I don't think I've ever seen anything that more perfectly replicates how psychosis feels. The latching onto/ascribing meaning to little details. The endless "searching..." as your brain tries to fit every real-life stimulus into its narrative of what's REALLY going on. The background preoccupation with real, ongoing emotional difficulty...
People often imagine psychotic delusions as being entirely dependent on hallucination, people seeing and talking to fully fleshed out, convincing looking characters. But delusion doesn't require hallucination at all. All it requires is the conviction that ordinary things are a puzzle to be solved, that there's meaning to be made... and that you're so close to understanding things that no one else knows.
The wind is light today, prickling at skin like the probing gaze of strangers. The metal grating below Sunny's feet creaks in time with the swaying of the lamps overhead. The everpresent bustle and drone of the stacks is carried on the breeze.
"It's been okay," Jasper says. "Kind of a lot. I still don't know if the school is worth it, though." He's sitting cross-legged on the solid metallic section of the floor, grounding himself with the illusion of stability a hundred feet above the ground.
"Of course it's worth it. Fuck, I'd pay 20,000 be in Metla for eight months a year." Sunny is standing, one shoe off, pressed into the balcony. The wind whistles through the gaps in the metal grating, between her toes, snaking under her pants and jacket.
The two are on the 12th floor of this stack. They frequently hang out here, in the alleyway formed by a gap between two adjacent housing blocks, and a metal balcony with a steel grating floor that wraps around the front and leads to doorways on both. Old flyers and old wires flap in the wind on the wall that loosely functions as a community board for the 12th floor. Somebody, a long time ago, set up some hanging upside-down cone lamps to marginally light up the area.
"I know you hate it here," Jasper says drily. "But like…20,000 is a lot. And anyways, what's an arcana degree gonna do in this city? I'm good at it, but-"
"Come out west with me," Sunny says. The rumbling of an airplane reaches their ears. She glances up. Aeroknife jets, the loudest sound of their engines not quite touching the ground yet, soar overhead. "Be my meganist for my plane." She leans on the rickety balcony, allowing it to creak under her weight. Jasper very deliberately does not react to the spark of fear in his chest. The wind ruffles her hair.
"You're still serious about that?" Jasper's eyes follow Sunny's gaze, catching the tail of the planes before they dip out of view behind the stacks. He yells to be heard as the sound of the engines makes full landing in his eardrums. "I though we hated cops. Does that not include military?"
Sunny grimaces. "I'll be in commercial airlines. Not every plane is for military. Remember the ones we get in spring?"
"You'd have to quit smoking." Jasper says. "And you'd always be up in the air."
"I'd quit breathing if I could be a pilot for a day," Sunny sighs. It's just loud enough to be heard over the wind.
Jasper frowns. "You don't mean that."
"I do," She says seriously. "Fuck man, can you imagine it? My very own aerostatic."
A vision of bright blue skies and white clouds under his feet flashes through his mind. He grimaces. "Yeah."
"C'mon, man," She laughs and finally pushes off the railing. "Can't believe you grow up in here and you're afraid of heights."
"I'm not afraid of heights," Jasper protests. "It's dangerous -- you have any idea how many people fall off their roof every year?"
"Roof? What's that got to do with planes?" Sunny asks pointedly. "Anyways, about the same as the people who die from burned lungs, I'm guessing." She steps off the metal grating and grabs her other shoe. The black and yellow ripcord lace forms a pair of bunny ears under her fingers as she jams her foot into her shoe. "You wanna take the shortcut?"
Normally he says no. But today, he finds his mouth forming agreement before he can regret it. Sunny's eyebrows grow higher as she straightens up, but he nods firmly.
After scuffing his shoe to make sure his feet are securely sealed within them, he follows Sunny around the wall with the bulletin board, revealing the 12-story façade of the stack beside them.
Like piles of matchsticks, the makeshift apartments, many still with scaffolding, some barely more than that, built on top of each into a in a tremendous wall of urban sprawl make up the entirety of the Stacks. Clouded dust rising above blot out most of the slivers of sky between apartment blocks. But to a truly devoted eye, one might see just enough blue to find heaven within.
Sunny unlatches the grate below their feet, revealing an old ladder comprised of scaffolding that descends to the lower balcony. From there, a fire escape descending to the floor below it, a slight jump to a precarious window ledge -- like an overgrown shelf of fungi on a rotted tree -- a slide down a rusty sewage pipe -- in heavier winds, he imagines it might sway, although he's seen it do so -- into the smoke break door of a production floor, and then through that floor to the most functional staircase in the stack, the only one that goes form this high up directly to the ground. It used to be accessible from the 12th, but some of the floorboards collapsed, and the only way to get to is now the parkour. Technically, you could just go down the ladder and find it on the 11th, but it's through a private residence on this side, and the old woman who lives there is angrier more often than not. Might as well go all the way if you're taking the shortcut anyway.
Sunny goes through the grate and lands like a plane hitting the runway. She doesn’t bother to button her jacket before descending down the ladder.
Jasper takes a breath to calm himself and peeks over the edge. She's not going to slow down for him now that he's said yes.
He ties the drawstrings of his hoodie into a hoop and pushes it under his hoodie before descending, though. No need to see them dance in the wind. He can feel it on his face plenty.
i like the term "gallows humor" because it always makes me think of someone getting sentenced to death and being like "i have GOT to be the funniest person at my public execution"
One thing that I think a lot of Disco Elysium meta misses (likely because a lot of it is very clearly written by young Americans writing from an intensely American-centric cultural perspective without even really realizing it) is that one of the singular and central themes of the game is massive-scale generational trauma in a home that is economically collapsing as its resources and people are being drained by an occupation. People have noted that no one tries to help Harry, despite the fact his mental illness is incredibly obvious to everyone around him. He tells Kim that he completely lost his memory, and Kim politely asks him to focus on the work. He tells Gottlieb that he had a heart attack, and Gottlieb tells him that if he’s still alive it couldn’t have been that bad. That he’ll drop dead sooner or later, but then so does everyone.
And that’s the most important thing: so does everyone. Look at Martinaise. Look at the world in which Harry lives. It is not our own, but it is adjacent to ours. More specifically, it is clearly adjacent to the states of the Eastern Bloc: overtaken and occupied by a faraway government that clearly doesn’t care about Revachol or its people. And that is obvious in every tired face, every defeated citizen, everyone trying to eke out a little happiness or meaning in spite of the overwhelming trauma and damage around them. The buildings are still half-destroyed. The bullet holes are still in the walls. The revolution was decades before, but it still feels to the people there like a fresh wound. The number of men of Harry’s generation who are not alcoholic or otherwise deeply fucked up are very few. Some, like Kim, hide it better, but the deeper you dig into his history, the more you realize how damaged Kim is. He’s more than a little trigger happy, and hates that about himself, but he is a product of his environment: Kim’s entire life is seeing people he cared about shot and killed, so his instinct now is to shoot first himself, to protect those few people left who still matter to him.
Harry is not unique in his trauma. He is a distillation of an entire culture of people who tried to rise up and make something beautiful, and were instead routed and occupied. He is trapped between the occupation and the people on the ground, along with all the rest of the RCM. Their authority comes from the occupying government, but it is implied that they were formed out of the remnants of the citizens militia which sprung up from Revachol itself as a way to try to mitigate some of the horrors being committed on its streets. The Moralintern sure as hell wasn’t going to get their hands dirty, so they happily conscripted (and therefore could better control) this group, who are only recognized in certain places, and whose authority mostly amounts to giving out fines. The RCM is corrupt, but it is corrupt in the same way its culture is. Bribes are considered standard with them, not a moral failing, but a necessity, so long as those bribes are correctly logged as ‘donations’. It’s how the RCM stays afloat, and the rest of Revachol completely understands that. Everyone would take a bribe if it meant they kept eating. Everyone would take a little under-the-table money if it meant keeping a roof over their heads. The officersof the RCM certainly don’t make enough to see a doctor. They have an in-house lazarus, and if he can’t fix them they just die. Mental health care? What mental health care? Harry doesn’t get it for the same reason no one else does: it doesn’t really seem to exist. There are no counselors, no psychologists, no psychiatrists. How would they even start? If the world is what is broken, if everyone is suffering a similar catastrophic amount, it makes sense that Harry’s trauma would simply get rolled up with all the rest. Kim asks him to get on with the job because Harry’s suffering is not remarkable in Revachol. He is one of an entire generation who have an astronomical number of orphans from the revolution, and so many younger people are left more or less orphans as their parents drink themselves into oblivion like Cuno’s father. So Harry’s truly unique attribute is embodying all that trauma, having it all inside of him, filling him to bursting.
To really engage with the themes of the game, engaging first and foremost with the reality of Revachol is imperative. Imposing our own reality onto Revachol, particularly if coming from an American perspective (which tend to have the habit of both viewing the world through an American lens and not realizing they’re doing it because they’ve never experienced a different lens), will always feel shallow to me because of this.
All that is to say, I would love to hear some more explicitly European meta about this game, and especially Eastern European meta. If anyone can point me to some good, juicy essays from that perspective, I would be grateful!
