Disco Elysium’s character portraits are among
the most memorable in videogame history, and there is a reason why they are so expressive.
Take Kim here for example, and his contrast to the portrait of Jean. Without going into any artsy
stuff or even looking at how the characters themselves are drawn, we can look at the simplest
things like colors and geometry. Behind Kim, there’s a white circle, not unlike the one we
see in Christian icons and other religions. Maybe that’s why it’s so nice to have him
hanging on your wall, as a protector.
Besides the religious iconography,
the white circle protects his head from the bullshit that our protagonist
throws at him on a daily basis. It’s a protective bubble that lets him keep a cool head.
All portraits depict not just the characters, but Harry’s perspective on them. They reflect how
he perceives them. And after all, Kim is Harry’s protector from the moment they met. A man who can
withstand even your most destructive tendencies without breaking composure – a composure
that you find comfort in too. The soft, circular shape is a cushion not only
for him, but for you too. It softens your blows, for the benefit of both of you.
Replace the white circle with a black rectangle and you have Jean Vicquemare, the edgiest mofo
in town. “You stupid idiot, your even worse than before. How is that even possible?” Your grumpy
and irony-poisoned colleague is repulsed by your idiocy after having to endure the worst of you for
years. He doesn’t care if he hurts you. There’s no attempt at softness to cushion any blows, and he
does cut deep. There’s edginess in the geometrical and figurative way. He is also vocally depressed.
“If I wasn't clinically depressed, I'd burst out laughing.” There’s a black shroud around his head,
and he is very upfront with it. In fact, it’s one of the first things he tells you. And the portrait
is, after all, the way Harry perceives him.
All of this fits into a more general comparison
of their portraits too, where Jean features much higher contrasts, a lack of warm colors, and
a prevalence of straight lines over curves.
Let’s look at some others.
Idiot Doom Spiral, the local alcoholic whose life fell apart, looks like he's
getting eaten alive by the background. His life and portrait are slowly disintegrating. But even
though he’s all over the place, he still retains a certain sharpness of the eyes, and around him,
the colors of a vivid imagination. He is still a shrewd businessman and a colorful storyteller.
His two alcoholic companions, Rosemary and Don’t Call Abigail, are beyond that point. They look
like they are slowly bleeding into the world, leaking into it through open
wounds; not unlike Victor who is actually bleeding into the boardwalk.
Often, the most elemental thing about these portraits is the interaction between the person
and the background. It’s their relation to the world around them. Some get eaten by it,
others radiate their own energy outwards.
Measurehead here for example is emanating
the authority of his cranial perfection into the sky like an aura, or like
a steamy bald dude on a cold day.
He is also the only character
whose presence is felt even in the background of another person’s portrait.
The old Paledriver’s background is corroded and distorted by the pale, just like her
past and her idea of the world she’s in.
Egghead receives light from the sky
like a divinely inspired artist, until, in the updated portrait of The Final Cut, he
violently radiates that light into the world.
Pawnshop Roy is shrouded into the calm,
drug-induced yellow of his Pyrholidon.
Garry and The Pig, who both are pretty
bland themselves, are both colored by their backgrounds that shine their light on
them. Fascist aesthetics on the one side, brain damage inducing TV shows on the other.
Both outshine a diminished sense of self.
Joyce and Sileng, a trade empire representative
and a trader, both have the same blue background, furrowed by a white net that spans the world
seas. Harry always meets Joyce in front her boat, which in her case provides the white lines with
its masts, ropes and sails. It is itself a symbol for international trade. “Point taken. I
am a bourgeois woman and this is my fast, light, interminably bourgeois boat."
All union members share the same orang-ish red, the complementary
color to the ultraliberal’s blue.
Similar to Measurehead, the Smoker on the Balcony
emanates his charm into the night like a beacon, or like the smoke of his cigarette. Harry is
captured by it even from way down in the yard.
There are more fringe cases too:
The coalition warship’s signaller for example is merely the bureaucratic mouth of a greater
power. She reads from a flowchart. Harry doesn’t see her, and what he hears aren’t her words.
The portrait of Ruud the mercenary is dominated by a jitter that I think is Harry trembling
before what is basically an indestructible killing machine. It’s one of the few portraits
that is just pure menacing violence and coldness.
Kras Mazov’s portrait in the sea fortress is
dusty and greyed out, just like the state of his ideology in Revachol.
The Light Bending Guy, well… He bends light, I guess.
Doloris Dei is an interesting case: she seems to be made into statue with the same
material as her background. It makes sense, since she is the personification of her
Weltgeist; the world around her, or, in this case, behind her. But there is more to her
than just being the icon of an epoch that turned out as much dominated by war and exploitation as
any other. Where the cold blue patina didn’t yet cover her warm copper tones, she still seems to
be a real person, capable of love, and not just a figurehead for the powers she represents. It’s
no wonder that her image serves as a stand-in for Harry’s ex in his dream sequence. It’s about the
contrast of cold inapproachability and the remains of love that Harry wishes to still see in her.
Sylvie on the other hand, the Whirling-in-Rags former bartender, has a rather boring portrait.
For Harry, she is not laden with any emotional baggage. She fled from Harry’s conundrums in
an effort to preserve some residue of normalcy and soundness of mind in the insanity
that is Martinaise. Or, as lead artist Kaspar Tamsalu puts it in the game’s artbook:
“Sylvie is presented as a simple person with a simple life and a straightforward portrait,
deliberately boring in its professionalism to reflect how our protagonist perceives her.
You have no access to the depth of her soul.”
Hmm but if that’s how it works, then what the
is up with HER?? *Scrolling* “Do real estate agents even have a soul?” Huh. I guess not.
In the same text, Kaspar mentions that the character’s portraits were among the very first
things they made for the game. The portraits came before even the writing. This means that they
don’t just illustrated a finished character, but shape them, and affected how they behave
in the game. “You know I appreciate a joke as much as every jolly fat guy” I
don’t know if an Evrart Claire who didn’t look like this would have said that.
Kaspar also wrote about how “The aggressively hard edges that dominate the portraits for
very physical characters have been replaced with softer, gentler, almost ephemeral brushwork
for others.” This is true for the skill portraits as well as the characters. Compare the lines and
contours of Kortenaer with that of **** the World and Piss******, the punks who are all talk and
give in after the tiniest bit of pressure.
When we look at Harry’s archetype portraits, we
see the same principles at work that we looked at before. Again, it’s in how the character
interacts what’s outside of their outline that we see their relation to their world.
Harry the Thinker analyses his environment, channels it through a cool head and produces
a vortex of ideas like a cloud. The ray of light rising from his RCM plaque and mixing
with his thoughts might mean that this Harry, more than the others, is guided by his role
as a detective, and is provided with a lot of classic detective skills. In contrast to
the next archetype however, this Harry is in a kind of capsule or dome, with his head in
the clouds, secluded from the more unfiltered, immediate impressions of his environment,
connected to it only in intellectual heights.
Sensitive Harry is the opposite of that. He
is sensitive to the world around him. The purple traces in the background aren’t emanating
from him like in the case of the Thinker Harry, but belong to the world he’s in. They surround
him. Harry receives these fleeting signals of people and things around him like a medium, and
lets them flow through him. “As a detective, he’s like a magnetic reader on the world tape.” Unlike
the Thinker Harry, this one is less analytical and is instead portrayed as someone who lets
the unfiltered world flash through his mind.
Physical Harry is the opposite of the leaned back,
receiving nature of the sensitive one. He drives himself into the world like a chisel. The game
says that he “interacts with the world through his body” and the portrait makes that more than clear.
Here we have aggressive, hard brushstrokes that radiate from his entire body. When you compare
it to the Thinker Harry, this one has no barrier between himself and the outside world. Quite the
opposite: the outlines become smudgy. While the thinker Harry slowly and deliberately accumulates
his energy over his head, this one radiates it from his entire body as uncontrolled, fiery rays
of light, like a coked up super saiyan detective. And again, this is not an exhausting analysis or
something, it’s still just me looking at how the characters in the portraits interact with what is
outside of their outlines. It’s still just about what’s going on between foreground and background,
the person and their world. We didn’t even talk about body language or expressions, and I rarely
even mentioned the abstract, experimental color choices or the character designs themselves.
Also, I’m not an expert for visual art at all. But there was something that Kaspar wrote
in the Disco Elysium Artbook that made me laugh. He writes about how “A good
portion of art-making is accidental, but the artist still needs to claim the credit.
It’s about positioning yourself in a way that you can claim credit for as many seemingly
accidental revelations as possible.” For example, this light blue shimmer on Kim’s forehead found
its way there simply because Rostov thought it would look nice as a contrast to his overall
warm theme. In the finished portrait however, it ended up being a characterization: Kim is
keeping a cool head and calculating mind to counteract his more hot-headed colleague. It’s
the artist’s role to synthesize all of these little revelations into a meaningful whole. And
maybe that’s true for my perspective too. A lot of what I’m able to observe in art might not have
a meaning deliberately put into it, but I have to interpret it in a way that presupposes intent.
Because that’s when things start making sense and that’s when you can suddenly put your impression
into words. It’s like a secret arrangement between artists and commentators; a game where I hold up
my end of the bargain by translating my impression into concepts, principles, and meaning that wasn’t
necessarily put into it. That doesn’t necessarily mean I’m wrong, just that the hermeneutic
circle remains incomplete; and that’s okay.
Because in reality, art is neither
anarchy of meaning nor a coherent signifying system. I found this ambivalence to
be particularly evident in Disco Elysium’s art, and it has to do with where it came from.
Alexander Rostov, Disco Elysium’s Art Director, who painted the portraits, traces the origin
of his art style back to his childhood:
“I grew up in the post-apocalypse. Amid the
ruins of the Soviet Union, a newly born land of arms deals, rapid financialization, and
cowboy capitalists killing one another in the public squares. In these interesting
circumstances, the traditions of figurative art were, to put it lightly, interrupted.
The neoliberal Zeitgeist which emerged from the ashes of the Great Project had little
appetite for the frivolities of painting.
In its place, an aggressive conceptual art was
taking the soap-in-sock to all other forms with what appeared to be vengeance. Nothing short of
a complete reset of all truth and institutions of art. In painting, little else remained besides
serious abstracts for bank lobbies, financed by the banks, abstract and serious themselves.
Suffice to say, post-apocalyptic conditions were hardly ideal for the study of art, and in
isolation, one develops an uneven skillset.”
Much like the game itself, Rostov’s art developed
against the odds. He grew up as an artistic autodidact, drawing in sketchbooks that his father
bound for him because the stores didn’t have any. He found his first artistic role model in the
concept artist Craig Mullins, one of the first visual artists to work with digital tools.
“His work was my first serious exposure to expressive brushwork and what you might loosely
call impressionist or expressionist painting and it completely blew my mind. The image seems
to come together without much hassle. In truth, of course, his loose brushwork and
seemingly effortless manner actually take a lot of effort. There’s an intuitive
understanding of how much needs to be depicted to trick you into seeing something
that’s not entirely there. It is painterly anarchy on top of rigid and true fundamentals.”
Mullin’s influence combined with an artistic skillset that Rostov himself says was still
crude in many ways resulted in what we call the art style of Disco Elysium.
“The autodidact, Rostov writes, must find a way to cover for their shortcomings
and put forth their strengths. For example, one technique that arose from these conditions
is the use of abstract flashes of color, splats of paint, and aggressive use of edge
hierarchies which are necessary to make up for shortcomings and impatience in composition.
It’s a bit like constructing a house on a shabby foundation and propping it up with flashy
scaffolding when it threatens to tumble over. I do not recommend this approach – after a while,
you start building tilted houses on purpose.
Truthfully, though, it is fortunate
that my natural proclivities for expressive work fed so well into the
subjective nature of Disco Elysium.”
It’s this experimental style of well-maintained
chaos that gave us the game’s trademark contrast of grey poverty ridden harbor townscape
aesthetics on the one hand, and colorful, aggressive flashiness that wants to
break out of it one the other. I think that’s the visual equivalent to the same
contrast we find in the game’s writing, setting and lore. Without its more fantastic
excesses, it would be depressing instead of visionary. “Sounds like turgid bourgeois
social realism”. It’s what elevates Disco Elysium from being stuck between post- and
pre-apocalypse into an imaginative piece of art.
“I hope, Rostov writes, that Disco Elysium
reflects not on the collapse of something, but instead on the tendencies of an incoming new
age of more bold and eccentric works of art.”
