Discover Top Posts Tagged with #dick mullen

YOU - "Ma'am, I am a renowned private investigator, a paragon of law and a specialist in all things criminal." KIM KITSURAGI - The lieutenant shoots you a sideways glance. "And I am his private partner, John... Shao. Together we run the pre-eminent spousal surveillance firm in Revachol." YOU - "We are truly private in our partnership."

Picked up a book from ‘Crime, Romance, and Biographies of Famous People’ up in Martinaise. Thought nine reál was a little expensive for a used book, but the owner wouldn’t budge on the price. Oh well, hope this one doesn’t fall apart like the last one!

Brushes: True Grit Texture Supply

Textures: Jeff Finley, Texturelabs ,blkmarket

#disco elysium #kim kitsuragi #harry du bois #harrier du bois #dick mullen #book cover #hard boiled detectives #private partners #digital art #procreate

I just found out a lot of people don't do the Modus: Mullen thing, so here you go. Harry pretending to be genius detective Dick Mullen.

And finally, the last one I managed to capture:

👀

#disco elysium #harry du bois #dick mullen #harry's such an idiot #kim kitsuragi

dick mullen, hard-boiled detectives, and cultural occupation

hi all. im back with more disco elysium meta. knowing me, this'll be long, so bear with me--

i'm really interested in thinking about the dick mullen series's role in revacholian culture, particularly by reflecting and creating a patriarchal and destructive police culture. taking it one step farther, i'm interested in their potential role in vesper's occupation

before we begin, i want to clarify that i'm taking the approach that art and culture influence each other constantly (art isn't just reflecting culture/history, it's also creating it). it's an idea that comes out of the school of new historicism if you want to look more into it! anyway, my argument is guided by the assumption that the world of disco elysium operates this way

with that out of the way, let's talk detectives! I want to zero in on this passage:

[Image ID: White text on a black background from the game Disco Elysium reading "Spillane needs Mullen to drive him in from Vesper to a small town along the Insulindian coast. Despite his friend's apparent agitation, Mullen does as he's asked, then returns home where he passes out drunk, as he does most nights..." Below the text is a red bar with the word "continue" on it, and an arrow pointing right. End image ID]

Right off the bat, there are two really interesting explicit references: Philip Marlowe and Mike Hammer.

First, the opening of this novel is borrowed from Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye, where detective Philip Marlowe's old friend (/homoerotic, depending on whose work you read) shows up out of the blue and asks to be covertly taken across the border from Los Angeles to Tijuana. The next day, the friend's wife is found dead, and Marlowe is arrested as an accesory to murder. He spends the rest of the book proving his (and his friend's) innocence. You're probably seeing a few parallels to Mullen already.

A few other things to know about Marlowe and the series he stars in--some of these might ring a bell:

Marlowe is depressed, at-times suicidal, and a likely alcoholic, though the books are deeply concerned with normative masculinity and try to minimize these

Adapted into a 1973 movie where Marlowe is recast as a "man out of time," (AKA sopping wet disco detective) awkwardly split between the 50s and the 70s

Generally tout conservative USAmerican values circa ~1940-1955, especially pushing white, cishet male individualism, fear of marginalized identity, and promoting the idea that government punishment and surveillance are the best, most desirable solutions to social issues

You're probably already seeing some interesting parallels (or places Disco Elysium adapts/interrogates some of these ideas). Hang onto the conservatism and government stuff--we'll get back into it.

(Quick caveat that basically ALL detective fiction pushes the bolded ideas above to some extent or another, but that Chandler's stuff gets especially highlighted in literature because he wrote a very famous essay about American detective fiction and the essay and his body of work were very popular and influential)

The next reference is a general one to Mickey Spillane, author of the Mike Hammer series. This is a pretty interesting pull, because

they're a bit niche!

2. they have some of the most explicitly sexualized violence against women in the entire hard-boiled detective genre (Mitzi Brunsdale has some great work on this). a few scholars i've read discuss them as outliers, but most consider them "the quiet part out loud" of a genre largely about controlling and punishing women

(if you're curious, this is a really interesting reading of some of them guided by queer/feminist theory and a focus on the post-WWII era).

I'll admit Hammer's a little bit more outside of my research niche than Marlowe, but I've read enough to know he's also very much in the "individualist straight white guy who represents the government has to fix uppity women" school of fifties detective fiction

Both of these references affirm and contextualize what we can tell about Dick Mullen from reading the book: he's the white macho-individualist picture of repressed trauma and masculine anxiety, while also constituting the popular fictional idea of policing

keeping that in mind, i want to return to the beginning of The Long Goodbye/Dick Mullen and the Case of the Stolen Identity, where Mexico and Insulinde both occupy an imperialist fantasy role as "lawless" places Americans/Vespertines can flee in order to avoid consequence for their actions. It's not a one-to-one cultural comparison (very little in this world is), but it gives us a little context for why it's weird and interesting to me that the Mullen books are so popular in Revachol

considering all of this, i think it's interesting to consider that the police culture of the RCM (intensely sexist, homophobic, racist/xenophobic, and generally supportive of an occupying government) might have been partially created, or at least reinforced through the popular notions of fictional policing produced and popularized within an occupying nation. given the RCM's roots as the ICM, i think there might have been a potential incentive to mass publish and produce these books in an occupied, formerly-communist region to normalize and entrench ideas of individualism, patriarchy, and government surveillance, especially among the only revacholians with any government power or representation

that being said, I think it's a little limiting to act like people will not naturally turn against a failed rebellion, especially given the ensuing mass destruction. despite being an ostensibly individualist and capitalist genre, hard-boiled detective fiction was born and popularized out of the Great Depression. its work to romanticize a return sociopolitical "normalcy" and to speak to the experience of the working class are what kept it popular in moments of social and economic upheaval in the US, even if, ultimately, it puts the pill of pro-capitalist/individualist sentiment in the cheese of working class appeal and bitter suspicion towards government bigwigs. granted, interpellation by the art of one's own culture has a different connotation from interpellation into the desired culture of an occupier, though i think it's important not to romanticize revachol as a place with 0 conservative sentiment before its occupation by the moralintern

i think there are a few possible and interesting arguments here--that there was an incentive for vespertine governments and businesses to promote vespertine individualism to help quell rebel sentiment within the RCM and revachol in general, that people naturally turned to the comfort and "normalcy" of conservative fictions in periods of turmoil despite their ideas being actively harmful (in neo-marxist theory, this is called interpellation, which, for the record, is all over the game), maybe some of column A, some of column B

regardless, i think it's interesting to view the dick mullen books as something which have created culture, rather than just reflecting it. it's definitely a lens that helps to explain part of the radical cultural shift between the idealized heyday of the ICM and the RCM (though i think the cracks in that shift are equally interesting and worth exploring another time)

(if you can't access any of the articles, please shoot me a dm! i'm happy to share wherever i can. i believe i have some pdf scans of pages from the linked books, but those are unfortunately limited)

#disco elysium #disco elysium meta #de meta #dick mullen #seamus rambles #seamus plays disco elysium

One thing I like about disco Elysium is how it has its own parallels to stuff in our world that aren't exactly the same.

When you hear about würms, it's in the context that we in the real world would have for dragons.

Dick Mullen is kind of like their Sherlock Holmes, right down to "no shit Sherlock"

#disco elysium #disco Elysium lore #dick Mullen