Introduction
The latest bit of content to drop on Netflix and cause a bit of a critical stir is Spiderhead, a film based on a book I haven’t read, that everyone says is much better than the movie. OK. Sure. I’ve always dismissed critiques of film that negatively compare the film (or tv show) to a book. They are two entirely different media and you can do vastly more with a book than a film – always. And the reality is that people who read the book are (almost) always disappointed with the film. OK, sure. Why shouldn’t you be?
On the State of Media (Skip if you just want the theology)
Film is in a weird place as a narrative medium. While the never-ending need to create content to justify a plethora of streaming platforms is invariably and indubitably ensuring that the content will mostly be only that – content – it’s also, according to the Laws of Normal Distribution, means that only 15% will be any better than “ehh”. In short, this means that studios have created a monster. The need to justify a streaming service means you need to populate that streaming service with things to stream. When Netflix came out, before is started making its own content, it had the advantage of pulling from a lot of extant and forthcoming material. But now with everyone and their brother having their own service, and reducing the availability of their studios’ material to aggregating services like Netflix, it means that the volume of content has necessarily increased. Which means that the volume of mediocre to bad has necessarily increased.
However, a series has one distinct advantage: time. It has time to flesh out characters, to do world-building, to make its own story its own. This should mean that episodic stories should be in their heyday. Which means that for movies (essentially 2 episode monoseries) to have their effect they need to effectively become short stories.
And short story writing is complex and difficult. It has to pack a punch. Admittedly before the proliferation of serial stories, film wasn’t compared to any other media (not really). TV was decidedly episodic, with the exception of miniseries and the budgets were lower, and the film quality lower, and the talent was not as apparent and the writing was simply not as good.
All that has changed.
Film is now in the position that “tv” was – having to justify its existence. And making films based on short stories seems like a good place to go, but in reality, it’s a very tricky thing. Short stories can be short because the written word has powers that are not really available to a filmmaker, except in a very limited set of plot-devices.
While, again, I haven’t read the book, Spiderhead falls prey to the economic pressures of producing content, AND being compared to series, AND trying to convey in a 90 minute “talkie” something that was said and said well and powerfully in an entirely other medium.
A Brief Review (note well the movie is NOT family friendly and may offend Christians – exercise your own conscience before watching…in fact, I don’t recommend it)
And I don’t think Spiderhead pulled it off – but I don’t think that it was the drek that the critics are claiming it is – at least not from a theological perspective. And that’s what I want to focus on. But first, a few words about the film. First, it has problems. The ethical issues aren’t really as powerful as the film wants us to think they are. SPOILER ALERT: the big evil secret is that they are testing a drug that induces obedience. K. Remember this is a place where people are getting penal diversion by participating in pharmaceutical studies that manipulates to people’s emotions and behaviors to the degree that with the touch of a smartphone can cause you to “fall in love”, experience panic fear, engage in suicidal ideation, see garbage as transcendentally beautiful, and laugh hysterically at atrocities.
Wait the big, deep-dark secret is that a prison where people’s free-will is violated is violating people’s free-will?
K.
I mean, this sorta lacks punch. And by “sorta” I mean it’s not an ethical problem. Sure, you could argue that their acknowledgements to engage in other tests were meaningless since they were under the influence of B-6 (the obedience drug O-B-D-X). But that doesn’t really change things in a meaningful way. It doesn’t make the tests ethical – but none of them really were! It is, as Kenny Wayne Shepherd would say, blue on black.
Theology
Spiderhead has other issues, that are more technical that I won’t go into, but I want to give it credit for raising an issue that is theologically evergreen and one which is particularly relevant today. And when I say “issue” it’s really a constellation of issues. From Transhumanism, to Ethics, to Utopianism, to Free-Will, to Anthropology, there are a LOT of implications in this piece; and that’s ALWAYS going to be heavy stuff for any film to deal with. That’s why films like Ex Machina relied on mythic tropes and narrative forms to do the heavy lifting – and succeeded with aplomb! But Spiderhead doesn’t rely on stories or idées fixes in the Western Canon; which puts it at a narrative and theological disadvantage because it has to do all the heavy lifting rather than letting tropes and forms do it for us.
Since I did my Masters’ Thesis on theology and impulsivity, that’s where I’d like to focus. It’s well established that impulsivity can be regulated, with a relatively high degree of success through medication. SSRIs (Selective Seratonin Reuptake Inhibitors) being some of the most successful, but also drugs that work on the Dopaminergic system have shown a lot of promise as well.
And all of us manipulate our body chemistry deliberately. A brilliant theologian I know was recently complaining of being hangry and later said she was feeling better as “the ravioli was taking effect”. We know what blood-sugar does (the Chili Peppers would add sex and magic, but that’s another pop culture reference for another day!) People drink alcohol for a variety of self-medicating reasons. We exercise to get endorphins and to excrete cortisol. We are constantly consciously affecting our chemistry to achieve desired results, and very often these are mood-altering. And we alter our mood, at least in part, to alter our behavior. We hand over a portion of our free will to our body chemistry (which one might argue isn’t really handing it over). For some this means an extra cup of coffee, or a hard spin class, or taking long drags on a cigarette or long pulls on the whiskey bottle. Some of us eat our feelings. Women are blessed with the ability to cry-it-out. Men in Scranton hug-it-out.
And yet, we all know that this is, or could be, cheating. That affecting our mood with chemistry is legitimate to a point, but somewhere in our nebulous ethics is a red-line that we darestn’t cross.
But should there be?
If we could solve societal problems through neurochemistry, would that be wrong? What if it only influences behavior without determining it? What if it DOES determine behavior?
Now, right off the bat, it’s theologically clear that people are culpable for actions that are not the result of a free-choice – habitual behaviors are still morally relevant behaviors. Now, many theologians, including the Roman Catholic Church’s Catechism states that free-will is an imperative and violation of free will is a moral evil. Is freedom really worth rape, murder, banditry, self-destruction, and fraud? Is it worth broken homes and broken lives?
Or should we rebuild the Tower of Babel with neuropharmacology?
These are interesting questions and ones that while they may have dogmatic answers, they aren’t easy answers because they come up hard against the problem of evil. Societies abrogate free-will constantly (that’s what a law is, in case you didn’t know). So is medicating a population a difference in kind or merely degree?
I don’t know.
I will say, that I’m against it. But I’m not against it because I think that evil is good. Or because I think that stopping evil things from happening is bad. I’m against it because I think it misses the point. I’m against it because I think it wouldn’t work – I have no doubt that we can, some day, effectively alter people’s moods so that a population becomes a docile, pliable, peaceful, society. But I’m not certain that that’s actually flourishing. Not because I think “flourishing” requires our feelings to be authentic (I am not sure that authenticity has as much to do with flourishing as our individualistic society has made it out to have). But because it sidesteps the issues altogether.
The real problem, in the end, is that we are in rebellion against God. The reason we cannot and do not flourish is because we rebel. Because in all our thoughts God is not. We want to live without God and without reminders of Him. That’s why we call murderers who are clearly rational “crazy” instead of “evil”. Why we attempt to medicate all our problems away, hoping for a better life with chemistry, rather than examining ourselves and seeing if there isn’t something fundamentally broken about us.
Doping a culture on happy-drugs, and love-potions, and obedience-pills is, in the biblical sense of the word, sorcery. It is witchcraft, in the biblical sense.
God didn’t stop Babel because it would fail, but because it would succeed. God insists that a certain degree of pain exists in the world so that we do not grow deaf and calloused to our alienation from Him. Moreover, this is not only eschatologically merciful, because dying apart from Christ means eternal separation from Him. It’s also temporally merciful. Yes, drugging up America might solve a lot of problems now, but it will create bigger problems later. Because the godless who will play God and never consider His laws and wisdom will not act in the best interests of others. Tyranny will be the result. And not tyranny where we’re all happy drones – but the worst kind of tyranny – the murdery, rapey, exploitative kind. Because the one thing we can be sure of is that the kinds of people who will control others for their own good will not be controlled. These are the people to whom and for whom no laws apply. It is the will to power that matters.
I think, in short, that Spiderhead asked a lot of good questions. It answered them ham-fistedly. But in the end, it’s narrative point was simply this: those who wish to use science to control the population view themselves as above the law and ethical norms and will violate them and will do ghastly evil in pursuit of their base pleasures.
Was it worth watching? Nah. Was it theologically interesting – sure. But in the end, I didn’t care about the characters, which is always my standard for whether something was entertaining. It was interesting, for sure – and it raises topics that will be very relevant very soon (and if they don’t become relevant, presume that the pharma-bros have already won!) and that hopefully will be handled more deftly by people with greater ethical understanding.