Interrogating the Immanent: Mapping the Weird Procedural

In the piece I wrote on Disco Elysium (which I recently learned had begun to rake in awards; good on Studio ZA/UM) I mentioned that I have begun developing a theory of the Weird Procedural, which I consider that game to be a landmark example of. Also falling under this heading would be Finch by Jeff VanderMeer and The City and the City by China Miéville. To an extent, one could also include Broken Monsters by Lauren Beukes and, and there are threads of it in Twin Peaks (created by David Lynch and Mark Frost; specifically season 1 and the start of season 2,) Stranger Things (The Duffer brothers,) and True Detective (Nic Pizzolatto, specifically season 1 and possibly season 3 – which I haven't seen.)

What I'm getting at here isn't just the juxtaposition of a classic mystery genre (the police procedural) with the weird (gray seas of nothing; Mushroom-people; socially-enforced inattention of a whole other city that crosshatches your own) but something that emerges from that juxtaposition, and what it says about us and the world that we live in.

Now, in the past, I've discounted genre – and I stand by that. If genre exists, I think that it should be the province of advertisers: I object to what I can't help but think of as the Tv-Tropes-ification of the writing process, with many aspiring writers using the parlance of that popular website to describe their incipient works, and thinking of their stories as constructions out of legos — where things can just be snapped into place, — thereby limiting them. It's a fine tool for describing things, but as with most schemes of description, it's garbage for prescription. Ergo, I have mixed feelings about describing an emerging genre, but in describing it, I feel some deeper structure can be teased out, and if that happens then it can be plugged into other places and made to do potentially interesting things (I am, to an extent, a pervert, in that I glorify in the perversity of mixing and matching such things.)

The Finnish Cover of The City and The City is possibly the best explanation of the book.

So, let's look at our examples: the three I listed off take place in secondary worlds (arguably,) while the four arguable ones I listed off take place in our own world. I feel that there is something about the secondary world setting that makes this genre easier to pull off than setting it our own world would. Likewise, with the caveat that I absolutely loved the other two Ambergris books (City of Saints and Madmen and Shriek: An Afterword,) I do feel that Finch is the weakest of the three primary examples I listed off above, though I will also note some disappointment in the ending of The City and the City. It's possible I would not, now, given that I have begun to develop the framework I'm laying out here.

So, if what I'm describing is an object, we can place these in an ordered distance from that object – Disco Elysium, The City and the City, and Finch. The other four examples can be placed likewise: of these, I would place Stranger Things the furthest, and Twin Peaks the closest; the other two – Broken Monsters and True Detective – might occupy a similar distance. My own inclination is to put True Detective slightly closer, though I would say that the first three examples are closer than any of these.

So we have seven different worlds illuminated by a common star, which I'm trying to divine the traits of. There are doubtless other worlds crafted by other artists that sit in this same metaphoric solar system, but I'm not necessarily familiar with them.

This is where you start from in Disco Elysium. It can literally only get better. Or you could die trying to retrieve your nauseating tie from the ceiling fan.

To my mind, the purest example of this would be vaguely similar to what I once described as the Millennial Metanarrative, because it centers on a person whose life is a disaster (the Cop in Disco Elysium drinks himself into full amnesia; Inspector Borlú is haunted by the disappearance of his wife; John Finch is a traumatized veteran who has adopted a new persona,) notably, in the majority of these, there is the pointed absence of a woman – the Cop and Borlú are both separated from the woman they love by her inclination or for mysterious reasons (it's never the protagonist who left.)

This absence shows up in the other examples: in many ways, Twin Peaks is all about this absence (note how Laura Palmer's theme has a romantic tone to it, albeit overwrought and reminiscent of soap opera music; note, also, the horrific destruction of the Palmer family in Laura's absence,) but we see Marty lose his wife and Rust already having lost a wife (and child!) in the course of True Detective, and I've already noted that Hopper is the Kidz Bop version of Rustin Cole. An inversion can be found in Broken Monsters, where Gabi Versado is divorced and raising a daughter (if memory serves; it's been several years since I read it,) and the loss of that daughter is a major threat to be averted in the course of the novel.

In many of these examples, we can see a purposeful explosion of the Freudian Triangle (Mother-Father-Child) which is the first social enclosure. The inside is gone; only the outside remains.

I need to read Beukes’s other work — this one was strong.

And the Outside is a major part of the story, but it is often a background element. In Stranger Things, Broken Monsters, Twin Peaks, and Finch, it becomes foregrounded, but absent an assessment of their quality, it seems that this distances them from the archetype of the genre.

No, it seems to me that the weird procedural is marked by the presence of two mysteries (at least) – the Major Mystery of the setting, and the Minor Mystery of the story. The Minor Mystery may be an enfolded and branched- or calved-off part of the greater mystery, but solving the Minor Mystery gives definitive insight, no serious hope of unpacking the greater Mystery. Fundamentally, that what I feel separates them off from adventure stories dressed up in the trappings of the Weird: Jim Butcher could never write a Dresden Files novel that qualifies as a Weird Procedural in whole (not without his fans rebelling, I don't believe,) because the sort of story that his readers expect from him isn't one where you can leave a major element untouched. It requires what has been called “Negative Capability” – the ability to sit in the presence of a mystery without attempting to flee from, uncover, or resolve it.

So, we might ask, what makes it a Weird Procedural instead of a Weird Mystery? Surely, we have other weird mysteries (The Crying of Lot 49 sits heavy on the shelf, reminding me always of its presence; and I reflect regretfully on my inability to make it through a single Manly Wade Wellman story.) Frankly, it's because of the added element of the organization.

It may come as no surprise to people who have read my political writing on this website that I'm not the biggest fan of fiction that foregrounds organizations – groups, yes, organizations, not so much – but it always seems to me that the presence of the organizational angle is too much of an edge for the hero of a fantastical story: what has higher stakes – an ancient, secret cabal within the Catholic Church or the British Government or the Red Army fighting demons, or the cashier down at Casey's General (or the off-brand IKEA) store stumbling into and trying to fight the end of the world?

All this being said, within the context of the weird procedural, the use of the organization, I feel, gives the story more thematic weight: the broken avatar of a (most likely flawed) bureaucracy keeping its head down and focusing on the mystery of a particular example of human suffering, while ignoring the grand questions of what in the hell is going on with the cosmos.

But just as Cooper is trying to solve what is going on in Twin Peaks, his boss, Gordon Cole, is researching what is going on with the world — the show becomes a series of investigations nested-within-investigations, each minor mystery acting as a major mystery for another — enfolding one another like the petals of a rose (hence the FBI task force’s code name, “Blue Rose”. Or, at least, so I would guess.)

In such contexts, the police department functions as a dysfunctional (in some cases abusive) surrogate family. This shows up in Disco Elysium and Twin Peaks, and on the smaller level in True Detective, but becomes problematic in many of the other examples. Finch and The City and the City both acknowledge problems with the whole construction of policing, and don't tend to take a terribly idealized view of the business.

What, then, does this genre – or nascent genre, or myth, or whatever we're calling it these days – mean?

Turn your eyes to postmodernism: one of the most commonly-deployed explanations of postmodernism is that it represents a skepticism towards grand narratives. The easy answer of what the meaning of it all actually is doesn't reflect anything you see in your day-to-day life. What we have, instead of a grand narrative, is a sort of grand mystery, and the profusion of postmodern detective stories grow out of this fact. The detective is a storyteller, a journalist who carries a gun instead of a camera, and attempts to make the mystery evaporate, revealing the sensible mechanics behind it.

There is no destination; it’s purely a matter of the journey.

But the real world is more like The Crying of Lot 49. There is no answer. You're cut off when you approach the moment of revelation, and are left sitting with the question of whether it's real or not, whether it means anything or not, whether it's all some kind of joke.

The Weird Procedural, I feel, is an attempt to answer this. We can't answer why any of this happened, we can't address capital-S, general-issue Suffering. But we can address instances of it. We can't find the capital-A, all-pervading Answer. But we can find an answer. It may be an endless, Sisyphean task, but I feel it points, in many ways, to a moralistic response to the Postmodern condition: turn your eyes from the transcendent mystery – which may be real or imagined, but which we cannot actually say is real or imagined – and begin to shovel the mud, solving the little mysteries and addressing the little sufferings of our day-to-day life.

And maybe, just maybe, it's better to do that as part of a team than as someone operating on their own.

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