SPOILERS AHEAD
“Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.”
Having spent some time exploring Cloud’s memories of Sephiroth and Nibelheim, we come now to a couple of the coolest cutscenes in the visually groundbreaking Final Fantasy VII. First, consider the epochal scene where Sephiroth walks into the fire. Through the flames’ heat we see him in all his regal beauty, turning his cold eyes–so like Cloud’s own–toward us with such a look of pure, aloof malice, as if he doesn’t know us at all. The likeness there is inescapable: even as Sephiroth voluntarily transgresses all bounds and embraces the destruction of Cloud’s home, we can’t help but see him as an image of the potential for evil within Cloud himself. Cloud, in turn, stands in for the player, so it’s as if in a moment of reflection we saw all the harm we are capable of, should we choose to go down that path.
Then there’s the image of Sephiroth coming face-to-face with the bust of Jenova. As his smooth face conceals those depths of destructiveness, so the metallic mask covers up her actual specimen chamber. This is all we are able to see of her, the scientific mask concealing and sanitizing what it contains, until he abruptly rips it aside, baring her terrible true form, breaking the seal. What looks like a face turns out to just be part of the machinery, while the actual Jenova is this humanoid mass of tissue and eyeballs frozen or suspended in her special capsule. With the statuesque casing and Gothic lettering, she’s an idol. In the midst of his iconoclasm, there’s a glimpse of the first emotion that we see in Sephiroth’s eyes. Their steady blankness is replaced by incredible desire, a zeal for this hideous being, to take and appropriate her.
The juxtaposition of these two scenes of destruction and liberation points towards a problematic sort of exhilaration vicariously stirred up in the player. Cloud paints these pictures for us by his telling, remember–how evocative his portrayal must be! How caught up in his tale he must be, and us with him! But how far does the bond between our hero and our hero’s hero extend? Sephiroth has told Cloud, you’re different, tossing off the comment in that moment of recognition when he saw himself in those poor unfinished monsters outside of Jenova’s chamber. Is it reassurance, or dismissal? We don’t know enough yet to say what that likeness or difference might mean for Cloud, his potential or gifts.
But he is evidently quite a storyteller, and clearly there’s something very interesting the game is doing here. It shows us the character who to all appearances should be one we’re playing as, the hero of the story being told by the one we are playing as–and then it shows us why we are not going to be that character. He’s not in our party ever again, he’s not going to be joining the adventure. Quite the reverse: Sephiroth becomes the big bad, the instigator for this new world-scale adventure that is shaping up outside of Midgar.
The epic type here to compare might be Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost. Incomparably brilliant, indomitably proud, wielding weapons no one else can use, representative of that pride and intellect–Sephiroth, like Lucifer as he was in heaven before the events of the epic, has been admired and extolled, and like him experiences a fall. For years since the Nibelheim incident, he has disappeared from the world, as if he had been thrown into hell. Now that he’s back, he antagonizes the world in the same way that Satan does, first in that distorted Eden of Midgar and now, like the adversary of Job, ranging over the rest of the world, going to and fro in it. He brings death and sin gruesomely into view in Midgar, if not originating them metaphysically as Satan does in Paradise Lost. And perhaps most to the point, Milton’s Satan, too, has given rise to endless debate over his status as hero or anti-hero of the poem, just as Sephiroth is widely idolized by fans of the game.
The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true Poet, and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.
— Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
It is, in my opinion, wholly erroneous.
— CS Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost
Arguably, the popularity of this tragic figure is partly to account for the development of similar motifs in Advent Children, with its planet-scale sickness, or the treatment of religious material in FFX, with the entity known as Sin.
Along with the art of the cutscenes centering on this magnetic supervillain, the influential cinematic quality of Final Fantasy VII owes much to its use of music in evoking his character. When you go and seek Sephiroth out in the basement of the Shinra Mansion, the background tension builds with a sinister heartbeat bass line, which then explodes into the full theme, “Those Chosen by the Planet,” when you find him. That’s the aural equivalent of his walking into the flames–he’s absorbed into the catastrophe represented by that song, which he himself has unleashed. Taken together with seeing what he can do in battle, these moments build up how powerful storytelling in games can be, how visceral that combination of music, visuals, and gameplay actually becomes, even when we are insulated or distanced by the way this whole episode gets explicitly framed by the narrative of Cloud’s retrospection. It’s not something that can be done with any other medium, and structurally speaking it doesn’t matter that there are continually greater technical advances in each of these constituents–their effectiveness here is down to the way they are balanced, weaving in that most important element in the reach of any art or game, the heartbeat of the player.
When the blaring theme announces itself, even if that flood of emotion makes analysis nearly impossible in the moment, it sends a thrilling recognition that there is no going back. This is when we know Sephiroth has turned, when that heroic leader and your ally is no longer there. He is now following a different ideal, now has a new goal, and from slaying dragons he goes to join with the winged serpent Jenova. As an archetypal image, a dragon, or a serpent with wings, suggests itself strongly as a symbol of transformation for all sorts of reasons. The snake on its own can shed its skin, and the addition of wings multiplies that existing potential for change: the chthonic or earthly element is linked with the heavenly and celestial. In animal form, it is a more dynamic take on the symbolic tree we’ve already noticed, whose roots are connected to the earth, its branches raised into the sky. And all of these obliquely reflect our human form, feet on the ground, head in the air.
When we interpret Jenova’s combination of serpentine and angelic aspects, then overlaid with that anthropomorphic casing of the mask, she reflects an ideal of incredible transformative potential. When attending to that ideal, Sephiroth aligns himself with it and embodies the anomaly that will destroy the current known territory. Jenova has done so in the past to the Ancients, and with her son-consort she does so in the present to Nibelheim. The clear warning is that she will so do forever on, a representation of forces that when embodied destroy civilization.
Sephiroth thinks he’s being true to himself, but in fact he’s corrupted and falling away. Like Satan’s mating with Sin, who brings forth Death in PL, Sephiroth’s wrestling with the sealed vessel has a sexual valence, additionally creepy the more the necrophiliac and Oedipal shades of the scene impinge upon us. He and Jenova become one, as he embraces this cataclysmic force now unleashed on the world.
As the player has looked up to him through Cloud’s eyes, it’s deeply troubling and very sad even in hindsight to contend with these scenes. Yet it’s also somehow alluring, the awesome coolness of Sephiroth in the fire, or the bold decisiveness in the chamber laying hands on this bodacious evil goddess. There’s something powerfully unsettling and enticing there, bringing to mind that other association of the serpent with temptation.
Jenova’s buxom female figure with creepy eyes all over her could also allude to the myth of Argos, the eye-covered giant slain by Hermes, and Io, the nymph he was guarding from Zeus. The original Panopticon, the nightmare of utilitarian efficiency, gives his eyes to the peacocks who draw Hera’s chariot. And sure enough Jenova will surprise us in all sorts of places as we go gallivanting across the planet.
There is one last curious connection between Kalm and the Shinra Mansion. Up in the tower room of one of the buildings, you can find a weapon that no one in the party can equip, a Peacemaker pistol. Maybe because it’s a handgun and obviously could be useful at some point, Cloud picks it up, even though he left behind the megaphone which will prove to be the ultimate weapon for Cait Sith back in the lockers of the Shinra Headquarters. The Peacemaker is surely going to come in handy for somebody, we just haven’t met him yet. That’s a side quest for another time.
Wesley Schantz (the Bookwarm Mage) coordinates Signum Academy, writes about books and video games, and teaches in Spokane, WA. FFVII Myth & Materia comes out of his podcast series with Alexander Schmid and Vincent Reese.
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