How to Write Dieselpunk

1848.

If you know me, you know where I’m going with this…

The Communist Manifesto, written by Marx and Engels, is anonymously published in the City of London, and is published in German. Within the Communist Manifesto, the ramblings of two madmen explain how capitalism is the path to socialism and socialism is the path to communism, and only once communism is achieved globally shall we be blessed by the actual utopia that is deemed materialistically possible by later-to-be-named Marxists. Marx was a firm opponent of the utopian socialists of yesteryear, due to their ideas which related to ancient greek forms of utopian societies that were believed to be ponderings of sophists who imagined a world full of happiness and deprived of sorrow. And Marx fully disagreed with them because they thought it could be achieved by simply reeducating people into a utopia instead of Marx’s idea, which was to have a blood-filled revolution that causes utopia to occur by force.

And remember: Marxism is also called scientific socialism, so you know it’s the super duper smarter way of doing things.

Before and after this release of The Communist Manifesto, both translations of the pamphlet and actual revolutions were occurring all over Europe, with the US itself entering a Civil War. Perhaps we could say that the US was a tad behind, because their civil war was over chattel slavery while the European revolutions were about entering a democracy by removing the monarchies in power, but personally I would say Europe had some catching up to do since they were still under the iron thumb of royalty and France was under the constant switching of thumbs between emperors and monarchs. Revolutions came in bursts, with the help of the bourgeoisie, the middle class business owners, causing serfdom to end in Europe, as well as bringing the fall of feudalism and the rise of republics. Finally, Europe was able to come into the modern age and have representatives instead of spoiled royalty tell everyone what to do as they waste public funds on personal luxuries. Now they were able to vote for who wastes public funds on personal luxuries and it was a beautiful feeling.

But not everything was beautiful during such a romantic era of industrial and political revolution. As monarchies fell, nationalism rose. The people finally found a way to care about their nation itself instead of the royal class who rules it. Countries were confused as to who exactly they were and as travel grew more possible, especially between African and Indian countries, so did racial tensions. Meanwhile, we have Marxism still spreading among smaller circles and it finally reached the US in small pockets around 1870, which was after Aberham Lincoln's death and it’s very unlikely Lincon even knew who Marx was, let alone think of him as a friend. The first thing you’ll learn about Marxism is that Marxists love to lie about history to make it fit their “formula” that they then use to determine when a revolution shall cause the communist utopia to be fulfilled.

And try they did.

Global tension shrank for a while during the gay 90s and the introduction of the 1900s, especially as the Victorian Era came to a close and England entered a new Edwardian era with King Edward VII. Evening gloves were top fashion among the women who wanted to follow current trends, and so were comedically giant hats, with all of these feminine romanticizations revolving around the art Nouveau of the time. Art Nouveau was short lived, being around the 1890s to 1910s, with this art style being a big focus on flowers, metal leaves on dressers, and naked women posing in the same way Rose did in the Titanic. The famous Titanic’s exterior and interior was designed with Art Nouveau and Edwardian fashion in mind because it was 1912 and that was the latest fashion.

But this time period was not simply about silly fashion, it was also about the advancement of technology and even the introduction of psychology by people like Willhelm Wundet who separated it from biology and philosophy back in 1879. Sigmund Freud developed the doctrine of psychoanalysis soon after during the gay 90s, which devloped into the understanding of the mind and killing off any form of humorism that was believed to be the cause of things like mental disorders. Freud also unlocked a bit of a Pandora’s Box as he started to merge psychoanalysis with art to create the concept of ideational mimetics, claiming that art had a special energy to it that was able to cause something similar to empathy. Art, to Freud, was far too close to reality, with the artist’s longing for an ideal vision causing neurosis. The mind was starting to be understood, and(speaking of neurosis) to the Marxists who have been coagulating upon the world like a bloodstain of prior, this meant it was time to have a revolution… again!

WW1 began, and the world felt like it was the war to end all wars. Never before had the world seen such chaos and torment put upon the individual, and as we started to understand the mind, we started to find out how terrible PTSD and shellshock really were. Stuck in a trench for years, with the smell of noxious gas and corpses constantly filling your lungs, the whistling of artillery shells announcing a possible end of your life, and the taste of maggots mixed with mud in your rotten food as supplies grow thin. In the middle of the action, but might as well be in the middle of nowhere. It gets to the point where mustard gas seems heavenly by its power to burn your eyes shut, and if such a shell may fall nearby, you give your gasmask drill a second thought.

As technology grew, so did our ability to torment our soldiers, almost beyond the capabilities of medevial torture devices that are designed to torment. The basic landship of WW1 was an onslaught on the senses and a test of endurance as you sweat through the loud engine’s screeching and pray none of the mechanisms in front of you malfunction as you cross no man’s land. Same could be said for life in a u-boat, which had the added bonus of having you drowning to death if someone didn’t screw something in right or if you bumped into one of those giant undersea mines that looks just like how viruses are drawn. As the war grew in size, so did demand for oil. Cars and oil-based engines were a novelty, but as the war required more power, the world demanded more oil.

This was the start of the diesel age… and there was also gasoline being used.

To be fair, it was a bit more gasoline than diesel being used, but because diesel was less combustible and didn’t cause giant explosions, it was a bit more convincing to use during war time when a lot of weapons make things explode. But then there were some countries like Germany who were like “it’s going to explode anyway, go with gasoline and save a mark or two”. But, back to the point, oil companies were becoming huge and so were car companies, because car companies helped in the creation of tanks and war vehicles, all thanks to the innovation of the assembly line. Before, war would make the horse companies jump in joy, but there wasn’t really a single horse source since those things just need a small time breeder and you’re good to go. There were no robber barons of horses, but there were of oil, because all you had to do was own wells and this would allow you to buy out more wells and the more predatory folks were rewarded.

Even after anti-trust acts being established in the US during the gay 90s, bussiness magnates were still able to fuel their enterprises to the fullest, even before the 90s due to people converting from whale oil to kerosene oil for things like lamps. I guess petroleum was also used to fuel the massive Vaseline industry that was rising since that was made from the rod wax that was left behind by petroleum after it was emptied out of barrels and built up on oil pumps. If we had many people like Robert Chesebourgh eating a spoonful of it every day, I’d say that was quite a demand. But one of the biggest petroleum producers at the time of WW1 that nobody ever really mentions was none other than the Tsarist Empire of Imperial Russia.

That’s right, you know where this is going: The Communist Revolution of 1917, sparked by Lenin and his Bolshivik pals being angry that the Tsar’s army was pushed out of Poland by the Germans. This was their time to strike and strike they did, with a successful revolution that took Russia out of the war and entered their new Soviet Regime. Let’s ignore the whole… terrible circumstances for Russians for now, because WW1 being ended as an agreed rage quit is far more important than Marxism causing the deaths of millions. The end of WW1 was a good thing, because this meant that our boys could return home and start investing into companies now that loans were getting easier. It was so easy, Germany was able to take out a massive loan for all of the war debt piled upon it as punishment for doing so well in trying to… end the freaking war.

But Germany wasn’t that stupid. They knew that the perfect plan was to make more money through film, and they understood how important film was at a global scale due to how popular footage of the war was when it came back to their countries of origin. So, get this: they had their supreme army command make a corporation called Bufa, which was used during the war to create films that would cause psychological warfare upon their enemies through propaganda, and then post-war this company would change its name to UFA. This company would then take control of every studio in the country and, as a huge media conglomerate, they would then outfit their directors and producers with the best equipment money could buy as long as these projects weren’t anti-German. During this time after WW1, two main types of movies came out of Germany: stuff that was popular because it was based on real events and then there was German expressionism.

Now, I could go on and on about how all of these different art styles popped up around the 20s, with stuff like futurism and surrealism, but this history lesson is going to focus specifically on German expressionism because of how it highly influenced noir later on as the US entered its own depression.

While the silent film era of the 20s was booming with all sorts of expensive production, ironically many talkies later on during the depression had to be made cheap and for cheap. People all over the world went from being filthy rich to simply filthy as the costs of the war with the quick reconstruction and expansion of industry caused a lot of debt that couldn’t really be paid on time. Oil was a big business, so was steel, so the US was able to keep itself from collapsing since it was a big oil and steel producer. Sadly, this meant that many jobs for the average joe went from having your own mom and pop shop to working in a factory or being an oil rig worker. There was also an increase of demand for oil thanks to people like Henry Ford causing the automobile to become more affordable through mass production assembly lines and things like diesel locomotives were becoming popular, turning the steam engine trains obsolete.

Meanwhile, in Russia, everyone was having a ball. Sure they had a massive famine before the civil war could end and it killed a disgusting amount of innocent people, but that was all in the name of Marxism, so it’s fine. You’re acting like you’ve never seen someone break a few eggs to make some spaghetti. And sure, maybe killing off the kulaks because they were sucessful farmers and it resulted in another famine during the 30s was a bit dumb, but they were making socialist realism art at that time, so it’s all good. This art was great because it was all about showing how wonderful socialism was in a way that the state approved. 

I mean, come on, it was no different than how Germany had their UFA corporation being run by the freaking military. Socialist realism was able to depict social concerns in a realistic way, which is why we had pictures of farmers holding their sickle in victory with a big meaty fist and Stalin smiling with little kids as he tiptoes through the tulips. This art also revealed a new man in town: The New Soviet Man. This archetype was portrayed in Socialist realism as the ideal man of Soviet doctrine. He was to work harder than any other worker, he was to reject all individualism and instead embrace selfless collectivism at no cost to the people around him. 

He was the world’s toilet and he smiled every time you took a shit into his mouth.

Now, don’t think we forgot about the ladies, because the Soviets also had a New Soviet Woman. It was practically the same thing but she was more powerful and more of a superwoman than the superman was. Her ability to give birth meant she was able to juggle being a soviet, a worker, a wife, and a mother. That last one was kind of important because with how people were dying, Russia really needed those damn babies. Having the older generation die off to bring in babies was the plan anyway, because they are easier to train to become good little Marxists. Sure, shoving propaganda down people’s throats all day causes rebellion eventually from the non-conformists, but who the hell would want to rebel against utopia? That’s just silly.

But if you thought the Soviets were the only ones making their own supermen, you’d be wrong. Fascist Italy, forming around 1922 was also making up their model of masculinity, thanks to art movements such as futurism. Rather than focusing on something important like being a Marxist, fascist masculinity focused on muscles, power, technological advancement, and ruralism. Other than being a word I cannot pronounce, ruralism is the idea that people should stay in their village and refrain from becoming urban or metro, with the metrosexual male being seen as a deviant. Modernism, female masculinity, urbanism, being bourgeois(meaning you’re middle class or a business owner in a capitalist way), these were all things that the facsist rejected heavily.

You know how Italians are infamous for being obsessed with their muscles and having their women being very feminine? It’s kind of from this, but that’s mostly from simply being traditional.

Lo and behold, a lot of pulp era stories contained heroes that were either traditional or very selfless in a collectivist way. At the same time, a lot of sci-fi coming out was being utopian, with one of the more popular sci-fi stories depicting it perfectly being The Lensmen, which is a series we never hear about but it’s where the trope of the future having everyone wearing togas comes from. All of this is revolving around tradition, classicalism starting to sprout out again, and then there was Art Deco that came out where structures and art were to depict technology advancing and materials being more fancy. As the US was plagued with crime through its prohibition era because it thought making beer illegal in a country full of angry Irish and Germans while everyone was poor was a good idea, their movies started to blend the crime of today with the German expressionism of yesterday. Utopia, tradition, romanticism, even classicalism, these were all starting to be rejected by movie goers as noir began to take the screen.

Made with a small budget, these cheap but powerful films captured audiences as they showed the underworld we all knew but nobody wanted to talk about. Real life started to look like a dream, with massive shadows taking up most of the shot as down-to-earth anti-heroes took on thugs and corrupt police that were just a slightly darker shade of grey from our protagonist. Root for the good guy? Who’s that? There is no good guy. 

There’s just different shades of grey and we’re following one of them as they make sure they’re locked out of heaven for good. Femme-fatales, bank robberies, private eyes, tommy guns, lounge singers, pants up to your nipples, and a fuck load of cigarettes. These movies were designed to be exploitation and shock the audience over how terrible the world could appear, and yet most audiences went to them going “yeah, I can relate to this.” Innocence was gone by the time these movies were able to come out, not realizing that WW1 had caused plenty of cynicism and simply adding existentialism to a crime melodrama with psychological themes about the id going haywire seemed rather keen.

Romanticism was still alive and kicking, considering Gone With the Wind is still considered the top grossing film of all time(if you adjust for inflation). But there was something about noir that was captivating. At the same time, things like pulp and comic books featuring masked vigilantes were starting to grow in popularity, bringing the criminal underworld into the eyes of the youth, even though it was usually a tame representation with robbers wearing domino masks doing a bank stickup. However, pulp novels were becoming darker by the day thanks to weird fiction merging heavily with pulp and growing among adults who wanted to read some escapism on their way to the assembly line.

Grand adventures to mysterious lands, the occult being portrayed as the ancient world coming in to threaten the modern age, and the occasional utopian sci-fi inspired by french utopian socialists was sprinkled in to give us a bit of hope for the future. A lot of these pulp stories were inspired by what was going on in Europe, because while the US was going through a depression in the 30s, Europe was going through numerous transfers of power between fascists, socialists, and communists. Germany became Nazi Germany in 1933, and it didn’t take long for them to start the second world war with the help of Imperialist Japan fighting with Russia and China over land claims. I would say Italy helped as well, but… come on, it’s Italy. The only thing they did was help the Axis lose the war.

But the frightening matter was that the axis came pretty damn close to ruling the world. Sure, we joke about it in hindsight, but as the late Norm Macdonald puts it: the scariest country out there is Germany, because they tried to rule the world twice and nearly did it both times. What people don't realize about older wars is that occupied territories convert their citizens to manpower towards the war machines of the oppressors. In 1927, an Austrian-German director by the name of Fritz Lang, with the help of his wife Thea von Harbou, created a perfect expression of such a circumstance with his masterful dystopian film, Metropolis. Based on the book written by Thea, this movie was a horrific vision into a futuristic utopia built off the backs of the common worker.

As a response to the way the Weimar Republic was transferring its power over to the sparticists AND the Nazis, thanks to both working together to take on the social democrats, borgoise, and monarchists of Germany; the film used metaphors and hillucinations to depict moments like a a machine malfunctioning and killing some workers as a bunch of slaves being sacrificed to the pagan maw of Moloch. People claim Fritz and his wife were creating an argument for Marxism, but Fritz knew better than to side with communists and fascists, and his wife was of the wealthy class when she wrote the novel. I've heard people claim the utopian tower of babel being made on the backs of workers' suffering down in the depths is an anti-capitalist idea and even then they would be wrong. Especially since Fritz fled Germany during WW2 in order to enjoy the luxury of living in the US, instead of living a life in Nazi Germany as a propagandist. Noir films can also be considered anti-capitalism, because some people consider the act of suffering through an urban wasteland as criminals kill for money as a perfect depiction of capitalism causing evil in the world. However, this too is a misunderstanding of capitalism and a misunderstanding of intent from the artists, which is easy to succumb to when critics of that time were either Marxists or fascists or some form of anti-capitalism because it was the time of revolt against the bourgeoisie.

Our lives changed as we became more urban and less rural. Rather than survive on our own little cottage in the meadow in a neat little village, lives were quickly turning into the Metropolis world of the very same nature, with the rich people at the top and the workers down below. But, Nazi Germany turn that into a literal dystpoia when they started their holocaust and had the unwanted races in camps to do the work of the Aryans, and unlike the big fear in Metropolis or the major point of Marxism, there wasn’t a possible rebellion in sight from the enslaved. WW2 required outside sources to save people who were becoming tyrannized by the Axis, whether it was the unwanted races of Nazi Germany or the conquered lands of Imperialist Japan. China alone suffered 14 million deaths at the hands of the Japanese(with the help of Marxists during their civil war), with over 12 million of them being civilians.

Russia itself would have been on the Axis side of this turmoil and destruction if it wasn’t for the fact that the Soviets wanted to rule the world themselves, they simply didn’t want to share it with the fascists and imperialist japanese. When the Nazi-Soviet pact was broken by Hitler in 1941, it was all because Hitler had a war machine and that machine needed Russian oil and he wanted to keep russians as pack animals. Again, Hitler and his fellow Axis powers were creating the world that Metropolis predicted. The advancement of technology and war turned the world into a more consumerist structure, with plenty of propaganda and advertisements filling the newfound airwaves as radios were entering every home. Romanticism was dead and we killed it.

WW2 was not what caused pessimism across the world, but it did hammer it in and reinforce it for every moment afterwards. The Great War was meant to be the final war, the last war that would be ruining countries as it did. But, barely 20 years later, within the same generation for many people, they saw an even worse war with even more horrific footage come back to haunt the people back home. The holocaust was one of the most terrifying things to realize for many people, to the point where many figured life had no meaning. It felt like an apocalypse had occurred, that no matter how much we advance in technology, humanity was already dead and we just didn’t know it. 

God was gone, nature lost all mystery, and all we had was more war and more death to look forward to.

Dieselpunk may be considered the darker relative of steampunk, but it is beyond darkness. It’s not that you feel bad for the people in the story, rather, you’re meant to feel bad for yourself because you can relate to them and their angst. Angst may be the best term to use for dieselpunk, yet nobody uses it to ever describe it. I know this introductory history lesson was long and perhaps boring, but it’s important to understand the context of that era to understand why their art was the way it was. Why does dieselpunk look and feel different from any other punk?

As much as it would piss off a lot of people: you can’t have dieselpunk without the nazis. You can’t have dieselpunk without the socialists and communists. You can’t have dieselpunk without noir being a main contributing factor. That’s the era it came from. Those are the things that inspired it. People try to consider it as a close relative to cyberpunk, but what we’re going to learn today is that it’s only related because of noir and that’s about it. So, let’s start swinging, daddy-o. This is dieselpunk.

What is Dieselpunk?

If you ever ask someone what dieselpunk is, they will almost always be wrong. However, if you ever show someone something that is dieselpunk and ask them if it fits the genre, they will usually be right. When it comes to punk genres, the punk aspect gets many people confused. For the most part, it’s because many people don’t study into what punk is or they are told the wrong definition and stick to it until they have to face reality, but they believed in a lie for so long, it’s hard to let go of such a lie. I also remember there was a debate one time on a community website where someone asked “What is dieselpunk?” and nobody could give a clear answer other than “it’s a retrofuturistic style that depicts as if the 1930s and 40s never ended”.

Sure, many people would accept that from the art we’ve seen. But, what exactly does that mean? What’s so important about that era that we don’t have in our own? The lack of digital computers and instead they had analog? People are reading newspapers instead of a twitter feed? People wear little rascal hats and sock suspenders?

If you question the actual aesthetics of the 1930s and 40s, you’ll soon realize that people aren’t really talking about the tech level or the fashion, but rather the style of life and the cultural philosophy that encapsulates that era. But, it’s not just the era, it’s the particular forms of media we are taking from that era and into our new project that is dieselpunk. Retrofuturism requires a history lesson because we are trying to recapture a particular time period and we’re transforming it into a new thing that is part of the past mixed with ideas from our own time and with our futuristic inspirations that they didn’t have back then. But when something is so close to our own time and we’re still using tech that was made back then, that’s where we start losing control if we don’t know what we’re doing. Amazingly, dieselpunk needs more explanation because it’s based on something so recent and because we’re so familiar with so much of it already.

In other words, I sort of have to explain to a fish what water is in a way they will understand, but they really can’t because they’re in the water already.

The trend and aesthetic of dieselpunk is less established than the other genres I’ve previously explained, both cyberpunk and steampunk, so dieselpunk doesn’t have much of an “origin”. Rather, it’s a deviation from steampunk to appeal to a different era, and in this case, a diesel era. The tinkerer is replaced with the engineer. The colonizer is replaced with the fascist. What also makes it rather constricting is that, for some reason, steampunk doesn’t mind mentioning things like confederates who enslaved people due to the color of their skin, while the dieselpunk “community”(and I put it in quotes because of how it’s only certain circles) don’t want any reference to fascism or Nazism.

Umm… news flash: that entire era was revolving around the topic of fascism and Nazism.

I know many people will try to find some strange way to disagree with this, but enjoying the aesthetic doesn’t mean you enjoy the ideology. Also, cosplaying as something like a retrofuturistic Wehrmacht solider doesn’t mean the cosplayer is a nazi, the same way the confereate reinactor isn’t a slave owner. Something like Iron Sky and women dressing up in the sexy BDSM style uniforms should be embraced rather than suppressed, but that’s obviously trying to be prescriptive instead of descriptive. Although, descriptively, dieselpunk has retrofuturistic Wehrmacht soldiers and sexy BDSM SS babes. A big thing that people don’t want to talk about is that dieselpunk has some pretty deep roots in what is called Nazi Exploitation films.

Inglorious Bastards and Overlord were inspired by such films because the idea of exploitation and nazis torturing people who had their human status removed by the government is really interesting to people who are fascinated by dark things. Bizarro also likes to take some of these Nazi themes, which fits in how dieselpunk and the diesel era was all about weird fiction and the absurd. Movies like Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS became a staple among the proto-dieselpunks as they enjoyed the grindhouse style in general and grew fond of the darkness from that time period. It’s almost as if exploitation movies like Noir and exploitation like grindhouse Nazisploitation are related or something. But as the proto-dieselpunks started to gather together over an aesthetic, the movement also started to gain some traction thanks to directors like George Lucas and Steven Speilberg.

Now, I know what a lot of people want to ask after I mentioned George Lucas: Is Star Wars dieselpunk?

Right away, I can assure you, without a shadow of a doubt… it has a dieselpunk aesthetic. I would also like to explain that Star Wars is based on movies from the diesel era. It was inspired by Japanese samurai films, with Japanese aesthetics being a major contributor to art deco. So, the argument is there to say that it is dieselpunk in how it looks. But is it dieselpunk as a genre?

Let’s see: you have a rebellion against a fascist regime, you have a gunslinging smuggler helping a space samurai save a princess, and you have doomsday weapons blowing up planets. But, there is a bit of a thing most people miss here, and that is existentialism, which is heavily present in the movies, due to the amount of freedom everyone has to choose whether they want to join the dark side or the light side. I would happily say Star Wars is dieselpunk, it’s just not one of those ideal examples people can point to and have everyone understand what the genre is all about from it. I’m sure a debate will continue over whether or not it is, but at least many of us can agree that something like Indiana Jones is dieselpunk, at least within the initial trilogy.

Now, here’s the thing that makes it a bit confusing for some people. When I talked about steampunk, I talked about how steampunk focuses heavily on romanticism and weird stuff is expected to happen because the world is viewed in an alchemical way. This could be said the same for something like Star Wars or Indiana Jones, but the main split is that romanticism is not part of their story, because they are existentialist. Existentialism counters romanticism. I will go over that subject later, but I want everyone to understand that romance or things looking beautiful doesn’t mean romanticism is automatically the go to genre in the work.

It also doesn’t help that things like romanticism from steampunk were still popular during the time era that inspired dieselpunk, but one major thing we must first learn is that romanticism is what dieselpunk firmly REJECTS. Dieselpunk is not romantic at all. Period. You can have a romance happen between characters, sure, but get ready to put them through tragedy. You do, however, have humanism and idealism in both dieselpunk and steampunk, which are the only things they relate with and the trail ends there.

I mean, yeah, they’re both retrofuturistic and punk genres, but you know what I mean.

As for cyberpunk, we have tech noir, and dieselpunk was inspired by its predecessor, noir. Since there’s tech stuff going on with dieselpunk, that sort of means both are tech noir, right? Well, the thing is that it can, but it doesn’t have to. Dieselpunk is more about existentialism than simply noir, which I’ll get into later on when I get into the philosophy of it all. But because it has the ingredients, it’s pretty much where you can, you most likely will, but you don’t have to.

Instead, what you’d have as your, sort of, minor aesthetic is german expressionism, due to german expressionism and poetic realism being a big influence on noir itself. Most of the works back then were trying to show ordinary people entering extraordinary predicaments, because we stopped caring about big people with big dreams and adventures. Weird fiction authors like Lovecraft helped form the storylines where lesser folk were at the forefront of the plot and it was the world around them trying to swallow them up into pure and utter chaos. This related to how the wars of both WW1 and WW2 harmed the average person more than it harmed larger than life heroes. A person like superman was great for kids, but for the average adult, they wanted to relate to a fellow working man getting into gun fights because he fell in love with the wrong girl.

Being punk in this type of time period was not really named, because there were so many different types of people who opposed their tyrannical governments at that time. The punk mentality of this time had people going against facism, communism, socialism, even capitalism with how people were against the bourgeoisie. The working class was not quite the middle class yet, but at the same time the bourgeoisie helped the working class escape serfdom. At the very least, we can say the far-right and the far-left were being rebelled against, but at the same time, both of these sides considered themselves the revolutionaries. If you’re not careful, you might start to assume the nazis were punks because they were against the Weimar Republic, or that Mussolini was a punk because he was an anarcho-syndiclist before he was a fascist.

Much like the romantics of the 1800s, these new punks of the diesel era were not actually part of any of the revolutions taking place. In fact, they were against these revolutions and didn’t want any part of them. Revolting against a government was beyond them because the government wasn’t at all part of their concerns. Existence itself was their concern because the meaning of life was at stake after they realized that god is dead and we killed him. It’s impossible to fight in a revolution when you’re already fighting against the encroaching nihilism that grows more examples every day.

Writers like Lovecraft created things like cosmicism to say “hey, we don’t even matter to the larger things in the world, so a revolution doesn’t even matter when our whole planet is a speck in the scheme of things”. Then there were people like Albert Camus who wrote stories like The Plague, showing that life can be taken from you in the most absurd ways and all you can do is embrace the absurdity of life and all we can do is enjoy being forced to push a boulder up a hill for the rest of eternity. These thoughts are not romantic or patriotic or invigorating. They are cold, distraught, and crippling. We might as well be that dude from The Pianist when he’s walking through his destroyed village crying uncontrollably. Romanticism be damned.

Make way for angst and absurdity.

After WW1, artists created dada to spit in the face of existence and art, to tell rationalism to put an egg in their shoe and beat it. People went from trying to make beautiful works of art to making random sounds and calling it a poem. Grab a turd, smear it on the easel, and voila, you have something of the same aesthetic value as any masterpiece, because it's all meaningless. People were broken after WW1 blew Europe a new bunghole, and WW2 sent us straight into postmodernism. If you don't get the hint: there's NOTHING romantic about dieselpunk.

I want to stress that as much as I can because I hold this genre very close to my heart. It's my favorite of the punk genres and is even the genre I made for my first crappy novel that I put back onto the drawing boards because of how much it sucked. But, amazingly enough, I did get one aspect right with it and that was the dieselpunk aspect. So, despite being misled by others and not knowing what even steampunk was, younger me was able to stumble his way into the right direction, in the most appropriately absurd way possible.

Dieselpunk is humanist, meaning there is a goal towards understanding what humans are and what can benefit us. There is no transhumanism being accepted by the punk, and if it ever is, it's more of a humanist argument, with the transhumanism stuff being a non-sequitur. From what I can gather, it seems that dieselpunk is the midpoint between cyberpunk and steampunk because it has the tech noir possibility of cyberpunk and it has the humanist approach of steampunk. But, as you can see, looks can be deceiving and it's why people have a hard time defining what it really is.

Thankfully, I can explain it with ease… after going through a huge amount of history and philosophy. 

Dieselpunk takes the anti-fascist and anti establishment nature of the early 1900s and contains 4 key elements:

1. Diesel technology
2. Individualism
3. Idealism 
4. Kierkegaardism

Dieselpunk covers both sci-fi and fantasy within a work under its genre and when you have things like the Nazis with their own paranormal research division trying to find out of Aryan supremacy from the past, it's not hard to understand why so much dieselpunk contains both. Even if there is no war present in the plot, the occult that was the main focus in so many pulp stories is still a strong influence, and so that aspect bleeds into retrofuturistic works as things like ghosts, psychic powers, deep sea cosmic gods, and Thelema related ceremonial rituals. The sci-fi aspects of it are influenced by the vast advancement of war technology, the futurists of Russia and Italy who embraced newer technology, and also works like Metropolis that merged German expressionism with a view into a dystopian future. The director of the movie, Fretz Lang, was such an inspiration for most dieselpunk, I nearly wanted to consider him as the main philosopher behind it, because his noir movies and sci-fi movies were that much of a staple. The automatons in Metropolis and relations to them, such as C3PO from Star Wars, are enough for some people to just go "yup, that's dieselpunk."

However, people think you can take a steampunk story and turn the steam engine into a diesel engine and now it's dieselpunk. I'm here to say nay. I'm also here to say nay to anyone who thinks you can glue some swastikas onto a cyberpunk story and now it's dieselpunk. And, on top of all that, I'm also here to say that the supposedly established dichotomy of dieselpunk, where you have Ottensian dieselpunk which is clean and Piecraftian dieselpunk which is more apocalyptic, is all part of a big lie. That dichotomy means nothing to the real concept of dieselpunk.

At best, you're just saying one is decopunk and the other is dieselpunk, which would be a split between aesthetic and tech. Decopunk is an aesthetic, dieselpunk is a tech. That tech is related to the concept of internal combustion, but… what exactly does that mean? Well, let’s find out.

Technology

Oil was not really well understood in the early days of the oil tycoons. All we really knew was that it was flammable and it was stinky. Most people paid to get rid of it before people realized it could be refined into things like kerosene or gasoline. But once we had both gasoline engines and diesel engines being devised by scientists during the end of the 1800s, we started to experiment with how this new energy source could be utilized. Although we more commonly used gasoline engines during that time, and even now, there is an important reason it’s called dieselpunk instead of gasolinepunk or petropunk.

The diesel engine is an internal combustion engine, meaning that it combusts the fuel introduced into it by creating a pocket of air within a cylinder and then has a piston push the air pocket into a heated density. The heated pocket is then given a bit of fuel to create a little explosion that pushes the piston away and then exhaust is released to repeat the cycle. Whenever you see a bunch of pistons cycling and going up and down with a bunch of smoke coming out of exhaust pipes, that’s usually the sight of a diesel engine going at it. These types of engines were large, so they were mostly used for larger machinery like construction and agricultural vehicles, or more popularly for factory work. We still use them today for that very use, which is why fake dieselpunks these days sometimes claim to be dieselpunk because they own a diesel-powered tractor.

It’s like owning a vape pen and claiming you’re a steampunk.

Another big difference between steampunk and dieselpunk is the fact that dieselpunk was of an era where we understood a grand amount of technology, but simply didn’t have the means of producing it properly. We had analog computers and could calculate things with amazing speed, but a lot of those calculators were the size of a house. We had things like radar and sonar to detect planes in the clouds and submarines deep in the water, but these things were giant and took a lot of energy. We had planes and we had submarines, but the planes were iffy with malfunctioning and submarines required battery usage to be underwater. The possibilities were endless, but they were simply expensive.

We weren’t quite in the space age yet, other than the Nazis having their V2 rockets reach space before they smashed down into buildings and bridges. Sure, there were raygun gothic adventures like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, but these didn’t really predict a world of rocket fuel or atomic energy. Rather they had disintegrator rays that resembled WW1 flamethrowers and their rocket ships resembled zeppelins. On top of that, most of the sci-fi from these stories focused on the earth itself and how it builds upwards into the sky, relating to how new construction tech and materials were allowing us to create skyscrapers. Big cities were no longer domed cathedrals with pillars holding up sandstone, because they were now closer to the tower of babel than anything prior.

In the bible, the tower of babel was a human made superstructure designed to unify humanity under the rule of King Nimrod. The word nimrod means to be a great hunter, but in the US, around the 1930s, it started to be used sarcastically thanks to Bugs Bunny cartoons using it as an insult against the incompetient hunter Elmer Fudd. This great hunter King Nimrod had great ambition and rebelled against god by trying to create a structure that would reach heaven, in an attempt to cheat his way into paradise. However, all went south when God noticed this plan of Nimrod and so he struck down the tower and scattered its inhabitants all over the world and made sure none of them could understand each other as punishment. This powerful story from the bible is used in the movie Metropolis to relate to its own utopia being struck down by the workers in a rebellion… or you know, this part where the workers flood the underground areas because a robot was disguised as their leader who was their prophet.

Look, the movie is German, okay? Just roll with it.

To say it in another way, the tower of babel represents man’s technological desire to reach heaven through a collective effort from a tyrant. God, or in other words nature, cancels this out because we can’t quite reach paradise through a tyrannical means. We can’t oppress others and sneak our way into paradise, because the system is already set up to where we have to follow a particular path, and we don’t even know if that paradise exists in the first place. The tower could be a huge effort simply wasted to cause everyone in the tower to die when it all collapses. This is why absolute monarchies and fascist dictatorships fall apart and end with rebellion. 

The bigger the empire, the harder the fall, and that destruction doesn’t really come from within.

I say that because empires like ancient Rome had plenty of problems but it didn’t come close to collapsing until barbaric tribes from outside knocked down the gates. The citizens of an oppressive system are the biggest threat because of how comfortable and conformate they are. Again, if Nazi Germany didn’t have outer influences come in to say “hey, you need to stop this holocaust thing” then there would eventually be zero jews in Nazi Germany, and the citizens would continue their days eating hamburgers or whatever Germans do. Also, as technology gets more advanced, the citizens are less likely to fight for themselves because the government is in control of the higher tech. Back in the 1800s, everyone had a musket. 

But once the 1900s hit, it was where you’d have a tommy gun and they would have a freaking panzer ready to blow you to smithereens. 

Futurism, the art movement related to things like power and an embracement of technology, was all for that, which is kind of why they merged with fascists due to futurism influence facism with its talk about how violence was to be praised and war was a necessity to purify humanity. This highly organized art form was all about order, showing us the new life of modernity that we never had in the 1800s. There was actually a time where we didn’t have electricity, if that’s possible to imagine, which means there was a time previously where we didn’t rely on a power plant or the production of batteries. These are things that come from someone else, they are produced and maintained by workers, and we depend on these things in order to survive. Modernity, in this sense, means collective, and this particular type of collective has to be nationalist.

And nationalist we became, with many European nations becoming ultranationalist. Whether you consider this as a good or bad thing, this is what happened and you must accept history for what it was. History, at this point in time, was absurd. We could understand something like medieval people in the dark ages burning witches at the stake, but for some reason it’s hard for us to accept that about a hundred years ago we had countries remove the human label from certain humans and sacrifice their children to Moloch. If you don’t understand what I mean by that, remember that Nazi Germany put people into ovens.

But while advancing nations became more technologically reliant, we also were able to use our ability to travel to enter new territories never thought possible. Adventure stories grew into a quicker pace as people started to explore lands we couldn’t reach before and we discovered new lands that we couldn’t even notice. Ideas started to form among artists and movies like King Kong tried to show how mysterious and absurd nature was.  Apparently, if you let a gorilla alone on an island full of dinosaurs, that gorilla turns into a giant and can fight a T-Rex. As badass as it sounds, you have to think to yourself for a second and realize that this makes absolutely no sense at all.

The probable is under attack, but the possible is unscathed.

What that means is that magic in dieselpunk isn’t like there’s a new world around us that’s from an alchemical perspective. Instead, the world is more focused on the idea of “as above, so below”. Whatever is within us is also outside in the real world. Our inner feelings and emotions are expressed outwards and the world outside of us changes as we change within. If you feel gloomy, it might as well be raining, and rain it shall.

While steampunk consisted of alchemical mysticism concerning its properties and limits, dieselpunk replaced alchemy with a more chaotic alternative called the occult. You would think that dieselpunk would be more focused on order, but on the contrary, order is exactly what dieselpunk is fighting against, especially that of the materialist sense. The hyperfixation of order from nations like Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy are exactly what caused the existential crisis among the dieselpunks to the very core. The world of oppression and cynicism became so grand that not even nature could offer a glimpse of meaning or solitude. So, instead, the dieselpunk turns to the occult to find any means of revenge against the machine.

Now, when I say the occult, I will have a bit of trouble giving it a specific definition because it means so many things. Before, I mentioned Thelma, which is an occult social and spiritual philosophy, which means that it goes beyond religion. Thelma is highly related to Egyptian mythology, with its major deity being that of Nuit, the queen of infinite space. Nuit is depicted as a naked woman who is covered in stars and she holds her body over the Earth. The thing is that every human is a “star” that is represented by the body of Nuit, so what this means is that chaos is above us, always around us, and whatever is outside of us, way above us, is a reflection of ourselves and we can see reflections of others equally.

The occult, in this sense, is everything science can’t explain, but we can still use it to our advantage. Nazi Germany tried to do this during WW2, attempting to retrive artifacts such as the spear of destiny and the recording of pagan sorcerers and witches. There was even the belief that Hitler himself was possessed by a demon, possibly due to an occultist ritual gone wrong. I don’t want this to sound like this was simply people making shit up. This was how absurd the world had become, where alchemy was discarded for being illogical but people were still trying to summon freaking demons and open pandora boxes.

And, when I say Pandora's box, I want you to consider the actual mythology of the term. The Greek myth goes where Prometheus, the titan of fire, steals fire from heaven to give it to the humans. Okay, we can see this as an entity that was before the gods, a part of chaos, was given to humans to allow us to create societies and survive through technology. Pandora was created by Hephastus, meaning a god, a part of order and tech development, creates this type of person designed to torment humanity who then later opens a jar(or box). This box contains numerous evils within, and when opened they are all released to torment humanity, and when Pandora panics, she closes the box and all that remains locked inside is hope.

This relates heavily to any time someone says “I’m going to create a weapon so powerful, all war will end.” Gatling made his gatling gun, thinking it would end all wars, but didn’t realize that all he did was make war more deadly and increase the destructive capabilities of soldiers. When the tank was made, many people were like “there’s no reason to fight now, tanks are going to stop all wars.” Little did they know, the tank made WW2 far more deadly. Do I even have to mention the atomic bomb?

What I’m saying here is that a Pandora’s box, in relation to technology, is when someone, usually a mad scientist, creates a weapon or new tech that they believe will change the world for the better. But, big shock, it is designed to make the world worse. This goes the same for the occult, to reveal or unearth old relics that harness power that we shouldn’t wield or mess with. This is when the past comes back to haunt us and ruin our world. The occult was just as big of a threat as the tech that was advancing like no tomorrow, with the occult being a mental threat and the tech being a material one.

This wasn’t just in Nazi Germany either. All over the world, the occult started to grow as people rejected Christianity and grew accustomed to new things. Romanticism wasn’t working, the world was in a high-functioning apocalypse, and so people figured it couldn’t do any harm to do a bunch of drugs and have mass orgies. Thelma was not the only belief system that had things like free will and libertine values, but it was the most popular one that influenced others. True will was one of its biggest concepts, the idea that we are given a purpose or calling in due time, with the world around us showing us the way.

This wasn’t meant to be satanic or hedonistic, but during such a time period, it might as well have been. When you're told you have a true calling, but you’re also told there’s no meaning in life, you might as well go ahead and snort some cocaine off a hooker’s asscrack, because that’s calling you in one way or another. Also, with how absurd the world was, you might as well encounter some kind of ancient Egyptian curse that brings on a more obvious apocalypse over the one you’re already in. In 1923, when we opened the tomb of Tutankhamun, the people who opened it died of mysterious causes. Later on, in 1932, we had a movie called The Mummy come out, inspired by the event.

Many people know about this, but did you know the cinematographer of Metropolis, Karl Freund, also did the cinematography for The Mummy, giving it the German expressionist mood that it had? Despite being a gothic horror, The Mummy was part of a growing genre of German Expressionist horror that related to silent films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, a movie where a person is forced to kill against their will through hypnosis. And yes, you guessed it! This movie was yet another allegory about Germany in WW1 and how conforminty causes ordinary people to do the darnest things like commit murder. What the movie lacked in actual plot, it made up for it in how the world it shows is this mystical wonderland of distorienting shapes and structures.

The inner resembles the outer. As above, so below. 

Our main character doesn’t understand such a world that would allow such things to occur, and so the audience is shown a world that makes almost no sense. It’s chaotic and distorted, as well as dark and personal. Things that aren’t part of the story aren’t really there, because they might as well not exist in such a world. Ironically, it would make too much sense to have random bystanders or like a bird fly around, because that kind of thing has a beauty that doesn’t belong in this type of world. This kind of world has insane hypnotists turning innocent men into murderers. Also, before I get too far away from this topic, Metropolis accidentally created the mad scientist trope by having a smart dude with crazy hair sacrifice his hand to create a robotic woman, and he also gave himself a new robot hand.

Look, these movies are German, okay. Roll with it.

If you pay close attention, you’ll soon realize that both the mad hypnotists and the mad scientist are the same thing. They are both “-tist” kind of people. But, remember a long time ago back in the beginning when I mentioned that Freud started psychoanalysis in order to treat patients for their mental woes? Well, the dude started out with hypnosis as a means to help patients and then later resorted to psychoanalysis. This doesn’t mean that people don’t do hypnosis anymore today, many clientitans still do in order to create a hyper-focused concentration to dig up something that might have been pushed deep down into the psyche.

Students of Freud split away from his initial jumpstart into psychology, and some students like Carl Jung became as much, if not more important, to psychology and how it related to artworks of their time. Noir is assumed to be related to Freudian ideas because there are moments of noir that portray things like primal drives, but personally I would consider noir to be more Jungian in how it has German Expressionism as its main influence. When we’re talking about art and aesthetics, we’re talking about how art is portrayed to the audience and the thought process behind it all. There is a bit of a divide between German expressionism and Surrealism, which is hard to find because both of them deal with things like psychological interpretation and the personal point of view coming out into the setting. What we have to realize is that surrealism splits away from German expressionism because surrealism is more about causing scenes that don’t make sense in a literal interpretation while German Expressionism makes sense when taken literally. 

Surrealism has a juxtaposition, a contrast between two unrelated things, where one thing is probable but the other isn’t. For an example, there’s a famous movie by David Lynch called Eraser Head, where the main character has a baby, but the baby is this strange lizard monster. Him being a father is probable. He’s a human and he has the tools to make a baby with a woman. The weird chicken alien fetus is not probable, but its existence causes a symbolic representation to occur.

German Expressionism, on the other hand, goes through a rather Jungian path into the inner psyche, where we have things like the anima, the animus, and the shadow. Shadows are actually really big in German Expressionism and in noir, due to the ability to make things look more threatening or scary with lighting tricks. When a character has a massive shadow casted along the wall, or even where they start fighting and you see nothing but shadows, this relates to the concept of the shadow in Jungian psychology. The shadow is the part of you that you try to keep hidden from everyone, including yourself. This unknown side of us is what we fear the most, relating to the quote from Lovecraft: the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is of the unknown.

To be honest, we aren’t really designed to be in modernity. Modernity is accepted through conformity, meaning only the very obedient and collectivist types fit into this type of society. Our shadow is always within us and following us, no matter where we go. The character called The Shadow is a clear depiction of someone who represents the most frightening side of humanity, and that is unknown to us but is from us. He even had the powers of both reading minds and was able to hypnotize people into not seeing him, which was a trick he learned in his travels to India where he learned it from a Yogi priest. 

Oh look, it’s almost as if the occult and Jungian psychology are related in some way when it comes to dieselpunk!

Silliness aside, when we’re talking about noir, we’re talking more than simply a crime story. Noir, with the influence of both poetic realism and German expressionism, has this atmosphere that revolves around the individual in question. What is within them is expressed outwards and their stories revolve around normal people put into abnormal situations. The people in these stories aren’t really themselves as if they would be in a real life situation. 

The villains are over the top because this is the shadow they hate to reveal to society. The hero is knocking people out with one punch and shooting up all the goons because that is his inner caveman going in to become king of the jungle. The femme fatale isn’t there because she’s meant to exist, because in reality there’s never some beautiful woman who needs to be rescued because she got involved with the mob. A man who loses his family and has nothing left to lose is not really the case. If anything, all of these are just symbolic representations of things like the anima, the animus, and the shadow being portrayed through characters who represent each of these psychological concepts. 

People putting on capes and domino masks is no different than showing there is a Jungian persona being put at play here, with a person wearing a literal mask to cover their real identity. As we become collectivist and enter modernity, we are no longer allowed to be authentic. The classicists of the 1800s ended up winning the culture war, no matter how hard the romantics tried to take over. Sure, romanticism was still popular in the arts, but there wasn’t really room for it in society as everyone was forced to conform to a particular ideology or be killed. As much as we enjoy listening to westerns on the radio where a villain ties a woman to a railroad tracks and the heroic cowboy saves her, this kind of romanticism was no longer possible because now we’d get arrested for actually saving a life.

The individual is challenged in more ways than one by this oppressive society of a certain type of post-modernity. Despite the futurists being modernists, they were rather anti-individualist, because individualism was a liberal concept that was of the past, and the past didn’t matter to the futurist. The individual didn’t matter to the Marxist, it didn’t matter to the Nazi, it didn’t matter to the fascist, and it didn’t even matter to the society at large. The individual was either supposed to be an offering to Moloch or a Soviet Superman, meaning they weren’t an individual at all but simply an icon to show others how to be a selfless collectivist. Even most anarchists of that time were anarcho-syndicalists(including Mussolini before he became fascist), which means the anarchist simply wanted the state gone with the group still functioning as a collective.

So, with all of this anti-individualism going on during the diesel age… when does individualism come in?

Individualism

In a big city, relying on tech created by big factories, while the streets are run by big time gangsters… where exactly does a single person fit in? Well, the clear answer is: they don’t. The individual does not fit in at all. Whether you’re in a speakeasy drinking bathtub whiskey surrounded by flirty socialites, or you’re in the middle of a desert looking for a lost city of the dead, you don’t really fit in with the lifestyle around you. Modernity is your enemy because it made itself your enemy by calling you a threat first. 

You are the Han Solo shooting second(depending on which copy of Star Wars you’re watching). Also, related to Harrison Ford, you are the Indiana Jones traveling across the globe with the map trailing your adventures with a dotted-red line in the background. No matter how much he believes things belong in a museum, there are certain things in the world that cannot be contained. There are things that shouldn't be opened. A pandora’s box isn't able to be closed once it's opened and the one who opens it is responsible for the destruction thereafter, even though they aren’t the creator of the box.

The world around you is so collected and absurd, separate from humanity, that to be an individual, all you’re doing is admitting you don’t belong in the world. To think you do is to be absurd, it’s to accept a big lie as reality. In society, the role you play in relation to others comes first, but to the individual, it’s their authenticity that they take to the grave with them. Indiana Jones may be an archaeologist by day, scrounging up old relics found by dusting at the ground for hours on end, but at the end of the day, his identity is that of a constant savoir. The soviets would call him the New Man who shines like a beacon upon the workers as he shows off his selfless collectivism, but… saving the world wasn’t really part of the plan. 

From the beginning, Jones claims he doesn’t believe in the supernatural, which sounds weird when his adventures always lead him to the supernatural(especially since he says that a few years after he saw some dude get his heart ripped out and then lowered into a vortex of flames). Reality around him is rejected just to keep on trucking, because if he accepted reality for what it was, he would go insane like a character of a Lovecraft story. The world is so whacky that the individual must close their eyes and live in darkness just to walk forward. But there is a curiosity about the powers of nature, about the limits of the world, which is what drives the adventurer. There is also a desire and drive that carries the vengeful vigilante, with the thought of revenge always on their mind and pulling them like the helpless puppet they are.

Whether it’s Batman or The Spirit, the idea of fighting crime after losing your life in some way is just another form of trying to fight against the absurdity. Losing your family, being left for dead, losing your job, losing your ability to fulfill your previous passions, all of these create heroes and villains as they sadly attempt to fill in the void that shall never be filled, and so, they are sucked into the void. They become the void. Whoever fights monsters should see to it that they don’t become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into the void, the void begins to look back through you.

As above, so below.

The monster this individual seeks to destroy is never destroyed. Their evil is only transferred, never removed. One of the greatest moments in the bible is when Cain kills his brother, Abel, and afterwards God punishes anyone who kills Cain to suffer sevenfold. A lot of people might think “that’s stupid, why can’t we just kill him and cause all killers to stop existing?” That right there is the contradiction. To kill the killer means the killer never left.

This is why the Jungian shadow is never really defeated by the individual. The shadow remains until the end of time. As the individual wanders through darkness, hiding their eyes from the absurd reality they are trapped in, what they see before them is their shadow in action. The revenge story, the quest for treasure, the victim of circumstance, the law-abiding citizen lured into the life of crime, all of these people are showing their true selves to the world. The part that they thought nobody would be able to see and they didn’t even know about themselves.

Even a movie like Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow(as crappy as it was) has the shadow presented as an evil mad scientist who’s been dead for 20 years and his thoughts were transferred into a machine that tries to annihilate the entire world to have a noah's ark of a rocket carry a bunch of animals and these vials of genetic material for an Adam and Eve reboot. I understand, the movie sounds absolutely stupid, but the absolute absurity of such a plan from such a fascist-like shadow is what is so dieselpunk about this entire thing. Killing the whole world to make a new master race reboot to engage a world of tomorrow is literally what Hitler was trying to do, and to fight against such a shadow is to be the ultimate humanist. But the shadow is also a humanist, just, in a very evil way. 

The shadow says “humanity must be collected and collectivist into my way to be saved, for I am the New Soviet Man! I am the Übermensch! I give the meaning to life, not you!” But, this isn’t true in such an absurd world. You cannot give meaning to another with such a plan. All you can do is destroy every other, become the monster, stare into the void, and as the void stares back through you, the destruction of an absurd world is before you. And as you fall upon your knees, weakened by the act of finally opening your eyes, all you can do is weep at what your hands have caused. After you die, life returns, it’s revived, and the cycle carries on in another time or place to have another shadow rise out of the darkness to retain the absurd.

The Marxist is a shadow, the fascist is a shadow, the Nazi is a shadow, the factory owner is a shadow, the factory workers are the penumbra conforming to the umbra and cause it to be so dark. With so much light casted by electric powered lamps and diesel powered factories, we are able to mimic the stars above with our twinkling cities below. But, this technology has brought us chaos on earth, for Nuit, the Thelema goddess of infinite space, has been artificially birthed by engineers. This copy, this monstrosity, brings us the darkness from within, creates a suitable environment for our shadows, and if the individual falls into the void, they are almost inevitably possessed by their shadow.

The individual doesn’t fear the lack of choice in life. The fear comes from the unknown of the exact opposite. There’s so many choices of what a person could do with their life, the concept of free will cripples us into doing nothing with it. Following others is done out of safety, out of utter fear, because it’s either following toward a collective fate or choosing your own path towards a mysterious fog. When a noir character falls for a femme fatale and enters the criminal underworld, he might as well be entering hell itself through the sin of lust he’s enslaved himself to. 

If he removes the chains, he’s still in hell. If it’s not terrible enough to be hell, he might as well be in purgatory, still locked out of paradise. He chose sin, he chose to be a slave, he chose to close his eyes and walk straight into the maw of Hell, to face the devil himself and eagerly shake hands with him. All in the name of freedom. All in the name of Satan.

These are things that reduce humans to primitive animals. The shadow is the part of us that remained because we had to do whatever it took to survive in the wilds of prehistory. Every noir character might as well be a caveman with a gun, dragging women by the hair to have their way with them, and killing anyone who tries to stop them. It sounds exciting, it reminds you that you’re alive, but… at what cost? Your humanity is gone and you’re another cog in another machine, only able to suffer through your new obedience to Satan. 

At least the conformist forgot they were alive while they move in mechanical motion with the machine they tend to, but those possessed by their shadow are now just as mechanical with the benefit of being driven insane. They wish they could close their eyes, boy howdy do they wish they can close their accursed eyes. All they can do now is look back at the conformist and wish they didn’t take that dreadful step off the path as the void swallows them whole. I know this is hard to understand for a lot of people, I know it’s very symbolic, and I know it sounds religious. But it’s not telling anyone to follow a particular path, it’s quite the contrary.

You follow your own path, you have the free will to do it, but the shadow is there waiting for you in the fog and you can’t destroy it. All you can do is accept it’s there and assimilate with it. Jung has a crazy term that he used called Enantiodromia, which means “running in opposite ways”. As we become better, our shadow becomes worse, to counter us and to retain equilibrium. As Heraclitus said “cold things warm, warm things cool, wet things dry and parched things get wet.” The inner and outer are always at conflict, which is also why Heraclitus said “war is father of all, king of all.”

Whether or not you agree with something like Islam, that religion has the perfect word for such a thing: Jihad. It means struggle, but it also relates to war, which is the father of all, the king of all. Jihad never ends. We are always in a struggle, we are always suffering, we are always in conflict with the world. When we want to do one thing, the world pushes us towards another. You can never step in the same river twice, for the flow of the world creates a constant change and a constant struggle.

The individual understands this struggle, accepts it, and refrains from becoming possessed by their shadow. They are able to create a new path through the fog, and therefore, a new light, but it’s for them and them alone. They walk through the light, their shadow follows, but the light keeps the shadow from possessing the individual. The ego, the part of us that please our drive in a realistic way that obeys the outside world, are united in a precarious bond, much like yin and yang. Ever swirling, ever working off of each other, but never destroying the other.

This individualism, this walk through the fog, creates a crisis within the newly born individual. An existential crisis, if you will. But despite being in crisis, the individual can still see things in an idealistic way, and this is thanks to what I would like to call existential idealism. 

Existential Idealism

Imagine a world where there is no meaning. Kind of easy these days, since we are already past the diesel era, but this was a very new thing when the 1900s began. During the 1800s, thanks to the romantics, we believed we had a meaning in life even if we didn’t think God put it there for us. In the East, we’ve always had a belief where our role in society was our purpose, and few people questioned that. But Buddhism was starting to gain a notoriety among western philosophers, despite it being a bit older than Plato.

A lot of German philosophers were reading up about things like dukka, enlightenment, nirvana, anatta, the list goes on. A lot of these things countered what the Christians believed in, because most Christians, if not all, believed in a soul, believed in a heaven being the end goal, and believed in a form of original sin. Then Buddhism comes along and is like “those morals are cute, but the goal is to not care about entering heaven or hell.” This heavily confuses so many people, even to this day, that Buddhists like me are considered Christian, even though our core beliefs are complete counters to Christianity.

Christianity tends to give us the idea that being a human is our role, while the reincarnation of Buddhism makes it so that if we die, we come back as something else, meaning a death is more like a transfer. If we enter heaven, our expected goal would be to conform to a heavenly role. If we become a god, well then, we’re going to be stuck controlling some aspect of this absurd world, wouldn’t we. Our goal would be to ignore humans, with their petty little desires, and make the world absurd for them. I don’t know about you, but that sounds pretty brutal.

This type of freedom and choice causes the individual to question existence itself. “Why, oh why, am I even here? What is the meaning of my life?” The lack of an answer, combined with the newfound responsibility of deciding their own path causes what is known as existential dread or angst. This is a moment in pretty much anyone’s life where they have to question their actual purpose, identity, and meaning. After this existential crisis, we have two choices: live in depression from lack of meaning or create our own meaning for ourselves. 

Are we that powerful where we can conjure up a meaning from where the world gave us none?

Idealism and existentialism don’t really play nicely with each other. You’d have to expect the perfect forms of the world under idealism to cast the individual with a meaning at least. If there is a god somewhere controlling things, it seems rather cruel for such a god to put us in a world where we don’t matter to it and we have no meaning. But is that actually cruel or unfair when we are given free will? This is where we assume things contradict but they make more sense than if they weren’t together.

Idealism and existentialism go together like yin and yang, as long as we have free will in the mix to glue them together. 

I know I’ve said absurd many times, but I think here is a perfect place to really explain what I mean by absurd. We, as humans, seek meaning, because meaning is what lets our little feet continue to pitter patter towards a goal. But the world around us gives no meaning. In fact, it looks like the world rejects us in the way it tries to kill us with every little thing going on. Followers of the crowd, or, more accurately(as Nietzsche puts it) the herd, are the most inauthentic bunch who do as they are told because they feel safe within the collective. 

But their newfound meaning is to be part of the machine, to be sacrificed to Moloch, and then by the end of the day, they realize the happy chemicals from fitting in didn’t mean anything. It’s no different than being the popular kid in high school, then barely a year after leaving it you become a nobody because the herd is gone. Your meaning is gone. Your purpose died before you did. You are reduced to nothing because you are nothing.

All those hours, all of those emotions, all of that effort: gone.

Existentialism engage.

But if there are forms, there must be a form of a human right? The New Soviet Man? The super buff and sexy Italian fascist man? The beautiful blonde hair blue eyed Aryan? According to the collectives trying to destroy the world: sure, why not. According to the individual or what a human really is: hell no.

The human, under idealism, has their perfect form in their thoughts, not their body. Idealism is about the mind, not the body. Through free will, through our existential crisis, through understanding that the establishment has lied to us and the world has rejected us, we are then able to enter the path towards our perfect form. That perfect form is the individual and this individual brings in their own meaning. Their search, their trial and error, their efforts to resist joining the herd and destroying the world with the collective, this is what causes them to at least be on the right path.

The perfect form might as well be nirvana. The perfect form might as well be to live within your own dreams as an abstract entity, but the goal is not the destination. It’s the journey. This journey is performed through diesel power, whether it's to engage with the occult or to engage with technology based on modernity. The individual destroys that which will harm the world, but also embraces and respects those which should not be disturbed or those pesky pandora boxes that should not be opened.

Absurdism, popularized by Albert Camus, claims that life is no different than The Myth of Sisyphus, a Greek myth where Sisyphus is punished by Zeus to roll a boulder up a hill for all eternity after cheating death twice. That and because he killed anyone who came to his palace, which pissed Zeus off because it was Greek custom to treat your guests with kindness in case they were a Greek god in disguise. And so, Sisyphus was punished with eternal frustration and labor as he pushes this stupid boulder up a hill and then watches it roll back down. There is another tormented soul in Hades called Tantalus, who either tried to eat his own child during a feast or stole a golden dog from Hephaestus. I like to think that he did both, because his punishment has him trapped in a pool of water with a fruit branch hanging over him and a threatening stone dangling above him as well, where he is eternally hungry and thirsty but can’t drink nor eat.

Both of these punishments are brutal and both of these seem to be considered journeys where the goal is never met. The entire time they are being tortured and tormented. People like Camus believed this was practically life itself and all of us were in no different situations than these two figures. We can consider rolling a boulder up a hill the same as giving birth to a child just to have them die. We could also consider a person striving to become something big or even wishing for it and they get nothing out of life.

Even if we could somehow live forever, there will always be this repetition and suffering in our lives that keeps us trapped in this never ending punishment. 

But to the absurdist, the act of enjoying this punishment is the goal. The goal is the journey, not the destination. The enjoyment is the struggle, not the absolution. This existential idealism also relates to the aesthetics of dieselpunk as the anti-hero determines their suffering as part of the human goal. Noir, specifically, revolves around a horrible circumstance or even a horrible world causing this confused protagonist to endure suffering beyond their wildest dreams. 

Usually, this journey is brought to them by some form of temptation, whether it’s them thinking they’re doing the right thing, they meet a woman who leads them to trouble, or they try their hand at the criminal underworld. As they settle into this “new world” the scenery changes to match with how they feel internally. The subjective inner feeling of the protagonist ends up manipulating the outside world because the objective reality of it all doesn’t matter. The world is absurd and so absurdity ensues. This is why noir has high contrast between light and shadow, the world grows dark, it starts raining, the evil women get more beautiful and happiness seems to vanish entirely.

Their old life is dead, this new world is born, and this new world is from their idealistic perspective that has been influenced by their existential dread.

Some of you might be thinking “Where does humanism come in among all of this cynicism and sorrow?” The beauty of dieselpunk is that humanism comes in the form of a hatred of the world. A hatred of the establishment that’s caused turmoil for the protagonist. Through this pure hatred is birthed this newfound love and comfort in what we consider as the “personal path”. The individual creates their own existential meaning and this suffering reminds them they are alive. This constant reminder of life, goals, feelings, whether it’s positive or negative, this is what being human is all about.

This struggle is enough to fill a man’s heart. It is enough to cast a light within the infinite darkness, for it causes the individual to live with their eyes open instead of closed. Sure, the encounter with a cosmic deity will cause you to become insane, but that’s a limit the human is willing to admit and a pandora’s box you understand should not be opened. The knowledge gained through the occult is just as valuable, if not more, than the knowledge gained about technological advances.

Most of all, the main thing that separates the human from the infinite absurdity of the world is the fact that the human is able to choose to have faith. But, having faith comes at a cost, which not many wish to pay. Sure, you can pick your own meaning, but to do this means you must reject objectivity. Is that really humanist or even a valid way of looking at the world? To the dieselpunk, of course. To explain it, we’re going to talk about a Danish man with a funny name: Soren Kierkegaard.

Kierkegaardism

Now, as much as I want to refrain from making the claim that dieselpunk revolves around christian values, I am forced to say that dieselpunk is highly influenced by Christianity in general. It’s not just Christian motifs or symbols in stuff like Raiders of the Lost Ark. No, Christianity is a main part of dieselpunk because of Soren Kierkegaard, and without him, we wouldn’t have any of the precursors of dieselpunk. Much like the German idealists who were related to the romantics of the 1800s, Kierkegaard followed idealism, despite the fact that he critiqued German idealism to no end. In an almost poetically justified way, he fell straight into the absurdity and paradox that he wrote about to practically prove his own points.

In his writings, mostly done with fake names, he wrote of something called inwardness. This was a word he used to speak about what we use to separate ourselves from the outside world, or what he considered was outwardness. Inwardness was subjectivity, while outwardness was objectivity. A person interacts with the world and obeys it by obeying objectivity. You cannot change the world but the world can get you to obey, join the collective, get sacrificed to Moloch, become part of the machine.

The objective, absurd, outrageous machine.

For inwardness to exist, we must have a firm rejection of fatalism. There is nothing like a prophecy or a fate when it comes to something like existentialism, because there is nothing that is predetermined or controlled in such a chaotic world. The order doesn’t come from outwardness or objectivity, the order comes from within and from a faith that this order even exists in the first place. This is why something like a highly ordered government like a fascist regime results in pure chaos as a dystopia and what might as well be an apocalypse. The herd follows this chaos, follows this pseudo-order, and leads itself straight to the mouth of Moloch.

Existentialists like Kierkegaard viewed this chaos as something to reject, this outwardness was a corruption and a limitation. Existentialists don’t define humans as primarily rational, meaning the rational choice theory is incorrect to them. The idea that everyone is a rational actor determining things for their own benefit is really a post hoc rationalization of something irrational, which creates a paradox. Existentialists reject positivism and they reject rationalism. Where positivism would claim that metaphysics and theism is invalid due to the inability to scientifically prove them through observation, the Kierkegarrdian existentialist would embrace the metaphysical and theism, but only if they chose to live the ethical or religious life.

To Kierkegaard, there are three stages of life: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. Now, before I start to explain these three, I want you to hammer into your head that this is where Kierkegaard and Kant disagree heavily, they are the exact opposite on this specific topic, and this is where dieselpunk completely contradicts steampunk. And when I say completely contradicts, I mean it 100% is nothing like steampunk and is the exact opposite in every single way possible for this specific subject alone. This is the very spot where so many people mess up, it’s exactly why it’s so hard to pin down what dieselpunk is. This is the part where romanticism and existentialism look like they are agreeing to an outsider, but they are actually saying the exact opposite.

The aesthetic life, according to Kierkegaard, is the life of avoiding boredom. He understood that boredom is so terrible that people would rather face death than face boredom. Every terrible regime that took over Europe might as well have been a result of people being bored and wanted to do something. This is because boredom causes the victim of it to move, not out of desire, but out of pure repulsion of boredom. Boredom is a void and we wish to run away from this void to enter the aesthetic life.

This aesthetic life is full of occupying one’s self with hedonistic luxuries or what could be considered as the “hedonistic treadmill” of consumerism. Keep on trying to fill that void with preoccupation and see where it leads you. Well, to Kierkegaard, this leads the aesthetic person to a meaningless life, a view that contradicts what Kant believed the aesthetic life would bring. Kant thought that a person being bored should keep their idle hands occupied with some kind of work or play. Kierkegaard thought that idle hands should understand that being idle is a choice and this idle state is actually an ethical one.

The ethical stage is where the individual understands their place in the world, that meaning was not given to them, and their only double edged gift was the ability of free will. They have the choice, they have the freedom, so they must choose wisely. This is where the individual is created, the separation from the herd forms, and this individual ends up embracing their own subjective inwardness. The difference between aesthetic and ethical is the same as the difference between exciting orgies and a happily married life. Sure, it can be considered repetitive and boring to be married, but it does a service to society and it causes the person to reflect upon their actions and the good will of others before they act.

Rules are established, subjectively, and the individual could start to live with boredom instead of run away from it. The running is futile, the boredom will catch up eventually, but enjoying boredom is a step in the right direction. Although more beneficial to becoming a full self, this stage actually causes anxiety in the individual and causes them to follow a sort of collectivist ruling. Sure, the person could start to find morals or meaning, but it usually gets turned into their purpose becoming that of a cog in the machine. The identity needs to be authentic to be a true self, so the identity being that of social role is not quite an end to the goal.

This is where the third stage comes in, the religious stage. To not only believe in God, aka the absolute good or “the Idea”, but to also understand that they should be happy in suffering because suffering is inherent to the religious experience. The paradox of faith is that to have eternal happiness, the subjective individual is able to understand the meaning of suffering. In the process of seeking out a subjective truth, a personal relationship with God, the individual then encounters their objective uncertainty. The absurd is revealed and the paradox is embraced.

To explain it in a way that makes sense, Kierkegaard uses the example of Abraham and his son Issac. In the bible, Abraham is about 100 years old and still doesn’t have a child. God comes into the picture and gives him a child. Abraham loves the boy, names him Issac, and then later on God comes back and says “sacrifice the child for me by killing him”. This is a total “WFT” moment in the bible, where God has got to be doing a horrible prank.

But, what happens is that, without questioning God’s word or anything, Abraham obeys, and God stops him before Issac is killed and he goes “Now I know you fear me” and then has Abraham replace Issac with a ram and has that sacrificed instead.

Someone who doesn’t already believe in God will see this as a clear reason to hate God. Oh, that bloody bastard, all he does is make the world so terrible, he might as well not exist. The rational person wouldn’t even get to the part where they listen to God in the first place. The rational person would question if that’s really God to begin with and try to sleep on it, only to later go “you know, that might not have been God, I saw no proof.”

As if God should be carrying around a driver’s license or have a facebook page, am I right?

What Abraham did was out of pure faith, knowing deep inside that God told him to do something with the best intention, rather than something sinister. Kierkegaard considered this figure in the bible to be the embodiment of the ultimate religious stage. 

Was his decision ethical? No.

Was his decision aesthetic? No.

This type of stage in Abraham’s life was purely religious. His action was entirely based on the faith that his child would still live despite him actively going in there to kill the child. This entire decision making process is what Kierkegaard called a qualitative leap or what is more commonly known as a “leap of faith”. This is an action that must be done beyond reason. For anyone who’s seen Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, you already know what I’m going to reference here. 

There’s a scene where Indy is committing trials related to Christianity and the second trial involves a leap of faith, to step forward into a massive chasm. When he does, he steps on what is an invisible bridge that is camouflaged with the rocky wall in front of him. All reason is telling him that he will fall to his death, but the leap of faith forward grants him, not only his life, but a path towards the holy grail. This is the positive side of the leap.

A leap of sin is also possible, which was expressed in the bible through Adam and Eve, where Adam commited a leap of sin by trusting Eve. So, we aren’t simply ignoring rationalism to be faithful, we are also ignoring rationalism to be sinful, because these two lifestyles are the opposite sides of the same coin. This is kind of why Kierkegaard considers the lifestyle choice as binary, you are either faithful or a sinner, never both. But faith alone is not quite the goal here. What we want to have is complete faith to become a full individual, and to do that, we must become a Knight of Faith.

A religious stage person can always still commit ethical acts, which is normal. Some kind of social norm is expected from the ethical person who is also religious. Even aesthetic acts can be done if a person forgets here and there, which can come with something like raising a child or living a married life. But the Knight of Faith is one who not only fully rejects the aesthetic stage, but also rejects the ethical stage. According to Kierkegaard, only two people are at this Knight of Faith status: Abraham and the Virgin Mary.

Abraham rejected all rationality and accepted to kill his child over a paradox that his child would still live, all because God said so. The Virgin Mary agreed to become the mother of Jesus and, through a paradox, gives birth to the child she never physically conceived because God put the baby in her. Jesus himself was a Knight of Faith, because he chose to bear the burden of the cross out of faith that God would bring him a better outcome than how it rationally on the surface. All of these biblical figures followed the same stage in life, the same paradox, the same acceptance of suffering, and the same subjective truth. Objective reality around them be damned.

There are other kinds of “knights” in the Kierkegaard mythos: the knight of infinite resignation and then the aesthetic “slave”. The aesthetic slave kind of speaks for itself, it’s where they obey reality and just follow the herd and their vices. The knight of infinite resignation is one who follows social norms with an ethical life, but is trapped in a sense of unfulfillment and they are also lacking the distractions of aesthetics to numb the pain of existence at the same time. He uses a great example of a commoner falling in love with a princess to make it more clear. The slave would admit that they would not get the princess in this world or this time, while the knight of infinite resignation is not sure other than they will not have such a love in this life and in this time.

The Knight of Faith, however, fully feels that they would have such a love in this life and in this time, despite the entire world saying “no”.

This Knight of Faith mentality is a massive part of Dieselpunk that nobody talks about, but I understand why because it’s so convoluted with how philosophers speak. Also, I understand that it’s hard to get into the philosophy of art when it is so obscure, but there are tons of examples of this blind leap of faith people make in noir movies alone. One of my favorite examples of a Knight of Faith in noir movies is the character of Christopher in the 1945 film Scarlet Street. Fun fact: this movie was directed by the same guy who directed Metropolis, Fritz Lang. So if you haven’t noticed the pattern that Fritz is one of the main precursor contributors of dieselpunk, you might want to get your brain checked for worms.

In the movie, we have an old crusty man called Christohper, who has an old battle ax of a wife harassing him all day and tells him how useless he is. Christopher sees a beautiful woman and desires her, wishing he could have a woman so beautiful because his wife is like a Sasquash wearing an apron. This is the aesthetic stage of his life, desiring an aesthetic life, something that pleases him. Later on, he sees a beautiful woman being beaten and he saves her, leading him up to the ethical stage, doing something that pleases the social norm. At this point, he’s enjoying the aesthetic and ethical at the same time.

The problem is that this is where his life goes downhill and we find out that the dude beating up the woman is her boyfriend and the two team up to fool Christopher, who they think is a rich dummy because he mentions his art. So he starts flipping between aesthetic and ethical, believing he’s doing something good while also doing things that are wrong, like stealing to fund an apartment to use as an art studio, but is actually being used for shady underworld deals for the boyfriend. This movie is heart wrenching as you watch Christopher get bamboozled over and over again. He leaves his wife, his job, his entire being to be with this woman, and when he expresses his love for her in his religious stage, she laughs the most evil laugh possible and calls him all sorts of ugly names. Christopher snaps and he freaking stabs her with an ice pick out of pure wrath against her and the very world he lives in.

All of this suffering builds up into one man, until he finally snaps and kills the one thing he gave up his whole life for. But the movie doesn’t end there, because here is where we enter the religious stage. The entire time Christopher is being tricked, the woman and her boyfriend are committing crimes left and right. They set the entire situation up to have it appear as if the boyfriend killed her, not Christopher. So when the trial begins, everything points to the boyfriend as the murderer and Christopher gets away scott free.

But he’s not really free from the murder, because even though the objective reality has him as the murderer, the subjective inwardness had zero punishment put upon him from the justice system. His religious stage fully begins here as he has blind faith that he will be punished somehow as the voices of the woman and her boyfriend echo in his mind and he’s reduced to a homeless wreck. Even though what he did was wrong, he has faith that God will set it right, allowing his punishment to be set forth.

It’s an amazing existential crisis and it’s an amazing film that shows all three stages being played out by the same person. Detour, another noir film, has a similar set up to this. I mean, the list can go on and on with great examples of this being played out, but I think the point is clear. We have a protagonist who commits a leap, usually into sin, but then later on has to make a leap of faith in order to set things right again and gain any meaning in their life. In Scarlet Street, Christopher’s art gets sold under the woman’s name and it becomes this super famous and well renowned art after the trial, so his life gets reduced to shambles but his soul lives on in this art that inspires all who sees it. Whether you want to consider this a spiritual or humanist position, what you have to realize is that it’s humanist because it’s spiritual because it’s the person reaching the fully religious stage as a Knight of Faith.

The faith Christopher had, in this absurd world of torment, is what gave him the ability to paint something that lives on after his life is gone. He not only got what he wanted, but he got more than what he wanted. It wasn’t the woman in the aesthetic flesh that he was able to have as his, it was the woman he painted as her portrait that he was able to have forever as part of his soul. And, amazingly, following the paradox, this aesthetically pleasing portrait to others is what is what causes his religious stage. He found his meaning, as an artist, all because he gave into the leap of faith.

Now, it isn’t really expected to be as deep as this in all dieselpunk stories. But even a game like Return to Castle Wolfenstein allows a moment for this existential crisis to be averted through having the main character find their meaning through their journey, and he gains this meaning by using diesel technology to battle against the oppressive authoritarian regime that threatens his individuality. In the end of that game, he defeats all odds, through the absurdity of fighting the zombified first king of Germany, and finds his meaning in killing nazis and occult threats to the world. This meaning being found is always on a subjective individual basis, and when it comes to something like a pulp hero or a faithful soldier of virtue, their meaning is found in defeating evil one step at a time. This endless journey while honing in on their meaning in life is expressed amazingly well in how many of these are written in a serial form or with an open ending.

The job’s never done, the evil will always exist, but the individual has faith in the paradox of defeating the infinite evil because that is where they find their meaning.

Summery

Boy oh boy, isn’t this such a happy-go-lucky kind of genre? But, sarcasm aside, the entire genre of dieselpunk seems to revolve around a horrible idealist world that rejects the human, and so the human must declare their own meaning by relying on their own subjective approach towards assimilating with their shadow and reaching a relationship with God. Now, as much as some people would hate to have Christian themes or values in their work, for whatever reason, you can always try to get away with something else. The problem is that people will notice and it won’t be dieselpunk. You are always more than welcome to market your story as whatever you like, nobody will stop you, but the audience will detect such a difference and it won’t really hit the mark.

Naturally, we would expect something like sci-fi to have some kind of technology present, so it would be like saying you’d want a sci-fi story with no tech if you demanded a dieselpunk story with no Christian existentialism. Maybe you can go with another kind of existentialism, maybe you can do something Sartre was talking about if you want to go that route, but I’m having a hard time seeing how it would fit. But, like every other time I have talked about a punk genre, I highly implore everyone to try their best to fit within the genre instead of trying to redefine the genre. I say this as someone who constantly sees people try to deconstruct for the sake of being postmodernist, they hope to be original, and then they end up being unoriginal and don’t even have a genre to attach themselves to.

I know we’ve been talking a lot about paradoxes, but your writing efforts shouldn’t be trying to force a paradox for the sake of being special. If you want to do dada, knock yourself out, but leave the dieselpunks out of it, or have a satire of dada in your work for some aesthetics. Also, I understand a lot of people will get confused with the whole New Soviet Man and the master race type of talk, so I will explain these a bit more here. Like the crazy absurd objective world, the dieselpunk is rejecting all forms of authoritarian collectivist “super structures”. Some people might want to know if socialism or communism could be something the hero would go for.

I’ll tell you this: if the ideology is able to have the protagonist both be a humanist and an individual: knock yourself out. Go right ahead, the world’s your oyster at that point. But if the ideology does NOT allow your protagonist to be a humanist or an individual… it’s not diesel and it’s not punk so it’s not dieselpunk. A punk is an individual, with a do-it-yourself ethic, who rejects corporations, fascism, and pretty much any form of authoritarianism or collectivism. My problem is that it’s really hard for anyone to justify socialism or communism being individualist when they are so collectivist.

I’m more than happy to have someone say “hey, you’re wrong, because…” and then they give me some ideology with a funny name that is individualist or libertarian. Okay, whatever, go ahead, try that, and come back to me to let me know if it worked. I understand that there’s a difference between what the Soviets had and whatever random anarcho-communist “return to monkey” idea some people have. Okay, I get it. I don’t need to read through a bunch of complaints over something I never said, so for anyone already typing up their hate mail over this subject, you can stick it where the sun don’t shine, because I already told you what the real enemy is to the dieselpunk.

The absurd objectivity, the authoritarian regimes related to fascism and marxism, the machine aka Moloch, and their jungian shadow. But only the shadow is to be assimilated with, the absurd objectivity is simply rejected(and respected) instead of destroyed, the machine is what’s to be avoided, and the regimes are the main things that take all of the dieselpunk’s beatings. Romanticism is also firmly rejected, it’s the main thing that separates steampunk from dieselpunk. If I didn’t already make that clear enough, the main philosophy of steampunk completely conflicts with dieselpunk when it comes to the philosophical part of things. You can have steampunk in the early 1900s and you can have dieselpunk in the 1800s.

I think this is what confuses a lot of people. The time period and the tech era are not the same thing. It’s like if I said you can have the internet in the 1800s, or a laser gun in prehistoric time. That’s alt history for ya. All that’s being said is that a tech level can be introduced in a different year than what happened in reality, and that’s something more people should play with. I mean, there’s all sorts of theories where incredibly high tech civilizations existed in a time period before humans came along and so we might as well have that toga utopia before some Atlantis style catastrophe happened and destroyed it all, with humans starting civilization over again from scratch.

And no, sadly, Atlantis: The Lost Empire is not dieselpunk. But it is a perfect example of a steampunk story set in the early 1900s. The way the world functions in that movie is Kantian, goes with romanticism, and it’s based on Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas. This is one of those times where someone will go “no, it’s dieselpunk, look at the guns and the airships”. This is where I would go “guns and airships are not elements, they are tropes. 

Atlantis is steampunk, it’s just not a very good example of what steampunk is all about, SAME AS how Star Wars is dieselpunk but not a very good example of what it’s all about.”

Dieselpunk has 4 major elements:

1. Diesel Technology
2. Individualism
3. Existential Idealism
4. Kerkegaardism

Dieselpunk also has 6 minor elements:

1. Occultism 
2. Noir(or tech noir if it’s more sci-fi oriented)
3. Existentialism 
4. Jungian psychology
5. Humanism
6. Knights of Faith

This is what makes dieselpunk complete. One of the big ones that people tend to forget is the Jungian psychology, which I only touched a little bit in this story. Mostly because the Jungian psychology comes from the influence of Joseph Cambell’s book Hero With A Thousand Faces, which came out after the diesel era. This means the book inspired the proto-dieselpunks rather than the works that the proto-dieselpunks were basing their works on. However, Jung himself was an influence on those works, so it still counts, just in a way that’s almost indirect.

All in all, it’s better if you include these elements than ignore them or try to reverse them, because then your audience will notice this tampering and they won’t be happy campers about it.

Some people might be able to switch noir with weird fiction and that’s fine, but it’s probably better if you add weird fiction to your noir instead of switching them out. I say this because if you try to go for weird fiction alone in this type of setting, you’re more likely going to be writing a lovecraftian or eldritch horror story instead of something that’s dieselpunk. Again, it’s better if you try to lean closer to the core of it instead of diverge away from it. I almost want to say dieselpunk is the most fragile of the punk genres because of how easy it is to ruin its aesthetic with a tiny change that would seem mundane. Treat it like a quiche, because this thing will go flat the second you mishandle it.

When in doubt, give your protagonist an existential crisis and watch a Fritz Lang film.

Tropes and Plots

This is my favorite part, because this is where I can stop talking so much about the horrors of a dieselpunk world and instead talk about what makes such a world aesthetically pleasing to the viewer. If I haven’t said this already, I fucking love the aesthetics of dieselpunk. However, so many people get dieselpunk mixed with decopunk, simply because decopunk shares a lot of visual styles with many dieselpunk stories. For example, the first 3 Indiana Jones films are, to an extent, decopunk and dieselpunk at the same time. There’s art deco in a lot of places, there’s that beautiful Nazi aesthetic from the villains, and they have scenes in cities and military bases that have art deco styles. 

But then there’s something like Bioshock which shares the art deco style and nothing else, which is why Bioshock is not dieselpunk but is rather biopunk and decopunk. I know these are hard to tell the difference between because they both start with the letter “d”, so I understand if anyone is having their brain melt from this nuance. The best way to explain it is that decopunk is an aesthetic(meaning an art direction) while dieselpunk is a tech level and story philosophy, where the dieselpunk part actually affects what the story is all about. Something like decopunk is no different than oceanpunk or desertpunk or… I don’t know, cottagecore. As you can see, it’s just a way to talk about the setting rather than the story itself.

This is not saying decopunk isn’t related, I’m simply saying they are two different things. Then again, at the same time, I have to say that the Ottensian and Piecraftian versions are just decopunk vs dieselpunk. Max Payne is a great counter to them where it is in an apocalypse, but it’s not an obvious one, because a lot of it is symbolic through a ragnarok theme and it’s not where you can visibly see the apocalypse in the objective reality. What I mean is that some people would call it one or the other, while in reality it’s both, because all it did was combine decopunk with dieselpunk, which is probably why people like it a bit more than if it didn’t. I’m not saying every dieselpunk story will be stronger with a decopunk setting, but I am saying a lot of tropes mix well and work off of each other with the two types of punks.

Speaking of, let’s get to some much needed tropes.

Absurdity: The world doesn’t make sense, but it’s ours and we’re here to stay in it. Dinosaurs are found on islands or in the middle of the Earth. Nazis make bases in the tundras of Antartica. The very shadows are controlled by the emotional state of one person. It's absurd and it's ours, but that doesn't mean we have to accept it when we have free will and the religious stage of existence to work towards.

Two fisted tales: any time you think of two fists being held up, always think of that Indiana Jones "thwak!" sound when he punches a Nazi. Vigilantes, hitmen, adventurous archeologists, aviators, and Mecha crews. Everyone has to get their hands dirty, and boy do they get dirty. This is where the darkness of pulp really shines and leaves a shiner!

A Tommy Disintegrator Gun: There's nothing like seeing a old timey gangster holding a tommy gun with a big drum magazine who breaks down the door and fills the room with lead. Same goes for a US soldier doing the same thing, but during an act of war. At home, overseas, or even on another planet, technology has advanced to where rapid fire and disintegration is the new musket line. The one man army is no longer about kung fu moves, but they are even more deadly if they have both.

Diesel vehicles: the airplane is new, but that doesn't mean it has to be terrible. Move over cavalry, tanks now rule the land. Technology is so good that rockets can send anyone to another planet or have a space station be made that can use the sun as a solar beam(and yes this is actually a reference to the Nazi plans to make a solar gun). That Antarctica base isn't half bad in the winter when there is plenty of kerosene to heat up the joint. Also, don't forget, everyone in the big city has a car now, just don't be surprised if all of them are black.

The Mad Scientist: Technology keeps getting more advanced and we are not able to handle it. Crazy hair mixed with a lab coat always means something bad is going to happen. According to them, they aren’t crazy, it’s the world that’s gone mad( and they’re not wrong). A lost love and maniacal laughter is a must. Whatever their field of expertise is, they always find a way to turn something into a super weapon that will destroy the world or at least make the anti-hero try to stop them from ruining their peaceful smoke break. Extra points for wacky hair.

Maschinenmensch: whether it's a humanoid robot or a panzerhund, you're going to see a lot more manufactured creatures walking around. They're not much different from the common collectivist, probably better since their positronic brain fits in well with the objective absurdity. It's not that they are better at being human or even have free will, they are simply better to feed to the machine because they are the machine.

The Tentacle: magic is a bit more than pulling a rabbit out of your hat. It’s more like being pulled into the depths of the ocean and being consumed by pure chaos. Not only does the world not mean much in the scheme of things, but the things that control the chaotic existence around us look more like a melted octopus than anything. Even colors can become sapient. Bone structures are for the pathetic humans trying to bring subjective order into the world and those can easily be crushed.

Paranormal Division: Not only has technology advanced dramatically, so has research into ancient magic. As governments become more authoritarian, their desperation for global takeover has brought them to develop military branches that are sent to unearth the world’s darkest secrets. It doesn’t even have to be part of the government, it can even be your local police force or a neighbor with too much spare time and paranoia.

The Three Reichs: Nazis may have been the biggest offenders of the diesel era, but they were not alone. Soviets, fascists, even corporate oil barons are all trying to take over everything they can. If the world isn’t able to please them, they might as well try to make everyone else suffer for one reason or another. Race, nation, resource, money, species, whatever their idea of superiority is, they soon find out that they aren’t as high up on the food chain as they thought they were. Extra points for space nazis.

Exploitation: not only are the workers being exploited, but so are their troubles and pretty much anything considered taboo for society. Lurid content ahoy! This isn’t something for the faint of heart. There’s a lot of violence, drug abuse, sexual content, torture, and nazis because that’s what brings in the slimeballs. Even though these are like b-movies or part of the grindhouse, they are exactly where they belong.

Vive la resistance: just because totalitarian governments have the power to take over the world doesn’t mean we’re going to go down without a fight. Occupied countries always have a resistance group ready to sabotage the shit out of their occupiers. This also goes for any vigilant trying to save their city from a crime boss taking over. Just because these evil people think they are unstoppable doesn’t mean there’s a slightly less evil anti-hero out there ready to put their feet in a wood chipper because the wrong family was killed.

Chemical Monstrosities: Not only do you have to worry about chemical warfare turning your lungs into soup, you also have to worry about chemicals being poured onto you by accident and turning you into a monster. Before there was radiation as a mutagen, there were chemicals, especially ones with an “x” in the name. If you’re lucky, they can give you superpowers. But if you’re unlucky, or a military experiment, you’ll become a bloodthirsty beast no different than a werewolf during a full moon. Extra points if the chemical is actually the presence of a cosmic god.

Tropes for dieselpunk should instantly make you feel something that’s not steampunk. In fact, you should see that it’s the exact opposite of steampunk in nearly every way, other than the modernist, individualist, and idealist thing. While steampunk has this love for nature that brings out the individual, dieselpunk has a respectful rejection of nature with the individual being brought out as the identity and self is created through an assimilation with the shadow. The romanticism of steampunk is completely countered, with pretty much the only remnant of romanticism left being some kind of gothic scenery that is due to the Germanic origins of German expressionism. All we can really say is that dieselpunk is its own monster, while sort of sharing the noir aspect with cyberpunk, which is likely where a lot of the appeal comes from. 

Rather than being “high tech, low life” we can say dieselpunk is “orderly tech, chaotic life”. The tech of the world is meant to bring some kind of order and yet the world rejects it with its own infinite chaos. This is where the dieselpunk comes in with their respected but self actualized tech which relates more with their identity than their will to power. Whether it’s the whip and revolver of Indiana Jones or the lightsaber of Luke Skywalker, the dieselpunk sticks with their personal appreciation of modernity and takes them with them to the religious stage. Having faith in tech is important to the dieselpunk, especially if they are in a desert wasteland like Mad Max or an urban wasteland like Max Payne. All of these characters are in an existential crisis and they get through it by becoming a Knight of Faith instead of the cyberpunk Ubermensch. 

So what exactly is a plot we could attach to this type of setup?

Two major conflicts with dieselpunk are society and the supernatural. Technology is also an issue, but it’s more where society creates a situation where tech is the problem. There’s always a war going on in one way or another, meaning the battlefield overseas and the streets of the homefront are both in utter chaos. Also, your pulp villains will be no different than your military villains, both using the occult and mad scientists to get what they want. Both aspects of objective reality are going to be messed with, but this is countered by our anti-hero receding into their own subjective truth. It’s less about being moral and instead standing for something they believe gives them meaning during their existential crisis. 

The plots that come from these two major conflicts tend to be reduced to a revenge story or some kind of “save the world” tale as the big bad and their doomsday weapon is to be defeated. The doomsday weapon was just designed or their ancient relic of doom was just recovered. Expect a lot of adventure, melodrama, shooting, and punching. Steampunk has a bit more of a swashbuckling feel to it, with swords being used a lot, but dieselpunk will only use swords if the East side of the world gets involved. That or if some ancient evil is awakened and our anti-hero is out of ammo.

While steampunk doesn’t take itself seriously, dieselpunk is as serious as a heart attack, but the melodrama makes it bearable. The world will be poked fun at, due to the world being absurd, so expect a lot of visual gags from the world, rather than dry wit from the heroes. One important thing to remember though is that the anti-hero will never be more technologically advanced than the enemy. At best they will simply get high powered equipment from the enemy and use it against them, or from some ancient relic that is or might as well be magic.

Speaking of villains, they are to be the ultimate opposite of the anti-hero. They are the shadow, the anti-hero is the self, and this self must find a way to assimilate with the shadow, or defeat the lesser personas along the way. This type of assimilation causes the dieselpunk to enter a repeating issue of having a new evil enter the fight, meaning their shadow gets worse and they are trapped in serials that escalate. But, sooner or later, the anti-hero learns about the ethical stage of life and then slowly crawls their way towards the religious stage as they lose everything they’ve fought for. Even though the evil grows more evil as the lessers are defeated, the anti-hero also gains more dedication and meaning as they lose more of their aesthetic life.

The types of villains are rather obvious, but some great places to start with are: the mob boss, the fascist general/dictator, the mad scientist, the rival relic seeker, a corrupt police official, or even a cosmic god itself if you want to go that route. Just think of anything Soviet or from the Axis Powers and you’re pretty much set, but we also have to be honest and admit it would be cool to have some kind of British or French villain to spice things up a bit. Hell, have something happen in China. Strangely enough, China is more of a cyberpunk or atompunk thing, but the dragon lady and mystical old chinaman tropes were big in pulp stories, so try to find something related to the triads or maybe something involving one of the Sino-Japanese wars.

These were huge parts of world history and NOBODY writes about them.

Nazi Zombies are what people would consider cliche but you could always try to spin it up with something like communist jiangshi. Mao finds a way to revive peasants to fill his army by turning people into mindless vampires that hop around the rice fields. Get creative with it. If you really REALLY don’t want to use the Nazis, just think of anything the Nazis did and put it into another country. Change the motif, keep the plot, bingo bango bongo. Instead of sailing to skull island, you have an Italian exploration group encounter a lost civilization in Africa. Instead of some kind of Egyptian curse, have a drug deal go wrong in an Aztec temple. Instead of having the same generic story about an American taking on the Nazi army, have an Australian crocodile hunter show the Japanese what a real knife looks like. 

Honestly, this isn’t that difficult. Hell, there’s so much about Romania nobody wants to talk about from that time period, why not have some crazy story about a vampire with a dieselpunk twist? And, of course, the absurdity of the world should be complimented by the aesthetics of German expressionism. It’s not really dieselpunk if everything is well lit and bright. The sun kind of ruins the moment. The world is chaotic and the best way to express chaos is through night time with a giant moon in the background because this is how we symbolically represent the emotions of the anti-hero through the world.

If you want to try your own hand at a dieselpunk apocalypse, simply ask yourself these questions:

1. What is aesthetically pleasing to my anti-hero?
2. What does their shadow do to counter them?
3. How can I express chaos through the world?
4. What tech will my anti-hero take with them through their journey towards the religious stage?
5. What meaning will my anti-hero create for themselves after integrating with their shadow?

Those 5 questions are all you need to get yourself started on a dieselpunk story because those 5 answers are going to be your major themes. Anyone can put on a fedora and punch a Nazi because it’s trendy. A true dieselpunk genre writer understands that it takes an existential crisis with a path towards the religious stage to make a real dieselpunk story. Melodrama is crucial for the story, as well as tightly written dialogue. You’re not there to show something that’s realistic, you’re trying to show something that’s expressive and poetic. 

There are some common questions I would like to address before I wrap this up, and I waited until the end to answer them so that you can see that 

Now, there is something I do want to complain about dieselpunk and this is the way people can get lost in vernacular. Strangely, this isn’t really a problem for steampunk, but in dieselpunk it’s the main issue. If I don’t understand what the characters are saying, they are saying nothing to me. I’m not going to sit there and look up old slang or try to decipher made up slang just because you weren’t sure what poetic meant. A little bit of vernacular is fine, especially if you want something to sound funny like in The Three Stooges. But if you have your character speaking in this crazy slang and nobody knows what they’re saying… that’s horrible writing.

Nobody cares about how much research you put into slang or how authentic you want something to sound. This is dieselpunk. You’re already rewriting history. In steampunk, sometimes people change a word to make it sound cute, and that’s fine. But with people doing dieselpunk, I always see this vernacular issue happening and it makes so many things unreadable and insufferable. If you want vernacular, then do it like Max Payne or The Three Stooges. Try to copy something that works, you know it works, and it’s already popular because it works.

I mean, be honest with yourself. You’re not being original by copying something from the past. So there’s no reason to try to be original with your vernacular so that everything is a word salad. Any dieselpunk fan might know what I’m talking about when I say A Fist Full of Nothing is the worst offender in this regard. I swear, I’m not trying to target anyone, and that book is old enough to not really care about such publicity. But if you want to know what I’m talking about, go ahead and check that book out.

Also, for anyone wondering why I haven’t mentioned Warhammer 40k at all until now… it’s because any story with a main character of that world would be called dieselprep. The prep means that the collective is to be adhered to and not the individual. I’m not really familiar with any books or stories where the individual is focused to have a personal journey away from the collective, but I’m always open to recommendations. This isn’t to say they are bad, all this is saying is that they are not punk. You can’t be punk and for the collective at the same time, it doesn’t work that way.

Speaking of being easily mistaken, next time, we’re going to go over a genre that is easily mistaken for dieselpunk because both are related to art deco. However, this one is so far from dieselpunk that it doesn’t even share the same view of existence. We could even say it’s different at the atomic level. That’s right, we’re going to get into atompunk.

Stay tuned...