In an era of hyperbolic realism on television, it's interesting to see the rise of its opposite in film. Over the past few years, a handful of haunting and utterly freaky movies have flagrantly violated the rules of conventional Hollywood storytelling to mix fantasy with politics, and magic realism with sex. These flicks have been popular too, which is perhaps the weirdest part of all. Critical and commercial success have turned movies written by Charlie Kaufman such as Being John Malkovich (1999) and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), as well as Danny Boyle's antimilitary mind-bender 28 Days Later (2002), into genre-redefining breakthroughs rather than misfit underground pieces consigned to art houses.
Indeed, Kaufman and Boyle movies have practically become their own genre. Call it neuroscience fiction. It's become so widely-imitated that even the dreary Cameron Crowe tried his hand at it with the utterly sucky Vanilla Sky (2001). Neuroscience fiction movies are instantly recognizable for a tendency to dip inside the minds of strung-out protagonists and convert their sweaty daydreams into fullblown plot developments. Social conventions are turned on their heads: women take over men's bodies and fuck their girlfriends; everybody eats impossibly potent drugs; identities split and merge again; emotional states become communicable diseases; and lab mice learn to use salad forks.
Despite a narrative predilection for subversive wacky shit, neuroscience fiction is making money right now because people are hungry for fantasies about brains. With Alzheimers Disease making headlines in newspapers, and pharmaceutical companies hawking their mood-altering wares on bus stops and via email, it's impossible to avoid a growing sense that our minds are out of control. They break down without explanation; they force us to feel things we would rather not.
In an article about Eternal Sunshine in Slate magazine, science writer Steven Johnson gushes that the film “demonstrates a remarkably nuanced understanding of how the brain forms memories, particularly memories about intense emotional experiences.” He goes on to explain that the sleazy Lacuna Company, whom Joel and his girlfriend Clementine have hired to erase memories of their unhappy relationship, uses a memory-erasure method which fits with current theories about how recollection works. Mainly, he seems impressed that Kaufman awknowledges that emotional experiences are stored in more than one part of the brain.
Johnson's enthusiastic response to the film says a lot about why audiences are drawn to this thorny, difficult story about love's failings. The tale feels tough and educational, but all the lessons it teaches are reassuring ones. The characters' conscious memories get nuked by a quack doctor, but they can't forget their feelings for each other (due to the redundancy of emotional memories). There's a kind of comfort in believing that science itself teaches this lesson: we're dealing in solid facts here, not the vagueries of ethics.
What a Johnson-style, gee-whiz analysis of these movies leaves out are the deeply political impulses in neuroscience fiction. Like early SF novel Frankenstein, these films aren't just smart speculations on where innovation might lead. They are intensely critical of science. In particular, they excoriate the way co-called scientific progress is beholden to corporate and government power. And yet they can't help but be excited by it. After all, nothing could be cooler than tweaking your own brain.
After praising the British health care system, one of the heroin-addled, Scottish characters in Boyle's Trainspotting observes, “Some people hate the English, but I don't. They're just wankers. We, on the other hand, are colonized by wankers.” At its antiauthoritarian core, neuroscience fiction is about what happens to our brains when they are colonized by wankers.
In Being John Malkovich, everybody has a chance to be a wanker for the right price. Craig, a frustrated avant-garde puppeteer whose career is going nowhere, discovers that the filing cabinets he manages at his day job hide a secret portal into actor John Malkovich's brain. When he shows off this discovery to the object of his desire -- the icy, unavailable Maxine – she suggests that they go into business selling “rides” in Malkovich's mind at $200 a pop.
Eventually, Craig and his wife Lotte discover that they can control Malkovich when they're inside him. At first, they use Malkovich to have sex with Maxine, who isn't attracted to either of them unless they're inside the actor's body. Later, Craig occupies Malkovich's brain for several months and uses his newfound fame to get what he's always dreamed of: an artistic career as a puppeteer. He also marries Maxine, who has been impregnated by a Lotte-driven Malkovich.
We discover that it's no accident that the filing company where Craig worked houses the portal. Craig's boss Mr. Lester – a rich health nut obsessed with longevity – is part of a group of people determined to live forever by taking over the bodies of “vessels” like Malkovich once they become “ripe.” And Craig's occupation of the ripening Malkovich threatens their plan. Aided by the spurned Lotte, Lester and his crew eventually figure out a way to throw Craig out of Malkovich and take over his brain themselves.
Lester's hodgepodge of new agey platitudes and pseudo-medical mumbo-jumbo is hardly what could be called brain science. But in this magic realist universe, Lester's use of what look like bizarre patent diagrams to depict his future journey into “the ripe vessel” make it clear that what we're dealing with here are all the creepy wishes of a population convinced that something like science can save them from being stuck in their miserable minds. In one scene, a line of people eager to lay down $200 for a chance to spend 15 minutes inside Malkovich snakes out Craig's office door and down the street.
Meanwhile, as Lotte, Craig and Lester compete for possession of Malkovich, we discover what really drives them. There are no high-minded philosophical objectives, here – no wish to escape the body, to innovate, to experience a sublime moment of psychological transcendence. Instead, there are just the usual grubby, prosaic human desires for sex, money, fame and immortality. Given the fantastic ability to transport themselves into someone else's brain, our protagonists want only to rape and pillage.
This realization – that advanced capabilities are used to serve our basest urges – forms the bedrock of neuroscience fiction politics. There is a kind of ugly conservatism here, a profound mistrust of humans' ability to move beyond savagery and childish selfishness. People use each other's bodies and minds to get what they want, and we are left with no hope that this situation will ever change.
In part this conservatism grows out of the basic premise of neuroscience – and indeed, all life sciences – that humans evolved from animals whose minds are optimized for survival and nothing more. No matter how noble or ethical our impulses seem to be, ultimately our brains are controlled by fairly retrograde hunt-and-fuck impulses.
But Kaufman's most recent film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, reminds us that there is a utopian side to all this evolutionary fatalism. Humans are still evolving, and as such they are always straining to learn from their past mistakes, to adapt themselves to new circumstances, and to reproduce the best parts of humanity.
Perhaps Kaufman's only truly hopeful story, Eternal Sunshine is also the most explicitly critical of science as a business. The Lacuna Corporation promises to sell people peace of mind by erasing their painful memories, but in reality it dishes out what company owner Dr. Mierzwiak admits is “technically . . . brain damage.” When Joel purchases the erasure of ex-girlfriend Clementine from his memories, we discover that the treatment is relegated to low-level techs who hook him up to a machine that looks like something out of Doctor Who. As the entire fabric of Joel's consciousness is irrevocably altered, the techs proceed to get stoned and root around in his liquor cabinet for supplies. This situation seems to be one logical result of converting mental states into things that can be bought in a doctor's office.
As soon as Joel realizes the enormity of what he's doing – happy memories of everything he loves about Clementine are being whisked away like litter – he begins to resist. But at that point his procedure has already begun, and the drugged-out techs are too busy eating junk food and making out with each other to notice Joel's attempts to wake up and escape having his memories plundered.
To preserve his memories of Clementine, Joel tries to hide them inside other, unrelated memories. He drags an amused and intrigued Clementine with him through his weird, chaotic interiority, secreting her away in early experiences of extreme sadness (when friends convince him to kill a wounded bird) and humiliation (when he's caught masturbating). His frantic race against erasure gradually begins to feel like a protest against the quick fixes that science offers us as talismans against mental discomfort. Lacuna's treatment, like antidepressants and neural prostheses, promise relief from troubled thoughts but also rob us of our joy and complexity.
Plus, the Lacuna treatment doesn't work. Although Joel and Clementine forget each other, they are still emotionally connected: mere days after their erasures, they wind up meeting and falling in love again. At the same time, one of Dr. Mierzwiak's assistants discovers that the doctor tried to end her affair with him by erasing her memories of their relationship. Feeling used and despondent, she mails every Lacuna client his or her case records. Mierzwiak, like the characters in Being John Malkovich, has converted an extraordinary power to alter people's identities into a way to rip off clients and clean up (imperfectly) his personal problems. In Kaufman's universe, scientists are no better than corrupt used car salesmen.
Ultimately, Clementine and Joel confront the fact that there's nothing they can do to make themselves feel any better. But this depressing insight becomes the film's greatest moment of hope. Kaufman ends with a scene where the two former lovers play recordings they made at Lacuna about why they wanted to erase their memories. As they listen to themselves insult each other over fights they no longer remember, they are forced to confront each other's flaws – and, implicitly, their own. And yet they still love one another, even after Lacuna has roto-rooted their memories.
Corrupt consumer neurology is replaced here with a kind of pragmatic, guarded optimism about human relations. Certainly there are inescapably shitty parts of our minds, but our love and connectedness are more integral to who we are. Love seems to go beyond memory itself, beyond neurology, and become a political force of its own. While this force is inchohate, it nevertheless lays the groundwork for a progressive neuroscience fiction. In this progressive vision, our most basic human impulse is to value and cherish one another; we hold onto this impulse even as our identities are rewritten and our genetic code passed along to the next poor sap who'll be cursed with consciousness.
The neuroscience fiction genre has roots that stretch back to the earliest tales of enchantment and mind control, but stories about the dangers of brain science can probably be traced back to two films released in the 1950s: Forbidden Planet (1956) and Donovan's Brain (1953). In both movies, the future of the human race is threatened by scientists obsessed with the human mind. The infamously cheesy “Krell technology” in Forbidden Planet unleashes the unconscious, violently incestuous fantasies of a scientist on an expedition to an unexplored world. And in Donovan's Brain, the mad Dr. Corey is almost taken over by the “brain waves” of a disembodied brain he's keeping alive in a tank.
In both films, scientists try to penetrate the mysteries of human consciousness with disastrous results. The message seems to be that it's better to keep their grubby instruments off our brains because the contents of our minds are just plain dangerous.
Later films in the genre turn the tables, suggesting that our minds are less dangerous than the people who want to manipulate them. In this group, I'd include the famous PBS TV movie adaptation of The Lathe of Heaven (based on an Ursula LeGuin novel), several David Cronenberg flicks (The Brood, Videodrome, eXistenZ, Scanners, Naked Lunch, Crash, just to name just a few) and a few David Lynch offerings (Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks). Even The Matrix Trilogy could be counted among neuroscience fiction's greatest hits: it is, after all, a series which takes place largely inside a computer-controlled hallucination.
Perhaps the classic antineuroscience movie is The Lathe of Heaven (1980), which is about a man whose dreams have the power to alter reality. His psychiatrist talks him into having directed dreams, and proceeds to create his own gigantic psychiatric institute and wipe out most of the population on earth in an effort to achieve professional recognition, create world peace and wipe out racism. Here, the dreamer is victimized by the rapacity of his doctor. The Brood (1979) offers us the same scenario on a smaller scale: the spooky Dr. Hal Raglan tries to advance his theories about the connection between mind and body by exhorting his patients to externalize their feelings. Eventually, he induces a particularly angry woman to literalize this process by extruding tiny, monstrous “children of rage” who live only to kill her estranged husband.
Lynch's infamous Blue Velvet (1986) begins shortly after a camera angle plunges us directly into the severed ear of a dead man (and into the psychosexual underbelly of protagonist Jeffrey's imagination). The magic realist cast to this film, with its nightmarish evocations of suburbia and jarring, clownish humor, is a clear antecedent to Kaufman's style. Jeffrey becomes a kind of amateur forensic scientist as he tries to sleuth out the severed ear's owner. Eventually the evidence trail leads him to Frank Black, an animalistic, violent criminal whose desires, we discover, are not so different from the clean-cut Jeffrey's. Both men are obsessed with Dorothy, a tormented nightclub singer; and both are more or less seduced by the dark side of small town America.
The point, hammered home in multiple scenes of spectacular, erotic horror, is that humans are naturally savage – everyone, under the right circumstances, has the capacity to become perverse or evil. All our minds are full of dark impulses that cannot be tamed. As if to underscore this point, the film's main narrative is sandwiched between two scenes which suggest that nature appears beautiful and peaceful only when it has been converted into something artifical. In the opening sequence, a lovely picket fence surrounds a plot of intensely green grass that is occupied by a man who has just had a heart attack; as he convulses, the camera swoops under the green stalks to show us the ferocious mandibles of bugs living monstrous lives inside the lawn. As the film closes, a rehabilitated Jeffrey sips iced tea with his innocent girlfriend, admiring an exaggeratedly mechanical robin singing in a tree outside the kitchen window. Civilized suburbanites may try to paint over the savagery of nature with their fake trimmed lawns, but this is a fabricated version of nature. The truth is that we are just one step away from biting and mutilating each other.
Kaufman's Human Nature plays with similar themes. Like Being John Malkovitch, Human Nature postulates that scientific progress is a masquerade for something vicious and petty: protagonist TK is a rule-obsessed evolutionary biologist who longs to prove that any animal can be “civilized.” An enormous grant allows him to spend all his time training mice to eat salad with the appropriate fork. He pushes his wild, nature-writer girlfriend into being more “feminine,” and attempts to convert a Tarzan-like man raised by apes into an erudite gentleman. But animal impulses win out: first the ape-man murders TK, then he has sex both of TK's girlfriends. Fucking and killing turn out to be far more compelling than learning to eat with the right forks.
Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later, hailed by critics as a newfangled zombie movie, is more accurately one of the most overtly political films in the neuroscience fiction genre. A brain disease called Rage wipes out most of England after animal rights activists release some infected monkeys. Humans who catch Rage don't simply die, however; they become speedy, homicidal pseudo-zombies who seem intent on killing everyone who isn't one of them.
Dreamy and unapologetically allegorical, 28 Days Later follows four characters who band together to survive in the wake of a plague that seems to have destroyed the world. Looked at from one perspective, the film would seem to echo science writer Johnson's boppy, pro-science take on Eternal Sunshine. After all, we'd love to believe that rage and other difficult emotions are diseases. These feelings may ignite wars and catalyze crimes of passion (or wipe out all of England), but they aren't really “us.” Instead, they are physical ailments that medics will eventually be able to cure.
The film's controversial happy ending, in which the characters are about to be rescued, also supports this reading. As the characters smile hopefully up at a rescue plane, there's a distinct 1950s monster movie vibe: sure, the scary guys were pretty scary, but a nice authority figure will pluck you up and make everything alright in the end (it's worth noting that Boyle included three darker, alternate endings on the DVD).
But 28 Days Later is ultimately about why getting rescued by authority figures is worse than being mutilated by the jittering, Rage-maddened masses who vomit blood. Our heroes' most harrowing experience comes once they've fled zombified London in pursuit of a radio signal emanating from the countryside. “Salvation is here,” the broadcast promises. But when Jim, Selena, Frank and Hannah track it down, the signal turns out to be coming from a remote military outpost full of soldiers far more violent than any of the infected.
Major West, who has taken command of a fortified mansion with his small band of men, informs Jim that he has kept order among his troops by promising them women. The world has ended, he says, and they need to build it back up again. Either Jim will join the soldiers in their rape-based breeding project, or he will be killed. Here Boyle plays on one of Kaufman's favorite themes (and, incidentally, one treasured by conservative geneticist Richard Dawkins): evolution hasn't taken us much beyond our most heinous and selfish instincts. These soldiers have reverted to nightmarish Paleolithic versions of themselves, erecting a crude patriarchal regime of violence and sexual coercion.
Selena, Jim and Hannah manage to escape the soldiers' grasp only by reverting to savage violence themselves. After a grueling proto-rape sequence, Selena and Jim manage to outwit the soldiers and release several Rage-infected people in the compound. As they fight for their lives, it's as if the non-soldiers and the infected have joined forces against a greater evil: the military. Although militarization is not a disease, it has nevertheless infected West and his men just as Rage has the citizens of England. Their minds have been obliterated by the urge to take power by any means necessary. These men are the true zombies of 28 Days Later; they are the “wankers” who have colonized the world and whose bio-weapon has destroyed the minds of an entire nation.
Often, neuroscience fiction postulates that the military mind games Boyle parodies here are not unlike scientific mind games. Science tries to establish order in the natural chaos of the human brain, but winds up recreating the very kinds of savagery and uncontrollable crappiness it sets out to eradicate. But this political condemnation can lead to a perverse and progressive optimism about the future of the species. In 28 Days Later, for example, the people who survive are not the militarized patriarchs; natural selection seems to favor men and women who do not exploit one another.
Kaufman's Adaptation is even less bleak; with the help of his pseudo-imaginary twin brother, protagonist Charlie Kaufman manages to prove that the process of cinematic adaptation (the artistic equivalent of natural evolution) can actually improve on the original. Before Charlie's twin brother dies, he explains his life philosophy: “You are what you love, not what loves you.” Love, an emotion attached to one of the human brain's most archaic impulses, is the part of our identities that nobody can take away from us. No matter what other people do – love or fuck us, maim or kill us – our minds and identities are structured by a love that cannot ever be erased.
