Iceman (1984)

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iconogassed
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Iceman (1984)

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Spoiler towards the end.

Ivan Illich wrote:The Greeks told the story of two brothers, Prometheus and Epimetheus. The former warned the latter to leave Pandora alone. Instead, he married her. In classical Greece the name "Epimetheus," which means "hindsight," was interpreted to mean "dull" or "dumb." By the time Hesiod retold the story in its classical form, the Greeks had become moral and misogynous patriarchs who panicked at the thought of the first woman. They built a rational and authoritarian society. Men engineered institutions through which they planned to cope with the rampant ills. They became conscious of their power to fashion the world and make it produce services they also learned to expect. They wanted their own needs and the future demands of their children to be shaped by their artifacts. They became lawgivers, architects, and authors, the makers of constitutions, cities, and works of art to serve as examples for their offspring. Primitive man had relied on mythical participation in sacred rites to initiate individuals into the lore of society, but the classical Greeks recognized as true men only those citizens who let themselves be fitted by paideIa (education) into the institutions their elders had planned.

-- "The Rebirth of Epimethean Man", Deschooling Society

Iceman (1984) opens with the discovery of a Neanderthal, estimated age 40,000, by an arctic mining team. Drilling and blasting are ceased and the base's bearded anthropologist, Dr. Richard Shepherd (Timothy Hutton), is called in from the cold. He was visiting with the local Inuit, which earns him ridicule from the rank and file--"they still lend you their wives?" one asks, laughing.

The novel method by which the Neanderthal's frozen body managed to stave off cell death, something about cryoprotectants absorbed through buttercups, could of course have many far-reaching applications. The disputes between Shepherd and the base's other scientists (which include a young David Straithairn and Lindsay Crouse) revolve around whether the iceman will be allowed to live, observed, or stripped for parts to be sent around the world and studied for humanity's benefit ("His brain to Cambridge, his spinal ganglia to Berkeley..." / "Where does his heart go, San Francisco?").

Though the film, through Shepherd, notes that such innovations invariably serve and strengthen consumer capitalism, the script shows a spine in making the opposing forces not stock benevolent science and stock evil commerce, but differing views as to the place and purpose of science. These scenes are too obviously, even absurdly, manipulated for the sake of plot and sympathy, but in probing the logical extension and complications of such research make a sincere effort to represent the debate, all the more relevant now, around the "end of death"; that is, the point at which technological advancement will allow us to radically extend the limits, chronological and otherwise, of human life. They also introduce, bluntly, the film's main theme (also more relevant than ever): the first step in understanding and learning from our past should be to approach it on its own terms, openly, outside the prison of our own passing prejudices.

Shepherd, whose early efforts in field study resulted in the quick corruption of an African tribe, gets a chance at redemption: the iceman, eventually called "Charlie" after the vocalizations by which he identifies himself, is allowed to awaken in a fully-stocked multi-species vivarium located on the base--the bears are evicted, and Charlie moves in. (The film is vague on the details of what kind of arctic commercial mining camp also houses a massive multi-species vivarium.)

The scientists disappear for some precious minutes and we watch as Charlie drinks from berries, makes fire, even hunts boar helpfully left in the enclosure. Or, helpfully released into the enclosure. (The film is also vague on the details of the research.) There is an interesting effect to these scenes, of watching an ancestor go about the most elemental activities and formative experience of our species, shot and scored as if they were taking place in nature, and yet being constantly aware of the doubly artificial environment. I think it's also an attempt to portray the appeal of anthropology (and thus of our protagonist and his goals) as well as some of its tensions and complexities, the kind of doubling of perception, the social scientist's need, in Clyde Kluckhohn's words, to know as much about the eye that sees as the object seen.

This tension is most vividly expressed when Charlie escapes his habitat. As with his awakening scenes, we are with him alone. Then, we were watching him interact with an artificial environment he believed was natural; now, it is as he runs rampant through an artificial one that is for all intents and purposes much more "natural" to us than the real outdoors, and to him is outright hallucinatory. He comes upon a convex mirror on the wall, and the film really tries to get you to imagine what it would be like to encounter it and the rest of the base anew, even as it seems to acknowledge the difficulty in doing so: the camera adopts Charlie's point of view as he explores unimpeded, only to repeatedly pull ahead of him, ahead of us, and turn back around, revealing Charlie's terror and fascination, emphasizing the gulf in identification with a distant past.

The film mostly avoids Spielberg-style schmaltz. The Thing meets Starman might be a fairer comparison than E.T., but Charlie is still far away from Bridges' sextra-terrestrial, and the film doesn't stray egregiously far from the plausible--all things considered--in having the two "relate". The closest might be when, seated around the fire, Shepherd begins to sing Neil Young's "Heart of Gold", the camera slowly pushing in as Charlie takes to the melody. There's a music-is-the-universal-language moment when Charlie urges Shepherd to continue singing, and then joins in with one of his own favourites, and it's all admirably restrained for what it is, about as much as possible for a scene like it, and seeing as a scene like it was probably a prerequisite, acceptable. And rilly jes' so awful sweet.

The real idealization of Charlie is in a slightly different form.

Through some very swift deductions aided by the intrusion of a helicopter into the airspace over the glass-roofed enclosure (and the local Inuit), Shepherd concludes that Charlie, at the time of his freezing, was on a spiritual quest, seeking redemption for failing his family after their food ran out. This eventually results in some primitivist posturing that feels unearned by the script. Take this exchange between Shepherd and Straithairn's character:

- He's not a monkey, he's a human being...like us.
- Well, not QUITE like us, we've undergone a few changes in forty thousand years.
- Not exactly for the better.
- For once we agree on something.
- What's that?
- Our opinion of modern civilization. But what I would like to know is how you expect him to survive in it...

It's hard to imagine an audience feeling the same way after watching Charlie try to "buy" Lindsay Crouse's character with a piece of plumbing he thinks is treasure. I'm criticizing neither the inclusion of said rape-scare nor the scientists' eventual position--but rather the fast and loose way the film plays it, without making its case, and having the antagonistic scientist join in with even less basis, co-signing a position that simply doesn't square with everything else he has said and done in the film. You get the sense from this and other weak moments that the filmmakers were contracted for a hundred minute cut, and were forced into some patchwork. The rationale here soon becomes clear: get two Smart Men of opposing sides to reveal themselves as True Believers to help sell an ending that finds ecstasy in vicarious metaphysical experience. And not only that, but in self-annihilation for such, and all at the explicit expense of the Quest for Knowledge. That is our final impression of Straithairn's character: he recedes with philosophical approval of Shepherd and Charlie's dual redemption arc. A film nominally about scientific discovery renounces the Promethean ethos, and reveals itself to be not the story of the discovery of an iceman, but of the rebirth of Epimethean man.

As Illich, with some help from Yevgeny Yevtushenko, concludes the essay above (and the book it's in):

Ivan Illich wrote:We now need a name for those who value hope above expectations. We need a name for those who love people more than products, those who believe that:
  • No people are uninteresting.
  • Their fate is like the chronicle of planets.
  • Nothing in them is not particular,
  • and planet is dissimilar from planet.
We need a name for those who love the earth on which each can meet the other,
  • And if a man lived in obscurity
  • making his friends in that obscurity,
  • obscurity is not uninteresting.
We need a name for those who collaborate with their Promethean brother in the lighting of the fire and the shaping of iron, but who do so to enhance their ability to tend and care and wait upon the other, knowing that
  • to each his world is private,
  • and in that world one excellent minute
  • And in that world one tragic minute.
  • These are private.
I suggest that these hopeful brothers and sisters be called Epimethean men.

Shepherd's interest in Charlie is interest in Charlie, rather than the knowledge, and products, Charlie can provide. Shepherd collaborates with his Promethean brethren, but only until it interferes with the application of real care: first, in the thoughtless destruction of Charlie's private world, and then the continued, forcible confinement within it. He is able to fulfill the sacred self-denying hope of anthropologists everywhere, and give back to Charlie the great, abiding gift of obscurity.

In a sense, this is somewhat incidental to the demands of commercial filmmaking of the period. After all, the ending isn't much different than those of E.T. and Starman: the otherworldly visitor, having given meaning to the audience surrogate's journey, escapes from scientists with the surrogate's help and departs into the sky. But there is one important difference:

He comes back down to earth.

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