RapeLay: Sleazier than any Hollywood horror film?

I know that Hollywood is obsessed these days with buying the movie rights to the latest violence-strewn video game, but I'm pretty sure that the industry's cool hunters will be able to draw the line at RapeLay,  the underground Japanese video game that has already been barred from Amazon and EBay, but is available online with a couple key strokes and the click of a mouse.

The premise of the rape-simulator game is chilling, even more chilling than Eli Roth's vile "Hostel" horror series: A man stalks a young girl on a subway train, eventually cornering her in a station bathroom or a park (with the help of male friends), prompting a series of interactive rape scenes.

Not being much of a gamer, I would've never realized this sort of scenario existed if it weren't for a fascinating Slate post about RapeLay and the eroge Japanese video game phenomena by Leigh Alexander, a female video game journalist who writes the Sexy Videogameland blog. But what makes the story especially worth reading is the way Alexander analyzes how the game's premise -- that rape victims could possibly enjoy being attacked -- is embedded in the sexual repression of the Japanese culture.

As Alexander explains: "It's an old cliche, that the more repressed a society, the more extreme its pornography -- but more upsetting than RapeLay is the social environment that birthed it." She explains that in Japan, there is a virtual epidemic of chikan -- subway perverts -- especially in major cities where trains are so crowded that predators can easily conceal their crimes. According to one 2004 survey, 64% of Tokyo women reported that they'd been groped on a train. Alexander writes: "Not only is RapeLay rooted in a social illness that's embedded in Japanese society, it's just one game in a niche industry that's more closely related to the porn business than to the video game world. Risque PC games, or eroge, are big business in Japan, and legions of Japanese software-development houses are devoted to churning them out."

As a gaming enthusiast, Alexander clearly has a libertarian attitude about the dissemination of offensive video games like RapeLay. She sees the game as deeply disturbing, but views any political outcry against it as grandstanding, especially since it's not available in brick-and-mortar stores -- and is all but impossible to block online, thanks to the usual crew of software pirates and copy-protection hackers. I'm not so sure that outrage, even from grandstanding politicians, is always a bad thing, since at least it stirs up a legitimate debate about how far we're willing to let entertainment go down the slippery slope to blood-soaked mayhem and pure pornography.

What Alexander provides is a cool dissection of the game's cultural roots, a dissection I wish we saw more often about our own all-American horror and slasher films. If anyone has any answers to this question, I'd love to hear it: What is it about our culture that propels young moviegoers to horror films, eager to see their peers maimed, menaced and tortured by a variety of despicable perverts and villains?

Alexander's story also serves as a timely reminder that every country seems to spawn its own unique variety of cultural ill. In Japan it may be illicit sex. Here in America, it's nihilistic violence, which is so pervasive in our movies -- with another round of horror films due out later this year -- that we hardly notice it anymore. As troubling as it was to read about RapeLay, it was also a cautionary jolt for those of us who too often tend to ignore the images of violence that so fully inhabit our everyday world. As a serious gamer, Alexander is refreshingly free of any broad-stroke indictments. But her sober reportage was still a kick in the head. Whether its the exploitation of women or red-blooded American violence, the ugliness is there -- just because we close our eyes doesn't mean it will go away.

Image from the box cover art of the Japanese PC game RapeLay

Comments

[j. mchenry]

Sadly, this article operates on the familiar assumption that the real world is nicer than the media world. There isn't anything appearing in any media format which doesn't get its inspiration from true life. Read an account of the Roman emperors at their worst, or about any war zone in any time period. No matter how hard we try, our imaginations will always fall short of the bad things that really happen. A gunman shooting up a school full of little girl pacifists? Child prostitution? Axe murders, sex slaves, Zyklon B? Or how about hundreds of thousands dead in a country invaded under plainly false pretenses by a major superpower hungry for oil? In case the author didn't notice, a natural form of censorship is already keeping this "game" out of the mainstream. Better to be offended by the knowledge that such a thing exists, than to have it suppressed, where it can fester - and perhaps mutate into something worse.

[Dan]

First: creepy Japanese "erotic" video games and slasher movies are apples and oranges. This game is not for sale in the US and it's unlikely it ever would have been. It's not like this would go on sale at your local mall next to the first-person-shooters. So your comparison is a little weak. You may not like either, or find both troubling, but that does not mean they are the same thing and should be conflated.

Second: a cynic would say that slasher movies appeal to the lizard brain in all of us, and its blood thirst. And, actually, the slasher film's a vast improvement over what we USED to do. Even our gladiators don't kill each other anymore. I think that says something about how we've improved.

But a larger part, I think, is that we like danger and adventure, rooting for the underdog, and the horror film is the flipside of the action movie in this respect. There's a reason the one remaining girl gets one over on the lumbering horror at the very end in most of these movies; people love that story, regardless of context, especially when the odds seem impossible.

Third: Honestly, there's no commitment to realism in most slasher movies. The gore is over the top and the movies themselves are so heavily stylized that it's difficult for anybody to get involved. Go see one of these at a 7:30 show on a Saturday at your local multiplex, and you won't hear many screams. Lots of laughs and hooting, though.

People know it's fake. They've grown up knowing it's fake. They go to enjoy how fake it is. Nobody's rooting to see actual violence; I sincerely believe that if you switched the print with, say, "Africa Addio" or "Mondo Cane", the average slasher-film audience would find it utterly repulsive.

[Leigh Alexander]

Hi! Thanks for your even-handed read of my work and your contributions to the discussion. Wanted to weigh in on a couple of your points:

"I'm not so sure that outrage, even from grandstanding politicians, is always a bad thing, since at least it stirs up a legitimate debate..."

It also stirs up probably a new spike in download and play of a two or three year old game that most people would otherwise not have known about, and when levied largely in ignorance, it also stirs up a fresh salvo of misplaced slings against the proper and healthfully-consumed video game biz!

"What is it about our culture that propels young moviegoers to horror films, eager to see their peers maimed, menaced and tortured by a variety of despicable perverts and villains?"

I always saw these as archetypal updates on fairy tales like Red Riding Hood, where the young are penalized by villains for straying off the path of innocence. Note what the victims of slasher flicks are usually doing with themselves when the horror begins, and note that the first victim is usually the meanest girl, the hardest partier, the person with the most overt sexuality -- or although less frequently these days, "The Black Guy."

So in a way, Western left-of-center entertainment is just as obsessed with violating the innocent as we're saying the Japanese are here.

"In Japan it may be illicit sex. Here in America, it's nihilistic violence..." Yeah, that's largely true, although I think it's super important to note that there is this voracious internet community of Westerners around RapeLay and games like it -- to say "this is something Japan likes and we don't" isn't quite true, sadly.

Thanks so much for the linkage and thoughtful commentary!

Leigh Alexander

[David Sahlin]

There's no one single answer to your question, due to the wide range of young moviegoers. I think desensitization and schadenfreude play a large part. A desire to keep with the trajectory of pop culture could be a smaller one. Beneath it all could be the delusion that things people see in the movie theater -can't possibly- happen to you in real life. Spooky in its own right!

[Brandon]

While I might have a problem with "blood-soaked mayhem" and "nihilistic violence", I don't have any problem with "pure pornography". We have got to stop being embarrassed about sex! We are not puritans. While rape and other sexual crimes are certainly reprehensible, I don't fit pornography in that box. I'd much rather have Japan's problem with sex than ours of "red-blooded American violence." Really, which one is worse?

[Kenny]

this game is repulsive on several levels. And that Slate writer is right on....this game is the horrific brainchild of a repressed culture. At least there's a lot of hate for this garbage...http://hateonme.com/2009/03/12/developing-this-video-game-began-with-a-dare-right/