MY WHAT A DIFFERENCE 100 YEARS MAKES. I don’t think anyone could call the modern world a shining beacon of perfection, but BioShock Infinite wastes no time in demonstrating how much ideas about racism, religion, and patriotism have advanced with all the subtlety of swatting flies with a baseball bat. Columbia, the sprawling city in the clouds where the action unfolds, is a political cartoon brought to gory life, and the intensity of its caricatures sometimes run the risk of undermining the cultural criticism they seek to impart. Against this backdrop, we as players need someone we can relate to; someone whose shoes we wouldn’t mind stepping into as we venture through this uncomfortable looking glass. In its greatness, BioShock Infinite gives us that someone.
Her, too. But enough’s been written about her.
We “get” protagonist Booker DeWitt not because he’s a stubbled paragon of manliness but because he’s in debt. Not the kind of debt that spawns from missed tabs or unpaid parking tickets–no, Booker’s debt is the kind that defies comprehensible numbers, that sits in the control of a nameless, faceless man in a New York that Booker likely has never met himself. Based on the few clues in the game, it’s the kind of debt that he can’t just settle with a gun. No matter where he goes or how many goons he kills, someone else will step in to collect.
This, alas, is closer to our experience than we care to admit, particularly if you’re of the age group this kind of game is aimed at. According to American Student Assistance, for instance, over 37 million Americans pay student loans today and around 14% of them have missed at least one payment. The average American household’s credit card debt sits at around $15,000.
Even in Canada, personal consumer debt has reached a staggering high of $27,000 according to credit monitoring firm TransUnion. Debt thus preoccupies our thoughts. It keeps our society in a near inescapable vise, it gnaws constantly behind our dreams, and it drives some of us to desperation. So when Booker first encounters a scrawled note reading “Bring us the girl and wipe away the debt,” we get it. All too well.
Hope you filed your taxes on time.
I admit wasn’t prepared for this. I’d gone into BioShock Infinite expecting a yet another moody exploration of some dubious philosophical creed, but the first sight of Booker’s neglected apartment and the sounds of threatening knocks outside closed doors rekindled memories of my own nightmares–nightmares that pop up when I try to picture paying back all the student loan and credit card debt I amassed in graduate school. Even today, seven years later, the juggle I maintain is so precarious that with one slip, I risk falling into the abyss. Hearing Booker’s offer, I was hooked, and in some dark corner of my soul, a little jealous of his convenient ticket out. Indeed, if someone were come to my door with the same proposition, I’m fairly certain that I, too, would take it.
We’re meant to make this personal association. Sure, finishing BioShock Infinite reveals that Booker’s debts have mind-blowing moral consequences than we never could have imagined, but at the beginning, they barely matter. The plot hinges on a question–how far would we go to pay a debt–and every subsequent action complicates this challenge. If you weren’t nosy enough to sift around Booker’s desk and find the scattered betting sheets for horse races, you could go the whole game without realizing why Booker’s in debt in the first place.
Talk about killer interest rates.
The initial vagueness is intentional. More than a mere plot device, that simple drive to clear his name of his debt fuels our desire to see him through to the end of his struggle and, by proxy, our own. For me that struggle involves student loans and credit cards; for you it might be a mortgage. So powerful is this struggle in contemporary society that a priest’s claim that he can wash away Booker’s sins seems hollow and baseless; for many of us, greater redemption lies in the act of resetting the debt to zero.
A pity, then, that BioShock Infinite sometimes loses track of what this debt must mean for Booker. Nowhere, for instance, do we get that mindset that comes with true fear of crippling debt; a mindset that may have had Booker in palpitations at the sight of the thousands of dollars (or “Eagles”) that drop for him.. Keeping inflation in mind, Booker carries enough cash on him at the end to at least rub shoulders with Rockefeller, and never once does he express fears about spending the money too eagerly. If Booker learns a lesson, it’s that we can never truly outrun a debt, for old ones get replaced by new ones. By the time we reach the end, we find Booker acknowledging that “There’s a debt I owe the girl, and if it means paying her and not the man in New York, so be it.”
Yeah, I know. You’re more interested in Elizabeth. Here.
Booker thus remains stuck, and the frustration of it all ran the danger of building to a closing shot with Booker and Elizabeth as old timey versions of Marla Singer and the onetime Tyler Durden. It comes damn close, and it’s a credit to Irrational Games that the existing ending is much, much more satisfying. Still, I wonder if I would have minded–the appeal of catastrophic and alternate-history stories is especially strong for our generation. We don’t fear apocalyptic scenarios–we almost crave them. We fantasize about the possibility of the world just going to hell, this tangled web we’ve woven for ourselves just falling away and leaving behind only the fundamentals, the primal stuff that really matters, and leaving us on an equal playing field with our peers who decided to skip business loans and grad school and mortgages and just keep the damn money they make. Leave it all behind, cap the bad guys, keep the cash, blow this pop stand. Bring us the girl, and wipe away the debt.
Doesn’t it sound so easy?
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