by Kaleem Hasan
Billy Wilder is one of the genuine American movie greats with masterpieces like The Apartment, Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard and a host of other excellent works. My own weakness within his oeuvre is for his late gem Avanti but his greatest work to my mind is the very dark Ace in the Hole. This movie is now available for the first time on DVD (anywhere) in a gorgeous Criterion transfer and this is therefore the best time to visit the film outside a movie theater.
The plot in a very skeletal sense concerns a cynical newspaper reporter (Kirk Douglas) who drifts into an ‘edge of empire’ town in New Mexico, lands a job and a year later finds an assignment that becomes life-altering for him. As in many other Wilder works Ace in the Hole features much social commentary but unlike just about any of his other works there is a strong visionary intensity to the narrative. Most importantly Wilder (as was his wont) eschews easy and conformist resolutions.
The allegory of Plato’s cave is easily the most famous one in the ‘Western’ heritage. With typical dramatic brilliance Plato creates a remarkable mise-en-scene. In a dark cave there are prisoners lined up and unable to move from their respective positions. They face a wall on which they constantly see shadows flickering. There is a fire behind the prisoners and the light from this source casts the prisoners’ shadows on the wall in front of them. Not being able to turn around and see the fire the prisoners assume that the shadows operating on the wall before them are ‘real’ in the sense that these represent not the mere ‘appearance’ of something but tangible bodies. In effect they take the ‘reflection’ to be all that there is. At one point one of the prisoners is released and let out of the cave into the sunlight. He realizes that there is much more to the ‘world’ than the cave and in the blazing sunlight sees things as they really are. He then returns to the cave, figures out what has really been happening and then proceeds to persuade his fellow prisoners who not having been out of the cave find everything a bit hard to believe.
In Plato’s allegory the prisoners in the cave are people blinded from the ‘truth’ and the prisoner who does make it out of the cave is treated to the sunlight and is initially blinded ‘by’ the ‘truth’. The latter eventually recovers and starts learning how to live with the ‘truth’ and is then faced with the ethical demand of returning to the cave and persuading others as well. Whether one defines the ‘truth’ as philosophical or mystical or religious or political is less important. What is critical however is the movement from a state of ‘unknowing’ to one of ‘knowing’ and the dynamic that comes into play when there is interaction between the two.
Wilder marvelously inverts all of this. Kirk Douglas discovers his ‘crisis’ when his assignment involves doing a story on a mine accident. When the protagonist gets there he finds a man trapped under the rubble. The former is able to see the latter and communicate with him but neither he nor anyone else has any way of performing a rescue. A large part of the film consists of ‘dialog’ between these two men. But for the purposes of the Platonic allegory what is fascinating about the structure here is that Douglas is already a man on the outside who then descends into a ‘cave’ to learn the ‘truth’ about his outside world. Additionally the path into the ‘cave’ leads to ‘self-revelation’ for the protagonist.
The cinematic medium allows Wilder to invert Plato’s allegory in a literal sense while paying perfect homage to it in the truest way. This is exactly the kind of ‘worldly scene’ Plato imagined when he conceived his ‘mise-en-scene’. The cave represents the world and Plato’s hopes for those who seek to be enlightened and in turn enlighten others. He envisions a moment out of the cave into the sunlight and then back into the cave to lead others out of it. Wilder’s Douglas is one of those Platonic hopefuls! But in a neat reversal he is already in the sunlight (of New Mexico no less!) and goes into the cave, learns something essential there, returns to the sunlight, tries unsuccessfully to convince everyone of the ‘truth’ he has located in the cave and symbolically returns to a kind of ‘cave’ towards the end.
Plato’s allegory much like any other involves double vision. Literally, a powerful dramatic moment is laid out before us but we are also meant to see the parallel narrative at the same time. The story involves a kind of two way street with traffic in both directions. The man who ascends and then descends but the latter is the true ethical correlative of the actual ascent. But also the underworld of the cave is really the (over)world and the ‘blazing sunlight’ where all things are clear is not the ultimate abode for the true Platonic hero. In fact it is down there in the cave where there is presumably a lifelong game of persuasion that is the ethical imperative. But the traffic must always be moving towards the sunlight for the ethical question to ever be phrased. As such this is Plato’s cinema where the reader mentally has to crosscut between both levels of the allegory.
In the Wilder work it is the cave that reveals everything to the protagonist, not the sunlight. Douglas is already “in the sun” but once he visits the cave he finds the ‘sun’ of his world totally eclipsed. From the darkness of the cave emanates the truest light.
Psychoanalytic critics have always been interested in cave/womb parallels. Again Wilder offers visually a very womb like space in the mine where just a single man is trapped and who is slowly racing to his death even as rescue efforts are underway. Facing him is another man (the protagonist) who is slowly being ‘reborn’ at the same time and who will encounter his own ‘womb’ towards the film’s climax.
Most of the film takes place either on a plain in front of the mine in very bright sunlight or in the dark cavern. Wilder’s visual choices are entirely appropriate in the context of this discussion. Inside the cave there is silence and a man almost able to see his approaching death, outside there is the carnival of the world (the film was re-titled ‘The Big Carnival’ in the US at one point). Wilder is at almost Fellini-esque with the latter. The mine accident eventually becomes a cause celebre attracting journalists from elsewhere and parts of the general populace as well as the paraphernalia of amusement park rides, refreshments and so on. The whole site becomes a massive theme mark and is extremely reminiscent of moments in Fellini’s work, most notably in La Dolce Vita.
Towards the end of the film Douglas symbolically ascends the mountain for the first time where previously he has only been under it in the mine. He launches in a Jeremiad and faces no more audience than that Biblical prophet. As the film draws to its conclusion the human circus ends and the site is once again isolated and ghostly. The protagonist who leaves that environment is also now something of a ghost, having left his soul back in the cave. The film’s final moments beyond this point are in essence quite logical.
At the Venice Festival in ’51 Ace in the Hole lost out to Rashomon, not entirely without irony in my view! Nevertheless it is one of the authentic Hollywood achievements in cinema and one that has so far been relatively ignored. Few films even in Wilder’s oeuvre are as suggestive as this one. In our media saturated moment this film speaks to us with even greater freshness.
[One could draw a line from Plato's Cave (Ace in the Hole) to Plato's Sun (Sunshine). Danny Boyle's very interesting and fairly disturbing 'solar' quest is very much in the genealogy established by Plato two and a half millennia ago..]
This is one for the annals because, though I have read this piece – or an earlier draft – before, I am in complete agreement with Kaleem that Ace in the Hole is Wilder’s greatest film. Only Sunset Boulevard gets into a photo finish, and that’s no disrespect to the greatness of the other masterworks of his career.
According to author Spencer Selby, (Dark City:The Film Noir) director Billy Wilder film Ace in the Hole is the
“Story of an unscrupulous newman’s big break in what is considered an outstanding example of
extreme noir cynicism.
Hi! Kaleem Hasan,
What a very “indepth” and very “interesting” review by you, of one my favorite film(s) that is considered a “noir” director Billy Wilder’s 1951 film “Ace in the Hole.”(Also titled “The Big Carnival.”)
Thanks,
dcd
Ace in the Hole is Wilder’s greatest film. Your treatment is very original and thought-provoking Kaleem, but the Plato’s Cave allegory seems a bit stretched to me. Chuck Tatum learns nothing in the cave, and is self-seeking to the last. He is affected by the trapped man’s death, but he has learnt nothing.
To paraphrase part of my review of the film at FilmsNoir.Net, Ace in the Hole is principally a savage critique not only of a corrupted but also corrupting modern mass media. This subversive film was not a box office success when first released. As Wilder said of the audience response at the time: “Americans expected a cocktail and felt I was giving them a shot of vinegar instead”. Only the poor trapped man, his inconsolable parents, and the owner of the small town newspaper, have any true decency. Everyone else, is either corrupt or corruptible, if not downright stupid or plain evil – the trapped man’s floozy of a wife included, and Tatum’s naive young photographer is easily seduced by the reporter’s phoney charisma. The corrupt sheriff who actively conspires with Tatum, even after he is told the poor trapped man is doomed, wants to use this turn of events to his political advantage. The power of this film resonates today, when countries go to war on manufactured evidence and manipulative spin. Innocent lives are as expendable today as they always have been in the cause of political ambition and warped ideological agendas: a world where the spin doctor rules.
I will have more to say about this utterly fascinating piece by Kaleem, later today. Well, I have SUNSET BOULEVARD as Wilder’s greatest film, but I’ll admit that either choice is universally accepted for the top spot, with DOUBLE INDEMNITY holding down #3.
The responses above by Allan, Dark City Dame and Tony are fabulous!
Mr. Hasan has penned a concise, thematically pertinent and enveloping review of this screen classic, which I think is correctly hailed as the director’s greatest film. (Although Sam’s position with Sunset Boulevard is fair enough too). I particularly like the cave/womb parallel.
………..Wilder’s best film is ‘Double Indeminity’, but what do I know? Seriously though, this really goes to the center of everything, and there are points made here that I wouldn’t think of in a million years………..
Thanks everyone for the very kind comments..
And I must give a nod here to Allan who’d been championing the film for a long time..
kaleem Hasen said, “This movie is now available for the first time on DVD (anywhere) in a gorgeous Criterion transfer and this is therefore the best time to visit the film outside a movie theater.”
But, for film goers who(m) would also like to experience Billy Wilder’s 1951 film in a movie theater. See Information Below:
NOIR CITY 7, the 2009 San Francisco Film Noir Festival, to be held January 23–February 1, 2009, at the Castro Theatre, and will have a newspaper theme: Will premiere?!? on the “Big Screen” the 1951 film Ace in the Hole…on Sunday January 25, 2009.
Alexander, are your ear burning?
Tks,
dcd
Oops!…Allan Fish, have asked me to watch those “e’s” and “a’s” ….I am so sorry! the last name is spelled…Hasan and not Hasen.
dcd
On a related note an extraordinary reworking of the Platonic terrain comes about in Saramago’s astonishing novel, the Cave.
One might speculate on the idea of Plato’s cave being the origin of many other caves. I don’t think there’s a prominent cave in the Old Testament. The New Testament has Lazarus in a in a kind of cave when Jesus brings him to life (the New Testament is in any case a Platonic text if ever there was one). The Islamic founding story (a book and a tradition as ‘Western’ as anything, we keep forgetting this to our discredit; on the other hand whether ‘Biblical’ equals ‘Western’ is itself a thorny question) is of course as interesting because here Gabriel appears to Muhammad in a cave and ‘reveals’ the Koran (the first word of which is ‘READ’ and I know of no more auspicious beginning for any kind of text! Sadly this is the first word that has been destroyed in our current ‘holy’ wars).
But keeping in line with this it is entirely appropriate that the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in the Qumran caves!
Getting back to Wilder I doubt there is another American filmmaker barring Ford and possibly Scorsese where I really like so many of the director’s films.
A small correction to the earlier note. Lot lived in a cave with his daughters at one point though I don’t believe the ‘cave’ is otherwise a major trope in the Tanakh (let’s not always be so Christian and call it solely the ‘Old Testament’… it makes a difference, even the ordering of the books is significantly different..). Of course I stand to be corrected on this.
The Islamic tradition though particularly likes caves. Muhammad meditated in a cave for the longest time before Gabriel showed up. There is another legendary story about his hiding out in a cave with his enemies tracking him, reaching the cave, but not entering it because they note a huge spider web across the mouth of the cave and figure no human could have recently entered it. Hence no arachnophobia in Islam!
I believe that story has echoes elsewhere also but I can’t recall at the moment exactly where. “Nothing is new under the sun” — especially when it comes to the Middle East!
A fascinating clarification for sure Kaleem, concerning the Islamic tradition, which is “cave obsessed.” I can surely understand Tony’s contentions, which are understandably viligant against overeach in a critical sense. Surely this particular film has been the recipient of varying interpretations through the years, and seemingly none are universally accepted.
Dark City Dame, that brightest of all stars has again embellished both this discourse and this seminal American film classic with yet another link and pertinent announcement. I am sure Mr. Hasan greatly appreciates your exceedingly kind words in his behalf, as well as your own great regard for ACE IN THE HOLE.
“Americans expected a cocktail and I felt I was giving them a shot of vinegar instead.”
Well, Tony, Mr. Wilder was surely aware of his the extent of his corrosive cynicism here, and he expressed it defty in layman’s terms!
Your own paraphrasing there Tony, from your filmsnoir.net review yields further fecund insights that stand with the best out there on this film. Tell me I’m not surprised, coming from the King of the Film Noirs online!
I would have to cast my lot with Sunset Boulevard, but there is no denying that this is a very great film. Food for thought here? Well that’s an understatement.
Very interesting thesis here. I liked the connection with Fellini and La Dolce Vita. But there is much to consider. Outstanding work by Mr. Hasan.
Thanks much Joe..
The Plato’s cave analogy here is most convincing. Quite an essay by Kaleem Hasan, but hardly a cinch to decipher.
I have been ruminating on Kaleem’s essay and still can’t agree with his thesis. The Plato’s cave allegory is intended to demonstrate Socratic form, which says that the essence of a thing, its form, is known not by its essence, but its representation, a description of its essential qualities. In Ace In the Hole, when Tatum goes down into the cave, yes there is a reversal in the allegory, but not, as Kaleem contends, of the direction of the enlightenment, but of it’s nature. Leo’s shadows are in his mind – that he has a decent loving wife, that Tatum is a good man and truthful, and that the world outside is sincerely concerned with his fate. Tatum does not bring the truth to Leo – only lies. Tatum learns nothing from his visits to Leo in the cave, and Leo dies nurturing the diabolical illusion that Tatum has fostered. Only Leo’s death has any impact on Tatum.
I had posted yesterday praising Mr. Hasan’s parallel, but I admit Mr. D’Ambra also brings something to the table.
I would be interested in hearing a response from Mr. Hasan. I am personally confused.
“The Plato’s cave allegory is intended to demonstrate Socratic form, which says that the essence of a thing, its form, is known not by its essence, but its representation, a description of its essential qualities.”
Tony, I would disagree with this formulation. For Plato’s ‘mimetic’ theory (as it has often been called) the ‘representations’ we see or the ‘images’ we perceive are possible manifestations of ultimate forms which can never be accessed by way of the senses but only ‘known’ (in the sense of true knowledge through thought. So for example when we see a ‘chair’ it is so because it corresponds to some idealized notion of ‘chair’. But many chairs could equally conform to the same notion. What Plato therefore wants to do is pierce the veil of ‘reality’ (always for him imitative, always one of ‘images’ that are unstable, always ‘copies’).
This is why the prisoner who exits the cave has really a quasi-mystical experience. What is the blinding light of the sun really? The opening in which ‘knowledge’ and ‘insight’ occurs. In which everything is made clear and the prisoner is truly ‘en-light-ened’.
The other point not to be missed here is that there is not another world out there somewhere that Plato is hinting at (though one could debate this point) but a new way of looking at this very world. The ‘forms’ are ‘ideals’. These can never be accessed concretely anywhere. There is a great deal of the allegorical in Plato’s writings that can mislead if it isn’t understood as such.
Getting back to Ace in the Hole I initially meant a structural analogy, even if inverted in one sense. But the Kirk Douglas character does arrive at a certain sense of knowledge which is why he becomes less cynical than when he started out. However this also leads him to an eventual nihilism in some ways. This latter is certainly not Plato’s prescription but the journey is Platonic to the extent that a crisis occurs.
Also remember that while I find some irony in the fact that Douglas enters a kind of cave and re-configures his thinking indicating a reverse movement when juxtaposed with the Platonic story, it is also true that Plato’s is an allegory. Clearly the people he’s preaching to also live in ‘daylight’ in a literal sense as certainly as does Douglas. But Plato thinks this kind of ‘light’ to be the other side of darkness and therefore a cave with images and illusions. It is the truest light he’s interested in.
A note on Wilder. Someone who grew up in turn of the century Vienna is quite likely to have been steeped in humanistic studies for which Plato was of course deeply relevant. It would be rather odd if Wilder went through the entire filming of Ace in the Hole without ever realizing how close he was to that most famous of Western allegories.
Thanks Kaleem for your response.
I am not classically educated and I am navigating here by instinct, so I must defer to your superior knowledge of the philosophical underpinnings of your argument.
Nevertheless, I don’t see any essential difference between my statement that the cave allegory says “the essence of a thing, its form, is known not by its essence, but its representation, a description of its essential qualities” and yours “that ‘representations’ we see or the ‘images’ we perceive are possible manifestations of ultimate forms which can never be accessed by way of the senses but only ‘known’ (in the sense of true knowledge through thought… )”.
Of course the enlightenment experience is not unique to Socrates or Plato. Christian mysticism and Buddhism for example, all talk about the veil of reality that we need to lift if we are to experience truth. Marxian alienation similarly talks about our attachment to things blinding us to truth. Don Juan in The Yaqui Way of Knowledge uses peyote to blow away the veil. In fact all these philosophies are merely tentative formulations that truth is only knowable as experience unmeditated by thought. A primitive with no language has the same potential for Nirvana as the Dalai Lhama.
This said, I still cannot accept your argument that “Douglas enters a kind of cave and re-configures his thinking indicating a reverse movement when juxtaposed with the Platonic story”. Your position is further muddied by your saying “the Kirk Douglas character does arrive at a certain sense of knowledge which is why he becomes less cynical than when he started out. However this also leads him to an eventual nihilism in some ways”. You can’t have it both ways – either he reaches enlightenment or he doesn’t. Nihilism is a complete repudiation of Socratic form. As Nietzsche says: “Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions.”
Getting back to Ace in the Hole. I can accept your use of Plato’s cave as a twisted allegory, but there is no evidence from the film that Tatum experiences any enlightenment within the cave. It is only when he confronts his own monstrous culpability for Leo’s avoidable death that he moves toward the threshold of truth. His immediate reaction is to deflect the blame and his guilt onto to Leo’s wife, and then only after facing his own death, does he come to some comprehension of truth.
As to Wilder’s intent, that is mute and not really open to speculation.
Tony: here’s your sentence:
“the essence of a thing, its form, is known not by its essence, but its representation, a description of its essential qualities”
I did understand you the first time around. I get what you are trying to say but I think I would nonetheless disagree with this construction. Plato does not suggest that the ‘essence’ of a thing or its ‘form’ is ‘known’ by its ‘representation’. Plato is saying something like ‘if there are many different kinds of chairs there must be that ideal of a chair because of which we are able to call different kinds of chairs by the same name’. But this does not mean that the ‘ideal’ chair is known only by the ‘copies’. The ‘ideal’ chair is what Plato retrospectively posits! It is these copies that alert us to a ‘form’ which nonetheless cannot be accessed. Hence cannot be ‘known’ in any sense of perception. Because there are ‘representations’ there must be a ‘form’ but the latter precisely is not ‘known’ by the former.
Similarly ‘representations’ are not ‘descriptions’ of the form’s ‘essential qualities’. Because the form paradoxically is ‘nothing’. It is what engenders. A classic reworking of this trope would be the opening of the Gospel of John. “In the beginning was the word. and the word was with God. And the word was God.” In the the Greek it’s (and I’m not trying to sound pedantic here) ‘logos’ for ‘word’ and there is an entire philosophical history behind this (a little later you read “and the light shineth in darkness and the darkness comprehendeth it not… what is this if not Plato’s cave once again, admittedly reworked?!). Plato would say ‘in the beginning was the form’.
The form is that which cannot be described but also that by virtue of which things become possible. The ‘forms’ are the other side of language or the ‘outside’ of language which as humans we of course can posit but not access. If things were simply the form in ‘parts’ you could put them together and somehow get the ‘form’. But you cannot. The example of the chair is also a little misleading in some ways. But let’s think of another one — beauty. We call people beautiful even though they often have nothing in common. Because there is a ‘form’ of beauty even if it describes nothing. It is a kind of mathematical empty set. Anything considered ‘beautiful’ can be put into it. It would make no difference. But in itself it wouldn’t have specifics of beauty which could then be compared with our own. This is why different cultures and sometimes same cultures at different points in their history often have radically different notions of beauty. What matters is the idea of ‘beauty’. Why do we call anyone or anything beautiful at all?
By the way I would never be bold enough to suggest that I am ‘classically educated’. I appreciate your compliment of course but I am simply a dabbler. I mean this sincerely.
Moving on I never suggested that enlightenment was possible only within the Platonic paradigm. That is manifestly not true.
About Wilder’s intent I think the film offers some evidence of this which is why I was able to come up with the reading I did! Ultimately all authors are ‘mute’ in the same way. It isn’t just that we often do not know ‘intent’ but this is even irrelevant beyond a point. The work in question should offer enough to support the surmise or the interpretation. This is because the ‘meaning’ of a work cannot be fixed or limited to a definite set of interpretations. A work is ‘open’. It’s a field of meaning and even the author of the work cannot exhaust these possibilities.
On the Douglas comment if your point is that he not literally an enlightened Platonist I of course concede the point. But I was offering structural similarities and a loose dynamic that resembles Plato’s. I never suggested that the film was a theoretical exercise in Platonic tropes. Clearly it isn’t. Much as Godard’s Contempt is not a serious reading of the Odyssey even if there are structural and thematic similarities.
But again the enlightenment that the Douglas character undergoes engenders a kind of nihilistic dead end for him. The recognition that he has missed the ‘truth’ all along is significant here even if he is not able to somehow reach it in the literal Platonic sense (though I would suggest that the ending of the film is a bit ambiguous). Obviously he’s not in danger of becoming a Buddha at any point!
As an aside I should add that I am not certain ‘nihilism’ is that ‘unlinked’ to Platonic thought. I have just been talking about the forms being a kind of empty set or ‘nothing’. And I share the idea that many have put forth about Nietzsche being in fact the last Platonist! Remember, many important Platonic dialogues do not really end in resolution and one is left at an impasse of meaning.
Kaleem, I did not mean to imply that you “suggested that enlightenment was possible only within the Platonic paradigm”. I am sorry if I was not clear.
But you are playing with semantics here:
1. “Plato does not suggest that the ‘essence’ of a thing or its ‘form’ is ‘known’ by its ‘representation’. Plato is saying something like ‘if there are many different kinds of chairs there must be that ideal of a chair because of which we are able to call different kinds of chairs by the same name’.”
2. “Similarly ‘representations’ are not ‘descriptions’ of the form’s ‘essential qualities’. Because the form paradoxically is ‘nothing’. It is what engenders.”
As you posit the argument nothing exists and we can never be enlightened because there is nothing to know. Rather than “And I share the idea that many have put forth about Nietzsche being in fact the last Platonist!”, you are effectively saying that Plato is the proto-nihilist: ‘proto’ being Greek for ‘first’
As Mark T. Conrad wrote in his essay, Nietzsche and the Meaning and Definition of Noir:
“Nietzsche says ‘Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions.’ Elsewhere: ‘All concepts in which an entire process is semiotically concentrated elude definition; only that which has no history is definable.’ Nietzsche here seems to be agreeing with Socrates: a definition must capture the essence of the thing, that which doesn’t change and thus has no history. The catch here is that, as we’ve seen, Nietzsche denies that there is any such thing, so he’s denying that anything at all can really be defined.”
Equally, your conclusion “But again the enlightenment that the Douglas character undergoes engenders a kind of nihilistic dead end for him.” contains it’s own contradiction. Yes nihilism is a dead end, but it hardly comes from enlightenment. More importantly though, you offer no evidence from the essential artefact, the shadows projected from the celluloid onto the cinemam screen – the movie itself – that Tatum undergoes enlightenment before reaching his ‘dead end’.
To paraphrase your last sentence our dialog cannot really end in resolution and we are left at an impasse of meaning, let’s call it a day.
“As you posit the argument nothing exists and we can never be enlightened because there is nothing to know. ”
Not at all! Things do exist but these are flickering shadows in the cave as Plato would have it. Remember it is one of the standard criticisms of Plato that he goes too far in the direction of the ‘copy’. I quoted the Gospel of John for a reason. The forms are nothing because these are idealized and cannot ever conform to something specifically. But these are otherwise the most eternal truths in the Platonic system. Just not accessible to the senses. So Plato’s is often (not everywhere and this is a whole different debate) a quasi-mystical view of things where what we are able to access through our senses is merely ‘illusory’. But this is also not too far from the Kantian idea where the world is subjective as a matter of sense-perception (or has no objective reality) though Kant always heroically tries to rescue the objective by indulging in an extraordinary architecture of the mind (and one could say he has his own ‘forms’).
“As you posit the argument nothing exists and we can never be enlightened because there is nothing to know.”
I reject this conclusion completely. In the Platonic universe to realize that objects are but ‘images’ with no more than temporal reality and that ‘forms’ have eternal reality is a ‘knowledge’ that is more or less ‘enlightenment’. Again you are taking ‘nothing’ literally. But Plato’s is the Buddhist of the mystic where ‘everything’ is found in the ‘nothing’!
“Nietzsche says ‘Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions.’
I think Plato is also saying the very same thing. The truths we often recognize as such in life are very contingent ones and depend on our ‘histories’ (cultural, and so forth).
‘All concepts in which an entire process is semiotically concentrated elude definition; only that which has no history is definable.’
This is an extension of the earlier point. We are ‘enframed’ by history. And therefore much in language and therefore are concepts is pre-defined. It is hard to step outside this ‘circle’. It is a problem many thinkers have tussled with in fact. The ‘truths’ that are ‘illusions’ can only be understood as such if one is willing to step out of the cave because in the cave there is history and politics and culture and so on. Our entire ways of thinking operate on various assumptions and we have to unlearn these.
On the actual point of the film I have already conceded that ‘enlightenment’ here is not the full enlightenment of a mystic! To put it in Platonic terms once again, Douglas is someone who emerges from the cave, recognizes that there have been illusions in the cave but is ultimately not able to stand the glare of the sun and is therefore not really able to gain access to ultimate truth (enlightenment if you will) and hence cannot go back to the cave to be the teacher Plato would have him be.
All of this I already conceded. I just used ‘enlightenment’ in a loose sense initially to illuminate a certain arc in the story. By no means did I ever try to convert Douglas into a Platonic thinker!
“To paraphrase your last sentence our dialog cannot really end in resolution and we are left at an impasse of meaning”
All thought operates at such an impasse of meaning!
Too many exclamation points Kaleem… a tko methinks.