Doom: a bit of the old Dionysian ultra-violence

What is it about this video game and its particular brand of bacchanalian bloodletting?

I’m up late. The television shimmers with extravagant feats of carnage. A chainsaw shield boomerangs through a crowd of demon fodder, scattering limbs and entrails like so much confetti. A weapon called the Pulverizer crushes the skulls of my enemies and fires the bony shards back at them in gut-rending salvos. I finish off a 30-foot cyborg demon by burying a spiked flail into his skull. I tear open his rib cage to exhume his still beating heart and crush it between my fingers, receiving as my reward a cache of ammunition. The message is clear: Keep up the good work! And to underscore this hecatomb, pulsing with jackhammered blast beats and Phrygian palm-muting, is the relentless thrum of industrial death metal.

I am unemployed. My basement is flooding and we’ll need to spend thousands to remediate the damage. My one-and-a-half-year-old daughter wakes up at 5:30 every morning. My cat is going blind. For three weeks now, gluteal tendonitis has kept me from running—my long-favored exercise and primary stress release. And my novel, my agent tells me, is pretty much dead, languishing as it has been on submission for well over a year.

But, as the Doom Slayer, I am an agent of chaos, a purifying vector of chthonic rage. At least, that’s how a middling psychologist would describe it.

I don’t particularly like first-person shooters. I don’t even play enough video games to consider myself “a gamer,” but the Doom series tantalizes me like the dark wisdom of a shoulder devil. It says, “You love the violence, don’t you? You love the power it simulates you pathetic little worm. Seek more and we shall see who you really are.”

Since the 1990s, when the original Doom game was released, pearl-clutching Christian mothers have been hyperventilating about the corrosive influence of video games. Every pop cultural depiction of violence attends some moral crusade to protect the children—always the children, our most vulnerable little angels who mustn’t so much as glimpse the extremes of the human condition.

In the 2000s, however, that fear gave way to a more cathartic theory: Violent video games, undeniably fun, are actually an outlet for aggression that, if not checked, will build and build until, one day, like Michael Douglas in Falling Down, it explodes upon the world with aimless malice. Violent video games, this theory goes, are a harmless outlet.

I don’t buy either of these theories. Sure, my life is a mess, but I do believe that Doom and its particular genre of over-the-top violence speak to something more communal, more ancient, and deeply human. So what is it? My first instinct, when faced with a curious hunch like this, is to check with the Greeks.

The God of Rebellion

Many cultures speak of creation and destruction as entwined aspects of the same thing. Through myths and rituals, they make a spectacle of motion: of noisy music and colorful clownery, of death-defying circus acts and flatulent freak shows, a pageant of masked shamans and two-faced tricksters and grotesque mannequins whose assault on the senses suggest a purpose not to entertain but to rebel. Rebellion of any kind will do, even if it’s against life itself.

Consider the Dionysian Mysteries. Most associate Dionysus with wine and merriment but he is also the god of masks, madness, and defiance. Under the epithet “Eleuthereus,” he is associated with violent revolts and was the patron of many a Roman slave rebellion. Spartacus himself was known as a "servant of Dionysus.” One of the most famous Greek plays, The Bacchae by Euripides, tells the story of a king punished by Dionysus for rejecting his cult. It features heavily in violent revelry, decapitations, stonings, animal dismemberment, the rape and pillaging of villages. Attempts to find meaning elude scholars, but perhaps the chaos is the point. This is the primordial stuff of creation we’re dealing with.

Bacchanale by Alessandro Magnasco

Centuries later, the Romans embraced Dionysus in the form of the god Bacchus, whose eponymous bacchanals achieved historical infamy. These frenzied carnivals of madness were not just wild parties but mystical rites with traditions that evolved over generations. They were characterized by the same sort of violence and debauchery, with the screams of torture victims vying with the constant beat of drums and laughter. James Hillman elaborates on the role of music in The Dream and the Underworld (and, indirectly, of death metal in the Doom aesthetic):

“Pounding drums, ringing bells and chimes, and high-pitched fifes have been used both to ban the demons of the dead, as well as waken them. This kind of discordant, uncanny music sometimes comes in dreams together with peculiar processions—a grotesque parody, a Bedlam, which too has come to mean a craziness of sound. I take these scenes of music as a rite in process, a movement gathering together the deformed and outcast elements of psyche and assembling them into the process of soul-making. The alchemical massa confusa is now en route, moving”

“The process of soul-making” is an interesting line. It suggests not some gnostic pleroma whose unknowable source is the birthing pool of all being, but rather something more carnal and violent.

Similar habits are found in medieval carnivals. Though there’s scant evidence of a direct lineage to Roman bacchanals, it’s easy to see why these customs might manifest in rigid hierarchies. Within the tight social constraints of feudal Europe, carnivals embraced rule-breaking, role reversal, momentary social equality, and, in some cases, violence and torture, as in the case of the Sardinian Carnival. Simulating revolution, rather than dispel interest in the real thing, indulges the social imagination, lest it atrophy and foreclose the possibility of renewal or, in more religious terms, rebirth.

I think Keats also captured the idea in The Second Coming, albeit with greater dread:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned

So my love for Doom might be explained through depth psychology: We, the human id, revel in destruction because we see demons in our enemies (demons being avatars of the underworld here to remind us of our appointment with death) but also for the prospect of creating something new from the ashes. To build a world anew requires such destruction that cannot be placated by notions of pattern, order, or reason, all of which feature in the corollary of creation. We see this in cultures across time—the yin and the yang, the Book of Genesis, Brahma and Shiva. It is through Dionysian revelry that new forms and social relations are imagined and, in some cases, violently imposed. Death shadows these rituals, and Dionysus, no mere wine god, is worshipped for having transcended death—one of the only gods to have returned from the underworld. The lesson is clear: The primary interest of the Dionysian impulse is change. Change, after all, is the one thing that unites life and death.

You might be tempted to point to some Hollywood version of this idea with movies like The Purge, but that would be a mistake. It’s not about purging the darker impulses of the human heart, which, in the context of that movie, serves to maintain a neoliberal status quo. Instead, the idea is to encounter entirely new forms of societal arrangement, violently if necessary.

Communal Violence

David Graeber is more practical on these accounts. In his book with David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, the authors present an account of civilizational birth as deliberate and creative. One of the core ideas has to do with the anthropological concept of “schismogenesis.” It refers to the tendency among cultures to define themselves in opposition to one another. The early highland cultures of Mesopotamia—nomadic, aristocratic, illiterate, hero-worshipping—developed in stark contrast to the fledgling urban societies of the lowlands—literate, communal, commercial, sedentary. Such societies live in close proximity to one another but their customs and belief systems are polar opposites. Think: Athens vs. Sparta. Graeber and Wengrow write:

“Aristocracies, perhaps monarchy itself, first emerged in opposition to the egalitarian cities of the Mesopotamian plains, for which they likely had much the same mixed but hostile and murderous feelings as Alaric the Goth would later have towards Rome and everything it stood for, Ghenghis Khan towards Samarkand or Merv, or Timur towards Delhi.”

History shows republics are just as capable of violence as dictatorships, which would seem to put violence lower in the strata of innate human qualities than political imagination. Hence, the longstanding claim that violence—be it in the form of ritual sacrifice, explosive carnage, or revolutionary upheaval—must occasionally be purged from the human spirit, which, let’s not forget, is of animal origin. As Judge Holden said, “Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.”

This, again, is the “purge” theory of violent revelry. But, as Graeber and Wengrow argue, this doesn’t quite work. They point to the example of the Iroquois cultures of North America, who had an enormous capacity for extravagant violence. One 17th century historian wrote, regarding a particular Iroquois tribe’s treatment of captives:

“All punishment, including the death penalty, involved severe physical suffering: wearing an iron collar, being whipped, having a hand cut off, or being branded.”

Jesuit Missionaries Tortured by Iroquois, 1649

Their aristocratic European counterparts were, of course, no better. The difference lay in the power relations among citizens. The punitive violence enacted upon Iroquois war captives was communal in nature, involving a shared body politic that defined and unified itself through its capacity for violence. European monarchies, meanwhile, defined the people—their subjects—as the sole potential victims of the crown’s violence. This violence was top-down, hierarchical, patriarchal, and it explains the horror that Iroquois visitors to France felt toward the Ancien Régime’s many public executions and punishments.

“Public torture, in 17th century Europe, created searing, unforgettable spectacles of pain and suffering in order to convey the message that a system in which husbands could brutalize wives, and parents beat children, was ultimately a form of love. [Iroquois] torture, in the same period of history, created searing, unforgettable spectacles of pain and suffering in order to make clear that no form of physical chastisement should ever be countenanced inside a community or household. Violence and care… were to be entirely separated.”

This confusion between care and domination is important because it demonstrates how certain cultures atrophy in their ability to evolve and, by extension, recreate themselves. (My novel about a near-future dystopia where one in three people lacks consciousness features at least one act of frenzied communal violence for precisely this reason.) Judge Holden, as the warrior demiurge of westward expansion, demonstrates the tragedy of America in that its particular brand of violence—racist, imperial, hierarchical, directional—would doom (!) the very nation it begot.

In the case of Doom the video game, there is no political dimension. The violence is extravagant, spectacular, omnidirectional, and cartoonish, not unlike the Mad Max movies. Such an apolitical spectacle provides players with a safe remove from the experience, allowing them to indulge in a bit of Dionysean ultra-violence without having to feel uncomfortable about the realities of violence. Put plainly, it allows you to have fun.

But that still doesn’t explain my unique attraction to Doom. Lots of video games are violent. Lots more are apolitical. Few resonate with such animalistic ferocity. What is it about Doom’s particular flavor of violence that so hooked me?

I think, despite the flamboyant violence and hellish aesthetic, the fundamental charm is one of awe. It is in the sense that our festive celebration and enjoyment of violence is not necessarily due to a safe remove or even the idea that the victims (demons) deserve it, but to the sheer imaginative wonder of it. We marvel at carnivalesque feats of violence for the same reason we marvel at a beautiful mountain vista or a virtuosic piece of music. The difference—and this is crucial—is that this particular marvel maps onto one of our deepest human instincts—the instinct to revolt, recreate, redefine, and reimagine.

It’s not much—just the very crucible of civilization. Why wouldn’t it resonate with those who are (blood)thirsty for change?