Knowing, Alex Proyas (2009)

N.B. I wrote this review shortly after the film came out. Originally it was to be part of a longer piece on SF films whose central themes dealt with latent or hidden extra-solar codes that hold the secret meaning of human history. This theme is locatd at the juncture where teleology succumbs to the pathology of paranoia. Other films to be considered were "Prometheus" and "Stargate." The piece isn't quite finished. I offer it here FWIW. Having also directed "Dark City," "I, Robot," and others, Proyas, along with Andrew Niccol, is one of the most prominent among contemporary SF auteurs at work today.

Like the comedy Ghost Town (2008), this 2009 film directed by Alex Proyas belongs to an emerging class of post-9/11 films that offer consolation by way of displaced representations or allegories of grief. It is also a film about the dangers of the risk society. More importantly, for this discussion, it exemplifies many of the features of the alien artifact film. The first two elements, it should be noted, are combined in the figure of the second of two ghosts who occupy and drive the film’s protagonist, John, namely, the figure of his wife, who, we learn via backstory, died in a hotel fire. The means of her death – by the failure of a building – seems designed to echo or point to the larger catastrophe of the World Trade Center’s structural collapse. Both events – the actual disaster and its pared down fictional counterpart – indicate the basic unreliability of modernity, the fact that structures and entire systems can overload or breakdown, often without warning.

[As an MIT astrophysicist, John is actually little more than a mouthpiece for the script’s metaphysical nostalgia. In an early classroom scene he expounds tritely on whether or not the universe functions by design or randomness, teleology or contingency. Later, he tells X that he thought he was supposed to feel it when his wife died, halfway around the world.]

The film’s prologue is set in a 1959 Lexington, MA elementary school named for William Dawes, a heroic Minuteman, invoking both the early alarms of the Revolutionary War, Cold War paranoia and the threat of total destruction, and a perverse boomer nostalgia for lost innocence. The installation of a time capsule (undertaken while a brass band badly plays the pastoral-triumphalist portion of Holst’s “Jupiter”) likewise signals both the onset of an alien knowledge that drives its child possessor Lucinda (the story’s main ghost) to dementia and eventual drug overdose. As we learn she is unwillingly subjected to transmissions from the alien archive of the future in the form of telepathic noise represented as overlapping whispers, which she is forced to translate into a series of seemingly meaningless numbers. The gleaming time capsule itself emblemizes Cold War anxieties with its burial of the now for some possible future retrieval, even after Armageddon. What its designers hope will stand as a message to the future becomes for that future a note from the angel of death.

[Brief note on time capsules: 1939 World’s Fair – to be opened in 6939. Implies an absurd faith in the future; it's meant to foster a hope in continuity, but becomes instead a message from our ruins to latter-day archaeologists and an acknowledgment of our fragility].

The film’s core theme – astrophysical theories of randomness versus determinism (a code word perhaps for intelligent design) – is explicated in an MIT lecture by the hero, John Koestler (the last name here rather needlessly alluding to Arthur Koestler and his book on the paranormal, The Roots of Coincidence). Still grieving the loss of his wife, J. appears consumed by the theory of randomness – “shit just happens” as he bitterly tells his class – there is no higher or larger meaning or design. Here the film plays up the binary of randomness/determinism all too reductively, as though the former were equivalent to nihilism and not some form of deeper complexity and emergent systems behavior that develops rhizomatically into decentralized self-organizing systems. "God," in this view, is not merely in the details; he is the details.

After his son Caleb, during a ceremony marking the opening of the time capsule, receives the mad scribblings of the girl from 1959 (Lucinda Embry–the name portentously suggests both illumination and embers) it becomes clear that her random strings of numbers depict a map of worldwide disasters. Some of these disasters are natural – earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis – and some are man-made: 9/11, the first one decoded; along with other plane crashes and massive infrastructure failures.

While this mix of registers proves fatal to the film’s logic, we might read these disasters as all man-made in the sense that the high death tolls they incur are the result of massive population clustering in narrow coastal and urban areas which lack adequate alarm and evacuation procedures. Cities, in other words, like buildings, or planes, or cars, are death traps, waiting for the right set of random circumstances to trigger their destruction. The conditions produced by the risk society greatly increase the likelihood of the traps’ chances to engulf its inhabitants.

John is able to decode the alien archive further and realizes that three events have not yet occurred. The first one (which leads to the decoding of the remaining set of unexplained numbers as lat/long coordinates) is a spectacular crash of a commercial airliner over I-90. This disaster revisits the trauma of 9/11 in a visible way, even if on a reduced scale. Improbably, as part of its fantasy of redemption, John staggers through the plan’s scatter path as EMT’s, who’ve arrived with miraculous alacrity, escort a few improbably surviving passengers away from the burning wreckage. He decodes, but is also unable to stop, the second of three remaining disasters on the list, this one involving a subway crash in NYC.

Both of these disasters are like compulsive re-enactments of both 9/11 and his wife’s death. His foreknowledge of them only makes him feel more impotent to stop them. He becomes a Cassandra-figure, isolated in his ability to make his warnings understood by the authorities, the classic position of the hero outlined by Sontag in her early, influential essay “The Imagination of the Disaster.”

Teleology here undergoes a shift from the dream of a completed totality, the fulfillment of history through universal emancipation, to a paranoid sign system in which all things, once understood as interconnected and legible, only signify total destruction and universal anarchy. The knowledge of all things is a zero-sum game. In a related sense, the knowledge of the beyond – of the future – which the alien archive transmits (thereby contaminating its readers with a kind of lucid dementia) is also a form of religious experience, a conversion from the placid containment of unbelief’s protective repression to belief’s holy terror.

What the alien archive finally represents is a theology of trauma – apocalypse, followed by survival of the chosen ones. The conversion experience John undergoes and later, if more reluctantly, Lucinda’s adult daughter, Diana, allows them to make sense of their pain and loss – which, finally, is the task of stories and art in general. The archive or code may not save them, but it does offer shelter for their children, thereby insuring a future for the human. [The SF Ark. The aliens have come to shepherd Earth’s children to a new planet, a rather sappy vision of the Wordsworthian sublime]

The logical link between man-made disasters and the planet-killing solar flare which strikes at random is never made by the film. The earthly disasters are produced by a risk society; they are the result either of the hazards of accelerated modernity or its corollary, the reactionary forces of political terrorism. The solar flare is a cosmic accident. It could be argued that it embodies the ultimate form of risk – that of living at the mercy of enormous and ungovernable stellar forces. But in the progression of disasters the film asks us to see that all disasters are somehow created equal: the only difference between the collapse of a bridge or a downed jet liner and the end of all life on earth is one of scale. This preposterous logic makes a hash of “Knowing’s” theological intervention, reducing it to a cynical ploy, an exploitation of the audience’s hopes for redemption.

The film’s dramatic ending, with a fleet of spaceships leaving Earth to deliver the children to a new world, can actually be read as a fantasy projection of the protagonist, somewhat in the vein of The Sixth Sense. John’s research has already revealed to him the threat the sun poses to the earth. The occult code of numbers, the menacing, black clad strangers (the Whisper People) who appear to be threatening his son only to transform into rescuing angels, all this is simply a delusion he has concocted to shelter him from his own knowing of the inevitable apocalypse. These angels are not rescuers, though; they are angels of death, and the new Eden we are shown at the end is merely John’s fantasy of a Heaven which does not exist. This becomes clear when we consider how this scene is cross-cut with John’s reconciliation with his minister father.

The rescue of the children and their transportation off-world to a new Edenic home, complete with a heraldic white tree, brims with Christian sentimentality; a sugar-coated denouement to the apocalypse. The trench-coated aliens transform into glowing angelic beings and the staging of the earth’s death takes on the trappings of the sublime. John, “left behind,” makes peace with his estranged father, a Christian minister, who assures him that death is not the end. This is a science fiction version of the Rapture.

How, then, to read the role of the alien archive in this compelling, but finally cloying, drama of trauma and redemption? The chain of numbers delivers random occurrence into the emplotment of knowing, that is, of pre-determined meanings which, properly decoded, spell salvation. Yet the connection between human catastrophes and the planet-killing solar flare is made tenuously, at best. The archive does not provide answers to this; only further obfuscations. The smaller disasters of history, according to the film, are to be understood as teleologically-driven, preludes leading up to the final disaster, which is itself a leap outside the logic of history, randomly driven, but responded to providentially.

The antithesis to knowing, of course, is believing. All of John’s knowledge of both science and the future don’t give him the power to alter the course of events. Only by returning home again, like the prodigal son, is he able to reinvest himself with the comforts supplied by faith.