"Who's Lila?" and Lynchian mystery

 

Who's Lila? is a point-and-click adventure game with an emotion mechanic heavily influenced by the works of David Lynch. It's about four and a half hours of gameplay and I liked it. Can I get into the analysis now?

Full spoilers for Who's Lila? and potentially a bunch of David Lynch films follow.

Initially, Who's Lila? appears to be an experimental adventure game about the role that facial expressions play in how we interact with the world. Saying something while frowning will contain a wholly different meaning to saying it while smiling or with no expression at all. We are seemingly controlling a possibly-neurodivergent young man named William Clarke who struggles to convey how he feels and must force his emotional reactions when interacting with others. A standard play-through of the game's narrative establishes a few mysteries: what happened to Tanya Jennings, who was last seen by William himself? Why, when William receives a phone call early in the game, is he referred to as "Lila"? And, indeed, who is Lila?

It seems from following the game's directions that Tanya was a young woman William knew; he murdered her and dismembered the body. Lila is William himself or something inside William. In the end William is arrested and enough evidence found to convict him of the crime.

However the game does not have one storyline but many: when you confront Tanya's friend Martha, who is assisting the police, on the roof of the school, it's possible for William to get thrown off the building by Tanya's boyfriend Graves and end up in a surreal other-world. It's possible, after being arrested, to confess to the murder, frame Graves for the murder, or confess to being Lila and not William. It's possible to not bother going to school at all: to go to the train station instead and confront Strupnev, the last other surviving member of the Lila-summoning cult of which William was a member. It's possible to explore the burnt-out ruins of the cult's headquarters. It's possible to take the bus back in time to the night of the party at which William and Tanya first met. Each of these storylines has its own end, after which the game returns to the menu screen. Apart from some information conveyed in some storylines which grants the player knowledge of how to find others, and a few items carried from one storyline to the other, many of the storylines can be played in any order.

As this might indicate, the game touches upon a number of philosophical ponderings: the nature of time and possibility; the concept of identity as merely a momentary perception of the self on the part of one's own mind; whether consciousness and ideas have an existence in and of themselves which humans merely access or perhaps imitate. The most central, however, is implicit in the game's title itself: who's Lila?

"Augmented Reality" elements of the game suggest that Lila the character is a kind of sentient idea which feeds on human attention, summoned by the cult of which William was a member. The game of course mockingly addresses a number of other common analyses of such characters, such as that Lila is a demon, or a ghost, or a representation of the character's inner psyche. Detective Yu, whose name is an obvious pun, seems to represent a player who wants the mystery to have clear answers. In that sense Lila is the game itself, which "feeds" on players playing it, thinking about it and discussing it. But speaking to a hidden character in the game reveals that "Lila is the mystery of who Lila is."

Before I go into this it's worth discussing the overt influence of the works of David Lynch on the game. This influence is not at all subtle. There is a Blue Velvet poster on Martha's bedroom wall, and William/Lila hides in her closet like Jeffrey does in that film. The bin area outside William's building resembles the yard behind Winkie's in Mulholland Drive. And at several points William encounters a silent character who resembles but is not quite identical to himself, identified as "The Stranger", whom the game's developer has compared to the Mystery Man from Lost Highway but is evocative of the many doppelgangers and not-quite-doppelgangers throughout Lynch's works (the latter always being more effective, in my view, than the former)[1]. And these are just the ones the developer has acknowledged on social media; there are plenty more. For instance, the creatures like Lila appear to travel through plumbing the way Black Lodge entities use electricity in Twin Peaks. Further, at one point seemingly the "real" William is encountered by the player (seemingly as Lila) in the form of a hissing, clanking mechanism not unlike the presentation of Phillip Jeffries in Twin Peaks' third season.

Throughout Lynch's work there is always a sense of something which is more intuitive than it is explicit. In some interviews Lynch refers to this as "think-feeling" and associates it with "dream logic", the idea that things which would not conventionally make sense in the cause-and-effect, object-permanent world of what passes for waking reality are accepted unquestioningly and appear wholly natural and correct in dreams. That is why when people watch Lynch's films they often try to piece together "clues" to explain what is happening in some rational, waking-world way. For example there is a conventional interpretation of Mulholland Drive which perceives the first two-thirds of the film, about Betty and "Rita", to be a mere dream on the part of Diane in the final act, an interpretation I largely reject. Similarly Lost Highway is interpreted as a parable about jealousy, and Inland Empire as a metaphor, much like Mulholland Drive, for the exploitative nature of Hollywood. And despite the fact that I have stated that I reject at least one of these (partly because it is just an effort to explain the story's events and not actually an attempt to contemplate its ideas), this is not to say that these interpretations do not lack validity, that the films do not address these points at all; they do. But the dreamlike nature of the presentation has a greater scope than those themes, which I think is not always grasped.

It is that reaching for a solution, an explanation, an interpretation which is one (but not the only one) of the main purposes of the dreamlike elements, because by resembling a dream Lynch conveys in his films the impression of things implicitly, intuitively, making sense, even if to the waking mind there appear to be gaps, omissions or inconsistencies. An enthralling intrigue is created by the feeling that things almost make sense, that there is key to all of this that, were it merely discovered, would put everything into place, like the dénouement of a detective novel. It is that feeling that these things make sense, that they must make sense, but it is not clear why, that gives truly dreamlike narratives their impact.

And thus the answer to the question "Who's Lila?" is that Lila is the mystery of who Lila is. The mystery is the answer, it is the point. The question is its own answer. And thus Who's Lila? functions effectively as an interpretation of more or less any Lynchian mystery without, despite its heavy and often overt influence, being a Lynchian mystery itself. This is not to say that the game is not Lynchian at all, regardless of influence; it is, but it's much more willing, perhaps even eager, to explain itself than one of Lynch's own works, a few ambiguous elements notwithstanding. I was probably enjoying the game the most during my first couple of plays-through in which, as far as I could tell, by a wholly dreamlike reckoning it seemed that William, Tanya and Lila were all the same person, and no further explanation was necessary.

It may seem a bit trite to simply say "the mystery is the point", and this arguably does not in itself fully address the impact and significance of Lynchian mysteries, but it is at least refreshing to experience a piece of media which is willing to state that rather than trying to either explain things neatly or, by contrast, explain them away metaphorically or symbolically. There's more to go into concerning how the gameplay extends outside the game itself, with the augmented reality elements, the "Daemon" program which can run alongside it, and even the online sharing of hints and datamining being part of the gaming experience, and that's not even getting into how the game's visuals and control scheme relate to the experience. But others will, I think, explain that better than I can right now.

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[1] A particular highlight for me was noticing in the interrogation scene that, when William is shown Tanya's photograph by the police, Tanya, who at all other times is shown as being exactly identical to Lila, is here shown as strongly resembling her but not actually looking the same.