What is the mouthwash for in Mouthwashing?

This article contains major spoilers for Mouthwashing. TAKE RESPONSIBILITY.

You can find so much mouthwash in the video game Mouthwashing. Blue bottles with white labels, packed into thousands of square cardboard boxes and stacked in the endless shelves of a doomed cargo ship. Enough mouthwash to drown a village.

It's not a game about mouthwash, though, right? Mouthwashing is about the crew of the Pony Express freighter Tulpar, their shortcomings, the crash that kills all of them, a birthday cake, capitalism, expanding foam. Not in that order. It's about making hard decisions in a crisis, taking responsibility for your actions, taking care of the broken people around you. Playing through the game without ever properly engaging with the mouthwash is easy. More important things are going on.

But it's called Mouthwashing. There's mouthwash everywhere. So what does it mean?

In a strictly literal sense, the mouthwash is a product being ferried through space by Pony Express. It holds value for people who wish to buy it, value for the crew who get paid for its delivery, value for the company in generating profit. Dragonbreath X Mouthwash is advertised as a "revolutionary new dental hygiene product" that is designed to "kill bacteria and kill germs without leaving a bad taste". In the present, this is more or less how mouthwash is already advertised, despite the fact that studies indicate mouthwash is, at best, a supplement to actual dental care. The fact that this society has developed space travel, but still touts the same nebulous benefits for a hygiene product, is a familiar capitalistic shell game. Advertising in the 1950s made the same claims about mouthwash products as companies do in the 21st century. As they might do in the 22nd, and so on.

Snake oil for every problem

Mouthwash is an ideal product from the perspective of capital. Relatively cheap to produce, seemingly tangible benefits for advertising purposes, and it's simple enough to convince consumers that they need to keep purchasing it indefinitely. Of course you need to keep buying mouthwash, how else will your disgusting human mouth stay clean? In a sense mouthwash is also a perfect metaphor for capitalism itself: something designed primarily to make money while convincing its user base that it is essential.

And, like the game's representation of capitalism, the wash in Mouthwashing probably doesn't actually work. Examining a bottle in the ship's hold, Anya notes that the sugar content in Dragonbreath X likely offsets any sort of benefits as a disinfectant. The package design and wording reassures the customer their mouth will be cared for, just as Pony Express assures its employees they will be looked after, right up to the point where the company shuts down and fires everyone on board. Both the mouthwash and the company are examples of Mouthwashing presenting profoundly negative situations as entirely normal and controlled. Don't worry about being fired, let's enjoy the party; don't think about the crash, let's get drunk on mouthwash; don't think about the moaning, skinless corpse of our former captain, he's in a different room.

On the same TV where the player watches the Dragonbreath commercial, they can also view a short cartoon about a salesman with a product called ISM. He extols the virtues of the product as an ideal solution for the woes of labour, of life, seemingly switching back and forth between selling to business owners and employees.

"Hurry hurry hurry! Step right up folks!
"Here's the answer to your problems, Dr. Utopia's sensational new discovery:
"ISM.
"ISM will cure any ailment of the body politic.
"It's terrific! It's tremendous!
"Once you swallow the contents of this bottle you'll have the bountiful benefit of higher wages, shorter hours, and security.
"Enormous profits! No strikes! Remember, you're the big boss.
"Government control, no worry about votes! Name your own salary!
"Bigger crops! Lower cost! Why ISM even makes the weather perfect every day."

There's no need for workers to fight with bosses when you have ISM. Why is it called ISM? You decide! Pick the -ism that you need and focus on that, rather than your real problems. Racism, fascism, capitalism, communism, sexism, alcoholism, ableism, neocolonialism, pacifism; the advertising keeps its claims as vague as mouthwash, and as broad. Karl Marx referred to religion as the "opium of the people", in the absence of widespread religious belief in our modern world capitalism creates its own opiates. Just shut up and buy your mouthwash, drink your mouthwash, become a consumer of mouthwash.

In the early 2020s, when the COVID-19 pandemic was in full swing, the President of the United States helped to promote two crackpot theories about medical approaches to the disease. First, that vaccines were dangerous, ineffective and perhaps full of spooky microchips. Second, that COVID-19 could easily be treated by using horse deworming medicine or by injecting bleach. Certain people believed (or presented themselves as believing) these falsehoods not because they wanted to make themselves as safe as possible, but because it suited their ideologies at the time. Following the president and their favourite culture warriors dosed them up with their own personal ISM. The outcome didn't matter, only consuming the ideology.

Everyone buys into this sort of thing to some degree, but for most there are limits to how convincing the façade is under pressure. Mouthwashing slowly reveals the flimsy nature of this kind of fantasy: the crew's jobs turn to dust, their unfortunate temporary home breaks down due to accident and neglect, their personal relationships are revealed to be lies. Despite an infinite supply of their very own ISM, their lives get worse and worse until they die. No matter how much you try to disinfect the mouth of capital, it continues to rot. Whatever you feed it, it wants more.

It's not for your mouth

The practice of rinsing one's mouth out for the purposes of health and hygiene has been around since at least 1000 BCE in some form. It wasn't until the late 19th century, however, that mouthwash became a product, rather than simply a tool. Joseph Lister, a British surgeon and scientist, had demonstrated in 1865 that putting carbolic acid onto surgical dressings reduced the rate of post-surgery infections significantly. In turn, a fellow named Joseph Lawrence used this research to develop an antiseptic which he called "Listerine" in Lister's honour. Lawrence licensed the formula—which was primarily promoted as a germicide and surgical antiseptic—to a pharmacist named Jordan Wheat Lambert, who began to push Listerine to dentists in 1895 as a method of oral care. By 1914, Listerine was the first over-the-counter mouthwash sold in the United States.

It's not a coincidence that the two enduring images of Mouthwashing are a bottle of mouthwash and a mutilated human body. Curly's skinless form is present in many of the game's scenes, from the many scenes where the player is forced to administer painkillers, to the unsettling dream sequences where Jimmy converses with the former captain and enacts varying degrees of disturbing torture on Curly's body.

His pain and suffering are inescapable.

However, despite the discovery that their ship is full of the oral version of medical-grade surgical antiseptic, nobody on the Tulpar ever suggests using mouthwash on Curly. Attempting to disinfect Curly's many exposed wounds isn't brought up at all, even though it would likely increase his chances of survival and ease his intense suffering. Later in the plot another crew member, Daisuke, is injured, and mouthwash is immediately suggested as an emergency solution. But Curly remains untouched.

I hope this hurts.

The crew want it this way. They want Curly to die, and no longer be a burden to their already burdensome situation. They want him to suffer, too, because he caused the crash. Its their way of bringing some justice to their unjust situation, of balancing the wrongs that were committed by the captain. A way to wash away the problems, even if it's only for a little while. The crew want Curly to take responsibility.

Curly even takes part in his own well-meaning version of mouthwashing, laundering the opinions of his fellow crewmates and washing away their potential emotional problems for the good of the whole. His inability to rock the boat when it comes to Anya being a victim of Jimmy's sexual assault is particularly distasteful, and indicative of his need to keep everything under control. The same happens when he keeps the truth about their jobs disappearing from the crew, ostensibly for their own good. A quick rinse, no time to clean up properly.

Wash it out

And then there's Jimmy. Main character. Co-pilot. The festering, rotten tooth that destroys the whole mouth. Jimmy's core character trait is a fundamental inability to take responsibility for his actions. Over the course of the story, the player learns that it was, in fact, Jimmy who deliberately crashed the ship, accidentally framing Curly for the act in the process; he also sexually assaulted Anya, the ship's doctor, leaving her with significant trauma and an unwanted pregnancy. Anya ultimately kills herself by overdosing on painkillers. Later in the game, his orders indirectly lead to the death of Daisuke, and he shoots Swansea with a revolver in a panic.

Fundamental to Jimmy's approach to all of this is his desperate, smothering need to repair his mistakes at all costs. Not to atone for them, mind you, or to gather the necessary self awareness to grow beyond past decisions. Just a manic desire not to be seen as the bad guy.

The turning point for Jimmy is the reveal of Anya's pregnancy, and the rape responsible. Rather than face his actions, he immediately sets the Tulpar on a collision course to kill everyone on board. When Curly tries to avert disaster and everyone survives, Jimmy allows the crew to believe Curly was the villain. When Anya and Daisuke are in danger, he maintains his silence and authority until they are dead by his hand. When Swansea confronts him with his own deeds, he murders him. All the while telling himself he is the hero of the situation. That everything will be okay in the end. That this is fixable. His problem solving is mouthwash poured over an infected wound, rinsing away the surface problems—damage to his reputation, knowledge of his crimes—and doing nothing to address the issues underneath.

Mouthwash—the object, the product, the solution—becomes as stand-in across the game for self-delusion, for agreeing to a pretty fantasy because it's easier. In Jimmy's case this is brought on by his own selfish need to be a good person in the eyes of others while doing no work on himself. In the case of the Tulpar crew at large, it's a fantasy pushed on them by a corporation and a society that needs to profit from their delusions.

Vitally, these always begin in a positive place, it's only when people buy into the illusion as real that it becomes harmful. Keeping people happy with birthday cakes and fun posters is positive, using those elements to paper over contempt for the lives of workers is bad. Wanting to be a good person is a valuable trait, but failing to do any of the work to actually make that true can transform you into the worst of humanity. This is why the final scene in Mouthwashing hurts so much: in condemning Curly to the cryopod for decades of suffering, Jimmy believes he is finally absolving himself of his misdeeds, partly because nobody is left to label him the villain. All his surface level sins are disinfected, and everyone will know he's a really good guy who fixed everything.

The mouthwash worked.