Thursday, June 2, 2011

Michael Anderson's "Logan's Run"

Logan’s Run portrays two people trying to find freedom from machines. In the future, thousands of humans live inside a dome, which provides food, water, shelter, medicine, face and body transplants, easy sex, and even reproduction without mating. Ostensibly the only thing it asks for in return is for the killing of any who turn 30 to prevent over population. This seems like a fair trade, especially when “revival” is taken into account. Logan 5, the hero, is a “sandman” who catches people trying to flee their ordered death. He is asleep, trying to escape his dream. I really enjoyed this movie. It was campy, fun, and different, and explored timeless themes. There were some confusing issues: namely, what’s with the accents? Some are American, some are British. It is details like these which can be confounding and take the audience out of the film, and these problems included some poor visual effects. In all honesty, I thought the models, the explosions, and awful robot added to its quirky charm. It’s definitely not the best movie I’ve ever seen, but it was fun, and that’s the best thing entertainment can be.

Heidegger’s described the Greek word “alethia” as an unveiling, where the world is revealed for the first time and we see things as they really are. Where Gilliam's Brazil was a deeply esoteric meditation on the failure of the reincarnated sun god to save the material world from itself, Logan’s Run shows us the history of consciousness—almost leading up to the society depicted in Brazil (the conclusion of individuality is strict materialism). The civilization which exists under the dome is innocent in its own way. Sex is without guilt or commitment and nakedness seems to be tacitly okay. Old age and suffering are unheard of because everyone dies on their 30th birthday, and the sheltered people even hold a belief in some sort of pseudo-reincarnation (whether it’s true or not). But unlike Eden, this is a paradise completely separated from the spiritual God. Everything is falling apart because no one remembers how to work the machines. Technology in Logan’s Run is a sort of false, fallible God which limits society’s spirituality and connection with nature and each other. It has left the world a wasteland, which can only be rediscovered through the “hero's journey” or “traveling through the spheres”. Logan 5 and Jennifer 6 are surprised to learn how humans once were married. They begin to discover in each other something they hadn’t had a word for before: “love”. Heidegger might have associated this with “techne”—in which learning is not taught by a dry text book, but by experience. In a Biblical sense, this is an apocalyptic moment. The haze, which has been clouding their vision, clears up, and the horizon, the sun above, the trees, the ground below suddenly hold new meaning. This tale is in the vein of The Matrix, Jacob’s Ladder, The Island, or even The Book of Revelation and Tibetan Book of the Dead. The characters had been living in a reality with a certain set of beliefs which were taken for granted, and then they “woke up”. That Logan 5 was called a “sandman” should not go unnoticed. He was dreaming the dome. He was sequestered from the truth (I won’t quite go to “Veritas” because I question whether there is a “real truth” at all). He walked out of Plato’s Cave and saw the light of day.

Logan 5 is another example of the risen sun god. He brings light back to the unbelievers only to discover that most of the Dome’s residents want to remain inside. They have been living in a place separated from Heidegger’s “universe”, and it has left them dazed, ignorant, and blissful. They lack the knowledge to upkeep the technology which allows them to live. Box the robot (representing the gorgon Medusa) malfunctions, trying to freeze the two runners, and earlier we see the water machines which power the Dome appearing to slowly break down. Technology saved humans from themselves, becoming a nurturing parent and providing the necessities of life (like food, water, and shelter). It returned them to a paradise, one which lacked the spirituality of the garden. However, Logan 5 saves the remnants of man from this wretched state, proving once and for all that man needs freedom. He needs the higher animal/”universal” consciousness, but he also needs the lower vegetable/”world” one. It is curious that the fictional “sanctuary” (is it really fictional or a place of mind?) is represented by the Egyptian Ankh which symbolizes death. “Death is the mother of beauty,” Wallace Stevens wrote. It is necessary for life and gives it meaning. The dome lacked death because of the revival. It lacked suffering which gives meaning to health. It lacked love, which gives meaning to life. It lacked identity because of the transmogrification of faces and bodies. Life was shallow and inane. Being free of technological paradise gives man the ability to really experience the material world which the machines were sheltering him from.

The Dome world is one of strict community, but the “real” one is one of individualism. Thus, we see the transmigration of the human consciousness in this movie. We see a strictly vegetable one (false, though it may be) transform into animal consciousness, which is represented by the sexual organs. Notice how Logan 5 and Jennifer 6 stumble upon the Washington Monument, an obelisk, a perfect symbol of the phallus? It draws power from the sun, bringing it down to earth and is also connected to phoenixes—the bird which eternally revives (think of the Eagle on the dollar bill). This spirit of materiality will eventually lead to a reincarnation of our own modern world. The descendents of these humans will reinvent the train, the automobile, the plane, and the atomic bomb. This is a new age of individualism, separated from both the machine and God. Capitalism is a system based on man’s innate individual nature, where communism relies on seeing man as Bentham’s pig depicted in Logan’s Run. The Dome is communistic; the outside world is thus capitalistic and anarchic. It is one which lacks the absolute parent figure. The movie falls on the individualistic side of man’s nature. The final images alone, with the young girl touching the old man’s face, seem to proclaim the love of the divided soul.

Do machines inherently make us lazy and disconnected? Heidegger would seem to believe so with his “standing reserves” views on technology. This idea is translated in the falling apart of the Dome. The people who constructed it saw the earth’s materials as “standing reserves”; therefore, the Dome is totally separated from nature. Yes, the people inside gain power from the sea, but similarly, Heidegger describes a hydroelectric dam on the Rhine—humans can gain its power, but they don’t live in harmony with it. When the Dome starts breaking down, no one is left to understand how to fix it. This “universal”/“animal” consciousness is gone, only left with complacency. In phenomenology, the difference between universal and world consciousness is the difference between our headlight eyes and our whole being. In the West, we value our minds and eyes more than any other part of our body. We are constantly told to pay attention in class when we are in school. We are always in our head, bemoaning or lauding our position in life. This is Heidegger’s present-at-hand notion. Opposed to that is his ready-to-hand notion—the part of us which does things without thinking about them. Think of the heart pumping blood or the lungs taking in air as opposed to the eyes scanning the horizon. At the end of the movie, the survivors begin to regain some of their present-at-hand abilities, but was it good that technology took these abilities away in the first place?

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