Life's But a Walking Shadow

Full of Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing.

Have you ever been tempted to wield total, absolute power over everyone?

Come on, be honest... have you? Maybe just a little bit?

Forget for a moment about all the paperwork that might entail or the money it would cost; right now I'm just talking about the power. All those annoying people out there who are so chaotic and disruptive: all thinking their own thoughts and disagreeing with each other; all those radicals and extremists who worship the wrong gods or vote for the wrong politicians or go to the wrong movies... wouldn't life be so much easier if you could make their decisions for them? If you could decide what they should think; who they should love; how they should live... wouldn't that make the world so much better...?

Okay, okay, I'm being silly. Obviously no one would ever be so arrogant as to think that they alone should get to dictate the worldviews and mindsets of every other person in existence. What kind of self-centred, egotistical maniac would you have to be to even be tempted by such an idea? Besides, think of the pushback; the reprisals; the resistance you would face from all the people out there who might have their own ideas about the right politicians, the right gods etc. They would fight you; they would resist you; they might even try to impose their ideas on you, which would be ridiculous since they are so obviously wrong, and you are so plainly right. Rather than subjugate such people (which is violent and brutal and repressive) it would be better if you could just... do their thinking for them.

Just plug people into your narrative and do their thinking for them. Easy!

There; isn't that nicer? All you need to do is go into their brains and rearrange a few things, and now they aren't going to resist you; they won't fight you and they won't resent you; they'll just... agree with you. Everyone, everywhere can think the way you want them to think. They'll say what you want them to say; they'll live the lives that you want them to live; not because you're threatening them or torturing them, but because you're, well... writing them. They won't be angry or violent, because they won't even realise it's happening. Their thoughts are their own (as far as they can tell) they were just... scripted by you.

Imagine that for a moment. A whole world... a whole universe... full of reflections of you.

Signifying Sound and Fury; Full of Nothing

If any of that sounds remotely appealing to you, then congratulations; it's easy! You can rule the world. You can control every aspect of everything that happens; everything that everyone says or does or thinks. Nothing in the world needs to happen without your express decree.

Of course it won't be this world, it will be a different world; a world that you'll need to create all by yourself. That's the hard part, but it's eminently doable, and writers obviously do this every time they create a work of narrative fiction. Hermann Melville controls absolutely everything and everyone in Benito Cereno. Shirley Jackson controls the entire population of Hill House. And so on, across the length and breadth of human literature. The angry and puritanical townsfolk in The Scarlet Letter? They're all Nathaniel Hawthorne. The defiant Hester Prynne, who stands up to the town? Hawthorne again. The Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, wracked with guilt because Hester accepts the punishment that should be his to bear as well? Sorry... still Hawthorne. 

Authors are basically gods of the realms they create: they exercise total power and absolute control and they bend all of Reality to their will. Glengarry Glen Ross is actually just David Mamet shouting at himself for two hours. And Shakespeare is both Romeo and Juliet. 

Under normal circumstances, none of this is a bad thing. A skilled writer creates magnificently believable characters and puts them in compelling situations, then puts unforgettable words in their mouths... and audiences love it.

So far, so good.

Things can get sticky when certain people decide they want to "script" the real world the way they might script a work of narrative fiction. Choreographing the thoughts and actions of a person you have invented out of thin air is one thing. Doing it to living, sentient people is rather different.

And yet, people do like to try.

Shakespeare (of course) describes this very phenomenon (Shakespeare has a scene for everything) when Hamlet turns on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern for trying to "play" Hamlet as if he were a little flute.

Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing
you make of me! You would play upon me, you
would seem to know my stops, you would pluck
out the heart of my mystery, you would sound me
from my lowest note to the top of my compass;
and there is much music, excellent voice, in this
little organ, yet cannot you make it speak. ’Sblood,
do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe?
Call me what instrument you will, though you can
fret me, you cannot play upon me.

Hamlet is quite correctly furious that anyone would presume to "operate" him like a passive vessel; controlling his actions, manipulating his thoughts... playing tunes upon him as if he were just a conduit for the motivations and desires of another. But there's the rub: Hamlet is just a conduit for the motivations and desires of another, and every single word he utters has been put into his mouth by a certain William Shakespeare. Shakespeare is sounding Hamlet, from his lowest note to the top of his compass, and there is nothing Hamlet can do about it. 

Shakespeare, by the way, is doing exactly the same thing to Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Ophelia, Claudius, Gertrude and everyone else. And then he murders them horribly. Fun times. (Moral: You do not want to exist in a Reality created by Shakespeare...)

Nothing But Sound and Fury: Full of Signifiers

Some years ago, a "Social Anthropologist" named Kate Fox gave a talk for the BBC about the impact of alcohol on British culture. Her argument was that the damage caused by alcohol was entirely about perception and was purely the result of bad messaging. (The fact that her work is apparently funded by the alcohol industry is no doubt entirely coincidental.) 

Kate Fox, who thinks she could re-engineer society if she were so inclined.

To prove her point, she made a rather interesting claim about her own anthropological prowess:

"If I were given total power, I could very easily engineer a nation in which coffee would become a huge social problem - a nation in which young people would binge-drink coffee every Friday and Saturday night and then rampage around town centres being anti-social, getting into fights and having unprotected sex in random one-night stands.

I would restrict access to coffee, thus immediately giving it highly desirable forbidden-fruit status. Then I would issue lots of dire warnings about the dangerously disinhibiting effects of coffee.

I would make sure everyone knew that even a mere three cups (six "units") of coffee "can lead to anti-social, aggressive and violent behaviour", and sexual promiscuity, thus instantly giving young people a powerful motive to binge-drink double espressos, and a perfect excuse to behave very badly after doing so.

I could legitimately base many of my scary coffee-awareness warnings on the known effects of caffeine, and I could easily make these sound like a recipe for disaster, or at least for disinhibition and public disorder.

It would not take long for my dire warnings to create the beliefs and expectations that would make them self-fulfilling prophecies. This may sound like a science fiction story, but it is precisely what our misguided alcohol-education programmes have done."

Let's put aside for a moment the fact that alcohol is directly responsible for about 27 deaths every day in the UK, and let's also put aside the fact that coffee actually was considered a dangerous and transgressive drug throughout much of the 17th and 18th Centuries in Europe (see J.S. Bach's Coffee Cantata if you don't believe me). 

Let's focus instead on Fox's rather arrogant claim that she could "easily engineer a nation" according to her own whims and whimseys, were she only given "total power". 

What she is effectively saying is that she believes she could "sound" an entire society "from its lowest note to the top of its compass" and make that society dance to whatever tune she chooses. 

"Easily."

Apparently, she's that good.

(Out of curiosity, I just looked up the casualty figures for caffeine in the UK. It looks like one person died in 2024 after overdosing on caffeine tablets. I guess that's... almost as bad as alcohol...?)

Of course if Kate Fox is truly determined to engineer a society that is overrun with coffee delinquents, there is nothing preventing her from doing so. All she needs to do is put pen to paper, and she can create a "society" that will do anything she wants. It might even be fun to read, and it would certainly give her the "total power" she apparently craves. And let's be honest here: there's a little bit of an egomaniac in every author, otherwise they wouldn't be imposing their will on an entire ecosystem of sentience-adjacent beings.

Guess what, Kate? Now you're a character in my narrative! Who's got the "total power" now?
Mwa-ha-ha-ha!

Full of Nothing but Signifiers, Sounding Furious

Fred Stiller, the protagonist of Fassbinder's World on a Wire, spends much of the narrative trying to break free of his power-mad programmer; a megalomaniac who was, from Stiller's perspective, in control of all Reality.

World on a Wire presents its narrative in the context of a computer simulation populated by simulated characters, but of course the same story can easily be told in the context of fictional characters trying to break free of their authors (see The Truman Show; Six Characters in Search of an Author; Last Action Hero; Ruby Sparks etc etc). The unifying thread here is the idea of a "scripted" character gaining self-awareness and comprehension of the true nature of its Reality.

Authors make a living by literally (literarily?) creating people out of words; making them as realistic as possible; giving them emotions, ambitions, passions. It's a relatively small step to then wonder what might happen if those created "people" were to become real enough to manifest some form of independence.

That's the problem with "total power" in Reality. It usually leads to some form of rebellion. Remember that the next time someone is tempted to "engineer" and entire society according to their own ideas.

Nothing but Sound, Full of Furious Signifiers.

Of all the "life-is-but-a-simulation" narratives that followed in the wake of World on a Wire (and Simulacron-3; its source novel) the most famous by far was undoubtedly The Matrix, released in 1999.

At the time of its release, The Matrix was widely hailed as one of the most original and mind-bending science fiction films ever released, and it arguably had a permanent impact on the look of blockbuster film-making for the next two decades. It also contributed significantly to the popular vocabulary of conspiracy theorists everywhere, and has undeniably left its mark on popular culture.

The Matrix is also a film I hadn't originally intended to include in this series. True, it deals very directly with Artificial Intelligence; with a completely "constructed" Reality and with the nascent self-awareness of characters within that Reality. But I do personally feel that its reputation has been somewhat over-stated. Its concepts are nowhere near as original or unprecedented as all that (see Simulacron-3; Pirandello or absolutely anything by Philip K. Dick) and its plot frankly does not stand up to close scrutiny.

Plus, I've been actively avoiding films of the "Killer-Robots-of-the-Apocalypse" variety - which are legion. We get enough of that from the news headlines these days.

But never mind that now. This Thursday is the 5th of November (otherwise known as Guy Fawkes Night!) and I thought we might need a film that is loud enough to compete with all the fireworks and general mishegas that will doubtless be going on outside.

To be fair, The Matrix is an engaging film that explored its concepts of Reality and Simulation in a genuinely original visual style. And like Star Wars two decades earlier, it brought together diverse influences and managed to combine them into something unique and unexpected. Just don't ask too many questions about the plot. And stay away from the sequels.

"How can we verify the authenticity of our own Reality" is a question that philosophers, poets and stoners have been asking since time immemorial. On Guy Fawkes Night (commemorating someone who tried - and failed - to impose his own will upon the rest of Reality) we will pay a visit to a well-known blockbuster that dabbles in the idea that Reality itself is not what we think it is; that life is but a walking shadow, full of sound and... I don't know; something or other. I forget the rest.

We will screen The Matrix at 7.30 on Thursday, the 5th of November at the Victoria Park Baptist Church.