Disco Elysium: Is it ever too late for us to change?
- ** WARNING: SPOILERS FOR THE GAME DISCO ELYSIUM BELOW ***
“I Don’t Want To Be This Kind of Animal Anymore!”
These are the last dire words of your character, Harrier Du Bois, in the 2019 game, Disco Elysium. At least, these were his last words before suffering complete retrograde amnesia of himself and the world he inhabits, brought on by a drug and alcohol binge the likes of which would have made Mötley Crüe shudder.
The game begins in the darkness of the void, with only the (admittedly seductive) tones of your own reptilian brain and the quavering voice of your limbic system to keep you company. And then the pain sets in.
Harry, or the man who had been Harry only the night prior, then opens his eyes to behold a destruction that he both caused and cannot remember; both in his immediate vicinity and everywhere he goes for the remainder of the game.
And this is where you, the player, come in. From this point on, you (and a handful of dice rolls) decide Harry’s fate.
***
I, like a lot of us, have spent much of the pandemic in a fugue-like state. And I, maybe also like some of you, took this era of confusion and anger and sadness, and turned inward. I folded in upon myself with those feelings and with them, looked over my life with a less than forgiving lens.
I’m… far from perfect. Most of us are. But because I only have myself to keep me company in my own head, I’m the only one around long enough to really get into the nitty-gritty about everything I’ve ever done wrong in my life. I’m something of an authority on ‘Reasons Why Brandon Perkins is in Fact, The Absolute Scum of the Earth, and is Unfit to Share Oxygen With The Whole of The Human Race’. (A topic we’re looking to release a paper on, just as soon as I can find a scientific journal that is willing to accept ‘Me’ as a cited source.)
Oddly enough, the many hours of self isolation required during these seasons of plague have been less than helpful when it comes to changing my self talk.
Then, in late 2021, I found Disco Elysium: The Final Cut for the Switch. And since that moment I’ve taken to telling every waking person in my life about it; like a man who awoke in crop circle with a head full of secrets that he must share, lest the knowledge burn its way out of the dark hermitage of his own brain case. So… here is my totally sane article about the game.
Disco Elysium is, put simply, a murder mystery… Enthralled yet? No? Okay. You play as a detective and attempt, through dialogue and dice rolls, to solve the case of a man who was apparently hanged in the backyard of a hotel. Now, what makes the damn thing so addicting is the characters. Specifically your character: Harry.
Harry is, without a doubt, the biggest train wreck of a human being possible. Almost cartoonishly so. A brief synopsis of the events that take place just prior to his losing his memory goes something like this, as told by his wiki page:
Directly preceding the in-game events, Harry and the Major Crimes Unit were called to Martinaise to investigate a report of a hanging. When they arrived, Harry drove off the rest of the unit, screaming at them to “fuck off” because they were “cramping [his] style. He was the “Detective God.” The rest of his tirade were variations on “Fuck everything. All will burn. Detect or die!”. He then went on a several-day suicidal bender across the district. He harassed the patrons at the Whirling-in-Rags, waving his gun in their faces and making graphic suicide jokes. He trashed his room and broke the Whirling’s taxidermy skua, finally driving the waitress Sylvie Malaìika to resign on the spot just to escape him. He sold his gun to Bird’s Nest Roy, wrecked his Coupris 40, and on the final night before he lost his memory, he could be heard in his room at the Whirling screaming “I DON’T WANT TO BE THIS KIND OF ANIMAL ANYMORE” while listening to The Smallest Church in Saint-Saens on loop.
See what I mean?
But, despite myself, I… kind of love him. Now, what that says about me could be anything (and trust me, the little critic in my brain is already on it). But, wow. Right? Entire albums of sad country music couldn’t cover all of the things in that paragraph. And this was just a week. The inciting event that caused Harry’s life to spiral like this occurred SIX YEARS PRIOR. That’s six years of carnage from this guy before he really went off the deep end and wound up forgetting who he was entirely.
And then, you, as the player, get to decide what happens next.
Now, for you sadists out there, the rest of this likely won’t be for you. Might I recommend videos of children falling over to satiate you. For the rest of us, getting control of Harry’s life means one thing: We get to fix him.
Which is precisely what I set out to do.
At least, as soon as I understood what the hell was going on myself. The first portion of the game, assuming you haven’t spoiled anything for yourself, functions as a perfect place to step in, since both you and your character are completely clueless about this world.
Through discussions with individuals around the city of Martinaise, you and Harry both get to start filling in the gaps of what happened; both in regards to the murder and with Harry. All the while though, Harry is, perhaps, becoming someone else.
It’d be a crime to speak about Disco Elysium without mentioning it’s truly wild and magnificent skill chart.
See, skills in Disco Elysium are not merely the standard Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Wisdom, Intelligence, and Charisma that us D&D kids are used to. Instead, we are presented with aspects of a person’s humanity. Sure, things like Physical Instrument and Hand-eye Coordination speaks in the same lingua franca as D&D stats. But then you have things like Shivers, which, for the life of me, I can still hardly describe. The game describes simply as: “Raise the hair on your neck. Tune into the city.” As if you were one Matthew Murdock, able to sense the entire city around you.
But perhaps even more fascinating than the skills themselves is how they affect your game. See, these skills do not only help you achieve certain goals, as they would in any other RPG. They speak to you. Quite literally.
Some of these voices are more obviously helpful than others. For instance, the skill Electro-Chemistry’s goal through the entirety of the game is to make you feel good. It is the id of all ids. Obsessed with sex and drugs and every gasping, pupil dilating moment of pure ecstasy. Does this help you solve crimes? Eh… But it does do something else. It helps us understand Harry. And maybe not just him, but ourselves.
Perhaps the biggest lie we’ve ever been told is that you and I and all of us are, individually, just one person.
Yeah, sure, each of us are a single human being. But within that human exists so many different people. Inside the little damp cavern of our skulls exists a jungle of impulses, desires, and personalities. Some to be thwarted and some to be listened to. And sometimes, we listen despite not having heard their voice at all.
For example, in the famous split-brain experiment, professors Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga tested what might happen if instructions were given to one portion of the brain, and withheld from the other. Specifically, instructions being delivered via words and images to the right hemisphere, and withheld entirely from the left. In order to do this, they recruited individuals who, through a surgery to assist in lessening severe epileptic seizures, had their two hemispheres surgically split from one another.
Their findings were somewhat disturbing. By projecting instructions, i.e a card saying “WALK”, to the right hemisphere, the subject would begin walking without truly understanding why. When asked, however, the left hemisphere kicked in, forming a narrative as to why. Each subject would give different explanations for their reactions, all which had nothing to do with the simple fact that they had been instructed to walk. They had not been consciously aware that they had been instructed, but they had followed the instructions all the same.
To quote Author Will Storr, in his book, The Science of Storytelling:
“The terrible and fascinating truth about the human condition is that none of us really know the answer to the dramatic question [:who am I?] as it pertains to ourselves. We don’t know why we do what we do, or feel what we feel. We confabulate when theorising as to why we’re depressed, we confabulate when justifying our moral convictions and we confabulate when explaining why a piece of music moves us. Our sense of self is organised by an unreliable narrator. We’re led to believe we’re in complete control of ourselves, but we’re not. We’re led to believe we really know who we are, but we don’t.”
Which all brings me back to me and to Harry, and to Disco Elysium’s fabulous skill chart.
We are not one person. We’re more like millions of impulses and moods and desires and morals stacked into a trench coat pretending to be one logical and consistent person.
And this is what I think about when I think of the mistakes Harry made. Of the screaming and raving man who crashed his car and pawned his gun. The man who drank himself into oblivion, only to wake up the next day as someone else.
We are, all of us, capable of becoming something this sad and miserable. The voices are there. We all have our own voice of Electro-Chemistry in our heads, telling us to ditch all responsibility and to become a hedonistic goblin.
But we also each have our own version of one of my favorite skills: Volition. Volition’s own laconic definition goes as thus: “Hold yourself together. Keep your Morale up.” The slightly longer description gives a better picture though.
Cool for: Sane People, Well-Adjusted Cops, The Non-Suicidal
Volition urges you to be a good guy — to others and to yourself. It enables you to resist temptation: be it in a bottle, between a pair of legs, or at the end of an iron barrel which promises oblivion. Volition gives you the will to finish the investigation, improving your Morale — one of the two health pools in the game.
This is the part of Harry, and ourselves, that keeps us going despite everything. And because of that, I like to think it is also the voice of self-forgiveness. Which is maybe one of the most important aspects to convincing ourselves to stick around. As Franz Kafka wrote:
“I am forever chained to myself; that’s what I am, and that’s what I must try to live with.”
I am, like I previously said, deeply flawed. I know I’ve caused hurt. We all have. It’s impossible to exist without damaging another. We are little blots of entropy, burning away the edges of each other, and given sentience only to feel guilt about that simple fact.
Which is why we need to know there are people who, despite having burned away a great deal more than we have, still manage to stay. To turn it around. This is part of what makes Disco Elysium mean so much to me.
We’re given the ability take a true dumpster fire of a man, and turn his life around. It won’t be perfect, and certainly not everyone forgives Harry, and not everyone will forgive us. But, for those of us who struggle to find the sense of self-worth enough to turn it all around, the ability to do so for another feels like permission to do so for ourselves.
I don’t know the answer to the question: “Is it ever too late for us to be better?”. I can’t answer it for you, just as you can’t answer it for me.
But, I can’t help but thanking Disco Elysium for giving me the permission to try.
Volition: In honour of your will[…] That you kept from falling apart, in the face of sheer terror. Day after day. Second by second.