There are a ton of voices swimming around the detective’s head in Disco Elysium, but none are as loud and grating as the Horrific Necktie: a greenish, garish piece of cloth described as “disturbingly vivid,” and which will longingly find its place, loosely hanging around your neck. It’s one of the first few items you’ll find hanging on the blades of the hotel room’s ceiling fan, where you woke up stark naked, with a hangover so potent you could barely remember the events that led you here.
Unlike the rest of your extremely regular clothes, the Horrific Necktie can speak directly to you and dispense truly terrible advice. In the game’s Final Cut, the necktie screeches and bawls with the jarring inflection of a self-indulgent stage actor. It refers to you as its “bratan” and “bratannoi”—which is, oddly enough, Russian for brother. It pipes up during pivotal moments to remind you to have fun, shrug off your responsibilities, and drink lots of beer. It wants you to fucking party.
But the necktie is also somehow your true best friend, the conduit to your basest yet sharpest instincts as an amnesiac, drug-addled, alcoholic cop, and a reminder of your wretched past. In your previous life, its proper name was Joopson AS Men’s Fashion, model “Colourful Tie”, catalogue number J327, and was picked up by a broken shell of a man in search of his lost youth, desperate to infuse the spirit of rock ‘n’ roll back into himself again. Its gaudiness is so notable that it’s now baked into the detective’s infamy; a suspect once described you as a human can-opener with a particularly distinctive disco tie. Over time, the Horrific Necktie has become you, and you the Horrific Necktie.
Of course, the Horrific Necktie can’t actually speak, and players can miss these conversations without a high enough Inland Empire skill, which is based on your capacity to tap on your wealth of imagination, hunches, and emotions. And like millions of games before it, Disco Elysium is also tinged with a touch of the Lynchian; the skill is named after David Lynch’s film of the same name after all, which is a mesmeric, hypnotic experience about a Hollywood actress who has been possessed by the personality of the character she’s playing in a movie. Amidst the hypnagogic nature of the movie—as with most of Lynch’s films, really—is a quiet celebration of and fascination with the bizarre in the mundane.
In the same vein, the Inland Empire skill narrates the surreal and otherworldly atmosphere of Disco Elysium, enabling the detective to speak to corpses, objects and fantastical creatures. The connection between this skill and the Horrific Necktie—a very ordinary but very ugly item—keeps the detective tethered to the supernatural. How else can a necktie convince you to buy a bottle of blue medicinal spirit, which turns out to be instrumental to one of the game’s concluding events? And if it’s just instincts, then how can one define the mechanics and nature of this oddly human, yet highly metaphysical, behaviour?
In the end, the Horrific Necktie is yet another emblem for the detective’s discordant state. But eventually it also became something more; It became Beautiful, at least to the eyes of the hallucinating detective, when fashioned into a makeshift bomb. Then the necktie performed one last miracle, hollering a premonitory warning to watch out for a speeding bullet, right before it disintegrated into nothingness. Even in its dying breath, it always had your back all along.