Rupert Read on Lars von Trier's 'Melancholia'

thinkingfilm co-founder Rupert Read has written a fabulous article on Lars von Trier's philosophical sci-fi masterpiece, Melancholia.

Melancholia, dir. Lars von Trier, 2011

'An allegory of the 'therapeutic' reading of a film: on Melancholia' in Sequence 1:2 is a response to Steven Shaviro's 'Melancholia: or the Romantic Anti-Sublime' which appeared in the inaugural issue of Sequence.

In his response, Read draws on both Wittgenstein and Heidegger to offer a moving personal and philosophical account of melancholia, emphasising the ways in which von Trier's film raises important questions about the experience of depression and the end of our planet. He argues that Melancholia 'functions as philosophy as therapy in the best sense of that word, in forcing upon its viewer the responsibility to grow its truth beyond the point that it itself manifests. It offers us some conditions of possibility for what we might risk calling a 'political sublime': through offering us a vision of communion.'    

The full article - which is well worth reading, along with Shaviro's - can be found here. 

Gravity’s Pull

by Peter Krämer and Rupert Read

Gravity, dir. Alfonso Cuarón (2013)

The true miracle is not walking on water or walking on air, 

but simply walking on this earth - Tich Nhat Hanh

Let’s begin by acknowledging that Gravity is a very unusual Hollywood blockbuster (here's the trailer). Basically it is a story about a single character, cut off from the rest of humanity for most of the duration of the film. And this character is a woman (unlike Robinson Crusoe and his Hollywood descendants, including the character played by Tom Hanks in Cast Away, and the Robert Redford character in All is Lost). The film itself acknowledges that its focus on a female character is unusual. The character is called Ryan Stone because, she explains to mission commander Matthew Kowalski, her parents wanted a boy. In other words: the woman at the centre of this movie is taking up a place usually reserved for men. She may have been ‘unwanted’ - but there she is.

The fact that Ryan Stone is female is crucial for the story because it makes it possible for her once to have given birth to a child. She is (was) a mother. This allows the film to focus on the primary and most primal bond between two human beings - that between mother and child - and on the sense of loss that comes with the severance of that bond. At the same time, Gravity’s dialogue refers to our planet as ‘Mother Earth’, so that Stone, cut off from other people, appears as that Mother’s daughter who is herself about to be lost. We can go even further: Earth is a giant rock in space, and the woman at the centre of this story is a ‘stone’ circling around it (and if she were to die up there, she would, after a while, be as inert and cold as stone). This intimate character study and the spectacular space adventure are thus presented in close parallel with each other.

Let’s take a look at the character study first. Ryan Stone’s daughter Sarah died in an accident when she was four years old, and Stone has never been able to process that loss. In some ways her life has been suspended ever since (could we say that she has almost turned to stone?) She says that since Sarah’s death her life has consisted of nothing but work (as a doctor in a hospital) and driving from and to work (while listening to music - never talk - which fills the void surrounding her).

On two occasions during the film (in conversation with Kowalski at the beginning and in a monologue towards the end) Stone states explicitly that she does not have any intimate bonds with anyone. There appears to be no boyfriend, nor does she seem to be close to the father of her child. She does not mention her parents or any siblings - presumably because the former are dead and there aren’t any of the latter (or, if there are, she isn’t close to them). Nor does she appear to have any friends. Perhaps she intentionally keeps her distance from people because she does not want to experience another devastating loss.

Now, what better way could there be to keep one’s distance from other people than to go into space? Indeed, Stone hints at this motivation when she responds to Kowalski’s question what she likes most about space with ‘silence’ - that is, one presumes, the absence of the noises made by human beings (rather than the absence of the sounds of the natural world, although, as we will see, on some level she might long for the absolute silence of death). Of course, at this point, there is no silence, because she is talking to Kowalski, and even when he is silent, the tinny music he listens to can be heard. There is a tension, then, between Stone’s desire for silence (she isn’t keen, early in the film, on Kowalski’s constant verbal burbling) and her need nevertheless for verbal communication (and perhaps music). The need for verbal communication – for connection with others – is something that becomes clearer as the action of the film proceeds.

Intriguingly, there might be a parallel to this in Kowalski’s entire story: he is a raconteur in space, relaying tales about life on Earth, which revolve around failed human connections (an ex-wife who cheated on him, a Mardi Gras date that is over before it even begins). His ambition in life is to go on the longest space walk in history, floating around the Earth all on his own. And he gets to realise this ambition. The circumstances are tragic, but also slightly ambiguous: He has saved Stone after a terrible accident in space, and she ends up holding on to a tether that prevents him from spinning off into space - and death. He argues that she won’t be able to pull him in because her own ties to the space shuttle are too tenuous; instead he will pull her with him into space - unless he severs their bond, which he does very quickly, indeed possibly almost eagerly. Is this just a noble sacrifice, or does it also have a tacit semi-suicidal dimension?

Gravity, dir. Alfonso Cuarón (2013)

In any case, it is a crucial moment. Ryan Stone may have gone to space to keep her distance from people and to find silence; if that is the case, she gets more than she bargained for. The accident in space cuts off all communication with Earth and kills all crewmembers of the space shuttle except for her and Kowalski - who now leaves her behind (although he will be able to speak with her for a little while longer). At the same time, Kowalski’s almost-eager noble sacrifice points to his willingness to cut his links with humanity for good - and to die all alone. Importantly, Stone refuses for a while to accept his apparently inevitable loss.

The film does not fill in all the psychological details, but it does suggest that space - and eventually death - is a void that some people, especially those who have lost loved ones, may want to escape into so as to prevent further suffering arising from their bonds to others. Stone herself suggests this when she later imagines Kowalski’s magical return which, in a powerfully-filmed scene that one experiences largely from Stone’s point of view, is not initially signalled as her fantasy but is eventually revealed to be just that. In this fantasy, Kowalski gently accuses her of wanting an easy way out of life’s struggles by giving up the fight to survive, instead peacefully going to sleep until she is poisoned by carbon monoxide. This is indeed what Stone is trying to do - but it is also, one might say, what Kowalski has already done.[i]

Stone’s will to live is revived by her fantasy of Kowalski’s return. On some level, perhaps, this fantasy establishes the kind of link to another person, which, she says, she no longer has on Earth. She feels connected to Kowalski who (in her fantasy) knows her well enough to identify her wish to die and who cares about her enough to confront her about it so as to change her mind. At the same time, of course, this very fantasy ensures that, at least in her mind, in her soul, Kowalski is still alive; death is not the end. (We will return to this point.)

Gravity, dir. Alfonso Cuarón (2013)

Not coincidentally, we think, her last words to him (to the person she remembers) concern her daughter; she asks him to look out for her in the afterlife. Earlier on she seemed to believe that only death could re-unite her with Sarah, but perhaps now she knows that her daughter is with her, just like Kowalski, as long as she can imagine her. Some of the dialogue in this sequence (which is in fact the monologue of a woman who secretly wants to talk herself out of committing suicide) might be claimed to be all too clichéd - but the central idea seems valid, and indeed deep: We can accept the loss of loved ones better if we think that, because we have shared so much with them, they do live on in us, which in turn gives us a reason to go on.

Later on, Stone is reminded of such bonds when she establishes radio contact with a man on Earth - not someone from the space centre in Houston, as she had hoped, but a radio amateur who speaks in a language unknown to her, but manages to communicate something important anyway by bringing a dog’s voice to the microphone and then (closer still) a baby. Stone is (ambiguously, tenuously) delighted when she hears him singing to the baby, perhaps because it reminds her of her singing to Sarah and also her having been sung to by her own parents. This temporarily renews her sense of human interconnectedness and perhaps undergirds her decision, after an internal struggle, to struggle on.

Gravity, then, deals with grief. And here our argument is supported by the wonderful fact that the Latin root of our word grief is the same as that for our word gravity. ‘Gravis’ is the common root of gravity, heaviness, and grief. Grief and gravity, in our historical subconscious, are the same thing: the grave, the heavy, that pulls us down and grounds us. Grief, we would argue, centrally concerns a refusal to allow that the world no longer includes the dead person.[ii] Both phenomenologically (i.e. in terms of our lived experience) and logically (i.e. conceptually), grief is the pain of a ruptured life-world. Grief is the lived refusal to accept that someone important has been taken from us. For when that person was a constitutive element of our world, an over-hasty acceptance of their exit would mean that we were not really denizens of that world, but merely observers of it, merely passing through rather than living, inhabiting.

Grief is rational, for it is rational to have a world, and to care about those in it. Indeed, we would suggest that grief is essential to our humanity. One would have to be some kind of inhuman monster, and/or disabled in a profound way, not to feel grief under appropriate circumstances. However, grief can be pathological if it becomes permanent, turning into depression. Stone is letting go of that depression, at last, when she overcomes her desire for death and realises that, due to their shared experiences, their influence, their values, her daughter (and also Kowalski) lives on in her. Thus, grief - and Gravity - is a forceful reminder of the ‘fact’ (that is deeper than any mere fact) that we are not separate from another, but always connected, even beyond death. (In this sense, to vary William Faulkner: The dead aren’t dead. They’re not even past.)  The film is thus about accepting (inter)dependency, rather than striving for independence (this striving being so closely associated with American culture). Interdependence - and none more so than the relationship between mother and child - makes us vulnerable but it also ensures that we live on in each other.

Gravity, dir. Alfonso Cuarón (2013)

Gravity adds another dimension to its renunciation of depression and its plea for life, which is to emphasise and make palpable the sheer excitement life can generate. Right from the beginning of the film, we find ourselves moving around in space high above the Earth, enjoying breathtaking vistas but also soon experiencing extreme danger and utterly disorienting movement. Initially, the film’s largely computer generated imagery creates the illusion of a camera’s continuous movement around spacecraft and bodies, and also into the very positions from which characters view the world around them (such subjective point of views being signalled by the clouding of space helmets which partially obstructs our vision). The deployment of director Alfonso Cuaron’s trademark ultra-long tracking- and panning-shots in Gravity is a technical tour de force, which may draw attention to its own virtuosity, but also adds to the film’s thematic concern with the connectedness of inside and outside, character study and space adventure. (Later on, conventional - and less noticeable - editing, moving from objective to subjective shots, achieves the same effect.)

In any case, spectacular views of Earth and space, and rapid camera movement provide us viewers with (the illusion of) a visceral experience, especially when watching the film in 3D. As first Kowalski and then much later Stone says: ‘It’s a hell of a ride!’ ‘Ride’ here initially refers to space travel, but, more generally, to human life - and also to the film we are watching. In other words, the film takes us on a ride, which is meant to remind us of the thrill of being alive. This continues for most of the story, which moves from exterior space to the interiors of various spacecraft until, finally, Stone plunges back to Earth in a small capsule.

Before we get to this point, the film examines the ambiguities of space exploration. Stone is in space because a device she developed for use in hospitals can also be used in the Hubble space telescope that, we are told, is designed to reach out to, and gather information from, ‘the edge of the universe’. Thus, exploring and healing the human body is connected to the exploration of the whole universe; looking inward and looking outward are two sides of the same coin.

The film never mentions the physical exploration of outer space - manned and unmanned spacecraft escaping Earth’s gravity altogether so as to go to the Moon and beyond. This is part of its much-greater realism than most of its predecessors as to the nature of life in space – which is likely to be virtually impossible for healthy human beings for periods longer than a few months, or at most years. Instead, in this film, people and their craft remain in Earth’s orbit, which provides them with spectacular views of the planet’s surface. Indeed, Kowalski’s last words - while drifting off to his death in space - concern the beauty of Earth and thus, it is implied, of life, and they are spoken precisely so as to give Stone a reason to go on. He speaks of the beauty of the sun shining on the Ganges in the hope that this great, glorious, grave beauty, together with Earth’s gravity, will pull Stone home.

However, the view from space has another dimension. Where there is night on Earth, the artificial light resulting from human habitation looks like a slow burning fire destroying everything in its way (like lava flowing off a volcano). In a tradition going back to the first widely disseminated pictures of the Earth in space (notably the ones known as ‘Earthrise’ and ‘Blue Marble’ from the late 1960s and early 1970s), seeing the globe reveals both its beauty and its vulnerability.

"The vast loneliness is awe-inspiring and it makes you realize just what you have back there on Earth" - Command Module Pilot Jim Lovell, Apollo 8.  'Earthrise', 1968, NASA 

Gravity, dir. Alfonso Cuarón (2013)

'Blue Marble', Apollo 17, 1972. Harrison Schmitt/Nasa

At the same time, near-Earth space is shown to be a new habitat for humans, who fill it up with various spacecraft. Two permanent space stations (an international one and a Chinese one) are pioneering outposts of humanity, with, possibly, significant waves of human migration to follow so that we might imagine that, like all the continents of Earth before, space as well may be colonised. Yet, this, and more generally the human use, the ‘development’, of space, is by no means unproblematic, because with human habitation comes environmental destruction (through new forms of pollution) - even in space.

When a Russian rocket destroys one of the Russians’ own satellites (a spy satellite with sensitive technology it would seem), a chain reaction is triggered, whereby debris from the first satellite slams into other spacecraft creating more debris etc. This (a realistic potential scenario) is the cause of the accident that kills all members of the space mission Stone belongs to - and also leads to the abandonment of the two space stations she flies to in search of an escape capsule. With accumulating space debris forever circling the Earth, humanity’s colonisation of near-Earth space has already begun to cancel itself out.

In this context, the film’s title takes on a range of meanings. Most banally, one might say, the story concerns a serious, ‘grave’ situation - Stone finding herself stranded in space as the lone survivor of an accident. The ‘gravity’ of this situation is intensified precisely by the fact that any outside help would now have to overcome the pull of Earth’s gravity so as to join her in orbit - and by the fact that space debris is held in the very same orbit by Earth’s gravity. Even if it was not extremely difficult to send a rocket to her rescue, such a rescue mission would be almost impossible due to the dangerous debris circling the Earth.

We can also note that Stone herself is circling the planet at great speed, so that the centrifugal force created by her movement balances the pull of Earth’s gravity, creating the experience of weightlessness. Complementing the pervasive imagery of tethers - tenuous, yet vital links between people or between people and spacecraft -, Stone’s floating in space is the result precisely of being tethered to Earth by the planet’s gravity. Rather than drifting off into empty space, she continues to be connected to Mother Earth by a kind of ethereal umbilical cord.

When she finally manages to find a spacecraft with which to return from her orbit to the planet’s surface, gravity is a potentially deadly force. Gravity accelerates the plunging capsule so much that it almost burns in the atmosphere - and yet it is only the pull of gravity that can bring her home. And here we are reminded of the trauma Stone has been trying to escape from: Her daughter played at school and fell down, gravity (together with her own momentum) pulling her to the ground with such force that she broke her neck. At the end of the film, then, we are reminded of the deadliness of gravity - and also of the fact that it is the basis of our lives. This reiterates, on another, global level, the central point we have made before: The film’s focus on grief serves to emphasise the fact that humans are dependent on each other, which makes them both profoundly vulnerable and indestructible. Similarly, the film’s focus on gravity expresses our dependency on the Earth - it ties us, sometimes pulls us, down, and also gives us life as well as a kind of material afterlife, because eventually our bodies become earth.

Now, Stone’s return to Earth is presented in archetypal imagery. She confronts the four basic elements of old: the air of the atmosphere, the fire that almost burns her capsule, the water of the sea into which the capsule falls, and the earth she crawls on to afterwards. There is also the eerie vision of what appears to be virgin land, untouched by human habitation, a kind of paradise which Stone is allowed to (re)enter – while the radio messages on the soundtrack have assured us that she is not in fact alone, that human company is on the way. Gravity thus depicts both the continuity of human connections and the promise of a new beginning, not just for Stone but also, perhaps, for humankind.[iii] The film emphasises the fact that she has to come very close to death before she can step on the Earth again; to be born again, first one has to die. As soon as she opens the capsule, it fills with water and sinks, and when she escapes from it, her space suit fills with water as well, dragging her down (Stone is indeed sinking like a stone). The technological devices that have protected her in space (capsule and suit) have to be abandoned for survival and a new beginning to become possible.

It is only after she has come very close to death for the second time that Stone can finally make her way back to the surface and to land. In retrospect, the capsule filling with water and the sea appear both as death traps and as wombs from which she is born again, her movement echoing the development of life on Earth - from water to land, and, on land, from crawling to walking. Indeed, the film includes a reminder of this development by briefly focusing on a frog swimming upwards, like its amphibian ancestors that were the first to make the transition from water to land (and whose descendants are proving the most vulnerable of all to anthropogenic extinction). Another reminder of broader developments is Stone’s passionate embrace of mud, the mud that provided living space for the first creatures to emerge from the sea. She says ‘Thank you’, looking down into the mud. Perhaps she is addressing a divine entity she believes in, or, possibly, the people who helped her get to this point (especially Kowalski, also the nameless radio amateur), or even the gravity that pulled her down, or, most likely, the Earth itself, producing this gravity, and its fertile soil (earth) that is here represented by this mud.

Finally, there is Stone’s struggle to get back on her feet (once again echoing untold millions of years of evolution). At the very end of the film, it takes every effort for her to stand up, finally towering majestically above the camera (which stays on the ground, looking up to her). It is hard to stand up and walk, as hard as it has been for Stone to overcome depression and return to life, return to the Earth. It is hard to accept and to cope with the pull. And it is wonderful.

Importantly, this final shot contains a reminder of the presence of the camera - similar to the breath clouding helmets in earlier point-of-view-shots and to reflections and refractions of light on the camera’s lens in numerous other shots. Here it is mud and water which has been splashed onto the lens by Stone’s movements. As the camera is positioned on the ground, we can say that the dirt on the lens reminds us of its - and our - immersion in and reliance on mud, the same mud that Stone clawed into and cherished after having extracted herself from the water.

Gravity, dir. Alfonso Cuarón (2013)

It also reminds us of course of the very existence of the camera and the fact that we are watching a movie. Thus, it is equivalent to the direct looks at the camera in the last frames of the action in both 2001: A Space Odyssey and Avatar (two films we have previously written about for the ThinkingFilmCollective). Both films revolve centrally, like Gravity, around the idea of re-birth (an astronaut being reborn as a Star Child, a human being reborn as a Na'vi) and around the need, and the possibility, to gain a new perspective on the world we live in (on): The Star Child gazes at the Earth before it turns towards the camera, and Jake Sully abandons his human body so as to be able to live permanently in the (for humans so hostile) environment of Pandora. When they both stare at the camera and, through it, at us, the films remind us that what is at stake in these stories is our perspective as well. Are we willing to see the world anew? And what might we be willing to do as a consequence of our new perspective? Might we, for instance. decide not to give up on the challenges we face today? We are talking now about us as individuals, us as part perhaps of a movement – and us as a species. Gravity ‘s ending addresses us in the same way, serving like that of 2001 and Avatar as a call to action.

Gravity, dir. Alfonso Cuarón (2013)

The ‘alienation effect’ of the mud hitting the camera is, we would suggest, the film’s final invitation to its viewers to heed its call, to think about what is offered in the experience of the film, to be reminded, in Wittgenstein’s sense, of what one utterly knows but can be persuaded by ideology to forget: in this case, that life on Earth is so worth saving, and that (for the foreseeable future) life for us is only possible on or near Earth. Thus the film seeks to transform us by returning us to life, to the awareness of the wonder of this life, and to the ‘fact’ (that is once again greater than any mere fact) that being alive is a gift not to be discarded. For Gravity’s space adventure ends with a renewed appreciation of many of the fundamentals of life on Earth - breathable air, fertile soil which is also the ground we can walk on, as well as great bodies of water that first nurtured life on this planet, and just as importantly, the human interconnectedness which sustains us. The space adventure in the film here stands in for the film itself, Stone’s journey representing that of every viewer: We let ourselves be taken into space by the film so as to return from this journey, just like Stone, with a renewed appreciation of our everyday surroundings, knowing them, and knowing our way about in them, perhaps, for the first time. In other words: The film is not a means of escape from our world; even when we appear to float in (its) space, we are tethered to our regular lives, not least by the pull of gravity we experience in our seats in the auditorium (and by the proximity of other people sharing our experience). Gravity is a constant reminder of our utterly-essential connection to the Earth (and to each other) - as is Gravity.

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[i] All of this is somewhat reminiscent of the harrowing Ray Bradbury story 'No Particular Night or Morning' from The Illustrated Man. Here a man suffers terrible loss on Earth and goes into space to disconnect himself from everything that could produce further pain, eventually denying the very existence of the past and of ever more aspects of the present, including his own body, which he experienced as extremely vulnerable when a meteor hit the spaceship; in the end he drifts into empty space in his space suit, accepting only the existence of his own mind. The difference is that Bradbury’s story is very much a meditation on scepticism as to other minds (or solipsism) as a disastrous philosophical challenge, whereas Gravity is interested in solipsism only as an (un-)ethical, self-protective temptation. The difference between 'No particular Night or Morning' and Gravity then is the difference between something that can be lived only at the cost of psychosis and something that can be lived more easily – at the cost of neurosis. It is the difference that Stanley Cavell famously describes as the difference between madness and tragedy. Gravity is interested in the latter, in depression, separateness, and the temptation to retreat from life, from the vulnerability that comes with one’s inevitable attachment to others. At the same time, Gravity replays many aspects of 2001: A Space Odyssey: the dead astronaut Frank Poole’s body drifting away into space; the tenacity with which the lone survivor of the Jupiter mission, David Bowman, clings to life and eventually is able to return home, after he is reborn, from his death bed, as a Star Child; and much else. In particular it is worth noting that the curve of the astronauts’ helmets in Gravity echoes the curve of the Star Child’s protective cocoon, and that in some shots Stone adopts a foetal position and slowly spins around like the foetal Star Child in 2001.

[ii] See Read’s examination of ‘The logic of grief’, forthcoming.

[iii] Once more, echoes of 2001 here.

The New Total Recall, the Old Wicker Man

By Rupert Read

Total Recall, dir. Len Wiseman (2012)

The new Total Recall is quite a ride. I saw it a couple of years back when it came out, on an IMAX screen, with my thinkingfilmcollective colleague, Emma Bell. It was shown quite a lot on IMAX — possibly a clue to its genre: an action movie; a thrills, spills and effects vehicle. To those of us who found the original 1990 Total Recall, which was based of course on a Phillip K. Dick story entitled We Can Remember It For You Wholesale (and Dick is the unpleasant conceptual genius of modern sci-fi), a profoundly philosophical work, the remake is inevitably disappointing.

And indeed: at all the points where the first film showed its deepest philosophical illumination, this one fell short.

   Examples:

• Hauser’s video-recordings for Quaid are less philosophical in content, less interesting personal-identity-wise, than in the original. Furthermore, we see Hauser speaking to Quaid, but what is missing is the beautiful symmetry of these video-recordings present in the first version of the film. We miss seeing Hauser telling the Hauser/Quaid who is about to be turned back into the original Hauser about this re-turning: the laughing Arnie at this point in the original film is replaced in the new version by a boring one-dimensional Cohagan. 

One of many moments in which the original Total Recall (1990) facilitates the audience's reflecting on the nature of identity. This one was 'copied' in the remake; others were, unfortunately, abandoned or bungled.

• The original film’s multiple investigation of the philosophy of personal identity — beautifully via Kuato [see the images below], also via the endless interest in mirroring, and via the robot-taxi-driver, and so on and on — is mostly missing. There is some nice new inclusion of doubles, but this is mostly put to poor use — as in Kate Beckinsale’s final appearance ‘as’ Jessica Biel at the end, which amounts to little more than an arbitrary Glenn-Close-still-coming-out-of-the-bathtub, still-not-dead attempt at a breathtaking twist at the end.

Pictured: a moment when the rebel leader Kuato is revealed to be a hidden, feotus like, in the body of  one of the [in this case, male] rebels. Total Recall, dir. Paul Verhoeven (1990)

• The new version has much less of the paranoid 'P.K.Dick' feel about it. It doesn’t do an effective job of leaving one with nagging quasi-Cartesian doubts about whether one actually has come out of Rekall. The original did; for instance, in having the same actress be the ‘sleazy’ secret agent image that Quaid chooses at Rekall as the one who plays his secret agent lover. One film worth comparing (the original) Total Recall to is then of course The Matrix. My interest in and admiration for (the original) Total Recall over the years has kept growing; I think that if you are looking for a great paranoid work that takes scepticism (and also of course questions of personal identity) seriously, then Total Recall is your best bet. The crucial difference between Total Recall and The Matrix is this: that The Matrix settles the question of which is the dream and which is the real world. Which makes the second half of it less interesting than the first half. Whereas Total Recall keeps the question alive... In the scene in Total Recall where the protagonist is offered a pill which would 'return him to reality', the question of which is reality is of course not quite settled (For, if one stares hard and paranoidly/schizoidly at the forehead of someone in one's dream, one could surely/probably strain enough to see a drop of sweat there...). Doubts keep returning in Total Recall, unlike in The Matrix, just as they ought to do for anyone inclined to (try to) take Descartes seriously...

•  Perhaps most crucially in this connection, the scene where someone comes in to ‘talk Quaid/Hauser down’ is a real failure, compared to the original. The psychiatrist with that little bead of sweat on his forehead was so, so, much subtler (and yet of course: hardly decisive of one not being in a dream) than what happens in the new version, where his workmate goes in to talk with Quaid and his lover.

The new version, like the original, argues that, while being deprived of one’s past is a terrible, terrible, thing, what is even worse is to be unwilling to be who one is in the present. To become who you are, as Nietzsche put it. Total Recall is about not being over-attached to the past; the choice that Hauser-Quaid makes, of not allowing himself to become his former self again, is profoundly the right one. Implicit in the bullet-points above (especially the first bullet-point) is that the original, on balance, provides a better setting for this philosophy of action-in-the-world (as opposed to: of action-flicks), of Total Recall. 

Moreover, what is completely missing in the new version (it is subjugated by a worshipping of machines) is the profound sense, incarnated in Kuato (the new version’s rebel leader, Matthias, is by contrast nothing more than a cipher), of how it might matter in this (future-directed) quest, to get everything one can from the accumulation of experience that is one’s past, without being subjugated by that past. In other words: to achieve a meditative presence. And thus, if necessary, to achieve total recall. To remember what needs to be remembered.

This is the new version’s greatest failing of all. In the crucial scene where Quaid/Hauser is to achieve recall of the vital (to the rebellion) experiences that he can’t remember, the new version offers us nothing. It turns out that there is nothing of this nature in Quaid/Hauser’s mind to recall; he was, in this sense, only a trick. A booby-trap, in which to trap Matthias and the resistance.

In the original, the marvellous scene in which Kuato, together with Quaid/Hauser (an experience of meditative communion; like the joining of viewer and film), enable Quaid/Hauser to achieve total recall justifies the film’s title. In the new version, nothing does. The film itself is in this sense a trick, an empty vessel. 

In other words: There is no good reason why this film has the title ‘Total Recall’. The only reason it has this title is that it is a remake of the earlier film. 

That isn’t a good enough reason. 

And now we can safely say: it is an inferior remake. It is nothing more than a — flawed —copy of the original. 

Consider now, by comparison, the original (and best) version of The Wicker Man from 1973 rather than the 2006 remake. The original Wicker Man is a film that, like the new Total Recall, centres upon a trick. There is an empty space, where one was expecting to find something. But in this case, the way in which the trick is practised upon the central character and upon the viewer alike is a triumph. 

The Wicker Man, dir. Robin Hardy (1973)

I love films as clever as The Wicker Man. For the first hour of the film, I was greatly enjoying it, but saw it very much as a slightly-hokey period-piece. I watched with pleasure, especially enjoying the ‘musical’ scenes, but I watched nevertheless with some detachment: I kept being surprised by the over-the-top cheese, by the plot-failures, by apparently having to subscribe to a belief in transmutation of bodies in order to be able to follow along with the film’s plot, and above all by the silly, weird and rather naïve way the island’s inhabitants were behaving. I was shocked and gripped when, with fifteen minutes of the film to go, I suddenly realised how I had been fooled. I had thought that the actors playing the villagers had been slightly over-acting / acting badly; and then I suddenly realised that it was the villagers who had been (so) acting, not the actors.

The Wicker Man, dir. Robin Hardy (1973)

The way I had been fooled (and I assume that this is the experience of the vast majority of film-goers to this film — those who have read/heard spoilers before seeing the film will unfortunately be drastically deprived of this effect) of course mirrors the experience of the protagonist, the police-officer. Thus one is subtly placed in his position, even while one might think one is resisting or superior to his position. For example: to his moralism and his Christian dogmatism. It doesn't matter that one feels distant from him: one is still forced to identify with him at the moment of revelation and thereafter. In fact, the film’s therapy could even work better if one is at a distance from him for most of it! This makes the experience of the closing portion of the film very sinister and disturbing (as of course befits a truly great horror film). For, even without consciously identifying with him, one is necessarily sucked into his point of view and his peril, by the sudden switch in what one understands to be happening, in the film, near the end. This alone is enough to make the film a potentially transformative / therapeutic experience. I found myself, for example, feeling surprisingly viscerally the pain of the character who is then about to be sacrificed.

The Wicker Man, dir. Robin Hardy (1973)

The one who is to be sacrificed goes rapidly and persuasively (but of course completely unpersuasively, to the rest of those present) through the whole gamut of arguments as to why they should not be sacrificed. Almost like a philosopher or a politician. The failure of these arguments to make any impact whatsoever (except to elicit a marvellous speech from Lord Summerhill (Christopher Lee, in a charismatic performance as one would expect from him in this role: going suddenly from seeming-naïf to chilling-invoker^[1]) about the glory of being martyred[2]) feels like a kind of slap in the face of the viewer who sat complacently through the first hour of the film feeling “This is lovely/interesting, but has nothing to do with me.” 

Not to put too fine a point on it: I felt that the film was speaking to and of me, suddenly; that I was placed in it. (Exactly the feeling that is missing, from the new Total Recall, no matter what thrills, spills and special effects it shoves at one.)  This is a profoundly uncomfortable feeling, especially given where one then is getting placed.  In this way, the shocking reorientation of the viewer, when they learn suddenly the true nature of the sacrifice — and learn therefore that virtually all their criticisms of the first hour of the film were simply mistaken —, and the true nature of the plot (using the word now in its double-meaning, as both story and plot (as in,  ‘conspiracy’), reminds me powerfully of the shock of recognition one experiences in the final three minutes of Apocalypto, as discussed by me here.

The Wicker Man: Finally, you are literally placed within it. What a great conceit. What a fine, fine, film, that in this way closes by commenting upon its own spine-chilling effectiveness...

And thus justifies its otherwise somewhat-strange title. After all, the giant ‘man’ made of wicker only actually appears to the plot and to our eyes in the final several minutes of the film. But what I am saying is: The wicker man symbolises the very device that the film is, the very trick that is played on the protagonist and the viewer alike. The wicker man is empty. One is placed inside it. And: destroyed, nihilated.

This is just what the film The Wicker Man does to one (at least, in visceral imagination), via the deep trick that it plays.

The Wicker Man, dir. Robin Hardy (1973)

The original version of Total Recall was, in a similar fashion, a marvellous meditation on what it is to watch a film. It counterposes the reality of going on a physical journey that is also a journey of quest, of self-discovery, with the banality of tourism, and the uber-banality of implanting false memories into oneself of a ‘trip’ ‘better’ than tourism or than real life. It implicitly questions the very industry, Hollywood, that it instantiates. (Recall the scene in the original Total Recall that, via adverts, juxtaposes going to Mars with going to Rekall, and that implicitly compares the ‘escapism’ of the latter with the escapism of the movies, compared and contrasted with the reality of real life, even as a ‘tourist’, and contrasted with the reality of what gets faked for us in the movies.) Like Avatar,[3] like any good philosophically ‘therapeutic’ film, it thus ‘forces’ the attentive viewer to question their own potential complicity in escapism. You fail to rise to the challenge of a good deep film, if you fail to see that it calls for you to act (for instance: to rebel, against colonialism). 

The new version of Total Recall loses the sense of a physical journey, and loses some of the sense of quest. It misses completely the comparison with tourism. This ill-fits it for being a therapeutic work that ‘forces’ the viewer to achieve an autonomy beyond their own manipulation at the hands of film-makers. It tends, rather, to encourage complete immersion (e.g. the Imax, again), and to function, therefore, as pure escapism. True, it delves slightly more deeply than the original into colonialism, and the invention of ‘The fall’ is clever. But cleverness is not enough: the depth of the original is missing. Moreover, in being a Schwarzenegger vehicle, the original Total Recall signalled to its audience that they should rise above the escapism portrayed in, but not recommended by, the film. The new version doesn’t. 

I have argued that, in this new version of Total Recall, there is no total recall. Worse: there is nothing to so recall. But: that very — devastatingly critical — point is the axis about which one might conceivably construct what I think would then be the only charitable way in which to see this as a philosophy-as-therapy film. For there is I believe one devious possible way to read the new Total Recall, on which it might come up trumps.

Is there a way after all to achieve the sought-after engagement with this film, for one as viewer to be more than merely escapist spectator? Does the lack of there being anything there to (totally) recall, in the new version, offer the requisite blank slate for the viewer to start to write what needs to be there? Does the film thus empower the engaged-viewer to see beyond it and its ilk, and into one’s own presence, and non-vacuity? 

If you watch this film clued in to its almost-complete emptiness, willing to accept its failure even to justify its own title, then I think ‘therapy’ becomes possible again...

There is one way then in which the new Total Recall can be understood as, if you like at the meta-level, not a disappointment. For, in its very disappointingness, in its being nothing more than a copy (of a copy?), in its being empty of meaning, in its not justifying its own great lineage and title, we might, ironically, find salvation. When we recall the original Total Recall (as, in a charming and funny series of homages, the new version explicitly and repeatedly invites us to do), when we see it more clearly in the light of its nihilistic and philosophy-lite successor, when we see that successor in all its barrenness, then again we are freed up, perhaps better than ever, from being captured by the attractions of our own Rekall-lite industry: Hollywood. Perhaps the great achievement of the new Total Recall is in taking the critique of escapism manifest in the original version to a new level. Perhaps the proper way to understand the new Total Recall is: as an antidote to itself and to all films in the genre. As a device engaging the audience, involving one and all of us, therapeutically after all, in the complete — the total — unmasking of the manipulation that special-effects-vehicles, action-flicks, sci-fi spectaculars, thrillers, love-stories, etc. routinely practise upon us. 

Total Recall, dir. Paul Verhoeven (1990)

So: two films. One a wonderful original, one a pointless remake — unless re-read in the devious hyper-charitable fashion I’ve just proposed. Both having profoundly in common a void at the heart of them, a deep trick played on the movie’s protagonist, and by extension played on you, the viewer. This deep commonality making The Wicker Man a work of genius, and the new Total Recall a failure whose only possible deep virtue lies ultimately in the point that one can see as being made by that (virtually total) failure.



[Thanks to Phil Hutchinson, Jessica Woolley, Alan Finlayson, Ruth Makoff and Emma Bell for conversations that have helped shape this piece.]

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[1] Here one might think of the following quote, from Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Frazer’s ‘Golden Bough’: “If I see such a practice, or hear of it, it is like seeing a man speaking sternly to another because of something quite trivial, and noticing in the tone of his voice and in his face that on occasion this man can be frightening. The impression I get from this may be a very deep and extremely serious one.” Wittgenstein is of course discussing practices precisely similar to those shown in The Wicker Man. He might almost be discussing Lord Summerhill, as portrayed by Christopher Lee…

[2] A speech that, in this regard especially, reminded me of the finely-balanced – often sympathetic - attitude of the pagan protagonists of The Mists of Avalon toward the religion of their Christian usurpers.

[3] Cf. my http://thinkingfilmcollective.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/avatar-transformed-cinema.html