The Book of Eli

1/22: Further discussion here.

Bob Cheeks calls The Book of Eli "the best film ever made" because it "expresses the tension of the experience of Infinite Being in metalepsis with being at the eschaton" and "portrays what Bergson referred to as the openness of the soul toward transcendence." Perhaps, in his effort to inspire an ideal conversation between the Postmodern Conservatives and the Front Porch Republicans, he goes too far (see Andy Garcia's The Lost City, The Village, Wall-E, The Lives of Others or The Road as alternatives).

Bob is right that "the film reflects the effects of Original Sin on the nature of man, where man is moving to that point where he no longer remembers the Logos or seeks the redemption and salvation of Jesus Christ." But you could say the same about any post-apocalyptic movie--and so we recognize that his focus is on the twofold phenomenon of revelation: Revelation as depicted "portray[ing] . . . the openness of transcendence" and revelation as experienced by the movie's audience ["Specifically, this 'revelation' was along the lines of a series of pneumatic illuminations (insights) that continued to fire any number of synapses during and following the film."]. Since the latter has yet to take its full course, it may be premature to say so, but the movie did not move me in the same way it moved Cheeks. I couldn't quite tell why until I reread his analysis of Carnegie, the movie's villain:

Carnegie, the villain, wanted the "Book" because he understood the ordering power of God’s Word. He desired to capture and institute "homonoia" in the community for his own aggrandizement, though his particular perversion was doomed to failure simply because he was not substituting the essence of the "Book," the Logos of Christ, for the Aristotelian transcendent nous as reason, but rather to dominate a disordered mob whose only "consciousness of kind" was based on survival and nothing more.

The difference is in the path Cheeks takes from Carnegie's understanding of the power of the Bible as what James Ceasar calls a "textbook of political science," through the tropes and symbols added to the film by its audience, to the interpretation of Carnegie as having been doomed. It seems to me that Cheeks puts too much faith in this symbolically created, retrospectively apparent doom.

I do not believe Carnegie's political project is doomed to failure in the way Cheeks thinks it is. Indeed, such a project has already been accomplished in history. As Eli himself mentions, most of the copies of the book were burned after the final war because many believed the book had been the cause of the war--in other words, because Carnegie isn't the first of his kind and people like Christopher Hitchens were paying attention to his ancestors. Carnegie fails, then, not because he is doomed by institutional plans that will misuse the Logos, but because he risks everything to possess the book physically, neglecting along the way all the other ways in which the Logos sustains itself among men. As his "wife" points out, he treats as expendable the small group of men he had used to maintain order in the town. Because of his eventual wound and the absence of order he is unable to put the book to use as he planned, even if he had been able to read it (after all, it isn't magic). And that's simply a matter of plot. What the plot cannot work out on Carnegie's behalf is his failure of imagination.

Eli participates in a similar failure. Eli, too, has relied for too long on possessing the book. As a practical matter, possessing the book hasn't helped him to get where he is going. His revelation took place 30 years ago and sustains him throughout his wandering. He claims he is going west and that he walks by faith, not by sight. Why, then, has he not reached his destination? In retrospect, the answer is simply that he has not arrived because he still has the Bible. He reads the Bible as if he were striking the rock--and the water does not come forth.

And here we get to the real interest of the movie: memory as participation in the Logos. What is most strange about Carnegie is that he is not an extraordinary "villain." His power is built on his intelligence, ruthlessness, and age ("Old men are the future," he tells Eli, meaning, those who remember). He remembers the time before the final war and he remembers the Bible. He even grew up with it. He acquires many books, but destroys most of them because they are not the Bible. The question I asked myself after the movie was, "Why is he so desperate for the Bible if he has a pretty good idea of what's in it--and maybe access to some literature or a few Great Books?" An extraordinary and educated tyrant could easily create persuasive tropes and symbols, even a whole religion, without the text itself.

And so Eli ends up giving him the book (and the audience is fooled into expecting that it is mere binding or that the pages are blank). In part he gives it up because he recognizes a difference in the way he keeps the book and the way he keeps its commandment, as it were (he is perhaps also aided by the community formed when he prays with Solara over their food). But he is also unconcerned with Carnegie's plans for it; Carnegie doesn't need to be stopped. Eli gives up the book and is, in turn, allowed to complete his task. He goes to Alcatraz and recites the remembered Logos.

P.S. Beliefnet blogger Sam Witherington calls The Book of Eli an answer to the "nihilism" of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, in which "the road leads nowhere, and there is nothing accomplished, nothing of purpose to accomplish in the end." I think he's totally wrong (about The Road mostly). If I think Cheeks has put doom where it doesn't belong, I think Witherington has attempted to doom possibility itself. I think critics rely on the post-apocalyptic genre to prepare the ground for the magical dissolution of the "immanent frame" when that simply underestimates what man is capable of in history in both the negative and positive sense--somewhat analogous to the overestimation of man's capability represented by Avatar (see Ross Douthat below).