The Amazing Digital Circus: Adapting “I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream” and its Critique of Ideology to the Internet Age
Pop culture today remains obsessed with dystopias and apocalypses. This may well be the case for as long as it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
Today, apocalypses show the end of the world (be it by AI, zombies, aliens, etc) as a cathartic and violent return from culture to nature, to simpler times of pure survival. Dystopias, meanwhile, show the never-ending of capitalism, and of oppressive systems in general (1984, Handmaid’s Tale, Black Mirror), that while not cathartic, capture our fascination via the exact same opposition.
Nowadays, apocalypses are power fantasies, and dystopias are all too relatable. The newest pop cultural dystopia that has been making the rounds lately is The Amazing Digital Circus.
Aired this Friday (13), it takes heavy inspiration from the book/game I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, presenting the usual case of an all-powerful entity toying with everyday humans for its own amusement, but in a cartoony way.
What differentiates No Mouth from other dystopian novels is an expansion of the possibilities of biological torture, with a machine that is not practical in its elimination of threats, but fully desiring of the Other’s suffering. It extends a character’s lifespan so that he can suffer longer, transforming him into a “great soft jelly thing” with an altered perception of time, incapable of even killing himself and with no mouth to scream.
It is a great example of what Lacan talks about in Kant with Sade, that Zizek often quotes, an infinite suffering which marks a sublime body:
“This difference between the two deaths can be linked with the Sadeian fantasy revealed by the fact that in his work his victim is, in a certain sense, indestructible: she can be endlessly tortured and can survive it; she can endure any torment and still retain her beauty. It is as though, above and beyond her natural body (a part of the cycle of generation and corruption), and thus above and beyond her natural death, she possessed another body, a body composed of some other substance, one excepted from the vital cycle — a sublime body.” (TSOI, p. 149)
Now, seeing that what differentiates The Amazing Digital Circus from No Mouth is its applicability as a window to understand the internet, we can then carry over the psychoanalytic potential from its inspiration — and therefore, find its value in a way to model the internet psychoanalytically.
Its premise, similarly, is an AI entertaining itself with captive humans, only this time the virtual medium is used to explain their imposed immortality instead of any biological technology. Instead of desiring pure suffering, the AI focuses on entertaining a certain gaze, making a performance.
In both book and show (although the themes of religion are more emphasized in the novel), we are dealing in the AI with a figure of the Big Other, the one whose gaze must be entertained.
The Big Other and the Algorithm
And yet, instead of just being a similar device for religious themes like in No Mouth, by identifying the Big Other with media production and moderation, the Digital Circus (as itself a media product) overlaps the gaze to be entertained with our own (the camera’s, the audience’s). The plot mechanic thus acquires a certain meta aspect, as being entertaining is a need on two levels.
Then, an identification with the protagonist presents us the struggles of behaving according to the gaze of the internet era in specific: instead of working bureaucracy or killing in the name of a totalitarian Leader who will have you tortured otherwise, it is the struggle of content creators, of managing your own profile, of being entertaining enough, and so on — this kind of Big Other is none other than what today we already call in pseudo-mythical tones, the Algorithm.
As a Big Other, it still demands, but instead of demanding suffering for a Cause, it demands activities and games, or in other words, that the subjects freely “Enjoy!” As a Big Other, it still censors (see: the gif) and regulates behavior, but not to a totalitarian degree, since such would make everything predictable, and thus not entertaining. It is permissive, postmodern, and virtually keeps the characters from needing to perform their biological functions (eating, sleeping) so they can keep on entertaining, performing an “aid” similar to Zizek’s recent mention of OxyCodone, a medication once used to keep soldiers “impervious from pain and suffering”.
It keeps them immortal, being literal sublime bodies, enduring and retaining beauty.
Symptom and the Clown
“The sublime object is an object which cannot be approached too closely: if we get too near it, it loses its sublime features and becomes an ordinary vulgar object.” (TSOI, p. 192)
And yet, the sublime and the grotesque, the symptom and the objet petit a, are only narrowly distanced in the dimension of the Real. Our society encourages today the multiplicity of cultures, the tolerance in plurality — and yet if any single faith starts taking itself too seriously, if the belief becomes too authentic, it becomes a grotesque transgression, fundamentalism and barbarism.
It is no different in the Digital Circus, where all characters are allowed their own entertaining quirks, but so soon as one takes its own obsession too seriously, it becomes “abstracted,” a corrupting force, a symptom that has to be eliminated and purged, so that order can be restored.
And yet, you don’t solve an illness by treating only a symptom. Both in the show and out here, the situation is similarly systemic, and such cases of grotesque transgression are, far from the exception, the rule. It is the natural eruption of a tension accumulating, just like once-in-a-lifetime-crises, that nowadays happen about once every ten years or so, if not accelerating.
The Sublime Object of the Circus
Even then, there is an attempt to keep the characters minimally sublime. A sublime object is, in Lacanian psychoanalytic theory the equivalent of being an object of desire, the objet petit a. This, once again, fits with the AI trying to capture the audience’s gaze, to fascinate them with the characters.
What especially sets the show apart though, is in its self-aware main character, and the premise of her trying to break out of the very show she is in — which, after setting the stage of comparisons in relation to our current neoliberal reality, we can understand as at least unconsciously relatable in its fantasy.
And yet, at a meta-level, we can go a step further and look at how well The Amazing Digital Circus’ Pilot has done for itself, garnering 13 million views in less than a week, at the time of writing this. If we do take it to be a critique of the internet/capitalism, performing exceedingly well on the internet/capitalism, it is no surprise: “nothing runs better on MTV than a protest against MTV.”
For in current times, that Mark Fisher best described in Capitalist Realism, this is the way in which we are as much stuck in an eternal digital circus as these characters are:
“In his dreadful lassitude and objectless rage, Cobain seemed to have give wearied voice to the despondency of the generation that had come after history, whose every move was anticipated, tracked, bought and sold before it had even happened. Cobain knew he was just another piece of spectacle, that nothing runs better on MTV than a protest against MTV; knew that his every move was a cliché scripted in advance, knew that even realising it is a cliché.” (Capitalist Realism)
Although the text of the Digital Circus says otherwise — and this is its minimal but crucial failure — raging against the system is far from enough to turn a subject “abstracted” nowadays, to turn them into a generated symptom that has to be removed by the system. Rather, such a thing as anti-capitalism is precisely the most sublime thing under our capitalism, a market that all audiences can unconsciously understand, if not fully relate to.
In a way, The Amazing Digital Circus does know this, but only unconsciously: it is there, in all the formal choices, of making escaping the system the ultimate goal of the protagonist, of making the final — and obviously most impactful — scene of the episode being precisely the realization of being stuck, maybe until the end of her life, in this absurd system, just for another’s entertainment. It is a sentiment not expressed in words, yet precisely because of this it can be felt clearly.
By these simple choices alone, The Amazing Digital Circus comes a bit closer to distilling the dystopia of our times than I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream got to its own, touching a nerve in the way only something profoundly relatable can. Both of them make the characters immortal, making the end of the world impossible, leaving only one avenue: wondering about the end of capitalism.
It wonders if they can find an end to capitalism, or if they’ll go insane trying. But just between us, and the time I spent making this post, it’s not looking too good.
