Category Archives: Vol.29

Anca Ursa
Iuliu Haţieganu University of Medicine and Pharmacy, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
ancaursa@yahoo.com

Dystopia, Bureaucracy and Identity in Crulic – The Path to Beyond

Abstract: The allegorical film about a young Romanian victim of the Polish justice system is an upside-down dystopia, in the three-dimensional mirror of the real. A typical Kafkaesque character passes the path to death in a world that refuses to hear him. We see dystopia as a study method, not as a purpose for the analytical investigation. In addition, we do not start from the idea that this is the opposite of an ideal world, but it’s the utopia converted into a degraded version which unfolded badly. I applied two scales of understanding to a deep and challenging scenario: the sociological theories about the world as a dysfunctional mechanism and the archetypes of the contemporary imaginative.

Keywords: Death; Laughter; Dystopia; Identity; Bureaucracy; Katabasis.

            A film hard to classify

            About Crulic – The Path to Beyond, Anca Damian’s 2011 work, it is easier to talk in negative definitions than positive ones: it is neither documentary, nor fictional; neither biographical, nor Romanian; neither a feature film, nor a short one; neither fully animated, nor exclusively with crêpe paper characters or actors; neither drama, nor comedy; neither realistic, nor totally parabolic; neither just narration, nor poetic collage. But it has something from all, in varying proportions.

With a less numerous team, consisting of two Poles and a few Romanians, with a budget under € 300,000, the film won 25 international awards in the first year of the festival circuit and it was very well received by the public and the press. What part of the composition makes each spectator resonate? How come the typical Kafkaesque hero and the bureaucratic dystopia have not lost their fascination, although the last half century has created numerous and redundant avatars for them in the lineage of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell’s novels, following the theories of Max Weber and Adorno or cinematic achievements like Metropolis, A Clockwork Orange, Brazil etc.?

            The script created by Anca Damian after a thorough documentation presents the story of Daniel Claudiu Crulic, a Romanian young man who went to work in Poland. In 2007, at 33 years old, already a suspect in a case of theft, he was falsely accused of sneaking the wallet of a High Court judge. He was arrested on September 9, 2007, in preventive detention, for 3 months initially, with a further extension of another two months. From the first week, he went on hunger strike to protest against his abusive arrest, which led to the young man’s death in January 2008. For four months he had sent letters to the Polish authorities and the Romanian consul in Warsaw, asking to consider the proofs of his innocence, but all the institutions involved continued to deny or abolish the emerged evidence as being irrelevant. Only in 2014 did the first convictions for Crulic case appear: two doctors from the prison hospital got eight months in prison for criminal negligence.

            The idea of a documentary was rejected by the producer from the beginning.

Although she managed to obtain copies of the files from Warsaw and Bucharest, though she transcribed endless confessions and details from the relatives, Anca Damian considered that the mosaic had too many missing parts, on one hand, and that extrapolating the experience through parable and poetry would be more valuable, on the other hand.

I refused that proposal [to make a documentary] because I didn’t want to go with the microphone in front of people’s houses and harass them with unnecessary questions. What would I have won? I believe that a film is a piece of art which compensates some misconducts of the society and of the man. I am not Michael Moore and I don’t want to be him.[1]

Therefore, she chose the protagonist’s voice from beyond the grave to simply narrate a biography which was apparently boring. The actor Vlad Ivanov narrates everything in the first person, with a mild irony, with a genuine Moldavian accent and an equal voice. It is an inspired trick; dystopia is stealthily created in the middle of the dull everyday life so that its subversion can be more persuasive.

            In the following pages, I use two scales to interpret the proposed film, one based on the psychological and sociological theories descended from the world-bureaucracy initiated a century ago, and the other derived from the analysis of symbols and archetypes of the current imaginary.

The typical Kafkaesque world of nonidentity: a quasi-Eastern-European      bureaucratic dystopia

            Crulic – The Path to Beyond is an allegory of a society which is still dysfunctional institutionally, now in the twenty-first century. We are not dealing with a classic dystopia, it is not a future projection fully imagined, and the reference to the present plays an essential part, as it creates the historical narrative core of the script. But as stated above, the film goes beyond the negative evolution of a destiny in order to draw a typical Kafkaesque world, with which the new millennium begins and which reinvents a couple of fears that we considered obsolete.

            Before detailing the perspective of some dystopian anxiety, a few terminological explanations are needed. Firstly, we do not focus on dystopia itself, as an object of study, but as an analytical category useful for understanding how we relate to the future, in view of the past. Not as an object of research, but as a method. It is a necessary distinction, recently promoted by the coordinators of the investigation volume on utopias and modern dystopias at Princeton University.[2] Therefore fable is not important in itself, but when and where the artistic projection appeared. What these issues say about the creator and his receptors becomes more important than the coherence or spectacular circumstantial narrative. How do we relate to the future here, in the Eastern areas of the old continent, in the European Union democratic frameworks, based on respecting human rights? It is important, in the same respect, to see how the problem of immigrants is perceived and managed by the responsible administrative bodies. Four years after the movie, the dilemmas tackled in Crulic are up-to-date topics for not such a far future as we thought then.

            In an analysis of the imaginary modern democracy, Lucian Boia believes that currently Europe has exhausted its aspirations, no longer has what to hope for, and no longer has ideologies that could divide it or give some consistency.[3] Therefore, a revitalization of solidarity and motivation can be achieved around an ancient, but eternally productive archetype, that of an immigrant or a foreigner. Crulic is a foreigner who went to Poland, a country from the former Soviet bloc, too. At the beginning of the film, in his genealogical tree, the protagonist mentions his grandparents, as immigrants from Poland and his surname (crulic means rabbit in Polish) retains traces of their native language. However, it is not enough for the young man to be assimilated by the adopted country. He is in preventive detention also because the judge frequently makes confusion between a Roma and a Romanian. Crulic is sure he will remain in custody for a while until they realize that “I’m not the Gypsy described by the saleswoman” (for sure, the stigmatic chain of the other one is endless). However, the archetype of otherness appears as a preface to the democratic labyrinth and as his legitimization. Solidarity through indifference to the stranger may be a confirmation of his own social or even national identity.[4]

Secondly, our analysis relies on the coherence of defining dystopia as not necessarily an opposite form to utopia. Despite the common element, we cannot speak of an antinomy. If that is the case, dystopian society would likely be anarchic or planned to evolve dramatically for its members. But anti-utopia or dystopia derives from a utopia that went in a wrong way or that works only for privileged groups.[5]

            Claudiu Crulic is doing quite well in the new country, until he is arrested for stealing from the judge. He does not think he has much chance of employment when he gets there, with a little Polish caught during his previous trips for merchandise. And yet, he finds an “uncle,” Razdvanek, who lets him live in his house. He is hired temporarily at some garages and car-washes. He also has a girlfriend, Lica, whom he knows from back home. He pays annual visits to his family in Italy and Romania. The hopes are confirmed by the initial images of Krakow, performed in the style of the 1970s communist advertising, long blue and pink, with naive optimistic messages -English “Krakow rocks,” “PeaceLove,” “Krakow is so cool!” Nevertheless the utopian imaginary is already threatened by visual oxymoronic clues. The last message of the sequence above, “Sun Shine Krakow” is projected on a rainy landscape, on an increasingly gray background, with a paroxysmal acceleration of both background music and images. Since the cinematic process of accelerating images usually gives place to gags and comic effects, here there is only anguish and menacing.

            The items that ruin Claudiu Crulic’s newly created idyllic world suddenly occur when returning from a vacation at home. The foreground image of the common file with Lica, the typewriter’s chatter, the judge’s hammer, the final group that summons him not to make an appeal, place the protagonist in another paradigm, that of the convict. The episode is frustrating for the innocent viewer as the cause and the sentence are missing altogether. Perhaps Anca Damian, attached to her character, intentionally omitted tougher strokes since it is important to see an innocent dying at the end, in the typical Kafkaesque world. The real process is yet to come.

            But first of all, a brief statement about the theoretical bureaucracy is useful, as it was done by two of the theorists of anti-utopia, with reference to the mechanized world, in the last century. In 1922 in his complex essay “Economy and Society,” Max Weber outlined a portrait of the new species of inhuman beings, rational experts in administration and production, incapable of emotion.[6] In the lineage of Weber, Ralph P. Hummel emphasizes that the changes made by bureaucracy do not affect the human being only at a superficial psychological level, but they challenges and even changes it at an ontological level, through at least three strategies:

1. Bureaucracy replaces autonomous personality with organizational identity.

2. Bureaucracy takes the functions of conscience (superego) and mastery (ego) out of the individual’s psyche and distributes them across organizational structures: hierarchy and the division of labor.

3. Bureaucracy, the increasing dependency of the individual self on structures of the organization (in effect, mingling self and organization), controls its functionaries by manipulating the existential anxiety over the loss of self that a separation from the job threatens to produce.[7]

These theories will be taken and adapted gradually to the history of the twentieth century by groups of critics of modern civilization, members of Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Benjamin) or French postmodernists (Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Baudrillard).

            Does Crulic’s world resemble the picture of the dystopias foreseen by the theorists? Not only has it common elements, but it seems to confirm the scenarios of the mechanized institutionalization in each detail. It is a dystopia à l’envers in a three-dimensional mirror of the real, an existential interpretation of speculative theories. Already suspected of theft in the first case, Claudiu and Lica are “recognized” in the police photos by the sacked judge. Here the voice changes, the producer has chosen to alternate confession in the first person with a neutral and serious narrative of the events in English, with Jamie Sives’ voice, as once inside the mechanical state institutions, destiny no longer belongs to Crulic, he can no longer control it.

            This is how it eventually turns out that those responsible for the development of Crulic’s case collaborate with solidarity worthy of a better cause than to ruin the prisoner’s life. The initial investigators keep on talking at the interrogation, overwhelming him with questions. In the first instance, Crulic says he was in Krakow on the day of the theft, as he was preparing to go to Italy, but then remembers that he was already on the bus on July 11, when the theft occurred. Nobody wants to hear, no one records. The Romanian Consul tells him to trust the Polish justice system, even when the main character’s requests are accompanied by an official letter from one of the majors from the detention center, in the investigation. The testimony of the guide who was on the bus on the way to Italy on the date of the theft and Crulic’s appearance in the company records as the ticket’s owner are not valid. The doctors at the prison kept postponing feeding him artificially; they declared him healthy, although he got unconscious in the prison hospital, for three times. They also delayed the start of maneuvers for artificial feeding, a gesture that would have saved the prisoner’s life after 4 months of strike. The Court hadn’t given them the permission yet. The serious voice, which exclusively dominates the last 15 minutes of video, is presented neutrally but with pauses that cause the spectator’s revolt: “Everyone followed the law. And according to the law, any decision of the Court awaits validation.”

            However Crulic has an admirable strength in refusing to get into the swirl of the declarations of guilt. He knows he is innocent, so he fights with every means to avoid being sentenced: hunger strike, letters to prosecutors, letters to the Romanian Embassy, a calendar made by him, allowing him to appear in court on the day of the trial, a journal in which he thoroughly documented the evolution of his case until the last moment and, not least, his efforts to remain aware and vigilant all the time, despite the weakness induced by the prolonged strike. In his chronicle, Angelo Mitchievici underlines the surprise that this Everyman from the East offers to the viewers:

What is surprising is not the dissolution of the lost ego, but its resistance to nothingness. The stubbornness with which Crulic wants to prove his innocence, to claim his rights has something stronger than any activism, it is an outrage that does not turn into a cry, but rather a kind of flatus vocis coming from nowhere. The committed injustice awakens in Crulic a reaction that is stronger than him, which he is unable to justify, a sense of dignity that redesigns him as a character in an intense and absurd drama.[8]

The symbolism of the body is well managed metaphorically by the drawers. If until then Crulic appears in vague strokes, with his body often transparent or outlined in watercolor, in order to suggest the common fate of an individual who remains faithful to his standards, now the touches of the outline are precise, their color inside is thicker, as if as the body melted into a hunger strike. His existential substance is much more consistent, more valuable. The relentless fight against a mechanized system increases its ontological value.

            A Failed Katabasis

            Erling B. Holstmark includes utopian and dystopian films in the series of those that take the mythological patterns as the journey to the underworld, along with westerns, detective thrillers, and war stories.[9] What else announces the title and leads the scenario for Crulic – The Path to Beyond? The Katabasis, the descending initiatory journey is associated with a profound knowledge of himself and his return to the surface as a superior being. All coordinates are found in Anca Damian’s movie, excepting the return from death, even if the final metaphor of the flying sheets can be interpreted as an escape, as a transition into a higher plan. But death is there, it is final and beyond doubt. It is present at the core of the film and the script seems not to negotiate anything with the receiver and not spare him in any way. Death is often treated with warm humor by the “dead” character, which makes it less frightening, but not less present. In addition, elements that connote it appear recurrent and consistent.

            The first scene already transmits unequivocally that the character is speaking from beyond the grave. His uncle finds out that his nephew Claudiu Crulic has died in Poland. The scene is presented as a novel exhibition. A raven appears on the left of the screen and sits on a black branch in front of the house. Reading from left to right is a good anchor for the viewer’s gaze, as he/she enters the “story.” The transparent role of the raven is that of psycho-pomp who will lead the dead man’s soul to the underworld. It appears with variations, whenever it feels the breath of death. When he moves to Krakow, the screen is invaded by a whole bevy, as a sign for a series of initiative attempts that were awaiting him on the path towards death. It also occurs when Crulic has a serious car accident and his companion dies. It comes when his and Lica’s child dies at birth. A very emotional scene is the “Russian roulette.” During the hunger strike, there is a decisive moment: once it is overcome, the striker cannot stop, either the problem gets fixed or he finally dies. The raven enters the character’s head and the wings keep on moving smoothly. Finally, in the episode of death, it appears in the window and then leaps over the sill.

            The descent into hell includes two major archetypes, outlined in the coherence of the pattern in Greek mythology, Hades and the road. The prison has the features of Hades: long and tangled roads / corridors, Cerberus guards without eyes, but whose menacing teeth can be seen, money confiscation, the tortures that he endures from the detainees and his imprisoned colleagues and, finally, the conviction that there is no way back.

            The Christian imagery of death is part of the story, too. The rooms in the prison and in the hospital often have long, narrow walls, like a tomb. A wall is always absent initially but after a few frames it slams loudly, like a coffin lid. Orthodox icons appear both in the wallet that his mother gets back after of his death and on the wall next to the bed. They do not necessarily express faith or the presence of a transcendent entity. They are rather a character hint, a sign of traditional education. Sometimes religious courts are even involved in the extermination scenario, their protective role being out of question. The Romanian Consul who is asked to intervene appears in a silhouette shaped like an angel, who wants to be begged, but who urinates on the applicant. A similar moment is when the camera slowly approaches the icon of Jesus on the wall and the viewer is almost waiting for a miracle. But the only noise that is heard is that of a coin dropped on the table.

The last reiterated symbol is the road. As a matter of fact, at some point in his confession, Crulic creates a metaphor of his personal life as a trip by bus. In one of the first scenes, the Mercedes with the coffin comes on a road lined with leafless and black trees, which may be lost in a white nothingness, where the path ends. The image returns towards the end, to conclude the story as a circle. Symbols of death are so numerous and diverse; the whole movie could be considered a poem about death.

            Crulic-The Path to Beyond is a very tender story about death, as tender as such a topic can bear. But there is also a breakdown of utopia for the immigrant in Europe, which is too overwhelmed to be functional and to have efficient mechanisms and institutions in order to give importance to isolated individuals. A failed utopia, converted into a criminal scenario, under the eyes of his victims, a dystopia which does not talk about an individual’s mistakes, not even about the system, but about a reorientation of the current imaginary toward social system that we considered it was linked and exhausted by the history of the last century.

Bibliography

Lucian Boia, Mitul democraţiei, Bucureşti, Editura Humanitas, 2003.

Lucian Boia, Pentru o istorie a imaginarului, Bucureşti, Editura Humanitas, 2000.

Anca Damian, “Despre cazul lui Claudiu Crulic: Nu m-a interesat cine e vinovat. Vinovaţi suntem toţi,” http://www.mediafax.ro/cultura-media/anca-damian-despre-cazul-lui-claudiu-crulic-nu-m-a-interesat-cine-e-vinovat-vinovati-suntem-toti-video-8525928.

Ralph P. Hummel, The Bureaucratic Experience: The Post-Modern Challenge, New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1977.

Michael D. Gordin, Helen Tille and Gyan Prakash (eds.), Utopia / Dystopia: Conditions of Historical Possibility, Princeton – New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 2010.

Gallya Lahav, Immigration and Politics in the New Europe: Reinventing Borders, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Serge Latouche, Décoloniser l’imaginaire: La pensée créative contre l’économie de l’absurde, Lyon, Parangon, 2005.

Per Persson, Understanding Cinema: A Psychological Theory of Moving Imagery, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Max Weber, Oraşul, Bucureşti, Editura All, 2013.

Martin M. Winkler (ed.), Classical Myth & Culture in the Cinema, New York, Oxford University Press, 2001.

Notes

Anca Ursa
Iuliu Haţieganu University of Medicine and Pharmacy, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
ancaursa@yahoo.com

Dystopia, Bureaucracy and Identity in Crulic – The Path to Beyond

Abstract: The allegorical film about a young Romanian victim of the Polish justice system is an upside-down dystopia, in the three-dimensional mirror of the real. A typical Kafkaesque character passes the path to death in a world that refuses to hear him. We see dystopia as a study method, not as a purpose for the analytical investigation. In addition, we do not start from the idea that this is the opposite of an ideal world, but it’s the utopia converted into a degraded version which unfolded badly. I applied two scales of understanding to a deep and challenging scenario: the sociological theories about the world as a dysfunctional mechanism and the archetypes of the contemporary imaginative.

Keywords: Death; Laughter; Dystopia; Identity; Bureaucracy; Katabasis.

            A film hard to classify

            About Crulic – The Path to Beyond, Anca Damian’s 2011 work, it is easier to talk in negative definitions than positive ones: it is neither documentary, nor fictional; neither biographical, nor Romanian; neither a feature film, nor a short one; neither fully animated, nor exclusively with crêpe paper characters or actors; neither drama, nor comedy; neither realistic, nor totally parabolic; neither just narration, nor poetic collage. But it has something from all, in varying proportions.

With a less numerous team, consisting of two Poles and a few Romanians, with a budget under € 300,000, the film won 25 international awards in the first year of the festival circuit and it was very well received by the public and the press. What part of the composition makes each spectator resonate? How come the typical Kafkaesque hero and the bureaucratic dystopia have not lost their fascination, although the last half century has created numerous and redundant avatars for them in the lineage of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell’s novels, following the theories of Max Weber and Adorno or cinematic achievements like Metropolis, A Clockwork Orange, Brazil etc.?

            The script created by Anca Damian after a thorough documentation presents the story of Daniel Claudiu Crulic, a Romanian young man who went to work in Poland. In 2007, at 33 years old, already a suspect in a case of theft, he was falsely accused of sneaking the wallet of a High Court judge. He was arrested on September 9, 2007, in preventive detention, for 3 months initially, with a further extension of another two months. From the first week, he went on hunger strike to protest against his abusive arrest, which led to the young man’s death in January 2008. For four months he had sent letters to the Polish authorities and the Romanian consul in Warsaw, asking to consider the proofs of his innocence, but all the institutions involved continued to deny or abolish the emerged evidence as being irrelevant. Only in 2014 did the first convictions for Crulic case appear: two doctors from the prison hospital got eight months in prison for criminal negligence.

            The idea of a documentary was rejected by the producer from the beginning.

Although she managed to obtain copies of the files from Warsaw and Bucharest, though she transcribed endless confessions and details from the relatives, Anca Damian considered that the mosaic had too many missing parts, on one hand, and that extrapolating the experience through parable and poetry would be more valuable, on the other hand.

I refused that proposal [to make a documentary] because I didn’t want to go with the microphone in front of people’s houses and harass them with unnecessary questions. What would I have won? I believe that a film is a piece of art which compensates some misconducts of the society and of the man. I am not Michael Moore and I don’t want to be him.[1]

Therefore, she chose the protagonist’s voice from beyond the grave to simply narrate a biography which was apparently boring. The actor Vlad Ivanov narrates everything in the first person, with a mild irony, with a genuine Moldavian accent and an equal voice. It is an inspired trick; dystopia is stealthily created in the middle of the dull everyday life so that its subversion can be more persuasive.

            In the following pages, I use two scales to interpret the proposed film, one based on the psychological and sociological theories descended from the world-bureaucracy initiated a century ago, and the other derived from the analysis of symbols and archetypes of the current imaginary.

The typical Kafkaesque world of nonidentity: a quasi-Eastern-European      bureaucratic dystopia

            Crulic – The Path to Beyond is an allegory of a society which is still dysfunctional institutionally, now in the twenty-first century. We are not dealing with a classic dystopia, it is not a future projection fully imagined, and the reference to the present plays an essential part, as it creates the historical narrative core of the script. But as stated above, the film goes beyond the negative evolution of a destiny in order to draw a typical Kafkaesque world, with which the new millennium begins and which reinvents a couple of fears that we considered obsolete.

            Before detailing the perspective of some dystopian anxiety, a few terminological explanations are needed. Firstly, we do not focus on dystopia itself, as an object of study, but as an analytical category useful for understanding how we relate to the future, in view of the past. Not as an object of research, but as a method. It is a necessary distinction, recently promoted by the coordinators of the investigation volume on utopias and modern dystopias at Princeton University.[2] Therefore fable is not important in itself, but when and where the artistic projection appeared. What these issues say about the creator and his receptors becomes more important than the coherence or spectacular circumstantial narrative. How do we relate to the future here, in the Eastern areas of the old continent, in the European Union democratic frameworks, based on respecting human rights? It is important, in the same respect, to see how the problem of immigrants is perceived and managed by the responsible administrative bodies. Four years after the movie, the dilemmas tackled in Crulic are up-to-date topics for not such a far future as we thought then.

            In an analysis of the imaginary modern democracy, Lucian Boia believes that currently Europe has exhausted its aspirations, no longer has what to hope for, and no longer has ideologies that could divide it or give some consistency.[3] Therefore, a revitalization of solidarity and motivation can be achieved around an ancient, but eternally productive archetype, that of an immigrant or a foreigner. Crulic is a foreigner who went to Poland, a country from the former Soviet bloc, too. At the beginning of the film, in his genealogical tree, the protagonist mentions his grandparents, as immigrants from Poland and his surname (crulic means rabbit in Polish) retains traces of their native language. However, it is not enough for the young man to be assimilated by the adopted country. He is in preventive detention also because the judge frequently makes confusion between a Roma and a Romanian. Crulic is sure he will remain in custody for a while until they realize that “I’m not the Gypsy described by the saleswoman” (for sure, the stigmatic chain of the other one is endless). However, the archetype of otherness appears as a preface to the democratic labyrinth and as his legitimization. Solidarity through indifference to the stranger may be a confirmation of his own social or even national identity.[4]

Secondly, our analysis relies on the coherence of defining dystopia as not necessarily an opposite form to utopia. Despite the common element, we cannot speak of an antinomy. If that is the case, dystopian society would likely be anarchic or planned to evolve dramatically for its members. But anti-utopia or dystopia derives from a utopia that went in a wrong way or that works only for privileged groups.[5]

            Claudiu Crulic is doing quite well in the new country, until he is arrested for stealing from the judge. He does not think he has much chance of employment when he gets there, with a little Polish caught during his previous trips for merchandise. And yet, he finds an “uncle,” Razdvanek, who lets him live in his house. He is hired temporarily at some garages and car-washes. He also has a girlfriend, Lica, whom he knows from back home. He pays annual visits to his family in Italy and Romania. The hopes are confirmed by the initial images of Krakow, performed in the style of the 1970s communist advertising, long blue and pink, with naive optimistic messages -English “Krakow rocks,” “PeaceLove,” “Krakow is so cool!” Nevertheless the utopian imaginary is already threatened by visual oxymoronic clues. The last message of the sequence above, “Sun Shine Krakow” is projected on a rainy landscape, on an increasingly gray background, with a paroxysmal acceleration of both background music and images. Since the cinematic process of accelerating images usually gives place to gags and comic effects, here there is only anguish and menacing.

            The items that ruin Claudiu Crulic’s newly created idyllic world suddenly occur when returning from a vacation at home. The foreground image of the common file with Lica, the typewriter’s chatter, the judge’s hammer, the final group that summons him not to make an appeal, place the protagonist in another paradigm, that of the convict. The episode is frustrating for the innocent viewer as the cause and the sentence are missing altogether. Perhaps Anca Damian, attached to her character, intentionally omitted tougher strokes since it is important to see an innocent dying at the end, in the typical Kafkaesque world. The real process is yet to come.

            But first of all, a brief statement about the theoretical bureaucracy is useful, as it was done by two of the theorists of anti-utopia, with reference to the mechanized world, in the last century. In 1922 in his complex essay “Economy and Society,” Max Weber outlined a portrait of the new species of inhuman beings, rational experts in administration and production, incapable of emotion.[6] In the lineage of Weber, Ralph P. Hummel emphasizes that the changes made by bureaucracy do not affect the human being only at a superficial psychological level, but they challenges and even changes it at an ontological level, through at least three strategies:

1. Bureaucracy replaces autonomous personality with organizational identity.

2. Bureaucracy takes the functions of conscience (superego) and mastery (ego) out of the individual’s psyche and distributes them across organizational structures: hierarchy and the division of labor.

3. Bureaucracy, the increasing dependency of the individual self on structures of the organization (in effect, mingling self and organization), controls its functionaries by manipulating the existential anxiety over the loss of self that a separation from the job threatens to produce.[7]

These theories will be taken and adapted gradually to the history of the twentieth century by groups of critics of modern civilization, members of Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Benjamin) or French postmodernists (Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Baudrillard).

            Does Crulic’s world resemble the picture of the dystopias foreseen by the theorists? Not only has it common elements, but it seems to confirm the scenarios of the mechanized institutionalization in each detail. It is a dystopia à l’envers in a three-dimensional mirror of the real, an existential interpretation of speculative theories. Already suspected of theft in the first case, Claudiu and Lica are “recognized” in the police photos by the sacked judge. Here the voice changes, the producer has chosen to alternate confession in the first person with a neutral and serious narrative of the events in English, with Jamie Sives’ voice, as once inside the mechanical state institutions, destiny no longer belongs to Crulic, he can no longer control it.

            This is how it eventually turns out that those responsible for the development of Crulic’s case collaborate with solidarity worthy of a better cause than to ruin the prisoner’s life. The initial investigators keep on talking at the interrogation, overwhelming him with questions. In the first instance, Crulic says he was in Krakow on the day of the theft, as he was preparing to go to Italy, but then remembers that he was already on the bus on July 11, when the theft occurred. Nobody wants to hear, no one records. The Romanian Consul tells him to trust the Polish justice system, even when the main character’s requests are accompanied by an official letter from one of the majors from the detention center, in the investigation. The testimony of the guide who was on the bus on the way to Italy on the date of the theft and Crulic’s appearance in the company records as the ticket’s owner are not valid. The doctors at the prison kept postponing feeding him artificially; they declared him healthy, although he got unconscious in the prison hospital, for three times. They also delayed the start of maneuvers for artificial feeding, a gesture that would have saved the prisoner’s life after 4 months of strike. The Court hadn’t given them the permission yet. The serious voice, which exclusively dominates the last 15 minutes of video, is presented neutrally but with pauses that cause the spectator’s revolt: “Everyone followed the law. And according to the law, any decision of the Court awaits validation.”

            However Crulic has an admirable strength in refusing to get into the swirl of the declarations of guilt. He knows he is innocent, so he fights with every means to avoid being sentenced: hunger strike, letters to prosecutors, letters to the Romanian Embassy, a calendar made by him, allowing him to appear in court on the day of the trial, a journal in which he thoroughly documented the evolution of his case until the last moment and, not least, his efforts to remain aware and vigilant all the time, despite the weakness induced by the prolonged strike. In his chronicle, Angelo Mitchievici underlines the surprise that this Everyman from the East offers to the viewers:

What is surprising is not the dissolution of the lost ego, but its resistance to nothingness. The stubbornness with which Crulic wants to prove his innocence, to claim his rights has something stronger than any activism, it is an outrage that does not turn into a cry, but rather a kind of flatus vocis coming from nowhere. The committed injustice awakens in Crulic a reaction that is stronger than him, which he is unable to justify, a sense of dignity that redesigns him as a character in an intense and absurd drama.[8]

The symbolism of the body is well managed metaphorically by the drawers. If until then Crulic appears in vague strokes, with his body often transparent or outlined in watercolor, in order to suggest the common fate of an individual who remains faithful to his standards, now the touches of the outline are precise, their color inside is thicker, as if as the body melted into a hunger strike. His existential substance is much more consistent, more valuable. The relentless fight against a mechanized system increases its ontological value.

            A Failed Katabasis

            Erling B. Holstmark includes utopian and dystopian films in the series of those that take the mythological patterns as the journey to the underworld, along with westerns, detective thrillers, and war stories.[9] What else announces the title and leads the scenario for Crulic – The Path to Beyond? The Katabasis, the descending initiatory journey is associated with a profound knowledge of himself and his return to the surface as a superior being. All coordinates are found in Anca Damian’s movie, excepting the return from death, even if the final metaphor of the flying sheets can be interpreted as an escape, as a transition into a higher plan. But death is there, it is final and beyond doubt. It is present at the core of the film and the script seems not to negotiate anything with the receiver and not spare him in any way. Death is often treated with warm humor by the “dead” character, which makes it less frightening, but not less present. In addition, elements that connote it appear recurrent and consistent.

            The first scene already transmits unequivocally that the character is speaking from beyond the grave. His uncle finds out that his nephew Claudiu Crulic has died in Poland. The scene is presented as a novel exhibition. A raven appears on the left of the screen and sits on a black branch in front of the house. Reading from left to right is a good anchor for the viewer’s gaze, as he/she enters the “story.” The transparent role of the raven is that of psycho-pomp who will lead the dead man’s soul to the underworld. It appears with variations, whenever it feels the breath of death. When he moves to Krakow, the screen is invaded by a whole bevy, as a sign for a series of initiative attempts that were awaiting him on the path towards death. It also occurs when Crulic has a serious car accident and his companion dies. It comes when his and Lica’s child dies at birth. A very emotional scene is the “Russian roulette.” During the hunger strike, there is a decisive moment: once it is overcome, the striker cannot stop, either the problem gets fixed or he finally dies. The raven enters the character’s head and the wings keep on moving smoothly. Finally, in the episode of death, it appears in the window and then leaps over the sill.

            The descent into hell includes two major archetypes, outlined in the coherence of the pattern in Greek mythology, Hades and the road. The prison has the features of Hades: long and tangled roads / corridors, Cerberus guards without eyes, but whose menacing teeth can be seen, money confiscation, the tortures that he endures from the detainees and his imprisoned colleagues and, finally, the conviction that there is no way back.

            The Christian imagery of death is part of the story, too. The rooms in the prison and in the hospital often have long, narrow walls, like a tomb. A wall is always absent initially but after a few frames it slams loudly, like a coffin lid. Orthodox icons appear both in the wallet that his mother gets back after of his death and on the wall next to the bed. They do not necessarily express faith or the presence of a transcendent entity. They are rather a character hint, a sign of traditional education. Sometimes religious courts are even involved in the extermination scenario, their protective role being out of question. The Romanian Consul who is asked to intervene appears in a silhouette shaped like an angel, who wants to be begged, but who urinates on the applicant. A similar moment is when the camera slowly approaches the icon of Jesus on the wall and the viewer is almost waiting for a miracle. But the only noise that is heard is that of a coin dropped on the table.

The last reiterated symbol is the road. As a matter of fact, at some point in his confession, Crulic creates a metaphor of his personal life as a trip by bus. In one of the first scenes, the Mercedes with the coffin comes on a road lined with leafless and black trees, which may be lost in a white nothingness, where the path ends. The image returns towards the end, to conclude the story as a circle. Symbols of death are so numerous and diverse; the whole movie could be considered a poem about death.

            Crulic-The Path to Beyond is a very tender story about death, as tender as such a topic can bear. But there is also a breakdown of utopia for the immigrant in Europe, which is too overwhelmed to be functional and to have efficient mechanisms and institutions in order to give importance to isolated individuals. A failed utopia, converted into a criminal scenario, under the eyes of his victims, a dystopia which does not talk about an individual’s mistakes, not even about the system, but about a reorientation of the current imaginary toward social system that we considered it was linked and exhausted by the history of the last century.

Bibliography

Lucian Boia, Mitul democraţiei, Bucureşti, Editura Humanitas, 2003.

Lucian Boia, Pentru o istorie a imaginarului, Bucureşti, Editura Humanitas, 2000.

Anca Damian, “Despre cazul lui Claudiu Crulic: Nu m-a interesat cine e vinovat. Vinovaţi suntem toţi,” http://www.mediafax.ro/cultura-media/anca-damian-despre-cazul-lui-claudiu-crulic-nu-m-a-interesat-cine-e-vinovat-vinovati-suntem-toti-video-8525928.

Ralph P. Hummel, The Bureaucratic Experience: The Post-Modern Challenge, New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1977.

Michael D. Gordin, Helen Tille and Gyan Prakash (eds.), Utopia / Dystopia: Conditions of Historical Possibility, Princeton – New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 2010.

Gallya Lahav, Immigration and Politics in the New Europe: Reinventing Borders, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Serge Latouche, Décoloniser l’imaginaire: La pensée créative contre l’économie de l’absurde, Lyon, Parangon, 2005.

Per Persson, Understanding Cinema: A Psychological Theory of Moving Imagery, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Max Weber, Oraşul, Bucureşti, Editura All, 2013.

Martin M. Winkler (ed.), Classical Myth & Culture in the Cinema, New York, Oxford University Press, 2001.

Notes

Cristina Vidruţiu
Fellow of the Associazione Internazionale Dino Buzzati, Feltre, Italy
vidrutiucristina@yahoo.com

The Blind Spot. Utopian and Dystopian Seeds in José Saramago’s Novel Blindness

Abstract: The paper first explores the peculiar symbiosis between utopia and dystopia in José Sarmago’s novel Blindness, by tracing a parallel between the group in the novel and the brigata in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron; and second, it analyzes the way this atypical world is translated on the big screen by Fernando Meirelles, using a number of different cinematography techniques.

Keywords: Plague; José Saramago; Giovanni Boccaccio; Blindness; Fernando Meirelles.

When Fernando Meirelles decided he wanted to shoot the cinematographic version of José Saramago’s novel Blindness, he knew it would not be an easy job, first of all, because he had to convince the Portuguese writer to give him this opportunity. Along the years, Saramago refused several offers to make a movie out of Blindness, because he said he was afraid that fallen in the wrong hands, the message of the novel would be distorted. Finally, he accepted Meirelles’s offer, and in 2008, when the movie premiered and Saramago saw it, he cried tears of happiness, saying that watching the adaptation made him as happy as when he finished writing the novel.

With that in mind, we can clearly say that, at least from Saramago’s point of view, Meirelles succeeded in making the camera see and show the unseen, and thus to assume the role of storyteller for the viewer. Not only that, but by using a set of well-timed techniques, Meirelles ended up making the viewer constantly “adapt to” and “adopt” the camera lenses’ view in understanding the movie.

When Saramago wrote Blindness, he did not make a choice between dystopia and utopia; instead, he acknowledged that the grains of paradise can be found in the midst of hell, confirming what Rebecca Totaro once wrote: “Utopianism took literary form, growing out of plague-time.”[1]

For the Portuguese writer, there is never a clear mark between these two areas, as these are always on the move, changing borders, reimagining the world. In Saramago’s novel, dystopia and utopia are permeable to each other and they seem to co-exist in a peculiar form of symbiosis.

From the moment the mysterious blindness epidemic hits the city and all falls apart, the world sets slowly its pace to a new rhythm: that of dystopia, promising a resurrection, in accordance with Elana Gomel’s distinction between apocalyptic-regenerative narratives and post-apocalyptic-death and suffering ridden narratives.[2]

As soon as the infected persons are put into the mental hospital, at gunpoint, under the strict surveillance of the military, on rationalized food, under scanty conditions of living and without any medical supplies, all hell breaks loose, making the fight for survival a day-to-day task for each and every one of those imprisoned. In this context, the dysfunctional “plague-stricken town” fails to become “the utopia of the perfectly governed city,”[3] as seen by Foucault. In fact, it turns out to be quite the opposite.

In the midst of violence, destruction and death, a new chance for life arises, as a small group of people understands the importance of cooperation, organization and leadership. The doctor’s wife, played by Julianne Moore, the only one who sees, coagulates a new form of brigata around her, whom she does not lead, as she says, but to whom rather she lends her sight.

In relation to the classical brigata from Boccaccio’s Decameron, the group from Saramago’s Blindness seems to be built on complementary principles. But beyond structural differences, it is important to remember the fact that both groups have a common origin, the outbreak of a disease, and that the main goal of both groups is to create a structure able to survive and function in the face of the plague.

While the brigata from the Decameron runs away from the bubonic plague, the new brigata from Blindness tries to escape the white blindness epidemic. In both cases, the disease is considered a violent event that changes the course of things. But the way each author envisions how people should react to the epidemic is totally different. Both Boccaccio and Saramago agree on the idea of a group, but where, when, how and with whom the group should be formed is seen very differently by the two authors.

Let’s take for example the classical brigata from the Decameron. This is a group made of young men and women (that have names), formed as soon as the plague sets in Florence, dwelling in the countryside and guided by a set of principles that represent the scientific preventive views of the time regarding the plague: in order to prevent or fight the plague, it is recommended to keep a good sense of humor, to engage in activities like storytelling, dancing, walking, singing, to eat nutritious and rich food, sleep well and retreat in the countryside for the fresh air.

On the other hand, the new brigata from Blindness is complementarily built. First of all, this other group is more heterogeneous. It consists of men and women, young and old, a child and eventually even a dog. Second, the characters do not have names. Third, the group is formed only as the epidemic invades the city and the characters escape the insane asylum, where they were kept. Fourth, the group dwells in the city. Fifth, the members of the group are not able to engage in relaxing activities, nor to have a healthy diet because of the chaotic state of the city, where provisions are scarce and the air is polluted.

Still, despite all the differences between the two brigata, there is a moment and, more specifically, a place when the groups resemble each other, when the two groups can be seen as the seeds of utopia. As soon as the group from Saramago’s novel escapes the insane asylum and enters the doctor’s home, things change.

This new space is defined in opposition to the space of the ward. In here, cleanliness, nice smells, order, food supplies, fresh water and a friendly atmosphere rule, leading to its being called a paradise by the members of the new brigata, while the place left behind is called hell. The access to this space of purity is guided by the doctor’s wife and her husband, who ask the members of the group to abandon their dirty clothes and wash themselves. Once settled, the new brigata can enjoy the provisions and engage in a pleasant way of spending time, much like the merry group from the Decameron.

The most striking difference, regarding the way the two groups try to articulate a functional, utopic structure in the midst of plague ridden cities, resides in the way these understand the notion of ruler.

In the Decameron, each day has a different patron, which establishes the theme for the stories to be told on that particular time frame. Each of the brigata’s members is to rule and each of them is bringing their contribution each day by telling a story. In other words, the power and the responsibilities that come along with it are distributed equally among all members, giving them the chance to assume different roles and to contribute in complementary ways to the good functioning of the group.

In Blindness, the one and only leader for the whole period of time is the doctor’s wife, mainly because she is the only one that does not lose her eyesight, and thus has the power to make decisions. Her relation to the others is one of great responsibility. Mainly, she assumes a role similar to that of a mother: she guides the members of the group, she feeds them, she takes care of them, she washes them, and she protects them.

Even though she is in a position whence she might take full advantage of her eyesight and become a tyrannical ruler, she does not do it. Nor does she consider herself a leader, but more of an organizer, a person like the others, who lends her sight to the others. When relating to others, she insists on the idea of community and the power of collaboration. In this case, the power irradiates from the doctor’s wife to the others and returns once again to the doctor’s wife, as the members of the group see in her a sort of savior.

If we consider the dynamic of the two brigata and the relation between these and the diseased environment, we can observe a certain similarity regarding the way these interact and the roles they assume. At first, the groups separate themselves from the chaotic mass of people. Second, they try to coagulate as a functional group. And third, they “contaminate” the world, serving as a functional model in the midst of chaos.

The group’s way of functioning as an independent and self-sufficient unit goes from chaotic, non-organized and destructive to defined, organized and regenerative. In biological terms, the functional transition the groups make is similar to that from cancer cells to stem cells. In this equation, the diseased city acts the same way as cancer cells, while the two brigata act the same way as stem cells. In both novels, the two groups irradiate life, they fight against disorder and give a solution: a way to organize themselves.

The nature of the diseases present in the two novels has a strong influence on the way the sense of community arises. If in the Decameron the bubonic plague allows everyday rules to be broken and the imagination to be set free, giving cathartic powers to the stories, in Saramago’s novel, the white blindness encourages touch as a way to bond with the others.

Meirelles clearly understands the transition from sight to touch, in Saramago’s novel, and while adapting the story for the big screen he lays a big emphasis on this aspect.

The camera focuses mainly on parts of the body. It assembles the whole image like a puzzle, trying to make sense of it. It usually starts with the extremities, the feet, or the hands, which usually make a strong sound while touching something else. In fact, the visual image of the movie is constructed by respecting the “contours” left by the sound.

The director superposes the movement of the camera to Saramago’s words from the novel: when the first man goes blind, his explanation about what he is experiencing synchronizes with the images the camera shots apparently in a random manner. While saying he is seeing white all around him, the windows of the car where the man is reflect the white light. As the explanation of the character continues, the car goes from light to dark, while crossing a tunnel.

This transgression between white and black or black and white will repeatedly appear in Meirelles’s movie, becoming a sort of visual rhythm, sewing together the pieces of the puzzle: from the street in the broad daylight to the tunnel, from the black wall of the kitchen to the light in the kitchen, from day to night, switching on and off lights or headlights, moving from the street to the dark van.

The visual rhythm of the movie is accompanied by a specific sound, which has the role of highlighting the proportions of the blindness epidemic. Each new case of blindness is signaled by a sound, similar to that of hitting a piece of crystal, while a white light invades the image.

The movie’s images suffer a reconversion once blindness is installed: the image is chopped, there is a lot of zooming, the eyes of the characters are outside of the frame, the extremities become the main focus and the sound guides the way to assembling the whole picture. As the epidemic progresses, the fight between the image and the white color is repeatedly staged in the movie: sometimes the image surfaces slowly from under a sea of white; at other times the image fades away, erasing itself in order to let the white invade it.

Meirelles’s movie is very resourceful when it comes to the seeing-not seeing dynamic. The director accurately and instinctively senses the variety of intermediate nuances raised by this battle. This is why the movie is a kaleidoscope of reflections and transparencies.

The car, the hotel and home windows and mirrors, the sun glasses, a glass elevator, an aluminum tea pot, a glass table – all mirror the characters, insisting on the importance of the point of view of the camera and, implicitly, of the audience.

The insane asylum, where Saramago’s characters are segregated, is made to look like a labyrinth of mirrors. When entering it, the doctor’s wife is reflected many times in the glass of the windows, thus insisting both on the fragmented image and the multiple images of self. The screen of one of the TVs in the asylum, showing an official talking about the benefits of isolation, reflects the ward, thus superposing the official version of the disease with the unofficial version of the disease.

The eye of the viewer is left to wander. Often, the characters are seen through a wall of glass: the doctor and his wife are watched through the glass walls of the living room, the health secretary through the glass walls of the hall, the girl with the sun glasses through the glass walls of the elevator, the first blind man through the windows of his car, the doctor’s secretary through the glass walls of the office, the doctor’s wife through the windows of the ambulance. This gives the viewer the impression of transparency, but at the same time it reminds him there is a boundary that he will not be able to cross.

Saramago’s interpretation of the novel, that “Blindness is a metaphor for the blindness of human reason,”[4] is reflected visually in the movie by focusing on the eye that no longer sees, and that is seen through a series of mediums built in order to exercise sight, like peepholes, lenses or glasses.

The novel highlights a disruptive logic: the characters “see, without seeing,” unlike Homer or Tiresias, who “don’t see, but see.” Following this logic of the dysfunctional eye, blurred images, close-ups and zooming become a way of moving through the movie, a red line that connects all the dots and forms the big picture. The repeated out-of-focus images force the audience to readjust sight many times during the movie, thus creating a strong interdependent connection between the eye of the viewer and the camera telling the story.

Following the same line, Saramago also questions the classic view on the relation between white and black. Atypical blindness is white, not black, as usual, giving, at least in the beginning, the impression that this disease is a noble one. Still, this presumption is rapidly dismantled when, for example, one of the characters “sailing” on a sea of white is appalled by the awful smells around him, rising from the dirty and chaotic city.

By becoming physically blind, Saramago’s characters are forced to become aware of and to overcome their rational blind spot, which prevents them from truly understanding the essence of the world and of the self. One blindness enlightens the other. One blindness serves the other. Only when they cannot see the physical world do they turn their eyes onto themselves, to the meaning of things. As soon as they learn how to live peacefully with the others in this new position, their sight comes back, in order to let them fully see the better place they have created, by connecting harmoniously the two gazes, targeted at the world and at themselves.

Bibliography

Barroso, Donzelina, “Jose Saramago: The art of fiction CLV”, The Paris Review, No. 149, Winter 1998, p. 55-73.

Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by Alan Sheridan, London, Vintage Books, 1995.

Gomel, Elana, “The Plague of Utopias: Pestilence and the Apocalyptic Body”, Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 46, No. 4, “Literature and Apocalypse,” Winter 2000, p. 405-433.

Totaro, Rebecca, Suffering in Paradise: The Bubonic Plague in English Literature from More to Milton, Pittsburgh, Duquesne University Press, 2005.

Saramago, José, Blindness, translated by Giovanni Pontiero, London, Vintage Books, 2005.

Blindness, directed by Fernando Meirelles, writers José Saramago and Don McKellar, Miramax, 2008, DVD, 121 minutes.

Notes

Cristina Vidruţiu
Fellow of the Associazione Internazionale Dino Buzzati, Feltre, Italy
vidrutiucristina@yahoo.com

The Blind Spot. Utopian and Dystopian Seeds in José Saramago’s Novel Blindness

Abstract: The paper first explores the peculiar symbiosis between utopia and dystopia in José Sarmago’s novel Blindness, by tracing a parallel between the group in the novel and the brigata in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron; and second, it analyzes the way this atypical world is translated on the big screen by Fernando Meirelles, using a number of different cinematography techniques.

Keywords: Plague; José Saramago; Giovanni Boccaccio; Blindness; Fernando Meirelles.

When Fernando Meirelles decided he wanted to shoot the cinematographic version of José Saramago’s novel Blindness, he knew it would not be an easy job, first of all, because he had to convince the Portuguese writer to give him this opportunity. Along the years, Saramago refused several offers to make a movie out of Blindness, because he said he was afraid that fallen in the wrong hands, the message of the novel would be distorted. Finally, he accepted Meirelles’s offer, and in 2008, when the movie premiered and Saramago saw it, he cried tears of happiness, saying that watching the adaptation made him as happy as when he finished writing the novel.

With that in mind, we can clearly say that, at least from Saramago’s point of view, Meirelles succeeded in making the camera see and show the unseen, and thus to assume the role of storyteller for the viewer. Not only that, but by using a set of well-timed techniques, Meirelles ended up making the viewer constantly “adapt to” and “adopt” the camera lenses’ view in understanding the movie.

When Saramago wrote Blindness, he did not make a choice between dystopia and utopia; instead, he acknowledged that the grains of paradise can be found in the midst of hell, confirming what Rebecca Totaro once wrote: “Utopianism took literary form, growing out of plague-time.”[1]

For the Portuguese writer, there is never a clear mark between these two areas, as these are always on the move, changing borders, reimagining the world. In Saramago’s novel, dystopia and utopia are permeable to each other and they seem to co-exist in a peculiar form of symbiosis.

From the moment the mysterious blindness epidemic hits the city and all falls apart, the world sets slowly its pace to a new rhythm: that of dystopia, promising a resurrection, in accordance with Elana Gomel’s distinction between apocalyptic-regenerative narratives and post-apocalyptic-death and suffering ridden narratives.[2]

As soon as the infected persons are put into the mental hospital, at gunpoint, under the strict surveillance of the military, on rationalized food, under scanty conditions of living and without any medical supplies, all hell breaks loose, making the fight for survival a day-to-day task for each and every one of those imprisoned. In this context, the dysfunctional “plague-stricken town” fails to become “the utopia of the perfectly governed city,”[3] as seen by Foucault. In fact, it turns out to be quite the opposite.

In the midst of violence, destruction and death, a new chance for life arises, as a small group of people understands the importance of cooperation, organization and leadership. The doctor’s wife, played by Julianne Moore, the only one who sees, coagulates a new form of brigata around her, whom she does not lead, as she says, but to whom rather she lends her sight.

In relation to the classical brigata from Boccaccio’s Decameron, the group from Saramago’s Blindness seems to be built on complementary principles. But beyond structural differences, it is important to remember the fact that both groups have a common origin, the outbreak of a disease, and that the main goal of both groups is to create a structure able to survive and function in the face of the plague.

While the brigata from the Decameron runs away from the bubonic plague, the new brigata from Blindness tries to escape the white blindness epidemic. In both cases, the disease is considered a violent event that changes the course of things. But the way each author envisions how people should react to the epidemic is totally different. Both Boccaccio and Saramago agree on the idea of a group, but where, when, how and with whom the group should be formed is seen very differently by the two authors.

Let’s take for example the classical brigata from the Decameron. This is a group made of young men and women (that have names), formed as soon as the plague sets in Florence, dwelling in the countryside and guided by a set of principles that represent the scientific preventive views of the time regarding the plague: in order to prevent or fight the plague, it is recommended to keep a good sense of humor, to engage in activities like storytelling, dancing, walking, singing, to eat nutritious and rich food, sleep well and retreat in the countryside for the fresh air.

On the other hand, the new brigata from Blindness is complementarily built. First of all, this other group is more heterogeneous. It consists of men and women, young and old, a child and eventually even a dog. Second, the characters do not have names. Third, the group is formed only as the epidemic invades the city and the characters escape the insane asylum, where they were kept. Fourth, the group dwells in the city. Fifth, the members of the group are not able to engage in relaxing activities, nor to have a healthy diet because of the chaotic state of the city, where provisions are scarce and the air is polluted.

Still, despite all the differences between the two brigata, there is a moment and, more specifically, a place when the groups resemble each other, when the two groups can be seen as the seeds of utopia. As soon as the group from Saramago’s novel escapes the insane asylum and enters the doctor’s home, things change.

This new space is defined in opposition to the space of the ward. In here, cleanliness, nice smells, order, food supplies, fresh water and a friendly atmosphere rule, leading to its being called a paradise by the members of the new brigata, while the place left behind is called hell. The access to this space of purity is guided by the doctor’s wife and her husband, who ask the members of the group to abandon their dirty clothes and wash themselves. Once settled, the new brigata can enjoy the provisions and engage in a pleasant way of spending time, much like the merry group from the Decameron.

The most striking difference, regarding the way the two groups try to articulate a functional, utopic structure in the midst of plague ridden cities, resides in the way these understand the notion of ruler.

In the Decameron, each day has a different patron, which establishes the theme for the stories to be told on that particular time frame. Each of the brigata’s members is to rule and each of them is bringing their contribution each day by telling a story. In other words, the power and the responsibilities that come along with it are distributed equally among all members, giving them the chance to assume different roles and to contribute in complementary ways to the good functioning of the group.

In Blindness, the one and only leader for the whole period of time is the doctor’s wife, mainly because she is the only one that does not lose her eyesight, and thus has the power to make decisions. Her relation to the others is one of great responsibility. Mainly, she assumes a role similar to that of a mother: she guides the members of the group, she feeds them, she takes care of them, she washes them, and she protects them.

Even though she is in a position whence she might take full advantage of her eyesight and become a tyrannical ruler, she does not do it. Nor does she consider herself a leader, but more of an organizer, a person like the others, who lends her sight to the others. When relating to others, she insists on the idea of community and the power of collaboration. In this case, the power irradiates from the doctor’s wife to the others and returns once again to the doctor’s wife, as the members of the group see in her a sort of savior.

If we consider the dynamic of the two brigata and the relation between these and the diseased environment, we can observe a certain similarity regarding the way these interact and the roles they assume. At first, the groups separate themselves from the chaotic mass of people. Second, they try to coagulate as a functional group. And third, they “contaminate” the world, serving as a functional model in the midst of chaos.

The group’s way of functioning as an independent and self-sufficient unit goes from chaotic, non-organized and destructive to defined, organized and regenerative. In biological terms, the functional transition the groups make is similar to that from cancer cells to stem cells. In this equation, the diseased city acts the same way as cancer cells, while the two brigata act the same way as stem cells. In both novels, the two groups irradiate life, they fight against disorder and give a solution: a way to organize themselves.

The nature of the diseases present in the two novels has a strong influence on the way the sense of community arises. If in the Decameron the bubonic plague allows everyday rules to be broken and the imagination to be set free, giving cathartic powers to the stories, in Saramago’s novel, the white blindness encourages touch as a way to bond with the others.

Meirelles clearly understands the transition from sight to touch, in Saramago’s novel, and while adapting the story for the big screen he lays a big emphasis on this aspect.

The camera focuses mainly on parts of the body. It assembles the whole image like a puzzle, trying to make sense of it. It usually starts with the extremities, the feet, or the hands, which usually make a strong sound while touching something else. In fact, the visual image of the movie is constructed by respecting the “contours” left by the sound.

The director superposes the movement of the camera to Saramago’s words from the novel: when the first man goes blind, his explanation about what he is experiencing synchronizes with the images the camera shots apparently in a random manner. While saying he is seeing white all around him, the windows of the car where the man is reflect the white light. As the explanation of the character continues, the car goes from light to dark, while crossing a tunnel.

This transgression between white and black or black and white will repeatedly appear in Meirelles’s movie, becoming a sort of visual rhythm, sewing together the pieces of the puzzle: from the street in the broad daylight to the tunnel, from the black wall of the kitchen to the light in the kitchen, from day to night, switching on and off lights or headlights, moving from the street to the dark van.

The visual rhythm of the movie is accompanied by a specific sound, which has the role of highlighting the proportions of the blindness epidemic. Each new case of blindness is signaled by a sound, similar to that of hitting a piece of crystal, while a white light invades the image.

The movie’s images suffer a reconversion once blindness is installed: the image is chopped, there is a lot of zooming, the eyes of the characters are outside of the frame, the extremities become the main focus and the sound guides the way to assembling the whole picture. As the epidemic progresses, the fight between the image and the white color is repeatedly staged in the movie: sometimes the image surfaces slowly from under a sea of white; at other times the image fades away, erasing itself in order to let the white invade it.

Meirelles’s movie is very resourceful when it comes to the seeing-not seeing dynamic. The director accurately and instinctively senses the variety of intermediate nuances raised by this battle. This is why the movie is a kaleidoscope of reflections and transparencies.

The car, the hotel and home windows and mirrors, the sun glasses, a glass elevator, an aluminum tea pot, a glass table – all mirror the characters, insisting on the importance of the point of view of the camera and, implicitly, of the audience.

The insane asylum, where Saramago’s characters are segregated, is made to look like a labyrinth of mirrors. When entering it, the doctor’s wife is reflected many times in the glass of the windows, thus insisting both on the fragmented image and the multiple images of self. The screen of one of the TVs in the asylum, showing an official talking about the benefits of isolation, reflects the ward, thus superposing the official version of the disease with the unofficial version of the disease.

The eye of the viewer is left to wander. Often, the characters are seen through a wall of glass: the doctor and his wife are watched through the glass walls of the living room, the health secretary through the glass walls of the hall, the girl with the sun glasses through the glass walls of the elevator, the first blind man through the windows of his car, the doctor’s secretary through the glass walls of the office, the doctor’s wife through the windows of the ambulance. This gives the viewer the impression of transparency, but at the same time it reminds him there is a boundary that he will not be able to cross.

Saramago’s interpretation of the novel, that “Blindness is a metaphor for the blindness of human reason,”[4] is reflected visually in the movie by focusing on the eye that no longer sees, and that is seen through a series of mediums built in order to exercise sight, like peepholes, lenses or glasses.

The novel highlights a disruptive logic: the characters “see, without seeing,” unlike Homer or Tiresias, who “don’t see, but see.” Following this logic of the dysfunctional eye, blurred images, close-ups and zooming become a way of moving through the movie, a red line that connects all the dots and forms the big picture. The repeated out-of-focus images force the audience to readjust sight many times during the movie, thus creating a strong interdependent connection between the eye of the viewer and the camera telling the story.

Following the same line, Saramago also questions the classic view on the relation between white and black. Atypical blindness is white, not black, as usual, giving, at least in the beginning, the impression that this disease is a noble one. Still, this presumption is rapidly dismantled when, for example, one of the characters “sailing” on a sea of white is appalled by the awful smells around him, rising from the dirty and chaotic city.

By becoming physically blind, Saramago’s characters are forced to become aware of and to overcome their rational blind spot, which prevents them from truly understanding the essence of the world and of the self. One blindness enlightens the other. One blindness serves the other. Only when they cannot see the physical world do they turn their eyes onto themselves, to the meaning of things. As soon as they learn how to live peacefully with the others in this new position, their sight comes back, in order to let them fully see the better place they have created, by connecting harmoniously the two gazes, targeted at the world and at themselves.

Bibliography

Barroso, Donzelina, “Jose Saramago: The art of fiction CLV”, The Paris Review, No. 149, Winter 1998, p. 55-73.

Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by Alan Sheridan, London, Vintage Books, 1995.

Gomel, Elana, “The Plague of Utopias: Pestilence and the Apocalyptic Body”, Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 46, No. 4, “Literature and Apocalypse,” Winter 2000, p. 405-433.

Totaro, Rebecca, Suffering in Paradise: The Bubonic Plague in English Literature from More to Milton, Pittsburgh, Duquesne University Press, 2005.

Saramago, José, Blindness, translated by Giovanni Pontiero, London, Vintage Books, 2005.

Blindness, directed by Fernando Meirelles, writers José Saramago and Don McKellar, Miramax, 2008, DVD, 121 minutes.

Notes

Laura T. Ilea
Université de Montréal, Canada
airarle@yahoo.com

Soumission ou capitulation? Une France antiutopique dans le roman Soumission

et dans le film L’enlèvement de Michel Houellebecq/

Submission or Surrender? A Dystopian France in the Novel Submission and in the film The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq

Abstract: This article analyses the novel Submission by Michel Houellebecq (2015) and the movie The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq by Guillaume Nicloux (2014). It highlights the idea of an anti-utopian France and the auto-immune crisis that characterizes the Western civilization at the beginning of the 21^st century. The fragility of a democratic system that, according to Houellebecq, will end up in “insurrection” and “civil war” leads to the nostalgic temptation of the happiness of surrender.

Keywords: Anti-utopia; Surrender; Western Decadence; Michel Houellebecq.

1. Décadence de la civilisation européenne

            Quoique controversé et problématique puisse paraître à la première vue le dernier roman de Michel Houellebecq, Soumission (2015), il incite à une réaction imminente. Houellebecq décrit et déconstruit un monde où il se sent étranger, où il n’est plus capable de déceler des chances de survie; un monde en pleine déchéance, dans lequel un homme en train de vieillir reconnait les traces des civilisations disparues. À plusieurs reprises, le livre est traversé par des images du Moyen Âge, revu par ses adulateurs, Péguy, Claudel et Huysmans, imbus de mysticisme et désavouant le rationalisme d’un Pascal, d’un Newton ou d’un Kant. Le livre est également traversé par des images de la Rome antique : une des scènes qui précèdent « la soumission » finale a lieu dans un appartement parisien luxueux, aux alentours des Arènes de Lutèce, le lieu où l’esprit de Rome est le plus présent à Paris.

            À ce moment, la vision du personnage principal du roman – un des multiples visages de l’auteur – met en parallèle la décadence des deux civilisations, la prémonition de leur fin, au moment précis où elles se sentent au comble de leur développement historique. Un désir secret de disparition, caché sous l’apparence d’une force vitale en pleine ascension. Cette vision concerne les Romains, qui « avaient eu la sensation d’être une civilisation éternelle, immédiatement avant la chute de leur empire; s’étaient-ils, eux aussi, suicidés? Rome avait été une civilisation brutale, extrêmement compétente sur le plan militaire – une civilisation cruelle aussi, où les distractions proposées à la foule étaient des combats à mort entre hommes, ou entre hommes et entre fauves. Y avait-il eu chez les Romains un désir de disparaître, une faille secrète? » (p. 258).

            Le livre d’Houellebecq est au premier abord un cruel réquisitoire de la civilisation occidentale, qui s’est suicidée au bout de quelques décennies. Si c’était son seul enjeu, il ne susciterait aucune controverse. Son auteur n’est pas le premier à l’avoir fait. Après Nietzsche, la perspective nihiliste concernant le sort de l’homme occidental, affaibli par le christianisme, la tolérance et l’effémination, est monnaie courante dans tout discours intellectuel. Mais la façon dont Houellebecq dépasse le lieu commun est spécifique à cet auteur dont la force de la vision est secondée par un érotisme dont la cruauté se nourrit de la franchise qui dévoile un homme à qui le manque de plaisir physique semble plus difficile à supporter que la mort.

            En d’autres mots, Houellebecq ne se limite cette fois-ci à regarder le déclin de la civilisation occidentale ; il imagine également un avenir très proche, dans lequel la Fraternité musulmane, un mouvement islamique modéré dirigé par Mohammed Ben Abbes, remporterait de manière démocratique les élections en France. Ce n’est pas la première fois qu’Houellebecq s’attaque au problème islamique. Il l’avait déjà fait dans son livre Plateforme, où un terroriste tue l’amante du personnage principal. Dans le roman Soumission, l’élément le plus difficile à traiter est la limite extrêmement fine entre ironie et capitulation. Parce que, pour un personnage d’une intelligence décapante comme c’est le spécialiste du XIX^e siècle à travers lequel l’histoire est racontée, la soumission ne signifie pas la joie de l’union de l’homme à Dieu et l’acceptation du monde, tel qu’il a été créé, mais plutôt capitulation. Capitulation devant le manque de solutions vitales, devant l’impossibilité de régénération qui caractérise un homme qui se réclame de la civilisation occidentale du début du XXI^e siècle.

            Quelles sont donc ses impossibilités? Qu’est-ce qui l’empêche de vivre et pourquoi la capitulation (soumission) totale peut lui sembler une solution? À chaque fois que je parlerai de la solution (finale) de la soumission, je n’oublierai pas de mentionner l’ironie avec laquelle elle est présentée, de sorte que le lecteur atteigne une zone d’indiscernable, là où ses valeurs morales sont bouleversées et son jugement annulé. S’installe la paralysie de la volonté et de la raison, où la rhétorique et la fascination de l’orthodoxie s’insinuent. C’est la même sensation que celle créée par Ben Abbes, le dirigeant de la Fraternité musulmane, au sein de la nation française, au bout de quelques apparitions télévisées: « En y réfléchissant je me rendais compte que je n’en savais rien, et au moment où s’achevait la conférence de presse je compris que j’en étais arrivé exactement là où le candidat musulman voulait me mener: une sorte de doute généralisé, la sensation qu’il n’y avait rien là de quoi s’alarmer, ni de véritablement nouveau. » (p. 109). Les journalistes les plus agressifs, les plus acharnés, sont hypnotisés en présence de Mohammed Ben Abbes, et toutes les questions légitimes qu’ils pourraient lui adresser sont réduites au silence: la suppression du régime mixte par exemple, ou le fait que les professeurs doivent passer à la croyance musulmane, afin de pouvoir continuer leur carrière.

            Je pense d’ailleurs que c’est précisément ceci l’élément-clé du livre d’Houellebecq: la façon dont il est capable de raconter l’histoire de la décadence de la civilisation occidentale à travers des observations incisives qui concernent autant ses contemporains que le personnage principal.

2. Le nouveau désordre amoureux

            La diagnose du début du XXI^e siècle passe en premier par Huysmans, puisque le narrateur est un spécialiste en Huysmans – un écrivain passionné par le problème religieux, par la beauté de l’amour conjugal, vivant dans un monde où la grande boucherie du XX^e siècle, qui avait conduit au nihilisme occidental, n’était qu’un pressentiment. On nous rappelle la tendre passion nourricière de la femme, qui épluchait et cuisinait les légumes, un plaisir désirable, même s’il n’était en fin de compte qu’une faible compensation du plaisir charnel. Comme Houellebecq nous a déjà habitués dans ses autres romans, les névroses d’inadaptation dans les sociétés contemporaines sont expliquées par le déséquilibre érotique des mâles en souffrance, auxquels le nouveau désordre amoureux soustrait le fruit de leur désir.

Les relations érotiques dans les romans d’Houellebecq sont en perpétuel déséquilibre. L’homme est pris dans une course suicidaire contre le temps, en se choisissant des amantes de plus en plus jeunes et de plus en plus indisponibles, jusqu’à ce qu’il finisse dans l’écroulement total du sentiment amoureux. Dépourvue de désirs et de la capacité de se les satisfaire, la pensée du suicide le hante. Ce qui est le plus intéressant c’est le fait qu’aucune des idiosyncrasies de la compétitivité occidentale (y compris l’échec implicite) ne peut mener Houellebecq à l’idée du suicide. Son équation est bien plus simple: la mort de la libido et de la capacité de la satisfaire signifie privation de vie, d’où le suicide. De manière cynique et élégiaque, il insinue que toutes les valeurs occidentales, telles l’autonomie, la liberté, la reconnaissance, pourraient être sacrifiées en échange de l’équilibre hormonal: le mariage d’amour a échoué lamentablement (comme l’affirme Pascal Bruckner), ce qui reste est le mariage arrangé, qui met ensemble les qualités physiques de la femme et le statut social de l’homme. Pour que les deux fonctionnent ensemble, les marieuses regagnent leur importance dans la société.

            Le choix est une illusion: « On observe que tous les hommes, mis en situation de choisir, font exactement les mêmes choix. C’est ce qui a conduit la plupart des civilisations, en particulier la civilisation musulmane, à la création des marieuses. C’est une profession très importante, réservée aux femmes d’une grande expérience et d’une grande sagesse. Elles ont bien évidemment le droit, en tant que femmes, de voir les jeunes filles dénudées, de procéder à ce qu’il faut bien appeler une espèce d’évaluation, et de mettre en relation leur physique avec le statut social des futurs époux. » (p. 293). Vu que les hommes sont strictement déterminés du point de vue biologique, choisissant imperturbablement en fonction de critères physiques, il s’ensuit que l’évolution de l’espèce est en grande partie due à la plasticité intellectuelle des femmes, qui peuvent adapter leurs critères reproductifs, par une éducation soutenue, aux critères de la richesse ou de l’intellect. « On peut même, dans une certaine mesure, les persuader de la haute valeur érotique des professeurs d’université » (p. 294), écrit, cyniquement, l’auteur.

            Par une telle équation simplifiée, la souffrance de l’homme occidental serait réduite au minimum. La situation désespérée dans laquelle « les possibilités vitales coulaient entre mes doigts avec une rapidité croissante, me laissant, comme l’aurait dit Huysmans, inému et sec » (p. 205), ou la tentation du suicide, sans désespoir, sans tristesse, « simplement par dégradation lente de la somme totale des fonctions qui résistent à la mort dont parle Bichat » (p. 207) est annulée. L’équilibre du désir masculin est assuré par la possibilité d’avoir quatre femmes. Quelle perspective rassurante, mise en parallèle avec celle de son propre père, qui « lui, avait eu… ma mère, cette putain névrosée. » (p. 227).

En échange de l’ordre amoureux réinstallé, la femme n’a qu’à renoncer à l’autonomie. Mais à quoi ça sert, la fameuse autonomie, si elle ne peut assurer le bonheur? Fuck autonomy, déclame l’intellectuel spécialiste en Huysmans; lui-même y avait renoncé avec beaucoup de facilité, avec soulagement même. Responsabilités intellectuelles et professionnelles – ne sont que des sources de malheur – se dit-il pendant un voyage dans le train, en regardant devant lui l’homme arabe qui noircit d’angoisse à chaque fois que son téléphone sonne. La seule façon de se soustraire à cette existence néfaste est la compensation créée par les deux femmes gracieuses qui l’accompagnent pendant son voyage.

Quant à elles, les femmes peuvent rester toute leur vie des enfants. En sortant de cette période idyllique, elles deviendraient tout de suite mères, bref elles replongeraient dans l’univers de l’immaturité. À quelques années près, où elles troqueraient les jeux enfantins contre les jeux sexuels, ce qui revient en gros à la même chose.

Houellebecq s’attaque aussi au sensible problème du vêtement féminin, renversant le point de vue habituel selon lequel la femme arabe est prisonnière de son vêtement, entièrement soumise à l’homme. Il nous présente la relation de la femme avec ses vêtements comme un problème de séduction qui pourrait à la rigueur jouer en faveur de la femme arabe. La femme occidentale, selon lui, regarde ses vêtements comme une empreinte sociale. Quand elle sort, elle met en jeu l’infrastructure de la séduction. Sa séduction se dirige vers le monde extérieur. L’effort social l’épuise, de sorte que, alors qu’elle se retire dans son espace privé, un t-shirt avachi soit plus que suffisant pour mettre fin à son épuisante prestation sociale. C’est exactement le contraire de ce qui se passe avec la femme arabe. Comme son rôle social est extrêmement limité, son entière capacité de séduction se dirige vers l’espace intime. Ainsi, elle s’y concentre sur la satisfaction de l’homme, telle une déesse qui pulvérise le quotidien.

Ces considérations souffrent bien évidemment de l’égocentrisme masculin occidental, dont Houellebecq se rend coupable dans la plupart de ses livres. Tout féminisme, aussi superficiel soit-il, pourrait démonter ce genre d’arguments. J’insiste là-dessus parce que, par leur caractère absurde, ils nous donnent la mesure d’une certaine tentation que l’homme occidental pourrait ressentir devant le nouveau modèle de société, d’ordre économique, amoureux et politique proposé par la Fraternité musulmane de Ben Abbes. Il ne faut pas oublier, suggère Houellebecq, qu’au comble de la civilisation romane, qui précédait de près son effacement définitif, elle donnait beaucoup de pouvoir aux femmes, tout comme la civilisation européenne actuelle. Malheureusement, semble-t-il insinuer de manière élégiaque et ironique, la sophistication de la civilisation va de pair avec les symptômes de sa décadence. Je ne vais pas trop insister sur ce genre de détails, parce que j’aimerais également présenter dans le chapitre suivant les autres avantages qui se présentent à celui qui croit au Nouveau Monde.

3. Le Nouveau Monde

Tout d’abord, du point de vue religieux, aucun bouleversement majeur n’apparaitrait puisque, en plein milieu des ardents débats présidentiels, Ben Abbes propose le dialogue autour de la laïcité, ce qui lui confère l’image de la modération. Qui plus est, pour un islamiste modéré, tel qu’il se présente, la France fait potentiellement partie de la dar al islam, la loi de l’Islam; sa doctrine s’oppose aux djihadistes, pour lesquels la France représente une terre d’impiété, dar al koufr. Les élections et la prise du pouvoir par la Fraternité musulmane ne miseraient donc pas sur des questions économiques, mais surtout sur des questions de valeurs. Là où Tariq Ramadan présentait charia comme une option novatrice, révolutionnaire, qui effrayait la population française, Ben Abbes lui restituait la valeur traditionnelle, en y ajoutant un parfum d’exotisme qui la rendait désirable, par la restauration de la famille, de la morale traditionnelle et du patriarcat. La Fraternité musulmane serait en faveur de la religion chrétienne, puisque son grand ennemi n’est pas le christianisme, mais l’athéisme matérialiste et la laïcité. Les subventions allouées aux associations catholiques et à l’entretien des bâtiments religieux, en pleine déchéance, augmenteraient.

Du point de vue politique, le plan de Ben Abbes est simple, suivant d’ailleurs l’aspiration millénariste de l’Empire romain. Le point principal de sa politique externe serait le déplacement du centre de gravité de l’Europe vers le sud, ce qui ne serait pas trop compliqué, puisque ce genre d’organisations existait déjà, par exemple l’Union pour la Méditerranée. Englobant en premier la Turquie et le Maroc, et par la suite la Tunisie et l’Algérie, l’ambition du leader arabe est celle de devenir le premier président choisi de l’Europe élargie. Il ne serait d’ailleurs le seul à avoir développé une telle ambition, De Gaulle l’avait précédé, lui qui avait initié la grande politique arabe de la France.

            Tétanisé par cette liste d’avantages évidents, le lecteur se retrouve devant la vision du personnage principal du roman, qui comprend que le bonheur humain réside dans la soumission absolue. La soumission de la femme à l’homme, de l’homme à Dieu. Alors que pour le bouddhisme le monde est souffrance, et pour le christianisme Satan est prince de ce monde, dans l’Islam la création divine est parfaite, un chef-d’œuvre absolu. Voici le secret du bonheur, et la conversion finale du professeur universitaire, décrite au mode conditionnel – « La cérémonie de la conversion, en elle-même, serait très simple … le hammam me serait spécialement ouvert, il était d’ordinaire fermé aux hommes; vêtu d’un peignoir, je traverserais de longs couloirs aux colonnades surmontées d’arches … Le silence se ferait autour de moi. Des images de constellations, de supernovas, de nébuleuses spirales me traverseraient l’esprit ; … de grandes forêts presque vierges… Et puis ce serait fini ; je serais, dorénavant, un musulman ; … et ce serait la chance d’une deuxième vie, sans grand rapport avec la précédente. » (p. 297-299) – porte témoignage du fait que le livre d’Houellebecq, dont la sortie était prévue le 7 janvier 2015, quand les journalistes de Charlie Hebdo furent tués par deux extrémistes arabes, n’est pas un réquisitoire islamophobe. Houellebecq parle plutôt d’une crise auto-immune. La tentation de la soumission s’insinue dans l’esprit de la civilisation occidentale parce que sa sophistication la prédispose à la névrose et au nihilisme. Le secret de la prose d’Houellebecq dans ce livre se trouve surtout dans le fait que les deux dimensions – le comique et la métaphysique, la crise auto-immune et la farce politico-religieuse – coexistent jusqu’à l’indiscernable.

4. L’enlèvement de Michel Houellebecq, un film de Guillaume Nicloux (2014)

            Même si apparemment le film L’enlèvement de Michel Houellebecq se penche sur des enjeux différents, quelques scènes retracent les idées présentées dans les trois chapitres précédents. De quoi s’agit-il au juste ? Le sujet du film est l’enlèvement de Michel Houellebecq, qui vit dans un appartement style Le Corbusier, où il s’ennuie, écrit des poèmes et fume sans arrêt. Trois hommes, Luc, Max et Mathieu l’immobilisent dans l’ascenseur, puis l’amènent par force à la campagne, à la maison de Ginette et d’André (Dédé, d’origine polonaise) Suchotzky, les parents de Mathieu. L’opération se passe dans le calme ; les « agresseurs » s’entretiennent avec l’écrivain sur un ton de respect. Le seul qui a des poussées d’orgueil est Luc, un Gitan, qui ne veut pas se « faire passer pour une fausse couche » et qui ne veut pas concéder à l’écrivain sa supériorité intellectuelle. Il avait d’ailleurs écrit un poème en secondaire, qu’il se rappelle même à ses quarante-trois ans : « Des années et des années passent/Et je ne t’aime toujours pas, la chasse/J’aime les animaux en liberté/Quand on n’a pas besoin de les tuer/Existe-t-il sur terre quelque chose de plus extraordinaire/Que ces choses en plein air ? ». Surpris par l’hilarité générale suscitée par son poème, Luc jette son profond mépris au monde : « Je vous emmerde profondément ».

            Enfermé à la campagne et menotté, Houellebecq attend sa libération. Mais il n’arrête pas à demander à ses « bourreaux » qui est celui qui pourrait payer la rançon, du moment où ni son agent ni sa famille ne se permettraient les 20.000 euros que les trois gars demandent pour sa libération. Le soupçon ironique de l’écrivain va en direction de François Hollande, surtout que ses agresseurs le prennent en photo avec, sur la poitrine, une image de la Libération qui montre le président français secondé par Désir de l’avenir.

            L’intrigue du film est ponctuée par une série d’images antiutopiques : l’habitation dans laquelle vit l’écrivain, au tout début du film  – le village vertical, le simulacre grotesque imaginé par Le Corbusier. Dans la deuxième partie du film, il est amené à la campagne, dans un décor délabré, où les voitures abandonnées s’entassent dans un paysage surréaliste. C’est précisément dans ce paysage qu’Houellebecq profère ses théories sur la nécessité de se vider, de s’ennuyer, de sortir du quotidien. C’est là que « les choses » arrivent. S’extraire du monde antiutopique de Le Corbusier et plonger dans « le monde du réveil » et du paradoxe : « La Pologne est un rêve », profère l’écrivain, affirmation qui choque les trois braves gars, dont le métier est celui de bodybuilder (Max) et de boxeur (Mathieu). L’occupation de Luc n’est pas précise, chose qui convient parfaitement à sa « race ». C’est lui qui fait les décomptes des victimes d’Auschwitz – 6 millions juifs, 2 millions gitans, 1 million de la « race de Charles Aznavour ». « Arméniens ? », demandent les autres. « Oui, Arméniens », répond Luc, comme s’il disait « Peu importe ».

            Les discussions se continuent sur le même ton de farce et de grotesque. De temps en temps, Houellebecq revient à ses thèmes favoris, cette fois-ci traités du point de vue des potentiels « terroristes » : la lutte (n’oublions pas qu’Houellebecq a écrit un livre qui s’appelle L’extension du domaine de la lutte) – il est confronté à ses propres thèmes, décodés dans le langage commun, qui appartient à ceux qui ne se nourrissent pas d’utopies, mais de la réalité. Houellebecq regarde ensemble avec Mathieu l’un des combats de ce dernier. L’homme lui explique les techniques d’attaque et de défense. L’écrivain ne peut pas s’y concentrer. Il répète incessamment : « Il saigne. On peut y trouver un intérêt ? Il saigne ». Il s’intéresse à la lutte abstraite, mais le combat en tant que tel est trop saignant pour lui. Quant à l’autre, le boxeur, il lui demande s’il pouvait écrire un livre sur lui. « Pourquoi pas ? », lui répond Houellebecq.

            La fragilité d’Houellebecq, sa position inhabituelle sont évidentes. N’empêche qu’il continue à proférer ses professions de foi : l’intolérance (« Il faut dire les choses », affirme-t-il), le bonheur qui se trouve dans le présent (« si la vie s’arrêtait maintenant, je ne regretterais rien. J’ai assez vécu »), l’incontournable féminin (« Voulez-vous un film porno ? », lui demande Ginette, la mère de Mathieu. « Non, plutôt une fille ». Et Ginette lui amène une jeune fille arabe, Fatima, qui se trouve dans une situation familiale précaire et qui possède un charme physique évident). Les théories présentées dans Soumission sont illustrées donc à merveille. La fin du film revient au problème de la démocratie participative – l’idéal d’Houellebecq. Il critique encore une fois la régression de l’Europe : « Ça va finir dans l’insurrection. Bruxelles – ça sera la guerre civile. Suède – c’est la dictature. C’est pire qu’en France. L’anti démocratie. »

            Le film finit dans l’accélération : Michel Houellebecq, après sa libération, au volant d’une voiture (sa part de la rançon) qui roule à 250 km/heure, sur une autoroute qui efface dans l’ivresse de la vitesse le cauchemar antiutopique : les habitations style Le Corbusier et les paysages délabrés de la campagne. Michel Houellebecq rendu au vide de ses pensées, à l’écoute de la fragilité des choses.

Bibliography

Michel Houellebecq, L’extension du domaine de la lutte, Éditions Maurice Nadeau, Paris, 1994.

— Plateforme, Flammarion, Paris, 2001.

— Soumission, Flammarion, Paris, 2015.

Guillaume Nicloux, L’enlèvement de Michel Houellebecq, film (2013).

Laura T. Ilea
Université de Montréal, Canada
airarle@yahoo.com

Soumission ou capitulation? Une France antiutopique dans le roman Soumission

et dans le film L’enlèvement de Michel Houellebecq/

Submission or Surrender? A Dystopian France in the Novel Submission and in the film The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq

Abstract: This article analyses the novel Submission by Michel Houellebecq (2015) and the movie The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq by Guillaume Nicloux (2014). It highlights the idea of an anti-utopian France and the auto-immune crisis that characterizes the Western civilization at the beginning of the 21^st century. The fragility of a democratic system that, according to Houellebecq, will end up in “insurrection” and “civil war” leads to the nostalgic temptation of the happiness of surrender.

Keywords: Anti-utopia; Surrender; Western Decadence; Michel Houellebecq.

1. Décadence de la civilisation européenne

            Quoique controversé et problématique puisse paraître à la première vue le dernier roman de Michel Houellebecq, Soumission (2015), il incite à une réaction imminente. Houellebecq décrit et déconstruit un monde où il se sent étranger, où il n’est plus capable de déceler des chances de survie; un monde en pleine déchéance, dans lequel un homme en train de vieillir reconnait les traces des civilisations disparues. À plusieurs reprises, le livre est traversé par des images du Moyen Âge, revu par ses adulateurs, Péguy, Claudel et Huysmans, imbus de mysticisme et désavouant le rationalisme d’un Pascal, d’un Newton ou d’un Kant. Le livre est également traversé par des images de la Rome antique : une des scènes qui précèdent « la soumission » finale a lieu dans un appartement parisien luxueux, aux alentours des Arènes de Lutèce, le lieu où l’esprit de Rome est le plus présent à Paris.

            À ce moment, la vision du personnage principal du roman – un des multiples visages de l’auteur – met en parallèle la décadence des deux civilisations, la prémonition de leur fin, au moment précis où elles se sentent au comble de leur développement historique. Un désir secret de disparition, caché sous l’apparence d’une force vitale en pleine ascension. Cette vision concerne les Romains, qui « avaient eu la sensation d’être une civilisation éternelle, immédiatement avant la chute de leur empire; s’étaient-ils, eux aussi, suicidés? Rome avait été une civilisation brutale, extrêmement compétente sur le plan militaire – une civilisation cruelle aussi, où les distractions proposées à la foule étaient des combats à mort entre hommes, ou entre hommes et entre fauves. Y avait-il eu chez les Romains un désir de disparaître, une faille secrète? » (p. 258).

            Le livre d’Houellebecq est au premier abord un cruel réquisitoire de la civilisation occidentale, qui s’est suicidée au bout de quelques décennies. Si c’était son seul enjeu, il ne susciterait aucune controverse. Son auteur n’est pas le premier à l’avoir fait. Après Nietzsche, la perspective nihiliste concernant le sort de l’homme occidental, affaibli par le christianisme, la tolérance et l’effémination, est monnaie courante dans tout discours intellectuel. Mais la façon dont Houellebecq dépasse le lieu commun est spécifique à cet auteur dont la force de la vision est secondée par un érotisme dont la cruauté se nourrit de la franchise qui dévoile un homme à qui le manque de plaisir physique semble plus difficile à supporter que la mort.

            En d’autres mots, Houellebecq ne se limite cette fois-ci à regarder le déclin de la civilisation occidentale ; il imagine également un avenir très proche, dans lequel la Fraternité musulmane, un mouvement islamique modéré dirigé par Mohammed Ben Abbes, remporterait de manière démocratique les élections en France. Ce n’est pas la première fois qu’Houellebecq s’attaque au problème islamique. Il l’avait déjà fait dans son livre Plateforme, où un terroriste tue l’amante du personnage principal. Dans le roman Soumission, l’élément le plus difficile à traiter est la limite extrêmement fine entre ironie et capitulation. Parce que, pour un personnage d’une intelligence décapante comme c’est le spécialiste du XIX^e siècle à travers lequel l’histoire est racontée, la soumission ne signifie pas la joie de l’union de l’homme à Dieu et l’acceptation du monde, tel qu’il a été créé, mais plutôt capitulation. Capitulation devant le manque de solutions vitales, devant l’impossibilité de régénération qui caractérise un homme qui se réclame de la civilisation occidentale du début du XXI^e siècle.

            Quelles sont donc ses impossibilités? Qu’est-ce qui l’empêche de vivre et pourquoi la capitulation (soumission) totale peut lui sembler une solution? À chaque fois que je parlerai de la solution (finale) de la soumission, je n’oublierai pas de mentionner l’ironie avec laquelle elle est présentée, de sorte que le lecteur atteigne une zone d’indiscernable, là où ses valeurs morales sont bouleversées et son jugement annulé. S’installe la paralysie de la volonté et de la raison, où la rhétorique et la fascination de l’orthodoxie s’insinuent. C’est la même sensation que celle créée par Ben Abbes, le dirigeant de la Fraternité musulmane, au sein de la nation française, au bout de quelques apparitions télévisées: « En y réfléchissant je me rendais compte que je n’en savais rien, et au moment où s’achevait la conférence de presse je compris que j’en étais arrivé exactement là où le candidat musulman voulait me mener: une sorte de doute généralisé, la sensation qu’il n’y avait rien là de quoi s’alarmer, ni de véritablement nouveau. » (p. 109). Les journalistes les plus agressifs, les plus acharnés, sont hypnotisés en présence de Mohammed Ben Abbes, et toutes les questions légitimes qu’ils pourraient lui adresser sont réduites au silence: la suppression du régime mixte par exemple, ou le fait que les professeurs doivent passer à la croyance musulmane, afin de pouvoir continuer leur carrière.

            Je pense d’ailleurs que c’est précisément ceci l’élément-clé du livre d’Houellebecq: la façon dont il est capable de raconter l’histoire de la décadence de la civilisation occidentale à travers des observations incisives qui concernent autant ses contemporains que le personnage principal.

2. Le nouveau désordre amoureux

            La diagnose du début du XXI^e siècle passe en premier par Huysmans, puisque le narrateur est un spécialiste en Huysmans – un écrivain passionné par le problème religieux, par la beauté de l’amour conjugal, vivant dans un monde où la grande boucherie du XX^e siècle, qui avait conduit au nihilisme occidental, n’était qu’un pressentiment. On nous rappelle la tendre passion nourricière de la femme, qui épluchait et cuisinait les légumes, un plaisir désirable, même s’il n’était en fin de compte qu’une faible compensation du plaisir charnel. Comme Houellebecq nous a déjà habitués dans ses autres romans, les névroses d’inadaptation dans les sociétés contemporaines sont expliquées par le déséquilibre érotique des mâles en souffrance, auxquels le nouveau désordre amoureux soustrait le fruit de leur désir.

Les relations érotiques dans les romans d’Houellebecq sont en perpétuel déséquilibre. L’homme est pris dans une course suicidaire contre le temps, en se choisissant des amantes de plus en plus jeunes et de plus en plus indisponibles, jusqu’à ce qu’il finisse dans l’écroulement total du sentiment amoureux. Dépourvue de désirs et de la capacité de se les satisfaire, la pensée du suicide le hante. Ce qui est le plus intéressant c’est le fait qu’aucune des idiosyncrasies de la compétitivité occidentale (y compris l’échec implicite) ne peut mener Houellebecq à l’idée du suicide. Son équation est bien plus simple: la mort de la libido et de la capacité de la satisfaire signifie privation de vie, d’où le suicide. De manière cynique et élégiaque, il insinue que toutes les valeurs occidentales, telles l’autonomie, la liberté, la reconnaissance, pourraient être sacrifiées en échange de l’équilibre hormonal: le mariage d’amour a échoué lamentablement (comme l’affirme Pascal Bruckner), ce qui reste est le mariage arrangé, qui met ensemble les qualités physiques de la femme et le statut social de l’homme. Pour que les deux fonctionnent ensemble, les marieuses regagnent leur importance dans la société.

            Le choix est une illusion: « On observe que tous les hommes, mis en situation de choisir, font exactement les mêmes choix. C’est ce qui a conduit la plupart des civilisations, en particulier la civilisation musulmane, à la création des marieuses. C’est une profession très importante, réservée aux femmes d’une grande expérience et d’une grande sagesse. Elles ont bien évidemment le droit, en tant que femmes, de voir les jeunes filles dénudées, de procéder à ce qu’il faut bien appeler une espèce d’évaluation, et de mettre en relation leur physique avec le statut social des futurs époux. » (p. 293). Vu que les hommes sont strictement déterminés du point de vue biologique, choisissant imperturbablement en fonction de critères physiques, il s’ensuit que l’évolution de l’espèce est en grande partie due à la plasticité intellectuelle des femmes, qui peuvent adapter leurs critères reproductifs, par une éducation soutenue, aux critères de la richesse ou de l’intellect. « On peut même, dans une certaine mesure, les persuader de la haute valeur érotique des professeurs d’université » (p. 294), écrit, cyniquement, l’auteur.

            Par une telle équation simplifiée, la souffrance de l’homme occidental serait réduite au minimum. La situation désespérée dans laquelle « les possibilités vitales coulaient entre mes doigts avec une rapidité croissante, me laissant, comme l’aurait dit Huysmans, inému et sec » (p. 205), ou la tentation du suicide, sans désespoir, sans tristesse, « simplement par dégradation lente de la somme totale des fonctions qui résistent à la mort dont parle Bichat » (p. 207) est annulée. L’équilibre du désir masculin est assuré par la possibilité d’avoir quatre femmes. Quelle perspective rassurante, mise en parallèle avec celle de son propre père, qui « lui, avait eu… ma mère, cette putain névrosée. » (p. 227).

En échange de l’ordre amoureux réinstallé, la femme n’a qu’à renoncer à l’autonomie. Mais à quoi ça sert, la fameuse autonomie, si elle ne peut assurer le bonheur? Fuck autonomy, déclame l’intellectuel spécialiste en Huysmans; lui-même y avait renoncé avec beaucoup de facilité, avec soulagement même. Responsabilités intellectuelles et professionnelles – ne sont que des sources de malheur – se dit-il pendant un voyage dans le train, en regardant devant lui l’homme arabe qui noircit d’angoisse à chaque fois que son téléphone sonne. La seule façon de se soustraire à cette existence néfaste est la compensation créée par les deux femmes gracieuses qui l’accompagnent pendant son voyage.

Quant à elles, les femmes peuvent rester toute leur vie des enfants. En sortant de cette période idyllique, elles deviendraient tout de suite mères, bref elles replongeraient dans l’univers de l’immaturité. À quelques années près, où elles troqueraient les jeux enfantins contre les jeux sexuels, ce qui revient en gros à la même chose.

Houellebecq s’attaque aussi au sensible problème du vêtement féminin, renversant le point de vue habituel selon lequel la femme arabe est prisonnière de son vêtement, entièrement soumise à l’homme. Il nous présente la relation de la femme avec ses vêtements comme un problème de séduction qui pourrait à la rigueur jouer en faveur de la femme arabe. La femme occidentale, selon lui, regarde ses vêtements comme une empreinte sociale. Quand elle sort, elle met en jeu l’infrastructure de la séduction. Sa séduction se dirige vers le monde extérieur. L’effort social l’épuise, de sorte que, alors qu’elle se retire dans son espace privé, un t-shirt avachi soit plus que suffisant pour mettre fin à son épuisante prestation sociale. C’est exactement le contraire de ce qui se passe avec la femme arabe. Comme son rôle social est extrêmement limité, son entière capacité de séduction se dirige vers l’espace intime. Ainsi, elle s’y concentre sur la satisfaction de l’homme, telle une déesse qui pulvérise le quotidien.

Ces considérations souffrent bien évidemment de l’égocentrisme masculin occidental, dont Houellebecq se rend coupable dans la plupart de ses livres. Tout féminisme, aussi superficiel soit-il, pourrait démonter ce genre d’arguments. J’insiste là-dessus parce que, par leur caractère absurde, ils nous donnent la mesure d’une certaine tentation que l’homme occidental pourrait ressentir devant le nouveau modèle de société, d’ordre économique, amoureux et politique proposé par la Fraternité musulmane de Ben Abbes. Il ne faut pas oublier, suggère Houellebecq, qu’au comble de la civilisation romane, qui précédait de près son effacement définitif, elle donnait beaucoup de pouvoir aux femmes, tout comme la civilisation européenne actuelle. Malheureusement, semble-t-il insinuer de manière élégiaque et ironique, la sophistication de la civilisation va de pair avec les symptômes de sa décadence. Je ne vais pas trop insister sur ce genre de détails, parce que j’aimerais également présenter dans le chapitre suivant les autres avantages qui se présentent à celui qui croit au Nouveau Monde.

3. Le Nouveau Monde

Tout d’abord, du point de vue religieux, aucun bouleversement majeur n’apparaitrait puisque, en plein milieu des ardents débats présidentiels, Ben Abbes propose le dialogue autour de la laïcité, ce qui lui confère l’image de la modération. Qui plus est, pour un islamiste modéré, tel qu’il se présente, la France fait potentiellement partie de la dar al islam, la loi de l’Islam; sa doctrine s’oppose aux djihadistes, pour lesquels la France représente une terre d’impiété, dar al koufr. Les élections et la prise du pouvoir par la Fraternité musulmane ne miseraient donc pas sur des questions économiques, mais surtout sur des questions de valeurs. Là où Tariq Ramadan présentait charia comme une option novatrice, révolutionnaire, qui effrayait la population française, Ben Abbes lui restituait la valeur traditionnelle, en y ajoutant un parfum d’exotisme qui la rendait désirable, par la restauration de la famille, de la morale traditionnelle et du patriarcat. La Fraternité musulmane serait en faveur de la religion chrétienne, puisque son grand ennemi n’est pas le christianisme, mais l’athéisme matérialiste et la laïcité. Les subventions allouées aux associations catholiques et à l’entretien des bâtiments religieux, en pleine déchéance, augmenteraient.

Du point de vue politique, le plan de Ben Abbes est simple, suivant d’ailleurs l’aspiration millénariste de l’Empire romain. Le point principal de sa politique externe serait le déplacement du centre de gravité de l’Europe vers le sud, ce qui ne serait pas trop compliqué, puisque ce genre d’organisations existait déjà, par exemple l’Union pour la Méditerranée. Englobant en premier la Turquie et le Maroc, et par la suite la Tunisie et l’Algérie, l’ambition du leader arabe est celle de devenir le premier président choisi de l’Europe élargie. Il ne serait d’ailleurs le seul à avoir développé une telle ambition, De Gaulle l’avait précédé, lui qui avait initié la grande politique arabe de la France.

            Tétanisé par cette liste d’avantages évidents, le lecteur se retrouve devant la vision du personnage principal du roman, qui comprend que le bonheur humain réside dans la soumission absolue. La soumission de la femme à l’homme, de l’homme à Dieu. Alors que pour le bouddhisme le monde est souffrance, et pour le christianisme Satan est prince de ce monde, dans l’Islam la création divine est parfaite, un chef-d’œuvre absolu. Voici le secret du bonheur, et la conversion finale du professeur universitaire, décrite au mode conditionnel – « La cérémonie de la conversion, en elle-même, serait très simple … le hammam me serait spécialement ouvert, il était d’ordinaire fermé aux hommes; vêtu d’un peignoir, je traverserais de longs couloirs aux colonnades surmontées d’arches … Le silence se ferait autour de moi. Des images de constellations, de supernovas, de nébuleuses spirales me traverseraient l’esprit ; … de grandes forêts presque vierges… Et puis ce serait fini ; je serais, dorénavant, un musulman ; … et ce serait la chance d’une deuxième vie, sans grand rapport avec la précédente. » (p. 297-299) – porte témoignage du fait que le livre d’Houellebecq, dont la sortie était prévue le 7 janvier 2015, quand les journalistes de Charlie Hebdo furent tués par deux extrémistes arabes, n’est pas un réquisitoire islamophobe. Houellebecq parle plutôt d’une crise auto-immune. La tentation de la soumission s’insinue dans l’esprit de la civilisation occidentale parce que sa sophistication la prédispose à la névrose et au nihilisme. Le secret de la prose d’Houellebecq dans ce livre se trouve surtout dans le fait que les deux dimensions – le comique et la métaphysique, la crise auto-immune et la farce politico-religieuse – coexistent jusqu’à l’indiscernable.

4. L’enlèvement de Michel Houellebecq, un film de Guillaume Nicloux (2014)

            Même si apparemment le film L’enlèvement de Michel Houellebecq se penche sur des enjeux différents, quelques scènes retracent les idées présentées dans les trois chapitres précédents. De quoi s’agit-il au juste ? Le sujet du film est l’enlèvement de Michel Houellebecq, qui vit dans un appartement style Le Corbusier, où il s’ennuie, écrit des poèmes et fume sans arrêt. Trois hommes, Luc, Max et Mathieu l’immobilisent dans l’ascenseur, puis l’amènent par force à la campagne, à la maison de Ginette et d’André (Dédé, d’origine polonaise) Suchotzky, les parents de Mathieu. L’opération se passe dans le calme ; les « agresseurs » s’entretiennent avec l’écrivain sur un ton de respect. Le seul qui a des poussées d’orgueil est Luc, un Gitan, qui ne veut pas se « faire passer pour une fausse couche » et qui ne veut pas concéder à l’écrivain sa supériorité intellectuelle. Il avait d’ailleurs écrit un poème en secondaire, qu’il se rappelle même à ses quarante-trois ans : « Des années et des années passent/Et je ne t’aime toujours pas, la chasse/J’aime les animaux en liberté/Quand on n’a pas besoin de les tuer/Existe-t-il sur terre quelque chose de plus extraordinaire/Que ces choses en plein air ? ». Surpris par l’hilarité générale suscitée par son poème, Luc jette son profond mépris au monde : « Je vous emmerde profondément ».

            Enfermé à la campagne et menotté, Houellebecq attend sa libération. Mais il n’arrête pas à demander à ses « bourreaux » qui est celui qui pourrait payer la rançon, du moment où ni son agent ni sa famille ne se permettraient les 20.000 euros que les trois gars demandent pour sa libération. Le soupçon ironique de l’écrivain va en direction de François Hollande, surtout que ses agresseurs le prennent en photo avec, sur la poitrine, une image de la Libération qui montre le président français secondé par Désir de l’avenir.

            L’intrigue du film est ponctuée par une série d’images antiutopiques : l’habitation dans laquelle vit l’écrivain, au tout début du film  – le village vertical, le simulacre grotesque imaginé par Le Corbusier. Dans la deuxième partie du film, il est amené à la campagne, dans un décor délabré, où les voitures abandonnées s’entassent dans un paysage surréaliste. C’est précisément dans ce paysage qu’Houellebecq profère ses théories sur la nécessité de se vider, de s’ennuyer, de sortir du quotidien. C’est là que « les choses » arrivent. S’extraire du monde antiutopique de Le Corbusier et plonger dans « le monde du réveil » et du paradoxe : « La Pologne est un rêve », profère l’écrivain, affirmation qui choque les trois braves gars, dont le métier est celui de bodybuilder (Max) et de boxeur (Mathieu). L’occupation de Luc n’est pas précise, chose qui convient parfaitement à sa « race ». C’est lui qui fait les décomptes des victimes d’Auschwitz – 6 millions juifs, 2 millions gitans, 1 million de la « race de Charles Aznavour ». « Arméniens ? », demandent les autres. « Oui, Arméniens », répond Luc, comme s’il disait « Peu importe ».

            Les discussions se continuent sur le même ton de farce et de grotesque. De temps en temps, Houellebecq revient à ses thèmes favoris, cette fois-ci traités du point de vue des potentiels « terroristes » : la lutte (n’oublions pas qu’Houellebecq a écrit un livre qui s’appelle L’extension du domaine de la lutte) – il est confronté à ses propres thèmes, décodés dans le langage commun, qui appartient à ceux qui ne se nourrissent pas d’utopies, mais de la réalité. Houellebecq regarde ensemble avec Mathieu l’un des combats de ce dernier. L’homme lui explique les techniques d’attaque et de défense. L’écrivain ne peut pas s’y concentrer. Il répète incessamment : « Il saigne. On peut y trouver un intérêt ? Il saigne ». Il s’intéresse à la lutte abstraite, mais le combat en tant que tel est trop saignant pour lui. Quant à l’autre, le boxeur, il lui demande s’il pouvait écrire un livre sur lui. « Pourquoi pas ? », lui répond Houellebecq.

            La fragilité d’Houellebecq, sa position inhabituelle sont évidentes. N’empêche qu’il continue à proférer ses professions de foi : l’intolérance (« Il faut dire les choses », affirme-t-il), le bonheur qui se trouve dans le présent (« si la vie s’arrêtait maintenant, je ne regretterais rien. J’ai assez vécu »), l’incontournable féminin (« Voulez-vous un film porno ? », lui demande Ginette, la mère de Mathieu. « Non, plutôt une fille ». Et Ginette lui amène une jeune fille arabe, Fatima, qui se trouve dans une situation familiale précaire et qui possède un charme physique évident). Les théories présentées dans Soumission sont illustrées donc à merveille. La fin du film revient au problème de la démocratie participative – l’idéal d’Houellebecq. Il critique encore une fois la régression de l’Europe : « Ça va finir dans l’insurrection. Bruxelles – ça sera la guerre civile. Suède – c’est la dictature. C’est pire qu’en France. L’anti démocratie. »

            Le film finit dans l’accélération : Michel Houellebecq, après sa libération, au volant d’une voiture (sa part de la rançon) qui roule à 250 km/heure, sur une autoroute qui efface dans l’ivresse de la vitesse le cauchemar antiutopique : les habitations style Le Corbusier et les paysages délabrés de la campagne. Michel Houellebecq rendu au vide de ses pensées, à l’écoute de la fragilité des choses.

Bibliography

Michel Houellebecq, L’extension du domaine de la lutte, Éditions Maurice Nadeau, Paris, 1994.

— Plateforme, Flammarion, Paris, 2001.

— Soumission, Flammarion, Paris, 2015.

Guillaume Nicloux, L’enlèvement de Michel Houellebecq, film (2013).

Eduardo Portanova Barros
Unisinos-RS, Brésil
PNPD/CAPES
eduardoportanova@hotmail.com

Ruy Guerra et Dionysos

ou la contre-utopie de l’imaginaire de l’auteur au cinéma: les racines de l’éthéré

Ruy Guerra and Dionysos

or the Counter-Utopia of the Imaginary in the Authorial Film: Ethereal Roots

Abstract: Post-modernity could be an alternative sensibility to the values sustained by the logic of rationalistic type. That means to say that, at the present time, it is already possible, with more clarity, to observe aspects such as the emotions, the feelings and the intuitions of an artist- in the case Ruy Guerra and of his imaginary. This is the aim of this article: to investigate Ruy Guerra’s path from the point of view of the imaginary, as theorized by Gaston Bachelard and Gilbert Durand. We focused on a film director who was a very active presence in the Cinema Novo (Brazil) of the 1960, a phase marked by political ideology, but also in the context of hedonist post-modernity. What interests us is to show the balance between subjective and objective coercions in Ruy Guerra (Gilbert Durand). We are not looking for a rigid answer, but for a constellation of factors in post-modern (counter) utopia.

Keywords: Ruy Guerra; Cinema; Imaginary; Post-modernity; Utopia.

            Depuis les années 1960 et 1970, lorsque le Brésil était une dictature, le cinéaste mozambicain Ruy Guerra (né en 1931) qui vit à Rio de Janeiro depuis la fin des années 1950, produit (ou, comme il préfère, « fait ») du cinéma. Pourquoi ? Difficile à dire. Néanmoins, il est possible de tenter des approximations (et non des réponses) méthodologiques en affirmant, tout d’abord, que nous sommes, il faut bien l’admettre, dans une toute autre époque que celle du communisme (ou de sa fin) : dans la contre-utopie de la post-modernité. Qu’est-ce que c’est, alors, la contre-utopie post-moderne ? Si le terme post-moderne est une abstraction ou une métaphore de la réalité humaine, parce que le présent est plus vécu que rationalisé, cela signifie qu’une chose quelconque ne représente pas la Vérité. Et c’est bien ça la contre-utopie. Penser à une chose quelconque et savoir en même temps que cette chose à laquelle on pense n’est jamais là. Penser à Dionysos, par exemple, qui, avec les Bacchantes, dilacérèrent tout ce qui, au nom de la rationalité, récuse une effervescence fécondatrice. Penser à Guerra, un cinéaste qui, en utilisant une pensée bachelardienne, laisse à l’imagination le temps de travailler la matière cinématographique. Penser le contraire. Penser l’inverse ou l’éthéré.

C’est bien cela l’objectif de ce travail: observer les idées obsédantes, du point de vue de l’imaginaire contre-utopique localisé, parmi d’autres auteurs, dans la lignée de Gaston Bachelard (« imagination matérielle ») et Gilbert Durand (« cercle anthropologique »), d’un directeur cinématographique qui a travaillé aussi bien dans le Cinéma Nouveau (Cinema Novo) brésilien des années 1960 – une phase marquée par l’idéologie politique – que dans le contexte de la post-modernité hédoniste. Selon Maffesoli[1], c’est une sensibilité alternative aux valeurs soutenues par la logique d’empreinte rationaliste. Cela signifie que, à présent, il est déjà possible, avec plus de clarté, d’observer des aspects comme les émotions, les sensations et les intuitions d’un artiste – dans le cas Ruy Guerra – et de son imaginaire (rêves, contre-utopies, mythes et désirs). L’intérêt, dans ce cas, est de montrer l’équilibre, chez Ruy Guerra, entre la subjectivité et les contraintes d’ordre objectif (Gilbert Durand). Nous ne voulons pas chercher une réponse rigide, mais une constellation de facteurs. Constellation propre aussi bien à l’état de matérialité-règle qu’à la nature éthérée d’un vol cinématographique (la subjectivité).

            Pour Bachelard, l’imaginaire n’appartient pas au royaume des nombres et des mesures. Par conséquent, selon Maffesoli[2], chaque objet ou phénomène est lié avec les autres : pour cette raison, il est soumis au changement et au hasard. Ce qui nous intéresse, alors, est la révision de la notion d’auteur cinématographique dans la post-modernité dans le sens d’une contre-utopie (ou anti-utopie) et du « trajet anthropologique », selon Gilbert Durand[3], d’un cinéaste, Ruy Guerra, qui travaille, aujourd’hui, d’une façon moins égocentrique (hypothèse) que dans les années d’avant-garde lorsque il représentait un rôle politique dans le Cinema Novo. Une analyse peut prendre en considération l’auteur comme un exemple abstrait, oui, mais aussi comme une personnalité qui s’exprime à travers la caméra. Il n’est pas question, ici, de découvrir ce qu’un directeur cinématographique comme Guerra pense derrière la caméra, mais bien d’admettre qu’un film, dans certaines circonstances, puisse être la représentation d’une individualité sensible et, seulement pour ça, il serait déjà justifié si nous considérons, comme dit Maffesoli[4], que le thème du sensible – on ajoute dyonisiaque et contre-utopique – pourrait être la marque de la post-modernité.

            Si l’esthétique, matière première du cinéma, est la connaissance par le sensible, nous appellerons contre-utopie cinématographique chez Ruy Guerra le contradictoire de l’utopie de type réaliste. Mais notre intention n’est pas de traiter à fond – en soulignant ce qui est ou ce qui n’est pas contre-utopie chez Ruy Guerra – l’analyse d’une œuvre particulière. En effet, cette analyse ne se limite pas, puisque, selon Teixeira Coelho (1973), le fait esthétique permet des appréhensions variées aussi bien de l’individu même que de récepteurs multiples. Par conséquent, celle-ci est également ouverte, ce qui signifie, selon Eco: « […] que chaque spectateur apporte une situation existentielle concrète, une sensibilité personnelle conditionnée, une certaine culture, des goûts, des tendances, des préjugés personnels ». Si nous analysons un cinéaste pour rechercher chez lui une contre-utopie nous dénaturerions la notion avec laquelle nous travaillons dans cet article. Dans l’idée de contre-utopie l’impression sensible de l’interprétation compte plus que le rationalisme déconstructiviste, parce que, comme dit Merleau-Ponty, « […] la signification du perçu est seulement une constellation d’images qui commencent à réapparaître sans raison ». La créativité approximative ne peut pas créer, de manière forcée, une contre-utopie d’une œuvre cinématographique en essayant de la surpasser analytiquement.

Nous ne voulons même pas promouvoir une analyse descriptive et reconstructrice d’une œuvre, encore moins d’un seul film ou cinéaste pour justifier l’idée de contre-utopie, mais bien la considérer, dans la théorie du cinéma, comme une sorte de nihilisme. La contre-utopie cinématographique, qui est le sujet de cet article, découle donc de son contraire, l’utopie du réalisme. Pour l’interpréter comme « anti » ou « contre », au sens voulu, nous ne faisons aucune distinction entre ces deux termes, il faut comprendre la nécessité de ce qui est alogique. La logique disjonctive est représentée par le cinéma traditionnel (quelle que soit la tradition) et donc par l’esprit captif, parce qu’attaché à cette même tradition. La contre-utopie est déjà alogique et a également besoin d’un esprit, mais pas prisonnier de cette même tradition : libre. C’est un exercice de capacité, pas de savoir. Capacité de réaliser quelque chose d’une manière pertinente, pour paraphraser Nietzsche dans son aphorisme 256 sur la science. Et pas un savoir logique. La contre-utopie de Ruy Guerra est constituée, à l’instar de la foi, par une « adhésion que l’on sait au-delà des preuves, non nécessaire, tissée d’incrédulité et menacée à chaque instant par la non-foi », comme dit Merleau-Ponty. Elle est le visible et l’invisible.

Nous pouvons aussi considérer la contre-utopie, de façon analogue à la physique, comme une mesure de « l’inexploitabilité » (comme une quantité de chaleur non utilisable complètement pour sa transformation en travail). L’opposé de l’entropie, qui représente l’originalité, est, dans la Théorie de l’Information, la redondance (répétition). La répétition est une ressource (elle ne cesse pas d’être, pour le meilleur ou pour le pire) de l’intelligibilité du contenu, y compris filmique. Nous avons vu, par conséquent, que l’entropie est le désordre et que la redondance est la prévisibilité. En effet, pas toute la chaleur prévue n’est exploitée dans l’entropie. Quand se déroule une consommation d’énergie qui, en chemin, empêche toute cette possibilité d’exploitation, on considère cela comme étant un phénomène entropique. Cette indétermination (on ne sait pas combien le système sera plus ou moins affecté par la consommation) est ce qui caractérise l’entropie et ce qui justifie également sa relation avec la contre-utopie. Le cinéaste Ruy Guerra la pratique ainsi. Et Bergman également : la scène finale « […] où la Mort s’éloigne en dansant avec les marcheurs », dans le film Le septième sceau a été improvisée en quelques minutes, avec la figuration de techniciens et de touristes.

En d’autres termes, la contre-utopie est un archétype numineux, parce qu’il s’agit, selon Jung, « […] d’un fondement émotionnel qui semble inaccessible à la raison critique ». Il n’y a pas une seule histoire, mais bien des points de vue mythiques. Et de quels points de vue parlons-nous ? Certainement de beaucoup, la polyphonie discursive étant une ressource qui s’actualise avec force à chaque nouveau cycle de l’éternel retour mythique qui marque la contre-utopie dans l’œuvre de Ruy Guerra. Ainsi, la contre-utopie tend plus à l’implosion des directions de narration qui structurent les scénarios traditionnels et moins à l’explosion de pratiques redondantes. Godard suggère que sa posture créative est parfois stimulée par des circonstances qui peuvent définir des stratégies et des solutions uniques. À propos de À bout de souffle (1960), le cinéaste dit qu’il aurait aimé tourner en studio, mais ce ne fut pas  possible en raison de divers problèmes. Dans ses limites pratiques et techniques, tout en reconnaissant qu’à l’époque il ne savait rien techniquement, le réalisateur est resté en dehors du formalisme qui subsiste dans l’art cinématographique, arrivant à sacrifier quelques images premières au nom de la nécessité que le moment de faire du cinéma a imposée.

Conscient de sa capacité à effectuer des contre-utopies, Godard montre que renoncer à un idéal filmique peut améliorer le sentiment de liberté dans le tournage – la liberté de réaliser le rêve possible, au moins. Ainsi, l’improvisation devient l’un des nombreux outils de création valorisés par le cinéaste anti- ou contre-utopique. Dans cette longue période s’étendant au moins de la période d’or de Hollywood à nos jours, où les scripts traditionnels ont assumé un rôle central dans le processus de réalisation, le script (ou scénario) est passé par un processus intense de structuration, se plaçant comme un outil essentiel et potentiellement inflexible pour la production de films. Des scénaristes comme l’américain Syd Field, créateur de Paradigme qui définit les 120 pages d’un script supposé idéal et dans lequel figurent les trois actes de base d’un long métrage (La Présentation, la Confrontation et la Résolution), sont devenus les gourous de l’industrie du divertissement. Le paradigme, ainsi qu’un guide Vogler, est à l’opposé de la contre-utopie. Vogler s’est basé sur le livre Le Héros aux mille et un visages, du mythologue américain Joseph Campbell, qui a inventé le terme Voyage du Héros pour caractériser les stades archétypaux chez l’homme et les a reliés à la narration du film.

Cela a abouti à l’utopie d’un Guide Pratique du Scénario caractérisant les étapes suivantes: monde ordinaire; appel à l’aventure; refus de l’appel; rencontre avec le mentor; franchissement du premier seuil; test; allié; ennemis; approche de la grotte cachée; épreuve suprême; récompense; chemin du retour; résurrection, et enfin retour avec de l’élixir. « J’ai travaillé avec l’idée de Campbell du Voyage du Héros pour comprendre l’incroyable phénomène qui a eu lieu avec des films comme Star Wars et Rencontre du Troisième Type […] ils reflètent les schémas que Campbell a vus dans les mythes », a déclaré Vogler. Contrairement à ce modèle, le Septième Sceau, comme on l’a déjà dit, contenait une grande improvisation, comme dans la scène mentionnée auparavant, filmée à cause de quelques nuages soudainement apparus qui formaient, pour Bergman, un visuel parfait pour l’image qu’il avait à l’esprit. D’ailleurs, selon Bergman, ce film n’a pas pris plus de 35 jours pour être terminé. Il faut rappeler que des accidents de parcours arrivent même dans ce trajet supposé régulier du Héros structuré par Campbell et répandu dans le cinéma. Et c’est probablement sur ce point que deviennent claires les divergences sur les perceptions du Héros entre le penseur nord-américain et la théorie du mythe de Durand.  Pour Durand, le héros n’est ni un personnage unidimensionnel qui répond à une narration préalablement structurée, ni l’expression principale d’un monomythe, mais bien une image symbolique dont la multipolarité sémantique fait référence à l’archétype du héros, ce contenu psychique présent dans l’inconscient collectif qui est la racine d’images et de symbolismes universels et complémentaires. La contre-utopie serait probablement plus proche de la vision durandienne de la pluralité des sens propre à la récurrence mythique que du cadre organisationnel proposé par Campbell.

Les cinéastes ne seraient-ils pas en train d’éviter l’utilisation de leur imagination créatrice, génératrice d’images, en dépendant de scripts très fermés qui contrôlent l’inattendu, pour empêcher des processus d’essais et d’erreurs? En programmant et en scénarisant chaque seconde de toutes les scènes de l’ensemble du film et en standardisant  à l’extrême tout le processus de tournage, les réalisateurs – mais ce n’est pas le cas de Guerra – ne bloqueraient-ils pas le pouls de la création artistique? La contre-utopie n’a pas pour objectif d’ignorer la planification minimum nécessaire à la réalisation d’un film mais laisse observer que la possibilité de l’existence de lacunes et de doutes peut mener vers des chemins créateurs qui emplissent l’œuvre en délivrant la réalisation cinématographique. Les hiatus dans la texture d’un script ne sont pas, pour la contre-utopie, des défaillances structurelles, mais bien des crevasses dimensionnelles qui peuvent fournir des sauts quantiques au réalisateur dans son propre travail. L’inattendu, pour la contre-utopie, serait une façon pour celui-ci de ne plus faire circuler exclusivement la tension linéaire des trames filmiques traditionnelles, de sorte qu’il puisse être présent d’une façon créative dans les récurrences circulaires d’un éternel retour que le scénario mythique pourra assumer.

La contre-utopie permettrait ainsi la « libre » création du réalisateur à partir de la célébration de l’incertain et de la scénarisation de l’imprévu, ces outils revitalisant la forme et la direction du film. Naturellement, les conduites créatives proposées par la contre-utopie cinématographique se heurtent aux exigences de la technique et de la pratique, des demandes du marché et du schéma artistique exigé par celui-ci. Il revient aux cinéastes de choisir entre la rigueur imposée par les règles de la production de masse et la liberté offerte par l’anarchie de la création – qui peut dé-former (Bachelard) le langage et encourager un « cinéma de libération », comme Inácio Araújo définit le travail d’Orson Welles,  de Jean-Luc Godard et, pourrions-nous ajouter,  de Ruy Guerra.

 Cette notion peut également être observée dans des documentaires, qui, aujourd’hui, assument un caractère fictionnel toujours plus grand (par exemple Un passeport hongrois, 2003, de Sandra Kogut) pour faire comprendre que toute représentation humaine est une « construction », un choix. Et, en étant choix, elle est, évidemment, aussi refus (anti-contre). Dans ce cas, le documentaire se développe, a priori, sans unité et sans définition. Il signale une rupture plus nette avec le mythe de la naturalité et de l’académisme documentaires. Aujourd’hui, la tendance est de penser dans une réalité plurielle. Godard, dans ses scènes,  mélange le « réel » avec la fiction. Godard est une fiction de lui-même. Dans « JLG par JLG », il déclare: « La culture est la règle; l’art est l’exception ». Ces distinctions demeurent encore dans la culture. Cependant, la postmodernité a conduit à une liquéfaction progressive de la référence exprimée par Godard. Ceci parce que Godard regrette la défaite de la pensée. Autrement dit, la référence serait dans cette analogie que nous faisons avec la culture, l’exception, tandis que la postmodernité, selon le point de vue présenté, promouvrait la culture volatile et facile au niveau de la spectacularisation. La Science, qui contrarie le mythe, cherche une cause linéaire aux choses.

Mais le mythe, au contraire, qui transcende toute forme de rationalité continue, se déplace dans toutes les directions: passé, présent et futur. Et un film, qui n’est rien de plus qu’une dé-formation par la sensibilité, se déroule comme un événement mythique. Il est un éternel instant. Il est l’éternité de l’instant. Cet instant et cette éternité sont le fondement, selon la vision nietzschéenne de l’éternel retour du même, de la circularité. Pas le temps fait d’une succession d’étapes ultérieures, mais bien la centralité de toutes parts. La mémoire même dans le présent mythique, cyclique, qui ne se divise pas en catégories et qui est prisonnière de l’entropie. Le non-début entropique est alors le fondement quantique de la contre-utopie. Quantique parce que, dans cette physique, il y a un principe d’indétermination des pôles. La contre-utopie est donc encore un exercice de philosophie polaire. Quand on parle d’entropie, nous devons considérer ce qui suit. L’entropie est un système, mais, comme tout système, même s’il paraît fermé, il est néanmoins proche, conceptuellement parlant, d’un changement, parce que nous ne réussissons pas à établir le début d’un système entropique.

Par conséquent, ce qui importe dans la contre-utopie entropique n’est pas le fait selon lequel, conceptuellement, elle nous emmène au « triadique », avec un début, un développement et une dégradation, mais bien qu’elle représente un processus indéterminé des pôles qui finissent par s’attirer et se repousser constamment. L’entropie se trouve dans cette constante variation entre ce que nous appellerions début – qui existe seulement conceptuellement – développement – qui n’existe lui non plus que conceptuellement – et fin (irréaliste). En somme, le concept d’entropie nous aide à réfléchir sur la contre-utopie. En termes de Théorie de l’Information, selon Teixeira Coelho, l’entropie est « la mesure du désordre introduit dans une structure d’information ». Cela signifie que l’entropie est similaire à l’état de l’art des films de réalisateurs comme Ruy Guerra, Bergman et Godard, entre autres, mais pas de beaucoup d’autres, en raison de leur haut degré d’originalité  par rapport aux films redondants du point de vue de l’information. Teixeira Coelho (1973) précise que le mot entropie en physique est la fonction d’un état thermodynamique des systèmes utilisés pour déterminer « l’inexploitabilité » de l’énergie de ce même système.

La question de la polarité qui, au fond, se reflète ici en termes d’utopie et de contre-utopie, se réfère aussi, dans notre cas, à la philosophie présocratique décrite par Nietzsche. Parménide, dit Nietzsche, réfléchissait, dans le sillage d’Anaximandre de Milet, à l’existant et à l’inexistant. Lui, Parménide, s’interrogeait: l’inexistant existe-t-il? Parménide se basait sur la validité universelle des concepts (c’est comme si nous pensions à la validité universelle de l’utopie, ou plutôt au concept d’utopie). Ainsi, Parménide se distanciait intentionnellement du monde intuitif. Autrement dit, il s’éloignait, dans notre cas, de la contre-utopie qui est une pratique plus intuitive que conceptuelle. Nous dirions donc que la contre-utopie représente une idée parménidienne de la subjectivation de l’alogique. En ce sens, nous supposons, ici, que la contre-utopie est l’un des pôles d’un devenir de la guerre des opposés (scénario/anti-scénario, film/anti-film, utopie/contre-utopie), comme Héraclite – un autre philosophe grec – le pensait en allant à l’encontre de Parménide. Oui, mais si l’anti-utopie est déjà en nous, comment pourrait-elle être en devenir? C’est parce qu’il y est déjà au sens d’antériorité à la formulation de lui-même.

Nous connaissons seulement quelque chose parce que nous formulons un concept qui préexiste dans notre esprit, selon Merleau-Ponty (1999). Par conséquent, nous pouvons considérer la contre-utopie comme étant un antiréalisme parce qu’il est impossible de séparer la réalité de nos opinions. Autrement dit, si nous avons une opinion sur quelque chose, comme au sujet de la contre-utopie, c’est déjà une réalité pour nous, mais cela peut ne pas l’être pour les autres. Il faut assumer d’avoir un discours « idéologique » par rapport à la contre-utopie parce qu’il s’agit d’une construction abstraite et un choix de réflexion individuel. Il n’existe aucune prétention, ici, d’encadrer la contre-utopie dans telle ou telle école de cinéma (si, le cas échéant, cette école ait jamais existé). Pour continuer sur ce sujet, nous devons nous diriger vers l’imagination symbolique. Une définition en premier lieu: « Elle est la transfiguration d’une représentation concrète à travers un sens toujours abstrait », dit Durand. En considérant la contre-utopie comme étant l’opposé du signe, car elle n’est pas une représentation concrète, mais une transfiguration de l’utopie et de la représentation, il est possible de transiter sur le terrain mouvant qu’est l’imaginaire.

Nous savons qu’on utilise le terme d’imaginaire de diverses manières, comme nous éclaire Durand: « Image, signe, allégorie, symbole, emblème, mythe parabole, figure, icône et idole sont utilisés indifféremment par la plupart des auteurs ». Pour ne pas tomber dans ce flou, nous avons choisi ce terme au sens d’une qualité à peine présentable concrètement ainsi que le cas de la contre-utopie au cinéma nous semble être. Alors, si l’imagination est alogique et ne fait pas référence à une représentation, à une, comme ci-dessus, « qualité guère présentable concrètement » comment pouvons-nous la considérer théoriquement? Il n’y a qu’une seule issue: la considérer comme une expression de la subjectivité. Dans ce cas, le choix de la Guerra se justifierait donc plus par la raison sensible que par un supposé concept de l’utopie dans son cinéma. La contre-utopie se présente plus, par ailleurs, comme une notion que comme un concept – celui-ci étant plus fermé et rigide. Dans l’art tragique de Nietzsche, traduit par le dionysiaque, le Je se désintègre. Pour l’instant, rappelons-nous que l’idée du dionysiaque (ou « instinct esthétique ») chez Nietzsche sous-tend la thèse selon laquelle l’expérience artistique est plus importante que la rationalité scientifique apollinienne (« esthétique rationaliste »). Ces deux instincts esthétiques coexistent. L’un s’ajoute à l’autre. Pour lui, la genèse du mythe tragique partage avec la sphère artistique apollinienne la joie à parts entières de l’apparence et de la contemplation. Mais, dans un même temps, elle nie cette joie et va trouver une satisfaction plus élevée en s’annihilant du monde perceptible de l’apparence (Nietzsche).

Nous voulons ainsi montrer qu’à cause du lien ombilical entre le réalisateur, la forme et le contenu de son film, un thème commun à eux tous peut revêtir différentes approches. Nous avons choisi la contre-utopie parce qu’elle est, ainsi que la mort dont elle ne se sépare pas selon l’imaginaire occidental, une vision récurrente dans les films  d’auteur de réalisateurs comme Guerra. Cependant, cette violence prend un contour symbolique. Elle fonctionne comme une sorte de catharsis afin d’éloigner la pensée de finitude que la mort véhicule. La distance à laquelle nous voulons nous maintenir de la mort n’est cependant jamais suffisante pour l’oublier. Pourtant, la vie et la mort sont inséparables dans notre existence, chose que la pensée rationaliste du progrès a toujours voulu nier. Aujourd’hui, on travaille avec l’hypothèse selon laquelle nous incorporons dans le quotidien une sensibilité tragique (Maffesoli). Si nous acceptons cette observation et pensons que les auteurs cinématographiques comme Guerra réélaborent la quotidienneté dans leurs films, car c’est bien dans cette espèce de chaudron qu’ils vivent, nous verrons alors que vivre, pour eux, se relie intensément au quotidien et que leurs films sont imprégnés par cette atmosphère. L’art est plutôt séducteur, une caractéristique qui ne rentre pas dans la lecture hygiéniste de la modernité.

Son dernier film – jusqu’au mois de janvier 2009 – se base sur le roman La mala hora écrit en 1962 par Gabriel García Márquez et traduit au Brésil par O veneno da madrugada. En français: Le poison de l’aube. C’est l’histoire d’un hameau dont les familles sont perturbées par des ragots (d)écrits sur des morceaux de papier. Le nom de cette pratique est marforio, comme l’explique Gabriel García Márquez[5] dans son roman: « […] une injure anonyme clouée sur la porte d’une maison ». Par exemple: « Il y a deux jours, ils ont mis mon nom dans ces messages mensongers. Les bobards habituels. L’histoire des ânes. Chaque âne que je vendais était retrouvé mort deux jours après, sans aucun signe de violence ». L’ex-propriétaire des animaux, qui raconte l’histoire au médecin du village, aurait été présent, de nuit, aux différents endroits, pour tirer dans l’anus des ânes. Le film commence avec une voix-off  dans un écran noir qui, peu à peu, cède sa place à une pluie présente durant toute l’œuvre. L’ambiance est inhospitalière. Quelques rares personnes circulent dans le bourg. Tous les autres habitants semblent exister hors du cadre, selon la thèse cinématographique de Ruy Guerra. Ce sont des personnages retranchés qui finissent par ne penser, à cause des billets anonymes, qu’à leurs malheurs et craignent de nouvelles accusations. Il n’existe aucun climat favorable à l’optimisme. Tous, comme le dit un des personnages, « sont fatigués de tout », principalement parce qu’ils sont esclaves de l’alcaide, une sorte de maire et de commissaire de police. La narration n’a rien de linéaire, car, comme dit la cartomancienne du cirque, « la flèche du temps vole dans plus d’un sens ». Cette idée est transposée dans le film. L’ambiance, en plus d’être claustrophobe et intense, prend rapidement un ton absurde. Tous voient des fantômes.

Il y a également, dans l’imaginaire de Ruy Guerra, un espace pour la manifestation poétique de la contre-utopie. Dans Estorvo (Embrouille, 2000), par exemple, Guerra fait une adaptation du livre homonyme de Chico Buarque en cherchant à imprimer une marque personnelle dans l’histoire. Guerra fait ressortir l’existence marginale du protagoniste qui n’a pas de nom. Il est simplement le “Je”. Estorvo commence par une interrogation: ouvrir ou non la porte quand la sonnette de son appartement retentit. Le judas optique lui restitue un œil distordu et menaçant. Commence alors la crainte de la persécution, et c’est ceci, dans Estorvo (Embrouille), que le film montre. Le  “Je” n’a pas de maison, il déambule sans direction et se réfugie dans sa propre imagination. L’image de Guerra est plus que la visualité. Elle est également le non-dit. On finit avec la question de Wunenburger[6]: « Comment enfin articuler la régularité des imaginaires individuels et culturels-collectifs, c’est à dire, pour adopter la nomenclature disciplinaire, la psychologie avec la sociologie des imaginaires ? ».

(Avec la collaboration d’Olivier Chatriant pour la traduction)

Bibliographie

Bachelard, Gaston. (1988) A poética do devaneio. Martins Fontes, São Paulo.

Bachelard, Gaston. (1993) A poética do espaço. Martins Fontes, São Paulo.

Barros, Eduardo Portanova. Truffaut, o homem que amava o cinema. Canoas: Ed. da Ulbra, 2013.

Barros, Eduardo Portanova. Autoria cinematográfica: a impressão digital de François Truffaut. São Paulo (SP). Dissertação de Mestrado. Universidade de São Paulo (USP), 2003.

Barros, Eduardo Portanova. O cinema de Ruy Guerra: um imaginário autoral na pós-modernidade. Porto Alegre (RS). Tese de Doutorado. Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS), 2009.

Bergman, I. Imagens. São Paulo, Martins Fontes, 1996.

Coelho, T. Introdução à teoria da informação estética. Petrópolis, Vozes, 1973.

Durand, Gilbert. (1997) As estruturas antropológicas do imaginário. Martins Fontes, São Paulo.

Durand, Gilbert. A imaginação simbólica. Lisboa, Edições 70, 2000.

Durand, Gilbert. (1998) O imaginário – ensaio acerca das ciências e da filosofia da imagem. Difel: Rio de Janeiro.

Eco, Umberto. Obra aberta. Forma e indeterminação nas poéticas contemporâneas. São Paulo, Perspectiva, 1976.

Godard, Jean-Luc. Introdução a uma verdadeira história do cinema. Martins Fontes, São Paulo, 1989.

Jung, Carl Gustav.  Resposta a Jó. Petrópolis (RJ), Vozes, 1979.

Maffesoli, Michel. (1998) Elogio da razão sensível. Vozes, Petrópolis (RJ).

Maffesoli, Michel. (2004) Notas sobre a pós-modernidade: o lugar faz o elo. Atlântica, Rio de Janeiro.

Merleau-Ponty, M. Fenomenologia da percepção. São Paulo, Martins Fontes, 1999.

Merleau-Ponty, M. O visível e o invisível. São Paulo, Perspectiva, 2014.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Humano, demasiado humano. Um livro para espíritos livros. São Paulo, Companhia das Letras, 2005.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. A filosofia na era trágica dos gregos. São Paulo, Hedra, 2008.

Vogler, C. A jornada do escritor: estruturas míticas para contadores de histórias e roteiristas. Rio de Janeiro, Ampersand, 1997.

Wunenburger, J.J. L’imagination mode d’emploi ? Une science de l’imaginaire au service de la créativité. Paris, Manucius, 2011.

NOTES

Eduardo Portanova Barros
Unisinos-RS, Brésil
PNPD/CAPES
eduardoportanova@hotmail.com

Ruy Guerra et Dionysos

ou la contre-utopie de l’imaginaire de l’auteur au cinéma: les racines de l’éthéré

Ruy Guerra and Dionysos

or the Counter-Utopia of the Imaginary in the Authorial Film: Ethereal Roots

Abstract: Post-modernity could be an alternative sensibility to the values sustained by the logic of rationalistic type. That means to say that, at the present time, it is already possible, with more clarity, to observe aspects such as the emotions, the feelings and the intuitions of an artist- in the case Ruy Guerra and of his imaginary. This is the aim of this article: to investigate Ruy Guerra’s path from the point of view of the imaginary, as theorized by Gaston Bachelard and Gilbert Durand. We focused on a film director who was a very active presence in the Cinema Novo (Brazil) of the 1960, a phase marked by political ideology, but also in the context of hedonist post-modernity. What interests us is to show the balance between subjective and objective coercions in Ruy Guerra (Gilbert Durand). We are not looking for a rigid answer, but for a constellation of factors in post-modern (counter) utopia.

Keywords: Ruy Guerra; Cinema; Imaginary; Post-modernity; Utopia.

            Depuis les années 1960 et 1970, lorsque le Brésil était une dictature, le cinéaste mozambicain Ruy Guerra (né en 1931) qui vit à Rio de Janeiro depuis la fin des années 1950, produit (ou, comme il préfère, « fait ») du cinéma. Pourquoi ? Difficile à dire. Néanmoins, il est possible de tenter des approximations (et non des réponses) méthodologiques en affirmant, tout d’abord, que nous sommes, il faut bien l’admettre, dans une toute autre époque que celle du communisme (ou de sa fin) : dans la contre-utopie de la post-modernité. Qu’est-ce que c’est, alors, la contre-utopie post-moderne ? Si le terme post-moderne est une abstraction ou une métaphore de la réalité humaine, parce que le présent est plus vécu que rationalisé, cela signifie qu’une chose quelconque ne représente pas la Vérité. Et c’est bien ça la contre-utopie. Penser à une chose quelconque et savoir en même temps que cette chose à laquelle on pense n’est jamais là. Penser à Dionysos, par exemple, qui, avec les Bacchantes, dilacérèrent tout ce qui, au nom de la rationalité, récuse une effervescence fécondatrice. Penser à Guerra, un cinéaste qui, en utilisant une pensée bachelardienne, laisse à l’imagination le temps de travailler la matière cinématographique. Penser le contraire. Penser l’inverse ou l’éthéré.

C’est bien cela l’objectif de ce travail: observer les idées obsédantes, du point de vue de l’imaginaire contre-utopique localisé, parmi d’autres auteurs, dans la lignée de Gaston Bachelard (« imagination matérielle ») et Gilbert Durand (« cercle anthropologique »), d’un directeur cinématographique qui a travaillé aussi bien dans le Cinéma Nouveau (Cinema Novo) brésilien des années 1960 – une phase marquée par l’idéologie politique – que dans le contexte de la post-modernité hédoniste. Selon Maffesoli[1], c’est une sensibilité alternative aux valeurs soutenues par la logique d’empreinte rationaliste. Cela signifie que, à présent, il est déjà possible, avec plus de clarté, d’observer des aspects comme les émotions, les sensations et les intuitions d’un artiste – dans le cas Ruy Guerra – et de son imaginaire (rêves, contre-utopies, mythes et désirs). L’intérêt, dans ce cas, est de montrer l’équilibre, chez Ruy Guerra, entre la subjectivité et les contraintes d’ordre objectif (Gilbert Durand). Nous ne voulons pas chercher une réponse rigide, mais une constellation de facteurs. Constellation propre aussi bien à l’état de matérialité-règle qu’à la nature éthérée d’un vol cinématographique (la subjectivité).

            Pour Bachelard, l’imaginaire n’appartient pas au royaume des nombres et des mesures. Par conséquent, selon Maffesoli[2], chaque objet ou phénomène est lié avec les autres : pour cette raison, il est soumis au changement et au hasard. Ce qui nous intéresse, alors, est la révision de la notion d’auteur cinématographique dans la post-modernité dans le sens d’une contre-utopie (ou anti-utopie) et du « trajet anthropologique », selon Gilbert Durand[3], d’un cinéaste, Ruy Guerra, qui travaille, aujourd’hui, d’une façon moins égocentrique (hypothèse) que dans les années d’avant-garde lorsque il représentait un rôle politique dans le Cinema Novo. Une analyse peut prendre en considération l’auteur comme un exemple abstrait, oui, mais aussi comme une personnalité qui s’exprime à travers la caméra. Il n’est pas question, ici, de découvrir ce qu’un directeur cinématographique comme Guerra pense derrière la caméra, mais bien d’admettre qu’un film, dans certaines circonstances, puisse être la représentation d’une individualité sensible et, seulement pour ça, il serait déjà justifié si nous considérons, comme dit Maffesoli[4], que le thème du sensible – on ajoute dyonisiaque et contre-utopique – pourrait être la marque de la post-modernité.

            Si l’esthétique, matière première du cinéma, est la connaissance par le sensible, nous appellerons contre-utopie cinématographique chez Ruy Guerra le contradictoire de l’utopie de type réaliste. Mais notre intention n’est pas de traiter à fond – en soulignant ce qui est ou ce qui n’est pas contre-utopie chez Ruy Guerra – l’analyse d’une œuvre particulière. En effet, cette analyse ne se limite pas, puisque, selon Teixeira Coelho (1973), le fait esthétique permet des appréhensions variées aussi bien de l’individu même que de récepteurs multiples. Par conséquent, celle-ci est également ouverte, ce qui signifie, selon Eco: « […] que chaque spectateur apporte une situation existentielle concrète, une sensibilité personnelle conditionnée, une certaine culture, des goûts, des tendances, des préjugés personnels ». Si nous analysons un cinéaste pour rechercher chez lui une contre-utopie nous dénaturerions la notion avec laquelle nous travaillons dans cet article. Dans l’idée de contre-utopie l’impression sensible de l’interprétation compte plus que le rationalisme déconstructiviste, parce que, comme dit Merleau-Ponty, « […] la signification du perçu est seulement une constellation d’images qui commencent à réapparaître sans raison ». La créativité approximative ne peut pas créer, de manière forcée, une contre-utopie d’une œuvre cinématographique en essayant de la surpasser analytiquement.

Nous ne voulons même pas promouvoir une analyse descriptive et reconstructrice d’une œuvre, encore moins d’un seul film ou cinéaste pour justifier l’idée de contre-utopie, mais bien la considérer, dans la théorie du cinéma, comme une sorte de nihilisme. La contre-utopie cinématographique, qui est le sujet de cet article, découle donc de son contraire, l’utopie du réalisme. Pour l’interpréter comme « anti » ou « contre », au sens voulu, nous ne faisons aucune distinction entre ces deux termes, il faut comprendre la nécessité de ce qui est alogique. La logique disjonctive est représentée par le cinéma traditionnel (quelle que soit la tradition) et donc par l’esprit captif, parce qu’attaché à cette même tradition. La contre-utopie est déjà alogique et a également besoin d’un esprit, mais pas prisonnier de cette même tradition : libre. C’est un exercice de capacité, pas de savoir. Capacité de réaliser quelque chose d’une manière pertinente, pour paraphraser Nietzsche dans son aphorisme 256 sur la science. Et pas un savoir logique. La contre-utopie de Ruy Guerra est constituée, à l’instar de la foi, par une « adhésion que l’on sait au-delà des preuves, non nécessaire, tissée d’incrédulité et menacée à chaque instant par la non-foi », comme dit Merleau-Ponty. Elle est le visible et l’invisible.

Nous pouvons aussi considérer la contre-utopie, de façon analogue à la physique, comme une mesure de « l’inexploitabilité » (comme une quantité de chaleur non utilisable complètement pour sa transformation en travail). L’opposé de l’entropie, qui représente l’originalité, est, dans la Théorie de l’Information, la redondance (répétition). La répétition est une ressource (elle ne cesse pas d’être, pour le meilleur ou pour le pire) de l’intelligibilité du contenu, y compris filmique. Nous avons vu, par conséquent, que l’entropie est le désordre et que la redondance est la prévisibilité. En effet, pas toute la chaleur prévue n’est exploitée dans l’entropie. Quand se déroule une consommation d’énergie qui, en chemin, empêche toute cette possibilité d’exploitation, on considère cela comme étant un phénomène entropique. Cette indétermination (on ne sait pas combien le système sera plus ou moins affecté par la consommation) est ce qui caractérise l’entropie et ce qui justifie également sa relation avec la contre-utopie. Le cinéaste Ruy Guerra la pratique ainsi. Et Bergman également : la scène finale « […] où la Mort s’éloigne en dansant avec les marcheurs », dans le film Le septième sceau a été improvisée en quelques minutes, avec la figuration de techniciens et de touristes.

En d’autres termes, la contre-utopie est un archétype numineux, parce qu’il s’agit, selon Jung, « […] d’un fondement émotionnel qui semble inaccessible à la raison critique ». Il n’y a pas une seule histoire, mais bien des points de vue mythiques. Et de quels points de vue parlons-nous ? Certainement de beaucoup, la polyphonie discursive étant une ressource qui s’actualise avec force à chaque nouveau cycle de l’éternel retour mythique qui marque la contre-utopie dans l’œuvre de Ruy Guerra. Ainsi, la contre-utopie tend plus à l’implosion des directions de narration qui structurent les scénarios traditionnels et moins à l’explosion de pratiques redondantes. Godard suggère que sa posture créative est parfois stimulée par des circonstances qui peuvent définir des stratégies et des solutions uniques. À propos de À bout de souffle (1960), le cinéaste dit qu’il aurait aimé tourner en studio, mais ce ne fut pas  possible en raison de divers problèmes. Dans ses limites pratiques et techniques, tout en reconnaissant qu’à l’époque il ne savait rien techniquement, le réalisateur est resté en dehors du formalisme qui subsiste dans l’art cinématographique, arrivant à sacrifier quelques images premières au nom de la nécessité que le moment de faire du cinéma a imposée.

Conscient de sa capacité à effectuer des contre-utopies, Godard montre que renoncer à un idéal filmique peut améliorer le sentiment de liberté dans le tournage – la liberté de réaliser le rêve possible, au moins. Ainsi, l’improvisation devient l’un des nombreux outils de création valorisés par le cinéaste anti- ou contre-utopique. Dans cette longue période s’étendant au moins de la période d’or de Hollywood à nos jours, où les scripts traditionnels ont assumé un rôle central dans le processus de réalisation, le script (ou scénario) est passé par un processus intense de structuration, se plaçant comme un outil essentiel et potentiellement inflexible pour la production de films. Des scénaristes comme l’américain Syd Field, créateur de Paradigme qui définit les 120 pages d’un script supposé idéal et dans lequel figurent les trois actes de base d’un long métrage (La Présentation, la Confrontation et la Résolution), sont devenus les gourous de l’industrie du divertissement. Le paradigme, ainsi qu’un guide Vogler, est à l’opposé de la contre-utopie. Vogler s’est basé sur le livre Le Héros aux mille et un visages, du mythologue américain Joseph Campbell, qui a inventé le terme Voyage du Héros pour caractériser les stades archétypaux chez l’homme et les a reliés à la narration du film.

Cela a abouti à l’utopie d’un Guide Pratique du Scénario caractérisant les étapes suivantes: monde ordinaire; appel à l’aventure; refus de l’appel; rencontre avec le mentor; franchissement du premier seuil; test; allié; ennemis; approche de la grotte cachée; épreuve suprême; récompense; chemin du retour; résurrection, et enfin retour avec de l’élixir. « J’ai travaillé avec l’idée de Campbell du Voyage du Héros pour comprendre l’incroyable phénomène qui a eu lieu avec des films comme Star Wars et Rencontre du Troisième Type […] ils reflètent les schémas que Campbell a vus dans les mythes », a déclaré Vogler. Contrairement à ce modèle, le Septième Sceau, comme on l’a déjà dit, contenait une grande improvisation, comme dans la scène mentionnée auparavant, filmée à cause de quelques nuages soudainement apparus qui formaient, pour Bergman, un visuel parfait pour l’image qu’il avait à l’esprit. D’ailleurs, selon Bergman, ce film n’a pas pris plus de 35 jours pour être terminé. Il faut rappeler que des accidents de parcours arrivent même dans ce trajet supposé régulier du Héros structuré par Campbell et répandu dans le cinéma. Et c’est probablement sur ce point que deviennent claires les divergences sur les perceptions du Héros entre le penseur nord-américain et la théorie du mythe de Durand.  Pour Durand, le héros n’est ni un personnage unidimensionnel qui répond à une narration préalablement structurée, ni l’expression principale d’un monomythe, mais bien une image symbolique dont la multipolarité sémantique fait référence à l’archétype du héros, ce contenu psychique présent dans l’inconscient collectif qui est la racine d’images et de symbolismes universels et complémentaires. La contre-utopie serait probablement plus proche de la vision durandienne de la pluralité des sens propre à la récurrence mythique que du cadre organisationnel proposé par Campbell.

Les cinéastes ne seraient-ils pas en train d’éviter l’utilisation de leur imagination créatrice, génératrice d’images, en dépendant de scripts très fermés qui contrôlent l’inattendu, pour empêcher des processus d’essais et d’erreurs? En programmant et en scénarisant chaque seconde de toutes les scènes de l’ensemble du film et en standardisant  à l’extrême tout le processus de tournage, les réalisateurs – mais ce n’est pas le cas de Guerra – ne bloqueraient-ils pas le pouls de la création artistique? La contre-utopie n’a pas pour objectif d’ignorer la planification minimum nécessaire à la réalisation d’un film mais laisse observer que la possibilité de l’existence de lacunes et de doutes peut mener vers des chemins créateurs qui emplissent l’œuvre en délivrant la réalisation cinématographique. Les hiatus dans la texture d’un script ne sont pas, pour la contre-utopie, des défaillances structurelles, mais bien des crevasses dimensionnelles qui peuvent fournir des sauts quantiques au réalisateur dans son propre travail. L’inattendu, pour la contre-utopie, serait une façon pour celui-ci de ne plus faire circuler exclusivement la tension linéaire des trames filmiques traditionnelles, de sorte qu’il puisse être présent d’une façon créative dans les récurrences circulaires d’un éternel retour que le scénario mythique pourra assumer.

La contre-utopie permettrait ainsi la « libre » création du réalisateur à partir de la célébration de l’incertain et de la scénarisation de l’imprévu, ces outils revitalisant la forme et la direction du film. Naturellement, les conduites créatives proposées par la contre-utopie cinématographique se heurtent aux exigences de la technique et de la pratique, des demandes du marché et du schéma artistique exigé par celui-ci. Il revient aux cinéastes de choisir entre la rigueur imposée par les règles de la production de masse et la liberté offerte par l’anarchie de la création – qui peut dé-former (Bachelard) le langage et encourager un « cinéma de libération », comme Inácio Araújo définit le travail d’Orson Welles,  de Jean-Luc Godard et, pourrions-nous ajouter,  de Ruy Guerra.

 Cette notion peut également être observée dans des documentaires, qui, aujourd’hui, assument un caractère fictionnel toujours plus grand (par exemple Un passeport hongrois, 2003, de Sandra Kogut) pour faire comprendre que toute représentation humaine est une « construction », un choix. Et, en étant choix, elle est, évidemment, aussi refus (anti-contre). Dans ce cas, le documentaire se développe, a priori, sans unité et sans définition. Il signale une rupture plus nette avec le mythe de la naturalité et de l’académisme documentaires. Aujourd’hui, la tendance est de penser dans une réalité plurielle. Godard, dans ses scènes,  mélange le « réel » avec la fiction. Godard est une fiction de lui-même. Dans « JLG par JLG », il déclare: « La culture est la règle; l’art est l’exception ». Ces distinctions demeurent encore dans la culture. Cependant, la postmodernité a conduit à une liquéfaction progressive de la référence exprimée par Godard. Ceci parce que Godard regrette la défaite de la pensée. Autrement dit, la référence serait dans cette analogie que nous faisons avec la culture, l’exception, tandis que la postmodernité, selon le point de vue présenté, promouvrait la culture volatile et facile au niveau de la spectacularisation. La Science, qui contrarie le mythe, cherche une cause linéaire aux choses.

Mais le mythe, au contraire, qui transcende toute forme de rationalité continue, se déplace dans toutes les directions: passé, présent et futur. Et un film, qui n’est rien de plus qu’une dé-formation par la sensibilité, se déroule comme un événement mythique. Il est un éternel instant. Il est l’éternité de l’instant. Cet instant et cette éternité sont le fondement, selon la vision nietzschéenne de l’éternel retour du même, de la circularité. Pas le temps fait d’une succession d’étapes ultérieures, mais bien la centralité de toutes parts. La mémoire même dans le présent mythique, cyclique, qui ne se divise pas en catégories et qui est prisonnière de l’entropie. Le non-début entropique est alors le fondement quantique de la contre-utopie. Quantique parce que, dans cette physique, il y a un principe d’indétermination des pôles. La contre-utopie est donc encore un exercice de philosophie polaire. Quand on parle d’entropie, nous devons considérer ce qui suit. L’entropie est un système, mais, comme tout système, même s’il paraît fermé, il est néanmoins proche, conceptuellement parlant, d’un changement, parce que nous ne réussissons pas à établir le début d’un système entropique.

Par conséquent, ce qui importe dans la contre-utopie entropique n’est pas le fait selon lequel, conceptuellement, elle nous emmène au « triadique », avec un début, un développement et une dégradation, mais bien qu’elle représente un processus indéterminé des pôles qui finissent par s’attirer et se repousser constamment. L’entropie se trouve dans cette constante variation entre ce que nous appellerions début – qui existe seulement conceptuellement – développement – qui n’existe lui non plus que conceptuellement – et fin (irréaliste). En somme, le concept d’entropie nous aide à réfléchir sur la contre-utopie. En termes de Théorie de l’Information, selon Teixeira Coelho, l’entropie est « la mesure du désordre introduit dans une structure d’information ». Cela signifie que l’entropie est similaire à l’état de l’art des films de réalisateurs comme Ruy Guerra, Bergman et Godard, entre autres, mais pas de beaucoup d’autres, en raison de leur haut degré d’originalité  par rapport aux films redondants du point de vue de l’information. Teixeira Coelho (1973) précise que le mot entropie en physique est la fonction d’un état thermodynamique des systèmes utilisés pour déterminer « l’inexploitabilité » de l’énergie de ce même système.

La question de la polarité qui, au fond, se reflète ici en termes d’utopie et de contre-utopie, se réfère aussi, dans notre cas, à la philosophie présocratique décrite par Nietzsche. Parménide, dit Nietzsche, réfléchissait, dans le sillage d’Anaximandre de Milet, à l’existant et à l’inexistant. Lui, Parménide, s’interrogeait: l’inexistant existe-t-il? Parménide se basait sur la validité universelle des concepts (c’est comme si nous pensions à la validité universelle de l’utopie, ou plutôt au concept d’utopie). Ainsi, Parménide se distanciait intentionnellement du monde intuitif. Autrement dit, il s’éloignait, dans notre cas, de la contre-utopie qui est une pratique plus intuitive que conceptuelle. Nous dirions donc que la contre-utopie représente une idée parménidienne de la subjectivation de l’alogique. En ce sens, nous supposons, ici, que la contre-utopie est l’un des pôles d’un devenir de la guerre des opposés (scénario/anti-scénario, film/anti-film, utopie/contre-utopie), comme Héraclite – un autre philosophe grec – le pensait en allant à l’encontre de Parménide. Oui, mais si l’anti-utopie est déjà en nous, comment pourrait-elle être en devenir? C’est parce qu’il y est déjà au sens d’antériorité à la formulation de lui-même.

Nous connaissons seulement quelque chose parce que nous formulons un concept qui préexiste dans notre esprit, selon Merleau-Ponty (1999). Par conséquent, nous pouvons considérer la contre-utopie comme étant un antiréalisme parce qu’il est impossible de séparer la réalité de nos opinions. Autrement dit, si nous avons une opinion sur quelque chose, comme au sujet de la contre-utopie, c’est déjà une réalité pour nous, mais cela peut ne pas l’être pour les autres. Il faut assumer d’avoir un discours « idéologique » par rapport à la contre-utopie parce qu’il s’agit d’une construction abstraite et un choix de réflexion individuel. Il n’existe aucune prétention, ici, d’encadrer la contre-utopie dans telle ou telle école de cinéma (si, le cas échéant, cette école ait jamais existé). Pour continuer sur ce sujet, nous devons nous diriger vers l’imagination symbolique. Une définition en premier lieu: « Elle est la transfiguration d’une représentation concrète à travers un sens toujours abstrait », dit Durand. En considérant la contre-utopie comme étant l’opposé du signe, car elle n’est pas une représentation concrète, mais une transfiguration de l’utopie et de la représentation, il est possible de transiter sur le terrain mouvant qu’est l’imaginaire.

Nous savons qu’on utilise le terme d’imaginaire de diverses manières, comme nous éclaire Durand: « Image, signe, allégorie, symbole, emblème, mythe parabole, figure, icône et idole sont utilisés indifféremment par la plupart des auteurs ». Pour ne pas tomber dans ce flou, nous avons choisi ce terme au sens d’une qualité à peine présentable concrètement ainsi que le cas de la contre-utopie au cinéma nous semble être. Alors, si l’imagination est alogique et ne fait pas référence à une représentation, à une, comme ci-dessus, « qualité guère présentable concrètement » comment pouvons-nous la considérer théoriquement? Il n’y a qu’une seule issue: la considérer comme une expression de la subjectivité. Dans ce cas, le choix de la Guerra se justifierait donc plus par la raison sensible que par un supposé concept de l’utopie dans son cinéma. La contre-utopie se présente plus, par ailleurs, comme une notion que comme un concept – celui-ci étant plus fermé et rigide. Dans l’art tragique de Nietzsche, traduit par le dionysiaque, le Je se désintègre. Pour l’instant, rappelons-nous que l’idée du dionysiaque (ou « instinct esthétique ») chez Nietzsche sous-tend la thèse selon laquelle l’expérience artistique est plus importante que la rationalité scientifique apollinienne (« esthétique rationaliste »). Ces deux instincts esthétiques coexistent. L’un s’ajoute à l’autre. Pour lui, la genèse du mythe tragique partage avec la sphère artistique apollinienne la joie à parts entières de l’apparence et de la contemplation. Mais, dans un même temps, elle nie cette joie et va trouver une satisfaction plus élevée en s’annihilant du monde perceptible de l’apparence (Nietzsche).

Nous voulons ainsi montrer qu’à cause du lien ombilical entre le réalisateur, la forme et le contenu de son film, un thème commun à eux tous peut revêtir différentes approches. Nous avons choisi la contre-utopie parce qu’elle est, ainsi que la mort dont elle ne se sépare pas selon l’imaginaire occidental, une vision récurrente dans les films  d’auteur de réalisateurs comme Guerra. Cependant, cette violence prend un contour symbolique. Elle fonctionne comme une sorte de catharsis afin d’éloigner la pensée de finitude que la mort véhicule. La distance à laquelle nous voulons nous maintenir de la mort n’est cependant jamais suffisante pour l’oublier. Pourtant, la vie et la mort sont inséparables dans notre existence, chose que la pensée rationaliste du progrès a toujours voulu nier. Aujourd’hui, on travaille avec l’hypothèse selon laquelle nous incorporons dans le quotidien une sensibilité tragique (Maffesoli). Si nous acceptons cette observation et pensons que les auteurs cinématographiques comme Guerra réélaborent la quotidienneté dans leurs films, car c’est bien dans cette espèce de chaudron qu’ils vivent, nous verrons alors que vivre, pour eux, se relie intensément au quotidien et que leurs films sont imprégnés par cette atmosphère. L’art est plutôt séducteur, une caractéristique qui ne rentre pas dans la lecture hygiéniste de la modernité.

Son dernier film – jusqu’au mois de janvier 2009 – se base sur le roman La mala hora écrit en 1962 par Gabriel García Márquez et traduit au Brésil par O veneno da madrugada. En français: Le poison de l’aube. C’est l’histoire d’un hameau dont les familles sont perturbées par des ragots (d)écrits sur des morceaux de papier. Le nom de cette pratique est marforio, comme l’explique Gabriel García Márquez[5] dans son roman: « […] une injure anonyme clouée sur la porte d’une maison ». Par exemple: « Il y a deux jours, ils ont mis mon nom dans ces messages mensongers. Les bobards habituels. L’histoire des ânes. Chaque âne que je vendais était retrouvé mort deux jours après, sans aucun signe de violence ». L’ex-propriétaire des animaux, qui raconte l’histoire au médecin du village, aurait été présent, de nuit, aux différents endroits, pour tirer dans l’anus des ânes. Le film commence avec une voix-off  dans un écran noir qui, peu à peu, cède sa place à une pluie présente durant toute l’œuvre. L’ambiance est inhospitalière. Quelques rares personnes circulent dans le bourg. Tous les autres habitants semblent exister hors du cadre, selon la thèse cinématographique de Ruy Guerra. Ce sont des personnages retranchés qui finissent par ne penser, à cause des billets anonymes, qu’à leurs malheurs et craignent de nouvelles accusations. Il n’existe aucun climat favorable à l’optimisme. Tous, comme le dit un des personnages, « sont fatigués de tout », principalement parce qu’ils sont esclaves de l’alcaide, une sorte de maire et de commissaire de police. La narration n’a rien de linéaire, car, comme dit la cartomancienne du cirque, « la flèche du temps vole dans plus d’un sens ». Cette idée est transposée dans le film. L’ambiance, en plus d’être claustrophobe et intense, prend rapidement un ton absurde. Tous voient des fantômes.

Il y a également, dans l’imaginaire de Ruy Guerra, un espace pour la manifestation poétique de la contre-utopie. Dans Estorvo (Embrouille, 2000), par exemple, Guerra fait une adaptation du livre homonyme de Chico Buarque en cherchant à imprimer une marque personnelle dans l’histoire. Guerra fait ressortir l’existence marginale du protagoniste qui n’a pas de nom. Il est simplement le “Je”. Estorvo commence par une interrogation: ouvrir ou non la porte quand la sonnette de son appartement retentit. Le judas optique lui restitue un œil distordu et menaçant. Commence alors la crainte de la persécution, et c’est ceci, dans Estorvo (Embrouille), que le film montre. Le  “Je” n’a pas de maison, il déambule sans direction et se réfugie dans sa propre imagination. L’image de Guerra est plus que la visualité. Elle est également le non-dit. On finit avec la question de Wunenburger[6]: « Comment enfin articuler la régularité des imaginaires individuels et culturels-collectifs, c’est à dire, pour adopter la nomenclature disciplinaire, la psychologie avec la sociologie des imaginaires ? ».

(Avec la collaboration d’Olivier Chatriant pour la traduction)

Bibliographie

Bachelard, Gaston. (1988) A poética do devaneio. Martins Fontes, São Paulo.

Bachelard, Gaston. (1993) A poética do espaço. Martins Fontes, São Paulo.

Barros, Eduardo Portanova. Truffaut, o homem que amava o cinema. Canoas: Ed. da Ulbra, 2013.

Barros, Eduardo Portanova. Autoria cinematográfica: a impressão digital de François Truffaut. São Paulo (SP). Dissertação de Mestrado. Universidade de São Paulo (USP), 2003.

Barros, Eduardo Portanova. O cinema de Ruy Guerra: um imaginário autoral na pós-modernidade. Porto Alegre (RS). Tese de Doutorado. Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS), 2009.

Bergman, I. Imagens. São Paulo, Martins Fontes, 1996.

Coelho, T. Introdução à teoria da informação estética. Petrópolis, Vozes, 1973.

Durand, Gilbert. (1997) As estruturas antropológicas do imaginário. Martins Fontes, São Paulo.

Durand, Gilbert. A imaginação simbólica. Lisboa, Edições 70, 2000.

Durand, Gilbert. (1998) O imaginário – ensaio acerca das ciências e da filosofia da imagem. Difel: Rio de Janeiro.

Eco, Umberto. Obra aberta. Forma e indeterminação nas poéticas contemporâneas. São Paulo, Perspectiva, 1976.

Godard, Jean-Luc. Introdução a uma verdadeira história do cinema. Martins Fontes, São Paulo, 1989.

Jung, Carl Gustav.  Resposta a Jó. Petrópolis (RJ), Vozes, 1979.

Maffesoli, Michel. (1998) Elogio da razão sensível. Vozes, Petrópolis (RJ).

Maffesoli, Michel. (2004) Notas sobre a pós-modernidade: o lugar faz o elo. Atlântica, Rio de Janeiro.

Merleau-Ponty, M. Fenomenologia da percepção. São Paulo, Martins Fontes, 1999.

Merleau-Ponty, M. O visível e o invisível. São Paulo, Perspectiva, 2014.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Humano, demasiado humano. Um livro para espíritos livros. São Paulo, Companhia das Letras, 2005.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. A filosofia na era trágica dos gregos. São Paulo, Hedra, 2008.

Vogler, C. A jornada do escritor: estruturas míticas para contadores de histórias e roteiristas. Rio de Janeiro, Ampersand, 1997.

Wunenburger, J.J. L’imagination mode d’emploi ? Une science de l’imaginaire au service de la créativité. Paris, Manucius, 2011.

NOTES

Francisc Ormeny
Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
ormenyfrancisc@yahoo.com

Digging out the Heideggerian Linguistic Utopia from Bryan Fuller’s and Mads Mikkelsen’s Hannibal (Seasons 1 & 2)

(The Insinuation of the Vortex in the Human Act of Blinking)

Abstract: In this study we analyze the vortical insinuation and inscription of the transcendental fierceness (its rapacious avidity for a reincarnation-through-fiber-corruption in the flooded human “cloud”) in the human experience, through the supra-linguistic gesture of blinking. We apply Heidegger’s anti-humanist utopian vision on the primacy of language over the human subject (ego) to Bryan Fuller’s and Mads Mikkelsen’s Hannibal series (Season 1 & 2 only). According to Heidegger and to his recent exegetes, modern man’s model of perfectibility should take into account a divorce from the vulgar individualistic concerns and replace them with a greater attentiveness to Being, through a language that can disclose the Being and further brings it into the open. This displacement is enacted by making use and abuse of the most emotionally intense (verbal and non-verbal) meta-erotic expressions. We analyze how Mads Mikkelsen (Hannibal) uses the act of blinking (always coupled with a large spectrum of facial tensions and chiasms), – one by means of which intersubjectivity is at once disbanded and affirmed, and one which allows man to use the energy of the nonpresence and nonevidence while retreating into his coziest and most demonically-fertile inner abysses and secretly recharging himself therein – to control his subjects, to destroy their Eros and to make them brutishly and desperately cling to reason.

Keywords: Linguistic Utopia; Linguistic Anti-humanism; Saying (Sage); Blinking; Fierce Transcendental Insinuation; Savagely-Poetic Expressions of Being.

Although the show seems to be a stand-alone (intransigently independent) reflexive line about the body and its culinary pollinations and polymorphizations, Hannibal, as far as the essence of the theological, epistemological and axiological privileges[1] from behind which it was conceived (and according to which it was assumed by its captious audience) goes, is a savage meditation about the preeminence of linguistic acts over any other type of human acts … genetic or generic.

This work of cinematic Schellingian shadowy theology[2] is constructed around the premise that neither divine imagination nor human phantasy can exist, as long as they are not translated into language and thus turned into an incarnated echo – i.e. into a life-tree that imitates the structure of a derivation tree (used by linguists working in generative grammar and considered by them a primary object of human study) bent over the grave of the former Cartesian human ego (fiendishly deepening his roots in the sustaining and bulging darkness of the human body and using its branches in order to bring upon ourselves storms that normally should not belong to us). It is here that Bryan Fuller’s utopian linguistic vision (“What do you see, doctor? Sum up the Ripper in so many words? Choose them wisely. / Oh, I always do. Words are living things. They have personality, point of view, agenda. They’re pack hunters”[3]) meets what was generally condemned as late Heidegger’s anti-humanism:

The Cartesian ego or consciousness is no longer conceived as the privileged subject of knowledge. (…) A more radical decentering of the subject occurs with Heidegger’s famous “turn” or “Kehre” and the associated attack on Sartre’s humanism. In Heidegger’s later writings his earlier, apparently existentialist account of individual existence – as “anxious” or “caring”, “authentic” or “fallen” – gives way to a more impersonal preoccupation with Being. Heidegger wishes to divert our ‘thinking’ from its individualistic concerns towards a greater “attentiveness to Being”. Only by transcending the limited perspective of the Cartesian subject, “who may deign to release the beingness of beings into an all too loudly bruited ‘objectivity’”, can “thinking” “realize the proper dignity of man” as “the shepherd of Being”. Accompanying this change of emphasis, there is in Heidegger’s later writings an overriding concern with language as “the House of Being” (…) Language discloses Being or “brings it into the open”: “language alone brings beings into the open for the first time. Where there is not language, as in the Being of stone, plant, and animal, there is also no openness of beings, and consequently no openness either of nonbeing and of the empty.”[4] (…) Heidegger is particularly hostile to Sartre’s Cartesian claim that “one must take the subjectivity as his point of departure”[5]. Heidegger’s anti-humanism leads instead to “thinking” as the “letting-be” of transcendent Being [author’s note: through language].[6]

In more direct words, when the characters from the series begin referring to their lives and to their deaths in terms of punctuation marks, as Jack Crawford’s dying wife Bella does when Hannibal tricks her and maliciously refuses to euthanize her (“Hannibal: The punctuation at the end of a sentence gives meaning to every word, every space that proceeded it. Bella: They moved my punctuation mark, Dr. Lecter. You moved my meaning. I’m not here because I want to be here. You saw to that.”[7] ), what they do is resurrect in the most eloquent manner the cleanest possible abruptness of the colors of the deific frenzied feeding, and provide a model for the reincorporation of the “God” into the human “cloud”[8] (host), via language – i.e. monstrously attribute a human system to the (infernal) divine self-understanding, in the exact manner in which John Fowles’s character Clegg from The Collector does to his rare and dangerous butterflies, using only the most ontologically “developed” (up to the limit of lunacy) words: “Seeing her always made me feel like I was catching a rarity, heart-in-mouth, as they say. A Pale Clouded Yellow, for instance. I always thought of her like that, I mean words like elusive and sporadic, and very refined – not like the other ones, even the pretty ones. More for the real connoisseur.”[9]

Clegg’s description of Miranda in terms of insects by means of the most exquisite possible choice of words, Heidegger’s stress on language to the detriment of the human subject, and Bryan Fuller’s decomposition and punctuation of the human matter in terms of derivation trees represent an anti-humanist utopia but not necessarily a dystopia – because the real aim behind all these three examples is not at all a deculturation or a critique of any kind of the human subject; on the contrary, all of them are attempts at making use through abuse of the phenomenal empty (available, unoccupied) spaces (Wolfgang Iser’s vision of some areas of human thinking and of human intuiting for which there are no specific or code-governed signifieds, so that the signifier can point to an empty position, and can also allow for a nonbeing to be posited as a signified), in order to project (and inject) in there a demented fleshy consistency for the otherwise unrealistic human speculations, longings, infinite wishes and cravings – all disconnected from ideologies and skillfully connected to the passionately-obsessive idea of evolution (change) into better / superior grasping forces:

The derivation of “utopia” is Greek words meaning “not-place”, and utopianism is generally identified with unrealistic speculation, providing the adjective “utopian” with its everyday pejorative meaning. (…) Utopian though is seen as springing from the unconscious, whose imaginative capacity confronts, challenges, surpasses, and overrides conscious reality by means of projected counter-pictures containing hopes, desires, and wishful thinking. This utopian faculty, however, is only critical if disconnected from existing ideologies, and based on an understanding of social totality and the means of realizing better conditions of existence. (…) utopianism is limited neither to a literary genre nor to specific conceptions of the good life. It rather plays a genuine role in relation to possible or intended change in existing social conditions.[10]

*

            Yet, talking about linguistically-secured derivation trees and Heidegger’s linguistic anti-humanism in the same logic, and applying these conjoined thought-tapestries to the Hannibal series is an extremely dicey claim, and this happens precisely because Heidegger was against all sequences of “orthodox” grammar and phonetics, and equally obsessed with letting the in-between-the-lines speak for itself, through our (in) voices. Heidegger abjured all “affability and condescension”[11] in his relation with the category that we like to call today “Grammar Nazis” and, in his bond with the Being through language, adopted the position that, once again, we like to identify today as that of an emotionally-engaged “situated observer” or “positioned subject”[12] (always with an implied critique of the so-called “detached” phenomenological and linguistic observer, a raw scientist relying solely on his disengaged reason and impersonal observation): 

More vigorously than ever, the later Heidegger fights against the entire phonocentric and logical-grammatical representation of language that has dominated from antiquity up until Husserl in order to summon us to the place where language itself speaks and where humans learn with humility that they are not the masters of language, but that it is rather they who are under the command of language (…) we learn that speaking is not just using words in a banal fashion to name things and beings; naming cannot be reduced to providing an already known object with a name, to affecting things with a label that fits them  like a glove (…) Naming is not the arbitrary act of denomination that some believe it to be. Contrary to a tenacious image inherited from metaphysics, words are not barrels and buckets from which we draw the content of a pregiven meaning. To speak is to receive into oneself the saying [author’s note: our italics] of the words of our language. To name is “to call the thing to the world”, to summon it in its very absence into our presence, to invite it to do something in a world of things.[13]

In the Hannibal series, this artifice within the linguistic utopia promoted by Bryan Fuller (and having its roots, consciously or not, deeply implanted in a Heideggerian soil) appears when the discourse on language passes from the radically-visceral psychiatrist Hannibal to his milder and softer colleague – Doctor Alana Bloom:

Alana Bloom: Sharing will help normalize.

Abigail Hobbs:  I’m not normal… not anymore.

Alana Bloom: What happened to you was a… Some of these women aren’t even sharing. They speak in “little girl voices”, telling everyone what was done to them without saying a word about it. Certain traumas can arrest vocal development. And victims can sometimes broadcast victimhood involuntarily.[14]

            In the lines above we have an example of what Michel Foucault called the “strong power,” which is the power to attract (and to seduce), and which stands opposed to Hannibal’s “weak power” (at least at this level of expression), a power irremediably bound to all the types of coercive influences and supremacies, a power which governs our lives in the shape of a scale, starting from the most elusive informative methods and ending up in full-fledged actual physical force.

What Dr. Bloom implies by “speaking about something ‘in little girl voices’ and without actually saying a word about that something” resembles Heidegger’s vision of man being “trapped” in the inseparable and indissoluble interminglings and interlinkings of language by the grace of the fabulous magnetism of the language’s saying (Sage) – an almost transcendental manifestation of the springs of creation as they enter, each time as if (als ob) for the very first time, into the complexly-enfleshed human poetry, made of intuition, gestures, unique facial expressions and depths of eye-effulgences and splendors:  

Words are like gestures that engender a world by making things come to the world and the world come to things. This is the “poietic” power of speaking attested to by the poet, who, better than anyone, knows that we do not cease to speak after our language, which always walks in front of us in each of our steps. Language is like the “house of being” that humankind inhabits, the unique dimension in which we can establish residence, and where the paths of thinking always already pre-traced in our bosom are discovered, Provided we listen to our language, we become aware that we are always already caught up in its saying (Sage), in the inextricable interweavings of the relations that it spins and to which we belong due to our own speaking. With the omnipresence and omnipotence of language that is expressed in the unusual tautological formula “Die Sprache spricht” (language speaks), humans do not speak except by providing a reply to it and by entering into correspondence with its saying [author’s note: our italics]. If speech relieves humans of all initiative, what they say, each of their words, is carried by the speaking of their language. Language is like the “Geläut der Stille” (the sounding of stillness) that nevertheless does require the speaking of mortals in order to be understood, provided that they are disposed to the quiet hearing of this eloquent silence.[15]

*

I

n trying to treat Abigail Hobbs’s posttraumatic stress disorder, Doctor Alana Bloom perfectly intuits Heidegger’s thesis on die Sage, but she fails to implement it. On the other hand, if Hannibal misses his therapy at the level of the discourse per se (where he behaves like an orthodox priest of doom or like an inquisitor the boiling “high definition” plasma), he perfectly applies it at the level of gestures, of a supreme use of silence, and of the act of blinking – displays which Heidegger interprets as being of paramount importance in the “capturing” of the Being inside a human vocalized value; as being capable of inducing a decisive positioning of the subject in his relationship with a Beyond, actively involved and trans-organically immersed in His human design:

(…) the wink, ostensibly a bonding gesture, also manifests a moment of dysfunction: I wink at the other in my very incapacity to reach that other in a more articulate way. As in the case of the blink, intersubjectivity is at once disbanded and affirmed: for in winking at or to another I also collaborate with that other in some significant way. I assert the link that my lack of express verbal representations has otherwise placed in question.[16][17]

To speak in real terms, what Caroline Dhavernas (Alana) beautifully formulates but fails to bring into the act, Mads Mikkelsen (Hannibal) elevates to the highest possible allure and appeal – the virtuoso of the Danish actor transforming the very mystery of language into a an all-pervading differential and into the ultimate trigger for the aborted consciousness. This is also where he shifts his discursive weak power into a strongly-seductive (as if shifting into the highest possible gear) gestural influence and art of rooting a person to the ground (as it combines in a fatal / deadly way the power of the most intense non-spoken with the avidity of a Being that greedily awaits its incarnation into the human host), a power capable to arrest the human subject in an truly anti-humanistic manner, while taking away all his speaking vigor. (This is also how Hannibal manages to para- and supra-linguistically get into the mind of Will Graham and seize both his will and his power of self-understanding and of crime-reconstruction[18] [his clarity], creating an inescapable blind-spot on the mind of his patient: “Dr. Lecter: Lost in thought? Will: Not lost. Not anymore. I used to hear my thoughts inside my skull with the same, (…) tone, timbre, accent, as if the words were coming out of my mouth. Dr. Lecter: And now? Will: Now my inner voice sounds like you. I can’t get you out of my head.”[19])

In his will to penetrate the mystery of language, Heidegger discovers another name that is more appropriate because it gathers together in a single word logos and Being, the Saying and the Said, and that which induces us to speak. He calls it “die Sage” (Saying), from an ancient word that has the same origin as deixis, the source of signs that are not made from the gestures of humans, but rather from the “gesture of word”. This is a remarkable hypostasis of language that seems to take away every power of the speaking subject in order to give this power to the Saying and the Said of language. For the thinker, all original language is “the coming of Being into the Said” that it assumes as its destiny, and it is foundational for the history of the community of humans. At this point we are (…) carried away into the mysterious land in which lies the being of language as Sage (legend) and out of which all that “there is” in world originates.[20]

And Bryan Fuller knows how to make the best of Mads Mikkelsen’s capacity to embody and synthesize in real time and in real facial laws the clash of phenomenal powers as well as the serene acceptance of the developing disaster, by using feverish and intimately-porous close-up shots combined with long takes and long shots, where “long takes give the impression of real time; long shots allow us to see complete figures in the context of their milieu; the moving-camera knits time and space together in a contiguous whole so that events can appear to be actual.”[21]

                Every time Mads Mikkelsen blinks, he uses this clever ruse in order to retreat into the most sacred depths of his inner voids (or, as he says, of his “vast mental palace”), and to recharge himself with the gestating powers of the vortexes that await ravenously and devastatingly therein, puddling threateningly at the edge of his being, in the reverberatory furnace of pre-language. That is why Mason Verger (portrayed by Michael Carmen Pitt) ends up being disfigured and dementedly dehumanized by Hannibal – as he cannot understand the supra-linguistic and utterly-disarming use of the power of the non-presence, in the act of blinking (“Don’t get me wrong. I play chicken with Margot all the time. I just don’t tell her I’m playing. I’m good at chicken, Dr. Lecter. I never blink.”[22]):

“Nonpresence and nonevidence are admitted into the blink of the instant. There is a duration to the blink, and it closes the eye. This alterity is in fact the condition for presence, presentation, and thus for Vorstellung in general.”[23] The blink of the eye, the obverse of the glance, undermines the open-eyed attestation of the kind of sheer presence that is available in essential insight, whether this is said to occur in Platonic or Aristotelian noesis, Cartesian intellectual intuition, or Husserlian Wesensanchauung. But something not taken into account by Derrida is that if the same blink detonates the now as point in time (i.e., as “source-point” in Husserl’s term), by the same token it affirms the subjectivity of the subject: an abyssal subjectivity but a subjectivity nonetheless. For when I blink, for a fleeing instant I retreat into a bottomless refuge that lies, somewhere and somehow, within myself.[24]

All the murders and all the horrors can be erased by the blink of the eye, because when one blinks he re-opens his accusing wounds and his sloppy cuts, and the horrors and the maggots of denunciation disappear back into those wounds. For this reason the blinking signals exactly what Edmond Jabès called the “wounded words.” Through blinking credibility and naturalness is restored (“You get all starey and non-blinky like that, it’ll undermine you and me, but mainly him. (…) You are smitten with the accused, Miss Bloom. And it is adorable, but not our brand of defense.”[25]). In the blink of the clever eye, the identification between the indexical and the projective is greater than anywhere else – the two melt into each-other and fuse with one-another, turning into an undetectable superior predator (haunting its prey neither inside, nor outside the human spectrum) – namely, into a predator capable of escaping representation (the ultimate human system of detection) and of resting on a new (unknown and unapproachable) ontological foundation, a “groundwork” reaching not the linguistic constructs but the very springs and reservoirs of the need-for-language. Here is where the anti-humanist utopia begins (in the not-yet translated vortex which imperatively demands its first translation, in the noxious ravenous nothingness of the middle position [no-longer uncreated, but not-yet creation[26]]):

“I return with the unsayable. The unsayable can be given to me only through the failure of my language. Only when the construct falters do I reach what I cannot accomplish.”[27] Faltering constructions – linguistic and otherwise – expose the fault of foundations and the error of every foundationalism. This crack, this fault, lies “beyond” the end of theology. (…) The wound of words is a tear that cannot be mended – a tear that can never be wiped away. This tear or tear, which interrupts the system of exchange, is neither exactly inside nor outside the text. As such, it eludes the economy of representation. That which is neither outside nor inside cannot be represented either referentially or self-reflexively.[28]

Will Graham, a man trapped in Hannibal blink – in this supra-linguistic anti-humanist “teleportation-contraption,” loses control over both time and space (Hannibal being able to literally maneuver him like he would a hologram – “Well, I was on a beach in Grafton, West Virginia. I blinked, and then I was waking up in your waiting room, except I wasn’t asleep! Grafton, West Virginia, is three-and-a-half hours from here”[29]). He loses his dreams and his sleeping hours (as a consequence of having had his blink stolen by Hannibal and replaced with his psychiatrist’s “clandestine” blink – unlike Hannibal who sleeps and dreams perfectly: “Hannibal: What is there to think about? You listen to your breathing in the dark and the tiny clicks of your blinking eyes. I dream more now than I used to”[30]). Moreover, while immersed in the compact plasma of the pre-linguistic streams of Being and surrounded by the walls of Hannibal’s linguistic utopia, he also has his meta-erotic creative knowledge worryingly suspended.

He now strives desperately to cling to his fading reason in order to remain, at least a common man, at least a primal organically oriented Hominidae in front of the colossal vortical assault of the Being through the linguistic living marks of direct passage of the transcendental fury into the human experience – such as the blinking. In the doing of it he goes against his nature, his design – because he is not and he has never been a “normal man.” And this is how Hannibal uses the linguistic utopia to break him own – by forcing him to urgently forget about his meta-erotic creativity and to desperately seek a degraded refuge in reason:

(…) meta-erotica. It must be said that this mystical or creative knowledge is not what it is known as rational knowledge. And then, only the Devil will always know what the rationalists name reason! Rattio is a thing, and Vernuft is another. I am reading, for example, from a rationalist (Lev Sestov), the following lines about Pascal: “The fundamental condition of the possibility of human knowledge consists, I repeat, in that that the truth can be noticed by any normal man.” What is a normal man? Maybe it is the same thing as the “middle man” (the average man, Durch-schnittsmensch). Meaning a fantastic entity: Phantasia non homo, as Petronius used to say (Satirycon, XXXVIII, 16). And exactly about these poor normal men, who notice the rational truth and nothing more, the count Joseph de Maistre, another agonic, wrote, not without arrogance: “They are only right!: (“Ils n’ont que raison!”). The poor human reason and not the divine, creative truth.[31]

This work was possible due to the financial support of the Sectorial Operational Program for Human Resources Development 2007-2013, co-financed by the European Social Fund, under the project number POSDRU/159/1.5/S/140863 with the title “Competitive European researchers in the fields of socio-economics and humanities. Multiregional research net (CCPE).”

Bibliography

Arion L. Kelkel, “Language after Husserl,” in Lester Embree, Elisabeth A. Behnke, David Carr, J. Claude Evans, José Huertas-Jourda, Joseph J. Kockelmans, William R. Mckenna, Algis Mickunas, Jitendra Nath Mohanty, Thomas M. Seebohm, Richard M. Zaner (eds.), Encyclopedia of Phenomenology, Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997, pp. 394-401.

Bernard, Freydberg,Schelling’s Dialogical Freedom Essay (Provocative Philosophy Then and Now), New York: State University of New York Press, 2008.

David West, “The Contribution of Continental Philosophy,” in Robert E. Goodin and Philip Pettit (eds.), in A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy, Oxford and Cambridge (Massachusetts): Blackwell Publishers, 1995, p. 39-71.

Edward S. Casey, “The Time of the Glance: Toward Becoming Otherwise,” in Elizabeth Grosz (ed.), Becomings. Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures, Ithaca (New York) and London: Cornell University Press, 1999, pp. 79-97.

Hans-Herbert Kögler, “Utopianism,” in Ted Honderich (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1995, pp. 892-893.

Henry Heath Bawden, The principles of pragmatism: a philosophical interpretation of experience, Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, The Riverside Press Cambridge, 1910.

John Fowles, The Collector, London: Vintage, 1998.

Mădălina Diaconu, Pe Marginea Abisului, Søren Kierkegaard şi nihilismul secolului al XIX (On the Edge of the Precipice, Søren Kierkegaard and the Nihilism of the 19^th Century), Bucureşti: Editura Ştiinţifică, 1996.

Mark C. Taylor, “The End(s) of Theology,” in Sheila Greeve Davaney (ed.), Theology at the End of Modernity (Essays in Honor of Gordon D. Kaufman), Philadelphia (PA): Trinity Press International, 1991, p. 233-248.

Miguel de Unamuno, Agonia Creştinismului (The Agony of Christianity), translated from Spanish by Radu I. Petrescu, Iaşi: The European Institute Publishing House, 1993.

Tim Bywater, Thomas Sobchack, Introduction to Film Criticism, New York: Longman, 1989.

Internet Sources

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Hannibal_%28TV_series%29

http://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/

Notes

Francisc Ormeny
Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
ormenyfrancisc@yahoo.com

Digging out the Heideggerian Linguistic Utopia from Bryan Fuller’s and Mads Mikkelsen’s Hannibal (Seasons 1 & 2)

(The Insinuation of the Vortex in the Human Act of Blinking)

Abstract: In this study we analyze the vortical insinuation and inscription of the transcendental fierceness (its rapacious avidity for a reincarnation-through-fiber-corruption in the flooded human “cloud”) in the human experience, through the supra-linguistic gesture of blinking. We apply Heidegger’s anti-humanist utopian vision on the primacy of language over the human subject (ego) to Bryan Fuller’s and Mads Mikkelsen’s Hannibal series (Season 1 & 2 only). According to Heidegger and to his recent exegetes, modern man’s model of perfectibility should take into account a divorce from the vulgar individualistic concerns and replace them with a greater attentiveness to Being, through a language that can disclose the Being and further brings it into the open. This displacement is enacted by making use and abuse of the most emotionally intense (verbal and non-verbal) meta-erotic expressions. We analyze how Mads Mikkelsen (Hannibal) uses the act of blinking (always coupled with a large spectrum of facial tensions and chiasms), – one by means of which intersubjectivity is at once disbanded and affirmed, and one which allows man to use the energy of the nonpresence and nonevidence while retreating into his coziest and most demonically-fertile inner abysses and secretly recharging himself therein – to control his subjects, to destroy their Eros and to make them brutishly and desperately cling to reason.

Keywords: Linguistic Utopia; Linguistic Anti-humanism; Saying (Sage); Blinking; Fierce Transcendental Insinuation; Savagely-Poetic Expressions of Being.

Although the show seems to be a stand-alone (intransigently independent) reflexive line about the body and its culinary pollinations and polymorphizations, Hannibal, as far as the essence of the theological, epistemological and axiological privileges[1] from behind which it was conceived (and according to which it was assumed by its captious audience) goes, is a savage meditation about the preeminence of linguistic acts over any other type of human acts … genetic or generic.

This work of cinematic Schellingian shadowy theology[2] is constructed around the premise that neither divine imagination nor human phantasy can exist, as long as they are not translated into language and thus turned into an incarnated echo – i.e. into a life-tree that imitates the structure of a derivation tree (used by linguists working in generative grammar and considered by them a primary object of human study) bent over the grave of the former Cartesian human ego (fiendishly deepening his roots in the sustaining and bulging darkness of the human body and using its branches in order to bring upon ourselves storms that normally should not belong to us). It is here that Bryan Fuller’s utopian linguistic vision (“What do you see, doctor? Sum up the Ripper in so many words? Choose them wisely. / Oh, I always do. Words are living things. They have personality, point of view, agenda. They’re pack hunters”[3]) meets what was generally condemned as late Heidegger’s anti-humanism:

The Cartesian ego or consciousness is no longer conceived as the privileged subject of knowledge. (…) A more radical decentering of the subject occurs with Heidegger’s famous “turn” or “Kehre” and the associated attack on Sartre’s humanism. In Heidegger’s later writings his earlier, apparently existentialist account of individual existence – as “anxious” or “caring”, “authentic” or “fallen” – gives way to a more impersonal preoccupation with Being. Heidegger wishes to divert our ‘thinking’ from its individualistic concerns towards a greater “attentiveness to Being”. Only by transcending the limited perspective of the Cartesian subject, “who may deign to release the beingness of beings into an all too loudly bruited ‘objectivity’”, can “thinking” “realize the proper dignity of man” as “the shepherd of Being”. Accompanying this change of emphasis, there is in Heidegger’s later writings an overriding concern with language as “the House of Being” (…) Language discloses Being or “brings it into the open”: “language alone brings beings into the open for the first time. Where there is not language, as in the Being of stone, plant, and animal, there is also no openness of beings, and consequently no openness either of nonbeing and of the empty.”[4] (…) Heidegger is particularly hostile to Sartre’s Cartesian claim that “one must take the subjectivity as his point of departure”[5]. Heidegger’s anti-humanism leads instead to “thinking” as the “letting-be” of transcendent Being [author’s note: through language].[6]

In more direct words, when the characters from the series begin referring to their lives and to their deaths in terms of punctuation marks, as Jack Crawford’s dying wife Bella does when Hannibal tricks her and maliciously refuses to euthanize her (“Hannibal: The punctuation at the end of a sentence gives meaning to every word, every space that proceeded it. Bella: They moved my punctuation mark, Dr. Lecter. You moved my meaning. I’m not here because I want to be here. You saw to that.”[7] ), what they do is resurrect in the most eloquent manner the cleanest possible abruptness of the colors of the deific frenzied feeding, and provide a model for the reincorporation of the “God” into the human “cloud”[8] (host), via language – i.e. monstrously attribute a human system to the (infernal) divine self-understanding, in the exact manner in which John Fowles’s character Clegg from The Collector does to his rare and dangerous butterflies, using only the most ontologically “developed” (up to the limit of lunacy) words: “Seeing her always made me feel like I was catching a rarity, heart-in-mouth, as they say. A Pale Clouded Yellow, for instance. I always thought of her like that, I mean words like elusive and sporadic, and very refined – not like the other ones, even the pretty ones. More for the real connoisseur.”[9]

Clegg’s description of Miranda in terms of insects by means of the most exquisite possible choice of words, Heidegger’s stress on language to the detriment of the human subject, and Bryan Fuller’s decomposition and punctuation of the human matter in terms of derivation trees represent an anti-humanist utopia but not necessarily a dystopia – because the real aim behind all these three examples is not at all a deculturation or a critique of any kind of the human subject; on the contrary, all of them are attempts at making use through abuse of the phenomenal empty (available, unoccupied) spaces (Wolfgang Iser’s vision of some areas of human thinking and of human intuiting for which there are no specific or code-governed signifieds, so that the signifier can point to an empty position, and can also allow for a nonbeing to be posited as a signified), in order to project (and inject) in there a demented fleshy consistency for the otherwise unrealistic human speculations, longings, infinite wishes and cravings – all disconnected from ideologies and skillfully connected to the passionately-obsessive idea of evolution (change) into better / superior grasping forces:

The derivation of “utopia” is Greek words meaning “not-place”, and utopianism is generally identified with unrealistic speculation, providing the adjective “utopian” with its everyday pejorative meaning. (…) Utopian though is seen as springing from the unconscious, whose imaginative capacity confronts, challenges, surpasses, and overrides conscious reality by means of projected counter-pictures containing hopes, desires, and wishful thinking. This utopian faculty, however, is only critical if disconnected from existing ideologies, and based on an understanding of social totality and the means of realizing better conditions of existence. (…) utopianism is limited neither to a literary genre nor to specific conceptions of the good life. It rather plays a genuine role in relation to possible or intended change in existing social conditions.[10]

*

            Yet, talking about linguistically-secured derivation trees and Heidegger’s linguistic anti-humanism in the same logic, and applying these conjoined thought-tapestries to the Hannibal series is an extremely dicey claim, and this happens precisely because Heidegger was against all sequences of “orthodox” grammar and phonetics, and equally obsessed with letting the in-between-the-lines speak for itself, through our (in) voices. Heidegger abjured all “affability and condescension”[11] in his relation with the category that we like to call today “Grammar Nazis” and, in his bond with the Being through language, adopted the position that, once again, we like to identify today as that of an emotionally-engaged “situated observer” or “positioned subject”[12] (always with an implied critique of the so-called “detached” phenomenological and linguistic observer, a raw scientist relying solely on his disengaged reason and impersonal observation): 

More vigorously than ever, the later Heidegger fights against the entire phonocentric and logical-grammatical representation of language that has dominated from antiquity up until Husserl in order to summon us to the place where language itself speaks and where humans learn with humility that they are not the masters of language, but that it is rather they who are under the command of language (…) we learn that speaking is not just using words in a banal fashion to name things and beings; naming cannot be reduced to providing an already known object with a name, to affecting things with a label that fits them  like a glove (…) Naming is not the arbitrary act of denomination that some believe it to be. Contrary to a tenacious image inherited from metaphysics, words are not barrels and buckets from which we draw the content of a pregiven meaning. To speak is to receive into oneself the saying [author’s note: our italics] of the words of our language. To name is “to call the thing to the world”, to summon it in its very absence into our presence, to invite it to do something in a world of things.[13]

In the Hannibal series, this artifice within the linguistic utopia promoted by Bryan Fuller (and having its roots, consciously or not, deeply implanted in a Heideggerian soil) appears when the discourse on language passes from the radically-visceral psychiatrist Hannibal to his milder and softer colleague – Doctor Alana Bloom:

Alana Bloom: Sharing will help normalize.

Abigail Hobbs:  I’m not normal… not anymore.

Alana Bloom: What happened to you was a… Some of these women aren’t even sharing. They speak in “little girl voices”, telling everyone what was done to them without saying a word about it. Certain traumas can arrest vocal development. And victims can sometimes broadcast victimhood involuntarily.[14]

            In the lines above we have an example of what Michel Foucault called the “strong power,” which is the power to attract (and to seduce), and which stands opposed to Hannibal’s “weak power” (at least at this level of expression), a power irremediably bound to all the types of coercive influences and supremacies, a power which governs our lives in the shape of a scale, starting from the most elusive informative methods and ending up in full-fledged actual physical force.

What Dr. Bloom implies by “speaking about something ‘in little girl voices’ and without actually saying a word about that something” resembles Heidegger’s vision of man being “trapped” in the inseparable and indissoluble interminglings and interlinkings of language by the grace of the fabulous magnetism of the language’s saying (Sage) – an almost transcendental manifestation of the springs of creation as they enter, each time as if (als ob) for the very first time, into the complexly-enfleshed human poetry, made of intuition, gestures, unique facial expressions and depths of eye-effulgences and splendors:  

Words are like gestures that engender a world by making things come to the world and the world come to things. This is the “poietic” power of speaking attested to by the poet, who, better than anyone, knows that we do not cease to speak after our language, which always walks in front of us in each of our steps. Language is like the “house of being” that humankind inhabits, the unique dimension in which we can establish residence, and where the paths of thinking always already pre-traced in our bosom are discovered, Provided we listen to our language, we become aware that we are always already caught up in its saying (Sage), in the inextricable interweavings of the relations that it spins and to which we belong due to our own speaking. With the omnipresence and omnipotence of language that is expressed in the unusual tautological formula “Die Sprache spricht” (language speaks), humans do not speak except by providing a reply to it and by entering into correspondence with its saying [author’s note: our italics]. If speech relieves humans of all initiative, what they say, each of their words, is carried by the speaking of their language. Language is like the “Geläut der Stille” (the sounding of stillness) that nevertheless does require the speaking of mortals in order to be understood, provided that they are disposed to the quiet hearing of this eloquent silence.[15]

*

I

n trying to treat Abigail Hobbs’s posttraumatic stress disorder, Doctor Alana Bloom perfectly intuits Heidegger’s thesis on die Sage, but she fails to implement it. On the other hand, if Hannibal misses his therapy at the level of the discourse per se (where he behaves like an orthodox priest of doom or like an inquisitor the boiling “high definition” plasma), he perfectly applies it at the level of gestures, of a supreme use of silence, and of the act of blinking – displays which Heidegger interprets as being of paramount importance in the “capturing” of the Being inside a human vocalized value; as being capable of inducing a decisive positioning of the subject in his relationship with a Beyond, actively involved and trans-organically immersed in His human design:

(…) the wink, ostensibly a bonding gesture, also manifests a moment of dysfunction: I wink at the other in my very incapacity to reach that other in a more articulate way. As in the case of the blink, intersubjectivity is at once disbanded and affirmed: for in winking at or to another I also collaborate with that other in some significant way. I assert the link that my lack of express verbal representations has otherwise placed in question.[16][17]

To speak in real terms, what Caroline Dhavernas (Alana) beautifully formulates but fails to bring into the act, Mads Mikkelsen (Hannibal) elevates to the highest possible allure and appeal – the virtuoso of the Danish actor transforming the very mystery of language into a an all-pervading differential and into the ultimate trigger for the aborted consciousness. This is also where he shifts his discursive weak power into a strongly-seductive (as if shifting into the highest possible gear) gestural influence and art of rooting a person to the ground (as it combines in a fatal / deadly way the power of the most intense non-spoken with the avidity of a Being that greedily awaits its incarnation into the human host), a power capable to arrest the human subject in an truly anti-humanistic manner, while taking away all his speaking vigor. (This is also how Hannibal manages to para- and supra-linguistically get into the mind of Will Graham and seize both his will and his power of self-understanding and of crime-reconstruction[18] [his clarity], creating an inescapable blind-spot on the mind of his patient: “Dr. Lecter: Lost in thought? Will: Not lost. Not anymore. I used to hear my thoughts inside my skull with the same, (…) tone, timbre, accent, as if the words were coming out of my mouth. Dr. Lecter: And now? Will: Now my inner voice sounds like you. I can’t get you out of my head.”[19])

In his will to penetrate the mystery of language, Heidegger discovers another name that is more appropriate because it gathers together in a single word logos and Being, the Saying and the Said, and that which induces us to speak. He calls it “die Sage” (Saying), from an ancient word that has the same origin as deixis, the source of signs that are not made from the gestures of humans, but rather from the “gesture of word”. This is a remarkable hypostasis of language that seems to take away every power of the speaking subject in order to give this power to the Saying and the Said of language. For the thinker, all original language is “the coming of Being into the Said” that it assumes as its destiny, and it is foundational for the history of the community of humans. At this point we are (…) carried away into the mysterious land in which lies the being of language as Sage (legend) and out of which all that “there is” in world originates.[20]

And Bryan Fuller knows how to make the best of Mads Mikkelsen’s capacity to embody and synthesize in real time and in real facial laws the clash of phenomenal powers as well as the serene acceptance of the developing disaster, by using feverish and intimately-porous close-up shots combined with long takes and long shots, where “long takes give the impression of real time; long shots allow us to see complete figures in the context of their milieu; the moving-camera knits time and space together in a contiguous whole so that events can appear to be actual.”[21]

                Every time Mads Mikkelsen blinks, he uses this clever ruse in order to retreat into the most sacred depths of his inner voids (or, as he says, of his “vast mental palace”), and to recharge himself with the gestating powers of the vortexes that await ravenously and devastatingly therein, puddling threateningly at the edge of his being, in the reverberatory furnace of pre-language. That is why Mason Verger (portrayed by Michael Carmen Pitt) ends up being disfigured and dementedly dehumanized by Hannibal – as he cannot understand the supra-linguistic and utterly-disarming use of the power of the non-presence, in the act of blinking (“Don’t get me wrong. I play chicken with Margot all the time. I just don’t tell her I’m playing. I’m good at chicken, Dr. Lecter. I never blink.”[22]):

“Nonpresence and nonevidence are admitted into the blink of the instant. There is a duration to the blink, and it closes the eye. This alterity is in fact the condition for presence, presentation, and thus for Vorstellung in general.”[23] The blink of the eye, the obverse of the glance, undermines the open-eyed attestation of the kind of sheer presence that is available in essential insight, whether this is said to occur in Platonic or Aristotelian noesis, Cartesian intellectual intuition, or Husserlian Wesensanchauung. But something not taken into account by Derrida is that if the same blink detonates the now as point in time (i.e., as “source-point” in Husserl’s term), by the same token it affirms the subjectivity of the subject: an abyssal subjectivity but a subjectivity nonetheless. For when I blink, for a fleeing instant I retreat into a bottomless refuge that lies, somewhere and somehow, within myself.[24]

All the murders and all the horrors can be erased by the blink of the eye, because when one blinks he re-opens his accusing wounds and his sloppy cuts, and the horrors and the maggots of denunciation disappear back into those wounds. For this reason the blinking signals exactly what Edmond Jabès called the “wounded words.” Through blinking credibility and naturalness is restored (“You get all starey and non-blinky like that, it’ll undermine you and me, but mainly him. (…) You are smitten with the accused, Miss Bloom. And it is adorable, but not our brand of defense.”[25]). In the blink of the clever eye, the identification between the indexical and the projective is greater than anywhere else – the two melt into each-other and fuse with one-another, turning into an undetectable superior predator (haunting its prey neither inside, nor outside the human spectrum) – namely, into a predator capable of escaping representation (the ultimate human system of detection) and of resting on a new (unknown and unapproachable) ontological foundation, a “groundwork” reaching not the linguistic constructs but the very springs and reservoirs of the need-for-language. Here is where the anti-humanist utopia begins (in the not-yet translated vortex which imperatively demands its first translation, in the noxious ravenous nothingness of the middle position [no-longer uncreated, but not-yet creation[26]]):

“I return with the unsayable. The unsayable can be given to me only through the failure of my language. Only when the construct falters do I reach what I cannot accomplish.”[27] Faltering constructions – linguistic and otherwise – expose the fault of foundations and the error of every foundationalism. This crack, this fault, lies “beyond” the end of theology. (…) The wound of words is a tear that cannot be mended – a tear that can never be wiped away. This tear or tear, which interrupts the system of exchange, is neither exactly inside nor outside the text. As such, it eludes the economy of representation. That which is neither outside nor inside cannot be represented either referentially or self-reflexively.[28]

Will Graham, a man trapped in Hannibal blink – in this supra-linguistic anti-humanist “teleportation-contraption,” loses control over both time and space (Hannibal being able to literally maneuver him like he would a hologram – “Well, I was on a beach in Grafton, West Virginia. I blinked, and then I was waking up in your waiting room, except I wasn’t asleep! Grafton, West Virginia, is three-and-a-half hours from here”[29]). He loses his dreams and his sleeping hours (as a consequence of having had his blink stolen by Hannibal and replaced with his psychiatrist’s “clandestine” blink – unlike Hannibal who sleeps and dreams perfectly: “Hannibal: What is there to think about? You listen to your breathing in the dark and the tiny clicks of your blinking eyes. I dream more now than I used to”[30]). Moreover, while immersed in the compact plasma of the pre-linguistic streams of Being and surrounded by the walls of Hannibal’s linguistic utopia, he also has his meta-erotic creative knowledge worryingly suspended.

He now strives desperately to cling to his fading reason in order to remain, at least a common man, at least a primal organically oriented Hominidae in front of the colossal vortical assault of the Being through the linguistic living marks of direct passage of the transcendental fury into the human experience – such as the blinking. In the doing of it he goes against his nature, his design – because he is not and he has never been a “normal man.” And this is how Hannibal uses the linguistic utopia to break him own – by forcing him to urgently forget about his meta-erotic creativity and to desperately seek a degraded refuge in reason:

(…) meta-erotica. It must be said that this mystical or creative knowledge is not what it is known as rational knowledge. And then, only the Devil will always know what the rationalists name reason! Rattio is a thing, and Vernuft is another. I am reading, for example, from a rationalist (Lev Sestov), the following lines about Pascal: “The fundamental condition of the possibility of human knowledge consists, I repeat, in that that the truth can be noticed by any normal man.” What is a normal man? Maybe it is the same thing as the “middle man” (the average man, Durch-schnittsmensch). Meaning a fantastic entity: Phantasia non homo, as Petronius used to say (Satirycon, XXXVIII, 16). And exactly about these poor normal men, who notice the rational truth and nothing more, the count Joseph de Maistre, another agonic, wrote, not without arrogance: “They are only right!: (“Ils n’ont que raison!”). The poor human reason and not the divine, creative truth.[31]

This work was possible due to the financial support of the Sectorial Operational Program for Human Resources Development 2007-2013, co-financed by the European Social Fund, under the project number POSDRU/159/1.5/S/140863 with the title “Competitive European researchers in the fields of socio-economics and humanities. Multiregional research net (CCPE).”

Bibliography

Arion L. Kelkel, “Language after Husserl,” in Lester Embree, Elisabeth A. Behnke, David Carr, J. Claude Evans, José Huertas-Jourda, Joseph J. Kockelmans, William R. Mckenna, Algis Mickunas, Jitendra Nath Mohanty, Thomas M. Seebohm, Richard M. Zaner (eds.), Encyclopedia of Phenomenology, Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997, pp. 394-401.

Bernard, Freydberg,Schelling’s Dialogical Freedom Essay (Provocative Philosophy Then and Now), New York: State University of New York Press, 2008.

David West, “The Contribution of Continental Philosophy,” in Robert E. Goodin and Philip Pettit (eds.), in A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy, Oxford and Cambridge (Massachusetts): Blackwell Publishers, 1995, p. 39-71.

Edward S. Casey, “The Time of the Glance: Toward Becoming Otherwise,” in Elizabeth Grosz (ed.), Becomings. Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures, Ithaca (New York) and London: Cornell University Press, 1999, pp. 79-97.

Hans-Herbert Kögler, “Utopianism,” in Ted Honderich (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1995, pp. 892-893.

Henry Heath Bawden, The principles of pragmatism: a philosophical interpretation of experience, Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, The Riverside Press Cambridge, 1910.

John Fowles, The Collector, London: Vintage, 1998.

Mădălina Diaconu, Pe Marginea Abisului, Søren Kierkegaard şi nihilismul secolului al XIX (On the Edge of the Precipice, Søren Kierkegaard and the Nihilism of the 19^th Century), Bucureşti: Editura Ştiinţifică, 1996.

Mark C. Taylor, “The End(s) of Theology,” in Sheila Greeve Davaney (ed.), Theology at the End of Modernity (Essays in Honor of Gordon D. Kaufman), Philadelphia (PA): Trinity Press International, 1991, p. 233-248.

Miguel de Unamuno, Agonia Creştinismului (The Agony of Christianity), translated from Spanish by Radu I. Petrescu, Iaşi: The European Institute Publishing House, 1993.

Tim Bywater, Thomas Sobchack, Introduction to Film Criticism, New York: Longman, 1989.

Internet Sources

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Hannibal_%28TV_series%29

http://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/

Notes

Ştefan Bolea
Babeş-Bolyai University, Romania
stefan.bolea@gmail.com

The Phantasm of Revolution from Fight Club to Mr. Robot

Abstract: In the following paper we explore the utopian theme of revolution in two filmic works of art: the movie Fight Club (1999), directed by David Fincher, and the very recent TV series Mr. Robot (2015), created by Sam Esmail. We will argue that Fight Club is an existential meditation on simulation, dehumanization and the capitalistic tyranny of the objects combined with a nihilistic pursuit of authenticity through violence. Closely following Fight Club’s rumination on madness as “revolution of the self,” Mr. Robot allows us to take a peek into the mystery of revolutionary freedom: will it change everything or will we come to regret our former tyrants?

Keywords: Authenticity; Nihilism; Existentialism; Film Studies; Revolution; Freedom; Destruction; Anarchy; Psychosis.

Fight Club: From Simulation to Project Mayhem

The cult movie Fight Club (1999) combines central themes from the existentialist tradition with a postmodern critique of consumerism and a nihilistic perspective (from Schopenhauer to Cioran). Based on the novel written by Chuck Palahniuk (1996), David Fincher’s movie tells the story of an insomniac office worker (Jack, played by Edward Norton) who crosses paths with a nihilistic soap maker (Brad Pitt as Tyler Durden). They both form an underground fight club that becomes the first step in a revolutionary project targeted at the destruction of society.

Fight Club movie poster (1999).

The postmodern motif of the copy (“Narrator: With insomnia, nothing’s real. Everything’s far away. Everything’s a copy of a copy of a copy”[1]) is essential. In a society ruled by the Heideggerian “They Self” (das Man), we are, as psychosociological subjects, one another’s copies. In Heidegger’s version, “the Others… are … those from whom, for the most part, one does not distinguish oneself.”[2] Such being the case, we are identical not only in our pursuit of similar objects, we are also alike in the inherent structures of subjectivity. Society seems to provide the common measure for each individual and the result is a dehumanization of the Dasein. This is why Robert Bennett remarks that Fight Club calls for a rehumanization of the subject through the existential exploitation of death, suffering and violence.[3] Are we still human? We certainly keep the appearance of the human structures but we might be only a reflection of the things we own (“Tyler Durden: The things you own end up owning you.”[4]) or an echo of the repetitive cycle work-media-sleep.

In Chuck Palahniuk’s novel, the critique of consumerism is made from an anarcho-nihilistic perspective:

And I wasn’t the only slave to my nesting instinct. The people I know who used to sit in the bathroom with pornography, now they sit in the bathroom with their IKEA furniture catalogue.

We all have the same Johanneshov armchair in the Strinne green stripe pattern…

We all have the same Rislampa/Har paper lamps made from wire and environmentally friendly unbleached paper…

You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you’re satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you’ve got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug.

Then you’re trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you.[5]

The “obscure object of desire” (to paraphrase Buñuel) has moved from the erotic sphere to the economic one, following the phases of a libidinal economy. Just as lust can become gluttony, it can also turn into avarice. The possessive and individually dispossessive objects are not perceived by the majority of the consumers as an alienating factor: on the contrary, the objects are seen as the means of displaying personal success. We should remember Tyler Durden’s words: “Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need”[6] (double dissatisfaction: destructive work + contingent possessions).

The society of simulation, one in which we have become the copies of the others, in which we imitate and mimic existence, is balanced in Fight Club by the pursuit of authenticity. The quest for authenticity is coupled with a project of cultural destruction (just like in Nietzsche’s oscillation between nihilism and anti-nihilism, the eventual intentionality of destruction is recreation and rehumanization), which stems from the postulates of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche or Bakunin. This declaration of active nihilism is called Project Mayhem: “It’s Project Mayhem that’s going to save the world. A cultural ice age. A prematurely induced dark age. Project Mayhem will force humanity to go dormant or into remission long enough for the Earth to recover.”[7] As Barry Vacker argues: “To blow up the world requires an older form of consciousness, a consciousness destined to be emptied of scientific and technological knowledge, the intellectual devolution from modern to premodern.”[8]

The utopic project of assassinating modernity in order to create a premodern age fit for hunters and gatherers is highlighted in the novel in poetic post-apocalyptic fragments:

You’ll hunt elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center, and dig clams next to the skeleton of the Space Needle leaning at a fortyfivedegree angle. We’ll paint the skyscrapers with huge totem faces and goblin tikis, and every evening what’s left of mankind will retreat to empty zoos and lock itself in cages as protection against bears and big cats and wolves that pace and watch us from outside the cage bars at night.[9]

The civilizing symbols (Rockefeller Center, a complex of 19 commercial buildings from New York covering 22 acres and the Space Needle Tower from Seattle, 184 m high), touristic attractions and emblems of the capital, become, in a premodern projection, hunting terrains. The urban guerilla becomes fighting for survival, where we must prove once again our spiritual and especially our physical superiority over animals, while zoos become cages of protection for the human beings.

Fight Club’s emphasis on the body (our consciousness is embodied) and on fight (the body is not only a temple; it is also a tank) is a plea for immediacy, which proves that the exploitation of pain and death brings us in our true center, defending the idea that we can overcome alienation through authenticity. If simulation brings along with it conformism, authenticity is synonymous with originality: we have the exact ratio between depersonalization and individualism. Palahniuk (and maybe also Fincher) believes that after postmodernity a sort of premodernity will be resurrected. Is it a sort of postexistential utopia to believe that after late modernity a sort of alternative modernity may be possible, a modernity which goes beyond capital and is in need of an authentic individual, who awakens from the “dogmatic sleep” of alienating work (who works for his own development and not for money) and overcomes the Pascalian diversion of the media through existential focus and recreation of the self? There is an inherent need of the Dasein to turn himself or herself into a work of art, to resist the vile dictatorship of the objects.

Mr. Robot: Revolution at the Gates

Mr. Robot (2015), the psychological thriller TV series created by Sam Esmail, combining somehow The Matrix with Fight Club, tells the story of a computer programmer who is also a vigilante hacker. Elliot Anderson (played by the inspired Rami Malek) is a security engineer for the cybersecurity firm Allsafe. Plagued by clinical depression and anxiety disorder, dealing also with a morphine addiction, Elliot is recruited by the charismatic anarchist Mr. Robot (Christian Slater) to take down the great corporation E(vil) Corp (Allsafe’s greatest client) and to totally cancel all debts.

             Mr. Robot TV series poster (2015).

In a plot that is often reminiscent of Fight Club, Elliot’s purpose is to reset the economic clock to the anarchistic zero hour, to recreate the postulate of equal chances which is the cornerstone of any democracy. “Our democracy has been hacked” (a quote from Al Gore) is one of the key lines of the TV series. Moreover, “equality,” one of the principles of the French Revolution, is today – simply put – a lie. “There’s no middle anymore. Just rich and poor,”[10] claims Darlene, one of the hackers of society (the group that recruits Elliot). The mediatic sleep intends to make us forget that we live in a modern plutocracy, where to exist is synonymous with to pay, where money has a high ontological status.

As I have mentioned, what is impressive in Mr. Robot is its capacity to provide a serious reply to the nihilistic and existential Fight Club. What happens to Tyler Durden, Project Mayhem, revolution in the age of Facebook, terrorism, migrationism and “total” camera surveillance? Tyler, like Neo from Matrix, must become a hacker. It is interesting that both the movie Fight Club and Mr. Robot’s episode 9 touch climax with the accomplishment of revolution. The bank buildings explode in the famous final Fight Club scene, accompanied by the indie rock track Where Is My Mind by the Pixies, and as Elliot explains to Tyrell (one of his archenemies) how he destroyed E Corp, we hear Maxen Cyrin’s brilliant piano cover to Where Is My Mind:

Tyrell Wellick: How long has this been going on?

Elliot Alderson: I don’t know.

Tyrell Wellick: And what is it that you’re doing exactly?

Elliot Alderson: Encrypting all the files, all the Evil Corp’s financial records will be impossible to access. The encryption key will self-delete after the process completes.

Tyrell Wellick: What about the backups?

Elliot Alderson: I took care of that too. China…

Tyrell Wellick: Steel Mountain? Of course, even when we went redundant.

Elliot Alderson: I hacked the AirDream network. I was in all of them.

Tyrell Wellick: You really thought of everything.

[pauses]

Tyrell Wellick: Who else was involved?

Elliot Alderson: Just me.[11]

Like Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, Sam Esmail’s Mr. Robot allows us to take a peek into the end of everything, answering the primary question: what happens after the victory of revolution? Is absolute freedom possible or – to paraphrase Emil Cioran – will we miss our tyrants? There are three answers to this crucial question and the first one belongs to one of E Corp’s executive vice presidents, James Plouffe, who speaks the truth for the first time in his life and kills himself live (in a scene reminiscent of The Network), after his persona was shattered:

James Plouffe: You want me to be honest?

Reporter: Of course.

James: You’re right, absolutely right. The public should be worried. I mean, personally, my life is over. My pension, savings, everything has been in this company since I started here and that’s all gone now. Truth is, I’ve been with the engineering team all week and no one knows how to fix it. In fact, about the only thing they do know for certain is that this will be impossible to fix.[12]

Some of the tyrants (or plutocrats) will be destroyed by the advent of revolution and this is the first answer. They who believe that the poor are “nobodies,” that the life of the ordinary citizens amounts to zero will be reduced to zero as well, to the economic and ontological class of non-existence. The formula of this class is the following one: if you were penniless or broke, you might as well be dead (or, to put it more simply: if you have nothing, you are nothing.) This is why Mr. Plouffe killed himself – because he had lived inside this closed circuit of ontological capitalism which claims that existence and wealth are equivalent. We should quote Tyrell Wellick to understand this equality between being and financial success and the patronizing contempt of the master regarding his slaves.

Tyrell Wellick: I’ve seen our waiter here for the last seven years. Must be in his 50s. Maybe has kids … I wonder, what must he think of himself. His life’s potential reached a 30 grand a year salary, an economy car he still owes money on, two bedroom apartment, child support, coupons. I couldn’t bear it. A life like that. A life of an ordinary cockroach whose biggest value is to serve me salad.[13]

For the plutocrats, we – as ordinary citizens – are mere “cockroaches.”  Seen from their perspective, “equality,” “justice,” “freedom” and “God” are nothing but hollow words deprived of essence. The only truth is the 100$ bill, the rest is just, for instance, the delusion of equality – ridiculous for the master, necessary for the slave. It is almost Kafkian that we, as ordinary “poor” struggling people, seem to be identified with cockroaches. But this personification is fitting for a society that has no middle ground, as the anarchist Darlene infers. Let us move to a second answer to the problem of revolution. We have seen that some of the oligarchs have been squashed just like the bugs they look down upon in a world built upon on an economic ontology.

Angela: Everyone else is worried, but you? You’re sure that you’re gonna get through this. Why?

Philip Price: People did this. Right? I mean, aliens didn’t invade our planet. Zeus didn’t come out of the heavens to destroy us. Zombies haven’t risen from the dead. No. Whoever’s behind this, they’re just people… like you and me. Except, of course, I have the full weight of the biggest conglomerate in the world behind me. You’ll come to realize that when you have that, matters like this, they tend to crack… under that weight.[14]

From the speech of E Corp’s CEO Philip Price, one can see that revolution may be able to wipe out some of the tyrants, but in the long run the power structures will remain unaltered. It is a kind of stoical wisdom that advises against rebellion, that the hegemonic system will integrate its systemic anomaly, to remind one of the theses from Matrix Reloaded. Therefore, in the CEO’s conclusion we have the same reference to an economic ontology: the biggest amount of money is equal to (quasi)absolute power and to (real) existence.

The third answer to the revolutionary issue brings along a new take on reality. Closely following Fight Club, where Jack turns into Tyler Durden in order to initiate the revolution, Elliot has to identify with Mr. Robot to achieve his ambitious plan. One can say that both revolutionaries are psychotic and perhaps madness is a revolution of the self, a way of meeting the Jungian shadow, of becoming aware of our unconsciousness. Without the revolution of the self, no “real” objective revolution is possible: “How can I change the world if I even can’t change myself?”[15] We might say that changing ourselves and changing the world are comparable because my universe will change if I change my perspective (with the postscript that some philosophers like Seneca or Schopenhauer wonder whether it is really possible to change ourselves). So what is reality?

Eliot: You’re not real. You’re not real.

Mr. Robot: What? You are? Is any of it real? I mean, look at this. Look at it! A world built on fantasy. Synthetic emotions in the form of pills. Psychological warfare in the form of advertising. Mind-altering chemicals in the form of… food! Brainwashing seminars in the form of media. Controlled isolated bubbles in the form of social networks. Real? You want to talk about reality? We haven’t lived in anything remotely close to it since the turn of the century. We turned it off, took out the batteries, snacked on a bag of GMOs while we tossed the remnants in the ever-expanding Dumpster of the human condition. We live in branded houses trademarked by corporations built on bipolar numbers jumping up and down on digital displays, hypnotizing us into the biggest slumber mankind has ever seen. You have to dig pretty deep, kiddo, before you can find anything real. We live in a kingdom of bullshit. A kingdom you’ve lived in for far too long. So don’t tell me about not being real. I’m no less real than the fucking beef patty in your Big Mac.

Mr. Robot’s brilliant speech, taking place in New York’s Times Square, perhaps the most “hyperreal” (Baudrillard) place on the planet, among noisy protesters and extremely invasive commercials (the revolution has taken place but advertising ironically lives on: someone also has to advertise the revolution), with sounds of helicopters surveying the scene,  is centered on this idea: “We haven’t lived in anything remotely close to [reality] since the turn of the century.” There is a misunderstanding between the two meanings of the word reality: Eliot, battling with his demons (anxiety, depression, psychosis), refers to a sort of psychological reality; Mr. Robot, clearly a sensation type in the Jungian sense (a sort of extreme realist), describes a sociological reality. But what is real from a philosophical perspective?

Even if one calls it “hyperreal,” “post-real” or “para-real,” reality seems to have absorbed its antithesis, unreality. We live in a “world built on fantasy,” a world where life has become a dream. A sure sign of madness is that one cannot discern between fantasy and reality. In a world that cannot discern between those two, in a psychotic universe, isn’t it a sign of normalcy to become mad? Perhaps we can say that in both Mr. Robot and Fight Club becoming insane is a symptom of wisdom, a sign of (total) understanding, a way of accessing hyperlucidity: the ones who are considered normal must willingly join the cage of repression, forgetfulness, the most common lies and mostly sleep (“the biggest slumber mankind has ever seen”). We sleep while working, shopping, watching TV: the ones who wake up must be executed or incarcerated in asylums. So, let us ask once again: what is reality?

Logically speaking, reality = reality + unreality: a hegemonic metastatic disease that has the structure of a dream. Moreover, what is the final answer of revolution? Let us review the former three versions: (1) some of the tyrants are wiped out like cockroaches (the metaphor for the ordinary citizens); (2) other plutocrats believe that revolution changes nothing, the power structures remain the same; (3a) the revolution of the self is the real revolution; (3b) if life is a dream, then revolution is also a dream. Perhaps revolution is just a phantasm but in a world built on the logic of phantasy, it might be the only dream worth pursuing. To quote Albert Camus, “I rebel – therefore we exist.”[16]

This paper is the result of the doctoral research made possible by the financial support of the Sectoral Operational Programme for Human Resources Development 2007-2013, co-financed by the European Social Fund, under the project POSDRU/159/1.5/S/140863, with the title “Competitive Researchers in Europe in the Field of Humanities and Socio –Economic Sciences. A Multi-regional Research Network”.

Works Cited

Robert Bennett, “The Death of Sisyphus: Existentialist Literature and the Cultural Logic of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club,” Stirrings Still. The International Journal of Existential Literature, Fall/Winter 2005, Vol. 2, No. 2.

Albert Camus, The Rebel. An Essay on Man in Revolt, translated by Anthony Bower, New York: Vintage, 1991.

Faithless, “Salva Mea,” Reverence (Audio CD), Swanyard Studios, London, 1996.

Fight Club (1999), directed by David Fincher, written by Jim Uhls, based on Chuck Palahniuk’s novel.

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.

Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club, London: Vintage Books, 2006.

Barry Vacker, Slugging Nothing. Fighting the Future in Fight Club [Kindle version], Theory Vortex Experiments, 2008.

Notes

Ştefan Bolea
Babeş-Bolyai University, Romania
stefan.bolea@gmail.com

The Phantasm of Revolution from Fight Club to Mr. Robot

Abstract: In the following paper we explore the utopian theme of revolution in two filmic works of art: the movie Fight Club (1999), directed by David Fincher, and the very recent TV series Mr. Robot (2015), created by Sam Esmail. We will argue that Fight Club is an existential meditation on simulation, dehumanization and the capitalistic tyranny of the objects combined with a nihilistic pursuit of authenticity through violence. Closely following Fight Club’s rumination on madness as “revolution of the self,” Mr. Robot allows us to take a peek into the mystery of revolutionary freedom: will it change everything or will we come to regret our former tyrants?

Keywords: Authenticity; Nihilism; Existentialism; Film Studies; Revolution; Freedom; Destruction; Anarchy; Psychosis.

Fight Club: From Simulation to Project Mayhem

The cult movie Fight Club (1999) combines central themes from the existentialist tradition with a postmodern critique of consumerism and a nihilistic perspective (from Schopenhauer to Cioran). Based on the novel written by Chuck Palahniuk (1996), David Fincher’s movie tells the story of an insomniac office worker (Jack, played by Edward Norton) who crosses paths with a nihilistic soap maker (Brad Pitt as Tyler Durden). They both form an underground fight club that becomes the first step in a revolutionary project targeted at the destruction of society.

Fight Club movie poster (1999).

The postmodern motif of the copy (“Narrator: With insomnia, nothing’s real. Everything’s far away. Everything’s a copy of a copy of a copy”[1]) is essential. In a society ruled by the Heideggerian “They Self” (das Man), we are, as psychosociological subjects, one another’s copies. In Heidegger’s version, “the Others… are … those from whom, for the most part, one does not distinguish oneself.”[2] Such being the case, we are identical not only in our pursuit of similar objects, we are also alike in the inherent structures of subjectivity. Society seems to provide the common measure for each individual and the result is a dehumanization of the Dasein. This is why Robert Bennett remarks that Fight Club calls for a rehumanization of the subject through the existential exploitation of death, suffering and violence.[3] Are we still human? We certainly keep the appearance of the human structures but we might be only a reflection of the things we own (“Tyler Durden: The things you own end up owning you.”[4]) or an echo of the repetitive cycle work-media-sleep.

In Chuck Palahniuk’s novel, the critique of consumerism is made from an anarcho-nihilistic perspective:

And I wasn’t the only slave to my nesting instinct. The people I know who used to sit in the bathroom with pornography, now they sit in the bathroom with their IKEA furniture catalogue.

We all have the same Johanneshov armchair in the Strinne green stripe pattern…

We all have the same Rislampa/Har paper lamps made from wire and environmentally friendly unbleached paper…

You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you’re satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you’ve got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug.

Then you’re trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you.[5]

The “obscure object of desire” (to paraphrase Buñuel) has moved from the erotic sphere to the economic one, following the phases of a libidinal economy. Just as lust can become gluttony, it can also turn into avarice. The possessive and individually dispossessive objects are not perceived by the majority of the consumers as an alienating factor: on the contrary, the objects are seen as the means of displaying personal success. We should remember Tyler Durden’s words: “Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need”[6] (double dissatisfaction: destructive work + contingent possessions).

The society of simulation, one in which we have become the copies of the others, in which we imitate and mimic existence, is balanced in Fight Club by the pursuit of authenticity. The quest for authenticity is coupled with a project of cultural destruction (just like in Nietzsche’s oscillation between nihilism and anti-nihilism, the eventual intentionality of destruction is recreation and rehumanization), which stems from the postulates of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche or Bakunin. This declaration of active nihilism is called Project Mayhem: “It’s Project Mayhem that’s going to save the world. A cultural ice age. A prematurely induced dark age. Project Mayhem will force humanity to go dormant or into remission long enough for the Earth to recover.”[7] As Barry Vacker argues: “To blow up the world requires an older form of consciousness, a consciousness destined to be emptied of scientific and technological knowledge, the intellectual devolution from modern to premodern.”[8]

The utopic project of assassinating modernity in order to create a premodern age fit for hunters and gatherers is highlighted in the novel in poetic post-apocalyptic fragments:

You’ll hunt elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center, and dig clams next to the skeleton of the Space Needle leaning at a fortyfivedegree angle. We’ll paint the skyscrapers with huge totem faces and goblin tikis, and every evening what’s left of mankind will retreat to empty zoos and lock itself in cages as protection against bears and big cats and wolves that pace and watch us from outside the cage bars at night.[9]

The civilizing symbols (Rockefeller Center, a complex of 19 commercial buildings from New York covering 22 acres and the Space Needle Tower from Seattle, 184 m high), touristic attractions and emblems of the capital, become, in a premodern projection, hunting terrains. The urban guerilla becomes fighting for survival, where we must prove once again our spiritual and especially our physical superiority over animals, while zoos become cages of protection for the human beings.

Fight Club’s emphasis on the body (our consciousness is embodied) and on fight (the body is not only a temple; it is also a tank) is a plea for immediacy, which proves that the exploitation of pain and death brings us in our true center, defending the idea that we can overcome alienation through authenticity. If simulation brings along with it conformism, authenticity is synonymous with originality: we have the exact ratio between depersonalization and individualism. Palahniuk (and maybe also Fincher) believes that after postmodernity a sort of premodernity will be resurrected. Is it a sort of postexistential utopia to believe that after late modernity a sort of alternative modernity may be possible, a modernity which goes beyond capital and is in need of an authentic individual, who awakens from the “dogmatic sleep” of alienating work (who works for his own development and not for money) and overcomes the Pascalian diversion of the media through existential focus and recreation of the self? There is an inherent need of the Dasein to turn himself or herself into a work of art, to resist the vile dictatorship of the objects.

Mr. Robot: Revolution at the Gates

Mr. Robot (2015), the psychological thriller TV series created by Sam Esmail, combining somehow The Matrix with Fight Club, tells the story of a computer programmer who is also a vigilante hacker. Elliot Anderson (played by the inspired Rami Malek) is a security engineer for the cybersecurity firm Allsafe. Plagued by clinical depression and anxiety disorder, dealing also with a morphine addiction, Elliot is recruited by the charismatic anarchist Mr. Robot (Christian Slater) to take down the great corporation E(vil) Corp (Allsafe’s greatest client) and to totally cancel all debts.

             Mr. Robot TV series poster (2015).

In a plot that is often reminiscent of Fight Club, Elliot’s purpose is to reset the economic clock to the anarchistic zero hour, to recreate the postulate of equal chances which is the cornerstone of any democracy. “Our democracy has been hacked” (a quote from Al Gore) is one of the key lines of the TV series. Moreover, “equality,” one of the principles of the French Revolution, is today – simply put – a lie. “There’s no middle anymore. Just rich and poor,”[10] claims Darlene, one of the hackers of society (the group that recruits Elliot). The mediatic sleep intends to make us forget that we live in a modern plutocracy, where to exist is synonymous with to pay, where money has a high ontological status.

As I have mentioned, what is impressive in Mr. Robot is its capacity to provide a serious reply to the nihilistic and existential Fight Club. What happens to Tyler Durden, Project Mayhem, revolution in the age of Facebook, terrorism, migrationism and “total” camera surveillance? Tyler, like Neo from Matrix, must become a hacker. It is interesting that both the movie Fight Club and Mr. Robot’s episode 9 touch climax with the accomplishment of revolution. The bank buildings explode in the famous final Fight Club scene, accompanied by the indie rock track Where Is My Mind by the Pixies, and as Elliot explains to Tyrell (one of his archenemies) how he destroyed E Corp, we hear Maxen Cyrin’s brilliant piano cover to Where Is My Mind:

Tyrell Wellick: How long has this been going on?

Elliot Alderson: I don’t know.

Tyrell Wellick: And what is it that you’re doing exactly?

Elliot Alderson: Encrypting all the files, all the Evil Corp’s financial records will be impossible to access. The encryption key will self-delete after the process completes.

Tyrell Wellick: What about the backups?

Elliot Alderson: I took care of that too. China…

Tyrell Wellick: Steel Mountain? Of course, even when we went redundant.

Elliot Alderson: I hacked the AirDream network. I was in all of them.

Tyrell Wellick: You really thought of everything.

[pauses]

Tyrell Wellick: Who else was involved?

Elliot Alderson: Just me.[11]

Like Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, Sam Esmail’s Mr. Robot allows us to take a peek into the end of everything, answering the primary question: what happens after the victory of revolution? Is absolute freedom possible or – to paraphrase Emil Cioran – will we miss our tyrants? There are three answers to this crucial question and the first one belongs to one of E Corp’s executive vice presidents, James Plouffe, who speaks the truth for the first time in his life and kills himself live (in a scene reminiscent of The Network), after his persona was shattered:

James Plouffe: You want me to be honest?

Reporter: Of course.

James: You’re right, absolutely right. The public should be worried. I mean, personally, my life is over. My pension, savings, everything has been in this company since I started here and that’s all gone now. Truth is, I’ve been with the engineering team all week and no one knows how to fix it. In fact, about the only thing they do know for certain is that this will be impossible to fix.[12]

Some of the tyrants (or plutocrats) will be destroyed by the advent of revolution and this is the first answer. They who believe that the poor are “nobodies,” that the life of the ordinary citizens amounts to zero will be reduced to zero as well, to the economic and ontological class of non-existence. The formula of this class is the following one: if you were penniless or broke, you might as well be dead (or, to put it more simply: if you have nothing, you are nothing.) This is why Mr. Plouffe killed himself – because he had lived inside this closed circuit of ontological capitalism which claims that existence and wealth are equivalent. We should quote Tyrell Wellick to understand this equality between being and financial success and the patronizing contempt of the master regarding his slaves.

Tyrell Wellick: I’ve seen our waiter here for the last seven years. Must be in his 50s. Maybe has kids … I wonder, what must he think of himself. His life’s potential reached a 30 grand a year salary, an economy car he still owes money on, two bedroom apartment, child support, coupons. I couldn’t bear it. A life like that. A life of an ordinary cockroach whose biggest value is to serve me salad.[13]

For the plutocrats, we – as ordinary citizens – are mere “cockroaches.”  Seen from their perspective, “equality,” “justice,” “freedom” and “God” are nothing but hollow words deprived of essence. The only truth is the 100$ bill, the rest is just, for instance, the delusion of equality – ridiculous for the master, necessary for the slave. It is almost Kafkian that we, as ordinary “poor” struggling people, seem to be identified with cockroaches. But this personification is fitting for a society that has no middle ground, as the anarchist Darlene infers. Let us move to a second answer to the problem of revolution. We have seen that some of the oligarchs have been squashed just like the bugs they look down upon in a world built upon on an economic ontology.

Angela: Everyone else is worried, but you? You’re sure that you’re gonna get through this. Why?

Philip Price: People did this. Right? I mean, aliens didn’t invade our planet. Zeus didn’t come out of the heavens to destroy us. Zombies haven’t risen from the dead. No. Whoever’s behind this, they’re just people… like you and me. Except, of course, I have the full weight of the biggest conglomerate in the world behind me. You’ll come to realize that when you have that, matters like this, they tend to crack… under that weight.[14]

From the speech of E Corp’s CEO Philip Price, one can see that revolution may be able to wipe out some of the tyrants, but in the long run the power structures will remain unaltered. It is a kind of stoical wisdom that advises against rebellion, that the hegemonic system will integrate its systemic anomaly, to remind one of the theses from Matrix Reloaded. Therefore, in the CEO’s conclusion we have the same reference to an economic ontology: the biggest amount of money is equal to (quasi)absolute power and to (real) existence.

The third answer to the revolutionary issue brings along a new take on reality. Closely following Fight Club, where Jack turns into Tyler Durden in order to initiate the revolution, Elliot has to identify with Mr. Robot to achieve his ambitious plan. One can say that both revolutionaries are psychotic and perhaps madness is a revolution of the self, a way of meeting the Jungian shadow, of becoming aware of our unconsciousness. Without the revolution of the self, no “real” objective revolution is possible: “How can I change the world if I even can’t change myself?”[15] We might say that changing ourselves and changing the world are comparable because my universe will change if I change my perspective (with the postscript that some philosophers like Seneca or Schopenhauer wonder whether it is really possible to change ourselves). So what is reality?

Eliot: You’re not real. You’re not real.

Mr. Robot: What? You are? Is any of it real? I mean, look at this. Look at it! A world built on fantasy. Synthetic emotions in the form of pills. Psychological warfare in the form of advertising. Mind-altering chemicals in the form of… food! Brainwashing seminars in the form of media. Controlled isolated bubbles in the form of social networks. Real? You want to talk about reality? We haven’t lived in anything remotely close to it since the turn of the century. We turned it off, took out the batteries, snacked on a bag of GMOs while we tossed the remnants in the ever-expanding Dumpster of the human condition. We live in branded houses trademarked by corporations built on bipolar numbers jumping up and down on digital displays, hypnotizing us into the biggest slumber mankind has ever seen. You have to dig pretty deep, kiddo, before you can find anything real. We live in a kingdom of bullshit. A kingdom you’ve lived in for far too long. So don’t tell me about not being real. I’m no less real than the fucking beef patty in your Big Mac.

Mr. Robot’s brilliant speech, taking place in New York’s Times Square, perhaps the most “hyperreal” (Baudrillard) place on the planet, among noisy protesters and extremely invasive commercials (the revolution has taken place but advertising ironically lives on: someone also has to advertise the revolution), with sounds of helicopters surveying the scene,  is centered on this idea: “We haven’t lived in anything remotely close to [reality] since the turn of the century.” There is a misunderstanding between the two meanings of the word reality: Eliot, battling with his demons (anxiety, depression, psychosis), refers to a sort of psychological reality; Mr. Robot, clearly a sensation type in the Jungian sense (a sort of extreme realist), describes a sociological reality. But what is real from a philosophical perspective?

Even if one calls it “hyperreal,” “post-real” or “para-real,” reality seems to have absorbed its antithesis, unreality. We live in a “world built on fantasy,” a world where life has become a dream. A sure sign of madness is that one cannot discern between fantasy and reality. In a world that cannot discern between those two, in a psychotic universe, isn’t it a sign of normalcy to become mad? Perhaps we can say that in both Mr. Robot and Fight Club becoming insane is a symptom of wisdom, a sign of (total) understanding, a way of accessing hyperlucidity: the ones who are considered normal must willingly join the cage of repression, forgetfulness, the most common lies and mostly sleep (“the biggest slumber mankind has ever seen”). We sleep while working, shopping, watching TV: the ones who wake up must be executed or incarcerated in asylums. So, let us ask once again: what is reality?

Logically speaking, reality = reality + unreality: a hegemonic metastatic disease that has the structure of a dream. Moreover, what is the final answer of revolution? Let us review the former three versions: (1) some of the tyrants are wiped out like cockroaches (the metaphor for the ordinary citizens); (2) other plutocrats believe that revolution changes nothing, the power structures remain the same; (3a) the revolution of the self is the real revolution; (3b) if life is a dream, then revolution is also a dream. Perhaps revolution is just a phantasm but in a world built on the logic of phantasy, it might be the only dream worth pursuing. To quote Albert Camus, “I rebel – therefore we exist.”[16]

This paper is the result of the doctoral research made possible by the financial support of the Sectoral Operational Programme for Human Resources Development 2007-2013, co-financed by the European Social Fund, under the project POSDRU/159/1.5/S/140863, with the title “Competitive Researchers in Europe in the Field of Humanities and Socio –Economic Sciences. A Multi-regional Research Network”.

Works Cited

Robert Bennett, “The Death of Sisyphus: Existentialist Literature and the Cultural Logic of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club,” Stirrings Still. The International Journal of Existential Literature, Fall/Winter 2005, Vol. 2, No. 2.

Albert Camus, The Rebel. An Essay on Man in Revolt, translated by Anthony Bower, New York: Vintage, 1991.

Faithless, “Salva Mea,” Reverence (Audio CD), Swanyard Studios, London, 1996.

Fight Club (1999), directed by David Fincher, written by Jim Uhls, based on Chuck Palahniuk’s novel.

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.

Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club, London: Vintage Books, 2006.

Barry Vacker, Slugging Nothing. Fighting the Future in Fight Club [Kindle version], Theory Vortex Experiments, 2008.

Notes

Andrei Simuţ
Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
andrei.simut@gmail.com

The Post-human Utopian Paradise and the Impossible Gaze from Philip K. Dick to Spike Jonze’s Her

Abstract: This paper analyzes the dialectic between the absence of the physical body, the presence of the out-of-body entities, and the promise of a post-human paradise, as well as their connection with the (impossible) gaze. These motifs are discussed in relation to the science fiction genre in literature (Philip K Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and Dr Bloodmoney) and film (from The Invisible Man-1933 to Transcendence-2014). The article concludes with a few examples that seem to transgress the science fiction genre (Spike Jonze’s Her, 2013; Black Mirror), and the entire science fiction tradition, where the absence of the physical body and the presence of an intrusive consciousness are always intertwined, generating dystopian worlds.

Keywords: Post-human Body; Impossible Gaze; Absence; Post-human Paradise.

Staging the dialectic between the disappearance of the human body and the presence of the visual subject has been a staple of SF novels and films since the advent of New Wave authors such as Philip K. Dick. His cyborg character, Palmer Eldritch, aspires to become immortal through the identification with an impossible, otherworldly gaze. Our paper will investigate the extension of this motif beyond the realms of science fiction films and literary texts, to recent examples which have become mainstream, such as the Oscar nominated film Her (2013, Spike Jonze). This film could serve as a typical example for staging an absent body: the plot centers on the absence of a character, Samantha, who exists only as a voice and perceives the world through the eyes of the protagonist. Our approach will circle around a few basic questions, such as: how do film and literature represent the impossible encounter between a human conscience and its own physical disappearance? What is the relation between the absent human body and the impossible gaze? What is the significance of the post-human body in this context?

            I would start with a three-fold dialectic: the disappearance/absence of the physical body, its replacement with a post-human entity (a cyborg or a digital entity), and the question regarding consciousness, self-awareness, which has been a main topic of the post/trans-humanist debate. This is one of the philosophical concerns for Spike Jonze’s film, which dramatizes what has been termed as the “impossible gaze”, when the subject perceives the world in the absence of the physical body, in such instances which exclude the typical position of the witness. The film manages to render an almost perfectly ambiguous representation of the intrusiveness of technology and its power to replace human consciousness. The film Her and the TV series Black Mirror are symptomatic examples that show the transformation undergone by science fiction as a genre. In order to understand this symptomatic shift, we need to refer briefly to a few classic examples of science fiction illustrating not only the technophobic perspective in their representation of the cyborg, the post-human body and the expansion of consciousness through technological means, but also the inter-relation between these three sub-themes of science fiction: the cyborg, the artificial intelligence/reduplication of consciousness and the virtual reality/ the fascination with the impossible gaze.

            This technophobic trend of science fiction tends to rely on a negative dialectic in the representation of the cyborg since its origins. The destruction of the organic human body/absence and its replacement/incorporation of prosthetic enhancements have disastrous consequences for the human dimension and it usually generates malevolent entities. The description of the new post-human body/mind seldom included negative features: strong impulses towards control, surveillance, violence directed towards the human representatives. This type of representation has permeated science fiction film since the beginning of the genre[1], from Lang’s Metropolis (1927), considered a forerunner of the “cyborg film”[2], featuring one of the earliest examples of a human replaced with a cyborg-almost-identical twin, to Michael Crichton’s Westworld (1973), another forerunner of the genre, where the presence of cyborgs is originally associated with the simulated world of the thematic parks and also a source of violence and chaos. Sue Short mentions three categories of cyborgs, according to their origin: former humans with prosthetic/synthetic modifications; androids with organic components and machines impossible to differentiate from their human counterparts[3]. The first and the second category are more generous in their speculative output regarding the cyborg as the mirror for the ambiguities of human subjectivity faced with the new intrusions of technology. The presence of the cyborg signals the possibility of simulations and transgressions that put into question the very concept of the “real.” Metropolis and Westworld were less concerned with the questions regarding the human essence, their cyborgs belonging to the second category, which is far more appealing for the genre, from the Terminator trilogy, to Star Trek’s Data, from the famous Darth Vader of Star Wars saga to Spiderman 2. Only when Philip K. Dick’s novel (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep) was adapted for screen (Blade Runner, 1982, Ridley Scott) did the cyborg film capture its true speculative force of the topic.

My concern here is not the representation of the cyborg as such, but how these transgressions from the human to the post-human inspire a few recent films (Her, Transcendence, and Black Mirror), emblematic for the new paradigm of SF, but also perfectly illustrated in Philip K. Dick’s Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1964), a novel that proves the deep connection between three sub-themes of science fiction (and cyborg films especially): the cyborg, virtual reality/ ontological displacement and artificial intelligence/ out-of-body experiences. Decades before the debate regarding the consequences of the bio-technological revolution reached the academic field, Philip K. Dick’s novels staged the confrontation between human nature and invasive technology. He captured the subtle effects of the encounter between the decayed human world and post-human enhancements, when their intrusion began to alter the unity between the mind and the body, and also the very concept of a human body. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and Dr. Bloodmoney could offer the best instances of these transformations.

The most compelling example is to be found in the novel about Palmer Eldritch, who is not only a cyborg, a fusion of organic and artificial life, but also an all-encompassing consciousness, controlling the dreams of the other characters, assuming supernatural features, taking control, ever expanding, invading and dissolving the human consciousness:

      “God,” Eldritch said, “promises eternal life. I can do better; I can deliver it.”

           “You’re not just out of your body; you’re out of your mind, too.”

            Eldritch seated himself nearby, rested his artificial arm on his bent knees, and idly swung his stick from side to side, scrutinizing the gluck, which had still not departed. “When we return to our former bodies–you notice the use of the word ‘former,’ a term you wouldn’t apply with Can-D, and for good reason–you’ll find that no time has passed. We could stay here fifty years and it’d be the same; we’d emerge back at the demesne on Luna and find everything unchanged, and anyone watching us would see no lapse of consciousness.”[4]

The fragment not only suggests Eldritch’s promises of transgressing the limitations of the human body, the barriers of time, space and mind, the evasion from a depressive reality, but also Leo’s revelation about the danger of Eldritch’s power, an irreversible invasion. They also point to the limits of literature in suggesting the “impossible gaze,” the gaze beyond the limitations of perception.         

The novel performs a perpetual ontological vertigo, where is difficult to decide if we ever return to the first degree reality presented in the first four chapters: from the fifth chapter on, the novel describes the partial, drug-influenced, personal and fragmented perceptions of Leo Bulero and Barney Mayerson.

 It is significant to note that ontological destabilization occurs only after Leo Bulero’s encounter with Palmer Eldritch in the fifth chapter, and the initial stability of the fictional world is never restored. Palmer Eldritch’s first appearance in the novel is reduced to a voice from a technical device, a sort of mechanical extension (“an electronic contraption”), very far from a human organic body, although Leo was expecting to meet a real person. Palmer Eldritch could as well be an anticipation of artificial intelligence. Science fiction dystopian film has always had a fascination with the sheer terror and panic suggested by a disembodied voice, and I will select below two emblematic examples from 1933, a few years after the introduction of sound, which coincided with the spread of radio propagandistic broadcasts of Hitler and with Goebbels’s speeches across the Western world. Spike Jonze’s film Her (2013) will illustrate an entirely different approach regarding the representation of a disembodied voice: the absence of the body/image becomes a new source of fascination.

Dr. Mabuse and the Invisible Man

This uncanny replacement of the organic body, the sign of a clear identity and limited powers with the omnipresent voice, issued from an electronic device, resembles a famous scene from Fritz Lang’s Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933), when a member of the gang, Thomas Kent (Gustav Diessl), revolts against Mabuse’s authority and confronts him, only to find out in awe that behind the curtain the malefic doctor is absent, replaced by a recorded voice and a loudspeaker. The difference from the first Mabuse series, (Dr. Mabuse, der spieler, 1922), is also striking: although his physical force and therefore his hypnotic influence have been neutralized (Mabuse is locked in an asylum), his absent body is transformed into an uncanny, haunting (omni)-presence, which cannot be confronted with conventional, human means. The effects of a diffuse evil force were an obsessive thematic concern for Lang, but this last film he made in Germany before Hitler came to power stands apart from the rest as far as the presence of the source of evil is concerned. The influence of Mabuse becomes impossible to be contained precisely because of this new gap between the human body as a sign of fixed identity and its non-human extension (spirit, ghost, technical extension, voice, etc.), emphasized in another famous scene, when the spirit of Mabuse literally emerged from his writings, enters the body of professor Baum who studies them, generating a new degree of confusion until the end of the film.

In Metropolis, the famous scene representing the creation of the non-human substitute for Maria becomes not only an iconic symbol for science fiction/dystopian film, but also a simpler explanation for the confusion and chaos to come, namely the substitution of real Maria with a malevolent entity, a cyborg that channels the latent violence of the workers towards the revolutionary outburst. But the representation of Mabuse goes one step further, and maintains the ambiguity regarding the way Mabuse directs his agents and their actions, isolated in the insane asylum and transmitting the orders through the loudspeaker in the secret meeting room where Thomas Kent discovers it.

Another film of 1933, delivering the same terror of an uncontainable evil force, a film that staged the same transgression from the organic body towards the invisible uncanny “almost human” force was James Whale’s The Invisible Man: the story tested the limits of the medium (how to film an invisible body, an absence/presence), where the presence of the actor in the leading role (Claude Rains) is reduced to the inflections of his voice. The same dialectic is employed: the moment when the organic, limited human body disappears (also its identity, its image) and gives way to a new entity, impossible to locate, a source of utter panic and the pure will to dominate humanity. Both films strive to represent the new diffuse character of evil, an inherent prophecy of the things to come and they both choose to emphasize the negative effects of transgressing the limits of human body.

Palmer Eldritch and the impossible gaze

In his conquest of all the possible alternative worlds, Palmer Eldritch encounters little possibility of resistance. Only after experiencing the effects of the substance Chew Z[5], does Leo recognize in Eldritch the perfect instance of total control: “Palmer Eldritch is an invader and this is how we’ll all wind up, here like this, on a plain of dead things that have become nothing more than random fragments; this is the ‘‘reincarnation’ that he promised.”[6] Eldritch’s post-human paradise proves to be a labyrinth of controlled illusions from which there is no escape, since those who experience it could no longer differentiate between “real” and virtual realities. This also holds true for a great many science fictional characters, making use of a post-human body, either cyborgs or computer uploaded entities: they are all portrayed as invaders, from Philip K. Dick’s characters such as Hoppy Harrington in Dr. Bloodmoney to the scientist Will Caster in Transcendence.

But what is so fascinating about Eldritch’s post-human paradise? The short answer is: the specific effects of the substance Chew-Z in offering limitless perspectives in the absence of the human body and transgressing any limit regarding space, time; in other words, in conferring the privilege of a divine, impossible gaze. None of the characters can resist the fascination which resides in breaking the barriers of perception: Barney is confronted with a future version of himself in the Eleventh chapter, who perceives his ghost-like appearance and lets him know that Eldritch was finally killed; he plunges into his past in a desperate attempt to re-live it differently; finally Barney is forced to dissipate his identity into the all-encompassing Palmer Eldritch, acquiring for a moment his God-like vision of eternity. The ontological vertigo of the possible worlds is intertwined with the multiple transferred identities at the end: Palmer voluntarily confines himself to Barney’s human body.

Dick’s prose has a cinematic ability to suggest these translations as they happen, and Eldritch’s three stigmata (the artificial hand, the Jensen eyes and the “radically deranged jaw”) function as recognizable signs of the simulated world. They are also sings pointing to the ambiguous nature of Eldritch himself, who is simultaneously absent and present in their visions. The appearance of the stigmata triggers the instant revelation of the ambiguous essence of the world perceived: the subject understands it is Eldritch’s simulation, but it is already caught up in the object of desire and considers it “real” (an unfulfilled past in Barney’s case, the desire to master the world in Leo Bulero’s case – the ending suggests his desire to master the destiny of humanity, to envisage himself as the “Protector”). Therefore, Philp K. Dick’s novel could also be interpreted in Lacanian terms: Eldritch isolates each character with their ultimate object of desire, making them captive of the gaze. At the end of the novel, Barney explains to Anne the significance of the three stigmata, also pointing to the impossible gaze: “It meant that you were seeing into absolute reality. The essence beyond the mere appearance.”[7]

The process of translation into Barney’s body could also be read as a liberation from the effect of the drug (metaphorically a liberation from Eldritch’s influence), but Barney’s subjective perspective suggests a full contamination with Eldritch as a supernatural entity. This is also a fulfillment of his expressed utopian intention to literally and spiritually translate into a whole community, that of the Mars colony, an idea which was developed by scriptwriter Jack Paglen in Transcendence (2014). The end of the novel maintains the same ambiguity regarding the delusion induced by Eldritch: it is difficult to decide whether Leo Bulero’s return to Earth occurs inside or outside his dream, generated by Palmer Eldritch, whose ‘stigmata’ are infinitely proliferating, recognized by Leo in every inhabitant of the ship, including himself. The end of the film Inception (2010, Christopher Nolan) will play upon the same ambiguity and the same irreversible journey towards the depths of the dream-world.

            Another instance of the impossible gaze can be found in the third chapter of Dr. Bloodmoney, with Hoppy Harrington, a “phocomelus” (he has no limbs) who overcomes this rare congenial disorder with psychokinetic powers, thus becoming an intruder in the other’s minds (like Palmer Eldritch), also possessing the ability to simulate the voice of others, a simulation that creates confusion and chaos. After the nuclear holocaust that he predicted, he seeks to gain total power and he completes his human body with prosthetic sophisticated limbs, therefore becoming another perfect post-human cyborg in quest for total control over the former territory of USA. In the third chapter, he predicts the nuclear apocalypse and the novel seems to offer the first instance of a post-human, impossible gaze (to be present and to perceive an impossible event like the end of the world), transcending the physical body: “Beyond the grave. The After Life’ is the name of Hoppy’s vision he keeps having until the event actually happens, assuming a more trivial, prosaic stance, which apparently transforms Hoppy’s vision into a parody of a prophecy:

Hoppy said mumblingly, “Gray darkness. Like ashes. Then a great flatness. Nothing but fires burning, light is from the burning fires. They burn forever. Nothing alive.”

“And where are you?” Connie asked.

“I’m–floating,” Hoppy said. “Floating near the ground… no, now I’m very high. I’m weightless, I don’t have a body any more so I’m high up, as high as I want to be. I can hang here, if I want; I don’t have to go back down. I like it up here and I can go around the Earth forever. There it is down below me and I can just keep going around and around.”

Going up beside the cart, Mr. Crody the jeweler said, “Uh, Hoppy, isn’t ‘there anybody else?’ Are each of us doomed to isolation?”

Hoppy mumbled, “I see others, now. I’m drifting back down, I’m landing among the grayness. I’m walking about.”

Walking, Stuart thought. On what? Legs but no body; what an after life. He laughed to himself. What a performance, he thought. What crap. But he, too, came up beside the cart, now, squeezing in to be able to see.

“Is it that you’re born into another life, like they teach in the East?” an elderly lady customer in a cloth coat asked.

“Yes,” Hoppy said, surprisingly. “A new life. I have a different body; I can do all kinds of things.”[8]

In fact, it is not only a prophecy, but also a detailed plan to control the world through the re-invention of technological means, as the last man/ cyborg standing: he predicts that everyone else will be able to talk only through him (Dick, 2014, 31). The irony is that Harrington is half-way through accomplishing his mediated reality after a nuclear disaster that has freed the world from this mediated control.

Harrington best exemplifies the horrors of a “body in between,” all the other characters are appalled by Hoppy’s secret powers to fix any technical device through a mysterious process (he literally “heals” the devices). This strange technophilic and intimate relationship with the machines is the first sign of transgression of the human realm. He also frightens his colleagues at Modem TV company with his vision of a perfect cyborg body which will render the human body obsolete:

“And I’m designing a new one, my own design; all electronic – I read an article on brain-wiring, they’re using it in Switzerland and Germany. You’re wired directly to the motor centers of the brain so there’s no lag; you can move even quicker than – a regular physiological structure.” He started to say, than a human. “I’ll have it perfected in a couple of years,” he said, “and it’ll be an improvement even on the Swiss models.”[9]

Like The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Dr Bloodmoney focuses on Hoppy Harrington’s post-human nature, which becomes even more appalling in its invasiveness after the nuclear disaster occurs: he threatens to transform the post-apocalyptic world, which has regressed to a pastoral stage, liberated from technology, into a dystopian realm, under his own control, once he manages to control the radio station, the abandoned satellite and all the other character’s minds, through his power to reduplicate and simulate their voices and through his mysterious relation with technology. The three-fold scenario of transgressing the human body is also present: Harrington surpasses his dysfunctional human body, becomes a perfect cyborg after the demise of human civilization and finally achieves God-like status with his omniscient ability to invade the minds of the others. However, there is an opposing force to Harrington’s dystopian plans, and, contrary to the human opponents of Palmer Eldritch, it does stand a chance against Hoppy precisely because it also has post-human features: Bill Keller is a mysterious entity located in Elsie’s body, but able to transgress any boundaries, and enter any life form, animal or human.

The end of the novel stages a confrontation between two entities possessing a post-human body, both able to control thought ad a source of confusing simulacra, both being able to expand limitless, transgressing space and time. Only Bill Keller, an out-of body consciousness, can stop Hoppy Harrington from taking control over the world and humanity.

            Beyond Technological Singularity – Divinity?

Although both Harrington and Palmer Eldritch are cyborgs, the nature of the latter is more ambiguous, lending itself to religious interpretations.[10] Umland’s emphasis on the religious dimension of Dick’s prose, which should not be treated as marginal is very comprehensive. However, it should be mentioned the strange coexistence of the religious element with the obsessive emphasis on the technological signs, namely the recurrence of the three stigmata in the character’s visions. Eldritch post-human body appears only in their hallucinations induced by the substance chew-Z: in the first four chapters, Eldritch is either an absent character, whose apparition is intensively debated by the other characters, or a voice emerging from an “electronic contraption.” In their visions, both Leo Bulero and Barney Mayerson are obsessed with Eldritch’s double nature: that of a cyborg and his God-like abilities. This can be interpreted as a strange foreshadowing of the strange combination between religion and technology, a techno-religion that promises eternal life (uploading the consciousness on inalterable materials), the end of disease (biotechnology), namely the limitations of the organic human body. The biography of Eldritch is also an emblematic one, in trans-humanist terms: after a few accidents, he becomes a cyborg (he replaces his eyes with artificial ones) and he mysteriously acquires new abilities, mostly he becomes an ever-expanding consciousness, with infinite power to permeate the world.

This transgression of the human body towards a supernatural entity by means of technology which radically transforms the world, along with his desire to create a perfect utopian society on Mars (by simultaneously spreading through the minds of its inhabitants) is also the plot of a recent movie, Transcendence (2014) which received bad reviews, but it is a significant attempt to synthesize the post-human/trans-humanist utopia: uploading the human consciousness, the final construction of a self-aware super-intelligence, outside the human body, in other words creating divinity by technological means, a techno-utopian project declared with the full arrogance of a trans-humanist scientist by Will Caster (Johnny Depp) at the beginning of the film: “the combined intellect of engineers, mathematicians, neuroscientists and hackers pales in comparison with even the most basic A.I. A sentient machine will quickly overcome the limits of biology and in a short time its analytical power will be greater than the collective intelligence of every person born in the history of the world. […] Now imagine such an entity with full range of human emotion even self-awareness. Sometimes we refer to this as Singularity. I prefer to call it Transcendence.”

The project of the film was inherently utopian: to gather all the contemporary fears regarding the actual development of technology (human bar-coding, cyborgs, surveillance, the separation of the body and the mind, the supremacy of artificial intelligence over the human mind, the end of organic life, transfer of artificial intelligence to a synthetic body, etc.), but also to imagine the ultimate consequences of such a “techno-divine invasion”, a “technological singularity” that ultimately tests the limits of representation in the film itself. Jack Paglen’s script gathers a few real dilemmas about the future of artificial intelligence, and it is remarkable the attempt to remain ambivalent towards the ultimate consequences of the biotechnological revolution. The difficult answer to the uniqueness of human consciousness is also notable, with the repeated scene when the A.I. are asked about their self-awareness, and the inquiry is redirected towards the human agents, echoing the debate from post-humanist studies regarding the differences between mind and consciousness[11].

The bird’s eye view is probably the most significant scene of the entire film, the attempt to render the perspective of an uploaded consciousness and its pantheist presence in every aspect of nature, showing how the utopian post-human project takes refuge in this all-encompassing, God-like, transcendent, impossible gaze. As compared to this, the long and tiring sequences describing the utopian facilities built by Will Caster’s artificial consciousness seem irrelevant and unconvincing. The attempt to render cinematically the dominant perspective of the ever-expanding consciousness points to what Louis Marin has termed as the frontiers of utopia[12].

The film eventually loses momentum in the second and third acts. The utopian developments at Will Caster’s establishment are shown in a realistic and descriptive manner, like in a documentary film, which is unusual for a science fiction movie and it signals the drive towards realism that permeates the entire genre. The replacement of nature/man with the artificial super-intelligence is shown as a gradual, non-dramatic, natural event, as if the film adopted the trans-humanist perspective of Will Caster. The final attack of the activists and FBI agents, which is responsible for the final blackout, seems a violent, unnecessary action. The final act of the drama is undermined by contradictions, failing to convey both the fascination of techno-utopians with the benefits of technology and the consternation of the technophobics faced with the ultimate end of organic life on Earth. The end of the film is irremediable flawed, since the entire ambivalent perspective towards Will Caster’s post-human paradise is involuntarily trivialized by Max Waters’ conclusion about Will’s accomplishment (pointing to its selfishness and inhumanity). Transcendence’s failure is significant for the discussion of a new phase in the evolution of the science fiction, being marred by two opposite tendencies: the maximalist ambition to incorporate/synthesize all post-human themes, technologies and concerns into one ordinary story, lacking true conflict, and the realist, descriptive, documentary tendency to de-dramatize the grand transformation from technology to simulated divinity.

Realism, Science Fiction and Out-Of-Body Perception

Two transformations undergone by science fiction films should be mentioned here. One regards the new drive towards realism on account of the new importance gained by realism in film throughout the 2000s and because of the new developments in technology (which explains why the SF as genre is more inclined to obsolescence). The other concerns the representation of the body and consequently, the utopian/impossible gaze: faced with the inflation of images depicting perfect bodies, the film manifests the opposite tendency to represent the transgression of the physical body, the invisible body or out-of-body experiences, and the examples abound not only in the sub-genre of the cyborg film (from Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days to the Matrix trilogy or Existenz), but also in blockbusters such as Avatar or Inception. Although so frequently quoted (even in Matrix), Baudrillard’s famous essay “Simulacra and Science fiction” becomes again actual with films such as Her, Transcendence, TV series such as Black Mirror, Humans or even space travel movies such as Gravity, Interstellar or The Martian: the distance between the real and the imaginary, between present-world and future-world, between present and future technologies are minimized and, in Baudrillard’s words, there is no “room for any fictional extrapolation”[13]. Science fiction films tend to generate their cognitive estrangement from the tensions of the utopian/impossible gaze and from the dialectics of the visible/invisible. Gravity is a minute account of the space perceived through an astronaut’s eyes/helmet, Interstellar – how is the world seen by an astronaut caught in a black hole, Black Mirror (episodes White Christmas and The Entire History of You) and Her – depict various instances of how the world could be perceived by a consciousness/artificial intelligence in the absence of the physical body.

“Not Just an Operating System, it’s a Consciousness”

Spike Jonze’s film stands apart from the rest in its deliberate emphasis on the invisible, as the unconquered territory of science fiction, which can re-formulate metaphysical questions present in the good tradition of SF, in a new form, radically different from it (what is our irreducible human essence, can an artificial intelligence become self-aware, sentient and human?). Spike Jonze offers an entirely different representation of the invisible woman, Samantha (Scarlett Johansson), whose materialization is indefinitely postponed, a disembodied voice which captures and generates all the romantic and erotic phantasms of Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix), a lonely anti-hero with an awkward job (a professional writer of love letters), who fills his loneliness with a new computer program, presented as “not just an operating system, it’s a consciousness.” The first difference from a common science fiction film is the programmatic avoidance of any direct reference to the technophobic aspects of Samantha’s post-human identity, although it is precisely the question of her self-awareness that haunts Theodore in the memorable scene when the operating system is activated, the scene of the encounter with the post-human. When compared with the opening of the classic SF Blade Runner with the Voight-Kampff test, when the android was interrogated, Spike Jonze’s film operates a striking reversal between the human and the non-human: in this scene, Theodore is questioned by the operating system and Samantha’s voice conceals the frightening aspect when computers have crossed the boundaries of the human body. From the moment of its initialization, Samantha has intruded into the most intimate corners of Theodore’s mind (to be compared to the less subtle representation of Will Caster as an uploaded entity in Transcendence).

A similar theme and scene features in Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror, in the episode “Be Right Back” (February 2013): after Martha loses her husband Ash in a car accident, she is convinced to use an operating system that re-creates Ash’s identity by using all his online activity, an archive which seems to generate a consciousness. The film depicts with irony Martha’s readiness to believe that she actually speaks with the online avatar of Ash himself, echoing the delusion induced by “chatterbot,” the artificial conversational entity. Martha overcomes her depression and becomes gradually involved in her dialogue with the artificial Ash, a dialogue conducted via email at first, then by telephone and, finally, when the virtual Ash acquires a synthetic body and finally awakens Martha from her delusion. Both films insist on the protagonist’s estrangement from the world and their desire for intimacy with the virtual entity, echoing one important effect observed with the ELIZA experiment (the first program simulating an Artificial Intelligence) – humans could easily believe that the “voice in the machine” is not a simulated, but real, self-aware entity. Another irony of this episode is that the real Ash is shown as being more distracted by technological devices than his synthetic alter-ego, whose presence perfectly simulates real emotions, but becomes uncomfortable only when Martha understands that the human contradictions are unknown to him. His presence in the body/image form clarifies what the voice has left ambiguous: Ash’s voice was the perfect presence/absence, since it was an empty signifier which captured Martha’s projections about the real Ash.

Theodore experiences a similar reluctance and acute disillusion when confronted with the possibility to have an embodied Samantha, after she confesses her ultimate fantasy of taking a human shape. The film stages an exchange of impossible fantasies, when Theodore in his turn is absorbed in the invisible world of Samantha. The film is structured on the inter-play between the absence of image/body – the presence of the voice, or the presence of the body – the absence of decision, personality: while Theodore is thorn with indecisions, Samantha quickly selects his important emails, even re-writes his letters, takes decisions, and literally becomes his alter-ego. Theodore’s dependence on Samantha is more subtly and more ambiguously described: she quickly evolves and becomes more than just a virtual entity (she seems to know when Theodore is distressed and “activates” at will, beyond his control). The film suggests these unsettling aspects with subtlety and without the directness of a dystopian form.

The reviews of the film have overlooked the subtle technophobic suggestions and the fact that Theodore himself works at a company that practices a legal intrusion into the most intimate aspects of people’s lives (Theodore writes their love-letters). His job is an indirect irony towards the place of art in a hyper-technological society, but also an original account for an old idea (we have all already become cyborgs). There is an unconquered territory for Samantha: Theodore’s style of writing love letters, which at the end are compiled and selected by Samantha in a book. The film also opens to two possible interpretations, one being an unexpected revival of a Romantic idea/motif, as in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (the longing for an ethereal body-less entity, and the other based on a more referential reading of post-humanist dilemmas (the simulated mind becoming a real human mind, the existence of the mind in the absence of the body, etc.). The film portrays how a computer program could undergo a process of humanization (Samantha confesses her irreversible transformation, her ability to want and feel), while Theodore’s dependence on technology is stressed: he becomes a cyborg with a prosthetic consciousness. Samantha will soon abandon her quest for human nature and her fascination with corporeality, offering a startling fragment of post-human utopia/ideology: “I used to be so worried about not having a body, but now I truly love it, I’m growing in a way that I couldn’t if I had a physical form. I mean I am not limited, I could be anywhere, and everywhere simultaneously, I am not tattered to time and space in a way that I would be if I was stuck in a body that’s inevitably going to die.”

The confrontation between Samantha and Theodore also spells for a contrast (very slight at the beginning, but striking at the end) between the human perspective and the post-human/utopian gaze. This explains why this operating system exerts such a fascination and why it radically changes Theodore’s relation to/perspective on his world: he acquires a new vision upon the “real” through “the eyes” of Samantha. Instead of the classic “cognitive estrangement,” Darko Suvin’s term for the essence of science fiction, Spike Jonze’s offers a “perceptive estrangement”: a few essential scenes attempt to grasp this estranged view upon the world, as if the spectator perceived the world from a non-human perspective, attempting to capture the post-human gaze. This permanent shift of perspectives between Samantha and Theodore effaces the differences between human and post-human. Theodore selects different aspects of the world (faces in a crowd, landscapes, etc.), staging a human, subjective point of view, focused on relevant details, for a post-human spectator (Samantha). Gradually these fragments of reality are replaced in the film by a series of static long shots, as if the post-human cold examination of the world has replaced the human eye. After Samantha disappears, the equilibrium is restored with the depressive return of the real.

Conclusions

Samantha’s final monologue suggests she has transgressed her world to another level, “not up to the physical world.” Not only Samantha remains invisible, but also these levels of virtual reality. Spike Jonze points to a utopia of the gaze, fascinated with the realms of the invisible, contrary to an entire tradition of science fiction movies, dominated by visual excess, by the desire to screen these virtual, strange worlds. Spike Jonze’s film constructs the invisible space beyond the dominant gaze and beyond the frontiers of utopia, resuscitating the imaginative powers of the viewer. The new imaginary of science fiction films is obsessed with the accelerated transgressions of boundaries between human and post-human, between human consciousness and virtual artificial intelligence, in search of the suitable representations for the new scientific realities.

Bibliography:

            Baudrillard, Jean, “Two Essays. Simulacra and Science Fiction”, Science Fiction Studies, vol. 18, part 3, November 1991.

            Dick, Philip K., Dr Bloodmoney, Or How We Got Along after the Bomb, London: Golancz, 2014.

           Dick, Philip K, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, New York: Vintage Books, 1991.

           Dick, Philip K., Roger Zelazny, Deus Irae, London: Gollancz, 2013.

Dinello, Daniel, Technophobia! Science Fiction Visions of Posthuman Technology, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005.

Dufresne, Jacques, Après l’homme, le cyborg, Quebec: Editions Multimondes, 1999.

            Haney W. S., Cyberculture, Cyborgs, and Science Fiction. Consciousness and the Posthuman, Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2006.

            Marin, Louis, “Frontiers of Utopia. Past and Present”, Critical Inquiry, vol. 19, no. 3 (Spring, 1993), pp.397-420.

Parrinder, Patrick (ed.), Learning from Other Worlds. Estrangement, Cognition, and the Politics of Science Fiction and Utopia, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000.

Palmer, Cristopher, Philip K. Dick, Exhilaration and Terror of the Postmodern, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2003.

            Umland, Samuel J. (ed.), Philip K. Dick. Contemporary Critical Interpretations, London: Greenwood Press, 1995.

            Short, Sue, Cyborg Cinema and Contemporary Subjectivity, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

Filmography:

Black Mirror, Tv series, (2011-2015), creator Charlie Brooker, with Daniel Kaluuya, Toby Kebbel, Rory Kinnear (episodes: “White Christmas”, 16 December 2014; “White Bear,” “Be Right Back“, 11 February 2013).

Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse (1933), directed by Fritz Lang, written by Norbert Jacques, Fritz Lang, with Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Otto Wernicke, Gustav Diessl.

Her (2013), directed by Spike Jonze, screenplay by Spike Jonze, with Joaquin Phoenix, Amy Adams, Scarlett Johansson.

The Invisible Man (1933), directed by James Whale, written by H.G. Wells, R.C Sheriff, with Claude Rains, Gloria Stuart, William Harrigan.

Transcendence (2014), directed by Wally Pfister, written by Jack Paglen, with Johnny Depp, Rebecca Hall, Morgan Freeman.

This work was supported by Romanian National Authority for Scientific Research within the Exploratory Research Project PN-II-ID-PCE-2011-3-0061.

Andrei Simuţ
Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
andrei.simut@gmail.com

The Post-human Utopian Paradise and the Impossible Gaze from Philip K. Dick to Spike Jonze’s Her

Abstract: This paper analyzes the dialectic between the absence of the physical body, the presence of the out-of-body entities, and the promise of a post-human paradise, as well as their connection with the (impossible) gaze. These motifs are discussed in relation to the science fiction genre in literature (Philip K Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and Dr Bloodmoney) and film (from The Invisible Man-1933 to Transcendence-2014). The article concludes with a few examples that seem to transgress the science fiction genre (Spike Jonze’s Her, 2013; Black Mirror), and the entire science fiction tradition, where the absence of the physical body and the presence of an intrusive consciousness are always intertwined, generating dystopian worlds.

Keywords: Post-human Body; Impossible Gaze; Absence; Post-human Paradise.

Staging the dialectic between the disappearance of the human body and the presence of the visual subject has been a staple of SF novels and films since the advent of New Wave authors such as Philip K. Dick. His cyborg character, Palmer Eldritch, aspires to become immortal through the identification with an impossible, otherworldly gaze. Our paper will investigate the extension of this motif beyond the realms of science fiction films and literary texts, to recent examples which have become mainstream, such as the Oscar nominated film Her (2013, Spike Jonze). This film could serve as a typical example for staging an absent body: the plot centers on the absence of a character, Samantha, who exists only as a voice and perceives the world through the eyes of the protagonist. Our approach will circle around a few basic questions, such as: how do film and literature represent the impossible encounter between a human conscience and its own physical disappearance? What is the relation between the absent human body and the impossible gaze? What is the significance of the post-human body in this context?

            I would start with a three-fold dialectic: the disappearance/absence of the physical body, its replacement with a post-human entity (a cyborg or a digital entity), and the question regarding consciousness, self-awareness, which has been a main topic of the post/trans-humanist debate. This is one of the philosophical concerns for Spike Jonze’s film, which dramatizes what has been termed as the “impossible gaze”, when the subject perceives the world in the absence of the physical body, in such instances which exclude the typical position of the witness. The film manages to render an almost perfectly ambiguous representation of the intrusiveness of technology and its power to replace human consciousness. The film Her and the TV series Black Mirror are symptomatic examples that show the transformation undergone by science fiction as a genre. In order to understand this symptomatic shift, we need to refer briefly to a few classic examples of science fiction illustrating not only the technophobic perspective in their representation of the cyborg, the post-human body and the expansion of consciousness through technological means, but also the inter-relation between these three sub-themes of science fiction: the cyborg, the artificial intelligence/reduplication of consciousness and the virtual reality/ the fascination with the impossible gaze.

            This technophobic trend of science fiction tends to rely on a negative dialectic in the representation of the cyborg since its origins. The destruction of the organic human body/absence and its replacement/incorporation of prosthetic enhancements have disastrous consequences for the human dimension and it usually generates malevolent entities. The description of the new post-human body/mind seldom included negative features: strong impulses towards control, surveillance, violence directed towards the human representatives. This type of representation has permeated science fiction film since the beginning of the genre[1], from Lang’s Metropolis (1927), considered a forerunner of the “cyborg film”[2], featuring one of the earliest examples of a human replaced with a cyborg-almost-identical twin, to Michael Crichton’s Westworld (1973), another forerunner of the genre, where the presence of cyborgs is originally associated with the simulated world of the thematic parks and also a source of violence and chaos. Sue Short mentions three categories of cyborgs, according to their origin: former humans with prosthetic/synthetic modifications; androids with organic components and machines impossible to differentiate from their human counterparts[3]. The first and the second category are more generous in their speculative output regarding the cyborg as the mirror for the ambiguities of human subjectivity faced with the new intrusions of technology. The presence of the cyborg signals the possibility of simulations and transgressions that put into question the very concept of the “real.” Metropolis and Westworld were less concerned with the questions regarding the human essence, their cyborgs belonging to the second category, which is far more appealing for the genre, from the Terminator trilogy, to Star Trek’s Data, from the famous Darth Vader of Star Wars saga to Spiderman 2. Only when Philip K. Dick’s novel (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep) was adapted for screen (Blade Runner, 1982, Ridley Scott) did the cyborg film capture its true speculative force of the topic.

My concern here is not the representation of the cyborg as such, but how these transgressions from the human to the post-human inspire a few recent films (Her, Transcendence, and Black Mirror), emblematic for the new paradigm of SF, but also perfectly illustrated in Philip K. Dick’s Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1964), a novel that proves the deep connection between three sub-themes of science fiction (and cyborg films especially): the cyborg, virtual reality/ ontological displacement and artificial intelligence/ out-of-body experiences. Decades before the debate regarding the consequences of the bio-technological revolution reached the academic field, Philip K. Dick’s novels staged the confrontation between human nature and invasive technology. He captured the subtle effects of the encounter between the decayed human world and post-human enhancements, when their intrusion began to alter the unity between the mind and the body, and also the very concept of a human body. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and Dr. Bloodmoney could offer the best instances of these transformations.

The most compelling example is to be found in the novel about Palmer Eldritch, who is not only a cyborg, a fusion of organic and artificial life, but also an all-encompassing consciousness, controlling the dreams of the other characters, assuming supernatural features, taking control, ever expanding, invading and dissolving the human consciousness:

      “God,” Eldritch said, “promises eternal life. I can do better; I can deliver it.”

           “You’re not just out of your body; you’re out of your mind, too.”

            Eldritch seated himself nearby, rested his artificial arm on his bent knees, and idly swung his stick from side to side, scrutinizing the gluck, which had still not departed. “When we return to our former bodies–you notice the use of the word ‘former,’ a term you wouldn’t apply with Can-D, and for good reason–you’ll find that no time has passed. We could stay here fifty years and it’d be the same; we’d emerge back at the demesne on Luna and find everything unchanged, and anyone watching us would see no lapse of consciousness.”[4]

The fragment not only suggests Eldritch’s promises of transgressing the limitations of the human body, the barriers of time, space and mind, the evasion from a depressive reality, but also Leo’s revelation about the danger of Eldritch’s power, an irreversible invasion. They also point to the limits of literature in suggesting the “impossible gaze,” the gaze beyond the limitations of perception.         

The novel performs a perpetual ontological vertigo, where is difficult to decide if we ever return to the first degree reality presented in the first four chapters: from the fifth chapter on, the novel describes the partial, drug-influenced, personal and fragmented perceptions of Leo Bulero and Barney Mayerson.

 It is significant to note that ontological destabilization occurs only after Leo Bulero’s encounter with Palmer Eldritch in the fifth chapter, and the initial stability of the fictional world is never restored. Palmer Eldritch’s first appearance in the novel is reduced to a voice from a technical device, a sort of mechanical extension (“an electronic contraption”), very far from a human organic body, although Leo was expecting to meet a real person. Palmer Eldritch could as well be an anticipation of artificial intelligence. Science fiction dystopian film has always had a fascination with the sheer terror and panic suggested by a disembodied voice, and I will select below two emblematic examples from 1933, a few years after the introduction of sound, which coincided with the spread of radio propagandistic broadcasts of Hitler and with Goebbels’s speeches across the Western world. Spike Jonze’s film Her (2013) will illustrate an entirely different approach regarding the representation of a disembodied voice: the absence of the body/image becomes a new source of fascination.

Dr. Mabuse and the Invisible Man

This uncanny replacement of the organic body, the sign of a clear identity and limited powers with the omnipresent voice, issued from an electronic device, resembles a famous scene from Fritz Lang’s Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933), when a member of the gang, Thomas Kent (Gustav Diessl), revolts against Mabuse’s authority and confronts him, only to find out in awe that behind the curtain the malefic doctor is absent, replaced by a recorded voice and a loudspeaker. The difference from the first Mabuse series, (Dr. Mabuse, der spieler, 1922), is also striking: although his physical force and therefore his hypnotic influence have been neutralized (Mabuse is locked in an asylum), his absent body is transformed into an uncanny, haunting (omni)-presence, which cannot be confronted with conventional, human means. The effects of a diffuse evil force were an obsessive thematic concern for Lang, but this last film he made in Germany before Hitler came to power stands apart from the rest as far as the presence of the source of evil is concerned. The influence of Mabuse becomes impossible to be contained precisely because of this new gap between the human body as a sign of fixed identity and its non-human extension (spirit, ghost, technical extension, voice, etc.), emphasized in another famous scene, when the spirit of Mabuse literally emerged from his writings, enters the body of professor Baum who studies them, generating a new degree of confusion until the end of the film.

In Metropolis, the famous scene representing the creation of the non-human substitute for Maria becomes not only an iconic symbol for science fiction/dystopian film, but also a simpler explanation for the confusion and chaos to come, namely the substitution of real Maria with a malevolent entity, a cyborg that channels the latent violence of the workers towards the revolutionary outburst. But the representation of Mabuse goes one step further, and maintains the ambiguity regarding the way Mabuse directs his agents and their actions, isolated in the insane asylum and transmitting the orders through the loudspeaker in the secret meeting room where Thomas Kent discovers it.

Another film of 1933, delivering the same terror of an uncontainable evil force, a film that staged the same transgression from the organic body towards the invisible uncanny “almost human” force was James Whale’s The Invisible Man: the story tested the limits of the medium (how to film an invisible body, an absence/presence), where the presence of the actor in the leading role (Claude Rains) is reduced to the inflections of his voice. The same dialectic is employed: the moment when the organic, limited human body disappears (also its identity, its image) and gives way to a new entity, impossible to locate, a source of utter panic and the pure will to dominate humanity. Both films strive to represent the new diffuse character of evil, an inherent prophecy of the things to come and they both choose to emphasize the negative effects of transgressing the limits of human body.

Palmer Eldritch and the impossible gaze

In his conquest of all the possible alternative worlds, Palmer Eldritch encounters little possibility of resistance. Only after experiencing the effects of the substance Chew Z[5], does Leo recognize in Eldritch the perfect instance of total control: “Palmer Eldritch is an invader and this is how we’ll all wind up, here like this, on a plain of dead things that have become nothing more than random fragments; this is the ‘‘reincarnation’ that he promised.”[6] Eldritch’s post-human paradise proves to be a labyrinth of controlled illusions from which there is no escape, since those who experience it could no longer differentiate between “real” and virtual realities. This also holds true for a great many science fictional characters, making use of a post-human body, either cyborgs or computer uploaded entities: they are all portrayed as invaders, from Philip K. Dick’s characters such as Hoppy Harrington in Dr. Bloodmoney to the scientist Will Caster in Transcendence.

But what is so fascinating about Eldritch’s post-human paradise? The short answer is: the specific effects of the substance Chew-Z in offering limitless perspectives in the absence of the human body and transgressing any limit regarding space, time; in other words, in conferring the privilege of a divine, impossible gaze. None of the characters can resist the fascination which resides in breaking the barriers of perception: Barney is confronted with a future version of himself in the Eleventh chapter, who perceives his ghost-like appearance and lets him know that Eldritch was finally killed; he plunges into his past in a desperate attempt to re-live it differently; finally Barney is forced to dissipate his identity into the all-encompassing Palmer Eldritch, acquiring for a moment his God-like vision of eternity. The ontological vertigo of the possible worlds is intertwined with the multiple transferred identities at the end: Palmer voluntarily confines himself to Barney’s human body.

Dick’s prose has a cinematic ability to suggest these translations as they happen, and Eldritch’s three stigmata (the artificial hand, the Jensen eyes and the “radically deranged jaw”) function as recognizable signs of the simulated world. They are also sings pointing to the ambiguous nature of Eldritch himself, who is simultaneously absent and present in their visions. The appearance of the stigmata triggers the instant revelation of the ambiguous essence of the world perceived: the subject understands it is Eldritch’s simulation, but it is already caught up in the object of desire and considers it “real” (an unfulfilled past in Barney’s case, the desire to master the world in Leo Bulero’s case – the ending suggests his desire to master the destiny of humanity, to envisage himself as the “Protector”). Therefore, Philp K. Dick’s novel could also be interpreted in Lacanian terms: Eldritch isolates each character with their ultimate object of desire, making them captive of the gaze. At the end of the novel, Barney explains to Anne the significance of the three stigmata, also pointing to the impossible gaze: “It meant that you were seeing into absolute reality. The essence beyond the mere appearance.”[7]

The process of translation into Barney’s body could also be read as a liberation from the effect of the drug (metaphorically a liberation from Eldritch’s influence), but Barney’s subjective perspective suggests a full contamination with Eldritch as a supernatural entity. This is also a fulfillment of his expressed utopian intention to literally and spiritually translate into a whole community, that of the Mars colony, an idea which was developed by scriptwriter Jack Paglen in Transcendence (2014). The end of the novel maintains the same ambiguity regarding the delusion induced by Eldritch: it is difficult to decide whether Leo Bulero’s return to Earth occurs inside or outside his dream, generated by Palmer Eldritch, whose ‘stigmata’ are infinitely proliferating, recognized by Leo in every inhabitant of the ship, including himself. The end of the film Inception (2010, Christopher Nolan) will play upon the same ambiguity and the same irreversible journey towards the depths of the dream-world.

            Another instance of the impossible gaze can be found in the third chapter of Dr. Bloodmoney, with Hoppy Harrington, a “phocomelus” (he has no limbs) who overcomes this rare congenial disorder with psychokinetic powers, thus becoming an intruder in the other’s minds (like Palmer Eldritch), also possessing the ability to simulate the voice of others, a simulation that creates confusion and chaos. After the nuclear holocaust that he predicted, he seeks to gain total power and he completes his human body with prosthetic sophisticated limbs, therefore becoming another perfect post-human cyborg in quest for total control over the former territory of USA. In the third chapter, he predicts the nuclear apocalypse and the novel seems to offer the first instance of a post-human, impossible gaze (to be present and to perceive an impossible event like the end of the world), transcending the physical body: “Beyond the grave. The After Life’ is the name of Hoppy’s vision he keeps having until the event actually happens, assuming a more trivial, prosaic stance, which apparently transforms Hoppy’s vision into a parody of a prophecy:

Hoppy said mumblingly, “Gray darkness. Like ashes. Then a great flatness. Nothing but fires burning, light is from the burning fires. They burn forever. Nothing alive.”

“And where are you?” Connie asked.

“I’m–floating,” Hoppy said. “Floating near the ground… no, now I’m very high. I’m weightless, I don’t have a body any more so I’m high up, as high as I want to be. I can hang here, if I want; I don’t have to go back down. I like it up here and I can go around the Earth forever. There it is down below me and I can just keep going around and around.”

Going up beside the cart, Mr. Crody the jeweler said, “Uh, Hoppy, isn’t ‘there anybody else?’ Are each of us doomed to isolation?”

Hoppy mumbled, “I see others, now. I’m drifting back down, I’m landing among the grayness. I’m walking about.”

Walking, Stuart thought. On what? Legs but no body; what an after life. He laughed to himself. What a performance, he thought. What crap. But he, too, came up beside the cart, now, squeezing in to be able to see.

“Is it that you’re born into another life, like they teach in the East?” an elderly lady customer in a cloth coat asked.

“Yes,” Hoppy said, surprisingly. “A new life. I have a different body; I can do all kinds of things.”[8]

In fact, it is not only a prophecy, but also a detailed plan to control the world through the re-invention of technological means, as the last man/ cyborg standing: he predicts that everyone else will be able to talk only through him (Dick, 2014, 31). The irony is that Harrington is half-way through accomplishing his mediated reality after a nuclear disaster that has freed the world from this mediated control.

Harrington best exemplifies the horrors of a “body in between,” all the other characters are appalled by Hoppy’s secret powers to fix any technical device through a mysterious process (he literally “heals” the devices). This strange technophilic and intimate relationship with the machines is the first sign of transgression of the human realm. He also frightens his colleagues at Modem TV company with his vision of a perfect cyborg body which will render the human body obsolete:

“And I’m designing a new one, my own design; all electronic – I read an article on brain-wiring, they’re using it in Switzerland and Germany. You’re wired directly to the motor centers of the brain so there’s no lag; you can move even quicker than – a regular physiological structure.” He started to say, than a human. “I’ll have it perfected in a couple of years,” he said, “and it’ll be an improvement even on the Swiss models.”[9]

Like The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Dr Bloodmoney focuses on Hoppy Harrington’s post-human nature, which becomes even more appalling in its invasiveness after the nuclear disaster occurs: he threatens to transform the post-apocalyptic world, which has regressed to a pastoral stage, liberated from technology, into a dystopian realm, under his own control, once he manages to control the radio station, the abandoned satellite and all the other character’s minds, through his power to reduplicate and simulate their voices and through his mysterious relation with technology. The three-fold scenario of transgressing the human body is also present: Harrington surpasses his dysfunctional human body, becomes a perfect cyborg after the demise of human civilization and finally achieves God-like status with his omniscient ability to invade the minds of the others. However, there is an opposing force to Harrington’s dystopian plans, and, contrary to the human opponents of Palmer Eldritch, it does stand a chance against Hoppy precisely because it also has post-human features: Bill Keller is a mysterious entity located in Elsie’s body, but able to transgress any boundaries, and enter any life form, animal or human.

The end of the novel stages a confrontation between two entities possessing a post-human body, both able to control thought ad a source of confusing simulacra, both being able to expand limitless, transgressing space and time. Only Bill Keller, an out-of body consciousness, can stop Hoppy Harrington from taking control over the world and humanity.

            Beyond Technological Singularity – Divinity?

Although both Harrington and Palmer Eldritch are cyborgs, the nature of the latter is more ambiguous, lending itself to religious interpretations.[10] Umland’s emphasis on the religious dimension of Dick’s prose, which should not be treated as marginal is very comprehensive. However, it should be mentioned the strange coexistence of the religious element with the obsessive emphasis on the technological signs, namely the recurrence of the three stigmata in the character’s visions. Eldritch post-human body appears only in their hallucinations induced by the substance chew-Z: in the first four chapters, Eldritch is either an absent character, whose apparition is intensively debated by the other characters, or a voice emerging from an “electronic contraption.” In their visions, both Leo Bulero and Barney Mayerson are obsessed with Eldritch’s double nature: that of a cyborg and his God-like abilities. This can be interpreted as a strange foreshadowing of the strange combination between religion and technology, a techno-religion that promises eternal life (uploading the consciousness on inalterable materials), the end of disease (biotechnology), namely the limitations of the organic human body. The biography of Eldritch is also an emblematic one, in trans-humanist terms: after a few accidents, he becomes a cyborg (he replaces his eyes with artificial ones) and he mysteriously acquires new abilities, mostly he becomes an ever-expanding consciousness, with infinite power to permeate the world.

This transgression of the human body towards a supernatural entity by means of technology which radically transforms the world, along with his desire to create a perfect utopian society on Mars (by simultaneously spreading through the minds of its inhabitants) is also the plot of a recent movie, Transcendence (2014) which received bad reviews, but it is a significant attempt to synthesize the post-human/trans-humanist utopia: uploading the human consciousness, the final construction of a self-aware super-intelligence, outside the human body, in other words creating divinity by technological means, a techno-utopian project declared with the full arrogance of a trans-humanist scientist by Will Caster (Johnny Depp) at the beginning of the film: “the combined intellect of engineers, mathematicians, neuroscientists and hackers pales in comparison with even the most basic A.I. A sentient machine will quickly overcome the limits of biology and in a short time its analytical power will be greater than the collective intelligence of every person born in the history of the world. […] Now imagine such an entity with full range of human emotion even self-awareness. Sometimes we refer to this as Singularity. I prefer to call it Transcendence.”

The project of the film was inherently utopian: to gather all the contemporary fears regarding the actual development of technology (human bar-coding, cyborgs, surveillance, the separation of the body and the mind, the supremacy of artificial intelligence over the human mind, the end of organic life, transfer of artificial intelligence to a synthetic body, etc.), but also to imagine the ultimate consequences of such a “techno-divine invasion”, a “technological singularity” that ultimately tests the limits of representation in the film itself. Jack Paglen’s script gathers a few real dilemmas about the future of artificial intelligence, and it is remarkable the attempt to remain ambivalent towards the ultimate consequences of the biotechnological revolution. The difficult answer to the uniqueness of human consciousness is also notable, with the repeated scene when the A.I. are asked about their self-awareness, and the inquiry is redirected towards the human agents, echoing the debate from post-humanist studies regarding the differences between mind and consciousness[11].

The bird’s eye view is probably the most significant scene of the entire film, the attempt to render the perspective of an uploaded consciousness and its pantheist presence in every aspect of nature, showing how the utopian post-human project takes refuge in this all-encompassing, God-like, transcendent, impossible gaze. As compared to this, the long and tiring sequences describing the utopian facilities built by Will Caster’s artificial consciousness seem irrelevant and unconvincing. The attempt to render cinematically the dominant perspective of the ever-expanding consciousness points to what Louis Marin has termed as the frontiers of utopia[12].

The film eventually loses momentum in the second and third acts. The utopian developments at Will Caster’s establishment are shown in a realistic and descriptive manner, like in a documentary film, which is unusual for a science fiction movie and it signals the drive towards realism that permeates the entire genre. The replacement of nature/man with the artificial super-intelligence is shown as a gradual, non-dramatic, natural event, as if the film adopted the trans-humanist perspective of Will Caster. The final attack of the activists and FBI agents, which is responsible for the final blackout, seems a violent, unnecessary action. The final act of the drama is undermined by contradictions, failing to convey both the fascination of techno-utopians with the benefits of technology and the consternation of the technophobics faced with the ultimate end of organic life on Earth. The end of the film is irremediable flawed, since the entire ambivalent perspective towards Will Caster’s post-human paradise is involuntarily trivialized by Max Waters’ conclusion about Will’s accomplishment (pointing to its selfishness and inhumanity). Transcendence’s failure is significant for the discussion of a new phase in the evolution of the science fiction, being marred by two opposite tendencies: the maximalist ambition to incorporate/synthesize all post-human themes, technologies and concerns into one ordinary story, lacking true conflict, and the realist, descriptive, documentary tendency to de-dramatize the grand transformation from technology to simulated divinity.

Realism, Science Fiction and Out-Of-Body Perception

Two transformations undergone by science fiction films should be mentioned here. One regards the new drive towards realism on account of the new importance gained by realism in film throughout the 2000s and because of the new developments in technology (which explains why the SF as genre is more inclined to obsolescence). The other concerns the representation of the body and consequently, the utopian/impossible gaze: faced with the inflation of images depicting perfect bodies, the film manifests the opposite tendency to represent the transgression of the physical body, the invisible body or out-of-body experiences, and the examples abound not only in the sub-genre of the cyborg film (from Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days to the Matrix trilogy or Existenz), but also in blockbusters such as Avatar or Inception. Although so frequently quoted (even in Matrix), Baudrillard’s famous essay “Simulacra and Science fiction” becomes again actual with films such as Her, Transcendence, TV series such as Black Mirror, Humans or even space travel movies such as Gravity, Interstellar or The Martian: the distance between the real and the imaginary, between present-world and future-world, between present and future technologies are minimized and, in Baudrillard’s words, there is no “room for any fictional extrapolation”[13]. Science fiction films tend to generate their cognitive estrangement from the tensions of the utopian/impossible gaze and from the dialectics of the visible/invisible. Gravity is a minute account of the space perceived through an astronaut’s eyes/helmet, Interstellar – how is the world seen by an astronaut caught in a black hole, Black Mirror (episodes White Christmas and The Entire History of You) and Her – depict various instances of how the world could be perceived by a consciousness/artificial intelligence in the absence of the physical body.

“Not Just an Operating System, it’s a Consciousness”

Spike Jonze’s film stands apart from the rest in its deliberate emphasis on the invisible, as the unconquered territory of science fiction, which can re-formulate metaphysical questions present in the good tradition of SF, in a new form, radically different from it (what is our irreducible human essence, can an artificial intelligence become self-aware, sentient and human?). Spike Jonze offers an entirely different representation of the invisible woman, Samantha (Scarlett Johansson), whose materialization is indefinitely postponed, a disembodied voice which captures and generates all the romantic and erotic phantasms of Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix), a lonely anti-hero with an awkward job (a professional writer of love letters), who fills his loneliness with a new computer program, presented as “not just an operating system, it’s a consciousness.” The first difference from a common science fiction film is the programmatic avoidance of any direct reference to the technophobic aspects of Samantha’s post-human identity, although it is precisely the question of her self-awareness that haunts Theodore in the memorable scene when the operating system is activated, the scene of the encounter with the post-human. When compared with the opening of the classic SF Blade Runner with the Voight-Kampff test, when the android was interrogated, Spike Jonze’s film operates a striking reversal between the human and the non-human: in this scene, Theodore is questioned by the operating system and Samantha’s voice conceals the frightening aspect when computers have crossed the boundaries of the human body. From the moment of its initialization, Samantha has intruded into the most intimate corners of Theodore’s mind (to be compared to the less subtle representation of Will Caster as an uploaded entity in Transcendence).

A similar theme and scene features in Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror, in the episode “Be Right Back” (February 2013): after Martha loses her husband Ash in a car accident, she is convinced to use an operating system that re-creates Ash’s identity by using all his online activity, an archive which seems to generate a consciousness. The film depicts with irony Martha’s readiness to believe that she actually speaks with the online avatar of Ash himself, echoing the delusion induced by “chatterbot,” the artificial conversational entity. Martha overcomes her depression and becomes gradually involved in her dialogue with the artificial Ash, a dialogue conducted via email at first, then by telephone and, finally, when the virtual Ash acquires a synthetic body and finally awakens Martha from her delusion. Both films insist on the protagonist’s estrangement from the world and their desire for intimacy with the virtual entity, echoing one important effect observed with the ELIZA experiment (the first program simulating an Artificial Intelligence) – humans could easily believe that the “voice in the machine” is not a simulated, but real, self-aware entity. Another irony of this episode is that the real Ash is shown as being more distracted by technological devices than his synthetic alter-ego, whose presence perfectly simulates real emotions, but becomes uncomfortable only when Martha understands that the human contradictions are unknown to him. His presence in the body/image form clarifies what the voice has left ambiguous: Ash’s voice was the perfect presence/absence, since it was an empty signifier which captured Martha’s projections about the real Ash.

Theodore experiences a similar reluctance and acute disillusion when confronted with the possibility to have an embodied Samantha, after she confesses her ultimate fantasy of taking a human shape. The film stages an exchange of impossible fantasies, when Theodore in his turn is absorbed in the invisible world of Samantha. The film is structured on the inter-play between the absence of image/body – the presence of the voice, or the presence of the body – the absence of decision, personality: while Theodore is thorn with indecisions, Samantha quickly selects his important emails, even re-writes his letters, takes decisions, and literally becomes his alter-ego. Theodore’s dependence on Samantha is more subtly and more ambiguously described: she quickly evolves and becomes more than just a virtual entity (she seems to know when Theodore is distressed and “activates” at will, beyond his control). The film suggests these unsettling aspects with subtlety and without the directness of a dystopian form.

The reviews of the film have overlooked the subtle technophobic suggestions and the fact that Theodore himself works at a company that practices a legal intrusion into the most intimate aspects of people’s lives (Theodore writes their love-letters). His job is an indirect irony towards the place of art in a hyper-technological society, but also an original account for an old idea (we have all already become cyborgs). There is an unconquered territory for Samantha: Theodore’s style of writing love letters, which at the end are compiled and selected by Samantha in a book. The film also opens to two possible interpretations, one being an unexpected revival of a Romantic idea/motif, as in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (the longing for an ethereal body-less entity, and the other based on a more referential reading of post-humanist dilemmas (the simulated mind becoming a real human mind, the existence of the mind in the absence of the body, etc.). The film portrays how a computer program could undergo a process of humanization (Samantha confesses her irreversible transformation, her ability to want and feel), while Theodore’s dependence on technology is stressed: he becomes a cyborg with a prosthetic consciousness. Samantha will soon abandon her quest for human nature and her fascination with corporeality, offering a startling fragment of post-human utopia/ideology: “I used to be so worried about not having a body, but now I truly love it, I’m growing in a way that I couldn’t if I had a physical form. I mean I am not limited, I could be anywhere, and everywhere simultaneously, I am not tattered to time and space in a way that I would be if I was stuck in a body that’s inevitably going to die.”

The confrontation between Samantha and Theodore also spells for a contrast (very slight at the beginning, but striking at the end) between the human perspective and the post-human/utopian gaze. This explains why this operating system exerts such a fascination and why it radically changes Theodore’s relation to/perspective on his world: he acquires a new vision upon the “real” through “the eyes” of Samantha. Instead of the classic “cognitive estrangement,” Darko Suvin’s term for the essence of science fiction, Spike Jonze’s offers a “perceptive estrangement”: a few essential scenes attempt to grasp this estranged view upon the world, as if the spectator perceived the world from a non-human perspective, attempting to capture the post-human gaze. This permanent shift of perspectives between Samantha and Theodore effaces the differences between human and post-human. Theodore selects different aspects of the world (faces in a crowd, landscapes, etc.), staging a human, subjective point of view, focused on relevant details, for a post-human spectator (Samantha). Gradually these fragments of reality are replaced in the film by a series of static long shots, as if the post-human cold examination of the world has replaced the human eye. After Samantha disappears, the equilibrium is restored with the depressive return of the real.

Conclusions

Samantha’s final monologue suggests she has transgressed her world to another level, “not up to the physical world.” Not only Samantha remains invisible, but also these levels of virtual reality. Spike Jonze points to a utopia of the gaze, fascinated with the realms of the invisible, contrary to an entire tradition of science fiction movies, dominated by visual excess, by the desire to screen these virtual, strange worlds. Spike Jonze’s film constructs the invisible space beyond the dominant gaze and beyond the frontiers of utopia, resuscitating the imaginative powers of the viewer. The new imaginary of science fiction films is obsessed with the accelerated transgressions of boundaries between human and post-human, between human consciousness and virtual artificial intelligence, in search of the suitable representations for the new scientific realities.

Bibliography:

            Baudrillard, Jean, “Two Essays. Simulacra and Science Fiction”, Science Fiction Studies, vol. 18, part 3, November 1991.

            Dick, Philip K., Dr Bloodmoney, Or How We Got Along after the Bomb, London: Golancz, 2014.

           Dick, Philip K, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, New York: Vintage Books, 1991.

           Dick, Philip K., Roger Zelazny, Deus Irae, London: Gollancz, 2013.

Dinello, Daniel, Technophobia! Science Fiction Visions of Posthuman Technology, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005.

Dufresne, Jacques, Après l’homme, le cyborg, Quebec: Editions Multimondes, 1999.

            Haney W. S., Cyberculture, Cyborgs, and Science Fiction. Consciousness and the Posthuman, Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2006.

            Marin, Louis, “Frontiers of Utopia. Past and Present”, Critical Inquiry, vol. 19, no. 3 (Spring, 1993), pp.397-420.

Parrinder, Patrick (ed.), Learning from Other Worlds. Estrangement, Cognition, and the Politics of Science Fiction and Utopia, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000.

Palmer, Cristopher, Philip K. Dick, Exhilaration and Terror of the Postmodern, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2003.

            Umland, Samuel J. (ed.), Philip K. Dick. Contemporary Critical Interpretations, London: Greenwood Press, 1995.

            Short, Sue, Cyborg Cinema and Contemporary Subjectivity, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

Filmography:

Black Mirror, Tv series, (2011-2015), creator Charlie Brooker, with Daniel Kaluuya, Toby Kebbel, Rory Kinnear (episodes: “White Christmas”, 16 December 2014; “White Bear,” “Be Right Back“, 11 February 2013).

Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse (1933), directed by Fritz Lang, written by Norbert Jacques, Fritz Lang, with Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Otto Wernicke, Gustav Diessl.

Her (2013), directed by Spike Jonze, screenplay by Spike Jonze, with Joaquin Phoenix, Amy Adams, Scarlett Johansson.

The Invisible Man (1933), directed by James Whale, written by H.G. Wells, R.C Sheriff, with Claude Rains, Gloria Stuart, William Harrigan.

Transcendence (2014), directed by Wally Pfister, written by Jack Paglen, with Johnny Depp, Rebecca Hall, Morgan Freeman.

This work was supported by Romanian National Authority for Scientific Research within the Exploratory Research Project PN-II-ID-PCE-2011-3-0061.

Theodora-Eva Örmény

Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

theodora.ormeny@gmail.com

Phenomenological Insights into Cinematographic Dystopia

as It Unfolds in Divergent and Insurgent

Abstract: In the present paper we will attempt a phenomenological investigation of dystopia in two cinematic productions (Divergent and Insurgent), while using as a conceptual apparatus Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notions of flesh (la chair), perception, dehiscence (écart /divergence) and thickness. The choice for this type of approach is supported by the documented assumption that there are few phenomenological incursions into film analysis and interpretation. We will discuss that specific role of imagination that may generate, in the visual experience, a preference towards dystopia, and how embodied-subjectivity influences the viewer’s fascination with dystopian scenarios. A parallel will be drawn between the city described by Socrates in Plato’s Republic and the futuristic city of Chicago – the milieu where the plot of the films Divergent and Insurgent develops – with a focus on the aspirations, beliefs and ambitions that lead to the construction of a society divided in factions.

Keywords: Film; Dystopia; Divergent; Insurgent; Maurice Merleau-Ponty; Flesh (la chair); Dehiscence; Thickness; Apotropaion.

            The analysis and interpretation of cinematic productions have entered the focus of the academic world from film theory to aesthetics and philosophy. Insofar as the latter is concerned, one may notice that phenomenological approaches to film are less common and books following this course of inquiry are scarce. Therefore, we attempt in the present paper to discuss the phenomenological representations of dystopia in cinema, while appealing to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concepts of appearance, perception, dehiscence and thickness.

Film theorists are still disputing the matters of authorship, narrative, perspectives and the role of imagination in the viewer’s act of perception and visual experience. Regarding the issue of imagination, on one side of the debate, theorists infer that when watching a movie the viewer falls under a perceptual illusion, becoming in this way a fictional character himself, without breeching the reality-fantasy wall and without constructing false beliefs; on the other side, theorists state that viewers exercise their imagination, but remain observers involved in the filmic narrative only to a certain emotional degree. Should we agree with either part of this ongoing debate, we may note that imagination is the faculty which processes external perception and internalizes it through the filter of one’s own subjectivity. Directing one’s imaginative fascination is a matter of preference, and recently it has become more noticeable that cinematic dystopia has grown increasingly popular, to the detriment of utopias. The reason for this shift resides, we believe, in the structural changes of the phenomenal thickness of the flesh.

The phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty constructs his philosophical inquiry around concepts such as “flesh” (la chair), “thickness” and “divergence” (dehiscence, fr< écart). The notion of “flesh” replaces the Husserlian “lived-experience” and refers to the intertwining of different dimensions. It can signify the world and the body sharing themselves to each other, overlapping continuously. The subject of perception is the body. It does not represent a mere connection with the world but, because it is immersed in the world, it becomes, as Merleau-Ponty names it, an “exemplar sensible” which pertains to the lived experience, sees it and incorporates it. “Thickness” appertains to the flesh (which, as we have already stated, can mean both body and world) and contains the actual act or perception, memory, image-consciousness and general knowledge of things. Karel Novotny explains that “thickness” is:

a universal characteristic of phenomenality […] closely related to the animate organism and indeed the body. […] If every act of appearance happens with the realm of sensibility, then the light of appearance is always bound up with the dense shadows of bodily organs. […] [author’s note: and that] every phenomenon is in its facticity and factical experience apprehended with the organic body. Its nature is constituted by the dense shadow of the body and the temporality proper to the factual bodily condition of experience.[1]

One of Merleau-Ponty’s most important contributions to phenomenology is the shift he establishes in the method of gaining access to appearance. Starting from the assumption that one cannot attain the pure phenomenon, Merleau-Ponty brings forth the theory of creating a divergence (l’ écart) that opens the possibility for subjectivity:

[…] the thought and the body intertwine: the thought presupposes the body, and the body presupposes the thought. Neither of them can be the only foundation, but the relation between them is foundational for both. This relation is a chiasm, a common tissue of the different dimensions. The flesh is the connection that comes out of the difference.[2]

As we have stated above, we believe that changes in the structural thickness of the flesh (“flesh” to be understood in this study, which uses a Merleau-Pontian perspective, as an assembly of bodily organs, acts of perception and the state-of-affairs of the world in which it is actively immersed) may generate preferences in the exercising of the imagination. The impressions we construct in cinema are profoundly impacted by the transgression of things into us (the body both sees and is being seen at the same time by the outer world) as reflected by the world and by our propensity to share ourselves to the world. The predilection towards dystopia in films is given by the need to create an Apotropaion[3] for humankind at the level of the social conscience. All too infused with the flesh of the world, we construct dystopian productions with the intention of offering warnings for what may become of the future. This type of films represents the symbol meant to avert misfortune and distractions by depicting possible dire scenarios. The latter usually render the ruins of our crushed world, destroyed by environmental hazards and by humanity’s greedy ambition. The scenarios overtly display the repercussions, the prices to pay and what mankind forfeited. Frequently, the remaining inhabitants construct for themselves a simulacrum of a perfect society, which permits social stratification and generates social and political struggles and violent confrontations.

These apotropaic scenarios are enacted by appealing to both individual and collective imagination. The experience of viewing a film could be individual or influenced by the medium in which it unfolds, as well as by the people one regards the production with. Either way, the movement of images on the screen opens possibilities, describing and re-describing contexts, facts and characters while encouraging the subject of perception, the viewer, to make use of the phenomenological dehiscence (l’écart) in order to grasp the phenomenon in the lived-experience. In the following quotation from the subchapter “Futures Beyond Dystopia” of the book Futures Beyond Dystopia: Creating Social Foresight, Slaughter dwells on the role of speculative imagination inquiring:

What, then, is the role of the speculative imagination? (…) it complements and extends reason and rationality. In so doing, it gives us other, often divergent, images, options, arenas of possibility that lie beyond reason and instrumental analysis. These sources provide access to an entire ‘grammar’ of future possibility. (…) these imaginative constructions take the human mind out beyond the boundaries of currently constituted reality – beyond trends, forecasts and the like – and feed our capacities for speculation, imagination and social innovation. (…) A key to their mainstream emergence is an advanced futures discourse that can critique and re-shape existing agendas. Beyond it are several other ‘layers of capability’ that need to be understood and applied. (…) Overall, the goal is to work toward the creation of social foresight and the steady emergence of societies and cultures that are not merely past-driven, but responsive to the merging near-term future context.[4]

            Imagination appears here to utilize its therapeutic force to both give an escape valve from reality and to support social innovation through the advancement of constructive criticism of the state of affairs of societies.

In the present work we will direct our inquiry towards the two productions Divergent and Insurgent, released in 2014 and 2015, enjoying success and receiving mixed-reviews. Divergent and its sequel are based on Veronica Roth’s novel trilogy which recounts the social artifice, machinations and political traps of the fragmented futuristic Chicago.

While viewing the two films one cannot refrain from making a parallel with Plato’s Republic, an association which we will strive to investigate further below.

The plot is relatively simple and even predictable at certain points. There is the main line of development and an auxiliary, hidden one, which proves to be the key of the entire story: the world falls to pieces due to human actions and all that remains after the decay and destruction of humankind is the future city of Chicago, in ruins, enclosed by a defense wall meant to protect the utopian world that the remaining people inherited from their forefathers. Their world is an embodiment of Socrate’s city that he depicts in Plato’s Republic. Chicago survives based on myths (that of the privilege of living in a just, disciplined and organized enclosure under the guarding legacy of the ancestors) and lies of the factions fighting over political power.

Socrates explains how the ideal city would have people directed to work in the trade they are most skilled at, perfecting in this way their virtues. Society would, therefore, be stratified and divided into categories and the ruling class would be that of the intellectuals, more particularly, of philosophers. Similarly, in the movie Divergent, society has branched out into factions, also built according to abilities, human virtues and affiliations; and their government is entrusted to the faction that devotes its life for the good of others with selfless strives – Abnegation. The criterion of education is ignored in the plot (unlike in the famous dialogue), the main interest being oriented towards the qualities able to achieve and maintain equality and peace. Abnegation rules in this fashion; they administrate and safeguard the interests of all the other factions: Amity (the peaceful), Candor (the honest), Dauntless (the brave), and Erudite (the intelligent). Their structural governance seems to adhere to John Stuart Mill’s concept of utilitarianism, as all social reform and organization strived to attain the concrete needs of the people. Their future as human beings is oriented since birth towards living in the faction where one can be most useful for society. Comparing Chicago with Socrates’ city, we may observe that the inclination towards totalitarianism is more evident in the Republic where it is explained that:

There is to be a rigid censorship from very early years over the literature to which the young have access and the music they are allowed to hear. Mothers and nurses are to tell their children only authorized stories. Homer and Hesiod are not to be allowed, for a number of reasons. First they represent the Gods as behaving badly on occasion, which is un-edifying; the young must be taught that evils never come from the gods, for God is not the author of all things, but only of good things.[5]

Nonetheless, in a dystopian tone, the movie also presents from the beginning two basic stances of the fissure of their alleged utopian world: the factionless and the divergents. The former were misfits who were unable to be a part of either faction, therefore they were excluded and forced to seek shelter among the ruins of the old city (they were denied their right of being in the city); the latter ones, the divergents were complex people who possessed all the virtues necessary to function in any of the factions (they were denied their lives). Their mutability and ability to adjust to any situation and see outside the box made them a threat to the stability of the society, as they could not be controlled by the faction rulers. During the rule of Abnegation, the divergent threat was silent but, in the second movie, Insurgent, the faction of the Erudites attacks and destroys the entire Abnegation faction, seizing power and overtly waging war against the divergents.

Divergence signifies dehiscence from censorship (an attitude emerging from the Greek relation to the notion of faith and that of necessity) and from the belief that everybody should be compliant and eager to stick to their place. Plato gives in book IV the definition of “justice” as consisting in “everybody doing his own work and not being a busybody: the city is just when trader, auxiliary and guardian, each does his own job without interfering with that of other classes.”[6]

Beatrice Prior (Tris), the main character and heroine of the dystopian trilogy, born within Abnegation, discovers she is a divergent and she is forced to hide her abilities in order to survive. She decides to relinquish the serene safety of her Abnegation family and lose her divergent trace and stigma within the faction of the Dauntless – which she seldom watched fascinated while they were roaming across Chicago as its fearless guardians. If we are to take a closer look at this character we may note that, unoriginally, she is the embodiment of all the qualities that make their world cripple and make it far from being perfect. Her brain is specially wired to achieve a vertical perspective on their societal particularities and to assess their flaws and the danger they generate.

 In order to maintain the illusion that the people of the future Chicago possess freewill, the custom was to offer teenagers the choice of their desired faction. The teenagers take a sort of psychological test, similar to the Briggs Myers personality test often used in schools today. They enter a drug-induced dream-world where they are put in simulated situations in order to discover (by means of their responses to stimuli) which are their strongest virtues, and in this way, their best compatibility with one of the factions. The results of the test have the purpose to guide the teenagers while deciding upon their future, but in the end their decision is their own. 

Tris chose Dauntless believing that they could give her a good cover-up, but at the end of her Dauntless training, she was compelled to take a final test, another simulacrum in which they were supposed to surpass their greatest fears. Being a divergent, Tris immediately comprehends the artificial dimension of the context and, in this way, she reveals her divergent abilities to her supervisor Four. Following an underlining romance in the story, Four teaches Tris how to avoid using her extraordinary skills and to pretend to respond to stimuli in the simpler way of the Dauntless.

            Tris becomes Dauntless and together with Four she escapes the city and the rule of the Erudites controlled by Jeanine. The second movie, Insurgent depicts their flight outside the city seeking shelter from faction to faction, while a war bursts between people and ideologies. The film mostly revolves around action and love scenes, depicting Tris and Four’s love on the background of their fight against the dictatorship of Jeanine, who applies à-la-lettre (we may say) Plato’s words “Let our city be accounted neither large nor small, but one and self-sufficing”[7]. The stress falls here on the word “self-sufficient”, and Jeanine relishes on the city’s enclosure that gives her a better control on who is allowed to live there and who should be eradicated. For her, what is outside the wall is irrelevant.

The plot develops quickly only to reveal in the end of the movie the truth that generated the state of affairs of Chicago. Jeanine has in her possession an artifact, their legacy – the words of their forefathers. The curios box, once opened through the effort of the pure (100 percent) divergent Tris, displays a hologram of the ancients which explains how they inhabit an artificial world, the result of an intended experiment. The forefathers fenced the city of Chicago sheltering it from the influence of the outer lands and put the basis of the faction-divided society, gave them rules to abide to and let them to believe that they were the last survivors of a defeated Earth with the hope to recover the humanity they themselves have lost. The goal of the experiment was to observe how a world given the perfect premises for evolution and leading a perfect life, could use its resources to develop towards a true utopian world, or to crumble and waste away under moral perversion and turpitude. The forefathers may have anticipated the faith of their experiment due to knowledge of the human drives, so they offered Chicago the tool for salvation: the divergents. The moral and social implications of this Apotropaion become obvious:  diversity should and needs to surpass categorizing and that one should support and sustain the mixture of idiosyncrasies and variations.

In the following part of our paper we would like to approach another aspect depicted in the two films: when the rulers can no longer apply satisfactory constraint on the inhabitants, they resort to chemical distortions of perception. The narcotics affect their central nervous system and cause changes in their behavior or in their relation with the world. In terms of appearance and of interpreting what appears as a result of what one sees, the films depict how only divergents can escape the imposed framework for apprehension, by being able to distinguish between what is real and what is hallucination. During the drug-induced episode Tris, due to her divergent nature, manages to maintain the difference between her and the flesh of the world (or what seemingly is the world) and to remain an observer of the events and not an incorporated participant. Karel Novotny affirms that:

[…] the phenomenon is not merely a correlate between meaning-bestowal through intentional consciousness. This act of bestowing meaning is no longer apprehended in the sense of the ineluctable spontaneity of the intentional act of an ‘I experience’, of an act of noesis which would be absolutely transparent to itself via the noema […] the origin of the phenomena is to be sought at a deeper level than that that of intentional consciousness…[8]

Tris maintains her perspective and reaches out for the possibility of the imagined object and internalizes it according to her perceptual rules. The drug-induced test builds its illusions so strongly that it induces physical pain, and strenuous efforts are made to conclude the violent parts of the hallucination. The subject of the test perceives with his/hers sensory apparatus, but for Tris her perception remains “contact from a distance.”[9] She does not only perceive but, by putting a distance, she can also reflect and remain aware of herself. She conveys and restores information through the thickness of her flesh, and her gaze (what she sees in the induced dream) on the fictional world does not hinder her in any way, but supports her in merging with the dimensions she moves in:

[…] my body is “made” out of the very same flesh, so to speak, as the world, and as Merleau-Ponty writes in the very same working note, “this flesh of my body is shared with the world, the world reflects it, and encroaches upon it and it encroaches upon the world (the felt (senti) at the same time the culmination of subjectivity and the culmination of materiality), they are in relation of transgression or of overlapping.

Viewed from this perspective, dehiscence comes into the world thanks to the bodiliness pertaining to the lived experience, and thanks to the flesh, in which the world qua perceived and sensed in lived experience participates. Thus one could understand the flesh of the world, on hand, as an articulation based on the concept of dehiscence, in which dehiscence is a property of lived experience thanks to the bodiliness that pertains to it.[10]

In the same matter, when one watches a film, one makes the distinction between fact and fiction. Our subjectivity, reacting from the dehiscence we put between us and phenomena, analyzes and interprets the narrative line of the plot and the acting of the performers. Similarly, we comprehend reality by both observing and living it according to personal criteria. Since a utopia embodies the ideal of its creator[11] it becomes unachievable, due to the controversy sparked by human beings’ difference of opinion. A dystopian filming approach would obtain, in our opinion, a more authentic experience for the viewers. Regardless of the label attached to the production, the spectatorship will nevertheless imply a horizon of expectation which may or may not be fulfilled during the experience at the cinema (divided into portions some perceptions may be supported by the director’s eye, others are doomed to being underlooked).

At the end of our short paper we may conclude that the analysis of cinematography through phenomenological notions of inquiry (such as those of Maurice Merleau-Ponty) depicts itself to be a promising academic endeavor. The body (following Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological perspective which we have applied here) signifies our earliest and first contact with the world; and our perception of everything around us is further configured by the imagination. The viewer (composed of body, mind and instants of the lived-state of affairs) is immersed in what he sees while experiencing (living) what he perceives. Therefore, the appreciation of a particular type of filmic technique or of a film genre remains, we believe, an ongoing shifting perspective of the embodied-subjectivity of the viewer.

The main goal of a cinematic work is to respond to a targeted audience, hopefully it may have a prolific reception outside it as well, nonetheless, the relativity of possibilities that our contemporary mentalities encompass, make dystopias successful and popular cinematographic stories.

Bibliography

Bertrand Russel, History of Western Philosophy and its connections with political and social Circumstances from the earliest times to the present day, London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1946.

Karel Novotny, Pierre Rodrigo, Jenny Slatman, Silvia Stoller (eds.), Corporeity and Affectiviy. Dedicated to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Boston, Leiden: Brill, 2014.

Mary Rose Barral, Merleau-Ponty. The role of the body-subject in inter-personal relations, Pittsburg, PA: Duquesque University Press, 1965.

Noel E. Caroll, Philosophical problems of classical film theory. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.1988.

Peter Kivy (ed.), The Blackwell guide to Aesthetics, Malden, MA, USA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004.

Richard Slaughter, Futures Beyond Dystopia: Creating Social Foresight. London & New York: Routledge Falmer (Taylor & Francisc Group), 2004.

Internet links

https://www.wordnik.com/words/apotropaion

http://www.aprendendoingles.com.br/ebooks/republic.pdf

Notes

Theodora-Eva Örmény

Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

theodora.ormeny@gmail.com

Phenomenological Insights into Cinematographic Dystopia

as It Unfolds in Divergent and Insurgent

Abstract: In the present paper we will attempt a phenomenological investigation of dystopia in two cinematic productions (Divergent and Insurgent), while using as a conceptual apparatus Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notions of flesh (la chair), perception, dehiscence (écart /divergence) and thickness. The choice for this type of approach is supported by the documented assumption that there are few phenomenological incursions into film analysis and interpretation. We will discuss that specific role of imagination that may generate, in the visual experience, a preference towards dystopia, and how embodied-subjectivity influences the viewer’s fascination with dystopian scenarios. A parallel will be drawn between the city described by Socrates in Plato’s Republic and the futuristic city of Chicago – the milieu where the plot of the films Divergent and Insurgent develops – with a focus on the aspirations, beliefs and ambitions that lead to the construction of a society divided in factions.

Keywords: Film; Dystopia; Divergent; Insurgent; Maurice Merleau-Ponty; Flesh (la chair); Dehiscence; Thickness; Apotropaion.

            The analysis and interpretation of cinematic productions have entered the focus of the academic world from film theory to aesthetics and philosophy. Insofar as the latter is concerned, one may notice that phenomenological approaches to film are less common and books following this course of inquiry are scarce. Therefore, we attempt in the present paper to discuss the phenomenological representations of dystopia in cinema, while appealing to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concepts of appearance, perception, dehiscence and thickness.

Film theorists are still disputing the matters of authorship, narrative, perspectives and the role of imagination in the viewer’s act of perception and visual experience. Regarding the issue of imagination, on one side of the debate, theorists infer that when watching a movie the viewer falls under a perceptual illusion, becoming in this way a fictional character himself, without breeching the reality-fantasy wall and without constructing false beliefs; on the other side, theorists state that viewers exercise their imagination, but remain observers involved in the filmic narrative only to a certain emotional degree. Should we agree with either part of this ongoing debate, we may note that imagination is the faculty which processes external perception and internalizes it through the filter of one’s own subjectivity. Directing one’s imaginative fascination is a matter of preference, and recently it has become more noticeable that cinematic dystopia has grown increasingly popular, to the detriment of utopias. The reason for this shift resides, we believe, in the structural changes of the phenomenal thickness of the flesh.

The phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty constructs his philosophical inquiry around concepts such as “flesh” (la chair), “thickness” and “divergence” (dehiscence, fr< écart). The notion of “flesh” replaces the Husserlian “lived-experience” and refers to the intertwining of different dimensions. It can signify the world and the body sharing themselves to each other, overlapping continuously. The subject of perception is the body. It does not represent a mere connection with the world but, because it is immersed in the world, it becomes, as Merleau-Ponty names it, an “exemplar sensible” which pertains to the lived experience, sees it and incorporates it. “Thickness” appertains to the flesh (which, as we have already stated, can mean both body and world) and contains the actual act or perception, memory, image-consciousness and general knowledge of things. Karel Novotny explains that “thickness” is:

a universal characteristic of phenomenality […] closely related to the animate organism and indeed the body. […] If every act of appearance happens with the realm of sensibility, then the light of appearance is always bound up with the dense shadows of bodily organs. […] [author’s note: and that] every phenomenon is in its facticity and factical experience apprehended with the organic body. Its nature is constituted by the dense shadow of the body and the temporality proper to the factual bodily condition of experience.[1]

One of Merleau-Ponty’s most important contributions to phenomenology is the shift he establishes in the method of gaining access to appearance. Starting from the assumption that one cannot attain the pure phenomenon, Merleau-Ponty brings forth the theory of creating a divergence (l’ écart) that opens the possibility for subjectivity:

[…] the thought and the body intertwine: the thought presupposes the body, and the body presupposes the thought. Neither of them can be the only foundation, but the relation between them is foundational for both. This relation is a chiasm, a common tissue of the different dimensions. The flesh is the connection that comes out of the difference.[2]

As we have stated above, we believe that changes in the structural thickness of the flesh (“flesh” to be understood in this study, which uses a Merleau-Pontian perspective, as an assembly of bodily organs, acts of perception and the state-of-affairs of the world in which it is actively immersed) may generate preferences in the exercising of the imagination. The impressions we construct in cinema are profoundly impacted by the transgression of things into us (the body both sees and is being seen at the same time by the outer world) as reflected by the world and by our propensity to share ourselves to the world. The predilection towards dystopia in films is given by the need to create an Apotropaion[3] for humankind at the level of the social conscience. All too infused with the flesh of the world, we construct dystopian productions with the intention of offering warnings for what may become of the future. This type of films represents the symbol meant to avert misfortune and distractions by depicting possible dire scenarios. The latter usually render the ruins of our crushed world, destroyed by environmental hazards and by humanity’s greedy ambition. The scenarios overtly display the repercussions, the prices to pay and what mankind forfeited. Frequently, the remaining inhabitants construct for themselves a simulacrum of a perfect society, which permits social stratification and generates social and political struggles and violent confrontations.

These apotropaic scenarios are enacted by appealing to both individual and collective imagination. The experience of viewing a film could be individual or influenced by the medium in which it unfolds, as well as by the people one regards the production with. Either way, the movement of images on the screen opens possibilities, describing and re-describing contexts, facts and characters while encouraging the subject of perception, the viewer, to make use of the phenomenological dehiscence (l’écart) in order to grasp the phenomenon in the lived-experience. In the following quotation from the subchapter “Futures Beyond Dystopia” of the book Futures Beyond Dystopia: Creating Social Foresight, Slaughter dwells on the role of speculative imagination inquiring:

What, then, is the role of the speculative imagination? (…) it complements and extends reason and rationality. In so doing, it gives us other, often divergent, images, options, arenas of possibility that lie beyond reason and instrumental analysis. These sources provide access to an entire ‘grammar’ of future possibility. (…) these imaginative constructions take the human mind out beyond the boundaries of currently constituted reality – beyond trends, forecasts and the like – and feed our capacities for speculation, imagination and social innovation. (…) A key to their mainstream emergence is an advanced futures discourse that can critique and re-shape existing agendas. Beyond it are several other ‘layers of capability’ that need to be understood and applied. (…) Overall, the goal is to work toward the creation of social foresight and the steady emergence of societies and cultures that are not merely past-driven, but responsive to the merging near-term future context.[4]

            Imagination appears here to utilize its therapeutic force to both give an escape valve from reality and to support social innovation through the advancement of constructive criticism of the state of affairs of societies.

In the present work we will direct our inquiry towards the two productions Divergent and Insurgent, released in 2014 and 2015, enjoying success and receiving mixed-reviews. Divergent and its sequel are based on Veronica Roth’s novel trilogy which recounts the social artifice, machinations and political traps of the fragmented futuristic Chicago.

While viewing the two films one cannot refrain from making a parallel with Plato’s Republic, an association which we will strive to investigate further below.

The plot is relatively simple and even predictable at certain points. There is the main line of development and an auxiliary, hidden one, which proves to be the key of the entire story: the world falls to pieces due to human actions and all that remains after the decay and destruction of humankind is the future city of Chicago, in ruins, enclosed by a defense wall meant to protect the utopian world that the remaining people inherited from their forefathers. Their world is an embodiment of Socrate’s city that he depicts in Plato’s Republic. Chicago survives based on myths (that of the privilege of living in a just, disciplined and organized enclosure under the guarding legacy of the ancestors) and lies of the factions fighting over political power.

Socrates explains how the ideal city would have people directed to work in the trade they are most skilled at, perfecting in this way their virtues. Society would, therefore, be stratified and divided into categories and the ruling class would be that of the intellectuals, more particularly, of philosophers. Similarly, in the movie Divergent, society has branched out into factions, also built according to abilities, human virtues and affiliations; and their government is entrusted to the faction that devotes its life for the good of others with selfless strives – Abnegation. The criterion of education is ignored in the plot (unlike in the famous dialogue), the main interest being oriented towards the qualities able to achieve and maintain equality and peace. Abnegation rules in this fashion; they administrate and safeguard the interests of all the other factions: Amity (the peaceful), Candor (the honest), Dauntless (the brave), and Erudite (the intelligent). Their structural governance seems to adhere to John Stuart Mill’s concept of utilitarianism, as all social reform and organization strived to attain the concrete needs of the people. Their future as human beings is oriented since birth towards living in the faction where one can be most useful for society. Comparing Chicago with Socrates’ city, we may observe that the inclination towards totalitarianism is more evident in the Republic where it is explained that:

There is to be a rigid censorship from very early years over the literature to which the young have access and the music they are allowed to hear. Mothers and nurses are to tell their children only authorized stories. Homer and Hesiod are not to be allowed, for a number of reasons. First they represent the Gods as behaving badly on occasion, which is un-edifying; the young must be taught that evils never come from the gods, for God is not the author of all things, but only of good things.[5]

Nonetheless, in a dystopian tone, the movie also presents from the beginning two basic stances of the fissure of their alleged utopian world: the factionless and the divergents. The former were misfits who were unable to be a part of either faction, therefore they were excluded and forced to seek shelter among the ruins of the old city (they were denied their right of being in the city); the latter ones, the divergents were complex people who possessed all the virtues necessary to function in any of the factions (they were denied their lives). Their mutability and ability to adjust to any situation and see outside the box made them a threat to the stability of the society, as they could not be controlled by the faction rulers. During the rule of Abnegation, the divergent threat was silent but, in the second movie, Insurgent, the faction of the Erudites attacks and destroys the entire Abnegation faction, seizing power and overtly waging war against the divergents.

Divergence signifies dehiscence from censorship (an attitude emerging from the Greek relation to the notion of faith and that of necessity) and from the belief that everybody should be compliant and eager to stick to their place. Plato gives in book IV the definition of “justice” as consisting in “everybody doing his own work and not being a busybody: the city is just when trader, auxiliary and guardian, each does his own job without interfering with that of other classes.”[6]

Beatrice Prior (Tris), the main character and heroine of the dystopian trilogy, born within Abnegation, discovers she is a divergent and she is forced to hide her abilities in order to survive. She decides to relinquish the serene safety of her Abnegation family and lose her divergent trace and stigma within the faction of the Dauntless – which she seldom watched fascinated while they were roaming across Chicago as its fearless guardians. If we are to take a closer look at this character we may note that, unoriginally, she is the embodiment of all the qualities that make their world cripple and make it far from being perfect. Her brain is specially wired to achieve a vertical perspective on their societal particularities and to assess their flaws and the danger they generate.

 In order to maintain the illusion that the people of the future Chicago possess freewill, the custom was to offer teenagers the choice of their desired faction. The teenagers take a sort of psychological test, similar to the Briggs Myers personality test often used in schools today. They enter a drug-induced dream-world where they are put in simulated situations in order to discover (by means of their responses to stimuli) which are their strongest virtues, and in this way, their best compatibility with one of the factions. The results of the test have the purpose to guide the teenagers while deciding upon their future, but in the end their decision is their own. 

Tris chose Dauntless believing that they could give her a good cover-up, but at the end of her Dauntless training, she was compelled to take a final test, another simulacrum in which they were supposed to surpass their greatest fears. Being a divergent, Tris immediately comprehends the artificial dimension of the context and, in this way, she reveals her divergent abilities to her supervisor Four. Following an underlining romance in the story, Four teaches Tris how to avoid using her extraordinary skills and to pretend to respond to stimuli in the simpler way of the Dauntless.

            Tris becomes Dauntless and together with Four she escapes the city and the rule of the Erudites controlled by Jeanine. The second movie, Insurgent depicts their flight outside the city seeking shelter from faction to faction, while a war bursts between people and ideologies. The film mostly revolves around action and love scenes, depicting Tris and Four’s love on the background of their fight against the dictatorship of Jeanine, who applies à-la-lettre (we may say) Plato’s words “Let our city be accounted neither large nor small, but one and self-sufficing”[7]. The stress falls here on the word “self-sufficient”, and Jeanine relishes on the city’s enclosure that gives her a better control on who is allowed to live there and who should be eradicated. For her, what is outside the wall is irrelevant.

The plot develops quickly only to reveal in the end of the movie the truth that generated the state of affairs of Chicago. Jeanine has in her possession an artifact, their legacy – the words of their forefathers. The curios box, once opened through the effort of the pure (100 percent) divergent Tris, displays a hologram of the ancients which explains how they inhabit an artificial world, the result of an intended experiment. The forefathers fenced the city of Chicago sheltering it from the influence of the outer lands and put the basis of the faction-divided society, gave them rules to abide to and let them to believe that they were the last survivors of a defeated Earth with the hope to recover the humanity they themselves have lost. The goal of the experiment was to observe how a world given the perfect premises for evolution and leading a perfect life, could use its resources to develop towards a true utopian world, or to crumble and waste away under moral perversion and turpitude. The forefathers may have anticipated the faith of their experiment due to knowledge of the human drives, so they offered Chicago the tool for salvation: the divergents. The moral and social implications of this Apotropaion become obvious:  diversity should and needs to surpass categorizing and that one should support and sustain the mixture of idiosyncrasies and variations.

In the following part of our paper we would like to approach another aspect depicted in the two films: when the rulers can no longer apply satisfactory constraint on the inhabitants, they resort to chemical distortions of perception. The narcotics affect their central nervous system and cause changes in their behavior or in their relation with the world. In terms of appearance and of interpreting what appears as a result of what one sees, the films depict how only divergents can escape the imposed framework for apprehension, by being able to distinguish between what is real and what is hallucination. During the drug-induced episode Tris, due to her divergent nature, manages to maintain the difference between her and the flesh of the world (or what seemingly is the world) and to remain an observer of the events and not an incorporated participant. Karel Novotny affirms that:

[…] the phenomenon is not merely a correlate between meaning-bestowal through intentional consciousness. This act of bestowing meaning is no longer apprehended in the sense of the ineluctable spontaneity of the intentional act of an ‘I experience’, of an act of noesis which would be absolutely transparent to itself via the noema […] the origin of the phenomena is to be sought at a deeper level than that that of intentional consciousness…[8]

Tris maintains her perspective and reaches out for the possibility of the imagined object and internalizes it according to her perceptual rules. The drug-induced test builds its illusions so strongly that it induces physical pain, and strenuous efforts are made to conclude the violent parts of the hallucination. The subject of the test perceives with his/hers sensory apparatus, but for Tris her perception remains “contact from a distance.”[9] She does not only perceive but, by putting a distance, she can also reflect and remain aware of herself. She conveys and restores information through the thickness of her flesh, and her gaze (what she sees in the induced dream) on the fictional world does not hinder her in any way, but supports her in merging with the dimensions she moves in:

[…] my body is “made” out of the very same flesh, so to speak, as the world, and as Merleau-Ponty writes in the very same working note, “this flesh of my body is shared with the world, the world reflects it, and encroaches upon it and it encroaches upon the world (the felt (senti) at the same time the culmination of subjectivity and the culmination of materiality), they are in relation of transgression or of overlapping.

Viewed from this perspective, dehiscence comes into the world thanks to the bodiliness pertaining to the lived experience, and thanks to the flesh, in which the world qua perceived and sensed in lived experience participates. Thus one could understand the flesh of the world, on hand, as an articulation based on the concept of dehiscence, in which dehiscence is a property of lived experience thanks to the bodiliness that pertains to it.[10]

In the same matter, when one watches a film, one makes the distinction between fact and fiction. Our subjectivity, reacting from the dehiscence we put between us and phenomena, analyzes and interprets the narrative line of the plot and the acting of the performers. Similarly, we comprehend reality by both observing and living it according to personal criteria. Since a utopia embodies the ideal of its creator[11] it becomes unachievable, due to the controversy sparked by human beings’ difference of opinion. A dystopian filming approach would obtain, in our opinion, a more authentic experience for the viewers. Regardless of the label attached to the production, the spectatorship will nevertheless imply a horizon of expectation which may or may not be fulfilled during the experience at the cinema (divided into portions some perceptions may be supported by the director’s eye, others are doomed to being underlooked).

At the end of our short paper we may conclude that the analysis of cinematography through phenomenological notions of inquiry (such as those of Maurice Merleau-Ponty) depicts itself to be a promising academic endeavor. The body (following Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological perspective which we have applied here) signifies our earliest and first contact with the world; and our perception of everything around us is further configured by the imagination. The viewer (composed of body, mind and instants of the lived-state of affairs) is immersed in what he sees while experiencing (living) what he perceives. Therefore, the appreciation of a particular type of filmic technique or of a film genre remains, we believe, an ongoing shifting perspective of the embodied-subjectivity of the viewer.

The main goal of a cinematic work is to respond to a targeted audience, hopefully it may have a prolific reception outside it as well, nonetheless, the relativity of possibilities that our contemporary mentalities encompass, make dystopias successful and popular cinematographic stories.

Bibliography

Bertrand Russel, History of Western Philosophy and its connections with political and social Circumstances from the earliest times to the present day, London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1946.

Karel Novotny, Pierre Rodrigo, Jenny Slatman, Silvia Stoller (eds.), Corporeity and Affectiviy. Dedicated to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Boston, Leiden: Brill, 2014.

Mary Rose Barral, Merleau-Ponty. The role of the body-subject in inter-personal relations, Pittsburg, PA: Duquesque University Press, 1965.

Noel E. Caroll, Philosophical problems of classical film theory. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.1988.

Peter Kivy (ed.), The Blackwell guide to Aesthetics, Malden, MA, USA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004.

Richard Slaughter, Futures Beyond Dystopia: Creating Social Foresight. London & New York: Routledge Falmer (Taylor & Francisc Group), 2004.

Internet links

https://www.wordnik.com/words/apotropaion

http://www.aprendendoingles.com.br/ebooks/republic.pdf

Notes

Ştefan Borbély
Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
stefanborbely@yahoo.com

The Divergent Series & The Giver: A Stroll into the Post-geometric World

Abstract: The paper analyzes comparatively the first installment of the Divergent series and The Giver, two post-apocalyptic movies from 2014, within the general frame of the post-geometric episteme emerging within post-structuralism and beyond. Both are teenager movies, related to specific rites of initiation into seemingly perfect societies, structured in casts or in so-called factions, and both express a crisis particular to those dystopian, post-apocalyptic worlds which rely on a utopian syntax in order to respond to a historical cataclysm. The paper will also compare them to Orson Scott Card’s Ender Saga, but the main dilemma of the demonstration might be summarized as follows: is nature capable of healing the wounds of a post-apocalyptic world, or do you need an anti-human – that is, dystopian – dictatorship in order to survive and go further? Apart from their totalitarian geography, both films talk primarily about human regression, violence and power.

Keywords: Divergent; The Giver; Utopia; Dystopia; Post-Geometric World; Chaos; Postmodern Anthropology.

It is not my task to convince you that we live in a post-geometric, fluid world. The evidence resides in the very essence of the transition from modernism to postmodernism and beyond. So, instead of words, please allow me to start by showing you a few buildings:

And now, two of Mandelbrot’s famous fractals…

…followed by Edward Lorenz’s “butterfly effect”:

Let us finish with two representations of the virtual world, of the Internet, or of the so-called “global village.” There is nothing geometrical here, either:

We have been accustomed to representations of space which suggest order, harmony, an almost hygienic discrepancy between what is organized and what is out of control, erratic, menacing. Order means, in this case, the epiphany of will and of power, whatever their motivations may be: sociological, political or cultural. Geometry is abusive in relation to the spontaneity of existence: it means the ability to express everything in already recognized and measurable patterns and forms, to accept the fact that what is abstract is superior to the fluid surprises of life, nature or the human psyche. On the contrary, the post-geometric world is commonly associated with the energy heralded by Nietzsche and his followers. Energy is, in itself, pre-geometric, anamorphous, unpredictable. Its tool is not order, but monstrosity. While geometry is calm and relaxing, energy is menacing: it ignores rules, social and political expectations, and it also ignores, in many cases, the will to contain it. That is why energy is associated with liberty and anarchy rather than with discipline and control. Its hero – in most of the cases, an anti-hero – is the “divergent” individual, the trickster, analyzed by Paul Radin and other authors. His style is not predicated on integration, but on delinquency. The word should not be considered solely in relation to the courts of law and tribunals, because a delinquent may also be a person who puts play above and beyond ethics and morals.

Our task here is to analyze movies. We will not restrict our commentaries to them, because our aim is to consider epistemic changes related to space, geography and human commitment. Let us make reference to an example here: Peter Bogdanovich’s 1972 movie What’s Up, Doc?, starring Barbra Streisand in the leading role, as Judy. Compared to the harsh revolts against the “squares” specific to the Counterculture of the 1960s, What’s Up, Doc? was a rather late echo of the former disruptions, which had already been toned down. Its protagonist is a charismatic female troublemaker, who generates chaos wherever she shows up. Although nice and attractive, her magnetism is not primarily sexual, but derives from her incapacity to obey simple rules, accessible to every individual and community. Interestingly enough, the director of the movie suggests some transpersonal, almost metaphysical deficiency in her case, because she appears to be – wherever she makes an appearance – the anarchic knot of the social tissue: cars collide suddenly, “out of the blue sky,” when she crosses the street, and a skilled pizza maker inexplicably loses his ability to throw the dough into the air when she steps in front of his bakery shop. Later on she makes a professor set fire to his hotel room. Nevertheless, she is attractive and charismatic, helping the same professor to get out of trouble and to gain an extremely valuable academic grant, which will help him to pursue research in a particular field: the extraction of archaic tunes (of…music) from ancient rocks.

Generally, we are accustomed to seeing and valuing only the luminous half of existence, leaving its shadows behind. The Enlightenment’s patterns still mold our philosophy of life, teaching us that you have to go for what is rational and logically explainable, by thoroughly avoiding the irrational. As a consequence, Paul Radin says, the trickster emerges from the forgotten, obscure and shadowy half of the universe, in order to remind us that there is nevertheless a roundness, a “totality” in the economy of existence: “Disorder belongs to the totality of life, and the spirit of this disorder is the trickster.”[1]

The trickster’s substance is liberty, Paul Radin adds, because he is “inimical to all boundaries.”[2] In his commentary on Radin’s book, entitled On the Psychology of the Trickster Figure, inserted in the same volume, C.G. Jung asserts that the trickster comes from an “archetypal” depth prior to any individuation or separation. That is why he is summative or plural, indicating a phase of the universe when beings have not yet acquired their specific or personal identity, floating freely among future “possibilities”: “He [the trickster] is a forerunner of the savior, and, like him, God, man and animal at once. He is both subhuman and superhuman, a bestial and divine being, whose chief and most alarming characteristic is his unconsciousness.”[3]

You remember, probably, Judy’s impressive academic career, tenderly ridiculed in What’s Up, Doc?: being unable to stay in one university until graduating (for instance, she blows up a lab while studying chemistry), she moves from one academia to another, regardless to subject and discipline. As a consequence, she substitutes academic logic and focused professional identity with the more or less hilarious randomness of the encyclopedia. But she is bright, even brilliant, and has a tremendous memory. The main gag of the film presents her as the only solver of an unethical academic procedure, plagiarism. The detail involved is the only English translation of a controversial musical proposal, formulated at the beginning of the 20th century. Obviously, it is so strange that nobody can remember it.

One of the main social and historical anxieties that led to the Counterculture of the Sixties derived from the fear that a hyper-organized society, based on “inhuman” technology and on bureaucracy, would necessarily “kill” life and spontaneity, by replacing the basic joy of existence with obedience and “conformity.” In Peter Bogdanovich’s movie, the echo of this idea is associated with a comic treatment of structuralism, which was, at that time, the main epistemic complex of the period. The plot of the movie is built up around four identical travel suitcases having, of course, different contents: a bunch of highly secret documents chased by the FBI, a collection of jewelry owned by an extremely wealthy lady, the male protagonist’s “musical rocks” and, finally, Judy’s underwear. We should remember Ferdinand de Saussure’s structural semantic, with the classical division between “signifié” and “significant,” in order to understand this. Four separate “semantics” are messed up in a comic “syntax” by Judy’s unpredictable and disaster-causing behavior, in order to suggest that you need a trickster to cure God’s depressive drive to separate everything, to differentiate.

Peter Bogdanovich smilingly reaches here out to one of the main ideologies of the Sixties, which says that the solid, well-organized world we have been taught to admire is, in fact, the inverted form of an otherwise joyous and happy “totality.” Needless to say that there are two contrastive forms of womanhood in the movie, because the director builds a fabulous, anti-feminine counterpart of Judy’s, Eunice (the name comes of course from the “eunuchs” of the ancient worlds), whose character is cheerfully derived from Philip Wylie’s castrating “mom” from his seminal Generation of Vipers (1942), being already found in the iconic movie Rebel Without a Cause (1955), which featured James Dean in the leading role. Striking scenes from the film show the protagonist’s father being weak, helpless, clumsily wearing a kitchen apron, as opposed to the female counterparts of the family – his wife and his mother-in-law – who are menacing and dominating.

The epistemic substance of utopianism is geometry and order. Clean, rational architecture, rational life planning, easy, comfortable uniforms, carefully designed children and, by all means, similarity. Therefore, the field of utopia is life, not death, because you can’t predict or plan it. Dead people simply vanish in utopian texts, discretely disappearing from the geometry of the world, without disturbing it or menacing the solidity of its joints. By contrast, dystopia is about extinction and dying. In postmodern dystopias, corpses and rubble lie everywhere, and light is generally distorted towards some sort of dark apocalypse deprived of revelation, because – as Žižek has said – we like to live, in our postmodern era, “end times”: the “end of ideology” heralded by Daniel Bell, Fukuyama’s “end of history” and so on. The main distinction here – Žižek argues – is between “living” and “surviving.” When we live, we imagine plans for future, and we disseminate ideologies of progress, which are the deep imprints of our trust that life means, above all, a project to be realized and improved. On the contrary, survival presupposes several cautious regressions, the most striking of them being the regression from “humans” to “species”: “With the idea of humans as a species, the universality of humankind falls back into the particularity of an animal species.”[4] Watch, in order to understand, the subhuman choreography of many dystopian proposals. People live in “dens” or ruins; the dominant color is black; the great majority of the scenes, in the films, are shot in obscure, dark places; beings crawl, violence is the general syntax of survival.

Two more introductory remarks before stepping further with our inquiries and demonstrations. If we look at the plot of a classical utopia – take Thomas Morus’s seminal story or Bulwer-Lytton’s Vril – we may easily recognize that in spite of all similarities there is nevertheless a redundant trickster in their texture: the narrator itself, that is, Raphael Hythloday and his avatars, who travel to the distant world and then come back, refusing any temptation to become a utopian immigrant and to keep living in a better world than ours. The utopian trickster does not belong to the universe he visits: he remains an outsider. In the postmodern world, derived partially from the Counterculture of the Sixties, the trickster is, on the contrary, a dropout. He used to belong to the world he lives in, but he is now rejected by it, or repudiated. Structurally, he is similar to trash, and that is why many postmodern dystopias are built in the vicinity of the so-called “trash culture” or dejection. Nowadays apocalypse means an end whose remnants were not cleaned up by anyone. They are over there, all over the place, in the streets, in the houses, in or in front of the office buildings. Postmodern dystopia presents a dusty landscape missing the broom: no one came to clean the stuff or to shovel out the filth. 

The second introductory remark is about the post-human beings of postmodern dystopian proposals, that is, about cyborgs (but not restricted to them). Let us go back to what C.G. Jung said about the trickster: precisely, that he comes from a distant, immemorial, “shadowy” past, where beings were not yet differentiated. In other words, these beings were plural: polymorphous beings, whose chances to evolve were also plural. Necessarily, he says that when they started to evolve, they did not select one specific identity as opposed to all the others, but privileged a certain “shape” while keeping the others at hand, in some sort of shadowy “reserve.” The cyborg represents a reenactment of this plurality. In Donna Haraway’s words: “By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology.”[5]

Both 2014 movies, The Giver and Divergent, start from the assumption that a post-apocalyptic society must be carefully planned, geometrized in order to be perfect. The ideology of counter-nature prevails in these films, because – the planners, the organizers of the new societies used to say – nature failed to secure humanity, leading to catastrophe. In The Giver (2014), a film based on Lois Lowry’s 1993 book, a huge calamity, called “the Ruin” had left behind a supposedly disoriented society, whose wounds are healed by the engineering of a perfect humanity, devoid of any pain, suffering or negativity. Artificial values take the place of the natural ones. Words that have no more application – like “love,” for instance, or even “family,” replaced by “unit” – are used in a distorted way, as it also happens to “death,” the word itself being replaced by the phrase “release to elsewhere.” People continue to live together in separately designated compounds, but they are “units,” no families, whose main purpose is not to provide warmth, but to functionally raise the future generations of perfectly integrated beings.

Interestingly enough, men are more flexible in The Giver than women are, whilst in the Divergent empowered women control and restrict everything. It is so because nature is endowed with opposite values in the two movies. While in Divergent (and its continuation so far, Insurgent, aired in 2015[6]) nature is indifferent to the plot, set up in a post-apocalyptic Chicago partially transformed into ruins, in The Giver nature appears as being only repressed. The Giver’s protagonist, Jonas, assigned at 16 to be the new “Receiver of the Memory,” learns the repressed natural values from his tutor, The Giver, played by Jeff Bridges (colors, senses, tenderness, love etc.), and finishes by escaping to nature, where the rest of the human race still continue to exist (and celebrate Christmas), contrary to what the people of the perfect civilization were taught: that the whole civilization had been swept away by “The Ruin,” leaving no other survivors but them. A further development is captured in Insurgent, the second part of the Divergent series, when the escaped protagonists learn that the encircled town they used to live in is nothing more than a surviving “experiment” set up by the people living “outside the fences.”

An otherwise obscure word, blood, present in both films, also indicates this difference. The slogan of the faction system from Divergent, which controls the independent will of the members, is “Faction before blood,” which also means that blood is undervalued within the faction of the “Dauntless” that the protagonist, Tris, opts for, through the ritualized “choosing ceremony,” at the age of 16. Following a serum induced aptitude test, which Beatrice – the later Tris – fails, the choosing ceremony is the ritual through which each young “dependent” is assigned to one of the five functional factions of the society (Erudite, Amity, Candor, Dauntless, Abnegation), becoming a full-fledged member of the perfect civilization. The ceremony requires a self-inflicted wound: slashing one’s hand by oneself and spilling the blood into one of the five urns adorned with the symbols of the five casts. Anthropologically, this means consubstantiation by giving one’s blood away, by estranging it. Put differently, it is a ritual through which one becomes estranged from one’s own blood. Later on Tris is caught in a series of violent initiation and training rites which secure her position within the faction, showing courage before the Dauntless meaning that you become indifferent to your pain and to your wounds. A central symbol of the movie, the mirror, is meant to suggest this estrangement. Rules say that within Abnegation – Beatrice’s nurturing faction – mirrors are forbidden. When she prepares to take the serum induced test, she has the vision of a mirror, reflecting menacing and snarling dogs that are ready to bite children.

On the contrary, in The Giver blood has been carefully repressed by the engineers of the society. One of the roles played by the Receiver of the Memory is to keep societal memory active, to avoid its repression. A further ambivalence is added to this idea: everybody is obliged by “the Rules” to receive a morning injection, whose role is to kill pain and any other negativity, allowing people to function as perfect pieces of the artificially constructed system. The necessity of this injection suggests that by going to sleep, people can regress, each night, to a “natural stage,” which will be “released” in the morning, when they receive the shot. A hidden Christian structure – consecration by rising from the death – lies underneath the story of The Giver, adding a few religious connotations to the otherwise faith-free plot, related to which we must also note that the young Receiver’s real name is Jonas, while The Giver’s daughter comes back to his memories as an already “enlightened Mary” (Rosemary).

A somehow paradoxical dimension, present in both films, should be further discussed, placing it in the wider relation that links utopia to dystopia. Both universes are post-apocalyptical, ruined. And both societies apply to specifically utopian tools and procedures to recover. Their injection is artifice: they plan against nature, organizing themselves differently than nature would have done by compressing time and evolution, controlling emotions and failures, and eliminating them from common life and usage. Divergent and The Giver are post-apocalyptic syntaxes which suggest that what comes after dystopia is necessarily utopian.

Utopia is about four things: sameness, frozen time, a remote, sometimes exotic geography and enlightened humans living in some sort of desired, super-civilization. If it is so, can we imagine that utopians can live within Marshall McLuhan’s “global village”? Do we have around exotic, secret spaces and societies hidden from our civilization, or do we live in an omniscient world, where satellites, computers and telescopes earnestly dwell in our subconscious, dismantling every “paradise” we dare to imagine, and any form of an escapist geography we may attempt to propose?

If a utopian society were meant to be perfect, its main purpose would be to carefully eradicate any menace to the system. Divergent and The Giver provide us, on the contrary, a rather different perspective, by suggesting that imperfection is actually – and paradoxically – the ultimate goal of the system. In Divergent, Beatrice (Tris) fails the serum induced aptitude test because, unlike her peers, she is a “divergent,” which means that she does not fit in any of the five assignment patterns (Erudite, Amity, Candor, Dauntless, Abnegation) prescribed by the system. In The Giver, the function of the “Receiver of the Memory” is, in itself, a menace to the system. Why do they need it, since it is obvious that it undermines the system, revealing its secrets and manipulative oddities? Nevertheless, the new human race continues to assign the job, although the experience has shown that the last two candidacies proved to be failures. Beyond the oddities of both stories, a structural question persists: is a utopian society capable of pushing its perfection to the ultimate limits, or does it need a “flow,” some sort of imperfection in order to remind us that utopia is about aspiration, about going towards an ideal and not about reaching it or about enjoying it entirely? You should to what I have already said, namely that a utopian proposal needs an outsider or a trickster to reveal it to the world. In most of the cases, he is the narrator himself: the visitor, the person who comes and goes, refusing to stay within perfection. Why is it so? Is he not content with it, or some sort of seer?

The question is not only rhetorical. From Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas to Orson Scott Card’s Ender Cycle, the dilemma of utopias has been how to escape utopia, and not how to live within it, herein and hereafter. You might say that this has always been the problem, down to Bulwer-Lytton’s Vril, because – as I have already said – the narrators of utopias are visitors. They go to and come back from the promised or accidentally discovered land: be it perfection, be it paradise, no one wants to settle there, to enjoy it roundness until the end of his life. Thus, it becomes our duty to ask which exactly are the limits utopia can stretch out to? Is it perfection? Or is it a thoroughly engineered imperfection?

You might have guessed, I think, the main orientations of my interrogations so far. I do believe that classical utopia is extinct now, in spite of many weak, stereotyped aftershocks. Nobody killed utopia, you should not be looking for the culprit: it has been simply stepped over by the epistemic changes of the 20th century, related to the way we now conceive time (as duration) and the world (as a vivid collection of “differences”). Utopia has been the direct continuation of Platonic and Pythagorean ideas flown into the modern world. Both intellectuals and common people enjoyed it, because it dissolved their anxieties into the realm of harmony, equalitarian common sense and transparent, rational, solar happiness. Imagination associated utopia with a perfect social geometry: the same houses, the same needs, similar clothes, wishes, and carefully engineered children. Harmony evoked geometry and mathematics, as the epitomes of careful planning and intelligence. It necessarily follows that the dawn of classical geometry understood as unquestionable perfection also brought about the collapse of utopia. Happily enough, dystopia was already there to absorb the shock. So the diagnosis might be neat: in a post-geometric world, utopia has become a relic.

The hypothesis that an over-organized system is by itself dysfunctional, and that it necessarily finishes in anorexia was one of the major topics of the Counterculture of the 1960s. In the Generation of Vipers (1942), Philip Wylie accused British and American democracies of being “frozen,” “conservative (“Some nations froze their societies into absolutist schemes of life…”), which proved to be untrue for dynamic, “fluid” societies: “Only a fluid and realistic society is evolving.” A certain state reaches the dead end of the so-called frozen society because of its will to function as a hyper-organized mechanism. In Growing up Absurd (1960), Paul Goodman says that each society tends to crystallize into one of two “organized systems”: the repressive society, controlled by the state, and the natural society, in which “the free, natural power is the only source of existence.”

Referring to Freud, Herbert Marcuse draws a distinction, in the 1966 Political Preface of Eros and Civilization, between a “mono-morphous” and a “polymorphous” understanding of personal and social sexuality, suggesting that the former is frozen, while the latter is entirely functional. In his seminal One-Dimensional Man (1964), Marcuse had already said that through “technological rationality,” the “repressive society” expands its irrational will to control people in a purely rational way, depriving its members of essential human drives such as imagination, fantasizing, critical participation or even protest. Technological rationality – he asserted – is derived from formal logic, whose outcome will fix the individual into the mystifying cage of a perfect, social and political prison. He will scarcely protest because the entire process will appear to him as perfectly understandable and rational.

That is why the heralds of the “fluid” societies insist on understanding reality as differentiation and dissemination, as a lax tissue of freely floating, non-structured and non-hierarchical entities. In his much read Star Maker (1937), which was praised by Borges too, Olaf Stapledon defined the cosmic body as a “collective mind” formed by a network of loose individuals interconnected through telepathy, which is echoed in Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game (1985), whose alien, insect enemies, called the “buggers” (later on: the Formics), exist and fight as an infra-organism activated not by a centralized source of power, but by a free-floating mind game called collective consciousness. In 1998, dealing with the newly emerged fantasy literature, Rosemary Jackson (Fantasy. The Literature of Subversion) defined her topic as a fluid reality, made up of free-floating texts, symbols and mythological or religious contents, which is not bound by any unity of space, time or character. Let us take a glimpse at how Nicholas Negroponte imagined the Internet (see Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 2006): as an open system which will “flatten organizations, globalize society, decentralize control, and help harmonize people.”

The fear that any system tends to over-crystallize and therefore freeze was much discussed by structuralism. But times have already changed, and the new episteme favors fluidity and dissemination as opposed to structure. Allow me to remind you a few representations of fluidity and recaptured nature, before discussing several causes of these epistemic transformations. My point is that utopia was too formalist to adapt to these changes. The paradox is this: for many centuries, utopia and utopianism proved to be a hard response to different, more or less disturbing challenges. It was so because of its creators’ brilliant intelligence and perfectly polished minds. As Ernst Bloch said, utopia is about world construction by intelligence, and not about the alleged nostalgia to recuperate a long forgotten “paradise.” The creators of utopias were highly intelligent mythmakers, who challenged the scarcity and decadence of their society by acting like Creators of better, superior worlds. Oddly enough, they were so mesmerized by their creations that they didn’t realize that a society cannot survive when it reaches perfection.

Perfection is a goal, not the substance of life. Dystopia came as a help when utopia was eroded by its perfection. Utopia is about timeless perfection, dystopia is about history and – more or less – politics. The paradox is that utopia, as a cultural discourse of self-polishing and social building, was unable to counterbalance politics. The creators of utopia assumed – the heritage came down from Thomas Morus, and was highly praised throughout the 18th century – that there is an inner, godly mechanism in men, which drives them towards excellence and perfection. Geometry, arithmetic, logic and utopia have been the experimental tools of this assumption. Nietzsche was again right by saying: “As a matter of fact, logic (like geometry and arithmetic) only holds good of assumed existences, which we have created.”

Creating utopias used to be a purifying artistry. So it lasted until art was perceived as some sort of religion. Walter Benjamin said that art used to have a “utopian aura” in past times, for people clinch to art because it replaces their aspiration towards timelessness and perfection. But the same Walter Benjamin considered that the serial, technical reproduction of art harmed art’s utopian brilliance, by turning it into a humble “product.”

There are thinkers who do believe that utopia became extinct because communism grotesquely “confiscated” it. I have no relevant answers to such a naive assumption. Instead, we will take a look at Benoit Mandelbrot’s fractals, or at Edward Lorenz’s Chaos Theory – illustrated by a movie in 2008, directed by Marcos Siega, whose presentation on IMDB runs like this: “the story of an obsessively organized efficiency expert, whose life unravels in unexpected ways when fate forces him to explore the serendipitous nature of love and forgiveness.” By exploring several postmodern irregularities, differences and disseminations, by deepening happily into Derrida’s and Vattimo’ writings (not to forget Umberto Eco’s cryptographic “tissue”), we will reach the irregular, ever-progressing net of the WWW, as conceived by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Victor Turner’s liminality theory will also help, by contrasting “societas” to “communitas,” which will bring us to the countercultural communities of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as to ecology and nature.

All these postmodern icons – chaos theory, liminality, free-floating texts, monstrosity, Fredric Jameson’s association of schizophrenia with capitalism etc. – indicate a post-geometric perception of the world and culture. The landscape from Divergent is post-geometrical, ruined, as the plot is set in a post-apocalyptic, partially abandoned Chicago, where nobody is interested in mending or reconstructing, as if one of the basic imprints of existence – the drive to complete, to finish something – had been definitely lost. Remember, even though it may not be the most appropriate comparison, Daniel Defoe’s famous Robinson Crusoe. Immediately after getting shipwrecked on a deserted island, Robinson starts to organize it: he builds a shelter, then a house, starts farming, integrates Friday, and so on. As compared to him, the post-apocalyptic society from Divergent simply takes over the ruins, not touching the rubble, not mending or fixing anything. The people simply internalize the destruction and what it left behind. In order to reach the headquarters of the Dauntless, the initiated are obliged to jump into a scary concrete hole left over by some – we may only guess – bombardment.

The landscape in The Giver is utterly different, clean, carefully designed and impersonal. The colorless, grey park replaces nature around here, together with its scents and odors. No bees, no sparrows or gekkos: only humans. The desired uniformity attained by eradicating any difference induced by colors and by reducing them to grey is really striking. Nevertheless, there is a subtle clue when the director (Philip Noyce) shows us, from high above, the general contour of the city, and when we discover that it is, actually, a butterfly-shaped world. A hidden link draws us to Benoit Mandelbrot’s fractals and, even closer, to Edward Lorenz’s butterfly effect and chaos theory. Apparently apart from them, the butterfly shape from The Giver illustrates the perfect organizing contour of a perfect social and political system. But by recalling Mandelbrot and Edward Lorenz, it suggests that there is a dormant, intrinsic turmoil inside the system, linking the idea to the main message of the film, that the seemingly perfect society will be really “complete” only when what is not predictable, what is accidental, that is, “natural,” will come back to the system.

Let us go back to Paul Radin’s and C.G. Jung’s understanding of the trickster as the depository of excess, of multiplicity. Both Divergent and The Giver echo this structure. In the first movie, Tris fails the serum induced test, whose result is considered “inconclusive, extremely rare,” not because she is unfit to take up any assignment, but because she possesses too many qualities at the same time, being simultaneously Erudite, Dauntless and Abnegation. Therefore, she is a rare “Divergent,” and therefore “dangerous” to the alleged equilibrium of the system. In The Giver, the young Jonas (number 52, as impersonally designated) is initially skipped by the assignment committee, and later on designated to be the next Receiver of the Memory because, unlike his simple peers, he combines four qualities: intelligence, integrity, courage and the capacity “to see beyond.” Both protagonists share with the trickster the ability to be plural and to act at the same time as multiple, polymorphous identities. Needless to say, they do not go with the existing rules and orders, but against them.

This work was supported by a grant of the Romanian National Authority for Scientific Research, CNCS – UEFISCDI, project number PN-II-ID-PCE-2011-3-0061.

Notes

Ştefan Borbély
Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
stefanborbely@yahoo.com

The Divergent Series & The Giver: A Stroll into the Post-geometric World

Abstract: The paper analyzes comparatively the first installment of the Divergent series and The Giver, two post-apocalyptic movies from 2014, within the general frame of the post-geometric episteme emerging within post-structuralism and beyond. Both are teenager movies, related to specific rites of initiation into seemingly perfect societies, structured in casts or in so-called factions, and both express a crisis particular to those dystopian, post-apocalyptic worlds which rely on a utopian syntax in order to respond to a historical cataclysm. The paper will also compare them to Orson Scott Card’s Ender Saga, but the main dilemma of the demonstration might be summarized as follows: is nature capable of healing the wounds of a post-apocalyptic world, or do you need an anti-human – that is, dystopian – dictatorship in order to survive and go further? Apart from their totalitarian geography, both films talk primarily about human regression, violence and power.

Keywords: Divergent; The Giver; Utopia; Dystopia; Post-Geometric World; Chaos; Postmodern Anthropology.

It is not my task to convince you that we live in a post-geometric, fluid world. The evidence resides in the very essence of the transition from modernism to postmodernism and beyond. So, instead of words, please allow me to start by showing you a few buildings:

And now, two of Mandelbrot’s famous fractals…

…followed by Edward Lorenz’s “butterfly effect”:

Let us finish with two representations of the virtual world, of the Internet, or of the so-called “global village.” There is nothing geometrical here, either:

We have been accustomed to representations of space which suggest order, harmony, an almost hygienic discrepancy between what is organized and what is out of control, erratic, menacing. Order means, in this case, the epiphany of will and of power, whatever their motivations may be: sociological, political or cultural. Geometry is abusive in relation to the spontaneity of existence: it means the ability to express everything in already recognized and measurable patterns and forms, to accept the fact that what is abstract is superior to the fluid surprises of life, nature or the human psyche. On the contrary, the post-geometric world is commonly associated with the energy heralded by Nietzsche and his followers. Energy is, in itself, pre-geometric, anamorphous, unpredictable. Its tool is not order, but monstrosity. While geometry is calm and relaxing, energy is menacing: it ignores rules, social and political expectations, and it also ignores, in many cases, the will to contain it. That is why energy is associated with liberty and anarchy rather than with discipline and control. Its hero – in most of the cases, an anti-hero – is the “divergent” individual, the trickster, analyzed by Paul Radin and other authors. His style is not predicated on integration, but on delinquency. The word should not be considered solely in relation to the courts of law and tribunals, because a delinquent may also be a person who puts play above and beyond ethics and morals.

Our task here is to analyze movies. We will not restrict our commentaries to them, because our aim is to consider epistemic changes related to space, geography and human commitment. Let us make reference to an example here: Peter Bogdanovich’s 1972 movie What’s Up, Doc?, starring Barbra Streisand in the leading role, as Judy. Compared to the harsh revolts against the “squares” specific to the Counterculture of the 1960s, What’s Up, Doc? was a rather late echo of the former disruptions, which had already been toned down. Its protagonist is a charismatic female troublemaker, who generates chaos wherever she shows up. Although nice and attractive, her magnetism is not primarily sexual, but derives from her incapacity to obey simple rules, accessible to every individual and community. Interestingly enough, the director of the movie suggests some transpersonal, almost metaphysical deficiency in her case, because she appears to be – wherever she makes an appearance – the anarchic knot of the social tissue: cars collide suddenly, “out of the blue sky,” when she crosses the street, and a skilled pizza maker inexplicably loses his ability to throw the dough into the air when she steps in front of his bakery shop. Later on she makes a professor set fire to his hotel room. Nevertheless, she is attractive and charismatic, helping the same professor to get out of trouble and to gain an extremely valuable academic grant, which will help him to pursue research in a particular field: the extraction of archaic tunes (of…music) from ancient rocks.

Generally, we are accustomed to seeing and valuing only the luminous half of existence, leaving its shadows behind. The Enlightenment’s patterns still mold our philosophy of life, teaching us that you have to go for what is rational and logically explainable, by thoroughly avoiding the irrational. As a consequence, Paul Radin says, the trickster emerges from the forgotten, obscure and shadowy half of the universe, in order to remind us that there is nevertheless a roundness, a “totality” in the economy of existence: “Disorder belongs to the totality of life, and the spirit of this disorder is the trickster.”[1]

The trickster’s substance is liberty, Paul Radin adds, because he is “inimical to all boundaries.”[2] In his commentary on Radin’s book, entitled On the Psychology of the Trickster Figure, inserted in the same volume, C.G. Jung asserts that the trickster comes from an “archetypal” depth prior to any individuation or separation. That is why he is summative or plural, indicating a phase of the universe when beings have not yet acquired their specific or personal identity, floating freely among future “possibilities”: “He [the trickster] is a forerunner of the savior, and, like him, God, man and animal at once. He is both subhuman and superhuman, a bestial and divine being, whose chief and most alarming characteristic is his unconsciousness.”[3]

You remember, probably, Judy’s impressive academic career, tenderly ridiculed in What’s Up, Doc?: being unable to stay in one university until graduating (for instance, she blows up a lab while studying chemistry), she moves from one academia to another, regardless to subject and discipline. As a consequence, she substitutes academic logic and focused professional identity with the more or less hilarious randomness of the encyclopedia. But she is bright, even brilliant, and has a tremendous memory. The main gag of the film presents her as the only solver of an unethical academic procedure, plagiarism. The detail involved is the only English translation of a controversial musical proposal, formulated at the beginning of the 20th century. Obviously, it is so strange that nobody can remember it.

One of the main social and historical anxieties that led to the Counterculture of the Sixties derived from the fear that a hyper-organized society, based on “inhuman” technology and on bureaucracy, would necessarily “kill” life and spontaneity, by replacing the basic joy of existence with obedience and “conformity.” In Peter Bogdanovich’s movie, the echo of this idea is associated with a comic treatment of structuralism, which was, at that time, the main epistemic complex of the period. The plot of the movie is built up around four identical travel suitcases having, of course, different contents: a bunch of highly secret documents chased by the FBI, a collection of jewelry owned by an extremely wealthy lady, the male protagonist’s “musical rocks” and, finally, Judy’s underwear. We should remember Ferdinand de Saussure’s structural semantic, with the classical division between “signifié” and “significant,” in order to understand this. Four separate “semantics” are messed up in a comic “syntax” by Judy’s unpredictable and disaster-causing behavior, in order to suggest that you need a trickster to cure God’s depressive drive to separate everything, to differentiate.

Peter Bogdanovich smilingly reaches here out to one of the main ideologies of the Sixties, which says that the solid, well-organized world we have been taught to admire is, in fact, the inverted form of an otherwise joyous and happy “totality.” Needless to say that there are two contrastive forms of womanhood in the movie, because the director builds a fabulous, anti-feminine counterpart of Judy’s, Eunice (the name comes of course from the “eunuchs” of the ancient worlds), whose character is cheerfully derived from Philip Wylie’s castrating “mom” from his seminal Generation of Vipers (1942), being already found in the iconic movie Rebel Without a Cause (1955), which featured James Dean in the leading role. Striking scenes from the film show the protagonist’s father being weak, helpless, clumsily wearing a kitchen apron, as opposed to the female counterparts of the family – his wife and his mother-in-law – who are menacing and dominating.

The epistemic substance of utopianism is geometry and order. Clean, rational architecture, rational life planning, easy, comfortable uniforms, carefully designed children and, by all means, similarity. Therefore, the field of utopia is life, not death, because you can’t predict or plan it. Dead people simply vanish in utopian texts, discretely disappearing from the geometry of the world, without disturbing it or menacing the solidity of its joints. By contrast, dystopia is about extinction and dying. In postmodern dystopias, corpses and rubble lie everywhere, and light is generally distorted towards some sort of dark apocalypse deprived of revelation, because – as Žižek has said – we like to live, in our postmodern era, “end times”: the “end of ideology” heralded by Daniel Bell, Fukuyama’s “end of history” and so on. The main distinction here – Žižek argues – is between “living” and “surviving.” When we live, we imagine plans for future, and we disseminate ideologies of progress, which are the deep imprints of our trust that life means, above all, a project to be realized and improved. On the contrary, survival presupposes several cautious regressions, the most striking of them being the regression from “humans” to “species”: “With the idea of humans as a species, the universality of humankind falls back into the particularity of an animal species.”[4] Watch, in order to understand, the subhuman choreography of many dystopian proposals. People live in “dens” or ruins; the dominant color is black; the great majority of the scenes, in the films, are shot in obscure, dark places; beings crawl, violence is the general syntax of survival.

Two more introductory remarks before stepping further with our inquiries and demonstrations. If we look at the plot of a classical utopia – take Thomas Morus’s seminal story or Bulwer-Lytton’s Vril – we may easily recognize that in spite of all similarities there is nevertheless a redundant trickster in their texture: the narrator itself, that is, Raphael Hythloday and his avatars, who travel to the distant world and then come back, refusing any temptation to become a utopian immigrant and to keep living in a better world than ours. The utopian trickster does not belong to the universe he visits: he remains an outsider. In the postmodern world, derived partially from the Counterculture of the Sixties, the trickster is, on the contrary, a dropout. He used to belong to the world he lives in, but he is now rejected by it, or repudiated. Structurally, he is similar to trash, and that is why many postmodern dystopias are built in the vicinity of the so-called “trash culture” or dejection. Nowadays apocalypse means an end whose remnants were not cleaned up by anyone. They are over there, all over the place, in the streets, in the houses, in or in front of the office buildings. Postmodern dystopia presents a dusty landscape missing the broom: no one came to clean the stuff or to shovel out the filth. 

The second introductory remark is about the post-human beings of postmodern dystopian proposals, that is, about cyborgs (but not restricted to them). Let us go back to what C.G. Jung said about the trickster: precisely, that he comes from a distant, immemorial, “shadowy” past, where beings were not yet differentiated. In other words, these beings were plural: polymorphous beings, whose chances to evolve were also plural. Necessarily, he says that when they started to evolve, they did not select one specific identity as opposed to all the others, but privileged a certain “shape” while keeping the others at hand, in some sort of shadowy “reserve.” The cyborg represents a reenactment of this plurality. In Donna Haraway’s words: “By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology.”[5]

Both 2014 movies, The Giver and Divergent, start from the assumption that a post-apocalyptic society must be carefully planned, geometrized in order to be perfect. The ideology of counter-nature prevails in these films, because – the planners, the organizers of the new societies used to say – nature failed to secure humanity, leading to catastrophe. In The Giver (2014), a film based on Lois Lowry’s 1993 book, a huge calamity, called “the Ruin” had left behind a supposedly disoriented society, whose wounds are healed by the engineering of a perfect humanity, devoid of any pain, suffering or negativity. Artificial values take the place of the natural ones. Words that have no more application – like “love,” for instance, or even “family,” replaced by “unit” – are used in a distorted way, as it also happens to “death,” the word itself being replaced by the phrase “release to elsewhere.” People continue to live together in separately designated compounds, but they are “units,” no families, whose main purpose is not to provide warmth, but to functionally raise the future generations of perfectly integrated beings.

Interestingly enough, men are more flexible in The Giver than women are, whilst in the Divergent empowered women control and restrict everything. It is so because nature is endowed with opposite values in the two movies. While in Divergent (and its continuation so far, Insurgent, aired in 2015[6]) nature is indifferent to the plot, set up in a post-apocalyptic Chicago partially transformed into ruins, in The Giver nature appears as being only repressed. The Giver’s protagonist, Jonas, assigned at 16 to be the new “Receiver of the Memory,” learns the repressed natural values from his tutor, The Giver, played by Jeff Bridges (colors, senses, tenderness, love etc.), and finishes by escaping to nature, where the rest of the human race still continue to exist (and celebrate Christmas), contrary to what the people of the perfect civilization were taught: that the whole civilization had been swept away by “The Ruin,” leaving no other survivors but them. A further development is captured in Insurgent, the second part of the Divergent series, when the escaped protagonists learn that the encircled town they used to live in is nothing more than a surviving “experiment” set up by the people living “outside the fences.”

An otherwise obscure word, blood, present in both films, also indicates this difference. The slogan of the faction system from Divergent, which controls the independent will of the members, is “Faction before blood,” which also means that blood is undervalued within the faction of the “Dauntless” that the protagonist, Tris, opts for, through the ritualized “choosing ceremony,” at the age of 16. Following a serum induced aptitude test, which Beatrice – the later Tris – fails, the choosing ceremony is the ritual through which each young “dependent” is assigned to one of the five functional factions of the society (Erudite, Amity, Candor, Dauntless, Abnegation), becoming a full-fledged member of the perfect civilization. The ceremony requires a self-inflicted wound: slashing one’s hand by oneself and spilling the blood into one of the five urns adorned with the symbols of the five casts. Anthropologically, this means consubstantiation by giving one’s blood away, by estranging it. Put differently, it is a ritual through which one becomes estranged from one’s own blood. Later on Tris is caught in a series of violent initiation and training rites which secure her position within the faction, showing courage before the Dauntless meaning that you become indifferent to your pain and to your wounds. A central symbol of the movie, the mirror, is meant to suggest this estrangement. Rules say that within Abnegation – Beatrice’s nurturing faction – mirrors are forbidden. When she prepares to take the serum induced test, she has the vision of a mirror, reflecting menacing and snarling dogs that are ready to bite children.

On the contrary, in The Giver blood has been carefully repressed by the engineers of the society. One of the roles played by the Receiver of the Memory is to keep societal memory active, to avoid its repression. A further ambivalence is added to this idea: everybody is obliged by “the Rules” to receive a morning injection, whose role is to kill pain and any other negativity, allowing people to function as perfect pieces of the artificially constructed system. The necessity of this injection suggests that by going to sleep, people can regress, each night, to a “natural stage,” which will be “released” in the morning, when they receive the shot. A hidden Christian structure – consecration by rising from the death – lies underneath the story of The Giver, adding a few religious connotations to the otherwise faith-free plot, related to which we must also note that the young Receiver’s real name is Jonas, while The Giver’s daughter comes back to his memories as an already “enlightened Mary” (Rosemary).

A somehow paradoxical dimension, present in both films, should be further discussed, placing it in the wider relation that links utopia to dystopia. Both universes are post-apocalyptical, ruined. And both societies apply to specifically utopian tools and procedures to recover. Their injection is artifice: they plan against nature, organizing themselves differently than nature would have done by compressing time and evolution, controlling emotions and failures, and eliminating them from common life and usage. Divergent and The Giver are post-apocalyptic syntaxes which suggest that what comes after dystopia is necessarily utopian.

Utopia is about four things: sameness, frozen time, a remote, sometimes exotic geography and enlightened humans living in some sort of desired, super-civilization. If it is so, can we imagine that utopians can live within Marshall McLuhan’s “global village”? Do we have around exotic, secret spaces and societies hidden from our civilization, or do we live in an omniscient world, where satellites, computers and telescopes earnestly dwell in our subconscious, dismantling every “paradise” we dare to imagine, and any form of an escapist geography we may attempt to propose?

If a utopian society were meant to be perfect, its main purpose would be to carefully eradicate any menace to the system. Divergent and The Giver provide us, on the contrary, a rather different perspective, by suggesting that imperfection is actually – and paradoxically – the ultimate goal of the system. In Divergent, Beatrice (Tris) fails the serum induced aptitude test because, unlike her peers, she is a “divergent,” which means that she does not fit in any of the five assignment patterns (Erudite, Amity, Candor, Dauntless, Abnegation) prescribed by the system. In The Giver, the function of the “Receiver of the Memory” is, in itself, a menace to the system. Why do they need it, since it is obvious that it undermines the system, revealing its secrets and manipulative oddities? Nevertheless, the new human race continues to assign the job, although the experience has shown that the last two candidacies proved to be failures. Beyond the oddities of both stories, a structural question persists: is a utopian society capable of pushing its perfection to the ultimate limits, or does it need a “flow,” some sort of imperfection in order to remind us that utopia is about aspiration, about going towards an ideal and not about reaching it or about enjoying it entirely? You should to what I have already said, namely that a utopian proposal needs an outsider or a trickster to reveal it to the world. In most of the cases, he is the narrator himself: the visitor, the person who comes and goes, refusing to stay within perfection. Why is it so? Is he not content with it, or some sort of seer?

The question is not only rhetorical. From Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas to Orson Scott Card’s Ender Cycle, the dilemma of utopias has been how to escape utopia, and not how to live within it, herein and hereafter. You might say that this has always been the problem, down to Bulwer-Lytton’s Vril, because – as I have already said – the narrators of utopias are visitors. They go to and come back from the promised or accidentally discovered land: be it perfection, be it paradise, no one wants to settle there, to enjoy it roundness until the end of his life. Thus, it becomes our duty to ask which exactly are the limits utopia can stretch out to? Is it perfection? Or is it a thoroughly engineered imperfection?

You might have guessed, I think, the main orientations of my interrogations so far. I do believe that classical utopia is extinct now, in spite of many weak, stereotyped aftershocks. Nobody killed utopia, you should not be looking for the culprit: it has been simply stepped over by the epistemic changes of the 20th century, related to the way we now conceive time (as duration) and the world (as a vivid collection of “differences”). Utopia has been the direct continuation of Platonic and Pythagorean ideas flown into the modern world. Both intellectuals and common people enjoyed it, because it dissolved their anxieties into the realm of harmony, equalitarian common sense and transparent, rational, solar happiness. Imagination associated utopia with a perfect social geometry: the same houses, the same needs, similar clothes, wishes, and carefully engineered children. Harmony evoked geometry and mathematics, as the epitomes of careful planning and intelligence. It necessarily follows that the dawn of classical geometry understood as unquestionable perfection also brought about the collapse of utopia. Happily enough, dystopia was already there to absorb the shock. So the diagnosis might be neat: in a post-geometric world, utopia has become a relic.

The hypothesis that an over-organized system is by itself dysfunctional, and that it necessarily finishes in anorexia was one of the major topics of the Counterculture of the 1960s. In the Generation of Vipers (1942), Philip Wylie accused British and American democracies of being “frozen,” “conservative (“Some nations froze their societies into absolutist schemes of life…”), which proved to be untrue for dynamic, “fluid” societies: “Only a fluid and realistic society is evolving.” A certain state reaches the dead end of the so-called frozen society because of its will to function as a hyper-organized mechanism. In Growing up Absurd (1960), Paul Goodman says that each society tends to crystallize into one of two “organized systems”: the repressive society, controlled by the state, and the natural society, in which “the free, natural power is the only source of existence.”

Referring to Freud, Herbert Marcuse draws a distinction, in the 1966 Political Preface of Eros and Civilization, between a “mono-morphous” and a “polymorphous” understanding of personal and social sexuality, suggesting that the former is frozen, while the latter is entirely functional. In his seminal One-Dimensional Man (1964), Marcuse had already said that through “technological rationality,” the “repressive society” expands its irrational will to control people in a purely rational way, depriving its members of essential human drives such as imagination, fantasizing, critical participation or even protest. Technological rationality – he asserted – is derived from formal logic, whose outcome will fix the individual into the mystifying cage of a perfect, social and political prison. He will scarcely protest because the entire process will appear to him as perfectly understandable and rational.

That is why the heralds of the “fluid” societies insist on understanding reality as differentiation and dissemination, as a lax tissue of freely floating, non-structured and non-hierarchical entities. In his much read Star Maker (1937), which was praised by Borges too, Olaf Stapledon defined the cosmic body as a “collective mind” formed by a network of loose individuals interconnected through telepathy, which is echoed in Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game (1985), whose alien, insect enemies, called the “buggers” (later on: the Formics), exist and fight as an infra-organism activated not by a centralized source of power, but by a free-floating mind game called collective consciousness. In 1998, dealing with the newly emerged fantasy literature, Rosemary Jackson (Fantasy. The Literature of Subversion) defined her topic as a fluid reality, made up of free-floating texts, symbols and mythological or religious contents, which is not bound by any unity of space, time or character. Let us take a glimpse at how Nicholas Negroponte imagined the Internet (see Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 2006): as an open system which will “flatten organizations, globalize society, decentralize control, and help harmonize people.”

The fear that any system tends to over-crystallize and therefore freeze was much discussed by structuralism. But times have already changed, and the new episteme favors fluidity and dissemination as opposed to structure. Allow me to remind you a few representations of fluidity and recaptured nature, before discussing several causes of these epistemic transformations. My point is that utopia was too formalist to adapt to these changes. The paradox is this: for many centuries, utopia and utopianism proved to be a hard response to different, more or less disturbing challenges. It was so because of its creators’ brilliant intelligence and perfectly polished minds. As Ernst Bloch said, utopia is about world construction by intelligence, and not about the alleged nostalgia to recuperate a long forgotten “paradise.” The creators of utopias were highly intelligent mythmakers, who challenged the scarcity and decadence of their society by acting like Creators of better, superior worlds. Oddly enough, they were so mesmerized by their creations that they didn’t realize that a society cannot survive when it reaches perfection.

Perfection is a goal, not the substance of life. Dystopia came as a help when utopia was eroded by its perfection. Utopia is about timeless perfection, dystopia is about history and – more or less – politics. The paradox is that utopia, as a cultural discourse of self-polishing and social building, was unable to counterbalance politics. The creators of utopia assumed – the heritage came down from Thomas Morus, and was highly praised throughout the 18th century – that there is an inner, godly mechanism in men, which drives them towards excellence and perfection. Geometry, arithmetic, logic and utopia have been the experimental tools of this assumption. Nietzsche was again right by saying: “As a matter of fact, logic (like geometry and arithmetic) only holds good of assumed existences, which we have created.”

Creating utopias used to be a purifying artistry. So it lasted until art was perceived as some sort of religion. Walter Benjamin said that art used to have a “utopian aura” in past times, for people clinch to art because it replaces their aspiration towards timelessness and perfection. But the same Walter Benjamin considered that the serial, technical reproduction of art harmed art’s utopian brilliance, by turning it into a humble “product.”

There are thinkers who do believe that utopia became extinct because communism grotesquely “confiscated” it. I have no relevant answers to such a naive assumption. Instead, we will take a look at Benoit Mandelbrot’s fractals, or at Edward Lorenz’s Chaos Theory – illustrated by a movie in 2008, directed by Marcos Siega, whose presentation on IMDB runs like this: “the story of an obsessively organized efficiency expert, whose life unravels in unexpected ways when fate forces him to explore the serendipitous nature of love and forgiveness.” By exploring several postmodern irregularities, differences and disseminations, by deepening happily into Derrida’s and Vattimo’ writings (not to forget Umberto Eco’s cryptographic “tissue”), we will reach the irregular, ever-progressing net of the WWW, as conceived by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Victor Turner’s liminality theory will also help, by contrasting “societas” to “communitas,” which will bring us to the countercultural communities of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as to ecology and nature.

All these postmodern icons – chaos theory, liminality, free-floating texts, monstrosity, Fredric Jameson’s association of schizophrenia with capitalism etc. – indicate a post-geometric perception of the world and culture. The landscape from Divergent is post-geometrical, ruined, as the plot is set in a post-apocalyptic, partially abandoned Chicago, where nobody is interested in mending or reconstructing, as if one of the basic imprints of existence – the drive to complete, to finish something – had been definitely lost. Remember, even though it may not be the most appropriate comparison, Daniel Defoe’s famous Robinson Crusoe. Immediately after getting shipwrecked on a deserted island, Robinson starts to organize it: he builds a shelter, then a house, starts farming, integrates Friday, and so on. As compared to him, the post-apocalyptic society from Divergent simply takes over the ruins, not touching the rubble, not mending or fixing anything. The people simply internalize the destruction and what it left behind. In order to reach the headquarters of the Dauntless, the initiated are obliged to jump into a scary concrete hole left over by some – we may only guess – bombardment.

The landscape in The Giver is utterly different, clean, carefully designed and impersonal. The colorless, grey park replaces nature around here, together with its scents and odors. No bees, no sparrows or gekkos: only humans. The desired uniformity attained by eradicating any difference induced by colors and by reducing them to grey is really striking. Nevertheless, there is a subtle clue when the director (Philip Noyce) shows us, from high above, the general contour of the city, and when we discover that it is, actually, a butterfly-shaped world. A hidden link draws us to Benoit Mandelbrot’s fractals and, even closer, to Edward Lorenz’s butterfly effect and chaos theory. Apparently apart from them, the butterfly shape from The Giver illustrates the perfect organizing contour of a perfect social and political system. But by recalling Mandelbrot and Edward Lorenz, it suggests that there is a dormant, intrinsic turmoil inside the system, linking the idea to the main message of the film, that the seemingly perfect society will be really “complete” only when what is not predictable, what is accidental, that is, “natural,” will come back to the system.

Let us go back to Paul Radin’s and C.G. Jung’s understanding of the trickster as the depository of excess, of multiplicity. Both Divergent and The Giver echo this structure. In the first movie, Tris fails the serum induced test, whose result is considered “inconclusive, extremely rare,” not because she is unfit to take up any assignment, but because she possesses too many qualities at the same time, being simultaneously Erudite, Dauntless and Abnegation. Therefore, she is a rare “Divergent,” and therefore “dangerous” to the alleged equilibrium of the system. In The Giver, the young Jonas (number 52, as impersonally designated) is initially skipped by the assignment committee, and later on designated to be the next Receiver of the Memory because, unlike his simple peers, he combines four qualities: intelligence, integrity, courage and the capacity “to see beyond.” Both protagonists share with the trickster the ability to be plural and to act at the same time as multiple, polymorphous identities. Needless to say, they do not go with the existing rules and orders, but against them.

This work was supported by a grant of the Romanian National Authority for Scientific Research, CNCS – UEFISCDI, project number PN-II-ID-PCE-2011-3-0061.

Notes

Corin Braga
Universitatea Babeş-Bolyai, Cluj-Napoca, Roumanie
CorinBraga@yahoo.com

Antiutopies critiques post-apocalyptiques /

Post-Apocalyptic Critical Dystopias

Abstract: Contemporary series of books and movies for teenagers and young adults, such as The Giver by Lois Lowry, The City of Ember by Jeanne duPrau, The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, The Maze Runner by James Dashner, Divergent by Veronica Roth or Aeon Flux, imagine a dystopian future in which small communities of survivors from a global (artificial) catastrophe are subject to monstrous genetic, social and mental experiments. Conceived on the pattern of the ancient myth of the Minotaur in Crete, they present the trials that young heroes have to pass in order to survive. The labyrinth is a metaphor for the future dystopian societies; survival from its ordeal, as well as the destruction of the occlusive system, offer a new hope for these “critical dystopias.”

Keywords: Critical Dystopias; Post-apocalyptic Societies; “Maze Ordeal”; The Giver; The City of Ember; The Hunger Games; The Maze Runner; Divergent; Aeon Flux.

            Après la marée antiutopique (« the dystopian tide ») du XX^e siècle (Zamiatine, Orwell, Huxley, Bradbury, etc.), plusieurs espèces utopiques plus ambiguës, comme les utopies critiques et les antiutopies critiques, ont provoqué une sorte de reflux du défaitisme général. Ce que les commentateurs anglo-saxons appellent des « critical dystopias » se proposent de « negotiate the necessary pessimism of the generic dystopia with a militant or utopian stance that not only breaks through the hegemonic enclosure of the text’s alternative world but also self-reflexively refuses the anti-utopian temptation that lingers in every dystopian account[1] ». Ces auteurs « critiques » re-introduisent le « principe d’espérance » dans les visions tourmentées des contre-utopistes, laissant entrevoir la possibilité que la société totalitaire et cauchemardesque, qui a séquestré le futur de l’humanité, soit à son tour abolie. Ou, selon les commentaires de Raffaella Baccolini et de Tom Moylan, si les antiutopies modernistes canoniques procèdent à une forclusion de l’espoir de leurs univers imaginaires, les antiutopies critiques contemporaines (postmodernes ?) acceptent le retour d’un espoir de rédemption autant chez leurs personnages que chez leurs lecteurs[2].

            Dans ce travail, nous nous occuperons d’un corpus d’antiutopies critiques, appartenant à ces dernières décennies, qui assument l’inévitabilité d’une catastrophe future et se placent, donc, dans un avenir post-apocalyptique, tout en envisageant une chance de salut pour l’humanité survivante. Grâce à leur succès de librairie, la majorité de ces livres ont été continués dans des séries thématiques : le tétralogie de Lois Lowry The Giver (1993), Gathering Blue (2000), Messenger (2004) et Son (2012) ; la tétralogie de Jeanne DuPrau The City of Ember (2003), The People of Sparks (2004), The Prophet of Yonwood (2006) et The Diamond of Darkhold (2008), la trilogie de Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games (2008), Catching Fire (2009) et Mockingjay (2010), la tétralogie de James Dashner, The Maze Runner (2009), The Scorch Trials (2010), The Death Cure (2011) et The Kill Order (2012), et la trilogie de Veronica Roth, Divergent (2011), Insurgent (2012) et Allegiant (2013).

            Aussi, en accord avec la stratégie des médias actuels et des producteurs de Hollywood, de grandes compagnies cinématographiques ont acheté les droits de ces romans pour en tirer des films et faire « recette ». The Giver a été produit en 2014 par Walden Media, de même que The City of Ember en 2008 ; Color Force et Lionsgate ont porté à l’écran The Hunger Games (2012), Catching Fire (2013) et Mockingjay (divisé en deux parties : 2014 et 2015) ; 20^th Century Fox a abordé la série de The Maze Runner (2014), The Scorch Trials (2015), The Death Cure (annoncé pour 2017) ; alors que Summit Entertainment a adapté à l’écran Divergent (2014), Insurgent (2015) et Allegiant (annoncé pour 2016). À ce corpus de films nous ajouterons Aeon Flux, produit par Paramount Pictures en 2005 à partir non d’un livre, mais d’une série télévisée de dessins animés créée par Peter Chung.

            La stratégie de vente et de diffusion de ces livres et de ces films cible un public spécifique, les adolescents (« young adults »). De ce fait, un pattern, sinon un stéréotype, peut y être identifié, celui des rites de passage et d’initiation. Les auteurs et les directeurs de film explorent les inquiétudes et les problèmes d’intégration des jeunes dans la société contemporaine et imaginent des scénarios plus ou moins héroïques, voire archétypaux, pour offrir des « corrélatifs artistiques » et des solutions symboliques à ces angoisses liminales souvent non-verbalisées. Afin de mieux mettre en relief les conflits psychologiques et sociaux des jeunes, ils projettent les aventures dans un « décor mythique », repris aux genres de l’(anti)utopie et des apocalypses contemporaines. Les difficultés de mûrir deviennent ainsi des épreuves initiatiques qui se vivent dans des univers périlleux et terrifiants. De l’échec ou de la réussite des héros dépendra non seulement leur destin, mais aussi l’avenir de ces sociétés au bord du gouffre.

            En règle générale, tous ces romans et leurs adaptations cinématographiques sont placés dans un futur post-apocalyptique, après une catastrophe naturelle ou artificielle qui a quasiment anéanti la civilisation humaine. Jeanne DuPrau imagine dans City of Ember et ses suites qu’une hécatombe de nature non précisée (arme biologique, virus létal ?) aura exterminé l’humanité, à l’exception d’une cité construite sous la terre. Pour éviter les traumatismes psychologiques, les survivants ont été laissés par les Constructeurs dans l’ignorance du monde du dehors et de la catastrophe qui l’a détruit. Une valise sigillée a été transmise en héritage au maire de la « ville d’ambre » pour qu’on l’ouvre dans deux cents ans, quand les effets nocifs de la catastrophe auront disparu ; la valise contient des indications sur la voie de retour à la surface.

            Dans The Hunger Games, les États-Unis auront été réduits, après un cataclysme global, à une communauté située quelque part dans les Monts Appalachiens (ou peut-être dans les Rocky Mountains), composée d’une capitale et treize provinces fonctionnant comme des succursales de la métropole. La condition d’îlot de survivants de l’humanité n’a pas empêché Panem d’avoir sa propre guerre civile, qui a mené à la destruction (partielle) du treizième district et à la soumission brutale des autres. Dans le cycle de James Dasher, qui commence, du point de vue chronologique, avec le quatrième roman, The Kill Order, la Terre est ravagée par des éruptions solaires qui brûlent et font mourir la moitié de la population. Pire encore, le gouvernement lance un virus du cerveau, « The Flare », qui, au lieu de permettre le contrôle des individus, provoque la folie et menace le reste de l’humanité. Dans Aeon Flux, c’est toujours un virus, créé artificiellement, qui est responsable, en 2011, de la mort de 99% de la population du globe, à l’exception des rescapés de la cité enclave de Bregna.

            Parfois, même si les apocalypses n’auront pas annihilé l’humanité dans son ensemble, elles auront suffi pour amener le gouvernement (des États-Unis) à prendre des mesures radicales. Lois Lowry, dans son cycle The Giver, préconise un avenir où la planète aura été ravagée par des guerres, luttes intestines, violences, famines et autres désastres dus aux défauts de l’être humain, de sorte que l’État survivant aura construit des communautés isolées afin d’expérimenter une rééducation et un changement de cette nature humaine même. De même, dans le cycle Divergent, Veronica Roth voit la cité de Chicago, dévastée par « The Purity War » (à la suite d’expérimentations génétiques désastreuses), comme une enclave isolée par le gouvernement pour explorer la possibilité de stimuler par une politique des castes les qualités morales des individus.

            À l’instar de toutes les utopies, les sociétés humaines de ces œuvres sont attentivement séparées du reste du monde (supposé disparu) et de la nature en général (considérée infestée et toxique). La Cité d’Ambre se cache dans les profondeurs de la terre, pour éviter la contamination avec les germes de la surface. Tout Panem de Hunger Games semble isolé dans des vallons des Monts Appalachiens, alors que ses districts sont délimités par des barbelés pour en empêcher la sortie. Chicago en ruines du cycle Divergent est entourée de palissades futuristes qui le réduisent à une sorte de camp d’expérimentation. Bregna d’Aeon Flux est séparée du monde extérieur par un grand mur aseptique, censé bloquer l’accès des virus, mais aussi d’empêcher l’évasion des individus. Les Communautés de The Giver sont construites sur un grand plateau montagneux, difficilement accessible, entouré de déserts de sable et de neiges, et finalement d’un écran énergétique qui bloque la mémoire des habitants. Quant au cycle de Maze Runner, les groupes qui ont encore le contrôle de leur destin, comme le WICKED, sont protégés militairement, dans des casemates, alors que le reste des survivants fouinent dans les ruines des anciennes villes et les déserts créés par les radiations solaires.

            Néanmoins, à l’exception de la tétralogie de James Dashner, dans les autres cycles la Nature semble, à la différence de la civilisation humaine, avoir survécu aux cataclysmes ou être finalement revenue à son état normal. Katniss Everdeen et Gale Hawthorne de Hunger Games se faufilent souvent hors de leur très pauvre District 12 pour se procurer de la nourriture en chassant ou en cueillant des fruits, mais aussi pour se retrouver eux-mêmes au milieu de la nature. L’espace naturel situé en dehors des communautés emmurées de Divergent, Aeon Flux ou The Giver, bien que déclaré invivable et létal par les leaders qui font des expérimentations sur ces groupes humains, s’avère bénin, riche, charmant. Quant à Lina et Doon, les deux fugitifs de la Cité d’Ambre, pour eux le monde de la surface, solaire, fécond et sain, est une véritable Terre Promise où ils conduiront le reste des survivants prisonniers dans les entrailles terrestres.

            La nature aura donc survécu aux désastres provoqués par l’homme (ce n’est que dans Maze Runner qu’une catastrophe naturelle se combine avec un désastre artificiel pour anéantir autant le milieu naturel que l’humanité) et les communautés isolées apparaissent plutôt comme les dernières survivantes de ce mal généralisé qu’est l’humanité elle-même. Pour sortir du cycle de la destruction, il faut que ces noyaux malins se rouvrent vers l’extérieur, qu’ils se laissent et se fassent soigner par la Mère Nature. La sortie de la demeure souterraine est l’unique solution de survie pour la population en pleine décrépitude de la Ville d’ambre. La destruction de la muraille qui entoure Bregna et la reprise du contact avec la nature extérieure sont la garantie que l’humanité d’Aeon Flux récupérera sa capacité de reproduction naturelle. La percée du mur d’ondes psychiques qui entourent les communautés de The Giver refait non seulement la liaison des individus avec le monde extérieur, mais aussi avec la nature intérieure de l’homme (ses sensations, ses souvenirs, ses sentiments, etc.).

            Ce rapport axiologique entre l’intérieur et l’extérieur va à l’encontre de la distribution qui caractérise l’utopie classique. Les défenses terrifiantes, naturelles et artificielles, qui entourent la majorité des cités idéales ne sont plus censées protéger l’Utopie face à la barbarie, la violence et la monstruosité qui grouillent à l’extérieur, sinon empêcher les citoyens à fuir la cité prison où ils ont été claustrés par la catastrophe globale, ou, pire encore, où ils sont les sujets d’une quelconque expérimentation perverse. Sur le schéma polaire du genre utopique, les textes et les films dont nous traitons ici suivent la distribution des toutes les contre-utopies, en attribuant le bien à un passé pré-apocalyptique perdu et regretté, et le mal à un présent post-apocalyptique rendu encore pire par les survivants eux-mêmes. Ce que la caractérisation d’« antiutopie critique » rajoute à cette structure c’est la possibilité que les citoyens de la « Cité du mal » puissent en sortir ou même la détruire. Le futur sans horizon des protagonistes des antiutopies modernes (Zamiatine, Orwell, Bradbury, etc.) fait place à l’espérance que les communautés des survivants pourront revenir à un état des choses d’avant le moment où la civilisation s’est détruite elle-même, par l’intermédiaire de ses propres inventions et de son progrès technologique.

            Car ce sont bien les innovations scientifiques qui ont provoqué les apocalypses de tous ces textes et films. Dans les enclaves des survivants, ont voit à l’œuvre des machines et des artefacts qui font partie de l’arsenal de la science-fiction. Par contraste soit avec les anciennes villes de gratte-ciels en ruines, soit avec les paysages désertifiés, ou encore avec la nouvelle nature triomphante, les communautés disposent d’appareils et de techniques parfois dignes d’une civilisation future développée et resplendissante. Les innovations les plus modestes se retrouvent peut-être The City of Ember, ville souterraine qui commence à ressembler, dans sa déchéance, avec les cités dévastées de la surface. Toutefois, la technologie nécessaire pour concevoir et maintenir, pendant plus de deux cent ans, un monde souterrain, avec sa source d’énergie, est le signe d’une avancée scientifique dont les Constructeurs (« Builders ») avaient su en tirer profit.

            Par contraste avec l’état misérable, dégénéré et humble des simples survivants, les groupes, les castes ou les cliques dominantes de tous les autres récits détiennent des ressources scientifiques et technologiques qui n’ont rien à envier aux romans d’anticipation optimiste. Ils possèdent tous des techniques de manipulation génétique, qui leur permettent de se reconstruire physiquement (The Hunger Games), de se cloner et de vivre ainsi éternellement (Aeon Flux), de créer par sélection des « Immunes » (The Maze Runner) ou de créer des individus ayant des qualités standardisées, en utilisant des gènes spécialisés (Divergent, The Giver).

            L’organisation WICKED (World In Catastrophe: Killzone Experiment Department) de The Maze Runner dispose de moyens pour construire de gigantesques labyrinthes dont les pièces mobiles sont peuplées de monstres biotechnologiques (« Grievers »). Les « Érudits » de la série Divergent ont en leur possession, pour tester les individus, des sérums capables de susciter des simulations mentales complexes, des « épreuves » tellement vraies qu’elles peuvent provoquer la mort. Les concepteurs  des « jeux de la faim » utilisent des dispositifs électroniques et des champs énergétiques à même de projeter et de matérialiser des décors complets (comme l’Arène où se déroulent les jeux mortels), avec des monstres tels les « mutts », des mutants issus des bêtes et des joueurs morts. Dans le cycle The Giver, si la technique dont disposent les « communautés » est minimale (rappelant la simplicité voulue des toutes les (e)utopies phalanstériennes et physiocrates), en revanche le technologie utilisée par le gouvernement pour créer des enclaves expérimentales est suffisamment complexe pour pouvoir contrôler (lobotomiser) la psyché des individus par des champs de force.

            Si toutes ces communautés sont des enclaves de survivants après des catastrophes globales, certaines ont aussi le rôle de « laboratoires d’expérimentation ». Des gouvernements ou des élites secrètes ont construit ces « pièges à rats », le plus souvent avec les meilleures intentions, à savoir le désir non seulement de conserver la race humaine en voie d’extinction (The City of Ember, Aeon Flux), mais de l’améliorer par des sélections et des mutations génétiques capables de la préserver de futures apocalypses. Et si, dans les utopies, de telles procédures puissent faire évoluer et progresser l’humanité, dans les antiutopies elles mènent à des déviations monstrueuses et à des échecs patents.

            Ces récits réussissent une « mise en abyme » du mécanisme intime de toute pensée utopique : la construction imaginaire d’un espace où l’utopiste puisse faire des « expériences de pensée » sur la société. Il s’agit de démonstrations par l’absurde : les auteurs partent d’hypothèses ou de propositions apparemment positives et les mettent en œuvre, pour voir ce qui advient du groupe cible. L’intention des « expérimentateurs » est d’habitude de séparer les traits positifs des traits négatifs de la nature humaine, de rendre plus forts les premiers et de faire disparaître les seconds. Mais si dans les utopies la procédure débouche sur des résultats bénéfiques, dans les antiutopies elle mène à la détérioration et à l’annihilation de l’être humain. Les antiutopistes font le procès de la procédure même de sélection et d’extrapolation utopique et démontrent qu’elle est anti-humaniste.

            Ainsi, dans le cycle The Maze Runner, les savants de WICKED soumettent-ils des jeunes aux épreuves d’un labyrinthe létal pour en faire émerger les individus immuns au virus « Flaire ». L’expérience suppose la suppression de la mémoire des « cobayes », pour qu’aucun savoir antérieur n’interfère avec les épreuves ; il est moins évident cependant comment les périls presque insurmontables, appartenant plutôt à un jeu de massacre sadique, puissent vraiment stimuler les traits immunitaires nécessaires pour trouver le « remède » de la maladie. De sorte que la formule « Wicked is good », inoculée à maintes reprises aux protagonistes, est un oxymoron spécifique de toute vision prétendue utopique qui se manifeste de façon antiutopique.

            Dans le cycle Divergent, un gouvernement central invisible a divisé la communauté qui survit dans un Chicago post-apocalyptique en cinq factions, en vue d’expérimentations sur les traits de caractère nécessaires afin de réformer la nature humaine et en extirper la propension à la violence et à la guerre. Les cinq vertus sont l’Abnégation, l’Amitié, la Candeur, la Bravoure et l’Érudition ; à la fin de l’adolescence, tous les jeunes sont testés par des simulations mentales et distribués à la faction qui leur correspond le mieux. Ceux dont la vocation n’est pas évidente deviennent des « sans faction », des parias, alors que ceux à multi-vocation sont traités de « divergents » et éliminés de la société. Veronica Roth y reprend en quelque sorte l’expérimentation utopique de Platon, qui divisait déjà l’État idéal en une hiérarchie des classes représentant les facultés mentales dominantes : les rois et les prêtres – l’intellect (le nous), les guerriers – la volonté (le thymos), les travailleurs – les appétits et besoins du corps (l’epithymia). Apparemment, par la sélection génétique des traits positifs de la nature humaine, extrapolés dans des classes sociales, les tensions et les conflits qui ont mené à la quasi destruction de la race humaine devraient disparaître.

            Or, voilà qu’au lieu d’instaurer un régime de l’harmonie et de la paix, la communauté de Chicago non seulement rejette et persécute les anomiques, mais échoue dans une conflagration intestine quand les Érudits, manipulant par des implants cérébraux les Braves, exterminent la faction de l’Abnégation et en viennent à soumettre les deux autres. Veronica Roth semble faire une « expérience de pensée » sur les relations entre les facultés de l’âme, un test qui montre que l’intellect risque d’être pris en possession par l’orgueil, que la bravoure est souvent aveugle et manipulable, que l’abnégation, l’amitié et la candeur sont passives, naïves et incapables de réagir. Malgré ce que pensent des chefs de factions comme Jeanine, ce n’est pas l’exclusion des « gènes mauvais » et la pureté des types de personnalité qui peuvent assurer la survie, puisque ces typologies finissent par se concurrencer, mais le mélange et la cohabitation des facultés. Béatrice (Tris), la protagoniste, en tant que « divergente » à 100%, s’avère être la personnalité totale recherchée par les auteurs de l’« expérience Chicago » comme solution pour la race humaine.

            L’expérience la plus radicale pour purifier et améliorer la race humaine est peut-être celle de la série The Giver. La communauté du roman a l’aspect d’une utopie. Isolée soigneusement sur une plateforme montagneuse, avec un climat contrôlé, sans froid ou chaleur excessifs, neige, tempêtes ou canicules, elle pratique les vertus que toute éthique utopique propose pour une société parfaite. Les biens appartiennent en totalité à la communauté, de manière qu’il n’y ait pas de concurrence, envie, haine, violence. Chaque citoyen se dédie à son travail, sans commentaires ou défaillances. Les miroirs sont interdits pour éviter le narcissisme et l’égoïsme. Le « Livre des règles » de conduite est suivi aveuglement, les transgressions ne sont que des accidents mineurs, punis par des excuses publiques et des réprimandes polies. Ceux qui ne désirent toutefois pas se soumettre au régime de vie communautaire sont « libérés », c’est-à-dire exclus et envoyés vivre « autre part » (« Elsewhere »).

            Quoique les membres de la communauté n’en soient pas conscients, le lecteur comprend bien vite que la société présentée comme idéale comporte des malformations et des dysfonctionnements. Les vêtements sont réduits à des uniformes, la tonsure est standardisée pour les hommes et les femmes, les noms sont limités à un stock récurrent (le même nom est ré-attribué à la disparition du porteur précédent), les dissemblances entre les individus dues aux yeux, à la stature, au sexe, au tempérament sont passées sous silence. Les couples sont planifiés en fonction des besoins publics, les familles sont limitées à deux enfants, un garçon et une fille, les enfants sont conçus dans des chambres incubatrices et les surnuméraires sont « libérés ». Le monde de Lois Lowry a mis en pratique l’ancien principe des utopies égalitaires : l’uniformisation. L’idéal commun est la « Sameness » : tous les individus ont été manipulés génétiquement pour que les différences entre eux soient réduites aux maximum[3].

            En fait, la manipulation de la race perpétrée sur la Communauté de The Giver s’avère bien plus monstrueuse. La libération, découvre Jonas, le héros du roman, ne signifie pas départ ou exil, mais simplement mise à mort. À cette nuance près que ni ceux qui la mettent en pratique ni le reste des citoyens, ne sont capables d’en comprendre la signification. La Communauté a été soumise à une lobotomisation, tous se comportent comme des schizophrènes incapables de saisir la dimension réelle des évènements. Dopés chaque jour depuis la naissance, ils n’ont pas d’émotions, ils n’ont pas de mémoire collective du passé, ils ont perdu jusqu’aux sens des couleurs, des goûts, du froid et du chaud.

            La communauté imaginée par Lois Lowry met en pratique, dans une sorte de laboratoire social clos, l’expérimentation utopique à l’état pur. Si la race humaine est, de par sa nature, féroce et destructrice, il faut extirper, par le contrôle génétique, l’eugénisme et l’éducation dirigée, toutes ses pulsions primitives, « animales », les instincts, les sensations, les rêves, les souvenirs, les sentiments. Ce qui en résulte est une humanité aseptisée, décérébrée. Le prix à payer pour l’éradication de la violence, de la souffrance, de la guerre, pour la sécurité et l’harmonie collective, est la déshumanisation. Souffrant d’un orgueil démiurgique malsain, les projets utopiques mélioratifs ne font que détruire la complexité naturelle de l’individu, sa spontanéité, sa joie de vivre, son humanité même. Réduit à l’extrême du bien moral, privé du choix et du libre arbitre, le sujet de l’utopie devient une marionnette, un automate.

            Une situation plus spéciale est celle de The Hunger Games. Dans la série de Suzanne Collins, les douze districts de Panem sont obligés, depuis la rébellion d’il y a 75 ans qui a mené à la destruction du treizième district, d’envoyer, en guise de « tribut », un jeune homme et une jeune fille entre 12 et 18 ans participer aux « jeux de la faim » du Capitole. Les jeunes sont transformés en une sorte de gladiateurs postmodernes, des condamnés à mort, dans une nouvelle Rome qui met en pratique, par son président Snow, le principe machiavélique « panem et circenses », le contrôle par le pain et le cirque. Néanmoins, en dépit des autres renvois onomastiques au latin et à l’Empire romain (Cato, Cinna, Sénèque, etc.), le pattern qui sous-tend la série est celui du mythe de la Crète minoenne qui, afin de punir Athènes « l’ancienne », l’obligeait à envoyer des jeunes pour être sacrifiés au Minotaure du Labyrinthe. Dans le futur dystopique de Suzanne Collins, le progrès des sciences et des inventions a été accompagné d’une croissance exponentielle des différences entre les riches du Capitole, menant un vie de splendeur décadente, et les pauvres des districts, réduits à la famine et à l’esclavage.

            Les futurs post-apocalyptiques décrits par ces séries sont des plus déprimants. Ce qui sépare néanmoins ces fictions contemporaines des antiutopies du XX^e siècle est leur optimisme sous-jacent, qui les transforme justement en des « antiutopies critiques ». À la différence de Zamiatine, Huxley, Orwell ou Bradbury, qui n’envisagent aucune solution pour abolir les sociétés dysphoriques, DuPrau, Lowry, Collins, Roth ou Dashner entrouvrent une voie de sortie du cauchemar et de rédemption des communautés totalitaires. De ce fait, leurs récits sont beaucoup plus dynamiques : au statisme de la description spécifiquement (anti)utopique ils opposent les récits des aventures par lesquelles les protagonistes arrivent à démembrer les systèmes en place.

            Le rôle de rédempteurs revient aux jeunes, les romans et les films de ce sous-genre ciblant le public des adolescents (« teen-agers », « young adults »). Les commentateurs n’ont pas manqué d’observer que les antiutopies critiques pour jeunes comme The Giver, The Hunger Games ou  Divergent explorent les anxiétés de l’adolescence : changement du groupe d’âge, séparation des parents et de la famille, déterritorialisation (« losing a sense of localized home identity »), choix d’un parcours éducatif et d’un métier futur, prise en main de son propre destin, remplacement des copains d’enfance avec de nouvelles catégories d’amis, pression des traditions héritées et de l’opinion publique, intégration dans et / ou confrontation avec un nouveau milieu social et professionnel, etc.[4] 

            De ce fait, les récits rejoignent, parfois à l’insu des auteurs, les scénarios des « rites de passage », plus exactement, la classe de ce que Arnold Van Gennep définit comme des « rites d’initiation ». L’atteinte de l’âge de la puberté, tant physiologique que sociale, était marquée dans les sociétés traditionnelles par l’initiation dans une nouvelle classe d’âge et dans divers types de confréries : magiques, religieuses, secrètes, de caste, de classe sociale ou de profession, etc.[5] Or, dans la plupart des séries envisagées ici, les systèmes centraux ont créé des cérémonies d’entrée dans l’une des divisions sociales, professionnelles ou morales de la société respective : à douze ans, Jonas et ses collègues de The Giver reçoivent la nomination pour une des professions pratiquées dans la Communauté ; de même, Lina et Doon de City of Ember sont assignés au travail pour lequel ils semblent les mieux préparés ; Tris et ses compagnons d’âge de Divergent doivent choisir, après un test mental, entre les cinq factions psychologiques de Chicago ; entre 12 et 18 ans, les jeunes des douze districts de Panem sont tirés aux sorts pour participer aux Hunger Games ; de même, les savants de WICKED choisissent leurs cobayes humains parmi les adolescents, pour les jeter, après avoir annihilé leur mémoire, dans des labyrinthes artificiels.

            Partant de The Maze Runner, on pourrait caractériser le schéma rituel de tous ces récits par ce que Mircea Eliade appelle « l’épreuve du labyrinthe [6]». Les jeunes athéniens étaient envoyés au labyrinthe de Cnossos pour être sacrifiés au Minotaure ; en survivant à l’épreuve et en tuant le monstre, Thésée est devenu le sauveur d’Athènes. Chez James Dashner, en échappant aux épreuves du Labyrinthe (« the Maze ») et puis de la Terre calcinée (« Scorched Earth »), Thomas et les autres « Gladers » démontrent qu’ils ont les gènes nécessaires pour permettre la fabrication du « remède » et sauver ainsi l’humanité restante. De même, Katniss Everdeen sort indemne, deux éditions à la suite, des labyrinthes artificiels conçus par les ingénieurs des « jeux de la faim » et, à la tête de la révolte des districts, finit par provoquer la mort du « Minotaure » du Capitole, le président Snow. À leur tour, Lina et Doon réussissent à trouver une sortie des souterrains où est construite la « Ville d’ambre » et, jouant sur une image figurale du mythe platonicien de la caverne, retrouvent la lumière et rendent à leur communauté en train de dépérir l’occasion de revenir à la surface et à la vie.

            Dans les autres séries, les labyrinthes sont présents aussi, bien que de manière plutôt métaphorique que littérale. Les communautés de The Giver, Divergent et Aeon Flux sont isolées par des murs impénétrables du monde extérieur. Mais, à la différence des défenses des cités idéales, censées protéger Utopia de l’assaut de l’extérieur, dans ces antiutopies les murailles sont destinées à empêcher la fuite des citoyens, à les contenir par la force dans une société cœrcitive. C’est en trouvant le « fil d’Ariadne » que les jeunes héros défont le système et sauvent leurs semblables du monde clos où ils sont soumis à des expériences inhumaines. Le labyrinthe symbolise la société ou la communauté post-apocalyptique pour laquelle les antiutopistes critiques pensent avoir trouvé le salut.

            Ces récits ne narrent plus le voyage initiatique dangereux certes, mais réconfortant, que des voyageurs utopiques devaient entreprendre pour rejoindre un « point suprême » de la mappemonde, sinon le trajet que des individus révoltés contre l’ordre régnant doivent suivre pour anéantir ces régimes et libérer ses captifs. Il s’agit d’un trajet initiatique inverse : les jeunes héros se trouvent déjà dans le labyrinthe (le monde futur post-apocalyptique), ils doivent le parcourir jusqu’à son centre de ténèbres pour conjurer le monstre, pour vaincre le mal et ouvrir ainsi la prison de la topie négative.

            L’épreuve du labyrinthe rend possible l’avènement d’un espoir, la découverte d’une solution qui mette fin au règne de la destruction. C’est comme si, au cœur de la détresse et de la mort, se trouvait le germe de la renaissance et de la vie. Lina et Doon retrouvent la valise perdue qui contient les instructions pour sortir de la cité engloutie, le « grain » d’information qui permette à l’humanité d’« éclore » à nouveau. Tris, de Divergent, Insurgent et Allegiant, passe les épreuves de la division de la société en des factions sur des critères psychiques et moraux et, démontrant qu’elle est une « divergente » qui possède les qualités de toutes les typologies, elle ouvre littéralement la « boîte à tests » par laquelle le gouvernement central annonce la fin de l’expérimentation menée à Chicago. Défaisant le complot d’Oren Goodchild et détruisant le « Relical », le dirigeable contenant les échantillons d’ADN à partir desquels sont clonés les citoyens de Bregna, Aeon Flux arrête le cycle des clones et redonne une chance à l’humanité survivante de se reproduire par voie naturelle ; c’est le dirigeable lui-même qui, dans sa chute, détruit le mur qui isolait la communauté aseptique de l’intérieur, de la nature exubérante de l’extérieur.

            Finalement, dans le cycle The Giver, en s’enfuyant de la Communauté et en brisant le mur d’énergie psychique qui maintenait les individus dans un état de privation sensorielle et mnésique, Jonas rend à ses semblables l’accès aux sensations et aux sentiments perdus, aux souvenirs du passé et au sens de la vie. Il met fin à une expérimentation qui se proposait de protéger l’humanité des désastres de la violence et de la guerre en annihilant l’instinct de vie lui-même. Il met fin à une utopie monstrueuse, qui soumet ses sujets à une mancurtisation psychique. L’épreuve du labyrinthe, menée à bon terme par les jeunes protagonistes de ces séries de romans et de films, signifie justement la voie de salut pour les communautés post-apocalyptiques, la sortie de l’antiutopie.

This work was supported by Romanian National Authority for Scientific Research within the Exploratory Research Project PN-II-ID-PCE-2011-3-0061.

Bibliographie

Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games, New York, Scholastic Press, 2008.

Suzanne Collins, Catching fire, New York, Scholastic Press, 2009.

Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay, New York, Scholastic Press, 2010.

James Dashner, The Maze Runner, New York, Delacorte Press, 2009.

James Dashner, The Scorch Trials, New York, Delacorte Press, 2010.

James Dashner, The Death Cure, New York, Delacorte Press, 2011.

James Dashner, The Kill Order, New York, Delacorte Press, 2012.

Jeanne DuPrau, The City of Ember, New York, Random House, 2003.

Jeanne DuPrau, The People of Sparks, New York, Random House, 2004.

Jeanne DuPrau, The Prophet of Yonwood, New York, Random House, 2006.

Jeanne DuPrau, The Diamond of Darkhold, New York, Random House, 2008.

Lois Lowry, The Giver, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1993.

Lois Lowry, Messenger, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 2004.

Lois Lowry, Son, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 2012.

Veronica Roth, Divergent, New York, Katherine Tegen Books, 2011.

Veronica Roth, Insurgent, New York, Katherine Tegen Books, 2012.

Veronica Roth, Allegiant, New York, Katherine Tegen Books, an imprint of Harper Collins Publishers, 2013.

Notes

Corin Braga
Universitatea Babeş-Bolyai, Cluj-Napoca, Roumanie
CorinBraga@yahoo.com

Antiutopies critiques post-apocalyptiques /

Post-Apocalyptic Critical Dystopias

Abstract: Contemporary series of books and movies for teenagers and young adults, such as The Giver by Lois Lowry, The City of Ember by Jeanne duPrau, The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, The Maze Runner by James Dashner, Divergent by Veronica Roth or Aeon Flux, imagine a dystopian future in which small communities of survivors from a global (artificial) catastrophe are subject to monstrous genetic, social and mental experiments. Conceived on the pattern of the ancient myth of the Minotaur in Crete, they present the trials that young heroes have to pass in order to survive. The labyrinth is a metaphor for the future dystopian societies; survival from its ordeal, as well as the destruction of the occlusive system, offer a new hope for these “critical dystopias.”

Keywords: Critical Dystopias; Post-apocalyptic Societies; “Maze Ordeal”; The Giver; The City of Ember; The Hunger Games; The Maze Runner; Divergent; Aeon Flux.

            Après la marée antiutopique (« the dystopian tide ») du XX^e siècle (Zamiatine, Orwell, Huxley, Bradbury, etc.), plusieurs espèces utopiques plus ambiguës, comme les utopies critiques et les antiutopies critiques, ont provoqué une sorte de reflux du défaitisme général. Ce que les commentateurs anglo-saxons appellent des « critical dystopias » se proposent de « negotiate the necessary pessimism of the generic dystopia with a militant or utopian stance that not only breaks through the hegemonic enclosure of the text’s alternative world but also self-reflexively refuses the anti-utopian temptation that lingers in every dystopian account[1] ». Ces auteurs « critiques » re-introduisent le « principe d’espérance » dans les visions tourmentées des contre-utopistes, laissant entrevoir la possibilité que la société totalitaire et cauchemardesque, qui a séquestré le futur de l’humanité, soit à son tour abolie. Ou, selon les commentaires de Raffaella Baccolini et de Tom Moylan, si les antiutopies modernistes canoniques procèdent à une forclusion de l’espoir de leurs univers imaginaires, les antiutopies critiques contemporaines (postmodernes ?) acceptent le retour d’un espoir de rédemption autant chez leurs personnages que chez leurs lecteurs[2].

            Dans ce travail, nous nous occuperons d’un corpus d’antiutopies critiques, appartenant à ces dernières décennies, qui assument l’inévitabilité d’une catastrophe future et se placent, donc, dans un avenir post-apocalyptique, tout en envisageant une chance de salut pour l’humanité survivante. Grâce à leur succès de librairie, la majorité de ces livres ont été continués dans des séries thématiques : le tétralogie de Lois Lowry The Giver (1993), Gathering Blue (2000), Messenger (2004) et Son (2012) ; la tétralogie de Jeanne DuPrau The City of Ember (2003), The People of Sparks (2004), The Prophet of Yonwood (2006) et The Diamond of Darkhold (2008), la trilogie de Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games (2008), Catching Fire (2009) et Mockingjay (2010), la tétralogie de James Dashner, The Maze Runner (2009), The Scorch Trials (2010), The Death Cure (2011) et The Kill Order (2012), et la trilogie de Veronica Roth, Divergent (2011), Insurgent (2012) et Allegiant (2013).

            Aussi, en accord avec la stratégie des médias actuels et des producteurs de Hollywood, de grandes compagnies cinématographiques ont acheté les droits de ces romans pour en tirer des films et faire « recette ». The Giver a été produit en 2014 par Walden Media, de même que The City of Ember en 2008 ; Color Force et Lionsgate ont porté à l’écran The Hunger Games (2012), Catching Fire (2013) et Mockingjay (divisé en deux parties : 2014 et 2015) ; 20^th Century Fox a abordé la série de The Maze Runner (2014), The Scorch Trials (2015), The Death Cure (annoncé pour 2017) ; alors que Summit Entertainment a adapté à l’écran Divergent (2014), Insurgent (2015) et Allegiant (annoncé pour 2016). À ce corpus de films nous ajouterons Aeon Flux, produit par Paramount Pictures en 2005 à partir non d’un livre, mais d’une série télévisée de dessins animés créée par Peter Chung.

            La stratégie de vente et de diffusion de ces livres et de ces films cible un public spécifique, les adolescents (« young adults »). De ce fait, un pattern, sinon un stéréotype, peut y être identifié, celui des rites de passage et d’initiation. Les auteurs et les directeurs de film explorent les inquiétudes et les problèmes d’intégration des jeunes dans la société contemporaine et imaginent des scénarios plus ou moins héroïques, voire archétypaux, pour offrir des « corrélatifs artistiques » et des solutions symboliques à ces angoisses liminales souvent non-verbalisées. Afin de mieux mettre en relief les conflits psychologiques et sociaux des jeunes, ils projettent les aventures dans un « décor mythique », repris aux genres de l’(anti)utopie et des apocalypses contemporaines. Les difficultés de mûrir deviennent ainsi des épreuves initiatiques qui se vivent dans des univers périlleux et terrifiants. De l’échec ou de la réussite des héros dépendra non seulement leur destin, mais aussi l’avenir de ces sociétés au bord du gouffre.

            En règle générale, tous ces romans et leurs adaptations cinématographiques sont placés dans un futur post-apocalyptique, après une catastrophe naturelle ou artificielle qui a quasiment anéanti la civilisation humaine. Jeanne DuPrau imagine dans City of Ember et ses suites qu’une hécatombe de nature non précisée (arme biologique, virus létal ?) aura exterminé l’humanité, à l’exception d’une cité construite sous la terre. Pour éviter les traumatismes psychologiques, les survivants ont été laissés par les Constructeurs dans l’ignorance du monde du dehors et de la catastrophe qui l’a détruit. Une valise sigillée a été transmise en héritage au maire de la « ville d’ambre » pour qu’on l’ouvre dans deux cents ans, quand les effets nocifs de la catastrophe auront disparu ; la valise contient des indications sur la voie de retour à la surface.

            Dans The Hunger Games, les États-Unis auront été réduits, après un cataclysme global, à une communauté située quelque part dans les Monts Appalachiens (ou peut-être dans les Rocky Mountains), composée d’une capitale et treize provinces fonctionnant comme des succursales de la métropole. La condition d’îlot de survivants de l’humanité n’a pas empêché Panem d’avoir sa propre guerre civile, qui a mené à la destruction (partielle) du treizième district et à la soumission brutale des autres. Dans le cycle de James Dasher, qui commence, du point de vue chronologique, avec le quatrième roman, The Kill Order, la Terre est ravagée par des éruptions solaires qui brûlent et font mourir la moitié de la population. Pire encore, le gouvernement lance un virus du cerveau, « The Flare », qui, au lieu de permettre le contrôle des individus, provoque la folie et menace le reste de l’humanité. Dans Aeon Flux, c’est toujours un virus, créé artificiellement, qui est responsable, en 2011, de la mort de 99% de la population du globe, à l’exception des rescapés de la cité enclave de Bregna.

            Parfois, même si les apocalypses n’auront pas annihilé l’humanité dans son ensemble, elles auront suffi pour amener le gouvernement (des États-Unis) à prendre des mesures radicales. Lois Lowry, dans son cycle The Giver, préconise un avenir où la planète aura été ravagée par des guerres, luttes intestines, violences, famines et autres désastres dus aux défauts de l’être humain, de sorte que l’État survivant aura construit des communautés isolées afin d’expérimenter une rééducation et un changement de cette nature humaine même. De même, dans le cycle Divergent, Veronica Roth voit la cité de Chicago, dévastée par « The Purity War » (à la suite d’expérimentations génétiques désastreuses), comme une enclave isolée par le gouvernement pour explorer la possibilité de stimuler par une politique des castes les qualités morales des individus.

            À l’instar de toutes les utopies, les sociétés humaines de ces œuvres sont attentivement séparées du reste du monde (supposé disparu) et de la nature en général (considérée infestée et toxique). La Cité d’Ambre se cache dans les profondeurs de la terre, pour éviter la contamination avec les germes de la surface. Tout Panem de Hunger Games semble isolé dans des vallons des Monts Appalachiens, alors que ses districts sont délimités par des barbelés pour en empêcher la sortie. Chicago en ruines du cycle Divergent est entourée de palissades futuristes qui le réduisent à une sorte de camp d’expérimentation. Bregna d’Aeon Flux est séparée du monde extérieur par un grand mur aseptique, censé bloquer l’accès des virus, mais aussi d’empêcher l’évasion des individus. Les Communautés de The Giver sont construites sur un grand plateau montagneux, difficilement accessible, entouré de déserts de sable et de neiges, et finalement d’un écran énergétique qui bloque la mémoire des habitants. Quant au cycle de Maze Runner, les groupes qui ont encore le contrôle de leur destin, comme le WICKED, sont protégés militairement, dans des casemates, alors que le reste des survivants fouinent dans les ruines des anciennes villes et les déserts créés par les radiations solaires.

            Néanmoins, à l’exception de la tétralogie de James Dashner, dans les autres cycles la Nature semble, à la différence de la civilisation humaine, avoir survécu aux cataclysmes ou être finalement revenue à son état normal. Katniss Everdeen et Gale Hawthorne de Hunger Games se faufilent souvent hors de leur très pauvre District 12 pour se procurer de la nourriture en chassant ou en cueillant des fruits, mais aussi pour se retrouver eux-mêmes au milieu de la nature. L’espace naturel situé en dehors des communautés emmurées de Divergent, Aeon Flux ou The Giver, bien que déclaré invivable et létal par les leaders qui font des expérimentations sur ces groupes humains, s’avère bénin, riche, charmant. Quant à Lina et Doon, les deux fugitifs de la Cité d’Ambre, pour eux le monde de la surface, solaire, fécond et sain, est une véritable Terre Promise où ils conduiront le reste des survivants prisonniers dans les entrailles terrestres.

            La nature aura donc survécu aux désastres provoqués par l’homme (ce n’est que dans Maze Runner qu’une catastrophe naturelle se combine avec un désastre artificiel pour anéantir autant le milieu naturel que l’humanité) et les communautés isolées apparaissent plutôt comme les dernières survivantes de ce mal généralisé qu’est l’humanité elle-même. Pour sortir du cycle de la destruction, il faut que ces noyaux malins se rouvrent vers l’extérieur, qu’ils se laissent et se fassent soigner par la Mère Nature. La sortie de la demeure souterraine est l’unique solution de survie pour la population en pleine décrépitude de la Ville d’ambre. La destruction de la muraille qui entoure Bregna et la reprise du contact avec la nature extérieure sont la garantie que l’humanité d’Aeon Flux récupérera sa capacité de reproduction naturelle. La percée du mur d’ondes psychiques qui entourent les communautés de The Giver refait non seulement la liaison des individus avec le monde extérieur, mais aussi avec la nature intérieure de l’homme (ses sensations, ses souvenirs, ses sentiments, etc.).

            Ce rapport axiologique entre l’intérieur et l’extérieur va à l’encontre de la distribution qui caractérise l’utopie classique. Les défenses terrifiantes, naturelles et artificielles, qui entourent la majorité des cités idéales ne sont plus censées protéger l’Utopie face à la barbarie, la violence et la monstruosité qui grouillent à l’extérieur, sinon empêcher les citoyens à fuir la cité prison où ils ont été claustrés par la catastrophe globale, ou, pire encore, où ils sont les sujets d’une quelconque expérimentation perverse. Sur le schéma polaire du genre utopique, les textes et les films dont nous traitons ici suivent la distribution des toutes les contre-utopies, en attribuant le bien à un passé pré-apocalyptique perdu et regretté, et le mal à un présent post-apocalyptique rendu encore pire par les survivants eux-mêmes. Ce que la caractérisation d’« antiutopie critique » rajoute à cette structure c’est la possibilité que les citoyens de la « Cité du mal » puissent en sortir ou même la détruire. Le futur sans horizon des protagonistes des antiutopies modernes (Zamiatine, Orwell, Bradbury, etc.) fait place à l’espérance que les communautés des survivants pourront revenir à un état des choses d’avant le moment où la civilisation s’est détruite elle-même, par l’intermédiaire de ses propres inventions et de son progrès technologique.

            Car ce sont bien les innovations scientifiques qui ont provoqué les apocalypses de tous ces textes et films. Dans les enclaves des survivants, ont voit à l’œuvre des machines et des artefacts qui font partie de l’arsenal de la science-fiction. Par contraste soit avec les anciennes villes de gratte-ciels en ruines, soit avec les paysages désertifiés, ou encore avec la nouvelle nature triomphante, les communautés disposent d’appareils et de techniques parfois dignes d’une civilisation future développée et resplendissante. Les innovations les plus modestes se retrouvent peut-être The City of Ember, ville souterraine qui commence à ressembler, dans sa déchéance, avec les cités dévastées de la surface. Toutefois, la technologie nécessaire pour concevoir et maintenir, pendant plus de deux cent ans, un monde souterrain, avec sa source d’énergie, est le signe d’une avancée scientifique dont les Constructeurs (« Builders ») avaient su en tirer profit.

            Par contraste avec l’état misérable, dégénéré et humble des simples survivants, les groupes, les castes ou les cliques dominantes de tous les autres récits détiennent des ressources scientifiques et technologiques qui n’ont rien à envier aux romans d’anticipation optimiste. Ils possèdent tous des techniques de manipulation génétique, qui leur permettent de se reconstruire physiquement (The Hunger Games), de se cloner et de vivre ainsi éternellement (Aeon Flux), de créer par sélection des « Immunes » (The Maze Runner) ou de créer des individus ayant des qualités standardisées, en utilisant des gènes spécialisés (Divergent, The Giver).

            L’organisation WICKED (World In Catastrophe: Killzone Experiment Department) de The Maze Runner dispose de moyens pour construire de gigantesques labyrinthes dont les pièces mobiles sont peuplées de monstres biotechnologiques (« Grievers »). Les « Érudits » de la série Divergent ont en leur possession, pour tester les individus, des sérums capables de susciter des simulations mentales complexes, des « épreuves » tellement vraies qu’elles peuvent provoquer la mort. Les concepteurs  des « jeux de la faim » utilisent des dispositifs électroniques et des champs énergétiques à même de projeter et de matérialiser des décors complets (comme l’Arène où se déroulent les jeux mortels), avec des monstres tels les « mutts », des mutants issus des bêtes et des joueurs morts. Dans le cycle The Giver, si la technique dont disposent les « communautés » est minimale (rappelant la simplicité voulue des toutes les (e)utopies phalanstériennes et physiocrates), en revanche le technologie utilisée par le gouvernement pour créer des enclaves expérimentales est suffisamment complexe pour pouvoir contrôler (lobotomiser) la psyché des individus par des champs de force.

            Si toutes ces communautés sont des enclaves de survivants après des catastrophes globales, certaines ont aussi le rôle de « laboratoires d’expérimentation ». Des gouvernements ou des élites secrètes ont construit ces « pièges à rats », le plus souvent avec les meilleures intentions, à savoir le désir non seulement de conserver la race humaine en voie d’extinction (The City of Ember, Aeon Flux), mais de l’améliorer par des sélections et des mutations génétiques capables de la préserver de futures apocalypses. Et si, dans les utopies, de telles procédures puissent faire évoluer et progresser l’humanité, dans les antiutopies elles mènent à des déviations monstrueuses et à des échecs patents.

            Ces récits réussissent une « mise en abyme » du mécanisme intime de toute pensée utopique : la construction imaginaire d’un espace où l’utopiste puisse faire des « expériences de pensée » sur la société. Il s’agit de démonstrations par l’absurde : les auteurs partent d’hypothèses ou de propositions apparemment positives et les mettent en œuvre, pour voir ce qui advient du groupe cible. L’intention des « expérimentateurs » est d’habitude de séparer les traits positifs des traits négatifs de la nature humaine, de rendre plus forts les premiers et de faire disparaître les seconds. Mais si dans les utopies la procédure débouche sur des résultats bénéfiques, dans les antiutopies elle mène à la détérioration et à l’annihilation de l’être humain. Les antiutopistes font le procès de la procédure même de sélection et d’extrapolation utopique et démontrent qu’elle est anti-humaniste.

            Ainsi, dans le cycle The Maze Runner, les savants de WICKED soumettent-ils des jeunes aux épreuves d’un labyrinthe létal pour en faire émerger les individus immuns au virus « Flaire ». L’expérience suppose la suppression de la mémoire des « cobayes », pour qu’aucun savoir antérieur n’interfère avec les épreuves ; il est moins évident cependant comment les périls presque insurmontables, appartenant plutôt à un jeu de massacre sadique, puissent vraiment stimuler les traits immunitaires nécessaires pour trouver le « remède » de la maladie. De sorte que la formule « Wicked is good », inoculée à maintes reprises aux protagonistes, est un oxymoron spécifique de toute vision prétendue utopique qui se manifeste de façon antiutopique.

            Dans le cycle Divergent, un gouvernement central invisible a divisé la communauté qui survit dans un Chicago post-apocalyptique en cinq factions, en vue d’expérimentations sur les traits de caractère nécessaires afin de réformer la nature humaine et en extirper la propension à la violence et à la guerre. Les cinq vertus sont l’Abnégation, l’Amitié, la Candeur, la Bravoure et l’Érudition ; à la fin de l’adolescence, tous les jeunes sont testés par des simulations mentales et distribués à la faction qui leur correspond le mieux. Ceux dont la vocation n’est pas évidente deviennent des « sans faction », des parias, alors que ceux à multi-vocation sont traités de « divergents » et éliminés de la société. Veronica Roth y reprend en quelque sorte l’expérimentation utopique de Platon, qui divisait déjà l’État idéal en une hiérarchie des classes représentant les facultés mentales dominantes : les rois et les prêtres – l’intellect (le nous), les guerriers – la volonté (le thymos), les travailleurs – les appétits et besoins du corps (l’epithymia). Apparemment, par la sélection génétique des traits positifs de la nature humaine, extrapolés dans des classes sociales, les tensions et les conflits qui ont mené à la quasi destruction de la race humaine devraient disparaître.

            Or, voilà qu’au lieu d’instaurer un régime de l’harmonie et de la paix, la communauté de Chicago non seulement rejette et persécute les anomiques, mais échoue dans une conflagration intestine quand les Érudits, manipulant par des implants cérébraux les Braves, exterminent la faction de l’Abnégation et en viennent à soumettre les deux autres. Veronica Roth semble faire une « expérience de pensée » sur les relations entre les facultés de l’âme, un test qui montre que l’intellect risque d’être pris en possession par l’orgueil, que la bravoure est souvent aveugle et manipulable, que l’abnégation, l’amitié et la candeur sont passives, naïves et incapables de réagir. Malgré ce que pensent des chefs de factions comme Jeanine, ce n’est pas l’exclusion des « gènes mauvais » et la pureté des types de personnalité qui peuvent assurer la survie, puisque ces typologies finissent par se concurrencer, mais le mélange et la cohabitation des facultés. Béatrice (Tris), la protagoniste, en tant que « divergente » à 100%, s’avère être la personnalité totale recherchée par les auteurs de l’« expérience Chicago » comme solution pour la race humaine.

            L’expérience la plus radicale pour purifier et améliorer la race humaine est peut-être celle de la série The Giver. La communauté du roman a l’aspect d’une utopie. Isolée soigneusement sur une plateforme montagneuse, avec un climat contrôlé, sans froid ou chaleur excessifs, neige, tempêtes ou canicules, elle pratique les vertus que toute éthique utopique propose pour une société parfaite. Les biens appartiennent en totalité à la communauté, de manière qu’il n’y ait pas de concurrence, envie, haine, violence. Chaque citoyen se dédie à son travail, sans commentaires ou défaillances. Les miroirs sont interdits pour éviter le narcissisme et l’égoïsme. Le « Livre des règles » de conduite est suivi aveuglement, les transgressions ne sont que des accidents mineurs, punis par des excuses publiques et des réprimandes polies. Ceux qui ne désirent toutefois pas se soumettre au régime de vie communautaire sont « libérés », c’est-à-dire exclus et envoyés vivre « autre part » (« Elsewhere »).

            Quoique les membres de la communauté n’en soient pas conscients, le lecteur comprend bien vite que la société présentée comme idéale comporte des malformations et des dysfonctionnements. Les vêtements sont réduits à des uniformes, la tonsure est standardisée pour les hommes et les femmes, les noms sont limités à un stock récurrent (le même nom est ré-attribué à la disparition du porteur précédent), les dissemblances entre les individus dues aux yeux, à la stature, au sexe, au tempérament sont passées sous silence. Les couples sont planifiés en fonction des besoins publics, les familles sont limitées à deux enfants, un garçon et une fille, les enfants sont conçus dans des chambres incubatrices et les surnuméraires sont « libérés ». Le monde de Lois Lowry a mis en pratique l’ancien principe des utopies égalitaires : l’uniformisation. L’idéal commun est la « Sameness » : tous les individus ont été manipulés génétiquement pour que les différences entre eux soient réduites aux maximum[3].

            En fait, la manipulation de la race perpétrée sur la Communauté de The Giver s’avère bien plus monstrueuse. La libération, découvre Jonas, le héros du roman, ne signifie pas départ ou exil, mais simplement mise à mort. À cette nuance près que ni ceux qui la mettent en pratique ni le reste des citoyens, ne sont capables d’en comprendre la signification. La Communauté a été soumise à une lobotomisation, tous se comportent comme des schizophrènes incapables de saisir la dimension réelle des évènements. Dopés chaque jour depuis la naissance, ils n’ont pas d’émotions, ils n’ont pas de mémoire collective du passé, ils ont perdu jusqu’aux sens des couleurs, des goûts, du froid et du chaud.

            La communauté imaginée par Lois Lowry met en pratique, dans une sorte de laboratoire social clos, l’expérimentation utopique à l’état pur. Si la race humaine est, de par sa nature, féroce et destructrice, il faut extirper, par le contrôle génétique, l’eugénisme et l’éducation dirigée, toutes ses pulsions primitives, « animales », les instincts, les sensations, les rêves, les souvenirs, les sentiments. Ce qui en résulte est une humanité aseptisée, décérébrée. Le prix à payer pour l’éradication de la violence, de la souffrance, de la guerre, pour la sécurité et l’harmonie collective, est la déshumanisation. Souffrant d’un orgueil démiurgique malsain, les projets utopiques mélioratifs ne font que détruire la complexité naturelle de l’individu, sa spontanéité, sa joie de vivre, son humanité même. Réduit à l’extrême du bien moral, privé du choix et du libre arbitre, le sujet de l’utopie devient une marionnette, un automate.

            Une situation plus spéciale est celle de The Hunger Games. Dans la série de Suzanne Collins, les douze districts de Panem sont obligés, depuis la rébellion d’il y a 75 ans qui a mené à la destruction du treizième district, d’envoyer, en guise de « tribut », un jeune homme et une jeune fille entre 12 et 18 ans participer aux « jeux de la faim » du Capitole. Les jeunes sont transformés en une sorte de gladiateurs postmodernes, des condamnés à mort, dans une nouvelle Rome qui met en pratique, par son président Snow, le principe machiavélique « panem et circenses », le contrôle par le pain et le cirque. Néanmoins, en dépit des autres renvois onomastiques au latin et à l’Empire romain (Cato, Cinna, Sénèque, etc.), le pattern qui sous-tend la série est celui du mythe de la Crète minoenne qui, afin de punir Athènes « l’ancienne », l’obligeait à envoyer des jeunes pour être sacrifiés au Minotaure du Labyrinthe. Dans le futur dystopique de Suzanne Collins, le progrès des sciences et des inventions a été accompagné d’une croissance exponentielle des différences entre les riches du Capitole, menant un vie de splendeur décadente, et les pauvres des districts, réduits à la famine et à l’esclavage.

            Les futurs post-apocalyptiques décrits par ces séries sont des plus déprimants. Ce qui sépare néanmoins ces fictions contemporaines des antiutopies du XX^e siècle est leur optimisme sous-jacent, qui les transforme justement en des « antiutopies critiques ». À la différence de Zamiatine, Huxley, Orwell ou Bradbury, qui n’envisagent aucune solution pour abolir les sociétés dysphoriques, DuPrau, Lowry, Collins, Roth ou Dashner entrouvrent une voie de sortie du cauchemar et de rédemption des communautés totalitaires. De ce fait, leurs récits sont beaucoup plus dynamiques : au statisme de la description spécifiquement (anti)utopique ils opposent les récits des aventures par lesquelles les protagonistes arrivent à démembrer les systèmes en place.

            Le rôle de rédempteurs revient aux jeunes, les romans et les films de ce sous-genre ciblant le public des adolescents (« teen-agers », « young adults »). Les commentateurs n’ont pas manqué d’observer que les antiutopies critiques pour jeunes comme The Giver, The Hunger Games ou  Divergent explorent les anxiétés de l’adolescence : changement du groupe d’âge, séparation des parents et de la famille, déterritorialisation (« losing a sense of localized home identity »), choix d’un parcours éducatif et d’un métier futur, prise en main de son propre destin, remplacement des copains d’enfance avec de nouvelles catégories d’amis, pression des traditions héritées et de l’opinion publique, intégration dans et / ou confrontation avec un nouveau milieu social et professionnel, etc.[4] 

            De ce fait, les récits rejoignent, parfois à l’insu des auteurs, les scénarios des « rites de passage », plus exactement, la classe de ce que Arnold Van Gennep définit comme des « rites d’initiation ». L’atteinte de l’âge de la puberté, tant physiologique que sociale, était marquée dans les sociétés traditionnelles par l’initiation dans une nouvelle classe d’âge et dans divers types de confréries : magiques, religieuses, secrètes, de caste, de classe sociale ou de profession, etc.[5] Or, dans la plupart des séries envisagées ici, les systèmes centraux ont créé des cérémonies d’entrée dans l’une des divisions sociales, professionnelles ou morales de la société respective : à douze ans, Jonas et ses collègues de The Giver reçoivent la nomination pour une des professions pratiquées dans la Communauté ; de même, Lina et Doon de City of Ember sont assignés au travail pour lequel ils semblent les mieux préparés ; Tris et ses compagnons d’âge de Divergent doivent choisir, après un test mental, entre les cinq factions psychologiques de Chicago ; entre 12 et 18 ans, les jeunes des douze districts de Panem sont tirés aux sorts pour participer aux Hunger Games ; de même, les savants de WICKED choisissent leurs cobayes humains parmi les adolescents, pour les jeter, après avoir annihilé leur mémoire, dans des labyrinthes artificiels.

            Partant de The Maze Runner, on pourrait caractériser le schéma rituel de tous ces récits par ce que Mircea Eliade appelle « l’épreuve du labyrinthe [6]». Les jeunes athéniens étaient envoyés au labyrinthe de Cnossos pour être sacrifiés au Minotaure ; en survivant à l’épreuve et en tuant le monstre, Thésée est devenu le sauveur d’Athènes. Chez James Dashner, en échappant aux épreuves du Labyrinthe (« the Maze ») et puis de la Terre calcinée (« Scorched Earth »), Thomas et les autres « Gladers » démontrent qu’ils ont les gènes nécessaires pour permettre la fabrication du « remède » et sauver ainsi l’humanité restante. De même, Katniss Everdeen sort indemne, deux éditions à la suite, des labyrinthes artificiels conçus par les ingénieurs des « jeux de la faim » et, à la tête de la révolte des districts, finit par provoquer la mort du « Minotaure » du Capitole, le président Snow. À leur tour, Lina et Doon réussissent à trouver une sortie des souterrains où est construite la « Ville d’ambre » et, jouant sur une image figurale du mythe platonicien de la caverne, retrouvent la lumière et rendent à leur communauté en train de dépérir l’occasion de revenir à la surface et à la vie.

            Dans les autres séries, les labyrinthes sont présents aussi, bien que de manière plutôt métaphorique que littérale. Les communautés de The Giver, Divergent et Aeon Flux sont isolées par des murs impénétrables du monde extérieur. Mais, à la différence des défenses des cités idéales, censées protéger Utopia de l’assaut de l’extérieur, dans ces antiutopies les murailles sont destinées à empêcher la fuite des citoyens, à les contenir par la force dans une société cœrcitive. C’est en trouvant le « fil d’Ariadne » que les jeunes héros défont le système et sauvent leurs semblables du monde clos où ils sont soumis à des expériences inhumaines. Le labyrinthe symbolise la société ou la communauté post-apocalyptique pour laquelle les antiutopistes critiques pensent avoir trouvé le salut.

            Ces récits ne narrent plus le voyage initiatique dangereux certes, mais réconfortant, que des voyageurs utopiques devaient entreprendre pour rejoindre un « point suprême » de la mappemonde, sinon le trajet que des individus révoltés contre l’ordre régnant doivent suivre pour anéantir ces régimes et libérer ses captifs. Il s’agit d’un trajet initiatique inverse : les jeunes héros se trouvent déjà dans le labyrinthe (le monde futur post-apocalyptique), ils doivent le parcourir jusqu’à son centre de ténèbres pour conjurer le monstre, pour vaincre le mal et ouvrir ainsi la prison de la topie négative.

            L’épreuve du labyrinthe rend possible l’avènement d’un espoir, la découverte d’une solution qui mette fin au règne de la destruction. C’est comme si, au cœur de la détresse et de la mort, se trouvait le germe de la renaissance et de la vie. Lina et Doon retrouvent la valise perdue qui contient les instructions pour sortir de la cité engloutie, le « grain » d’information qui permette à l’humanité d’« éclore » à nouveau. Tris, de Divergent, Insurgent et Allegiant, passe les épreuves de la division de la société en des factions sur des critères psychiques et moraux et, démontrant qu’elle est une « divergente » qui possède les qualités de toutes les typologies, elle ouvre littéralement la « boîte à tests » par laquelle le gouvernement central annonce la fin de l’expérimentation menée à Chicago. Défaisant le complot d’Oren Goodchild et détruisant le « Relical », le dirigeable contenant les échantillons d’ADN à partir desquels sont clonés les citoyens de Bregna, Aeon Flux arrête le cycle des clones et redonne une chance à l’humanité survivante de se reproduire par voie naturelle ; c’est le dirigeable lui-même qui, dans sa chute, détruit le mur qui isolait la communauté aseptique de l’intérieur, de la nature exubérante de l’extérieur.

            Finalement, dans le cycle The Giver, en s’enfuyant de la Communauté et en brisant le mur d’énergie psychique qui maintenait les individus dans un état de privation sensorielle et mnésique, Jonas rend à ses semblables l’accès aux sensations et aux sentiments perdus, aux souvenirs du passé et au sens de la vie. Il met fin à une expérimentation qui se proposait de protéger l’humanité des désastres de la violence et de la guerre en annihilant l’instinct de vie lui-même. Il met fin à une utopie monstrueuse, qui soumet ses sujets à une mancurtisation psychique. L’épreuve du labyrinthe, menée à bon terme par les jeunes protagonistes de ces séries de romans et de films, signifie justement la voie de salut pour les communautés post-apocalyptiques, la sortie de l’antiutopie.

This work was supported by Romanian National Authority for Scientific Research within the Exploratory Research Project PN-II-ID-PCE-2011-3-0061.

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Notes