Waking Up

In the opening credits, the first Sam Bell clone to be formally introduced is running on a treadmill and wearing an ironic t-shirt.  Oddly enough, I developed an interesting ideological reading upon my consideration of the relationship between these two seemingly disparate pieces of Moon’s mise-en-scene to one another and the relationship between these pieces and the whole of the film’s form and function.

On the surface, the treadmill serves as a reference point that distinguishes between the physical well-beings of the Sam Bells, illustrating the deterioration that occurs across the duration of their three-year contracts on the moon.  We see the first Sam Bell clone (in actuality #5) use the treadmill a second time and stumble exhaustedly.  Soon after, while we don’t see him use the treadmill, the newly awakened Sam Bell is at his peak physical performance: we often see him working out in some manner or another, whether it be jump-roping or hitting a punching bag. 

The treadmill’s meaning stretches beyond the physical fitness of the characters and creates a motif: the illusion of progress.  The Sam Bell clones are literally running in place.  They are awoken only to serve their three-year contracts and are motivated by false promises of a life on Earth.  This illusion of progress extends to the harvesting project itself: the collection of He3 on the moon is presented at the film’s inception as the Holy Grail of clean energy.  “The Power of the Moon, the Power of the Future” appears to be just as invasive as the practice of mining fossil fuels on the Earth.  Furthermore, there is a sly intimation that the He3 creates a radioactive byproduct that causes the clones to deteriorate in health over the course of three years.

Wake me when it’s quitting time.

The t-shirt has a more immediately powerful impact as we learn about the three-year life span of the clones and how a new one is “awakened” every three years to replace its incinerated predecessor.  While the shirt makes its first appearance sweat-stained on the first Sam Bell clone running on the treadmill, the shirt makes an ominous reappearance in the drawer of an unawakened clone.  The shirt’s “Wake me when it’s quitting time” echoes the dark themes of human mortality presented in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, where Leon Kowalski commands of Rick Deckard: “Wake up, it’s time to die!”

The combined significance of the treadmill and the t-shirt is startling: the Sam Bells unknowingly dismiss the concept of their impeding mortality through the illusion of progress.  The initially inconsequential naming of the harvesters after the four gospels of the New Testament obtains a greater gravitational force in the realm of the film’s ideological or symptomatic meanings as the film may be making a statement about religious struggle.  The Bells persevere through their stay on the moon only because they are promised a life on Earth after their service: in a sense, they overlook the significance of the present life and emphasize the potential of another one to follow.  This can be read as a statement about the emphasis on an afterlife present in many religious followings that seemingly downplay the significance of life itself, as if life were a transitional experience, a proverbial waiting room to another realm.

The clones’ communication with the outside realm is prevented, most notably through the inability to establish a live connection with the Earth’s base and through the repeated lines of the computer system emphasizing this inability: “Searching for long range comms…searching for long range comms…signal failure on long range comms.”  Moreover, prior to the incidental overlap of the two clones’ lives, much of their day-to-day activity was marked by an insular nature (ie, playing ping-pong by themselves).  The attempts of Sam Bell to connect to this other-worldly realm seems symptomatic of a spiritual crisis. 

Biblical allusions exist throughout, not only through the “good news” harvesters but through the motif of resurrection allusions as well.  For instance, the injured Sam is retrieved from the wreckage 3 days after his crash and sacrifices his life for the other clone to make an escape to Earth.  Overall, Duncan Jones’ Moon appears to be making an interesting statement about the predicaments of the human psyche that manifest as illusory worldviews are increasingly deconstructed and an understanding of the human existence must be reconstructed. 

Theo Faron: The Anti-Gatsby

            Anamorphosis, (morphosis meaning “a shaping” and ana meaning “back, again”) was an early Renaissance art form that manipulated perspective.  Anamorphic designs were marked by image distortion requiring them to be observed from a specific vantage point, rendering standard viewing conventions inadequate.  Philosopher and social critic Slavoj Zizek assesses that the background throughout Children of Men is anamorphic and elicits a paradoxical viewing.  Citing the Renaissance phenomenon, he argues that “the true focus of the film is there in the background, and it’s crucial to leave it as a background.”  Extracted from the background are themes of infertility and despair, but, again, they can’t be viewed as a foreground in themselves or they are devoid of their meaning.  Focusing on the balance between foreground and background in the mise-en-scene of anti-hero Theo’s reunion with Julian, we find credibility to Zizek’s claims and extend them to probe the film for meaning. 

The opening shot doesn’t aim to merely establish the setting as The Fishes’ interrogation chamber.  Instead, it slowly pans across a wall lined by vaguely apocalyptic news clippings, a technique of cinematography that develops as a motif throughout the film (ie Jasper’s journalism shrine).  The only legible portions are the bolded headlines, which prove insufficient in providing information beyond that offered by the ominous train propaganda: “the world has collapsed.”  We discover, as the camera settles on a bound Theo surrounded by his captors, that the entire room is lined with these clippings reading ambiguously: “US Troops Full Attack,” “Extremists Explosion,” and “Immigrants Protest Against Government: New Racist Policies.”  While they provide minor pieces of information to supplement the plot, meanings become muddled when we try and construct the plot around the background itself; this idea solidifies taking into consideration the creative choices made by Alfonso Couron in concern to lighting. 

The intense, artificial, frontal lighting that initially illuminates the newspapers creates an opaque, insular perimeter in the mise-en-scene that entices us to attempt a perusal of the clippings.  However the editing jerks into a point-of-view shot that forces the viewer to accompany Theo as a deer in the headlight.  When a switch is made to a softer, more natural lighting, the newspapers take up a translucent quality: they aren’t quite invisible or transparent, but they are a thin layer covering glass windows.  The now semi-transparent thickness of the background diverts attention away from the background and returns it to the foreground.  The lighting technique itself encourages the reading of the background as anamorphic, paradoxically pulling us into and pushing us out of an analytical treatment of the background as a second foreground.    

Children of Men’s control over the background’s legibility occurs through allusions to a future dystopia’s significant historical events that we are not permitted to fully comprehend.  As soon as we begin to grasp their gravity they fade and become unattainable.  A similar conundrum arises in allusions to an intimately familiar past at Nigel’s art-littered mansion.  Picasso’s “Guernica” and Michelangelo’s “Statue of David” stand as testaments to a historically rich and increasingly irrelevant past.  In a sense, they are infertile as pointed out by Zizek.  He states that art “only works when it is signaling a certain world, and when this certain world is lacking it’s nothing.”  What the film may be suggesting is the self-destructive nature of a society’s obsession with a fleeting past/present that causes it to overlook the persistent approach of the future.  The film ends in an oceanic vacuum, in which Theo and Kee float completely isolated from the anarchy that has erupted.  This could be extended, as Zizek encourages, to an existence detached from the past, with the arrival of the Human Project aboard a ship named Tomorrow.  In a sense, this offers treatment to the F. Scott Fitzgerald’s diagnosis of the tragic human condition.  In the closing lines of The Great Gatsby, he poetically coos "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."  Theo candidly debunks the beauty of this thought, mumbling: “A hundred years from now there won’t be one sad fuck to look at this.”

           

Pink Matter

“If a robot could genuinely love a person, what responsibility does that person hold toward that mecha in return?”

If Bruno Latour had been dead at the moment of this quote’s inception, he would have rolled over in his grave.  The question that develops and gains traction throughout the film is that of Frankensteinian abandonment: it lingers, not as a question of whether or not the robots are human, but of whether or not we are willing to take responsibility and care for our creations in a world “when science and nature and technology and politics become so confused and mixed up as to be impossible to untangle” (Latour).  While there is a split within the film between characters that accept and reject the humanity of “mechas”, the unromantic patterns that emerge are, one, the prevailing of pathos over logos and ethos (in other words, love conquering all) and, two, the unrequited desire to organize life into binary structures.

Whether they are crimes of passion or committed in cold blood, love motivates the construction of binary worldviews through destructive actions in the world of Artificial Intelligence.  Henry takes on the roll of the pot when he calls David, the kettle, black and queries:

“If he was created to love, then it’s reasonable to assume he knows how to hate. And if pushed to those extremes, what is he really capable of?”

Everyone capable of love is capable of hatred and jealousy-fueled acts of passion.  Artificial Intelligence deploys parallelism, a relatively simple principle of film form, through the motif of human possession (ie humans belonging to one another in relationships).  This not only denotes a fundamentally human quality and a reference point for “orga”/”mecha” comparisons, but enables the film to create a sense of ambiguity in distinguishing the organic from the mechanical.  This ambiguity, or ‘resourcefulness,’ arises in one main area: the inconsistent and paradoxical blaming of “mechas” for territorial encroachment. 

I.               Henry and Martin find no fault in the actions of Monica, but instead blame David.  This implies a burden of responsibility that can’t be placed on a mechanical being, but at the same time dismisses the significance of his potential “death.”

II.             Mr. Bevans finds no fault in the actions of Gigolo Joe, murdering his wife and simultaneously recognizing that Joe isn’t human by sparing him any sliver of blame and recognizing that his wife betrayed him by sleeping with another man (aka, human). 

III.           David finds fault in the first David 2.0 that he encounters, believing that he is threatening to steal Monica.  David yells “You can’t have her! She’s MINE!”  In attempting to establish his own humanity, he refutes that of the other David and himself.

In all of these scenarios, those who consider themselves “orgas” are willing to blame “mechas” for human faults without recognizing their humanity.  They fail to recognize that they have been trespassed on a significantly human level in regards to love, that “mechas” now mirror the interior and exterior human life.  Even when Henry tries to deconstruct and dismiss David’s humanity by stating he is composed of “a hundred miles of fiber,” he fails to comprehend that he developed and expressed his thought through the complex interaction of the 600 miles of neurons that utilize electrical impulses in his own body.  The only remaining barrier is the human ideological construction of the organic vs. inorganic binary: the collection of information is not inadequate, rather the categories in which they are intended to be placed are inadequate.    

Nodding to its Blade Runner predecessor, Artificial Intelligence purposefully aims at creating a multitude of perplexing scenarios and ambiguities that cannot be placed into the provided strata.  Why?  To what particular end does this serve as a mean?  It appears that both films take a page from I.A. Richards in exploring the matters of the universe (pun).  Richards says:

“Neither this book nor any other can say how a page should be read-if by that we mean that it can give a recipe for discovering what the page really says.”

This principle extends beyond the written word and the crafted sculpture.  This principle extends beyond the way in which we interact with and interpret these artistic renderings of our world, and speaks to the way we with interact and interpret our actual world.  We become frustrated as viewers of Artificial Intelligence because we have developed desires to neatly sort these images into rigid social constructs.  These films work because of our fundamentally incorrect notions of reading art and reading life.  These films work because we are two year olds trying to pick between the circle and square hole to place the triangle.  From there, we claim we are seeing grey matter that can’t be categorized.  Grey matter is a pessimistic view, and renders the objects we are interacting with inoperable as we forfeit to the pre-determined categorizations.  Perhaps there is another way for us to consider information instead of enslaving ourselves to these binaries.  

PS - this conclusion was quite paradoxical in the sense that it set up another binary

Blade Runner: A Proverb's Proverb

“But one cannot be in a vacuum.

We express our being by creating.

Creativity is a necessary sequel to being.”

-Rollo May, The Courage to Create

            The interaction of human reason and emotion makes creativity and creative acts an inevitable phenomenon.  Creativity is a mechanism utilized by humanity to make sense of their existence, to develop an authentic order out of disorder and chaos.  These creations have the capacity to reflect the internal human experience, to reflect “the uncreated conscience of the race” (Joyce). 

            The dystopian Blade Runner introduces us to a world where Nexus 6 Replicants, a human-developed android, have advanced to an unprecedented level of technological innovation: being “more human than human.”  Before their introduction, the viewer develops the expectation that the “skin-jobs” will be robotic Neanderthals embedded with survival instincts, sharing the human form rather than the human experience.  It is the gradual refutation of this expectation that forms the crux of the issue tackled by the film: what does it mean to be human?

            Tyrell Corporation’s creations present a caricature of the internal human experience.  Roy Batty and company wear their hearts on their sleeves, while we have trouble deciphering the motivations behind the presumably human characters.  We are introduced to Batty’s struggle against impending death through a focused shot of him struggling to unclench his fist, gasping the words “time enough.”  Deckard, on the other hand, (pun unintended, although recognized) seems to be reluctantly drawn into his duties as a Blade Runner by Captain Bryant.  What is troubling about the juxtaposition between the human and Replicant forms is the role reversal that happens throughout the film: the Replicants test the humanity of the humans.

Rachel, a Replicant unwittingly masquerading as a human, immediately probes Deckard with a test of empathy, simultaneously bringing into question the human mode of distinguishing Replicants: “have you ever retired a human by mistake?”  Later she explicitly brings into question Deckard’s humanity and the effectiveness of the void comp when asking “have you ever taken the test yourself?”  Furthermore, it seems on key that Leon Kowalski enacts his escape by shooting an agent who is delivering a void comp test (delivering the Freudian line “Let me tell you about my mother”) and that Batty seems to test Tyrell, proceeding to gouge his eyes in an Oedipal manner. 

While Pablo Picasso didn’t expect to be murdered by Guernica when he said, “every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction,” it perhaps would have been morbidly appropriate advice for Tyrell.  On the same note, while Oedipus kills his father and then marries his mother, Roy Batty kills his creator and marries/claims a reformed sense humanity.  The motif of eyes as a window into the soul manifests in the idea of the void comp tests, and ties the idea of the film together in Batty’s quote:

“If you could see what I’ve seen with your eyes…”

The Replicants take over the role of judge, jury, and executioner.  Through the bestowment of human qualities by their human creators, they judge the human qualities of their creators.  While it certainly brings into discussion specific aspects of humanity, the film takes on a more focused proverbial duty as a form of meta-art.  Our artistic creations are displays of realism depicting true human action in fictional and non-fictional genres.  They are created as close to human as humanly possible, which in turn aims to teach us about typical, recurrent situations and social phenomena (Burke).  They bring into question our actions and often imply a command for change, just as the Replicants challenge their human creators.

In essence, Blade Runner is a proverb on proverbs.