Thinking about Disco Elysium and stars. Something about communal experience and simultaneous isolation, hope and idealism, fear and beauty and terror and burning. The inherent horror in the vast romantic starscape of the sky, the melancholy and loneliness inherent in the untold distance, a communal experience of something too enormous to fathom. Stars bear witness to humanity, to the millions of tiny people crawling on the face of Elysium. They watch the people, and the people watch back, and make up stories about the stars. Stars symbolise love, hope, something unreachable and unattainable.
The way that the light of the stars reaches every single being in Elysium, from human to phasmid, but no matter how far it reaches it is still a cold and distant glow, always on the verge of going out. A moral brilliance, a holy light to strive towards, something always at risk of burning out, but there's a dichotomy too. A duality between the stars as brutal unfeeling observers, moralists even, like the aerostatics flying overhead, tiny dying lights that watch impassively over every terrible thing in the world, and the flipside; stars as the burning kernels of hope, furious burning flames that parallel Harry and his golden-orange forest fire nature. Stars as the light of communism, the star-and-antlers. They're hope and dreams- a million years in the stars. Rockstars and superstars. The light of a brighter future (however short-term that future might be) coming towards them at the end of the tunnel. It makes me think of Sacred and Terrible Air and the light pollution in Vassa- ending light pollution as the world ends. "You may laugh at this, but in the evening, when the big world in the distance swells into a bloody maelstrom, families come out into the street in Vaasa and are insignificant together. Only distant explosions disturb the deep peace of the winter night, its flawless starry sky. Everyone watches, heads tilted back." The stars are a shared experience. Something that everyone watches, insignificant together, when there's nothing more that can be done. Light in the face of darkness, community in the face of inevitability. Togetherness. The stars are there in the church with the ravers. They're there watching Harry and Kim together. Insignificant together. In dark times, should the stars also go out?
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