“Personal Identity and Dystopian Film Worlds”
By Juan JG. Noblejas *
[This is the short version of the paper I presented at the 28th annual IAPL (International Association for Philosophy and Literature) Conference, being the topic “Virtual Materialities” - Syracuse University, NY, 19-25 May 2004. (Download here the full provisional .pdf text.) (Descargar aquí el texto en español, formato .pdf)]
We know that Gustave Flaubert said once: “Madame Bovary c’est moi!” (“Madame Bovary is me!”, or even “Madame Bovary, that’s me!”). My point is that he was not just talking about his personal identification with Madame Bovary, namely with Emma, the character. He was talking also about his personal identification with “Madame Bovary” as the whole meaning of that text as an artwork.
When Amélie O. Rorty asks herself about the subjects of fear and pity associated with the poetic catharsis of tragedy, she responds with great confidence: “For whom do we feel fear and pity? For the tragic hero? For ourselves? For all humanity? For all three; for all three together”.
I think that we have to enter the diegetic world of the characters with comprehension (fear and pity for the hero), and we have to leave and transcend that world with refigurative application (fear and pity for ourselves and for all humanity), as we return to the real world of people.
1. Introduction: concepts involved
To speak of “Personal Identity and Dystopian Film Worlds” means to speak of “reference” and of the personal appropriation of that fiction. To put it briefly, I will speak of the personal “refiguration” of fictions according to the hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur, making reference to three films that depict dystopian worlds: Blade Runner (R. Scott, 1982) Brazil (T. Gilliam, 1985) and The Truman Show (P. Weir, 1998).
My understanding – according with Ricoeur’s “mimesis III” and Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics – is that “refiguration” is to be considered as being a personal moment, a moment implying two things: the intellectual (technical) “comprehension” of a text, and the “application” of the meaning of that text by a person to his or her life.
Aware that the two things are not chronologically separate. “Nonetheless, from an epistemological point of view, comprehension and application are separate; otherwise, comprehension would be merely arbitrary.
For this reason, in order to describe that moment, Ricoeur coined the term ‘refiguration”, which is the one I use here. If I did not make this distinction, rather than working in Ricoeur’s shadow, I would be operating in the shadow of Richard Rorty’s ludic subjectivism. A view that I cannot share, as I prefer that one offered by Umberto Eco in his “textual meaning”, far away from any overinterpretation.
One possible way of creating a distinction between two operations, which, like comprehension and application, overlap, is to speak of “two perusal or navigations” of the text. The “first one”, always essential, technical-structurally is centred in character, and attentive to a comprehension of the surface structures of the narrative content. And the “second perusal or navigation”, concerned rather with a hermeneutical analysis of the deep poetic structures of the text, if they may exist.
2. Paths of comprehension (first perusal or navigation) and paths of application (second perusal or navigation)
It could be said that in immersing ourselves in the possible worlds of these 3 dystopian films, and doing so from the focalising point of view of their protagonists, we find ourselves facing two paths very similar to what Ricoeur recently calls “parcours de la réconnaissance” (in English, both “recognition and thankful paths” between people). Ricoeur talks about those paths as situations in which personal errors and oversights lead to serious misunderstandings, because nobody is wrong about himself without being wrong about others.
Ricoeur recalls that errors and oversights in the paths of recognition of our own identity have a dominant characteristic indicated by Pascal: “L’essence de la méprise consiste à ne la connaître pas”. The error is redoubled by the fact of not knowing itself. For this reason, actively contemplating some character’s error in the refiguration of a story can disrupt its diegetic reduplication. And this, without doubt, gives us the opportunity to know better our own personal identity, as well as that of the world in which we live.
As I have said, the “second perusal or navigation” of a possible world – which usually happens when we face a work of art – obliges us to make a personal identification, not so much with the characters of the possible world, as with this possible world itself considered as a whole. Our identity as people has the characteristic of shared relationships to which – with Ricoeur – we will refer using the strong Greek expression of sociability, “allèlôn”. We people are, in principle, “one-and-the-other”. Characters are, in principle, just “one-or-the-other”.
2.1. Blade Runner
1) From a first perusal in “Comprehension” of Blade Runner – both the commercial version (1982) and the “director’s cut” (1991) – it is clear that Deckard, the protagonist is our “lazarillo” or “blind man’s guide” in the dystopian world, is the best hunter, “blade runner”, or deactivator of humanoid replicants.
Yet at the end of the day he is not that good, as on two occasions the replicants save him from death. One of them is Rachel, with whom he seems to fall in love, and the other is Roy, leader of the replicant group. Roy kill his father-designer who proved incapable of prolonging his life, in a somewhat Freudian scene with transcendent pretensions. And Roy ends up saving the life of his much-battered adversary, Deckard, in a “climax” with paradoxical Christological allusions. Roy wounds his own hand with a nail, as if in a crucifixion, but only in order “to feel alive” (he has no-one to redeem), while in his other hand he carries a dove. When he “shuts down”, the dove flies up towards the sky which, for the first time in the film, is blue.
Motivated by the evident but only diegetic features of the film, as well as about the progressive “humanisation” of the replicants, it is about this that everyone who has seen both versions talks about.
It is clear enough that the semantic field in which the conclusion of the film takes root and blossoms is that “this life (the only one there is) is not worth the trouble of living”. When Deckard discovers the unicorn’s “origami”, he thinks he is a replicant. And he remembers the voice of his supervisor shouting, “it’s a pity she won’t live, but then again who does?”. And everything ends there, with the closing of a door and a lift going down.
2) Let’s consider now the second perusal of “Refiguration”. On the subject of the “thematic” content of Blade Runner, it is not, I feel, the humanisation of replicants that is important in the end. I agree with Philip K. Dick, who says precisely the opposite: “the theme of my book is that Deckard has become dehumanised by hunting for androids”.
Another important factor, I would add, is the disappearance of any kind of transcendent horizon, which, at least in Dick’s novel, appears with Mercer, a false preacher whose creed is “there is no salvation”.
In line with George Steiner in his controversial intuitions into literary and artistic works, we can say that the meaning of “refiguration”, as relates both to life and epistemology, implies a dialectical context.
Steiner states that “where God’s presence is no longer held as a supposition, where His absence is no longer felt as a heavy and, in fact, overwhelming burden, certain levels of thought and creativity become unattainable”.
Turning back to Blade Runner, I believe that its transformation from a simple text into a very worthy work of art is based precisely upon the diegetic presence of this “lack of transcendence, experienced as an overwhelming burden”. This, obviously, is in itself a symptom of the transcendental possibilities added by those who relate actively to the meaning of the film.
Confronted with this necessary possibility, I feel a refiguration or personal identification with the overall meaning of Blade Runner is possible, rather than the dystopic alternative of just identifying with some of its characters. What is being contested is the adventure of knowing our own personal humanity – what Ricoeur understands as “one-and-the-other” in translating our social dimension according to the Greek “allèlôn”.
An adventure that calls us to explore some of the extreme possibilities, between what is humanly worthy and unworthy. Here, in Blade Runner, those extreme possibilities are between being natural and being artificial.
2.2. Brazil
Terry Gilliam planned “Brazil” with a twisted happy ending, in which a man triumphs over his enemies by going mad.
1) From the first perusal of “Comprehension”, how does Brazil deal with these matters of happiness and madness? Any attempt to create a synopsis of the story will always be inadequate. We can say that we follows the character of Sam Lowry, an employee in the documentation department of a large bureaucratic government organisation. Sam’s view of the world alternates between being trapped as a simple ‘cog of the machine’ in a depressing world of paperwork, and escaping from his gloomy existence to become the hero of his own elaborate dreams. His life and dreams begin to run together, … and his dreams become reality at the same time as his life falls apart.
2) The second perusal of “Refiguration” according to the sense we see in Ricoeur’s notion, facilitates an appropriation of Gilliam’s Brazil that, in principle, respects its meaning - sense. Gilliam is clear when he speaks of “the feeling that things are out of control. It is as if the world were dreaming”. And when he adds: “in some way, writing Brazil was like a kind of swindle: we give no answers. We only highlight things that are obvious, but they are obvious things that people almost never take into account.”
Although the spectator’s personal identity continues to be at stake, the means to stabilise the meaning of that identity in Brazil are to be found – the same as in Blade Runner – in the exploration of some opposite ends of our humanity, between what is humanly honourable and dishonourable, in accordance with the well-known Greek “allèlôn”: “one-and-the-other”.
But instead of placing ourselves between the natural and artificial poles, we are offered a chance between dreaming idealism and wakeful reality to bring together into a single entity, everything that we have experienced vicariously through both characters, Sam-asleep and Sam-awake.
2.3. The Truman Show
From the first perusal of “Comprehension”: Richard Corliss describes The Truman Show in Time (1 June 1998): “What a wonderful world Truman Burbank inhabits – a town of pretty houses and smiling people. On Seahaven Island, the streets are spotless, the traffic is orderly, the weather glorious, from seductive dawns (let’s get out of bed!) to sunsets worthy of Turner’s brush. He’s headed for his honourable job as an insurance salesman, then home to his blond, bedimpled wife Meryl, perhaps off for a late brewski with his best friend, Marlon. You have it all, Truman: good afternoon, good evening and good night! Except for one thing, folks. The whole kit and kaboodle is fake”.
Truman has no world, not even a fictitious world within the fiction of the Show in which he lives. For this reason, his adventure begins as that of a “prisoner in paradise” and culminates with his flight from the “wonderful world” in search of the “real world”.
The second perusal of “Refiguration”. Concerning The Truman Show, there is less to say from the point of view of refiguration. Or what there is to say has less solidity and artistic merit if we compare it with the other two films.
Kafka said that “we live as if we were the only lords, and that makes us slaves”. This perhaps is what has happened to the people, not to the ‘system’, in the truly Kafkaesque world of Brazil, and its certainly what happens in Truman. Not because it involves an “I” who is “unsupportive” with respect to others, but – and this is the strong point of The Truman Show – because the Truman character is a pure individual surrounded by actors who, socially speaking, are perfect “unsupportive Is”, mere masks. And a pure human individual is not a variant of Robinson Crusoe; he may, perhaps, be a kind of pathetic Tarzan surrounded by abstract personages and not by personally living beings.
We find ourselves unable to acquire the necessary “comprehension” of the diegesis, which in this case has too many loose ends and too many pseudo-transcendent allusions.
There are some thought-provoking ideas, but the ones that have been developed in the form of a “love-conquers-all-story” are much less rich than the narrative and dramatic implications of the protagonist’s own pseudo-identity.
We find that the protagonist’s narratively closed universe – in which he lives a pseudo-marriage, a pseudo-friendship, a pseudo-job, etc. – remains unexplored; aporias that would be interesting for “refiguration”.
Yet, this does not only have to do with the spectator’s application of the meaning of the story to his life; if a satisfactory “comprehension” of the possible world and its inhabitants is not achieved, no such “refiguration” takes place, whatever the expectations may be. And this, in my opinion, is what happens with The Truman Show.
3. Conclusion
I shall close now. I trust that – with this incursion into dystopian worlds – I have thrown some light on that dark moment of the refiguration of fiction.
When Georges Steiner studied the “Grammars of Creation”, and the history of art, he ended up by suggesting that, in order to be able to work, artists need at least a hypothesis of a transcendent God. Determining if such a thing effectively exists in a Dante or Dostoyevsky (explicit agreement) way on the one hand, or in a Beckett (mockery) way on the other, is left up to those who refigure their works, either applying or not applying the human condition of “guests of creation”.
As we said with Amélie O. Rorty at the begining, we have to enter the diegetic world of the characters with comprehension (fear and pity for the hero), and we have to leave that world with refigurative application (fear and pity for ourselves and for all humanity), as we return to the real world of people.
Without a refiguration of this kind, genuine cognitive poetic pleasure is not possible; and that, in the final analysis, is what we are interested in.
---
* Juan G. Noblejas, Università della Santa Croce – Rome [ noblejas@pusc.it ]
Darfur - It took an American movie star to bring the plight of Darfur to the public attention in America. Where is the international media in these cases. Where is the United Nations in dealing with such inhumanity!Why is this tolerated. Why hasn't it stopped. Such apathy to the plight of these poor souls,who just happen to live in the wrong place, at the wrong time.
Shame on the people of the world to stand back and allow this murder of innocents to go on and on and on!
Publicado por: Lynn Winters | 08 noviembre 2007 en 04:46 a.m.
I'm not sure what the hold-up is... maybe they have re-thought their stance on how this is going to actually make the company any money. Or perhaps their lawyers pointed out the liability of providing agents a platform to stick their feet in their mouth. Whatever it is, it's hardly something I'd claim as being "Well done".
www.jebshouse.com
Publicado por: Jeb Simons | 25 abril 2008 en 12:46 a.m.