The Book of Eli Film Review

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A Closer Reading of The Book of Eli

By Gregory Desilet

Venturing into a discussion of the Hugh’s brothers film The Book of Eli (2010) comes with some hesitation. The chorus of critical commentary discourages taking the film seriously. Many reviewers have not minced words:

“The script is a calamity, the direction worse” (Nigel Andrews of Financial Times)

“Earnestly shallow, machete-and-bow-and-arrow entertainment” (Stephanie Zacharek of Salon.com)

“A synthesis of modern Hollywood-videogame bloodlust and conservative heartland godliness that . . . comes off as a preachy Sunday school slog of a marriage” (Nick Schager of Slant Magazine)

“Denzel Washington attempt[s] to become a poster boy for black scifi geeks—the only conceivable audience for adolescent trash like this” (Armond White of the New York Press)

“This futuristic action catastrophe, seemingly collaged together from the lesser works of Vin Diesel, is an affront to anyone with even moderate blood flow to the brain” (Colin Covert of the Minneapolis Star Tribune)

Based on these assessments, the film conveys little of importance while doling out a junk food helping of gratuitous violence. A superficial body count would not dispel such notions. But even after one viewing and the passage of several months, the film lingers in memory. Atticus Ross’s soundtrack powerfully promotes this haunting quality. Cinema in general, while dominated by the image, draws on vocabularies of logos and pathos, intellect and feeling, as major contributors to its effects. The critics above find Eli’s logos lacking and its pathos puffed with crude shock violence. But the haunting quality suggests something overlooked that may frame the film and its violence differently—a level of mythos or narrative that slides beneath or alongside the surface “videogame” graphics. The use of a strong measure of sepia tone throughout the film contributes to a sense of slightly unreal dream/myth imagery. Much like dream, myth appeals to layers of perception beyond direct communication and imitates the structure of dream in bypassing standard logic and everyday temporality. Of course, such claims about super-rational qualities of mythic narrative could lazily be used to inflate a work that, rather than being art, is in fact nonsense and “an affront to anyone with even a moderate blood flow to the brain.” But I hope to show that this is not so in the case of The Book of Eli.

Mick La Salle of the San Francisco Chronicle notes, Eli is yet another film in “Hollywood's current preoccupation with the apocalypse” (other examples from the same time frame include Knowing, The Road, and 2012). The story transpires thirty years after a global war that has annihilated most of humanity. Those who remain attempt to build a life out of the technological fragments left after the catastrophe. La Salle rightly asks “what is with” Hollywood’s current preoccupation? But he saves answering this question for another time and instead ends his review with the next obvious question: “Should we be getting paranoid right around now?” In pondering La Salle’s question I’m reminded of Freud’s famous remark in reference to dream imagery, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” But this reminder should not diminish attention for the possibility that a cigar is sometimes not a cigar. It’s worth wondering whether current apocalypse films are not about raising the alarm for the potential of global disaster and the need for honing survival skills. But when the theme of apocalypse does not speak of apocalypse, what does it speak of?

Manohla Dargis of the New York Times is among few who are onto a mythic framing of Eli and a less conventional framing of its themes, including its violence. This view emerges when he comments on an early fight scene occurring outside a tunnel underpass: “. . . the arcs of spurting gore appear black, not red. Like all the fight sequences, this one is highly stylized: set inside a tunnel with the camera low and the sky serving as an illuminated backdrop, it looks like a page out of a comic come to animated life.” Dargis goes on to speak of the simplification of the imagery and the larger significance of this for understanding not only the style of the film but also how that style informs the content and the broader meaning of the film. “The graphic simplicity of this scene works not only because it’s visually striking, but also because it’s a part of a meaningful piece in a story in which everything, nature and civilization included, has been stripped away.” Consistent with this stripping away of “everything,” even the people have been stripped, including the character of Eli (Denzel Washington). As Dargis notes, “Much like the land and narrative he travels through, Eli has been similarly reduced. A loner, he doesn’t speak much, even to himself.”

It does not seem odd to find stripped down people and environments in films featuring the aftermath of an apocalyptic event. But instead of the apocalyptic narrative necessitating stripped down characters and landscapes, the key to understanding the significance of these kinds of narratives in the current age may lie in a reversal of emphasis. The goal may be to tell a story with stripped down characters in stark landscapes. With this as the end, the apocalyptic narrative offers a convenient and arresting means (much like films set in the old west). Films such as Eli may not be taking audiences to the “end times” so much as taking them to a much simpler time—a time when most of the modern and postmodern technological paraphernalia have been stripped away so that it becomes possible to experience life and its conflicts in a more basic and primal way. In this primal world it may become easier for audiences to sense, experience, and remember what is really of value in life.

The current appeal of apocalyptic films styled for mass audiences may reside in their response to a collective need for stripping away the overwhelming complexity and stimulation of contemporary life. The experience of mass destruction may be one that appeals to many people because it feeds an actual desire to blow away all the competing stimuli and challenges present—and looming ever more present—in that world. The desire for destruction may not be symptomatic of dissatisfaction with the particular trappings of this complex world so much as an inability to cope with, process, control, structure, and make sense of all its trappings. The “progress” of civilization may have its benefits but it also brings with it sensory and cognitive overload. In this world of overload, the desire for clearing away and stripping down becomes a physical need. Complexity can breed confusion and confusion can breed despair and a scramble to find relief. Films featuring apocalypse fill this need by depicting or implying an act of sweeping destruction, a clearing away, followed by the simplified life of the aftermath in a stripped down world. This stripped down world is not without its challenges, but its conflicts come with greater clarity and it becomes easier to see what really matters in life.

Now it may be thought, given the possible downside to progress and civilization brought by increasing technological sophistication, that technology itself is the essence of “evil,” of everything that is wrong or has gone wrong with postmodern civilization. In line with this thinking, it would only be wry poetic justice, then, that a massive catastrophe wrought by high-tech weapons wipe out the contrived technological facade hanging over the world and the people and culture that created that facade. But The Book of Eli contains one especially iconic scene that suggests technology itself is not the problem. This scene occurs early in the film where Eli sits in the remains of an abandoned house and listens rapturously on an early model iPod to Al Green’s “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart." This scene produces not only an echo of and a longing for the comforts of civilization but also a confirmation of at least the potential for benefit in technological devices. On the basis of this scene alone it would seem the film suggests that technology, in and of itself, is not the undoing of humanity. And this thought raises the question of what has gone wrong. What does the film say about how humanity lost its way in the search for what really matters in life?

A significant clue for the answer the film gives to this question may be found within its broad structuring and particular depictions of conflict. Superficially, its conflict follows a melodramatic structure where Eli functions as the hero or saintly figure and Carnegie (Gary Oldman) serves as the villain or demonic figure. In a struggle of mythic proportions, Eli must thwart the villain, rescue the damsel in distress--Solara (Mila Kunis), and return human community to a proper course. This melodramatic theme also comes with religious overtones of sin and redemption as audiences learn fairly early in the film that Eli’s “book” is in fact the Bible. Eli reveals himself to be a Biblical “scholar” as throughout the film he recites passages of the book from memory.

Carnegie also treasures the book. But for him it is more than a book. Early in the film he sums this up when he screams at one of his henchmen, “It’s not a book, it’s a weapon!!” Carnegie believes the words and stories in the Bible hold a power that can be used to draw people into his web of influence and yolk them to his plan for domination. The worship the book inspires creates the worship of he who is master and possessor of its content. For this reason Carnegie has been relentlessly searching for the Bible because he does not have a copy. Most copies were destroyed in the catastrophe. And, as Eli recounts in the campfire scene with Solara, “After the war people made it their business to find and destroy any [copies] that the fires didn’t get already.” He then explains this purge of Bibles by saying, “Some said this [book] was the reason for the war in the first place.” If we are to believe Eli, his copy is the only surviving copy.

When Solara asks how he found his copy he tells her he heard a “voice” that seemed to come from inside him. The “voice” led him to where he found the book. When he had the book, the “voice” told him to follow a path west in order to bring it to a place where it would be safe. On this journey he was told he would be protected “from anyone or anything that stood in his path.” Evidence of Eli’s ability to protect and provide for himself emerges throughout the film in the fight scenes and in his uncanny talent for flawless aim—with bow, machete, or gun. Eli’s talents appear even more stunning when it is revealed near the end of the film that he is blind! His miraculous powers warrant the belief that he is assisted by a supernatural hand, whereas Carnegie’s earthly and corrupt desires for subjugation and control suggest he is influenced by the hand of a lower, darker power.

However, the melodramatic drawing of characters and plot fails to account for significant parts of the story. Eli’s credentials for a “saintly” role do not always appear thoroughly authentic in the film. He is not the embodiment of his brother’s keeper. He is prepared to kill to protect the book and his mission west. Early in the film he encounters “hijackers” who want to kill him and take his possessions. He leaves them all dead. He spares a woman accomplice but refuses her request for help and leaves her alone on the roadside to fend for herself. Soon after, he watches (hears) in seclusion from an overpass a scene of rape and murder on the road below him and cautions himself not to intervene by whispering the words, “Stay on the path. It’s not your concern.” A Christian might well ask, “Was this what Jesus would have done?” For Eli it appears that the mission of transporting the book to the mysterious location “west” is more important than any code of behavior the book might contain. Any means justify the end. Similarly, in his departure from Carnegie’s town he leaves in his wake a trail of dead bodies.

Solara finally awakens in him some feeling for others. At first he refuses to help her leave Carnegie’s town, but when she is assaulted by two highwaymen who obviously plan to rape her, he intervenes by killing both men. But his awakened humanity does not extend to George and Martha, the owners of the isolated house Solara and he visit after leaving the town. In the scene at their house, while being attacked by Carnegie’s men, Solara yells to Eli, “Hey, you know that voice you heard? Did he say anything about this?” Eli calls back to her, “We’ll get out alive, both of us.” George overhears this and asks about Martha and himself. Eli glibly replies, “Didn’t mention you.” Shortly later George and Martha are both killed. Although they are portrayed as unsavory characters, does Eli’s (or “the voice’s) attitude toward them reflect an attitude consistent with his “book”?

Clearly, Eli’s role is more that of a warrior than a Jesus humanitarian. Yet, while they are driving west in the car taken from Carnegie’s men, Eli confesses to Solara that in all the years of his journey he got “so caught up in keeping it [the book] safe he forgot to live by what he learned from it.” When Solara asks him what that is he replies,“Do for others more than you do for yourself.” It appears Eli has come to an awakening and has, however late in the day, taken a message from the book in sharp contrast to the message and potential Carnegie sees in the book. But those who thirty years ago survived the great catastrophe apparently agreed with Carnegie regarding the book, yet they feared rather than craved its potential as a weapon. Instead of wanting to preserve the book, they wanted to destroy it.

While superficially the film seems to draw a clear portraiture of human conflict in the melodramatic mold of good versus evil, Eli versus Carnegie, the audience is left with an unsettling deeper question about the clarity of the conflict. Who is right about the book? The crucial conflict may not be so much between Eli and Carnegie, both of whom for different reasons want to preserve the book, but rather between those who want to preserve the book and those who want to destroy it. And this conflict is a more complex conflict, one not so easily framed in melodramatic simplicity.

If the book can rightly be understood to have played a role in the great catastrophe, is it then also right to take such pains to preserve it? Will it not ultimately initiate once again the processes of conflict and violence that resulted in the near destruction of humanity? And if such is the case, could it be that the supernatural hand guiding and protecting Eli is less than benevolent? In preserving the book, Eli may play as destructive a role as Carnegie. Some hint of this dark process of violence is indicated at the conclusion of the film with the image of Solara—dressed like Eli and back on the road carrying his backpack and weapons. What has Eli and his book spawned?

If there is a particular message in The Book of Eli, it cannnot be, as some critics have claimed, that of homage to Christianity or the Bible. The film clearly contains the message that the Bible cannot be relied on or provide a guarantee for producing benevolent human community. As already stated, the film hints, with the early scene of peaceful music emanating from the old iPod, that technology itself may not be the problem. Technology is a tool. How technological devices are used determines whether they yield good or bad outcomes. In this respect the Bible is also a “tool.” Perhaps even words are no more than tools. How they are used, the meaning and currency assigned to them rather than the words themselves, may determine the kind of world they will help create.

A scene near the end of the film lends support to this interpretation. The leader of the Alcatraz community (Malcolm McDowell) places the newly printed copy of the Bible on a shelf alongside copies of the Torah and the Quran (following mention also of Shakespeare and the Britannica). Audiences are left with the impression that no one book will serve as ground for a restoration of the future of humanity. Perhaps this is the message of the film and its clue as to what really matters in life.

And if you were a survivor in the aftermath of the catastrophic destruction of humanity and material civilization and you could take with you into the future only one book for purposes of helping to found a new civilization, what book would you choose? Can any one book guarantee an untroubled future for humanity? Could any one book be relied on to rise to that task without possibility of failure? Can or should one book serve as the sacred text of texts? And if the answer is no, what does that say about the value of any one book? What really matters in human community may lie deeper than tools, books, and words can convey, create, or preserve. Clearly, The Book of Eli, in its stripped down context of mythic iconography, presents complex conflicts as it confronts complex questions. Granting as much, the film deserves more respect than it has broadly received in the marketplace of critics.

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