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and Kubrick’s A.I., which envisions a future in which human beings have become extinct from the earth and have been replaced by robots, or in the case of 9, by strange little assembled patchwork beings that we might as well call “homunculi,” since the director Shane Acker at one point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.