We’ve been reading about film studios scanning movie actors, and using their personas in future movies, even after the actor has died.
While researching the subject, I read about The Congress—a 2013 live-action and animated film—about an actor who’s being scanned for future use.
We found the DVD among our unwatched movies collection, and watched it.
(An added incentive was that the film is loosely based on Stanislaw Lem’s Futurological Congress.)
This article is a comparison of the 1971 science fiction book, to the 2013 genre film, and to 2022’s Everything, Everywhere, All at Once.*
The protagonist of the 1971 novel Futurological Congress is an academic Ijon Tichy—a delegate to the Eighth World Futurological Congress studying overpopulation.
The site is a 100-story Hilton in Costa Rica, and the story takes place around the year 2000.
While attending seminars, Tichy drinks water from the public supply.
He’s unaware that it’s has been drugged to control the area in and around the hotel (ahead of a revolution) and is caught up in the savagery.
After Tichy drinks the hallucinogenic water, neither he (or the reader) can be sure which sequences are real, and which are not.
The world that Tichy lives in—prior to the revolution, and the hallucinogens—is one of ever-present violence.
A fellow delegate (standing next to Tichy) is shot—for being dark-skinned, and reaching for a handkerchief.
(Tichy washes the blood splatter from his clothes in his hotel room.)
He has a drink at the hotel bar, and learns that a bar companion is a religious sharpshooter who plans on murdering the Pope.
A sign in his room reads: “This Room Guaranteed BOMB-FREE.”
There’s a ten-foot crowbar, a khaki camouflage cape, and an Alpine rope available in this room closet—indicating that “disturbances” may be a common occurrence in this Hilton.
Tichy retreats, with a few other guests, to the basement of the hotel.
Later, he’s evacuated (in two different scenarios) by the U.S. military, and wakes up as a stigmatized “defrostee” in the year 2039.
In this “utopian” world, people are addicted to “psyches”—drugs that regulate every aspect of their lives.
A passage reads:
We live in a psychemized society.
From "psycho-chemical."
Words such as "psychic" or "psychological" are no longer in usage. . .
One should always use the drug appropriate to the occasion.
It will assist, sustain, guide, improve, resolve.
Nor is it it, but rather part of one's own self, much as eyeglasses become in time, which correct defects in vision.
As one character says: “A dream will always triumph over reality, once it is given the chance.”
A woman tries to help Tichy acclimate to her world, but he becomes disillusioned with their relationship.
He discovers that the 2039 world wasn’t real, and that it’s actually 2098, or is it?
The major roles in The Congress are: Robin Wright (played by Robin Wright); her agent, Al (Harvey Keitel); studio CEO Jeff Green (Danny Huston); her young son, Aaron (Kodi Smit-McPhee); her teenage daughter, Sarah (Sami Gayle); Aaron’s doctor (Paul Giamatti); and Robin’s long-time animator Dylan Truliner (voiced by Jon Hamm).
Even if I weren’t interested in the subject, the performances of the actors—especially the star—made the film well worth watching.
Although the animated half of the film is a bit uneven, most of it is quite beautiful.
(The animation is all hand-drawn.)
The film is directed by Ari Folman, who wrote the screenplay.
“Robin Wright” is the protagonist of The Congress film.
She’s playing a variation of herself—much like John Malkovich did in 1999’s Being John Malkovich, and Nicholas Cage in 2022’s The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.
She’s an actor—once The Princess Bride, and now a single mother whose son has Usher Syndrome.
Her teenage daughter (Sarah) seems bitter toward her.
Is Sarah so bitter because Robin concentrates so much attention on the son?
Twisted studio head, Jeff Green, offers her much less money than a male star would receive to sell her identity to the studio.
One condition of the sale is that she not perform again, on film or stage.
At first, she refuses, but then—after Aaron’s disease progresses—she agrees to a 20-year contract.
Of the live-action sequences, one of the most psychologically interesting is the scene in which Robin is scanned.
This scene doesn’t take place on a set.
As I learned in the DVD commentary, it was filmed in the actual Digital Domain studios, where actors are scanned for posterity.
She’s first asked to wear a special bodysuit, and then places herself within a giant dome made of LED lights.
Later, Robin is asked to exhibit a series of emotions, but she’s so overwhelmed by feelings of being drained, that she freezes.
Her agent Al (Harvey Keitel) extracts the emotions out of her during a long monologue.
(Her agent has a long history of manipulating her for his own ends.)
Twenty years later, an older live-action Robin drives through a crossing gate, and enters the “animated zone” to meet with smarmy CEO Jeff Green (in an appropriately cockroach-filled room).
(As Robin enters this zone, the Lem book and the film become more similar, and the film switches from live-action to animation.)
Green’s studio has made a tidy profit from Robin’s persona—in a film franchise called Rebel Robot Robin—but “animated Robin” is an ignored guest at the studio’s “Congress” (set in a 100-story hotel).
She hallucinates, and a revolution explodes (as in the book).
Robin escapes to the flooded basement—where after various “rescues”—she awakes from being frozen, and explores a future society.
Her initial companion is Dylan Truliner (voiced by Jon Hamm)—an animator who’s obsessed with her.
Unlike Tichy (in the novel), Robin isn’t just an explorer.
She’s searching for her son, Aaron.
At one point (in the hotel basement), Robin thinks she sees daughter Sarah in a corridor, but she doesn’t pursue her.)
During the hotel scenes of Futurological Congress, Lem uses a lot of familiar names—UPI, Agence France Presse, Interpol, Berkeley University—to signal that we aren’t too far in the future.
Similarly, in both animated worlds of The Congress (the present and future), entities use familiar cartoon avatars of a few years back. There are animated caricatures of famous people (among them: Jesus, Frida Kahlo, Cyndi Lauper, Frank Sinatra, Yoko Ono, and Primo Levi); actors in roles, like Elizabeth Taylor (as Cleopatra) and Clint Eastwood (from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly); as well as non-people like the “Robot” from Metropolis, and a trio of costumed “Robin Wrights” from Rebel Robot Robin.
Hotel staffers are characters from Max Fleischer cartoons (from the 1930’s and 1940’s).
The desk clerk is a sex doll.
When Robin makes her transition to the future, “Grace Jones” (in her A View to a Kill guise), wakes her from slumber.
The future in the 2013 film is very dark, but it’s not as dark as the two futures in Lem’s Futurological Congress.
After Tichy takes a dose of “up'n'at'm”—a powerful anti-psychem—he realizes he’s not living in a utopia after all.
Instead, the “magnificent hall” where he’s dining is a “concrete bunker,” and the pheasant he’s eating is “unappetizing gray-brown gruel.”
He discovers why people are always gasping for breath.
They’re out of breath from running along the streets, and only believing that they are driving elegant cars:
Holding their hands out chest-high and gripping the air like children pretending to be drivers, businessmen were trotting single file down the middle of the street. . .
Then the vapor wore off, the picture gave a shudder, straightened out, and once again I was looking down on a gleaming procession of car tops, white, yellow, emerald, moving majestically across Manhattan.
Fifty years later, the 2098 world in Futurological Congress is even uglier—an overpopulated, glacier-filled, dying nightmare.
People aren’t just ordinary-looking; they are deformed—with tails, bristles on their backs, crude artificial limbs, and skin diseases—all “living” in a grotesque world that they are oblivious of.
(I’m not going to spoil the endings of the novel, or the film, but it’s ironic that Robin won’t sign a new contract allowing buyers to become her, but ultimately chooses to exist as another person.)
The Congress has several elements in common with 2022’s Everything, Everywhere, All at Once*—most importantly, that the focus of both films is on a mother and her child.
Both are genre films with an art house vibe that transport us in and out of different worlds—one a multiverse, and the other various futures.
Both films deal with metaphysical issues, as well as motherhood, feminism, and age.
A central difference is that Everything has a lot more humor than The Congress, and its’ humor has an open-hearted quality.
Most of the humor in The Congress is in the performances of Danny Huston (as CEO Jeff Green) and Harvey Keitel (as Al), but it’s a bitter sort of humor (as we watch both men manipulate Robin).
I suppose I understand why The Congress wasn’t more of a commercial success.
The title is very dull and not evocative.
The film itself is half live-action and half animation (yet clearly for adults).
The “futures” portrayed in The Congress are terrifying, and its’ portrayal of sexism is clear-eyed.
I know that we (an older couple who love genre films) would have gone to see it on a big screen, if we’d heard more about it.
As it was, we picked up the DVD because the cast was so interesting.
The Congress is currently available, on DVD, and streaming.
* Both Michelle Yeoh (the star of Everything, Everywhere, All at Once), and the directors (Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert) have mentioned in interviews that the directors originally wanted the protagonist “Evelyn Wang” to be named “Michelle.” However, they gave up the idea after Michelle Yeoh didn’t agree.
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