Cities and Certainty

Disco Elysium is a video game where you play as Harry Du Bois, a cop with no memory and a case he knows nothing about. While you work on this case you explore Revachol, which is kind of but not really France, and find out about its history. Revachol was a monarchy, and then a commune that got bombed, and then a tax haven. These days, it’s a disaster of a city, all falling apart and full of empty bottles and recession. Also, it talks to Harry inside his brain through Shivers, one of the skills in the game. Through Shivers you can feel Revachol’s past and present through the wind, or just straight up talk to it, sometimes.

Riverdale is a TV show my friends make fun of me for liking. Very loosely based on the Archie comics, it follows Archie, Jughead, Betty and Veronica, doing… a lot. Riverdale - the town - attracts weird happenings, and even if you're on board with the many, many plots of the show, it’s easy to look at this and go, “Yeah, Riverdale takes place in Riverdale, so what? Who cares?” But Jughead, the narrator of the show, tends to blame how insane everything is on Riverdale itself, and outsiders to the town are generally everymen, unaccustomed to cults and organised tickle porn crime and syrup-based waterboarding, so you really get the vibe that he’s right and there is something inherently fucked up about Riverdale.

I Am In Eskew is a podcast following self-described “broken little man” David Ward trying to stay afloat in the city of Eskew. In one way or another, Eskew is alive and it has its eyes on David. All of the worst parts of his brain are made manifest - got bullied as a child? Eskew makes you watch it happen to a whole bunch of teenage girls in increasingly horrific ways at the school you work at. Passively suicidal? There’s a bridge that really wants you to jump off it and all the cool kids are doing it. Got trust issues? …Good!

In Season 5 of Riverdale, the main cast go their separate ways, to become a soldier, a stockbroker, a cop, and a writer, all equally contemptible jobs. Seven years later, Betty is dealing with some fresh trauma, Jughead is in debt, Archie is fresh out of a war, and Veronica’s marriage is on the rocks - in this state, they come home. When they do, Riverdale has changed. There’s this theme in Riverdale of becoming your parents - people rightly goof on the serial killer genes thing but it’s a very Riverdale way of showing it. Betty struggles with her underlying darker nature - because she has the serial killer genes - and the knowledge that her dad ended up being a serial killer, though he doesn’t have the - look, nobody accused Riverdale of being coherent. Jughead’s family has alcohol issues going at least as far back as his granddad that really come back to hit him in adulthood and after Archie’s dad dies he has this arc about being just like him on purpose and if I get started on Veronica we’ll be here all day.

Coming back to Riverdale shows a step in the process of becoming your parents - they try to escape, build their own lives, but ultimately they all end up staying permanently. Riverdale is innocence manifest, a picture of the American dream. When they go home and poverty is on the rise, and places that were special to them are being shut down, and Betty’s mother resents her for leaving, the message is clear: you can’t go home again. The Riverdale of their childhoods was a mess but the Riverdale of their adulthoods is a mess in a distinctly different way, the problems around them more grownup while also somehow being much less grounded. Compare how their parents’ Riverdale changed - they all played evil D&D when they were kids and someone died and that was enough for them to mostly cut contact with each other. The horror that they now have to face is the more adult fear of watching their kids come into contact with evil D&D and a bunch of people dying in the process and their kids kind of just rolling with the punches. Because coming of age is universal, it’s also a cycle. Your parents come of age into a world you come of age to leave. Or, in Riverdale’s case, a world you come back to, no matter what.

David talks about leaving Eskew a lot. It’s this distant point of hope for him, he talks about his future in terms of “when I leave Eskew”. But after a failed attempt to strike out at the city he actually finds himself on a plane out of there with something that used to be his girlfriend.

“Let’s talk about what comes next,” she says. “I mean, my God, we’ve got all the time in the world to decide what comes next, but just try and get your head around, try and think of it...what do you want to do, David? Who do you want to be, once we get home?”

The truth is, I want to be nobody."

On one level, this is about the trauma of having lived in Eskew. David literally can’t conceive of a world where he leaves Eskew and becomes okay with himself because Eskew has made him vigilant in an inescapable way. On another level, though, this is more about David himself. David’s been unhappy seemingly as long as he can remember - his mother made up a story about “the boy who saw cracks in the world” as a way to warn him against being too gloomy and getting everyone down. He later ran away to Eskew, where, terrible as it is, his gloom is very much justified. He actually is alone in the world, the cards actually are stacked against him. So he doesn’t leave. Even when he aspires to get out of Eskew he dodges every opportunity, writes off the guy trying to escape with him because he’s annoying, lets the daughter that Eskew gave him die rather than letting her experience the same horror he does in his place. When he finally does make a real attempt to leave, he has to fight himself to do it.

Mental illness likes to make itself worse. Feeling like shit feels good and getting better is hard, boring work. You don’t do it because it’s fun, you do it because you don’t want to be this kind of animal anymore. David knows this. He can’t leave Eskew and get better when it’s so much easier to be in Eskew and be justified in his depression. Harry du Bois also knows this pretty damn well.

A big theme in Disco Elysium is failure. As inescapably as Betty is her father and David is in Eskew, Harry is a failure - an absolute cringe and fail tire fire of a man. Martinaise is a failure, too - the businesses in the Doomed Commercial Area have all failed, several governments and revolutions all failed - hell, Disco Elysium’s development started with the phrase, 'My friend, we failed at so many things. Let us also fail at making a video game.’. You can find out that for Martinaise, this comes from the Pale, the mysterious connective tissue of the whole world. It’s suggested at one point that Harry’s amnesia could have come from the Pale too - that he shoved his head into this hole in the world to forget everything that was wrong with him. Revachol reflects back at him like this all the time - the player has some control over what type of guy Harry is, but the world around him usually has an answer for him, in one way or another. Harry can be an Art Cop, a pretentious nightmare finding art to criticise wherever he looks - and he can find a wall the light hits just right and make it his mission to paint a mural on it. Or he can be an apocalypse cop, preaching the end of the world, and Revachol can look right back at him and go “yeah, buddy, we’re probably getting nuked one day”.

In a Tumblr post explaining what he was going for in Eskew, Jon Ware explains,

“I will wake up each morning, and go into the city, back to a job that corrupts me morally, walking past suffering people who are reaching out for my help and will not receive it, and I will pay money to get what I want from vast companies whose horrors will outlive me, and I will return. And the next day, I’ll do it again, and the best hope I have of living well is to stop thinking too hard about it and stop questioning the process.”

Over the course of the story David gets several jobs and good god do they corrupt him morally - the most glaring example is when he has to work on the Fitzsimmon’s Project, which consists of some kind of creature in a sack that he and his team of office workers have to squeeze some kind of profit out of, and before any of them even know what it really is, they all start sacrificing each other to it. David takes his own moral corruption completely in stride as part of life in Eskew, the same way he takes all the other fucked up stuff Eskew throws at him. He takes no delight in killing his coworkers but he doesn’t really do much to question it. It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of Eskew. One day, maybe, he’ll leave, but what else is there? He’s so used to the horror and corruption of this city that he can barely conceive of a reality without it. If any of this sounds familiar, you might be living under late stage capitalism!

Disco Elysium takes a similar approach. If you make Harry a communist, the game tells you,

“0.000% of Communism has been built. Evil child-murdering billionaires still rule the world with a shit-eating grin. All he has managed to do is make himself *sad*. He is starting to suspect Kras Mazov *fucked him over* personally with his socio-economic theory.”

Harry does not believe he’ll change the world. Like David, his real politics are that he’s going to get mad about it, and then he’s going to keep on going. People talk about some distant “Return” in the future, but there’s no sign of anyone making it happen. The game is pretty clearly communist itself - Robert Kurvitz’s Wikipedia page has a section dedicated to him owning a bust of Lenin for some reason - but it makes fun of it all the same, in that way leftists love to make fun of each other. When you remember that a lot of the devs, Kurvitz included, come from Estonia it makes a lot of sense - the politics in the game are given the complexity that comes from being a communist whose country got kind of fucked by a communist government. Harry’s politics are affected by Revachol’s history and Robert Kurvitz’s politics are affected by Estonia’s history.

One thing does stop David from taking Eskew’s horrors in stride, though. Riyo’s story runs between David’s episodes. She’s an investigator hired by David’s mother to find him. When she ends up in Eskew, she takes a different approach. She finds David, picks him up by the scruff of his neck, and does what she can to get both of them the fuck out of there. Leaving Eskew is a distant thing David can aspire to - it’s the communist soldier camping out alone on an island seething with hate and dreaming of Girl Child Revolution, it’s the CW frowning and saying “isn’t poverty bad” and just shying away of tackling any root cause, it’s Harry deciding Kras Mazov fucked him over personally - but Riyo comes in and says, “dude, join my fucking union, let’s get out of here”.

Ultimately, this connection is David’s only hope of leaving Eskew. The big difference between Eskew and the other two cities is that David does not like Eskew and the feeling is mutual.

Eskew’s streets move around a lot. This never really even registered to me - of course they move around, it’s Eskew, it’s fucked up city 101. But David is living in a perpetual state of tourism in a city he’s lived in for years. Riverdale is such an important town because the main characters grew up there and fell in love with it over the course of their lives. Harry may not remember anything, but his Shivers skill lets him feel Revachol’s presence with something like muscle memory. Obviously, David has a litany of other reasons to not like Eskew, getting lost sometimes isn’t exactly high on that list, but he doesn’t get to fall in love with it in the same way - it doesn’t offer him that certainty.

Except, at one point, David finds himself behind the scenes of a fish market.

"-and I’m standing in a great vaulted hall of glass ceilings, ruddy and glorious in the dusklight, fresh white meat hung from the rafters and steaming with ice and frost. Men and women in white fishmongers’ aprons stroll back and forth across the space. Clutching crates, laughing and gossiping to each other, weaving between the gigantic glass tanks of slopping water that contain today’s catch.

I forget, you know. I forget that Eskew is a city of wonders too."

This almost strikes me as funny. This city has been terrorising David for a long time. “Today’s catch” ends up being people who adapted to the sea via the fucked up worm disease from a previous episode. Even setting that aside, this is a fish market, it’s not exactly a wonder of the world. But I grew up in Birmingham, a city widely regarded across the UK as “not good”. I don’t actually know where that comes from. It could be the greyness, or the occasional piss smell, or it could be time-honoured British traditions like “goofing on your neighbours” and “goofing on anywhere with a perceived lower-class regional accent or big non-white population”. I’m sure people have their reasons, but for everything ugly about Birmingham I see some level of charm in it. Maybe growing up there taught me to like it there or maybe as people we just fall in love with anywhere we go. Jughead constantly puts Riverdale itself at the centre of all the wild shit that happens there, but he still talks about the town with reverence and love, still fights to keep it alive. Early in Disco Elysium, going off on a racist lorry driver, Kim says,

“Every school of thought and government has failed in this city, but I love it nonetheless.”

The places we put ourselves give us a sense of certainty. Some of this is good - the certainty that the world will be there when you step out into it, that it has a place for you - but sometimes it’s the certainty that you’ll become your father and never leave your hometown and capitalism will keep you down forever and you can’t escape the depressive hole you’ve dug yourself into. Eskew is a city of wonders not because there’s anything particularly cool about the fish market but because, lost as he is, David is also wired to find some kind of beautiful certainty in Eskew. This is bad for him, obviously; we know Eskew is terrible for David’s mental health. But he still finds those moments of beauty and he still clings to them. The permanence that cities offer can be demonstrably bad, but any threat to that permanence is bad in a more immediate, existential way. That’s my city, my bizarre, corrupt, lonely city, and there are like 4 different cults, and there’s a long history of violent political suppression, and sometimes some guy finds out he can influence history and goes mad with power and ends up committing arson, and some of it smells like piss. But it’s going to be there when I leave my house, so it has to be something beautiful.