After numerous sequels, books, spin-off games and three entertaining but shallow feature length films, the Resident Evil franchise continues to capture the hearts and dollars of gamers on both sides of the Pacific–and beyond. The now-cliché adage that “violence sells” found its herald with the release of the original Resident Evil in 1998 and the series has remained the spot for nerve wracking thrills and gratuitous blood letting ever since. Far from adding to the exhaustive debate around video game violence, my interests lie with the fluid, often contradictory representations of gender that are seen in Resident Evil 4. And with that, I will bet all the unlockable characters in “Mercenaries” that I know what y’all are thinking…
Yes, Ashley is, bar none, one of the most annoying characters ever to taint a video game franchise.
Yes, she is a rapid departure from previous women in Resident Evil, who relied on their own guile and skill to survive.
And yes, she exists solely to placate the hoards of drooling fanboys whose penchant for virtual violence and digital pornography grows more ravaging with each passing E3. The scene where she is forced to crawl on her knees while the camera follows her from behind? Please.
Ashley is really not to blame, however, as she’s a young teenager thrust into a living hell. Honestly, how many people, regardless of age, would handle that well? I sure as hell would be screaming my head off while running the other way. More to the point, the regressive gender politics exhibited in Resident Evil 4 are the result of a troop of programmers and artists and writers and scenario gurus (virtually all men) who (for reasons beyond the scope of this essay) consciously and unconsciously reinforce paternalistic attitudes centered on the trope of man as protector, woman in need of protection. Previous RE female protagonists strongly rebuked this age old dichotomy. Carlos comically tried to “be the man” several times in Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, only to find that Jill is a stalwart warrior fully capable of dispatching undead on her own, ridiculous baby-blue outfit non withstanding. Resident Evil Zero found the female-male team working together to survive, and both Resident Evil 1 and 2 saw female leads fighting death largely on their own.
Ashley’s inability to do anything save scream and cower pitifully all but obliterates the strong tone set by her female predecessors, Jill and Claire, who skillfully maneuver their way through the horrors of the Resident Evil world with determination and chutzpah not seen in sci-fi since Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley. As playable protagonists, Jill and Claire act, as opposed to being acted upon, and they operate largely under the same auspices as their respective male counterparts within the series. Granted, the plot lines of the first two Resident Evils offer little in the way of character development, but Jill and Claire serve as gun-wielding agents in both. This cannot be said of Ashley, whose whimpering presence at the end of Resident Evil 4 merely serves to reinforce Leon’s cavalier masculinity.
Artificially accentuated by Ashley in RE4, Leon’s warrior skills were noticeably inept next to Claire’s in RE2 (a little extra health is nothing when you have to backtrack through two buildings to pick up a key). Violent masculinities require feminine foils in order to be maintained, and the discrepancy between Leon’s prowess in Resident Evil 2 and 4 are a direct result of the gendered “othering” of Ashley. Yet Leon’s unwarranted emergence as action hero par excellence in Resident Evil 4 goes beyond dichotomous chauvinism and has more to do with the he-man attitude of contemporary global politics. As the “war of terror” mentality continues to seep through our public consciousness, previously mellow pop culture characters take on increasingly violent and highly gendered roles (just how many weapons do Jax and Daxter carry now?). Coupled with this increase of violent masculinity are a number of gender aesthetics such as ridiculous muscled male bodies and guns twice the length of an average person. A casual look at the screen shots from Resident Evil 5 confirms this, as Chris’s body has morphed from Bruce Willis in the early nineties, to the Rock post-9/11.
Clearly, Ashley’s deference to Leon departs from the egalitarian male-female partnerships in the previous games. But why does this matter? In the grand scheme of video games, women (or anyone who is not heterosexual white male) are not given the empowering end of the proverbial stick, and this is not exactly new information by any stretch of the imagination. Undoubtedly, Resident Evil 5’s colonialist foray into Haiti will produce even more critical dialogue about everyone’s favorite zombie-bashing series, so why worry if Resident Evil 4 is a bit gender regressive in comparison to its predecessors?
Simply this: in a time when the video game industry is trying to expand beyond the realm of video game zealots and guys who believe “your mom” is a sophisticated rebuttal in conversation, it is increasingly important to remain vigilant and critical of the images video games use and the sociopolitical ideologies behind these images. Given the immense popularity of Capcom’s survival horror tour de force, the influence the series has had, and continues to have, on other video game productions is inevitable. Rather than write Ashley off as yet another annoying plot device, we need to take a minute and connect her sophomoric presentation to larger structures of hegemonic control and oppression. Sound big and scary? Maybe, but truly, if you can burn twelve plus hours (first time around, of course) habitually tapping the A button, then you can certainly take five minutes to critically think about what is being played out on the screen.
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