps to acknowledge others. I'd felt tortured by an overt, autistic sensitivity to events that were beyond my understanding and control in the world. And, as a result, I'd buckled.
Alice didn't buckle.
Alice's life, world, existence - it's all torn to pieces over the course of the film. She finds out that everything she believes is false, that the people she trusts can't be trusted, that the life she created is a lie. I understood that as I was watching. I got that. I'd felt that, myself. But then, I got to watch this character, portrayed by this amazing actress, react to all that by fighting back, by learning to trust someone new, to fight for herself and others - to find the strength to lead other people even though she wasn't even sure of herself as to who she was when that leadership was required.
Here's the ending of the first film, summing up a lot of what Alice is experiencing - the disorientation, the isolation - and her absolute and total refusal to surrender under those conditions.
And as that ending scene hit, I felt a surge of energy flow through me that I hadn't felt in a long time - and it was inspiration and looking forward to something. Sure, it was just a movie. Sure, it was just a zombie horror film. But I found myself anticipating something, and that was a change. I was anticipating another adventure with Alice Abernathy fighting the good fight against the hordes of evil, against Umbrella. And it was enough to get the ball rolling. I was anxious for something in my future for the first time in a long time, instead of being anxious ABOUT my future.
The fact that my depression was caused by a very real sequence of events and circumstances, versus finding inspiration in total fiction, was actually vital to the entire situation. By finding that inspiration in a fiction, I was able to soothe myself without ripping off the scab that had formed on my psyche. It was a different world, a different universe - with different rules. And the movie changed my attitude enough for me to seek out real life healing. The fiction created the spark. But, like Alice, I had to fight through my real world agonies to find hope again.
And when that new adventure for Alice came in the year 2004, I found myself having no trouble going to the theater to see it. I'd worked out those problems. Trouble was - I got physically ill when the second movie came out and wasn't ABLE to go see it due to physical issues that kept me at home until the movie had left theaters. So I had to wait for it to come out on DVD. But not even that caused me any problems psychologically - I knew I wasn't staying home out of a choice to avoid people. I was staying home because I had to. Just knowing my willingness to go out into the world compared to where I was a few years before helped me feel proud - and Alice was a part of that, if not the actual cause.
But I could find inspiration in heroes again, and I did in Alice.
And as she fought her way through this second movie, this is where my recognition of her presence as an important hero in my life became locked into my psyche, and led me to return to the heroes of my past as well, feeling optimism again, feeling hopeful - not because of Alice curing my problems, but because the movies featuring her struggles became a part of my life, a new chapter every few years becoming sort of an event, revisiting the characters and watching as Alice has to not only protect herself and the growing cast of supporting characters from Umbrella and its monsters - but also the subplots in which Alice's true nature is explored and she must decide what kind of person she is.
She's a reluctant hero who isn't defined by her gender but rather by her sense of self-identity, thrilling to cliff-hanger endings that would have me rushing back to find out what happened next in this world, in those characters' lives.
And as she fought her way through this second movie, this is where my recognition of her presence as an important hero in my life became locked into my psyche, and led me to return to the heroes of my past as well, feeling optimism again, feeling hopeful - not because of Alice curing my problems, but because the movies featuring her struggles became a part of my life, a new chapter every few years becoming sort of an event, revisiting the characters and watching as Alice has to not only protect herself and the growing cast of supporting characters from Umbrella and its monsters - but also the subplots in which Alice's true nature is explored and she must decide what kind of person she is.
She's a reluctant hero who isn't defined by her gender but rather by her sense of self-identity, thrilling to cliff-hanger endings that would have me rushing back to find out what happened next in this world, in those characters' lives.
And as my own confidence grew in my own life, Alice grew and changed, too. She developed powers and abilities that have come and gone in the series, thanks to her unique status as the one person who properly bonded with the T-Virus, but more so is her evolution in terms of developing as a character from that blank slate whose life was revealed to be a lie all the way through to her decision to bring down Umbrella and rescue the world from the monsters threatening to destroy it. It's silly, high drama - but Alice's over-the-top exploits and refusal to surrender followed with my own dramas in my own life as I refused to surrender to depression and anxiety.
She wouldn't quit as her own body became changed by the effects of the T-Virus, and I too refused to quit as I dealt with a long-term illness I have since defeated.
But in a strange parallel, we both had to deal with coming to terms with these differences in ourselves - albeit in no way connected to each other. It was a "Huh" kind of thing, an interesting coincidence - and it made the chance to feel inspiration from the character a little more profound on my part.
And as the drama got weirder and more bizarre in the series, Alice kept on fighting back, changing form a broken individual in part 1 to a courgeous warrior in part 2 to an outright supernatural, psychic superhero by part 3.
I followed through it all as my own life improved even as the world of Alice's movie heroics got worse and worse.
Of course, there had to be a cliff-hanger ending there, too, and one that brought the series to a whole different level as far as leaving me wondering where it was going to go. And it went there.
By the time the fourth movie, RESIDENT EVIL: AFTERLIFE came out in 2010, Alice has become the impossibly unstoppable hero of legendary proportions, in the sense that she's become an entirely adaptable character to a variety of stories the way only classic action heroes can: by that film, she's a psychic ninja assassin with an army of superhero clones and can periodically warp reality while hacking machines with her mind. It's totally ridiculous, but I've loved Alice's evolution to the ultimate movie superhero beyond the boundaries of any reality because Alice has become one of those legendary heroic characters who can be anything, do anything, much as I've recognized I can be and do anything. Alice, you see, evolves. She's not defined by what she was in the last movie. She's not just "a woman super hero" - she's a super hero. She's joined the ranks of the everyheroes of endless male-dominated action pictures, and done so without her gender being the focus of that inclusion. She's not being included as a token woman or to make some kind of social commentary on gender. She's just a hero.
She's simply awesome. And that's enough.
What's also awesome in this movie series is the way Alice's opponents aren't simply trumped-up male archetypes of aggression for her to knock down.
To be sure, there are plenty of those, but the series also features strong female adversaries and allies for Alice to work with and against over the course of the films, as the ending for the fourth film illustrates.
And they, too, are all awesome.
So Alice has continued to evolve, and I continue to evolve in my own life, as well. She moves into the venue of 3D, I get over my own afflictions in my own life to a point where I'm now aware of what was wrong and have taken steps to fix it. But there was a time that seems like fiction to me now where I didn't think it was possible.
I didn't think I could work at the job I do now, but I do - and I'm financially comfortable and live in an environment of mutual respect with co-workers who know me as I am and understand me and treat me accordingly. I'm financially stable. I'm no longer depressed and I have the confidence to put my words out there online and live in the real world at the same time (though this piece has eaten a lot of that real world time over the last few days).
But I did all those things. I accomplished every goal I've set out to so far in my life, but there's always another hill to climb and I'm honestly thankful for that. I couldn't live in stasis. And I need my cliff-hangers in real life, to a degree.
What's also part of the evolution of Alice's character from the first film to the most recent comes in the form of increasingly intense combat sequences that spotlight the character's prowess in a way that's not based on gender the way you'd see it in, say, Zack Snyder's SUCKER PUNCH.
Rather than hypersexualize Alice, the films portray her as if she were any other action hero. And it's a good thing, too, because she's had to become rather skilled at handling zombies by the fifth movie. Seeing Alice presented in a way that isn't specific to her being a woman is inspirational in an abstract way, because it indicates actual progress.
I'll let the scene below illustrate.
Notice how this long action scene is shot - it's filmed the same way you'd expect to see these incidents depicted in, for example, one of the films in Jason Statham's THE TRANSPORTER series. There's not an excessive focus on making Milla pose in particular ways at particular angles that have more to do with titillation than with filming the action the way that makes the most sense for the sequence. Even a few scenes featuring nudity throughout the series aren't sexualized. It's a welcome relief for me.
Now, supposedly, there's going to be only one more RESIDENT EVIL movie featuring Alice. The cliffhanger ending of EXTINCTION sure makes that seem likely, aside from being insanely epic and ridiculous. Notice the parallels to the ending of the first movie - but see how much it's evolved into something so totally and completely insane.
That's the fun of the series, watching it grow and thrive and watching Alice become a legendary heroic character in the same fashion as so many classic movie heroes, defined by her actions and not her identity as a woman. It's a positive change, seeing a woman play the role of action hero without that gender-bias that alters the material so profoundly. To me, it means that our subconscious perceptions have, in one way at least, evolved. Evolution is the key. I can't wait to see how the sixth movie ends Alice's story. And in my own life, I can't wait to see what happens to me next.
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