There’s an inherent absurdity (in America at least) to trying to make art. The gears of imperialist capitalism have a way of turning the most fundamental aspects of human expression and culture, or even, if we consider early cave paintings, the most human thing we can possibly do, into an indulgence. A side hustle. Something to be done in the shadow of The Big Important Work of lining up spreadsheet data or serving another for pennies on the dollar. This contradiction feels all the starker in a “post-COVID”, late-stage-capitalism world. Every generation assumes that they’re the last, but as we arc past the mid-point of 2024, things seem capital-B Bad in an unprecedented kind of way. This was an, I believe, misunderstood aspect of Bo Burnham’s Inside: what was mis-attributed by many as white guilt or a kind of liberal doomerism felt more to me like someone trying to find his place in a world that was working to make him extinct. How do you continue to create in a world that is perfectly happy to let your friends and family members die gasping in the back of refrigeration trucks? Is a world where millions are dying due to administrative incompetence (or, in the case of Palestine, unrepentant malice) have room for comedy? How does one “contribute” or exist in a world so fractured when the craft they’ve been honing for their entire adult (and pre-adult) life relies on being perceived and is increasingly being treated as an indulgence?
Anthology of the Killer, an anthology game project primarily by Stephen Gillmurphy, aka The Catamites, takes this contradiction, pulls it screaming into the absurd, and makes a bolder claim: Art is the only moral thing we can do. The project, developed over the course of four years beginning in 2020, is a collection of nine short narrative games (Voice, Hands, Drool, Eyes, Flesh, Blood, Ears, Heart, and Face, all “of The Killer”) that follow college-age BB, a zine maker trying to survive (both figuratively and literally) in XX City. Murder is an everyday part of life in XX City, as it is the primary export and engine on which the entire place runs. Over the course of the anthology, BB has many encounters with a singular assumed “titular” killer with a bird-like silhouette and a penchant for murdering other murderers. It becomes clear much earlier on than the project’s final act that the killer to which the title refers is likely something broader, more abstract, and more knowable than any kind of supernatural beast hunting for victims in the night.
The game itself is quite simple – as you pilot BB through bizarre scenarios, there’s only two inputs: move and interact. However, I can’t stop thinking about how the game made me feel. The anthology starts in the guts of a surreal call center and only gets stranger. Every day structures like museums, parks, apartment complexes, and universities mutate into darkly comedic murder carnivals; twisting, impossible labyrinths filled with malice, all the while BB cracks wry observations about youth and zine culture. As the scope of the series expands to include things like an entire college for murderers, one starts to question if anyone does anything other than murder in XX City. The answer is, not really. Anthology of the Killer skewers young adult zine culture almost as much as it does anything else, but it remains clear that this is a loving ribbing. Though never directly stated, Anthology of the Killer gestures at the argument that we’re accelerating towards a reality in which everyone is either an artist or a murderer.
As western capitalism moves closer towards being approximately six defense companies in a trench coat, keeping one’s labor out of instruments of death has become increasingly difficult. Last year, I lost my job at a furniture company, and having built a career as a computer guy, I found myself faced with a minefield of tech startups with blood-soaked VC money. Even seemingly unrelated companies have blood on their hands – Disney, Starbucks, Sweetgreen, Airbnb – the list of Israeli donors is endless. I don’t think it’s a reasonable or healthy exercise to judge a McDonald’s worker for trying to make ends meet, but there’s a grim absurdity to the reality that to be an American, or any member of western imperial society for that matter, is to indirectly contribute to the murder of tens of thousands of innocents across the globe. How do we disentangle this from our day-to-day lives? The answer, unfortunately, is that we don’t. You cannot dismantle a system designed to feed on the blood of the innocent with incremental change, you have to tear it out and start anew. This is, doubly unfortunately, out of the capabilities of most people.
So, what do we do? We connect with each other. We do the most human thing we can do and try to make sense of the world around us by abstracting it into something we can reach out and touch. We try and distill the complexity of experience and feeling into something just beyond words in the hopes that it reaches someone else who can say “I have felt that”. Even bad, pretentious, half-baked art is an attempt to communicate something that words cannot, a cry for connection in a sea of violence and confusion. Everything else is basically just murder with extra steps.