My Girl

Starting up My Girl I was initially overwhelmed by a swarm of dubious associations. No one of my generation can read that title without thinking first of the lively Motown standard and second of a dying Macaulay Culkin, and then when I started the game and saw that the protagonist’s husband was named Santiago and spent most of his time out at sea, Hemingway shouldered his way in there too. But it didn’t take long to realize that none of these were authentic influences: this is Bluebeard, and a Bluebeard played shockingly straight, with no dramatic twists to the premise or gimmicky gameplay to distract (indeed, this is dynamic fiction – the only interactivity is clicking forward to the next passage).

This means that the game’s prose has nothing to hide behind – which is good news, since you wouldn’t want it to even make the attempt. Some early excerpts will stand for many more that I saved in my notes file, with their precise mastery of detail and portentous allusion:

“You know that I love you, don’t you, Carmilla?” he asks. His eyes are doleful, focused intently on your own: pinning you beneath the weight of his gaze like a butterfly skewered for a collector’s pleasure. “Thank you for listening to me. You know that I only want what’s best for you,” Santiago says. He brushes aside a curl of your dark hair, smudging his thumb against your forehead as if it were Ash Wednesday. You close your eyes. You don’t want to see his mouth slanting closer.

"Later, Santiago is fiddling around with a length of rope, restlessly tying and untying knots in turn. The fires crackle in the distance, the thick stone walls slow to warm. Santiago loves the sea, is bound to die by its hand someday - to be swallowed by the arctic depths, bones plunging to the bottom of the sea: whale-fall, to return from whence he came. Sea foam and salt, smooth bone and corrugated shell. When you view your husband at just the right angle, in the fast falling light, he is nothing but the blue afterimage that burns after bearing witness to the sea."

Visible too in these passages are some of the grace-notes the game does introduce to the folktale. First, rather than doom standing over Bluebeard’s wife, here it’s the sailor himself who seems destined an early grave; second, despite her material dependence upon him, his need for her love and approval goes some way to balancing or even reversing the traditional power dynamics. For all that Santiago carelessly constrains Carmilla to the same straitened horizons as her literary precedents, fulfilling his role as an instrument of the patriarchy, this is a softened Bluebeard: there’s no confrontation scene after she disobeys his instruction, as he meekly accepts her lies and slinks off-stage to be murdered. Indeed, the discovery of the Bloody Chamber is underplayed, so much so that I could almost believe Carmilla decides to kill him as much out of jealousy for his love of the sea as out of desperation to save her own life – indeed, the happy ending crows that “the sea will haunt [her] no more,” as though the ocean was the target of her vengeance, with Santiago simply the unfortunate vessel.

Of course it’s not as simple as all that; the patriarchy is ultimately what sets women against each other in competition, and the sea’s not immune to that, and Santiago’s very blindness to his wife’s needs and emotions justifies his demise. Beyond being a lush and lovely retelling of one of the great stories, I also enjoyed My Girl for the way it denies the ideas that a threatened wife needs to be only a victim, or that a monstrous husband can’t suffer.