“Divergent” Subjects: The Individual Against the Collective
Last weekend, I finally watched Divergent. Last semester, I kept telling students in my Plato’s Republic seminar that someone needed to get on the film version of the dialogue. It just seems so cinematically rich. I mean, I know people have made films that are treatments of the cave analogy, but I want the thriller that is the dialogue as a whole.
Halfway through the semester a student told me I needed to see Divergent because it depicted Plato’s Republic. Let’s just bracket that this film fails as a depiction because any successful film of the dialogue would have to find a way to perform the narrative encapsulation of the dialogue–Socrates narrating the story of the conversation that follows, the argumentative set up to the city in light of the question of whether justice is advantageous. If Divergent depicts the Republic, it does so because it depicts a community in which people are divided into classes on the basis of their natures and these classes do the different tasks needed for the city to flourish. Erudite seeks knowledge, Dauntless defends the city, Amity farm peacefully at the outskirts of the city, Candor speaks the truth, and Abnegation feed the poor and rule the city. The film, which is based on the novel of the same name by Veronica Roth, gets traction from the problem that not everyone easily fits into one category, because you know, they’re divergent! Like Hunger Games, a story that sets itself up as a revolutionary tale of resistance against oppression, Divergent ends up serving the same neoliberal practically Ayn-Randian celebration of individualism against collective action. In this film, the collective becomes a problem because it attempts to limit and narrowly define individuals, while individuals succeed only when they work independently of the collective in order to resist it. Read more
The Trott Line 