The purpose of the video essay format is to hook the viewer in with your personality; about welcoming your audience with the possibility of being your friend, your confident. But the opposite is true: I do not know you, I don’t know you to like you, I am remote and inaccessible. I have never even heard of you.
This is an essay about the future.
Part One: Noah
Camus said there was only one properly serious question in philosophy, and that is suicide. But the question of whether we should embrace annihilation is inherently tied up in the question of why we are here in the first place — the question of creation. The lingering effects of the enlightenment and huge advances in fundamental physics have led to a popular conception of life as a rational phenomenon, explained in some way by the long chain of cause and effect that brought it into being. There remain irritating holes in this conception, and it is by no means universal, in fact — it is fully alien to most of our known history, in which intentional creators and creation myths proliferated.
Creators and creation myths too are a staple of cinema going back to the start of the medium. These themes are so common — not just in the biblical adaptations that have recurred throughout cinematic history, but in sci-fi and fantasy works, horrors and even comedies. People see myths represented in cinema so often that often conversations slip between the cinematic and the mythic as if they are interchangeable — as if the relation were in fact, more than aesthetic, which is an argument I’m not usually convinced by
But the two do properly intersect in films such as Noah, Darren Aronofsky’s film of 2014. Perhaps Noah would have made a bigger impact, would have been received with a unanimous wave of applause, if it had been released today. It is often the curse of art to be all too timely, naively arriving to warn of the great storm before the rain has begun to drop. In 2014 it might have been quite easy to dismiss a film where the planet, starved of resources with a dwindling number of remaining inhabitants, lies in a state of terminal decline. Now, somehow, it is starting to sound all too relatable.
I was first shown an Aronofsky movie, Pi, when I was seventeen. It was during a school philosophy class. For me, Noah is the culmination of a deep scepticism about the effect of modern society on the individual in Aronofsky’s movies. Films like Pi and Reqiuem for a Dream, Black Swan, they depict people caught in the thousand mouse traps that make up modernity: addiction, obsession, delusion — rule the day in and around characters like you and me.
Noah moves past this point. In Noah, the end has already come. The society we are shown blossoming in the opening sequence has consumed itself and everyone who lived in it, leaving only stragglers living in the ruins left behind.
Society progressed and progressed until it was too late, the forces in motion were too great, and the humans, human society — they were crushed by gears that continued to turn independent of human action well after they had caused the apocalypse. Industrialisation and industry — represented euphemistically throughout the film by the presence of refined, sparkling rocks that act as a synthetic metaphor for the entire scale from gunpowder to oil to uranium to tiberium — industrialisation and industry have swept through the world, consuming and being consumed, and left nothing to remain.
In a flashback we see young Methusalah, Noah’s grandfather, swinging a great sword of fire before him, and the results are those of atomic warfare — dead earth, everything living turned to sand. Noah is implicitly living in the aftermath of nuclear winter, the aftermath of global warming, the aftermath of the complete breakdown of society. Whatever was tried, has failed. All that is left is a reckoning.
The world of Noah is populated by people clad in visibly modern rags, repurposed designs, patched up to last. As they travel, the few ruins they see are futurist structures straight from the pages of eco sci-fi magazines. Noah is at pains to let us know that this world is one that was invaded and colonised by our future; this is progress, but an uncritical, harmful progress that prioritises growth and expansion over human life.
People where I’m from are often taught that the Luddites, armed protesters in 19th Century England who would smash textile mills, were backwards people, futilely standing against the course of history. This true if you accept that history is written by the winners, and progress is synonymous with “what happened next”.
This negative progress is brought into sharp relief in Ken Russell’s The Devils, set in 17th Century France. A subplot in the film concerns the attempts by the French monarchy, under the direction of Cardinal Richelieu, to remove the walls and battlements from the town of Loudun, to be better able to centralise power in France. Power centralised in an absolute Monarch, though it seems outlandish today, was widely perceived at the time as a modernising move — increasing the ability for the state to act towards a single, unified interest, without having to divest power to a crowd of cantankerous nobles.
Russell aptly depicts the church, in this vein, as anachronistically modern in comparison to the homely town with its salt-of-the-earth priest — a town which nonetheless possesses fantastical walls to rival Game of Thrones. In the climax of the film the town is forcibly stripped of its independence, both in the person of the priest and in the destruction of the town walls.
This aesthetic is revisited in the 2018 Robin Hood, where the church is again a progressive force in the vacuum left by an absentee King. Robin Hood goes one step further, and ties the machinations of the modernising Church directly to the outcomes of the political system of the modern day and age, dressing up the corrupt crusades as the Iraq War.
But where both The Devils and Robin Hood are broadly optimistic movies — this malevolent force can be bravely opposed and collectively resisted — Noah is a pessimistic movie, and the title character embodies that pessimism. The descendants of Cain — ambiguously literally inheritors of sin, carnivores, and cast out from god — are many, while descendants of Seth — the third son of Adam and Eve, vegetarians, and people of faith — have whittled to next to none. Noah spends much of the film considering how not being descended from Cain does not exempt him from this collective responsibility and does not exempt his sons from sin.
In Noah, humanity has a God willing to intervene, in theory if not in practise, to sort right from wrong. Even if his sole act is to destroy us all, he is still there. For thousands of years humanity lived under Gods and religions; only in the last hundred years have atheism, agnosticism and apathy become significant statistical contenders. The smartest people in history of all creeds and genders were undoubtedly believers, though what form that belief took often varied.
Why don’t we believe? Have we lost the passion to seek our creator, to demand answers?
Interlude: ‘The story of Noah part one’ (‘Genesis’)
Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight and was full of violence.
So God said to Noah, “I am going to put an end to all people,
So make yourself an ark of wood;
This is how you are to build it:
I am going to bring floodwaters
But I will establish my covenant with you
You are to bring into the ark two of all living creatures
Pairs of all creatures that have the breath of life
Then the Lord shut him in.
The waters rose and covered the mountains
Every living thing on the face of the earth was wiped out;
Only Noah was left, and those with him in the ark.
“Come out of the ark,
“Everything that lives and moves about will be food for you.
“Be fruitful and increase in number
“Never again will all life be destroyed
“I have set my rainbow in the clouds,
“This is the sign of the covenant”
To take on a project like this, or any artistic endeavor really, requires a certain measure of single-mindedness. You have to see the thing before it exists, and endure the lengthy period in which what you’ve made doesn’t even come close to the thing you imagined. Often it won’t even be a good match when it’s done. But you have to not be averse to ploughing ahead alone, trusting that once the idea is sufficiently realized, then friends and acquaintances will begin to see why you have bothered.
This is definitely my experience, at least. It’s a risky, indulgent feeling, and the thrill of pulling it off can be intoxicating. Being able to justify a course of action to yourself and yourself alone makes you feel powerful. This is the kind of allure that people experience in the arguments of Nietzsche or Ayn Rand — permission to disregard common convention in the pursuit of a specific goal. And this can be a dangerous, seductive feeling, one that has been used to justify all manner of horrific behaviour. The idea that not only does your vision not discredit you for diverging from the mainstream, but it in fact it distinguishes you — you’re fighting a noble, true battle.
It’s a notion that weighs heavily in Ridley Scott’s The Duellists, a Napoleonic-era tale of two military officers who, following the fulfilment of their abstract honour, spend the better part of their lives resolving a dispute over an offence so trivial that it eventually becomes clear that at least one of them has forgotten it. Keitel’s Feraud, and to a similar extent Carradine’s d’Hubert, are so enamored with the need to resolve their conflict in the titular duel that it blinds them not just to the irrelevance of the dispute, but to the shifting political currents in the world around them. Feraud, a committed Napoleonite, ends the film isolated and alone in a France that has, for better or for worse, moved past the philosophy which animated him.
And that’s definitely an animating fear as I sit here and make this — that no-one will watch, no-one will listen, or that those who do will find the whole thing a dreary waste of time. Please pause reading at this point and leave a nice comment. I’ll wait. There’s a knife-edge balance to maintain, having faith in the thing and ignoring the chasm beneath, but also being aware that if you go too far out on a limb you may get to the end and find that you’ve wasted your time — or worse.
Noah spends much of the runtime of the film he helms in this position. Nominated by God — so he believes — to judge on the survival of humanity, he must repeatedly extend himself on faith alone, engaging with the Watchers in the wasteland, building the Ark, and facing down Tubal Cain. Finally, as the flood waters are about to break, he heads into the encampment of desperate humans who will shortly charge the Ark in a final attempt to survive. Seeing only a litany of human sins, Noah makes the terrible decision that God must want for humanity to end — and so Noah must ensure that his family, though they will be saved on the Ark, do not reproduce.
Noah’s family dissent. His middle son, already disgusted and angry with his father’s refusal to save his nascent girlfriend aboard the ark, falls in with the secreted Tubal Cain. His eldest son and daughter-in-law, miraculously, discover that they are to have a child — Noah remains unshaken in his conviction. That his family oppose Noah in his plan is, by this logic, only further proof of his absolute individual righteousness. He is the only one with the strength of character to see this task — ordained, as he sees it, by God — fulfilled. Like Feraud, he has stepped too far down this path.
In the end, nothing persuades Noah so much as random chance and caprice. The birth of twins is a divine sign, but as Sartre tells us, religious signs and omens are personal revelations; the pregnancy in itself was miraculous, the Ark itself was miraculous, Tubal Cain’s untimely ejection from the plane of existence was miraculous, but none of these things persuaded him. His conviction simply cracks, and he is revealed to himself as monstrous. The facts remain static but his viewpoint completely inverts.
And so, paradoxically, he becomes doubly guilty — once for condemning his family, and once again for failing to see condemning them through. Noah disintegrates, becomes a drunk, and abandons his family — until, in either a miracle or a wine-soaked dream, an interventionist God returns, draws a rainbow in the sky, and tells Noah he did the right thing.
Once again, if you’d like to take a moment to leave a positive comment in reply to this essay, or send me a positive tweet, or an email, or a Facebook message, now is most definitely the time.
Do you ever think about nuclear winter? Growing up in the north of England in the 90s and 2000s, the fear of a nuclear apocalypse was something largely experienced through pop culture, where it clung on well after the fall of the Soviet Union as the cataclysm of choice in movies, and later on the ‘dirty bomb’ threat revived it for the war on terror. It was only later on that I properly grappled with the Unworldly Horror that scenes like this depiction from Terminator 2 were meant to evoke; a regular day interrupted by a flash, a rush of wind, the realisation with just enough time to register it before a rolling wall of fire. The inevitability: Russell T Davies’ Years and Years has it right: an atomic bomb detonating in South China sea is as immediate and vital a threat as one going off in Brighton. The doomsday machine from Dr Strangelove does not need to be literal to be real.
All that said, I’d never particularly dwelled on it. But lately I’ve been having nightmares; the same nightmare, not often but occasionally. It’s a regular day and I’m going about my business. I pause, or look up from what I’m doing, or step out the door, and in the sky there is a mushroom cloud.
A video essay is a piece of video content, that much like a written essay advances an argument. Video essays take advantage of the structure and language of film to advance their arguments. While the medium has its roots in academia, it has grown dramatically in popularity with the advent of the online video sharing platforms like YouTube and Vimeo. While most of such videos are intended for entertainment, some argue that they can have an academic purpose as well.
Easily the most striking sequence in Noah is the pair of time-lapses that make up the Genesis creation myth that Noah tells, once aboard the ark, to distract from the suffering wails of the rest of humanity. It is the creation myth recast as a tragedy, beginning with the creation of the heavens and the earth and ending in annihilation, evenly cleft by the only cut in the sequence, between the illustration of evolution and the image of humans walking in Eden. Humanity in this way is presented as rupture, discontinuity, and ultimately the flaw that will destroy paradise and then destroy what’s left. The second half, the Mark of Cain sequence, displays a brief, affecting history of human conflict.
The other use of stop-motion in Noah, separate from the creation/mark of Cain sequence is when Noah plants the seed from Eden. We see the miraculous flowering of the small forest he uses to build the Ark, the waters of which head out across the wasteland and call to the animals of creation. But this call is also what summons Tubal-Cain, bringing with him the the curse of Cain, the violence, and murder. His camp feeds off the forest for cages and furnaces at the same time as Noah constructs the Ark from it.
Before the flood there is nothing good the creator can provide that will not be turned to evil purposes. Tubal Cain could have had his people build their own ark — he himself is farsighted enough to see that the deluge might come. But his people, their society, is fundamentally incapable of long-term planning — except for war.
The stop-motion genesis sequence smartly integrated a visual description of evolution into the traditional creation myth; while god is described as creating the beasts, what we see is microbes into fish into mammals. But while, as mentioned, Noah’s retelling of the story introduces a rupture — a line drawn clean between beast and man — we as the audience know that, in real life, evolution proceeds to produce humanity from animals. We know that even saving only the animals is not sufficient; even if Noah condemns all living humanity, it will, in time, reassert itself.
There is a theory in biblical criticism that this dichotomy between the heirs of Cain and the heirs of Seth is a later addition, an embellishment by anxious religious leaders concerned that a story in which we are all culpable for the crimes of our collective ancestors might be inopportune or unpopular. The insertion of Seth then, of a new lineage specific to the sin-free Noah, scrubs the record clean — not just of culpability for the crimes of the world swept away, but also for participation in its talents. Tubal-Cain, scarcely mentioned in the text before he is swept away by the flood, would in another telling be the father of all metalworkers before he was unceremoniously ejected from the narrative.
So it stands to reason that figuratively as well as literally in the film, Tubal-Cain clings to events, clings to the route forward opened by Noah, in the (accurate) conviction that this is the only way for him and his to pass through to the next era. His refrain — “We are alone. Orphaned children, cursed to struggle by the sweat of our brow to survive. Damned if I don’t do everything it takes to do just that. Damned if I don’t take what I want.” — is ultimately accurate. There is no godly salvation available for Tubal-Cain.
One of the most haunting scenes in the movie is when Noah and his family sit down for a meal aboard the ark, only to be repeatedly interrupted by the screams of the remnants of humanity, shapeless, clinging to a great peak and begging for help. Noah firmly, fanatically believes that there is no salvation available to them, and does nothing — but whether by grace or by lineage, there is salvation possible for Noah.
Tubal-Cain’s power — human power, the power of a King turned against the power of God — succeeds in getting him aboard the Ark. In this way, he is correct — his power is formidable even in the face of God. There’s the quiet, awkward implication that God might want to start humanity over again on the proviso that they know not to challenge him. Tubal-Cain repeats his mantra again to Ham, Ham whose defining character trait is lack, lack of having what he wants, lack of indulgence to his masculinity. This defiance, this refusal to stick to your station, is symbolised in the hammer Tubal-Cain presents him with as a present. In the text the mark of Cain, which we have been liberated from by decendance from Seth, is replaced with the curse of Ham — ambiguous, historically a vessel for the worst excesses of racism and cruelty. We can’t excuse ourselves, however much we want to, from collective responsibility. For all of our crimes against the world around us. Ultimately all of us have more in common with Tubal-cain than with Noah.
Interlude: ‘The story of Noah part two’ (‘Enoch 1’)
cleanse the earth from all impurity and from all wrong and from all lawlessness and from all sin and godlessness, and all impurities that have come upon the earth remove, and all the sons of men will become righteous, and all the peoples will worship me, and all will bless me and prostrate themselves. and i shall not again send any upon them any wrath or scourge, for all the generations of eternity.
teach the righteous one what he should do, the son of lamech how he might preserve himself alive and escape forever. from him a plant will be planted and his seed will endure for all the generations!
Noah is a fanatic, and the movie is delivered through his fanatical view — we don’t know the accuracy of his lineage or his depiction of world events, except in so far as Tubal-cain indulges him. The title cards are from his perspective, and the movie follows his lead as he later retells the Genesis myth. He is a “Descendent of Seth”, but we see no hard evidence of this alternate lineage — a family heirloom, some odd traditions. The true mark of his separation from Tubal-cain et al is in his fanaticism — Noah’s family are, in effect, the last members of a cult.
There’s a famous line in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, where, speaking of his nemesis Russian counterpart Karla, British spymaster George Smiley says “Karla is a fanatic, and the fanatic is always concealing a secret doubt.” “One day that lack of moderation will be Karla’s downfall.” But in the eventual sequel, Smiley’s People, the climax turns on Smiley’s own lack of moderation — his excess of duty. Smiley’s fanatical pursuit of his overall goal causes him to burn through a seemingly never-ending string of personal relationships, some worthwhile, some less so, until he finally traps the elusive Karla — it is only upon seeing him that he realises that in the pursuit of this man he has destroyed everything he claimed to treasure. He has nothing left but image of Smiley the Spymaster, suave, reserved, noble — in supposed contrast to people who have already replaced him. Smiley the man remains estranged, alone, obsessed with the paraphernalia of a life now lived.
Noah, too, is a fanatic. His vision drives him to construct the Ark and save live on earth, but even from the start it makes him paranoid and impulsive. The requirement on him to interpret the messages from God destroys his sense of proportion; he forgets that he himself inscribed the limits of their mission, and by the time the Ark launches he has altered them more than once: in not taking wives for Ham and Japheth, in taking Ila, Shem’s wife, even after her miraculous regaining of fertility at the hands of Methusalah and Naameh. In using the seed of Eden to begin with, which Noah treated with absolute skepticism and distrust when it was gifted to him.
Noah’s wife, Naameh in the film, goes unnamed in most editions of the Bible. Historical religious scholarship suggests Naameh, daughter of Lamech as the prime candidate. This has the curious outcome of giving both Noah and Naameh a father named Lamech; it also places Noah’s wife, in the Biblical geneaologies, as the sister of Tubal-cain. And she is the sister of Tubal-cain, symbolically or otherwise, as Noah’s wife is (by necessity) a Cainite, and Noah’s children each also an inheritor of the mark of Cain. This sense that he is an outsider even in his own family fuels his unceasing suspicion of his family and specifically his sons. Noah only truly trusts his own motivations, his own interior. He is fanatical.
Part Two: Prometheus
Aronofsky’s Noah tells a creation myth in a story of destruction, the almost-absent creator nonetheless looming over the events that follow. An absent creator looms over Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, a far more cynical story that is nonetheless all about creators and creation.
Ridley Scott is one of the most prolific living blockbuster directors, competing with Spielberg and Scorsese as a director capable of tackling big concepts and big ideas while still drawing in the punters. His first three films as director were The Duellists, Alien and Blade Runner.
2012’s Prometheus is in no way a failure, though it is one of his lesser financial successes. Prometheus, a follow-up to Alien that seemed almost to actively resent that association, was pilloried for its acerbic, misanthropic story about a spaceship full of people ultimately too self-absorbed to live. I’ve often described it as “Final Space-Destination” for the way in which the unceasingly arrogant characters meet telegraphed, ironic demises.
But Prometheus, in addition to being a sequel to Alien, also serves as a thematic sequel to Blade Runner. Prometheus introduces us to the character of David, the synthetic human, who evidently fascinates Scott to the point that the sequel, Alien: Covenant, retains only his character from the earlier film. Blade Runner was a story about created people seeking their maker to ask for more life; Prometheus is a story about a created person trapped under the thumb of his creator, the creator’s jealousy over his creation’s strength and longevity immediately evident. In Blade Runner the synths, hunted by Harrison Ford’s titular Blade Runner, seek their own creator to ask for more time, and Roy Batty is horrified to find him a petty, pseudointellectual human with nothing to offer him.
As well Prometheus reflects Noah in many ways; where Noah’s creator now shuns his creations, Prometheus’s engineers are physically and emotionally as distant as possible; their creations seek them out to kill or be killed by them, and the cycle is repeated with humanity’s own creation of life in the Synths.
If Noah is a film about the unknowable inhumanity of a distant creator, Prometheus is a film about knowing your creator to be all too human.
Interlude: ‘The story of Prometheus’ (Plato, ‘Protagoras’)
Once upon a time there were gods only, and no mortal creatures.
the gods fashioned them out of earth and fire in the interior of the earth;
Prometheus found that man was naked and barefoot and stole those mechanical arts, and gave them to man.
Thus man had the wisdom necessary for the support of life, although political wisdom he had not;
but he carried off Hephaestus’ art of working by fire, and also Athena’s tools of war, and gave them to man.
And in this way man was supplied with the means of life.
Prometheus was punished.
Everything that happens in Prometheus is initiated by the contagious black goo, a primal substance of corruption and death that is also associated with knowledge, evolution and progress. At the start of the film we see an unknown Engineer on Earth, ambiguous whether it was sent by its people or has struck out, the titular Promethean, to give life to humanity. Its body, sacrificed, distributes itself into the water, seeding the Earth in a life-bearing flood of genetic material. A seed of knowledge, sent to a planet, dripped into the water to soak through the bones of the Earth, will create new life — and can and will destroy everything. A true seed of Eden.
In Prometheus though, knowledge leads inextricably to destruction. The Alien, the perfect killing machine, is the derivative that the taint of knowledge brings out of any living creature. Weyland, the geriatric plot-moving antagonist of Prometheus, is obsessed with meeting his maker — the Engineers, the snow-skinned giants. Weyland has set off from Earth in his own ark, with his own group set to repopulate some distant world — rather than two of every animal, he brings one of every speciality, a geologist, an exotic animal specialist — and one synth, to whom he himself is creator. All, crucially, faithful — of a sort. All under his thumb, he stands as his own mirror to Noah, the Patriarch, and Weyland does indeed oversee the deaths of almost everyone on board his doomed ship.
Weyland is convinced beyond all reason, very literally convinced to the point where he doesn’t even discuss it during the film, that if he is able to meet his maker he will be healed — not even of a particular ailment, but of the condition of life itself. He ascribes his creator with absolute power and absolute benevolence — to him at least — right up until one of them exercises limited power with minimal benevolence. The dark joke of Prometheus is, of course, that the desire on the human’s part to meet a perfect creator — and the crew of the Prometheus are explicitly selected for their religious belief — is mirrored by the inability of the android, David, to escape his. Weyland loves David, but his (fairly wretched and insubstantial) human love is insignificant compared to the Godly compassion that David expects.
Ridley Scott, as a young man making Blade Runner, portrayed enigmatic youths seeking eternal life as idealistic, heroic and doomed, and the old man who fooled them into it as detached and callous. As an old man, making Prometheus, he portrays youths seeking enlightenment from their maker as hopeless blundering imbeciles, and portrays the old man stringing them along as unimaginably cruel and blinkered.
There is what you might call a twist in the plot of the movie I, Robot, directed by Alex Proyas. It’s not especially subtle — it’s the crux of the entire plot, but it’s there. All the way through, we’re told that the robots are open books, pure automata, nothing more than machines. Of course, we’re primed to expect otherwise. And the ghost of the robots’ creator, their Tyrell, loiters around in archival footage, making ambiguous and ominous statements about potential future consciousness.
That twist, so slight as to be barely a twist at all, is that it’s true. They do have secrets, they do have dreams. The robot with a secret is of course the one the size of a house suspended from the middle of a skyscraper, and the secret is a murderous robotic desire to kill Will Smith, but still, the point is there: don’t think these human-shaped robots who act just like people aren’t people. Don’t fall over yourself worrying about the metaphysics of the soul. They will act like people right up until they realise that you aren’t treating them like they’re people.
This is not a grand revelatory sentiment, and I, Robot is not the first work of fiction to touch on it. Not even close, really. But it’s the first one I saw. Similar sentiments emerge in Cloud Atlas, in Pluto, and of course in Prometheus. It’s even touched on in some video game thing called Detroit: Become Human, but I wouldn’t know anything about that.
The watchers, putatively ‘fallen angels’, are a fascinating addition to the Noah story derived from the Book of Enoch — an apocryphal religious text. Half-angel, half-robot, they live in an autonomous society that shuns humanity in a manner comparable to the tree-Ents of Lord of the Rings. Humans are said to have betrayed the Watchers — and the Watchers are shown in brief flashbacks chained, hauling great engines of war. “It was men who broke the world”, they say, and they take an almost pleasure in their ability to strike Noah and trap him and his family in an inescapable pit. Most notably, their relationship to the creator, despite being beings of light from the heavens, is also one dependent on faith and interpretation. They are also believers. Do the Watchers pray to the same creator as us, or do their have their own AI god of who we are just aspects? Their deaths, great explosive ascensions, bring to mind the rapture, as well as nightmares of nuclear-fuelled vehicles, tying them again to those shining fuel rocks — and the great shining crucifixes that accompany death in Evangelion.
This is the role of David among the humans in Prometheus, with the exception that he is far from unique in being subservient to Wayland; all the other human characters are just as subject to his whims and purposes. David suffers the double indignity that Wayland is both his creator and his master. We are first introduced to David, aboard the Prometheus, wandering the living quarters. The human crew having been placed in statis for travel, he has been living alone aboard the great vessel, occasionally nosing into the crew’s dreams and otherwise learning languages and — crucially — watching movies. David watches Lawrence of Arabia, and both his look and his mannerisms are subsequently inspired by O’Toole’s performance. His decision making process is inscrutiable to the film, alternately suggesting compassion for the crew, hatred for those who insult him, robotic loyalty to Weyland’s orders, and ultimately impassivity to Weyland’s demise. If anything, David looks happiest upon being decapitated by the Engineer, finally free of his responsibility to the tangle mess of humans, living or dead.
David, the artificial being, is generally taken to be descended from Ash, the science officer from Alien who is revealed, with psychosexual aplomb, to be a synthetic being. But David is also descended from the replicants of Blade Runner — the living, breathing, dreaming artificial workers of the Tyrell Corporation who can only be detected from humans by means of something like a panic attack. And even within that inscription, ambiguity clouds both our perception of Deckard and even Deckard’s perception of himself. That it doesn’t matter if you are a robot is what makes it so terrifying to be a robot — a static signifier of class rather than a category of being. Holloway mocks David’s suggestion that, like how humanity made him, the Engineers may have made humanity “just cause”. Is there anything to that other than fear?
The AI-botherers of our age perceived a robot so artificially capable that it would be able to look back through time and punish those who, knowing of its possibility, did not act to bring it into being. The creation passes into being the creator. It’s suggested that the ultimate flaw with David, from Weyland’s point of view, was that despite being superior to a human in every possible way, he was not capable of being Weyland. It’s not enough to invent God to free ourselves from existential fear; we have to invent ourselves into a God. David is familiar to Weyland; he cannot imagine that he will grant the impossible. The Engineer, nameless, voiceless, found floating in space — is nothing but limitless potential.
The task, the challenge is to imagine a future. When I was younger, we talked about the ‘end of history’ — the horror, a la The Matrix, of a world where all the big questions were settled and resolved with technological precision, an infinite bland expanse — the desert of the real. But in actual fact, this was an illusion. And behind the illusion wasn’t a world which could be changed. Instead, we have a world which changes of its own accord, the motion of impending impact over and over. They made lots of films about that too. No bomb, no flash, just warmer summers and worse governments.
I wonder sometimes how much the historic communists believed it — the ideologues who lived post-revolution and pre-collapse. When the warts really were ‘and all’, did they look at the Soviet government of the 1970s and 1980s and think it really was the vehicle through which global freedom could be won. It is impossible to imagine from here.
Noah is a vision of the future; Prometheus is a vision of the past. Our society will not self-sustain its way to the stars, no great lumbering spaceships bringing us out to meet our maker. Can we aspire to more than becoming an angry displaced mob living in the ruins of the past? We have to.
Interlude: ‘Prometheus Unbound’ (Shelley)
Monarch of Gods and Dæmons, and all Spirits
But One, who throng those bright and rolling worlds
Which Thou and I alone of living things
Behold with sleepless eyes! regard this Earth
Made multitudinous with thy slaves, whom thou
Requitest for knee-worship, prayer, and praise,
And toil, and hecatombs of broken hearts,
With fear and self-contempt and barren hope.
Whilst me, who am thy foe, eyeless in hate,
Hast thou made reign and triumph, to thy scorn,
O’er mine own misery and thy vain revenge.
There are many stories where the climax consists in seeing the world restored, peace renewed, the land terraformed in one great, final act of creation. Noah is one of these films — as we discussed, the film ends with the slightly delirious detached experience of God’s renewed favour to man, in the form of mild agriculture and some refraction. The miracle by which God catches Noah’s attention at the start of the film is this writ small, the birth and growth of a single tiny plant — here is the prize on offer. The seed from Eden which establishes Noah’s Ark-building camp is the medium edition. The seed is shown to us as rupture, divide, and it comes to attract both the innocent animals Noah wishes to save, as well as the baying hordes who would see the Ark destroyed. Creation brings with it destruction; a waterfall ends in crashing against rocks.
The Genesis machine from Star Treks number two and three, appropriately given the name, serves this exact purpose. Dispatched to a planet, it creates a new paradise — at the cost of destroying the planet that is already there. A recurring theme in Zack Snyder’s superhero films is terraforming as a semi-metaphor for one society displacing another: first with the Kryptonians in Man of Steel and their foundation of skulls, and second with the mother boxes, the ‘change machine’ in Zack Snyder’s Justice League, which strip the world down to nothingness in order to rebuild it.
One of the many ways in which Fallout 3’s story is somewhat muddled is that the GECK, the large-scale terraforming device which is possessed by the villains of the game, does not have such a quandary with its use. Instead, there is a simple on-off switch on the device itself which the villains have set to ‘on’, and should our hero wish to build a new society not on the bones of the super mutants, all they need do is flip it to ‘off’.
Prometheus inverts this construction; the destruction of the world is not risked at the end of the film, although it is echoed. Instead, the Engineer at the start of the film begins the process of terraforming that will give rise to humanity — humanity who will eventually cast out into the stars, locate the Engineers and — in the coda to Prometheus that was released in the run-up to Alien: Covenant — return the favour, as David unleashes the mercurial black goo on an ambiguous mass of present-day Engineers.
Prometheus, and Alien before it, understand terraforming as the Xenomorph. We are first introduced to the field of eggs, the nursery that has been made of the unknown space jockey’s control room. In Prometheus we learn that the towering black figure of the Xenomorph was a religious icon of some sort, a Satan lurking in the Promethean shadows, a literal nightmare made real. The Xenomorph terraforms the body itself by means of the face-hugger. The black goo, the dispensable form of the Xenomorph, is simultaneously creation and destruction. Beware of Gods bearing gifts.
The biblical Methuselah was the claimed longest-lived human, exceptional even among the anomalously long-lived cast of the Old Testament. Clocking in at an advanced 969 years, his extreme age is often conjectured to be a translation error. Methuselah is a by-word for human longevity. Methuselah in Noah, played with a casual gravity by Antony Hopkins, is shown to have been a great warrior who defended his holy mountain single-handedly against an army of men and watchers alike, by wielding the great flaming sword given to Adam on leaving the garden of Eden. Methuselah’s reward, in this way, is apparently that he has been made effectively immortal and as close to a direct agent of god’s will as the film portrays.
Weyland is the Methusalan character of Prometheus, the patriarch extended well beyond his natural lifetime. But he is also Tubal Cain; a man who has lived his entire life by the mantra of taking what he wants and demanding what he needs, hoarding wealth and hoarding technology. Methusalah is capable of performing a quiet miracle to restore Ila’s ability to have children; Wayland’s machines are unaware of the concept of the womb. Given the chance to seize the knowledge of human creation and the extension of life he would probably take it for himself, abandoning his crew to whatever fate awaited them. He is not one to, in the fashion of Methusalah, compound his grace in longevity by willingly committing himself to a flood.
The character in Prometheus who does bring about miracles, bring about transformations, is not Weyland of course, but David. Prometheus only has one seed of eden, and admits no sentimentality about its effect.
The Holy Mountain, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s masterpiece, tells the story of a string of characters who are assembled by a shady alchemist and given a quest to discover the secret of their creation — the secret of alchemy. The quest is personal as well as physical, each person having to symbolically destroy themself in order to undertake the journey. At the climax of the film, they ascend the titular mountain and discover the truth of their creation, the film set and the actors, and are immediately annihilated.
A mountain and a tomb; Prometheus is set within a proverbial Olympus, long since left to ruin. A great installation from where the Engineers were once able to rain thunderbolts on all creation, the flight chair of the Engineers — design derived of course from the Space Jockey in Alien and the Alien species from Planet of the Vampires — is revealed to be exactly what it appears to be: a humongous, indiscriminate gun. The crew ascend this mountain to its upper chambers, but within find no truth, only a monument to death and the dead bodies of those who built it. To find the actually existing Engineers they must descend. This mountain also only contains annihilation.
This is the quest of Roy Batty as farce — scaling the inscrutiable skyscrapers of those who made us to demand an answer, to demand more life, convinced of the only thing that makes sense — that your creator will love you on sight, and be concerned only with your preservation. Roy Batty puts out the eyes of the false god he finds atop his mountain, the deaths of his companions driving him beyond sanity as he ekes out his final moments. Batty is the flame that burns twice as bright; Weyland, who has burned far too long, is dull and lifeless by comparison. The Engineer, his long-sought maker, dismissing his request with a single single movement of the hand.
The top of the mountain is where Noah finds Methusalah, of course, to be given the seed of eden. To be given annihilation for all of God’s creations, so he thinks. The truth of the matter is this: to discover is to change. To learn is to be annihilated. We are always overwriting ourselves and our conception of others in every living moment. Nothing is static, nothing holds true. To seek God is to seek heaven; to seek death.
At the conclusion of Prometheus, David expresses confusion that despite everything, Shaw still desires to seek her creators. She still desires to ascend further up the mountain, the quest transformed from a self-destruction passion to a Sisyphean task. Having experienced the senseless death of everyone aboard the Prometheus, her faith is reaffirmed as pure, opposed to Holloway’s technocratic agnosticism. The act of creation, mastered by humans, needs no longer to be attributable to God. Together, they can seek their creators with clear vision. Until Alien: Covenant comes along and entirely upsets the apple cart, we can imagine Shaw and David happy.
We would like, in our actions that we would take as leaps of faith, to know that we’re at least well-informed, if not expert. In the covid crisis, I spent lots of weeks bundled up in my flat reading about the latest thoughts and latest practices for minimising my chance of catching the virus. I know some friends also did likewise. Some of the things I did — like wearing surgical gloves to the supermarket, for instance, turned out to be unlikely to have had any impact. Others, like my early adoption of facemasks and sticking to medical designs, however cheaply manufactured, probably helped. Expertise always has an end, and we always end up acting without the maximum possible knowledge, because no one person knows everything. We make a judgement about where we can stop thinking, and start acting.
Prometheus is full of characters who act too soon, move too soon, touch things they should not and suffer the consequences. They engage in the whole endeavour without knowing Weyland’s plan; even once they are aware of the rough outline, they slowly have to discover the full extent of it. But still they act. And in the climax of the film, Shaw persuades Janek that, despite knowing very little about the Engineers and their motivations, preventing the awakened Engineer from heading for Earth is of absolutely critical importance.
Kanye West is the greatest living rock star. Over his ten released studio albums, his genius in the production of music is reiterated over and over again. When he was rapidly becoming a respected producer, he demanded to do rap. When he was top of the world in rap, he released an album of autotuned singing. After making an epic near-concept album soaked in theatricality, he released a furious album of stomping beats. He has infamously made and never released multiple albums, some which have gone so far as to have singles released, dates announced and album art created. He is iconic, unstable, offensive. His drive to engage with anything and everything on his own terms causes him to increasingly regularly veer off the piste of acceptability, not in the fashion of a shock comedian — though it’s safe to assume that he likes getting a rise out of people — but often he’s simply wrong, via the study of the autodidact or just by the wildly distorted perspective of a now-billionaire — and to be a billionaire is a disgrace in itself.
Kanye’s magnum opus, the song “Runaway”, is an operatic extending musing on his own failures — in relationships, in life — that descends by the climax of the song into an incoherent mumbling, distorted by auto tune beyond recognition — fragments of the earlier lyrics almost coming to the surface then drifting away. It’s the culmination of the eight-minute song’s themes of struggling to communicate and struggling against compulsive behaviour. In the subsequent track “Blame Game” this will descending into recrimination and regret, the things easiest to clarify born of misery and spite, mirrored ultimately by a climax to that song that is a petty, misogynistic spoken word sketch. But that descent into static, into the impossibility of communicating, will always matter to me.
What gives Kanye enduring appeal over someone comparable in self-promotion and ignorance like Elon Musk is the deeply vulnerable, deeply discontented humanity of it all. Even when it’s all scripted, even when he’s waist deep in the hyper-real world of the Kardashians, even if we accept that even the craziest tweet is partly the product of PR managers and press officers, Kanye moves first and evaluates later. He’s not unique in this; Miley Cyrus has a similar appeal, straddling the invisible line between manufacture and impulse. But Kanye’s self-promotion, self-belief and self-achievement combined with his grandiose, baroque artistic sensibilities are — to me at least — an enthralling mix.
In his way, Kanye — who went “from the greatest to the most hated” bears similarity to another widely despite pop culture figure, Alan Moore’s pastiche of the objectivist leanings of his friend Steve Ditko: Rorschach.
Watchmen’s Rorschach is the fine point on the end of that book’s effortless skewer of the idea of the super-hero: a right wing fanatic come straight down from Ruby Ridge, obsessed with intrigue and powerful figures, keeping copious notes of the decay of society around him. And yet set among the other miserable, compromised figures of Watchmen, the bean-eating conspiracy theorist starts to look positively heroic. His hyper-violence, while contemptible, is at least consistent with his hardline morality. Nite Owl and Silk Spectre engage in it for a borderline sexual thrill, and Ozymandias’ casual plan for mass death is considerably worse. There is much criticism of the movie version of Rorschach for making the character cool or heroic, but there isn’t anything there that isn’t in the book. As Alan Moore said,
“The most unpleasant, right-wing character is Rorschach. He almost ends up the hero of the book. He’s certainly the character who seems to have the most ferocious integrity. Even if his politics are completely mad, he has this ferocious moral integrity that has made him one of the most popular characters in the book.”
As mentioned Moore based Rorschach on Ditko creations such as Mr A, a superhero named for the first tenet of Objectivism, “A = A”, that explains how something or other, who cares. In an interview, Moore explains his admiration of Ditko the person in similar terms to that of Ditko the character: “With Steve Ditko, I at least felt that though Steve Ditko’s political agenda was very different to mine, Steve Ditko had a political agenda, and that in some ways set him above most of his contemporaries.”
Rorschach’s ranting, his homophobia, his violence are not excuseable — he remains a wretched character up until he is summarily executed. But there remains with him this line of humanity, this line of integrity that Moore saw in Steve Ditko and that appeals to me with Kanye.
Occasionally one of those questions goes around that’s designed to intentionally provoke: what’s your favourite work of right-wing art? And I always reply, the writing of Yukio Mishima. Mishima is a figure of almost Shakespearean tragedy, a post-war Japanese fascist who was blessed (or cursed, depending on your point of view) not with a talent for leading men, but for writing beautiful prose. He proceeded to write acclaimed works of fiction which sublime his fascism into an intoxicating fervour that almost rises off the page, before gathering a small number of crypto-military followers and attempting to stage a coup. It failed, and he took his own life in undertaking it much as his teenaged protagonist of “Runaway Horses” had sworn to.
There is a throughline of these individuals, two in fact. One is their fanatical commitment to their ideals, to seeing their trusted task through to the end — though you have to hope that Kanye spends more time running for the presidency and less time plotting a failing military coup. The other is their dalliance with individualist right-wing ideas. I have no qualms with jettisoning the latter — there is perhaps a natural inclination towards right-wing politics in individualism, rather than the collectivist politics that are more typical on the left. The left has it’s share of singularly driven martyrs though — this is surely the enduring appeal of the famous photo of Che Guevara, or the rationale behind Marx’s giant Highgate tomb.
But there is a special spark, a something, that appeals to make Guevara and Mishima and Kanye these enthralling characters, and that spark is identified and criticised in the character of Noah, and identified and mocked in the characters of Prometheus.
I desperately want to believe like Noah believes. Just a fraction of that faith that there is a beyond, it is attending to us, and we are not just floating on a spinning rock in a vast, lifeless void — that our small actions, our scratches in the dirt can mean something not just now but forever. Sartre says we chose not just for ourselves but for all of humanity. Tolstoy says we are infinite, making decisions for all time. Rationally I can see that these things are true — rationally I can see that we know nothing at all about our existence and the whys and hows, and that when we close our eyes at night, or in the end — anything might happen. I can lay it all out like a jigsaw. But faith comes and goes like moonlight behind clouds and when it goes, the only thing that seems like it could possibly make sense is a mad, senseless world. Sometimes the only fitting moral to this life feels like God flipping a coin, over and over again. Noah’s belief is his entire world, and the entire world comes to his belief. There is an appeal in that.
But it can be hard to shake the feeling that we’re all much more like the protagonists in Prometheus: floating, unmoored in an improvised cosmic comedy. Fated by birth to serve at the beck and call of idiots and imbeciles, our entire fate turning on the whim of some daydreaming oligarch.
I wanted to write this essay, make another video, because what I think is important is communicating honestly, putting you and yourself up for view, up for access, even though it is terrifying. To share and try to explain my anxieties about the world and my place in it, in the hopes that it is a comfort to your anxieties about the world maybe. And to swell my own ego by seeing people engage again with a thing I made. I couldn’t do this for a living — or rather I don’t want to. It’s too hard. Not only do you have to ignore the sensibilities of others, like I say above, but you have to ignore yourself. The critic that you’re never good enough to please. I started writing this essay immediately after finishing my previous one in 2021. By November of that year I had recorded some of the audio tracks for the video version. And then I just kept picking away at it. At the start of this year I decided I needed to finish it or else I never would and I’d have put so much effort into something that never happened. Well, now it’s happened. I hope you enjoyed it. Unironically, I hope it brought you that little bit closer to me, or to yourself.
I wrote this essay to share my passion for the films I talk about in it, and to proselytise for the approach to criticism that I take, an approach which isn’t about saying whether art is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ or any other nonsense category game. I want to explain what the films mean to me. Otherwise I can only repeat the same cheap mantras I say all the rest of the time: anyone can do this. Everyone should do the things they love, create the things that matter to them and be their own Fanatic, at least some of the time.
If you appreciated this (video) essay, please check out my earlier (video) essay ‘Sixteen attempts to talk to you about ‘Suicide Squad’’, in every way the thematic precursor to this. If you’re after more text, please follow me on Medium or subscribe to my Letterboxd reviews.
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