Disco Elysium

In the center of the transparent wall, which cannot protect the guest from the horrors swarming in the dark, is a wound the size of a couple of bottles of murmur through which cold and the dank gray sky ooze. In a thin stream, they slide down the remnants of the glass, flop to the floor and rush to the center of the room in subtle turns. Deep into the universe that has plunged into pitch darkness — into the open mouth of an unnamed detective story.

He looks no more than fifty; he stinks terribly with sweat and fumes that could easily be mowed down by a whole cluster of sinewy dinosaurs, the hair on the top of his head is tangled with the whiskers of bygone eras, and his mustache is so long that he periodically gets stuck in yellow teeth. If he was a living person who opened his eyes in the morning with illusory hope, now he's nothing but shrapnel left. The fine dust of the crumbling stained glass window.

As soon as the detective comes to his senses — someday he gets bored with the ugly devil and is driven to the surface — Revachol's stone children will surround him. Outside the musty room, multi-storey huts will grow brick by brick, benches will hide under trees, asphalt will settle in uneven pieces in the middle of the roads, and gusts of wind will cover them with dust that smells like the sea. But suddenly, the darling with the lush whiskers groans and the construction of a new world will stop.

The ten-story buildings will not have time to reach their promised grandeur and will fearfully freeze after the third row of windows, the paint will fall on the facades in faded lichens, the window frames will skew in horror and howl even in the breeze that tiptoes around. The cradle of luxury and hedonism, frightened either by the snoring of a lawyer or of its own beauty, will hunch over and scatter hints of unborn splendor around.

In fact, neither the detective story nor the will of the city where he met a hangover are responsible for the decline of Martinaise, the unloved child of so colorful Revachol. This is due to unrealizable hopes, faith in a better world and the power of human thought. Thoughts that sprouted through a revolution that grew into a large-scale war and devoured tens of millions of lives like Saturn's son.

While the shells were resting from gluttony and digesting people's souls, they plucked the city with a fork. A dull volley, a growing whistle, and the interiors of the buildings are pouring miserably onto the pavement: the ornate chair has landed in the spring mud and leaned on two orphaned legs; the curtains cling to the eaves and peer fearfully into the darkness of the basement, which used to be hidden behind the ceiling. A boy about nine years old might have looked at this destruction, but he was scattered around.

The detective sleeps no matter where, but in a great district of a great city who could not cope with the role that history had given them. At the end of the revolution, Martinaise should have risen from the ashes like the rest of Revachol, but after the bloody rivers that swept through its streets, he went limp and slipped into even more chaos. Now it is populated only by hard workers and marginals — reflections of embittered beatniks that William Burroughs himself would give in to.

Instead of school, the children here are snooping around looking for drugs; they sell something, take some themselves. Some men bend their backs in the port, while others drink soundly in an attempt to brush off the terror that reigns around them. More beautiful women give themselves for nothing — in revolutionary-era bunkers surrounded by communist posters and rusty rifles. On top of that, someone constantly yells, either in an alcoholic fever or because of a bleeding hole in the belly.

An unnamed detective who still has his tight face against a tile of ice has nothing to do with heroism. It's not his marginal appearance, his alcoholism or his cocaine abuse, but his fracture that's about to lead to suicide. He is dark and desolate, like a classic noir hero, but unlike Humphrey Bogart his Femme Fatale has long since evaporated.

Despite the betrayal that the femmes fatales bring with them, they hide the hope that the darkness is about to dissipate, evil will be defeated, and the sun will finally rise after many years of absence. But a Revachol's disco lover and lush whiskers, was convinced firsthand that all this hoax was a fairy tale for idiots with a midlife crisis.

His lady either died or, worse, ran away in a hurry with a couple of suitcases because of her unloved companion's alcoholism or on the eve of it. All the detective has left of hope is a hole right in the center of his chest, through which drunk tears flow every now and then. Now, like the pugnacious Bukowski, he is the king of all Martinaise's hookers and bastards, the lord of cinematic post-noir and the saddest cop in the neighborhood.

Martinaise is left to his own devices. At least they are trying to restore other districts, but he's just rotting, howling at the whole district. Just like the people trapped in it — laundresses, kindergarteners, welders, failed rock stars and police officers. Innocence left this place after the last shell fragment left. Only the heads of the port trade union enjoy the devastation here, who really don't care about communism and the commandments of the Comintern. They are the epitome of capitalism's fat face, with its cheeks hanging down to its shoulders.

The creepiest thing about Martinaise isn't broken people, the echoes of bloodshed and the crumbling skeletons of buildings, but ideas floating between them. A perverse nationalism that shines with racism in the sun; communist urges that resemble collective coping with need; and an evil capitalism that is ready to swallow anyone who dares at its riches. This is a boiling pot in which humanity's most eerie thoughts are screaming. And his name is “Disco Elysium”.