1.1 Introduction: Flappers in Rapture
This all started with the semiotic ghost of Annette Hanshaw , a Jazz Age singer with whom I hadn’t been particularly familiar before the late 2000s, when her music was featured quite prominently in both a critically acclaimed film—Sita Sings the Blues (2008)—and, more importantly, a critically acclaimed video game— BioShock 2 (2010). Her sound and style should have been incongruous in both worlds, but they were not, because her semiotic ghost was haunting them, as ghosts often do, for very specific reasons.
Annette Hanshaw’s aural presence can be considered an ideal signifier of the 1920s and 1930s. Her calling card was ending many of her songs with an endearing “That’s all” emblematic of her style, simultaneously demure and provocative. This quality would become an exaggerated childish affectation in the singing style of Helen Kane, the inspiration for the voice of Betty Boop, a character which has remained more vivid in cultural memory than the women it parodied. It can easily be argued that these exaggerated and even child-like voices and attitudes are meant to make the flapper, the liberated, irreverent modern woman of the Jazz Age, less threatening to a society that was not entirely prepared for her.
Annette Hanshaw and Betty Boop are both evoked in Sita Sings the Blues , where a parallel is drawn between the main character, a young woman who goes through a relationship breakdown, and Sita, Rama’s wife in the ancient Indian epic Ramayana. Throughout the film, sequences from the epic are set to the music of Annette Hanshaw , resulting in unusual animated musical numbers. The theme that ties the three narratives , otherwise separated by time and space, appears to be heartbreak, but the relationships built between these referents are more complex. Sita is, not coincidentally, drawn and animated to embody an Indian Betty Boop, as Anette Hanshaw marks the end of every musical number with her characteristic “That’s all”, almost sealing Sita’s fate. The iconic image of the flapper is represented both aurally and visually and is the hint to what the common theme of the story truly is—not heartbreak, but rediscovery. Nina Paley thus injects the Ramayana with some light twenty-first century feminism , with the help of a twentieth-century flapper. By juxtaposing different visual styles, appropriated music and parallel storylines, Paley constructs a coherent feminist narrative in which Annette Hanshaw becomes a complex signifier. But what role does the music of Annette Hanshaw play in BioShock 2 ? What role do flappers play in the world of Rapture?
BioShock and BioShock 2 are first person shooters set in the fallen underwater paradise of Rapture. Having heard the music of BioShock 2 before playing the game, the juxtaposition between music and visuals seemed even more unusual than that of Sita Sings the Blues , and the comparison between video game music and film music was also near at hand. The use of music performed by Annette Hanshaw , as well as other artists such as Billie Holiday , Louis Armstrong and The Andrews Sisters, proved to be part of a gameworld in which art deco aesthetics , retro appropriated music, and the philosophy of Ayn Rand (although not as deeply explored in BioShock 2 as it is in predecessor) built a complex semiotic world. The flapper becomes a character emblematic of the ‘Roaring Twenties’ and the laissez-faire attitudes that can be considered a trademark of the decade.
In both works, it is not only the art and aesthetics of the Roaring Twenties that are appropriated but a broader social, economic and political context. Norman Klein describes the Max Fleischer cartoons which feature Betty Boop as visual embodiments of the social anxieties of the time:
The subtleties of urban paranoia have their own visuality; a rhythm in the shoulders, in the posture, in walk cycles; angling the neck just a fraction to watch out for who may be behind you; staying toward the outside of the sidewalk. It is not really a fear of crime so much as a fear of the mixing of classes and races. It is a comfort zone built out of a mood of uncertainty. (Klein 2000, p. 30)
The same can be said about the sound of the Jazz Age. Sita Sings the Blues reflects images of empowered women but also their oppression. Both Betty Boop and Anette Hanshaw represent the post-war impetus for change and equality but also society’s response to it, its anxiety. BioShock brings out even more of the underbelly of the Roaring Twenties, criticising hubris, individuality and laissez-faire capitalism through a dystopia that takes their possible results to a violent extreme. In Fleischer cartoons, Klein argues that “the ‘story’ is about uncertainty – modernity and the depression as the Fleischer team witnessed it. Indeed, from 1931 to 1933, Fleischer cartoons have a peculiar bite to them” (Klein 2000, p. 29). This uncertainty is transformed into hyperbolic criticism of Ayn Randian philosophies and the age they stand for.
Both Sita Sings the Blues and BioShock 2 use appropriated music in conjunction with numerous other cultural references and take advantage of the sociopolitical connotations that are an indelible part of the sound they appropriate. Annette Hanshaw and her music act as signifiers of a particular time and also imply relevant themes often associated with the Jazz Age and the Roaring Twenties. The film and the game use music in different ways, as exemplified by the way in which “Daddy Won’t You Please Come Home” plays in both.
In the film, Sita sings the song while held captive by the demon King Ravana, waiting to be rescued by Rama. The vector-animated musical number focuses on Sita as performer and the visuals are perfectly synchronised to the song: the monkey Prince Hanuman moves strictly in rhythm to the song, as the lyrics are illustrated visually (Sita taps her wrist as if tapping a watch when the lyrics mention ‘waiting’, for instance). The song is fixed, and the sequence is tightly synchronised, like a music video; it is meant to illustrate this particular moment in the story and no other. Her longing and her desperation are reflected in the song’s lyrics: “When night is creepin’/ And I should be sleepin’ in bed/ If you were peepin’/ You’d find that I’m weepin’ instead”. The song appears immediately after a scene in which the demon King Ravana offers to spare Sita if she would marry him. Later in the musical number lyrics reflect her feeling following his proposal and her consideration of it: “There’s lots of other new sheiks who would like to be sheikin’/ Haven’t slipped yet, but I’m liable to weaken/ Daddy, daddy, won’t you please come home?”
In BioShock 2 , “Daddy Won’t You Please Come Home” acts as a theme song. The song appears initially in the game’s launch trailer, where it invites the player, who in this installment of the game plays a type of character called a ‘Big Daddy’, to return to the world of Rapture and play the new game. The ‘daddy’ in the lyrics thus addresses the player directly. In the game itself, the song appears in the first playable area, Adonis Luxury Resort, and then throughout the game on jukeboxes and loading screens. The song is thus not synchronised to a particular scene but is pervasive, appearing in various locations and playing anempathetically , constantly encouraging the player-character as well as the player to continue until the goal is reached and ‘daddy’ can ‘come home’ and rescue Eleanor, the girl he (the player-character) is conditioned to protect. The pervasive use of music is particularly poignant following the first BioShock game, in which repeated phrases are used to manipulate the player-character. In BioShock 2 , the song encourages the player to empathise with the player-character’s unrelenting mission and obsession by acting as a constant reminder, while also acting as a temporal signifier in this heavily 1920s- and 1930s-inspired world.
The type of complex semiotic world built from elements of the popular culture of the past, including architecture, literature and music and film, is not unique to BioShock , but is integral to a number of video games of the twenty-first century. While these games span different genres and appropriate the music and culture from different decades of twentieth-century America , they are surprisingly similar in the way they relate to the past. These games offer their players increasingly extensive experiences of bygone eras through the lens of popular culture, sometimes as relatively straightforward period settings like Gone Home (2013), sometimes as fallen retro paradises like BioShock . Instances like these reinforce the novelty and the innovative potential of video games as a medium as well as their strong connection to the past. Sean Fenty notes that “William Blake’s claim that we can ‘see a world in a grain of sand’ seems prophetic in light of the silicon-rendered reality we now can play in with ever-increasing ease” (Fenty 2008, p. 22). While Fenty mentions Blake’s Auguries of Innocence only to refer to the expansive spaces of video games, the poem’s further reference to time seems particularly appropriate in this instance: games not only allow players to “see a world in a grain of sand” but also to “hold [..] eternity in an hour”...