This year the reluctant family has joined me at the shore for the typical psychoanalyst’s August vacation. Unfortunately, Hurricane Bertha has joined us as well and, despite being far out at sea, she has dumped a lot of rain and cloudy weather on us. We have done jigsaw puzzles and gone to the local aquarium (where we learned the 80% of the world’s population lives within 40 miles of an ocean – we, in the other 20%, must drive to be near but not in one – who wants to get wet when it’s raining?), so it was time to get out of the house for a movie. Seeing as it is summer and the offerings are limited – further, we are at the beach and our favorite theaters are hours away – our choices were limited. The reluctant wife and I voted for the Phillip Seymour Hoffman vehicle, but we were outvoted by the reluctant children, who were more interested in Lucy – something that I was mildly drawn to by the trailers that featured the question “What would we do if we could use 100% of our brains?”
I should
have known I was in trouble during the trailers. After each come on for a shoot ‘em up, each
one with less apparent plot than the one before, I whispered to the reluctant
wife, “Just find your center.” The eldest
reluctant stepdaughter didn’t understand what I was saying or why I was saying it,
but the reluctant son, I think, did – of course he finds zombie movies
appalling while she feasts on them.
Now don’t
get me wrong – I’m no longer squeamish in the way that I was immediately after
the birth of the reluctant son. Then,
each movie death was not simply an act, but the death of a human being, the
child of someone. I’m still a softie. My kids all can tell when I’m going to tear
up while we’re watching a movie or, worse, a particularly moving commercial,
but I have become somewhat hardened to the experience of watching violence,
death and mayhem on film again and recognize in a film like The Avengers that
this is all just for fun. This movie,
though, begins with a defenseless woman (played by Scarlet Johansson) being swirled
into a drug gang crazy world by her lout of a boyfriend whom she has been with
for a week. And after the first scene
there had been more deaths, some of them quite brutal, than minutes – and
perhaps that was still the case at the end of the whole movie – we were trying
to figure that out but could not produce an accurate body count of the extended
car chase scene down multiple streets the wrong way creating mayhem and who
knows how much murder and maiming.
Ironically,
the woman’s capturer’s brutality injures her in ways that empower her and, in
what the reluctant wife notes is a fantasy for all women, she lures a would be
rapist into being thoroughly thrashed (and killed, along with his henchmen – at
this point in the movie the body count was way beyond the minutes). (I wonder if it is also partly Johansson’s
fantasy about what she would do to the Marvel group that has not given her a
well-deserved starring vehicle in that franchise because they are too afraid
that a woman can’t successfully headline.)
In any case, Johansson’s character proceeds to grow in intellectual and
physical power and is, incidentally, able to seek vengeance on the drug lord
who gets her into this mess in the final scene.
So, why
bother writing about this movie? In
part, it makes sense to give it some thought because the come on teaser is one
that is broader than a shoot-‘em-up.
This is billed as a movie about what would happen if we could use more
than 10% of our brains (a statement that has lots of legs, but no real basis in
anything like modern neuroscience). What
is the intellectual framework that undergirds a shoot-‘em-up? What does the director think is the reason
that we are drawn to this?
We are delivered a truism by the character played by Morgan Freeman, that "when the
environment is supportive, we seek immortality through connection and passing
on what we know to those we love, but that when the environment is hostile, the
organism seeks personal immortality." Hmm… So, because the drug lords
are seeking to attack Lucy, she becomes more focused on her own survival than
on being connected with those around her.
Lucy’s only ally is a French cop who is mystified by how he can help her
as she demonstrates her superhuman powers and she explains that she has him
along as a reminder – so that she doesn’t forget her own humanity as she
becomes increasingly smart and, in the language of the movie,
computer-like. From this perspective,
having more access to our minds makes us more machinelike and less human – as if
intelligence did not include empathy and connection but was only “cerebral”…. Again, hmm… (For a very different view of the relation between human and machine logic, see my review of Hozier). One problem with this film is that it is filled with so much drivel that
it is hard to stay focused on the central message – which seems to be that the hero in an action film
is so threatened that she must become, at least in Lucy’s case, essentially invincible
and focused on solving the problem of individual immortality so much that she is in danger of losing track of the best interests of the community and therefore my fail to pass along what is
known so that the tribe may survive.
Well, Lucy
somehow manages to do both (whew!) (the dead in the cars are just collateral damage and
she checks to make sure that one of her victims is terminal before mercifully killing
him). She leaves a flashdrive with all
the information that we need to know (it’s a REALLY BIG flashdrive) when she
poofs into post physical existence and is, as she says, everywhere. Maybe she is able to manage it all because
she is a woman. I suppose boys get
bullied more than girls (there must be data on this somewhere) and this may
account for their sense of vulnerability and thus flocking to theaters to see
the vulnerable hero overcome all odds to beat the corrupt enemy, but it really
is women – especially as adults – who have to fight long odds and are, I think,
constantly reminded of how vulnerable they are to more powerful men who can do
bad things to them. So it makes a lot of
sense to have a female character be the hero in a shoot ‘em up. Further, it makes sense that she refuses to consider that she is able
to do all kinds of magical things because of drugs so that anyone else should
be able to do this as well – but perhaps she just doesn’t trust men to handle the job, any job, with
integrity. They will just use the drugs
to get people high. What a waste. Better to kill someone every minute until you
get it all figured out and then hand on the wisdom.
This movie
has wonderful visual effects. Imagine
what Stanley Kubrick would have done in 2001 if he had our toys? Imagine what the Beatles would have
done? Perhaps there is a danger of
moving more and more to the surface as we marry our intelligence to the
visual. Freud maintained that it is our
initial thinking – our primary process, animal thinking, that is visual. Our secondary process thinking – the rational
part of ourselves – is, for him, narratively based – it is the thinking of
Shakespeare where the words are the play, and the staging is just an excuse – a
way to illuminate the words. In our
modern shoot ‘em ups, the words are an excuse to get to the next dazzling
effect, and this effect has to be more expansive and, frankly, grosser than
anything we have seen recently or we will, like the reluctant stepdaughter who
found seeing the legs of dead people and then the bloody hands of the murder
unimpressive, say that we could have done better with a bottle of ketchup. Ouch…
So, the day
after the movie, what should happen but that I should be kicked out of the
ocean by a lifeguard? Kicked out of the
ocean? Who gets kicked out of the
ocean? Well, it turns out that Bertha is
creating rip tides in addition to dumping water. I wanted some of Lucy’s superpowers to defeat
the lifeguards. They were kicking me, a
body surfer, out, while allowing the surfboarders to remain. It turns out the surfboarders had a flotation device with
them - the surfboard. If I fetched a boogie board, that
would not suffice. Aargh. What is an analyst to do? Stay out of the water so that he can pass
information on to his students and his patients? Preservation of the individual for the
betterment of society – it’s the right thing to do. I know, I know. But I would much rather be personally immortal
and not have to worry about small natural events like hurricanes… I would much rather take a drug that would lead to immortality, invincibility and enlightenment that trudge along towards small gains. Kind of like the folks in the sixties who thought that LSD would be a shortcut to enlightenment. We can wish - but the lifeguards apparently stand ready to provide an unwanted dose of reality.
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