Conservatives like to point out that Hollywood does not reflect the values of mainstream America, and I think there's some truth to that. But it looks like things are changing.
My twelve-year-old son wanted to see the Scorch Trials. It's the second in a series of movies, adapted from a series of Young Adult novels. I guess the series has been billed as "the Hunger Games for boys," which seems accurate. We had seen and enjoyed the first movie in the series (the Maze Runner).
My son liked the Scorch Trials, and I enjoyed it while I was watching it. It was nice and action-y without being too violent. But thinking about it afterward, I realized it's very very similar to another movie I've seen and reviewed recently:
Divergent. Not only are there similar stories and characters, but these two movies share a conservative world view. They actually deal with philosophical ideas, so I am appreciative that there's something going on under the surface, even though I don't agree with the conclusions.
Divergent and the Scorch Trials share some overt similarities:
- Set in a dystopian future (with pockets of civilization among large areas of lawlessness, ruins, and filth),
- a ragtag bunch of teens
- (who share some special trait which may help save the world, but which keeps them from fitting in)
- and who fight against an oppressive power structure
- (the leader of which is a woman).
Going a little deeper, we find that the underlying message of both movies is: don't trust the liberals......their philosophy may sound good, but it's morally wrong, and will lead to more suffering and injustice (it's bad in theory and in practice). In the case of Divergent, the liberal idea that the movie demonizes is that government knows best, and people should accommodate to government power for their own good. Now, maybe there is some liberal somewhere who believes this, but I don't and I don't know anyone who does. It's not really a liberal idea, it's a conservative caricature of a liberal idea.
With the Scorch Trials, the demonized idea is utilitarianism (or rather, a cartoon version of utilitarianism). Here's how it works (warning: spoilers). The zombie apocalypse has happened (caused by a virus or something), our hero and his plucky companions are immune, and the key to finding a cure is in their blood. A big bad organization has taken them prisoner, and is doing non-consensual and horrifying experiments on similar teens, in an effort to find a cure. It's not clear if the bad guys (known somewhat unsubtly as WCKD) are in fact the government or what, but they might as well be. They're the oppressive power in the movie.
So, if the bad guys hold people against their will and use their precious bodily fluids to help others, it's a form of forced re-distribution. The bad guys are taking liberty (and life) from some individuals, to increase the overall well-being of society. It's the perfect nightmare for conservatives and libertarians. And I have to give some points to the writers, for making this bogyman philosophy attractive enough that one of the main characters falls for it and betrays her fellow teens. The bad ideas are not plainly wrong, they're
seductive.
The trouble is, pretty much nobody believes in this terrible version of utilitarianism (just as with Divergent, nobody believes that individuals are so malleable that they can and should be forced to serve the government). The right-wing types conflate coercive taking of money (that is to say, taxes) with coercive taking of bodies and lives. It's a confusion I've seen many times in debates with the right. They don't want to pay taxes, so they convince themselves that taxes are literally slavery.
Oh, by the way, the author of Divergent (the book) is a born-again Christian, and the author of the Scorch Trials (the book) is a Mormon. I am not surprised. [I don't know anything about the screenwriters, and I'm too lazy to do any research on them. Below, I'll speak of "the writers," conflating the book version of the Scorch Trials and the movie version.]
Okay, so now we've looked at the most obvious layer of the Scorch Trial movie (plot and characters), then we went a little deeper at the philosophical points that the writers intended. But now we're going even deeper, into the writers' subconscious commitments. Now we're out of the realm of philosophy, and into the realm of identity. These observations will necessarily be more speculative than what I've discussed so far.
I hate to do this, but my honest reading of the movie is that at the most fundamental level, it's a straight white male's anxiety about his country being taken over by women, gays, and people of color.
The two main female characters are the bad guy boss (played by Patricia Clarkson) and our hero's love interest (played by Kaya Scodelario). Now the Clarkson character is interesting. She's not a cruel person, in fact her intentions are good. (There is an actually evil character for contrast, played by the guy who plays Littlefinger in Game of Thrones.....again I'm too lazy to look him up, so sue me.) Her problem is not that she has an evil heart, it's that she's a
true believer in an evil philosophy (that the end justifies the means). Typical woman, right? A soft heart, but a soft head to go a long with it. And the Scodelaria character also buys into the evil philosophy, and ends up betraying her friends (all for the greater good, of course). So, the female characters are not evil, they're
weak, and it would have been better if they'd never been placed in a position to act on their
feelings. Just as Eve betrayed Adam and brought sin into the world. Surely you can see why women in power are dangerous? Or so this movie would like us to believe.
There is only one character who seems to be anything other than heterosexual. Of course he is amoral, a drug dealer, and a liar. But worse than that is the fact that that he's tortured by the good guys, in a scene I found very disturbing in a movie aimed at teens. None of the characters had any qualms about torturing this guy. I suppose that's right in line with the conservative willingness to torture people who are suspected of not being on our side. Interestingly, the seemingly gay character is not tortured by our (white) hero, or by his original companions, but by the Giancarlo Esposito character. In the movie, as in real life, the "good guys"
support torture, but we're too sensitive to actually do it ourselves, so we outsource the dirty work to some brown people (because they're really just savages, I guess).
Speaking of brown people, I've saved my most speculative point for last. In the movie, the US is mostly a huge deserted wasteland. Ah, but it's not deserted, really. There are......zombies! They don't call them that, they call them plague victims or something. So if you get bit or scratched by one of them, you turn into one. I believe this is a symbol for the US being "taken over" by Mexican immigrants. They're savages, they're dirty, they're violent, and they must be avoided or gotten rid of. This fits in perfectly with the unconscious racism so many conservatives feel. I'll never forget the time I was listening to a couple of conservatives talk about illegal immigration. They made a lot of good points, but the most striking part of that nigh for me was that at different points in the conversation, immigrants were said to "breed like cockroaches" and to "spread like cancer." This attitude of disgust and anxiety seems to me what drives these folks' policy preferences. And it seems to me it's also what's at the heart of the Scorch Trials.
Oh, I almost forgot! This is a shallow movie review, and all I'm really concerned with is feminine charms. So with no further ado, the women I love in this movie. First, Patricia Clarkson. I think she's just fabulous! She, along with Stanley Tucci, is one of the best things about one of my favorite movies of all time, Easy A.
And then there's Lili Taylor! Her movies seem to be few and far between, but there's always something about her that's very grounded and real.
She seems like a good person. Maybe it's just acting, I don't know.
Last and least, there's Kaya Scodelaria. She's merely gorgeous.
