andrew.pilsch.com

Four new trailers were posted to Apple’s trailer site yesterday: Garden Party, Kabluey, Diminished Capacity, and Traitor. The descriptions of all four films play off the idea of radical human interconnectedness and the rich tapestry that constitutes a life. More and more, since Babel or maybe Traffic (or, even, earlier: Magnolia) films have drawn upon the meaningful chance encounter within a constellation of characters meant to stand in for the larger whole of the social (I am aware we could trace this idea much further: I’m interested in the proliferation of this narrative form at this present moment).

As a researcher interested in transhumanism, I’m very interested in this new filmic plot device (I won’t get into Fredric Jameson on the Utopian potential and boom/bust cycles of film genres, but interested parties should read “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture” in the first issue of Social Text), and how these sorts of films constitute a new genre of cinema (perhaps we should call it the “pre-singularity film”) full of Utopian potential centered around the coming spiritual singularity suggested in the works of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Sri Aurobindo. While films, like Babel, may merely constitute the latest iteration of Hollywood cannibalizing successful films to extract the last dime from this concept of radical human interconnectedness, I think these pre-singularity films are suggestive of the larger memetic spread of transhuman ideas (and good transhuman ideas, to boot (I’m sure I’ll get around to explaining good and bad transhumanism at some point)). The fact that so many of this kind of movie should show up on a mass-media portal at the same time is suggestive of the growing global awareness.

One problem, though, is that many of these films (Babel especially, and Traitor it would seem) are centered around questions of the “truth” of this radical potential and the “meaning” of these new social constellations. As my dissertation director, Dr. Richard Doyle, is fond of pointing out: the next step towards the evolution of consciousness is people learning to stop asking if these new formations and weird interconnections are true. The truth/falsity of such formations is irrelevant to their political, social, and spiritual power.

Image Credit: answers are somewhere hidden within ourselves, but often we just don’t know how to read them by yives