Or How to Review an Archetypal Movie, Again

By John Lobell

A while back, I did a review of Phantom of the Opera in which I took reviewers to task for not knowing what the movie was about. (See http://www.cinemadiscourse.com/the-phantom-of-the-opera/ )

As those who make movies move to explore archetypal themes, they are leaving the reviewers behind, who can only comment on production values. Read the rest of this entry »

Surrogates: A Movie Review

By John David Ebert 

Jonathan Mostow, the director of Terminator 3 (actually a pretty good film) has given us his new film Surrogates, starring Bruce Willis, a sort of reworking of The Stepford Wives crossed with Minority Report.

The premise is a by now familiar one, for it reworks the theme of the avatar or alternate self that we have seen explored in films like Total Recall, Strange Days and Existenz: we are to imagine a future society in which the creation of synthetic robots has reached such a state of perfection that nearly everyone has replaced himself with his own double. The only difference is that the synthetics are shinier and usually younger and more attractive versions of one’s self. People hide in their houses, where they sit on chairs with pods on their heads that enable them to inhabit their synths via long distance. You can be anyone you want: if you’re a man, you can be a beautiful young woman, say, or if you’re an older man you can replace yourself with a younger, more attractive double. Whatever you want.

The social effects of the replacement of everybody with synths is that crime is virtually nonexistent. So when a couple of murders take place, the Bruce Willis character and his sidekick are brought in as detectives to track down the person who is somehow managing to use a weapon that not only destroys one’s synth, but then fries the user’s brain in the chair where he sits. Eventually, we discover that the man who invented the synths has had a complete turn around and now wishes to destroy them. He wants to get rid of all this artifice and he has a plan that will destroy all the synths.

At the end of the film, there comes a moment when the Bruce Willis character can, at the touch of a button, destroy all the synths or else just turn the bad guys in. He opts to hit the button, and everybody in the streets suddenly falls down in their tracks. They’re all synths. After a few minutes, their operators, in various modes of dishevelment, come shuffling out of their apartments, blinking in the sunlight which they have apparently not seen for a long time.

Philosophically, then, there is a wonderful rejection of technology here on the part of the filmmakers, who recognize that all this electronic technology that enables the creation and proliferation of artificial selves really has only a numbing effect on us all; it covers and displaces our real humanity. Technology, as McLuhan never tired of pointing out, numbs the self: people in cars are often more hostile than people on the street, since the car numbs one’s sensitivities to others. Bombers have no psychological trouble dropping bombs on civilians, but ask one of them to pour gasoline on a child and light him on fire and you are most likely going to get some resistance. The airplane, you see, numbs the human sensitivity.

Surrogates has its thematic heart in the right place, certainly, for its central metaphor is all about how electronic technology, and indeed, the culture of hyperreality in general, enables us to replace and displace the world. As Baudrillard put it, we are building a gigantic double of the world. The real Lascaux must be shut down and closed to the public while an exact replica is built nearby. This is the Disneyfication of the world. The idea of the surrogate is basically a development of Disney’s animatronic robots which so excited him.

It can also be read as a metaphor for the Internet: online you can be anyone you want to be. Identities shift and change and become as slippery as demonic beings in Bardo. Is that woman you’re thinking of dating really a woman at all, or some 12 year old boy just having a few laughs at your expense? Who knows? We all like to hide, these days, behind false selves, electronic personae that cover and disguise who we really are. And it is all completely confusing and socially upsetting. We think, with all these clever gadgets that we’re “progressing” somehow, but we’re really just muddling up the world and creating ever more intricate webs of social chaos and confusion.

Surrogates makes another point, too, about the technological imitation of the astral body: the person sitting in the chair with the mask on is like someone asleep and dreaming, while the synth replicates his dream self, what Rudolf Steiner would call his “astral body.” We are using technology, then, to try to imitate the architecture of the subtle body, as William Irwin Thompson has talked about in his books.

So, the film has the right themes and has chosen good material to work with, but the problem is that the screenplay is not well written nor is the film well directed. It moves along at a jerky, spasmodic clip, and sometimes leaves plot mechanisms unexplained. There is also a certain dullness and lack of imagination about it: compare the look of the synths when their human flesh is off with the robots in Spielberg and Kubrick’s A.I. and you’ll see what I mean. Not much money was spent on the special effects, evidently. The film’s futuristic look, furthermore, basically duplicates that of Minority Report. There is little in the way of original production design and art direction here.

In short, I would skip Surrogates: it actually watches like a made-for-TV movie from the 1970s, one of those run of the mill cop dramas that, once upon a time, you could turn on at two o’clock in the morning.

9: A Movie Review

By John David Ebert

Just to get right to the point: 9 is a visionary masterpiece. It represents what I have termed “visionary film” perfectly, and moreover, it embodies and plays out the myth of the battle against the machine that I wrote about in my book Celluloid Heroes & Mechanical Dragons four years ago. It is yet another chapter in the long battle against Hal 9000. 

The story is set in a post-apocalyptic world that takes up the baton from the ending of Spielberg and Kubrick’s A.I., which envisions a future in which human beings have become extinct from the earth and have been replaced by robots, or in the case of 9, by strange little assembled patchwork beings that we might as well call “homunculi,” since the director Shane Acker at one point in the film visually quotes from a Paracelsus text showing the creation of a homunculus. 

There are nine of these little beings, and they are menaced by strange monsters that are cobbled together by sentient machines which have been sent forth to destroy them. The protagonist, number 9 himself, inadvertently awakens a spider-like mechanical monstrosity with a single glowing red eye that very much reminds one of Hal 9000’s eye (note the reiteration of the “9″ motif). The nine little homunculi engage these mechanical monsters in battle and the film recounts their exploits in charming and very inventive fashion. By the end of the film, we learn that the nine are actually the nine components of a mad scientist’s personality, the very same mad scientist who brought the spider creature into being originally as a synthetic brain and then came to regret it. Then he built these nine little homunculi, invested them with components of his soul, and died. They are all that remains of humanity.

Nine, of course, is an interesting number mythologically speaking: in Rudolf Steiner’s microcosmology, for instance, the subtle body has nine components, three each for the body, the soul and the spirit. In the classical tradition, there were nine Muses, each one of which later became the patron of one of the arts, and so we have the association of 9 in conjunction with the humanities and the subtle body pitted against the world of Blake’s dark satanic mills, i.e. the realm of the machine as personified in this film by the various mechanical monsters.

The myth of the homunculus comes from alchemy, which involved the attempt to create in the laboratory a tiny little man: it is this alchemical myth which inspired Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein, and which Goethe then borrowed for his epic Faust Part 2. It is the guiding myth behind the attempt of science to steal the creative powers from Nature and use them to create artificial beings, the very same beings which Rudolf Steiner termed “Ahrimanic beings,” meaning those little spirits and entelechies that inhabit our machines.

As 9 shows us, we humans are very much in peril from assault by our machines and we are engaged in a desperate struggle against them, without even realizing it. Consciously, we spend our daytime hours invested in the Myth of the Machine, building more and ever more of them, while at night we go to movies and watch projected dreams of how they are threatening to ruin our existence. And ruin it, they certainly have done: depression, divorce, drug addiction, gangs; all of these are stress responses to human beings attempting to live under the weight of servitude to monstrously gigantic mechanical systems that attempt to capture and enslave their spirits. In the movie, the spider machine that sucks the souls out of each of the nine remaining members of the human spirit is no mere metaphor: this is literally what our technologies are doing to us, sucking the life out of each and every one of us. We have become slaves to a vast and apparently sentient machine that demands, in order for us to receive social approval, the sacrifice of our personal creativity and individuality on behalf of economic slavery.

It is not, as anarchists like John Zerzan would have it, that civilization itself is the problem: the problem is too much of a good thing. Technology is all right when it is on a human scale and when it knows its place, when it blends into the background like the windmills in the paintings of the 17th century Dutch artists. Ask yourself this question as you look around your city streets, no matter where you are: what has happened to the artists and painters who used to occupy the hills and streetcorners of Paris at the turn of the twentieth century? Where have they gone, these painters? Let me answer for you: there is no longer any room for them. They have been pushed aside by traffic lights and grimy rumbling automobiles, which are full of people moving too quickly through their surroundings to even bother to have the kind of musing thoughts about the landscape that is necessary to produce the kind of ecology of consciousness in which such painters can thrive. When a society’s painters have vanished from the streets–as ours have very obviously have done–then the machines have won the battle.

9 is right: we are engaged in a desperate struggle to find our humanity in a world which demands the same compliance and routinization out of us that we would expect from a well functioning factory.

Pandorum: A Movie Review

By John David Ebert

Christian Alvart’s Pandorum aspires to the great science fiction tradition in cinema that began with 2001: A Space Odyssey and continues down through Alien and Sunshine. In the latter film, there is evident not only an increasing pessimism regarding technology and space exploration in general, but there is also a decline of artistic quality, coherence and clarity of vision.

Pandorum takes a dim view of space exploration and colonization. Its plot concerns an exodus from earth of thousands of human beings aboard a space ark that is sent to colonize a newly discovered world named Tanis, which has a climate and environment exactly like that of earth’s. The entire crew is put into hypersleep for the many years that the voyage takes, and as the film opens, two crew members have awakened to find themselves in a dire situation. It is gradually revealed that other humans aboard the ship have awoken from their slumbers and gradually, over time, have devolved into a race of strange mutants reminiscent of the creatures in the movie I am Legend.

The problem with the film, though, is that it is composed of a mosaic of cliched scenes stolen from every science fiction film that has been made since Alien: it is a sort of cross between that film and the zombie genre, which has become increasingly and drearily more and more popular as time has transpired. The film lacks originality and it is completely uninspired.

Pandorum reminds me of all the low grade sci-fi movies of the 1970s, the epoch of the great drive in space operas: remember “gems” like Saturn 3 with Farrah Fawcett or Damnation Alley or Battle Beyond the Stars? Atrocious films, all, but fun to watch nevertheless. Pandorum exists on the level of these films, with slightly better special effects, but it lacks the charm and naivety of that wonderful epoch.

Science fiction films, it seems, are on the wane. They are thoughtlessly made and based largely on rehashes of films from the 70s and 80s. They dazzle with all their hi-tech artifice, but they are churned out by anonymous directors and screenwriters with no real love for, or understanding of, the genre.

I look forward to James Cameron’s Avatar, but it remains to be seen whether the genre can be rescued or is becoming as moribund as the Western was in the late 1970s.