One Day I Will Return To Your Side: Disco Elysium and Hauntology
CW: mention of drug abuse, alcoholism, suicide, depression. Also spoilers.
“Un jour je serai de retour près de toi,” French for “one day I will return to your side.” These words are painted in the streets of Martinaise, outside of a local hotel. A few days prior a shootout occurred on the site between members of a local dockers’ union and mercenaries hired by their employer to break the ongoing strike. As the artist painted her graffiti, the paint mixed with the blood spilled onto the street that day. How many died depends on the choices and abilities of the detective, who those playing the recently released Disco Elysium control. While the graffiti is only a moment in the wider story of a game filled with many threads, it acts as a rare glimpse of hope in an otherwise depressing and exhausted world. Disco Elysium is a game haunted by possibility, of both what is to come, and what could have come, from the lost futures embedded in its past.
The artist is a young woman named Cindy. Cindy is met early on, throwing insults at a corporate representative who is nearby. Mostly she hangs out on a balcony and talks about art. She also hates the detective, for he is a cop, and cops are pigs in this part of town, but Cindy will take pity on his artistic ineptitude and gives him a paintbrush. You might later find out that she’s essentially homeless, living in the coal room of the building she’s hanging outside of.
Cindy is just one of the many lost and drifting inhabitants of Martinaise, the worst off neighborhood in the city of Revachol. Once, it was a bustling harbor district in the capital of the world. Now, Martinaise is but a bombed out ruin, filled with the most marginalized and desperate members of society. Revachol was a city-state and the seat of an old imperial empire, which was ran to the ground by incompetent rulers, who cared little for their subjects. This resulted in the Revolution and the establishment of the Commune. Like our own world’s Commune, Disco Elysium’s was a short-lived communist state inspired by the thought of Kras Mazov (whose physical likeness bears an uncanny resemblance to that of Karl Marx). Yet, as with our world’s Paris, while Revachol had its own “Le Temps des cerises,” so too did it have a Bloody Week. The capitalist nations of the world united into a military coalition and violently uprooted the Commune, with Martinaise being their beachhead.
The resulting conflict left scars, both literal and emotional, running across the district. A once luxurious middle class apartment is now a smashed up shell, the exterior wall of an electronics company is littered with bullet holes from an execution, munitions stores are regularly found in bunkers hidden throughout the area. The ghosts of the revolution refuse to leave the citizens of Martinaise. René Arnoux and Gaston Martin, two old men who lived through it, are found playing a game in a crater. Arnoux was a devoted monarchist soldier, while Martin married the woman they were mutually in love with. When she died, both were left with nothing but their mutual hate. You never see them outside of the crater, unable to escape the squabbles of the past. Another man, Iosef Lilianovich Dros, senile and dying, is met in the games conclusion. Once a commissar in the communist army, he has been hiding, silently continuing the war, for 43 years. This drove him mad, eventually leading him to commit the murder that functions as the game’s central plot. For him, the Revolution never ended.
The weight of the world hangs over everyone. The detective the player controls, Harry DuBois is himself trapped in the disco of his youth, with his face muscles permanently stuck in “The Expression.” Meanwhile he has nightmares of his ex every single night. She appears Christ-like, Harry unable to let go, holds her up on a pedestal. The horrors of society drove him to drug abuse and alcoholism, which periodically causes him total amnesia. His states of amnesia act as his only moments of clarity, unhindered by the burden of his memory or the world around him (it is no coincidence that he forgets what money is). Other characters, such as “Abigail”(whose only, repeating line is “Don’t…call…Abigail!”), Soona Luukanen-Kilde (obsessed with finishing the scientific work for a now defunct company), and Klaasje (on the run for corporate espionage) are completely dominated by their pasts and memory. All of this is captured in the game’s incredible art style, especially the portraits. Even the form of the game itself, akin to an oldschool tabletop game, is of a bygone time. An electronics company in the game attempted to create a virtual tabletop, but failed. Only a meta-dream in the game, it is (partially) fulfilled by Disco Elysium itself.
There is also the Pale. It surrounds and encompasses the whole world of Disco Elysium. The Pale is a haze that bends and warps reality and memory. It is a grayness into nothingness, impossible to describe or measure, a location without a defined location, into which one’s memories scramble with other’s and no one’s. It is filled with information from the past, but none that is clear, instead degraded like that of the damaged tapes found in the game. Traveling through it is dangerous. Reality is suspended, and one’s brain becomes garbled as one ceases to be able to remember what is the present and what is the past; what are one’s memories and what are not. It encases the game with a sense of oncoming apocalypse, as the majority of the planet is covered with it, and worse, it is expanding. A parallel to both our own climate change, and our cultural stuckness, it represents the end. The end of the world, a slow and ongoing process; and the end (or more accurately, the edge) of possibility. Disco Elysium’s reality is bounded by a sea of nothingness, in the same way our own is, with no escape from the confines of capitalist reality imaginable.
What hope is there for such a dying world? A world exhausted of the new, ravaged by neoliberal austerity, and overflowing with suffering. In this capacity, Disco Elysium is no fantasy, but our own sad, warped reality. In his book Ghosts of My Life, Mark Fisher describes the concept of hauntology. Originally a term coined by Jacques Derrida, hauntology is an idea that can be understood as how everything that exists is defined not only by what is present, but equally so by what is absent (the word itself reflects this: ontology is the branch of philosophy that studies existence and being. In Derrida’s native French, the h in hauntology is silent, thus (h)auntology is pronounced the same as ontology). He argues that hauntological music, in how it engages with memory and loss, has “an implicit acknowledgment that the hopes created by postwar electronica or by the euphoric dance music of the 1990s have evaporated — not only has the future not arrived, it no longer seems possible.” For Fisher, the latter half of the twentieth century represented a bursting forth of possibilities, with different cultural forms, in what he terms “popular modernism,” were allowed to experiment and expand, in large part due to post-war social welfare policies. With the closing of that period, and the dawning of the so-called “end of history,” such possibilities were drained away. Where once there was a hope for the future (whether in art or in politics), now we have only repetition and despair. In other words, to use his only terminology, these futures are lost. Yet, unlike the bubble gum optimism that neoliberals push, Fisher argues that this kind of sadness can be understood to be productive. In holding onto the desire for the future, rather than it being seen as some kind of conservatism or hopelessness, Fisher argues that “this refusal gives the melancholia a political dimension because it amounts to a failure to accommodate to the closed horizons of capitalist realism.” Sadness and holding into past desires for such lost futures, is political, and imperative, as it sustains the hope for something else, an alternative to that closed off reality that we live in under capitalism.
Disco Elysium exemplifies the kind of melancholia that Fisher talks about. The failure of the revolution is a lost future that weighs down the whole district. Despite the absence of the reality of communism in Martinaise, it exerts a strong presence like nothing else. Fifty years on from its defeat, it’s as if time has failed to really move on. In other words, the failure of the revolution haunts the area, the literal specter of communism can be found everywhere. Many of the other failures of the future can equally be ascribed to politics and the economy. Would any of the misery that surrounds Martinaise’s citizens be present if not for neoliberalism? It’s hard to say, but that ambiguity is what makes hauntology so powerful. It engenders feelings of what if and other potentialities; possibilities that the official reality attempts to close off. The character of Cuno, for example, is a twelve year old drug addict. His father is dying of alcoholism and is left mostly to his own ends, which leads him to all sorts of mischief and crime. It’s noted in the game that Cuno has potential, given the correct choices, it’s even possible for Cuno to take the place of your partner. Yet, for the most part, it only remains that: a potentiality. Cuno is just another poor soul, crushed in the grinder of neoliberalism.
The element of music in the game is especially noteworthy. The game includes numerous references to music culture, especially the disco of Harry’s youth. Despite the name, disco in Disco Elysium is as dead as in our own world (where it was killed by racism and homophobia). It remains only one of those past stepping stones towards an artistic-political future that never came. The soundtrack of the game itself, recorded by the indie rock band British Sea Power, adds to the feel of melancholy. Near the game’s conclusion, while crossing the water to an island off the coast, the player has the option to set the radio to Sad FM. Doing so plays a heavily remixed version of the song “Want to be Free,” from the album Let The Dancers Inherit the Party. The remix included in the game is far more ethereal compared to the original. The lyrics also drastically differ. Titled, “Burn, Baby, Burn” on the game’s official soundtrack, in many ways, it is its own song. Lyrics from “Want to be Free” are intermixed with lyrics from the Trammps’ song “Disco Inferno.” In that song, the fire of the inferno is that of a dancefloor, yet here none of the flames can be felt. Embers do not even remain, the song is cold and ghostly (thus the Sad FM). The inferno is instead that of Dante, Hell, the existence of living under neoliberalism. Wanting to be free, is the desire to escape that condition.
The final line in the Sad FM sequence is a lonely “disco inferno.” This, and the hellish conditions that the people of Martinaise find themselves in are in striking contrast to the title of the game. The Elysium here derives from the name of the planet that the game takes place in. Our word “Elysium” derives from Greek Myth, in which Elysium, also known as the Elysian Fields, was a realm in the Greek Underworld in which the gods, heroes and the righteous spent eternity. The usage of Elysium could be partially ironic. The distance between the misery of Martinaise as compared to it is not unlike the state of our world, and the utopian declarations made in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet bloc. We were in the end of history they told us, a post-political world, where conflict had been exorcised; a kind of heaven on earth. Yet, the Elysium of neoliberalism is hell for its inhabitants. A different reading, however, could be as productive. Despite its depressing vibe, Disco Elysium is a far more utopian piece of media than the forced optimism that so much of our contemporary media contains. In fact, not despite its sadness, but because of it. Only through the negativity found in the game, a scathing critique of neoliberalism, paired with the melancholia of hauntology can we find the path to utopia and escape.
While the utopian desire for communism may be one escape, there exists another within the game. This is of course, the cryptid, a strange stick-like being discussed throughout the game, but only met in the final moments. It is a mysterious entity that few encounter due to its ability to stay hidden. Upon meeting it, if one is able to pass a skill check, Harry can communicate with it. Doing so allows the cryptid to give its account of existence and humanity. In an essay on the cryptid for Vice, Cameron Kunzelman, argues the it is both hopeful and horrific. For Kunzelman, the beauty of the cryptid is that of its view of nature as something higher, yet the horror is how it “calls the experience of human memory ‘a kaleidoscope of fire and writing glass’ and ‘eternal damnation.’” Human experience, for the cryptid, seems fundamentally a negative. As a result “the beauty of the natural world doesn’t seem to be the guarantor of perspective and potential that Disco Elysium…want[s] it to be.” Instead, it is a perspective of “a picture of humanity as hopefully compromised and unable to change.” Such a humanity is doomed, unable or unwilling to alter it’s ways, to a ruin of its own making. It’s no coincidence that the cryptid explains to Harry that the pale is the result of human activity and anxiety. It is, like our own climate change, our fault. In the end, Kunzelman concludes that:
“The cryptid gives us permission to think that this, too, shall pass. But we will pass with this, whatever it is. The promise of the cryptid is the promise of the future, for sure, but it is one where our decisions and triumphs and mistakes do not matter. It is a future where human works are ruins.”
Such an argument is deeply pessimistic. The promise for the future here is that of human annihilation, framed, as both beautiful and horrific; the world cleansed of our species. It is the easy path of misanthropy when faced with a dying world. Instead, a different examination of the cryptid can be made that leads down far less genocidal paths. The cryptid is in many ways the weird and the radical otherness that Fisher described in so many of his writings. In The Weird and the Eerie, he writes “the weird and the eerie…allow us to see the inside from the perspective of the outside.” The cryptid gives us that perspective, of a human experience that is broken and dying. As Matt Colquhoun explains, Fisher “seemed to want to encourage the revitalisation of a community of Lovecraftian Outsiders…unsure of how they arrived…but nonetheless curious to leave the cloistered world.” It is only by desiring, and then taking the step into the outside, and letting new forms of (collective) subjectivity in, can we transcend the closed off nature of contemporary capitalism. The cryptid, from this perspective, is not a harbinger of doom, but of an alternative. Instead of trying to break away from those ruins, it is through identifying with them, and coming out the other side into a post-capitalist future.
In the end, the weirdness of the cryptid, along with haunting possibilities of lost futures and utopias, remain just that: possibilities. Yet, it is this possibility that allows hauntology, and Disco Elysium to encourage optimism in a time of depression. Desire for the future, for the revolution, is what sustains the struggle during dark times. It is the ravers building their nightclub, and the union fighting against the company; the refusal to move on from the belief that an alternative is possible; that despite the brutality, bloodshed and death that arises, the possibility that the future can still arrive. That un jour serai de retour près de toi. Cindy’s message, is, in a time of loneliness, suicide and sadness, one of the most clear hauntings present in the game. Her promise that “one day I will return to your side,” is a utopian declaration of confidence in a hopeless world, as Marx’s “specter of communism” once was, and is. While Cindy is never met again in the game, it is the refusal to abandon the desires and belief contained in her graffiti that allows for supreme optimism when nothing but loss and defeat seem possible.
Sources:
Egress: on Mourning, Melancholy and Mark Fisher by Matt Colquhoun
Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher
Ghosts of My Life by Mark Fisher
The Weird and the Eerie by Mark Fisher
“The Mysterious, Magical End of ‘Disco Elysium’ Was One of the Year’s Best” by Cameron Kunzelman
