So many of you who watched the movie Free Guy may have noticed some similarities between that and other films like Wreck-It Ralph and The Lego Movie. All of them are about a character who is just a pawn inside a larger world where they don’t have a whole lot of inherent value except to perform to a pre-determined script or set of rules.
They are initially unaware of their lack of free will, but come to be made aware through the actions of another character who has peeked behind the curtains themselves. In this way this film is also similar to films like The Matrix. They all raise the question — what happens when someone realises they are mere characters in a larger game, that too a character with no real purpose or agency?
Usually these films all show us that the answer to fling yourself into all out rebellion, spark a revolution, and symbolically challenge God himself.
Whew! That’s a whole lot of responsibility.
But even if this revolution succeeds, the machines are overthrown, the façade is ripped off, and the Bastille is stormed, what then? Do we all become completely self-actuated individuals who no longer bow to anybody else’s directions? Is free will the end goal in and of itself?
As we have seen after every historical revolution in our own world, an old exploitative order is replaced by a new exploitative order. It just differs in the methods of exploitation and the time it takes to get to the same state. Of course, the methods have become finer and finer till the point that we don’t even know when we are actually exercising free will and when we are being led to believe so.
Faced with such dire propositions, I have myself often wondered what the point is of a life where you exert almost no control or impact outside of your most inner circle of existence.
It may come as a surprise to you but Free Guy has a throwaway line that addresses this — about what the purpose of a well-lived life could be even in the absence of complete freedom. It’s when Buddy says to Guy (around the 55 minute mark), “So what if I’m not real? This moment is — right here right now, this moment is real. What’s more real than a person trying to help someone they love? And if that’s not real, I don’t know what is.”
That’s a deeper thought than we may realise at first. It hardly seems worth the effort to just live a life where we just accept and enjoy the little moments. But that’s really not the point. The larger realisation is that in a world where 99.9% of us are denied any real choice — whether it is about what we choose to do with our time, who we choose to do it with, where we choose to live, how long we choose to live, and so on — in all of this we still have some pretty valuable matters where choice can be exercised. Buddy can choose to help Guy and feel happy about being a dependable friend, Guy can choose to help Molotov Girl even if it longer means he can break out of the artificial world he inhabits.
If we can create little pockets of happiness and gratefulness, we are giving shape to our world in a way that cannot be taken away from us. When big choices are taken away from us, the little ones become the basis for our entire existence, and that’s not too bad. That’s how we break out of the systems of exploitation that inevitably are brought down on us. By choosing to be good and helpful and unselfish we are made revolutionary.
Buddy is an ideal to aspire to for the 99.9% of us. The 0.1% can shove their choices up their free ass.