Tevun-Krus #5 - DecoPunk

Fallout 3: The Dead Decopunk

 

I know we’re all here to talk about fantastic written Sci-Fi works, but Deco Punk is one of those genres that is so focused on the visual and physical world it’s hard not to stray into other media platforms.  One such platform that is unique as it allows us to explore a world as part of it, Video Games, and none as deep and immersive as the world of Fallout.

 

Right from the outset we’re dropped into Bethesda’s Future/Past World of Tomorrow crawling to our father’s arms. From then on it’s a skip through the 1950’s as a child from birthdays to leather jacket wearing gangs. We sit the G.O.A.T Test, a prime satire of 50’s pro-capitalism pro-America propaganda. We’re faced with moral questions about us being a stand-up citizen illustrated by the charming Vault-Boy mascot. It’s in these first minuets we get our only glimpse of the world that was in Fallout, before the destruction of human civilisation. These moments are filled with sleek clean hallways and smiling citizens that reminded me of old 1950’s advertisements, the kind where the grinning nuclear family hold up the soup can on a billboard next to one advertising the latest and greatest home appliance. But of course we see the ugly side of 50’s society represented here too in the form of the bully Butch and the Tunnel Snakes. They’re the classic image of the school Bully, talking mean to girls, beating you up for lunch money all while looking stylish with their dark black hair slicked down and leather jacket while twiddling a pocket knife between their fingers.

 

But it’s not until you open the door to the vault and take the first steps into the Capital Wastes can you truly appreciate the bittersweet beauty in this virtual world.  It’s your first stroll through that once perfect American suburbia that really gets you. It’s nothing but charred remains but you can piece them back together to make an image of the world before the nukes. Rusting children’s play apparatus stand twisted and scorched, small once hot-rod red tricycles are now black and rusted. And from then on it’s a stroll down dead Deco Punk lane.

 

Hydrogen powered cars lay all about, shaped with smooth lines and curves like the retro view of the future Deco Punk is all about. They all follow that 50’s streamlined feel like Chevrolet’s Bel-Air trying to break away from the square and harsh cornered world of the past and blur the line between reality and science fiction like the Cold War Space Race.

 

While wandering through the wastes your ears stumble upon the signal’s from the ol’ wireless. One side you have GNR playing you music from that period, songs that sit with you long after you’re done playing so one day you’ll start singing “I don’t want to set the world on fire…” You’ll listen to jazzy up-beat and swing tunes with performers in your head looking like Frank Sinatra suited up in a Las Vegas performance or Hollywood musicals. The soundtrack gets it power and effect from how it juxtaposes with the visuals, in your ears your listen to words of love, instruments and voice that force you to think of black and white films, Marilyn Manson and the decade after WW2 where everyone was looking forward to the future. Yet we see the world we’re thinking of before us in ruin’s the player listens to what the paradise was like while sifting through the remains like we were just too late to the party and all we get to see are a few blurry videos recorded on a camera phone the next day.

 

Flip over to the other side and we’re greeted with John Henry Eden, you’re all American Conservative President who tells you that with him the world of painted white fences, nuclear family’s and afternoon baseball can be born again from the ashes. Eden really brings the attitudes of the 50’s and Deco Punk with him, he talks as if apocalypse never happened and during my first play through I thought I was listening to old recording until I finally met the man. He was the walking talking American Dream from a dead Deco Punk utopia. 

 

50’s and 40’s politics is also represented here. The fear of a Communist Invasion can be seen everywhere, billboards still hold recruiting posters of the heroic white American marching rifle in hand with the stars and stripes overhead. One character, Liberty Prime is a walking talking Deco looking propaganda machine. He marches through foes hurling insults like “Communism is the very definition of failure” and “Democracy is not an option” reminding you of such conflicts like the Korean and Vietnam War.

 

But what’s Science Fiction without Science? And Fallout has a lot of science. We remember the 50’s as the Atomic Era, Bikini Atoll, Area 52, and the New Mexico desert as victims of nuclear tests left scarred with burned out creators. In Fallout we’re certainly not lacking in atomic powered devices. The real world went mad with atomic bombs, nuclear missiles were mounted on submarines, the US even got down to little Atomic Annie while it seemed as everyday someone else was learning the secret to the bomb. In Fallout we get the Fat Man, a shoulder mounted mini nuke launcher. Yup.

 

And where would a Deco Punk 50’s world be without its next household American made product? Mr Handy! Everywhere you turn you can see posters and advertisements over two hundred years old telling the homemaker that this new shiny chrome robot will do all her house work and make life easier allowing people to spend more time as a family. You on the other hand might not be as excited when one of the damaged Mr Handy’s start burning you with a flame thrower that someone thought was a good idea for a robot butler.

 

And of course we can’t forget out second-class citizens who’ve not yet had their Civil Rights. In the Fallout world these are Ghouls, hideous former humans mutated by radiation and looked down upon and attempted to be hidden away from the spot light.  

 

The beauty of Deco Punk in Fallout 3 is not in what we see but what we imagine. Environment designers gave us pieces of a world to put together in our minds and we come up with is something the like Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. A world both utopian and dystopian, an unsettling look at the past through advertisements yet when we delve deeper we can see a seedy underbelly. John Henry Eden represents the brainwashed public into believing everything was happy and fine while the government and soldiers protected them. And the destruction itself is evidence that humanity was toying with things it didn’t quite understand just to see what would happen in the true spirit of science all to the back drop of a war with the Communists. That world is there in Fallout 3, you’ve just got to dig through the rubble and find its remains.

 

Tunnel Snakes Rule.