DIVERGENT Movie: Reading FOUR Through NIETZSCHE

Only one time in the movie do we see Four's entire tattoo.

We see it in the scene directly following the one where Four takes Tris into his own Fearscape and Tris sees Four's deepest fear, being beaten with a leather belt and buckle by his father Marcus starting in childhood.

Usually Four stands and calms his breathing and heart rate. (This is standard technique for "flooding" developed by Edna Foa.) Tris however grabs Marcus's belt, punches Marcus and Four protects her from Marcus, thus initiating a new response in Four.

In these two images we have the complete history of Four/Tobias's childhood, in reverse sequence for the viewer.

The Tattoo

The tattoo is a record of his beatings. On a child's skin, a leather belt is going to leave terrible welts, cuts and permanent scars. Not like Patsy's beatings in 12 Years a Slave nor like this slave:

A horrifying explicit vision of Nietzsche's Torturous Inscription of  the Body

But you get the idea. To a child it is a terrible thing to endure beatings that leave permanent markings. 

Down the center of Four's back on his spinal cord are the five faction symbols. 

So with this piece of dialogue we know that every time Tobias displayed curiosity - forbidden in Abnegation - which is linked to intelligence, or bravery, honesty, happiness or kindness Marcus forbid it. And he not only forbid it - the way Beatrice was forbidden - but he was also punished unmercifully for being a curious, kind, intelligent, honest, brave and happy child until he learned never to show any of those feelings. Ever. 

The tattoo clearly shows the lash marks probably covering some scars. It clearly shows all five of the factions, desires, attributes, a well rounded person who was emotionally mature might have. 

But exposing the tattoo reveals both shame and desire.

In revealing what he has concealed to Tris in his Fearscape and on his back he is confessing shame and opening himself to vulnerability. (Badiou:In Praise of Love)

Tris carefully runs her fingers and hand down Four's back touching him tenderly and admiringly
And Four is being touched tenderly for the very first time in his life. He does not wear his tattoo openly nor share it with anyone as he is a very private person.
"Not approachable."

This is an explicit Inscription of the Body - Mind always included in this concept - that Nietzsche details for us in The Genealogy of Morals. 

Four has turned his torture into body art. He has carved the memory of it onto his back to be there forever. 

All you have to do  is look at the lashes as they curve around his arms, neck and rib cage, how the belt falls on his shoulder blades and back to understand this. He never wants to forget it. He never wants to forgive. He always wants to remember the terrified child he was. 

Is this why he keeps going back into his Fearscape? Has it become erotic for him? 

Actually in terms of Behavior Therapy Four chooses flooding - implosion - to confront his fears (Edna Foa). With flooding it is necessary to re-experience the "flooding" on a semi regular basis to keep the fear manageable. It doesn't go away forever. 

Spontaneous recovery is a fact of psychological learning theory.

BTW this works really well to desensitize your dog to thunder and Fourth of July explosions. Tape similar sounds, go to confined room with your dog, play the tape very low (read a book or something) until your dog ignores it. Every time you do  it increase the noise a little bit. Until you can play it as loud as possible and your dog ignores it. You will have to do it semi regularly to condition your dog as Four is conditioning himself.

Back to Four and Nietzsche and The Inscription of the Body/Mind

Four's body/mind is inscripted by Dauntless when we meet him. He is carefully gendered masculine: he walks forcefully into every scene or exits purposefully. All his movements are deliberate. His dialogue is all truth. No extraneous small talk. He exhibits a frightening awareness of being a killer when he acts in that capacity. He is deadly.

Nietzsche on The Inscription of the Body which also includes the Mind.

192 How does one create a memory for the human animal?

192-193 ....there is perhaps nothing more terrible in man's earliest history than his mnemotechnics. "A thing is branded on the memory to make it stay there; only what goes on  hurting will stick"...It is the past - the longest, deepest, hardest of pasts - that seems to surge up....Whenever man has thought it necessary to create a memory for himself, his effort has been attended with torture, blood, sacrifice. ....sacrifice...repulsive mutilations...the cruelest rituals in every religious cult....all these have their origin in that instinct which divined pain to be the the strongest aid to mnemonics.

Nietzsche says more and he says pages about punishment. Festinger's work has showed that the stronger the initiation procedures, the more adherence to the group. Is this the rule for punitive families also?

Engraving your back is not  pleasurable. And culturally now, tattooing has become a wide practice. These people are engraving their body/minds. This is a surface Inscription of the Body. Ask anyone who wants to tell you why they have this one, where they got it, how they chose it, what it means, when they got it, who was the artist who did it. Each one is a MEMORY.

Going through a reading of Badiou it is only Love that opens him to vulnerability. 

REVIEW:Reading DIVERGENT Through Zizek and Lacan

First scene between Tris and Four

Beatrice is wrapped in the net as she comes to rest after her jump. She has an expression of happiness on her face for the first time that we see. She has faced a fear of plummeting seven stories down and is in a state of euphoria. This is what we see and what Four sees but we do not see Four seeing; only imagine his seeing. He pulls the net to allow her to sit up and he grabs and lifts her out.

Roth's account of this scene is fragmented between the action, what goes through Beatrice's mind about the name change, the dialogue between Lauren and Four and the snippets of conversation between Four and Beatrice/Tris. 

Beatrice/Tris is the first female Abnegation transfer so she is a surprise. The fact that she is first jumper is also a surprise. The screenwriting team has edited Roth's account. 

Our first look here at Four reveals his open and rather surprised face. He has witnessed a gift from the sky, from the Heavens miraculously appearing in the net. Like a Silkie from the deep. 

Four: What,you were pushed?(quietly)
Beatrice: No. (all breathlessly happy)Thank you. (as he helps her down)
Four: What's your name?
Beatrice: B......stuttering
Four: Is it a hard one? 
Beatrice: nodding yes embarrassed
Four: You can pick a new one. Make it good. You only get to  pick once.(emphasis on choosing with no reversal)
Beatrice: stuttering saying Tris. My name is Tris.
Four: First jumper - Tris! Welcome to Dauntless.

So quick. The contained surprise that the first jumper is a girl, from Abnegation, who appears elated rather than frightened by her ordeal so far. Four is open faced, nice, assertive and non-threatening, non-aggressive. 

The presentation of the ideal masculine social construction of gender is performed. Four has a beautiful face, intelligent and sensitive and sexy. But he is matter-of-fact all business here, gently and firmly. No provocation, just a short intimate moment.

People say that the first minutes of any encounter encompass the whole relationship in miniature. - ALEX by Pierre Lemaitre (p. 339)

There is quite a bit of subtext in this short and vivid scene:

1. He underestimates her sort of by alluding to the fact he thinks she was pushed.
2. He offers her a way to change her name with the limiting factor that it is a one shot choice with no return.
3. He intuits her dissatisfaction with Beatrice and suggests it is possible for her to change her name, become a different person, become Other.
4. His welcome is warm and accepting. This is unlike Eric's immediate dislike of her when she volunteers to be first.
5. Through Lacan, Tris rhymes with Chris, short for Christina her first friend. 

Here is Four's account of that first meeting with Beatrice/Tris in Allegiant:

When her body first hit the net, all I registered was a gray blur. I pulled her across it and her hand was small, but warm, and then she stood before me, short and thin and plain and in all ways unremarkable--except that she had jumped first. The Stiff had jumped first.

Even I didn't jump first.
Her eyes were so stern, so insistent.
Beautiful. (Allegiant p. 491)

All this in 9 short sentences and the images. Now that is a screenplay folks.
Four introduces himself to the group as their instructor and says: My name is Four.

Christina: Like the number four.
Four: Exactly like the number four.
Christina: Were one, two and three taken? 
Four: What is your name?
Christina: Christina.
Four: (stepping closer to her face, half smiling)
Four: Well Christina, the first lesson you will learn from me, if you want to survive here, keep your mouth shut. Do you understand?
Christina: (nodding yes) 
Four: Good. (stepping back from her)

All this is said firmly, assertively, non-threatening in a way that projects that he means what he says.

Later at dinner in the cafeteria Tris sits next to him because Christina has maneuvered herself away from him. They are with the transfers from other factions, the ones Four will work with.

Tris: Were you a transfer or Dauntless born?
Four: Are you kidding?(softly)
Tris: No, (smiling and flustered)
Four: (coldly) What makes you think you can talk to me?
Tris: (abashed now and slightly smiling in embarrassment) Must be because, you're so approachable.
Four: (muttering quietly) Careful.

His very un-approachableness signals approach, reading through Lacan. "Don't come near me" signals the opposite as a "floating sign" which Tris has accurately picked up.

There is more as he takes her through her fear simulations. He is puzzled by how fast she gets through them and her inability to say how she does it so well. After the water drowning sequence:

Four: How did you do that?
Tris: What?
Four: How did you break the glass?
Tris: I don't know. I just did it.
Four: (sitting down beside her) What were your test results?Your aptitude test.
Tris:  Abnegation (flustered)
Four: (continuing to look at her) I don't think so.
Tris: What?
Four:I think you're lying to me.
Tris: Why would I lie to you? 

Here is where it gets unusual. He does not accuse her, try to trap her in her lie, argue with her or threaten her. He avoids the Dominating Discourse and does not allow it to frame his thinking or his reply to her.

Four: I'm going to ask you one more time. What were your test results?
Tris: (still softly) Abnegation. 

Four gets up,  and says, "Time to go." Tris stands up and starts to walk out. (He says what he means and he means what he says.Consistent.) 

Four: Tris! Just so you know. (as she exits out the door) Dauntless never break the glass like that. 

Ancient Asian wisdom: To be sincere in the land of the insincere is dangerous.

Now we think that he has guessed the truth, that she is Divergent and no one has said a thing out loud. It is a fine, nuanced scene by both actors, subtly performed. A scene for adults I would say or for teens who are observant. The screenplay and the director have a respect for their audience that we don't often see so simply presented.( This is what makes the Divergent screenplay superior to all the others in these YA franchises. The screenplay transcends the plot.Unfortunately this screenplay team will not do Insurgent nor Allegiant nor will Neil Burger be back as director. So do not expect the same quality in the future.

Four is still puzzled. The next thing he will do on this subject is to invite her to go through his own fearscape partnering with him. 

If someone lies to you that means the truth is too dangerous for them to say. They feel threatened by you. They don't trust you. This is the meaning of the lie. This is what Four understands and by taking her into his own fearscape he offers his trust to her as a gift.
Tris: In my fear landscape? Four: No in mine. We're going to go in together.
Tris: Have you ever done this before?
Four: No.
Tris: You're going to let me see into your head? (astonished)
Four: (nonchalantly)Why wouldn't I?
Tris: I don't know. You've never told me anything about yourself and now you're going to just let me in your mind?!!!
Four: Are you afraid of that?
Tris: Aren't you?!!!
Four: No.

This is his gift of trust to her.

These early scenes establish the character of Four. This is communicated to us linguistically by unambiguous language. Assertive but not aggressive. Not especially emotionally rendered either, very matter of fact, nonchalant. He so far has been consistent. I have left out the exchanges taking place during physical training, but they are factual and low key also. 

This is a different kind of man and intimate conversation women want but have difficulty engaging in because of the man and their own preconceptions. In this setting we have a master(teacher)/student relationship that is very often emotionally and erotically charged.

Reading through Calchi-Novati: LINK

Who We Might Be

Performing the Potentialities of Otherness and Selfhood: Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga
Gabriella Calchi Novati

Abstract
In Our Vampires, Ourselves, Nina Auerbach argues that vampires ‘can be everything we are, while at the same time, they are fearful reminders of the infinite things we are not’.

 Disagreeing with her reading, I will show that the Cullen family of vampires in the Twilight Saga tells us not who we are, but rather who we might be. Drawing primarily from the writings ofJacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek, this paper aims to analyse the performance of otherness and selfhood in the Twilight Saga and the upshot of such a performance. 

In using this paper by Calchi-Novati in reading the performance of Four in Divergent, is to show a man, not as most men are, but as men might be.

Four is a Zizekian "sign from the future" that we must make space for in the words of Calvino:

Calvino:“seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”

Of course Roth has begun to castrate Four in Divergent, increased  in Insurgent and finishing the job in Allegiant. Roth slops around in the psychological interpretive swamp until there's not much left of him. By the time she has finished Four is diminished and ground down into gray mediocrity. 

There are so many ways to be brave in this world. Sometimes bravery involves laying down your life for something bigger than yourself, or for someone else. Sometimes it involves giving up everything you have ever known, or everyone you have ever loved, for the sake of something greater.

But sometimes it doesn't.

Sometimes it is nothing more than gritting your teeth through pain, and the work of everyday, the slow walk toward a better life.

That is the sort of bravery I must have now. (Allegiant p. 509)

Ugh.

And then the Epilogue which is pretty bad also. Hopefully the movie will not follow the book literally. But with Scummit Summit's template of "directors for hire," after the first film, rather than a director like Burger who is an artist, I think we can expect the worst.