Wednesday 1 September 2010

The Island [2005]: A Unexpected Political Critique

the island-jpeg Michael Bay's 2005 film The Island has an interesting popular culture take on the shape of our society today and what the new future holds. Essentially a magpie combination of Huxley's Brave New World and Logan's Run and, although in terms of direction and plotline it rarely strays from its central template of a 'boy and girl against the world' action adventure, it does nonetheless beneath the veneer hold a salient for the present day which is worth discussing in detail.

Set in 2019, the central character [Ewan Macgregor] lives in what is apparently a perfect, gentle if sterile environment where his diet is carefully controlled and social interaction is controlled by a benign 'security' force. Employment is provided by simple production lines and individual, personal focus is maintained on the weekly lottery where a fortunate individual is chosen to go to 'The Island,' an idyllic place which the inhabitants of the environment are told is the last place on earth not contaminated by some unspecified catastrophe in the outside world.

The central protagonist [Macgregor] however discovers that there is an outside world and decides to escape, spurred on by the fact that the girl he has befriended, has just won that week's lottery.

Of course all is not as it seems in this ordered society; the habitat is a corporate construction deep in a former US military ICBM silo and ran by the Merrick Corporation as a centre for growing clones of wealthy patrons, who take out an insurance policy to have a clone 'grown' and maintained for spare body parts in case of accident. The lottery winning is in fact, the calling up of that particular clone to be harvested for an injured and/or dying 'sponsor.'

The Merrick Corporation's secret is however, that according to Eugenics Laws, such clones had to kept in a vegetative state and not allowed to be conscious- that is- actively human. Despite this, the corporation had found that the organs from vegetative clones failed after a few days of harvesting; but the organs of a viable, conscious clone were healthy and remained operative. As such they had decided to secretly maintain a colony of fully grown clones as exact copies of their sponsors, albeit developmentally arrested at 15 years old and brainwashed from birth with false memories and social mores and, critically, not allowed to sexually mature.

Needless to say, the story focuses on the escape of the two clones and the pursuit of the Merrick Corporation of them out in the real world, but it is the details of the whole corporate process that is fascinating. The colony is for example almost all white; one of the few black clones is that of a famous football player, which the escapees eventually see on a giant billboard as they flee through LA. The corporation is serving a definite elite- it costs many millions to sponsor an individual clone- and this neatly shows the core aim of an elite to self-perpetuate not just its structure, but it's individuals as well, who are effectively being promised the potential to 'live for ever'. They can truly be the New Gods- so long of course, they have enough money to buy the privilege.

This posits the reality of how a corporation, supposedly free of political control and regulations [although the president has a clone in the colony too] will do whatever it wants to achieve a profit and of course under the guise of advancing society, such as finding a cure for leukaemia [but as with all neo-liberal myths, this is in reality only for the benefit of the elite alone of course]. The clones are consistently referred to as 'product;' they are seen as flesh and blood automatons- walking organ banks awaiting transplant- nothing more.

The film sketches out ideas of spirituality- the director of the corporation is adamant that the clones are soulless- although it becomes apparent with the escape of the two protagonists, that sentience and 'human' traits such as curiosity and a sense of justice and personal freedom are inherent in them as organisms. Whether this is a genetic trait passed on through the DNA of the original host-sponsor, or a matter of spiritual 'birthing' is of course unresolved- as would be expected, as whole libraries are full of books discussing the nature of that issue, the selfish gene, or the God Spark?- but the reaction of the corporation director upon discover of the characteristic in what is identified as a particular model of clone, is immediately branded as a defect and in the time honoured corporate technique of re-adjustment at times of product failure, the director announces a recall, meaning of course, the destruction of all completed and in production clone models deemed to have the human defects.
Now of course one has to be careful not to over-analysis and attach too many intellectual symbols onto a film like this; it's director is known more for his action movies than the cerebral and it's debateable how many of the anti-corporate symbols and comments on the nature of human existence appear by accident rather than design, but it nonetheless is a striking contemporary comment on our current society and it's near future.

This is exemplified by the controversy at the time the film was released over the level of product placement in it. The makers were adamant it was necessary to supplement the huge budget required for the making of the movie- the chase scenes in particular are genuinely spectacular- and it has to be said that the logos of some of its sponsors, such as MSN at time literally jump out and hold centre screen as if in some quick flash advertisement. But that makes the film all the more complete as a microcosmic example [and at times unwitting] commentator on our times. The juxtaposition of a story line exploring the evil, over-reaching powers of capitalism, ignoring even what little regulation has been applied to it, is openly- almost lovingly- funded and actively promoted by some of the largest global corporations of today.

Then within the film's structure itself, there is the dichotomy of the illusion of freedom and 'individuality' within the [discreetly] policed colony- a stasis that neo-liberal capitalism sees as it's nirvana- being shattered by the discovery by some of its inhabitants of a true individuality that can extend out of the holographic projected confines of the colony's boundaries. In fact the film ends with the holographic projectors turned off, and its freed inhabitants wandering out into the desert, blinkering at their new surroundings. This has overtones of slave emancipation, but it does beg the question...what now? The released clones need to find the wider society, assimilate themselves into it and what then? Do they revert to the capitalist 'slave model' all the rest of us are in? Does this mean there is no escape? In this way, the neo-liberal, corporate capitalist fog of supposed non-ideology and anarchic self-determination, the sense that there is no centre, no identifiable force, that we are all agents swept along in one chaotic but cogent system largely of our own making and with a lack of any definable alternative- we truly are at the end of our history- seems all the more reinforced. There can be no Marxist analysis of this movie's premise of a released proletariat, establishing a communist paradise as a reaction to the horrors they realise they were subject to in the colony. The reality is that a cell of humanity has been released from one control system, into a similar, wider outside world one. As such this film is a genuine post-modern comment on the western corporate world. The clones will in all likelihood assimilate into that wider society quietly and either disappear, or use their new found awareness and sense of purpose to find their original human sponsors, whereupon either a battle of the egos will ensure where one or the other will kill each other, or the clone becomes a willing surrogate for its original master, literally bowing down to what it perceives as its genetic superior, essentially seeing him or her as its parent.

Whatever the eventual scenario, there would appear to be one consequence in the projected aftermath of this film's particular storyline- no matter what, we can expect business as usual.