FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - Limitless

Rant Number 435

Limitless recall. Limitless energy. Limitless creativity. Limitless power. Limitless charm. Limitless success. Limitless sex appeal...and more. They could all be yours – at the drop of a tiny, translucent pill. You swallow it and...Bingo! Stock market wizard! Prime Minister! President! CEO! Financier! Inventor! Best selling author! Top scientist...You are limitlessly, amazingly realised. Limitlessly everything you ever dreamt to be.

Director Neil Burger’s movie, Limitless, trades on a simple conceit. NZT. A sort of intellectual super-Viagra. A wonder drug which unlocks and eminently enhances hero Bradley Cooper’s talents. NZT thrillingly transforms Bradley’s life from shabby, washed-up nonentity to a fair approximation to Nietzsche’s superman. He knocks off a masterpiece of a novel in four days. Picks up a foreign language in hours. Develops hypnotic gift of the gab. (Fab glossy hair, too.) Makes pots of money on Wall Street. Senator, President...today New York, tomorrow... ‘Tomorrow the world belongs to me!’ he might rightly cry out.

Limitless captivates because, I feel, Bradley’s ego incorporates elements of Everyman. Unless you are either stupid or saintly you are unlikely not to desire higher achievements. Je ne regrette rien is a sentence few can utter with sincerity. Would you not like to do better in life? Of course, Faustian pacts are nowadays out of fashion. For our civilisation the devil is dead, not unlike...ahem, the old guy upstairs. Why bother with the supernatural when the pharmaceutically natural can deliver miracles here and now? A pill like NZT may well be developed soon – a Brave New World inhabited by real Bradley-like people could be round the corner. Why does the thought make me nervous?

The achievements of Limitless man are qualified, however. Because NZT, unlike Faust’s Mephistopheles, does not work magic. The drug only heightens and sharpens your latent powers, it does not create new ones. Take memory. If I fully remembered all the books & articles I have read or glanced at, and I was able to reproduce them at will in a logical, organised way (luckily, Bradley is unlike J.L. Borges’ sad hero, Funes, who drowns in his infinite ocean of recollections), I guess people would judge me pretty clever. No wonder drug, however, could give me the potentialities I do not naturally possess, even in embryo. NZT could never make me into a Mozart or a Von Neumann because, alas, my musical and mathematical endowments are nil. Similarly, a bloke whose readings were confined to the sports pages of rags likeThe News of the World would perhaps blossom out into a great football commentator but never, barring dormant virtues, into a great novelist or physicist. Chemical magic has its limitations, praise God.

Dogmatic egalitarians might dispute that. Offended, they may insist that we are all potentially Newton and Milton and Picasso (or indeed Bruce Lee – Bradley wipes out a bunch of subway muggers by mentally aping the martial arts legend’s fights), all geniuses. NZT would then turn everyone into a genius. Fine. Only remember that ‘genius’ is a terms that implies exceptional abilities. In a truly egalitarian scenario, everybody has access to NZT. Hence everybody would be a genius. But when everyone is a genius then nobody is. I mean, when everyone is exceptional, unusually bright, there is no point in calling anyone exceptional. Genius becomes the regular, normal way everyone is. No one stands out from the mass anymore. Boring, in the end, but egalitarianism will have it so.

Limitless’ limitations appear to extend to morality. Bradley cynically lies, pretends and cheats his way around. NZT thus effects no moral improvement. Aristotle’s moral exemplar in the Nichomachean Ethicswas a summation of human virtues. That included ethical perfection. That is, he was good, not evil or amoral. Even Nietzsche, despite his bombast, never really went beyond good and evil – he simply redefined, or inverted, the meanings of those words. Bradley himself is no Zarathustra. He sticks with the traditional morality... and just fails to live up to it. Moreover, the superdrug seems to make him at times peculiarly dumb, otherwise why on earth would he end up in hock to a ghastly loan shark of a Russian gangster?

I suppose that a statesman like President Obama on NZT would perform superbly, instead of flip-flopping hopelessly. That super-smart Obama might sort out the Middle East, for instance. But what if Presidents Assad and Saleh and other dictators also swallowed the stuff? Groan...I suspect things might even out in the end. Back to square one.

It is good, however, that in this film the emphasis falls on the brainy side of the human being. Although once or twice we see the hero furiously copulating, as is indeed de riguer these days, mercifully sexual prowess does not take over the movie. It would never have occurred to Aristotle, I don’t think, to include erotic performance amongst distinctive human virtues. The philosopher thought reason was a bit more important but...well, guess he was old-fashioned. Progress is progress - times have indeed changed.

Limitless’ is visually ambitious, with sequences resembling LSD highs, vibrant colours and speeded up feats. The voice-over commentary is as seductive a story-telling device as it was in the original Blade Runner movie. This fine story suffers from a curse though – that of the happy ending. Very implausible and confusing here. Bradley stuffs himself with smart pills right through. Surely the effect is bound to wear out with time? And there will be a price to be paid for his hubris? The Greeks and Goethe knew all about that. But no, he gets away with it all. It seems today’s audiences cannot bear an unhappy upshot. Nietzsche, again, accused Christianity with being responsible for the fashion of the happy ending. I am not sure. Methinks more likely the fault of the sunny, moronic mentality of today’s cinema audiences.

Final thought. I’d be a bloody liar if I did not admit I would not at all mind giving NZT a go. That’s just the boy in me, as my friend Carolyn observed. Alas, young Abdullah was wrong when he called the priesthakim, wise. I am not. If I were, I would not doubt that there is one thing no drug, however wondrous, can ever deliver: happiness.