Movie Review: The Island
The commodification of bodies
By Clarice Kuhling
The Island is an action-packed science-fiction flick about the commodification (the producing of something to be bought and sold on the market) of bodies and labour. It is also a story of resisting this commodification and of self-liberation. Its central themes prompt us to explore our own social practices and reexamine fundamental questions: how do we identify and transform the types and sites of commodification in our own lives? How do those who are unfree become capable of self-liberation and begin to free themselves?
The two main protagonists, LincolnSixEcho played by Ewan McGregor and JordanTwoDelta played by Scarlett Johansson are residents of a futuristic “community” which has ostensibly survived a massive contamination. Everyday life here is rigidly regimented. Sleeping habits, nutrition, health and behaviour are routinely monitored by one of the many surveillance devices positioned throughout the complex. “Remember, be polite, pleasant, peaceful. A healthy person is a happy person” an anonymous female voice breathes huskily over the loudspeaker. Everyone is allocated the same attire, and different foods are dispensed to each individual so as to maximize physical well-being. Sleeping quarters are segregated on the basis of gender. “Rules of proximity” govern sexual behaviour by limiting the amount of time and extent of physical contact with others. Many of the designated jobs consist of the mundane yet mysterious task of “feeding the nutrient lines”. In their leisure time they fraternize at the local “bar” – all to the backdrop of attractive servers, unusual drinks, vibrant coloured lights, music and exotic settings projected onto the walls. One of the highlights of their lives is “The Lottery”, where the winner is sent to The Island (“nature’s last pathogen free zone”), an apparently beautiful and exciting escape from the mundanity of daily routines.
Yet the alluring settings and occasional Lottery cannot erase the recurring nightmares that Lincoln starts having. He asks his friends at work the question, “Where do these tubes go, anyways?” and of his doctor, “Tuesday night is tofu night and who decides we have tofu, and what is tofu anyway? Who cleans my laundry and folds it, who is this person? I want to know answers and I wish there was more. More than just waiting to go to The Island!” Indeed, Lincoln’s distress at work echoes the distress many workers in our society feel about the lack of control in the workplace, that the conditions under which we labour, as well as what and how we produce and distribute, are never democratically controlled.
The boat in Lincoln’s nightmares, The Renovatio (Latin for “rebirth”), as well as the butterfly (an ancient symbol for “awakening”) which he finds one day, both foreshadow his shift in consciousness and serve as plot devices which enable him to awaken to the real nightmare about his horrifying role in life. He and all of his peers are actually clones, “grown” as a type of insurance policy for their “sponsor” for the sole purpose of providing wealthy elites with the necessary organs, skin and tissue to extend their lives a half century longer. In other instances, the female clones are created to serve as living, walking wombs, for those wealthy women who cannot, or do not wish to, bear children themselves. In every case, however, once their role as surrogate mother or organ donor is complete, all clones are eliminated and discarded, like any other used “product”. For in this version of the future, keeping such a clone alive after her/his “use” has expired, is an extraneous and inefficient cost that any “reasonable” shareholder or investor would seek to eliminate. Ultimately, Lincoln discovers ‘The Lottery’ is nothing but a cynical ruse, designed to placate the clones into accepting the present state of affairs (“giving them hope and purpose” as Dr. Merrick, CEO of Merrick BioTech later admits), while they live out their lives hidden in a discarded military bunker underground (the hidden abode of production and reproduction?) - until such time that the organs are required to fill this new niche market “need”.
In the fictitious world depicted in this film, we see the eternalizing, expansionary logic of capital expressed through the imperial ambitions of the rich in their efforts to extend their lives and their reach into the future. Here we have a kind of reformulated(cannibalistic?) “service”economy: rather than goods and services produced for human consumption, here we have humans produced literally for “consumption” by other humans. Indeed, the Marxist insight that capital devours the bodies and sucks the life out of workers is given literal expression in this film. Here, the living wealthy elites feed off the flesh (or harvested organs) of the soon-to-be dead (the walking undead haunted by the daily spectre of death?). Or, inversely, we have the seemingly boundless appetite of (dead) capital devouring the living (like vampires? zombies?) to ensure its continual profits.
Furthermore, Lincoln and his friends’ exploitation is twofold. In the first instance, they labour for free unknowingly helping to (re)produce other clones and thereby enriching the profits for Merrick BioTech. Here, their labour is a means to serve the larger ends of producing more “product” and profit for the company, and for producing a longer life for those who can pay. But in addition, they serve as an end in itself, a commodity and object to be harvested, literally chopped up, disassembled and sold.
While we may dismiss the world depicted in this film as having no correlation to our present circumstances, we must ask ourselves if there is any correspondence between the two. While examples such as the commodification of our air, water, forests, land and other natural resources readily come to mind, other forms such as biopiracy (patenting of life forms), the international sex trade, global sweatshops, migrant labour (often affecting women of colour most adversely) are sometimes less obvious forms. The social process by which human labour power is reduced to a thing to be purchased is much less understood and discussed. With routine casualness we accept a set of social and economic practices which attach a price to our skills and capacities. And despite the indisputable irony of a film which engages in an enormous amount of product placement at the same time as it critiques the exploitation of humans as products (note the presence of Puma, MSN, Nokia etc.), this does not erode our ability to formulate a critical reading of the film – a reading which understands the capitalist market as a realm characterized more by domination and coercion than by freedom and choice.
For Lincoln, the knowledge that he is nothing but a vessel of organs and tissue to be harvested, is a “profane illumination” – an experience of shocking revelation which jolts him into seeing and acting in the world in a fundamentally new way. “There is no island!” he cries, upon learning that his role in life means certain death. His exposure to the previously unseen social forces and relations in which he is enmeshed enables him to begin acquiring a more comprehensive, illuminating account of his world and its workings. It is unfortunate that Lincoln’s self-consciousness and awareness is largely attributed to biological origins (a synaptic scan reveals that memories are growing in his brain, memories which are actually his sponsor’s), rather than understood as a social phenomenon, acquired through our activity in the world. Nevertheless, the film shows that as Lincoln begins asking questions, others start questioning their existence too. As a metaphor for awareness/self-consciousness, then, Lincoln’s process of remembering can be read as a challenge to capital’s attempts to extend the exchange principle into every pore and crevice of human life, its assertion that there is nothing beyond or outside of the commodity form and its efforts to position people as commodities. Lincoln’s act of remembering, then, is a challenge and a threat to what the capitalist system would have us forget: that an economic system cannot possibly circumscribe and contain all resistance and activity. In this way, the slogan “never lose hope”, which is used at the beginning of the movie to induce obedience, is at the end of the movie subverted and recuperated to serve the goal of social transformation.
We can also criticize the film for reproducing once again the misguided notion that a small cadre (our two protagonists) of enlightened leaders can and should transform society. However, Jordan’s exclamation near the end of the movie, “The island is real, it’s us!” perhaps should be read not only as an assertion of their own agency as actors in making social change rather than as spectators, but as an affirmation of the necessity of collective, mass, democratic action of working/oppressed people in making social change ourselves (ie. the island is all of us). And Jordan and Lincoln, acting on John Donne’s observation that “no man (sic) is an island” return home to prevent their peers from dying at the hands of Dr. Merrick, even when they could have taken over their sponsor’s lives and never returned. Unlike Merrick, they choose class solidarity and unity over individual salvation and self-aggrandizement, despite the personal risks. If Lincoln and Jordan embody the slogan “an injury to one is an injury to all”, then Merrick is the embodiment of individualism and hyper rationality upon which the formulation of white male western identity is founded. Echoing capital’s insistence that it gives birth to itself, that it creates itself out of itself and it alone (not human bodies) produces its own wealth, Merrick hubristically (and ironically) makes similar claims: “I brought you into this world and I can take you out of it!” he seethes, right before he dies.
When finally they all emerge from the bunker into the light of day for the first time after their insurgency from below is victorious, we are amazed and joyful at how far they’ve journeyed and what they’ve accomplished. Even if we are aware that the project of self-liberation is always unfinished, this film reminds us that there are always forces of and possibilities for social transformation inherent in any system, no matter how seemingly circumscribed these possibilities might at first seem.
