Every Second is a Narrow Gate
Any place humans have lived in for sufficiently long is haunted. Anthology of the Killer is a tour of many such locations. More specifically, it is a tour of the worlds beneath worlds: Roman roads underneath Baroque cathedrals and industrial centers overwritten into gentrified art districts. It is a path that can only be understood in symbols, in blood, in discarded rubber Halloween masks, in waste (human), waste (plastic), waste (art made by poor people). There is a man behind the man behind the man behind the throne: the corpse under your feet.
All this makes Anthology of the Killer sound dire, downtrodden, self-righteous, and self-serious. It is, for the most part, none of these things. Developer Stephen Gillmurphy understands that absurdity is profound, that a joke can cut to the heart of a system. AOTK is a horror-comedy because both rely on punchlines and on architecture.
The system that AOTK cuts through is the city. Even the game's one rural excursion unfolds into endless factory hallways and networked selves. In AOTK, protagonist BB is never alone. There's always a stalker wandering in or out of frame or a perspective shift that gives the player a murderer's eyes. Parties, apartment complexes, theaters, and factory floors are places where others see and hear you. There are many systems of observation--literal murder cults, armies of policemen, but the game rarely evokes the security camera or cell phone. Instead, there is the knife, the eye, the edge of what it takes to kill another person.
In Kevin Fox Jr.'s contribution, he understands that violent immediacy as an exploration of globalist exploitation. Instead of violence shipped to an offshore factory, it's under our foundations, murdered countries that sprawl from cellars. This is far from wrong, but AOTK struck me as an evocation of that exploitation's twin: past violence that structures the now. AOTK's placelessness in important here. Hard to find an urban environment from the past hundred years that some past atrocity does not shadow. The killer could be anywhere.
Nevertheless, AOTK reminded me of Germany and of Tár. For one, both film and game are horror-comedies. For another, both concern themselves with the simple thefts and exploitation of creative work, albeit at opposite ends of scale. Both depict urban underworlds, the atrocities that the pavement and concrete hide. For the unfamiliar, Tár concerns the fictional, titular conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic. In the film, she in one of the most celebrated and charismatic figures in classical music. The movie chronicles her (light) downfall, as a groundswell of knowledge about years of exploitation and sexual harassment swallow her. Most of the film was shot in Berlin, with other German sequences shot in Potsdam and Dresden.
The film rarely cuts to wide, at least not while out in the open; there are no shots of the TV Tower or the Berliner Dom. Instead, Tár jogs lonesome through Tiergarten (I am picturing now BB's little footfalls, dreadful in the dark). She hears far-off screams (sampled from Blair Witch Project) or pursues a young woman into a cellar, only to find flooded rooms and a growling wolf. In short, Tár is interested in Berlin as a city with a history of violence. In a pointed scene, one of Tár's predecessors compares her looming ousting to denazification (derogatory). In Berlin, a wrong turn might throw you into an unrecognizable, yet familiar, world.
Of course, this is what happens to BB in every episode of AOTK. Dormant museums overseen by robotic painters, murderous, unsanitary water parks, the underground campus of a tech start-up are among its haunted places. None of there are real, but they resemble realities. Take the water park. My brother worked for the local waterpark in my hometown for a summer. It paid less than minimum wage (something you can get away with if you are a seasonal resort). After that summer, a hazy, hellish one in his telling, he no longer enjoyed going to the park. Knowing that there was some other kids having a bad day killed his ability to enjoy the park uncritically. What was invisible became visible.
This is to say, Killer gets at something real that stretches from the mundane exploitation of city life to historical violence. It is about what lies beneath, either the systems that undergrid our lives and the more literal catacombs under our feet. When I lived in Berlin, I went on a tour of one of the city's Nazi-era Flak towers. These massive structures were built as a defensive measure against Allied bombing runs. But, according to the tour guide, the tower downed few planes. Their purpose was both more naked and more insidious: propaganda. The sheer concrete walls projected a feeling of safety and protection that the Nazis did not build the towers to provide (though they were eventually used as massive bunkers). They were symbols of might and power in the sky, the kinds of structures that BB might wander through after they were abandoned.
In Berlin, denazification buried these towers under rubble. My tower was under a hill in Volkspark Friedrichshain. I had walked over it to get there. Other such towers were built in Vienna and Hamburg; most of these still stand. In Vienna, one stands vacant in a public park (I remember it emblazoned with graffiti which read "nie wieder" or "never again"). Another is an aquarium. In Hamburg, a private investor converted another remaining tower into a "green" luxury hotel, propaganda of a different kind.
Tár's architecture may serve as a mirror of its protagonist's inner world, but it also maps the psyche of a city perpetually haunted, personal woes become sprawling injustices. This maps onto AOTK as well, which marks again and again how much the petty grievances and stupid dreams of the rich create the places where we live. You can explain the absurdity of the present though the shadows of architecture past.
Those echos of reality are what make AOTK so funny and resonant. We all have stories like the ones I've told. Killer just stretches them. But for all the games' jokes and snide commentary, it lets the absurdity of its spaces breathe. You spend most of your time in AOTK wandering, having time to think, before the camera turns to a stalker with a knife. Most of the would-be killers--foolish academics, obsessive playwright, moron policemen, are buffoons. But the titular killer, a vulture-faced specter with a hooked beak, outshines them all. BB's a holy fool, stumbling into change, surviving with no survival skills, but she is actually afraid. You should be too.
