Probably a good idea to watch the movie Hit Man, now streaming on Netflix, before reading this post.
Glen Powell is something of a thing lately. He's not just a heartthrob actor, but also gets credit for writing the script for, which seems to give him some intellectual chops because the movie is covertly a paean to Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus. Even though Powell plays the part of a philosophy professor, he never mentions Anti-Oedipus, but it suffuses every moment of the film. Remember what I had to say about Deleuze and Guattari in the Cathedral Lecture Part 3--
[Stuart Jeffries] writes that Anti-Oedipus is a--
“gleefully godless liberation theology for which Deleuze and Guattari had proselytized. The Gender was fluid, identities exchangeable – perhaps even the biologically determinate constraints of sex could be overcome. Instead of being doomed to be, one could become multiple. Instead of remaining what one was born as, one could become what one wanted – multiple, provisional, fluid. Identities became masks one could pick up in the marketplace, wear, and discard at will. In this way, desire exploded identity.” (pp. 46-47)
The whole idea of ‘reinventing oneself’ becomes a thing. Americans always knew that, of course, read The Great Gatsby, but now it gets the imprimatur of French intellectuals. Reject your acculturation, reject your biology, your gender, whatever it is that you’ve been acculturated to believe that you are because it’s all a jail that’s keeping you imprisoned. Step beyond all that determines you and embrace endless other possibilities. Reject that you are a fixed self and embrace that your identity changes incessantly—or it should. Do you see how this meshes with the Transhumanist project?
I’m spending so much time on this because of the way it has become so normative among cultural elties and fits into exactly Marcuse’s critique of repressive de-sublimation that we talked about last week. Their solution is a form of transgressivity for the sake of transgessivity in the name of liberation, but liberation to what? It has no positive doctrine about what it means to be human except that you now have a responsibility to reinvent yourself by whatever whim catches your fancy. There is only repression on the one hand and de-sublimation on the other.
They encourage their readers to “de-territorialize”—to stop being sheep and start being birds. Sheep are ‘territorialized. They don’t need fences or walls to keep them in. People, say D&G are the same way. They can be given unrestricted freedom, and they will not exercise it. Why? Because they are habituated, like sheep to remain in their stable, safe identities. Better that we become ‘birds because then we de-territorialize—“rather than live tranquilly and hypocritically in false refuges.”
A ”flight” for D&G is a kind of delirium—
To be delirious is exactly to go off the rails.… There is something demoniacal in a line of flight. Demons are different from gods, because gods have fixed attributes, properties and functions, territories and codes: they have to do with rails, boundaries and surveys. What demons do is jump across intervals, and from one interval to another. (Dialogues II, p. 40)
This they saw as an anti-capitalist, subversive project. They want to challenge all preconceptions of normality and madness. Madness need not be all breakdown; it may also be breakthrough. Madness is sanity, and sanity is deadening conformity. A conformity enforced by the Oedipus Complex and superego. So to be free humans must slay all forms of superego, all forms of authority, tradition, morality, and restraint.
This defines the essential arc of Powell's character Gary Johnson. At the beginning of the film, he's awkward and nerdy, at the end he's suave and sexy. The transformation is a thing to behold. At one point one in the middle of the film mid transformation, of the female students asks, "When did our philosophy professor become hot?" In other words, when did he become really interesting as a human being--not the invisible guy who drives a Honda Civic. We meet him in the beginning as teaching a handful of students in a cinderblock classroom, and at the end we see him teaching a huge class in a large hi-tech auditorium, a symbol of how his walk on the wild side led to his flourishing and how it comports with success in the TCM.
This is nihilism with a smiley face. Sure it's an entertainment, but it aspires to be more, to be an emancipatory statement. It would be benign enough, but the film's nihilism takes a step beyond that in its last act when it justifies two murders. It's ok, right? After all, the murderers instead of going to prison became solid citizens contributing to their community. Isn't the world better off with two dirtbags dead and these two interesting, attractive, emancipated people brightening the lives of everyone around them?
Dostoyevski's Raskolnikov murdered a dirtbag, too. But he, at least, had the decency to feel guilty about it. Not these two. They're emancipated uebermenschen, no longer constrained by taboo. They have taken flight, and they live happily ever after. Good for them, the film wants us to think.
I haven't done an exhaustive reading of reviews, but among the ones I've read, there's nothing about the underlying philosophy in a movie that is so self-consciously making a philosophical statement. Maybe it's because Anti-Oedipus is so much the air we breathe these days that's we no longer notice its nihilism, especially when so attractively presented in its two main actors and with such a glimmering patina of philosophical sophistication.
How far we've come since Leopold and Lowe.
BTW, if this sounds like an old-man rant about how the world is going to hell, then read the comments above in the context of the larger point I'm making in Cathedral Talk 3. I argue there that there's something valid in the idea of de-territorialization, and I think that to become an adult we all need to find a way to transcend the constraints of superego. But there's a wisdom tradition that's not taught anymore that shows us how to do that in a healthy, integrated way that works with the energies of the Anthropos archetype. In the western tradition, it starts with Socrates, goes through Christianity, and comes out into the secular modern world through Rousseau, Kant, and Schiller and in the lecture I make a big deal of Schiller's idea of the "beautiful soul". I don't think the murderers in Hit Man qualify by any stretch of the imagination as models for the beautiful soul, although the movie wants us to think of them that way.
Another sidenote: I think that Lefebvre's Liberalism as a Way of Life understands itselfto be in this tradition, and that's to be applauded, and I embrace him as an ally. I just don't think he goes far enough, and so his Liberalism just becomes another option on the cultural menu for those.