"Prometheus": A Movie Review. Part III.

[Friedrich]

II. "The Crucifix": Religion Within the Province of Reason Alone.

The search for humanity's "Creator" and for human origins is really
the search for ourselves. It is the effort to understand ourselves.
Stanislas Lem writes:

"We take off into the cosmos, ready for anything, for solitude, for
hardship, for exhaustion, death. Modesty forbids us to say so, but
there are times when we think pretty well of ourselves. And yet, if we
examine it more closely, our enthusiasm turns out to be all a sham. We
don't want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the
boundaries of the Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos. ... We think
of ourselves as the Knights of the Holy Contact. This is another lie.
We are only seeking man. We have no need of other worlds. We need
mirrors."

"Solaris" (New York: Harcourt, Inc. 1970), pp. 72-73. (Translated from
French by Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox, after the Polish text of
1961). Please compare Leszek Kolakowski, 'On the So-Called Crisis of
Christianity,' in "Modernity On Endless Trial" (Chicago: U. Chicago
Press, 1997), p. 86.

The search for a homecoming, the feeling of loss after God's departure
from history (Deus Absconditus), haunts this movie. This has nothing
to do with a literal search for aliens who visited our planet
centuries ago, but with the allegory of God, or god-like "creators" of
humanity. In order for humanity to be free of design ("They designed
us!"), a creator-God's second action would be to disappear from the
universe.

This defense of free will allowed by a vanishing God is a feature, for
example, of the metaphysics of John Duns Scotus. Nietzsche's comment
that the death of God -- or the murder of the gods by man -- is a
crime that is "still too great for us" is brought to mind in this
movie. God's absence is felt and mourned by Mr. Scott whose Christian
education is showing in "Prometheus."

The archeologist, Shaw (Ms. Rapace), and her boyfriend, Halloway (Mr.
Marshall), embody the curiosity that defines our species. They are
among several pairs of dialectical twins in this movie, a kind of Adam
and Eve. "Prometheus" has a twin-sister or parallel myth in the story
of "Pandora" who unleashes all evils on the world, but also ushers in
hope for humanity. ("Where's my crucifix?")

A second pair of dialectical twins, Meredith (Charlize Theron), and
the HAL and Peter O'Toole-like robot, Dave (played by Michael
Fassbender), dramatize the tension between human and inhuman that
obsessed 20th century science fiction. For example, Philip K. Dick's
"Blade Runner" and several of Mr. Dick's philosophical essays are
devoted to this topic which is also found in the works of Assimov,
Bradbury, Ellison and Lem. (See my list of books, if I am able to
provide a list of sources. My group was tampered with today as I
attempted to write this text.)

An obvious mythological reference for this dialectical and bi-gendered
pair is Krishna/Arjuna in "The Bhagavad Gita." We do not find God
among the aliens, but only the "mirror-image" of man -- selfish,
brutal, appetitive, and driven by an urge to dominance over others.
Plato's shadows on the cave wall become holograms." The cave or dark
interior of an ancient and abandoned spaceship becomes an image of the
subconscious (movie theater?) by way of Conrad ("The Heart of
Darkness") and Freud ("Civilization and its Discontents"), but also a
reflection of the Holocaust with the piling of alien bodies, like
refuse, before a seemingly permanently shut door.

Death is the consequence of life. We are necessarily devouring
organisms who excrete everything that we ingest, including this movie,
eventually. Yet we are capable of love. Our alienation from one
another is FURTHERED by science which reduces life forms and
subjectivities to laboratory "objects." A machine performs surgery on
a person who, scientifically, is only another machine.

How many robots are there in this movie? Has Mr. Scott experienced
surgery, recently? There but for the grace of God go all of us.

Technology makes us all nothing but intellect "connected" to machines
with various "aps." Few of us now are deeply "connected" to others,
despite E.M. Forster's advice. We merely interact for mutual
convenience. We have become all head and no heart. The history of our
dangerous species has brought us only to the edge of self-destruction
by way of our marvelous gadgets. The question left to audiences at the
conclusion of this movie and after we read the daily newspaper is --
"Will humanity survive?".