Guy, with his amusing facial expressions and wholesome nature, just like 20th century philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, reminds us that we’re freer than we allow ourselves to imagine, amidst the ordinary pressure of commitments and obligations. Too often we believe that we are not free to choose, thinking that our decisions are somehow made for us and we follow the “script” that society would want us to enact. But to reach our full potential and authentic self we must dare to defy. Existence is about being in a fundamentally free and responsible predicament. Little does it matter if Free City is a video game, because we exist first and only then, do we try to make sense of things through science, religion, politics, philosophy. At the end of the day Guy (and his friend Buddy, played by Lil Rel Howery) will teach us that the realm of experiencing existence turns out to be more primary than the objective validity of scientific principles.
As good a place to start as any… From here: https://cinemadailyus.com/reviews/free-guy-when-video-games-set-an-existential-example/
There may be mild spoilers.
You will rage at the words “present”, “intentionality”, “toxic”, “existential” by the end of this.
I unabashedly love this film for sneaking extremely complex philosophical concepts into said silly/fun. It’s a phenomenally humanist and existential film with Buddhist undertones that question the meaning of existence, what “free will” means, and what it means to “be”, and what you’re meant to do with that. It’s possible this film hit all the right chords after all my personal headwork through the pandemic; because it just nailed all the concepts I was struggling with in how to exist happily and peacefully in a complex, uncaring universe. The film also delves into the suffering of existence, and you see each character deal with that in their own way. I was so impressed with L’il Rey Howard’s delivery in his apartment, with a zen-like sobering critique of “doubt”. It’s a beautiful moment about intentionality and being present… “who knows what is real, or if we’re real, because what is real is that you and I are here right now”. It’s a beautiful philosophy.
It’s also a sort of opposite end but companion to the Alex Garland film Annihilation, about what it means to grow and change and see the person you were, what you’ve become, and the consequences (and necessary accountability) around that. What’s more, I doubt there’s been a more philosophical subtext in a film since Annihilation, but it’s possible Free Guy isn’t seeing the same thoughtful critique because it’s so expertly hiding big, important concepts in plain sight. How can we be present and live with intentionality? What is the nature of love or a relationship, male friendship vs toxicity, and how can it manifest? Why is there a ruling class that can shape their reality, while so many of us are given a framework seemingly impossible to break free from?
If you’re having trouble conjuring where I’m going, let’s have the screenwriter chime in: https://www.theringer.com/movies/2021/8/16/22626608/free-guy-ryan-reynolds-zak-penn-matt-lieberman
“This movie’s always been about free will, and being stuck in your lane, and just actively thinking about how much of our lives is our ‘programming’ and how much is under our control,” he says. In the grand tradition of time-loop movies like Palm Springs and Groundhog Day—a comedy that’s also, on some level, about Buddhist themes—Lieberman wanted Free Guy to be “a movie that’s definitely talking about real things, but it’s packaged in this big fun piece of candy.”
Also Director Levy:
“Thus began almost a year of rewriting the script to bring out the characters and humanist themes more and more”.
https://www.indiewire.com/2021/08/shawn-levy-interview-free-guy-1234657896/
So much of this film is about being present, in the now.
In the film, the “TODAY” stamp at the bank is a commentary on being present. The Reynolds Howard apartment conversation about what it means to exist and “be” is a conversation about being present. The only thing you can take for granted is now. Is a connection with a NPC / AI real, or not? What does connecting mean? If it’s fulfilling, isn’t that real? If you have an experience real to you, shouldn’t that be enough? In the end, the reformed game where NPC are “doing whatever we want” is clearly a message about the purpose of life, meaning that we’re not supposed to be locked into an existence we’ve no control of, and that leisure is the prime aim of life. To spend time and experience existence with friends without expectation is the only truth we have, in the moment, present together.
In that, “Guy” is *truly* free at the end, out of a bank job, and able to explore his free-will. In that, another subtext of the film is about a ruling class versus labor exploitation… which is highly relevant to the psychological condition of most laborers and workers in these current times, which completely interrupts being present, our free will, and our inability to become unshackled from routine and unfettered from being just another cog in the machine. In the real world at the video game company, and with all the NPC in Free City, most people are just background characters that abide their supposed reality. They can’t “level up” (professional stasis without growth) in their life of complete mundane repetitiveness. All the while, a ruling class breaks laws, flouts rules, mods reality to their liking, while suffering zero accountability. Sound familiar?
The film is stating that the nature of the human experience is not meant to be about subjugation, or being a background player yoked to the mundanity of your own laboring existence. It’s to realize life isn’t about work, but leisure, ie “doing whatever you want” from the end of the film. You should not be helplessly anchored to the notion you will never “level up” and are at a society level “stasis” where you watch a ruling class level up, ignore laws, and mod reality with impunity. What an incredible message.
It also grapples with toxic masculinity. First, with the emotional closeness and availability of the NPC male friends, locked into their role of not understanding how the ruling class operates or why they’re so mean. But, they bond so closely as men in the most pure and least toxic way possible, vs seeing someone like Antwon who is a man-child both evil and somewhat cruelly aloof. A great example of this is how the real world love story at the end of the film (lovers meet in the middle of the street) is TOTALLY MIRRORED by the best friends in game at the end, where they see each other again and meet in the middle of the street as well. That mirroring shows that love and relationships can take many forms, as long as you are emotionally available and not anchored in toxicity (like the ruling class). A side not is that Julie Comer’s character was *not* present, so she didn’t see the obvious clues that resulted in her realizing a platonic relationship was more than that, something she missed as too wrapped up in dealing with her stolen code. The second aspect of the male toxicity is MolotvGirl, and her curated in-game persona of a badass, vs the real world woman who is struggling to gain her voice and recognition for her talents in a world dominated by toxic, cutthroat men. Seeing a woman curate the person she wants to be within the gaming world, while struggling with idiotic men in the real world, who are furiously working on removing her agency and literal work from her, and exploiting her, etc. It was interesting take on how the costuming worked out as commentary on what women experience, either within video game production (as we see by current scandals everywhere, Blizzard most notably as of recent) and types of NPC characters without agency, and the world of misogyny in-game. https://www-themarysue-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.themarysue.com/exclusive-free-guy-clip-molotov-costume/
So, the film is a delight in finding Baudrillard’s Simulacrum, and playfully telling the theatre goers that we’re essentially in our own version of it… We’re the NPC, locked into our existence. Whether our existence is real or not isn’t the issue, because we’re here. It’s our choice to exercise free will by being present in the only reality you can rely on… therefore freeing ourselves from the existential dread of society’s framework.
Also, to free oneself from our flawed intellect, that we have presuppositions about reality we take for granted as true which demonstrates confirmation bias, selective perception, and cognitive dissonance, which completely takes us out of existing in the honest present. Whatever we “real” people consider “God” in fact could be Antwon… just some famous person we think we know and have a close relationship with. This was best delivered in the scene in Molotov Girl’s garage, where Ryan is learning that his God is just “some guy” who’s mean and doesn’t give a damn, but he’s not prepared to understand that yet.
In this real, non-film world, anyone that has a relationship with “God” is essentially in a parasocial relationship, where God not only might not care you exist, he may not know, and he may not be paying attention. In the film, this is demonstrated by the fact that “God” doesn’t even know or understand the citizens in the game are living and suffering, which is a very realistic Buddhist notion of our human condition. In fact, with an axe in hand, “God” cruelly doesn’t care. This leads to a moment before his “awakening”, where Guy is shattered to find out nothing matters and life isn’t real… which then helps him existentially release himself from an intellectual prison, finally going to the road to become the titular “Free Guy”. The philosophical revelation that nothing is real, nor does it matter, helps him follow the call to adventure, and evolve into his own spiritual meaning and purpose, ie finding the intentionality of presence, and existing *now*, vs projecting himself into a future which may or may not be true. The meta commentary of the in-game people can easily be extrapolated to our shared human condition of suffering and potential meaningless of our existence or actions. The below from here: https://www.cbr.com/free-guys-best-scene-guy-learns-truth/
It’s an expected moment for Guy, who had to learn the truth about his world. But the fact that he’s having this conversation with one of the creators of his world, after having fallen in love with her, makes it all the more painful. Guy seems not so much mentally shattered or spiritually broken as he is emotionally devastated — a distinct difference. He treats the revelation like a betrayal by the person he most wanted to share the world with. Making matters worse is Millie, who’s reduced to tears at putting this person she’s grown to care for through an existential crisis.
What’s more, his self-awareness of being present in the moment conjures the notion of intentionality and accountability, two major themes in humanism and philosophy in regards to self-awareness. the below from here: https://washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/free-guy-blends-slapstick-comedy-with-philosophy-and-it-works
The NPCs’ dull and cyclical lives are the core of Free Guy’s pathos. Are we all just repeating lines of code in some simulation? To borrow from Oscar Wilde, “To live is the rarest thing in the world; most people just exist.”
And better yet, this really nails it. The below from here: https://www.vox.com/22617231/free-guy-review-reynolds-truman-show
“…modern-day reincarnation of the existentialist tradition stretching back to the late 19th century, drawing on figures like Kierkegaard and Sartre. Give life meaning by making deliberate choices, then take responsibility for those choices, they exhort. It’s an old, appealing philosophy, albeit one that tends to downplay factors outside of people’s control… Free Guy raises some other surprisingly deep questions about the nature of being, too. For instance, if we develop self-aware artificial intelligence, and then decide to delete the code that powers them, does that mean we’ve killed off a being? If so, does that imply that intelligence is the fundamental measure of being? And if our answer to that question is yes, what are the implications for how we value human life? Dark but important stuff. But when you’re worn down, it’s hard to imagine choosing any path other than the one of least resistance. That’s likely why the cheery conclusion of Free Guy is that we don’t just need to take charge of our own lives; if we want to save our world from becoming like Free City, we need to resist the people who try to construct our realities for us and find a way to live outside their grasp (or at least find a better way to live).”
And yes, the irony of Disney’s first non-IP film in years becoming IP is a treat for the senses. And yes, Ryan… if it’s not called Albuquerque Boiled Turkey, we have failed.
If it isn’t called, “Albuquerque Boiled Turkey” we’ve failed.
— Ryan Reynolds (@VancityReynolds) August 14, 2021
An aside to close: I thought it was playful that the entire movie was rooted in the notion that he has historically subverted the “call to adventure” and the hero’s journey his entire life because of ignorance. That’s a bit different way to start, and yes slightly disingenuous in that this forms a subversion to that subversion, by getting him to “wake up” and follow through on the typical narrative storytelling, but it sort of taps into our paranoia in the real world that “Should I be doing more? Am I missing something?”. It also delves deeply into those existential themes of free will vs being trapped, and realizing (leveling up) that we’re far more unfettered and trapped than we believe.
The only way a film could truly subvert the call to adventure and hero’s journey is by making your sidekick the hero, and have the hero a complete buffoon who doesn’t move the story along. This was famously done in Carpenter’s love note to 1970s Kung-Fu… Big Trouble in Little China. Carpenter wanted to respectfully bring Asian cinema to American audiences. In it, Kurt Russell is the hero who does ABSOLUTELY NOTHING but acts like John Wayne, while all the sidekicks and other characters resolve the storyline. It’s brilliant subversion, and nearly impossible to do in a straightforward narrative that somewhat has to play by the rules. Not only that, Carpenter’s film didn’t use racist tropes or stereotypes in ANY way. And it was fun. Which is why I even bring it up… because I don’t need to overanalyze the subtext of Free Guy, and we can just sit in a place where it’s a charming, delightful, smart, funny film with a VERY good heart and a great message about empathy and what it means to exist. BUT…
yeah I think this was Karl Havoc A LOT. lol =)
