The Event, Fate and Terminator II

The Effect that Creates its own Cause

Towards the end of Terminator 2 the boy who is to lead the human resistance against the domination of the machines in the future ponders out loud how strange it is to know that his father has not yet even been born.

Let us be very clear about this strange development in the story: it involves a logic of causality that exceeds the mechanistic model we still carry in our heads. The shortsighted mechanistic model drove Newton to figure out the laws governing the motion of masses—their acceleration and transfer of force. Similarly, standard paternity can be seen under conventional mechanics in so far as a father (who necessarily precedes his son) comes together with a mother to produce an offspring.

But in the case of Terminator II, it is John Connor himself – already a veteran commander who selects his own father from among the ranks of his troops to go back and time and become his father so that he himself might exist. Thus, what we have here is a narrative which seems self-contained to such extent that its own Event governs the past and runs through past present and future with its Being and Becoming.

Here we come to understand that it is not so much that the effect is caused by a prior cause, but rather that an effect retroactively protects its own cause. In the case of John Connor, he retroactively determines his own conception. Thus it would seem that his own strength overruns the conventional status of the hero as a character who can protect others but not himself. In this case, it would seem that John Connor is the knot of contradictions who protects his own conception and stands over and beyond his own father. John Connor outlives his father in both temporal directions: both in that he is older (was born before his father), and survives his death. Thus, when the machines journey back into the past to try to murder John Connor’s mother, Sarah – not only do they fail, it is their very attempt to destroy him which allows John Connor to send back a soldier to protect his mother. This soldier becomes his father.

What we have here is a diagram of Development: a narrative unfolding such that the very struggles of the agents to defeat the other reveal the extent to which fate at once will not be bested, yet it only comes into being as a direct result of the attempts of the factions to change it.

John’s mother, Sarah – is similarly thwarted when, after a horrible nightmare in which she sees herself as a young mother and an infant John in a playground incinerated to shreds from a nuclear blast she decides to murder the man who is to develop the new microchip processor that shall enable the machines to achieve self-awareness. She hunts him down, riddling his home office with bullets. By chance, he finds cover, so Sarah tosses the machine gun aside and makes her way to shoot him at point-blank range. She finds his shoulder with her handgun and he is thrown to the ground, but his wife and small son interfere before she lands the coup de grace. She loses her resolve and falls to the floor shocked just as the terminator and her son rush in and take control of the situation.

After telling Dyson – this man most directly responsible, how he is at fault for 3 billion lives, they learn that his abandoning the project will not be enough to stop the development of the deadly technology. This is because Dyson mentions something about some super advanced chip kept locked away in the company’s vaults. Something of whose origins no one would ever speak. Sarah and the terminator immediately know that it must be the damaged microprocessor of the vanquished enemy terminator in the first movie. The incredible irony of course is that Dyson is responsible for very little – the event has produced its own architects: Dyson himself admits that this chip is the source of his innovations and their rapid progress. Meaning that both the attempts of the machines to change fate so much as the struggle of the humans is already inscribed into the story. They are just finding this out as they go along.

This means that the genesis of the terminator defies mechanistic cause. It is almost as if the necessity of judgment day retrospectively engineers the past to make the moment inescapable. Thus, the rule of the linear narrative is defeated – and linearity becomes a mere effect of human perception. Thus it is something we must transcend, going beneath the apparent sequential causality to the underneath which is texture bending towards some sublated moment which acts upon the fabric of space-time as the ripple effects of a stone tossed into water.

The Event of Judgment Day as a Model for the Event of Life

Can we not extend this model of causality to the supreme event – the genesis of life and the coming-into-being of humanity. Is this not analogous to the terminator – whose fateful moment is that of achieving self-awareness?

The Nightmare of Consumer Culture: Fight Club and The Adjuster

Fight Club (1999) directed by David Fincher, based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk
The Adjuster (1991), written & directed by Atom Egoyan
Simulacra and Simulation (1995), by Jean Baudrillard

Here, I would like to interpret Fight Club and The Adjuster against each other and in relation to Baudrillard’s The Precession of the Simulacra. In essence, both these films are a critique of what is taken to be a false reality—a mode of life which has seeped out of the awake and into the dream world. These films critique “the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.” (Baudrillard 1994:1) It is therefore fitting that The Adjuster begins as Noah startles awake and Hera is still asleep, taken by nightmares. In this same eerie spirit, our narrator in Fight Club, Jack, has insomnia. He therefore is “never really awake and never really asleep.” And he describes life as “a copy of a copy.” Although we might expect films intending to prove a social falsehood to focus on dream and fantasy, it is quite the opposite. These films de-center the material world and expose the consecrated fantasy that sustains our consumer culture.

They succeed masterfully in exposing the materialistic obsession as a lie, as the real nightmare. In this sense, they are about exposing a social fiction as embodied in stuff. But although the films share this broad trajectory, they have significant differences. Most importantly, Fight Club refuses to relinquish the hope that a true world might still be uncovered by ripping down the false adornments of our culture and by blowing up the headquarters of creditors. The Adjuster, on the other hand, truly delivers history beyond the real and into the realm of nightmares—a realm where the real is nothing but a taunt and a haunting memory. Here “there is no longer a God to recognize his own, no longer a Last Judgment to separate the false from the true, the real from its artificial resurrection, as everything is already dead and resurrected in advance.” (Baudrillard 1994:6) The Adjuster ends in this hopeless tone.

Fire burns through both Fight Club and The Adjuster. The homes of the adjuster’s clients are torn out of a quotidian order through physical reduction. They are reduced to dust and ashes and expose the ease with which the lofty abstraction of the home can be rendered noxious fumes. Similarly, Jack comes home from a business trip. He steps out of his cab, and looks up into that concrete “filing cabinet for widows and young professionals.” The floor to ceiling windows of his apartment have blown out, revealing blackened husks. His scattered and fried little shits are an embarrassment to him, “a household full of condiments and no food.” This lack of food is emblematic in that the material comes to signify not substance but absence of substantive meaning. For both these films whirl around an absence—the flamed destruction of material property that reveals there was no property. Jack later tells Tyler “I was close to being complete,” as he mourns the loss of DKNY shoes and A/X ties.

“It started as a little spark,” one of his clients tells Noah. Her gaze is like transfixed; frozen in the imagining of the eye before the storm, a tiny eye, “so small,” but pregnant with a firey demolition of the woman’s house and life. The adjuster is startled for a moment, coming to understand that this devastated woman had been already devastated before the flames came to wreak her inner anguish onto the props of her life. But his surprise is half-faked, for the woman’s flirting with destruction makes too much sense to him. “Something had to change,” she says. And he understands. He knows the swirl of life, that unceasing premonition that the home has walked out the door of the house, that all is but simulacrum. Noah must counsel these people who have seen the cracks of the simulacrum in the evaporation of their life in the burning of the material props in which it was grounded. He is therefore a fundamentally conservative character—an agent of the establishment.

Tyler Durden rescues Jack from his vertigo of interpretation. He serves as Jack’s adjuster with a slight difference—he blew up Jack’s apartment to begin with. Whereas Noah works for the property structure, and therefore acts as the prophet of a restored materiality, Tyler does not take the shipwrecked under the wing of capital. Tyler is in this sense an anti-adjuster. Instead of promoting Jack’s material clinging, he advises that he “let the chips fall where they may.” Tyler first blows up the coin, and then he seizes the lust for the coin—the need for perfect teeth, fashionable clothes, an eternal home improvement and re-improvement—and he exposes the lie by revealing the immaterial nature to a love of the material. It’s not about the great pile of stuff, it never was. This is Tyler’s revelation.

But rather than withhold his wisdom, Tyler and Jack embark on a project of religious conversion. They deny a world in which “people no longer look at each other, but there are institutes for that. They no longer touch each other, but there is contactotheraphy. They no longer walk, but they go jogging.” (Baudrillard 1994:13) Their revolution is a new orientation to materiality: an orientation whose pulse is set by the hard smacks of fists on angular cheekbones; whose new face is measured not in skincare creams but inaudible rips and bruises of the skin; whose constant bodily wounding purges the soul of its artificial lust for stuff. In fighting, a new orientation and technique of the body is fashioned. This technique becomes the reason for cutting one’s hair short and trimming one’s fingernails. But it also allows the participant to feel a smack of reality, and thus to re-inject some vigor and even meaning in a life that had seemed to be horribly mediated and far removed.

This critique does not stop there. Having seized upon and eroded the material obsession in the individual, it seeks to enact such transformation across the entire society. Underground fights turn to Project Mayhem. They turn to organized chaos and troops of space-monkeys prowl the cities of the country blowing stuff up and pranking Tyler’s sneering critique onto the self-satisfied face of yuppie culture. They expose the simulation of daily life. This is best demonstrated by Jack’s masterful performance of the debased employee roughed up by his boss. But the culmination of this instinct is the end scene, as the phallic skyscrapers, headquarters of the creditors of consumer culture, are shaken by explosions and topple to the ground. Here Fight Club asserts a genuine reality which it claims we should prefer. And it does so in simulation, in film.

Whereas Fight Club explodes Jack’s relinquishing of the material through social mobilization, The Adjuster does just the opposite. Noah works to contain the interpretative vertigo opened by the fire. He stuffs them in a motel where he makes the rounds—visiting and attending to their existential angst. He provides for them a human consolation, a warm hand to re-induct them into the cold embrace of the filing cabinet. Noah’s clients are so moved by his unwavering attention to their angst, that they even kiss his hand lovingly, as if he were a saint or prophet. The kissing of the hand also features in Fight Club. Tyler licks his lips and plants a big wet one on the hands of his inductees, just before pouring lye on their moistened flesh. This is Fight Club’s new baptism. Jack and the space monkeys’ willingness to undergo the intense pain of the chemical burn materially scars their commitment to “hitting bottom”—losing everything to be able to do anything. Noah, on the other hand, saves his clients from touching this bottom, and even resorts to sex so as to take their minds off the emptiness of their loss. In this way, he preserves their investment in consumer culture.

At first glance, Noah himself embodies a model of social perfection. He has a family and owns a spacious house in suburbia. But Noah’s life too is set disturbingly close to the abyss. His house is built on what looks to be the frontier of civilization, its last bastion a huge billboard at the edge of an unfinished construction project. Noah flings arrows at the simulated family’s frozen smile from his window while his wife moves restlessly in her sleep. When he asks about her nightmares she changes subject. Their angst is implosive, clinging onto the fleetingness of meaning by burying it deep within. Jack and Tyler also live in the middle of nowhere, in a real “shithole.” In this rotting house Jack learns to be without any of the “versatile solutions to modern living” around which he had ordered his life. In Tyler’s words, “the things you own, end up owning you.” So what appears to be Noah’s accidental teetering at the edge of a material order, is a self-consciously search for material denial on the part of Jack and Tyler. They destroy the materialistic fluff around them, and then cultivate a practice of ensuring the reality of their physique by smacking it against each other.

The Adjuster’s ending, through the intervention of Bubba and his twisted troop, fits in the film as the shared nightmare between Noah and Hera. She is a censor, and her work, like Noah’s, brings her to the boundary between permitted discourse and the pornographic groaning and wheezing of the abyss. In renting out their already marginal home, Hera and Noah allow it to be seized onto by a perverse nightmarish agency of wealth, whose desire is to bring their twisted games into their walls, and to simulate the content of Hera’s disturbing videos. Bubba is able to seize the house through his superior standing in material culture, through his wealth. And so it is the system itself that exposes its ghastly contradiction—the complete lack of purpose to this material hand-over. It exposes that the material is merely a setting for perverse games that are an end in themselves. Not only that, the separation between setting and content erodes. So the house becomes both setting and pornographic content, as much as the porno becomes the setting of the house and its content.

Bubba knows this, the horrible realization bursts into flame just after Noah bursts into his own house, finding it drenched in gasoline. Bubba finally takes off his mask and looks Noah in the eye, describing the scene as that in which the “person in the film decides that he’s going to stop playing house,” and thus exposing the terrible spectral quality to their reality. He then poses the film’s final question, “are you in or are you out.” Noah stumbles out of the door as Bubba strikes the match. And so even the priest of material culture, this adjuster, falls victim to the nihilistic maw, that horrible collapse of opposite poles into one another. As he cries watching the flames, he imagines himself arriving at the scene, comforting his family not as a father but as an adjuster. Here the alienation between agent of the materialistic order and person is complete. The reality of the film and its nightmare merge into one another until we cannot tell them apart.

We might understand the house to be representative of Noah’s ark—the cradle of our current and much deluded civilization. Perhaps this is Egoyan’s way of letting us know that something is rotten in the state of Denmark. And that it’s time to stumble out the door before the whole thing burns down. This is also Fight Club’s prescription, to burn it down. Yet as Noah watches his home burn, the happening of the moment merges into his own worst nightmare. It becomes less clear that we can ever crawl away from the ghastly pornography that rented its way in through the back. Now those horrible sounds echo through plastic walls just as much as our plastic walls shine in the grisly film. Fight Club is an easier simulacrum to watch and dream in.

The Latent Ideology in Entertainment: King Kong versus Narnia

King Kong (2005)
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005)

Every review I come across on film and movies takes its object of study as a neutral piece of entertainment and then evaluates it on how well the subject (reviewer) was entertained. These writings are interesting but often very confused because they cannot articulate or even become aware of the grounding for their own subjectivity.

They neglect to understand the ideological nature of film—whereby entertainment assumes participation in an ideological value system that has transcended argument and passed into the substance of a fictional reality. So it is often the case that where one disagrees with the fundamental premise of the fantasy at play, one will become disgruntled and overly critical. If one is eager to accept the latent values, on the other hand, than the imagination is lulled into harmony with the screen and is entertained.

Of course elements of technique and execution make films more convincing or more engaging. These qualities include particular determinations on special effects (how they should blend into the story) and good acting (where quality is premised on plausibility). Yet it is important to note that all these things are solely cultural, implying that different cultures—leaving the term in the abstract—would have different preferences for special effects, cinematic technique, and even different ideas on the plausibility of an actor’s performance. In any case, a film that aims to present the greatest implausibility in performance, for instance, should not be immediately discarded. This type of experimental play is the thing of art—it pushes the limits of our crude habits.

I have recently watched two films that I will use to expose the ideological basis for the fictional reality as presented by film, and the very real compliance with given message that entertainment implies. These are King Kong and The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

King Kong is a very interesting film for many reasons. In terms of an ideological base, we should take note that it parodies American values through the embodiment of Jack Black’s character, the deranged filmmaker whose sole drive is a kind of appropriation and pacification of the wild and exotic for the consumption of Americans and the enrichment of himself. The movie thus plays on an idea of the natural and civilized, while at the same time using the film itself to problematize these simple categories. By the end of the film, as the broken King is crudely prodded by New Yorkers eager to take a picture with the shattered corpse, we cannot but feel that these ignoble and leering people are the barbarians.

Similarly, those moments of empathy shared between the magnificent animal and Naomi Watts’ character dissolve, frame by frame, the stark ideological boundaries erected in our minds between human and animal. (Our minds similarly dam the flow of empathy according to race, nationality and other systems of inclusion and exclusion.) The end result is that humanity itself—the quality that commands respect and empathy—becomes detached from the condition of being human, and therefore dehumanized. Thus is the imperative of empathy and respect un-dammed from the strict conditions of the idea of humanity and spread across all the living.

It should be noted that much of human history has been a re-working of these systems of exclusion. Prominent examples are the perennial Judeo-Christian insistence that mankind is meant to rule over the natural kingdom—a view that enables industrial cattle-farming, cramming chickens in very small cages and force-feeding ducks for economic productivity. Indeed, a CEO of one of these companies recommended that the animal be viewed as merely an economic producer. This view makes the natural world something that has no value but what the market dictates—so that as long as the pain or pollution of nature does not come with a monetary price, it is not to be considered.

The era of Slavery in the recent history of the west should be aligned with this cultural instinct to greater and greater material wealth at the expense of nature. Slavers conceptualized their captives as something beneath human—because humanity was fixed to a concept of race. Hence it was because of an ideological category, which we now consider obsolete, offensive and dangerous, that a group of people was deprived from social worth and reduced to that of beast of burden. This all goes to show that the concept of the human has been a mutable one through history, and been used to justify slavery, genocide, and rampant exploitations.

King Kong makes us see greater humanity in a non-human character than in most of the other Americans in the film. It is thus an example of the ideological play that challenges the contemporary human/non-human boundaries that permits the onslaught of greed and exploitation. This is certainly an element of the latent ideological content of the film, and will have a lasting impact on the attitudes and behaviors of people. It is hard to speak of effects without tacitly suggesting that film and the arts are valuable only in so far as their direct impact, a view I would like to avoid. Nevertheless, this film does mark a powerful discursive tool that considers, if not propagates, a critique of western capitalism premised on a reworking of civilized/barbaric and human/non-human.

Watching this film was not my initiative; I expected little else than blockbuster banality. I was pleasantly surprised to say the least, as well as moved to indignation by it. Yet it is nonetheless true that I carried beforehand a similarly veined critique. A part of me was comforted in having a kindred ideology mirrored on the silver screen.

On the other hand, my experience with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, was one of incredible distaste and annoyance. This film seems to drive into my bone and prod the nerve. In many ways it can be seen as an ideological opposite to King Kong, filled with an innocence and naiveté that many are bound to find satisfying and compelling. Where King Kong dehumanizes humanity so that the giant animal can become sympathetic, Narnia humanizes the non-human to support the view of mankind ruling over the natural kingdom. This is taken to gruesome proportions, culminating in the crowning of four children at the end of the film, bringing to mind how adult black men were called “boy” by their white betters.

First of all, Narnia is a world of animals. Being devoid of humans, it can be understood as the idealized realm of the natural, despite being nothing but fantasy. What is interesting, is that the natural is not conceived as mere existence, but rather presupposes a certain moral value-system. CS Lewis thus is able to take his accultured morality and paint it onto the idea of nature. He therefore justifies his beliefs by embedding them into the firmament of existence in a fictionalized world. The animals of Narnia are therefore divided into good and bad—and this world is wrought by a moral battle between the good lion and the evil witch.

The entry of the four children is something like the “white man’s burden”. The four are somehow fated by the scripture of some manifest destiny in the prophecy to overthrow the evil witch and save the natural kingdom. What is even more perverse is the superimposition of British schemes of royalty and nobility onto the scene, echoing the arguments of “divine right” of old.

Films like these present a mixture of the familiar and the uncanny, to the extent that the uncanny becomes familiarized; it is anchored through familiarity as a point of entry into unknown discourse. In this way, such extreme representation of reality—that even human children lord over the natural world—is anchored by a good dose of old fashioned British snobbery. The film enthralls its audience with a rags to riches story, where fortune is dependent on the immersion into a foreign world. This structure is familiar and therefore credible, all the while the film indulges in the sodden fantasies of the west.

Another parallel might be useful in fully outlining the very real political implications of movies like these—that the four children are colonizers. For this reason it becomes particularly ironic when people in say, Mexico, flock to see this film and are thrilled by it. They are consuming the retrospective justifications of brutal colonization—unaware that the Indigenous are made beavers that are ruled by white witches, and that genocidal killers like Cortes are represented as innocent children come to save us.

For all these reasons, I am much more sympathetic to King Kong than the delusions of Narnia.

The Saw Trilogy: Horrifying with Theoretical Truth

1. Saw (2004)
2. Saw II (2005)
3. Saw III (2006)

In the Saw trilogy, victims wake up dazed and confused in a situation that contains a cruel challenge that will see them either failed corpses, or mutilated survivors. To survive, they must purify themselves by their own self-infliction of wounds and pain. This purification depends on the symbolic appropriateness of the challenge, which is meant to force victims to channel their will to live to overcome their jadedness and therefore unworthiness to live.

Another point of interest, in so far as it serves to symbolically strengthen the meaning of the murders, and therefore the films claim to meaning beyond senseless killings, is the identity of the killer himself. He is dubbed Jigsaw by the media, because of a jigsaw path of skin he etches out of his victims, but also because of the riddle-like nature of the challenges he sets. In reality, this murderer is a terminally ill cancer patient, who has decided that too many people are unworthy of their bodies and their lives. So in this light, his killings are meant to be read as a kind of salvation. Indeed, he goes as far as to personally investigate and select each of his victims, happening to know in precisely what way these people are unfulfilled so as to put them to the test.

In one such case, Amanda—a heroin addict—awakes to find herself carrying an odd metal helmet over her head and attached to her upper and lower jaw. She is in some grimy apartment, and immediately enters into a panic at finding herself in such precarious situation. The nearby television set flickers on to reveal a talking doll, its face horribly grotesque.

It speaks with a distorted demonic voice. It explains how it “wants to play a game.” That her helmet will go off after a certain time limit—“think of a bear-trap in reverse,” the doll says and laughs. The key that will allow her to take off the helmet, and prevent her head being ripped open is in the entrails of a body lying nearby. She has to cut into his body and find the key if she wants to live.

Gasping in horror, Amanda crawls towards the body of a man in a business suit lying on the floor. She has found a scalpel in a toolbox. As she looks to the body, before beginning the gruesome task, and as the incessant clock ticks on her helmet, she startles to see the man open his eyes and groan. He is still alive. She quickly overcomes the dread of it, and lifts the scalpel to plunge it onto his navel in desperation. She does this once, twice, many times, accompanied by the man’s screeches as he receives the stabs. She inspects the man’s bloodied flesh. Her fingers like blind tendrils, sliding across the tender shredded meat of a dying man.

She finds the key and escapes the trap, later telling police officers and detectives that “he [the killer] helped her.”

But what if no matter how much we dig into our flesh we will never find the key that will allow us to rid ourselves of the horrible suspicion, one that cuts despair into our brains, that there is an intrinsic hollowness to living and to the flesh. Is Saw not the movie that takes its premise from a fundamental truth—that the meaning and cause of living can be nothing but absent—and addresses the public’s sense of unease and despair by fictionalizing this conflict in the killings of a madman who tackles this unavoidable nihilism and dramatizes it in gruesome killings? Does the public not revel to see Amanda actually find, moved by her awful desire to live, through the guts of a dying man who she was capable of killing, the key that will not only allow her to survive, but also overcome her heroin addiction?

Shallow Hall: Misguided Good Intentions

Shallow Hal (2001): A Summary and Critique

In the movie Shallow Hal a superficially-minded man, used to objectifying women and seeing nothing but their physical beauty, is hypnotized by self-improvement guru Tony Robbins so that he can see the internal beauty of women. By this sleight of hand, Shallow Hal acquires the gift of “depth” integrated into his very perception. Hal walks out of his chance meeting with Tony Robbins seeing a changed world, a world in which most women look like sleek supermodels.

Upon approaching them, he is surprised to find that they aren’t as dismissive as his usual targets are. The reason is that these women are in “reality” very overweight or not considered very attractive. So although Hal thinks he’s meeting women of incredible beauty, this is only because he can see her “internal” attributes, and they themselves are quite pleased to be approached by an average-looking man. So that he is surprised by the success he is able to have and thinks Tony Robbins has blessed him by allowing him to do better with women, as opposed to changing his perception to make him think certain physically unattractive women are incredibly beautiful.

Hal meets Rosemary, played by Gwyneth Paltrow, in a department store. He finds her stunningly beautiful and becomes involved in a relationship with her. Their dating is marked by an insistence in bringing forth interpretative asymmetries, where Hal compliments Rosie repeatedly, while others or even she imply that she is fat and unattractive. He does not understand their implications, and is outraged when her father remarks that she is not a pretty girl. Hal firmly stands by his conviction that she is really beautiful, and thus impresses her father. But the plot further complicates in that her father is actually Hal’s boss.

The end result is that not only does Hal find the love of his life, but he impresses Rosie’s father and even his friends with his newfound “deepness”. So this optic phenomenon endows Hal with a fundamentally different moral standing, and his improved ethics reward him with happiness and success when Rosemary’s father promotes Hal.

However, the film is complicated when Mauricio, Shallow Hal’s equally Shallow friend, finds Tony Robbins and learns the phrase that would undo what Robbins calls “de-hypnosis”. So Mauricio says the words to Hal, who loses his optic gimmick and suddenly is overwhelmed by the physical ugliness of people he thought were beautiful, including his girlfriend Rosemary. Hal is forced to either revert to his shallow self, or to overcome his fixation with physicality and instead come to arrange his relationships according to “true” beauty. Hal overcomes his condition and finds true “depth” as a person. He stays true to Rosemary and to inner beauty in spite of physical appearance.

Critique:
At the heart of this movie is the idea that a fixation on physicality is superficial, “only skin deep” or whatever, while the interior beauty of a person is overlooked. So this movie purifies the negative association we have with physical beauty by capitalizing on the idea that it is not true beauty. Of course, the convenience of such an attack on physical beauty is that beauty itself, as a concept we can cling to, is saved from the horrible suspicion that it is a confluence of factors, a mix of hypnoses or indoctrination, and that its reality is much less certain than the immediacy of flesh. The film therefore masquerades itself as an attack on superficiality while its acts to filter out that tickling of nihilistic suspicion, only to deliver beauty as an ideal firmly into the fold of a morally satisfied and complacent smile. Shallow Hal as a character serves to mark a standard of superficiality so that we can feel profound, whereas in reality preferring a woman for her supermodel looks or for her involvement in the peacecorps are equally clutchings of a person rather than the actual person.

Shallow Hal goes ever further in this purification. The movie also acts to re-align material wealth and social prestige on the side of “depth”, a concept here created by satirizing Hal’s superficiality. Hal’s flirtations with depth as he courts Rosie impress her father who happens to be his boss. So the film imagines that appreciating “true beauty” is directly linked to material fulfillment. True beauty is embodied in the fat folds of Rosie, and that her father is president of Hal’s company metaphorically ties in career advancement to aligning ourselves with Hal’s discovery of the true principle of beauty.

Upon leaving this film we can feel comfortably profound, and assured that a commitment to these principles the movie endorses will result in our success. So like Job, our piety will eventually be rewarded in the flesh. The reality however, is quite different and quite complex—the loss of the beauty principle: beauty not as something to be found in social patterns, but rather as a personal creation mapped out by the trajectory we decide upon. Beauty is fictive, not real. Conforming to the standard espoused by Vogue magazine is no worse than conforming to the standard espoused by Shallow Hal—both pretend there is a beauty principle out there, when there is not.