Killing People Is Fun When They’re Zombies: A Personal Essay about Lollipop Chainsaw

I’ve been suicidal since I was nine years old, but I didn’t really seriously start considering it until I was 14. This was in the days before Columbine, you see: We didn’t shoot up our schoolyard bullies back then–especially not in New Jersey, which didn’t really have a hunting culture–we listened to sad music with distorted guitars and angsty screaming while we slit our wrists or, in my case, overdosed on migraine medication. Not that I actually overdosed ever–I’d simply calculated how many pills I’d need to take (the whole bottle, just to be sure), had the whole plan–would stay home sick from school, which I was doing a lot already because there were just too many days I could not deal with the constant torment from the ganging up, the molestation, the abuse, the verbal threats, the ignoring, would take them the second my parents left the house, an hour later put on my favorite song (the Smashing Pumpkins b-side “The Aeroplane Flies High (Turns Left, Looks Right)”, yes, yes, I know, but it does have a kickass solo) and drift off into death’s embrace or whatever. So yeah. My response to schoolwide bullying was to take up smoking, get into drugs, listen to angry music, masturbate furiously until deep chafed bleeding wounds developed on my penis–I had constant oozing scabs on the head of my dick that year which, in what might be a proto form of CBT, I would pick off to bleed and scab up again, getting some weird thrill out of it–and contemplate suicide. It would have been nice to have figured out some way for the entirety of my high school class to die, painfully, agonizingly, if only there were a way of torturing an entire building of teenagers en masse!, but I’d transferred to a much better school by the time Harris and Klebold shot up theirs. And while I had much kinder, gentler jerkoff sessions to the thought of bringing a gun into my old school–I’d discovered hand lotion by this point–and while these times informed my personal theory that the pair had had erections during the entire massacre, freshman year of high school faded the older I got. Now, at the age of thirty, I barely think of it–while I hope to hear of the violent deaths of the children and families of certain people, there’s enough that I have to deal with that I don’t really go there very often.

It’s with this in mind that I played Suda51′s 2012 game Lollipop Chainsaw, an action brawler in which you play a young cheerleader named Juliet who is having the craziest birthday ever. Juliet is your typical teenage girl–she loves her boyfriend, shopping, cheerleading, and her family; she worries about her weight and about her boyfriend finding out that–omigod–she’s a zombie hunter! And one day her school is overrun by zombies, and her boyfriend is bitten, and she performs a magical ritual so that way just his head survives, and it turns out that the local goth kid was made fun of and ignored so much that he opened up a rift in dimensions and called in demons and is attempting to destroy everything. I would have loved to have opened up a rift in dimensions. It would have been nice for all of my classmates to have turned into zombies and died. Assuming that that meant an eternity of suffering and torture. If they felt no pain or enjoyed it in any way, then no deal.

Juliet is played by Tara Strong. Tom Bissell has noted–and Brendan Keogh has echoed–that Spec Ops: The Line’s casting of Nolan North represents the Nolan North Character–the generic action game hero–going insane. Strong’s career is more or less at the same level as North–he could be described as videogames’s Mel Blanc to her June Foray–and the characterization of Juliet is very much a riff on the Tara Strong Character. It’s best exemplified by Bubbles from the Powerpuff Girls or Rikku from Final Fantasy X–an extremely perky, girlishly silly dynamo whose energy is channeled into bloodthirstiness. Juliet is an extreme version of this–her adventure is much more visceral than anything Rikku or Bubbles ever dealt with, and her exuberance colors the world to the extent that her enemies bleed rainbows and pink sparkles. (The Lisa Frank-styled gore is in-universe: Characters even comment on it.) She is, like Bayonetta, at face value a complete cheesecake character–she’s a ditzy cheerleader wearing skimpy clothing, and you can even get an Achievement for trying to look up her skirt–and yet we’re very much dealing with a Girls That Kick Ass narrative. Juliet tells us from the very beginning that her mother taught her daughter to “wear [her] vagina proudly”, and she and her two sisters are competent and badass. The title screen music is done by Joan Jett: we’re dealing with tough rocker chicks. What I find interesting is several reviews which stated that Juliet is stupid or unintelligent. While she’s silly and doesn’t have the greatest sense of priorities, that’s played up more as a facet of her youth and excitability than as a sign that she’s dumb. The game actually briefly mentions that her GPA is 3.4–my exact GPA in high school!–and later, after she comes up with an explains a plan to him, her master zombie hunter father erupts into unabashed tears of pride that his daughter is–his words–”a tactical genius”.

We have had this character before–Buffy the Vampire Slayer, of course, a little closer to the original film incarnation–but where the television Buffy was played for drama as much as comedy, was taken seriously, Lollipop Chainsaw is just interested in absurdity. (Of course, Buffy, as a whole, was funnier and scarier and more dramatic and more interesting than anything in Lollipop Chainsaw, but….)

The game’s script is typical Suda–it’s crass and vulgar and sexually suggestive…and yet as much as it earns its M rating, there are a lot of punches it pulls. Juliet’s boyfriend is just a head–and there’s only one oral sex joke I noticed. Juliet’s favorite food is a lollipop–it’s used to regenerate health–and yet we only see Juliet eat three over the course of the narrative. In every case, it’s not the erotic focus of the scene–she eats one almost as an idle tic. Bayonetta parodied the trope of the sexy lollipop suck by making its lollipops pathetically diminutive. Lollipop Chainsaw goes a step further and doesn’t seem to find the act suggestive whatsoever. In many ways, the game’s sexuality is more ribald and burlesque than it is exploitative. In many other ways, the game is actually a critique of exploitation: Her head boyfriend’s character arc leads him to get extremely infuriated with Juliet (and suicidal to boot!), believing–with evidence–that she considers him more of a fashion accessory than an equal. It’s an interesting role reversal.

I mentioned Joan Jett: The game has a wonderful music selection. One of the boss tracks is done by Jimmy Urine of Mindless Self Indulgence–the boss is voiced by him as well–and I have to say, they were totally a college band for me, they were totally a Hot Topic band, but the song, in context actually works. The soundtrack is very gimmicky, but it’s surprising. There’s a level where you mow down zombies on a combine tractor to the tune of “You Spin Me Round Like A Record” by Dead or Alive. Your limit break is done to the tune of “Mickey” by Toni Basil. At one point they play “Pac-Man Fever”.

It’s the kind of game where every level gives you something ridiculous, and then the next wants to give you something more ridiculous, and it succeeds. The boss fights are wonderful. It’s not a serious game by any means. It is high camp. But it is good camp.

It’s not the most elegant action game–it’s a button mashy beatemup. Everything’s fairly typical–for the most part you’re locked into a screen with a bunch of zombies until you defeat them. X throws a pom pom punch and Y attacks with your titular chainsaw. You can buy combos to string them together and–oh, you’ve played an action game before. If you’re interested in playing the game you’ll play it anyway and if you’re not, an instruction manual won’t change your mind. It’s not a great game. It’s a short game. You may or may not feel like doing its score attack modes. I got it from Gamefly, randomly, and even though it wasn’t my number one choice it was pleasantly surprising, and I had fun with it. It’s not a $60 game. It might not even be a $20 game.

But let’s say this: Like most people with depression, I have a standing appointment with a shotgun and a copy of Automatic for the People–at some point I will brutally kill myself in as messy and as spiteful a way as possible. This is something I have known since I was about nine years old and it is something I look forward to like I might a lover who is going to violently fuck the thoughts out of my head. But my suicide will be something that I want to choose, not an instinctual act through desperation. And so, I’m a heavy drug user–nothing, you know, needley or anything, but I spend more money on pot than you probably do on food.

And while I’m high, I like to do stuff that’s entertaining–because if I’m not entertained then I will shoot myself in the head with a shotgun, scattering pieces of my skull, brains, and other viscera around my apartment. (Perhaps a better and more interesting and, most importantly, more spiteful, way to do this would be to jump in front of a train somewhere around Wall Street–it’s an option I can consider.) And since I don’t want to just randomly kill myself at age 30–it’s something I picture myself doing in my 50s, really–I play a lot of videogames when I’m high because I need something to fill up the existential void that is in the back of my brain every day telling me that there’s really no point to sticking around. And I don’t like the cliche shit, Dyad and Super Hexagon and all of that–I hate that fucking cliche stoner shit because, I’m sorry, there’s nothing cute or romantic about being a drug addict with depression. Lollipop Chainsaw is a great game to play while you’re high because it has a lot of shiny colors and funny things happening and while I was playing it, my usual brain cycles spent figuring out how to get a shotgun, how to load it, the position to put it on the floor so I can pull the trigger with my toe, the music I would be listening to (perhaps I’ll just put on In Utero when I actually do it), the place I would sit, the last thoughts I would have, the feeling of uselessness and meaninglessness, which is not the feeling I want when I kill myself, rather I would like to kill myself with a feeling of Accomplishment, don’t worry I’ll wait till I either realize I’ve peaked or I’ve won the Nobel Prize–all of that receded from being my active thought into just a tiny hum at the back of my head while I was playing Lollipop Chainsaw because it was just so hilariously dumb that, even though it’s not a great game, I had a good time, and so the best thing I can say about Lollipop Chainsaw is it made me not want to commit suicide. 10/10.

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