Shanice Aga is a Khoja-American designer, and visual artist.
A trained architect and material culturalist,
Melancholia in the Metropolis: Analyzing ‘Q’ in The Zero Theorem, 2018 (1/2)
The opening scenes of the film paint a picture of the city and environment Q is living in by tracking him from the moment he wakes up through his morning walk to work on a day in his life. Q lives in an old abandoned church building that is dimly lit and messy. He has upwards of five locks on the inside of his door, and, when he leaves he ties a chain around the handles to his front door and padlocks it shut from the outside. He values his isolation. As Q steps outside of his house we are alerted to the overwhelming chaos of the city. As he walks to work, we see the people of the city are dressed in brightly colored eclectic clothing with wild accessories and hair styles. Q is bombarded with advertisement videos that light up brightly and follow him across the screens that cover every building in the city. He basically blocks this all out in a kind of “Blasé” fashion and is more annoyed than impressed by the spectacle – it is his commute to work every day. (Simmel, 14) One ad in particular for the company “Euphoria Finance” states: “put the you back in euphoria,” and Q is followed with more loud video ad’s that tell him “,The church of intelligent design reaches out to that special you” and “your dreams are our dreams” as he continues towards his place of work.
This opening scene and overall characterization of the city can be analyzed through the lens of Georg Simmel’s “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” Living in a city like this, where everything is “stimulating” and fighting for your attention, causes a de-sensitization to life that produces in the people of the metropolis a “Blasé” attitude. (Simmel, 14) We see this in Q as he walks to work ignoring most of the things around him, focusing only on himself and his own “self-preservation” in the face of all this chaos. (Simmel 14-15) This attitude of “indifference” towards others brought on by excess of stimuli in combination with the commercial “de-personalization” of life due to the ease and access one has to cultural “goods” and means of entertainment creates a population of inwardly focused people who become wrapped up in feelings of solitude, dissatisfaction and the rational de-valuing of themselves as an individual in light of their environment. (Simmel, 19) This “overgrowth of objective culture has been less and less satisfactory for the individual” and the general response to this de-valuing of the individual is for people to want to be noticed. (Simmel, 18) The metropolitan craves differentiation and achieves it by having very eclectic interests and appearances, or otherwise by molding themselves into a product (something that does have value in society) version of themselves. We see this sort of behavior in the aesthetic choices and eccentricity in dress and character of everyone around Q, but Q’s own reaction to these feelings is more extreme than the purchasing of a brightly colored wig and some quirky clothing for attention.
Q’s differentiation comes in the form of him believing he had once, long ago, received a phone call in which he was just about to be told the meaning and purpose of his life. This was never revealed to him, however, because he dropped the phone, ending the call. Q has been waiting for a call back ever since and has developed, not just a “blasé” “indifference,” but an “enduring” “aversion…strangeness and repulsion” to his environment, the people around him, and the unfulfilling repetition of his life. (Simmel, 15) Q holds a belief that he is special because of this phone call and that his life will be better than it currently is once he gets his call and until he gets this call he feels nothing, no joy and no purpose. This reaction people have to the metropolis - to be different – manifested in Q with the creation of “his call” 3 and resulted in his aversion to others and disinterest in every other aspect of his life. While Q’s reaction originated in the same blasé Simmel describes that is commonly felt among city dwellers, I believe it has progressed further in Q and become “melancholia” in the Freudian sense.
After his walk through the stimulating lights and advertisements of the city, Q finally arrives at work. His desk chair is a bike, his computer display looks like a video game puzzle with blocks of mathematical equations called “entities,” and his task is to fill vials with glowing downloads and data taken from his work on the entities that are monitored by “management”- an all knowing, always watching singular individual. A big-brother Orwellian type of CEO. Q is an “entity cruncher” in the Ontology research department of a corporation called Mancom, a position that never gets fully explained but it seems like his job is to group together, identify, and prove the existence of certain equations in that video game like program described above. Mancom runs an advertisement that reads as follows: “We live in chaotic world…Who do we Love?..What do we need?...Mancom, making sense of the good things in life.” We get to know “management” and the inner workings of Mancom more throughout the movie as Q requests to work from home, so he can receive “his call,” and gets assigned to work on the special project called the zero theorem for which he will have to prove that everything is for nothing or that 0 = 100%.
From what little is presented about the nature of the work of Mancom we can assume that Mancom and corporations in general in this world have a strong grip on the structure of the society. In Mancom’s case, it seems that they profit off the chaos of the city while also providing the service to consumer of making their lives less chaotic. Which is a paradox - they will never actually relieve people entirely of the chaos of the city because it is the source of their profit and thereby their power. Macom relieves the chaos for their customer through constant surveillance of the people they are providing services to and by use people as “tools” to change, interrupt and make the consumer’s life seem more fulfilling. Appropriately, Mancoms logo is an eye and there are prominent graphics in their offices that say “management” is watching. The people Mancom use as tools in this attempt to relieve customers of chaos are often bribed with money or given access to products, technology and services that they 4 otherwise would not have access to. The “tools” themselves feel they need these things to make their own lives more fulfilling. So, the corporation maintains its consumer base by profiting off the metropolitan populations’ feelings of isolation and anxiety by providing them with people as love interests or whatever “management” thinks they need so that they may feel they are living more fulfilling, individually tailored “you” focused lives. The tools that “management” uses are just regular people that don’t really care about the customers lives they are influencing but are bribed into performing their actions. Furthermore, the laborers of Mancom, like Q, are also constantly surveilled and manipulated by “management” and his “tools” so that Macom may maintain their workforce and keep them from revolting, burning out, or quitting by making them feel more fulfilled in life. Corporations maintain power in this society though their understanding of the effects the city has on the mental life of the metropolitan being.
The structure of Mancom and entity crunching work that Q does for them directly ties into arguments made by Simmel regarding the mentality of metropolitans. Q’s work forces him to constantly value, group, and quantify entities. This sort of work that can only exist in the city drives Q and others in the society to the blasé feelings of indifference towards the individual and self. Q “becomes a single cog as over against the vast overwhelming organization of things and forces which gradually take out of his hands everything connected with progress, spirituality and value.” (Simmel, 18) The overarching goal of Mancom too aligns with the mental condition of those living in a city outlined by Simmel as the tendency to be “calculating.” (Simmel, 13) Mancom wants to fit the chaos of life into these equations so that by “transforming the world into an arithmetical problem” they can solve it. A very modern “mental tendency” of the metropolis resulting from a “money economy.” (Simmel, 13) This disconnect between the person and the soul of the person that results from the overcalculating, rational mind of the city dweller combined with the de-valuing of self and feelings of being doomed to a repetitive and unfulfilling life makes people in the metropolis, like Q, more prone to symptoms of melancholy.
Q responds to this environment of constant commercial stimuli and the repetitiveness of his job that de-values him as an individual in a more extreme way than most others in the metropolis. He creates 5 complete solitude for himself and waits patiently for his phone call so that he may start to live a life full of joy and purpose. His solitude is so intense that he feels almost no connection to the outside world or the people in it and has also lost connection and value of his own self in the process. He creates as many physical barriers between him and the outside world as possible, hence the locked up old church that he at one point in the film never leaves for over a year. His unwillingness to interact or engage with the world is his extreme way of differentiating and ultimately turns him melancholic. Until Q gets his call he sees “no reason for being” and while waiting for his call he develops delusions that the people around him regard as “insane.” They regard this as insanity only because Q’s symptoms and reactions to the city are different from the more normalized reactions that other characters in the movie have, even though they are just as deluded and dissatisfied with the systems set in place - but are responding in a way that is more widely understood.
The delusion that Q invented for himself, that he received a phone call that would have brought purpose to his life and given him an answer, or some sort of meaning if only he hadn’t dropped the phone has resulted in Q feeling that he has lost something. But not just a loss as is experienced by others in the society as a result of similar conditions of the metropolis, Q’s is the loss of an unknown thing. Because Q “cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost” he broods over it every day and it “consumes his ego.” (Freud, 245) It is the loss of his ego that turns him melancholic. It is the unknown quality of the call in that Q could have known but as of now does not know what the meaning of his life is combined with the fear that he will never know and the fear of his life actually being meaningless that drives his melancholic symptoms and “absorbs him…entirely.” (Freud, 246) Q has many of the symptoms of melancholia described by Freud that are unveiled throughout the movie. For example, Q manages to spark up a relationship with a woman who really cares about him but when she asks him to be with her Q refuses, believing that she doesn’t really care about him and she is just pretending to as part of the job she was paid to do. This is indicative of an inferiority complex and an expectation Q has that he is to be “cast out” from society and that he is “unworthy” of such love from her. (Freud, 246) Q also states in the film that he remembers enjoying food once, but feels no joy now, now he just feels nothing, and his greatest fear is nothing. He also reveals that his current “diet dictates against any foods with perceptible flavor.” Q’s “refusal to take nourishment” says more about his melancholic state as a person who is de-valuing their own life. So really all of Q’s problems stem from a huge dissatisfaction and struggle with himself. Q too fits Freuds description of the melancholic who, after expressing disgust with themselves. still do not display any “humility and submissiveness” but “always seems as though they felt slighted and had been treated with great injustice. Freud goes on to explain that this behavior stems from the fact that their “mental constellation of revolt” has somehow “passed into the crushed state of melancholia.” (Freud, 248) Q is in revolt against being a participant in the world around him (his job, the normal behaviors of his peers, building relationships etc.) so that he may wait at home near his phone for his call. At some point he felt loss, that maybe his call wouldn’t come, and through a process of isolation, self-deprecation and “ego-loss” that revolt turned into melancholy. (Freud, 249)
In the end, management reveals to Q that he was chosen to work on the zero theorem because he “represents the anti-thesis of it” as Q is “a man of faith living a meaningless life waiting for a phone call to give him purpose” and the zero theorem would prove that “all is for nothing.” Q gets frustrated and starts destroying the Mancom mainframe. “Management” points at the black hole in the room and tells Q the only true thing he knows is “that's it. Chaos encapsulated. That's all there is at the end. Just as it was at the beginning.” We are unsure if any of this is really happening but the movie ends with Q smiling, walking backwards into the black hole that appeared in the Mancom mainframe room, and then fading into a scene of Q in a virtual reality beach environment where he is content, in control, and can finally make the sun set, whereas before it was stuck frozen in time at the moment right before the sun dips down into the water. So perhaps, Q in the end experiences joy and content by finally realizing that if everything is nothing in the end then he hasn’t actually lost anything. Thereby letting go of his obsession with the phone call, his fear of nothing, and recovering from his melancholia that was brought on by the conditions of the modern metropolis and their effects on the mental life of the metropolitan.
Film Chosen to Analyze:
Gilliam, Terry. The Zero Theorem. 2013
Assigned/Required Readings:
Simmel, Georg. The metropolis and Mental Life. 1903.
Freud, Sigmund. Mourning and Melancholia. 1914-1916