American auteur Jeffrey Jacob “J. J.” Abrams has a knack for creating the kind of twisty, densely plotted TV series and films that keep us on the edge of our seats and begging for more. His particular genius seems to be in the way he combines geek appeal and broader commercial and critical successes in TV shows like Felicity, Emmy-nominated Alias, Emmy- and Golden Globe–winning Lost, the critically acclaimed Fringe, and films such as the Godzilla-inspired Cloverfield, the reboot of the Star Trek franchise, and his Spielbergian ode to the late 1970s, Super 8. As writer, director, producer, and even composer, he puts his particular stamp on everything he touches—a stamp that at times is rife with philosophical themes. His name on a project promises that your heart, mind, and sometimes even your soul will get a workout.
The Philosophy of J. J. Abrams is a collection of chapters by thinkers highlighting the philosophical insights present in Abrams’s television and film work. Using Abrams’s works as a touchstone, the book leads the reader through some basic concepts in philosophy, making it useful for an introductory philosophy course, but it also contains enough content on Abrams’s individual works to satisfy his fans, media and popular culture students, film students, and people who would like to dabble in a little philosophy.
Philosophical themes may be found throughout Abrams’s continuingly popular works. As cocreator of Lost, Abrams melded the popularity of the reality show Survivor to the twisted concept of a living island with incredible monsters and a fascinating set of characters—many of them named for famous philosophers—whose interactions take place in the past, present, and future via flashbacks and flash-forwards. And if that wasn’t enough, in the final season we got flash-sideways into alternate pasts, presents, and futures! If any show contains philosophical analysis, it is this one. Man of science or man of faith? Nature vs. nurture? Live together or die alone? The Island could be seen as a heavenly tabula rasa—or was it purgatory, or even hell? Would we ever get any answers to the show’s many mysteries?
Continuing his pattern of having an overarching mystery move the action of a television story, Abrams next took on Fringe, with its “Pattern” mythology slowly revealed as we learned more about the heroes of the piece. As with his other works, relationships are central; in this case, those caught in the orbit of the unconventional and at times quite mad Dr. Walter Bishop, whose highly unethical medical experiments on young children allowed him and his partner, William Bell (played by Leonard Nimoy), to find and eventually travel to a second Earth. When Walter’s son, Peter, died as a child, the grieving father kidnapped his doppelganger from the other Earth—what parent wouldn’t at least contemplate it? That Peter grows up ignorant of his true origins and estranged from his father (who has gone slowly mad and been institutionalized) is just the sort of poignant irony Abrams’s work celebrates.
Abrams’s film work champions the ability of ordinary people to undergo transformation and become, in their own ways, heroic. In Armageddon the least likely guys, a bunch of rough oil drillers, face their fear of death and save the world. On a more personal level, his script for Regarding Henry uses a sort of reverse flashback technique to show how a damaged man regains his simple humanity. In the wrong place at the wrong time (another common problem for Abrams’s heroes), Henry is shot in the head and loses his memory. His struggles to refill his blank slate reveal a portrait of a hard-driving, unethical corporate lawyer who was estranged from his family, having an affair, and ignoring his wife and child. It turns out that the damage was not the gunshot; that bullet to the brain was his salvation or a reset, bringing him into accord with his true ethical and familial center.
This “resetting of reality” is found in most of Abrams’s work (in television, we see how 9/11 played out in two different ways on Fringe as well as seeing the alternate worlds on the final seasons of Felicity and Lost and Sydney’s missing three years on Alias) and most recently in his big-screen version of the classic Star Trek. Again, a framing device provides continuity for the piece—Mr. Spock, long retired from Starfleet, has lived among the Romulans for decades, working to reunite them with their ancestors, the Vulcans. When catastrophe looms, his efforts to save their planet fall short and set into motion a series of events that will throw him back into his own past, forever altering or perhaps creating a new reality.
Questions of destiny loom large in all of Abrams’s work. We often hear characters say, “I was meant to do this,” “You’re not supposed to do this,” or “Nothing in my life has ever felt this right,” and this is especially true in Star Trek. Because he has already lived it, old Spock knows that James T. Kirk is meant to captain the Enterprise with Spock at his side. When Kirk miraculously appears on the ice planet where he has been stranded, old Spock does what is necessary to maneuver the two younger versions of his captain and friend, and himself, together. We, the viewers, feel a sense of completion when the whole core crew—Kirk and Spock, plus the wonderfully freaked out “Bones” McCoy, sultry Uhura, boy genius Chekov, swashbuckling Sulu, and daft but deft Scotty—are finally together on-screen on the bridge of the Enterprise. Is this Star Trek? You betcha. Abrams has united the two realities in such a satisfactory way that we can remember the past fondly and still look forward to future installments of the series beyond Star Trek into Darkness—which totally kicked Klingon heinie, by the way.
Worry over the culture of surveillance and the changing nature of privacy has permeated the public consciousness in recent years with the advent of new technologies, from the Internet to GPS to the CCTV cameras in most large metropolitan areas. The Abrams-produced TV show Person of Interest taps into our unease about just what Big Brother really knows about our lives and how it uses that information. “The Machine”—created by Mr. Finch after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and used by the heroes to identify those in need of help . . . or censure—could just as easily be turned against us if in the control of the wrong people.
Friendship and collaboration are also what drive the ethical choices made by the characters in Abrams’s two alien invasion/terrorism allegory scenarios, Cloverfield and Super 8. In the former, we are swept along with a group of ordinary New Yorker twentysomethings who use a handheld digital camera to record their impossible flight from the city as it is attacked by Godzilla-sized aliens and their deadly, human-sized foot soldiers. In the latter, a group of teenagers making a student horror film in 1979 are drawn into a government conspiracy when they discover the truth about a crashed alien ship and its pilot, which had been tortured by its captors.
The chapters in this volume run the philosophical gamut: the logic of time travel and parallel universes; the metaphysics and malleability of identity; the alienation of the individual in a technological culture; ethical decisions in tough circumstances; and death, loss, and the search for meaning. In each of these thoughtful chapters, the writers explore how Abrams’s ability to tap the core of popular culture for deeper and more meaningful themes makes his works ripe for philosophical analysis. Abrams often places his characters in situations that at first seem mundane—for example, a young woman attending college or a group of people sitting on an airplane—and then sets them (and the audience) spinning, and thinking, too.
The three chapters in the first section, scene 1: Identity Issues, deal with the shifting nature of human identity. In the multi-verse of the Abrams television show Fringe, two or more versions of the same person may exist and issues of personal identity and responsibility become clouded. What are we? Are we the totality of our conscious memories, or are we just our brains and physiological processes, or neither? “ ‘Grey Matters’: Personal Identity in the Fringe Universe(s),” by A. P. Taylor and Justin Donhauser, examines how two concepts of personal identity—the Lockean-based psychological theory and the somatic or brain theory—are revealed in the events of the series and considers which seems the better fit to explain our world. In “Person of Interest: The Machine, Gilles Deleuze, and a Thousand Plateaus of Identity,” Franklin Allaire looks at how an “ultimate event” such as 9/11 may be used as justification for the collection of intimate personal data and the implications of having the Machine grant “identity” to an individual as either perpetrator or victim, in effect making a moral judgment.
Abrams is well known for producing TV shows and films with strong female characters, and in “Are J. J. Abrams’s ‘Leading Ladies’ Really Feminist Role Models?” Cynthia Jones finds common threads of identity in three prime examples: Felicity’s Felicity Porter, Alias’s Sydney Bristow, and Fringe’s Olivia Dunham. Using feminist theories to examine these characters in terms of oppression and interconnectedness, Jones finds that despite their differing life circumstances—naive college student, worldly secret agent, and paranormal investigator, respectively—the three young women are all products of their contact with and reaction to male-dominated society as they strive to create their own independent and free-acting identities.
The second section of the book, scene 2: Memento Mori, uses as its theme the quality of human life informed by the sure knowledge of death. In the first chapter, “The End Is Nigh: Armageddon and the Meaning of Life Found through Death,” Ashley Barkman reminds us of the fact that the least likely guys—a bunch of rough oil drillers—face their fear of death and save the world in the Abrams-penned sci-fi thriller. She uses examples from the Bible and Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations to argue that life is often best understood in the context of death, the great equalizer, which stimulates heightened awareness and tests one’s genuine beliefs.
In the second chapter of this section, “The Fear of Bones: On the Dread of Space and Death,” Jerry S. Piven and Jeffrey Stephenson invoke the utterances of philosophers such as Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Dr. McCoy to explain how science and religion are two antithetical modes of resolving existential desire, anxiety, and dread. The yearning to comprehend the unknown can inspire creative imagination, ingenious problem solving, scientific inquiry, medical discovery, wish-fulfilling fantasies, mind-numbing faith, and even terroristic violence.
In “Do We All Need to Get Shot in the Head? Regarding Henry, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and Ethical Transformation,” Adam Barkman argues that the Abrams-scripted film questions the ethical origins of human happiness. Just as the main character’s near-death experience alters his brain (a bullet will do that, you know) as well as his perception of what is important, perhaps certain disruptions of our comforts from time to time serve as a means to refocus us on the true nature of happiness.
We deal with a few ethical considerations in the third section, scene 3: Moral Matters. Phil Smolenski and Charlene Elsby look into one of the ever-present defining questions of bioethics in “Fringe and ‘If Science Can Do It, Then Science Ought to Do It.’ ” Using Hans Jonas’s imperative of responsibility, they examine the technological wizardry employed by Walter Bishop in his lab in terms of the moral correctness of his (and the other characters’) decision-making processes in comparison to the viewers, who identify with and value the relationships between the characters on the show.
In the next chapter in this section, “An Inconsistent Triad? Competing Ethics in Star Trek into Darkness,” Jason T. Eberl looks at the ethical values of duty, utility, and loyalty in the second entry of Abrams’s Trek reboot films. Using Immanuel Kant’s deontology contrasted with John Stuart Mill’s utilitarian perspective, Eberl looks at incidents where the Starfleet Prime Directive of noninterference is invoked as well as ignored in the film by the heroes, Kirk and Spock, as well as the villains, Khan Noonien Singh and Admiral Alexander Marcus.
Randall Auxier uses the relationships between humans and a stranded alien in the rather autobiographical Abram-directed film Super 8 to meditate on the true nature of moral empathy—and love—in “The Monster and the Mensch,” which completes this section.
The fourth section, scene 4: Friends and Family, opens with Joseph Foy’s “Abrams, Aristotle, and Alternate Worlds: Finding Friendship in the Final Frontier.” In the Star Trek reboot, the classic Trek characters James T. Kirk and Mr. Spock triumph in one dangerous situation after another, revealing the noble individual traits that will enable them to succeed in future endeavors with the Federation. However, as Foy shows, their ultimate challenge is really overcoming an initial enmity toward one another to defeat their Romulan foes. By the end of the film, they have started a friendship that will allow them to achieve the Aristotelian goal of true collaboration, where individual excellence will be used communally to support society.
The second chapter in this section is “Heroic Love and Its Inversion in the Parent-Child Relationship in Abrams’s Star Trek,” by Charles Taliaferro and Emilie Judge-Becker, in which they use three traditional precepts of justice (preacepta juris)—live in a morally right way, do no harm to others, and render to each what is her or his own—to examine the duties (if any) that are owed between parents and children. This is exemplified by the Star Trek characters George and his son James Tiberius Kirk, and Spock and his parents, Amanda and Sarek.
In “You Can’t Choose Your Family: Impartial Morality and Personal Obligations in Alias,” Brendan Shea investigates the extent to which identity may be created and altered by one’s familial relationships. The characters in the twisty spy show have to juggle loyalties to country, family, lovers, and friends that create obligations and betrayals, stretching the boundaries of morality and personal responsibility. Each must balance his or her impartial moral obligations (e.g., duties toward humanity) and personal obligations (e.g., duties toward one’s children), with potentially tragic consequences.
The fifth section is titled scene 5: Metaphysically Speaking, and so these three chapters deal with questions concerning the nature of reality. Daniel Whiting’s chapter, “Is Abrams’s Star Trek a Star Trek Film?” ponders the nature of remakes. As Whiting sees it, the film invites us to ask about the extent to which Abrams’s Star Trek has inherited the characteristics of the Star Trek series, about the parentage and pedigree of this movie. What does it take for the Star Trek reboot to be a Star Trek film? Does this reboot or reset make it a prequel or an entirely new series?
In the second chapter, “Determinism, Free Will, and Moral Responsibility in Alias,” Vishal Garg examines the nature of predestination and free will. He argues that despite the fact that many of the Rambaldi prophecies came true, characters in Alias did in fact have free will and are therefore morally culpable for their actions.
In the final chapter in this section, “Finding Directions by Indirection: The Island as a Blank Slate,” Elly Vintiadis and Spyros Petrounakos revisit the complicated world of Lost to contemplate the Lockean concept of tabula rasa as it relates to both the characters and viewers. They argue that, for the characters, the Island is not as blank a slate as it first appears to be and that the audience is required to deconstruct many television-viewing conventions as the plot unfolds over the course of the series.
The sixth section, scene 6: Your Logic Is Flawless, begins with Andrew Fyfe’s chapter on an oft-contested scientific and philosophical concept in science fiction and fantasy, namely, the logical implications of time travel. In “You Can’t Change the Past: The Philosophy of Time Travel in Star Trek and Lost,” Fyfe explains the three possible forms of time travel and why logical paradoxes like the grandfather paradox rule out only one of these three possibilities. Using the plots of the film and television series, he explores the reasons for thinking that there are forms of time travel that not only are logically possible but also are actual parts of our world.
The next chapter is “Rabbit’s Feet, Hatches, and Monsters: Mysteries vs. Questions in J. J. Abrams’s Stories,” by Paul DiRado, in which he uses several of Abrams’s works—including Mission: Impossible III, Cloverfield, and Lost—to examine the true nature of the mysterious. “No answer to any question, then, can ever be said to ‘answer’ a mystery. A mystery doesn’t need an answer, but to be resolved it needs all of the various propositions discovered in a situation to make sense with one another and to cohere with previous experiences and expectations about the world.” So claims DiRado near the end of his chapter.
In scene 7: Considering Cloverfield, the authors, well, do just that. Jeff Ewing starts the section off with “Monsters of the World, Unite! Cloverfield, Capital, and Ecological Crisis.” He uses Karl Marx’s criticism of capitalism—with its inherent greed and overaccumulation of things, which cause many problems, including ecological ones—to show how an analogy can be made between the awakening and rampage of Clover (as the monster has been called in Cloverfield) and the harmful impacts of capitalism.
In “Cloverfield, Super 8, and the Morality of Terrorism” we (Pat Brace and Rob Arp) use the Kantian deontological and Millian utilitarian arguments for why terrorism is immoral and should not be pursued as an avenue for expressing grievances in a typical democratic-based republican regime and offer (possibly) one kind of case where terrorist activities actually may be morally justified.
In a Beatles-ish attempt to be clever (possibly not), the final section of this book is titled scene 8: Talkin’ ’Bout a Revolution. Revolution is another one of Abrams’s TV series, and it takes place some fifteen years after electricity—and, as a result, technology—all over the world suddenly becomes nonfunctioning. In a kind of postapocalyptic environment, the USA is now divvied up into five new territories, one of them called the Monroe Republic, controlled by the dictator-like Sebastian Monroe and the Monroe Militia. In his chapter, titled “A Place for Revolutions in Revolution? Marxism, Feminism, and the Monroe Republic,” Jeff Ewing uses Marxist and feminist theories to investigate the gender, class, and identity relations of the Monroe Republic. He ultimately argues that the Monroe Republic, like other real-life totalitarian regimes, is doomed to collapse without “serious restructuring and a reprioritization of state policy” with respect to these relations.
The final chapter of the book is Michael Versteeg and Adam Barkman’s “A Light in the Darkness: Ethical Reflections on Revolution.” Thoughts of a postapocalypse will get you to start thinking about moral matters for sure, and in their chapter Versteeg and Barkman use stories from Revolution to investigate four prominent ethical theories: ethical subjectivism, contractarianism, utilitarianism, and natural law theory. After a critique of each theory, they ultimately settle on natural law theory as the theory of choice for moral matters in an end-of-the-world kind of environment.
J. J. Abrams’s works have entered the zeitgeist of popular culture and are prime fodder for a book like this. In a way, writing about Abrams is like trying to hit a moving target. As one may see by taking a look at his profile on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), he is a prolific artist. He is very hands-on in his direction—he can be seen literally shaking the camera by hand in the DVD extras for both Lost and Star Trek to achieve a specific visually chaotic effect—and clear about his own inspirations. In a now-famous talk he gave at the March 2007 TED.com forum, he spoke about his love of the unseen mystery, which may be seen throughout his work and which is specifically discussed in the chapter by Paul DiRado.
The summer of 2010 saw the opening of the well-reviewed sci-fi thriller Super 8, inspired by his own childhood filmmaking adventures and such Spielberg fare as E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. His direction of the film was praised by his mentor Spielberg as “a milestone movie for Abrams” in which his “very original and unique voice” shines through.1 Interestingly, 2010 was also the year when he had a conspicuous failure, the TV series Undercovers, which attempted to graft Hart to Hart with Alias by having an attractive spy couple engage in secret international adventures. The show failed to capture the audience’s interest because it had none of the trademark twisty plots, underlying symbolism, and tortured but appealing characters that usually populate an Abrams production. It was quickly cancelled, as was the more typical Abrams series Alcatraz, which failed to capture a large enough audience with its one-note mystery about disappearing prisoners reappearing decades later. Every season new TV shows from Abrams’s Bad Robot production company continue to premiere, including Person of Interest in 2011 and Revolution in 2012, giving critics and academics alike plenty of opportunities to analyze his ongoing oeuvre.
In the spring of 2013 it was announced that Abrams had been handpicked by his boyhood idol, George Lucas, to helm the new series of Star Wars films, creating a dilemma for the often antagonistic Star Wars and Star Trek fandoms. Some critics have said his more adventure-packed, lensflaring, and less-cerebral reimagining of the Star Trek universe resembled Lucas’s “galaxy far, far away” more than Gene Roddenberry’s original concept for the show. In the end, however, as Abrams said in his TED.com lecture, “The most incredible sort of mystery, I think, is now the question of what comes next.”2
Patricia Brace: This book is dedicated with love to my parents, Nancy Kay and Marion Kent Brace, who showed me by example to love reading and introduced me to science fiction, both of which have served me extremely well. Robert Arp: This book is dedicated to the other J. J. Abrams (editor of the UPK book The Philosophy of Stanley Kubrick), a sharp guy who attended grad school with me at Saint Louis University.
1. Jeff Jensen, “Kids at Heart: J. J. Abrams and Steven Spielberg,” Entertainment Weekly, June 10, 2011, http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20313460_20507915,00.html.
2. J. J. Abrams, “The Mystery Box: J. J. Abrams on TED.com,” transcription by Robert Thomas Carter, TED.com Forum, March 2007, Monterey, California, http://blog.ted.com/2008/01/10/jj_abrams/.