This weekend I played the latest horror indie darling Mouthwashing, and I have plenty of thoughts about it. Spoilerful thoughts about its plot, involving heavy subjects, so be warned that this will involve misogyny, sexual harassment, and the current political landscape regarding female body autonomy in the world.
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In Mouthwashing you witness the tragedy of a 5 person crew of space freighters that underwent an accident, and are now stuck in an asteroid. They don't have enough supplies, there's no rescue coming, and, to add to all that, their ex-captain - who intentionally crashed the ship - is in a mangled state, requiring constant attention and painkillers to deal with unimaginable pain. It is, to put in simple terms, an ordeal.
As you progress through this short story, however, you start to see the bigger picture; the acting captain and POV for most of the game, Jimmy, was instead the one that caused the accident. And the reason was finding out about the unwanted pregnancy of another crew member, Anya.
Through the entirety of the game, Jimmy feels a bit off. He doesn't seem qualified to be in this position - which is not a surprise, given it was a field promotion - but he is also hardly a good person. Constantly berating others, demanding respect, he seems to be especially prone to lashing out at Anya. The nurse of the team - as he often reminds of her failures to go to Med School - is the person in charge of Curly (the mangled ex-captain) as well as the well being of the others. And while everyone in this team seem to be barely holding it together after the crash, Anya is the only one that constantly gets scolded by Jimmy. While Swansea sinks back into alcoholism and Daisuke is wallowing about never seeing his parents again, they barely get a mention from Jimmy. Anya, instead, who is genuinely depressed, is constantly called out on being emotional, unreliable, incompetent. Her feelings and her methods of coping are the only ones seem as despicable by Jimmy.
For the most part of the game, Anya seems evasive, sheepish. One would assume its just part of her personality, or that she is afraid of authority, but in the flashbacks before the crash - where the player is in the POV of Curly instead - the nurse is far more outspoken and relaxed, comfortable in the presence of the former captain. Could that shift in mood be due to the crash and her impeding death then?
In one of the last flashback interactions the player witnesses between Curly and Anya, she reveals to the then captain that she is pregnant. This is told amidst a conversation regarding a stolen gun, which Curly is frantically searching for. Anya explains that the captain would never allow her to use the gun to defend herself, but that's not the reason she stole it. The biggest threat to her is that Jimmy would be the one to find the weapon.
Before that, in a previous flashback, Anya and Curly talk about one of the electronic panels that display an artificial daytime or nighttime for the crew. The nurse mentions there's a dead pixel in the screen, something that is always in the back of her mind. Curly can't find it, but reinforces his ideal of always looking at the bigger picture. Anya then asks the captain why the cockpit and the medical office are the only places with locks, and not the crew quarters. After a few moments, the captain replies "Safety".
Safety of the ship, safety of the supplies, safety of the cargo, but never the safety of the crew. The bigger picture, the haul, the docked payments, all those broad strokes are what Curly is in charge of, but he can't see the details. In this year long trip - which Anya specifically mentions there are 8 months left - Curly was unable to see Anya and Jimmy as anything but coworkers, and was blind to her struggles. He was unable to understand that Jimmy had been assaulting her, and due to his carelessness, she didn't feel safe around the captain anymore. When she tells him the truth, that Jimmy is the father, Curly response is that he will "fix it". He sees the bigger picture, not the people. He doesn't want anyone to have their salaries cut, he doesn't want the company to suffer. The woman having a breakdown in front of him isn't a problem; the black mark on their resumes is.
In response to being told about Anya's pregnancy, Jimmy hijacks the ship and crashes it, hoping to take everyone down, removing his responsibility as a rapist and the stain that would be on his life. Curly, once again not seeing the bigger picture, allows it to happen - perhaps obliviously or by inaction, but one can't imagine a situation in which he couldn't understand that would be the result. And Anya, after the crash, sees her abuser being promoted to captain, becoming her superior, and any hope she had of relief being dashed away.
While Mouthwashing is a brief experience, flashing by the several months that the crew wastes away after the crash - and occasionally back to the days before the tragedy - the true victim of the game was always Anya, and her horror began far earlier than the crash. One could say it began when Jimmy first assaulted her, but the truth is that this game is about the horror of being a woman in a male dominated world, in a world where she is not in charge of her own body. After the crash, Anya is faced with two options: In one, she is forced to live with her rapist and carry his child to term - if he even allows her to live that long. In another, she attempts to abort her child and maybe take her own life in the process. But at the end of the day, neither of these are part of the bigger picture. Even if the crash never happened, if Jimmy never snapped, Anya would be forced to travel in an enclosed space for an entire year with a man that repeatedly assaulted her, with no avenue to escape, while the biggest fear anyone in a position of power would have about this situation is how it might affect the status of the company and the crew.
But even that is not the bigger picture itself. Its not the situation that made Jimmy who he is. There's nothing to indicate that this trip turned him into a monster. Jimmy is just a man. He's not an important man either. He isn't an executive, a politician, a white collar businessman. Jimmy is a co-pilot for a company that's about to go bankrupt. But he's a man, and in this world - or this universe, rather - that's what matters. There's no point in the entire narrative where Jimmy feels a smidge of regret for what he did to Anya; in fact, he is incapable of see her as an equal, or even a human being. In the sole moment of his breakdown where he envisions Anya, she is represented by a disfigured womb, carrying a foal inside it. A broodmare, is what she is - and always has been to Jimmy. And to the captain, to the rest of the world, Anya was a liability. A potential salary cut, a scandal, a black mark on the company. A problem to be fixed. But never a person, or a victim.
As I finished Mouthwashing, I couldn't stop thinking about this scenario, and what it means in the current world. This type of story is hardly unique to the point in time where we are, but I couldn't help but settle on the term "Roe v Wade Horror" to describe the game. The idea where a woman simply isn't in charge of herself, where her body is owned by others, where she is forced to share a space with abusers and carry their children, and god forbid if she brings any misery to those around her. No complaining, no emotions, no qualifications. Inferior and in her place, as many times as Jimmy could remind her of it.
With more and more media being delisted throw in the garbage, with the idea of "politics" being constantly excised from narratives to make them safer, and with the made up specter of "woke" stories haunting men devoid of personality, Mouthwashing stands as not just a fantastic game but also a eerie demonstration of just how horrific existing can be for half of the population of the world.
