Henry Stein and Joey Drew. Susie Campbell and Allison Pendle. Beginnings and endings. Creation and destruction.
Opposites become increasingly important throughout Bendy and the Ink Machine, and are in no place more significant than during the stunning conclusion: Chapter Five - The Last Reel. It was evident as soon as Henry appeared in an apartment rendered in the colour spectrum of the ‘real world’, rather than the sickly claustrophobic yellow tint inside Joey Drew Studios, that we were going to get an ending no-one could have predicted.
Having reflected on the game and all it’s loaded dialogue that tiptoes round the edges of greater meanings, and subtle visual cues that connect the blurry dots across chapters, it strikes me that one particular contrast may hold the key to understanding this masterpiece: creators and destroyers. It’s been hinted at repeatedly since the very beginning. In Chapter 3 we were presented with the possibility of the split identity of the voice behind Alice Angel. In Chapter 5 this was confirmed, and the binary of a ‘good’ Alice and a ‘bad’ Alice was revealed. Tracing this back, Alice Angel the cartoon is itself part of a binary: the angel and the devil. The game strongly encourages us to impose this binary on all the characters - this is even geographically enforced when Henry has to choose ‘the path of the devil’ or the ‘path of the angel’ in Chapter 3.
We find out vague details of the mechanism by which the cartoon characters are rendered ‘real’ in Chapter 5. Film is used to imprint their figures in the ink machine, creating them like a type of ink 3D printer in ‘real life’. In one of his recordings in Chapter 5, Joey Drew insisted that they needed ‘souls’, implying what we’ve all suspected: his employees all supposedly gave themselves over to the ink machine and were embodied within the ‘real life’ renditions of cartoon characters that the animation studios had designed. Hence, Susie Campbell actually became an Alice Angel. Perhaps the Lost Ones are cartoon characters without a ‘soul’. The details of this process are left deliberately ambiguous to add to its sinister, occult and magical nature, and also because they aren’t important.
What is important is voiced by Joey Drew during the ending sequence: ‘who are we?’ Who is Henry? Who is Joey? His reflection does not appear in the mirror in the safe house of Chapter 3. He appears to be immortal, and when killed resurrects by transcending back into the Studio through a tunnel of ink. At first, I suspected that at the end of Chapter 1 Bendy captured Henry, hence the wheelchair and ink machine, and turned him into an ink creature through some unseen horrific procedure. But now I’m not so sure. So ‘who are we?’ The key word here is the plural first person pronoun - ‘we’ are one and the same. Joey and Henry are the same person.
Joey proceeds to binarise himself and Henry further - Henry had a family, Joey a 'crooked empire'. Those two things are by no means mutually exclusive. Joey is the unhappy, aged, megalomaniac monomaniac - yes he creates, but he also destroys through his creation. His huge occult perversion of what was at first an innocent cartoon idea meant to make people smile has destroyed him and all his employees. It has bankrupted his company and turned his studios into a mess of guilt, pain and sorrow. None of the ink creatures understand why they are there or what they have done, all they know is that one thing rules: Ink Bendy - the ultimate destructive and devilish force, murdering anyone who undermines, ridicules, crosses or apparently does anything in his vicinity. He even kills (apparently only temporarily) songwriter and devout worshipper Sammy Lawrence, another creative figure gone wrong, completely obsessed by his music and the cult of Bendy to the point where he becomes an axe-wielding, demonic megolomaniac himself. His creative obsession consumed him and became his downfall.
The ink machine represents imagination, and how if imagination is not kept in-check by a conscience (what Joey refers to as the ‘right thing’), terrible consequences await any creator. Henry represents the good side of Joey Drew’s creative spirit. Hence his name: Henry Stein. This is an obvious reference to Dr. Frankenstein - a doctor who created a terrible monster, despite having supposedly good intentions, and goes out to undo the damage he has done and stop his own creation. And just like Dr. Frankenstein, Henry failed. Joey tells him this: ‘you should have pushed me a little harder’ to do the right thing. Joey/Henry’s creative drive spiralled out of control due to his power-hungry attitude, and he let his creation turn into something awful, something destructive.
The game has a very prominent meta-narrative running throughout. This is evident on a number of levels. Firstly, Henry is voiced by TheMeatly, the co-creator of the game and the figure of Bendy. Ink is a huge part of the game - you write and create with ink - it’s a black void that represents the depths of our imagination - that’s why it’s so terrifying. How is Bendy defeated? By ending his infinite loop cartoons which play on the TV screens decorating his lair. This is of course true in real life as well - once the game is over for the player, Bendy ceases to exist. Henry literally inserts a reel called ‘The End’ into a projector, and Bendy’s life, and apparently the entire studio and everything it contains, is ended. Endings are the ultimate destructive force, while the opposite can be said of beginnings. It makes sense that this is the only thing that can kill the devil himself, as Bendy was 'there for his beginning, but he's never seen, the end'.
But it doesn’t end. It starts again, back to the very beginning. Joey points you towards the door of his house which supposedly leads back into Joey Drew studios. Have we stepped back in time and are receiving an explanation of what happens just before you enter the Studio in Chapter 1? I don’t think so, because it doesn’t correlate with what we know - Henry is sent a letter by Joey, not met by him in person in his own house. No - Joey sends Henry, his ‘creative aspect’, back into his studio, into the depths of his guilty conscience, to undo his destructive and morally corrupt actions. Is it real or is it in his head? It doesn’t really matter - what matters is that we are back at the beginning, and Joey is still stuck in an endless battle with his conscience that the creative force must continue to fight against in order to balance out the binaries of creation and destruction, good and evil, the angel and the devil, that are inside him and his world.
By sending us back to the beginning, we are also as players encouraged to play the game again to seek our own answers. To read into the ink to discover the mysteries of this fantastic game, to look at events and signs from different perspectives and discover new meanings. Indeed, we are given a tool to do so. The ‘Seeing Tool’ shows us all the clues and hints that previous Joey/Henrys have left to help him in later play-throughs to navigate the levels. This theory would explain why Henry is so completely unfazed by the horrors and bizarre happenings that he is confronted with. It would also potentially explain the tally on the walls that you see through the Seeing Tool right at the start. Furthermore, the date on the calendar next to Joey is different on every play-through and for every player - it’s hard to tell if this is just something the developers put in to frazzle us further, but it does suggest that each play-through is unique to each player, and that Henry’s journey is happening repeatedly over and over again, just like the cartoons that play in Bendy’s throne room, stuck on an infinite loop until someone turns them off and stops playing them, determining that they have ended.
Bendy and the Ink Machine is about the power of imagination - and the more you play the game, the more you come to realise this. Joey Drew (his surname is also loaded with significance) used it poorly and destroys through creation; Henry, his binary who we never see but only hear (just like a conscience), journeys through his memories, guilt and the dire consequences of his actions, creates through destruction - by destroying inky enemies and ending, figuratively and literally, Bendy, the studio, the story and the game. And the female voice right at the end, asking Uncle Joey to ‘tell another one’ just after we see an ink machine inconspicuously sitting in Joey’s house? Not only another encouragement to continue playing the game, but also another affirmation of the power of the imagination and storytelling. Joey tells Henry in his final recording that he 'can save' all the 'monsters' and the 'shadows of the past' in the Studio. He is telling Henry/himself to put his creative talent to good use - by telling stories to children and inspiring others to create good things using ink and imagination, rather than creating demons, both within himself and out in the ‘real’ world.