DIVERGENT (Burger 14): [3]

It's a good idea to watch movies with your sisters. Not only do you discover what excites them and have something to share with them, you also get the chance to expand outside your viewing habit comfort zone. More generally, watching movies intergenerationally can teach you about how people more naive with media and narrative art -- or, perhaps in this current era, more sophisticated! -- enjoy things with which they've yet to become jaded. This can only help when trying to understand how time and age affect our engagement with the world around us. As an example, I suspected my intuitive response to the Faction system of DIVERGENT was because of its similarity to the various Houses of Harry Potter. I couldn't say whether this construct has some innate narrative appeal or if it's simply a trend on the ascent with the recent YA Lit boom, but it's very interesting to wonder if my sisters were experiencing a rapport with the story similar to how I had with Harry Potter more than a decade ago. 

I haven't read the book series upon which this film and its upcoming sequels are based, nor do I particularly plan on it. I don't consider my decision to be unfair to the film or its universe, though I recognize that my unfamiliarity with this book series and others is rapidly aging me in the eyes of a young population for whom they will be future generational touchstones. Books, especially book series, require a lot of time, investment, and attention that I'm not sure I can feasibly devote. I feel this same way about television, so I see consistency in my choice to avoid most serialized narratives. (At least I watch the movie versions of pop culture phenomena!) And I do think we have to accept at some point that we will not be able to preserve the intensely meaningful relationships we have with books in our younger years. But I don't necessarily think that means youth-oriented books are off-limits either. I think age means we get to choose, and that means we can experience YA Lit as adults instead of children, or we can move on to more standard adult literature and experience that as adults too.

Anyhow, DIVERGENT. Where pure pop pleasure is concerned, I found it to be a fun (and colorful!) variation on the rather dour state of blockbuster filmmaking lately. The amount of eye-catching set design and saturated colors suggests we are meant to like what we see, if only for a while. The requisite turn towards seriousness comes with due diligence, but until then, at least we get Urbex, ziplines, and games of capture-the-neon-flag. This is supposed to be a utopian society, after all. Some allure helps to sell the illusion, and it comes the added bonus of fostering a better viewing experience for this weary filmgoer. Because while I do see value in THE HUNGER GAMES' (series) consideration of personal trauma and political self-assertion, the bleak world in which they take place is rather unenjoyable for me to take in after the recent deluge of joyless megamovies. The video game tide has risen nauseatingly high, and so we are condemned to a blockbuster hell in which the Call of Duty games seem to be the main artistic inspiration. THE HUNGER GAMES and its sequels only just keep their heads above this tepid water. Nevertheless, I expect time will treat those films kindly as we move on from fallacious filmic ultrarealism. My guess is that, one day, we'll look back on them as formative experiences in the lives of young women facing down hardships closer to home.

DIVERGENT, though, has quite a few things to say on trauma as well. Its observations are embedded within its clever use of induced hallucinations to draw out inner emotions from its protagonists (which seems like a much more accepting view of psychedelic drugs than I'd expect for a movie like this). We first see the threat of trauma as it affects the mind of Tris Prior, our protagonist. Her test in proving herself to the Dauntless faction, a group of soldier-like young adults, is to overcome her four most private terrors (shades of Neon Genesis Evangelion here). In mental simulations reminiscent of THE MATRIX, Tris pushes past her first two garden-variety fears of animal attacks and drowning...on through to attempted rape. Her recent infatuation with Four, a mentor figure in the Dauntless faction and mostly supportive presence so far, suddenly turns violent and sinister. The Four of her fears ignores her demands for him to stop, and he taunts her by suggesting her refusal implies cowardice.

It's jarring to see such a stark scene in a YA Lit adaptation, and yet, really, this might be where it belongs most of all. After all, keeping such intimate violence off the screen hasn't decreased its ubiquity in real life. Young girls are dreadfully underserved by the indifference and trivialization of rape in ostensibly adult art. If YA wants to tackle this very serious problem through the safe remove of artistic interpretation, I can't imagine very much wrong with that (barring trigger potential). The potential rape scene flickers by quickly, but it is no less impactful for its succinctness. Tris' subconscious dread serves as a reprise of Four's fourth and deepest fear, an encounter with an abusive father several times refracted. This abuse had been set up earlier in the film as a plot point, and when we finally confront it, it's in a suitably primal fashion. Four's experience is a common one: alone at home, young and defenseless; a loved one looming with punishment in their hands, mania in their eyes. Before the assault, the cruelest of justifications: his father just wants him to be stronger.

Four's striking down of the hated father follows his third fear, where he has to push past his reluctance to kill in order to dispassionately shoot an innocent girl. That scene, in turn, is reprised in Tris' own fourth and final confrontation with fear, a scene which initially scans as taking place after a waking re-entry into the real world. The society's overlord (Kate Winslet) hands Tris a gun and directs Tris toward her newly-arrived family members. With little hesitation, Tris points the gun toward her loved ones and begins to fire. We may recognize this set-up as a deliberate echo of Four's own mental reckoning with murder, and we may unconsciously recognize that Tris has only conquered three of her four fears at this point, but by now I hope I've adequately set up for you the daring things this film is doing with perspective and identification. The effect of watching Tris shoot her family is fleeting and ultimately misleading, but it lingers just as the imagined sexual violation by Four does. For a movie about the moral triumph and self-actualization of a young girl, DIVERGENT is impressively willing to imagine its protagonist in some ugly situations.

I should mention at this point that DIVERGENT owes much of its success to Shailene Woodley, a favorite of my middle sister (THE FAULT IN OUR STARS!) and rapidly growing on me too. Woodley ably switches between steely resolve, fear, heartbreak, and bravery with naturalistic ease as the scene requires. It goes without saying that her facility for broad-ranging emotional expression comes in handy for a movie about the unpredictability of personality. Less obviously perhaps, Woodley is a superlative avatar for impressionable viewers to vicariously navigate life's conflicts. While Theo James, as Four, acquits himself well in the beginning, his devil-may-care charisma is less convincing when he is called upon to be earnest and openhearted. Shailene Woodley has no such difficulty; she can hide herself behind uncertain defensiveness just as easily as she reveals layers of inner strength. While I look forward to her continuing experimentation in films along the lines of Gregg Araki's WHITE BIRD IN A BLIZZARD, she deserves praise for stopping off in the YA world first to give young girls a heroine worth admiring.

I haven't paid much attention to the central metaphor of the film because I don't think it carries the philosophical weight it seeks. The concept of externally imposed identity has been dissected with much more passion and weirdness elsewhere. As a storytelling device, though, it's pretty unimpeachable. Consider: Tris' closest girl friend in the film always speaks her mind - because she's from the Candor faction! Her other friend can relay plot exposition to her - because he's from Erudite! And when Tris' mom comes to save the day despite belonging to Abnegation, it's because she was actually born into Dauntless at first! Character traits are textual in this movie, and enjoyably so. The rigidity of factional allegiances also gets an interesting workout where the emerging group of friends compare their lives before each had joined the Dauntless faction. It's clear they've all been shaped by their previous factions, and that their entry into Dauntless is shaped by where they come from. Again, as a metaphor for leaving home and meeting new people, this is really solid stuff! We come from many homes and many families, and even as we mature and build new kinds of relationships with each other, we are constantly negotiating against the private worlds that shaped us. Foregrounding that process through metaphor is one of DIVERGENT's best and most subtle conceits.

Even the (vaguely defined) central conflict gains a certain amount of weight from its metaphorical backing. The tough Dauntless faction prides itself on its authoritarian obedience, or not resisting orders from above. It is literally a training ground for soldiers, and so its militaristic nature comes ported in from the real world. Eric (Jai Courtney) leads Dauntless with the inflexibility of a drill sergeant, all the better to create contrast with the softer Four and more empathic Tris. Masculinity, as represented by Eric and his cold adherence to rules, is cast as something that inflicts pain and increases hostility between its adherents. Tris wants the freedom of Dauntless/masculinity, but her sensitivity to the Factionless/homeless and other vulnerable people places her in opposition to Eric. When Eric eventually manipulates Dauntless into a robotic police militia, this seems less like a co-optation by higher powers than an extrapolation of the warrior culture it had been consciously cultivating all along. The climax of the story has Dauntless enacting what basically amounts to an ethnic cleansing. There had been hints of unilateral aggression against the passive Abnegation faction throughout the movie. Tris and her brother are too late to realize the faction system has been fomenting this kind of unrest all along, a realization which costs them the lives of their parents. DIVERGENT ends with Tris stunned and hurting, disillusioned but determined, on her way by train to parts unknown.

One last, related point: Tris' rejection of the faction system can be read a number of ways. The most obvious (as well as the presumable intention) is as an affirmation of the importance of identity, the ubiquitous Be You-nique! message directed at misunderstood teens craving such validation. However, it's also possible to draw the exact opposite meaning out of the metaphor. If, like me, you believe that a strong belief in personal identity has fascistic under-/overtones (i.e. Eric, most Dauntless of all), you can read DIVERGENT as a rejection of identity altogether. In the real world, dominant culture commands that we create for ourselves an identifiable and consistent personal brand. Believing in the importance and uniqueness of our identities, we consolidate our social capital and become better and more marketable consumers. By contrast, Tris Prior represents an amorphous and uncategorizable form of being. For me this brings to mind Terre Thaemlitz's idea of the anti-essentialist, unreconciled identity. Terre advocates refusal to tame the contradictions of our most private selves, both to be more honest to our unruly self-concepts and to be more resistant to the capitalist segregation by predetermined target demographics. Tricky, in his own way, also feels it's more honest to reject the strict boundaries of identity in favor of a fluid internal state. I mention these artists, my personal heroes, not to "reclaim" DIVERGENT as some sort of secretly, militantly queer anti-capitalist samizdat. Rather, I think this is the ultimate utility of pop culture objects. They are so appealingly broad that we are compelled by their simpleness and left free to write our own interpretations over top of them. I don't doubt that DIVERGENT was deliberately designed to be an ode to individualism, but I think it's interesting and exciting that I can dig a totally oppositional reading out of it with minimal effort. Like a pop song, and by nature of its own looseness, DIVERGENT can contain many seemingly contradictory meanings. The very title and structuring metaphor of the story hints at departing from preconceptions, but it doesn't necessarily dictate that there's only one way to do so. The narrative of the film suggests that you rebel against authority and be true to your unique self. You could, however, just as well rebel against the film's plot and find a queer message of resisting false binaries and oversimplification of selfhood. It's a radically open text, and its radicalism comes from refusing to impose an authorial point-of-view as the lone true interpretation. Its mass popularity means it will be seen and adored by many people around the world, and it will mean things to them that we could never predict just by outlining its story beats and metaphors. I can't say for certain what my sisters see in it, but even as we come together to watch it, we each leave with a vastly different experience. There is no objective DIVERGENT, only a multiplicity of DIVERGENTs constructed in the mind's eye of each viewer who comes to it, ready to learn.