One Final Pitbull Song (at the End of the World) by Paige Morgan
Here is Harold Bloom on Nathanael West’s wonderful 1933 novella Miss Lonelyhearts :
Bloom distinguishes between satire, which hopes to improve us, and parody, which does not. This seems to me a rather idiosyncratic use of these terms, which in addition risks concealing from view the fact that satire is best thought of as a spectrum. What is crucial, I would say, is the relation of the author to those whom they satirise. On one end of the spectrum is the kind of satire where the author satirises a We, a community that the author takes themselves to be part of. Such satire can be gentle or sharp, but in identifying with those who are satirised, the author is inviting us all to laugh at ourselves and thereby improve ourselves. On the other end of the spectrum is the kind of satire where the author satirises a They, a community that they see themselves as completely cut off from. Such satire can be bitter or more good-humoured, but its essential nature is that it sees those who are satirised as beyond redemption. It does not and cannot understand itself as a medium of self-improvement. Rather, its business is coping with the existence of the Others by laughing at them.
Most satire sits somewhere between these two extremes. The author of satire usually feels some distance from the exact groups or tendencies that they satirise, but also appeals to values that those whom they satirise are expected to share. For instance, Mark Twain’s The War Prayer is a satire of religious jingoism. Twain certainly doesn’t consider himself under the spell of religious jingoism, so in that sense he is satirising a Them; but he hopes that the reader, who may be under this spell to a certain extent, can be made to see how ludicrous such a position is, so in that sense he is satirising an Us. It is possible to laugh at someone in a way that invites them to join in.
What does this mean for satire in the current United States of America? I am not making a statement either controversial or new when I observe that American society is being torn apart into opposing camps that can no longer even contemplate working together. We are at the point where one can build a political career out of being nasty towards those on the other side: for people like Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, saying nasty things about trans men and women – to take an example that is, in the context of this review, not entirely random – is a way of generating political popularity. One doesn’t vote for such politicians because one wants certain beneficial policies enacted; one votes to ‘own the libs’. Causing pain is the point. In such an environment, being grotesque is a benefit, not a disadvantage. When politicians are willing to say and do anything, no matter how extreme, it is impossible for satire to hold up a mirror to them, as Bloom correctly observes.
In such a society, satire is effectively reduced to its two extremes, with the entire middle of the spectrum falling away. There is, on the one hand, the satire of the strict We, where we are urging our own group to see in what respects we are being ridiculous and where we can therefore improve. There is, on the other hand, the satire of the strict Them, where we have no hope of reaching or influencing those whom we satirise, but where the satire is a way for our group to let off steam and at least get a laugh out of the foolishness and evil that confronts us. We can of course have both types of satire in a single work, but if we do this will be a major source of tonal tension; and only in the hands of a deft artist can such a juxtaposition work. Bringing these two types of satire together is exactly what One Final Pitbull Song is doing.
We can say at the outset (if this still counts as the outset) that One Final Pitbull Song is a complicated game, made more complicated by the fact that it consists of three wildly different – though connected – lines of plot development. The longest and most detailed of these, and the one that the game itself suggests is the first, is the line that takes us to prison and then drops us into the underground caves. Here we have, on the one hand, a harsh satire of what the game itself calls the prison-industrial complex. This is the satire of an enemy, an enemy that is known to be beyond reason and morality, since anyone, anyone, can see the wrongness of these social institutions simply by looking. On the other hand, there is the much more gentle satire of the anxieties that plague the protagonist and her cell mates. All of them are well-meaning people; all of them know the others to be well-meaning people; and yet they are constantly afraid of hurting or embarrassing each other, far beyond what is useful in structuring their social interactions. One Final Pitbull Song rather masterfully mixes these two types of satire together. An absolutely cold-blooded murderer in service to a cruel and inhumane system may, a few seconds after shooting someone through the head, get flustered and apologetic when they find out they have perhaps misgendered that person. Characters that are running away from devouring monsters through dark caves may spend minutes apologising over an insensitive comment they made about someone’s body. Now I suppose one could write these scenes in such a way that they suggest that sensitivity is unimportant compared to the real macho value of survival. But that’s not at all what is going on here. That is only what someone on the other side might take away from it. If anything, we are shown in a grotesque and absurd way the difficult realities of being decent and sensitive in a society that promotes egotism and cruelty.
The two types of satire reach an apotheosis in the person of the Cracked Visor Enforcer, an apparently sensitive soul who is absurdly easy to embarrass even when they have done nothing wrong, but who nevertheless wholeheartedly embraces a cruel societal system even after it has been revealed as completely indifferent to their well-being. Of all the character story arcs in the game, Kyle’s arc in the first narrative line is the one that seemed most thematically consistent and consequential. O, Cracked Visor Enforcey! O, Kyle! You’re a horrible piece of shit, but you’re also the authentic (anti)hero of this post-satirical satire.
As I said, One Final Pitbull Song is a complicated game. It is impossible to get through even one of the longer narrative lines in the two hours set aside for the Interactive Fiction Competition, and you haven’t really experienced the game until you’ve seen all three of them. Clearly, one satirical target of the author is the notion of choice. Large parts of the game are entirely non-interactive, in the sense that we just read a page of prose (often a very long page of prose) and then click the single link that is available to us. In fact, there are only two choices in the game that make a real difference. First, there is a the choice in the beginning about whether or not to leave the car; a choice that you, the protagonist, make only because you feel you have to show you can make a choice. Second, there is the choice of whether to eat beans or potatoes in the prison canteen. Both choices completely change how the rest of the game plays out; and change it in ways that not only could not have been foreseen by either player or character, but that also make no causal sense. This suggests that, yes, we can influence the stories of our lives, but no, not in a way that gives us agency. Furthermore, the game at many points tells us that the best choices are those you make without thinking about the fact that you are making a choice; the best choices are not experienced as choices. But – and here we see an example of how the ironies of One Final Pitbull Song keep destabilising any easy lesson we might want to draw from it – the structure of the game as a whole suggests that our true self is only achieved when we identify with all the choices we had, both those we made and those we did not make. And it suggests that real happiness can only be achieved when divine powers set up a ‘perfect divergence’ for us, where we just happen to make all the right choices. And it suggests that this happiness consists in us taking responsibility for ourselves and our own lives. One Final Pitbull Song revels in the tensions all of this generates.
Let us look at another example of the game’s irony. As we go through the three narrative lines of the game – in order or out of order – we are subjected to approximately every gross and horrible event one can think of. At various points the protagonist is covered in piss, in vomit, in blood, in cum, and probably in other substances I’ve forgotten about. People die in an astonishing variety of terrible and extremely graphic ways. And yet we finally arrive at what we are tempted to understand as a happy ending: the reunion of Bal, his wife Pae, and their child PeeBee. It’s almost a Hollywood movie! Until we start thinking about it, and realise the terrible irony of ending a game that is centrally concerned with gay and trans people and with the many ways that relatives can be harmful to you, of ending a game like that with a literal reconstitution of the traditional family. A traditional family that moreover literally consists of murderous monsters. It’s not that we are supposed to understand that this is not a happy ending; the monsters are no less humane than some of the humans. It’s that the game’s ironies cut so deep that they make all simple evaluations impossible. This definitely extends to the various interjections made by the supposed author of the piece, interjections that claim, among other things, to apologise (or not) for certain difficulties in understanding the game (even to the point of referring to one potential reviewer by name and suggesting that they probably won’t understand or like it). It would be absolutely impossible to take any of these statements at face value, which means that they only serve to further undermine our attempts to boil the game down to a simple message.
This already extremely long review has only scratched the surface of the game’s contents. I haven’t even mentioned the bizarre premise of an entire culture built around the music of Pitbull. This is a game that at every point seems to burst at the seams. There are always more characters, more gory scenes, more ideas, more ironies, more mindless cruelty, more romance, more dialogue going over more of the same things – and so on. I can’t do justice to all of that. But perhaps I can do justice to there being all of that, to there being so much and to there being the kinds of things there are. To do so, I want to put forward an interpretative hypothesis.
What One Final Pitbull Song is fundamentally about is the deeply exhausting experience of living in a hostile world. It is a world where your hesitant attempts to be yourself – hesitant because they are made after a long history of animosity – are constantly interrupted by outside threats. It is a world where your attempts to find a modus vivendi with your friends can always be aborted by the stressful attack of a monster; although in real life, the monster could be, say, Ron DeSantis, and thus a metaphorical rather than a literal spawn of Baäl. It is a world where you don’t feel in control, because things can always suddenly change for the worse. It is far too often the world of the trans person, of the gay or the lesbian, of the member of a racial minority.
Some other reviewers who are astute and discerning readers of interactive fiction have complained about the long, sometimes tedious prose passages, the length of the game, the seemingly never-ending sequence of events. Well, yes. Absolutely. But how could this have been a neatly trimmed story, nicely designed to be just right for the human reader, when it wants to acquaint us with the exhaustion of living in a world that was designed to be against you rather than for you? This game wants to acquaint us with that, but it also wants to show us how one deals with it – through inexhaustible energy, creativity, perseverance; through a will to life that is stronger than the forces of darkness; but, since such energy and such a will are rather too much to ask of us at almost every moment of our lives, at least through this: the ability to laugh; to still, after all the horror and cruelty, be able to muster a sardonic smile at the absurdity of it all.
And so I salute Paige Morgan, the demonic parodist, as she provides an endless string of Pitbull covers to celebrate our march down into hell. Read her for her prophecy, and for the unsettling laughter she will bring you, as you too approach the monster-filled pit prepared for the American soul by the American religion.