Limitless
Thursday, January 5, 2012
7:42 AM
1
Marxian Rating:
By Gabriel Tupinambá
Introduction
Limitless tells the story of Eddie, a failed writer who stumbles across an unknown drug designed to boost one’s intelligence. By secretly using these pills, Eddie is welcomed to the life he always wanted: he writes a long overdue book in three days, makes a ton of money in the stock market in less than a month, and, soon enough, he is consulting for Carl Van Loon, a Wall Street magnate who hires him to overview a multi-million dollar company merger.
On the other hand, the drug quickly starts to show its side-effects: Eddie begins to experience strange black-outs - becoming the suspect of a model’s murder even though he does not remember anything of it - and ends up getting involved with Gennady, a loan shark who discovers Eddie’s secret and wants to use the drug’s power to become a mastermind criminal.
In the end, Eddie manages to kill Gennady and to avoid being blackmailed by Carl Von Loon - who by now knows of the existence of the “smart pills”. Using his great intelligence, he hires a laboratory to synthesize his own perfected version of the pill, which allows him to keep the knowledge and skills he acquired even after the effects of the drug wear off. Rich, intelligent, and with his enemies out of the way: the movie ends with Eddie running for Senate - he plans to be president of the United States.
The first question to ask, of course, is the following: what about this storyline or the character of Eddie is properly “limitless”?
It is clear that the movie title is supposed to name the unending possibilities opened by the drug - yet another premise built upon the notion that our stupidity is neurological rather than ethical. However, what is conveyed by the film is not so much an unlimited opening as the crude limits of Hollywood’s imagination. Just as in the recent Green Lantern (2011) movie - in which the hero’s super power is to be able to materialize anything that he thinks of - Limitless reveals on screen a fundamental impasse: the only way to show how thought produces novelty is to engage with actual thought. There is no possible feigning of thinking, for this fake semblance is already a by product of how thinking takes place in every day life. Because of this, films which deal with the power of thought end up touching on a symptomatic point of the relation between the boundless ocean of possibilities that we are promised today and our utter impossibility to think beyond the most basic rules of the ordinary. This is why Limitless produces the most repetitive conclusion (the best thing is to be president of USA) out of the most general promise of innovation (a pill that allows you to think the best thing to do) - and why the Green Lantern, when given ultimate power to materialize thoughts, is unable to think anything other than a (slightly bigger) machine gun.
What we would like to propose - after a rather long detour through Badiou, detective stories and Karate Kid - is that the crucial problem in the way cinema portrays thought is that of the distinction between information and knowledge - and ultimately, between what is demanded of us and what we desire. And though Hollywood is more than willing to feed the fantasy that intelligence is the product of data gathering and fast-processing - in other words, the final goal of an asymptotic, encyclopedic approximation - its repetitive failure to produce a film about thought that itself thinks offers us the opportunity and the concrete material to investigate how this very failure can help us to locate the proper place of thought of and within cinema.
Some preliminary remarks on the production of truths in cinema
Alain Badiou defines cinema as an impure art. In The False Movements of Cinema, the philosopher locates it as the “‘plus-one’ of the arts, both parasitic and inconsistent” (in Handbook of Inaesthetics, p.83). Cinema is parasitic because it inherently relies on other art forms (theatre, painting, music, etc.), and it is inconsistent because the cinematic art is not founded on what is presented on the screen (images, sounds, etc), but on how these elements are “unpresented” (HI, p.78) - that is, how they are placed at the service of the editing cuts, which both separate and bind them together.
This constitutive impurity introduces cinema, at its very root, into the problematics of the vulgar and the non-artistic. Consider, for example, the distribution of judgements in movies regarding the artistic and the entertaining: to say that a film is “artistic” is, first of all, not a tautology, and, furthermore, it is probably a deprecatory remark (either about the movie or about whoever is saying it). On the other hand, if we say the same thing of painting or a sculpture, it is clear that we are on very different territory. According to the logic of the contemporary art world - with which cinema has only a parasitic relation - the word ‘art’ assigns only four possible destinies to an element. A painted canvas, for example: it is either (a) art; or, if it is not, it can only be (b) an amateur work, (c) a piece of marketing (“graphic design”), or (d) a redefinition of what art is. In other words, vulgarity is something a painting falls back on (in order to retain some value as future art (b), “applied” art (c) or new art (d)), and not something it raises out of. As a last example, just think of the difference between the painting of a movie scene, and a movie sequence based on a painting: while the first is supposed to elevate the movie to a new artistic dignity, we all expect the movie to make the original art work more entertaining.
Because it produces a new relation between the pure and the impure - the artistic and the non-artistic - the “parasitic and inconsistent” status of the cinematic art form also asserts a new logic for the production of its truths. Otherwise put: because a film is not in contradiction with its own vulgarity - like a painting or a symphony would be - the greatness of cinema cannot be thought of in terms of the purification of its idea. Fortunately, outside the domain of instructed opinion - instructed specially on how to pass opinions for serious thought -, the attempt to grasp the cinematic form against the background of classical (or post-modern) art has already been abandoned. But rather unfortunately, this abandonment has in fact turned into an almost unanimous agreement amongst the general public that there is no other logic at play in cinema than that of being good or bad entertainment. Thus, while the opinion of the aristocracy is that cinema shares with other contemporary art forms the vocation to its own purification - an ideal whose model is, no wonder, the meaningless purity of the one dollar bill -, the opinion of the masses (if we can use such a term to denominate the ‘general public’) is that the vocation of cinema is that of its total vulgarization - an ideal whose model is the easy-to-consume commodity. A tensionless opposition, of course.
However, Badiou’s affirmation that cinema is constitutively impure does not lead to this self-perpetuating pair. On the contrary, he maintains that two radical conclusions follow from this claim:
1. “[cinema’s] force as a contemporary art lies precisely in turning (...) the impurity of every idea into an idea in its own right” (HI, p.83)
2. “cinema is a ‘mass art’” (from Cinema as a Democratic Emblem, p.1)
The first statement proposes a short-circuit between the pure and the impure in cinema: the ordinary dimension of the movie - the baseness of its themes and appeal, as well as its vulgarization of other art forms - is not an obstacle to the cinematic idea, for the object of cinema is nothing but the way an idea is always partially caught up in the ordinary - what Badiou calls the law of the situation. Therefore, cinema is not a “failed” art, but an art of failure: the split between the situation and the idea is the very material of its thinking.
The second formulation puts forward another short-circuit, evoking a conjunction of that which is for everyone and that which is strictly singular, whose philosophical import is summarized by Badiou under the name of a “paradoxical relation”:
“In “mass art” we have the paradoxical relation between a pure democratic element (on the side of irruption and evental energy) and an aristocratic element (on the side of individual education, of differential locations of taste).” (CDE, p.2)
It is precisely by giving body to the tension between evental power of an idea - the irruption of what belongs to generic humanity - and the locality of tastes - the negotiation of bodies and languages - that cinema becomes an object of interest for philosophy. The idea of the impure, once we recognize its philosophical dignity, becomes the very means through which one can think the conjunction of the democratic dimension of audiences and the aristocratic unfolding of the arts:
“The simple form of the paradoxical relation: the first great art which is mass in its essence appears and develops in a time which is the time of the avant-gardes. The derived form: cinema imposes impracticable relations between aristocracy and democracy, between invention and familiarity, between novelty and general taste. It is for this reason that philosophy takes an interest in cinema. Because it imposes a vast and obscure complex of paradoxical relations. “To think cinema” comes down to forcing the relation, to arranging the concepts which, under the constraint of real films, shift the established rules of the connection. (CDE, p.2)
To conclude this short presentation, we would like to point out that there is yet another side to the conjunction of these two statements. We have already seen that to tarry with the impurity of cinema in order to think the idea of impurity itself - specially in terms of the conjunction of the democratic and the aristocratic - is to elevate cinema to an idea worthy of philosophical investigation. But here we would like to we propose an additional definition: to allow this thought to shed a light on the law of the ordinary - on the ordination of a world - is to engage in ideology critique.
The first is the question of the thought of cinema, the latter, the question of thought in cinema.
Thinking, in movies
Cinema relies on certain mechanisms to portray thought on screen, and the genre of detective stories is particularly helpful in isolating these cinematic devices. Let us consider the two most basic of them:
- narration: the detective narrates his own thoughts non-diegetically (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diegesis) - a form most commonly associated with film noir and Cartesian investigations.
- interlocution: the detective discusses his reasoning with a side-kick or presents his conclusions to a stunned gathering - a form most commonly associated with Sherlock Holmes and the Platonic dialogues.
What these two devices have in common is that, in both of them, thought appears as a certain handling of the split between the actions portrayed and the character’s speech (in the case of Descartes and Plato, this distinction is reduced to its minimal dimension, between words and the action of thought itself).
In the first case, we have the superposition of the image of the detective smoking a cigarette in the rain and the narration, usually in his own voice, telling us that he is suspicious of the beautiful woman who just hired him. Something similar is at stake in Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy, in which we follow the Cartesian subject investigation of the grounds for certainty through Descartes’ narration - in ways which sometimes come dangerously close to the film noir, when, for example, at the end of the first meditation, Descartes becomes suspicious of the beautiful God who seems as malevolent and capricious as a femme fatale...
In the second case, rather than relying on the distinction between diegetical action and non-diegetical narration, the split between the two becomes the suspension of sense within the plot itself: the detective seems sometimes slightly lost, his actions are incomprehensible - until he reveals to us their purpose and the thought-process guiding them. We can better understand now the function of the side-kick - from Watson to Robin - and of the famous final scene of a gathering of policemen and possible suspects: they set the stage for the retroactive precipitation of the detective’s thought into the otherwise senseless scene of his wanderings. In fact, when we consider this simple structure, the naive explanation as to why so many detectives have doctors for side-kicks (or are doctors themselves) - which is that of recognizing the historical basis of the modern detective, the mixture of keen observation and analytical thinking, in the birth of modern medicine and clinic of symptoms - can be supplemented by a more synchronous one: just as the side-kick allows for the detective’s speech to reflect the thoughts suspended between his previous actions and his current conclusions, his medical gaze ties them back to the detective’s body, as a sort of displaced pineal gland.
Furthermore, it is interesting to note that, in the case of this particular cinematic device, our lack of understanding of the detective’s actions becomes, once his reasonings is revealed, a confirmation of his superior intelligence. In fact, the detectives who are defined by their intelligence are normally portrayed according to this second method, while movies with detectives whose defining trait is being “street smart” normally recur to superposed narration.
Detective stories also allow us to identify certain crucial distinctions between cinema and literature, as well as to exemplify what Badiou means by cinema’s impure parasitizing of other art forms. The detective genre is, first and foremost, a literary one: from Edgar Alan Poe’s Auguste Dupin, through Conan-Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes up to Chandler’s Marlowe - the written text has woven through its detectives an investigation of the process of thought and of the production of knowledge. It is here that we first encounter the methods of narration and interlocution, though we cannot define them, as we did above, according to the tension between (the image of) senseless actions and enlightening (sounding) words.
The first problem is, then, how to create this gap when the words which designate the interior and the exterior are made of the same material. What is guaranteed in cinema by the irreducible division between image and sound, is kept functional in literature only through the craft of the writer - his artistic merits being converted into a mere ‘fact of structure’ in cinema. The relation between the past and the present tense, the declinations of the “he didn’t know”, “little did he know”, “it was him all along”, the structural disposition of characters, etc. are the material at the author’s disposal, the tools available to accomplish what, in cinema, is practically a given. We only have to consider how cinema did away with the narration from the standpoint of the side-kick - a fundamental tool in classic detective stories, such as Sherlock Holmes and Poe’s The Murders at Rue Morgue - to see that certain mechanisms of storytelling simply lose their relevance when the form guarantees the separation between image and sounds.
Because the cinematic form starts off from the split which the literary form struggles to construct, movies allow us to isolate more easily another dimension of this problem, which is at the cause of both methods we described above: the matter of the scene of thought. At stake here is the further comprehension of what takes place in this suspended, hidden scene which is marked on the screen as the interval between the detective’s silent observations at the crime scene and his final speech, or between his impassive cigarette smoking and the voice which tells us about his smokey suspicions. Between these two moments or instances, there is a negative dimension which is retroactively filled by the supposition that thought has taken place.
How can we refine our grasp of this other scene, whose absence mediates the working through of the material clues and the production of knowledge?
Learning, in movies
In a very rudimentary sense, the enactment of learning is the inverse of the staging of thought in cinema. If detective stories rely on the suspension between action and speech in order to locate the brilliancy of a given character, movies which portray learning - from Karate Kid (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087538/) to Finding Forrester (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0181536/) - must slowly construct this negative place through the composition of actions and dialogs.
The minimal distinction between these two structures can be exemplified with a simple comparison. In the detective story, there is a re-doubling of the thinker’s actions: at first they seem incomprehensible, and then, after the final conclusion, we realize how the incomprehensible character of the scene actually implied that the detective’s superior reasoning was always present. If we now consider the classic “wax-on, wax-off” scene from Karate Kid (1984), we see a similar redoubling functioning in a different way: at first, the work of the student is meaningless - it marks that he does not know what his master knows - and then, after his training, the student repeats the same mindless actions as the knowledge that he previously did not know - “wax-on, wax-off” is no longer the name of a technique of polishing surfaces, but a martial arts move. The interval between the two actions is not supposed to mark the place of an already pre-existing ability - the detective’s intelligence - but the place where the senseless, repetitive work acceded to knowledge.
This comparison allows us to think another common characteristic of films which focus on the process of learning: they tend to reduce intellectual education to the repetition of the body. The reason for this tendency is almost too evident: in order to stage the movement of elaboration that is proper of thought - for example, the enactment of how someone learns how to draw - it is required that something of this thought be actually worked through - that is, that the actual knowledge of how to draw and paint be presented in the film, which, in turn, relies not so much on the characters, but on the actual cast, crew and production of the movie and on what is available in our concrete network of social relations in terms of that knowledge. In fact, in its generalized form, this invariance has a structuring function in cinema: nothing in a movie scene is co-extensive with the world, but there is something which pierces through the movie scene in the same way that it pierces through the world.
Whatever that is - let us linger in the unnamed for while - it makes its effects clearly felt when we see an actor playing a great painter, who is on the brink of creating a new masterpiece, and the painting that is shown to us on screen is something completely vacuous and ordinary. Here, no argument as to the “make believe” dimension of cinema will keep us from recognizing that the bad painting presented in the film is a bad painting in a movie as much as in an art gallery (though we are more and more accustomed to the opposite movement). This is because the "reference point" of art was never the world to begin with, but something else, which is equally removed from the world as from the staged scene. To portray someone who learns how to paint - or who innovates in the scientific realm, for example - is to bring into the movie a dimension which cuts across fictions and facts alike, for a painting remains subjected to the same apprehension, wherever it is presented. This is, we might say, the other side of cinema’s impurity: that which it strives to substitute - and therefore to vulgarize - nevertheless has its purity caught on screen.
However, movies in which learning take place in the context of martial arts, sports, or military discipline are not necessarily haunted by this other dimension. A montage sequence in which we see the character training, repeating the same movements until he finally gets it right, etc, already convenes the true dimension of effort at stake. The repetition of the body marks the asymptotic “shaping” of a new skill, which is why the montage of different moments of the character’s training does not make us think that something happened in between the shots we are seeing. For example, we are free to imagine what Rocky was doing between the shots which show him punching a sandbag at the gym and the ones where he is running up the museum’s stairs, for all that remains unseen between the two is the further specification of the "curve of learning" that we have already grasped. The fact that cinema relies almost exclusively on the thematics of shaping or conditioning of the body to portray what it is to learn can be further exemplified by the most common strategy used to present the completion of the hero’s apprenticeship: when the student is finally ready, his final challenge is to “let go” of everything he thinks he learned. Ultimately, in today's ideology, to learn is to learn to do without thinking - it is the body who is supposed to know.
We have seen how detective stories can help us circumscribe the place where most movies allocate the scene of thought - in the suspended, and only retroactively filled, gap between the senselessness of certain actions and their later clarification - and we have briefly touched upon the problem which arises when a movie needs to construct this place step by step, so as to portray how a person starts to think about something that he or she could not think before, without reducing this construction to the continuous perfecting of a body.
Let us now examine how these two dimensions come together in the case of Limitless, and what that says about what we think of thought today.
Limitless
We mentioned at the beginning of this review the basic plot line of the movie - how Eddie takes a pill that makes him smarter and the story that follows from this - and we also delineated the basic problem that this story renders apparent - the promise of limitless thought being undermined by what the movie itself is able to think.
An interesting scene to consider, in light of what we have developed above, is when Eddie first takes a pill and experiences its transformation. The first effect is that the world gains color and depth - in fact, if we consider the opening scene, in which the camera zooms in concatenating colorful scenes of the city at night, it is clear that this depth is connected to a sense of constantly moving forward and into, as if there is no looking back, no escape but to go on. This association between perpetual depth and thought is already problematic given what we developed as to the retroactive effect of speech on the gap left open by thought: if there is no going back, if every intellectual move is the optimal way of moving forward (and not of understanding what took place), then a certain similarity to the training of a body is already in place. Once the colorful and bottomless world reveals itself, Eddie realizes that he can now remember things that he only saw once, in passing, a long time ago, and he is also able to connect these "quantum" of memory in an increased speed. Thinking is then indistinguishable from the permutation of the data gathered by memories, according to the (invisible) rules which govern what would be their optimal combination.
This conception of intelligence is articulated in a similar way in another movie - The Matrix - though the "pill" plays here a different role. More than once, the characters within the matrix ask someone outside the system to "download" the knowledge of how to kung-fu or how to pilot a helicopter into their virtual versions. The crucial point being that, though the body outside the matrix is sufficiently connected with the virtual version inside the system so that it can actually die out of "virtual" causes, nevertheless what is learned within the matrix in terms of "downloaded knowledge" is not maintained when the characters unplug. The same thing happens with Eddie: all the things he knows when he takes the pill disappear from his thoughts when the effect wears off. The question, in both cases, is: what is learning if the characters themselves can only access the acquired knowledge within the matrix and within the effects of the pill? We are either in a Cartesian, Malebranchian or Spinozist universe, where the res cogitans is totally disjunct from the res extensa: the first can undergo change without consequences for the latter. But we are also in La Mettrie’s universe, for the res cogitans has the same structure as the res extensa: the division between thought and the body becomes the division between two sorts of bodies.
This is why it is quite curious that, while Neo becomes the One precisely by recognizing the disjunction between the laws of the matrix and the laws of his own insertion in it (i.e. laws of thought), this purely virtual scene in which the true action takes place is nevertheless modeled after the body. If we think about it for a second, once Neo has access to the "code", there is no reason why his battles should be fought with punches rather than on the level of thought (direct articulation of code lines, bypassing the martial arts representation of his struggle). Ultimately, just like in Eddie's case, the pill which sets Neo’s mind free only does so by offering a spectacle whose main function is to further obscure the irreducible dimension of what is to think.
This is also why the problem of experience takes a reduced and strategic function in the process of learning: the time that takes for Neo to become a great kung fu fighter is determined only by the time that it takes for him to let go of what he thought he knew. Similarly, the time that it takes Eddie to learn how to use his recently-acquired capacity for remembering everything and combining everything is determined only by the time it takes him to realize that he must include into his calculations the greed and personal interest of his peers (the character of Carl Van Loon reproaches Eddie at some point for having intelligence without experience - experience meaning "not having had to deal with an ex-wife"). In both cases, the issue of what is learned in a purely intellectual way finds its crucial and final condition on the letting go of the idea that thought cannot be reduced to the body (either as not-thought or as the thought of the necessities of survival).
We are now in position to address a fundamental impasse: the fact that movies about learning and movies based on the intelligence of the main character rarely deal with the problem of transmitting knowledge. A movie in which a student becomes a master will rarely, if ever, show the new master teaching a new student, for that would require us to re-inscribe the new master’s previous apprenticeship back into the problematics of the supposition of thought - to teach “wax-in, wax-off” to someone else, it is not enough to have let go of one’s thoughts. Similarly, while a great detective might be capable of solving several cases with the help of his side-kick, it is unlikely that he should actually teach his ability to him, so that the side-kick too could train his deductive powers. The problem here is that - as Jacques Rancière tirelessly remarks - transmission of knowledge departs from equality, it does not seek to arrive at it, and the conjunction of thought and equality breaks away with the idea that education can be reduced to something like the training of a body.
This impasse is evidently present in Limitless - it is what prevents different characters from finding out they have more in common than they would care to imagine: while Eddie suddenly wanted to change his life and become president of the USA, Gennady remained basically the same crook only with a better vocabulary and some new clothes and Eddie’s ex-wife just read a book “and understood it”. The pill makes Eddie smarter than the others because he was already inherently more prone to it than they were, the pill revealed his potential, it did not add anything. This impasse is further confirmed at the end of the movie: as we watch Eddie dismiss Van Loom’s black mail and continue his very successful campaign for Senate, it is quite evident that it is not in Eddie’s political plans to offer universal healthcare so everyone can have access to the pill.
Ultimately, the strict relation between thought and equality is substituted by the identity between knowledge and opportunity: it is not that thinking confronts us with what is common to all, but rather that by seizing what is common we can move ahead of others. The equality between thinkers is substituted by the equality between the things that are thought - this is the difference between knowledge and information: while the former requires work because the only guarantee of knowledge is that it implies a common ground between the knowers and so we must work to arrive at that grounding, the latter is already coded, carrying its own equality as its form, and promising to think in our place.
Detective movies and other movie genres which rely on the intelligence of their characters explore the potential of thought by keeping it in a suspense that is managed by the editing cuts and its consequences on the scenes which circumscribe it. What is particularly worrying about Limitless - and so many other recent film productions - is that the movie is interested in the suspended scene of thought only insofar as it can substitute the real of thought for the staging of more flexible bodies and more optimized languages - in other words, the current ideals which govern the maintenance of the world as it is.
Nothing is more in line, after all, with certain contemporary doxa than the idea that learning is not very different from the gathering of information - an idea shared by those who consider the internet the "revolution" of our times and those who, seeking a future revolution, rely on the identification of class awareness with dissemination of data. Just as in the case of Limitless, the exacerbated value of being intelligent is inversely proportional to the appearance of any trace of the question of the desire to know - the question which binds thought to its own inertia: not so much how much knowledge can one accumulate, but how much the learning of certain things is dependent on the courage to uphold thought's consequences.
Isn’t this precisely the reason why Neo’s knowledge of kung fu is discontinued between the inside and the outside of the matrix, while the consequences of the Oracle’s words cut indistinctly between the two? The former is a matter of information, the latter a matter of desire. More generally, this is why movies stumble when portraying thought: the idea that knowledge is a matter of gathering evidence and organizing the data in an optimal way consents to cinematic visibility, the problem arises when knowledge must be conceived against the background of what, were it to be known, would impose change upon the very principles which determined what is “optimal” and what is possible to know.
This problematics reflects back into the "in between" of the scene of thought the split which was first that of what is presented on screen (images and sound) and what is left in suspense. In fact, the question of the desire to know is the equivalent of showing a work of art on screen: that we only learn by working through all the reasons not to know, that we truly think only by learning not to confuse thought and the semblance of thought - this is thought at work, and it is the point where portraying thought on screen would be indistinguishable from the movie itself thinking.