January 23, 2012 at 1:45 P.M. "Errors" reinserted in this essay have been corrected once more.
October 30, 2010 at 6:47 P.M. "Errors" reinserted and recorrected.
July 25, 2010 at 8:12 P.M. "Errors" inserted and corrected.
Richard Matheson, I am Legend (New York: TOR, 1995).
I am Legend, Two-Disc Special Edition, Time Warner, 2008, Andrew Leslie, Director, Will Smith as Robert Neville, Alice Braga, Dash Mhok, Screenplay Akiva Goldsman and Mark Protosevich.
I, Robot, 2004, Twentieth Century Fox.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London & New York: Pantheon, 1975).
Lionel Rubinoff, The Pornography of Power (New York: Ballantine, 1968).
R.D. Laing & D.G. Cooper, Reason and Violence: A Decade of Sartre's Philosophy 1950-1960 (New York: Pantheon, 1964).
"Affidavit of FRANZ BLAHA," in Richard Overy, Interrogations: The Nazi Elite in Allied Hands (London: Penguin, 2001), p. 374.
Richard Kearney, Modern Movements in European Philosophy (New York & Manchester, 1994), entirety.
Kent A. Kiehl & Joshua W. Buckholtz, "Inside the Mind of a Psychopath," in Scientific American, September/October, 2010, at pp. 22-29.
The Will Smith vehicle "I am Legend" -- which is based on a classic sci-fi novel by Richard Matheson and a Charlton Heston movie dating from the early seventies, "The Omega Man" -- is a well-written, multi-layered work examining mythical, political, sociological and psychological issues in the context of a blockbuster action flick.
Mr. Smith is usually very smart about selecting material that is filled with ideas. Will Smith has become a really good actor and an outstanding global movie star, comparable to Harrison Ford and Bruce Willis, or Arnold Schwarzenegger in the eighties. No woman has yet achieved this iconic action star presence on the world's movie screens. Several are quite capable of this status. (See Melanie Griffith's kick-ass "Tracker Johnson" in the sci-fi classic, Cherry 2000.)
Jada Pinket-Smith emerged from the Matrix with heroic qualities sparkling. This suggests that Ms. Pinket-Smith would be perfect as a female James Bond-type of character in an action-thriller-romance. I can only hope to have misspelled Mr. Schwarzenegger's name. I am looking forward to Angelina Jolie as "Salt."
At the mythical level, we see images of "butterflies" early on in the narrative. Butterflies are symbolic of the soul and also of freedom in many archetypal systems. Indeed, what defines human beings or persons is explored both in terms of the contrast between the seeming manequins and Mr. Smith's character, but also in terms of the mutants "produced" by the virus that promised a scientific solution to a plague afflicting humanity, namely cancer. We will return in this film to the pre-political situation or state of nature to test various theories of man. (See "John Rawls and Justice" and "Roberto Unger's Revolutionary Legal Theory.")
Really, it is the plague of violence and criminality -- together with the scourge of racism -- that is explored in this film, along with the dangers of science and scientism's purported "solutions" (psychobabblers take note!) to human moral dilemmas. The need for religious wisdom in our postmodern settings is recognized. Script master Akiva Goldsman (A Beautiful Mind) is exploring the question of good and evil with obvious reference to social stratification based on class and race (Marx, Lenin, Castro, Malcolm X), also with a background setting suggesting the AIDS epidemic and (more profoundly) both slavery and the Holocaust, posing ancient riddles about human nature. ("'The Matrix': A Movie Review.")
Science -- like most interesting things created by people -- is ambiguous. Antibiotics are great; nuclear weapons are not so great. The crucial consideration is the use to which scientific knowledge is put, which is an ethical and not a scientific question. Germ warfare is about as malignant a use of science as I can imagine. A concern is hubris, overweening scientific ambition or pride, that may lead to a doomed human effort to play God. Moral wisdom is more necessary in our use of scientific power than in most places in culture. Discussions of the question of whether "progress is real" are often marred by a failure to define the concept of progress under examination in order to allow for the reality of material enhancements in our lives (better science) and, equally, the possibility of moral stagnation (evil uses of better science).
The solutions to the problem of evil will not be external, objective, or collective, without internal, individual transformations. Without a Robert Neville, there will never be a "cure" for evil -- and the price paid by the Nevilles of this world is always a high one. The problem of the best form of legal and political organization is necessarily connected to the theory of human nature we adopt:
"The concept of man at issue here" -- in terms of good and evil -- "is not one for which the ordinary empirical techniques of verification are even relevant. The humanist and liberal conceptions of man are presuppositions which function like myths [that] are applied to a hermeneutic (i.e., interpretive) understanding of experience." (Rubinoff, p. 87.) ("Dehumanization.")
Notice where this division of the conceptual and psychic landscape leads:
"The hollow man [T.S. Eliot] is without feeling and compassion, but not without emotion. The result of dehumanization is not simply a state of passivity. It is worse: a weakening of the ego and, consequently, a loss of the capacity of restraining the instinct for aggression. Writers like Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Freud have made us painfully aware of this. ... Through the ritual of conformism, in which the ceremony of innocence is drowned, the individual is reshaped into a potential psychopath. ..." (Rubinoff, p. 164.)
Psychobabblers say: "Adjust and do your part in Iraq!" Alternatively, religious leaders say: "fly an airplane into a building!" Humanism, in science or religion, makes all the difference. Bob Marley's music and repeated references to Marley's themes are a little heavy-handed. We get it. Love and the madness of art are all we have against evil. Fortunately, these things are enough to defeat that ancient villain, which is human evil expressed in hatred and violence. Never "adjust" to injustice and evil. Never stop fighting those who would enslave you. Never become one of those idiotic grinning goons at the equivalent of a Nuremberg rally or the Republican National Convention. Fight to remain a free person and moral subject.
In terms of the Scriptures, references are drawn less from the Hebrew Bible (although Noah does spring to mind), than the Hindu texts and Lord Krishna's struggles against the demons of the underworld. Humanity must be achieved. This achievement is the real cure for the plague that deprives so many victims today of their moral status as persons, whether through commodification as suburban middle class consumers (i.e., the manequins), or by way of a descent into the sewers of malignancy and violence, aggression and hatred, the mutants. These are the options for everyone: Will we be docile consumers or mutants? Shall we become Republicans or rebels? Both, you say? ("'The Stepford Wives': A Movie Review.")
One reading of the film sees the blighted landscape as an externalization of Neville's unconscious, both individual and collective, in Jungian terms and in opposition to Freud, pitting Laing and Foucault against Adler and Skinner. Internal versus external solutions. Fascism (Hitler) and Communist totalitarianism (Stalin) against phenomenological and existentialist humanism, whether religious or non-religious. Humanism and socialism wins in Neville's final gesture of self-giving for another and a child (the future).
It is self-giving that allows for the redemption of the woman rescued from a night world of criminality, with a serum produced from Neville's "saving" blood. The Christian imagery is obvious. Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" is evoked in this narrative and so is George Steiner's "The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H." Civilization with its discontents is made bearable only with love as self-giving that leads us to heaven. Mysteriously, "heaven" or "sanctuary" is located in Vermont in this movie. Maple syrup? Ben and Jerry? Must be the mulled cyder. ("The Northanger Arms on Park Avenue.")
Are the plague's victims akin to the millions devoured in the concentration camps? Are they not much more like the soldiers responsible for those millions of deaths? Do they not -- these albino-like victims of their own hatred -- need saving? These plague victims are the "Afrikaners" who tortured and imprisoned Steven Biko, then Nelson Mandela. Who is a human being in a post-apocalyptic world consumed by such hatreds? What is a human being? An animal that devours its neighbor, like the lion that is seen killing a deer early in the film? (Hobbes) Or the gentle woman and child saved by Mr. Neville's sacrifice, as indeed his own family was "saved" by Neville's voluntary and painful separation from them? (Rousseau)
Criminals are the unsaved. These criminals are the true victims of the plague's deprivation of humanity. To the extent that Neville's family avoided that fate -- criminality or hatred -- they were saved. Albert Camus' La Peste is a clear influence on these artists and thinkers. The worst of the criminals is the happy-go-lucky scientist initiating the ultimate horror with the best of intentions. Hubris. How does such a "nice" monster live with herself? How does a Jew become Mengele? (Again: "'The Stepford Wives': A Movie Review" and "'Revolutionary Road': A Movie Review.")
Emma Thompson does a fine job of suggesting the blindness and evil created by the A-students of this world, the "best and the brightest" who sent 50,000 American young men and women to their deaths in Vietnam, or who have driven countless others into madness and suicide to test their little theories of human nature. We are approaching 6,000 American deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan; hundreds of thousands of others have also been killed. No more "errors" to be inserted in my writings today, Mr. Rabner? Any more psychological tortures for me today? ("'Inception': A Movie Review.")
The darkest questions raised by the film have to do with the nature of normality. Must the good and moral man be an outcast? "If all the world is insane," Don Quixote wonders, "then what is insanity?" Must we crucify the Robert Nevilles of this world to be redeemed from our collective madness of violence and greed? What will it take for 20% of the world's population to stop consuming 80% of the world's resources? Will you remain passive to the crimes you see being committed against these writings and me? A state torturer once said with a sick smile: "Most people want to be told what to believe."
The mutants may be seen, also, as the wretched of the earth -- the billions hovering at the edge of our comfortable lives in the richest societies, kept at bay by our superior weapons -- so far. America's post-9/11 anxieties are very much on display here. The mad, evil terrorists and torturers are the others, never ourselves. All the nuclear weapons in the world and concentration camps (Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo) will not suffice to keep billions of human beings who are starving -- as we cruise around in our SUVs -- from America's front door.
The mutants in this film are representations of how Americans see terrorists and Islamic fundamentalists, but they are also how much of the world sees America's military destroying villages in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq.
One new "error" inserted and corrected is not too bad. We believe in freedom of speech in America, don't we? Not anymore. Not for a long time. ("Thought Crime is Death.")
"... Foucault scrutinizes a wide variety of documents ranging from the late Middle Ages to the present day with a view to showing how the very concept of madness" -- later criminality -- "arose at a certain stage of Western 'rationalist' civilization ... [Foucault] reveals how the genesis of this concept coincided with the realisation [sic.] by the establishment that it could no longer rely on such traditional categories as the leper [Jews] or the 'demonically possessed' [whores and criminals] to satisfy the need for social outcasts -- whose very otherness [emphasis added] justified the privileged consensus of the status quo." (Kearney, p. 292.)
These categories -- criminal, insane, "negro," Jew, whore, witches -- made dehumanization a moral obligation. New Jersey's torturers would fit right in. Today dehumanization is expressed in the barbarism and inhumanity of the "expert" experimenting on mere "animals" without their consent, turning them into mutants worthy of destruction in the camps, or the Gulags and asylums of the former Soviet Union, or by means of hypnosis, drugging and other externalistic techniques that disregard the inner realities, dignity, and rights as persons. Neville's rats in lab cages are inmates in America's penitentiaries subjected to experiments, without their consent, raped, beaten, tormented for "their own good." ("What is it like to be tortured?" and "The Experiments in Guatemala.")
The real mutants may sometimes appear in the pleasant form of your local pharmacist, wearing a lab coat and a lovely smile -- like Emma Thompson's well-meaning scientist, again, unleashing hell on earth with the best of intentions, or like Dr. Josef Mengele, experimenting on Jewish children "in order to learn from them and advance the cause of science." Experiments in concentration camps on men immersed in freezing water were extended to the point of death in order to "learn from" victims ...
" ... When the men were removed from the ice water attempts were made to revive them by artificial warmth. For this last experiment prostitutes were used and the body of the unconscious man was placed between the bodies of two women. Himmler was present at one such experiment, I could see him from one of the windows in the street between the blocks. I have personally been present at some of these cold water experiments when Rascher was absent and I have seen notes and diagrams of them in Rascher's laboratory. About 300 persons were used in these experiments. The majority died." (Blaha, p. 377.)
Naturally, the prostitutes were destroyed when the Nazis were done with them -- except for a few, of course, who could still stand or breathe who were raped first. No one knows how many prostitutes were murdered in the camps, some say one million. It makes you want to pull the pin on that grenade. And maybe I have.
"One of the most striking peculiarities of psychopaths" -- even when they happen to be psychiatrists for the C.I.A. -- "is that they lack empathy; they are able to shake off as mere tinsel the most universal social obligations. They lie and manipulate yet feel co compunction or regrets -- in fact, they don't feel particularly deeply about anything at all. ..." ("The Wanderer and His Shadow.")
Significantly, very few psychopaths are interested in philosophy or literature because symbols and metaphors are important to these subjects whereas the psychopath cannot reason in indirect or metaphorical ways. As a result, art and religion will usually be incomprehensible to such disturbed persons:
"Charming as they may seem, psychopaths can also be tone-deaf because they lack access to their own feelings ["You don't need feelings in science!"] and those of others. ... Psychopaths have trouble understanding metaphors -- for example, they are more likely than others to judge as negative the [true] phrase: 'Love is an antidote for the world's ills.' ..." ("Metaphor is Mystery.")
Kent A. Kiehl & Joshua W. Buckholtz, "Inside the Mind of a Psychopath," in Scientific American, September/October, 2010, at pp. 22-25. (Interesting popular discussion of a condition generating a vast literature in multiple disciplines -- including philosophy, "psychopathy" -- the article is marred, however, by ungrammatical and illogical insertions from what I take to be a lesser hand.)
