Could you please talk more about le retour and its nihilist attributes rather than communist? (only if you want obs)
What we know is that the Return is supposed to happen within a few months after Disco in '51, and Ambrosius gets elected as an innocence in the same year, before autumn. In '52 Jesper's mother takes him to a perfumery there and the way they talk about Revachol sounds like it's a place where luxury perfume gets made. In '72 its considered a fashion capital. So I don't think there's a successful communist revolution happening there, but there is an attempt, since "the return" has communist connotations too. It is its failure that will probably result in nihilism winning. The pale is also referred to as "light" in SATA, and there's this line in DE:
Ambrosius got popular by talking in radio shows so this could be a nihilist radio show. The point of nihilism and entropolism is that they reject the world in its current form and want the pale to cover the earth, and to return to the past
(Saint-Miro's speech from SATA)
There is an interview with Helen Hindpere where she talks about the Return:
HH: I would say [history is] a spiral, not a circle. We are returning to the same themes but always with a new twist.
MM: Spiraling upwards?
HH: Exactly.
HH: (...) I think the Return is one of the most important concepts in the game, even though we donβt explore it much other than via snippets here and there. We could get psychological or Lacanian here, like the idea of returning to your motherβs womb.
MM: Or Freudian: the return of the repressed?
HH: Yes. Itβs what signifies revolution in the world of Elysium. Itβs the same idea I talked about earlier. Revolution is usually imagined in the future, but here, itβs as if itβs something you have already felt. It suggests why weβre so drawn to notions of revolution. Everyone has felt it in their life at some point, so itβs a return to that feeling you already know. Itβs a bit of a poetic, mystical explanation, but the Return signifies revolution and the aspiration that one day it will happen after all.
MM: Itβs like art. In the realm of aesthetic feeling, we appreciate that which we already sense but cannot yet find words for. And yet Adorno talks about the artistic act as the creation of that which we do not yet know.
HH: Definitely. Art can surprise you, like when you later look at an artwork you yourself created and say, βso thatβs what that is.β Itβs like discovering a part of yourself. In the context of society, I agree that itβs like showing something that might still be unknown to the collective consciousness. Thatβs what youβre striving to do.
JA: And yet it contains some of what we were addressing previously regarding Measureheadβs fascistic time travel, how itβs a forward-looking return.
HH: Yes, I noticed that connection as well when I was talking, but I had never put that together. On the one hand thereβs Measureheadβs return to better times, and on the other thereβs the βreturnβ forward into a utopian world that we have never known and has never existed, but feels like home.
This interview confirms that the Return is communist in some parts, however it's not just an uprising that gets crushed, there's something more to it. This psychological "returning to the womb" "return of the repressed" bring to mind this paragraph again:
(Side note, the 4th planned novel's title "TWO HUNDRED AND TWENTY NINE DAYS REMAINING" had a Sappho quote which was: "Evening brings the child back to the arms of the mother." this interview reminds me of that. Might be stretch but if we look at how elysium uses the times of day for metaphors, communism is the "morning" and the city where Dolores Dei was crowned is translated as "evening comes." "229 days remaining" sounds apocalyptic. so my wild guess is that the novel could have been about the end of the world and this type of "return". maybe.)
Robert Kurvitz has said this about revolution (on the Beyond The Frame podcast):
It's how I image - the End of Evangelion β it's what I imagine it looks like when world revolution comes - blood shaped crosses exploding in space, human bodies popping like zits to form a unified red ocean of some. Hugely the more apocalyptic, pale side and the larger part of Disco Elysium [was inspired by Evangelion]β which Disco Elysium only shows a very small part.
Here the revolution is associated with the apocalyptic pale side of Elysium and sounds more like the pale dissolving people.
There's also "nihil-mat" (nihilist materialism) which is connected to Ion Rodionov, so it's not a nihilism that is opposed to communism. I think Saint-Miro might be inspired by this ideology but it's probably not what he follows. "[History is] a spiral, not a circle. We are returning to the same themes but always with a new twist." So there can not be a communist revolution again that's the same as the turn of the century revolutions.
The failure of communism and the spread of nihilism is a huge theme in both DE and the book, the Return could be a key element in this narrative. Martin Luiga has said that he wrote text on or by Miro in 2021 which could mean that they were planning on including Saint-Miro in the DE sequel. (the sequel was cancelled in 2022)
In SATA the world seems to be ending by Mesque bombing every country and accelerating the pale's spread somewhat which eventually covers Elysium. This takes a couple of years. Since Kurvitz is a fan of End of Evangelion, I can imagine that it's not that simple. Maybe it's not just this slow process that ends with everything disappearing, but there's some big scale weird event that also happens at some point. Is that the Return, or something else? (Argo Tuulik said in a podcast that Kurvitz planned something mind-blowing for the sequel) Who knows but all these things make me think that nihilism was supposed to be introduced in the sequel which was also supposed to be about the Return so those things could be connected.
