A prefatory note:
What do texts mean? Is there a “true” or “correct” interpretation of a novel, or film, or game? I don’t really think so. Whatever virtues or flaws it might have, the meaning of The Empire Strikes Back is, for me, hopelessly tangled up in my experience of seeing it in a theater when I was a little boy. I don’t think there is a Platonic heaven of meaning where the significance of The Empire Strikes Back resides. It ultimately means what it means to me. To me, media is my experience of it.
As an author, I try to be true to this philosophy, and never explain myself or my work. All I can do is “leave it all on the field,” so to speak, and hope for the best. I do the same as a critic: honor my experience to the fullest, and hope for the best. I honor your experience, too: if you found something different in a work, that thing you found belongs to you and is all the more special for it.
Yarry
Zachary Dillon
spoilers
What does it mean to be strange? In many usages, “strange” is a light word. A peanut in its shell might have a strange shape; it is a curiosity. The weather might be strange if possesses unexpected features, like high winds on a day where none when none were predicted. A piece of media could be strange in either pleasing or displeasing ways. Many people experience the classic films of David Lynch as strange in a very positive sense.
It isn’t so good, however, to be a “strange” person. A strange person exists outside of social conventions, and there is something taboo or unnerving about strangeness. “Strange” implies an absence of normalcy, and normalcy (note that I don’t think normalcy is a virtue but rather a construct) is a kind of societal endorsement or minimal bar for its members to get over. “Estrange,” with all of its negative implications, simply means to “alienate” or to “treat like a stranger.”
To be strange is to have become a stranger, to have become estranged from so-called “normalcy,” to have become alien.
Yarry is a story of estrangement, and its unfortunate protagonist Larry is the one who becomes the stranger.
The mind of Larry, that of the stranger ascendent, is one in conflict. He has a very clear idea, at the beginning of the story, of who he is, but this idea is eroded by the very different idea that exists outside of him. Beyond the fragile borders of himself, he is becoming someone else, “Yarry” the not-Larry. Like many representations of the strange in media, at first blush it is amusing and toothless. Consider “eccentric” characters, for instance, as examples of the likably strange. Harmlessly strange. It seems at first blush that Jasper, Larry’s son, is the strange one. What a rascal, we might think. Kids are so fun and wacky.
The humor quickly evaporates, though, as Jasper begins to react to Larry as he might to a stranger, and a frightening one at that.
Even on the bus, he screams. Some people stare at you. Others pointedly stare out the window, which feels just like they’re staring at you. A teenager props her elbows on her thighs and cups her hands over her headphones, presumably to block out the noise.
Soon, Larry’s wife appears to be in cahoots with Jasper: do they know something Larry does not? Next, it’s baristas and fellow customers at the coffee shop who see and hear “Yarry” despite Larry’s experiences of having said otherwise.
Through this process, Larry/not-Larry becomes a stranger. First to others, and then to himself. As the story ends, it is as if Larry has disappeared completely: only not-Larry remains.
You search your eyes, eyes that have apparently become terrifying to your own son. Or maybe that was just for today.
Your skin hangs differently around your eyes and mouth. You’ve got new bags under your eyes. A few gray hairs in your hairline you hadn’t noticed before.
You lie in bed in the dark, not sleeping and against all logic not tired, staring up at the stygian trapezoid of the skylight, and waiting for Jasper’s call.
Wondering what name he’ll use, and who he’ll expect.
“Stygian trapezoid of the skylight” is a gorgeous construction.
I am unable to separate my experience of Yarry from my own experiences of mental illness, which often involve subjective experiences of strangeness or separation from the quote-unquote “normal” world. I think it’s hard for this type of estrangement to be rendered interactively, because balancing “normal” with a negating uncanniness requires a fine touch, and interactive media has “norms” (I mean this in terms of craft, i.e., less negatively) that must be considered for either subversion or adherence. If interaction enables a fantastic or fictionalized self, and estrangement likewise involves false or unsharable realities, then where can the author set an anchor for the player? How to center the “game” part of the game?
I felt Yarry navigated these waters admirably, and it has certainly left an impression that will endure.
Returning to my initial post regarding subjectivity and interpretation: I celebrate the openness of this work, in which no concrete meaning is ever spelled out. Pulling the camera back, I think it’s easy to see, no matter what the author might have intended (since I don’t really consider that), how this work might speak to experiences of being strange or outside in a rather transcendent way. I experienced this work on two levels, then. I saw it as a reflection, first, but second as an opportunity for solidarity or commiseration with others who also feel strange or estranged.