Reblogged cmajalis
little memorieeees march along
Reblogged
KIM KITSURAGI -- The lieutenant gently pries your hand away from the payphone, cradling it in his. The leather is warm from where his hands have been tucked by his sides. He looks at you with concern and a slight hint of pity.
"Let's get some rest, officer. I think we've had enough of the payphone for today."
Reblogged midnightfruitsqueeze
Disco, Murder & Mystery
Reblogged midnightfruitsqueeze
Your jigsaw falling into place
Reblogged
disco elysium and the male gaze
spoilers for the game ending under the cut! this one's gonna be long, but bear with me, i promise it's interesting
ok ive been losing it about this game's conversation with gazing in detective fiction for WEEKS and ill do my best to quickly summarize it (again, quick credentials, i did an undergrad thesis on detective fiction with a focus on hard-boiled genre and gender/sexuality)
in short, classical detective fiction (especially hard-boiled, which granted, disco elysium is NOT, though it's referenced often), there's a constant interplay between the ideas of knowledge/gazing and power, as well as power and gender. Looking, deducing, and investigating are highly gendered (male) acts that emasculate or feminize what they look at. the goal is essentially for the gender-transgressive killer (often a woman or man who needs to be punished for killing, and thus penetrating other men) to be "fixed" through gendered punishment or "removed from society," either by killing or jailing them
so ideally for these fictions, a man (the "body in the study," to use scholar kathleen gregory klein's phrase) has been Known About and killed/penetrated by the bad guy. the detective has to fix this by removing the perpetrator's agency through the penetrative gaze and power of the State, in short, emasculating them back into their place
if this feels like a weirdly erotic way to describe detective fiction, that's because it's WEIRDLY EROTIC! theres a history of the "corrective" violence against gender-transgressive women in these fictions being highly sexualized, though often these obsessions with controlling gender-transgressors bodily are a little more repressed (joy palmer's article tracing bodies: gender, genre and forensic detective fiction does a really nice job summing it up and expanding on klein's habeas corpus: feminism and detective fiction, which was the first work to note these patterns)
so what instantly struck me about disco elysium was that 1) the game punishes you for abusing police power against and taking autonomy from queer women 2) instead of being a pathetic, embarassing thing that needs to be corrected, the "emasculated" corpse is treated tenderly, noting the eroticism of autopsy which Palmer raises, and 3) there's a character who behaves exactly like The Detective in terms of gazing at women, emasculating men, and controlling women's bodies and sexualities: the deserter
so breaking things down in an internet-friendly numbered list--
first, the game is actively harder/full of more meaningless, haunting tragedy if you arrest klaasje or break ruby's machine. mechanically, you're punished for using police power to control and punish queer women. even though the classic "femme fatale" is often a cisheterosexual woman, her transgressing gender boundaries (often being a "maneater," having agent sexuality, harming men, often in a phallic manner, etc) marks her as queercoded in a way i really appreciate the game embracing in its more femme fataleish characters. you get the option to Gaze at and Know About women suspects, but the game will NOT make it easy for you
second, the game breaks the idea that the body's murder is a shameful act of gender/sexual transgression that needs to be fixed. the body's objectification (even by a couple of traumatized pre-teens) is treated as a tragedy, and the game does everything it can to humanize lely, even if it humanizes him as a real piece of shit. the autopsy is tender, bordering on romantic/erotic, because the game is constantly trying to remind you that you are exploring a human being's body. the "failed" or "penetrated" man isn't untouchable, which instantly breaks the patriarchal structure of detective novels trying to stamp out unspeakable threats to patriarchy. the further penetration of his life and body by the strange, uncaring investigator figure is also treated as something which could be uncomfortably exploitative, but isn't because you're given the option to be delicate and loving. (i was reminded a lot of lay your sleeping head by michael nava, wherein the protagonist solves his lover's murder, which is portrayed as no less intimate than exploring his body in sex. great book btw)
third, the deserter. dros is everything the hard-boiled detective is meant to be: obsessed with an idealized past, a man out of time (this is more common in neo-noir fiction, including adaptations of a few novels referenced in the dick mullen book), angry at the world for its corruption, unable to escape it himself, and obsessed with gazing at and sexually punishing women. the only difference is that he doesnt work for the government. his matronym is especially ironic, a remnant of a more progressive ideology which has been abandoned in favor of misanthropy. hes become convinced of the same terrifying, comedically corrupt world described in classical detective fiction (read an iconic hard-boiled author's description of that here, at the start of part 7*)
it's such a rejection of the way gazing and patriarchy usually acts in detective fiction. if you gaze destructively, the game gets harder. it emphasizes the sexual connotation of gazing at murders and forces you to be gentle, while empowering the voice of the victim to ensure you treat him like a human, instead of a stock "failed man." the character who thinks and behaves like a detective is a paranoid, sick, elderly murderer who is treated as desperately needing help.
it's amazing stuff
also, if you can't access any of these articles, dm me and ill get you pdfs!
*this article has a lot of issues. dont take it as gospel. it actively contradicts itself like five times and a lot of really good writing has been done roasting it. Miranda Hickman's history of it is really good. that being said, the description of the kind of world the detective thinks he lives in is VERY accurate, even if Chandler describes it as if it's realism. im including it just because it's a famous enough article that it's had a major impact on how detective fiction is written/culturally thought of, and that part is verifiably true