Data Prevents the Conquest of Paradise

            …in what they dimly realized was the land of Paradise…but all they ever found was half

a world of nature’s treasures and nature’s people that could be taken, and they took

them, never knowing, never learning the true regenerative power there, and that opportunity was lost.  Theirs was indeed a conquest of Paradise, but as is inevitable with any war against the world of nature, those who win will have lost – once again lost, and this time perhaps forever.

- Kirkpatrick Sale, The Conquest of Paradise

This passage, as fitting as it may seem, doesn’t record the tragic events hanging in the balance of Jonathon Frake’s Star Trek: Insurrection.  Rather, this passage records the events of Christopher Columbus’ voyage to the new world and the atrocities committed upon his arrival.  The settlement of the peaceful Ba’ku, a paradise by most standards, is threatened by the Son’a: former members of the Ba’ku colony who are in cahoots with the Federation.  Sale, and many scholars, assess that one of humanity’s main attributes that harbors the capacity for evil is obedience.  In Insurrection, Frake rewrites history and the powers that be in his film are challenged (as the title appropriately suggests).  What makes this film compelling is not simply that an insurrection occurs, but that a human insurrection is incited by a single android.  Picard’s crew on the Enterprise shed their human skin of obedience and fight to preserve paradise due to the rebelliousness of Data. 

The base of Data’s character draws from Isaac Asimov’s depiction of robots.  Not only does he possess a “positronic net” based on Aismov’s “positronic” brains, but Data is instilled with the Three Laws of Robots:

I.               A robot may not injure a human being by action or inaction.

II.             A robot must obey human orders, except when they harm.

III.           A robot must protect its existence, while maintaining the above.

0.              (Sublaw) A robot may not harm humanity by action or inaction.

Data, as we learn after he undergoes diagnostics, was not malfunctioning at the beginning of the film.  After discovering the holodeck and being shot, he resorted back to his purely moral functioning.  As a result, he fought the Son’a and the Federation, revealing their presence to the Ba’ku and to those aboard the Enterprise. 

What is fascinating about this film’s dealing with androids is that it negates the premise of most films we’ve observed thus far.  While the action of the film is often incited by androids breaching the laws unknowingly or by breaching them due to the ambiguity of robotkind and humankind, the action is incited in Insurrection due to the android’s strict adherence to the laws and their apt application. 

What is troubling about the film is that even in the distant future, amidst exponential technological advances and an exponentially greater understanding of the universe, humanity maintains its humanity.  Humanity remains imperfect, and it is perplexing and paradoxical that consistently imperfect beings can craft beings that surpass them in many human aspects.  Yet it also seems to make sense that through their consistent imperfection they strive to achieve something greater, as we see on the harmonious utopian society established by the Ba’ku. 

Escape to Brazil

Terry Gillman’s dystopic, retro-future film Brazil (1985) defies easy categorization as a satire armed to the teeth with tragic qualities.  To further complicate the search for the film’s equipment for living, its ideological or symptomatic meanings appear to be equally evasive.  The film seems to prove its usefulness in its hyperbolic visions of the future: these visions only contrast with the information age in the sense that their primary symbol of articulation is paper, while today the age has become increasingly paperless.  Brazil depicts a time where a big brother bureaucracy reins supreme,  doing so incompetently and through the control of information: those who are deemed a threat to national security are dealt with by Information Retrieval (my personal favorite propaganda tagline in the film is featured in the opening scene with the fly, on a poster that reads “loose talk is noose talk”).  In a world where the arms of society and government, however incompetent, are increasingly inescapable, the film offers an extremely dark proverb of human perseverance: when all else fails in reality, one can find comfort and consolation in fantasy.  As Archibald “Harry” Tuttle states in a conversation with Sam Lowry whilst performing maintenance on his air conditioning:

                       

                        “Found it.  There’s your problem.”

                        “Can you fix it?”

                        “No, I can’t…but I can bypass it.”

One of the film’s primary means of depicting Lowry’s gradual retreat from reality and into internal solidarity is through the soundtrack.  The eponymous song occurs immediately at the film’s opening, backing our first brief glimpse of Lowry’s dream world sequence.  It is non-diegetic and the song itself feeds Gilliam’s escapist philosophy within the film.  He describes the image that inspired the entirety of the film without actually being featured in it:

                        “I had an image of somebody sitting on a beach, a beach blackened by coal dust,    

                        somebody just sitting there in the evening with a radio and that haunting song

                        coming over the air waves – escapist, romantic sounds suggesting that somewhere

            out there, far from the conveyor belts and ugly steel towers, is a green and

            wonderful world.”

While Brazil, the actual country, has nothing to do with film, the idea of escaping to another world outside of Sam’s immediate dystopic surroundings becomes more and more prominent in the film and transitions from non-diegetic to diegetic.  Not only does much of the soundtrack contain variations of the melody in Kate Bush’s rendition of “Brazil,” but the song starts to be used in television commercials and is hummed by characters.  The song, resembling escape from reality, becomes more and more part of Lowry’s diegetic reality until the film’s iconic and depressing cadence.  Following the reveal that Sam has completely immersed himself in his fantasy, the last image of Lowry depicts him strapped in a chair in Information Retrieval’s torture chamber.  This is accompanied, not only by the closing credits, but also by Sam’s eerie humming of “Brazil.”  At this moment of the film, the human spirit has persevered and fantasy has eclipsed reality, but we are left wondering whether or not this idea is uplifting or depressing.    

Wall-E and Kuleshov

In Andrew Stanton’s animated Sci-Fi Wall-E, (2008) the restrictions placed upon the expressions of characters, both human and robotic, demand a regression to the silent film era in order to aptly communicate character feelings and “directives.”  The mechanical robot bodies of Wall-E and Eve are limited in both speech in body language due to their synthetic natures, while humans are limited due to their increase in body mass and their decrease in bone mass which renders them immobile and nearly incapable of body language in the slightest.  Furthermore, their interaction with other human beings occurs, until the climax of the film, solely through a virtual medium (Note that robotic speech doesn’t occur for the first 22 minutes of the film, and human speech doesn’t occur for the first 39 minutes). 

The film reverts as result, relying on editing and music to bestow meaning upon the formerly lifeless forms.

We understand Wall-E’s pursuit of robot-love because of the editing technique developed in 1920s Soviet Montage films known as the Kuleshov effect.  As expressed by Lev Kuleshov in his discussion “The Principles of Montage” in his film text The Practice of Film Direction, montage developed at a time when typage, or non-actors, were utilized to accurately portray a character of certain socioeconomic status visually.  Kuleshov nods to one of the primary functions of montage aiming to enhance the roles of the inadequate actors:

           

“Doubtless, the work of such an accidental actor (not an actor but a type) will be very poor in quality, and it is here that the role of montage, correcting and adjusting the actor’s job, is highly significant.”

Montage intervenes by juxtaposing a set of shots in order to achieve the Kuleshov effect: giving birth to an idea or feeling by juxtaposing two shots that is not present in either shot individually.  We learn about Wall-E’s aspirations through his viewing of the film Hello, Dolly! (1969).  We are first presented with a shot of Wall-E observing the film, then shifting to a POV shot of the screen on which Hello, Dolly! is projected.  The shots alternates back to Wall-E, and his eyes are able to express a sense of longing due to their ability to rotate downwards on their axis to suggest depression.  Returning to the projection, we see the affectionate human characters holding hands.  The shot again comes back to Wall-E, this time on his hands instead of his face, and he is grasping his own mechanical hands together in the absence of a robot love interest.  By juxtaposing shots in montage style, we are able to deduce that Wall-E is capable of very human emotions, particularly love.

Even in opening scenes that establish the dystopic setting of “trash planet,” the Kuleshov effect is accomplished, but through music instead of dynamic editing.  Despite the depressive, lifeless landscape, Wall-E movements are interpreted as swift and full of life: he appears excited to be creating skyscrapers of trash.  Taking into account, however, his lack of effective expression, we realize that while his body language and movements certainly contribute to the construction of meaning, it is not without the music that we are able to discern his character. 

The song “Put on Your Sunday Clothes” from Hello, Dolly! inspires our reading of Wall-E’s character, providing an uplifting musical number that is hopeful in discovering a new meaning in life, simultaneously touching upon motifs of the film:

“Out there

There's a world outside of Yonkers

Way out there beyond this hick town, Barnaby

There's a slick town, Barnaby

Out there

Full of shine and full of sparkle

Close your eyes and see it glisten, Barnaby

Listen, Barnaby...”

Alluding to the motifs of abandoning and discovering life throughout the film, we see that form follows function to an extent: Andrew Stanton acts as a necromancer, relying heavily on a film tradition of the past to bring expressive life to his formerly inarticulate characters.

MonsterMingle.com

“We prefer an ordered world, regular patterns, familiar forms, and when flaws or distortions occur, provided they are not too gross, our mind’s eye tidies them up.  We see what we want or expect to see…we never see the whole of any solid object at any given moment; even to see the whole surface of so simple an object as a sphere, six successive viewpoints are needed…but we except at a single glance that it is a sphere: we complete it on the assumption that it is a consistent shape and the simplest one possible.”

            -Lawrence Wright, Perspective in Perspective (1983)

Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) symptomatically wears Expressionist imprints as a product of the Weimar Republic’s reigning ideological mindset.  Modernism, the trunk from which Expressionism branches, raged to its development as an established school of thought in response to modern industrial societies and World War I.  Particularly disillusioned with Enlightenment thinking, Modernism rejects what it understands as neatly constructed fictions masquerading as certain truths.  The Expressionist denomination sought to emphasize the subjective framing of our understandings of the world, doing away with realism and precise physical representations of the world.  Juxtaposing different character’s perspectives, Lang pushes dramatic irony through the mediums of expressionist art and architecture to unveil a solution.  The incomplete perspectives must be fused together to progress towards a better understanding of the truth, or, better yet:

The unrestrictive narrative of Metropolis permits us as audience to assemble a portrait of the entire setting, but the restricted perspectives of each of the individual characters renders their worldviews incomplete.  The workers of the underground industrial sectors know nothing but the dystopic realm in which they endlessly labor.  Their dreary existence fulfills the Expressionist film approach, combining the characters with the setting for a seamless image: the workers themselves move mechanically as if part of the machines. 

Similarly, the perspectives of the regulars at the “Club of Sons” and “The Eternal Gardens” are limited to the utopia that they inhabit.  A stark contrast exists: whereas those below ground are claustrophobically confined to machines, those above ground are released to the vastness of nature and open stadiums.  The lives exist on opposite ends of the spectrum, and each is incomplete and limited to their perspective of the world.  Maria and Freder instigate the widening of perspectives.  The worlds begin to clash when Maria brings malnourished children to the Eternal Gardens and both the elites and working class are astonished by how the other half lives.

Another fascinating point of deviation in perspective is the actress Brigitte Helm.  Not only is the robot made in the likeness of Maria (her main role) to mislead the factory workers, but she is credited as Death, The 7 Deadly Sins, The Creative Man, and the Machine Man.  The inability of the characters to identify the difference between the Marias, or even the existence of two Marias, incites the madness of near-catastrophic proportions.  Depending on the depth of the character’s knowledge at any given point, Maria could resemble a dynamic spectrum of symbols, all of which may be misleading taken individually.

Where Lang’s mindset in Metropolis perhaps deviates from typical Modernist attitudes is that it refuses to abandon preceding perspectives.  Nodding to Bruno Latour, Metropolis refuses to abandon its numerous monsters and insists that they simply need to be introduced to one another.  In the documentary "Voyage to Metropolis," Lang is described to draw from his predecessors in an effective manner that points to his categorization as more of a Latourian compositionist.  He noticeably drew from Expressionist architecture and art, notably the Einstein Tower and Belling's Skulputre 23, but drew from products outside the school of thought, such as the New York skyline and the mythical tower of Babel.  In fact, Lang's reading of the view as he approached the New York Harbor reveals his inspiration for the layered setting: "the building seemed like a vertical curtain, shimmering and weightless, an opulent stage backdrop suspended against a sinister sky in order to dazzle, divert, and hypnotize."  In refusing to break completely from tradition, but to analyze it wholistically, Lang creates a lasting cornerstone in film and all of popular culture:

"Fritz Lang's film collects and intensifies the impulses of his time and then itself works to influence the development of art and architecture."