Watched Archive last night. It’s another sci-fi mind-bender about a man obsessed with re-creating his lost wife. It reminded me of Don Quixote tilting at windmills, Hamlet trying to avenge his father, Dr. Frankenstein trying to reinvent life, Captain Ahab searching for the white whale, Higgins and Pickering trying to reform Eliza, and Gatsby trying to reclaim Daisy. The vanity of human wishes.
The idea isn’t new. It’s about obsessive male psychology. But male psychology has a lot to do with technological advance for better and for worse. I recall a newspaper story a while back called it something like “the low-slung engine of progress” at a time when the Internet was still in its infancy, and we all live with what became of that.
British Romantic poet Percy Byshhe Shelley, husband of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, author of the Gothic classic Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818), penned this sonnet, “Ozymandias” (1818), about the elusive edifices of male authority. It has a powerful volta, at the end of the eighth line, as typical of a Petrarchan or Spenserian sonnet:
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
But back to the movie. It has a twist at the ending that I liked. It makes you think twice about what a man’s legacy really is. But the main part of the movie has to do with recreating a kernel of lived life and what the French literary theorist Jean Baudrillard called “simulacra and simulation.” Again, it’s not a new idea. Art is about simulating life. Maybe that’s why some consider it immoral.
The issue has become more pronounced in this electronic and wired age, and French literary theorists like Baudrillard saw it coming in the late 20th century. I guess the basic idea is that simulacra does not have any real correspondence to life, while simulation does. It seems like a fine distinction that I don’t entirely understand. Doesn’t any image or idea need some correspondence to life? Otherwise, it just seems like non-sense. But this is something I need to study further.
Some say this movie was a knock-off of the recent film Ex Machina, but I liked this one more.