Building Virtual Worlds: Video Games and Autobiographical Architecture
5th September 2021
You can tell that Clive Riordan, the villain in Edward Dmytryk’s Obsession (1949), is a thwarted and disturbed person because he owns an elaborate model railway. Admittedly, there are other indications: primarily the way he kidnaps his wife’s lover and holds the man captive in the basement of a blitzed building, slowly filling the bath of acid in which he plans to dissolve his corpse. It is the scenes of Riordan at play, however, that are truly damning. Running locomotives around the chest-high papier-mâché mountain range that dominates his basement, his megalomania and sadism are thrown into stark relief. This urbane postwar cuckold becomes legible as an ancestor of the basement-dwelling incel of contemporary folklore, impotently venting his frustrations via endless online deathmatches.
I found myself thinking of Obsession in September 2020, when Joe Biden’s campaign team created an island in the Nintendo game Animal Crossing: New Horizons (2020). Visitors could enjoy an ice cream with bobbleheaded Joe and Kamala avatars before picking up TEAM JOE signs for display on their very own in-game lawns. They could also pay a visit to ‘Joe’s Train Town’, a basement room featuring an array of model railway sets. This touch was presumably meant to evoke Biden’s old-fashioned decency and pioneer spirit, while expressing a vaguely greenish, vaguely leftish regard for mass-transit infrastructure; I took it as confirmation that anyone who aspires to be Commander in Chief must have a Riordanesque streak.