When Mercy is Futile: Klaasje's Fate in Disco Elysium

 SPOILER WARNING: The following focuses on a major plot development involving the murder case of Lely, revealed during Klaasje's interviews with Harry and Kim.

***

Game: Disco Elysium

Objective: Decide what to do with Klaasje

Location: The Whirling-in-Rags, Martinaise, Revachol

Summary: As Harrier "Harry" Du Bois crawls out from a narcotics-fuelled stupor to dissect Martinaise's gruesome lynching of a foreign mercenary, the detective is left scraping for answers; between the brash Union workers and cryptic locals there isn't much hope in piecing together a coherent story. Eventually Harry interviews Klaasje Amandou, former-industrial-espionage-agent-come-runaway who has built a persona of provocative mystique as an Oranje Disco Dancer.

Predictably, the tale of Klaasje - or Katarzine Alasije - is a bleak one, if her narration is reliable. Recounting her days as a corporate spy, Klaasje discloses sordid revelations of unemployment, depression, and suicide caused by her actions. Void of noble purpose and seeking self-gain at any cost, the only sympathetic aspect of Klaasje's character is that which paints her as a tragic figure hiding from her past through heavy drug-abuse like Harry himself. Harry's empathy can only extend so far, however - and coupled with Klaasje's deliberate misleading of a police investigation it's time to hold her to account. Or has she suffered enough?

More information: Klaasje Amandou | Disco Elysium Wiki | Fandom

Revachol: The graveyard of revolutions and revolts. Screen capture and edit: FetchQuester

Send Klaasje to the Moralintern

The Moralist International* or "Moralintern" - the inspirational brainchild of the Innocence Dolores Dei - offers little justice to the "little people" despite its façade of stability appealing to the modern centrist. Yet Harry Du Bois' driving rationale behind decision-making isn't cemented in lawful ethics but a frenzied chain of impulses threshing his psychosis; how he responds to Klaasje's welfare may be devoid of rhyme or reason, calling on the player's convictions to determine whether Klaasje becomes "Moralintern paste".

To complicate things, enter Harry's carnivalesque attributes: INLAND EMPIRE, VOLITION, and DRAMA, morbid players in a production staged on theatrics of fear and paranoia. "Remember this silence," the echoes of INLAND EMPIRE leech out a sinister warning to him. "The lady is dangerous. People suffer around her."

There is a truth to this condemnation - Klaasje is the fulcrum of destructive forces, a harbinger of ill-will by conscientious action entangled with misfortune. Being mortal enemy of the Moralintern is enough rationale to throw her in cuffs rather than face off against the juggernaut conglomerates before the corporate bloodhounds sniff her out. "[I] Joined a business collective with the intention of betraying them. Did well enough to be asked to do it again," Klassje explains during the investigation after Harry's persistent "can-opening" techniques. The deluge of her ambitions involve a small county bank affiliated with Lookskap; she sabotaged their ledgers, the employees lost their jobs, and one of them killed themselves. Klaasje is remorseful but unrepentant - brooding over her own guilt-ridden suffering vs. those she has bled dry all the way back to her first love, a writer of Oranje literature (tragic figure indeed).

The notorious Whirling-in-Rags, where Lely was shot, and the courtyard where he was hung.

Screen capture and edit: FetchQuester

Klaasje's spiral into degenerate behaviour avalanched from there. "Once you're done in the competitive intelligence circuit, you don't have allies. You're radioactive." A self-proclaimed liability who "knows too much", the serial exploit artist is doomed to a life on the run whose only remnants of conscience are submerged in drugs and liquor (her armoury of narcotics would widen the eyes of the most indiscriminate officers). But this isn't even the crux of Harry's confrontation with Klaasje: The pieces of her testimony are a cascade of mistruths and conflicting information.

Shortly before his staged hanging, Colonel Ellis "Lely" Kortenaer, a hired mercenary, allegedly threatened to violate an individual implied to be Klaasje (using derogatory terms) and unleash further violence in Martinaise. The Hardies - the Union's appointed "peacekeeping" force - "executed" him in response. Yet Klaasje denies any sexual assault took place, and admits to calling the RCM (Revachol Citizens Militia) several days after the murder to make a report, manipulating the comms to disguise her voice. When it is revealed Lely was shot during consensual intercourse with Klaasje and the body was staged to appear as a lynching, Harry learns she has been mostly complicit in the latter part of the scheme. Under threat of arrest she relents and recounts a jealous, jilted lover, Ruby, who Klaasje points out as prime suspect for two reasons: Her ability to devise a cover-up mere minutes after Lely's death which would confound the RCM, making it impossible to tangle with the Union, and Ruby's raging threats of retaliation against Lely and Klaasje's love affair.

Can Harry believe her? Even Titus Hardie and Elizabeth Beaufort, ironclads of the Union once allied with Klaasje seep misgivings and grow weary of her antics. The seditious saga of the solicitous ex-spy, temptress and tamperer, misleading a police investigation and placing the Hardies on the figurative chopping block is reckless - as if Martinaise's malcontent isn't rife enough. To spare the miscreants of Revachol, Harry Du Bois has one solution - end the madness engulfing Klaasje Amandou.

Harry takes down the floor on karaoke night.

Screen capture and edit: FetchQuester

Harry and Kim interview Klaasje (close-up, top right) on the rooftop.
Screen capture and edit: FetchQuester

Write a Station Call or Let Klaasje Off the Hook

"I don't deserve to be sent to the Moralintern and ground into some paste just because I disturbed the *sanctity* of accounting... [I just want] to spend my days with smoke and drink and dance - wallowing in shit. Just like everyone else."

Don't we all, Klaasje - especially Harry. Perhaps it is the antithesis of his ancient reptilian brain yearning for the universe to cast some luminous miracle into his own colourless life which softens his discretion, but Klaasje doesn't covet the male-saviour motif. Her only incentive is survival - as demeaning a dance with which she can cope having lost everything. "She doesn't feel like a Klaasje [anymore]," Harry empathizes. "She feels like nothing." His insight deflates the notion of a fearless fugitive with infatuation for the chasing game; the scene is inhabited by an empty shade of her former self.

In truth, Klaasje's corporate crimes are not "illegal", nor is she a murderess - the macabre twist of her presence during her lover's murder a blot of bad fortune, linked by coincidence (unless Lookskap's bullets have found their way to Revachol and caught the wrong man, which she initially suspects). "It's the politician in the motel room with the dead hooker scenario - only in reverse" as Titus Hardie reflects. But Lely's release from the world of clay and dust wasn't likely enacted by Klaasje herself, who denies her love for Lely more vehemently than murder. The soft-spoken, tattooed veteran with eyes like "little blue galaxies" evokes a surging emotion within her that she claims isn't genuine affection but chemically-induced comfort, though Harry believes otherwise.

"It's easier that way," she sighs, burying the remnants of her humanity alongside other memories too close-to-the-skin to touch; it's clear Klaasje harbours an authentic bond with Lely, woven out of the kind of pain which can only be subdued by the gentility of another broken human. Perhaps this inadvertent "love" confession is all an act, a decoy - but why would Klaasje implicate herself by calling the RCM when she could no longer bear Lely's body being defiled by the delinquent Cuno as it hung decomposing from the courtyard tree? If she truly committed homicide, skipping town or hiding in plain sight would be the safer path. "I hope with all my heart [calling the RCM] is not the last thing I do in Revachol" she laments, her resilience giving way to resignation.

Construction yard. Screen capture and edit: FetchQuester

Martinaise was her last "hope", even now - and Titus Hardie surprisingly intuits this better than anyone, insisting that Harry lets her off the hook. "We abide all sorts of runaways and losers here. It's a Martinaise thing... Klaasje came to Martinaise to hide - many of us did," he tells him. "This is where you wash up when there's nowhere left to go. The Union takes you in - now, she *refused* that protection, but... If we didn't take care of the people who end up here, this place would just be a couple of ruins and some cargo containers." Perhaps Titus' name isn't so hyperbolic in embodying his character after all - he is a force de résistance, at odds with Harry's splintered psychomachian state. (Or perhaps Titus is fetishizing recollections of Klaasje's drug and sex-fuelled parties in which the Union workers eagerly partook and feels a possessive sense of "obligation" towards her.)

Can Klaasje hold her last stand in Martinaise, or will her "runaway-come-reckless-abandon" transformation undo her, severing fragments of her identity until her counterfeit passport holds more likeness to her than her own self? Martinaise is no purgatory for refuge-seeking souls, but a stale graveyard where time's disconsolate chimes dissolve the morale of vagrants in a fever-dream of capitalism's flailing hegemonic thralls. Why would Klaasje want to stagnate here of all places, awaiting that foreboding station call? What could possibly change in two months?

"Le Retour" could change everything - a "part urban myth part political science [phenomenon]... big in industrial espionage circles" where Revachol embraces revolution to liberate itself and become an independent state, and the agents frothing at Klaasje's heels are reprimanded and tried in court. "It's a fool's hope, sir, and it's also all I've got," Klaasje tells Harry. The miracle she desperately craves, the old identity burrowing upwards through the barricades of intoxication and trauma expose a distant, primal need to reclaim a sense of herself. Is this a selfless dream of a fairer, more just world, a redemptive act to restore order in the chaos of Klaasje's existence? Perhaps, perhaps not. But it buys her time to figure it out.

"The world can change. It's changed before."

Dolores Dei and the Dolorian Church of Humanity.

Screen capture and edit: FetchQuester

Spoilers affecting choice:

If Harry decides to arrest Klaasje, Kim escorts her to Precinct 57 and promises to slow the extradition process. "It may be possible to stall it indefinitely. But you *will* be safer there for the purposes of the investigation," he states. It is later implied that Klaasje dies under Moralintern jurisdiction, ghosted away and "ground to paste" as she feared. It is true that Klaasje is not guilty of Lely's murder.

If Harry writes her a station call or lets her off the hook, she flees Martinaise minutes before the showdown with the Scab Leader (despite vowing to stay put/show up at the precinct). Harry's volition - among other forces - express mistrust of his judgement. Later, Harry and Kim learn from Ruby that the initial plot to stage a lynching was Klaasje's idea, revealing further mind-games (and risking war between factions). Kim admits that "it was a bad idea not to arrest her, but... Maybe it was a *good deed* that will pay off in heaven."

Note: When conversing with the "Sunday Friend", Harry can still choose to turn Klaasje over to the Moralintern even after her disappearance or implicate the presence of a spy to frame another character.

__________________

*Moralists don't really *have* beliefs. Sometimes they stumble on one, like on a child's toy left on the carpet. The toy must be put away immediately. And the child reprimanded. Centrism isn't change -- not even incremental change. It is *control*. Over yourself and the world. Exercise it. Look up at the sky, at the dark shapes of Coalition airships hanging there. Ask yourself: is there something sinister in moralism? And then answer: no. God is in his heaven. Everything is normal on Earth. (KINGDOM OF CONSCIENCE)

The Horseback Monument: A reminder of protest.

Screen capture and edit: FetchQuester

- Lucy A.

***

Sources: 

Disco Elysium (ZA/UM); fandom.com