I’m not sure that the wry and half-baked experimentation of Alain Resnais’ movie, Mon oncle d’Amérique, succeeds according to the lavish praise heaped on it by its receptive critics in 1980, the year of its release in France. It is an uneven movie that becomes more and more questionable as the story advances, its deadening thud timed to the smarmy interludes of its clean-cut figure of authority, the writer and neurobiologist Henri Laborit, who lectures us on the hard-wired evolutionary impulses and drives that determine our actions and in consequence our lives.
This is behaviorism at its worst, its most specious, and the saving grace of the movie is the comedy that acts as the ideal counterpoise to these rude and unwelcome interludes. But the movie would have been better, and its comedy more buoyant and involving, if it had done away altogether with the noxious influence of this silver-tongued man whose words and ideas seem rehashed. And the movie’s insinuation that human free will is just a fanciful fiction—a mere byproduct of so many underlying impulses that are the true determinants of our behavior—is at best ill-thought-out and dubious.
The solution to the so-called problem of free will (and that of Mon oncle d’Amérique) is simple: it is undoubted that humans live and act according to any number of subconscious mechanisms and impulses, all of which drive our behavior. This is not as controversial as the movie tries to make out; in fact, it is undeniable, and we as humans don’t have much control over our desires and their overweening hold on our motivations and actions. But this fact does not negate the existence of free will, since this manifests as the ability to say no to these desires, to resist a given temptation, and to act according to a willed and conscious decision rather than a blind and subliminal impulse.
So free will refers not to the capacity for freedom of impulse and initial motivation, but to a capacity for no-saying or veto power that is, by the way, the functional basis of our morality. If you deny that free will exists in this sense, rather than in the erroneous one, you’re suggesting that the entire structure and substructure of the law and order that governs our human society is just nonsense, arbitrary, without meaning. But that assertion is itself nonsense.
If we deny free will, we deny the value of such terms as good, evil, loyal, brave, just, kindhearted, and the like. And denying these things is flying in the face of reality and turning away from the evidence to go bury yourself in a mass of deftly intertwined word webs and theories. Free will cannot be denied any more than the feelings that underlie our notions of right and wrong. It is the foundation of our lives.
With that matter aside, Alain Resnais’s Mon oncle d’Amérique becomes far less compelling on the level of ideas and sinks into its proper wheelhouse of light comedy and the intersecting lives of its three characters. Of course these also would have been more captivating and substantial without the empty intrusions of our gentle but pseudoscientific man in the wings, waiting to pounce with his fistfuls of human-sized rats.
But the efforts of the movie are substantial, and the daring choice to use a structure in which Laborit pontificates to the high heavens while letting off a noisome gas is commendable—even if it isn’t always enlightening.
