Surrogates

“Surrogates” is a surprisingly interesting film with numerous Christian elements. It is written by the same team that wrote “Terminator: Salvation,” Michael Ferris and John D. Brancato, and stars Bruce Willis as FBI agent Tom Greer who has little to do in a dystopic future because everyone lives crime-free lives through robotic alter egos. Technology has advanced to the point that people can sit in chairs at home and send out “surrogate” (substitute) selves in their place. The robots are indistinguishable from people, and 98% of the human race lives their daily lives through their surrogates. The surrogates have the same personalities as their human “operators,” but they are as indestructible as machines. They play, drink, dance, have sex, etc., without physical limits to their desires. Nothing that happens to the robots affects their human operators.

A perfect world has perfect appearances. Surrogates are uniformly handsome and beautiful. It is a society of models with not a single imperfect human in evidence. As psychological expressions of their operators, the surrogates live a purely materialistic existence and yet seem to have fulfilled lives. Indeed, society itself has become one vast hive of surrogacy, since no real humans ever go out of the house anymore. Wealth, health, and pleasure are all experienced indirectly. There are no crimes of greed or passion, and the voice-over narration even claims that racial discrimination is a thing of the past. In other words, sin appears to have been vanquished.

Meanwhile, the human race has divided into two groups. The first group is a small minority of disgruntled misfits who live on reservations. A man called the “Prophet” (Ving Rhames) is their leader, and their anti-robotic cult degenerates into a society that is impoverished, violent, and ignorant. The second group comprises the other 98% of humanity who live in an artificial Sims world that is flawless but spiritually hollow. These chair-bound humans can enjoy endless kinds of pleasure without the consequences of their transgressive behavior. The antitheses are stark: a life of pleasure vs. a life of pain; a society that is mechanically perfect but inhuman vs. a society that is chaotic but human. Scientific rationalism rules one reality; human emotion rules the other.

Into this materialistic paradise enters sin. Someone has discovered how to kill people by killing their surrogates and plots to kill the entire human race. The same person who introduced people to sin wishes to kill them for their sins. This person is analogous to Satan, both in his animus toward people and in his representation as a false prophet.

Greer tracks the murderer into the movie’s “hell”—the human reservation—but he pays a price. The brutal humans, in the most important image of the movie, crucify the surrogate. This crucial Christian reference is made more significant by the fact that the Prophet’s followers were the ones who crucified him.

The person behind the murder of the surrogates later says, “In order to kill the addiction you have to kill the addicts.” In this context, one can understand “addiction” as sin and that the philosophy of the person who wants to effectively destroy the entire human race is that sin and the sinner are synonymous. This, of course, is the opposite of Christ’s teaching.

Bruce Willis, who now has no surrogate, symbolically enters the world of virtual people as a flesh and blood man. He is beaten, bruised, and hounded in his attempt to solve the crimes. Furthermore, he is dealing with the depression of his wife who is grieving the loss of their child. Unable to cope with the real world, she has dissolved her personality into that of her surrogate and has become addicted to sedatives. Her dependency reaffirms the theme that “surrogacy” is a drug that the human race is addicted to.

The movie seems to be saying that, in this day of computer networking (e.g. Facebook and Twitter), people are interfacing through virtual identities and not in person. In virtual reality, everyone is perfect; no one is old or fat or ugly or handicapped. The beauty of variation is sacrificed for the beauty of uniformity. This dependency has made people afraid of imperfection and real social interaction. All judgments are made on the superficial basis of appearance.

Without giving away the plot twists, Greer coaxes his unbeautiful wife out of her virtual cocoon, and the movie ends on a marvelously redemptive note. Greer sacrificed his own “sin” (surrogate) to order to put to death the sins (surrogates) of others. The powerful scene of all the surrogates falling down is succeeded by the spectacle of people coming out of their homes for the first time in years. Respectively, these actions represent death and resurrection. Just as Christ’s surrogacy paid the price for all, so does Greer’s. Greer’s substitutional death on the cross atones for all of humanity. The message is that sacrificial love redeems the film’s “multitude of sins”: vanity, greed, debauchery, sloth, and even excessive grieving, as in the case of his wife. Remarkably, the movie manages to incorporate all these disparate themes--sin, crucifixion, atonement, Satan, false prophets, death, resurrection—without beating the viewer over the head with the obvious Christian message underlying those elements. One has to pay careful attention to catch the symbolism of events and archetypal characters.

“Surrogates” is not a perfect film, but in terms of its themes, it is a perfect parable of Christ’s sacrifice. Jesus died on the cross for us so that we may throw off the surrogacy of the flesh and be resurrected as He made us, free of our man-made and sinful selves. The film models the Christian narrative without exploiting or trivializing it. This one is worth seeing for the artful elaboration of the Gospel.

Violence: Heavy / Profanity: Mild / Sex/Nudity: Mild

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