The surrealist art movement began in the late 1910s. Even though the surrealist art movement began in the first decade of the 20th century. Surrealism was known for using automatic writing or automatism, as their primary mode of expression. A form of expression which sought to free the unbridled imagination of the unconscious. The surrealist art movement spread through multiple mediums, such as poetry, prose, artwork, music, and film.  Today, it is alive in a contemporary form of visual art, video games. The video game Alice: Madness Returns (2011) uses elements of surrealism to create Wonderland as Alice’s unconscious which contributes to her revealing the truth about her family’s death. Which in turn, spurs an individual psychological revolution, that leads to Alice taking action toward social change.   

The surrealist art movement began in the late 1910s. Even though the surrealist art movement began in the first decade of the 20th century. Surrealism was known for using automatic writing or automatism, as their primary mode of expression. A form of expression which sought to free the unbridled imagination of the unconscious. The surrealist art movement spread through multiple mediums, such as poetry, prose, artwork, music, and film.  Today, it is alive in a contemporary form of visual art, video games. The video game Alice: Madness Returns (2011) uses elements of surrealism to create Wonderland as Alice’s unconscious which contributes to her revealing the truth about her family’s death. Which in turn, spurs an individual psychological revolution, that leads to Alice taking action toward social change.    

The surrealist art movement began in the late 1910s. Even though the surrealist art movement began in the first decade of the 20th century. Surrealism was known for using automatic writing or automatism, as their primary mode of expression. A form of expression which sought to free the unbridled imagination of the unconscious. The surrealist art movement spread through multiple mediums, such as poetry, prose, artwork, music, and film.  Today, it is alive in a contemporary form of visual art, video games. The video game Alice: Madness Returns (2011) uses elements of surrealism to create Wonderland as Alice’s unconscious which contributes to her revealing the truth about her family’s death. Which in turn, spurs an individual psychological revolution, that leads to Alice taking action toward social change.    

Surrealism arose out of an earlier art movement called Dadaism. The Dada movement was known for its whimsical disregard for rationalism and tradition. The poet, Andre Breton is considered one of the founders of surrealism and wrote the “Manifesto of Surrealism” published in 1924. Here, Breton wrote of the ideals of surrealism, describing it as “pure psychic automatism” the desire to free the mind from rational control and the desire to channel the unconscious into a form of artistic expression. The movement was heavily influenced by Sigmund Freud’s writings, particularly his work “Interpretation of Dreams” (1899) and his idea in psychoanalysis of free association. As well as, the importance Freud gave to dreams and the unconscious as a place for realizing possible repressed human emotions and desires. Surrealists enjoyed the interplay of real life and dreams in their artistic works.

In the “Manifesto of Surrealism” Breton stated, “I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality”. (Breton 1924). Breton believed that in this “surreality” there could be a kind of truth, a reality unveiled and free from constraint. Much of the imagery within these works is often uncanny and odd, meant to jolt the viewer out of their typical assumptions, with a strong focus on objects. The artists desired to make the objects surreal so that the viewer could see the object as if for the first time. Their strategy in making these objects “surreal” was by estrangement.  The goal was to displace the object by removing it from its expected form or environment, to defamiliarize it. The idea being that once this defamiliarizing had taken place the object could be seen without the mask of its cultural context and could therefore, reveal the sexual and psychological forces hidden under the surface of reality. As a video game, Alice: Madness Returns has the ability to do something that previous surrealism visual art couldn’t quite accomplish. It can create an entire surrealist atmosphere that engages the player through the defamiliarization of objects and people to see reality within the game for what it truly is.

Alice: Madness Returns was developed by Spicy Horse gaming studio and released by Electronic Arts for Microsoft Windows PC, Playstation 3, and Xbox 360. The game was long the awaited sequel to a dark computer game released eleven years prior titled American McGee’s Alice. The protagonist in both games is Alice Liddell.  In Madness Returns, we see that Alice has been released from the asylum and now lives in the Houndsditch Home for Wayward Children under the care of the proprietor, Dr. Angus Bumby. Alice appears to be in her late teens. It has been nearly ten years since the death of her family and destruction of her home in a fire. After the tragic fire, Alice went into a catatonic state broken only by sudden and often violent emotional outbursts where she proclaimed to have killed her family. In the beginning of the game, Alice sits before Dr. Bumby as he uses hypnosis therapy to try to make her forget her past, forget the fire in order to cure her madness and create a new sane Alice.

Throughout the game we snap back and forth between Wonderland and the real 19th century London. Each realm of Wonderland takes us deeper and deeper towards the heart of Wonderland and Alice’s deepest unconscious where her most repressed memories lie and the truth about what happened to her family. Unlike previous forms of visual art, a video game does not always guide your eye. The player is free to look around anywhere in the game so the created world around them immersing the player in one giant surrealist artwork. This has the effect of making the player overly observant of their surroundings. Any of the objects protruding from the wall or anyone of the strange anthropomorphic people may hold a clue leading to the truth. The player becomes engaged in trying to see what Alice may be missing, to divine the truth in the surrealism of Alice’s unconscious.

The game begins by setting up the real world and Wonderland as separate realities linked in Alice’s hallucinations. The real world of 19th Century London is painted as drab, in desaturated shades of grey, brown and black, as is the real-world Alice. In the beginning of the game, we follow Alice out into the street. It isn’t long before Wonderland bleeds into the real world, as creepy bunny men come for Alice. Despite the creepy hallucination segueingus to Wonderland, once there we see Wonderland as a vibrant place. A stark contrast to the dull real-world London. Alice floats gently down from a bright blue sky and lands daintily on her feet in some lush green grass. We quickly see Wonderland as a surreal world. This is the first level of Alice’s mind a bright dream world with scattered depictions of childhood innocence. The surrounding environment is a beautiful forest with massive children’s toys as part of the scenery. Dominos as river rocks and as clouds floating in the sky. Jacks protrude from the treetops, and giant dice are scattered throughout the foliage. Estranging the objects from their typical proportions and places.

As the player goes deeper the environment changes within Wonderland but it’s always surreal with objects either out of proportion and/or depicted in places they usually wouldn’t be. Many of the objects and characters are oversized, broken, or distorted. An example are the giant teapots or bits of teapots embedded into the surroundings throughout the realms. These teapots are a symbol of Alice’s childhood, when she used to have tea parties with her friends in Wonderland.  

The teapot imagery becomes bastardized in the form of an enemy you must fight, the Eyepot. It is a golden steampunk teapot with mechanical spider like legs that it scuttles about on, with a large red eye on the side of it with a vertical pupil and eyelids that open vertically. Another surreal enemy is the boltfly which appears to be a large dragonfly at first glance but is actually a large bolt with dragonfly wings. These are defamiliarized objects that point to Dr. Bumby’s therapy which is trying to reconstruct her with his repeated phrase “make a new Alice”.

“The law” is often talked about in Wonderland, particularly in the realm called “The Hatter’s Domain” where massive gears and clocks float in the smog filled sky and everything is metal, steam, and mechanical. Throughout this world you can hear one of the villains shouting at the workers about the “new law” and the endless work before them shouting “A good worker is a live worker” and “Fight the good fight, work until you expire” or “pay has been suspended, indefinitely”. In this world Alice can use steam vents to float up to unreachable places and leap across floating massive gears and buildings that resemble large mechanical teapots with clocks in the middle. She must navigate mazes of steaming mechanical machinery and large steel compression pillars shaped like fists that pound the metal and Alice into shape.

Surrealists were influenced by the work of Karl Marx and hoped that through the psyche they could reveal contradictions in the everyday world and spur on the revolution. After the “Manifesto of Surrealism” Breton and Leon Trotsky wrote the “Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art” (1938). Here Breton and Trotsky spoke of their concerns for art in the contemporary world, “we must recognize the ever more widespread destruction of these conditions under which intellectual creation is possible.”(Breton, Trotsky 1) They believed that “true art is unable not to be revolutionary” that “only the social revolution can sweep clear the path for a new culture”(Breton, Trotsky 2). They hoped that a psychological revolution on an individual level would spur a social and political revolution on the societal level. 

“The law” in Wonderland is the corrupting force, rational and demanding. There is no room for any sort of vibrant imaginative play like the previous domain. This domain focuses less on seeing the truth beneath the presented reality, the illusion, and more about pushing against the “new law” and freeing this domain from the corruption of the rational. This is also the realm where we first begin to hear Dr. Bumby’s influence and tie him to the “new law” of forgetting and rebuilding Wonderland and Alice. We hear the workers shouting as they work “Abandon false hope! Forget the past the damage is done, let the madness begin”.  Dr. Bumby has said “Forget the past”, “Forgetting painful things makes sense, it’s rational.”.

By the time we reach the third realm, a clear theme of illusions takes form. Each world is about uncovering the darker hidden meaning beneath what is initially presented. This is very much like what the surrealist project was aiming for in their artwork. The game continuously defamiliarizes objects and embeds them into the different realms in order to allow Alice to reach the truth through her own unconscious mind. In “The Deluded Depths”, an entire underwater portion of Wonderland, Alice helps a charming man called the Carpenter, who runs a theater, and his crew members who are human-like sea creatures. Alice’s father loved art and theater, so Alice has a soft spot for anything like this and was eager to help. However, in the end it turns out that the Carpenter and his anthropomorphic crew are actually murderers and they kill the entire audience and eat them during this bizarre musical number where the game’s style changes to an odd pop-up artwork.

Once the truth is revealed the “Deluded Depths” changes from a safe place with a well-functioning town full of life and music and art, to a ghost town with bloody streets and massive fish skeletons lining the walls, their jagged edges protruding out towards Alice and the player. Alice even stumbles upon a room full of dripping blood and the bodies of the audience mixed with carcasses from previous “shows”. Alice is furious and distraught at what has taken place and her naïveté in trusting the Carpenter and her own roll in the death of all of these fish people. This is a world that is again using the surreal atmosphere to get Alice to see the horror of her reality and what Dr. Bumby is doing with the children and Alice in his “home for wayward youth”.

In the domain, “Queensland”, one level above Alice’s deepest unconscious. The world is marked by crumbling buildings and a large crumbling castle in the distance with the shape of large heart arching above one of the towers. As Alice travels deeper into “Queensland”, the crumbling castle walls begin to be covered in flesh and the dull distant sound of a beating heart emerges, continuing the surreal atmosphere and creating uncanny defamiliarization by slowly turning the buildings into flesh. The closer we get to the Red Queen we begin to hear her voice telling us “it isn’t polite to be an unwanted guest”, and a “good guest is one who knows when to leave”. Her voice sounds vaguely familiar, but it’s fragmented into many of the same voice at once. Slowly, the entire world turns to spongy flesh around Alice and the player. We can hear the squelching with each step as the heart continues louder around us.

We walk along a long bridge made of flesh, tendrils of tissue reach out from the bridge tying it to the fleshy walls. At the end of the bridge we can just makes out a throne made of deep red flesh with someone sitting in it. The camera pans up and away for a moment before slowly panning down to reveal the face of the Queen of Hearts. It’s Lizzie, Alice’s older sister. We have only seen Lizzie in Alice’s memories up until this point and this is twisted surreal version of her. Lizzie in Alice’s memories is portrayed as a strong somewhat sassy young teen, but never actually threatening in any way.

Here Lizzie is defamiliarized, the Red Queen has Lizzie’s face though her eyes are larger than normal and her skin is pale with dark circles under eyes, the complexion of a corpse. She is dressed in a black and red Victorian style ball gown with a thin blood red heart spreading across her chest. A red crown floats above her head, not attached to anything.  In her left hand she grips a golden scepter with a red heart at the top. Her hands are where she ceases to even look human. They are overly large with long pointed fingers, the skin on her hands is covered in burnt scars. She scowls down at Alice as Alice says, “I was expecting someone else.” The Red Queen responds with “You don’t know your own mind.”

This statement berates Alice and the player, telling them that they still don’t know and need to look even closer at the world around them, at the objects and people. Not just their real-world representations or their Wonderland counterparts, but instead somewhere in-between. Particularly in the next domain, “The Dollhouse”, where the surreal environment holds so much of the truth. The Red Queen continues with her speech where she scolds Alice for repressing her memories “What you claim not to know, is merely what you’ve denied.” In the end of this scene the Red Queen’s fleshy tentacles pick up Alice as she begins to panic asking what the Red Queen is doing. The camera flips us to a shot from Alice’s point of view looking down at the Red Queen as she says, “Your view conceals a tragedy. The whole truth you claim to seek eludes you, because you won’t look at what’s around you!”

This is the last thing we hear before the Queen’s mouth stretches open, abnormally wide, and swallows Alice. A final reminder to pay attention to what is being laid before us. Alice plops into the Dollhouse world. A domain that is buried inside of the Red Queen and houses this tragedy that the Queen spoke of. The tragedy of what really happened to Lizzie, the truth of which is hinted at throughout the Dollhouse’s loss of innocence themed objects and places.

The Dollhouse, is a domain full of large toys and giant dollhouses that Alice must explore looking for the last of her repressed memories. Everything in the dollhouses is overly large as though from the view of a child, again encouraging us to see this surreal world from a different perspective. The truth is laid out in the surreal objects of the Dollhouse domain, particularly in the baby dolls. Baby dolls are defamiliarized, in their large size, and given sexual connotations in this domain, continuing the theme of loss of innocence. Many of the doors are placed in between large sculptures of naked baby dolls legs. A blatant hint at the tragedy Alice has so deeply repressed. The sexual assault and murder of her sister Lizzie. It’s here that Alice is able to put together the memories of Lizzie talking about a man who was stalking her and wouldn’t leave her alone, one of their father’s associates. Alice can’t remember who at first, but when she reaches the end of the Dollhouse she encounters the Dollmaker, a surreal version of Dr. Bumby.

He is huge, the largest of all the people we have seen in Wonderland. He has black ooze dripping from his eyes, mouth and ears spewing the inky black corruption we have seen throughout Wonderland. The Dollmaker is the source. He has doll parts embedded in his skin, an eyeless doll face protruding from the back of his hand. His coat that he is wearing is full of drawers where he pulls doll parts and screws them onto children referred to as the “unstable”.  It’s here that Alice puts the truth together. Dr. Bumby has been taking orphans and making them forget through his “therapy”. Once they are thoroughly mad and they can’t even realize what is happening anymore he prostitutes them out. This was his plan for Alice as well.

In the real world, London, Alice confronts the real Dr. Bumby and remembers that he was there the night of the fire. He broke in, assaulted Lizzie, locked her door, and smashed the lamp in the library downstairs starting the fire that killed her family. Alice saw him come in before he got to Lizzie but was too scared and do anything. The guilt over what happened to her family is the heart of Alice’s madness and Dr. Bumby took advantage of that. In the end of the game Alice pushes Dr. Bumby in front of a train, killing him. Though just before she pushes him, real-world Alice turns into Wonderland Alice.

Even after she kills him she doesn’t change back and when she walks out of the station it is into Wonderland. However, this Wonderland is vibrant and mixed with buildings from real world London. Giant mushrooms, oversized children’s toys and the scorched Liddell house are all wrapped together in Wonderland.  Alice has all of her past, reality, and the surreal dream world of Wonderland all together in an alternative reality. The two worlds have overlapped, bringing together all of the surreal imagery, from the past and present Wonderland and the real world, to make a truthful whole no longer hidden beneath reality, a “surreality” as Breton presented in “Manifesto of Surrealism”.

The surreal atmosphere of Wonderland spurs on a psychological revolution in Alice against the rational and real imposed on her from the real world and its people. Alice rallies against the mechanical “new law” and the “corruption” infecting the imaginative world of Wonderland with its rationality. This psychological revolution not only gets Alice to see the truth but allows Wonderland Alice and real-world Alice to overlap and take action over the social corruption of the real world in killing Dr. Bumby to stop him from hurting more children.   

Alice: Madness Returns’ visual aesthetic uses the interplay of the real world and the dreamlike Wonderland to uncover the hidden truth. Giant objects of innocence turned disturbingly sexual and the people of Alice’s everyday twisted into surreal versions of themselves, so Alice and the player can see who and what they really are. The game believes that if Alice would just know her own mind and see beneath the illusions of reality she could see the truth, an ideal of surrealism, and one the game wishes the player to depart with. Alice; Madness Returns is an example of how the surrealist project continues today in a modern medium such as video games.  Madness Returns creates a surreal dreamlike atmosphere and narrative, defamiliarizing players with objects and people in order to allow them to see what is right in front of them and perhaps leave the game viewing objects and their environment differently than they did before playing and give their own unconscious more credence. Carrying on surrealism’s desire for revolutionary art, to spur the individual revolution in its players and enact societal change.