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Rapture as Metropolis in Bioshock: Postmodern Gothic FilmNoire
By Jill Powers
I have been a Bioshock fan since I first started playing Xbox 360 games, which dates to
2010, although the game itself came into production in 2007. I did the last third of my
dissertation on Fritz Lang’s 1926 film Metropolis, so the first thing I noticed was that the city of
Rapture, the utopian city under the sea that is the setting of Bioshock, is very literally (and
deliberately) modeled on Metropolis as utopian city, down to the city father and the protagonist
Jack, who is actually his son, who somehow finds his way back to the cursed city and is forced to
confront his father. This dark Freudian plot is darker even than Metropolis’ original plot of Joh
as city Father and son/protagonist Freder. To wit, the conclusion for Joh and Freder results in a
reunion of Father and Son through the Deus ex Machina Maria and her evil twin, a cyborg
Maria, through the happy ending of Maria’s synecdochal joining of the Hands (the city workers,
whose union she represents) and the Head (Joh) through the Heart (Freder, who pursues Maria as
love object); the plot of Bioshock ends with Jack’s confrontation and execution of his father.
While some elements in Bioshock are definitely anachronistic in their settings (1920s Futurist
Bauhaus architecture, 1930s style gangsters and 1920s flappers and 1940s wave-wearing war
mavens) but set in 1960, every element of Metropolis pervades the atmosphere and plot of
Bioshock, with steampunk postmodernist updates. The main difference in the narratives is the
fate of the denizens of Rapture: while Metroplis portrays the cloning of Maria’s flesh onto a
female robot is one of the earliest renderings of German experimentations with genetics and the
Aryan nation and actually inspired Adolph Hitler’s own ambitions, Andrw Ryan, who is kind of
a love child of Howard Hughes-like demagogic billionaire/entrepreneur and Adolph Hitler, as if
this would have been the result if Hitler had succeeded. Indeed, the city is obviously called
Rapture (after the Latin rapturo from I Thessalonians 4:17, meaning “forcibly caught up in the

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air” and based on the Greek harpazo), and is usually meant to imply that the chosen of God
would be chosen to be snatched away, according to Pretribulation and Premillenial theology, so
that God’s elect will not have to suffer God’s wrath in the End Days. In this case, the city father,
Andrew Ryan, shows himself to be just as human as Joh, whose corruption is ultimately what led
to the city’s degradation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=lQYUXFLY728
Bioshock is a first-person shooter set in 1960. You play the role of Jack, a
passenger of a plane that crash lands in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean at the
start of the game. Jack appears to be the only survivor and, as the wreckage burns
on the ocean around him, he makes his way to a structure protruding from the
water. He has found an entrance to Rapture, a failed utopia built under the sea.
The city was envisioned as a breeding ground for the arts and science but the
leaking, dark, and dilapidated environ Jack finds himself in and the immediate
attack on his person by an obviously crazed and mutated human attest to an
ambitious project gone terribly wrong./Psychopathic surgeons, murderous and
autonomous defense systems, a liberal coating of gore, and the presence of
sinister, seemingly cannibalistic, girls called Little Sisters protected by groaning
pieces of mecha known as 'Big Daddies' all lead to the exquisitely constructed
sense of pervading horror and doom that qualifies Bioshock as an exemplary work
of contemporary Gothic. (Vee Uye
http://retrospeculation.blogspot.com/2009/03/is-bioshock-steampunk.html
Obviously, the citizens who came to Rapture are implied to mean that Andrew Ryan thought of
himself as God, and his utopian vision goes horribly wrong when he finances the production of a

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superrace via the pushing of a genetic goo called Adam, and Eve is a development of Adam into
individual Plasmids which the shooter can shoot up. The shooter can instantly develop
superhuman/supernatural skills, such as the ability to shock, incinerate, use telekinesis, direct
swarms of bees, and a number of other very useful and deadly skills, meant originally for
defense, but also obviously abused. The Adam ingested is very addicting and eventually drives
the consumer mad, becoming weirdly mutated into Splicers.
The problems caused by ADAM abuse among the population of Rapture were
exacerbated by Andrew Ryan's Free Market beliefs. His hands off approach to
running the city meant that there was no regulation of ADAM, and no prevention
of its side effects. By the time the Rapture Civil War began and Ryan was running
the city with an iron fist, the damage had already been done. ADAM was
discovered by Brigid Tenenbaum in a sea slug that had bitten one of Rapture's
dock workers and healed his long-crippled hand. However, the sea slugs alone
could not provide enough ADAM for experimentation and work, let alone
marketing. But when the slug is embedded in the lining of a host's stomach it was
discovered that, through regurgitation, they could have twenty to thirty times the
yield of usable ADAM. This was the original purpose of the Little Sisters and the
orphanage. The exact date of ADAM's discovery remains murky, although it
would seem to have occurred sometime before 1948 due to a concept for a
Teleportation advertisement seen in Fontaine Futuristics, dated 06/16/1948.
Another sign of it being at least before 1952 is that Tenenbaum, Yi Suchong and
Gilbert Alexander are all seen in a "Rapture's Best and Brightest" 1952 poster. All
were key figures in Rapture's scientific community after the discovery of ADAM.
It is unlikely that Tenenbaum would have been so revered prior to ADAM's
discovery. (ADAM) […]Due to abusive ADAM consumption, their bodies and
minds have been deformed beyond repair (though some of their physical
deformities can be attributed to Dr. J.S. Steinman's plastic surgery), and they have
become dependent on the substance, both mentally and physically. Many of them
still wear Masquerade Ball masks, perhaps, as Atlas suggested, out of shame at
how ADAM has deformed their bodies” (“Splicers,” Bioshock Wiki).
Furthermore, the splicers become horribly disfigured and deformed by splicing, rather than the
perfect, beautiful creatures Ryan intended with his own Dr. Mengele, Dr. Steinman, whose own
forays into plastic surgery lead to weirder mutations, including Thuggish, Leadhead, Spider
(like Spiderman, but much nastier), Houdini, and Nitro splicers in Bioshock 1, while Brutish

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splicers replaced the Nitros in Bioshock 2. When Jack crashes into the North Atlantic, he finds
himself stranded on the remains of a building protruding from the waves, and going in, finds his
way to a bathosphere that takes him down to the city of Rapture. One of the first things he finds
is an Adam vending machine, which yields one hypodermic of Shock Adam. Similarly, as you
go through the game, you are able to find Adam by either harvesting or helping the Little Sisters
who have the Adam you need to beat the splicers and take on Andrew Ryan himself; however,
his end is anticlimactic, since he is not the main boss to take down. The main boss is the one
who gave you the bathosphere in the first place, “Atlas” (as in, Atlas Shrugged), an alias for
Frank Fontaine, a thug turned megalomaniac/communist thug who is Ryan’s chief rival and
turns against him after Ryan took over Fontaine Futuristics, the scientific corporation that made
splicing possible through Brigid Tannenbaum’s discoveries. Frank Fontaine, like many
splicers, abused Adam so much that he has become the toughest hombre in the city and directs
all of the other splicers, provided from his welfare state housing as his own personal gestapo.
When Tannenbaum is introduced, so are the Little Sisters and Big Daddies, and she gives the
player a moral choice to make when you encounter your first Little Sister: to harvest (to kill the
Little Sister and take a large amount of Adam) or heal her (removing the Sea Slug).
Tannenbaum’s compensation for healing the Little Sisters are bonus prizes of Adam and
ammunition.
Why is any of this relevant to Metropolis? The whole setting of Rapture is an island
under the sea, much like Atlantis, and like Metropolis, is a Futurist utopia that is isolated from
the US and Russia mainlands for the purpose of keeping them contaminated by the corruptions
of both of these governments. The Trinitarian theme is doubled: Andrew Ryan as the City
father Joh/Jehovah; the city son Jack (the player stranded, who has been manipulated by

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Atlas/Frank Fontaine with the brainwashing phrase “Would you kindly…”) as Freder (who is not
brainwashed); and the Holy Spirit as scientists perfecting the technologies that bring about
horrible fates for the cities’ population, Brigid Tannenbaum (who is the only sane person left in
Rapture, because she didn’t splice) as opposed to the mad Einsteinian scientist Rotwang of
Metropolis, who made the Maria-cyborg in an attempt to remake Joh’s dead wife Hel and his ex-
crush. The creator of Bioshock, Ken Levine, originated this game with Thief: The Dark Project
of 1998 and Systemshock of 1994 and Systemshock 2 of 1999. Systemshock was deemed a
major coup for gaming, one of the first true 3D games, and combined with the first-person
shooter role of the player, makes for a compelling, complex character, not just observing what
the characters do like spectators of a movie, but participating in it. Such role play games were
obviously introduced by the board role playing games of Dungeons and Dragons (originating in
1974) and Zork (the first interactive computer adventure/quest game, originally written in 1994.
It is the anachronistic use of high concept steam technology that proves to be the
sticking point for any unequivocal categorisation of Bioshock as Steampunk.
Bioshock's narrative is set in the 1960s, after all, and the main technological
advancement - and the reason behind the unravelling of the denizens of Rapture -
has been the breakthroughs in genetic engineering and biotechnology. (Vee Uye
http://retrospeculation.blogspot.com/2009/03/is-bioshock-steampunk.html)
The steampunk elements of the game include its technologies, something mirrored in more
recent games such as Fable III and Bioshock Infinite, which is late Victorian prequel to the
Bioshock menagerie, which simply renames the Adam and Eve as “Salts” and “Vigours,” and
reformatting the setting to pose the political dangers of federalist nationalism vs. communist
nationalism, setting in the clouds rather than under the sea. Steampunk postmodernism enables
the writers to envision the dystopia and its denizens gone mad through the marvels of technology
gone awry and misused.

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It is the Futurist setting and characterization of Bioshock that sets it apart from other
games, especially shooter games. It is not the same genre as the traditional quest games like
Fable or Skyrim, peopled by elves, dwarves, wizards, witches, or fairies, which have some
moral consequences for the players’ actions. None of the denizens of Bioshock are moral,
despite Brigid Tannenbaum’s admonitions to the player that she would appreciate it if you don’t
hurt the Little Sisters, once you become a Big Daddy in the latter part of the game in the Point
Prometheus module, leading up to the final confrontation with Frank Fontaine. Brigid
Tannenbaum, after all, was the scientist who naively discovered and then marketed the use of
Adam as a consumer product. The whole “God trip” that the splicers have when they shoot up
Adam demonstrates the same moral as Metropolis: given the power of God, the people of
Rapture, like those of Metropolis, irresponsibly choose to be evil and use their powers against
each other, which leads to the destruction of the city itself. The whole scene of the machines of
Metropolis envisioned as Moloch/Baal worship in Metropolis, as well as the scenes with the
Seven Deadly Sins unleashed on the city from the cathedral and Maria’s story of the sins of
Babylon, are very similar to the moral structuring of Rapture, the name itself a Biblical
reference, as well as the constant chatter of the insane splicers singing “Jesus Loves Me” and
ranting “Father, why hast thou forsaken me?” Throughout the journey through Rapture, the
player is constantly reminded by Andrew Ryan’s and Atlas’/Frank Fontaine’s cryptic radio
messages and audio diaries that Jack (you, the player) shouldn’t judge them too harshly, even
though you wouldn’t be a slave without the mechanizations of any of them, especially
Tannenbaum and Fontaine. Ryan may be the true father of the player, and his sins might be
horrible, promising his residents Godlike power through the marketing of Adam, but Fontaine
and Tannenbaum had actually programmed you to kill your own father for their own personal

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reasons! Tannenbaum’s weak help afterwards, then, seems a tad lame, since she never really
gets out of her cubicle with the Little Sisters to help you fight the splicers or Fontaine, instead,
simply giving you more and more Adam to power you up for the final battle. Tannenbaum does
not use her own Gene splicing technology, knowing its effects, which is kind of strange,
considering that she discovered it, and most scientists like Viktor Frankenstein and Rotwang
eventually get their comeuppence by trying to play God in a similar fashion. Tannenbaum’s
repentance is that helping Jack (and then later, Delta, in Bioshock 2), is “the least she can do.”
Yep. Check. And the most she could have done is get out, like Elizabeth in Bioshock Infinite,
and actually play in the game, although we have to remember that the Artificial Intelligence of
Elizabeth did not exist when Levine created Bioshock. (Note: Levine’s inclusion of this aspect
is noteworthy, as no doubt players have complained that the only time you truly interact with
other players is to kill them, not work with them. Games like Overlord have long been
interactive between the gamer and other characters like the minion and require a substantial
amount of hand-to-eye coordination to manipulate between the player and the AI. Bioshock
Infinite’s capabilities are both improved but also annoying, because they interrupt the flow of
play and don’t always help the gamer, even though they do try, because the interference breaks
your concentration.) Getting back to the moral implications of the players’ actions, however,
we can see that one aspect of Metropolis is different from Bioshock in that the character of
Maria is a completely good character: she is a teacher, teaching about the moral consequences
of building a city that defies God; Brigid Tannenbaum is not such a character, but her actions
reveal the same dynamic that Jeff Goldblum’s chaotician warns about in Michael Crichton’s
Jurassic Park: these scientists were so busy proving that they could do something, that they
didn’t stop to think about whether they should do it or not. Tannenbaum is forced to admit that

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she is the one who let this evil Genie out of its bottle. Her fellow scientist, Dr. Suchong, does
not admit it, and he winds up dead.
It seems a tad disingenuous to say that it’s immoral to splice, then give your brainwashed,
accelerated growth test subject Adam to splice up just to kill off your enemies, even doing it to
protect the children. We could say that you, as the player Jack, are the most innocent person in
the game, even though you kill dozens of people just to move through the game; however, in
order to move through the game, you must kill them; it isn’t an option. Killing your father is
the only way you can progress in this game! Maria is basically kidnapped by Rotwang, mad
scientist still in love with Joh’s dead wife Hel, so she isn’t given an option of whether to
participate or not; her “splicing” to the demon-inhabited robot is not optional, either, which
becomes a cyborg with her likeness, mistaken by others, including Freder, as Maria herself. As
Andrew Ryan says first in his message to Jack, and then later, as Jack confronts Ryan in his
office, “a man chooses, a slave obeys,” to which Ryan adds “if you kindly,” the phrase the
scientist Suchong and Tannenbaum used to brainwash Jack, first brainwashed by Fontaine to
“kill Andrew Ryan,”: then demanded by Ryan himself, which you as player are forced to do in a
cut scene—you do not kill him with any of your own powers, but by being forced to take
Ryan’s own putter to bludgeon him to death. You do use your own powers and weapons to kill
Fontaine, however.
Finally, the steampunk aspects of Bioshock are definitely Bauhaus-inspired art deco
masterpieces of architectural wonders, which Metropolis reveals as dangerously ideological
monuments to man’s arrogance and quest for power. The setting of the same kind of
architecture in Rapture is comparable, but even more dreamlike, since we know that even with
our technology, building any such edifices at 20,000 leagues under the sea is impossible: what

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kinds of powers would you need just to maintain the structural integrities of such buildings with
the water pressures at cubic tons of water weight? It would take more than Howard Hughs’
billions (or Bill Gates’, or Ross Perot, or George Soros, or all them combined) to do it.
Metropolis, on the other hand, was a very possible city, and meant to be compared to other such
cities already in existence when the film Metropolis came out in 1926—New York City, with its
Gothic and Art Deco architecture is one such city with its skyscrapers. The anachronisms of the
setting of 1960 jars with this 1920s and 1930s architecture, combined with the characters from
1940s war mavens with their waves, 1920s flappers and organized crime thugs taken right out
of Stephen King’s The Shining’s New Year’s Eve ballroom party masks (to cover the splicers’
disintegrating features and ugliness), and 1930s street-wise thugs. However, that is what makes
this game postmodern, it’s collage a mélange of different character types from different times.
Essentially, Bioshock gives us the best and the worst of all possible worlds, the highest ideal to
the lowest depths of human character, the height of our loftiest ideals, hopes, and dreams, and
the meanest, most degraded depths of the human soul.