Hubris

As many of you probably know, I’m a film student. This semester my life has been consumed by the production of my junior project, which until recently has been titled Illumen. As of week ago,  I made a major change to structure of the project, and as a result, the project goes right along with what we’ve been talking about in class. But before I describe how that is, let me describe what Illumen was. 

Ever since I read a book by Daniel Quinn called Ishmael, I’ve been obsessed with displaced myths. That book focused on Genesis and the anthropological events that led to the creation of that most famous of creation stories, and made it clear to me that the seeds of myth had been planted in my mind long before I knew what the word dispersal meant. Because of that, even before this semester started I knew I wanted to create a myth based around contemporary society that could wield societal events and ideas as symbols. The idea was simple.

                Once upon a time, there was a world consumed by darkness…

All the people lived gathered around a single lightbulb, unblinking, their pupils permanently constricted. The lives of the people were disgusting at best; they were constantly sick and seldom spoke to one another. They never left the lightbulb though, because they were all so terrified of the surrounding darkness. The darkness whispered and moved, alive and ominous.

                Then one day (if you can call it that), the lightbulb flickered and went dim for no reason at all. The people panicked. They pushed and fought each other to get as close to the faded light as possible. Two children volunteered to follow the lights extension cord and fix whatever is on the other end, taking with them only a lantern and a rusty sword. 

                They followed the cord through the dark all the way to a rickety shack. Inside the shack, the cord connected to a glowing box chained to the floor. From the box came an inhuman voice that was weeping unmistakably. The Power Box shook, rattled and sobbed, and could not be comforted by the children despite their best efforts. Connected to the Power Box was a Pump. On the floor in front of the pump was carved the phrase “it must be done.” The children pumped it, and with each pump came a scream of anguish from the Box. Still, knowing what was at stake, the children kept pumping for as long as they could.

                The pumping charged the lightbulb, and the people calmed down; everything was back to normal. On the walk back, the children began to argue about what they’d seen and done. Suddenly, the darkness itself rumbled like thunder, frightening them both. From it, a voice spoke. “You have been blinded by your own light. The only way to regain your sight is to let your eyes adjust to the night.” One of the children, a girl, took their lantern and turned it off, against the pleas of her friend. 

                For a moment, they were immersed in total darkness. Slowly though, stars faded in above them, and their eyes adjusted to the dark, revealing a gorgeous landscape of a massive world all around them. Overwhelmed by the truth of their situation, the children took the sword, and severed the cord powering the lightbulb.

The end.

That was a simplified as I could make it, hopefully it makes some kind of sense. Here's a breakdown of some of the ideas I used:

·         Illumen = ill + lumen = sick light

·         the lightbulb is a symbol for technological progress

·         the darkness is a symbol for the natural world, which I feel is largely unknown in today’s society.

·         The whole story is an inverted allegory for the cave: the people are “trapped” but it is by a device of their own creation. I know the cave allegory has a notorious reputation amongst the honors kids, but it’s a massively important and relevant framework, so deal with it.

·         Light is symbol for knowledge and enlightenment, but it has become a source for distraction and blindness.

·         Darkness is a natural and contains a wealth of knowledge, but it has been mislabeled and misinterpreted as a symbol for evil and fear. 

Basically, I find that people are unaware of the beauty that surrounds them, and because of their reliance on technology and preset definitions of progress, they fear a world that lacks the safety and warmth of the lightbulb of modern society. 

I have been very excited to bring this idea into reality, largely because I feel it reflects reality so directly by playing with inversions and contradictions like the light that blinds. Sadly, due to several unfortunate factors, the footage we got didn’t communicate the story very well. Don’t get me wrong, the general story arc was there, and in a sense the footage looked really cool. However, it was too clumsy and too loose to captivate an audience in the way that would be necessary to simulate or recreate the enlightenment felt by the children when the stars come out. Maybe I’m too much of a perfectionist, but I can’t settle for that. The footage was never going to tell the story right, and the “how” of storytelling is absolutely essential to conveying any kind of meaning. Still, I couldn’t just walk away from the footage; too many people worked too hard to make it, and I personally had spent too much money on making it happen. So I found myself stuck: I needed to use the footage to tell a story, but that story could not be the story the footage was supposed to be telling, simply because the footage could not tell that story the right way. I needed a new story for the same old footage.

The project I am working on has been re-named Hubris, and it tells the story of my semester: me and my struggles to tell the story of Illumen. It opens with the cast and crew of Illumen on a very standard film set, waiting impatiently for the director to arrive. Suddenly the door flies open, and I run in covered in mud and filth screaming, “Everyone! I’ve had an idea! We’re changing everything, the whole movie is different!” I then proceed to try and explain the story of Illumen to them, which they don’t give a shit about and constantly lampoon it while I tell it. For example, as I narrate “all the people live gathered around a single lightbulb” the footage from that segment of Illumen plays. Then a cast member yells out, “I have an idea! What if instead of a lightbulb, it’s a strobe light!” The movie cuts back to the film studio, and the crew launches into an argument about whether it should be a strobe light or a lava lamp, much to the chagrin of my characterized version of myself.

This happens over and over again until the cast is so excited about making a movie radically different than the one I’m describing that they run out of the studio cheering, leaving me behind and disappointed. It’s looking really funny so far, and I can’t wait to see how it turns out.

There’s a reason I did this though. The story of Illumen is actually a broken allegory for the cave: when the children cut the cord, they forcibly enlighten the people sitting around the lightbulb. The actual allegory for the cave ends with the enlightened not being able to convince the people in the cave to leave, and those people mocking and laughing at the enlightened. If anything, Illumen is a Prometheus story, but the fact that I mixed up the most important element of the cave allegory made me realize something: I’m not enlightened. That one truth allowed me to spin the whole project back on myself, ridding it of any self-righteous elements in exchange for those of self-deprecation.

Hubris is a real cave allegory: I run into the studio trying to convince the crew of some great truth I’ve discovered (which is Illumen, making this a cave within a cave), but failing to do so. Not only is this a double dispersal of the cave, but it made me realize that my life outside of this project is equally cave-themed. Here, in the middle of a class about mythological dispersals and a project where I was trying to disperse a myth, I found myself being a vessel through which that same myth was operating. I’d been fighting it this semester, thinking it was a conscious choice to live a myth, but indeed, the potential of my project increased exponentially as soon as I realized that my actual experience with my was far more interesting than the one I was trying to create for people. Not only that, I think this story gets across the point of the cave story far clearer than Illumen: Illumen was about enlightenment, Hubris is about miscommunication. 

I will be re-making Illumen this summer, and I can’t wait. I couldn’t get over how well this whole experience has related to our class, so I had to tell you guys. 

Oh, and Hubris will be showing in the SUB during finals week, come check it out!