The five second drum loop that plays throughout “Bust Down the Doors” suggest chaos. The contrast between the loud beats and the softer, faster drums behind it create a sense of movement before the text can be seen on the screen. Once the text starts moving, the music matches it, and the work together to aid the movement that goes on throughout the story. Each piece of the story that appears on the screen tells a different portion of the story, so that when the text moves, the actual story and the music moves along with it.
By the time the first iterations of “Doors” plays through, the body and machine of the story are set. The story of “Doors” is its body, and that will never change. The machine of it is its delivery and mechanism. In this case, “Doors” uses the computer as a medium that allows us to perceive the story through sight and sound. The drums, the amount of time between each flicker of the screen, and the visual presentation of the words all stay the same in each iteration.
The face of the story, however, is different each time. In the first iteration, the person in the story is “you,” or the reader. This has the effect of making the face our face, the story our story, and it makes the text as a whole more relevant to us by doing so. By using the second person point of view, we become the ones who experience the story. And the characters in it are actually watching us move, cheering when we die. It effectively flips the common perception of a story on its head, making us become its characters and story, while making the story’s characters the ones to whom the story is told.
Each iteration of the story changes this face, or point of view. While the rest of the text stays the same, changing the face of the story completely changes its meaning. In two of its versions, the face of the story changes from “he” to “she,” and the different connotations that these two different points of view say much about our cultural and idiosyncratic perceptions of gender. All of the versions of the story point to the different implications that a point of view can convey. In one version, the point of view changes to the first person, and it’s interesting to see how much the reader relates to both.
By the time “Doors” comes to its end, the face becomes a distorted collage of each face that it had conveyed previously. Line by line, it switches points of view seemingly at random. Although the body of the story stays exactly the same as always, the distortion of its face makes the story unreadable in the short times that we have to read each line. We need to mentally adjust to the changing of the face much more than we would to a change in the actual body or music. In “Doors” we perceive a story through its face. The body and machine are simply mechanisms for a discussion of the transformational properties that point of view has on a story.