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Thursday, August 7, 2014

Lucy – The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Gets Dragged to a Popular Movie



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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