HELLO WORLD, HAL 9000 and the White Hats

Away! Burn all the records of the realm.¹

Editor’s note: This is not a review meant to explain anything to a general audience; it is more a kind of free association.

0. “Wo Es war, soll Ich werden”

—“Where it was, I must come into being—this is my responsibility.”²

First, I personally do not think the supposed “puzzle” produced by this film’s nesting-doll trickery is particularly ingenious. But any viewer who ventures to pass judgment is always a paranoiac (can we really deny that behind the plot are the people who made it?). Before offering the obvious explanation, then, we must pause and turn our eyes away from the closing scene that reveals the truth so bluntly: the adult protagonist wakes in a high-tech base on the moon, and the entire film has taken place inside his head during treatment. The “consciousness” here is therefore, of course, actually that of the adult protagonist—even though the narrative remains fixed on the younger protagonist, the one singled out by the camera.

If we accept such a moment of revelation, we arrive at a conclusion sure to delight those oh-so-authentic Lacanians: is the separation between these two not precisely the distinction between the subject of enunciation and the subject of the enunciated? The adult protagonist, &, has no substantial existence in the younger protagonist’s world, because, as an empty logical variable, he is “actually lying in a hospital bed.”³ Yet he is undoubtedly “more real” than the younger protagonist, the subject of the enunciated. For although the younger protagonist has substantial existence in his world, it amounts to nothing but illusory material, historical records and computer programs, whose sole purpose is to fill the void of &.

This apparently coherent conclusion is not entirely wrong. But why must we pause before reaching it? Because this is precisely where the screenwriters and directors have hidden the trap they so eagerly hope we will fall into. The plot obliges us to acknowledge that the younger protagonist has feelings of his own, thoughts, even a will. This means that the manifold of historical records and computer programs has nevertheless come together to form a consciousness in itself: the younger protagonist (a HAL 9000 with the looks and personality of a sweet-natured high-school boy from Area 11⁴—and here is the problem. This is also a familiar metafictional routine: unimaginative imitators have breached the fourth wall so incessantly that they have demonstrated precisely how impregnable it is. I even think this is one reason the film is called “Hello World,” that age-old programmer joke).

If we follow the truth disclosed by the coda—that the subject’s identity belongs, logically, to the adult protagonist—then we can only claim that the younger protagonist is a thing that nevertheless thinks: the cogito and substance have entered into a synthesis. Yet this contradicts the necessary disappearance of the very moment in which the subject of enunciation and the subject of the enunciated are distinguished. For on this account we cannot fill the adult protagonist’s self-consciousness, a logical construction, with empirical reality given in intuition: he has no substantial existence, after all (which puts this account itself in question). Clearly, the intention here is not to cancel the adult protagonist’s reality within this world (another condition given by the plot; intriguingly, however, the younger protagonist is the only one in this world who can perceive the adult protagonist, which hints at their actual connection). In other words, the unspoken claim is plainly that there are two different but equal, self-transparent beings. Someone absolutely “awake,” arriving from the true reality behind the world of appearances (ironically, he does indeed come from so-called true reality—only it is the true reality of true reality, and he is not actually all that awake), encounters a phenomenal entity that thinks (we might even maliciously conjecture that the former comes from The Matrix and the latter from 2001: A Space Odyssey). This equality is undoubtedly imaginary: &, or the pure self-consciousness of transcendental apperception, produces effects on substance only as a possibility. That possibility cannot itself be substantialized, since once substantialized it ceases to be the self-consciousness of a pure “One” and becomes empirical consciousness, part of the phenomenal world—that is, the subject of the enunciated.

Here, then, is the transgression the screenwriters and directors try to proclaim, only to bury it cautiously beneath their device of a double simulation. Why does the adult protagonist believe that the younger heroine from the virtual system, another such thinking thing (on the basis of intersubjectivity as he understands it—an understanding that is itself problematic), can serve as the “soul” of the adult heroine’s body in “true reality” (when only a moment earlier he was looking down on the younger protagonist and his world on ethical grounds as nothing but “false programs”—a self-contradiction)? Moreover, when the adult heroine in “true reality” loses her spirit, her flesh does not disappear. In the younger protagonist’s world, by contrast, the two are synthesized: snatching away the younger heroine’s thinking makes her body in that world disappear. And because such a cogito is part of a complex reality taken as a whole (a “small piece of the world,” in the Husserlian sense), the loss of this “small piece,” the heroine, brings about the complete collapse of that reality (these supposedly equal sides are thus utterly different).⁵ In short, these contradictions necessarily push the plot toward yet another “true reality,” securing this imaginary equality within a domain of fantasy that makes it possible. (In such a domain, the two, for all their enormous differences, are each posited as a complete and self-evident S [and A]: the standard operation of the Imaginary.) For fundamentally, the cogito is not a thinking “thing.” Rather, to approach the truth here, we should use Freud to perform a kind of verbal substitution on Descartes: the cogito is the noumenal “Thing” that thinks. The coda is therefore less a moment of revelation than an ultimate fantasy. The younger protagonist is not “a–a′ (a kind of body of the Other),” but precisely “object a,” filling the void of the lost Thing: the fantasy-object of S/ (which we can straightforwardly take to be the adult protagonist—but why not also take it to be the screenwriters and directors?).

Let us now turn back to the adult protagonist’s first appearance. In a fantastical, mysterious corridor of shrine gates, a point-of-view shot places us in the younger protagonist’s position: we see a neurotic muttering to himself, repeatedly asking for coordinates—time, place and so on. Suddenly he looks at the camera (the younger protagonist) and loudly confirms his own name in the form of a rhetorical question. After this instant of the gaze, the younger protagonist turns and runs (&), with the adult protagonist in relentless pursuit. What looks like a classic scene of Althusserian interpellation is revealed, on reversing the perspective, as a scene of J(A/). In other words, this is indeed a gesture of symbolic identification, but the younger protagonist is not actually a suitable Other (because he is not an individual: although he is interpellated as a kind of “subject,” is what gets interpellated in so-called interpellation not already a subject-position [x] supported by a symbolic identity?). The adult protagonist gains symbolic confirmation of his place in this world from the younger protagonist’s alarmed response to his own name: this is my younger self [the historical record of my younger self]. That certainty is shaken only when he finds himself caught in “Che vuoi?”—“What do you want?”—at the locus of the actual Other. (The adult protagonist is declared not to be the person his name designates when the heroine says it [incidentally, the coda shows that the adult heroine is administering the treatment, while the protagonist is the one dreaming in a hospital bed: the younger heroine and the adult heroine who remains entirely hidden throughout the main film exemplify the matheme a′/A].)

This destabilization of the adult protagonist finally reaches its extreme in his abandonment of the desire to cure the heroine (which is, in fact, an insistence on that very desire). He receives “nothing” from the Other: he is not “Naomi Katagaki.” Or rather, the positive content of “Naomi Katagaki” is precisely external to him; for him, “Naomi Katagaki” is another indefinite reciprocal subject (intersubjectivity here is not determinate, as it was in his earlier understanding). In this world, he is nothing but a self-relating empty point. Only now does the subject in the hospital bed actually complete the transformation of his own unity from S to &. In this time for understanding, he sacrifices the kernel of his existence within the symbolic structure (a kernel he never possessed) in exchange for absolute negation. Only after this double delay, out of the utter uncertainty of his own identity, does he truly take back what he had assumed about his symbolic identity and wake in the hospital bed in the coda’s moment of conclusion, becoming a “real” master.⁶ & becomes S₁, definitively declaring that both worlds, and the young couple and adult protagonist within them, were nothing but a dream of “mine.”⁷ This eventual passage from S to S₁ is precisely a passage from the (object-)subject to the signifier. That is, the ego (a) that is the adult protagonist within this world is the object that I am. And the protagonist is most ignorant of precisely what he is as this (invisible) object within this world. S/ and a are incompatible, like dreaming and waking. (Topologically speaking, S/ is precisely the Real of the Möbius strip’s structure [the hole ultimately exposed by the double loop], while S and a are the two sides of its non-one-sided surface. Starting at one point on the strip, we eventually return to it [before that, we reach the other side at the same position, obtaining an effect of signified meaning produced by a combination of signifiers], tracing a circle a. If this were a circle returning to itself on a plane, it could be contracted topologically to a point; it would belong to the Imaginary. Here, however, we are not on a plane but on a torus [Möbius strip], so the circle returns to itself along a double-loop trajectory, enclosing an irreducible hole-point. If we write this trajectory as a boundary, what we obtain is a disk as object a, not a as ego. This is why S/ and a are topologically incompatible. Object a appears on the other side of the fantasy formula because it and S/ have matching boundaries that can be sutured together to form a cross-cap [the subject of fantasy], whereas a lacks the self-intersecting twist that would form this boundary.) This is the true meaning of the so-called “principle of insufficient reason” governing the symbolic order—the dream in the film. The object is not an external limit against which the subject establishes its identity (thinking so would leave us as deeply caught in the puzzle as the protagonist is at the start). Rather, the object is extimate to the subject: it is precisely the subject’s internal limit. (Here we really must trot out the old refrain: spirit is a bone—an ineliminable mediation.)

Thus, even as we are heartened by the seemingly liberating atmosphere of the happy ending to this science-fiction adventure in search of the true self, we should recognize the film’s unmistakable Oedipal stance. The protagonist initially enters the dream for the sake of the desire of the comatose heroine (the lost maternal Other). In the process, however, he identifies with an empty signifier: the identity of the patient (the one who actually occupies the subject-position), stripped of all determinate content. In the end, he instead abandons his original demand. What happens here looks like a process of replacing “the fixed identity ‘Naomi Katagaki’” (the Name-of-the-Father) with “the absence of a fixed identity.” But is the truth of this process not, on the contrary, precisely that it ends by substituting the Name-of-the-Father for the Other’s desire? Every moment in the film when a world reveals its virtual meaning as a virtual space is therefore precisely a moment when the paternal metaphor erupts (when the adult and younger protagonists seize the younger heroine from each other).⁸ At such a moment, negated by himself, the protagonist transcends his symbolic identity as a void. A breach opens in the symbolic order, and all the characters suddenly discover that they actually inhabit a domain of fantasy, an electronic universe full of fox-masked monsters. At this instant, the adult protagonist faces not only the danger posed by the monsters but also an ethical responsibility: to preserve this world, or to let the young couple go regardless of the world’s collapse. This ethical responsibility breaks in just as abruptly as the content of a traumatic superego injunction (the monsters are actually antivirus software maintaining order). In the name of restoring the balance of the whole, it disrupts the adult protagonist’s internal balance as a subject at that moment, forcing him to abandon his original demand (the pursuit of pleasure) and thus to act “beyond the pleasure principle.” From a certain naïve angle, are the film’s inexplicable battles not precisely “‘my’ object a brandishing the Imaginary against the Real within the Symbolic”?

Incidentally, the crow’s assistance and the fox masks’ assault are clearly a pincer attack on the ego by the id and superego [in the Freudian sense]. The two are not opposed (the film’s uncanny, colorful space makes their common origin explicit). In fact, the latter advances the former’s victory in the name of prohibition (the crow was actually set up by the adult heroine). This is the truth of the ethical responsibility discussed above—and of what makes the premise of all so-called sekaikei works possible.⁹ Why not imagine an even crazier scene? What awaits the protagonist when he wakes is not the gentle heroine who has waited and watched over him for years, but a horrifying fact: he is merely a brain in a vat, without even an optic nerve hooked up (then perhaps Netflix would come running to snap up a sequel because it was just so avant-garde). Is the Other not, in fact, set up in advance for the subject’s enjoyment—jouissance—as an excuse for believing that one need not really bear ethical responsibility? (Because “the truth is that there is actually another real world,” the protagonist’s decision to sacrifice the world becomes the correct option. This reminds me of the ending of Weathering with You. We should admit that the protagonist’s choice, condemned by some viewers as “cruel,” is precisely the right one, because this is a [sekaikei] animated film, and outside it “there is another real world [the audience’s world].”) This allows us once again to discover Freud’s great transgression in animation, that “ultimate pervert art”:¹⁰ what is truly killed is not the primal father, but the fact that he does not exist.