Closing the Circuit

At first glance, in terms of their settings, no two movies could seem further apart than Alex Proyas’ Dark City and Peter Weir’s The Truman Show, both of which were released in 1998 (in the winter and summer, respectively). The sets for Dark City have been studiously copied from Edward Hopper’s painterly vision of the big city at night as a kind of hell – isolated men and women trudge through rain-slicked streets, gloomily illuminated by a pale yellow-white light, accompanied by the constant sound of cars going by and the occasional roar of an elevated train. The world of The Truman Show actually is a stage set – it’s a small town so picturesquely pristine that it, too, seems to come right out of some fantasy of sunshine, ocean views, and white picket fences. Yet it is The Truman Show which ends with its hero stepping through a dark doorway, and it is Dark City which ends in sunshine on the beach. Maybe it would be appropriate here to reference Kenneth Burke’s awareness of the paradoxes entailed by that “perfection” which is only attainable in ideas and imagination: if the world of Dark City is perfectly nightmarish, it is not so far off from the nightmarish perfection of The Truman Show. And so it is that the plots which unfold in these settings, which are so alike in their difference, are also rather alike. Both feature a struggle by an isolated hero to find truth and authenticity in a world which has been literally constructed around them as a three-dimensional virtual illusion, a con game, a vast fakery, a spectacle.

The years 1998-1999 produced a number of SF films organized around these sorts of plots and themes – practically whole a new SF subgenre, as when the 1980s saw a rash of “bad new future” films such as Blade Runner, Mad Max, and Robocop – but one that emerged in a far more compressed time frame. If we can speak of a “virtual-reality paranoia” subgenre, then it certainly had its precedents – The Stepford Wives (1975) and They Live (1988), for instance – but nothing like this had been seen before in terms of sheer profusion and density of thematic overlap. This particular group of films ranged from David Cronenberg’s relatively small-release film eXistenZ to the Wachowski brothers’ immensely popular The Matrix, as well as Josef Rusnak’s The Thirteenth Floor and The Truman Show. The eponymous hero of The Truman Show is the first human being to have been adopted by a corporation – a media group which produces a scripted TV version of life in which only one actor, Truman himself, is unaware of the existence of the script; the show is thrown into crisis when a random accident and a determined fan make Truman aware that his small-town home is entirely contained within the world’s largest TV studio – a dome so wide it can be seen from Earth orbit. The Matrix politicizes this scenario: as Laurence Fishburne’s character explains, the “computer-generated dreamworld” in which we all live was “built to keep us under control.” eXistenZ, which probably qualifies as the most disturbing of all of these films, is also about a virtual-reality video game, and features a similar sort of Chinese-box structure of illusions within illusions; game designer Allegra Geller (played by Jennifer Jason Leigh) and Public Relations assistant Ted Pikul (played by Jude Law) flee from fanatical assassins, members of an iconoclastic underground calling themselves the “Realists.” In the film-noirish Dark City, an amnesiac man named John Murdoch (played by Rufus Sewell) discovers that the city in which he lives is an inescapable prison, that the night never really passes but repeats itself over and over again, that his own fragmentary childhood memories of going to the beach are artificially implanted, and that everyone is being brainwashed by the city’s true masters, the Strangers. In The Thirteenth Floor, perhaps the tamest of these films, computer scientists creating a virtual Los Angeles of 1937 discover that their own Los Angeles is equally virtual.

This degree of overlap is odd enough. What is even more interesting to notice is that this pattern isn’t limited to the science fiction genre: 1999 also saw Fight Club, in which corporate cubicle-slaves seek out violence and physical pain as a desperate alternative to the relentless abstraction both of their work environment and of the leisure time which is its supposed reward (a memorable scene features Ed Norton wandering dazedly through his own living room, which has magically become a virtual-reality IKEA catalog, with price tags floating in the air and items of furniture materializing around him as he orders over the phone). The same year also produced American Beauty, whose promotional tagline, “Look Closer,” actually appears as a subliminal element in the center of a shot of Kevin Spacey at his corporate cubicle; his suburban home, with its neatly “beautified” lawns and picket fences, offers an appearance of purity which is only pure appearance, concealing a world of misery, boredom, and suppressed rage. Here, too, are “virtual realities” of a kind, illusions designed to control and subdue, against which our heroes and antiheroes revolt.

What explanation can there be for this extraordinary thematic convergence? It’s not as if Hollywood is above recycling ideas, or no two studios ever tried to imitate one anothers’ commercial successes, but this is really quite exceptional. In fact, it’s not clear that any of these filmmakers were much aware of the others’ projects, which proceeded more or less simultaneously. Even Andrew Mason, one of the producers of The Matrix, remarked on what a strange thing it was that “at the end of the millennium,” filmmakers “from all over the world . . . are having the same sort of paranoia,” writing films about “the question of whether or not what I am experiencing right now is real.” But the question of whether reality is real is one of those which doesn’t occur to most people outside of a philosophy classroom or a monastery. Why should so many films ask such a peculiar question all at once, in a chorus? If we cannot explain this convergence as a matter of imitation, how can it be explained?

Maybe this is the kind of thing that happens when a number of filmmakers try to appeal to the same audience fears and fantasies. George W. S. Trow points out that “nothing that doesn’t appeal immediately to ten million people happens in the serious mass-media business; ten million people immediately, fifty in potential . . . What you need is something people are in denial about that they want to see you take the risk of expressing” (21). Well, not all of these films were seen by so many millions of people, but certainly several of them were – for instance, The Truman Show made a $120 million showing over the course of seven weeks in theaters, and The Matrix made $165 million after spending a full three months as one of the ten most screened films in America (Internet Movie Database). Clearly these films “appealed” to enormous audiences, despite the duplication of plots and ideas – perhaps even because of that repetition. To whatever extent people reveal how they feel in the types of stories that they are willing to buy at a given moment in time, then perhaps we can read these films as symptomatic of a popular mood, might be “expressing,” in an indirect fashion, some widely shared desires and fears – “something people are in denial about”: maybe even, in the words of Laurence Fishburne’s character Morpheus in The Matrix, a “feeling you have had all your life . . . that something was wrong with the world.”

Here, in a nutshell, is my hypothesis: at the end of the ‘90s in America, large segments of the population were both giddy with the economic good news of the moment and – rightly, as it turned out – quietly worried that the good times couldn’t possibly last much longer, despite the constant assurances given by the spokespersons of big business that the American economy was invincible. A certain millenial, apocalyptic frisson hovered on the edge of the official mood of celebration. On January 12th, 1999, journalist Bob Harris questioned the “speculative bubble,” pointing out that the star performers of the dot-com economy were actually not all that they were cracked up to be: “The bookseller Amazon.com . . . has yet to show a dollar in profit . . . [but] according to the speculators now ruling the casino on Wall Street, the market capitalization of Amazon.com now exceeds that of the entire stock market of Norway.” In fact, U.S. corporate debt had doubled over the last decade (Plunkett Research). Harris calculated that even if Amazon “had a complete monopoly on every book sold in the United States,” its stock was “still priced at fifty times the hypothetical earnings. Which means Amazon.com is now worth five to ten times what it would be worth if it sold every single book in America.” Harris’ conclusion: “Are we getting close to a crash? Oh, possibly. That hissing sound you hear might just be the airbag getting ready to inflate.”

Even if only a few paused to ask where all the money was coming from, then many more must have been aware, on some level, that whatever success they had enjoyed wasn’t remotely proportional to that enjoyed by the wealthiest fractions of society: while Bill Gates had exceeded all previous definitions of “rich,” consumer debt had doubled over the previous decade (Plunkett Research), and the same 40 million or so Americans that didn’t have health insurance in the early ‘90s still didn’t have it. At the same time, any sour grapes they might have about this were excluded from the univocally positive media discourses. The Dow Jones index took on a numinous aura (much ado was made over its passing the magical mark of 10,000 points on March 29th, 1999 [BBC News]), as if the numbers themselves somehow created prosperity – and for some, in truth, they did. The overnight fortunes of young dot-com entrepeneurs were made through this sort of rhetorical inflation of exchange-value: according to Wall Street credit metaphysics, the appearance of a profit, if sufficiently believed in, was as good as a “real” one. It was as if actual, physical labor was a thing of the past, part of the “old economy” in which people actually made stuff and did things; now “wealth creation,” in the favorite phrase of the pundits, was the prerogative of the Bill Gates of this world. But this sort of breathless media representation of the “new economy” excluded the real contributions of the people who were not part of the stock market – not even indirectly, through 401(k)s; it marginalized the people who were still busy making stuff and doing things, while assuring them that they, too, were reaping the rewards of a new age of universal abundance. Indeed, on the terms of this discourse, Francis Fukuyama’s 1988 declaration had come to pass: the economy had brought an end to all conflict over how life should be lived, and with this conflict at an end, “History” as such had come to its close. Even the “business cycle” had been repealed: there was no reason to suppose that what goes up must ever come down. The present would continue indefinitely.

This notion of the Hegelian “End of History” is reminiscent of the static time of Dark City, which in turn borrows some of its imagery from Fritz Lang’s archetypal SF film Metropolis (1927). The centerpiece of the promotional posters for Dark City was the image of a man crucified against a giant clock – strongly reminiscent of a dramatic scene in Metropolis in which a shot of a worker toiling at a huge steam-powered machine dissolves into a shot of him chained to a giant clock. This repetition of imagery is also an important revision: where both films feature a symbolic revolt against the clock, the clock in Metropolis represents enslavement to an objective material time, the time of physical labor, while that in Dark City represents enslavement to a subjective mental time – the time of a night which never seems to pass.

Thus, Dark City offers a scenario of rebellion which is particularly well-suited for people whose dissatisfaction has lasted past the supposed “End of History,” and for people who are working harder than ever in an “information economy” which supposedly “creates wealth” without material labor. Indeed, in Dark City, the very materiality of the city is produced by thought alone: while the masses sleep, the Strangers are “tuning” its architecture, causing entire apartment buildings and streets to spring into being from nothingness.

Of course, this is a fantasy, and so in large part is the “information economy”: as economist Doug Henwood points out, the fastest-growing occupations in 1995 were scarcely more glamorous or “knowledge-intensive” than those of “teacher aides,” “cashiers,” or “janitors.” However, media pundits never ceased to advertise the “new economy” in which ideas, data, and digital images no longer represented but constituted “wealth,” in which the super-rich no longer were merely passive owners but actively engaged in “wealth creation,” and in which any remaining physical work was accomplished mysteriously, as if done in the night by unknown persons – “Strangers,” as it were. At the same time, the supposed advance represented by this “new economy” came with a real rise in working hours, both official and unofficial, even and especially for “knowledge workers” – aided and abetted by the new technology of laptops, emails, PDAs, and cell phones, which helped to erode the boundaries between leisure-time and work-time. As Jill Andresky Fraser recounts, “Throughout the 1990s . . . Public relations campaigns conducted inside and outside the corporate workplace” were required “to convince Americans that deteriorating job conditions were essential in order to fuel the nation’s thriving economy and soaring equity markets” (11). The clock to which these workers were chained was indeed no longer the externalized industrial punch-clock, but an post-industrial internalized “flex-time” which could and often did extend well into “leisure” hours. It is in this sense that John Shirley describes Fight Club as a ‘90s allegory: “We’re in a state of sleep-deprived dreaminess (while ironically in a kind of sleep, a zombie trance, the whole time) like Edward Norton’s character; we’re not deprived of sleep, we’re deprived of rest.” I’m reminded also of a scene in Dark City in which our hero staggers through a street full of unmoving cars, their drivers all asleep at the wheel, yelling “Wake up! Wake up!” Likewise, at the end of The Matrix, a Rage Against the Machine song playing over the credits screams “Wake up! Wake up!”

In retrospect, films like Dark City, Fight Club, and The Matrix do sound a lot like a wake-up call; certainly they seem to have anticipated, in a truly uncanny way, the sudden, unlooked-for emergence of massive public dissent in Seattle (November 30, 1999), the Nader campaign and the post-electoral chaos of 2000, and the subsequent collapse of the speculative bubble on Wall Street over the last two years. All of these films affirm what must have been a widely-shared sense that the rhetoric of collective enrichment concealed a reality of exploitation – a sense powerfully captured by one of the central images of The Matrix: as Neo awakens to “the desert of the real,” he sees endless fields of bottled human beings, which he is told are serving as “batteries” to feed the machines which run the world. This image makes a strong rhetorical appeal to a feeling that we're not in control of things anymore, that we are surrounded by empty electronic images that aren't real or true, and that we're being drained of our vital energy by a system that dehumanizes us.

This rhetoric is what made radicals of every stripe excited about the film. Consider Morpheus’ answer to the question, “What is the Matrix?”: “You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.” There is more than a whiff of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle in Morpheus’ little speech, with its sly suggestion of continuities behind seemingly heterogeneous moments of everyday life – work, church, government, television. It implies that something about working or voting is the same as praying or watching TV – as if, to complete the logic of the series, the common denominator between these things is credulous faith in the system and passive spectatorship. It’s a remarkable statement, conjuring up unimaginable fantasies of refusal within a popular medium – a mass-market action movie. Indeed, it could almost serve as a description of Debord’s concept of “the Spectacle,” the manufacture of appearances in advanced capitalist societies in order to elicit passivity and consent.

The connection that I’m drawing here between virtual-reality paranoia films and Society of the Spectacle is not a particularly original one, but I want to use it to make a more specific diagnosis of the sorts of critique and consciousness that I see suggested and reflected in these films. Movies like The Truman Show and eXistenZ dramatize some critical contradictions implicit within a particular kind of fragmented, consumeristic consciousness that I will call “commodity solipsism.” Let me explain what I mean by that term.

In late-‘90s America, what Marx had described as “commodity fetishism” (an unreal sense that the capitalist economy constitutes an objective necessity which rules our lives) had given way to a kind of “commodity solipsism” (an unreal sense of omnipotence, the fantasy that one’s own consumer preferences are not only the most important thing in the world, but in some way – as figured forth in Dark City – actually productive of reality).

A number of astute social critics have charted how commodity solipsism evolved and spread in the America of the 1990s through what Robert Reich called “the secession of the successful” (qtd. in Blakely and Snyder 24). In their 1997 book Fortress America, Edward J. Blakely and Mary Gail Snyder argued that “more and more, Americans are turning to protected spaces and away from public space” – a “trend” towards privatization signaled by “the rise of gated communities” as well as “the full-service, enclosed mall” (28). In An Empire Wilderness (1998), Robert D. Kaplan notes that suburban homeowners are also raising legal walls around their enclaves via “defensive incorporation” (Kaplan 32), “exclusionary zoning,” and “restrictive covenants” that “create an environment where there are no surprises,” keeping tax dollars in and people of other classes or races out (Blakely and Snyder 148, 62). As Cass Sunstein notes in Republic.com, this creation of “protected spaces” was matched by the creation of privatized experiences on the Internet, where interactive marketing devices increasingly provide “filtered” contacts with the “like-minded” as an alternative to “the ‘friction’ of ordinary life”: now, for instance, instead of shopping for books in a public space, I can log on to Amazon.com, where a program tracks my purchases and suggests what I am likely to enjoy “by combining information about what [I’ve] chosen [in the past] with information about what people who have chosen what you chose have also chosen” (199, 55, 168-169).

Reich, Blakely, Snyder, Kaplan, and Sunstein perceive different parts of the same pattern, but fail to perceive the bigger picture because they have no critical understanding of capitalism; commodity solipsism is just the kind of false consciousness which we should expect to see circulating in an advanced capitalist society. It was not only the wealthiest Americans who shared in the false sense that everyone either was or should be upwardly mobile (and that if you weren’t something was wrong with you). We were all bombarded by the advertisements for a good life that all could now enjoy – the “democratization” of the stock market, the “democratization” of the media in the age of the Internet, and so on. You didn’t have to live in an exclusive suburb or make a killing in day-trading to share in the feeling that these experiences were somehow the norm. And to the extent that workers could be encouraged to think of themselves as being part of this prosperous norm or as abnormal exceptions to the rule, as privileged individual consumers rather than as part of a hard-working class of producers, capital could maintain a nearly perfect status quo: private-sector unionization down to below 10% (AFL-CIO), low corporate taxes, and “bipartisan” acquiescence to continued deregulation.

Just as society is never really without conflict, however, so no form of false consciousness is ever fully coherent, and commodity solipsism is not without its own internal contradictions. Solipsism, as Slavoj Zizek recognizes in an essay that touches on these films, is both a wish-fulfillment fantasy of security (to be the master of the universe is to be perfectly safe) and a paranoid nightmare (perfect solitude means perfect loneliness and futility). To be liberated from “material inertia” is also to be “deprived” of reality, to be “substanceless.” The question that Zizek raises apropos of these films (and what they indicate about our national mentality) is whether the recent collapse of the bubble economy (and our sense of security) will mean that commodity solipsism, too, will collapse under the weight of its own contradictions (“Welcome to the Desert”). What indications of our real, social future do these movies offer?

My own answer is not optimistic. If these films point a critical finger at the solipsistic consciousness of a certain American audience at a certain intensely consumeristic moment, we can also see them as reflecting and even reinforcing that consciousness. For example, the ending of Dark City provides us with a kind of spurious escape. We watch Murdoch beat the Strangers by taking their mental powers into himself: in a neat parallel to the Book of Genesis, he makes an ocean appear out of nothing, and then he turns the face of the city, floating in the void, towards the sun, creating day. Finally, he walks to the edge of the city, passing its artificial bounds, and discovers there the previously nonexistent Shell Beach of his artificially implanted childhood memories, where his love awaits him. The only problem with this idyllic ending is that it only succeeds if we do not think too closely about it. Murdoch is not in touch with reality; in fact, there is no reality at the end. He’s trapped in the position of solipsism – for all intents and purposes, everything really is in his mind (he controls everything). In other words, while the filmmakers clearly wish us to see Murdoch as a hero who triumphs over the realm of illusion and deception – after all, the film begins in the darkness of ignorance, with its protagonist trapped in amnesia and solitude, and moves through memory to love, victory, and the full light of knowledge – nonetheless, all the contrived happiness of the ending is just that: contrived, artificial. This was the thematic problem the Strangers faced, and Murdoch merely inherits it. All the Strangers can “discover” are their own contrived plots, the stories they install in their test subjects – they can only know the “I,” never the “Not-I.” Everything the Strangers are surrounded by is an extension of their will, a projection of their mind. Likewise, Murdoch’s world is merely a reflection of his own wishes; there is no “Not-I” against which his ideas can be measured or tested. Nothing objects to his will, so there is no object-ivity. We are back in the position of commodity solipsism again.[1]

The Matrix, too, suffers from a contradiction: as David M. Boje points out, the revolt against “mythic-illusion” can only operate through a further myth-making and mysticism, a supposed transcendence which really means merging with the process that manufactures illusions. The world “without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries” which Neo heralds at the end, “where anything is possible,” is really the fantasy world of commodity solipsism, a laissez-faire techno-utopia in which poverty and wealth are merely states of mind.

Both The Matrix and Dark City camouflage this relapse into solipsism with “soul” language, appealing to romantic “love” as the gateway to an authentic human identity or core self. “Being the One,” the Oracle tells Neo, “is just like being in love. No one can tell you you’re in love, you just know it.” “You can't be dead,” Trinity implores Neo, “because I love you.” “I love you, John,” says Emma Murdoch in Dark City. "You can’t fake something like that.” A victorious John Murdoch taunts his former tormentors: “You wanted to know what it was that made us human . . . Well, you're not going to find it in here [pointing to his head]. You went looking in the wrong place [pointing to his heart] . . .” Likewise, American Beauty and The Thirteenth Floor offer escapist endings which appeal to “soul” and “love” as means of transcendence. This appeal to love, to the soul, to the human spirit, to an authentic identity or core self is a palliative: it flatters us that we are, as Dark City admonishes us, “more than the mere sum of our memories,” that our “capacity for individuality” makes us special, that our subjectivities are more than just a collection of the images we accumulate in everyday life, so many of which are fabricated for us by corporations like Time-Warner. In this way, thes movies not only reflect on commodity solipsism and its contradictions, they also reflect it, and provide us with false solutions to the contradictions, so that we are discouraged from thinking of ourselves as depending on and making common cause with others.

Some of these films, however, can be seen to propose something more challenging and less co-optative. We are not allowed to see what happens after Truman’s final departure from his televised prison – will he find love, discover himself? – but we do see two bored “audience members,” deprived of their favorite soap opera, flipping the channel. As fellow consumers of illusion, we are implicated. After the climactic violence of Fight Club, as we watch buildings crumble, it seems that anything might happen – the future to which this opens might be brutal or, for the first time, truly humane. Yet this too is a vicarious triumph, and one which avoids any of the hard questions: if the future is to belong neither to the abstract brutality of the corporations nor to the concrete brutality of the Fight Clubs, what will replace them? What would a “world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries” look like? This is beyond the horizon of these films’ vision. All they can do is insist on the truth of negation as a response to the negation of truth.

But this in itself is a positive achievement. In the final frames of eXistenZ, as a hapless character asks, “Are we still in a game?” we are left staring down the barrels of the guns held by Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jude Law, once sympathetic characters, now revealed as fanatical “Realists.” You’d be hard pressed to find a Hollywood film that would or could do this: not only does it deny us certainty and victory, not only does it point the finger at us, confronting us with our own passivity, it also takes away our identification with the protagonists. Here I’m reminded of a quote from Hegel that appears at the opening of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle: “In the case where the self is merely represented and ideally presented (vorgestellt), there it is not actual; where it is by proxy, it is not” (i). The protagonists in a Hollywood film are our proxy selves; they speak and act and live for us. For this movie to pull the plug on our connection with them, to destroy our emotional investment in them, is for it to say “no” to us in the most definitive terms. Perhaps there is some hope in that.

Blakely, Edward J., and Mary Gail Snyder. Fortress America: Gated Communities in the United States. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1997.

Boje, David M. “Spectacle and InterSpectacle in The Matrix and Organization Theory.” Sept. 5, 2000. Oct. 5, 2002.

Fraser, Jill Andresky. White-Collar Sweatshop: The Deterioration of Work and Its Rewards in Corporate America. NY: W.W. Norton & Co., 2001.

Kaplan, Robert D. An Empire Wilderness: Travels Into America’s Future. NY: Random House, 1998.

Mason, Andrew. Interview with Spencer Lamm. What Is the Matrix. Warner Brothers. Oct. 5, 2002.

Olsen, Stephen R. “Gated Communities: Privatizing the Public’s Safety.” Condo Management Online. Oct. 8, 2002.

Shirley, John. “Behind Blown Eyes.” Spark-Online. December 1999. Oct. 8, 2002.

Trow, George W. S. Within the Context of No Context. NY: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1997.

[1] Thus, Zizek reminds us of a paradox posed by Lacan: "the madman is not only a beggar who thinks he is a king, but also a king who thinks he is a king." In other words, “madness designates the collapse of the distance between the Symbolic and the Real, an immediate identification with the symbolic mandate” (“Two Faces of Perversion”). For Murdoch, the Symbolic and the Real have collapsed into one another – fantasy and fact are identical – and in this sense, he is indeed mad.