41ST PRECINCT: I always find it really interesting when you have a world such as Elysium - or any other - and there’s a certain bleakness to it. There is no more effective way to communicate the darker side of that world than through children. So I’m really like - Cuno and Cunoesse are probably the characters that fascinate me the most.
So - where did they both come from? Where did Cuno come from?
ARGO TUULIK: Well, honestly, proto-Cuno, Kuno with a K, comes from a summer, maybe 2005 or something like that, where Robert and I were working in this medical filter factory. Factory sounds so industrial, but it’s kind of in this small fishing village in Estonia where the lover of my father organized a summer job. Don’t ask. And I’ve thought about - how or why was this image and this manner of speech in my head? And I want to trace it back to Myron from Fallout 2.
Like, if you think about the facial features, and sort of this arrogance that Myron speaks to, I think there’s some roots there.
But one day, walking to work - it was like a five-minute walk from the apartment where I lived to the factory - I think I saw a guy with a bicycle and a flat tire or something like this. That was the trigger. And it echoes back to - remember when I told you that Kurvitz and I, we have this habit of coming up with characters?
Well, I created this scene in my head where you’re in the countryside road in the middle of nowhere, like, 30 kilometers of no civilization, and you get a flat tire. And just as you’re about to give up - like, what am I gonna do? Carry it on my back? You see this kid. Basically that perfectly fits the description of Cuno.
Ugly kid, makes you think about countryside incest a little bit, teeth all fucked up, you see him like an angel of God walking down this dirt road holding a tire pump. And you just look at it for a second, like an omen. Like, fate does exist. And you speak to him.
You say, “Hey kid. It’s so great that you’re here. Can I get the pump for a second?” And he completely ignores you.
Keeps walking. And you’re kind of thinking, like, maybe I’m not making it clear? So you’re like, “Hey.” You point to your tire. You’re like, “See? Tire is broke. Wheel no go around. Can I get that?” He’s still ignoring you.
Eventually you sort of grab his shoulder, and you say, “Please! My tire is broken!”
And now comes the translation bit, like, the line he uses is “Miks see Kuno keppi?”. In Estonian the direct translation is, “Why does it fuck Cuno?” The first English translation was, “Fuck does Cuno care?” That’s much more elegant in English. But what it loses is this introduction into this dualistic worldview of Cuno where everything in the world is categorized into the things that fuck Cuno and things that don’t fuck Cuno. Guess which one your flaccid tire falls into.
And the scene and why it stuck with me and why I played around with it in my head is I’ve always found something exhilarating and hilarious about - how do I say this? Circumstantial impotence meeting undeserved arrogance. Like, there you have this absolute power dynamic. You’re an adult. You’re a grown-up. Like, this is a kid. A kid with a tire pump. First of all, you don’t expect his arrogance. No one would expect this arrogance. You don’t expect that you would have to explain yourself to this kid. And furthermore, how the scene progresses is, you go from reasoning to pleading to threatening to physically trying to take the pump from the kid. But ultimately, at the end of the day, what are you going to do if he just doesn’t give it to you? Like, you are in this predicament where you feel validated by the circumstances. ‘Because I am an adult, because I am in the middle of nowhere, because my tire is broken: He needs to give it to me!’ But he doesn’t.
I tried to get a little bit of that across in this branch of Cuno where you can hit him, but fail, and then you’re locked out. And now you, an adult, are put into this situation where you basically have to make amends with him. It is essentially your origin story of Cuno.
Argo Tuulik for The Human Can Opener Podcast
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