And if You Go Chasing Rabbits The Inner Demons of American McGee’s Alice
Matthew Sakey
In 1884, Sarah Winchester – heir to the Winchester Firearms fortune – undertook a most peculiar construction project. She had been advised by a medium that her family was haunted by the spirits of those killed by Winchester guns, and in order to keep the angry ghosts at bay, she must build a house… and never stop building it. As such construction on the Winchester House went on 24 hours a day without interruption until Sarah Winchester died in 1922. It followed no strict plan and is full of meandering corridors, sudden dead ends, irrelevant wings and unexpected places.17
The Winchester House is an excellent allegory for the human mind, which also rarely follows a predictable pattern of growth, and evolves throughout our lifetimes. Everyone’s mental Winchester House is their own, and only they know intimately the vast grounds, labyrinthine corridors, and layout of rooms. As individuals, we know our way around our own imaginations, recognizing the “good” and “bad” places, where we keep our dreams and thoughts and fears. And amongst the bright and airy, the well-lit and pleasant, there are without exception places in the human mind that are dark and dangerous, where terrible things go on. No matter how saintly a person may be, even they have cruel, deviant, monstrous playgrounds deep in the landscape of their imaginations. The mind is private. Unless willingly shared, no one can ever truly know what is going on in someone else’s head. Most people only ever reveal surface thoughts, keeping the gates to the deep parts of their psyches closed and locked.
If you were granted an all-access pass to the mind of another person, you’d be horrified – just as that other person would be horrified to see the full activity of your mind. Consider all the terrible thoughts you think in the course of even a single day. The casual cruelties you never verbalize, the vicious, inappropriate, shocking things you think about other people… people you’ve just met, people you love, people you hate, people you’ve known for decades. The alligator thoughts of despising the person ahead of you in the grocery checkout because he’s arguing with the cashier over a thirty cent coupon, the flare of hatred for a person driving too slowly on the expressway. The sudden, instinctive emotional response upon seeing someone. Reflect on some of the sexual thoughts you’ve had but never revealed. From fantasies of “oh Hell yeah” (or Hell no) to reactions to strangers, to elaborately planned and imagined carnalities suitable for the 120 Days of Sodom.18 The Marquis de Sade was less unique in his thoughts than in that he chose to share them. Yes, our own individual minds contain and generate shocking things regularly, thoughts we would never act on or even vocalize. But they are there.
Each of us is singular unto ourselves, and we know it. The innate interiority of the mental dialogue means that people are perfectly assured sharing their darkness with themselves, but know they need never, ever reveal the darkness to another soul. The mind is the ultimate secure facility, and naturally enough, its darkest aspects: meanness, self-loathing, desire to harm; they take up residence in the darkest corners of the mind.
What if someone lost control of their mind, and became trapped in one of those dark corners, cut off from hope, from joy, from optimism, from the positive fountains and playgrounds in the imagination’s architecture?
While plenty of games put you “in” a character’s head in the casual sense, very few have ever actually put you in someone’s head in the more literal way. Psychonauts19 comes to mind; as a psychic detective trainee, you spend much of the game exploring other people’s imaginations, which are by turns hilarious and shocking. American McGee’s Alice20 is another. This towering, underappreciated masterpiece of character-driven narrative went largely misunderstood by gamers and outsiders alike. People shortsightedly saw Alice as a twitch title, a third-person platformer with odd visuals, heavy on moodiness and lacking in depth. But the jumping puzzle-based play and lavish Quake 3 powered graphics were just a gilded and occasionally frustrating frame to the game’s true strengths.
Beware the Jubjub Bird, and Shun the Frumious Bandersnatch
Set entirely in the catatonic mind of the former Wonderland explorer,21,22 now teenaged and institutionalized, Alice guides us through the deepest corners of a sexually maturing girl’s imaginings. Alice is a patchwork nightmare that illuminates in rich strokes the precarious constitution of sanity and the secret shape of guilt. Like some of the great novels, it is a story about regret, estrangement and tragedy; with the added layer of interactivity allowing the player to experience these emotions as no reader can. Hers is a mind consumed by misery and doubt, by natural hormones and unnatural self-hatred, where impish companions of the past manifest in adolescence as horrifying allegories of guilt and loss. Alice’s old friends have reinvented themselves within her mind, using memories and traumas as grist from which their identities spring. From a deeply disturbed Cheshire Cat to a terrifying clockwork Jabberwock, they are now ghoulish, dementia-fueled metaphors for everything Alice has ever done wrong, everything she hates most about herself, and everything that drove her to madness.
Thematically, Alice existed on a whole other level than most games, particularly from what we tended to see in 2001. If you think gravel-voiced space marines with biceps like Christmas hams are commonplace now, travel back in time and get a load of the sort of crap we endured back then. Thoughtful, slow-paced shooter/platformers were uncommon to say the least. This was long before the brilliance of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time23 would reawaken in gamers and developers the knowledge that action-oriented games could be about more than just saving the world and the girl (Sands of Time, ironically, is about both of those, but in a very introspective sort of way). Alice blazed a trail – while it offered a fair amount of white-knuckled combat action and maddeningly devious jumping puzzles, the game also offered slow, thoughtful experiences in which there was nothing to do but think about Alice and the predicament that got her here, trapped in this madness of her own creation.
The game was unique in other ways as well. Alice gave us a protagonist who was female, teenaged, insane, sexually immature, completely unhooked from reality, and very possibly a parricide. Almost no actual background setting up the storyline of Alice is provided, aside from a doctor’s journal included with the original release. The Alice of this game is older than the character in the novels, and has suffered much tragedy in her life; a fire at her home killed her parents and sister, while she slept upstairs. Her survival and escape are not chronicled, leading inevitably to a slim suspicion: a nagging doubt that maybe Alice herself had set the fire while playing. The possibility of her implication in the death of her family is not actually brought up during the game, but that tiny unscratchable question is there.
That she feels guilt for the deaths of her loved ones is unquestioned – not necessarily because she set the fire, since the game never brings it up – but because she was asleep and unable to help them. One of the game’s key villains is quick to point out her culpability in their demise even if she wasn’t the one who started the fire. “You were having tea with your friends while they burned,” sneers the Jabberwock, its hissing inflection all that’s necessary to drill home its cruel point: playing with matches or no, scatterbrained Alice was asleep and dreaming, happily lost in Wonderland, hanging out with the Dormouse and the Rabbit and all her imaginary chums, too much involved in her phantasmagoric tea parties to hear the screams of her real family as they died.
Themes like this pervade Alice. The girl is institutionalized after the fire; catatonic, either unable or unwilling to communicate. Her mind is active, but not in this world: rather than being a willing visitor, Alice is now trapped in Wonderland. And Wonderland has become a place quite different than the one she remembers. This Wonderland has gone to the dark corners of Alice’s mind. The idyllic croquet games and tea parties are a thing of the past.
The Queen of Hearts has tightened her fist on the realm, enslaving some inhabitants while torturing and murdering others who stand against her. Many of Alice’s old playmates – the Mad Hatter, the Duchess, the Tweedles, and plenty of others – have gone over to the Queen’s side, while those few who remain to fight for freedom in Wonderland are either enslaved and subject to ghastly experiments, on the run, or disconcertingly changed from their youthful incarnations. Of course, the key to remember here is that Wonderland, even this warped and twisted version of it, exists only in Alice’s head. The characters are like this because her mind made them that way; they are the gremlins of her id. The Jabberwock’s cruel accusation is, when laid bare, self-reproach.
It begins, as one might imagine, by chasing the White Rabbit down a hole. Mr. Rabbit is definitely in quite a hurry to get somewhere, and Alice is intent on finding him. But navigation in Wonderland, never particularly easy, is even more challenging now because of the Queen’s vicious Card Guards and similarly dangerous servants. We later learn that the White Rabbit is trying to lead Alice to the Caterpillar, but can’t communicate with her as directly as he’d like. The Caterpillar, yet another transformed character from the novels, in turn has information necessary to destroy the Queen of Hearts, information without which Alice can’t possibly hope to repair her shattered mind.
Alice’s quest, therefore, is one of both self-redemption and self-healing. Her journey through this dark and terrible Wonderland, and her battles with the Queen’s subjects, are part of her own mind’s attempt to rebuild itself. Just like dreams often make no sense in a waking context, but are nonetheless necessary for the retention of sanity, Alice is rich in symbolism we needn’t always understand. The mind is a complex place, and it uses complex imagery and experiences to represent other concepts. Being genuinely, as-if-you-were-awake, lucid in a nightmare (but not realizing it was a dream) would be strange indeed. Even understanding what’s going on around you would be a challenge, and safely navigating the experience might border on the impossible. What we recognize as “real” here in the “real” world, the things we take for granted as physical and natural laws; they have no bearing on the world of dreams – which, when all is said and done, Wonderland is.
Thus Alice has to ready herself for a bizarre and surreal journey. Since she’s already been to Wonderland she has a general idea what to expect, but this new dark mirror of the place adds a sinister tone that never existed before. She needs to be armed, and she needs allies. As befits a gothic lolita who may have murdered her parents, Alice comes equipped with a bloody butcher knife that she can swing and hurl with deadly efficiency. This weapon is the most important one you’ll find throughout the game, though our heroine does come upon other ordnance, almost all of which are toys: jacks, playing cards, a flamingo in croquet mallet form. It’s one of the many subtle disjunctions you’ll see throughout your adventures in Alice. Children’s playthings tend to be the most dangerous items, and places such as schools represent some of the most menacing and hazardous environments. The juxtaposition of youthful follies and very horrible adult concepts such as torture and slavery are part of what make the game so disturbing.
Because Alice is not a child any more. She’s a teenager, with all the angst and raging hormones and general confusion associated with that species. But only a sublimely ignorant and insensitive person would see this as some kind of sexual fantasy. Popping Alice into a pair of S&M boots and clipping a skull onto her apron tie do not a sexually appealing character make. Alice’s costuming is just the outward manifestation of her inner ghoul. Her clothing and demeanor match the disordered and unhealthy nature of her mind. The game is so adept at conjuring the reality of Wonderland that it’s easy to forget that the whole thing is taking place in a mad person’s fever dream. The fundamental difference between sane people and insane people is that the former can manage the flow and organization of their thoughts, while the latter are in thrall to the same. So long as the Queen of Hearts rules Wonderland, Alice cannot, and her mind is not under her control. Boots or no, there’s nothing sexy about Alice; she is broken and very sick. She’s someone players pity and worry for but aren’t likely to find attractive.
Another interesting contradiction of Alice: typically, mature gamers are going to admire female characters that are strong, independent, and willful. Alice is certainly all of these, but I at least was not attracted to her even from a perspective of camaraderie or identification. She’s not the kind of person you want to be around. She’s crazy. “Crazy” in movies and TV is often presented as either blindly murderous or funny and inconvenient, but not necessarily all that bad. Real crazy is tragedy and broken families, real crazy is helplessly watching as someone you knew turns into something they aren’t; real crazy is self-mutilation and voices and nightmares emerging into reality. Alice is real crazy, not cute crazy, and it’s frightening. But because we are in Wonderland, “real crazy” is on the outside, the environments and creatures, rather than internal to her. Alice herself is quite rational in the game, because she’s in her mind, and so what we see around us is what quantifies her insanity. Evil queens, enslaved gnomes, Mengele-like experiments performed on March Hares and Dormice, broken clocks and moving floors. It is her relationships, and how the creatures and places in her mind have changed to reflect her madness, that define the themes of Alice.
If You’ve Gotta Go, Go with a Smile
The most important man in Alice’s life is the Cheshire Cat, that grinning feline who told her flat out long ago that she was mad (“How do you know I’m mad?” asked Alice. “You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here”)24. He’s right, of course, though Alice didn’t go mad when Lewis Carroll seemed to think. That came later, and ironically enough, this time around the Cat never bothers (or maybe is too kind) to tell her the truth about her mental state.
The Cheshire Cat is useless throughout Alice’s entire adventure. You can summon him for worthless, plauditory suggestions that almost never apply to the challenge at hand (“As knowing where you’re going is preferable to being lost, ask”). But he is with her almost until the bitter end; invisible most of the time, appearing only when you summon him to emit one of those pointless lozenges of advice, or in the ’tween mission cutscenes, when he actually has information of some value to dispense.
I admit, during the first of my many playthroughs of Alice, this one back in 2001, I was fairly certain the Cheshire Cat would turn out to be a villain. After all, she’d been betrayed by others she’d felt close to. Even the Mad Hatter – never really a friend to Alice in Carroll’s stories, but certainly no ally to the Queen of Hearts – quickly turned, as has Tweedledee, Tweedledum, and the entire Red side of the chessboard in Looking Glass Land. But despite his demonic countenance and attitude, despite his almost gleeful ineffectuality, the Cat is indeed your friend, the one friend who survives almost – almost – to the very end of the game. Like a real cat he doesn’t actually contribute much besides companionship, but he is a good kitty.
The Cheshire Cat, though, is a remote figure of masculinity, and undefined by his gender. Since he’s one of the first creatures Alice encounters on this trip to Wonderland, his startlingly different appearance serves to give both Alice and the player a warning of what’s to come (“You’ve gone rather mangy, Cat,” she says, “But your grin’s a comfort”). His male-ness is insignificant to Alice’s growth; like the creature in the novels, he is nothing but a smile, a talisman rather than a true character. It is only when she loses him that Alice realizes how much he’d meant to her.
Much more interesting from an Alice-as-maturing-teenage-girl perspective is Gryphon, who turns up about midway through the story, needing rescue from one of the Queen’s prisons. His role in Alice is as her staunchest, bravest ally, and the one most dedicated to helping her free Wonderland. While the White Rabbit flees, and the Cheshire Cat vanishes, and the Mock Turtle pleads for help, and Humpty Dumpty does nothing at all, Gryphon fights, he fights right alongside her and is a key player in the uprising against the forces that would keep her mind from being put together again. He is what little remains of her sanity and inherent goodness, returning again and again to save her when she seems doomed. Gryphon is very much the classic white knight of the tale (the actual White Knight, interestingly, doesn’t appear in Alice, though many of the other White pieces do), and he’s idealized by her in a very specific and natural way. Gryphon is bold, righteous, strong, and kind. He’s also kind of a bad boy… just on the good side. He has no interest in joining with the Queen.
Teenage girls dig personalities like this, and since Alice is all a mental exercise, Gryphon doesn’t need to have any of the flaws or weaknesses that human hero-figures inevitably do. His death at the claws of the Jabberwock is a blow to Alice for many reasons, not least of which because he sacrificed himself to save her; but more significant is the constant realization that the Jabberwock didn’t actually kill Gryphon… Alice did. She created Wonderland and the creatures that inhabit it. She created this fearsome monster, this Jabberwock 2.0, with its clockwork innards and its laser beams and its scythe-like talons, and she created a Gryphon too weak to defeat him.
The death of loved ones is, obviously enough, such a pervasive current in Alice that by the end it’s become the core theme. One by one her friends are cut down, unexpectedly and often quite gruesomely. Alice has little time to grieve when Gryphon falls, because she must immediately deal with the Jabberwock or be killed herself in one of the most challenging boss battles ever coded into a game.
If Gryphon is the fingernails of sanity still holding on, the Jabberwock is the madness that seeks to overtake her mind. The Queen of Hearts, though the final villain and the core of the disease that has inhabited Wonderland, is a distant figure who does not present herself until the endgame. The Jabberwock, meanwhile, torments Alice often, and their final confrontation comes at the perfect moment for him: a moment when Alice has lost her strongest ally and truest friend.
An interesting aspect of all Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass reimaginings is the role – actually even the presence – of the Jabberwock. It figures prominently in most of the movies, cartoons, and television series devoted to Alice, and it figures prominently here. This is ironic because the creature never actually appears in either of Carroll’s novels – the Jabberwock is mentioned, briefly, in a nonsense poem Alice reads in Through the Looking-Glass,25 but it’s not a character in the stories. It has become in modern adaptations Alice’s key antagonist, a representation of her fears, of her failures… and most writers get it wrong even trying to use it as symbolism. First and foremost the creature is a Jabberwock, not a “Jabberwocky;” that’s the name of the poem. Nor are we given to believe (in the novels) that it’s the only one of its kind. In Through the Looking-Glass, Alice reads the poem, declares it “pretty” without understanding it,26 and moves on. The fell creatures described therein – the Slithy Toves, the Jabberwock, the Jubjub Bird, the Frumiuous Bandersnatch – never appear again in the narrative.
American McGee and his design team first deserve credit for bothering to read the books carefully enough to recognize the difference between the title of a poem and the name of a monster (Odyssey/Odysseus); but also for creating a Jabberwock that genuinely matches some of Carroll’s ideas regarding the beast – its “eyes of flame” transformed here into laser beams that rake the landscape, searing anything they touch, for example. Moreover we see the Jabberwock’s inherent cruelty. It does not simply attack Alice; it engages her in several conversations, taunting her about her madness, the loss of her family, and finally the loss of Gryphon. Only when it feels it has tortured her sufficiently does it try to kill her.
You’re Nothing but a Pack of Cards
Alice does defeat the Jabberwock, though, and is granted a moment to sob for Gryphon before the quest again takes the fore. At this point the Queen of Hearts is near, and Alice knows that by destroying her, she will regain control of what’s left of her mind. Still, though, the theme of loss is a crucial one in Alice, and the game has not yet stopped handing out defeats.
When the Queen finally manages to off-with-his-head the Cheshire Cat at the doorstep of her palace, it all becomes too much. Alice finally breaks down, lamenting that all who’ve tried to help her have died, and that she must go on alone. This is very Hero’s Journey. I don’t really support overzealous application of Joseph Campbell’s theories27 to game experiences. First of all I think the entire concept of the Hero’s Journey is obvious, lacking subtlety or nuance, and qualifies as the sort of “well duh” knowledge that didn’t really need to be turned into a book to be validated. And I think that in order to validate it, Campbell inserted unnecessary specificity into something that should be much more fluid, creating an almost mathematical set of rules to define what is and is not an acceptable rite of passage for heroic growth. I also don’t like the sexism implicit in much of the monomyth philosophy – stuff like the “woman as temptress” and overall masculine bias of the hero. Heroes can be girls, and girls can be heroes. It works here largely for narratological reasons: like Harry Potter and Luke Skywalker, Alice must eventually face the danger by herself or risk cheapening the victory.
One thing that has always interested me about this game is the presentation of Wonderland as an individual’s private, fully-realized mental space. A dark part of that space, to be sure, but one as real as the streets and buildings of waking reality. It’s a place that Alice can enter, leaving this world behind. Of course, that this leads to tragedy is an important part of the game, but the concept of a completely immersive imaginary world has always appealed to me. Like the Winchester House, Alice’s mind didn’t grow according to some master architectural plan. Rooms and towers and wings were added as she matured. And one day she found herself locked somewhere inside the very house her mind had built.
That Alice does eventually triumph over her demons and gets released from the asylum is a victory of sorts, but even as she encounters and apparently adopts a stray cat upon exiting the hospital (during the only few seconds of the game that take place in the real world) there’s a sense of loss. Alice defeated the Queen and saved Wonderland, but in so doing she had to abandon it and certain aspects of herself. The child locked in a teenager’s body has been replaced with a mentally healthy young woman, and the ease with which she was able to shift into imaginary worlds has, with maturity, diminished. The price of that, of course, is the loss of those places and friends she once held dear. Though they always were just figments of her imagination, we get the sense that Alice is unable to resurrect the Cheshire Cat, the White Rabbit, Gryphon, and the others. We get the sense that Wonderland itself may be lost to her. Growing up doesn’t necessarily mean that we must sacrifice imagination, but recovering from trauma, such as what Alice experienced, requires that she reinvent herself in a way that demands she let go of certain
once-cherished things.
Of course, even as of this writing, Alice: Madness Returns has been announced by publisher EA and will likely be available by the time of this essay’s publication. Due ten years after the appearance of McGee’s first title, he has again been tapped to helm the next. It will be interesting indeed to see whether his team is able to accommodate Alice’s healing process in their new game. By defeating her demons, Alice got better. Will new demons arise to recreate Wonderland? Or was Alice so unhinged by her earlier trauma that she never got better at all? Only time will tell.
Feed Your Head
Among its many themes, Alice is a rumination on insanity, and on the human capacity to use its own brain in odd ways to recover from terrible experiences. Dissociative disorders, fugue states, catatonia; these are the In Case Of Emergency Break Glass last-resort tools that a damaged mind can use to correct its course. Naturally, such tools are dangerous and don’t always work, but they’re better than nothing. It might be argued that being “driven mad” – versus suffering a documented illness like schizophrenia – is actually like having a fever. When the body is sick, it turns up the furnace to weaken and kill the invader; sometimes it loses control of the thermostat and winds up doing more harm than good. Alice’s retreat into Wonderland was just a way to come to grips with the tragedies in her life.
The Wonderland of Alice reminds me of a similar concept presented in Sam Kieth’s The Maxx28 comics, which suggests that everyone has a private mental place called an Outback, literally in the back of your mind where it’s safest. You can go to your Outback to hide or recover from traumatic events, though in The Maxx it can be dangerous to stay too long. Those who linger in their Outback may have difficulty differentiating it from reality, a risky situation that can lead to all kinds of problems. In both Alice and The Maxx, these mental shelters are intensely real to their occupants, but bizarre and dreamlike to viewers, which can be off-putting if you go in not knowing what to expect.
It’s interesting, but back in 2001 publisher EA kind of expected that Alice would be a barrier-breaker for the industry, bringing in nongamers and vastly expanding the medium’s playership. I don’t know what planet they were on when they came up with this idea; presumably they figured that a tie-in to a popular children’s story would be enough to draw grandmas and cheerleaders into gaming. But setting this sort of goal and then handing creation of the game to a mind as blighted as American McGee’s is the gameic equivalent of hiring Terry Gilliam to direct a remake of Winnie-the-Pooh. If any nongamers did buy Alice, they were probably so horrified by what they saw that we’ve lost them forever.
McGee started at id Software, working on DOOM and Quake; after his unwilling exit Alice became his first post-id project. It was in this game that he firmly established his vision, and, to be blunt, he’s been unable to recreate it since. His post-Alice work has ranged from merely bad to disastrous, leading many to wonder how much of Alice’s brilliance was actually McGee’s doing and how much was someone else’s. EA’s recent announcement that there’s to be a sequel at all, and that McGee will be leading it, is surprising, and cause for both ebullient hope and a little concern. Assuming American McGee was the creative steam shovel behind the original game, Madness Returns could be all we hope it will be. If he was not, however, it’s very possible that the Alice sequel comes off more like McGee’s famously dreadful29 Bad Day L.A. than the rich, moody, and layered experience for which we’re all hoping.
Alice stands out in game design as an early attempt to build a character-driven narrative around a true rite of passage, and it succeeds because it is able to effectively evolve the protagonist and weave the mechanics of gameplay into its themes without either one overshadowing the other. Because it did little to engage the player in the narrative, preferring instead to allow the environments and characters to speak for themselves, a lot of people didn’t get it, seeing the game as just a fairy tale laced heavily with fear and loathing. To be honest, I sometimes wonder if American McGee and his team saw in Alice what the actual game turned out to be: a thing of incredible delicacy and beauty, as much a cautionary tale about the fragility of the soul as it was a piece of entertainment.