Dandies Loiter Through the Night

All at once I understood the innermost nature of the mysterious creatures that live around me: they drift through life with no will of their own, animated by an invisible, magnetic current, just like the bridal bouquet floating past in the filthy water of the gutter. I felt as if the houses were staring down at me with malicious expressions full of nameless spite: the doors were black, gaping mouths in which the tongues had rotted away, throats which might at any moment give out a piercing cry, so piercing and full of hate that it would strike fear to the very roots of our soul.
 
Gustav Meyrink: The Golem

In today’s social mood, the line between folk horror and urban myths is as thin and crooked as the alleys of Old Prague. In the freshest historical memory, we have their re-enchantment by the decline of tourists and their re-population by the lonely figures of stray night walkers and people excluded from society. The age-old notion of art as a mirror, which allows us to see lived reality in a new perspective, or the distorted glass surface can distort shapes and create illusions, is put forward. Our shared imagination is full of worlds beyond the mirror, in which everything seemingly ordinary is, on the contrary, bleak and gloomy, full of rotten and decaying processes, literally twisted and collapsed in on itself. Think of the Polish video game psychothriller The Medium, in which the protagonist suffers from horror visions, which nevertheless allow her to glimpse the world “beyond” our reality, which is usually entered through portals via mirrors, and where everything otherwise ordinary is, on the contrary, bleak, decaying and suffering, much like in the admitted influence of The Medium – Silent Hill. This is served by the stylization of this tragic reverse world into visual forms that pay homage to the mystical-surrealist painter Zdzisław Beksinski.

An important part of the original romantic horror stories and gothic novels was the flip side of the same – the grotesque grin and inversion of order that can bring release or, conversely, materialize repressed demons into expressions of rage and violence. The garage environment is thus transformed into something at once more “picturesque” and mischievously “picaresque”, in the spirit of a haunted house where ordinary consumer objects come to life: the hinges of secret passages creak and the furnishings of the dwelling come to life in the darkness in a wondrous riot of shapes and moods. On the one hand, we usually associate horror stories with narratives of loss of certainty, but at the same time, the poetics of horror allow us to express ourselves in ways we are normally embarrassed to behave. Dark transgression can cause altered states of consciousness in which we perceive things distortedly, edges blurred, but in other ways the world around us appears clearer. The decision to become a dandy also changes attitudes towards experiencing one’s own corporeality, and relies on shaping ultimate taste through tastelessness, but in many ways it is also a desperate mockery of hegemonic conventions.

Today, the play of fantasy and delirium, often associated with loneliness, can perhaps be most fully experienced through audiovisual media in an interactive virtual environment, or rather, these states of rapture can be likened to video game mechanics. However, attempts to bring video game worlds into galleries or to offer various “walking simulators” for viewers to experience often flounder and the presented outcomes may be too gimmicky. Nevertheless, they can be traced as excavated traces in thinking, relating or looking back at a supposedly familiar space that can be radically transformed by a subtle turn of the point of view. Indeed, one of the first German Expressionist horror films with a Faustian theme of an evil mirror double, The Student of Prague, was based on an original theme by E. A. Poe, adapted to fit the language of the film. So there is nothing left to do but to be guided through the corridor to the “point of interest”, groping to illuminate nodal points, suggest hidden shortcuts or just let them catch a glimpse of their reflection in a pool of seeping water as in the presentation of atmospheric effects of a graphic engine. It does not matter if the light of a lantern illuminating a darkened alley is a reminder of the Prague architecture-inspired neo-gothic action horror game Bloodborne or a materialized tourist nightmare of a lamplighter lighting gas lamps in the historic city center. Marketing rumour has it that the From software development team and its boss Hidetaka Miyazaki have also travelled to Prague to soak up architectural influences and “drink in its gothic grandeur”. Moving through the menacing, plague-ridden neo-gothic world of Bloodborne with this knowledge could be seen not only as a simulation of “sharing in the tragedy” in a jagged setting overseen by Lovecraftian cosmic evil, but also a flashback to a delirious pub crawl among the declassed people begging outside matryoshka shops in the streets of Prague’s Old Town. Tourists disappear and reappear during the pandemic waves, while people excluded from society appear more and more in the streets, respawning like nonplayable characters in an action adventure game.

Tina Poliačková a Lumír Nykl