The film, Equals (2015), presents a fictional
story in which people in “the collective” are deemed healthy by the health and
safety “police-state” as long as emotions are not detected. Being healthy is
predicated on the assumption that emotion just gets in the way, not only of
work, but in life more generally. To be sure, they can indeed be difficult for
people who have suffered severe psychological and/or physical abuse, or have
lost a loved one whether by a death or outright rejection. In the film, Silas
voluntarily submits to a cure to the illness of having emotions coming through
consciousness because he has been told that Nia, the woman whom he has fallen
in love with, has just died. In a modification of Shakespeare’s play, Romeo
and Juliet, Silas does not commit suicide; instead, he gets the injection because
the emotional pain of having lost his loved one is simply too much. Anyone who
has fallen in love only to be rejected would be tempted to have emotion itself blocked
rather than to go on feeling. As a testament to just how deep love is as an emotion,
Silas still feels something for Nia even after the injection as the couple
travel on a train to escape from the totalitarian collective. He reaches out to
put one of his hands on one of hers. Deep inside, he is fighting the “cure.” In
actuality, the cure is the disease, foisted by an authoritarian collective on individuals.
Silas and Nia both work in the educational-books department of the collective. At first, he pays her no more attention than he does to the other coworkers, but such equality is based on no one having access to emotion. Rather than being healthy, as the collective claims, such an equality is artificial because emotion is innately part of human nature. A person who refuses to feel emotion due to past emotional/physical abuse actually suffers from severe psychological problems because “stuffing” natural emotions is actually repression. The quip, “emotions have never worked out for me,” is a cop-out that actually makes matters worse, psychologically. Rather than making a person fit for a romantic relationship, such wholesale repression actually inhibits any genuine relationship. A retired psychiatrist once told me that if a person has reached the point of refusing to feel emotion, that person has severe emotional issues that need to be addressed in therapy. In the film, such pathology is considered to be healthy, but Silas and Nia rightly reject the collective’s version of reality, which, by the way, is said to be found by investigating outer rather than inner space. Hence the book department's writers write on astronomy, whether as nonfiction or fiction.
The assumption that the
answer to the question of ultimate reality is to be found far away in outer space
is itself problematic because astronomy and ontology are two different fields
of knowledge. Put another way, perception and empirical study are bounded and
thus cannot capture raw reality itself.
To be sure, astronomical
science can be used as an analogy for human dynamics, through neither one gets
us to an answer concerning ultimate reality. Even as deeply meaningful as loving
another person is, the emotional intensity cannot reach reality in the sense of
Kant’s “things in themselves.” The emotionless equality of humans that is
espoused by the collective as a sort of dogma can be understood as artificial
by looking at the cosmic background radiation “photo,” which shows areas of
greater and lesser heat—the outer edge of the Big Bang’s blast is not internally
equal. Similarly, Silas begins to look at Mia more than he looks at his
other coworkers. He even stares at times, which she notices. She in turn begins
to look at him more. The quality of increasing inequality can be discerned from
the film in the gradual process of falling in love.
First, Silas’s eyes are increasingly
drawn to Mia. He notices her facial and eye expressions, which take on greater
meaning and significant for him emotionally, whereas the nonverbal expressions
of his other coworkers are no more significant, and so a new inequality is
evident, which is entirely natural, just as the cosmic background radiation of
the universe shows unequal temperatures.
Second, certain statements
made by Mia take on added significance emotionally for Silas. Whereas he could
easily forget something that another coworker may say to him, Mia’s ideas are
as though etched or engraved in Silas’ mind.
Third is touch. When Silas and
Mia touch hands, the significance emotionally is greater than were either to
touch a hand of another coworker. Inequality thus emerges in terms of touch, and
this inequality expands as the coupling process moves toward and includes sex,
which with emotional intimacy can seem utterly superficial as not being close
enough.
Fourth is a subtle feature that
comes about when the process of falling in love is a fait accompli. Silas gets
to the point of telling Mia that he does not want her to leave the area in
which they are hiding (in a bathroom at work). The presence of the other
person is sought. She complies because she is falling for him too. In fact,
when he gets his transfer to work in a garden because seeing her everyday and yet
not being able to be with her for fear of being taken to a mental
hospital for electric shock “treatments” to block emotion and thus “restore” him
to “health, she desperately comes to his apartment because she wants to be with
him.
As long as presence is
maintained, emotion is not a problem in a mutual coupling, but if the love is
unrequited or the two are separated, emotional hurt can be unrelenting—so much
so, in fact, that Silas prefers to feel nothing once he is misinformed that Mia
has committed suicide in the mental hospital. With respect to falling in love,
emotion can be a boon or a bust in terms of quality of life. The collective’s
claim that “social bonds help to alleviate anxiety” and thus are not of value
in their own right is based on the erroneous assumption that interpersonally-related
emotions are only painful. A person who blocks one’s emotions especially
interpersonally operates under the same assumption, and is accordingly severely
impacted by the decision psychologically.
The message of the film is
that emotion is innate in human nature, so efforts to block emotion in a human
psyche are unhealthy and thus counter-productive, especially in terms of
interpersonal relations. I read that China considers a particular religion to
be a case of mental illness. In the film, the collective authority considers S.O.S.,
Switched On Syndrome, to be a “debilitating disease.” When emotions are “switched
on” in a person’s consciousness, the collective views that person as sick, and even
as a threat. The “treatments” are based
on inhibitors that dampen the onset of emotion. If allowed to manifest
unfettered, emotion is assumed by the authorities to lead to chaos, so the
prime value of the collective is order. Emotion itself results in chaos,
and chaotic individuals mean a chaotic, destabilized collective. Even two people
falling in love is situated in a political theory as a political threat. That Mia
becomes pregnant is therefore a red flag that gets her dragged to the mental
hospital for an abortion and electric shock treatment.
Jonas, a friend to Silas who
helps him by arranging for Mia’s escape from the Den (i.e., the mental
hospital), observes, “You two were in love; that’s clear. According to the
collective, coupling makes the disease worse. But the inhibitors keep people
from being “who they really are.” Referring
to falling in love, Silas tells Mia, “The truth is right here,” rather than in
outer space as the collective claims. This statement is not far from Augustine’s
claim that God is love. That deity can manifest as unconditional love and as
wrath; so too, emotion can be a boon or bust depending on how the coupling
process goes. To extract emotion itself from a person’s consciousness is one-sided
and deeply problematic, given how we humans are “hard-wired” by nature. To “switch
off” emotion wholesale in one’s psyche is itself very unhealthy.
In terms of political theory, the autocratic collective’s authority is totalitarian in a way that goes beyond George Orwell’s novel, 1984, if ridding people of emotion is more invasive than controlling what people think. Preventing group-think, such as is evinced in the film when Silas and Mia agree that the collective is backward-wrong in what the authority considers to be health and disease, is one thing; severing emotion so people can’t even feel is arguably more severe. Silas and Mia would doubtlessly consent to considering coupling to be harmful medically but they would (and do) refuse not to feel the love they feel for each other. “Love is like oxygen,” Christian tells his new friends in the film, Moulin Rouge! A government regarding falling in love as making a disease more severe and thus preempting the process of falling in love is therefore incredibly invasive; it is like ridding an inhabited room of oxygen. Furthermore, viewing coupling as a threat that would lead to political instability makes Hobbes’ Leviathan look like an instance of limited sovereignty, as if Hobbes did not go far enough in devising his totalitarian political theory to stave off civil war. A totalitarian, autocratic government delving into psychology—politicalizing disease and mental health—is much more of a danger to humanity than is people falling in love.
