The Zero Theorem, The Congress, and Gettin' Old

Over the weekend of the 27th and 28th of last month my wife and I checked out Terry Gilliam's new movie The Zero Theorem, as well as The Congress, the new film by Ari Folman, the director of the animated Waltz With Bashir, at the Loft Theater in Tucson. We caught the trailers for both while attending part of a Quentin Tarantino retrospective there, and I thought, “Man, I've got to see those.” I really love cinematic science fiction, especially when it's thought-provoking and intelligently approached and not just space battles and robots punching each other in their angular faces.

What stood out for me is that both of these movies are about basically the same thing, but come at the idea from different perspectives. Zero Theorem is Gilliam's pessimistic treatise on where we stand today in a world dominated by personal electronic technology. Christoph Waltz plays a programmer at a futuristic firm who crunches numbers all day for reasons he can't fathom—he just does his job and wants people to leave him alone. The CEO of the company puts him on a project designed to prove a theorem that demonstrates life has no meaning. His life falls apart, he discovers he's manipulated from afar by forces beyond his control, and in the end we see that life has meaning after all, you just have to find it for yourself or something.

I don't know, I couldn't help but think the story essentially boils down to the curmudgeonly grumblings of a cranky old man who doesn't like where things have gone with technology and society. Background characters are immersed in advertising, engrossed with their smartphones and computers, have become vain and self-centered to a fault. Get it? It's all just like today, but set in a future where people have exactly the same tech as now, just with some slight tweaks. That...that isn't very profound. What is Gilliam saying, really? That we're all swallowed up in the distractions of superficial entertainment, dehumanized by the electrified world we inhabit? I'd be very surprised if that wasn't his point—a lot of his films deal with the supposed death of imagination, in roughly the same ham-fisted manner.

I can't get on board with that kind of flippant cynicism, probably because I'm one of the few people over forty who doesn't believe the world is going to hell in a handbasket (wouldn't air freight be faster?) with all these damn kids and their damn iphones and table tablet ipod whatevers. I don't think tech is a bad thing, on the whole. Sure, we lose some things, just as we did when the printing press was invented and people lost the ability to remember information as well as they could when they were illiterate, but literacy opened the way for revolutionary ways of looking at the world, and made it possible for vital knowledge to travel farther and with increased accessibility (provided you knew how to read).

I'm going to digress here for a minute with a two-part rant. First, I've never been a huge fan of Gilliam's work. I've watched a lot of his movies and liked them fine, and some, like Brazil and Twelve Monkeys, are probably genuine masterpieces. Others, like the almost-great Adventures of Baron Munchausen, end up being disappointments because they show you just how magnificent Gilliam could be if he exercised a little more discipline in his storytelling (I'm aware he often has a hard time getting his films made, and I'm sure that plays a role in how haphazard they sometimes feel). I keep waiting form him to do something that has the same anarchic kick of his Monty Python animations, and it never happens. Fear and Loathing probably comes closest, but after an hour of that sort of thing you get a little bored, mainly because it keeps threatening to tell a story that it never gets around to. In my opinion, either go all out with your surrealism or just don't bother. I find that his movies can be fun, but don't often warrant coming back to.

Now for part two: remember how I mentioned Tarantino up there in the opening paragraph? Well, he recently went on record about how much he despises digital filmmaking and how it'll never achieve the rich textures one finds in 35mm film. In a way, I think he's right—for now. Digital photography, at this point, doesn't possess the same visual qualities as celluloid film. But saying that is a far cry from going further and assuming that it never will possess those qualities. Digital filmmaking, done well, looks just fine and dandy, and it'll only keep getting better as the technology improves. The day will come—you may be certain of it—when digital movies will not only look as good as 35mm, but will surpass it. You know, like how digital audio sounds better than analogue.

What's that you say? Nothing will ever be better than analogue, the One True Way to reproduce recorded sound? It's more like “the real thing” because it allegedly mimics the actual soundwaves of what it records? If you in any way resemble the straw man I've been setting up in the last couple of sentences, then I'm going to go out on a limb and assume you're a big fiend for vinyl. Nothing wrong with that, by the way, some of my best friends are vinyl collectors. Used to collect it myself, before I sold off my entire collection to help bankroll a move to Hawaii. But I'm no longer convinced it's the best way to listen to music, or anything else. Sure, it sounds different, but not necessarily better. I've heard lots of digital recordings that sound absolutely fantastic, and despite vinyl enthusiasts' protestations that if you can't hear the difference in quality then you're not really very good at listening (a bit of snobbery that borders on the pathetic), I'm pretty sure the variance in sound reproduction is so negligible that not even analogue's most strident supporters could tell the difference in a controlled study (assuming they're listening to new records that haven't gotten bits of dust and whatnot stuck in the grooves already).

You're wondering what the hell my point is. Okay, I'm getting to it. Gilliam in Zero Theorem, for me, appears to be lamenting the state of change in the modern world, the way things have altered from what he was accustomed to decades ago to a culture more friendly to a younger generation that has grown up with the internet and personal computers. For him, a life spent in the company of electronics is essentially “meaningless”. First of all, no. I see people all the time who derive a great deal of personal meaning from a technologically-enhanced life. Second, change happens, you'll never stop it, you can only adapt to it, and if you don't, you'll turn into a cranky old person that people will listen to indulgently for a few moments before tuning you out, probably by watching a humorous video someone shared with them on Facebook. They grew up in this world, for them it's all there is, and they've never known anything else. The first music they heard was digitally recorded and mastered, and if they turn to vinyl (or anything else their forebears found interesting) later on as a kind of anachronistic hipster gesture, kind of like the way bow ties and suspenders, waxed mustaches and playing the saw with a violin bow have become oddly fashionable in the last few years, they do so because it's a trend, a statement of imagined rather than lived nostalgia, and all but a few of the inevitable diehards you find in every generation who hold on to the fashions of their twenties well into their forties and fifties will drop the it in time (in spite of what some folks believe about vinyl making a “comeback”--actually, we're seeing a last gasp before everyone turns to streaming everything from The Cloud and no longer owns any kind of format, a notion the minimalist in me really likes, even though the Gen-Xer in me loathes the idea of not having collections of LPs and CDs and VHS tapes to show off).

Anyway, that's my impression of Gilliam's new movie. Maybe I missed the point entirely, but I don't think I did. It's not that deep of a movie. Spiritually, it's a sequel to Brazil (and considered by some to be the third film in an unofficial dystopian trilogy that also includes 12 Monkeys), and feels as if it's set in the same fictional universe, just half a century later. I'll say this for it: it moves fast, isn't at all dull, and entertains even if it doesn't enlighten. It's a little pretentious, like most of Gilliam's work is, and has some great visuals, like all of Gilliam's work does, though none of the epic scope of his better early work. Christoph Waltz is terrific (of course he is, you saw Inglourious Basterds, didn't you?), and though I've spent the last one-and-a-half-thousand words bitching about how it doesn't have anything all that important to say, it actually does illustrate the the type of alienation from other human beings that can happen when people get too involved with the phantasmagorical worlds to be found on the World Wide Web and don't take the time to say hi to their neighbor. There, I said something nice.

I was going to talk a little about The Congress, wasn't I? It's vital that I do, or I'll have to rewrite some things. Where The Zero Theorem discusses where we are right now, The Congress addresses where we're going. Based in part on Stanislaw Lem's The Futurological Congress, the story focuses on the professional crossroads at which real-life actress Robin Wright finds herself (you remember her from The Princess Bride, don't you? It's alright if you don't, because the movie takes great pains to make sure that you do). With a son steadily losing both his hearing and sight as the result of a neurological disorder, she desperately needs money to pay for his treatment, but because she's burned a lot of bridges in Hollywood (I haven't done the research to find out if any of that is true—it's possible you don't see her so much anymore because she has more important things than acting on her mind these days), she can't get acting work. So a movie studio makes a deal with her: they'll pay her one time to let them electronically copy her image, everything about her, every facial expression and physical movement, as well as use her recorded image in any way they see fit for the next twenty years, and in exchange she can never act again. She struggles with the idea and, after hammering out a contract with a lawyer who specializes in these things, signs her career away.

Jump ahead twenty years. Time to renew the contract (which stipulated, among other things, no porn and no stupid science fiction movies). But the times have changed. To visit the studio, she must drink a liquid from a vial that makes her hallucinate that she and everything around her is animated (you'll recall that director Folman's previous film, Waltz With Bashir, was fully animated, in contrast to this project, which splits the run time between animation and live action). Here's where the movie really takes off. It's a dip into the aesthetic of Yellow Submarine and underground comics from the Sixties and Seventies, a setting where espionage and avarice play out while cartoon whales and fish with penises for heads fill out the background. The point the director makes here seems pretty clear—this could be a bad thing, but it can also be incredibly liberating, just like with technology today. The idea that people could sink into a hedonistic torpor as a result of being able to blot out the world with hallucinatory drugs doesn't seem all that far-fetched, although I think this kind of thing will be realized through some sort of direct electronic/neural interface rather than with pharmaceuticals. In the film, once Wright has finally woken up from the trippy dreamworld everyone has decided to reside in, she's in a city populated by hordes of disheveled homeless zombies (who somehow still manage to feed themselves and get from place to place in spite of the fact, from their point of view, they live in R. Crumb's id), implying that this is a direction we might go, if we don't proceed with caution.

But The Congress isn't a pessimistic film, in the end. There seems to be a fatalistic attitude here toward what the director sees as a foregone conclusion—the world is going to change, the state of entertainment is going to change radically over the years in ways that will seem strange and terrifying in the very least to anyone who came of age in the last couple of decades, but that isn't necessarily bad, just different from now. It could have some incredible, life-changing uses. In the last few scenes, Wright's character (or Wright herself, if you want to be technical) relives her entire life as her own disabled son. Imagine that, imagine the possibilities. It might be science fiction now, but I sincerely believe something like this will happen, maybe not for another fifty or a hundred years, but eventually-- if the human race doesn't destroy itself in the interim--, people will have access to such a power. What will we become as a result? Probably shapeless slugs who subsist on lab-grown protein, lost in an artificial reality, unless we also find ways to separate consciousness from the body (don't laugh, certain very crazy and ambitious engineers are working on that very thing—I make no predictions about whether they'll succeed).

So, to conclude: The Congress is a movie about accepting change, and learning to live in a society that has drastically altered from the one you've grown accustomed to. Wright has to accept that the idea of an “actor”, in the age of CGI, is no longer what it was. As for the studio head who first floats the idea of scanning her onto software, he's seen later in an office that is little more than a janitor's closet, reflecting his diminished status in a future where movies as we know them no longer matter as much as they do now (although people still watch them projected on the sides of blimps). Think about it—with the current generation as enthusiastic about video games as it is, with video games slowly gaining on cinema as a narrative art form, do you really think their children and grandchildren will look upon old-fashioned, two-dimensional movie storytelling with anything more than incredulity at how anyone could have found entertainment value in something so quaint and dull? Have you ever heard teenagers talk about black and white movies, and by that I mean how they refuse to watch them? Music might have a future, but I'm not sure film does.

Yeah, see this one. Hell, seem 'em both. The performances are great, and you won't be bored. The Congress will move you much more than The Zero Theorem, I think, because the characters feel more genuine, and The Congress just means so much more thematically. Good science fiction inspires contemplation on both the contemporary and possible, and both movies, in their own way, succeed at just that.