Disco Elysium and post-socialist melancholia

Ruins of a promised Utopia.

I keep waking up in Martinaise.

I wake up in that crumpled room above the Whirling-in-Rags, throat raw, a headache poured from a rusted factory funnel, all the world smelling faintly of old beer and wet coats. The ceiling flakes like socialist frescoes sunburned by time. There’s a tie spinning on a fan. There’s a ledger waiting like an indictment. There’s the soft, relentless undertow of a deeper ruin, the kind measured not in broken windows but in broken futures. And I think: this is not a videogame; this is a documentary. It must have been what my parents felt like when Yugoslavia fell apart.

Call it post-socialist melancholy. Not simply sadness for a country that no longer exists, but for a future that no longer exists. For an architecture that meant something, once: housing blocks aligned with a planetary optimism; mosaics of cosmonauts and wheat-fields and women holding up a dawn that would finally arrive; libraries where a child could join history by opening a book rather than a gambling app. For the hum of public canteens and youth palaces and stubborn municipal theaters. For a secular liturgy of the Common Good. Then came the hangover. Then came the auction. Then came neon signs promising loans. Then came the men with careful hair and quick knives.

In Disco Elysium you are an amnesiac cop trying to remember what your own mouth means when it says the word justice while shuffling through a city that can’t even remember how to be poor with dignity. Every step you take crunches on privatized glass. The revolution failed. The counterrevolution succeeded. The moralists hover. The ultraliberals count. The fascists flex. The communists keep a candle in the wind and call the draft a breeze. On the boardwalk, a pinball hall goes silent because the orbit of fun has decayed. The church of failed commerce births a nightclub because all religions mutate to survive.

Tell me this isn’t Europe after 1991. Tell me this isn’t a thousand towns from Tallinn to Tirana to Belgrade, a thousand railway stations where clocks still work but time does not. The statue got pulled down; the new billboard went up. Everybody bought track suits and God. Markets arrived, yes, but not the ones in the textbooks; they arrived like wolves, with teeth arranged as investment funds. Overnight, engineers became taxi drivers. Teachers became cashiers. Doctors became ghosts. The mafia learned to speak in boardroom accents. Everyone learned to bribe hope.

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What fell with the Soviet Union wasn’t only a state; it was the last halfway believable blueprint for a shared tomorrow. Its crimes and hypocrisies were real and rotting—gulags, shortages, surveillance, a bureaucracy so cynical it made the soul develop calluses—but alongside the lies there was an audacious sentence etched into the sky: we are building a world without exploitation. A sentence can move cities. It moved steel, concrete, art, ambition. It moved those lunar stage sets of modernist housing where the floor plans still whisper that private life should be public happiness in miniature. Then the sentence was declared grammatically incorrect by history, and the paper it was written on—streets, networks, institutions—was torn into confetti. We were told that the new sentence was freedom. Freedom meant selection, selection meant brands, brands meant salvation through purchase. There is a special kind of quiet that falls over a culture whose future has been replaced by an infinite shelf of cereal.

In Revachol, the skill voices speak. Inland Empire croons about the hole punched through reality, that great Pale around everything, the blankness into which meaning evaporates. Empathy notes how the dockworkers perform pride because without it their rib cages would cave in. Shivers hums: the city misses you; the city has been missing everyone since the treaty. That’s the sound of post-socialist melancholy: a municipal frequency transmitting the news that the body of the future is not expected to recover.

Of course communism didn’t work. Of course it choked on human nature, on the gnarly facts of status and appetite and the pleasure of owning something and saying mine. Of course it flattened curiosity, punished deviance, and smothered innovation under wet wool. We are not angels. People ache to be seen and rewarded, to hoard a little, to put their name on the doorbell and feel the bell is real. Pretending otherwise was like telling the tide to knock it off.

But then came our upgrade, the one that was supposed to liberate the human animal to invent, to make, to sing without permission. And what did we get? Bullshit jobs, the prestige of PowerPoint, entire lives spent managing inboxes as if we were tuning pianos for a concert that never begins. Innovation narrowed into advertising. Ownership ballooned into landlordism. Status rebranded itself as follower counts and “exposure.” Recognition became an algorithm’s shrug. We traded the censor’s red pencil for the market’s invisible eraser. Somewhere an economist smiles: efficiency. Somewhere a teenager scrolls past his own future and doesn’t notice it died fifty thousand swipes ago.

When people tell me there is no alternative, I hear the voice of Measurehead, anatomizing human destiny with the confidence of a bouncer at the end of history. When people tell me we must be moderate, pragmatic, sensible, I hear the watery slosh of moralist ballast keeping the ship from ever going anywhere. When people tell me we are freer than ever, I look at our daily calendars and see little prisons stacked end to end until they form an adulthood.

Post-socialist melancholy is not nostalgia for secret police and seven-year plans. It is grief for a certain temperature of the imagination, for streets that were meant as sentences in a story we believed we were writing together. If the old story was false—and yes, it was—the new one is wordless. Late capitalism cannot say what it is for beyond survival and shopping. It borrows the rhetoric of emancipation to sell subscriptions; it takes the radical desire to transcend fate and launders it into the desire to customize your phone case. You feel the lack not as outrage but as anemia. You drink, you doomscroll, you laugh loudly and forget as hard as you can. You become Harry: a man trying to interrogate the corpse of a dream with a broken moral compass and a kind soul he can’t quite kill.

Architecture is where this dream-homicide is most legible. The socialist city was a stage for collectivity, even when the play went wrong: courtyards, tram lines, parks threaded like commons through the concrete. The new city is a self-storage facility with cafés. Everywhere a box; inside each box a smaller box; inside the smallest box a person glowing bluely. Glass towers for money’s self-portrait; luxury blocks named after forests they helped erase. The old statues point to utopia; the new signage points to parking.

And yet there is this other thing Disco Elysium keeps doing. It keeps allowing miracles that are too small for newspapers and too large for cynicism. Kim’s steadiness. Cuno’s feral heart learning the first syllables of tenderness. The ravers building a cathedral of sound in the old coastal church, with a doomed commercial area failing in the background. The union thugs who are also fathers and brothers and, sometimes, men who remember the word comrades without irony. A woman on a bridge, not lying, just exhausted by the cost of being complex. You can call these details mere writing. But they are a political ontology. They insist that the dignity we were promised by utopian murals never belonged to murals; it belongs to the mess of us, to the way we keep trying to be more than appetites and less than monsters.

Here is a thought that will offend everyone in the right ways: people need ownership and status and recognition, yes. So let’s build a world where those cravings are fed by care rather than conquest. Let the prestige object be the library you endowed with your time, the clinic you co-own, the football pitch you maintain with neighbors, the open-source tool that made someone else’s week less hellish. Let status be distributed like oxygen: plentiful, ambient, irresistible. Let recognition be a civic ritual rather than a corporate performance review. You want to be a winner? Win at making others less afraid.

This isn’t a plan. Plans require committees, numbers, tables, the very instruments that start smelling like authority after five minutes. This is a bias, a vector, a hunch repeated until it becomes infrastructure. The socialist century made public goods without freedom. The neoliberal decades made private wealth without solidarity. The next thing, if we’re even going to get one, will put freedom in the commons and keep it there with teeth.

But where is the utopia to aim at? Not Mars, not the metaverse, not a spreadsheet with an ESG badge. The utopia is embarrassingly modest: no child hungry, no elder alone, no artist shamed into marketing, no bus late because profit margins disliked punctuality, no room where people die of paperwork. The utopia is public beauty that does not ask you to buy a ticket. The utopia is time—god, time—to think and joke and idle and love and make pointless, luminous things. The utopia is stairs that lead somewhere together.

You can hear Shivers now, a tremor running under the asphalt. It says the city still remembers how to do this. It learned from the communes and the unions and the grandmothers on benches and the kids tagging walls with slogans that refuse to sell sneakers. It learned from catastrophes, too: earthquakes that collapse the wrong buildings first, wars that reveal who the adults actually are, pandemics that show how quickly the invisible becomes visible when we decide to cooperate. It learned, above all, that utopia is not a singular palace at the end of time; it is the daily refusal to let the worst version of human nature be in charge.

This is not naïveté. This is the rage of a person who has walked through too many shopping streets at dusk and felt like a ghost at his own wake. This is the grief of a person who wants back the audacity of those cracked mosaics without repeating the cruelties of the regime that commissioned them. This is the confession of someone who knows communism thumbed its nose at human nature and got human nature back with interest—but who also knows that human nature is not just greed; it is also the stubborn wish to be good.

There is a moment in Disco Elysium, if you let yourself, where you dance in the church. It is not athletic; it is not stylish; it is not even particularly sane. But it is a brief, illegal proof that bodies are allowed to celebrate before paradise arrives. The subwoofer thumps, the stained glass shivers, Kim’s mouth almost smiles, and the city is not healed, not fixed, not saved—just briefly, beautifully convinced that saving is possible. Rave, rave, rave to a new dawn.

I keep waking up in Martinaise.

I keep opening the curtains and finding the same broken harbor, the same failed strike, the same men pretending to be history’s verdict. I keep shaving or not shaving. I keep answering questions with other questions. I keep finding tiny utopias hiding in ashtrays and stairwells and handshakes and second chances. I keep remembering that the future is not promised but it is promised to those who promise something to each other.

If the Soviet century gave us a cathedral to a dream that made hostages of its worshippers, and the capitalist present gave us a bazaar where the only thing for sale is our attention, then maybe our task is to open a workshop. Not a factory for salvation; a workshop for repairs. Fix the bench. Fix the clinic. Fix the schedule. Fix the law. Fix the school. Fix the way we give each other status. Fix the imagination, which is the hardest machine of all and the only one worth keeping when the lights go out.

I make this plea not to the politburo or the market but to the skill voices inside each of us. Authority, please learn how to kneel. Logic, please invite poetry in for tea. Endurance, please be our patron saint again. Inland Empire, by all that is unholy, keep the portal open.

And Shivers, bro, turn up the volume. We need to hear the city remembering. We need to hear the future.

Antonio Melonio

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