"Unknown": A Movie Review.

July 11, 2011 at 3:45 P.M. I was prevented from posting this essay from the public library's computer earlier this afternoon. The spacing between paragraphs was altered, again, despite my efforts to correct the inserted "error." Several obstructions to posting writings have been overcome in order to post this work. I will attempt to correct the spacing problem from additional NYPL computers in the days ahead. 

The goal of these "induced frustrations" in accordance with the protocol designed by psychologist Martin Seligman is to produce a kind of nervous breakdown in victims and "learned helplessness" or severe depression and/or psychosis. 

I doubt that these tactics will work with me. I will continue to write freely in accordance with my Constitutional and intellectual property rights. ("How censorship works in America" and "What is it like to be censored in America?") 

"Unknown" (Dark Castle, 2011). Director: Jaime Collet-Serra; Screenplay: Oliver Butcher & Steve Cornell; Starring: Liam Neeson; January Jones; Diana Kruger; Aidan Quinn; Frank Langella; Bruno Ganz.

Didier Van Cauwelaert, Unknown (New York & London: Penguin, 2010).

"Do you know where you are?" 

"Unknown" is a recent movie that falls into the category of Noir-thriller and philosophical text. In addition to the fast-paced, action-packed, shoot 'em up "guy's movie," there is a subtle meditation on identity and the self-deconstructing aesthetics of postmodernity along with a radical political theme running through the text. For a comparison, see Gilbert Adair, The Death of the Author (New York: Melville House, 2008), pp. 38-39: "Meaning itself had lost its centrality in an infinite external network of associated ideas." ("Michel Foucault and the Authorship Question.")

Costa-Gavras "Z" is placed alongside Hitchcock's "Vertigo." Numerous tributes to Hitchcock's classics are deposited, gently, in the film. ("Out of the Past.") The Berlin setting conjures associations to Wenders' "Wings of Desire" and the Graham Greene-like feel of "The Third Man." Like "Harry Lime," "Martin Harris" may be dead without knowing it or -- like so many of us these days -- simply non-existent, or "unreal."

" ... phenomenology tries to grasp the significance of daily experience in order to reaffirm the fundamental character of the subject, of the self, of its transcendental functions."

Michel Foucault comments:

"On the contrary, experience according to Nietzsche, Blanchot, and Bataille has rather the task of 'tearing' the subject from itself in such a way that it is no longer the subject as such, or that it is completely 'other' than itself, so that it may arrive at its annihilation, its disassociation."

Foucault then explains that we should leave it to police and government officials to go through our things after our deaths to decide "who we are."

"It is this de-subjectifying undertaking, the idea of a 'limit experience' that tears the subject from itself, which is the fundamental lesson that I've learned from these authors. And no matter how boring and erudite my resulting books have been, this lesson has always allowed me to conceive them as direct experiences to 'tear me from myself,' to prevent me from always being the same."

Michel Foucault, Remarks On Marx (New York & Paris: Semiotexte, 1991), pp. 32-33 (emphasis added) and Hubert Dreyfus & Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. xvii-xxvii. (See Carl Jung on "Metanoia" and "Jacques Derrida's Philosophy as Jazz.")

Liam Neeson is "Martin Harris" (or is he someone else?) arriving in Berlin for a conference on agriculture, biodiversity, and scientific solutions to the global crisis produced by starvation and misery in the Third World.

A plot twist that I will not reveal underlines the responsibility of American corporations and their "employees" in Washington, D.C. for much of the evil in the world. We knew that already in trendy corners of Manhattan.

CIA enforcers led by a false-friend and mentor, played with Shakesperean zeal by Frank Langella, are out to kill anyone who can create "agricultural solutions to feed billions." Solutions to hunger are especially undesirable as a "gift" to humanity (from a Muslim!) costing U.S. businesses billions of dollars.

Such a gift is almost as sinister as a limited energy supply that leads the U.S. oil industry to seek further wars in the Middle East. Starvation for billions of persons -- "little brown people" -- and more wars may be highly profitable and, thus, good for business even if they are bad for the little people. After all, what is good for big business is good for America. ("Little Brown Men Are Only Objects for Us.")

January Jones plays Martin Harris's wife with a Grace Kelly-like ease, a shy smile, and coolness under pressure. Ms. Jones wears a black evening dress with effortless elegance and a short string of flawless pearls which is enough to justify the cost of the DVD for me.

"That's my wife!" Mr. Neeson's "Martin Harris" says of the woman who is, in every sense, from "central casting" as the designer wife. ("'The Stepford Wives': A Movie Review.")

But is she a designer wife? Blond alternates with brunette. Woman as duality is confirmed by an alter ego, "Gina." Does a fictional character have a wife? Who is the "real" wife of Martin Harris? Is this an echo of "The Return of Martin Guerre"? Aren't we all "fictional" characters? Compare Harold Noonan, Personal Identity (New York & London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 128-148 with Bernard Williams, Problems of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1973), pp. 101-126. ("The Art of Melanie Griffith" and "Duality in Christian Feminine Identity.")

Mr. Neeson's character is involved in a terrible accident as a passenger in a taxi driven by Diane Kruger's "Gina." Gina is an illegal "un-person" living in Berlin under a false or fictional "name," or bogus "identity" -- like millions of persons in my society bearing false papers. ("David Hume's Philosophical Romance.")

How many of us find it necessary to remain "under cover"? How many of us are "hidden from the non-comprehending gaze of the other"? How many of us must distance ourselves from the destructive actions of torturers and oppressors seeking to wound or obliterate our identities?

"I am always in disguise." (Michel Foucault)

Money plays the villain again because Gina cannot live "freely" until she accumulates enough cash to buy her release from economic slavery or servitude. References to "persons" and "persona" abound in the cinematic text. Fictions within fictions a la Borges in Ficciones. 

"Persona" is Jung's term for the psyche and the name for the mask worn by tragedians in ancient Greece. Igmar Bergman is another shadow presence. Actors and acting are crucial to identity for everyone. Your "self" is a performance or role that is more or less convincing to yourself and others.

"There is a difference between someone telling you who you are and knowing who you are."

Martin Harris is "rescued" by Gina from certain death ("torn from himself") only to awake in a hospital where he is informed that "... there are no rules for recovery from severe trauma." Hence, the symbol of a shattered mirror seen in a disco that suggests Martin's mind and Cocteau's surrealist films along with Zizek's interpretations of Lacan.

We are in the "mirror stage" of identity in the movie theater.

As Martin recovers in the hospital he is asked by a doctor: "Do you know where you are?" The audience member is transported to another "place" in the encounter with the cinematic work, an alternative aesthetic "space" opens up at this instant in the movie, because we are "torn out of our comfortable lives" -- like Martin Harris! -- and forced to ponder the meanings we are creating and confronting through these "fictional identities." Slavoj Zizek, "The Real and Its Vicissitudes," in Looking Away: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 22-23 and Slavoj Zizek, "Otto Weininger, or 'Woman doesn't Exist,'" in The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality (New York & London: Verso, 1994), pp. 137-167. ("'The Da Vinci Code': A Movie Review.")

Trauma is one theme pursued in the story. Germany's trauma after the Holocaust is followed by the experience of Communism then the false dawn of a heartless American-style Capitalism. The great Bruno Ganz plays a dying detective and spy (a man with a false identity?), offering references to "The Laughing Policeman" in a Philip Kerr-like gesture -- a detective serving as the conscience of the director: "We [Germans or all of us?] are experts at forgetting," he says.

We must be artists of recollection to survive the agonies and atrocities of our history as a species. Memory is the "film director" of our lives which are the movies or narratives in which our identities are "invented." Ian Hacking, "False Consciousness," in Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 258-267 and F.H. Bradley, "Some Remarks on Memory and Inferences," in Essays on Truth and Reality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1914), pp. 353-380. ("What is Memory?")

The memory criteria of identity (internal, psychological) is contrasted with social criteria of validation for the self (external, physicalist) in terms of the philosophy of identity. The identity(ies) of the protagonist and ALL of the leading characters in the movie are placed in quotation marks (or doubted) throughout the narrative. No one is who he or she claims or appears to be. This raises the question of whether the audience member is who he or she believes him- or herself to be. ("Metaphor is Mystery" and "Magician's Choice.")

How would one "prove" one's identity to a skeptic? After all, much of what or who we are depends on social confirmation -- or disconfirmation -- that may lead to insanity. ("The Galatea Scenario and the Mind/Body Problem" and "What you will ...")

The identity or meaning of the film is deconstructed before our eyes because traditional narrative technique in cinema is treated ironically.

Censorship is akin to being denied one's ideas or expression. Censorship is a kind of assassination attempt or total disconfirmation of the reality of another human being. ("How censorship works in America.")

Are we enjoying a Noir thriller or being asked to ponder metaphysical mysteries? Both. The "identity" of the movie is always in question: Compare Olivier Pauvet, Noir: A Novel (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2007) with David Lewis, "Survival and Identity," in David Kolak & Raymond Martin, eds., Self and Identity: Contemporary Philosophical Issues (New York: MacMillan 1991), pp. 273-301. (Are "selves" mere narrative possibilities or probabilities, counterfactual "sets" in a quantum universe, or multiverse?)

"That's quite a story."

The phenomenology of movie viewing is analogized to madness or the "loss" of oneself. "Out of My Head" was the original title of the novel on which the movie is based. As societies may plunge into madness after 9/11-like trauma so individuals placed in Abu Ghraib or its social/psychological equivalents may lose all connections to a reality that dehumanizes and enslaves them. ("Albert Florence and New Jersey's Racism.")

It is the removal of the grounding -- or foundations -- for identity which produces madness or aggression in the individual, but also the schizoid break experienced by Western societies as "postmodernity."

We have wandered into a "hall of mirrors" at this moment in history as in the art gallery seen, briefly, in the film where our faces are reflected back to us in distorted forms through images -- images on movie screens and advertisements, slogans, political propaganda, and in many other ways have become the distorting lenses through which we view ourselves. ("'The Adjustment Bureau': A Movie Review.")

" ... most radical of all, the very ontological foundations are shaken. The being of phenomena shifts and the phenomena of being may no longer present itself to us as before. There are no supports, nothing to cling to, [after the disintegration of identity,] except perhaps some fragments from the wreck, a few memories, names, sounds, one or two objects, that retain a link with a world well lost. This void may not be empty. It may be peopled by visions and voices, ghosts, strange shapes and apparitions. No one who has not experienced how insubstantial a pageant of external reality can be, how it may fade, can fully realize the sublime and grotesque presences that can replace it, or that can exist alongside it."

R.D. Laing, The Politics of Experience (New York: Pantheon, 1967), pp. 132-133 and Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization (New York: Vintage, 1965), pp. 199-220 ("The Great Fear").

"Can you tell me what you do remember?" 

Foucault's suspicions of surveillance and monitoring are all over this film with cameras snooping on all of us, cameras that serve to "guarantee" who we are to our neighbors or even to ourselves. Government spying is probably worse than this film suggests -- certainly, in America's post-9/11 paranoia phase, since there is no longer much privacy for anyone and less real free speech as demonstrated in my blog wars. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Pantheon, 1979), pp. 177-184.

The central metaphor in the movie concerning identity(ies) explodes in multiple directions: the actor's creative efforts of interpretation/invention is analogized to the protagonist's self-invention and audience member's equally fictional or invented identity that is seen as the development of character in the form of a "self" with the proviso that there is no longer only one self per customer.

We must become many different persons/selves during the course of our days in order to thrive in complex postmodernist societies.

"There is no Martin Harris." The absurd and implausible character called "Liam Neeson" invents the much-more believable "Martin Harris" who is -- we are told -- less real than "Henry Taylor."

What is a name? How real are you? Are you a name? a number? a job title? a social status? a bank account? ("William Shakespeare's Black Prince.")

All social categories are in flux these days. Decoherence and fragmentation in such fluid social settings are always not only possible, but likely. A gentle nudge by governments is all that it may take to induce nervous collapse or psychosis in many victims. Michel Foucault, Knowledge and Power (New York: Pantheon, 1980), pp. 146-166 ("The Eye of Power") and Hubert Dreyfus, ed., & Alan Sheridan, trans., Michel Foucault, Mental Illness and Psychology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 44-60.

Frank Langella's CIA assassin says: "YOU invented Martin Harris."

It took a few seconds for me to realize that this statement refers to the audience member, not to Mr. Neeson's character on-screen, nor to the actor creating him: We invented Martin Harris. We have invented ourselves. We have invented our movie stars as the mythical personas we imagine them to be. It is we -- not any of them -- who are disappointed when they fail to "live up" to the absurdities of their public personas.

We have made the narrative -- the movie called "Unknown" known (individuated) or real, as a story -- resolving the aporias of selfhood along with the skeptic's dilemma concerning identity and reality:

"How would you prove to someone who you are in a world that denies your identity?"

Some of us have faced this little problem of ludicrous and false images of ourselves that power seeks to impose upon us.

I believe that this dilemma of responding to (or defending oneself against) false and harmful self-images imposed on persons is one of the challenges that racism (and sexism) places upon the shoulders of its victims. ("America's Holocaust" and "Is Western Philosophy Racist?" then "'The Stepford Wives': A Movie Review" and "David Stove and the Intellectual Capacity of Women.")

"The machines," Morpheus says to Neo, "cannot tell you who you are."

There is and always will be a struggle to disconfirm your identity on the part of powerful interests in every society concerned to control you. During a week when New York has passed gay marriage rights, it should not be difficult for persons to understand this public struggle for rights of self-definition and autonomy. We must struggle for the right to be treated as dignified and autonomous -- most of all, "equal" -- human beings before the power of government. (Again: "Is Western Philosophy Racist?")

Selfhood is a process of self-making through narration and action in the world, free choices, as interpretations, within the fight for individual memory and social history in which we are placed, whether we like it or not, and where we must remain if we are to be free. ("Manifesto for the Unfinished American Revolution.")

Compare Paul Ricoeur, "Narrative Identity," in David Wood, ed., Narrative and Interpretation (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 188-199 then Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 210 and John Perry, "The Importance of Being Identical," in A.O. Rorty, ed., The Identities of Persons (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 67-91 and R.D. Laing, The Divided Self (London: Tavistock, 1961), pp. 78-94 and Richard Wolheim, The Thread of Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 226-257 with Roger Scruton, "Emotion, Practical Knowledge and Common Culture," in A.O. Rorty, ed., Explaining Emotions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), pp. 519-537.

The state and other powerful forces have invaded these processes of self-creation and memory -- as Orwell and others anticipated -- in an attempt to take them from us in order to tell us who we are. This governmental effort to define us, usually in demeaning ways, is doomed to fail if we refuse to succumb to the forces of pacification. I will not be your slave. ("Freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal" and "Mumia Abu-Jamal and the Unconstitutionality of the Death Penalty.")

Ironically, among these forces of pacification is entertainment as distinct from genuine art. Luckily, "Unknown" falls into the "genuine art" category even if it is a highly entertaining movie which is a tribute to the human capacity to transform weapons against authenticity into the exact opposite -- forces for authenticity. ("'The Matrix': A Movie Review" and "'Inception': A Movie Review.")

We are intended to be "slaves" of corporations that define us as consumers; or bad movies that make us only audiences (it is better to be the protagonist of your own life!); religions that make us sinners in need of salvation for a small fee; or political ideologies making us cartoons in a child's interpretation of history, Democrats versus Republicans, the same history which Marx described as a "nightmare from which we cannot awake."

Like Martin Harris, Western civilization is in the midst of a crisis of identity in which cultural memory is being lost. ("Nihilists in Disneyworld.")

Memory must be recovered or fragmentation is likely: Hence, Ricoeur's and Gadamer's hermeneutics as well as Blumenberg's philosophy of history become weapons in the struggle for collective memories. We decide on the meaning of modernity or America. Our philosophical detective comments: "That's quite a story."

We need our stories -- stories that we fashion, like the narratives of our lives -- as we make ourselves in Nietzschean gestures of heroic resistance to corporate control and/or governmental manipulations.

Without history, as a story remembered -- again, collectively -- we lose the thread of our lives.

"Sentiment is the first thing to go," says Gina. Real love endures. Love is not time's fool. Neither is artistic genius. Martin Harris (or is it "Henry Taylor"?) is loved by Gina, who is loved in turn by "the man who knew too much."

If we are fortunate, all of us are moving from "Martin Harris" identities to more fitting "Henry Taylor" versions of ourselves. Both of these "men" -- Martin Harris and Henry Taylor -- are far more fascinating than boring old "Liam Neeson."

Mr. Nesson is a flawed action hero whose middle-aged elan is hard to resist and whom we cannot avoid liking or rooting for; Ms. Kruger creates a sympathetic and morally centered "Gina"; Mr. Langella is suitably evil and menacing, clearly relishing the opportunity to frighten us; Ms. Jones is a good actor and stunning to look at; Mr. Ganz and Mr. Quinn are old friends whom it is always a pleasure to see in unlikely roles. Bravos to all of the players.

If there is nothing outside the texts of science, philosophy, cinema or all of the arts, then we must become our own self-created masterpieces, dissolving in the end into a black ocean of memories as the credits come up to the accompaniment of U2's "When love comes to town":

"The mind that attempted to repair -- to compensate for -- the trauma becomes the trauma itself. The mind, in other words, becomes the patient's cummulative -- in fact, accumulating -- trauma. A trauma that the analyst might feel some solidarity with. ... [There are settings in which madness is the only sane response to abuse or dehumanization.]"

Judith Butler, "Melancholy, Gender/Refused Identification," in Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Vol. 5, Nov. 1, 1985. ("Master and Commander.")