The Adjustment Bureau:

A Movie Review

by John David Ebert

On the surface, The Adjustment Bureau appears to be yet another film about the Western myth of the Individual’s battle against Fate, a standard rehearsal of how, with the development and differentiation of the Self and free will, Western civilization identified itself with the myth of the solar hero who conquers the beasts and monsters of the zodiac of the night sky which, ever since the birth of astrology at the hand of the Sumerians, had determined his fate for millenia. The West — and this includes the Biblical Near East — rejected this astro-determinism and put in its place figures like Beowulf and Siegfried, men who chased away the monsters of the night sky and paved a path toward the dawn of human Reason and Enlightenment.

Indeed, Horkheimer and Adorno, in their Dialectic of Enlightenement discuss this very problem, for in that book, the founders of Critical Theory describe how, in chasing away the terrors and irrationalism of mythology, the Enlightenment itself established yet another myth in its place: that namely, of the almightiness of Reason (Vernunft) as a principle for determining and completing all systems of partial thought. Reason, especially of the Kantian sort, grasps and confers synthetic unity on the manifold of the phenomena given to the senses in empirical experience by conferring upon these sensory phenomena a final set of nonsensory terms to complete and unify it: hence, God, Freedom and Immortality.

But the Enlightenment notion of Reason crumbled, decayed and gave way to the rise of the irrational culture industry which, with its authoritarian, proto-fascist systems of mass entertainment, paved the way for the coming of the Nazis, who were only too happy to take over the technical apparatus from the culture industry — i.e. radio, advertising, etc. — and use it for their own propagandistic purposes. There was nothing accidental, then, about the coming of the Nazis, according to Horkheimer and Adorno, for the mass entertainment industry, by creating a completely passive and pacified subject of the state of entertainment had readied the way for its advent.

In the latest entertainment served up to us by the still vigorous culture industry of Hollywood, The Adjustment Bureau presents us with the narrative of a man named David, played by Matt Damon, who is an up and coming politician who happens to have the misfortune to meet a beautiful woman whom he finds more fascinating than his own career. (Sound familiar?) But his relationship to this woman is frustrated by a group of mysterious men wearing hats and long coats who call themselves “the Adjustment Bureau” and claim that they have been called other things by other people, such as “angels,” for instance. But it is their job to intervene in the lives of human individuals in order to make small changes, slight “adjustments” in minor decisions which they make that might steer them away from something called The Plan, which is a Book of Fate written by a mysterious Chairman who is a thinly disguised idea of the monotheistic God. According to the Chairman, David and Elise are not supposed to meet, for it will create a divergence in the Plan that will mess it up. David, of course, true to the stereotype of Western mythology, defies this authoritarian utterance from a Religious Entity: he’s not about to let anyone tell him who he can love and so he proceeds right along on his willful path of battling Fate and having his affair, even though he has been told by these mysterious men that if he does so, their relationship will ruin his eventual winning of the presidential election and also ruin her career as a dancer. He proceeds, nevertheless, in defying Fate and at the end, the two lovers are rewarded for their persistence by forcing the Chairman to rewrite his Plan with a different ending.

Thus, as I say, on the surface, we have yet another example of the Western myth of the solar hero who is not about to let Fate, or astrology, or anything else push him around: if you’ve got the Will, the myth of the West goes, the universe must make way for your titanic Ego. Meanwhile, of course, centuries of the propagation of this myth has left us with a planet in ruins: desertified topsoils, global warming, rising sea levels, etc. etc. So much for the value of the myth of the Great Ego Which Does as it Pleases.

However, I think it is possible — perhaps even likely — to see in this narrative a story about the victory of capitalist ideology: do not the adjusters remind one precisely of the hidden, mysterious power figures who are behind Adorno’s culture industry and who set about “adjusting” the lives of the passive consumer by programming him with stories, narratives and advertising that make him into a passive consumer in which the myth of the individual is very specifically destroyed? Adorno’s point was that capitalism, by selecting prefabricated stereotypes, narratives and actors for its stories ends up creating a society in which individuality is destroyed because everyone wants to be just like the images they see erected by the culture industry all around them. In doing so, capitalism creates a society of clones, a society in which everyone wants to be just like Everyone Else because Everyone Else is busy imitating the images on the covers of fashion magazines and doing what celebrities spend most of their time doing: conforming to the capitalist narrative.

The adjusters warn David that if he pursues his path he will abdicate the true path of being an individual that will lead him to a successful life as president of the United States. Elise, if left alone, will become a true individual artist, the next Martha Graham. But the true values propagated by the film do not lie here: they are evident in the film’s “happy” ending, in which the two lovers win through and are united happily, despite the fact that they have proceeded to ruin their lives as unique individuals.

The message is clear: the values of the film are those of the culture industry, which does not want anybody to succeed by becoming a true individual, for that would involve the dangerous process of learning to think for oneself and therefore of questioning the values of the culture industry (i.e. those of captialism, proper), which might begin to falter if it is questioned by enough people. Instead, the mind must be turned off, shut down, by whatever means, in the present case by falling into a blind passionate love that is heedless of consequences. And it gives the illusion of a happy ending by having the two lovers triumph over the System. However, the irony is that the System, in this case, was trying to preserve the myth of the Individual and defend its values. The fact that, in this film, this particular system is the Villain means that those values are no longer the present values of our society. The present values are those of conformity and of the victory of the culture industry in which the individual is squashed as everybody strives to become and imitate everybody else.

The values of this film, in short,are consistent with those of the dull, crude society of late capitalism, in which learning to think for oneself and being different is quickly becoming the dangerous, because persecuted, life path. If you follow your own path today, you will be punished with social ostracism. If you conform, you will be rewarded with money, sex, romance, power, etc. But it will be a life of hollowness in which you will be a victim of mysterious and shadowy powers who are always slicing out the archetypal patterns by means of which you will unconditionally conform. You will have the illusion of living your own life in this society, but it will never amount to anything beyond an illusion, since you will only ever be living the pre-fabricated life patterns as laid down and manufactured by the System, i.e. the culture industry, as the handmaiden and propaganda tool for the multionational corporations.

Congratulations, then, once again, are due to the multinationals for yet another narrative victory: they’ve squashed individualism yet again by presenting it deceptively in the narrative structures which used to articulate the struggles of the individual vs. a system that tried to squash him into conformity. In those films, i.e. Dark City, Blade Runner, The Truman Show, the narrative protagonist represented the values not of conformity but of true individualism. In The Adjustment Bureau, today’s viewer has his expectations subtly “adjusted” for him by trading out those values, putting those of the Individual on the side of the System and those of what used to be the System on the side of the individual protagonists.

In this film, it is the System which wins, although the viewer is duplicitously led to believe that the happy ending is yet another rehearsal of the traditional narrative struggle of the individual against the system. Take another look, viewer, at what you’re being fed: conformity is what’s being rewarded here, not defiance.