On DUSK

I was born in the early 1990s, a decade in PC gaming which was the formative, some might say golden age for one mighty genre: the first-person shooter. As well as essential, landmark titles like Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Quake and Half-Life, we had Wolfenstein, Blake Stone, Unreal, Rise of the Triad, Shadow Warrior, Heretic and Blood (a personal favourite). While the FPS genre is far from dead, as internet connections improved and the gaming industry grew like Tetsuo Shima into a corpulent, disgusting colossus of greed, it transformed dramatically, with the Halo and Call of Duty franchises pushing gaming into a lucrative new chapter of online multiplayer, where international Fortnite tournaments turn kids into millionaires.

Having the complicated relationship with social interaction that I do, the move in the zeitgeist from single-player towards multiplayer was extremely unwelcome. Playing by yourself or playing with others is often what divides the medium between art and sport, and while there is of course nothing wrong with sport, I’ve always been more of a fan of what feelings games can provide beyond the thrill of mere challenge. What I loved about those games of the 90s was the incredible settings and atmospheres that they created; often frightening, like Doom’s flickering corridors, or at least incredibly moody, like Duke 3D’s seedy urban pastiches. But I also liked the absurdity of the action in those games – tearing around at 100mph blasting rockets at monstrous foes as they explode into giblets by the dozens. They were often a perfect blend of psychotic fun and clever craftsmanship.

But though it might sound like I’ve been lamenting the changing of the seasons in the evolution of first-person shooters, we also happen to be living in an age where nostalgia still holds tremendous cultural power, and the age of the frantic, bloodthirsty shooter is having a bit of a renaissance. Bethesda’s Doom has been rebooted into a successful rework of its run-and-gun mechanics, Blood has been officially re-released for modern PCs, and just recently Ion Storm, formerly Ion Maiden, is the first game to use Duke Nukem’s still-excellent Build engine in twenty years. One game in particular, though, proved to be even better than I expected from a nostalgia-tickling tribute to the shooters of yore. New Blood Interactive’s Dusk could easily have been a simple retread of the same old concepts – running, shooting, red keys, blue keys, etc. But having only just finally gotten around to playing and finishing it, it was a delight to realise that Dusk is an exceptionally well-made, effective and memorable game in its own right.

The game follows the old familiar format of the Doom era of gaming – three episodes, each with a dozen or so levels with the objective of getting from the beginning to the end. Despite this point-A-to-point-B format, the levels aren’t exactly linear, folding over themselves through shortcuts and passages and their progression being structured via having to find coloured keys that correspond to coloured doors. With its concept being the most basic of basics, this leaves a lot of possibilities that can be hung on this basic skeleton, and the levels have a lot of variety in how they transpire. As you explore around, looking for keys, items, and of course secret places, the rush of the gun battles is supported by the wonder and curiosity of discovery that all exploration-based games seek to satisfy.

And that’s another factor common to these games that has been somewhat lost to time: level design. Since the proliferation of open worlds as the default template for most modern games, when was the last time anyone talked about level design, or even the concept of levels in general? With the level-by-level structure, each segment of the game becomes an insular creation following the vision of its (often) singular designer. Each level has its own character or conceit that makes it particularly memorable, whether it’s the tentative ‘realism’ of the farms and factories, or the dark and dingy castles and labyrinths, or the levels where space and logic are warped like an Escher sketch, there is so much careful thought put into the environments you go blasting through that you’re compelled to carry on if only to see what happens next. I was so entertained to see what new challenge awaited behind each door, or what abomination lay at the bottom of every pit I was nervous of dropping into, or in the traps, surprises, and insane boss fights that kept me on my toes whenever they burst into motion. As the game carries forward into the final episode, its creativity soars and the last stretch has such a wonderful succession of twists and turns that take it above and beyond its simple retro-shooter conceit.

The soundtrack, by the maestro Andrew Hulshult, helps a lot in cementing the tone. Unlike in the olden days when there was often one track per level, the music in Dusk is extremely dynamic, lulling into tense synth pieces for the ‘quieter’ moments and erupting into industrial, distortion-soaked mayhem whenever a particularly dense battleground has been entered. In fact, playing this game with headphones is a must as the sound design as a whole is completely perfect, both in the mechanical sense, where you rely on the sounds of your enemies to judge their distance, actions, and mortality, and in the purely aesthetic sense, where the sounds of an incoming creature in a particularly dim area can sometimes reach pant-shittening levels of tension. One of my favourite monster designs is the wendigo, a fast, antlered demon thing that aside from its pants and grunts is completely invisible until the moment you shoot it and it appears with a sudden musical sting, providing many an ‘oh-shit’ moment from its introduction onward.

There’s so much to love about the creativity employed in the game, taking inspiration from all the aforementioned 90s classics and fusing the best bits into its DNA. There’s even a powerup that replicates the entire concept of 2016’s Superhot, slowing time to bullet-dodging pace where the enemies only move when you move. I also like the Crystals of Madness, glowing rocks that you smash on the ground which cause the enemies to start attacking each other, strategic in a lot of ways but mainly just a shitload of fun. There’s also a strange sense of humour throughout, with every level providing a piece of soap somewhere on the map that can be thrown to kill any enemy in one hit, including bosses. And while references to old titles are naturally abound, the game doesn’t wallow so much in the past that it can’t be enjoyed by someone who hasn’t played the plethora of titles that this game bites off of, which is always welcome in a nostalgia-fuelled project such as this one.

But the thing I liked most about Dusk is probably its application of one of my favourite tools of the artistic trade – horror. I was surprised that Dusk turned out to be one of the scariest new games I’ve played in a long time. Much has been written on the classic survival horror games and the modern run-and-hide games such as Amnesia that much of their horror comes from the player’s comparative weakness, such as how in Silent Hill 2 the player is slow and inaccurate, fighting with planks, pipes and guns with limited ammo. What’s so interesting about Dusk is how it somehow brings you a riveting power fantasy, slaughtering foes with an absurd amount of speed and ferocity, yet manages to retain intense moments of serious fear. Through a combination of the ghastly sounds, freakish low-poly enemy design, and meticulous level curation that remains one step ahead of your expectations, Dusk is as much a horror game as it is a jet-fuelled murder marathon, with some sections in the later levels leaving me wincing with apprehension in a way usually reserved for overtly ‘scary’ titles.

I love Dusk as a faithful reimagining of some of my favourite games from my childhood, but even if you’ve never taken a ride on that train, if you have any interest in either high-octane action or tenebrous atmosphere I highly recommend that you play it. Coming in at maybe nine or ten hours from start to finish (for me, at least), Dusk comes from a tradition of sharp, focused gaming experiences where pure, visceral fun is its top priority. Simple yet vivid, puerile yet frightening, mindless yet particularly clever, it brings me immeasurable joy to see devoted fans of a specific period look back to the gaming elements that have stayed with us for decades and bring them into the modern age with an originally unoriginal work that has a personality all of its own.

On Euphoria

In the grand tradition of works like Kids, Larry Clark and Harmony Korine’s 1995 bleak festival of depravity, Euphoria is an eight-episode series that acts as a portrait of the troubled youth of today and the sinister channels of hedonism that bring them together and tear them apart. It’s a HBO show, based on an Israeli original and co-produced by, among others, the glorious A24. Worrying that the show might be something along the lines of Skins, except American and therefore four times as irritating, I was prepared to hate it. But the good news is I didn’t hate it, in fact, I enjoyed it a lot, even if it did make me feel surprisingly terrible almost all the way through.

Euphoria takes place in a dark, corrupt and miserable world of superficiality, cruelty and temptation. Its central character is Rue, a sometimes-recovering teenage drug addict, but the story stretches out to include a number of other tangentially-connected members of the same high school. You watch helplessly as even its most wholesome characters are warped by the ambient pressure of their environment, and who, without any real guidance to speak of, stumble confusedly from one bad decision to another. The show is narrated by Rue, and often opens with an expositional montage about one of its main characters, although these sections are never so much about introducing a character as fleshing out someone you’re already familiar with, providing significant context for how they got to where they are. What the show succeeds at is communicating exactly what bruises in their development cause each character to see the world in the way that they do, and why this carries them down their individual paths. This structure could easily be trite, or cheap, but here I found this style of storytelling relievingly effective.

With the main character being a drug addict, I expected that the show would concern itself mostly with the crushing power of narcotics, and there are plenty of moments of heightened reality that reminded me strongly of Trainspotting, but it was interesting to see that probably the most pernicious euphoria of the show’s namesake was sex, or rather the strange new frontiers of sex in our dystopian present. Much of it was depressingly recognisable, particularly in how the internet’s deluge of pornography has shaped our attitudes and expectations towards sex, which also combines naturally with old-fashioned misogyny. Knowledge of the common tropes of porn has one character, McKay, choking his girlfriend, Cassie, without her consent, assuming it to be not only normal but necessary. Cassie herself has already been sexualised constantly from an early age, particularly by her mother, and has internalised her worth as being one in the same with her sexual value. The same is true of Maddy, who unlike Cassie completely accepts this expectation of herself and runs with it, telling men what they want to hear and analysing porn so as to replicate it for her boyfriend’s benefit.

But in the internet age, porn isn’t simply a consumer product, but an expected part of any sexual relationship, with nudes and videos a central pillar of these kids’ sex lives. A whole sequence is dedicated to the do’s and don’t’s of dick-pic curation, and Rue and Jules's relationship is brought closer by Rue agreeing to take sexy pics of Jules to send to her mysterious crush. Sex tapes, filmed with or without good faith, naturally leak from privacy onto phone screens around the school and beyond. Cassie’s reputation, in the eyes of her insecure boyfriend, is besmirched by the existence of a previous sex tape that has made its way around the school, which to McKay is an affront to his own petty masculine pride. Reputation, as anyone who’s been to school will know well, is the most powerful force in Euphoria’s narrative. The entire show runs on secrets and pathetic power moves to improve someone’s standing, or protect them from social ruin, and sex is more often than not a tool, if not a weapon, used in order to gain something; if not respect from others, then at the very least the pacification of the serpent-toothed insecurity that is the basis of adolescence.

It’s worth pointing out that all of these instances of filmed and photographed sex amongst these kids is completely illegal, a fact which is itself weaponised by one character to blackmail another. Illegal or not, child pornography is as normal as ever, and it’s the children themselves who are doing it.

One interesting example of how the modern landscape bastardises young understandings of sexuality is with Kat, who starts the series as a virgin before quickly losing that virginity in a moment that was, naturally, filmed and uploaded to the internet. Noticing the view count rising, Kat senses an opportunity and enters awkwardly into being a camgirl, providing dominatrix services to a handful of dedicated viewers, and suddenly having cash to burn for doing sometimes literally nothing. As her confidence grows, she starts to enjoy herself, having sex with guys who she considered previously unattainable, but her understanding of sex isn’t as wise as she thinks it is, and it becomes apparent that she believes every interaction between a guy and girl revolves around trying to have sex with one another, brushing off the one nerdy virgin guy who’s clearly right for her as simply trying to get in her pants. Kat has learned to see sex as vapid and transactional, and while watching the often coldly aromantic trysts between the kids of Euphoria, it’s easy to see that perspective yourself.

But this isn’t a world where romance has been completely killed, buried, exhumed, and put on sale. Rue is an interesting main character as, aside from her own substantial issues (no pun intended) and the occasional instance of threatening to stab her own mother, she’s often by far the most rational and observant of the main characters, at least after finally making an honest effort to kick the habit. She is the story’s narrator, after all. But she also has the closest to a true and uncorrupt loving relationship that the show offers, complex as it becomes, in her maybe-more friendship with Jules. I think it’s notable that Rue, while forever tied to the millstone of addiction, seems to be the least dented in her sexual understanding than the rest of the characters, admitting to Jules that her sexual experience, while existent, is minimal at best. Rue doesn’t want Jules for any reason other than she adores her, she has no interest in the sexual rat race, she wants nothing more from her than to bask in her presence, and the same is… maybe… true with Jules. However, even this feeling isn’t necessarily pure, as her contact at NA points out that there’s a good chance her love for Jules is just one more dependency to replace the one she used to fill the void before her sobriety.

While this show could have easily been produced as a vicarious ride of sex and drugs made solely to entertain, there’s a surprising amount of depth and complexity to the emotions of these characters, and more importantly, it has you effortlessly sympathising with them, and rooting for them despite the myriad of problems they often have no idea how to solve. The only exception is Nate, the almost comically psychopathic antagonist of pretty much everyone, who is somehow both primally meatheaded yet also cunningly devious, a representation of everything that Euphoria wants to leave you with a lingering hatred for. I’d be hard-pressed to think of a more hateable character maybe in anything, although if like me you were hoping for a satisfactory consequence for his many crimes, the series finale will leave you disappointed. In fact, it came perilously close to romanticising the abusive relationship between him and Maddy, which I hope was just a misreading on my part. The last episode left me thoroughly unsatisfied for a number of reasons, leaving me worried that extending the show for another season (the original Israeli version was a one-shot miniseries) might leave it running out of steam.

But, nonetheless, this show is great. It can be a little corny at times, sometimes even weirdly moralising in a way I can’t quite articulate, but it manages to keep up this strong and sometimes unbearable tension, with moments of levity and genuine tenderness that never feel too out of place, too flat, or too forced. I’ve been hooked on it, which I guess is ironic, and I’m looking forward to seeing more of these characters in the future, even if it does dishearten me to be reminded of the shit kids have to put up with in the age of the catfish, the opioid epidemic, and the unsolicited dick pic.

On 'Low' by David Bowie

Before David Bowie moved to Berlin, he was a mess. He’d shrunk into paranoid seclusion, and was famously reported to have for a time subsisted only on milk, red peppers, and cocaine. Lots and lots of cocaine. The Thin White Duke, who openly threw darts in lovers’ eyes, was a dark persona which Bowie ran with during the time of his album Station to Station, getting in hot water for interviews in which he made uncomfortable remarks about Adolf Hitler and the degradation of society. It was ‘performance art’, sure; Bowie was playing the role of this sinister, drug-addled character, but it was also true that at this point in his life, Bowie was himself consumed by druglust while seeming to hold an unhealthily loose grip on the real world. He would later admit to hardly remembering entire years during which his cocaine abuse was particularly extreme.

Moving to Berlin, Bowie wanted a fresh start. He needed to get away from the coke-crusted web in which he was ensnared in Los Angeles, but he also needed to find a way to deal with possessing an alienated soul. Bowie considered one of the perks of living in West Berlin to be a newfound sense of anonymity – the locals didn’t bother him as much as he was used to, and he found he could retreat from the psychedelic excess that his superstardom had brought him, and have a chance to recuperate, and to come to terms with himself. The work that eventually arose from this fresh, undoubtedly life-saving, new chapter in his life was the 1977 album Low, and it’s my favourite of all his many, many, many masterpieces. Rather than speaking from fantastical detachment, as with his time living as the Thin White Duke, this feels more like an album where Bowie expresses himself personally about the miseries he was facing, both with glamorous veneer, and from vulnerable depths of emotion.

You could, if you wanted to, see this album as a bridge of sorts between the smokey guitar-rock of the 70s and the dawning electronic adventure of the 80s and beyond. With the inclusion of Brian Eno to the creative roster, and with Bowie drawing influence from the characteristically chic Berlin underground, the album’s sound is datedly futuristic. Its synth leads sound individually perfect in complementing whichever track they’re on, such as the scally horn-blasts on ‘Breaking Glass’, adding disruption to a song about destruction, or the warm rainbow-falls of ‘Sound and Vision’, or the popcorn texture brought to ‘What in the World’. They give these tracks a flair so as to distinguish these naturally excellent compositions as belonging entirely to Low. On the latter half of the album, of course, the synth moves from a strong supporting role to the dominant ideology, and Eno’s luscious sounds build worlds outside the expected Bowie brand of verse-chorus-verse art-rock.

Indeed, this is an album of two very distinct halves, so let’s talk about the first half, the accessible one with all the hits, the one that sounds like a David Bowie album. Roaring in like a stereophonic train, we open with ‘Speed of Life’, an instrumental, swaggering figment of the sound of the 1970s, acting as the album’s overture, something drunken and braggish, still flagrantly hedonistic, but every now and then pausing in a lull of hesitation, symptomatic of the album’s nervous mentality. This duality of more conventional rock assertiveness with a gaping vulnerability carries on throughout the rest of the first half. ‘Breaking Glass’, again a song with a brusque confidence in its stomping central rhythm, gives way to a faltering moment where the confidence evaporates and the song sounds suddenly unsure of itself, Bowie’s singing turning from brash to simpering. The lyrics are a mix of admissions of failure and begging for affection, with Bowie sounding maybe a little pathetic, or at the very least, desperate.

And this desperation continues, with ‘What in the World’ talking of a downtrodden girl, a depressed creature trapped in hermitage, with Bowie on the sidelines feeling powerless, ‘talking through the gloom’ of his maybe not-entirely-selfless desire. The brevity of these songs magnifies how well-carved they sound, begging for repeat listens, feeling ever-complete but still somehow much too short. I guess there was plenty of space for ponderousness on the other side of the record. But that’s for later. Let’s talk about ‘Sound and Vision’, one of the album’s especially beloved pieces, sporting doo-dooing backing singers, sax, synth, jovial bass work and bright, sighing guitar strums. One of my favourite things in the world is happy-sounding music with miserable subject matter, and I think it’d be tough to find a better example than ‘Sound and Vision’, gorgeously spirited in its instrumental as meanwhile Bowie switches between theatrical vibrato and a monotonous, drab apathy, as he sings of being sunk in a mire of sadness, titularly Low, hoping for sudden inspiration to pull him back into the world of the living.

‘Always Crashing in the Same Car’ is a spooky one, dreamy and flange-laden, a song about I think a repeating dream Bowie had of crashing his car, the lyrics describing him literally driving round in circles, comically still checking for oncoming cars and being in the middle of what sounds like a complete mental breakdown. Bowie’s voice is weak with lamentation, and he sounds in no better mood on ‘Be My Wife’, the ragtime-soul screamer that’s a personal favourite of mine. ‘I’ve lived all over the world. I’ve left every place.’ This is Bowie at his most disillusioned-sounding, at least thus far in his career, about the towering spectacle of fame, knowing how he lives a life of luxury and yet is lost with his romantic relationships. It’s got that end-credits dramatic energy that I adore completely, loud and soaring and retrospective. But the real closer of Side A is ‘New Career in a New Town’, another instrumental, with a foggy nostalgic harmonica sailing over a gleeful skip of synth and piano, blowing with the wind and sounding out with a woolly exhaustion, off into the distance in some optimistic direction.

And then – there’s a shift, firm and sudden as the pull of a handbrake. At the break of the ominous hum, we enter Low’s strange, polarising second phase. Until now, Bowie’s expressions of personal alienation have come garbed in catchy, accessible verve. Sad lyrics, fun music. With the Side B opener, ‘Warszawa’, all irony is jettisoned and a sincere, sometimes otherworldly composition emerges from black clouds. Mournful, spiralling, soaring synthesisers tell a tale of woe, completely instrumental unless you count Bowie’s meaningless hums and cries, eerily religious. The entire song sounds like a red sun rising over a dejected landscape. This is the moment the album often loses people, those who came for earthly pleasures of ‘Sound and Vision’, and reading a few contemporary reviews I saw that critics of the time were befuddled by this extreme change of pace, but when considering the album’s spinal conceit, the feelings Bowie wishes to explore on this album, it makes a lot of creative sense, and this sorrowful opener, along with its three successors, bring something wordless and primal to the experience, lending something beyond the rock parameters Bowie is more than comfortable in.

‘Art Decade’ is pensive, atmospheric, a little space-age, signalling maybe a sense of alienation, certainly a feeling of weightlessness, being anchorless, floating above weird, milky sounds and organic calls beyond comprehension. Inherently, it’s hard to get a handle on, and it’s a slow-burner of sorts, with what I’d call a planetarium aesthetic. Marimba clunks and stylophonic synths begin ‘Weeping Wall’, a dreamy blend of wood and steel that gets especially trippy when phrases of ‘Scarborough Fair’ creep into the equation, and the weightlessness started in ‘Art Decade’ rises further from any recognisable surface. If my read of these songs as a continuation of the first half’s concept is valid, this might instil images of a Bowie completely adrift from the world, maybe still beneath the covers as his disappointed mind flutters elsewhere.

Finally it’s ‘Subterraneans’, a dejected elegy of sorts, hissing synths acting as string sections before Bowie’s monastic hums enter the frame and the sound becomes a kind of hymn, spacious and grand, but with that essential humility which accompanies prayer. A little midnight saxophone arrives, along with more unintelligible but purposeful chanting, rising and falling, sounding as if directed towards the sky. And then it ends, rather abruptly, and I turn back to the beginning and listen to the whole thing again. To me, Low has it all – maudlin bangers, strong wailers, surreal loomers – and its cohesive theme, history and attitude are all striking. It’s always such a pleasure to hear a sorrowful album that’s so instantly gripping, in the way that only Bowie (plus Visconti, plus Eno) could make possible. And though Side A’s all-night party might suck you in, it’s the elusive magic comedown of Side B that returns me, as if every time I hear it I’m a different person than forty minutes ago.

On Getting Depressed

Depression and anxiety are the two wheels of the cart that carries me through life. They can both be unspeakably awful, but for most of the time they’re simply the emotional basis of my average day. Anxiety is the most conspicuous of the demons, taking hold of everything I do, from the minute to the massive, and while it ebbs and flows, it is forever constant. Depression is a different animal, crueller-sounding, the very word is like an immovable tombstone. While unquestionably ever-present, I used to think that depression just came and went – some days I’d be ‘normal’, and every now and then depression would creep up on me like inclement weather, and I’d switch from one mode of being into another. As time has gone by and I at least entertain the idea that I’ve gotten to know myself better, I realise that depression does indeed come and go, but that I don’t have to be cutting myself, starving myself and actively seeking my own destruction for depression to still be with me, watching from a distance.

In the same way that I doubt myself on everything – that I doubt I’m a drug addict, or doubt that people like me, even doubt if I’m feeling happy or doubt that I’m really sad – I doubt whether or not I really have depression. That sounds kind of strange considering the very first sentence of this post, but it’s true. After all, I’ve never tried to kill myself. It might be arrogance which causes me to believe that killing myself will not involve a ‘try’, and barring the classic change of heart or the auspices of fate, if I decide to end it, it will be the end. That probably sounds redundant to people who haven’t considered ending it all that often in their life, but the desire to ‘call for help’ is a powerful drive, and one I’ve fallen to the allure of before, cutting my wrists at school and such. But I haven’t ended it. Despite everything, and despite fantasising about it regularly – the method, the sensation, the aftermath that I shan’t be present for – I clearly haven’t considered things to have been bad enough that my loving family, who are wonderful, and my many adoring friends, who are amazing, deserve to attend my premature funeral. That sounds like a relief and a positive, which it is, but to me it’s also the fact that keeps me wondering: if I’m carrying on living, who’s to say my bellyaching and wallowing isn’t the product of my own self-centred narcissism? Essentially, is my misery valid?

I don’t expect anyone to understand this, but it’s how things are. Of course I’m not totally convinced by these doubts, and seem to accept that something in me finds the very fundament of being alive to be quite a struggle. And that’s not even to speak of my overwhelming privilege, where I am practically the definition of someone who has enjoyed a staggering amount of leniency for a human on Planet Earth. But happiness is more arcane than that. Things are certainly better than when I was younger, before drugs solved a number of problems while immediately presenting new ones, but I still spend most of my time thinking an array of complicated follies that all end in the same phrase: ‘Why bother?’ Having been on (and occasionally off) antidepressants for a long, long, long time, as long as I can literally remember, I do feel that the savagest of wolves are being kept from the door. But in keeping with the universe’s theme, antidepressants bring with them their own saddening drawbacks, as I feel that for all the misery that they temper, many true, sober joys are also diluted into something tepid and numb. But I should write about that some other time.

Depression has come to me in several forms. The weirdest, maybe the most alarming, are the few intense instances where depression has crossed the threshold of deep but understandable misery and into something panicked, as if the world has abandoned me and I feel assaulted by something huge, awful and invisible, to the point of acting out in some way, whether through a drug binge or bizarre moments of self-harm accompanied with aimless, tearful wanderings. One instance involving my flatmate finding me at the end of our road, arms scratched and bleeding, hysterical, and with no memory exactly of how I got there. Those have been the extreme moments, where the misery took complete control of me, to the point that my own memory refuses to be there for me. They’re quite bad, pretty bad, but they’re mercifully infrequent.

The more common depressive spells are ones that should be familiar to everyone – painfully low mood, complete apathy towards being alive, self-neglect, long periods between fits of crying spent staring at the walls. These are also pretty bad, in a sense worse because of how much more accustomed I am to them. In these states, no positive emotion I ever felt in the past is seen as valid, sometimes even turning to delusions that I have never been happy, ever, and all I’ve felt is the misery I’m with in those moments. This is the part where I believe that this could be an ‘illness’, not so much a disposition, as during these moments I believe, one hundred percent, in easily disprovable delusions that keep me miserable. Even when I know that my depressions come and go, and I’ve had too many of these downward plummets to even count, and they’ve always dissolved, eventually, when I’m in that particularly sad moment, I know that this time, this time, everything I feel is completely justified, and nothing on Earth can convince me otherwise.

Aside from all the self-sabotage and the fact that very little gets done during these instances, age (and, importantly, fantastic support from the people around me) has taught me better ways of, to put it bluntly, dealing with it. But there’s another form of depression that’s maybe the most insidious. It has a quieter personality, not making of me any urgent demands, but rather keeping me in a persistent state of anhedonia and pessimism, which I inhabit in the same way a fish has no concept of the water in which it swims. Things seem fine, functional, even. But the vapid boredom of the world around me makes sinister means of escape, through drugs, or sex, or old-fashioned life-wasting, all the more tempting. Even on my best days, I walk suspiciously through the world, wondering what goodness actually exists around me, if any. And despite the luxury of my many friends and neighbours, there’s rarely a moment when I don’t feel, in some way, alone. This is the way in which it seems depression isn’t just a frequent bastardisation of my otherwise carefree life, it’s as necessary as the blood in my veins and the air I breathe. This might sound ghastly, which it is, but as I said before, I’m still alive, and anything before the completeness of death means that the possibilities are endless, joy is still to be had, horizons are still there to be explored, and people are still around for me to enjoy their weird variety. I’m sure lots of people feel bad, all the time. I’m not so special. But I did feel compelled to put this absurdity into writing. So I did. I also intend to carry on living way beyond the foreseeable future in case you were wondering. Life is too weird and fascinating a cosmic phenomenon to miss out on.

On True Detective Series One

I picked the opening series of True Detective back up again this week, for the first time since it aired back in 2014. It shouldn’t be a surprise how much I enjoyed it, as a modern walk through the Southern Gothic genre. I feel I haven’t immersed myself enough in the brooding landscape of Southern Gothic – I think the last cultural artefact I swallowed that bore any resemblance was the fairly dumb but fairly brilliant True Blood from years ago, a show about Louisiana vampires that was a truckload of spooky Halloween fun. True Detective isn’t that. It draws its Gothic magic from its quintessential location, in the chillingly flat, spacious swampland of Louisiana. There’s a lot to praise about it – the directing, the acting, the ‘themes’, unsubtle as they are – but as with all the best pieces of art, the show’s power is in its palpable atmosphere, which True Detective gets exactly right.

No new ground is broken in the show’s plot, of a chalk-and-cheese cop duo hunting a serial killer. Like the resemblance of a child to its parents, you can recognise here the features of Silence of the Lambs and Se7en, mixed with a little Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but its more obvious, or perhaps open, influences are strangely literary. I didn’t know about The King in Yellow before this show aired, like most people, it seems, as the book had a resurgence in its wake, and if nothing else I can thank this series for bringing that book back to the world’s attention. The relation the show has to the 1895 collection of weird stories is arguably superficial, taking namesakes and elements; the ‘Yellow King’, a mysterious place called Carcosa, the appearance of the Yellow Sign. But by giving this series a heavily-telegraphed relation to the book, it can be understood that the show’s priority isn’t character, themes, or mystery, strong as they may well be, but in its embrace of the sensation of weird.

There’s nothing to suggest that any of what happens in True Detective’s story has any supernatural influence, but nonetheless the show seems to exist in some disquieting unreality, talking of devil worship, symbols, totems, the afterlife. The character Rust even hallucinates regularly, supposedly due to a history of drug use, though he refers to them at least once as ‘visions’, and this allows for a few moments of surrealism, when nature falls apart. The crimes themselves are baroque and ceremonial, with certain atrocities wearing the bizarre paganism of The Wicker Man. All these nods or allusions to something metaphysical, these unseen forces and hidden layers, are what give the show its unsettling personality. Though the subject, miserable as it may be, is a grounded one, it still feels throughout as though the rational world might abandon the viewer completely, and so there is always a sense that something beyond the comprehensible evils of criminality lurks beneath the soil or at the bottom of the bayous.

The show’s philosophical wanderings also caught much attention, being lacquered with a pessimistic attitude where very little respect is given to any perspective that isn’t aimed squarely towards the abyss. I can see why Rust Cohle can be a hero to many, openly shitting in the proverbial breakfasts of Jesus worshippers, and I can also see how he could be irritating to many others, espousing well-rehearsed dialogue about the nature of existence at a moment’s notice, acting as the show’s thematic mouthpiece. Nietzsche is predictably mentioned by name, redrawn once again as a proponent of nihilistic fatalism. I actually haven’t any hostility towards these famous ‘time is a flat circle’ moments, but I do feel as if they’re better digested when they’re taken less as thought-provoking standards to march under, and more as additional support to the aforementioned queasy atmosphere. At the heart of True Detective is a lightless and frightening world. As well as being a world of local sex offenders, or of an organised establishments of sex offenders, or of possible folkloric demon-monsters, Rust’s diatribes expand this terror to the entirety of the universe. They add to the show’s nature in much the same ethos of philosophical horror, with creator Pizzolatto citing Thomas Ligotti’s The Conspiracy Against the Human Race as another of his influences. Just as Ligotti’s ultra-negative philosophy is the centrepiece, not just the inspiration, of his horror writing, I believe that True Detective weaponises an openly atheistic, pessimistic, antinatal worldview to add to its menacing flavour, one that is given a glimmer of Hollywood optimism as the series bows out.

Watching it again, I got the sense of Rust Cohle as a bit of a Mary Sue. Not only outstandingly talented at basically everything, he also sees the world with total clarity, penetrating through all of mankind’s deceits with total, accurate certainty. I picked up a Holmes-and-Watson vibe to him and Marty’s relationship – Rust as the brilliant mastermind and Marty, with his flaws and his family, as the vessel of humanity to be the audience’s ambassador. It could be argued that Marty’s warm heart counteracts Rust’s cold one (Hart and Cohl, I’ve literally just got it), but in actuality there’s certainly a one-sidedness to their partnership, even if Woody Harrelson, showing as fine an acting spirit as McConaughey or Monaghan, keeps his character magnetic throughout his innumerable bad decisions. I thought about this as a problem as I watched it again, with Rust’s gravelly voice stealing the show as he took the lead in practically every plot point. By the end, at least, I did come to appreciate that what bound these differing characters together was their fealty to justice, and that Marty does, eventually, put aside everything to join Rust in the pursuit of something he knows is right. So despite Rust being written as superior to Marty in a myriad of ways, it is in this, their moral sense, that the two of them are equals.

True Detective couldn’t keep up its momentum, which was probably an inevitability. I didn’t care for the second series and as of yet have not seen the third, which swam under my radar with minimal fanfare, seeming to speak of the trauma that the response to the second series left on its creators. The decision to make the series an anthology, swapping setting and characters every season, made sense to me, but the problem I found with the second series is that they lost the first series’s two shining assets: its haunting mood and its dynamic central characters. The characters in series two were empty and dull, and the setting was completely dry of atmosphere. It’s a bit of a shame, as like I said the real draw of the show for me was its ominous weirdness, palpitating beneath its removable parts. Then again, the first series is so tightly constructed, with its excellent back-and-forth structure that couldn’t simply be reused, that any continuation might always have been doomed to fail. I might get to watching the third series, as one of the positives of an anthology series is it can always change for better or worse, but either way this opening series has proven itself as a short, strong and supremely effective work of television.