DISCLAIMER: WE GOT TOGETHER in October for the month of Halloween to play Resident Evil 2 and make some musings about it. If you didn’t get in there now: well bucko, you fuckin’ missed out. Maybe check us out on Discord and don’t be such a waste-case about it next time we do it.
Resident Evil 2 was where the series knew it was never going to be the kind of capital H horror that transformed the mind into a sheer state of fear and panic. It was the kind that rolled with Zombies (the word) and monsters, boogeymen and played with being “about” something the way genre used to.
Underneath the city, there’s an evil lab ran by a shady corporation willing to strip the flesh off of the bones of people: literally and because they make a product that turns people into flesh-hungry monsters. They’re working with the police, they’re working with civil servants and state municipalities.
It’s not the Zombies that keep me, personally, coming back to these early installments in the Resident Evil world. It’s the texture of the city and the people that inhabit it. Umbrella’s not just a spooky villain that slips it’s sinister hands into every innocent pie: they’ve managed to build the stage and run the play.
Resident Evil 2 from New Game through roll credits on The 4th Survivor is asking the question of who’s gonna do anything about it. The Special Tactics group from the first game turns out be be bankrolled by the same motherfuckers poisoning the city and everyone in it. If things worked out a little differently, it’s not hard to imagine our favorites from the Spencer Mansion case ending up in tactical gear and gas masks.
Who’s gonna do anything about it then? Resident Evil 2’s about a biker chick and a Police Officer who probably wouldn’t be any good at his job. Leon doesn’t have swagger or grace: revisiting the game for the Deep Hell Book Club makes it feel like he’s meant as comedy. The reason he’s late on the job in the first place is he was drowning his sorrows alone in a cheap motel after getting broken up with.
We don’t know much about Claire, but she’s got a close relationship with her brother and a possibly a degree in motorcycle engineering. She might be a college kid, but we can make the reading that her interest in knowing how to shoot and kick someone’s ass aren’t just because she wants to spend time with her brother. She’s a young biker: probably 15 years away from mixing up with a gang or ending up in one of those cop-based motorcycle groups that goes around harassing people.
Here we are: our two protagonists crossing ways on the outskirts of a city that’s sick and rotting from the inside out. Umbrella’s viral infection has hit the final stages, moving from every part of the nervous system to another. Leon and Claire have little hope of surviving, outsiders in every respect. What we lose in later Resident Evil games when our protagonists all become wrapped up in conspiracy and bureaucracy. The Chris of the most recent game is a trench-coated supersoldier closer to one of Umbrella’s goons than he is the scrappy survivor nerd of the first game.
Leon was one of the few cops in fiction that could be called, with some security, Not A Cop. He’d never hit the force in time, a naive recruit who joined because of a famous murder case. Knowing Leon showed up anywhere from a day to a week late to work, the dilapidated office bearing a banner that reads Welcome Leon! Seems more sarcastic than anything, as if the game is telling us Leon isn’t cut out for this job.
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Resident Evil 2 acquaints us with a world where the saviors aren’t coming from the inside. There’s no hope to cure the sickness by making a better version of the company that caused it in the same place. Raccoon City wasn’t going to be saved, and all of the problems caused in similar places were going to keep happening as long as the nervous system is being treated the same way.
That is not, sadly, the future the games saw for themselves. It seems everyone but Claire, the true outsider biker girl, really got spared. Even she would later turn up in a catsuit working for another government agency, lanyard around her neck. A pistol holding government spook like everyone else; that outsider frequency stripped from her identity. Who are these people, and how are they going to save me?
Claire’s not the knight in shining armor the Raccoon Police Department needed: by the end of the game her and Leon have no love for the police, the corporation or even the government that let them move into the city. Surrounded by piles and piles of evidence that everybody who had the money and the means knew this was happening.
The people most often committed to changing things for the better often have nothing behind them but personal reasons and experiences. Leaders don’t tend to have lanyard badges and government clearance, and then they do they should be getting asked what the hell they’re doing here every time someone lay eyes on them.
Resident Evil 2 tells us that the institutions are poisons, the cops are cowards, clueless and ran by sociopaths and the people destined to make money off of our bodies are salivating over what they can make off of every inch of us. We’re not gonna be saved by anyone with a gun and a badge.