Limited

NOTE: A version of this review will be posted at Flood Magazine. I'm just trying out my marketability, that's all. We'll see if anyone reads it there.

Interested in the proliferation of sci fi/realism films that landed on us in, say, February or March (Adjustment Bureau, Source Code, Limitless, probably others I have forgotten), we rented Limitless for Friday night, eager to see the moral conundrum of pharmaceutical narcotics improvement. The premise seems right: a guy gets a miracle pill that allows him to use "100% of his brain" rather than the same old noodles (the movie claims the 20 percent we normally use), and he suddenly becomes Sherlock Holmes in a cool guy jacket with no tie. He figures out the formula for making lots of money with stocks, has total recall of everything he has even incidentally read or seen, and likes to exercise more. Complications come up that he has to think his way out of (sometimes with the miracle pill, sometimes without), and he meets Robert De Niro and they have a few conversations. The movie ends with him running for the Senate and getting a new haircut, all the while being smart, ruthless, conniving, and handsome.

So, in a sci fi/realism film, which I'll define by explaining that it presents us with a realistic world in which something supernatural or impossible encroaches, to which the real world must react appropriately (the logic of each situation becomes the crux here: in a realistic world, an answer for the supernatural is crucial to the invitation of our belief, the suspension of disbelief not fully dialed in with the realistic setting, so the movies usually spend some time explaining the minutiae of the miracle with quantum physics or chemistry). The genre dramatizes certain commonplace existential or ethical questions that might arise: if you could have any wish in the world, what would it be? if you could go back in time, what would you change? if your knowledge could destroy the universe, would you lie? is cutting your hair indicative of success?

I like these movies, and really enjoyed Source Code, even if I had some misgivings about the ending. But I have a major issue with Limitless, and it is not just with its interest in male hair styles. So, let's perform the thought experiment that the writers inevitably performed while writing the movie. 1) if you could use all of your brain, what would you think about? 2) how fast would you think? 3) what would you do? The only one of those questions that has a verifiable answer is the second, so let's put that aside. In the film, though, the protagonist, once he could use all of his brain, thought about self-improvement, the kind that comes with a hot body, lots of money, and more girls. Before he took the pill, he was a self-described writer with writer's block, but after his first hit, he wrote the book in one sitting, handed it to the publisher, and moved on to better things, like cutting his hair and buying suitcoats and cliff diving with hot girls. The first thing to go was his status as a writer, a job certainly not suited for someone with the use of all their brain, in favor of his job as an investor, which no doubt requires 80% more of the brain than a measly writer. Can you see where I am going here? My belief in the premise ended at the moment he stopped writing.

At any rate, as indicated by the first moment, what was most disturbing about the movie was its view of intelligence: there seemed to be a direct correlation of brain usage to shallowness. This view of the brain capacity is, well, limited. As more brain was available, the more he became a bit of a sociopath, disregarding others in his own pursuit of self-interest. This was the point of the writers, right? A morality tale in which someone is given everything but loses his sense of good? If this was the point, the writers failed to understand their own premise--they seemed completely seduced by the surface desires of lust, power, and shiny surfaces.

But what would really happen if we could use all of our brain? To the evolutionary psychologist, we would perhaps do what the protagonist did, increase our capacity for self-interest, survival, and competition, destroying others on a path of absolute self-preservation. This, to me, seems cynical, depressing, and wrong. In the newish field of "positive psychology," neuro-psychologists have found that our power of empathy and emotion is also located in certain functions of the brain, perhaps the parts that are not accessed as much as the others. That is, what if the greater access to the brain we had, the greater access to ethical thought would occur, the greater our emotions would be, the more compassion we'd have? It seems just as plausible: indeed, Dacher Keltner and others have argued that the altruistic impulses are perhaps among the greatest of biological influences upon our species, so even evolutionary psychologists could begin to make the argument that the further evolved we become, the nicer we get (which is why we'll all be liberals in 100 years). A more interesting movie would have the protagonist, upon full use of his brain, operate on an ethical and emotional level that would seem totally foreign to his petty 20 percenters who can't access higher levels of love.

So what does the 80 percent of the unused brain contain? Maybe the mysteries of God, maybe the celestial soul, maybe the capacity for ruthless self-interest. But I think a good clue to what that 80 percent is comes from the study of the humanities and the recognition of joy. This is all conjecture, but that is the point: when one reads a good book, listens to good music, sees good art (the kind wherein "good" or any other evaluative language can only be a approximation, a metaphor of language that will never adequately convey its power), the feeling is transcendent. The sense of things is ineffable, undefinable, but also as real to the self as a mathematical proof. But the sense of transcendence is always impossible to describe because the 20 percent of our brain can't do it justice: we have just glimpsed something that belongs to the 80 percent and there are not definable answers available for articulation. I could go in several directions now: 1) that sense of transcendence, perhaps the Spirit, perhaps profound emotion, perhaps elevation, comes from a synaptic process that we really know very little about; 2) the glimpse of what the brain is not consciously doing is the glimpse of a world beyond mortality, accessible only in ways we don't understand and therefore have religions with attendant mysteries; 3) the "dark matter" of our brain corresponds to the "dark matter" of the universe, a playing field that we have yet to know; 4) this strange ineffable feeling, corresponding most closely to powerful emotion, motivates us more in our everyday decisions than any rational process or survival instinct; 5) this is where criticism gets its power--to come close to a description of the feeling derived from art is to allow the 20 percent to get close to 21 percent. But finally, I'll suggest that the unknowable stuff is the genesis of true joy, that men are: love and beauty.

I want to see a movie in which a person with the full use of his brain has a heightened sense of love and beauty beyond the capacity for mere mortals. And what would that person do? Write a book.