Make Way for the Homo Superior: The Perfect Human and the Five Obstructions

Introduction

            In 1967, Jørgen Leth, a young Danish filmmaker, directed a short film called The Perfect Human. Leth’s film was a mock anthropological study of the perfect Danish man and woman living their normal lives within an enclosed environment. Topics of discussion include how they eat, how they dress, how they jump and how they fall. Since its release, Leth’s film has come to be recognized as one of the greatest experimental films ever created. In 2003, Lars von Trier, the current poster child for Danish cinema, decided that The Perfect Human must be remade. In the Leth/von Trier co-directed film, The Five Obstructions, Lars von Trier “forces” one of the inspirational forces behind his own films, to remake one of von Trier’s favourite films five different times. Each time, von Trier adds several obstructions, making Leth’s job more difficult and seemingly trying to make him fail. The Five Obstructions is, technically speaking, a documentary which tells the tale (and shows the final products) of the creation of these five remakes. However, the film also works as a biographical documentary, taking the viewer deeper into the lives of these two individuals and their rivalry-laden friendship.

            The Five Obstructions poses a lot of questions about the nature of remakes, the nature of filmmaking and even the nature of life and humanity. In this film, henceforth loosely known as “the remake”, some of the questions that Leth and von Trier ask include what can the remake tell about the “remaker”? If a film is remade by its original creator, is it the same? Is it more authentic or is it corrupted? Do age, experience and life changes distort the original idea, for better or for worse? The questions are taken even further when it becomes obvious that von Trier’s role in the film process is not a passive one. Then, the question becomes, who is the filmmaker anyway? Lars von Trier plays the role of a sadistic producer attempting to restrict Leth, in order to get the film that he wants, while Leth attempts to inject his own views into a “studio” film. It is almost like the situation of the Hollywood auteurs of the 1940s and 1950s. Is the filmmaker in this case the artist or the financer? The Five Obstructions is a fascinating look at The Perfect Human, the mind behind it and the man who wants to play the role of Frankenstein and bring it back to life.

The Five Obstructions, the Perfect Human and the Aging of Jørgen Leth

            In his study of Alfred Hitchcock, Stuart Y. McDougal claims that Hitchcock remade scenes, shots or sometimes even whole stories throughout his illustrious career (McDougal, 53). Hitchcock only technically made one acknowledged remake. In comparing the original The Man who Knew Too Much from 1934 to its remake of the same title in 1956, Hitchcock claimed that “the first version is the work of a talented amateur and the second was made by a professional” (Truffaut, 65). Putting these two together brings about another truism; a director who remakes his or her own work is essentially remaking his or her own self. In other words, when a filmmaker returns to the well and remakes an earlier work, he or she is recreating it with all of the added ideas and experiences that have been acquired over the last years. This would explain why Michael Haneke’s cast a big star in Funny Games, why George Sluizer removed the important cynicism from the Vanishing and why Howard Hawks decided to remake Ball of Fire as a musical. Since The Five Obstructions is so self-aware, it ends up answering this same question, this question of why, for Jørgen Leth. It should, however, be noted that this film could very well be lying to its audience, as certain sequences, which will be mentioned in time, seem a little too uncharacteristic or out of place.

            Before one can study the effects of a remake, one must dissect the original. Jørgen Leth’s The Perfect Human seems to dispel the myth that the human being, even the perfect human being, is anything special. The films shows that these “perfect humans” are just as fragile as anything else, as they are visually vivisected, their body parts displayed and their faults exposed, while an unseen narrator asks a series of questions about what makes a perfect human. The perfect human is vulnerable and self-obsessed. The perfect human wants attention, but fails to notice when others are watching him or her. The perfect human is rich enough to spend his or her day in a tuxedo or an expensive dress and eat a gourmet meal nightly, but the money has not brought him or her happiness. The perfect human is insecure, depressed and bored! In short, it becomes clear that Leth, the thirty year old artist making short films, did not have a very positive view of humans or perhaps even the world that they inhabited, in general. Then, the question becomes whether, in the thirty six years after completing the Perfect Human, Leth has changed his mind?

            The Five Obstructions’ mission statement seems to be clear to Lars von Trier, who simply states that the original film is “a little gem we will now ruin”. By the time the first film is finished, it becomes clear that Leth has definitely changed. The first obstructions were that the film had to be filmed in Cuba, with no set, shots no longer than twelve frames (which was described as an attempt at being destructive) and, in order to remove all subtlety, the film had to answer all the questions that were asked in the original film. This first obstruction does not push Leth towards many boundaries, but a new visual style becomes clear. For example, this film is much more glamorous than its predecessor, with a larger focus on the erotic. A feeling of leftist revolution is still visible in the film, but it is overpowered by the techniques of the imperialists, which makes sense when one realizes that Leth has left Denmark since the filming of the Perfect Human, residing in Haiti while filming was occurring. It is only with the second obstruction that the repressed surfaces.

            While “snacking” on caviar and vodka, von Trier tells Leth that he wants to take away his perfection. His plan for this is to send him to the most miserable place in the world. This obstruction, which ends up filming in Bombay, India’s red light district, will be filmed in the middle of misery, but it will not show it. Furthermore, this completed film will only consist of the man, who will be played by Leth himself, and the meal. This obstruction may be one of the most unethical films ever put on celluloid and even this lack of ethics has several layers to it. As Susan Dwyer explains, one of the main issues within the ethics of documentary filmmaking is the level to which the subject of the documentary is exploited (2). This becomes an issue when the filmmaker attempts to be sympathetic to the subject. However, in this case, where von Trier is actually attempting to be unethical, that becomes a whole new issue. When von Trier sets these particular obstructions, the most important part is that the suffering should remain on the peripheries and be entirely invisible. In other words, this film could have very easily been filmed in the richest neighbourhood of Luxembourg, in order to avoid the ethical implications involved. However, Leth, in a brilliant twist which he credits to his director of photography, Dan Holmberg, decides to subvert this particular obstruction by placing a clear barrier between himself and the suffering masses, so that they will appear on the film. This is obviously Jørgen Leth’s attempt at fighting back his personal sense of wrongdoing. That still ignores the question of whether even accepting such a task is moral. The artist’s job is often to break taboos and do the unthinkable, but how far is too far? In a segment later in the film, von Trier asks Leth if he would be willing to film a dying child in a refugee camp, but Leth states that even he is not that perverse. Meanwhile, the Bombay segment is filmed in front of several children, either young prostitutes or children of prostitutes, and a woman with a child. Eating a gourmet meal in front of the suffering, even if it is to make a point, is an objectively disgusting activity. Especially when one adds in the fact that these people and their suffering is used merely to point out that Leth is affected by it (Dwyer, 9). Leth was the one who picked this particular area, because he felt that it was a “horror show”. Obviously, even if he claims that he was unaffected by it, that can be ignored as a lie. So, the questions again becomes, what’s the point? Why must one prolong suffering in a neo-colonized country just to prove a paltry point? Another interesting item of note is that, while this activity is being prepared, Leth is having another ethical crisis. According to Leth, the meal sequence from the original film was almost entirely improvised by Claus Nissen. So, the problem becomes whether he can use Nissen’s lines and mannerisms without committing an act of plagiarism. This will be discussed in more details later.

            After the Bombay obstruction, von Trier chastised Leth, since he had not made the film that was requested. Von Trier decides that Leth must go back to Bombay and shoot the film that von Trier asked for, which Leth refuses (again, why could he not refuse this obstruction the first time around?). Leth’s ethical side comes out here when he claims that he shot the film “cold-blooded and unscrupulous[ly]” and that, after filming this sequence, he felt that he had made a “Faust-like deal”. So, as a “punishment”, Leth has to make the third film any way he wants to, without any obstructions, unless he is willing to go back to Bombay. So, the third obstruction, filmed in Brussels, Belgium ends up being a film shot almost entirely in a split-screen format, with the latest technologies on display in perhaps the most commercial obstruction in the series. This film, the first to be shot in English with a crisp look missing from any of the others, looks like the film of an artist attempting to sell out to a community that refuses to buy. Another thing that shows in this particular obstruction is just how old Leth seems to feel now. If one were to look at the original man in the Perfect Human as a surrogate for Leth, which becomes more blatant when Leth plays him in the second obstruction, one can trace Leth’s evolution since the filming of the original film. Then, Leth was a young artist; he was cynical, but he was still full of life. In Cuba, he was still young, perhaps a decade along, and still able to dance and move. By Bombay, when Leth takes over his own role, the audience is offered a vision of a man past his prime; a man who cannot fall down and who gets lost trying to navigate the world. By the Brussels obstruction, Leth decides to cast Patrick Bauchau, an actor who worked with Erik Rohmer at the age of 29 and has since washed up, relegated to roles on television and cheaply-made B-films. The fact that Leth and Bauchau were born within two years of each other seems to send the message home: Leth is afraid of aging. He is afraid of becoming an imperfect human. While he used to loathe that perfect human in his thirties, he now envies him.

The fourth obstruction, a cartoon constructed in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, only furthers this old man hypothesis. Leth and von Trier both admit to hating cartoons, a symbol of childhood, and Leth more or less refuses to truly commit to the obstruction. In the end, he creates a rotoscoped film using footage from the previous obstructions and several Danish films. Again, like in Brussels, Leth embraces technological advancements, while refusing to return to his childhood.

The Fifth Obstruction

            The fifth and final obstruction brings up many questions that are not asked in the earlier obstructions. This final obstruction is to be directed by Lars von Trier, but still credited as directed by Jørgen Leth. This obstruction will be composed of film shot while shooting as Leth prepared and filmed the first four obstructions. All Leth has to do is a voice-over consisting of a fake letter, written by von Trier in the guise of a letter written by Leth to von Trier. The final product looks like an in memorial video shown at an awards show, with black and white footage of Leth taking part in various activities. However, the audio tells a different story. The audio tells von Trier that he failed in his mission. While he attempted to make Leth stumble and fall, Leth simply became more and more confident and in the end, it was von Trier who stumbled. This final obstruction brings out another question about the film. How much of this film is real, unscripted documentary and how much of it is scripted fiction created by a man who wishes to tell a conventional story.

Blurring between Fact and Fiction

            By the end of the fifth obstruction, the Five Obstructions starts to look like a narrative feature. While the Perfect Human and its remakes are made, the in-between segments tell the story of a superhero by the name of Jørgen Leth and a super villain by the name of Lars von Trier. In his director’s statement, von Trier mentions that with this film, he was “searching for something between fiction and fact” (Hjort, xvi). These segments between the films suggest that von Trier is perhaps that perfect human that Leth hated, who has come back to destroy him. This may be a bit farfetched, but fictional elements pop up throughout this film, including the ending, where the von Trier character (a character that he has been developing throughout his filmmaking and interviews) admits defeat to the greater Leth, going so far as to write a fake letter to himself.

            A more important blurring element in this film is related to Leitch’s idea of disavowal. Disavowal, in its original sense, involves the relationship between a remake, an original and a source material, where the remake attempts to show the errors that the original adaptation has made, in its adaptation of the source material, as a betrayal which the remake will avoid (Leitch, 51). In this case, in a more fictitious state, von Trier attempts to show that this same betrayal has occurred. However, while the source material is the Perfect Human, the original adaptation is Jørgen Leth, the decrepit, old man who is as far away from perfection as possible. Von Trier mentions that he knows Leth better than even Leth knows himself and that the Five Obstructions is an attempt to help him. So, the remake then takes the form of the true remake, in an attempt to remake Jørgen Leth and bring him back to perfection. In the end, von Trier’s letter mentions that Leth is the perfect human (the line “this is how the perfect human falls” is accompanied by an image of this old man falling) and that his perfection was never lost. So, the disavowal that was attempted resulted in a failure!

Authorship: Whose Film is it Anyway?

            As a final question, the subject of authorship is brought up several times throughout the Five Obstructions. This is to be expected with most remakes, as the creator of the original is held as somewhat responsible for the creation of the remake. However, in this case, these matters are complicated owing both to the fact that the creator of the Perfect Human is, obviously, at least half-responsible for its remake, but also because the two creators are in a constant power game for control.

            There is something of a subgenre of films which one may call the master-student co-productions. Essentially, these are films like Lightning over Water and Tigrero: A Film That was Never Made where a protégé (Wim Wenders and Jim Jarmusch, respectively) gets the opportunity to co-direct a film with one of his or her cinematic heroes (Nicholas Ray and Samuel Fuller, respectively). However, these films often take the form of reverence films, where the protégé spends most of the films basking in the glory of the individual who inspired him or her and whose brilliance he or she wishes to, one day, reach. The Five Obstructions is nothing like that. As has been mentioned so many times already, this film is, at least in a fictional sense, about disrespect; this film is about von Trier’s attempt to treat Leth like some kind of fraternity pledge. So, if there is no mutual respect, who becomes the author? Is it the creator of the original or is the original unimportant in this context? This question is probably closest to the question of producer versus director in the struggle for control. Von Trier acts as the producer who gathers the finances and gives Leth ridiculous demands, while Leth takes the role of director, closer than anything else to the early Hollywood auteur, who takes these demands and makes them fit his own agenda. So, who comes out dominant?

In a way, this is the manifestation of the author versus the critic that was brought up in Roland Barthes’ “the Death of the Author” (129), although Barthes’ author/critic relationship was not quite so vehement. Barthes’ view of this authorship question could be interpreted in two ways: faithfully or in a more subverted fashion. The obvious Barthes opinion would be that the Five Obstructions, just like the Perfect Human, has no author. The original film can be de-authorized by the mere fact that the film is a parody (or perhaps pastiche) of a previous film form, the anthropological study film, and is thus rendered as a simple part of an intertextual continuum (Barthes, 126). The mere use of language in both films would render them as non-authored film (Barthes, 126). Besides that, both films would also lack authors because they are up to the viewer to discover and comprehend (especially thought-provoking and experimental films like these two) (Barthes, 129). However, one could also claim that, using Barthes ideology, the remake and its obstructions make Lars von Trier the author. While Barthes would certainly disagree with that sentiment, one must look at von Trier’s role in the production of this film. Von Trier may give Leth the obstructions, but he is not an active participant in the creation of the five short films. His only participation involves viewing the films and judging them, giving his opinion on their meanings and shortcomings. As far as the death of the author gives birth to the reader (Barthes, 130), Leth’s death gave birth to von Trier. On a final Barthes-related note, one of Barthes’ main issues with giving authors credit is that the author becomes an absent figure during the consumption of the finished product (129). Since the author is simply leaving (objectively, speaking) undecipherable writings, then the author’s importance must become a thing of the past (Barthes, 128). This ideology, however, becomes problematic in this scenario where the author is right there. It is very difficult to remove the author when the author is sitting at the other end of the couch! If one humanizes the author, does that not simply turn the author into another reader? Barthes leaves more questions than answers, so it may be necessary to look at authorship through other means.

            The most convincing position is that Leth is the author of the remakes, just as he was the author of the original. This position may go against most established ideologies, but it becomes clear when one looks at the six films. All six films were made with almost-entirely unique cast and crew, with new innovations and evolutions coming from Leth and the final results always seemed to be the brainchild of Leth, in that they all seemed to have that Leth-ian look and feel to them, even if they did stray towards the edges sometimes. Another figure who was also in all of the obstructions, but absent in the original, is the director of photography, Dan Holmberg. Does he have any claim to the authorship of the remake? That is a question for another essay entirely. Using this theory, that the auteur can always manipulate those around him or her and make the film that he or she wants would place Jørgen Leth as the author of both the Perfect Human and the Five Obstructions.

            However, just because it is fun to answer questions with questions, one must look at the role of Claus Nissen in the whole making and remaking process. As mentioned earlier, Nissen played the perfect man in the Perfect Human. During the filming in Bombay, Leth wondered aloud whether it would be ethical for him to simply copy Nissen’s actions, when his actions were his own creation and not in Leth’s original script. So, one must wonder, is Nissen owed some credit as an author of this film? It is mentioned by Richard Dyer that stars can often take the form of the auteur, through their mannerisms and characteristics that later define them and any film that they make (483). So, since Nissen was in many of Leth’s early films and his screen persona and mannerisms defined the Perfect Man and said mannerisms were transcribed into the remade obstructions, Nissen is a star who may transcend towards author. Due to this and the fact that his mannerisms were what defined the film, particularly in the meal sequence, and gave it its surreal effect, perhaps Claus Nissen should be given some credit as an author of both films, alongside Jørgen Leth.

Conclusion

            The Perfect Human held a cynical view of humanity. More than thirty years later, that cynical view has not changed. Except now, the perfect human is extremely rich and he has the ability to use this money to play games, in which he will attempt to humiliate and destroy other perfect humans. The Five Obstructions really creates many questions that it, perhaps, was not planning to ask. Where are these directors headed? Since the creation of this film, Leth wrote an autobiography where he confessed to drug smuggling and sexual escapades with the underage child of one of his Haitian workers, followed by a documentary detailing his sexual conquests in the “underdeveloped” world. Meanwhile, von Trier went on to create one of the most self-consciously misogynistic films in recent memory and to botch a joke, ending with him calling himself a Nazi. Leth’s cynicism may have been a foreshadowing of things to come. After all, these individuals are now the perfect humans. They have grown up, gained experience, become rich and are now important cinematic figures. However, these are not the only perfect humans. Right now, the perfect humans are politicians, police officers, business owners and CEOs. The perfect humans are all around and they are running everything and, just like in the ending of the Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, they are coming for you!

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern. Ed. Sean Burke. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995. 125-130.

Dwyer, Susan. “Romancing the Dane: Ethics and Observation.” On the Five Obstructions. Ed. Mette Hjort. London: Wallflower, 2008. 1-14.

Dyer, Richard. “From Stars.” Film Theory and Criticism. 7^th Ed. Ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. 480-485.

Hjort, Mette. Preface. On the Five Obstructions. London: Wallflower, 2008. xiii-xxviii.

Leitch, Thomas. “Twice-Told Tales: Disavowal and the Rhetoric of the Remake.” Dead Ringers: The Remake in Theory and Practice. Ed. Jennifer Forrest and Leonard R. Koos. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. 37-59.

McDougall, Stuart Y. “The Director who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock Remakes Himself.” Play it Again, Sam: Retakes on Remakes. Ed. Andrew Horton and Stuart Y. McDougal. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. 52-69.

Truffaut, Francois. Hitchcock. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967.

The Inner Workings of David Cronenberg's Cosmopolis

Cosmopolis, the latest film from Canadian auteur David Cronenberg, may seem like an unusual film when one delves into it head-on, but it is in fact a continuation of one of the director’s favoured subject matter. Like Vittorio de Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, it could be said that this film has a very basic story: man wants haircut. However, whereas de Sica’s film was a view into the realities and horrors felt by Italians living on the losing side of a post-war world, Cronenberg is more interested in the realities and horrors of a world so unified with technology that the separation of the two becomes a near impossibility and the attempt to do so becomes a crime.

In order to fully grasp this particular film, one must go backwards in Cronenberg’s filmography, back to 1983’s Videodrome, where Cronenberg began his cinematic obsession with technology which could replace humans. In Videodrome, Max Renn, played by James Woods, becomes obsessed with a program whose signal is discovered by his co-worker. It turns out that this signal is a tumour-causing, hallucination-inducing virus which causes difficulty in telling the difference between reality and this hallucinatory sub-reality. While this virus causes difficulty in this particular arena, it is still readily combatable, leading to its seeming defeat with the cries of “death to Videodrome (long live the New Flesh)”. This virus may pervade the social reality and make it difficult to differentiate between the real and the sub-real, but it is a weak substitute for the real world, at least compared to what comes later. After all, the virus travels by videotape and while the television signals can pervade the human mind, the plastic of the tape is weak. This weakness was remedied over a decade later in Cronenberg’s 1999 film eXistenZ, which brings the real and the sub-real even closer by introducing virtual reality. While the Videodrome was plastic, the gaming system tranCendenZ, which contains the game eXistenZ, is a fleshy, receptive, seemingly-living creature. Videodrome’s death would lead to a new life for flesh and here it was. While Videodrome was hallucinatory, tranCendenZ or eXistenZ or wherever our heroes happen to be goes way past that. Even when the characters, who are unfortunate enough to be trapped in this sub-reality, realize that their reality is not real, it is impossible to escape. Even Allegra Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh), the woman “responsible” for the creation of eXistenZ, has trouble escaping the virtual reality game as her real reality has become as artificial as the game. Of course, it is revealed that what Geller believed to be her reality was actually at least two layers of reality below the actual reality (that is to say, the “real world” was a sub-reality of tranCendenZ, which was hinted to be a sub-reality itself). This virtual reality world was a clear precursor to where Cronenberg would go more than a decade later.

If you are still left wondering what the last paragraph and its summaries have to do with anything, here it is. Cosmopolis is a continuation of Cronenberg’s obsession with the sub-reality and its further and further advance into the real world. While Videodrome was a weak, plastic substitute, eXistenZ and its various higher levels became stronger and more flesh-based. Now, almost thirty years since the release of Videodrome, sub-reality is no longer separate from humanity. Not only has sub-reality pervaded the flesh, it has pervaded our flesh and become a part of us. This is not mere science-fiction. This is our new society. Rather than the videotape or the virtual world, this is a substitute for the internet and the social media that is a by-product of it. The internet has allowed everyone to create several online identities, distinct from one’s own flesh and blood identity. While a human walks around, he or she continues to build a character in a variety of online world, including, but not limited to, facebook, twitter, reddit, etc., where one can exaggerate or plainly lie about various qualities attributed to one’s self. This, however, results in a loss of reality of the self. Instead of videotapes or multi-layered virtual worlds, society is being destroyed by the members of society themselves. In the world portrayed in Cosmopolis, people are so sheltered from their surroundings that they no longer have personalities. They simply sit in their metal coffins and “live”, protected from anything that could harm their fragile sensibilities. Simply put, the real world has become a sub-reality and vice versa. Nothing is real anymore. This becomes clear throughout the film in so many instances. Life takes place within a limousine. People converse in clichéd, pre-written dialogue, which masks its own shallowness by using large, self-important words. Everyone in the world is a success, because the unsuccessful are simply tinted out of view. Even sex has become artificial, as a husband and wife must sit down and discuss plans to have sex in the distant future, an idea which seems to almost disgust the wife, who has better things to do. The husband must instead seek out no-genitals-shown sex with prostitutes with fake breasts and fake orgasms. Even the way that the film is presented to the viewer, with distorted close-ups and shots of television screens and windows which cannot be differentiated from each other, presents its subjects as cartoon characters, mere avatars for ideas that seem to be presented in the void of this “perfect” union of reality and sub-reality. What makes this sub-reality more dangerous than the sub-realities in the two earlier films is the fact that this sub-reality has invaded the human flesh and has stopped any differentiation between the two. While a dualism existed in the two earlier films, there is no dualism here, merely humans, their penetrated flesh.

While the film clearly attacks its subjects for going into this mindless, emotionless sub-reality without a struggle, a large amount of the scorn is saved for one particular group: the protestor. In this world, the most pitiable creature is the protestor, because the protestor does not realize that he/she is part of the sub-reality itself. The protestors believe that they are going against the sub-real world, by opposing the tenets of the society around them: essentially capitalism and all of its results, mainly corporations and ridiculous amounts of money. However, the protestors themselves are part of the sub-reality, going along with the predestined reality, where they believe that they are making a difference, while simply doing what they are supposed to do. There are three forms of protest in this film. The first comes when the group of “anarchists” attack Eric Packer’s limousine, throwing rats and defacing the outside of the car. As Vija Kinsky (Samantha Morton) mentions, the motto of the modern anarchist (“the destructive act is a creative urge”) can very easily apply to capitalism itself, which must destroy to create. These “anarchists”, with their rat-flinging ways, are doing nothing. They are attacking a limousine simply because it is a limousine (it is mentioned that they are not aware that Packer is in the car). Even if they knew that Packer was in the car, along with his theory advisor (Kinsky), they would only be attacking a cog in the machine, the figure-head, but a cog nonetheless. He is simply the image fed to the masses of what capitalism means. Packer is simply a spoiled child with only a fragment of knowledge about the bigger picture, because he is, after all, trapped in this sub-reality with the rest of us. He is also on his way out, because this new society deals in two things: rats and age. Age plays an important role in the bigger picture. Two characters in the film state their ages as 41: one has become a prostitute, the other has gone insane and both were once powerful. 22 is a golden age, where one can have power, but must start to think about retirement. Packer, at the age of 28, is already aware of his imminent downfall. The horror of this does not come from the science-fiction world of Logan’s Run, but rather from the fact that our new sub-reality does in fact deal in age. No one is successful, unless he or she accumulates billions before the age of 30.

The second form of protest is just as inane as the first, but more self-aware. Romanian “terrorist” (or whatever his designation would be) Andre Petrescu has a new form of protest. He attacks famous people (this is the essential designation, as his previous attacks included Michael Jordan, a man with no power in the grander scheme of things) by throwing pies in their faces and then stands around to get beaten up and photographed. This is the modern protestor. In the 1960s, people would get shot at protests and yet they would place themselves in front of the guns, for a cause. Today’s protestor has no underlying cause, other than to show himself or herself to a mass audience and creator a martyr-like legend of the self. In this sub-reality, the protest has already become about the singular rather than the collective. Each protestor is now an individual, hoping to get beaten and turned into a symbol. Their weapons range from pies to stones to words, but they still do not realize that they are still stuck in the sub-reality.

The third method of protest is the only effective one and yet it is one that is not often attempted and even less accepted. Only two people in the film attempt this method, because it is a difficult method. The first step is to realize that you are in fact in a sub-reality. In Videodrome, this could be accomplished by differentiating between hallucination and reality and in eXistenZ, it was about differentiating between the virtual world and the real world. Here, it is a more complex differentiation between various levels of reality. Packer only realizes where he is because of the death of Brother Fez, which brings him feelings that were previously mysterious to him. It was not just the death that brought him back, but the method of death. In the sub-reality, “natural causes” are not natural. In the sub-reality people can only die of shootings and televised facial stabbings. Just like the news of our world, natural causes do not exist. Packer can only come back to reality, break through his metal coffin and see the world through natural means. The only other person who can protest the sub-reality by leaving it is Benno Levin, a mysterious character in his own sense. He is visible in the sub-real world and he has not gone into hiding. He can be seen in the background in at least one sequence and he is seen by Packer, showing that there must be some kind of unexplainable connection between them. Benno, as he prefers to be called, used to work for Packer until he realized the absurdity of the day-to-day world around him and decided to become Benno and leave the sub-real world. It is also suggested that Benno could only leave the sub-real world, because he has gone crazy. In other words, insanity is a prerequisite to living freely in the real world (if such a thing can be found anymore). Benno has become a prophet-like individual who realizes the pretences of the world around him and has grown to hate all of them, again making the mistake of the first two protestors, thinking that taking out the figure-head will solve the world’s problems. Packer himself has only recently discovered these pretences and it is implied that he has begun an ill-fated mission to get himself out of this world before it is too late. Of course, this is a world that cannot allow people to leave, stopping them by labelling them, threatening them or inadvertently killing them, no matter how hard they try or how much they learn. After all, Packer is most likely killed by Benno soon after his revelation. This man who, all in one day, has killed his protection and experienced real pain, perhaps for the first time, by shooting himself through the hand, has tears in his eyes before his death. Packer, the Packer who we see in the limo at the very beginning of the film, is not the type to shed tears. The biggest irony of the film is that Cronenberg does not allow the audience to relate to Packer and, in doing so, does not allow the audience to feel for him during his last minutes, despite the fact that the people in the audience are Packer, other people trapped in a sub-real world and trying their hardest to get out.

There is also an argument to be made for an association between Packer and Benno. They are one and the same, and yet entirely distinct from each other. The mystery really comes down to one question: is Benno free? Has he really managed to escape sub-reality? On one hand, he is no longer concerned with finding meanings for the smallest irregularities in the world (his asymmetrical prostate, for example) and he has no problem killing those that he considers sub-real. However, at the same time, he seems far too obsessed with the sub-reality to be considered free of it. His attempt to kill Packer could be seen as a happy occurrence, as Benno killing off the last bit of sub-reality within himself, but it could also, just as easily, be Benno trying to keep anyone else from reaching his reality, because it is far from perfect. Since leaving the sub-reality, Benno has become more obsessive and anxious. So, is this a scenario like eXistenZ, where the escaped sub-reality is simply a place for a bigger sub-reality? Once reality and sub-reality collide, how long will it take to dig oneself out?

In the end, this film continues the cycle started by the two previous films of an impromptu trilogy, the already oft-mentioned Videodrome and eXistenZ. However, this film is the logical conclusion of this trilogy. Whereas in the previous two films, the hero(es) fought valiantly and (to varying degrees) defeated the virus that threatened them, in the most recent incarnation of the story, it becomes an impossible task to defeat the sub-reality and anyone who tries becomes a casualty, whether physically or mentally slain. Even David Cronenberg has given up on trying to break through the shell of sub-reality and declared any such attempts to be a losing struggle. We are firmly trapped within this sub-reality and the worst part of all is that we don’t even realize it!