Show Me What I'm Looking For: Moon

While I was “experiencing” the movie Moon, I was not initially impressed by the plot or the story, and I found it difficult to keep withstanding attention on the stagnant setting. This is because I didn’t get it; It was because I had kept a closed mind while watching the movie, which is precisely what this type of film seems to discourage. I discovered this fact while listening to the class discussion this week—by hearing the unbelievable veracity of the clone telepathy theory and by pondering the symbolic potentials of the number 39 that could have been intentionally placed in the movie. I realized through the possibilities discussed that what actually makes this film so interesting is the fact that it does not abide to or provide any details; the fixed setting allows the possibility for viewers’ minds to wander; the lack of information provides endless possibilities of interpretation to the open-minded viewer. The absence of clear direction is precisely the intriguing factor of this movie.

In the midst of nothingness, Sam’s character exists in isolation on the moon. As a viewer, I wanted to add purpose to Sam’s life—the satisfaction of knowing Sam’s reason for his situation. Part of this purpose was provided to me by the background of Sam’s room, a delicate element of mis-en-scene added to the film by the director.  Much like the memories that had been implanted in each clone’s head, there were pictures of these moments plastered all over Sam’s wall. These pictures served as a constant reminder and motivation for him to continue with his work on the Moon. I found myself wondering why these clones needed to be harshly implanted with memories that actually stemmed from nothing. Perhaps it was because a lack of focus usually drives people to search for a commitment, a passion, or a hobby to pursue, and in a way, it was to make each Sam’s life worthwhile. However hypothetical these pictures and memories were, they served to keep Sam sane and at peace. The pictures of Tess and Eve motivated each Sam to keep going, and as a viewer, this allowed me to sympathize with him.

Working to counter these photos was the depiction of the basement where the clones of the future were stored in their packaged form. Talk about an unmeaningful life (or rather lives)! Where the pictures had provided an objective, this room provided to each Sam’s life a notion that they were simply one of many, living and dying in a span of three years. This depressing thought was further emphasized by the lack of lighting that was shown in this room. Drawers full of Sam clones and a tunnel full of darkness drove older Sam to rush out of the room, and once again, it left me searching for a purpose to each Sam’s life. However, this time, I realized, this objective was simple and unbearable: to work for LUNAR international’s energy movement and then to decease. This darkness was an added supplement to the plot that allowed me to better sense this scene and atmosphere as a viewer.

Just as the ambiguity of the film appeals to the viewers and allows them to fill in the blanks, so the obscurity of Sam’s life leaves him in need of a purpose and meaningful memories to hold onto. Much of these memories are provided to each Sam by the scientists who cloned him; we as viewers, on the other hand, leave this movie with questions unanswered. We need the gray to be filled and we keep searching for possible connections that could better make this a concrete and solid story to make it meaningful – questions that the organization of the plot allows us to explore.  

Today, I See Tomorrow: Children of Men

In an attempt to dissect a single part of Children of Men, I have chosen the following portion of the exotic picture, one which I feel was a beautiful portrayal of the work as a whole.

While the three characters seek refuge at Merlin… I mean Jasper’s home, a beautiful scene unfolds before our eyes. Theo returns from the woods surrounding the home, and it is a dark but pleasant night. The camera follows Theo into the home, and the movement stops just as Theo does – perfectly, the screen is split down the middle, half of the camera covers Theo and his dimmed surroundings, while the other half displays the brightly lit, but distant, room occupied by the other characters.

Jasper begins, introducing us to the topic at hand – “everything is a mythic, cosmic battle between faith and chance.” We begin pondering about what this could mean about our own lives and those of our forebears. Immediately, we are directed to relate this topic to Yin and Yang, Shiva and Shakti, and Lennon and McCartney. These examples are nothing but intentional. They portray history; they allow our minds to wander to ancient Chinese and Hindu philosophies—both are ideas of opposites that cannot exist without one another. The legends John Lennon and Paul McCartney are renowned British artists that will forever remain a part of British history. Similarly, Hindu mantras and Spanish dialect are prevalent throughout the film. This could be a display of Britain’s historical imperialistic regime and how its foreign conquests have remained a part of it.

All the while of discussion, Theo is the focus of the camera. The deep-space composition of the camera disposition portrays a closer, larger, and clearer image of Theo and his expressions. We see the clear chuckle formed on Theo’s face when Miriam recognizes the taste of “strawberries” in her trial of Jasper’s prized recreations – but, very ironically, we cannot see Miriam’s expression herself. The director pulls our focus towards Theo’s visual elements and expressions, while, oddly, all of the dialogue is coming from the blurred room that we can barely discern. Through this scene, Cuarón utilizes the depth of his field and unbalanced lighting to obviously direct our eyes towards one character, while our ears are focused on the sounds and words coming from the room that is distant to our vision. Theo is merely supposed to be a passive observer in this course of dialogue, but he so beautifully becomes the main character in this scene.

The conversation directs itself to the history of Theo’s own life – how both fate and chance played a role in his past. Through chance and faith, he was fortunate to meet Julian and simultaneously ill-fated to lose his “little dream,” Dylan, to the awful flu.

At this moment, we are focused on Theo’s sudden turn of the face, and all we see is the despair in Theo’s eyes at the sound of his long-lost child’s name. This history that we are only hearing through a source, was a concrete experience that Theo himself had to live through. Cuarón artistically makes Theo’s expressions the center of this scene; by doing so, he seems to want us to realize that this was Theo’s memory. At the heart of every past condition have been the actual individuals who were forced with the complex dilemmas of choice, chance, and faith – the circumstances that formed their histories.

This scene spoke to me beyond what I could hear. It reminded me that history, at its very root, deals with the basic human-human interaction. At the very center of history, culture, and tradition are the conversations had, the thoughts formed, and the decisions made by individuals of the past.  As the cost of numerous lives allows Key to create a better history for those of the future, so it becomes the responsibility of the current population to work with whatever is in our bounds to create a “tomorrow” that we can be proud of, leaving the rest to faith and chance – things beyond our control.

Is It a Game? What if the Answer is No: Artifical Intelligence

You cannot take a boy with ambition, a dream for his future- a boy with a reason to live- and demolish absolutely everything human about him. You cannot simply stare into a child’s eyes, completely ignoring his desires, and, at the same time, fulfill your own instead. You cannot take from him his passion and his sole purpose in life. Is it just me or is this wrong? Mecha or Orga – it is inhumane and cruel.

In Artificial Intelligence: AI, Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick reel us into a future that has progressed beyond that which we can imagine. A devastating downfall has forced humans to continue their survival by creating robots to replace themselves. This world of machines was our own doing, and we ourselves chose to allow this world to occur. What this movie presented to me, however, was the notion that human beings cannot handle this futuristic world – we cannot understand it and we are not willing to accept it. If ever a time came that humans would be created not from bare flesh and bones, but from nothing but nails and metal (and a little bit more, I’m sure), it would become difficult for humans to distinguish real from artificial – or, as stated in the movie, “fast fact” from “fairy tale.” For me, this idea was offered through the journey of David, the machine child that can love.

There are several moments throughout the movie that a combat of dialogue presents an argument of how real David truly is. When Monica is talking to Henry about David, they cannot agree: Monica goes on to say “He is a child,” to which Henry responds “He’s a toy,” and finally Monica concludes “He’s a gift… from you.” Once again, when David is trapped in the cage at the flesh fare, the man is in awe as he speaks to this child, “You are a machine.” To this, David responds, “I’m a boy. My name is David.” Expectedly, to this the man responds, “Impossible.” While listening to these types of conversations, I was constantly reminded to reconsider the depth of David’s existence in the world. This is a child machine who can love, and alongside with that, bring with him countless other emotions. Being a mecha means that eating spinach causes David’s face to fall apart –other than this trivial detail, however, David can feel the warmth of a loving smile, he can feel the passion of desiring something with all his “heart,” and he cannot help but feel the subsequent devastation after everything he has ever known and cared for is cruelly torn away from him. In other words, this character feels all those things that all of us have felt at some point in our lives. We can relate to him because, as unreal as the other characters try to make him, he is everything that we are.

There were too many times while watching the movie that I empathized with David, thinking how unjustly he’s being treated – like leaving him stranded in a dark unknown forest… what’s with that? Hello, world, why is this allowed?  He could have been eaten by bears, or, since this is the future, stalked by flesh fare hunters who want nothing more than for him to explode. Furthermore, I empathized with David when he felt the awe-strucking pain of discovering that there are 500 machines and counting that are almost identical to him – a thought that overcomes and depresses the machine child. The very first thing that came to mind while watching this occur was why aren’t there laws against all this? I realized, however, that the humans in this movie cannot consider what is going on inside of the machines “heads” – they do not feel the need to create laws for how to treat machines. Especially in the case of David, he has emotions and for all symbolic purposes of this body part, he has a heart. When technology has come to a point of instilling a machine with emotions, alongside with that comes the question of how we are allowed to treat this machine. For all we know, David can feel exactly as we do, and as such, laws should have been created so that he could be treated as an individual.

           The movie made me think about how science and technology is progressing at an unimaginable rate. In a world full of ethics and laws, there seems also a constant need to create order so we can live harmoniously alongside those things which are, but not entirely, like us. Maybe we are not completely ready or capable of accepting and loving these inventions for the issues they present in our world, and maybe we are – I think we’re the ones who can ultimately create that answer, and thus, also shape what is to come.  

Beware the Onset of the Color Grey: Blade Runner

When it rains in this movie, it absolutely (and literally) poors. The very first piece of information we are provided with as the film Blade Runner appears before our eyes are words describing the setting, because, quite frankly, any viewer would not have been able to discern this piece of information without the help of those words. This film could have literally been placed in any country's large city, or even on another planet - nothing is recognizable. However, the idea of the future of a place we already know is more likely to interest us; despite how much absolute chaos surrounds the setting, we can relate to it because we have known Los Angeles in the past, which allows it to obtain more futuristic value. Anyway, enough about the first five seconds. Did I even watch this film? (I did).

The culmination of scenes had an effect of making me question throughout the entire movie, from lighting details to dialogue and behavior. It is rung with so many purposeful contradictions that it made me wonder about life. What is life really, and how does right compare to wrong in a world I cannot really claim to know? While watching, I wanted Deckard to kill all the replicants one moment, and I wanted the “evil” Roy to be happy the next. Most of us did not expect Roy to do what he did – so clearly, we are not good judges of his personality. But there is the ongoing debate - who can ultimately decide good or bad? As Roy is chasing after Deckard he questions, “I thought you were supposed to be good. Aren’t you the good man?” In that moment, I realized I that I didn’t know which man was good … who really does? A few of the factors that impact our ability to make ethical decisions include ideas such as emotions, religion, and our relationships – all of which are included in this film.

We are directly informed that replicants do not have emotions, what makes us innately human. If human beings did not have emotions, it would become difficult for us to judge our actions based on how they would affect others.  Replicants can’t feel the sorrows of losing the ones they love or the disappointment that follows discovering a heartbreaking truth… but wait, isn’t that exactly what happens in the movie? Roy is absolutely devastated when Pris’s life has ended and Rachel feels so morose after her discovery that she is not human that she storms out of the room. It struck me as contradictory while watching, but, frankly, as these characters developed emotions, I began to grow increasingly fond of them.   I realized that the less they could feel, the less likely they were to know what was right. Pris is jumping off walls, shrieking, setting the house on fire when she dies, but no real emotion is seen – and she’s suddenly finished and it is hard to feel sorrow for her.

The religious symbolism is my favorite in this one. Some argue that morality and religion are hand in hand – without the latter the first is nonexistent. Arguably, Scott thought this while making the film. For example, Zora is holding the snake, the biblical symbol of temptation – shown completely bare in the film. Not to mention the last chase between Roy and Deckard, which is brilliantly sculpted with “heaven and hell,” a clear testament to religion. Who is actually the judge of humans? Roy unexpectedly becomes the Christ figure in the movie. Deckard takes a leap of faith in life and misses the destination, about to meet his death. As he is hanging, Roy says to him, “quite an experience to live in fear. That’s what it means to be a slave.” We are much too often afraid of taking our own leaps of faith. Throughout the entire movie, we are frightened and uncomfortable, slaves to the experience. Nail through hand, Roy literally “saves” Deckard at the moment of his downfall. In his birthday suit, head bowed, it is finished as Roy sacrifices himself in a final hoorah, convincing me that he has loved. At this point, I no longer knew the criteria to judge which man was good and which was bad, who was right or wrong, which was ethical or unethical. Perhaps that is to be human, and we can only fight to know the truth not certainly knowing if we’ve discovered it. I think the film was designed to make us feel all those feelings of discomfort and uncertainty that we often try to avoid – it forces us to delve deep within our own psych and ponder, and it did a great job of doing that for me.