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.
