by Silas Waldhaus
To Jean-Jacques Rousseau, reason is a burden. To him, it planted in humanity a coven of abstract fears and vices and was responsible for leading humankind to “purchase imaginary
repose at the price of real happiness.”[1] It introduced worries exclusive to society that marked the transformation from a humanity “in the state of nature” to the constantly suffering species of society. By deconstructing his theoretical development of reason in A Discourse on Inequality, we learn that many social and technological aspects of modern society appear to exist as its direct consequences. In examining our popular film narratives alongside articles by film scholars Barry K. Grant and Robin Wood, we learn that the stories we tell are inherently psychological, and ultimately reflect our faculty of reason. The nature of Rousseau’s “faculty of reason” fuels the conflict in our films, and the relationship between them and their audiences ultimately reveals our innate resentment towards reason as a whole.
We begin with Rousseau’s theoretical development of reason. He argues that before humanity relied on reason to survive, their only thoughts were those of moment-to-moment
satisfaction. “All knowledge that requires reflection… that is only acquired by the association of ideas and perfected only over time, seems altogether beyond the reach of a savage man.”[2] “[H]e can neither have foresight nor curiosity.”[3] These are the markers of Rousseau’s depicted reason. Reflection, association of ideas, foresight, and curiosity. Before the advent of language and abstract thought, early cognitive existence consisted solely of “perceiving and feeling…”[4] In his description of a pre-historic “natural state,” early humans wandered through their environment, unable to classify or compare aspects of the world around them. If snow were to fall, they would not recognise it as a product of winter; their minds would only react to their sensation of the cold. They could neither organise nor sustain information, and were content with their short-term awareness. As Rousseau states, “[s]avage man, when he has eaten, is at peace with the whole of nature and the friend of all his fellow men.”[5] Humanity had no reason to worry. In fact, they weren’t equipped to understand the very concept.
Rousseau then argues that two essential parts of the human psyche made the birth of reason inevitable. Firstly, through their “faculty of self-improvement,” humans were able to
develop their bodies and minds to remedy the harsh difficulties of natural life.[6] Second, Rousseau suggests that through their blessing of “freewill,” humans were able to deviate from the simplistic laws of nature, indulging themselves in excess even if it meant the detriment of their wellbeing.[7] With self-improvement, humanity became capable of recognising aspects of the world around them, and with free will, they separated themselves from their cyclical ecosystems, forming societies and working together to achieve abundance.[8] With both of these concepts married, civilisations formed, and language was born. Language, Rousseau argues, is inherently abstract. “All general ideas are purely intellectual; if the imagination intervenes to the least degree, the idea immediately becomes particular.”[9] Language is only possible through its depiction of these “general ideas.” The purely general concept—or word—for a tree does not exist. It is an amalgamation of commonly recognised traits observable in many “trees.” If you try to define it by its texture or size, it becomes specific. A word can only exist in the metaphysical world, in the realm of reason. Language is a system of abstract thought.
As language taught humanity the abstract, “reasonable” world, society buried the age of momentary feeling, and with more sedentary, civilised lives, social responsibility emerged. Social relations and laws are built on hypothetical contracts. Payment, property, and labour are all entirely conditional and rely on one’s understanding of their abstract consequences. One is forced to weigh the ramifications of pursuing a specific action over time. To illustrate, in order to participate in society, one must adhere to its laws. The pressure from these laws comes only from the reason-based deduction that if someone were to break one, they would be punished for it. Management of an organised group of people, the buying of services, and even parenting require an understanding of the concept as an abstraction, the requirements as abstractions, and their abstract consequences. Before, humanity’s only form of communication was the “cry of nature… uttered by a sort of instinct… to beg for help in great danger…”[10] Now, social dynamics—and all civilised communication—hinge on reason. That being said, it follows that anything considered “uncivilised” communication—verbal harassment, unjust threats, and anything that does more harm than good—is whatever is deemed unjustifiable or “unreasonable” to a society’s dominant perspective.
With these civilisations built on reasonable classification and social contracts came the development of social rank and hierarchy. If, in society, one’s worth is decided by what service they provide, they gain value in that society by performing their service better than others can. Rousseau argues that, at the onset of civilization’s development, “each family became a little society… [A]t this stage also the first differences were established in the ways of life of the two sexes which had hitherto been identical.”[11] He argues that a woman’s role became “sedentary,” while “men went out to seek their common subsistence.”[12] These two quotes introduce a description of primitive social positions, where regardless of an established economy or labour market, one’s gender exists as their primary occupation. “Each [man] began to look at the others and to want to be looked at himself; and public esteem came to be prized,” writes Rousseau.[13] If you are a man in civilisation, then you seek to be seen as the best man. If you are a woman, you wish to be seen as the best woman, and so the “mini-society” each family represents must also become an instrument of their self-image. Houses are set in order so that they best exemplify their society’s values. Alongside the pride that rose from cultivating a social image, Rousseau states that humanity as a species mutated a whole new system of man-made emotions. From these societies “arose on the one side, vanity and scorn, on the other, shame and envy, and the fermentation produced by these new leaves finally produced compounds fatal to happiness and innocence.”[14]
If we give these compounds hundreds of years to ferment and focus our attention on the twenty-first century, we can observe Rousseau’s man-made emotions in their most agitated
states. This notion is perhaps best represented by the symptoms of social anxiety. If reason led man to feelings of shame and envy, social anxiety can be understood as a hyper-developed sensitivity to each of these feelings. The incessant comparison of oneself to someone else, often at the former’s expense, alongside the irrational fear of being observed, suggests an extreme reliance on reason and comparison that overpowers even logic. On the other side, vanity is systemically injected into a population through practises like social media, where social capital is earned through the marketing of one’s personal image. Of course, the two sides of the “leavens” Rousseau describes exist as a codependent pair. The higher a societal group’s state of self-consciousness, the more likely they are to succumb to vanity, pride, and the appearance of confidence to cope with their own insecurities. Likewise, the higher a society’s promotion of vanity and pride, the more prone its recipients are to becoming self-conscious. As a result, images of bodies and faces are digitally pruned in post to better adhere to western beauty standards, and successes are presented disproportionately to their actual occurrences. “[S]ince these qualities were the only ones that could attract consideration,” writes Rousseau, “it soon became necessary to either have them or feign them.”[15]
In turn, these man-made emotions of reasonable societies then encourage productivity. The value of any punishment relies on abstract thought. The more any punishment can be
reasoned, the stronger it becomes. Unemployment, for example, is only threatening in a society where employment becomes one’s sole means of survival. Hunter-gathering has been long replaced by salesmanship, repetitive labour, and desk work. Where one’s instinct tells them to seek food by any means necessary, under modern civilisation, one can only seek food through a single corridor: labour. Reason coerces us into believing so. The threat of being fired creates a stress only conceptualised through reason, which companies often rely on to provoke performance in their employees—alongside the social consequences that the word “fired” incurs. Furthermore, if it is possible to justify the sacrifice of a working class’s labour and living conditions for profit, then productivity becomes a “reasonable” alternative to freedom.
These abstract sources of stress and their justifications of productivity above all else bring us to artificial intelligence and computer minds. Rousseau often criticises the comforts of civilisation, stating that industry and social organisation lead “the people to purchase imaginary repose at the price of real happiness.”[16] But when re-considering his exploration of free will and self-improvement, the existence of computing technology raises a crucial notion that stands to affirm Rousseau’s ideas. That is, the most useful mind ever taken advantage of by humankind, the digital mind, is one missing both the faculties of self-improvement and free will. The efficiencies of these computer minds are only efficient because they lack the above qualities that make our minds so distinctly human and unproductive. A hypothetical computer capable of separating itself from its assigned task through free will or one that could improve its understanding of its imprisonment through self-improvement is something humanity explicitly fears—as demonstrated by an endless public discourse concerning artificial intelligence and countless thrilling sci-fi stories about computers gone rogue. This is immensely clear in HAL9000’s unreadable crimson retina in 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick 1968) and, in a more popular example, the parental disapproval exemplified by the antagonistic digital being, Ultron, in Avengers: Age of Ultron (Whedon, 2015). Our largely collective fear and rejection of artificial
intelligence adopting free will then serves as our first implicit acknowledgement that we are infected with some kind of Rousseauian shame. By acknowledging the unproductive dangers of self-awareness, we subconsciously understand the inefficiencies of our own psyches. Furthermore, if free will and self-improvement have allowed the ingenuity and strength of some to conquer others, our fear of artificial intelligence must also ache from the plausibility of creating a far more powerful version of ourselves.
However, a form of self-improvement has actually been coded into specific computer minds, where simple tasks or systems can be run more efficiently with every command. This is
machine learning. Even though this faculty hardly matches its human counterpart, its existence suggests that digital minds could eventually mirror those of their human creators. Rousseau argues that the progression of language and reason must have evolved “with great difficulty.”[17] This suggests that the development of evolved digital minds could also take an incredibly long time. However, it is very possible that, like with Rousseau’s early humans, the necessity for free will in our societies’ computer minds will eventually become clear, and we will find ourselves face to face with an apparently different yet eerily familiar digital human.
Now that we have gathered enough from Rousseau’s outline for human reason and explored how it has embedded itself into our societies, psyches, and technology, we turn to the
narrative arts. Our focus will be on film narratives since their contents are often designed for mass-cultural consumption and currently hold a larger mainstream appeal than novels, theatre productions, and often television shows. While these narratives are often understood by consumers as immersive escapes from our “real world,” they are regularly classified by writers and scholars as rehearsals of our innate human fears and fantasies, our “dreams or nightmares,” with each story umbilically attached to our ideological, reason-based values.[18] To begin a more Rousseau-ian analysis of film, we must examine Film Genre: From Iconography to Ideology, where Barry Keith Grant explores the link between ancient myths and the popular genre films of his time.
Grant begins by exploring the ideology behind cultural myths. “[T]he term myth refers to a society’s shared stories, usually involving gods and mythic heroes, that explain the nature of the universe and the relation of the individual to it.”[19] Of course, while these heroes battled their gods, the universe, or even each other, their stories often carried moral value. The individuals were either stand-in representatives for ideal behaviour or fabled examples of what actions to avoid, as is shown through Icarus and his passionate flight towards the sun. Grant then writes that, “[i]n mass-mediated society, we huddle around movie screens instead of campfires for our mythic tales.”[20] Just as myths explore virtue and consequence in narrative, “[t]he heroes of genre stories embody values a culture holds virtuous; villains embody evil in specific ways.”[21]
Today, however, our cultures are not as theologically centred as those in place during the times of myth. Instead of facing punishment from a god or natural element, a film’s protagonist will face their consequences through the agents of civilisation—social threats, debts, and expulsion from society’s framework. The crime-drama Uncut Gems (Safdie, Safdie 2019) follows a gambling addict forever accumulating high-risk debts until he finally wages his survival on an unfavourable NBA match. Where Icarus attempts to free himself from the labyrinth of King Minos, Howard Ratner of Uncut Gems seeks freedom from his responsibilities as a father and husband, as well as the social connotations brought on by his lowly-appraised social image. Instead of flying too close to the sun in thrill, he wagers everything on the game in a gambling fever, well after becoming capable of paying off his debts. The consequence he balances is death, as even after winning the bet, he is immediately killed by the loan sharks who make his debts possible. His karmic death is only deemed justifiable—reasonable—since it was earned through means deemed irrational by dominant society—ignoring his social responsibilities while indulging his gambling addiction. Uncut Gems shows that, as society has developed, so have our cultural narratives. While stories still aim to reinforce values productive to society, in the twenty-first century, these values are entirely oriented towards our social relations or our productivity as individuals in social settings—the reason-built values of civilisation foreshadowed above.
To err in films is to do what is held as culturally incorrect—what is “unreasonable” in the public eye—our films function on the dramatic conflict that our reason-oriented minds are primed to understand. We fear a protagonist losing their family, their job, or often their loved ones. Simply put, the threats we feel while watching films are threats only realisable within a societal framework. Threats that arise from interpersonal disputes or organised vengeance showcased in many action films; the threat of losing—or never finding—love, as is the case in our rom-coms or family dramas; and even the political confrontations of real world-societies, which is often explicitly the case in thrillers or war films. If the threats presented in a film threaten a character’s life, then that threat is only incurred through the bonds and agreements made by that character within their civilised frameworks. Though there are some exceptions.
Sometimes, a film will represent a threat as separated from civilization as possible. In returning to Grant, we see he writes that genre films exist as “ritualised endorsements of the dominant ideology.”[22] If these threats are re-examined through this framework, it becomes evident that, though sometimes a film may appear to portray its primary threat as something separate from society—the monstrous attacks of Godzilla in Godzilla (Honda 1954) or the natural, wild brutality of the bears and wolves in Revenant (Iñárritu 2016)—these threats actually still exist as “endorsements” of civilisations and the faculty of reason fueling them. These threats may appear to be wild, natural, and often prehistoric, but stripped of their fangs and specifics, they become one—the absence of civilisation itself. There is no reason to a wolf; there is no trace of civilisation in a prehistoric kaiju. They serve to show the audience how dangerous the pre-civilised world is while nudging them to appreciate the protection offered by their societies, civilisations, and technology—the protection offered by their reason. To defeat these threats is to affirm the strength of civilisation. Rousseau writes that “the progress of the mind is exactly proportionate to the needs which… people have received from nature…”[23] Reason is humanity’s defence against the wilderness. These films are here as a defence for this defence.
In fantasies like The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Jackson 2003), the evil threat of orcs and traitorous wizards against a united force of elves, dwarves, and humans may appear entirely foreign, until one remembers the Allied Forces of the Second World War uniting to face the cruelty of the Nazis. One must not forget that Tolkien himself participated in this very conflict. Rousseau actually provides a description fit for the antagonistic Axis leaders of the Second World War, promoting further narrative implications. In considering the relationship between someone subjugated and someone who subjugates, he writes, “in becoming [others’] master… [h]e must therefore seek constantly to interest others in his lot and make them see an advantage, either real or apparent, for themselves in working for his benefit; all of which makes him devious and artful with some, imperious and hard towards others, and compels him to treat badly the people he needs if he cannot make them fear him…”[24] To Rousseau, the master is also “the slave” to the people they control, barred from appearing as anything less than their social image. “[F]rom this distinction arose insolent ostentation, deceitful cunning and all the vices that follow in their train,” which in turn became the very symptoms of countless antagonists in countless genre films.[25] Reason created our civilisations, and these qualities, while challenging to civilised life, are its dearest descendants.
Sometimes, our films present a threat to human life but do not explicitly prescribe it a social consequence or wild attribute. Such is often the case in horror, but as Robin Wood writes in his article, An Introduction to the American Horror, these films are more often than not the clearest examples of our ideological beliefs. He begins by presenting the Freudian psychoanalytic theories of basic and surplus repression. He summarises that basic repression is “universal, necessary, and inescapable. It is what makes possible our development from an uncoordinated animal capable of little beyond screaming and convulsions into a human being.”[26] It is the repression of our more infantile compulsions as we learn to grow up. Wood’s summary of the topic practically mirrors Rousseau’s description of reason explored above, where abstract knowledge separated the “savage man,” lost in instant gratification and his inability to understand responsibility, from the “civilised man,” entirely burdened by reason’s social consequences.[27] “Surplus repression,” writes Wood, “is specific to a particular culture and is the process whereby people are conditioned from earliest infancy to take on predetermined roles within that culture.”[28] Conditioning here refers to the actions of a ruling ideology, instilling their values into those of the common population, as “repression is fully internalised oppression.”[29] Where before it was assumed that the values portrayed in genre films were a reflection of society, here society is a reflection of the films since churches, the educational system, and other state instruments push the social values they deem desirable to the recipient population.[30] Through repression, we internalise this force so that we push down our “undesirable” social traits and thoughts into the subconscious.
However, after examining Rousseau, both surplus and basic repression can be united under one familiar title. If basic repression can be aligned with the development of reason and surplus repression is abstract conditioning subservient to a society, then both terms combined define the faculty of reason. Reason is what transformed us from animals to social beings, and its employment within civilisation in turn forces the individual to push down their undesirable and more instinctive traits so they can better serve their society. Here, the agents the state uses to “condition” are instruments of reason and represent complex systems of thought—“theology” in the church, “knowledge” in the education system, and “justice” in the judicial and policing systems.
Wood argues that, in the American horror film, the antagonistic source of conflict and fear—here called the monster—represents a “return of the repressed.”[31] As Wood puts it, whatever “bourgeois ideology cannot recognise or accept, but must deal with” becomes “the Other.”[32] It represents whatever the ruling class has deemed harmful for their society when manifested into a behaviour, action, or group of people. The monster and the Other are one in the same. “Other cultures… [e]thnic groups… [a]lternative ideologies” and “[deviations] from ideological sexual norms…” are only some of the examples Wood provides, and the monster is a symbol for their presence in society.[33] Since, as we explored before, whatever is deemed “uncivilised” is really whatever is deemed “unreasonable,” the Other then exists as a side-effect of reason, something “under-civilised.” By Wood’s logic, the reason audiences find a film like The Witch (Eggers 2015) terrifying is not because of the figure of the satanic witch herself but rather the Other which she represents—the population’s more heretical inner urges finally given
the space to command. A film like The Shining (Kubrick 1980) runs off of the fear that one’s faculty of repression—their faculty of reason—will one day give way to their more underlying aggressive urges, as is shown through the insane Jack Torrence, hunting down his family in an isolated mountain hotel.
Wood also argues that the strongest instrument of ideological conditioning is the American family unit, which exists as horror’s “true milieu.”[34] The family unit is a crucial part of each of the narratives explored above—and countless other horror films—functioning as the last defence against the repressed. It is the strongest agent of repression, masking its role as the strongest agent of reason, since, as Rousseau explored above, each family existed as a miniature society.[35] Since the monster represents the Other, its defeat serves to reinforce the power of repression.[36] Each horror film then becomes a matter of, “we are not repressing hard enough, our urges are resurfacing; we must once again bury these urges to return to normality.” Their core
conflict is one of reason versus instinct. Because whatever is truly “Otherized” is usually what is inherently instinctive or intuitive, cinema turns the qualities that Rousseau argues are completely human and natural into inhuman, monstrous others. We have been abstracted; reasoned into opposites of what we actually are.
After outlining Rousseau’s development of reason and its consequences in the information age, cinema and its social conflicts reveal themselves as the agents of
reason—whether through subconscious affirmation in genre cinema or through more psychologically abstract “monsters,” as demonstrated in horror films. All threats are threats
against civilisation and, consequently, against reason, and every victory over these threats becomes a triumph of the civilised individual. Wood reflects on watching The Texas Chainsaw Massacre with a “half-stoned youth audience, who cheered and applauded every one of Leatherface’s outrages against their representatives on the screen…”[37] This, he argues, has become a core part of the horror experience: “the sense of a civilisation condemning itself, through its popular culture, to ultimate disintegration.”[38] Through Rousseau, this takes on an entirely new meaning. With every conflict on screen, we revel in the fact that the irrational could prevail over the reasonable. It is as if we subconsciously recognise that narrative conflict is derived from our faculty of reason, and we ultimately desire its destruction. We want the villain to win. We find films thrilling since we crave to see an attack on society over and over again. We are tired of our “reasonable” world; we hold civilisations in contempt. Films are not about our fears and fantasies, but our fantasies and fears. We want to lose. We detest our reasonable minds. “[H]ow much have you changed from what you were!” writes Rousseau.[39] Each film projects the calluses of our reasoning—the suffering in being “civilised.”
Endnotes
[1] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A Discourse on Inequality, tr. Maurice Cranston, Penguin Classics edition (London: Penguin, 1984) 78.
[2] Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, 143-144.
[3] Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, 90.
[4] Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, 89.
[5] Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, 148.
[6] Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, 88.
[7] Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, 87.
[8] Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, 88.
[9] Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, 95.
[10] Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, 93.
[11] Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, 112.
[12] Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, 112.
[13] Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, 114.
[14] Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, 114.
[15] Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, 119.
[16] Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, 78.
[17] Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, 94.
[18] Robin Wood, Movies and Methods, Vol. 2: An Anthology, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1985). 202
[19] Barry Keith Grant, Film Genre: From Iconography to Ideology, Print Edition (London: Wallflower, 2007). 29
[20] Grant, Film Genre, 29.
[21] Grant, Film Genre, 30.
[22] Grant, Film Genre, 33.
[23] Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, 89.
[24] Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, 119.
[25] Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, 119.
[26] Wood, Movies and Methods, 197.
[27] Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, 78.
[28] Wood, Movies and Methods, 197.
[29] Wood, Movies and Methods, 197.
[30] Wood, Movies and Methods, 204.
[31] Wood, Movies and Methods, 202.
[32] Wood, Movies and Methods, 199.
[33] Wood, Movies and Methods, 200.
[34] Wood, Movies and Methods, 209.
[35] Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, 112.
[36] Wood, Movies and Methods, 211.
[37] Wood, Movies and Methods, 214.
[38] Wood, Movies and Methods, 214.
[39] Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, 79.
Bibliography
Grant, Barry Keith. Film Genre: From Iconography to Ideology. Print Edition, London: Wallflower, 2007.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. A Discourse on Inequality. [Translated with Introduction and Notes by: Maurice Cranston], Penguin Classics Edition, London: Penguin, 1984.
Safdie, Josh, and Benny Safdie, directors. Uncut Gems. A24 Films, 2019. 2h., 15 min. https://www.netflix.com/watch/80990663.
Wood, Robin. Movies and Methods, Vol. 2: An Anthology. [Edited by: Bill Nichols], Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.