|
Michael
Bay migrates from the kiddie table with this derivative (visual
& thematic shout-outs to THX 1138, Logan’s
Run, Blade Runner, & The Matrix)
but still topical American fable starring Ewan McGregor as
a clone of Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson as a clone
of Scarlett Johansson. It’s too bad everyone got so
demoralized by Fantastic Four they couldn’t
rally themselves to the theater two weeks later, because The
Island [is pretty good and] bifurcates America’s
favorite muse (neoliberalism) into its pre-conjoined parts:
first it flaunts American democracy with its assertion that
copies are as good as originals (i.e. “all men are created
equal”), then shifts to American capitalism by siding
with the copies over the originals (i.e. e.g. corn syrup in
place of fruit, conference calls in lieu of meeting, Chinese
food but not China). Which means Ewan McGregor 1 has to die
so Ewan McGregor 2 can live instead of the other way around
(as EM1 & EM2’s creators intended) since the audience
met EM2 before it met EM1. Which makes the copy the original
because we saw it first. Which would explain the primacy
given to Grease 2 over Grease in my
internal IMDB and why I prefer Kim Wilde’s synthetic
version of You Keep Me Hangin' On to the Supremes’
stripped to its DNA oldie. Granted The Island could’ve
made the originals less dickish and risked a mixed audience
reaction by making a more complicated, morally ambiguous film,
but the audience never showed up anyway so fuck it. But this
is Bay’s The Color Purple, and he goes for
extra credit with a brief unsolicited thesis on the post-millennial
condition by inverting the relationship between the virtual
and the original via the copy. Midway through, clone Scarlett
Johansson (SJ3) has a confrontation with virtual Scarlett
Johansson (SJ2) in the guise of the Calvin Klein ads you may
or may not have seen in the symbolic media reality everybody
refers to as the ‘real world’. It’s a po-mo
moment of Escheresque complexity as Scarlett Johansson (SJ3
– but the audience relates to her as SJ1) realizes she
is a clone of her virtual self (SJ2, which in the ‘real
world’ is a clone of her SJ1 personal self), which in
the context of the movie is her original SJ1 self. And what
she takes from this indeterminate epiphany is that kissing
should be done on the mouth, and with tongue. This is anti-Platonic
enough to make us make the next zen step (even if she doesn’t)
of accepting the present-absence of the true SJ1, that is,
Scarlett Johansson is the void at the center of Scarlett Johansson.
But then Bay follows his cultural koan by ending the movie
on a moment of solidarity between African slaves and copies,
which is really fucking out if you think about it.
|