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. 

Divergent Reveiw: Reading Beatrice/Tris Through Lacan's Mirror Stage

Beatrice at mirror in Abnegation gif

Beatrice gets her hair trimmed the second day of every third month. At that time she may look in the mirror for a minute or so. That's FOUR times a year she gets to see her image in a mirror, from the chest up.

Beatrice at Mirror at Abnegation

Beatrice entering aptitude test room sneaking a look at herself

Tori: What's with Abnegation and mirrors.
Beatrice: We reject vanity.
Tori: Yes, I know. Sit down.

Here's a clip of that scene with commentary by director 
Neil Burger

So now you have seen that she lies in the chair and looks to her left that is a mirror, seeing herself. She gets up, walks over and sees herself standing for the first time - that is 

her entire physical body for the first time, not just from her chest up for a few seconds.

She gestures by raising her right hand as her image mirrors her in the mirror.

Reading through Lacan's Mirror Stage:

This EVENT takes place at six months usually. The mother plays with her baby in front of the mirror as the baby experiences an image that also waves its arms, jiggles its legs, moves in the excitement of its image, before words, before walking, before experiencing any SELF. 

Jacques Lacan

Beatrice - and Tobias and Caleb - have never experienced the Mirror Stage in the development of the SELF - the ego.

Beatrice has experienced herself as not selfless enough for Abnegation. She doesn't fit in. She doesn't belong.

How is it possible to feel or be selfless if you don't have a self.

Caleb fakes it by assuming a false self.

Tobias constructs a self at Dauntless.

A ZEN story:

A student goes to the zen master wanting to lose his ego.

ZEN master: First bring me an ego to lose.

___________________________________________________________________

"This jubilant assumption of his specular image by the child at the infans stage, still sunk in his motor incapacity and nursling dependence would seem to exhibit in an exemplary situation the symbolic matrix in which the I is precipitated in a primordial form, before it is objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other, and before language restores to it, in the universal, its function as subject." (Lacan ECRITS)

Lacan likens the EVENT to Kohler's Aha! of the ape grasping the stick to get the banana, the beginning moment of intelligence.

The moment as GESTALT!

____________________________________________________________________________

Beatrice has just experienced herself completely in the mirror then looks to her left, where she is multiplied into infinity.

This is an EVENT!

For Beatrice it has never occurred until the Aptitude Test when she experiences the 

EVENT of the Mirror Stage,

which sheds its light on the formation of the I  the Imago that ancient term - as experienced in psychoanalysis. (p.118 Ecrits)

We have only to understand the MIRROR STAGE as an identification, in the full sense that analysis gives to the term: 

namely the transformation that takes place in the subject when s/he assumes an image   

Turning to the left she sees herself multiplied into infinity and turning around again multiplied.

And there are multitudes of images of Beatrice. 
To echo the Walt Whitman quote, "I am multitudes." 
That there is no one person you are. There are changes and they can be made.

Turning around behind her to respond to the command "Choose"

Choose (Now we have had 3 Beatrices)

Beatrice says, "Tell me." She doesn't understand. Choose what as she looks at the luscious raw steak and shiny knife on the pedestal surface.
"Choose before it's too late."
And then it is too late as the growling ferocious dog comes at her and she looks at the now empty pedestal tables. She has missed her chance by refusing to choose.

But how can one choose between options if there is no SELF to do the choosing?

Now she must respond to the simulation - aptitude test - with her instincts, responding to what occurs. Trusting herself to choose now since she is alone with the situation in the simulation. Only now does she experience a self that responds instinctively, rather than complying obediently to demands.

As the multiple ferocious dogs get ready to attack multitple Beatrices, Beatrice assumes the position of satyagraha - passivity in the face of violence. At this moment all the multiples disappear and there is just one Beatrice who now responds in multiple ways to the problems in the Simulation. At this moment Beatrice experiences a SELF who chooses, and who chooses instinctively. 
In a few moments Beatrice has embraced the entire Mirror Stage.

In other words we have TWO egos (at least), if you will. Or rather an unexplainable, pre-linguistic core of a bodily and mental and emotional self that has no words to define it. Just a GESTALT. Identity is irrelevant here. And on this "self" is built the social self, our many identifications, our tweaking of it to present ourselves to our world, our presented and performative self to others.

Exiting from the simulation Tori tells her she must trust herself. The test didn't work on her, she is divergent.

She leaves the building and on the way home sees some "factionless" outside rummaging through the dumpsters. A woman is there that she looks at. For the first time Beatrice sees the Other as a person, not a nameless outcast. And the factionless woman turns, knowing that she is not only being looked at, but that Beatrice SEES her, and she feels shame, quietly walking away from her gaze.

At home she will reflect Caleb's questioning of her result in the test by inverting his question,
"What were your results?"
And Caleb smiles.
Beatrice has felt her SELF and its will to know/power
She will continue questioning at the dinner table.

The infant repeats the Mirror Stage up until 18 months and then tires of it. The chimp tires of it almost immediately as the mirror is empty.
Beatrice repeats it during dinner at home as she turns her spoon over and regards her face in the curved reflection of her spoon. 

Lacan discusses the non-verbal, pre-verbal imago as the unalterable core of the self before all social identifications are piled on top of it, obscuring it to our knowing, enabling us to forget it.
And this is where Lacan brings in the concept, that again ancient concept, of
THE DOUBLE. THE SHADOW. The reflection in the mirror

Reading through Baudrillard-LINK Beatrice will encounter her DOUBLE as Tris, when in a life threatening situation, during her fearscape. She is not alienated, as we are, from her DOUBLE, but converses with it as primitive cultures do.
This isn't real.

Returning to Lacan, the SELF in The Mirror Stage begins to repeat and to imitate others, building up with social identifications a social or second self. Beatrice after entering Dauntless begins by observing how others are running down the stairs, climbing to the platform, getting on the train, jumping off onto the roof.
Copying the others.

And then comes the moment, the EVENT for Beatrice. 

Eric: Who's it gonna be?
Beatrice: Me.

And Beatrice climbs clumsily up on the ledge, gathers her courage, and she jumps first.
Upon landing in the net, Four lifting her out and suggesting a new name, she becomes 
TRIS

She has condensed the Mirror Stage into 2 days.
She now begins the journey of building a social self in Dauntless where she will meet her Double a number of times.
First in warning in fearscapes, then in joy as she "flies" down the zipline and sees herself reflected in the windows of the buildings, 

lastly when expecting to be shot, in acquiescence, at her moment of impending death. The Double appears at the moment of Death. Her Double is silent as she looks at her reflection in a puddle of water as Narcissus did.

We have only to understand the MIRROR STAGE as an identification, in the full sense that psychoanalysis gives to the term: 

namely the transformation that takes place in the subject when s/he assumes an image   

DIVERGENT REVIEW: Marcus Deconstructed by Vanessa Taylor's Screenplay in 4 Sentences

Vanessa Taylor - Screenplay for Divergent

Marcus Eaton

Our first look at Marcus is as the camera pans over in the beginning with Beatrice's voiceover with a slight lisp. He is sitting in the central governmental position next to Andrew.

He first speaks at the Choosing Ceremony:

After today you will no longer be dependents but full-fledged members of our society.

We see his tightened lips as Caleb chooses Erudite and Andrew's astonished and disbelieving face.

Marcus in Four's Fearscape with Tris

Marcus: Tobias! I'm trying to help you.To make you better. (In other words I'm beating you for your own good.)
______________________________________________________________________________

We next see him when Tris does, after Tobias has been taken from her, and after Natalie has been shot and killed. She enters the place Natalie told her her father was. Inside is her father, Caleb, Marcus, et al.

Your mother?

Tris tells her father that her mother saved her and they hold each other and cry.

Marcus: (immediately while they are consoling each other) We need to leave here. Are there soldiers outside?

Tris: No, it's clear (looking at him with contempt and distaste).

Caleb: (comes up to her) I should have listened to you. I didn't know what was going on. Why are Dauntless fighting?

Tris: They don't know what they're doing. They're under simulation. I need to wake them up. I have to get into Dauntless.

Marcus: It's a fortress in there. Not gonna happen.

Tris: I can get us in.

Marcus at the Choosing Ceremony speaks in what linguistics calls "performative speech." He has a beautiful seductive voice. Persuasive. 

In the above sequence Marcus is attempting to dominate the group and especially Tris. She is a girl, approximately the same age as his son Tobias and he is not taking orders. He thinks. But this is the power of the screenplay. In four speaking lines Vanessa Taylor has given us the character of Marcus, his essence. His desire to control and dominate presented in language. There is no legislation that will protect you from this. It is a form of speech you will have to recognize and assert yourself in response. There will be consequences usually.

We need to leave here. This is a super ego communication. A parent to child communication. It's purpose is to dominate. 

It's a fortress in there. Not gonna happen. (Marcus immediately shoots down Tris's I need to get into Dauntless and wake them.

I can get us in. Tris asserts herself, takes command, leads the group and Marcus is forced to follow.

In the psychoanalytic transference we see all that we need to know of Tobias's childhood with this man. Any idea of his own, any assertion, any creativity, any solutions, etc ALL were shot down, DOMINATED by Marcus. And Tobias was beaten unmercifully for any disobedience, verbal or active. Passive endurance was his defense. 

You will see this in the supermarket every day if you wake up, listen and see. 

______________________________________________________________________________

Inside Dauntless Tris sees Peter who knows where the Control Room of Simulations is. She has to shoot him to prove to him she is serious.

Marcus: Did you really have to shoot him? (menacing and contemptuous, disgusted)

Tris: Every minute we waste an Abnegation dies and a Dauntless becomes a murderer. 

Here he is trying to induce guilt in a former Abnegation member but Tris isn't buying it.Marcus is still trying to dominate and now with guilt.

_______________________________________________________________________________

Ready to Shoot Train Run

Marcus is too out of shape to run and grab onto the train, pull himself up. He shouts.

Marcus: Tobias! (asking for help;remaining in the city is death for him,)

Four/Tobias is conflicted. He wants to leave him there but also feels he should rescue him from death so he does. 

Vanessa Taylor's screenplay is ADULT. It is asking and demanding you to attend to what is said, what is meant by what is said. It is clear that Vanessa Taylor knows exactly what she is saying, what it means and what it does. It appears Taylor has read Foucault and/or knows his work. This is an intelligent screenplay not often seen (Dark Knight Rises an Exception also) in a movie intended for commercial consumption. Neil Burger has created a film that is art as well as commercial.

People know what they say.

They even frequently know why they say what they say.

But what they don't know is what they say does. - Michel Foucault

DIVERGENT: Shai Woodley and Theo James - What Real Beauty looks like

Theo James as Four in Divergent

Yes he is beautiful. The performed role of Four introduces the new masculine. What man can and could be.

Shai Woodley as Tris in Divergent

Tris is not pretty.

She is not sexy.

She is not cute.

She is not hot.

Shai is simply beautiful.

Tobias runs from Abnegation to Dauntless.

Beatrice runs to Dauntless from Abnegation.

In his fearscapes Four calms his breathing and heart rate. His approach is passive. Four advises Tris to calm her breathing and lower her heart rate. Deal with what's in front of you. Be brave.

Tris actively deals with what's in front of her, to confront and eliminate it so the simulation moves to the next one. An active approach.

Interesting inversion

Yosarrian  in Catch-22: “I’m not running away from my responsibilities. I’m running to them."

Rebecca Schwart/Hazel Jones in The 

Gravedigger's Daughter: Where we're from is nowhere, Mister. But somewhere is where we are going.

Or shall we just read Beatrice through Dante who first saw her when she was nine. As a woman she had the highest reputation of goodness and charity as did her father. Completely selfless. He loved her all his life. She accompanied his imagination through the Circles of Hell and to Paradise, always guiding him with her strength and goodness. 

Beatrice comes to a Circle of Hell which is Dauntless to rescue Tobias.

Greek form of TOBIAH. This is the name of the hero of the apocryphal Book of Tobit in many English versions of the Old Testament. It relates how Tobias, with the help of the archangel Raphael, is able to drive away a demon who has been plaguing Sarah, who subsequently becomes his wife. 

Dante's  Beatrice dies when they are both around 25 years old. Dante cannot be consoled and he writes poetry about death as in Medieval times love and death were joined - Courtly Love. For 2 years afterwards he has an infatuation with a "woman in a window' to whom he writes poetry. Beatrice will reproach him for this in his writing. Then Dante will go into local Florence politics until he is exiled with a threat of death over him. (Both of them had been betrothed as children to others and married others.)

...but the government was still essentially middle-class republican. At the head were the three priors, drawn from the major guilds and housed across the way from the Alighieri hose, in the Tower of Castagna. (p. 71 Dante by R. W. B. Lewis)- I found this floating sign interesting although unimportant.

DIVERGENT REVIEW on Nietzsche's INSCRIPTION OF THE BODY (Baudrillard, Deleuze,Foucault)

Tris sees Four's tattoo for the first time right after she has been in Four's Fearscape - and so do we

We have seen Marcus come at Four with his leather belt to beat him in multiple selves - a nice wave to The Matrix. We now know that Marcus has beaten Tobias/Four since a young child and Four is paralyzed with fear of him as he regresses to a young child when confronted by him in his Fearscape - (my new word for it.) 

We are not told any more details, but the scene is allowed to resonate in our minds.When you are beaten your body/mind is inscribed as the two are inseparable, in a relation with each other.

We know Tobias's back was beaten because the welts and wounds would not be visible there.The tattoo is announcing the beatings to the world if the world sees.The beatings are revealed and concealed.The belt sliced around to his arms where the tattoo becomes stripes.

A tattoo such as this INSCRIBES the body/mind again. The MEMORY of the constant beatings is inscribed. The memory produces CONSCIOUSNESS of the original inscription. As repetition reinforced the memory of the pain, the tattoo reinforces the memory of what it emotionally and mentally means to you. 

Tris begins to touch the tattoo

The understanding and resonance of touch. Abnegation foregoes touch except in rather indifferent ways. Tris is taught that touch means something. By experiencing the lack of touch, the desire for it and its importance to you increases your awareness of it. Tris is aware of every time Four has touched her in coaching her. His touch is indifferent. Her reception of it is eroticized. She touches Four's tattoo with great tenderness and curiosity. Why all of the factions?

Because Four does not just want to be one person but all of them. We can imagine the child wanting to be imaginative, intelligent, brave, honest, happy and selfless and being beaten for showing any of those indications. His will to knowledge/power has been stifled with beatings. Tris's will to knowledge/power has been snuffed out by her family and her love for them, also an effective way to drive them underground. To repress them in the Inscription of the Body. And Tris's Body/Mind has been reinscribed at Dauntless to be sure. Abnegation, just as all of the other factions, is about Obedience. Staying inside the Dominating Discourse.

For Tris to touch Four with such awe and tenderness is the awakening of eroticism for Four. He turns and kisses her and touches her wanting more. It is then Tris stops him and says, "I don't want to go too fast."

Woman is not equal to man except in the Order of Production. In the Symbolic Order of Seduction, woman is OTHER. Tris does not have a fear of intimacy. That is a clinical term that belongs in the Order of Production. We know she is a virgin and has had Four in her imagination since she met him at the net. She has been unknowingly seducing him. SEDUCTION cannot be produced. It does not figure in the Order of Production - Baudrillard.

Reading through Lacan DESIRE/LACK is a relation. Tris wants to experience desire, not sexual satisfaction. And she wants Four to experience desire. Does she know this? Doubtful. But intuitively she does. This is where that philosophical term the unknown/knowns intercedes, that term Rumsfeld so befuddled himself with. It means that there are knowns you know which you are unaware that you know. Without Lack, there is no Desire.

By going slower Tris will experience longing, desire, waiting, and contemplation of the beloved object and the deepening of self-awareness. Badiou says that love is a challenge, a risk, a jump into the unknown. This is Tris turned into a lovely metaphor. This was Twilight. This is not Hunger Games.

But by going slower Four will also experience these deeper feelings. This is where Four resonates with Dante and his beloved Beatrice, his lifetime muse, whom he only saw once or twice on the street and whom he never knew. An apparition sort of who guided him through the circles of hell. Four's Beatrice will rescue Four from the dungeons of hell.

Step back: the pattern in the tapestry

won’t tell itself till more of it is made.

Although it’s eighty-seven in the shade,

we have to work this hard making the hist-

ory we need till, trusting it, we’re free

to kiss each other better than when we

imagined kissing when we hadn’t kissed.

Marilyn Hacker in Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons 

I would say the same is true on waiting to experience sex.

REVIEW: Reading DIVERGENT Through Ang Lee's LUST,CAUTION

Trailer for Ang Lee's Lust,Caution. The scenes I am referring to are the clips with the diamond ring and his throwing himself into his car.

For Lee, an astute observer of the warping power of sexual desire and repression (not just in "Brokeback Mountain," but also in films as disparate as "The Ice Storm," "The Wedding Banquet" and "Sense and Sensibility"), the allure of "Lust, Caution" lies in the irreducible mystery of its love story, which culminates in a seemingly rash and irrational act. "It's complex and hard to pin down," he said. "Maybe it can't be pinned down." LINK

This pivotal scene takes place when the two lovers are in the jeweler's shop viewing the large pink diamond he has bought for her which they see set for the first time. He does not want to see the ring, but only to see it on her hand. She puts it on and leans into him whispering/saying:

"Go. Now."

He is uncomprehending so she repeats it:

"Go. Now." 

He gets it, runs down the stairs, across the street sliding on his stomach into the back seat of his car which roars away.He escapes the assassins clustered around the jewelers waiting for his exit to kill him.

Since the entire movie has been about her playing a part to seduce him (he is a collaborator with the occupying Japanese in the 1940's in Shanghai) in order to assassinate him, this turn around has been the subject of much lit crit and has confounded all interpretations. WHY DOES SHE DO IT? Ang Lee has said he had great anxiety about this scene and trusted the actors to convey it intuitively and accurately, which they did. This is Eileen Chang's novel who was considered the cruelest writer writing in Chinese.

He will order the round up of her and her partisan group, have them lined up, shot and dumped in a large trench for a grave that is in front of them.

_______________________________________________________________________________

I think Neil Burger has replied to Ang Lee in the pivotal scene in Divergent:

Pivotal Scene to Wake Four Up

Tris enters the control room to stop the simulation program, sees Four connected to a drip, releases him only to have him come at her to kill her. A violent physical fight begins and then Tris gets a hold of her gun on the floor, saying,

Stop! 

and holding it on Four. He stops and freezes. He has no fear of being shot.  But she can't kill him and we know that.

His second greatest fear is killing an innocent whom he must look away from to perform the ordered killing. Tris has been in his fearscape and knows this. She turns her gun on herself, pointing it at her forehead and Four leaps to grab the gun, to take control. She is bloody, crying his name to wake him up from the simulation serum saying, "It's OK, it's OK, I love you, it's OK. Four it's me, Four wake up, wake up. Now he is close to her and in control so she can touch him, touch his lips, his mouth, his face, his skin while she is saying his name to wake him up. He turns his head away as he cocks the gun and she pulls his face back saying, "Look at me, look at me. It's me, it's me." And then he begins to wake up and says, "Tris?" And Tris smiles and says, "It's OK, I love you."

Then she says softly and carefully:

GO.

And he turns on a dime and mows down the ones with guns behind him and becomes a killing machine while Tris goes after Jeanine to stop her. When it is over both will have to run because the leadership of Dauntless is coming after them. So they hop the train with Caleb, Peter, some other Abnegation members including Marcus.

In Lust,Caution why does Wang warn Yee? Why does she save him? I think Burger is saying it is love, just as Tris is saying, 

"I love you enough to die for you. I cannot kill you. Wake up."

And the enigmatic word GO links these two films with love.

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.