The Simulacrum of Human Connection

This post was submitted by frequent guest contributor Michael Cifone, a philosopher at the University of Maryland.

I enjoyed reading this post that he wrote about his reaction to the David Lynch film, Inland Empire. The concept of automatic pilot in our daily life and the way it affects the way we relate to one another is deeply resonant. His post is below the fold.

Addendum: This post is an excerpt from Mike's personal blog/journal.


I haven't called many films I've seen recently 'works of art', nor have many of the films (many, that is, of the new films that have hit theaters) I've watched recently so fallen within the interiors of my own mind. Like the scent of a flower that so saturates the recipient of its odor, so too has this work of art integrated itself into the inland, inward, interior empire of my mind.

Too much of a thing, like works of art cut from the same stylistic mold, induces a state of unreflective, automatic response. The phenomenon of "automatic pilot" is universal, and a common feature of our experiences. The formulaic call and response of the salutations between human beings ("how are you" ... "I'm fine, and you?"), usually chanted out of some unspoken compunction, is but one example. When done many times over, it looses a potential connection to any real, inward emotion from which one might be motivated to utter this formula, and does not reveal or express any actual relationship between the two interlocutors; rather, this chant merely serves to further a simulacrum of human connection.

Deep and meaningful relationships to the objects and people in our experience are crucial to the human condition itself -- its lifeblood. So much so that in ancient India, many of its mystical "seers" taught that there must arise a balanced and measured "desire" (in Sanskrit, "kama") between a person and their environment or their fellow human beings. But not a desire impulsively untamed, not a desire that recklessly grasps out of a desperate longing for merely momentary gratification. No, the Indian seers were teaching how to become meaningfully connected to the world we daily experience -- from our possessions to those around us. Included here, too, would be objects of art.

But, this is the Age of Information. And what makes it so great, that we can get information instantaneously about anything anytime, is also what makes it so flawed. In the ubiquity of information there is the danger lurking of over-saturation, over-stimulation, too much repetition. We live, alas, in the age, also, of art-whenever-you-like. It is always present, as is anything that can be converted to a digital or otherwise transmissible and storeable form. There is also, accompanying this age of information, the profit-driven engines of the Market in this post-Industrial Age. Art has been commodified, branded and sold to us.

It is now a ritual: go to the movies, or wait for the Digital Video Disc or (even better and more profitable), both. Now, following in-line with the general phenomenon of "automatic pilot", we make the proper substitutions in the case above: it's not a human being we "greet" with prefabricated, conveniently available, social platitudes; rather, it's a movie clothed in a kind of prefabricated platitude of its own: a genre, or the classical Hollywood form known all-too-well. As in the case of automatically saying "hello, how are you" to a person we might very well know rather deeply, with the ritual of movie going so oft-repeated and with movies so often clothed in genre or well-known form we inevitably loose any real connection to the film flashing before our eyes.

Every now and then, a film (or rather, the artistic vision guiding the film) will take this automatic pilot phenomenon into account, and try to "get inside" and stay with its viewer and not allow mere passivity to drown out any real human connection to the rising and falling of experience.

As in life, there must be real struggle to build meaningful human connections, connections that are quite literally "grounded" in the external world by mixing of the internal with the external. Our life, thoughts, emotions, passions, our Spirit, all get bound up to the objects and people of our lives -- but only by actively engaging the world does real connection arise. So too with art. But like a good interlocutor, real art must try to awaken in us a desire to connect, and it must itself put forth genuine effort to forge the connection.

INLAND EMPIRE meets the burden of being a good interlocutor. Its details are hard to grasp, its content sometimes allegorical and sometimes obvious. But it leads viewers into themselves -- into the realms of the dream world and the tenuous divisions there may be between our dreams (or nightmares) and our waking life. Its message -- at once so universal and yet so illusive -- is plain: we are all like the spider, weaving webs of silky conscious narrative threads, subtly interrelated but yet so spontaneously, and sometimes incongruously, linked. So was the teaching imparted by its director on the night of its departure from Washington D.C., by humbly quoting a passage from the golden treasure of human Wisdom, the sacred Upanishads.

Perhaps, after more Empires than the mind have fallen, and the great erosion of History, that sacred leveler of all the mighty, has turned to sand our great land, this celluloid-cum-digital act of meditation will dull. Once the conditions of our peculiar (and possibly idiosyncratic) situation cease, this film too will cease to have its effect on the mind. I cannot speak for Time or History. I can only speak for my own Inland Empire.