Movie Review – Equilibrium (How is the conflict between totalitarianism and human emotion portrayed?)

The movie Equilibrium is about a dictatorship that tries to maintain a totalitarian society through the use of the emotion-suppressing drug Prozium, and the rebels who want to restore emotions. The film suggests that while the dictatorship attempts to reduce crime by suppressing emotions, the human desire for freedom and emotion cannot be suppressed.

 

The movie is set in a post-World War III world. A new world called Libria opens up and is ruled by a dictator called the Commander-in-Chief. This dictator believes that human emotions such as love, hatred, and anger are the root cause of crime in society, and orders everyone to take a drug called ‘Prozium’ regularly. As people take ‘Prozium’, they stop feeling emotions, and all crimes in society seem to be eradicated.
However, one by one, “emotion triggers” began to emerge who secretly stopped taking the drug against the dictator’s orders and began to feel emotions. These “emotion triggers” secretly keep a stash of soulful artwork that stirs human emotions. However, there is a group of dictator’s servants, known as “Classic” agents, who hunt down and kill these emotional triggers. The movie ends with the protagonist, a top-ranking Classic agent, secretly stopping taking his medication, and the protagonist working with the emotional triggers to defeat the dictatorship.
The movie depicts the brutality of a system that suppresses free emotions. Perhaps the most well-known example of a similar work is George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Orwell was inspired to write this work after seeing the brutality of his idealized Soviet Union, which has since been the subject of many films and novels. From this perspective, the movie can be seen as a reaction against an oppressive system that suppresses emotions for the common good, a social structure that leaves no room for human freedom. Moreover, it suggests that the human longing for free emotions will never go away and that it is central to human life.
In the movie, people are required to take regular daily injections of Prozium, an emotion suppressant, and if they miss a day, their emotions are triggered immediately. The movie’s drug, Prozium, is actually modeled after a substance called fluoxetine, which is also called Prozac. Fluoxetine (C17H18F3NO) is an antidepressant of the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor class, originally popularized by the name Prozac. It is used to treat depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder (in both adult and pediatric populations), bulimia, anorexia nervosa, panic disorder, and PMDD (premenstrual dysphoric disorder). However, the fact is that any drug doesn’t immediately lose its effectiveness by missing a day’s dosing, even if it has been injected consistently every day for a period of time. However, if this was intentional, I think there is room to interpret the movie in a different way.

 

 

In the movie, people walk around with emotionless robot-like expressions, but the movie actually implies that everyone has emotions, even if they are unconscious. The rebels’ feelings of obedience to their commander-in-chief, or the Classics’ hatred of the rebels, are recurring themes in the movie. In other words, Prozium itself is designed to instill a sense of “obedience” and suppressing emotions is a secondary or non-existent effect, a MacGuffin effect. The protagonist felt emotions before he was injected with Prozium, but these emotions were suppressed out of loyalty to the commander-in-chief, and the failure of the injections allowed these emotions to come to the fore.
In the movie, it is the rebels who finally play the most important role in destroying the dictator’s totalitarianism. The rebels’ success in overthrowing a dictatorship that suppresses natural human emotions and tries to homogenize people is certainly positive. However, the rebels in the movie can also be interpreted negatively. If we consider their stance as ’emotions are a personal indulgence and indulging in them gives us a sense of freedom’, then the act of stopping taking Prozium is similar to taking drugs. The refusal to take Prozium can be interpreted as a deviation from the established social framework. From this perspective, the rebels’ refusal to take Prozium is not a good thing. It is a symptom of an addiction to emotions that cannot be overcome by willpower, just like a drug addict cannot easily get away from it. The reason why other people besides the rebels are faithful to Prozium’s medication is that they are not restraining themselves from triggering emotions, but rather acting in accordance with social norms and laws that they are forced to follow.
In the movie, the Commander-in-Chief directly proclaims the legitimacy of his ideology (suppression of individual emotions for the common good) on billboards, airships, etc. throughout the city. This excessive propaganda of ideology is a common phenomenon in totalitarian states, which is, in other words, evidence that the ideology itself has not been sufficiently internalized by the population. In the Soviet Union under Stalin, Germany under the Nazis, and many other fascist countries, ideology was forced to reveal itself because it was ultimately false and unfounded. In this regard, the state in the movie was far more ideologically questionable than Nazi Germany or the former Soviet Union. Despite this excessive propaganda, the Commander-in-Chief was unable to maintain a totalitarian society without the incentive of Prozium.
Also, in the movie’s twist, when it is revealed that the commander-in-chief is already dead and the vice commander has been secretly fulfilling the role of the commander-in-chief, he could not announce his death because he knew that the commander-in-chief’s order was unreasonable and that the commander-in-chief would lose his authority without coercive means. At the same time, he also violates the law that the commander-in-chief enacted in order to maintain it. In the middle of the film, when the protagonist questions the Vice Commander about the Commander-in-Chief’s order (which is actually the Vice Commander’s own order) and whether it is an illegal order that goes against the Commander-in-Chief’s principles, the Vice Commander orders him to “obey the Commander-in-Chief’s orders unconditionally,” implying that the very act of carrying out their respective duties is a meaningless act of totalitarianism that excludes individual opinion.
So far, we have analyzed the meaning of Prozium and the totalitarian social structure in the film. We have analyzed how the emotion suppressant Prozium is interpreted in a totalitarian society and how the emotion triggers, the rebels, should be interpreted as a group in a totalitarian society. A totalitarian society is bound to encounter inevitable contradictions in its own system, which can be well represented by the core elements of rebels, cliques, and commander-in-chief.