Vince Gilligan’s Pluribus, which aired its finale on Christmas Eve, has all the characteristically ironic notes you would expect from its paradigmatically Gen X filmmaker. Gilligan, the mastermind behind Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, loves to set up expectations and then subvert them. In episode one, references to classic alien-invasion films encourage the viewer to anticipate an alien jump-scare, complete with drooling mouths and inhuman screeching. But over the course of the season, you find that Pluribus isn’t your blockbuster alien film, but something even more unsettling.
Some as yet unknown, advanced civilization has used a high-powered transmitter to beam to earth a code that has embedded within it an RNA sequence for a virus-like infection. Yet this infection turns out to be salutary. Once infected, the whole human race gains the ability to communicate with one another by tuning their natural electromagnetic output to the same frequency. The positive effects of this “Joining” are that the human race is, at long last, able to work in perfect cooperation. Indeed, all individuality is erased and individual human beings function like single organs in a gigantic, worldwide organism, or like ants in a global anthill.
And so, rather than predatory, snarling goons who wave their slimy tentacles, we have a well-mannered takeover, a post-viral society where all a progressive’s dreams come true: Because everyone is in sync, the world operates with the logistics of Amazon, and, thus, there is no waste; because there is no crime, the power can be turned off at night to conserve energy; and because there is no individuality, there is no racism, discrimination, or sexism.
And what is more, because all human beings are in tune, they can access one another’s memories and psychological experiences: Any person who has a memory of a really good cup of coffee in Vienna on a sunny morning automatically “uploads” that memory into the collective memory, so that all people have access to it at all times. No wonder they walk around with cheesy smiles.
It makes sense, then, that most of the twelve human beings who were inadvertently left out of the Joining, due to some unexplained immunity to the pseudo-virus, eagerly long for inclusion—except for Carol Sturka, the abrasive, alcoholic writer of bad, pirate-themed romance novels. In the first episode, Carol loses her partner, Helen, to injuries sustained during the Joining, and thus resents the hive mind. But she’s also touchy, proud, and independent: She’d rather be miserable than lose what makes her who she is. Her South American counterpart is Manousos Oviedo, a paranoid, OCD-suffering, unlikely tough guy from Paraguay. Over the course of the season, these idiosyncratic, antisocial cranks seriously investigate how they can foil the plans of the hive mind before its missionary zeal can discover a way to abolish their individuality, too.
Gilligan’s special talent as a filmmaker, though, is that he can borrow the most lavish and experimental cinematography from auteur directors—which in their hands seems conceited, precious, and boring—and redeploy it in ways that enlarge our capacity for emotion. When Gilligan, for instance, depicts Manousos’s long journey from Paraguay northward to New Mexico to meet up with Carol, Gilligan employs a series of crossfades, in which footage of technophobe Manousos using a marker to trace his route on an old-fashioned map is layered onto lush footage of his journey through mountains and then up along South American coastal highways. As Manousos continues on foot, Gilligan provides breathtaking footage of the Darién Gap. The list goes on.
But in addition to such big, zoomed-out images of landscapes, Gilligan also loves to zoom in, almost to the microscopic level: We get so close, say, to the patterns of ice, that we don’t know what we’re seeing until we zoom out to contextualize those shots.
And what Gilligan does on the level of cinematography, he repeats on the level of storytelling. When we first meet Carol, we see her as she wants to be seen: at a manicured book-signing event, where she presents her controlled image for the purpose of marketing. But as we “zoom out” and contextualize Carol within the rest of her life and relationships, we find that she has a drinking problem; she hates her books, because she thinks that they are false; and she is cranky, depressed, and controlling.
All of these techniques were used in his previous shows, but in Pluribus Gilligan uses this “zooming in” and “zooming out” to set up a dialectic: At turns, we sympathize with either side. We sometimes think we’re cheering for Carol, who clings to all of those values that get knee-jerk reactions from modern souls: She hates the idea of losing her personality, her individuality, her agency. And yet, once this alluring individualism has been re-contextualized within Carol’s loneliness, misery, selfishness, and destructive alcoholism, we are made to wonder: Could it be better to be part of the Joining?
At the same time, because the hive mind collective has the ethics of Johnny Appleseed and the Swedenborgians (they cannot lie, will eat no animals, and cannot even harm plants), you might think that this would be the world an affluent, white, progressive would have wanted: perfect sharing, 100 percent cooperation; no war, poverty, or racism.
And yet, because everyone is so eerily nice, and always trying to help, this post-apocalyptic world has the unexpectedly creepy vibes of The Truman Show or Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. This is not the first time Gilligan has skewered religious fundamentalists driven by family values and a zeal to make the whole world as smiley and nice as themselves. But in Pluribus we discover that the cost of utopian cooperation is radical loss of autonomy: The Joined humans sleep on sleeping bags within giant warehouses (to save energy), like insects in a hive; they have no families, no hometowns, and can speak every language perfectly (from Quechua to Japanese), and thus they have nothing distinct, nothing particular to love—and all of this is before taking into account their off-putting modes of protein supplementation.
Modernity is a fundamentally conflicted age in which the heroic individualism of Romanticism collides with the Enlightenment’s dream of redeploying the Scientific Revolution’s methodology to create a perfectly rational society. Gilligan’s talent in Pluribus is distilling these two tendencies and then bringing them into dialectical conflict.
