The Book of Eli: A Movie Review

By John David Ebert

On the surface, there’s nothing new about The Book of Eli. It has all the essential plot structures of the traditional Western: the loner who wanders into town from out of the waste land, where he encounters bad guys running the town who are a bunch of lawless rogues and opportunists hoarding all the women as well as the town’s natural resources. This structure is nearly invariant from A Fistful of Dollars right down to HBO’s Deadwood television series. The look of the film’s post-apocalyptic setting, with all its crumbling highways, rusting gantries, deserted way stations and broken machinery, is derived mainly from the Mad Max movies and also John Carpenter’s Escape From New York. So the plot mechanisms and the visual furniture are all familiar to the point of being timeworn. But the film is actually about something that is very interesting and unusual for sci-fi popcorn cinema, and that is the power of media to shape civilization.

The film takes it for granted that civilization is the outer visible phenotype of genetic patterns keyed into written texts, be they printed or otherwise, and this is actually what High Civilization has been based upon since the days when the priests of Mesopotamia invented writing by pressing triangular reed styluses into soft slabs of clay. The slabs were subsequently baked and lined up in rows on shelves in libraries at such sacred cities as Nippur and Uruk. There is no High Civilization that has not existed without writing of some kind, and so it is very possible that civilization of the higher kind — the kind, that is, with mathematics, books, monumental architecture, astronomy and sculpted or painted works of art — might never have come into existence without the crucial invention of writing, which is a form of cultural memory and storage that creates the existence of what Lacan called the Big Other of society that preexists the coming of the individual into the world. When the individual comes into being, he enters a world of cultural memory and tradition that has existed long before him and will continue to exist long after he is gone. The degree to which he is able to create spores out of his own thoughts and add them to the cultural memory that is stored in a society’s written traditions is a measure of the degree to which that individual can be said to have successfully engaged with his civilization, added to its discourse, and then went on his way back to Eternity.

And this is exactly what The Book of Eli is all about. In this case, the story concerns a man named Eli who has made a pact with himself to carry his sacred text, the Bible, as it turns out, with him along a broken and bandit-infested highway continuing ever West. For what reason, he does not know. The bad guys who encounter him discover that he has the only known copy of the Bible in existence, since all others were destroyed after the Great War that wiped civilization out, and the lead bad guy, played by Gary Oldman, knows very well, being a literate man, that he who has the Word has the authority and the power to remake civilization. So he wants that Bible and he will stop at nothing to get it out of Eli’s hands.

Since those of you who visit this site regularly know that I always proceed to spoil the movie, here I go again: at the film’s end, when the bad guy manages to get Eli’s copy of the text, he opens it only to find to his disappointment that it is written in Braille, a language he cannot read. Eli, meanwhile, has made it together with his travelling companion, a young woman, to San Francisco where he discovers that Alcatraz Island has been taken over by a small colony of “monks” as it were who are collecting and hoarding the treasures of civilization so that they can start it all back up again. The one thing they don’t have is a copy of the Bible, but since Eli has been reading the Bible every day for thirty years, he has it memorized, and at the film’s conclusion, he proceeds to dictate it word for word in English translation to a scribe who copies it down. The colony happens also to own an old-fashioned printing press — remember those? — and the film’s last frames show the new Bibles going into print, getting ready to restart civilization once again.

The idea of going to war over a book is, these days, an absurdity, but back in the Middle Ages, when books were scarce, and printed books nonexistent, such things did, indeed happen. The Irish monk St. Columba, for example, went to war in 561 a.d. over a book that he had copied by hand from a scriptorium, and when Saint Finnian of Moville contested his right to the book, a psalter, Columba went to war with him and a battle took place. Thus, The Book of Eli is neo-Medieval in its sensibilities.

But the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century not only shaped a new Gutenbergian civilization, it also dismantled and destructured the entire Medieval edifice. New ideas were invented at that time, such as intellectual property, copyright, individuality, reading silently, etc. and also new literary structures came into being, such as the Table of Contents, the Index, proper citation, and so forth. And as is well known, furthermore, the printing of the Bible in the vernacular tongues of Europe pulled the rug of authority out from underneath the Catholic Church and decentralized its power, so that anyone who could read in his own native tongue could have access to the Holy Word of God, no longer the exclusive property of the priests. This laid the groundwork for the success of the Protestant Reformation and dealt the final deathblow to the entire Medieval World Order.

Nowadays, of course, the Gutenbergian order that was ushered in by the printed word is precisely what is being destructured and dismantled. Today’s equivalent of the fifteenth century printing press is the Internet, and it is the Internet which is turning our society upside down. Indeed, when the dust of the present economic collapse has settled, I have a feeling that a much larger role in all of this will found to have been attributable to the advent of the Internet more so than anybody currently realizes. After all, in the decade or so prior to the 2008 collapse, the Internet  went merrily along disrupting one financial circulation after the next: it pulled the bottom, for instance, out of the recording industry; caused the near complete collapse of the indepedent bookstore (and even Borders may not survive this); caused the folding of several newspapers by stealing away their classified ads and giving them out for free; created competition with Blockbuster via Netflix; and so on, right down the line. All of this economic turmoil that bubbled up in the media industries prior to the housing market collapse must surely have played a large role in destabilizing all the other markets which, after all, are intricately and subtly interconnected with each other.

It may be that the Internet is primarily responsible for dismantling our current post World War II shopping mall society and so the world that emerges out of this wreckage will most likely look as different from that world as the world looked after the Great Depression and WW II, its climax: shopping malls may become a thing of the past; bookstores–gone; the recording industry: mostly gone; the automobile industry completely restructured with foreign ownership; and so on and on.

So The Book of Eli is refreshingly sensitive to the power of media not only to build and shape new civilizations, but also to dismantle and deconstruct old ones. The film is not only entertaining; it is worth thinking about, too.

Go see it, if  you haven’t already.