"Oblivion" (Universal Studios, 2013): Directed by Joseph Kosinski; written by Karl Gajdusek and Michael DeBruyn, based on the graphic novel by Mr. Kosinski; Director of Photography Claudio Miranda; edited by Richard France-Bruce; music M83; production design by Doreen Gilford; costumes by Marlene Stewart; produced by Mr. Kosinski; Peter Charmin and Dylan Clark; Barry Levine and Duncan Henderson; STARRING: Tom Cruise (Jack Harper); Morgan Freeman (Beech); Olga Kurylenko (Julia Rusakova); Andrea Riseborough (Victoria Olsen); Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Sykes); Melissa Leo (Sally).
... the story primarily unfolds in 2077, [sic.] long after a cataclysmic war between earthlings and extraterrestrials. Nuked to all but radioactive ash, the Earth has been rendered nearly uninhabitable, and its remaining people have fled to galactic shelter. The only ones [sic.] left on the planet appear to be Jack Harper (Mr. Cruise) and his companion Victoria (Andrea Riseborough), who live in a cantelevered aerie above the clouds that brings to mind a "Jetsons" sky pad. [sic.] His job is to repair drones that patrol the facilities that extract resources for the surviving populace and that are under attack [allegedly] from the aliens, or scavs, as in scavengers. [Victoria] monitors him back at their place, waving her hands over a tabletop computer, while in full makeup and [in tight dresses, flawless hair styles, and high heels.]"
Manohla Dargis, "After the Apocalypse, Things Go Downhill," The New York Times, April 19, 2013, p. C10.
Introduction: "We won the war."
A. Politics/Drones/Resources: "Mission Accomplished"?
Tom Cruise is often dismissed as merely the perfect "hero" for so-called "mindless" action movies and nothing more. We forget that Mr. Cruise was the lead actor in such influential films as "A Few Good Men" and "Born On the Fourth of July."
Growing up in the suspicious, post-Watergate and -Vietnam eras, Mr. Cruise's work displays his healthy skepticism about power, also all-American individualism, together with hatred of "mindless" militarism and our recent wars of exploitation. Not bad for a young man from Glen Ridge, New Jersey who was far from "privileged" in his early life.
I suggest that this late twentieth-century ethos of suspicion is revealed even in Mr. Cruise's film choices and interpretations. "Beware of power in anyone's hands," Mr. Cruise's acting career suggests. I concur.
"Oblivion" brings together Mr. Cruise's interests and various versions of his screen persona that, mysteriously, remains youthful and charming as well as essentially American. Mr. Cruise -- like Jack Harper -- is always optimistic about America.
"Oblivion" is both a sci-fi action adventure and political allegory as well as a psychological and religious/mythical exploration of human destiny in light of the industrial poisoning of the Earth. (Jack Harper explains to Sally: "I want the human species to survive!")
I will comment, briefly, on each major interpretive path through the movie, while underlining powerful criticisms of the status quo contained in this script which, deliberately, is ambiguous or invitational for the viewer. The word "survive" is scattered through the script because the writers seem worried about whether "we" will survive. I understand and share their concern.
The drama is not propaganda of any kind. The movie is the opposite of unpatriotic. I will look for future work from these film-makers. The New York Times reviewer missed many of the issues, references and meanings in an angry or dismissive -- even insulting -- assessment of what quickly became the number one film in the world. ("Manohla Dargis Strikes Again!" and "'The Reader': A Movie Review.")
Republicans and Democrats will discover items that are to their liking in this story. For example, the film hints at the decline of American and Western civilization, an important and valid Conservative theme, by means of the symbolic devastation of the representative American city, New York, a city that embodies the loss of values or declining commitment to the principles defining U.S. identity in the film. Hence, the view from a ruined Empire State building ("An Affair to Remember"); or the fragments of the Statue of Liberty ("Planet of the Apes"); most significant of all is the broken George Washington bridge disconnecting the city under attack from the nation, as on 9/11. (Manhattan was sealed off from all entry or departures on that fateful Tuesday, after the collapse of the Twin Towers.)
The theme of disconnection and reconnection is also prominent in the movie which is about loss and redemption of identity for an individual and nation.
Drones are not seen as "making us safer," or as "bulwarks of America's defense systems," but as the ultimate example of "technological dehumanization." The question for the viewer is whether we have become "drones." Mechanical or impersonal interaction is America's preferred mode of "dealing with" others in the world in the post-9/11 era. "We are good," Mr. Bush explained, "they are evil."
Victoria's beauty is strangely cold, neutral, automatic for reasons that will not be revealed immediately. The viewer is shocked to find such a beautiful woman "alienating" -- or difficult to connect with -- in the way that a machine evokes no affective response, normally. This is brilliant acting by Ms. Riseborough. ("The Galatea Scenario and the Mind/Body Problem.")
As "Sally's" creature, Victoria reflects a technological inhumanity that places instrumental reason over affective loyalties. Science over humanism? ("'The Stepford Wives': A Movie Review.")
Opposition to anonymous killing in a desert-like landscape reminiscent of Pakistan, Afghanistan or Iraq, the suction of sea water (oil?), causing further irreversible damage to the planet, as only one part of the extirpation of life on Earth in favor of machines and death, the mysterious "others" dwelling in the "Wastelands" (T.S. Eliot) of a blasted territory -- all of this reflects nightly newscasts describing a rising death toll from U.S. efforts to plunder the earth's resources by stealing them from billions of "little brown people" who are the rightful owners of these resources.
The film raises the timely question whether such thefts and our drone killings are compatible with America's identity and/or the vision of a Constitutional Republic offered by the Framers at the birth of the nation in priceless documents defining the brave and noble mission of America as "the last and best hope for man." (Thomas Jefferson.)
An analogy is drawn between the virtuous early Romans of the Republic -- Cicero's dialogues come to mind -- and the decadent later denizens of a collapsing empire by way of Thomas Babington MaCaulay's "The Lays of Ancient Rome" which is quoted in the script to illustrate the principle of sacrifice for which America's Roman soldier, Jack Harper, will offer his life.
It is not simply Jack Harper who must recover memories of himself by way of an earlier love, but his nation and humanity which must regain a sense of collective memory, civilization, or history that has been lost in the Wastelands of the desert where we are. ("What is memory?")
B. Psychology: Memory, Dreams, Selves and Time-Spirals.
The landscape in the film is developed from key images by surrealist painters as well as cinema directors (Dali, Magritte, Cocteau), and it is also an inner-territory or psychic geography representing the mind of protagonist, Jack Harper.
The women occupying this mythic landscape are filtered through the perceiving consciousness of the protagonist. The women embody the Jungian archetypes of "Spiritual Sister" (Victoria) and "Love-Object" (Julia).
Ms. Riseborough displays a highly British efficiency and professionalism yet still manages to provide a calculated erotic energy to balance self-containment. Victoria's costumes convey the impression of a uniform-like purposefulness and discipline without sacrificing feminine allure. Victoria is the designer-wife as imagined by a computer. ("'Revolutionary Road': A Movie Review.")
Olga Kurylenko's "Julia" offers the actress -- best recalled in a fruitless search for James Bond -- the opportunity to serve as love-object and embodiment of revolutionary authenticity. Perhaps this explains the character's Russian origins. Julia is a fighter and free. Unlike Victoria who is all about comformity to a mechanical order, Julia is a rebel with a cause.
These female characters are dual aspects of a single feminine divinity in world mythology. She sometimes appears as two women; at other times, she is singular. ("Duality in Christian Feminine Identity" and "'Total Recall': A Movie Review.")
The movie journey is more Jungian than Freudian: From Civilization and Its Discontents to Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Julia is the only character granted access and entry to Jack's "inner-Eden," for example, an "oasis" (or return) to nature's greenery at the center of the desert.
The desert is the place of withdrawal in the self to which the mythic hero journeys in abandoning the world. The desert is where Christ was tempted by Lucifer. It is where the Buddha wandered before meditating under the protection of the king cobra and encountering "Mara" -- the king of illusions. ("What is memory?" and "'The English Patient': A Movie Review.")
Within this green oasis, aesthetic and spiritual values survive in recollection. Fragments of our dying civilization are taken there: books rescued from a ruined Library of Congress, unread, forgotten, collecting dust find new life. This is what it is like for books today in the "Age of Twitter." (Can you "twitter" about War and Peace for me? "It's about Russia!")
Paintings, like the highly significant "Christina's World" by N.C. Wyeth, are rescued from oblivion. Music, in the form of old phonograph records played on an ancient device, fill the night with magical sounds that reflect the hero's mood. Memories usually have their own soundtrack.
This is Jack's version of the "enchanted grove," the clearing in the forest where the good knight finds the princess, chest of gold, and/or dragon. Not surprisingly, these classic Romantic themes are introduced in defense of values of self-giving love of country and others that is associated with the books held before the camera by Jack: Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities and MaCaulay's heroic couplets of warriors' courage.
Dickens describes two cities, one in turmoil (Paris) and the other at peace (London). The film depicts persons living in a celestial technological paradise as others scavenge for scraps below. This is to underline the perception of America's role in the Middle East and elsewhere at the moment.
We live in the heavens; others grovel for scraps closer to the ground. We seem not to be troubled by this cruel state of affairs which, unsurprisingly, is far from conducive to peace and cooperation among nations. ("'Elysium': A Movie Review.")
"Christina's World" depicts the place where a young and broken woman with her back to the viewer can be beautiful. The subject of the portrait was a handicapped young woman, Christina, whom the painter wished to depict as lovely and aspiring (along with the viewer of the work) to a condition of greater peace.
This classic American neo-realist painting is also a portrait of our national "dream" and the true as well as indestructible beauty of this Arcadia that is America. Like the U.S., the painting is oriented towards the future. It is aspirational. It is Romantic, like the film "Oblivion."
C. Religion/Myth/Art: "Christina's World."
The vision of heaven in this movie has nothing to do with military victory or killing an enemy. It is about simplicity and abandonment of greed. How can humanity return to its Edenic setting?
The wisdom of the movie is concerned with recovery of values and commitments. The brilliant use of a ruined version of the Library of Congress representing the remnants of "Modernity" (the culture of books) in our "post-modernist" era (the age of "drones"), demands that our hero rescue books and their contents as way of redeeming his humanity (and ours), by defying our doomed status as an endangered species on a dying planet -- especially as a single remaining representative of a gender deemed "superfluous." Christopher Norris, "Green Thoughts in a Moral Shade: Anti-Realism, Ethics and Response-Dependence," in Truth Matters: Realism, Anti-Realism and Response-Dependence (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002), PP. 98-130 and Andrew W. Butler, "Postmodernism and Science Fiction," in Edward James and Sarah Mendelsohn, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 2003), p. 137.
I have grown accustomed to the category of "superfluous male." Reproductive technologies, some feminists contend, make men "excess baggage" for the species. Andrea Dworkin and Susan Brownmiller, for example, have expressed such views.
Love as freedom is also a time-honored romantic theme celebrated in this movie and in Mr. Wyeth's painting, where Eden is shared in the end with the future, in the form of children bearing a striking resemblance to Mr. Cruise and Ms. Kurylenko. The point was made earlier by none other than William Blake:
I have sought for a joy without pain,
For a solid without fluctuation
Why will you die O Eternals?
Why live in unquenchable burnings? ("'In Time': A Movie Review.")
Jack Harper, like W.B. Yeats, declares by way of response:
I am looking for the face I had
before the world was made.
John Wain, ed., The Oxford Anthology of English Poetry: From Blake to Heaney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 1-15. Compare E.P. Thompson, Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (New York: The New Press, 1993), pp. 215-230 with Northrop Frye, "William Blake: The Key to the Gate," in Harold Bloom, ed., Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism (New York & London: W.W. Norton, 1970), pp. 233-255 then Harold Bloom, "An Elegy For the Canon," in The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York: Riverhead Books,1994), pp.15-39.
"Sally" is both the stand-in for God and American power expressed in mechanical warfare and the military use of technology. This is warfare without heroism from those in command making statistical judgments allowing them to throw away men's and women's lives.
War is now about the "exploitation of personnel" (killing people anonymously), as soldiers' lives and health are trivialized. Persons are mere "collateral damage" given little weight in pursuit of poorly-understood strategic objectives by leaders who seem as inhuman as "Sally."
I will examine each of these aspects of the film in greater detail (politics, psychology, myth) and offer my assessment of the movie in conclusion.
I. Politics: "We're not supposed to remember, remember?"
A. Woman's Duality: "We're a great team!"
I have suggested that a contrast is offered in the movie between the lives of Victoria and Jack in the smooth, cool, technological bubble that is absurdly comfortable against the lives of miserable others below.
Dwelling in the sky is much better than struggling desperately with the hot, hungry, and dangerous "scavengers," creatures who are barely surviving. One suggested analogy is between the First and Third World, affluence and poverty, violence as opposed to safety.
America is the dwelling in the sky; a place where beautiful people live in scientifically-planned splendor, with gadgets that will even suffer for us as we delight in sexual play with gorgeous Brits in skin-tight outfits speaking in Oxbridge accents. This certainly is every man's story in America.
Against this myth of American ease, along with acknowledgement of genuine privilege, the film suggests where America's true wealth is found: America's wealth is a set of spiritual values that are endangered, perhaps by our very material wealth and technological luxury.
Machines do our chores, kill for us, substitute for our consciences and minds ("Just Google it!"), and our "machine-generated" realities ("Oblivion"?) make us blissfully unaware of the human cost of such stylized lives. To live in such a state of unawareness is to be a child. The dwelling in the sky is a kind of womb, or Garden of Eden, to be contrasted with another and very different notion of paradise that will come later in our story.
Jack will emerge into full human status only with the awakening of his consciousness of good and evil, the reality of what drones do and the cost of his privileges become unbearable to him, as is the plight of his fellow human beings.
Awakening to the truth of inequality and injustice is to see that we are all implicated in such evils that are bringing about colossal pain for the vast majority of persons in order to please the greedy few. Departure from the womb is only possible after the arrival of Julia to serve as agent of liberation and praxis.
It will turn out that there are many "Jacks" created and used -- "Sally" is both divinity/evolutionary principle and political authority -- then discarded or destroyed. Jack is a "generic" product on which, perhaps, a patent has been granted.
Thousands of young men like Jack have been broken in body and spirit, killed, discarded in furtherance of America's quest for oil and gold. An image of clone-versions of "expendable" selves in tribute to the Matrix will be offered at the conclusion of our story.
Victoria, like most Brits/Americans "does not want to know." She prefers "oblivion," the childhood condition of amusement, non-thought. After all, childhood is easy and comfortable. "Superman" is the number one movie in the box office as I write this review.
Forgetfulness is provided by entertainment -- America's 24-hour, cartoon-like pop-culture receives a subtle tribute -- and is celebrated. This may be self-referential. "Oblivion" is also an attempt to get your entertainment dollars. The challenge for these film makers is to say interesting things in a commercially viable manner. I am sure that with "Oblivion" the effort is successful. ("'Inception': A Movie Review.")
Why not allow power (our "superiors") to remember and think for us, Victoria suggests? Reality is only what we are told to believe happened. ("What is memory?" and "Nihilists in Disneyworld.")
Victoria says: "We're not supposed to remember, remember?" This struggle is all about "weapons of mass destruction" and not oil or other resources. "We won the war." "Mission accomplished!" "Stay the course." A number of such meaningless slogans lifted directly from news coverage of the various Iraq wars and Afghanistan's "military operations" pop-up in the script.
Is Syria next, Mr. Obama? Public events in America have become the action movie we are seeing. In contrast, the global population "sees" our propaganda as absurdly transparent. ("Mr. Putin's Advice to America.")
Victoria and "pie-in-the-sky" is Jack's reward for good behavior as a slave. Julia is passion and liberation. She offers self-becoming with the acquisition of a human conscience. Neither love is rejected in a quantum universe where Jack encounters himself at an earlier point in the narrative through time-spirals.
Mirroring relations and wormholes make it clear that the director of this film is interested in contemporary physics. Time moves forward, then backward, only to move forward again. The various versions of Jack are entangled "possible selves" trapped in a revolving-door universe:
"All the successful equations of physics are symmetrical in time. They can be used equally well in one direction in time as in the other. The future and the past seem physically to be on a completely equal footing. Newton's laws, Hamilton's equations, Maxwell's equations, Einstein's general relativity, Dirac's equations, the Schrodinger's equation -- all remain effectively unaltered if we reverse the direction of time."
Roger Penrose, "Cosmology and the Arrow of Time," in The Emperor's New Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1999), pp. 391-392 and Stephen Hawking & Leonard Mlodinow, "The (Elusive) Theory of Everything," in Scientific American, August 12, 2013, pp. 91-93. (" ... according to quantum physics, the past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities." The authors defend a "Model-dependent realism" which is a version of Kantian-constructivism close to Roy Bashkar's Dialectical Critical-Realism, as I predicted in my essays on Hawking: "Stephen Hawking's Free Will is Determined" and "Stephen Hawking is Right On Time.")
B. Eros/Caritas/Filia: "The dreams are real!"
Like the abandoned books that recall a life of virtue and heroic values drawn from a more Romantic age, Julia's erotic power as awakening makes transformation for Jack possible by evoking recollections of another world and way of being.
Jack's memories of Julia surface in the water or in sleep, both environments are symbolic of the subconscious realm. Victoria's power of forgetfulness is a daylight energy associated with duty and efficiency: Victoria is the goddess of the day; Julia is the goddess of the night.
Each of these characters embodies the three aspects of love: eros, caritas, filia. Each woman cares for and seems to share in Jack's mission(s) even as they are on opposite sides of the struggle for the planet. Each is an effective and equal partner in a life-project for (or against) power: "We make a great team!"
Constant and contrasting references to "Eden" and paradise underline the Utopian political allegory, not only the psychological or religious meaning of the idea of paradise (a dwelling in the sky), but the distinction between the inferno (the dangerous and hot world below) and the world of power above (Sally's kingdom). Allusions to Dante and Milton (also Goethe's "Faust") would make the point obvious to all, except "Manohla Dargis" of America's leading newspaper.
Heaven or paradise is as variable as the men and women who dream of it. America has established itself as paradise on earth, in a literal sense. However, the "paradise" in America's initial self-vision had nothing to do with "things" or weapons, but was a MORAL vision of free and equal men and women in a just social order at peace with the world.
Republicans may appreciate the film-makers suggestion that something priceless has been lost with the achievement of superpower status that allows for America's pernicious fantasy of global domination.
We will always say: "We won the war." The "mission" will always be successfully "accomplished" -- except that it will also always be incomplete and unfinished, as it should be, because America's "mission" was never a strictly military one. ("Manifesto For the Unfinished American Revolution.")
C. A Mop-Up Operation: "I don't want to know!"
Like Victoria, many of us do not want to know about the sufferings of the little brown persons who must hunger, thirst, or die for our SUVs and comfortable life-styles. The nine year-old child in a factory making our expensive clothes; the women taken from schools at age thirteen, deprived of all rights by governments we put and keep in place -- often in exchange for their assistance with obtaining oil -- are not persons we wish to dwell upon.
Few Americans are aware of the drone policy that results in killing many innocent persons, usually women and children in countries with which we are not officially at war, nor do they know of targeted assassinations of Americans and others, tortures at Guantanamo and elsewhere, illegal phone and computer monitoring, or other mechanisms of control and preservation of our priceless "security" at the cost of our civil liberties.
I was shocked at the indifference in the U.S. media to recent claims by Mr. Snowden of massive American government criminality and violations of the civil rights of persons throughout the world. Mr. Snowden expected an outraged reaction to the NSA's crimes, but was immediately demonized in the American media as a traitor (rather than a whistle-blower) which is how the rest of the world sees him. We have drifted very far from the Constitution when people fail to appreciate what government spying is doing to our democracy. (The size of the type in this essay is altered, periodically, by illegal hackers from New Jersey's government.)
We live in a technological "womb" not all that different from the dwelling of the characters in the movie. We are led to believe that "our" concerns are the only issues that matter to the planet's five billion inhabitants while the hunger, desperation, misery of the so-called scavengers' lives are a depressing collateral issue we do not need to worry about or be distressed by -- let's go shopping.
We have become children "protected" from a most grim reality of our own making by a machine-like network of intelligence agencies, security police, military networks and a tidal wave of obfuscations, lies, propaganda that, sometimes, includes the entertainment industry aimed at preventing us from seeing how far we have drifted from the vision of the Framers of America's Constitution. Like Jack Harper, we must "come home" to our identity as a nation.
II. Psychology: "The memories are you."
A. Memory: "Do you remember her?"
Jack's dreams contain visions of a dark haired woman associated with his life before the catastrophe that has engulfed planetary civilization. Equating the external landscape with internal or psychic territory takes place throughout the movie. Accordingly, audience members are also invited to view the cinematic desert as a depiction of the collective subconscious in which all of our lives are being lived today.
Despite the metaphor of the ruined city borrowed from Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents, Jung's notion of the "collective subconscious" may be more helpful to appreciating the imagery of the movie and the political issues being dramatized.
If "modern man is in search of a soul," as Jung expressed it, his discovery of that soul may be concerned with a return to fundamental Western values associated with archaic notions of heroism. Projecting the shadow-self on to "little brown others" is not a solution, but creates the opportunity for great evil.
This possibility of return-to-self-through-self-giving seems distant in a culture that is increasingly alienated from its own founding value system and adrift in a sea of banalities as well as shallow substitutes for thought. ("Nihilists in Disneyworld" and "Whatever.")
The ruined city and desert are about fragmentation of memory, loss of identity, ethics, social living leading to the "space" of self-recovery or nothingness. The agent of liberation is the anima figure, projected beyond the subject, into light and shadow versions of the female "other self," in classic Jungian terms:
"The unconscious feminine side in man, the anima, leads him on a search to discover what is unknown and strange to him, to fill the interstices of his personality which exist because there is no part of his conscious adaptation that involves him fully as a whole man. He seeks his opposite in projected form, in a woman who will embody for him what he cannot be for himself."
Judith Singer, "Anima and Animus," in Boundaries of the Soul: The Practice of Jung's Psychology (New York: Anchor, 1973), pp. 234-235.
Aspects of the "anima" may embody or symbolize a man's different psychic needs by becoming projected on to dual aspects of the feminine archetype. This duality is seen in dichotomous images of the female goddess -- i.e., Athena/Minerva versus Aphrodite/Venus.
The women in Jack's life, similarly, embody the dual archetype of the anima figure, as I have noted, which feeds into the use of Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities.
B. Dreams: "The dreams are real!"
The messages of the subconscious are veiled in imagistic forms. As a result, persons often dismiss the insights or lessons of the subconscious mind. In the same way, religions teach ethical lessons by means of stories that are often triviliazed by literal persons.
The movie is making a serious point about contemporary society by way of an action adventure sci-fi story. The concern seems to be that the myth and its message will be disregarded by reviewers trivializing the action adventure. (See the Times review quoted above.)
Jack is aware that what he remembers is "real" and that it, somehow, threatens the safety of the life he knows. Yet he must seek the truth of his life and situation alone. In pursuing the shadow version of the anima, Julia, he is seeking his own meaning in the way that his subconscious has instructed him to seek that truth.
Dickens' story involves a man with a double, a twin version of himself, who loves the same woman that he does. The protagonist discovers his purpose as he experiences that love. The solution found by Sidney Carton will be Jack's solution also -- self-giving love: " ... there is no time there, and no trouble there," Sydney Carton said. (Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, p. 373.)
C. Landscapes of Reality: A Tale of Two Cities.
Sydney Carton's sacrifice for his physical double (clone?) and for the woman he loves, Miss Manet, as a sympathizer with the French Revolution that had "created the world anew upon the ruins of Medieval civilization," allowed Dickens to meditate on the essence of love drawn from the Platonic tradition and his reading of Shakespeare:
"I see the lives for which I lay down my life, peaceful, useful, prosperous and happy, in that England which I will see no more. I see Her [sic.] with a child upon her bosom, who bears my name. I see her father, aged and bent, but otherwise restored, and faithful to all men in his healing office, and at peace. I see the good old man, so long their friend, in ten years' time enriching them with all he has, and passing tranquilly to his reward."
" ... It is a far, far better thing I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest I go to than I have ever known."
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2001), p. 234.
Jack will be required to make a similar sacrifice in another "revolution" that is also intended to make the world new. Jack explains that humanity must survive.
Morgan Freeman's character lifts the veil from Jack's eyes by serving as the "Philemon" archetype -- the older man (Merlin) who brings the hero (Arthur) his mission -- explaining that all Jack has been led to believe is a lie. The war has not been won. The mission is not accomplished. His life is not a mop-up operation. The "scavs" (little dark people) are not his enemies, but fellow slaves struggling for freedom from oppression.
"Julia" already possesses this wisdom and absorbs "Victoria" ("the machines got it wrong!"), these two are the same woman, as freedom fighter and life-partner.
Knowledge is liberation and restoration of the fruits of Jack's civilization -- poetry, beauty in the visual arts, music, nature, the future in the form of their children, and "death" to the machines.
III. Myth: "Welcome home, Jack!"
A. The Fruit of Forbidden Knowledge: Nietzsche's "Death of God."
Jack's adventures -- especially the exit from a false paradise/Eden in order to return to a genuine or inner-paradise/Eden -- deliberately echoes the works of Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche is obviously the philosopher for the director of this movie.
"Will to Power," in the form of control by Sally, is also the model offered by the Old Testament God. The death of God is Jack's entry into human status -- as represented by Morgan Freeman's character, Beech -- by way of full adult responsibility, revolutionary commitment (with Julia as bonus), and heroism. In dying, Jack "becomes the person he is."
"The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. 'Wither is God?' he cried. 'I shall tell you. We have killed him. -- You and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? ... Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of infinite space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? ... God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. ... What was earliest and most powerful of all that the world has yet found has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off of us?"
Walter Kaufman, ed., "The Gay Science," in The Portable Nietzsche (New York & London: Penguin, 1976), p. 95 and a virtually identical passage is found in Zarathustra's parable of the "Madman."
Sally is far from a benevolent deity. The awakening from a condition of dependency and slavery by Jack comes with the discovery of his true mission, also eros/love directed against conformity (or obedience) and towards self-mastery or self-becoming through the chosen other, Julia.
The patterns established in the movie with Jack encountering himself at several "circles" in the narrative hint at what Nietzsche calls "the myth of the eternal return":
"The doctrine of the eternal recurrence of all things has actually been referred to previously -- as the Dionysian faith. The man -- Nietzsche chose Goethe as his representative -- who has organized the chaos of his passions and integrated every feature of his character, redeeming even the ugly by giving it a meaning in a beautiful totality -- this Ubermensch would also realize how inextricably his own being was involved in the totality of the cosmos: and in affirming his own being, he would also affirm all that is, or has been, or will be ... Elsewhere, Nietzsche notes: 'Thereupon Zarathustra rested, out of the joy of the Ubermensch, the secret that all recurs!'"
Walter Kaufman, "Overman and the Eternal Recurrence," in Niezsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1974), p. 320.
Jack becomes "one of the eternal ones." (Again: "'In Time': A Movie Review" and "'Unknown': A Movie Review.")
B. Obedience/Disobedience/Freedom: Is "Sally" America?
The smiling face of the mechanical intelligence (or power) at the center of this narrative is the image of a drone subjugating the powerless masses.
Perhaps "Sally" is Mr. Klapper of the NSA in disguise? There is beauty, charm, a dazzling "fassad" that is America for the world's peoples combined with a computer-like or inhuman technological cruelty associated with Superpower commands which must be obeyed.
"There will be dire consequences if anyone assists Mr. Snowden!" This comment from the State Department will make it more likely that nations will assist Mr. Snowden.
Commentators on this movie tried to associate Sally with Hillary Clinton, but a better fit may be someone like Sara Palin or Senator Dianne Feinstein: A thin veneer covers Sally's appetite for power as well as utter disdain for the moral claims of the other. Sally is a twisted and evil version of Martha Stewart or Paula Deen by way of Kubrick's "HAL" in 2001, A Space Odyssey.
Jack's recognition of rival moral claims requires his self-sacrifice for the billions like himself, humanity, and for freedom. Jack believes that it is freedom that is the real essence of America: If Jack is eros in relation to Julia; Sally is thanatos or death principle for humanity.
C. "What will you die for?": Roman Virtue and the Pax Americana.
The movie suggests that there has been a loss of American valor and humane values in our quest for sea water (oil) and impersonal, mechanical domination or oppression of the desert-dwelling "little brown people" who, annoyingly, refuse to obey the machine's orders. ("John Rawls and Justice" and "Little Brown Men Are Only Objects For Us.")
The ruins of American civilization brilliantly chosen to make the necessary point -- kudos to the art design team! -- really depict a condition of moral ruin, decadence, or a "falling away from ourselves" and the once common willingness to lay down our lives, if necessary, "upon our golden shields."
This sacrifice was to be made not in obedience to mechanical authority, but freely, as men and women who are citizens of an autonomous Republic that is symbolized, perfectly, in the Statue of Liberty, Empire State Building, and Library of Congress -- all structures that "aspire" towards the heavens, seeking to reach the skies, to name all the rivers and oceans, claim all the lands, protect all of the lives within these shores.
Please see the inscription in the rotunda at the Library of Congress.
Conclusion: "A beautiful death?"
A. Return to Eden.
Jack achieves his beautiful death even as Mr. Cruise demonstrates, once again, why he is a global movie star and will continue to be one for as long as he wishes. The final scenes might easily have slipped into parody or absurdity, but were just on the right side of adventure with a heroic message thanks to his earnestness in the role.
This movie offers America a message that is desperately needed today. The meaning of the film is the opposite of the "Superman" message which (I believe) we do not need. It is Jack's humanity that makes his suffering and heroism possible.
Mr. Cruise has managed to show these qualities -- suffering and humanity -- by representing and embodying what is heroic about our country. If this seems easy to you, then you try it. For this purpose of symbolizing frail and heroic humanity being too big or "super" is the opposite of helpful. (Once again: "'Total Recall': A Movie Review.")
Ms. Riseborough has a sparkling future in movies because in addition to her beauty, she has genuine thespian talent; Ms. Kurylenko is far more interesting than the appellation "Bond Girl" would lead you to believe and stunning without makeup. Supporting players were excellent, especially Ms. Leo and Mr. Freeman, creating a thinking-man's and -woman's blockbuster.
Closure of the hermeneutic circle is the completion of the hero's journey with the achievement of humanity's new beginning. The future of a "rescued" humanity (personal and plural) is symbolized by the beautiful children, who are tiny versions of the leads in the film. Did Mr. Cruise and Ms. Kurylenko have babies just for this movie?
I was surprised that reviewers missed the patriotic subtexts of the action adventure in addition to the political criticisms of the drone policy. This is a fun sci-fi movie which, again, Republicans as well as Democrats should enjoy and discuss. The makers of this movie want everybody's money, equally.
It stands in the Comitium,
Plain for all folk to see;
Horatius in his harness,
Halting upon one knee:
And underneath is written,
in letters all of gold,
How valiantly he kept the bridge
In the brave days of old.
Thomas Babington MaCaulay, Lord MaCaulay, "Horatius," A Lay Made About the Year of the City, CCLX, "The Lays of Ancient Rome," in The Oxford Anthology of English Poetry, p. 317.
