American Beauty and the Futility of Freedom

by Christopher Barr

“Society is a masked ball, where everyone hides his real character, and reveals it in hiding.”

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

American Beauty is about a group of suburbanites that have been so repressed by the choke hold society imposes on its populace, that their only recourse is to fight for freedom or implode.  It’s also about how life, within this struggle to be seen and understood, can suck.   

Lester Burnham is a slouched over, emasculated, vibrantly drained man that is living a life filled with uncertainty and insecurity.  He and his wife Carolyn and daughter Jane at this point are merely “playing” family, or how Lester later refers to it as a “commercial” for how abnormal they really are.

The problem here and within society in general is people are doing what they have been told to do.  What’s expected of them is being somewhat fulfilled but yet they still feel empty and alone among other people.

The highlight to Lester’s day that he narrates in the beginning is masturbating in the shower; he states that his day goes downhill from here; this is also a form of sexual renunciation that weaves throughout the film.  He’s a man with no power, a modern stepped-on man, insignificant and disposable.  The setback here is he doesn’t want to feel that way, he wants to get it all back but he feels stuck in the modern machine of progress. 

We live in a society where we battle with who will have the power to define reality.  Lester’s wife Carolyn is a woman who fights desperately in a male dominant world to keep up the appearance of strength as she projects herself as a powerful woman.  But when she fails miserably, according to her own account, she slaps herself in the face a number of times for being weak.  She is attempting to sell a house and the one particular house she fails to sell devastates her because she fails to meet the status quo.  A standard that she believes is expected of all Real Estate agents.  She is incapable of true connection, true sexual gratification as long as she insists on conforming to society’s expectations.

“The more the drive toward life is thwarted, the stronger is the drive toward destruction; the more life is realized, the less is the strength of destructiveness.  Destructiveness is the outcome of unlived life.”

– Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom

While we dive into the lives of these people during the beginning half an hour of the film, one begins to start to ask; what exactly are we fighting for here?  What type of life are we living that requires this must struggle and gives very little in return, and I don’t mean ‘stuff’, I mean fulfillment, I mean purpose?

Lester begins to wake up when he falls in lust with one of his daughter Jane’s attractive, cheer-leading friends, Angela.  So much so that while in bed later that night, he fantasizes about her lasciviously lying naked on the ceiling looking down on him, coveting him.  Surrounding her and covering her lady parts are red rose petals with some raining joyfully down on a jovial Lester.  He smiles widely with happiness for the first time in years as red petals softly breeze by his face.  Meeting her shock him from his slump, kicked him in his ass and made him stand up and feel again.

S-P-E-C-T-A-C-U-L-A-R

“Because there’s nothing worse in life that being ordinary.”

– Angela

Due to fear and a possible threat of change, people often avoid actually getting to know anything about their environment and anyone that happens to be around them.  There is a huge majority of the population that doesn’t know anything really significant about their family members and close friends.  This unfortunate use of our defense mechanism is creating a society of strangers that are under the illusion that they understand the people around them.  This likely results from a superficial pseudo-psychology defecated on TV talk shows and celebrity magazines.

Ricky Fitts is a young man that just moved in next door to the Burnham’s with his father and mother, a strict, dictator-type army Colonel named Frank and his spiritually drained, life-force deprived mother Barbara.  Ricky’s mother is clearly a woman that has had her will beaten out of her over the years by her controlling totalitarian husband.

“Oh it’s okay, I wouldn’t remember me either.”

– Lester

At a Real Estate gathering that Lester is forced to go to, Carolyn meets “The Real Estate King”, a man that is a bit of superstar in the Real Estate community due to his impeccable sales record, he’s also a bit of posturing douche bag, Carolyn is an awe of him.

Lester meets Ricky, who is working there as a waiter, and they go out back and smoke some marijuana.  This is a pivotal point in Lester’s awakening because marijuana, and the primary reason why it’s illegal is most places, is gateway to freedom, it can be a gateway to elevation, mentally and spiritually.  As oppose to alcohol, marijuana is often a non-violent eye opener that one could utilize on the path to autonomy.

Angela flirts with Lester as he has a fantasy about kissing her and then pulling a red rose pedal out of his mouth.  Angela is an attention seeker; she requires constant celebration where ever she goes, in order to support her swelling ego that she’s defensively constructed for herself.  There is no doubt that she’s pretty but sadly for her, she’s been sucked into the whirlwind beauty franchise of self-entitlement, where attractive people are supposed to get a free pass is this society for just being pleasant to look at.

Over hearing Angela tease Jane, in Jane’s bedroom, about fucking her father if he lifted weights, Lester goes to his basement and dusts off the old dumbbells and complies with said requirements and begins lifting them.  At the same time, Ricky up in his bedroom window, films Lester lifting his weights while he looks at himself in the reflection of his basement window. 

Lester’s fantasies continue with him walking into the bathroom with Angela naked in a filled bathtub, with the surface of the water smothered in red rose pedals.  Lester slowly reaches past the pedals and into the water toward her crotch, when Carolyn, in their bed catches Lester masturbating.  She is appalled by the sight of it and jumps out of bed and yells as him.  This is Lester’s first time since his awakening that he stands up to his controlling, manipulative wife.   

“It’s a great thing when you realize you still have the ability to surprise yourself.  Makes you wonder what else you can do that you’ve forgotten about”

– Lester

Lester buys marijuana off of Ricky and reminisces about the good old days when he had no responsibility.  He then works out in his garage with the music blaring when Carolyn confronts him about misbehaving.  He maintains his previous position from before and basically tells her to kiss his ass, he’ll do what he wants to do and she can’t control him anymore.

My job consists of basically masking my contempt for the assholes in charge and at least once a day, retiring to the men’s room so I can jerk off, while I fantasize about a life that doesn’t so closely resemble hell.

Lester quits his advertising job and blackmails his supervisor about their philandering boss’ misuse of company money to hire hookers for sex.  He walks out victorious, carrying his personal belongings and a great severance package.

Jane becomes intrigued by Ricky’s iconoclastic propensity for beauty in things.  He has an eye for seeing beauty in the little things that most people are blind to.  This intuition often becomes overwhelming for the young man to take.  He shows Jane a video of a floating white plastic bag that is caught in a whirlwind and spirals aimlessly around a brick wall along with some leaves.  The beauty of that video is; he captured a moment in time, a unique one, a simple one of something happening in the world that is outside of himself.  There’s something very poetic to the subversive eye that can see the world without them in it.  Only then one can reinsert oneself back in and see something real and original.  That in my opinion is where artist’s fish for inspiration and creativity.    

In the beginning Jane had body image issues, specifically with her breasts, but after meeting Ricky and spending time with him, she experiences her own form of awakening.  At night while in her bedroom window, she takes her shirt and bra off so Ricky, who’s in his own bedroom window across from hers, can film her and see her naked with her breasts exposed.  This is clearly a big deal for her, a girl who once felt she needed enhancing, now stands there awaken, beautiful.

Ricky’s father Frank storms in his room and punches the young man to the ground for breaking into his cabinet and showing Jane his Nazi plate.  Frank yells at Ricky, telling him that he can’t go out and do anything he wants in life, there are rules.  He tells him that he needs discipline and structure in his life to abide by.  Frank does represent the iron fist of society, where aspiring to be free is dangerous.  Individuals are molded out of the threat of violence for noncompliance.  Ricky, being far more intellectually evolved and thus smarter than his father, complies to stop the attack against him and save the fight for another day.

The possibility of change, for better or for worse, is heavily growing at this point in the story with Lester quitting his job and standing up against his wife.  Carolyn has sex with The Real Estate King and goes to a shooting gallery to fire a handgun, representing her desire for freedom but more for selfish reasons than anything.  Jane lets go of her body image issues and matures more and Ricky, well he’s already inspired by new and wonderful things, his problem is the authority of his controlling homophobic father, who punishes him anytime he attempts to display freedom.

Lester tries to reconnect with Carolyn but fails when he almost spills beer on the sofa, causing her to protect the sofa from getting damaged.  They argue over how her ‘stuff’ has become more important to her than living.  Stuff defines the hollow person in the modern age.  For a lot of people, their things are more important to them then their own family is.  Consumerism has convinced us to love our products more than ourselves; it’s convinced us that the more we collect the better person we will become.  Sadly most people have been scammed enough to believe this load of propaganda nonsense.

Frank, paranoid of change to his rigid structure, suspects that Ricky and Lester could be engaging in homosexual activity.  This conservative position in society is so pathetically petty.  All the brainwashed church folk are scared to death of homosexuals for reasons they would likely never be able to explain, other than that it says ‘no’ in the bible.  Society will continue on this ignorant path of destruction until, but not likely, people start to focus away from what people do in the privacy of their own homes to, who is actually running their country?  Who really are the policy makers and what is their agenda?

Lester catches Carolyn with the Real Estate King kissing in her vehicle.  He tells her that she can’t tell him what to do anymore.

“In order to be successful, one must project an image of success at all times.”

– The Real Estate King

After being punched by Frank for allegedly being with Lester sexually, Ricky finally realizes that convincing his homophobic father that he’s gay is the only way to escape him.  Frank is a latent homosexual living in a strictly homophobic environment where men do not have sex with other men, again for reasons none of them can explain other than ‘don’t’.  His anger is a form of displacement as a result of repressing his own desires.

Frank goes and sees Lester in his garage as rain pours down hard outside in the dark of night.  Frank exposes his real desire by attempting to kiss Lester, a man he thinks is a gay, and is rejected.  This devastates Frank’s masculinity and his moment of honesty as he cowers back into the rain and disappears in the night leaving a shocked Lester behind.

Lester and Angela later talk in the living room after her and Jane have a fight about how she thinks that Lester is sexy.  They walk toward each other so Lester can give Angela a drink of his beer.  A boutique of red roses is in a vase on a table exactly behind Lester.  Before, the red rose petals covered actual reality by allowing Lester close but not close enough to fulfill his desires.  But here the red roses are to his back as he faces Angela, his object of desire, in the real world where he has traversed his fantasy into reality.  The barriers have been broken and the dream is gone, he has what he wanted.

Lester doesn’t go through with having sex with Angela, which makes his enlightenment more about his own growth and less about getting Angela in bed.  His journey has led him to drop all his petty desires and seek real meaning in life.

Carolyn sits in her car, frustrated, upset and claiming out loud, in mantra-style jingoistic form, that she shouldn’t be the victim.  Even though she cheated on her husband, she doesn’t believe that she should have to take responsibility for that fact.  She sits in the car in the rain, looking at their house’s bright red door while holding a handgun, plotting, scheming, and determined that she will not be a victim.

Lester, liberated, sits at his table in the kitchen and is at peace; he is finally awake, enlightened, happy, content, grateful and lucky while he looks at a framed picture of his more jovial family.  He is then shot in the back of the head, red spraying the white tiled wall in front of him.  Red blood spills off the table as Lester’s dead body rests peacefully reflecting his face in the placid, calm red blood.  Ricky and Jane enter the room and find him, Ricky bends down and looks at Lester’s serene face and his beatific smile. 

The film ends with Lester’s disembodied voice expressing his gratitude from what we can only assume is the afterlife.  This could be seen as letting the audience off the hook with a Hallmark happy ending of sorts.  I look at it as a reminder of what it all meant in the first place.  There is no escaping the shackles of society.  Religion is one of the highest controlling forces to ever be used on people to get them to do what the powers-that-be want them to do.

The counter-cultural rebels of the film are Lester, Jane and Ricky.  They smoke dope, they behave in nonconformist ways and are all ostracized by the community.  Conversely, the fascists of the film are Carolyn, Colonel Frank Fitts and the Real Estate King, who are all neurotic, sexually repressed, they obsess about what other people think about them and they all play with handguns.  Angela on the other hand, started out bad and selfish but grew out of that with possibility moving forward, so she doesn’t really fit in either category.

Lester’s death is a symbolic gesture and not a pleasant one, that there are consequences to attempting freedom, penance is required so the flock doesn’t get any bright ideas of their own.  Descent in some cases is punishable by death because society functions as a result of a working system of servants, so those that rule over us all can guarantee profitability and continued power.  Aligning with Freud’s thoughts on civilization, it is just not possible to be a well-adjusted adult to live in confines of a society.  The problem here is one has to remain an adolescent, smoke pot and remain free or sell out to conformity in society, ending up neurotic and insecure in your own skin, there is very little room for a middle ground.  

The film does offer us a glimpse of something satisfying in the end.  Meaning is something that is accessible in our lives and along with, if one looks a little closer, one can find that there is a lot of beauty to be had as well.  Ricky and Lester both know that beauty is already here, waiting for one to let go of their stuff and open their eyes to see it.

Look Closer

The Zero Theorem and Everything Adding up to Nothing

by Christopher Barr

In the past the man has been first; in the future the System must be first.

"Birth, and copulation, and death.

That’s all the facts when it comes to brass tacks."  

– T.S. Eliot

The Zero Theorem, a Terry Gilliam film, is a tragedy under a multi-colored blanket of a humorous drug trip, quite reminiscent of a Gilliam early film, the brilliant idiosyncratic Brazil with a dash of his sci-fi marvel, 12 Monkeys.  The Zero Theorem is about an eccentric and reclusive computer genius that is plagued with the existential realities of the phony world he resides in.  He is a man without a home; a man lost in time and space and in turn, is a man convinced he’s entering the void of nothingness, down a black hole.

The world that Quohen, a bald, sick looking man, inhabits is a technological theme park city, where advertising is far more invasive than in Minority Report.  In both films, specific personalized advertisements follow one around in the public sphere but in Theorem it’s more like soliciting, it’s in one’s face, pushing and pulling, yelling and screaming.  It followed Tom Cruise in Minority Report, where here it sort of desperately chases Quohen on a face-level digital path that lines the many bustling, jumbo screen infested, streets of this circus of a city.   

Most of the people in this future world are adult-children, with immaturity levels hovering around 11 to 12 years old.  They all just want to have fun and plugin to the virtual world of useless simulacrum.  While dancing to hyper-jam, they hold their tablets close to themselves and film their face for others to see.  They are creating digital representations of themselves while in the actual presents of the very people in the same room.  This is using technology beyond the crutch and creating the ‘mirror stage’ of the Imaginary Order, in the foreground outside of the body.

The virtual reality depicted in Theorem is not at the realistic level as in films like The Thirteenth Floor, The Matrix or the holodeck in Star Trek: First Contact, but it doesn’t have to be.  The actual world of Theorem has a population of people as mentioned above that are immature, they are just happy to be out of their boring world and into a virtual world they can become gods in.  They are able to take their sexual fetishizations to whatever extreme they want and not have to get in trouble for it.

The computer hacker Quohen is using a form of video gaming to crunch “Entities” for the purposes that he is not made aware of.  He just functions as a cog does, without reason, without resolution and unfortunately, without fulfillment.

While Quohen is working on a formula, attempting to crack an enigmatic code, to determine whether life holds any meaning, he is constantly under surveillance by "Management", the authoritative BIG Other.  One of the cameras in the church Quohen resides in is of interest, it is mounted on the severed head of a Jesus Christ crucifixion statue, assuming the all-seeing eye of religious guilt set upon the earth by insane pious zealots and later weaponized by governmental overlords.  The film explores what has become pervasive in our own society - distrust.  We have become a society of people watching and being watched.  The Authority in society are investment protectors, they are money securers.  Their interest in their employees only lies in their worker’s level of mechanical productivity.  The superstructure is a product building system of money-makers, not philanthropic innovators.  Other than being a ‘tool’, the average worker in society is expendable, living a life decaying of meaning.    

The meaning of life is to live it, philosopher Alan Watts once said.  We have been told many lies and have been promised many things since our births.  The problem with the meaning of life is these lies have consequences that psychologically and sociologically plague most people for the remainder of their days.  Life has been built up with limitless possibility; it promises the individual can be significant, it promises that the individual can be celebrated for just being that individual.

The deep psychological problem here is most people become 'dots', they become insignificant in life and feel useless at times, they become autophobic to avoid thinking about their own insignificance, they drink, pop copious amounts of pharmaceutical drugs, they avoid, they escape, they play games on their TV's and cellphones between zonking out over series after series of escapist programming, they solder themselves to their mobile devices and addict themselves to social networking, all in the hopes of avoiding a dreamy nightmare of loneliness and despair.

"As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being." 

- Carl Jung

The alternative - nurture and build upon the working brain in our heads.  The only escape from the banality of existence is through knowledge fulfillment and understanding how the mind operates within the brain.  Only then can we slow it all down and enjoy the little things like love, while we are contemplating some of the big questions in life like; what gives meaning to our lives, and is it possible to find true happiness?  Are we able to find some form of solitude in an increasing connected, constricted world?  Does the world we live in maintain a level of order or is it simply chaotic?

This revelation should not drive one to the trenches of nihilism, but rather toward the rewards of knowledge that can make life meaningful by learning everything one can.  Avoiding the lethargy of primetime television can help one open their eyes to other things, other possibilities.  Maintaining a life of faith is to live a meaningless life because it is a life that is about a lie rather than a life about living.

"The Church of Intelligent Design reaches out to that special you."

The tragedy here is Quohen, desperately hanging onto hope, has been anxiously waiting for this phone call, where a voice on the other end will tell him the meaning of his life; it will tell him what to do.  This is mysteriously religious based, where theists pray to a god that isn't there and wait for 'him' to tell them what to do.  This passive position allows them to forgo responsibility for their own lives.  Essentially religion allows people to be lazy and not try, when the actual meaning of life is that life isn't about us; it's about everything adding up to nothing, which is okay.

"First of all man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and only afterwards defines himself." 

- Jean-Paul Sartre

Reservoir Dogs and Decentralizing the Nature of Reality

by Christopher Barr

“Structuralism is the belief that the phenomena of human life are not intelligible except through their interrelations.  These relations constitute a structure, and behind local variations in the surface phenomena there are constant laws of abstract culture.” – Philosopher Simon Blackburn

“Are you going to bark all day little doggie, or are you gonna bite?”

Reservoir Dogs was a brilliant film by first time writer/director Quentin Tarantino, which was inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing.  It was a movie that helped launch the Independent Film craze of the early 90’s, along with the likes of Slacker and Clerks.  The film on the surface seems somewhat simple but upon a closer look we can see that it is filled with structuralism and psychoanalysis.

The story is about a group of thieves and the events of the aftermath of a botched bank heist.  The goal was to steal a boat load of diamonds and live happily ever after.  The problem is ego got involved on a seemingly flawless gig, resulting in everyone getting killed in the end.

A mob boss Joe Cabot and his son “Nice Guy” Eddie, the organizers of the heist, sit around a table with six men who are unknown to each other.  They are having breakfast before their planned diamond heist, chatting about arbitrary things like; what’s the actual meaning of the Madonna song Like a Virgin or whether to leave a tip for the waitress or not.  The six men that are unknown to each other go by aliases given to them by Joe; Mr. White, Mr. Orange, Mr. Pink, Mr. Blue, Mr. Brown and Mr. Blonde.

The Semiology of the film can first be found in the arbitrary names of the characters in relation to who they are as men.  Mr. White is Mr. White only because he is not Mr. Pink and so on.  The use of colors to label these men is no different than naming them Larry or Bob but it does allow the meaninglessness of the names to standout more prevalently.

For me the film is an interesting lesson in the nature of reality and the arbitrariness of language.  Structuralism in part, derives from the student notes taken from Ferdinand de Saussure and published as Course in General Linguistics, for Saussure, The Sign is a combination of the Signifier; the sound patterns of words, the names we apply to things in the world, the phonic components and the Signified; the ideational components, the abstract concepts or objects that appear in the mind that together, help form an understanding of the world outside of the mind and our ability to relate to it.

Reservoir Dogs is quite unique with what we don’t see in the film.  We see before and after of the slicing of the cop’s ear by the nihilist Mr. Blonde, but not the actual slicing of it.  We see before the heist at the breakfast diner and after the heist at the warehouse but never the actual heist.  The bullets at the end of the film are not seen but only heard, we as an audience member assume that the remaining men are shot and killed by police.  After the Mexican stand-off, resulting in Joe and Eddie being killed instantly and Mr. White taken a bullet, lets us know that these men were shot and killed by bullets but when Mr. Pink fled we merely hear his botched escape and we fill in the blanks appropriating the Imaginary Order, mediated through the always present Symbolic Order.  Personifying the Symbolic by way of the Imaginary, one is able to alter reality and make it about them, making reality a perceived event from their own point of understanding and not an actual one.   

The end of the film resulted in a victory of the Super-Ego, the police, defeating the Ego, Mr. White and Mr. Pink and the Id, Mr. Blonde.  Mr. Orange was the Super-Ego in disguise and was thus defeated by the Ego, Mr. White after it was revealed of his deception, for Mr. White’s encounter with the Real was too overwhelming for him to handle.  It also should be noted on a psychoanalytical level, that the writer and director of the film Quentin Tarantino, when he was a child his father left he and his mother.  There were levels of guilt on his part for this, so in that regard, Mr. White could be seen as Quentin’s real father Tony and Mr. Orange could be seen as Quentin.  His unconscious guilt of his father leaving him as a child could have led to Quentin thinking that he must be punished in some way for forcing him to leave them.  In reality Quentin’s father was a piece of shit and he and his mother Connie were better off without him.  Regardless, guilt stays with us, even if we are rationally not guilty, this film is about punishing the guilt within us all, a sort of all-out-cleansing and thus is a fantasy.

Therein lies the issue, this movie rarely-to-never shows reality within the context of the film.  Reservoir Dogs is about the underlying system of language and is thus trapped in the arbitrary nature of the structure.  The film is unable to escape the Symbolic Order of its own subjective reality to actually “witness” the events as they would have taken place in the Order of the Real.  The Symbolic convinces the Imaginary that it is in the Real but it actually isn’t.  The film is not intentional on this point; the film had a small budget and couldn’t afford to include the heist scenes.  Regardless, as the film exists in the form as it does today, we are able to see it as metaphor for our prison of existence.  The warehouse is the Symbolic Order, as the men argue and fight, they point outwardly often, referencing outside in the world were the heist took place, but like in a novel, the Imaginary Order is activated for us to fantasize about what happened.  This initiates our belief system about what we understand about heists and how they may or may not go wrong.  This may well be the true brilliance of the film; it never tries to convince us that it’s real. 

Dark City and Living beyond the Cage of the Mind

by Christopher Barr

“I shall suppose that some malicious demon of the utmost power and cunning has employed all his energies in order to deceive me.” 

- Rene Descartes

BRAIN, n. An apparatus with which we think that we think. 

 – Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

SHELL BEACH – it brings back memories.

Dark City is a science fiction, film noir, crime thriller about a man that wakes up in a bathtub full of water and a little blood on his forehead, with no memory as to how or why he arrived in that room, there is just a light bulb swinging above him.  He soon discovers that the hotel room he’s in has the murdered body of a woman by the bed.  She has blood spirals carved into her chest as she lays lifeless on the floor.

John Murdock is the man’s name but he’s not sure if that’s true.  He becomes convinced that it is he who murdered that woman but just can’t remember.  Soon the investigation for the killer is underway and it becomes apparent that there have been six young prostitutes, viciously murdered.

Murdock has to evade police as he confronts his wife Emma, who he has no memory of.  But her affection and love for him are very real emotions that exist.  It’s likely, in spite of not remembering her; he can feel that she is telling him the truth.  What do our memories have to do with present experience?  Are we more than the memories that live in our minds?

Philosopher Rene Descartes entertained doubt when it came to his memories and dreams.  He wanted to be sure what was real was real and what his mind was fabricating was made known to him as well.  Dreams distort reality as well as the memories we believe are the road to our past.  Descartes was skeptical of his own operating system and its ability to deceive him.  He really brought the notion of trust, or lack thereof, within you, out in the open for all to see.  He made people question not only their own reality but reality as a whole, if there really is such a thing.

“They had mastered the ultimate technology, the ability to alter physical reality by will alone.” 

- Dr. Schreder

What is reality?  This film asks this question throughout.  Murdock discovers that there are these alien-like archons known as “Strangers” that alter reality on a nightly basis.  They shape shift the buildings, collapsing some and erecting others within minutes, in the murky, nightmarish city and inject new memories into the minds of some of the unknowing inhabitants.  The process of this ability is called “tuning” and Murdock soon learns that he has this ability as well; to alter reality with his mind.

Reality and our ability to examine it, exists with three hemispheres of thought within our psyche, mapped out by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.

THE IMAGINARY ORDER is the fantasy images the human subject creates of both himself and his ideal object of desire.  This is Lacan’s theorization of the mirror stage during the first few years of life, while one is just beginning to interact with the world during the premature stage of development.  This early influence of the imaginary realm continues to exert itself throughout the adult life and is not merely superseded in the child’s movement into the Symbolic Order.  The imaginary and the symbolic are inextricably intertwined and work in tension with the Order of the Real.  Their ego begins to develop during this stage of early life. 

THE SYMBOLIC ORDER is the social world of linguistic communication; it is the language order, intersubjective relations, knowledge of ideological conventions and the acceptance of laws (otherwise known as the “big Other”).  Once a child enters into language and accepts the rules and dictates of society, they are able to communicate with others.  The individual within the symbolic is bound for life with the laws and contracts founded within this world of the symbol.  The symbolic order works in tension with the Imaginary Order and the Real.

THE ORDER OF THE REAL is the state of nature from which we have been forever severed by our entrance into language.  It is the real world outside of linguistic rules and it lacks symbolization.  Only when we were neo-natal children were we close to this state of nature.  As far as human are concerned the Real is impossible in so far as we cannot express it in language because the very entrance into language marks our irrevocable separation from the Real.  The Real continues to exert its influence throughout our adult lives since it is the rock against which all our fantasies and linguistic structures ultimately fail.  The Real pops up during minute moments of trauma for example when we are unable to assign meaning to a given situation, when is lacks linguistic signifiers for us to symbolically cling to.

The people of this dystopic city are unaware of any changes.  Their realities have been changed so much that it begs the question; is reality even possible for them anymore?  It also asks the question, does it matter?  Is actual reality possible for any of us?  Are we not the subjective sum of all our neurological parts?

“No, no there is nothing in the world that can be imagined in advance, not the slightest thing.  Everything is made up of so many unique particulars that are impossible to foresee.  In imagination, we pass over them in our haste and don’t notice that they’re missing.  But realities are slow and indescribably detailed.”

– Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

One of the Strangers, Mr. Hand has Murdock’s memories injected into his brain through his forehead.  The Strangers believe that if they have Murdock’s memories they’ll be able to interpret his next move.  This will bring them closer to stopping him and then attempt to understand him.  Mr. Hand takes on Murdock’s aggression and his anger over his wife’s infidelity, memories that Murdock himself can’t remember.

Murdock tries to get to Shell Beach but the complex subway system doesn’t quite seem to get there.  An ex-cop, a man considers incompetent by his peers, tells Murdock that he can’t leave the city because he’s tried many times.  He tells him that the Strangers steal people’s memories and then they swap them between them.  Back and forth, back and forth so no one knows who they are anymore.  He then tells Murdock that he’s finally found a way out of the city, he then stands and jumps in front of a subway, killing himself.

Emma is out looking for her husband, she walks to places she remembers they would go together, even the pier where they first met.  While there she has an exchange with Mr. Hand, a man she does not know or suspect of anything.  She then goes to the apartment where Mr. Hand murdered the prostitute, and while in shock, she runs into the Inspector who was following her.  

“… imagine a life, alien to yours, in which your memories were not your own but those shared by every other of your kind?  Imagine the torment of such an existence?  No experiences to call your own.”

– Mr. Hand

“If it was all you knew, maybe it would be a comfort.”

– Emma

Murdock goes and visits his uncle only to realize that the man is not his uncle, he just has implanted memories instructing him that he is.  He starts to figure out that everything is a lie.  Reality is breaking down and becoming memory/dream fractals, where their reliability is all but lost.  This I imagine must be like when one loses their mind to insanity, where everything that is real seems unreal and everything unreal seems real.

Emma is at the crime scene with the Inspector, who himself is sensing something is wrong but he can’t put his finger on it, sort of like Neo’s “splinter in his mind” from The Matrix.  They begin to question their memories, why they remember certain times in their lives but can’t remember times that made those other times possible.  Time has escaped them, hours are lost like minutes, they begin to see that their very thoughts are betraying their past and present.

The psychological connectedness and psychological continuity are what the Strangers are robbing from the people every time the clock hits midnight.  The identity of a person is a result of their psychological being, where their memories do inform that person in spite of how their experiences define them.  This thought dance is a waltz that both must participate in to make what we understand as the individual person.  The person who is not a blank slate but rather a river of memories that pour into a lake of subjective presents.  If one is robbed of that river than one becomes more mechanical in nature, one merely functions much in the same way as these people.  Marcel Proust believed that all our present experiences were tethered to our past memories, even the ones not seemingly or obviously connected.  Like when Proust dips his muffin into his steeped tea and then puts it in his mouth, somehow the sensation of the hot muffin on his tongue ignites an early memory of himself falling off his bicycle as a child and scraping his knee.

Is this not identity, is this not the person living a life in the present while connecting to an earlier experience in the past?  This psychological connection that defines us is always there, one’s mental states exist alongside him, within him, while awake or while unconscious.  These mental states operate within his memories of the past while simultaneously adopting upgrades with present experiences that are then filed with the rest, and thus create a ‘you’.

Midnight – Everything stops as reality begins to shift, buildings sink into the ground while others sprout up like dead daisies.  Stairs elongate while poles and street lamps form into a grand symphony of a synchronizing metamorphosis, the city is alive and moving while all its inhabitants unknowingly sleep.

Mr. Hand and Murdock fight on the top of a building, then Murdock holds down Mr. Hand on the roof at knife point when the Stranger explains that they exchange the memories of the inhabitants and use those memories to rebuild the city every night, in order to understand them.  They need to be like us.  Mr. Hand reveals that he possesses the memories that Murdock has lost as the very building they are on begins to change, separating the two.  The city is closing in on Murdock as the Strangers chase him along its morphing terrain.  Emma and the Inspector intercept and pick up Murdock, before the Strangers can get him, and they drive away.

During an interrogation (the Inspector still thinks that Murdock is a murderer at this point), Murdock asks the Inspector, who still doesn’t know what to believe, how do you get to Shell Beach?  The inspector can’t remember, he knows of the place but like everyone else, when asked, they can’t remember how to get there.  Murdock then asks him about sun light and when was the last time he remembers being out in the sun.  Murdock tells him that he doesn’t even think that there is a sun in this place.  The inspector is overwhelmed by this brush with reality and goes onto the defensive, remaining in denial and demanding an explanation about the murders of six prostitutes.

Murdock is able to speak with Emma in an inmate visiting area at the police station about their false memories, the fact he is not really her husband and that their past together never happened.  He tells her that before a day ago, they didn’t know each other and were living other lives.

None of it seems real, it’s like I’ve been dreaming this life and when I finally wake up I’ll be somebody else, somebody totally different.

The Strangers arrive at the police station to get Murdock but the Inspector gets him out before they can get to him.  Murdock and the Inspector track Dr. Schreber to a bathhouse, where he goes to stay away from the Strangers on account that they dislike being around water, and get him to talk about what he knows and why is he working for them.  Murdock demands that Dr. Schreber takes them to Shell Beach.  The doctor resists but Murdock uses his mind, ‘tuning’ and hurts him, he then tells them about what the Strangers want and that there is no stopping them, they have machines in the underworld which they use to change the city at midnight.

Dr. Schreber tells Murdock that he is trapped in this sprawling metropolis along with everyone else.  The misanthropic Strangers conduct their tests, searching for what it is to be human.  They conduct their various scientific experiments with the hopes of understanding how humans act given their beliefs about their own pasts.  They believe that memory is what is characteristically human so they transform human memory at will to study the results.  They want to know what is unique about humans because their own species is dying and they believe if they discover what is unique, they might be able to ensure the continued existence of their own species.

They arrive and discover that there is no beach.  The doctor tells them that the Strangers abducted them all and brought them to this place, and that at this point, we are no more than the mere some of our implanted memories.  Our individuality, our soul is what they want to understand and they believe that the key is to unlock and deconstruct our memories.

The doctor tells Murdock that he is unique, that he has their gifts.  They arrive at the end of the road where there is a massive poster on a wall of Shell Beach.  The doctor tells them that there is no beach, there never was, it was just a manufactured pleasant memory for them all to have.  It was hope, it was something to hope for but a shell is after all, its own little tomb.

Murdock rips a hole in the poster and he and the Inspector, using pipes, start to smash a hole in the brick wall behind the poster.  The doctor pleads with them to stop but they keep going.

Murdock uses his ‘tuning’ gift to blow a big hole which sends the broken brick into outer space and into a massive protective force field.  The Strangers arrive as the truth is revealed.  They fight as the Inspector and one of the Strangers smash out through the hole and float out into space.

From out in space, as the dead inspector floats by, we see that the city is this huge space ship with an energy field surrounding it to contain its gravitational atmosphere.  The ship is massive in size and scope with high walls surrounding the panoptic city from the reality of where they really are.

The Panopticon is a type of institutional building designed by English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham. The concept of the design is to allow a watchman to observe all inmates of an institution without them being able to tell whether they are being watched or not.

The Panopticon was a metaphor that allowed philosopher Michel Foucault to explore the relationship between systems of social control and people in a disciplinary situation. In his view, power and knowledge comes from observing others. It marked the transition to a disciplinary power, with every movement supervised and all events recorded. The result of this surveillance is acceptance of regulations and docility - a normalization of sorts, stemming from the threat of discipline. Suitable behaviour is achieved not through total surveillance, but by panoptic discipline and inducing a population to conform by the internalization of this reality. The actions of the observer are based upon this monitoring and the behaviours he sees exhibited; the more one observes, the more powerful one becomes. The power comes from the knowledge the observer has accumulated from his observations of actions in a circular fashion, with knowledge and power reinforcing each other. Foucault says that "by being combined and generalized, they attained a level at which the formation of knowledge and the increase in power regularly reinforce one another in a circular process.” 

Mr. Hand holds a knife to Emma’s throat demanding that Murdock sleeps.  The Strangers take him to the underworld of their panopticon.  They believe Murdock is the key to their survival and decide to stop the experiments so they can all be one collective with John Murdock.

Instead of injecting Murdock with the collective minds of all the Strangers, Dr. Schreber injects him with a life time of memories about the Strangers.  He learns everything about them, about their machines and about their powers.  Murdock wakes up and is now all powerful, he starts to destroy them all.

“The real voyage of discovery consists, not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”

– Marcel Proust 

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave comes into play here; Murdock is the released prisoner while the inhabitants of the city remain chained.  Unlike Neo in The Matrix, Murdock is never actually able to leave his cave; he must remain but has the power to alter it creating a world with a beach and the sun.  This is where I think Dark City becomes more powerful and relevant than The Matrix because the reality here is, we can’t escape our illusions, we can only become aware of their falsifying existence.  This film tells us that knowledge can bring us to the gate but can’t free us from the cage.  The symbolic economy is still present within us all.  The theme here is actual reality is unknowable, the Order of the Real is not accessible within the Symbolic Order, and all we can do is attempt to understand it, but understand it only from a distance.

“I cannot escape the objection that there is no state of mind, however simple, that does not change every moment.”

– Henri Bergson