A couple of weeks ago I uploaded onto this blog an essay I had written about Neil Gaiman's comic The Sandman for a course I am taking. In this essay I talked a little about the story-arc "A Game of You". I wrote the essay to a deadline, and to a word-limit, so I didn't say everything I could have said about this story, but I have thought about it a lot more since and so intend to write a more detailed interpretation of this story in tonight's post. It will help if you've read Gaiman's original comic, and it will help if you've read my earlier essay, but this post should still make sense even if you haven't.
Gaiman is a darling of queer theory because he often features gay, lesbian and trans-gender characters, and so what I am going to suggest may seem controversial –that I do not believe at heart Gaiman is interested in deconstructing or undermining gender difference or advocating on behalf of the queer community. Rather I believe that Gaiman is committed to confirming and strengthening the male/female binary opposition and that the exploration of gender difference is his chief interest. The queer and trans-gender characters in his fiction are usually either treated unsympathetically or are killed off. For instance, Desire, a character who is neither male nor female is almost always presented unsympathetically. (An exception occurs in an issue in the "Endless Nights" series but this was written many years after the original run.) Hal, a gay man, is presented more or less sympathetically in "A Doll's House" but, later, in "The Kindly Ones" he is shown much more negatively. And Wanda, the pre-operative transexual in "A Game of You", who is presented sympathetically, is removed from the world when a building collapses on him/her towards the end of the story. Admittedly Gaiman does treat lesbian characters more positively but even then there is still a kind of violence at work. Generally, the unquestionably masculine and feminine characters, such as the comic's main protagonists Dream and Death, are presented most favourably. The issue of gender is important to Gaiman. Not all of Gaiman's fiction is centrally concerned with gender but a lot of it is, and this is why he is fascinated with gay, lesbian and trans-gender people – because they do not sit neatly either side the gender dichotomy. They are, to use Derrida's term, 'undecidables'. Gaiman's strategy is to introduce ideological tension, conflict, by presenting these characters in his stories, before either eliminating these characters or subordinating them to the dominant gender binary. And this strategy of excluding or expelling the sexually problematic or ambiguous is very much the prevailing dynamic in "A Game of You".
The protagonist of "A Game of You" is Barbie. Barbie is introduced in the story-arc "A Doll's House" as the girlfriend of a guy called Ken. I suppose I need to point out that Barbie is thoroughly heterosexual. Barbie and Ken seem the perfect heteronormative couple on the surface, seem perfectly suited, but have very different dream lives – in Barbie's dreams she is the princess of a fantasy realm called the Land where she has talking animal friends including a big dog or bear called Martin Tenbones and a dodo called Luz. Ken's dreams by contrast revolve around money, sex and power. In "A Doll's House" a supernatural event occurs in which people's dream worlds get mixed up, and as a result the masculine violence of Ken's dreams contaminates Barbie's feminine fantasy. As a consequence of this traumatic breaching, having seen each other for who they really are, Ken and Barbie break up. Barbie furthermore is severed from the Land, stops dreaming about it. This results in a long lasting identity crisis. No longer a princess in her dreams or her waking life, Barbie loses contact with her core sense of self, and starts compensating for this lack of essential identity by performing a role, for instance by painting checkerboard patterns on her face when she goes out to cafes. This is how we find her at the beginning of "A Game of You."
The Land however has continued to exist without Barbie and the masculine contamination that had occurred because of Ken's influence has led, directly or indirectly, to its being taken over by an evil being called the Cuckoo. The Land has become a place of carnage, desolation and eternal winter. The first scene in "A Game of You" shows Barbie's dream friends concluding that they need her to return to the Land to save them. Martin Tenbones travels to the waking world to find her, to give her a magic amulet called the Porpentine and to bring her back. Tenbones does succeed in finding Barbie and giving her the Porpentine, but he is killed in the process; Barbie shortly after is conjured back to the Land. Once returned, she and her dream friends, believing this the only way to defeat the Cuckoo, embark on a quest to take the Porpentine to the Shining Sea. This in fact is what the Cuckoo wants, what it has conspired to bring about, although Barbie and the reader don't learn this until much later.
"A Game of You" can be considered a 'girl's story'. It contains strong Fantasy elements and is usefully compared to Labyrinth, another 'girl's story'. In Labyrinth, the young female protagonist Sarah embarks on a quest to save her baby brother from the Goblin King; Labyrinth can superficially be seen as a tale of female vs. male but if we look deeper we see this interpretation is too simplistic – the Goblin King is played by the androgynous David Bowie. Both "A Game of You" and Labyrinth concern childhood notions of gender. In most respects, however, "A Game of You" differs greatly from Labyrinth. It subverts traditional female Fantasy fiction and contains a great deal of horror; Barbie's dream friends are all killed one by one, her trench coated rat friend Wilkinson, for instance, having his throat slit. The story greatly disturbs. There is a question about whether this really is a 'girl's story' and it is certainly not a kids' story. Barbie's fantasy land has been fatally compromised by masculine violence. The unsettling quality in "A Game of You" is brought home by the scene in which Barbie finally confronts the Cuckoo; up until this point it is has been reasonable to suppose that the Cuckoo is a demagogic male but when it appears it is in the form of a little girl. This completely subverts traditional Fantasy fiction. At this meeting, the cuckoo delivers the following speech to Barbie, that I quoted in the earlier essay but is worth quoting again. "Boys and girls are different, you know that? Little boys have fantasies in which they're faster, or smarter, or able to fly. Where they hide their faces in secret identities, and listen to the people who despise them admiring their remarkable deeds. Pathetic, bespectacled, rejected Perry Porter is secretly The Amazing Spider. Gawky, bespectacled, unloved Clint Clarke us really Hyperman. Yes? [...] Now, little girls, on the other hand, have different fantasies. Much less convoluted. Their parents are not their parents. Their lives are not their lives. They are princesses. Lost princesses from distant lands. And one day the king and queen, their real parents, will take them back to their land, and then they'll be happy for ever and ever." "A Game of You" is a Fantasy story about Fantasy stories.
The Cuckoo delivers this speech to lull Barbie into a kind of hypnotic trance so that she will do its bidding. This is a sinister magic the cuckoo has, to persuade and control others through its voice and presence, through deception. The Cuckoo is a liar, and its big lie is its pretence of being a little girl, when really it is a monster, perhaps even a male being. The Cuckoo is a kind of transexual. And it is not the only transexual in Barbie's life. In the waking world, Barbie lives in an apartment building with Thessaly, an ancient witch, two lesbians and a preoperative transexual named Wanda. The reason Wanda has not had a sex-change is because s/he is afraid of surgery, perhaps a sign that at some deep unconscious level s/he still feels a man. The three unproblematically female characters are able, using Thessaly's magic, to travel to the Land to help Barbie but Wanda, although s/he identifies as a female is viewed by Thessaly's gods as a male and is unable to accompany them. This seems cruel of Gaiman– Wanda, unlike the Cuckoo, is always presented sympathetically. But both Wanda and the Cuckoo are alike in being 'undecidables'.
After falling under the Cuckoo's spell, at the Cuckoos's command, Barbie smashes the Porpentine against the Hierogram, a monument on a promontory in the Shining Sea. This action, which the Cuckoo wanted, initiates the destruction of the Land and the death of all its inhabitants, an event which the Cuckoo desires because the land has been a kind of cage for it and this will set it free. The Cuckoo has never wanted to rule the Land, only to eradicate it. Morpheus himself appears on the scene, in a sort of deus ex machina, to facilitate the death of the Land and, later, to save Barbie and her friends. Abstractly, the last part of "A Game of You" works to resolve the tensions the story has created by removing undecidables and restoring traditional gender norms, something Gaiman achieves in a number of ways. The appearance of Morpheus puts a strong unproblematically male character for the first time in the position of supreme power; and the witch Thessaly, up until this point great and terrible, gets an inkling of a crush on Morpheus. The undecidables are eliminated. Wanda dies as the result of a hurricane caused by Thessaly's magic. And also tragically the Land itself, too contaminated by masculine violence to be saved, perishes. The Cuckoo drops its little-girl-disguise and all its lies, and takes on its real form, a bird, to fly away. Barbie asks Morpheus if he is "going to do anything about the Cuckoo" saying "she's dangerous. She's evil." Morpheus replies, "Dangerous? Perhaps. But evil? She acts according to her nature. Is that evil?" The undecidable quality in the Cuckoo has been resolved because its true nature has won through. It seems that, in the end, the 'natural' order has to prevail, and that there is no place in nature for the unnatural, for supernatural creatures who pretend to be little girls or for men who believe they're women, for undecidables.
"A Game of You" is disturbing for many reasons but chiefly because it has an unhappy ending. The Cuckoo wins and the Land is destroyed. The reader wants to ask: Could Gaiman have finished the story differently? Could Barbie have defeated the Cuckoo and saved the Land, making it again a purely female fantasy realm? Could he have resolved the issue of gender undecidability in a more positive way? When reading it however one senses that it is going to end tragically the moment we first see the Cuckoo as a little girl, when she delivers her speech about little boys and little girls and shows Barbie Barbie's childhood bedroom with its toys. The land is doomed because it is founded on a childish view of gender, rather than an adult's view of gender. Barbie has failed to grow up, to put away childish things. The Land is irrecoverable. The profound truth that Gaiman is subtly telling is that prepubescent children understand gender differently than post-pubescents and that children need to change their views of what constitutes gender difference when they grow up. Barbie needs to let the land go, to develop a different, more mature sense of what constitutes femininity; the Land itself cannot be saved. It is unnatural. Barbie's mistake is perhaps also Wanda's. Perhaps Gaiman is suggesting that Wanda's gender dysphoria may also be rooted in childhood experiences and beliefs but, if so, he is suggesting it very tactfully indeed.
The horrifying, unsettling and disturbing feel of this story stems from the fact that it is set in a world where all sexual and gender norms are in doubt. It is about the failure of childish notions of gender.
I'll finish this post by talking about the conclusion of the story. Barbie begins "A Game of You" in the grips of an identity crisis that has lasted since she was severed from the Land and the identity crisis is still present at the end of the story. She continues to perform her identity, penning a veil on her face before attending Wanda's funeral. Almost nothing has changed. The last ditch effort by her dream friends to save the Land and, by extension, Barbie, has failed, Barbie's childhood idea of what it means to be a girl is gone. But nor has Barbie been able to grow up. Still Gaiman finishes on a slightly positive note. At the very conclusion, Barbie has a dream in which she sees Wanda, with Death, as a perfect woman. "And when I say perfect, I mean perfect. Drop-dead gorgeous. There's nothing camp about her, nothing artificial. And she looks happy." In this way, too, the undecidabilty of Wanda's gender is resolved. In the universe Gaiman created, people get what they want when they die even when they can't get it in life. This scene is ambiguous, but another way to see it, the way I see it, is as Barbie's wish-fufillment fantasy. It is a dream of unqualified unproblematic femininity. Perhaps Gaiman is suggesting that she has in fact grown up.
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