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chloe-caulfield94 · 5 months ago

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The theme of sexual violence in Life is Strange S1

A very important theme of Season 1, present in the Dark Room plot, is the theme of sexual violence and of women being objectified, turned into inanimate objects by cruel men. This is what Jefferson and Nathan did to their victims - quite literally deprived them of all agency and posed their bodies for their own pleasure.

Chloe was also a victim of the Dark Room. Nathan lured her into his dorm, slipped her date rape drugs and attempted to assault her. She barely escaped before he began his photo session of her, which likely would've ended the same way as it did for Rachel, with Nathan overdosing his model.

By the way, this shows that the remorse expressed by Nathan over Rachel’s death and his complicity in Jefferson’s crimes in his voice mail to Max was completely phoney. Because after he had already murdered Rachel with an overdose, he attempted to perform a “photo session” on Chloe, clearly not minding the possibility of overdosing yet another girl. But why would he mind it? This time it wouldn’t be a friend of his, just some “whore”.

Nathan: “That whore in the bathroom!”

Chloe: “He dosed my drink with some shit ...”

Chloe: “I know I passed out on the floor. I woke up and that perv was smiling, crawling towards me with a camera ...”

When you first heard Chloe describe her encounter with Nathan, how he invited her to his dorm room and roofied her, how he stood over her with a camera when she regained consciousness, what was your reaction? What did you assume Nathan wanted to do to Chloe?

Kate: “I swear to God I had one sip of red wine. I remember ... I remember getting sick and dizzy ... Then Nathan Prescott said he would take me to the hospital ... All I recall is driving for a long time ... then I woke up in a room ... I don't know what happened ... I woke up outside my dorm room the next day. I felt gross”.

When you first heard Kate describe her encounter with Nathan, how she immediately felt drowsy after tasting her drink, how Nathan removed her from the party under the pretext of helping her but instead he took her to some secluded place where he did something to her, what was your reaction?

At that point, was there any reasonable explanation for Nathan’s behaviour apart from him being a date rapist? Spiking a girl’s drink, removing her from the party to a secluded place, taking pictures to keep as souvenirs and to blackmail the victim into silence – that’s textbook date rapist MO.

The sexual undertone of the violence perpetrated by Jefferson and Nathan against their unwilling models is obvious. Explaining his “art” to Max, Jefferson said he’s obsessed with “the moment innocence turns into corruption”. He also said that all his models have “the same doe-eyed look” once they realize what is about to happen to them.

Jefferson: “I’m obsessed with the idea of capturing that moment innocence evolves into corruption”.

Jefferson: “You all have the same doe-eyed look when you wake up here, replaced by fear as you realize what’s about to happen”.

But Jefferson’s usual MO didn’t involve him murdering his victims. He murdered Chloe and possibly Victoria as well as attempted to murder Max, because they were witnesses that needed to be removed. He usually dumped his unconscious victims somewhere after performing a photo session on them, still alive. So if the thing that made his victims supposedly lose innocence wasn’t impending death, what was it? Mark Jefferson strikes me as the kind of person who holds the reprehensible belief that being subjected to certain kinds of violence can cause a person to lose their innocence and become “corrupted”. That is of course not true. The only way a person can become corrupted is by embracing evil with their heart. Suffering violence at someone else’s hands can never deprive you of your innocence or corrupt you. But it seems that obvious truth was lost on Mark Jefferson.

When you first heard Chloe and Kate describe their encounters with Nathan, when you first heard Jefferson, a grown man, talk how he is obsessed with taking away the innocence and corrupting the teenage girls he kidnaps, weren’t the implications of what they did to their victims obvious? I think the writers wanted to leave what exactly happened to victims of the Dark Room ambiguous, but when all the voice lines for Episode 5 had already been recorded, they realized that the fate of the victims was anything but ambiguous, so they decided to add a newspaper clipping Max can find in the San Fransisco timeline, which states that no signs of violence going beyond drugging, kidnapping and posing of the victims was found. I am deeply grateful that they decided to add this bit of information, because I am very fond of all the characters who had the misfortune to be subjected to Jefferson’s and Nathan’s violence – Rachel, Kate, Chloe, Max. But even after we learn that the perpetrators “only” posed their victims and took their pictures, I still maintain that what Jefferson and Nathan did was sexual assault. They drugged their victims unconscious. They at least partially undressed them. On the pictures Max finds in the Dark Room, Rachel is missing her shoes and Kate is missing her black jacket, which they would've been wearing the moment they were kidnapped. And those were just the first photos in their respective albums. Thankfully, we weren’t shown the rest. Jefferson and Nathan exercised complete control over their victims’ limp bodies, posing them in ways they found pleasing.

In her diary, Max describes that some of the photographs of Kate and Rachel she saw in the Dark Room portrayed them posed with Nathan. Rachel’s photographs depicted her “all over” Nathan. This goes to show that the photo sessions done by Jefferson and Nathan involved a lot more physical contact than simply needed to pose the unconscious models and that Nathan got particularly handsy with his victims, both during photo sessions he performed with Jefferson and during those he performed alone.

And why did they only target pretty teenage girls? If Jefferson and Nathan wanted to capture the moment “innocence turns into corruption”, why not target young boys as well? Why go through all the trouble of kidnapping students from an expensive private school that would be searched for if they went missing? Why not target people that nobody would come looking for, like the homeless, or truckers on long hauls? Because they lusted for a very specific type of innocence and a very specific type of corruption. Finally, notice how they talked about their victims. Nathan kept calling Chloe a “whore”.

When Max lamented Chloe’s murder, Jefferson responded by saying she had to be silenced because she knew too much but he wasn’t interested in Chloe as a model because he’d already had his fill of faux punk sluts like that in his Seattle days.

Jefferson: “And don’t get me started on your late partner. I had enough of those faux punk sluts in my Seattle days”.

This is such a bizarre answer. Jefferson, when accused of murdering Chloe, felt the need to clarify that he was not interested in her, because he’d already had numerous flings with girls similar to her in the past. Why say that? If his lack of interest in Chloe stemmed from the fact that he’d had relations with similar girls in the past, then that clearly implies that the interest in his models was at least partially sexual in nature, even if he “only” satiated his desire by taking photographs. Talking about his “art”, Jefferson felt the need to bring up his taste in girls, explaining that he’d had enough of sluts and he was now after pure girls from good homes that he could corrupt to his evil heart’s desire.

Later, Jefferson said that Rachel and Chloe are fucking in heaven.

Max: “Chloe and Rachel! You killed both of them!”

Jefferson: “They’re fucking together in heaven right now. Is that what you want to hear?”

This is a grown man talking about high school kids using language like that – sluts, fucking. All that proves that Jefferson’s and Nathan’s disgusting crimes had a sexual dimension to them.

Look at it from Chloe’s perspective. Nathan lured her into a secluded location and slipped her date rape drugs. She barely escaped whatever he wanted to do to her. If this happened to you or someone you cared about, what would you assume? The only reasonable assumption would be that it was an attempted date rape. And the reality of Nathan’s photo sessions, seeing how they sometimes ended with the model suffering a deadly overdose, while different, was no better than that.

Chloe knew she would never get justice by going to the cops. Her word against the word of the local oligarch’s son? The Arcadia Bay Police Department was so notoriously corrupt that its members would openly admit to taking bribes from the Prescotts to teenage girls they just met for the first time.

Max: “I heard a rumour you were working for the Prescott family on the side”.

ABPD cop: “Look, sometimes I check up on the Prescott family to make sure they’re doing alright. Nathan included”.

Chloe figured that the only way for her to get any semblance of justice was to confront the boy who attempted to assault her and demand compensation. Now, riddle me this. Which ending concludes the theme of sexual violence and objectification of women in a better way? The victim being murdered by her would-be assaulter upon confronting him? Or the victim getting away alive? Murder is the ultimate form of objectification. It turns you into an inanimate object, forever. Should the story of the Dark Room end with it claiming one more victim, objectified irreversibly? Or with the victim reclaiming her agency, breaking free from the objectification and remaining animated?

#chloe price #max caulfield #kate marsh #nathan prescott #mark jefferson #life is strange #lis #double exposure #bae vs bay

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