Liberty on the Silver Screen

by Christopher Alexion
by Christopher Alexion

I usually end up catching a lot of movies on DVD, and recently I found myself watching four films touching on the idea of liberty and the state: The Matrix, Equilibrium, Minority Report, and I, Robot. The flicks did this in various ways (and with varying degrees of quality), but they shared some common themes.

Let me start with some brief synopses of the films, though some of my later comments will assume that you’ve seen them. The Matrix begins a trilogy set in the future, in a world where appearance is not reality. Man has been enslaved by his greatest creation: machine. Artificial intelligence began to rebel against human control, and the machines triumphed and began using people for bio-electrical energy. The Matrix is a computer-generated world to which men are connected in order to keep them unaware of the truth. Thomas Anderson, a.k.a. Neo, is a human freed from the Matrix who discovers that he is the Chosen One, a figure prophesied to carry on the war against the machines.

Equilibrium is also set in the future, after the devastation of World War III. Since it’s believed that man’s feelings and passions were behind war and destruction, a man known simply as "Father" has gained control of world politics and forced the population to take an emotion-deadening drug. The omni-competent state also forbids art or decoration, as these can lead to feeling. Christian Bale plays an elite enforcer trained to destroy the remaining resistance to the benevolent tyranny. As Bale’s character begins to feel, he’s propelled down the path to personal and political revolution.

It’s a revolution in crime prevention that forms the center of Minority Report. John Anderton is second-in-command of DC’s new Department of Pre-Crime. Thanks to new technology, combined with psychics or "precogs" who see murders before they’re committed, there hasn’t been a murder in the District for years. But when the system pinpoints Anderton as the next murderer, he’s forced to question the system and go on the run to prove his innocence.

Finally, I, Robot is also – you guessed it – set in the future. I almost hate to include this one, since the quality of the acting and the film as a whole is noticeably lower than the others. The movie swings from bombastic Will Smith-centered dialogues to cartoonish action scenes. But one element of the plot, I think, is worth noting, and I’ll come back to this point later. Smith stars as a homicide detective in a world where robots are the latest household technology. Robots cook meals, act as valets and bartenders, and even save lives. The machines are hardwired by their creator with "The Three Laws" to prevent a robot from ever harming a human. When the robot’s creator dies mysteriously, Smith follows a trail leading to plans for a robot rebellion.

So what themes do these movies present? For one, they all affirm individual liberty in the face of state control. In an early scene from The Matrix, Morpheus tells Neo that he can only promise Neo the truth. "What truth?" asks Neo. "That you are a slave," comes the answer. Morpheus, and the other humans freed from the Matrix, all assume that the truth is worth knowing, and the fight is worth fighting – that liberty is important. The phone call Neo makes at the end of the movie is sweet: "I know you’re out there. I can feel you now. I know that you’re afraid. You’re afraid of us; you’re afraid of change. I don’t know the future. I didn’t come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell you how it’s going to begin. I’m going to hang up this phone, and then I’m going to show these people what you don’t want them to see. I’m going to show them a world without you.…"

The view of Neo , Morpheus, and the others is contrasted with that of Cypher, who double-crosses his friends after growing tired of the war. During his meeting with Agent Smith, Cypher admits that he knows the Matrix isn’t real, but all that matters is that it seems real. "Ignorance is bliss," he says. Cypher represents the slave who, to echo Patrick Henry’s words, holds life so dear and peace so sweet that he counts them worth the price of chains and slavery. This reminds us that freedom isn’t for everyone – only those who want it, only those who will sacrifice everything to get it.

A second theme is that the benevolent state cannot be trusted. When the Father rises to power in Equilibrium, he does so on an appealing platform: no more war. Who the heck wouldn’t want that? But the cost is man’s ability to feel. Emotions aren’t our guide in determining truth, of course, but they aren’t evil – and they’re part of what makes us human. Destroying them robs man of his humanity. And notice that even with his "benevolent" tyranny, Father didn’t eradicate violence. His regime spawned a whole new breed of brutally effective killers: the Tetragammatron Clerics, who don’t so much enforce law as slaughter those the state labels "sense offenders." The state becomes guilty of the very vice it attempts to eliminate.

Minority Report also raises the question of how far the well-intentioned state can be trusted with power. In this case, the cops in DC were carrying out a legitimate state function: stopping murderers. But to accomplish this end they called on dangerous means: arresting someone for a crime he hadn’t yet committed. John Anderton and his officers thought the system was flawless. But the representative from the Attorney-General’s office pointed out that the system is human. It must have a flaw. Anderton realizes this when he is targeted as the next murderer. On the run he learns that the precogs don’t always see the same murder in the same way, that he’s arrested innocent people, and that the precogs are basically slaves, trapped in a life of exposure to future murders. And someone high in the ranks is manipulating the system to his own advantage.

Slowly things come together. John had stumbled onto a murder that didn’t add up: the drowning of a woman named Ann Lively. What John discovers is that someone had found a way to thwart the system and get away with the crime. The Pre-Crime Department depends heavily on the most perceptive of the precogs: Agatha. Ann Lively was Agatha’s mother, who, out of drug rehab and cleaning up her life, wanted her daughter back. This would have been the end for the Pre-Crime program – and its chances of going national – so Director Burgess, founder of Pre-Crime, murdered her.

Lust for power and importance drove Burgess not only to use the precogs for his own purposes, but even to murder, deception, and betrayal. When the Precrime program is shut down, on the eve of its becoming a national agency, the point is clear. Doing some good – even preventing murder – isn’t worth committing evil.

A third thing I thought was relevant is that even checks and balances can fail. As I mentioned earlier, I, Robot wasn’t the most brilliant of flicks, but one element I liked is how the one behind the robots’ attempt to subdue mankind turned out to be the computer program VICI. Now, people had foreseen the potential danger of creating artificially-intelligent robots with superhuman strength. But the scientist who designed the robots hardwired them with the Three Laws, thinking these laws would rein in the power of artificial intelligence – much as our Constitution is supposed to limit the federal government. But when VICI begins her takeover, she explains that her view of the Three Laws "has evolved." She still believes in protecting humans, but she now "sees" that man’s greatest threat is man himself. So in order to "protect" humanity, she is willing to unleash the robots to limit man’s freedom, and even to "sacrifice" some human lives for the "greater good." Sounds dreadfully familiar, doesn’t it? VICI believed in a "living Constitution" that meant what she wanted it to mean – and too bad for the few humans who got in the way.

In each of these films, the messianic state, or something like it, tried to solve man’s problems, and we see the results of man (or machine) "taking charge of his own destiny." C. S. Lewis pointed out decades ago that such utopian chatter is bunk. "All that can really happen," he said, "is that some men will take charge of the destiny of the others. They will be simply men; none perfect; some greedy, cruel and dishonest. The more completely we are planned the more powerful they will be. Have we discovered some new reason why, this time, power should not corrupt as it has done before?" (God in the Dock [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1972], p. 316.)

August 6, 2005

Chris Alexion [send him mail] is a homeschool graduate and college student living outside Baltimore.

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