The Congress

 

Today’s topic

We’ll be discussing Folman’s film The Congress, which is loosely based on Lem’s The Futurological Congress. What does Folman borrow from Lem and to what end? What does he change (and also to what end)?

 

Course management note

Planning for the final project, which will be due on Monday, 5/3 at noon.

 

Let’s go over the quiz

1.  In the film, Robin Wright works as: (a) a politician; (b) a corporate executive; (c) an actress;

(d) a child psychologist.

2.  In order to enter or exit the animated world, people must: (a) first die; (b) take a drug; (c) sign an exploitative contract; (d) be at peace with themselves.

3.  Robin’s son Aaron: (a) has a disease; (b) wants to be like Robin when he grows up; (c) is obsessed with cars; (d) all of the above.

4.  At a certain point in the film, Robin’s character is put into cryogenic suspension for a number of years: true or false.

5.  When Robin returns to the real (unanimated) world later in the film, what does she find? She finds a bleak dystopic reality.

Start-of-class discussion

Guide questions to the film. Contributions?

1.  What did you like about this film and what didn’t you—and why?

2.  The film was inspired by Lem’s The Futurological Congress (and this is made explicit in the film itself), but it is also not a full and faithful adaptation. What connections do you see?

3.  So what exactly happens at the end of the film? This is a controversial point! Robin goes back into the animated world to find her son, and she does find him. He’s building a (Wright-brothers!) plane. As she approaches him, she sees her own reflection on the side of a reflective metal structure, and the reflection is… her son. How do we make sense of that?

Background on the film: Folman and Wright

 

The director is Ari Folman, who is known for his 2008 fully animated film Waltz with Bashir.

 

The lead actor is Robin Wright.

 

The Congress is from 2013.

This film was inspired by The Futurological Congress, but it is not a faithful adaptation. What connections do we see?

 

Some connections to Lem’s work include certain common details. The overall premise is much the same.

But the film has a story line (the love of mother for son) that is new.

 

Folman also targets Hollywood, which means he focalizes Lem. What does this give us? How might we understand this focalization as still largely faithful to Lem’s idea?

 

Most critics skip the Lem angle altogether and write about the film as an idiosyncratic dystopia. One, for example, writes that the film is “a dystopian toon satire that evokes The Matrix by way of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, or Metropolis reconceived as a cautionary Hollywood nightmare.”

 

A scholar of Lem wrote that this film is one of the “more or less complete failures to do justice to Lem’s artistic and intellectual vision.”

What exactly happens at the end of the film? Robin goes back into the animated world to find her son, and she does find him. He’s building a Wright-brothers (Wright brothers, get it?) plane. As she approaches him, she sees her own reflection on the side of a reflective metal structure, and the reflection is… her son. How do we make sense of that?

 

There are different theories here, but no definitive agreement.

 

“What it means is that everything she experienced there was chemically induced within her own brain. Robin’s experiences with her son were stored chemically in her brain, and she used that to imprint herself so that she could experience him again, chemically, in a world created within her own mind.”

“I think Robin's son left her a chemical version of him, and that allowed her to experience his life and memories from his point of view. That's why we saw when he has breastfeeding, when he was growing up, and snippets of his life. We then see Robin looking like her son (which kind of explains my theory,) in the desert where another version of her son is flying a Wright-brothers plane.”

Other critical reactions to the film

 

One reading: this is an attack on Hollywood through Hollywood. Folman made a movie “about what happens when artists throw themselves at the mercy of the studio system.”

 

Another reading: it’s really about Robin Wright.

 

A third reading: it’s about anti-commercialism: “Folman’s beguiling project amounts to a stinging indictment of mainstream culture’s unending commodification… He uses beauty and wonder as vessels for rage.”

 

Yet another that is more SF-y is that the film depicts a new kind of strangely attractive dystopia.

 

Many critics agree that the film doesn’t quite work. One writes: “The Congress is less a movie than a mood, or really, a manifesto about the value of humanity that can’t quite cohere.” Another argues that it is “an overstuffed, incoherent, crazily ambitious sci-fi epic” that “threatens to severely alienate every viewer it fails to seduce.” Yet another says that it is “a muddled cautionary tale about entertainment serving as a permanent narcotic.”

 

Still another critic went meta: “Ironically, the animators and Folman’s imagination have done their jobs so well that the film itself never convinces us of what the script asserts as fact: that reality is better than make-believe.”

Does this loose adaptation succeed?

 

It’s an experimental film, and that means taking a big risk. It’s hard to do that and succeed 100%, but really that’s ok, isn’t it? (Perfection is boring!)

Text for end-of-class discussion

Tafoya reviews the film Contributions?

 

 

Are you working on your reflection paper? It’s due soon!

 

We have a guest speaker on Thursday. To prep for the class, please read Lem’s powerful short story—one of the best SF/F short stories I’ve ever read—called “The Mask.”