Opinion: This movie takes on American individualism at its most absurd
Editor’s Note: Noah Berlatsky (@nberlat) is a freelance writer in Chicago. The views expressed here are his own. View more opinion on CNN.
Hollywood films of diverse genres have one point in common — they’re all about the most important person in the universe. That most important person could be an amnesiac assassin fighting a mysterious government conspiracy, or some guy (or girl) seeking true love. It could be a kid bitten by a radioactive insect or a different kid rocketed from a distant planet. Whatever the narrative is, the film focuses on the person at the center of it. They are the main character; everyone else is secondary.
That Hollywood default reflects and encourages a vision of life as individual struggle and individual triumph. The goal of life is success and self-actualization as the main character of your own dream. That dovetails with the messages of the multi-billion-dollar self-help industry, with its motivational speakers (Tony Robbins, Deepak Chopra) and keto diets. “A person’s success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have,” author and lifestyle guru Tim Ferriss insists. “We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, handsome, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be?” self-help author (turned political candidate) Marianne Williamson adds. By being courageous, and believing in ourselves, we can be better, stronger, faster, thinner, so the thinking goes. We can be the main character and win.
Actor Jake Johnson’s quirky directorial debut feature “Self Reliance” takes this idea of personal narrative triumph and hugs it so tightly it starts to thrash and giggle and liquify. Being the main character and filling up the world isn’t fun or cool or awesome in Johnson’s view. Instead, it’s an exercise in narcissism and paranoia bordering on madness. If you were really the star of a Hollywood film, Johnson’s story suggests, you’d be a broken human being — not a tower of self-reliance, but a self-deluded clown.
The person at the center of the movie about being at the center of a movie is Tommy Walcott (played by Johnson himself). He’s a cubicle worker in a nothing job whose girlfriend of 23 years (Natalie Morales) broke up with him. He’s living with his mother when actor Andy Samberg (as himself) appears in a limousine and takes him to a warehouse where a couple of weird guys offer him the chance to appear on a dark web gameshow.
The game is murder. He will be hunted for 30 days by freelance assassins. If he survives, he will receive $1 million. The catch is that the hunters won’t attack while he’s with someone else, so he just needs to keep a friend or loved one with him at all times and he’s safe.
With that set-up, the film sounds like a parody of the Ludlum-esque, John Wick-ish man-alone genre of action thriller, in which one guy fights off an endless string of highly-trained baddies. Tommy has no intention of fighting anyone off, and no intention of being alone. He tries to enlist his sisters and his mother to shadow him. He follows his (surprisingly chill) brother-in-law into the bathroom. This action movie is an exercise, not in self-reliance, but in strategic co-dependence.
That would be a funny movie in itself. Johnson, though, isn’t satisfied with just mocking action films. Instead, the movie meanders through a mishmash of genres. There’s a dash of zany buddy comedy when Tommy enlists a homeless man to stay with him. There’s a rom-com element when he meets up with another contestant named Maddy (Anna Kendrick). The plot requires them to sleep in the same bed, just as in many a fake-to-real romance plot.
And of course the dark web game itself is a reality show; Tommy is constantly on camera, and occasionally interacts with the camerapeople, who are also fans — and also, improbably, ninjas.
Tommy is not just the most important person in one story. He’s the most important person in a whole range of familiar narratives, all crammed haphazardly into a 90-minute run time. The result is that the whole main character conceit starts to bulge and rupture.
You see the seams when Tommy’s family doesn’t believe he’s actually the target of a dark web assassination game. And you also see it as the movie itself starts to break the fourth wall by delivering pre-canned emotional beats with unnerving, absurdist regularity. Tommy and his ex have the big important conversation about Why She Left Him. Tommy and Maddy have multiple big important conversations. Then the movie drives a limo up and deposits the resolution of Tommy’s childhood trauma in his lap.
That resolution isn’t cathartic. It’s weird, upsetting and deflating. Being the main character isn’t a privilege, but a kind of uncanny joke. Tommy’s squinty glances in every direction, scoping out danger, start to feel as if he’s looking over his shoulder for the “kick me” sign.
Tommy begins to unravel over the course of the film, shouting at hidden cameras, seeing assailants who may or may not be there, losing his purchase on his middle-class job, routine, and relationships. Tommy’s paranoid nightmare is related to movies like “The Matrix” or “The Truman Show,” where the protagonist is trapped in a fake world, and must wake up to achieve self-realization and empowerment. Those films in turn offer a kind of real-life self-help advice, encouraging people to see and embrace authentic truths about themselves and to become the protagonist they were meant to be, despite the effort of the whole world to delude and trap them. “To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart, is true for all men, — that is genius,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson, the grandfather of self-help, insisted in his essay, “Self-Reliance.”
Tommy isn’t failing because he doesn’t believe in his own truth, or because he’s been deceived by the crowd, though. He doesn’t believe in himself too little, but too much. It’s like he read so many self-help books and seen so many Hollywood movies that he’s convinced himself that what’s in his private heart is true for everyone. His (possible) mental illness becomes a metaphor for the viewer’s cognitive confusion as well. Instead of an empowerment fantasy, where you identify with the hero as he wins the fight or wins the girl or learns something about himself, the movie becomes a vertiginous nightmare, in which being a hero means you’re disempowered because you’ve fundamentally misconstrued your place in the universe.
The film “Self Reliance” opens with a quote generally attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson: “To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else, is the greatest accomplishment.” It’s an epigram you might expect at the beginning of any number of Hollywood films — “Barbie” say, or “Oppenheimer,” or “Poor Things” or “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.” In the context of any of those movies, the quote would be a reference to daring, iconoclastic heroes listening to their hearts and finding their true inner main character. The quote would be cheering them on.
For Johnson, though, the quotation functions not as self-help or self-exhortation, but as a kind of self-satire. Why do you think the world cares about you enough to try to make you into something else? Do you really think fate has put your name out on the dark web, or sent Andy Samberg to you in a limousine? Where is the self that exists separate from other people or separate from the world, anyway?
Isn’t it kind of silly to think you can uncomfortable conversation yourself to empowerment and/or riches? Is everyone really brilliant and fabulous, and should we even expect them to be? Our media, our reading and a lot of our morality insists that you should constantly be working on yourself, giving yourself injections of inspiration so you can take your rightful place in your own arc of awesomeness.
Maybe though, we’d be better off if we just … didn’t. You don’t need to try to win $1 million at some silly game; you don’t need to believe your own thought is better than everyone else’s like some lonely genius crank — and maybe it would really be better that you didn’t. Hollywood and the inspirational quote machine that is self-help tell you earnestly that your life is a great narrative. Johnson, though, suggests that as soon as you decide your self is something you can win, you’ve already played yourself.
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