Vol. IV: Freedom vs. Control
As humans in the world, we have a plethora of identities depending on where we are, what we’re doing, or who we’re talking to. We cannot always control how we’re perceived by others, but we have the freedom to change and live life “our way.” The only way to fully embrace one’s humanity is to stick to one identity, where we acknowledge all emotions and events unapologetically. All of the films discussed in this final volume exemplify varying facets of freedom and control regarding our senses of self and how the world around us impacts them.
You may recall the Scramble Suit from A Scanner Darkly. The scramble suit makes Arctor the perfect “everyday man,” yet it still provides him with a double identity. He cannot be himself, so he masks it with a suit. It provides him with a sense of security during his job, where he’s busting people with the drug Substance D. ? Arctor can’t freely express his facials or even use his own voice to iterate points. It’s still constricting how he’s viewed in the world, not allowing him to choose who he wants to be. The suit strips him of the freedom to be himself
If being yourself is dangerous, if leading with a double identity is the only way to survive, then are you really getting the genuine human experience? One should think not. Because of this, the Scramble Suit can be used as a metaphor across all of these films; every person has one, and each person struggles with an internal sense of self and control of their lives.
Unscrambling Synecdoche, New York
This whole scene talks about the impact that each of us makes on the world around us, whether we realize it or not. Everyone is a lead in their own story. We contain the identities that we see and that others see, but there’s more to us than that. We are supposed to only have one life, one chance to work these problems out, but through his years-long process of creating this ‘play,’ Caden tries to fix his mistakes, obsessively looking for where he went wrong. His Scramble Suit, the disguise he uses to hide his weaknesses and have control, is his project. He can’t legitimately fix any of his past mistakes or learn from them when he’s so focused on reliving the past, watching his life like a spectator. This whole funeral is almost like a call-to-Jesus moment for Caden, where he mourns who he used to be.
In the end, Caden is afraid to die a nobody. He’s spent all of his life working on his ‘play,’ working on figuring out where he slipped up, that he’s pushed everyone away and cut off anyone that was there for him. Allowing his story to be told would have liberated him, connected him -- however, it ended up controlling him and isolating him instead. He was so obsessed with controlling his circumstances that he ended up, ironically, being caged. The more we fixate on how we’re viewed, our identities, our past, the less free we become to grow.
Unscrambling The Matrix….
Neo’s Scramble Suit is this pill, it helps him to grasp how the world sees him. Morpheus’ pills grant Neo the one “controlled” and deliberate decision that Neo’s ever really been able to make: continue his life as is in the Matrix, or to free his mind and join the real world, even if it isn’t as glamorous.
Neo and the people in the Matrix are trapped in a world in which they have no legitimate control. We’ve allowed this idealistic technology to consume us, to take us over, taking away any legitimate freedom we have. It’s as easy as being in a dream, but it isn’t real.
Unscrambling Vanilla Sky…
David’s Scramble Suit is this dream state that masks his unhappiness, his depression, his ultimate overdose. His death plans allow him to redefine himself, separating alive-David from dead-David. Would it not be better if David had known that he killed himself? To learn from the mistakes, to learn that looks aren’t everything that make a person? While free from knowing about this “real life,” David hasn’t exactly learned any lessons from his real existence.
In films such as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the depiction of freedom and control is quite different from the other films examined. In those, the individual knowingly struggles with themselves or struggles with two parts of themselves that are vying for control; in this film, the search for freedom and control stems from each character’s dependence on another person. Clementine and Joel work as each other’s Scramble Suits as ways to deflect their insecurities onto another person instead of themselves.
In this scene, it’s as if Joel and Clementine are in the beginnings of their relationship. She’s already deflecting being worthy of him because she’s sick of being an accessory to elevate everyone’s mood but her own. This grants Clementine multiple identities and concepts of who she is. In Joel’s mind, she does complete him and is his dream girl; however, in another life, Clementine erases her memories of Joel, which is evidence that she needed him to fix her as well, but it didn’t work out the way she’d hoped. Instead of gaining a sense of self and control over her life with him, she felt helpless. To Clementine, a spotless mind is the only source of freedom. She’d rather have a spotless mind than be perceived incorrectly by others and know that fact -- however, in real life, in our lives, we don’t have that blessing. We can only hope that we know ourselves well enough so as to not let the interpretations of others get in our heads.
In the films Fight Club. Black Swan, Whiplash, and Memento, the main characters struggle with freeing themselves from the various voices in their heads that cause them to struggle with creating the perfect life. The Scramble Suits are alter egos such as the reckless vigilante, artistic perfectionist, or Sisyphean ‘hero’ influence how these people are perceived in the world and what they feel their purpose should be.
Norton’s character acknowledges that he equated his collection of material possessions with his quality of life. His couch, stereo, and wardrobe show that he was so close to being an “adult.” Being respectable, in his eyes, only comes with physical markers. Forget being identified and remembered for who you are as a person -- it’s about what your home looks like. However, Brad Pitt’s character, Tyler Durden, has the right idea about these possessions. We don’t even live in simplicity and survival mode like our ancestors' past: we live to consume. This is how we hide and suit ourselves up to deal with the world before us. We consume things to represent and stress our individuality in society to escape the mundane, but it actually only traps us more in the consumerism cycle. It’s not murderers or crime or indecency that are going to destroy our society, but the magazines and celebrities that we try to model ourselves after. They are controlling our lives and prohibiting us from feeling free and unburdened. This unattainable goal that we all have as people takes away our ability to leave freely, so we must be aware of what we’re doing so, as Tyler says, the things we own don’t end up owning us.
Because of her regimented nature, it’s hard for Nina to let go and play both the black and white swan in the ballet. Throughout the film, Lily serves as Nina’s parallel, representing everything Nina struggles to be. Lily is imprecise - she doesn’t care about being perfect. Even their physicality and appearance are extremely contrasting. Nina is always dressed in pastels with a tight bun, whereas Lily is clothed in black, her dark hair constantly in disarray. Lily’s movements are frenetic as she smiles, while Nina is stoic and unmoving. Nina feels controlled and constricted by her suit, whereas Lily has freedom -- it represents the poles of Nina’s identity, where she is and where she wants to be.
At this point in the scene, Lily’s representation melds with Nina’s actual self, and she no longer serves a purpose. It represents that Nina has finally welcomed the “Black Swan” part of herself in a desperate attempt to be perfect, to obtain that sense of control. The mirror is shattered, demonstrating that Nina is in the middle of an identity crisis -- she longer feels like the woman that is displayed by the glass. She sees it as Lily, her competitor, but it’s really her embracing her darkness through an act of ‘sacrifice’ in order to accurately portray the Black Swan. If murder, metaphorical or not, is what it takes to get what she wants, so be it.
A swan is born. Here, Nina gains a sense of artistic freedom, letting her body move the way it wants and the art to be seen in its proper light when she stops trying to control herself. She lets her body rule her mind in order to achieve the perfect performance. The less she thinks about it, the more she melds into the black swan that she’s meant to be, that she wants to be. That’s figuratively demonstrated in the wings growing on her body the more she becomes hypnotized by her turns.
The alter ego wants perfection, to be relevant.
This short clip blurs the lines between one’s fascination with control to make a name for oneself but simultaneously demonstrates a lack of control over the body and mind. Andrew has so many emotions brewing at once.
Once again, a demonstrative point that this musician's alter ego wants to control Andrew’s opinions of himself. The arts are supposed to be about letting go and transcending physical feeling -- in other words, they’re supposed to be a path to enlightenment and release, an escape from the banal facets of reality. However, there’s a fine line between that and loss of freedom instead. The more an obsession grows and the stronger fixation with perfection and control becomes, the more we end up losing ourselves. It happens to Nina in her metaphorical deaths and metamorphosis, and it happens to Andrew in this car crash scene where he technically should have died.
Instead of dying, it’s as if this new, stone-cold, determined young man emerges from the broken glass. When he escapes the mounds of crushed glass, he’s a changed person. More cynical, and covered in blood instead of it just covering his hands like it did in the prior scene. Similar to Nina’s identity crisis/death scene, this accident symbolizes that his desire to impress and prove himself to Fletcher has consumed his being. The performance is no longer about enjoying or expressing himself: it’s about being perfect and proving others wrong.
If memory really is only relative to truth, then the most authentic life we can lead is one where we never dwell on the past, we’re only looking ahead so as not to tarnish what we’ve experienced. But, if you never dwell on the past, then you can’t grow from it, creating an unbreakable cycle of questioning one’s purpose and existence and control. You’ll never be free.
It’s said that we, as humans, can be measured by the sum of our actions. However, if we don't’ remember those actions, how do we forge a purpose, an identity? We still have one, but it’s hardly genuine. In Leonard’s case, he constantly places his freedom and self-worth in the hands of others, strangers (to him) because that’s the only way he can continue to live. “I have to believe that even when my eyes are closed, the world is still here...my actions still have meaning.”
The conditions of humanity are inevitably messy. What do we really have control over when it comes to how we see the world? It seems as though those terms are defined by us as much as we want them to be, we can try and create a scramble suit to deflect from our problems We can choose to let other people affect our way of thinking and seeing the world, or we can try and forge our own path to better ourselves, even if it’s the more challenging one. Being “scrambled” isn’t a bad thing -- we shouldn’t use it in an effort to hide. To be a person and enjoy the human experience, one must embrace the incoherence and messiness that comes down the line. It makes us interesting.
To be human is to find our purpose, to attempt to master our circumstances to our own discretion and to attempt to embrace emotions without shame, to always bring an insightful struggle or experience to the table.