So I’m catching up on “Legion.” The FX show that aired some time back. I caught part of season two back then, but didn’t see it all and never really knew what was going on. Then again, I literally grew up watching Patrick McGoohan’s “The Prisoner,” a summer replacement show back when there were summer replacement shows. That one intentionally never completely made sense, so I got used to it. Still, you gotta have a program if you wanna know who the players are.
The antagonist of the show, the villain, is a guy who talks. A lot. It’s supposed to be a Marvel superhero show, and the villain’s supposed to have superpowers, but they never really show. Anyway, the details don’t matter. The villainy does.
The second season includes a narrator, who provides “lessons” that elucidate the action; what there is of it. In the tradition of the science fiction I grew up on, it’s a story of ideas; not technology or the “future,” but, really, what it means to be human. It’s mostly adolescent stuff; the stuff children think are “hard questions” and harder truths because… really, they have no idea. Children think it’s all good and evil, and the distinction is easy if you just remember the rules. Which works for the show because while the villain is supposedly centuries old, the good guys are “young people,” still struggling to figure out how to be adults in an adult world.
So, if you’re old enough, the ideas aren’t that interesting, either. Except the last one; the last lesson. The second season lessons are all about delusions, the mistaken assumptions young people, inexperienced children, as it were, are especially susceptible to. And the final delusion, is the idea that people don’t matter; that selfishness is the default setting of all of us, and we are stuck in it. The lesson is Plato’s allegory of the Cave, with a parallel modern version. The cave allegory is twisted a bit: the dwellers in the cave can’t look at the source of the shadows because reality would overwhelm and confuse them. They stick with the simple familiar, because the truth is too hard to see. “Humankind cannot bear very much reality” as Eliot said. But that’s where the final delusion enters in; the fear of reality.
In the modern allegory, reality is a phone screen, where other people are not real, and so can be treated as badly as, well, children treat other children on social media (or adults treat anyone who isn’t in full agreement with them). But what if you put the phone down, and see a world full of people looking at the screens in their hands? That’s literally the endpoint of the”lesson.”
It’s an interesting allegory. But the point is: people are real; and people matter. Two things the villain denies.
He’s clever, the villain. He manipulates people. That’s his real “power.” Manipulation. Because he’s never the villain. He’s the “good guy.” He’s not the victim, whining about how unfair everything is. But he’s careful never to take responsibility for his actions. His actions are selfish, but he thinks they’re justified. He describes himself as a lion, at one point, except lions are predators; they have a place in the ecosystem. They don’t live to slaughter, to rule, to do exactly as they please to every other creature in the veldt. That’s what the villain wants to do. He thinks he’s a god, but to him that only means power. He has no other concept. He isn’t good, but he presents his story as if he is, and the protagonist is the real villain. But he uses everyone for his purpose. His actions are justified because other people don’t matter. And that, as the narrator says, is the greatest delusion of all.
Does this start to sound familiar? Like, maybe, an even more modern allegory? Because the villain, left to his own devices, would control the world, and treat every person on the planet as something that doesn’t matter; except as he can use them. The only thing that matters to the villain, is that he can manipulate other people. And that is the true villainy.
IDEAS DON’T MATTER.
THINGS DON’T MATTER.
PEOPLE MATTER.
But the villain can’t possibly see that; can’t ever see that; can’t begin to conceive that. He thinks he’s a lion. He thinks he’s a god. He’s self-justified.
No comments:
Post a Comment