On Knowing
Knowing: A Movie Review
By John David Ebert
Great artists are always sensitive to changes in our environment that remain subliminal to the rest of us. They pick up these transformations – usually inflicted by new technologies — with their ant-like antennae, and narratize them as pictures which often dramatize scenarios of invasion. George Pal’s 1950s version of War of the Worlds, for instance, was not about aliens from another planet, but about the invasion of our society by television. Note how the aliens bathe their victims in floods of electromagnetic radiation just like the average denizen of our modern living rooms bathed in low frequency pulses fired at him at light speed from his electronic scanning box.
This is what great artists do with their narratives: a change is brought about in the social Umwelt, a new technology, say, which seems to be one thing on the level of our conscious awareness but yet portends something else at the level of the deep psyche, which translates the implications of the new technology into narrative terms that attempt to bring the new environment or technology up into the threshold of conscious awareness.
Take, for example, the phenomenon of crashes and accidents. At first glance, nothing could be more banal than a trainwreck or a car crash or a sinking ship. These are everyday occurrences, and as a result, they tend to slip, unnoticed, beneath the threshold of our conscious awareness, which passes over them as so much background noise. But the deep psyche, on the other hand, does not do this. The deep psyche recognizes that crashes, the phenomenon of the crash per se, is something very, very deeply bizarre and troubling. There is, in fact, nothing the least bit “normal” about them. The unconscious mind, together with the archaic hominid body, did not evolve out of an environment of continual crashing cars and exploding buildings. These things are a threat to its well-being, and as such, they are worthy of being brought up to the threshold of conscious awareness in a startling manner. In other words, they portend something.
Crashes, and the very fact that crashes and accidents have become something which we accept as “banal” are not the least bit banal, but rather bizzare and monstrous deformities of a technological civilization gone haywire.Crashes as a daily occurrence? This has never happened before in the entire history of human civilization. In order for our modern sensibilities to accept that car crashes are a normal part of “life” something has had to have gone very, very wrong in the psyche of modern man in order for it to deceive itself into believing that crashes and accidents are in any way “normal.” They are not normal; they are monstrous.
And this is what the film director Alex Proyas, in his new film, Knowing, seems to be drawing our awareness toward: the fact that the very phenomenon of a civilization which regards crashes and accidents as something “normal” is extremely disturbing. We are losing our human sensitivities and becoming as coarse and brutal as the Romans of the days of the gladiatorial spectacles. Crashes are the modern equivalent of such spectacles, spectacles which we today regard with horror and revulsion. Slaughtering herds of screaming elephants in the hippodrome? Horrible, you say? Really? Watching people stick swords into each other while eating whatever the Roman equivalent of popcorn was? Horrible, you say? Really?And what about watching hundreds, even thousands, of people die every day in horrible accidents on the screens of our modern electronic arena, the now ubiquitous video monitor which has transformed the entire planet into a giant “videodrome” in which everyone can be simultaneously copresent everywhere on the planet at once? You think this is normal? Dear reader, if you do, then let me just say that you are out of your fucking mind and don’t realize it.
I think future civilizations will call us barbarians. They will look back on our hyper-technologized “crash civilization” and say to themselves — the same way we glance with revulsion at the Roman gladiatorial spectacles — what monsters these men were who put so much faith in their machines, virtually to the point of worshipping them, while watching thousands die in the fiery incandescence of such metallic Molochs.But then maybe the truth is actually even more horrible: maybe we need these spectacles in order to shock our overloaded and numbed nervous systems into sudden moments of human awareness. Paradoxically, maybe the witnessing of an exploding Space Shuttle or a burning Trade Tower momentarily makes us feel human enough again to help us realize that we are still human beings underneath all this metallic grandeur.
Knowing is a film that belongs in the very same tradition of apocalyptic literature that produced such cinematic masterpieces as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind or A.I. This is a tradition that goes clear back to the Hebrews, and indeed, finds its origins in the Book of Ezekiel, where the vision of a complex whiligig descending down out of the clouds is retrieved by Proyas for the climax of his film.
Knowing is a film that tries very hard to emulate these earlier movies and for the most part is quite successful in doing so.In the film, a series of man-made catastrophes forms the lead-up for what turns out to be a cosmic catastrophe that ends all life on the planet. This is a way of magnifying the scale of our daily crashes to apocalyptic dimensions in order to draw our attention to just how insane such a way of life really is.
It is indeed very possible, as Proyas seems to imply, that our currently accelerating mass-production of accidents and man-made catastrophes will eventually lead up to a global catastrophe, something that will crash on a global scale for the first time in history.The image of a series of “chosen” human beings, who are selected by angels to be cargoed away from the earth to another world on another planet, where they can begin civilization all over again, but in a sane way and on a human scale, while the rest of the earth is fried to a burnt crisp is, to my way of thinking, a bomb thrown in image form at our technopolitan global civilization. Such films crawl out of the depths of our deep psyche in order to imply a willed destruction of our civilization as something that is no longer worth saving and that humankind would be better off without. The subtext of Proyas’s film is, more or less, equivalent in sense and significance to Al Qaeda’s missiles sent hurling at the World Trade Center: Knowing is tantamount to a willed rejection of a civilization that calls “normal” the daily occurrence of technologically mediated mass catastrophes.
Proyas’s film belongs in the same genre with the Book of Daniel and the Book of Revelation; it is a modern celluloid work of electronic apocalypse that is extremely sceptical of the civilization in which we now find ourselves living.And who is to say that Proyas doesn’t have a point? Do you want to perish in the inferno of a car crash or a plane wreck? Because, hey, after all, it’s a “normal” way to go these days.
