Scream Like You Deserve It

It Takes a Lot to Be a Loser with All Your Might

If you know me, you know one of my big things is that violence has a tone. The short version of this is that there’s more separating the violence of Tom and Jerry cartoons from than that of Eastern Promises than the amount of blood hitting the walls. While that itself seems ridiculous and self-evident right off the bat, you have to consider points finer than blunt. Namely, yes, of course, Tom and Jerry has a cat whacking a mouse with a fire poker and each swing leaving a mouse-shaped indent in its length, while Eastern Promises has a scene where a nude man fights off assassins armed with knives in a bathhouse. This is a discrepancy, to a degree where not noticing it is a lot like not noticing the Dairy Queen you’re in is also on fire. In either case, you might not see it at first, but eventually the fire reaches the dining room and you see Viggo Mortensen’s balls.

The point is, there’s more to the violence in two pieces of media beyond what the ESRB puts on the back of boxes these days. Yes, there’s not a lot of blood in Tom and Jerry, but there’s also not an extreme close up of the faces of two men locked in desperate, mutually terrified, mortal combat. It’s like how people both lose limbs on-screen in both Star Wars and Hannibal, and yet handle even something as dramatically graphic as a maiming in dramatically different ways. In one, the limb hits the ground and there’s a cutaway; in the other, the limb becomes a prop in a scene where people are casually eating it, discussing other things in the plot.

Arriving at our terminal station: Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus could have done a lot of different things in terms of direction for its enemy voice cast and it made the perfect tonal choice to how it handles violence toward its antagonists, the Nazis.

Wolfenstein 2 is a game where the violence in it happens in two tones. There’s the reality tone, which is what it shows you when real people suffer violence in its world. It’s where the game strives to capture the stark feeling of grim finality that comes when someone crosses a line they shouldn’t have and the sinking nausea that comes when you start considering the damage done. In this tone, it succeeds utterly, at times playing a staring contest with the player that is hard to win, because it shows you some really awful things that you don’t want to look at. Then it takes a cheap shot at you when you think it’s over, because it knows the fash loves to take cheap shots.

Then there’s the catharsis tone, and it’s most often the mode the game is in when the player is in control and bringing the full hurt on the enemy. It’s catharsis because Wolfenstein 2 is pursuing a very specific audience beyond the general appeal of a mass market FPS, namely, people who fantasize about how rad it would be to be an Allied advance personified as charming lug. Wolf 2 does this better than anyone could have hoped for, making it very clear that it’s cool with you even if the advance you were fantasizing as happened to be one made by the Red Army. It’s in this state that violence stops being something real and starts being something viscerally entertaining. It’s not just that violence has begun happening to Nazis instead of actual human beings, it’s that violence has stopped being watching a friend’s body twitch after he was shot once in the head, it’s that now it’s some fascist dick flying through the air, whose limbs that haven’t been blown off are now on fire, screaming “DOOUUAAAAUUUUGHHHHHHUUUUGHH!!”

Every single enemy in Wolfenstein 2 is an idiot loser asshole. This is not a generalization based on the fact that they’re all Nazis and Klansmen, though that would still be valid. Regardless, I know this, and it’s not because my German is good enough to read the character portrayals in the performances; it’s because I heard the sounds they made when they died. There’s the ones who died having never felt real pain before that moment, because first their first scream was just shock, and the second one a split second afterward had a distinct quality of ‘oh no, this is much worse than I thought it would be, I have regrets!’ There’s the ones who died without a single thought in their thumb-heads, because the most they had to ofter their own end was a confused gurgle. There’s the ones who didn’t think they’d get shot up in a hallway by a Polish Jew from Texas, because they had the gumption to try hard but could still only manage an indigestive “aaarrrrughhhughhhhh” as their last words. My favorite are the ones that managed a moment of panic before a melee kill, their abortive yelp perfectly illustrating that their final neuron firings were that of a deer-in-the-headlight “ooooch meinnnn GOOOOOOOOOTT” before the hatchet hit their brain.

I know all of this, because these are things the German cast chose to tell us via death knell.

Now, it’s sort of morbid to say that the best work an entire wing of a production did was in the ways they died, and it’s also selling their effort short. There’s a lot of really amazing lines and conversations in Wolf 2, and a lot of them are spoken in German. You’ve probably heard about one of my favorites, where a pair of Nazi nobodies have a heartfelt conversation about how hateful and violent the left are in their rhetoric and activism, before segueing casually into talk of their next assignment on a death squad in New Orleans. Goes without saying, the script casts the role of the fascists that of a bunch of weaponized idiots, with those too smart to follow blindly being too cowardly to resist the social pressures of fascism. Or too well off from it to even want to.

Thing is, you have to give it to a bunch of people who go in so hard, they ensure what they provoke with their performance is only an amused contempt, right to their literal end. There’s no attempt at having a maudlin “why you kill me??” moment, no attempt to cry the crocodile tears of ‘it’d just be better if we could get along instead’ of Wise, Moderate Liberalism. What there is, instead, is a guy going “GUAWK” in a really satisfying way when I hit him with a hatchet so hard, his hat flies off. There’s also a submachine gun attachment that causes the bullets to come out as red-hot, semi-fluid nails that light wounded enemies on fire, causing them to go “Ah! AH! AHAHAAAAAAHH! HAAAAAA!!” before they burn to ash. Ditto what happens when you vaporize one with a laser, except they get abruptly cut off by the nifty vaporization effect that literally wipes them out of existence. How considerate- self-cleaning dead Nazis!

Nothing in their performance is anything more or less than a fatal clownshow, menagerie of the worst possible things you could allow to escape you in your final moments. These are the sounds that rob a person of dignity even if their death was utterly unspeakable; even if your legs are blown to uneven stumps, there’s no call to squeal quite that much like a tiny pig. Wolfenstein 2 does as those who have most effectively mocks the Nazis, by making them not into anything resembling comic book supervillains, but bumbling fools instead- remember that every principal actor on Hogan’s Heroes that portrayed a Nazi was himself a Jewish comedian, and these gentlemen got one thing straight with their fellow creatives: they’ll gladly do this role, but they’ll never portray it as being a winner. Because at the end of the day, even if Colonel Klink does land his lines, you’re here to laugh at him and never with him, because he’s a damn Nazi.

So then I’m reminded of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Chris Evans’ portrayal of Captain America, which continues to be one of the most charmingly natural and successful castings of a superhero since Christopher Reeve was Superman. Specifically, that line, “Germany was the first country the Nazis invaded.” I think about the people who worked at Machinegames, a collective of Swedish devs whose families most definitely felt the weight of fascism if not its full brunt. And I think about those German voice actors, those of the people who the Nazis invaded first, when a meth-addled, anti-semitic, human plumber snake in inadvisable shorts ran away with his position appointed as a participation ribbon by clueless centrists to plunge the entire world into a vortex of shit. I think about the people who have, by virtue of the industry they work in and the discipline they practice, have taken more than a few roles that bothered them or left them with a bad taste in their mouth, portraying historical villains without names, just pure, repugnant ideology. All because back before they were born, people messed up so badly, the language they speak, a language containing magnificent words describing emotions so nuanced, they lack analogues in most others, is instead known as the language of the a great historical villain, an evil that took root in the place they were born, that they had no hand in. I think about the people who loaned their voices to portray those faceless villains, what they must feel about the subject matter of a game like Wolfenstein 2.

But mostly, I think about the sheer relish at which these people portraying Nazis die with. Because nobody would choose to make sounds like they do when they die; those are the sounds you wish your enemies will make when they die.