Disco Elysium and Copaganda

Spoilers for Disco Elysium.

Disco Elysium is a 2019 detective-themed CRPG vaguely reminiscent of Planescape: Torment and Shadowrun, with narrative influences from a wide array of media ranging from “weird” cinema (Stalker), games (Kentucky Route Zero) and literature (The Southern Reach Trilogy, by Jeff VanderMeer). It was developed and published by Studio ZA/UM, and the “Final Cut” version was released on March 30, 2021. I was stuck doing the first two days of the game for a long time, until I wrote about it and then got unstuck. You can assume, if you like, that this piece picks up from that one.

There is so much that I love about this game, from the technical to the ephemeral, and I could talk about these things for literally days. The writing is nearly immaculate, the art illuminating every centimeter of Martinaise is so good as to occasionally move me to tears, that soundtrack (and the new fully voice-acted narration) absolutely fucking bodies me at every opportunity, and there are distinct moments, extremely intense feelings, I had while playing where I thought, with seriousness, “this is the best thing I have ever experienced in a video game.”

However, between these two conceptual isolas, technical and ephemeral, there rests an impenetrable gulf. A void, not not even technically darkness, just — negation. There is no interisolary fiber connecting these regions of enjoyment I’ve created for myself, and so – without employing extremely high-frequency radio waves to compress this region of pale and allow the two isolas to connect – I might simply be doomed here, consigned to eternal restlessness, forever struggling to reconcile my love of the game and all of its different unique mechanics and story beats with the sad fact… that this game is all about cops.

As a rule I don’t really like consuming cop media, and thus tend to avoid it when possible. And this isn’t to say that I think all cop media is bad, or whatever, I know how defensive people get when you insinuate-without-insinuating that watching Brooklyn 99 makes the watcher a bootlicker or what have you and that’s not what I’m trying to do. But historically I’ve only tuned into cop media on special occasions.

Take True Detective, season 1 for example. (Or, fuck, Twin Peaks.) They’re shows that don’t really deify the profession of policing; in fact, True Detective portrays cops as pretty fucked across the board, whether we’re talking about the two Louisiana State Police detectives, the utterly nihilistic Rust Cohle and his partner, the interminably jealous and appearances-obsessed Marty Hart, or we’re focused in on some random beat cop in some random shit part of Louisiana, and this pessimistic view of law enforcement does kind of carry over between seasons. Twin Peaks goes out of its way to show that the nearly-angelic FBI special agent, Dale Cooper, isn’t the norm but rather a very unique exception. Even lighthearted fare, like the aforementioned Brooklyn 99, takes its shot at policing by portraying police as being essentially bumbling fools.

However, in all of these examples, criticism of police doesn’t dive much deeper than the surface. In fact, there is a very clear thread that runs through a lot of cop media, from the straight-up apologia to the slightly-critical dramas: the meme of the besieged cop. These are all just cops doing their best to simply make the world a better place with limited resources and even less support out in the community. The enemies they face are nearly always smarter and stronger than them and sometimes it just feels like all these pesky regulations are getting in the way of doing some honest god damn police work around here.

The truth of policing in the United States is a little bit more complicated. When it comes to funding, police agencies around the country account for anywhere from millions to billions of dollars – huge chunks of municipal and county budgets, as it were. And cops are increasingly heavily militarized, getting surplus military gear from the federal government at a deep discount. Additionally, they have wide latitude in what they can do to you in the course of their duties – everything from arresting you because they don’t like the cut of your jib to straight-up murdering you because you’re Black and you got in their way. Did I mention that policing isn’t even in the top 20 most-deadly jobs? And that even if cops do get in trouble for committing an act of violence or a murder they hardly ever get punished to the same degree as a layman – especially a Black layman?

And of course the police are only one facet to an entire system of punishment and incarceration that has historically and contemporaneously acted as a replacement for slavery, explicitly justified in the 13th Amendment to the Constitution – “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

At this exact point in time, the only place cops are under siege is in the arena of public opinion, as more and more high-profile police shootings are taking place involving an officer almost carelessly and without thought just taking the life of a Black person, on camera, with witnesses. To say they do this with impunity is, at this point, a gross understatement. More and more communities are calling for defunding the police, even in places where the cops have historically been more popular. Meanwhile, cop media seems to be insisting on doubling down. I watched an episode of Chicago PD recently where one of the detectives on the show gunned a man down, and his partner (who he was also romantically involved with?) thought he had just killed the guy in cold blood; when it turned out he was “justified” in taking the shot, the show framed her as the villain for having the audacity to be even slightly critical of his actions. We’re in 2021 and reinforcing the thin blue line with shitty prime time dramas, boys, buckle the fuck up.

So the decision to make Disco Elysium a cop drama RPG is, itself, a Choice we have to deal with. A lot of the same tropes I just mentioned play out here. There’s enough happening on the margins – and the margins are wide enough – to make the game a worthwhile experience, even if you’re chafing on the cop shit that simply undergirds the whole thing. But boy howdy do you have to do a lot of mental gymnastics to get here.

As others have pointed out, Disco Elysium is not a typical RPG. Instead of random encounters and turn-based battles, the game’s experience system (which includes the Thought Cabinet and the Skill Trees) revolves entirely around talking to people and completing Cop Tasks. The inciting incident behind Harry DuBois’s visit to Martinaise is the hanged body of a private military contractor in the backyard of the Whirling-In-Rags – we’re here to get the body down, perform a field autopsy and interview residents in the surrounding area to get an idea of what happened here. The reason the game is an RPG instead of merely a point-and-click adventure game is because Harry drank himself into advanced brain damage immediately upon arrival in Martinaise and can’t really remember anything.

I tried to be the least-shitty cop I could possibly be within the confines of the game’s million-word script, and I think I succeeded – but I also earned the copotype of “Sorry Cop” in the process. What’s that? What’s a “copotype?” Oh, right, allow me to explain – you shape Harry’s personality profile based on how you respond to people in the world. If you are always saying sorry, you will earn the reputation of the “Sorry Cop,” and – like all of the copotypes – it will likely come back to bite you in the ass at the end. You can also become an Art Cop, a Cop of the Apocalypse, a Superstar Cop and… a Boring Cop. Other active game modifiers include your political ideology and whether you do drugs and drink after you wake up from your monumental bender.

Still, regardless of how un-cop-like I tried to be, nobody in Martinaise trusts the RCM. And they don’t really have a reason to do so. Their peacekeeping needs are more or less met by a group from within the Débardeurs’ Union, the Hardie Boys. Despite being literally still war-torn and dilapidated, Martinaise is relatively much quieter in terms of violent crime than neighboring districts, like Jamrock or Coal City. And, as many NPCs love to point out, the RCM is more like an armed vigilante group sanctioned by – and enforcing the will of – the Coalition, a collective of capitalist countries that crushed the Commune of Revachol in a war 50 years prior to the game, and the Moralist International (Moralintern), a semi-religious ruling class that desires, above all else, stability and the enforcement of the status quo. As Ltn. Kim Kitsuragi tells us early on, “We are in the twilight of international law.”

This is an area where the urban fantasy, the magic realism, of Disco Elysium meets squarely with the pavement of actual policing. “The police represent the most direct means by which the state imposes its will on the citizenry,” writes anarchist historian Kristian Williams. “When persuasion, indoctrination, moral pressure, and incentive measures all fail–there are the police. In the field of social control, police are specialists in violence. They are armed, trained, and authorized to use force. With varying degrees of subtlety, this colors their every action. […] Violence, as well as the law, is what they represent.”^[1]Williams, Kristian. Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America. AK Press, 2015. Page 32

The fact of Harry DuBois’s copitude colors the game for me – or rather, it draws the color out of the surrounding, much more interesting items within the game. “Don’t be afraid to get weird,” a loading screen tells me (or something to this effect). “People let people in power be weird!” Except you and I both know that nobody is just “letting” this cop be weird. Rather, the cop is forcing his weird shit on people under the implied threat of death if they say or do the wrong thing to him.

And here’s one of those cop drama tropes I talked about earlier rearing its ugly head: we’re reassured early on that Harry is “one of the good ones,” having solved a high volume of cases over a long career and only actually killing three people in his life. We’re supposed to breathe a sigh of relief that we can ethically play the cop game, but my only reaction was one of horror that other cops in this police agency apparently are so trigger-happy with reckless abandon, they roam the streets looking for suspect-victims to shoot dead over solving their backlog of cases. The fact we marvel at how low Harry’s body count is instead of going “wait what the fuck why do you have a body count at all” is telling.

But the absolute open-ended nature of the stat system means you could, theoretically of course, haha the devs read Marx so you know it’s all just in good fun and absolutely critical of the police, turn Harrier DuBois, Ltn. double-yfreitor of the RCM, into a full on fascist meathead for real – a racist, violent, nationalist authoritarian pig-for-brains who beats people up, threatens to shoot them, punches holes through walls and doors, and makes life for those around him basically unlivable (even more-so than he already does). In other words, you could turn Harry into a real cop any time you wanted.

I genuinely can’t imagine playing the game this way, but I’m sure that playthrough is out there. Harry isn’t a tabula rasa for us to write on. He is an unstable explosion of potential in all directions, and not every direction being pointed to is a good one. I’m sure someone is burning their way through Martinaise with the worst fucking bastard they could possibly make him into.

But even in my playthrough, the best parts of Disco Elysium kind of required me to be a shitty cop, almost the antithesis of a cop, in order for you to interact with them. In order to befriend Cuno (or at least make it easier for you to talk to him), you have to break into his dad’s apartment and steal some speed. You have to agree not to meddle in the anodic dance music enthusiasts’ plan to build a nightclub out of the old church across the bay. You have to engage in some form of bribery and corruption, whether that means running errands for the Débardeurs’ Union (my choice, in the end) or for Wild Pines, the company the Union is striking against.

At the most innocuous end of the shit cop spectrum, you have to help a paraplegic woman and her husband find a giant psychic stick bug, and help a bookstore owner feel better about a possibly-real curse. And help a former game developer find a hole in the world. The cop shit gets in the way of the “going around town and helping people for various reasons” shit, with exactly one exception.

Early on, I think it becomes available on Day 2, you meet a game-labeled “working class woman” and act like a complete fool around her, first prying about her kids, then her missing cockatoo (she doesn’t have one), and finally working back around to her husband, who has been gone for awhile on his way to the library to drop off a book for her. You don’t pay the mission any mind until you’re out past the fisherman’s village on the boardwalk, as early as Day 3. You stumble upon a dead body on the pier. Maybe the rotten wood gave out underneath their feet; maybe they were too drunk and fell into a hole that already existed. Their head hit the bench behind them – hard. No murder scene here. No mystery to solve. Just a missing person, found dead, and a loved one to notify.

It was a small scene in a game filled mostly with small scenes. It was also the only place that “being a cop” felt appropriate, explicitly contra an experience I had an in-game day before. Earlier I had met with a woman – the locals called her “The Pigs” – who was clearly not well. She had Harry’s gun and was waving it around, and wore on her back six beacon lights from various police motor carriages. She was playing through a wild scenario where she was a cop herself, and “perpetrators” were surrounding her. Every move I made brought the situation much closer to a very bad end. Eventually, we managed to bring everything back down to a slow simmer, and returned to Titus Hardie, the actual “law and order” in Martinaise, to see if he and his crew could get The Pigs to safety.

It’s a moment that stuck with me, and it’s the only thing I found that brought some kind of color to the game’s insistent, latent copaganda – the only moment that really justified “being a cop” in this – or any – world.

In the real world, in 2021 America, cops are also making it clear how unnecessary they are and how much better off we’d all be if they stopped existing. And no matter how intense the copaganda gets – no matter how many narratives of messy cops with hearts of gold we get – we cannot turn away from the reality that the only purpose police serve today is as a violent tool of social control, and it is clear what – and who – they are tasked with controlling. Defunding the police will not work. Limiting their power and scope will not work. In Portland, where police defunding and redistribution of tasks did happen, the dispatchers sending non-police crisis response teams on jobs are part of the police union, and it turns out they were actively sabotaging the non-police teams. Reducing their ability to do harm does not change their mission, which inherently includes the latitude to do harm.

When you step outside of the boundaries of “cop” in Disco Elysium, a mysterious and beautiful world of possibility and danger opens up. The game’s world is full of weird religious doctrines and political ideologies and scientific marvels to explore and discover. Every character is fascinating, even if only a few are really all that likable. I’d love to play a version of this game where instead of a cop we were a private investigator, or a journalist, or a field medic, or hell, one of the Débardeurs. Maybe one day, that version of this game will arrive.

And as for what we should do with the real police in the mean time?

Abolish them. We’ll be a safer, happier and much more flourishing society when we do.