Speaking without words
Affect and extra-linguistic communication in Netflix's "1899"
A show review?
For my first real blog post, I made the perhaps bold decision to write something of a show review despite having never written one before. Oops. But recently, my girlfriend and I finished watching Netflix’s 1899, a mystery-thriller that will blow your mind and make you question your reality. As we watched, I was continually surprised by the well-developed characterization and plot progression of the show, as well as the philosophical and intellectual problems it was posing. After finishing the last episode, I just knew I had to write about it. Some of the key issues at stake in the show are communication, language, logic versus feeling, and the very definition of “reality”—issues I work on extensively in my own research. So though I have never written something like this, I couldn’t help but try to explore the intellectual demands of this show and, in the process, hopefully advocate for the show as an artistic masterpiece (yes I’m looking at you shallow and whiny guardian review).
Spoiler Alert and Summary
Just a heads up, this post is going to contain a boatload (ha) of spoilers for this show in a quasi-review format. If you have not seen this show and intend on doing so, this is your reminder to stop reading and go watch this amazing show, and then come back and check out this post! That said, if you don’t mind spoilers by all means stick around but I must say the twists and rug-pulls of this show were very well done, and these spoilers might affect your experience of that.
Since I will be discussing the show casually throughout and don’t want to spend too much time summarizing, I will offer a brief summary of the setting that is hopefully concise yet explanatory enough; I highly recommend checking out the trailer on youtube as well.
The show takes place in, well, 1899. If you just watch the trailer and half of the first episode, you might think you are watching Titanic, and you wouldn’t be that far off. This thriller, produced by Netflix and created by Jantje Friese and Baran bo Odar, the creators of the other hit thriller Dark, focuses on a passenger ship named the Kerberos bound to America from England in the eponymous year, carrying people from many countries and languages. Along the way, the ship receives a distress call from a ship known as the Prometheus that had previously gone missing in the Atlantic. In a decision that upsets the passengers, captain Eyk (Andreas Pietschmann) resolves to answer the distress call. When they make it to the ship they find it eerily abandoned (save for a mysterious boy locked in a cupboard and a stoic, secretive man—remember them for later). On the abandoned ship, various characters begin to have vivid flashbacks to traumatic moments in their life, or otherwise find unexplainable traces of their loved ones on board. For example, captain Eyk finds a piece of cloth that belonged to his daughter who died in a house fire and was never on the ship. This is where it starts to get weird, and from this point onward the story revolves around the characters trying to make sense of their precarious and haunting situation.
Most importantly, it centers around protagonist Maura Franklin (Emily Beecham) and her coming-to-terms with both past trauma and the realization that she had a part to play in this whole mess. To jump over and simplify tons of plot in a way that hopefully does not cheapen the story for you, Maura has to come to terms with the fact that the entire setting is a simulation that the characters are “living in” and that she made. In essence, the simulation was a means for Maura of escaping her own trauma. Likewise other characters are implied to be there in order to escape their own past; despite this, the characters constantly have flashbacks to their past lives while Maura’s father, Henry Singleton (Anton Lesser) hopes to find a way to end the simulation from within, and her husband Daniel (Aneurin Barnard) hopes to wake her up from this fake reality (or is it?). As you can see, this gets confusing and complicated, and we had to pause this show a lot just to ask what the heck was going on. At the heart of all of this however, is the question of what reality is, and what experiences are “real,” and the show often cites Plato’s famous cave allegory which tackled this very question.
Language, Logic, and Feelings
Perhaps the most interesting stylistic choice of the show was to explore this question through language and communication. The greatest barrier to success in the show is the linguistic one, as the ship is comprised of an international group of passengers who all speak different languages (including English, German, French, Danish, Norwegian, Cantonese, Polish, Spanish, and Portuguese). This means that for the most part (save for a few characters who know multiple languages, or when a Danish passenger can vaguely understand a sister-language like German), the characters have no way of understanding one another. As spanish passenger Ángel comically remarks in episode one: “None of these poor bastards understands a word I'm saying” (Ep.1, 8:45). Beyond the overwhelming task involved in trying to understand what is going on, the characters also have to figure out how to communicate in a basic way. Almost bewilderingly the characters still seem to understand one another, especially at crucial moments, and I kept asking myself “how do the characters communicate so effectively despite the massive linguistic barrier that many characters don’t even acknowledge often?” If looked at uncritically, the show could be condemned for this mechanic as a sort of deus ex machina—they always seem to understand each other despite the linguistic barrier. But I think something far more interesting is happening; in fact I think the show is making a deliberate statement on how we interact with others and live through trauma in community, and how language is not the only or even primary means of communication in our world.
We often think of language as the only means of effective communication, or at least we think of precise language and the ability to communicate linguistically as a valued skill. However, the sword of precision is always double-edged. In being precise with our words we limit our ability to convey meaning to a fixed word, clause, or sentence. Precision thus lauded can easily become the adversary to nuance; As an example, we could convey a phrase which is linguistically precise and intended to have one meaning. Despite this, the phrase could be affectively charged or, in other words, could be interpreted in multiple ways depending on how the phrase is said.
We have all experienced this at one point or another. Maybe you are approaching a friend and say: “What are you up to right now?" This is a clear and direct statement, one that in writing conveys a meaning that would be hard to misinterpret. But you could also say "what are you up to right now?" or you could say the same phrase with no altered tone but with a visible scowl. In these cases, the actual wording has not changed, but the meaning has shifted to one of accusation or minor hostility simply through intonation or facial expression. In this example, the language is precise but limiting in its capability to convey meaning; we imbue our words with emotions and other extra-linguistic signs or "tags" to expand the potential of communication. 1899 illustrates this limitation of language and the capability of extra-linguistic communication through the international language barrier. When we invest language with the sole power to communicate, we find ourselves helpless when trying to convey a point or ask a question to someone who speaks a language different to our own.
At the start of the show, language is treated as sole arbiter of communication and it even determines social bonds, trust, and group boundaries. Episode one opens with each sub-group of characters speaking privately amongst one another and largely shunning contact with one another. In one instance, a danish passenger named Krester (Lucas Lynggaard Tønnesen) breaks out from the lower deck (where the lower-class passengers have been practically imprisoned, as in Titanic). He rushes into the dining room begging for a doctor for his sister who is near death from her in utero child being twisted within the womb. Only able to understand the word “doktor” from his mouth, Maura rushes down to help. Though she is ultimately successful and saves the woman’s life, the woman’s mother distrusts Maura saying in danish: “No. This is wrong. We don’t even know who or what she is” (Ep. 1, 13:56). In this case and others early on, language determines cultural in-group norms, and those norms dictate who you may and may not be in community with. In fact, one of the recurring themes throughout is the passenger’s distrust of the German crew and the German crew’s disdain for its English owner. Of course culture goes beyond just language, but the most immediate and glaring marker of someone of a different culture is the language they speak. In America we are sadly very well aware of this fact; increasingly the Spanish language is targeted by racist white-supremacists as a dog-whistle for limiting immigration and targeting hispanic citizens and immigrants.
But by the end of the show, forms of community building that cut through the linguistic barrier take precedence over the privileged position language holds. French, Danish, German, Polish, and Chinese characters work together despite not being able to communicate in traditional ways. In one of the more moving arc of the show, Jing Li (Isabella Wei) and Olek (Maciej Musial) speak to one another in their own languages (Cantonese and Polish, respectfully) at length. Though they never say that they understand one another and have no means of understanding each other’s words, they seem to intuitively know what the other person is sharing. Jing Li, for instance, finds Olek’s picture of the Statue of Liberty (symbolizing his desire to start a new life in America) and she listens to him try to explain why he carries this before they embrace. Jing-li had no way of knowing the emotional baggage tied to that image, but it is clear that she felt it. Olek and Jing-Li are just one example of this; characters constantly break down the linguistic and cultural barriers separating themselves from others and form community through feeling, emotion, and affect.
I should probably mention here what I mean by affect. In my academic work, I have worked within a framework known as "affect theory," a critical methodology that sees emotion, feeling, and force as the primary means by which we live in and experience this world. By affect I don’t necessarily refer to emotions, which we are conscious of, but something like a force that acts on our body. Affect is kind of like when you are in a bad mood but have no idea why and cannot describe it. Affect is thus pre-linguistic or extra-linguistic. In the scenes with Olek and Jing-Li, affect is that intuition that the two share regarding what the other is saying. Put another way, it is something like what argumentation scholar Michael Gilbert describes as “Kisceral Reasoning.” “The kisceral,” he argues, “is that mode of communication that relies on the intuitive, the imaginative, the religious, the spiritual, and the mystical. It is a wide category used frequently beyond the halls of academe.”1 It's sort of like when you go to a live concert and come out stunned, bathed in the joy of what you just experienced; you know you witnessed something incredible but cannot say what it was that made it incredible because it is not "logical," it goes beyond the limits of logic to the intuitive, the feeling.
As another example, affect theorist Sara Ahmed offers the example, taken from Teresa Brennan's example, of walking into a room and "feeling the atmosphere." For Ahmed, this exemplifies how objects and places have "feelings" attached to them and how we bring our own "feelings" into those places, potentially influencing the atmosphere.2 Again, I want to make this all concrete. It's that sensation of homeliness we get in some places, creepiness in others. It's also like when you are in a good mood but walk into a room of people that feels dour and gloomy and suddenly feeling sad too. Affect is, to simplify it, "vibe."
In the show, feelings, intuitions, and emotions are the keys to true and deep communication. Olek and Jing-Li, Maura and Eyk, Clémence and Tove, all of the main protagonists by the end, work through their trauma together as they uncover the truth behind what they experience—all of this is done through scenes where characters offer extended monologues to someone who does not speak their language, and yet they are understood and embraced with love. Wounds of the past are healed through bonds of love and, narratively, Maura only comes to realize the truth behind the simulation through the affective relationships she establishes with Eyk, her husband Daniel and their son Elliot, among others. Towards the end of the show, when the audience is still unaware of the fact that Maura, not her father, is the reason for the simulation, the camera cuts to the father talking about how he is going to restart the simulation once again (he has been resetting it continuously in search of the key to end the simulation once and for all). As he gazes through a TV3 he becomes frustrated, having once again failed to find the key, and says: "every time they [those on the ship] make the same mistakes, and every time they die, because they can't get rid of their emotions. But that's what makes them weak. It's human nature's ultimate flaw. One shouldn't base a choice on love, anger, hate. They are just silly feelings that cloud the mind" (Ep. 7, 43:45). But by this point in the show, his statement is rather absurd. As I mentioned above, it is only through relationships, established across the language barrier, that drive the characters towards self-discovery and closer to potentially breaking out of the cycle of simulations.
Beyond a narrative level, there is a philosophical question at stake. If the characters are in a simulation that will continue to be repeated until it is shut down, does it even matter that they made these connections, and are these connections real or mere figments of the simulation? I would say that absolutely it still matters. For one, in the show it is not that these experiences never occurred, only that the characters do not remember them each time the simulation begins anew. Secondly, I would argue that even if it is all a simulation, it is nonetheless very real, and the characters experience these intensities and emotions again and again. Even if they are doomed to repeat the simulation ad infinitum, those experiences in the moment are no less real, emotions no less potent, and bonds made through feeling no less stronger. If we live in the moment, and key into how the characters live in their moment, those relationships are very real. The meta-gaze of the viewer shouts “you are living in a simulation, this is all fake.” But this is like when people ask me “what if we all lived in a simulation and none of this was real?” To that I say so what? To me, it would not cheapen my life or change the fact that the experiences I had felt real to me and had real effects on my development and consciousness from my point of view. To me, what is real is what is experienced, felt, lived. A fairy-tale for example might be “fake” or “mythic” but nonetheless tells a story and relates a moral that influences us and changes how we view the world.
This is not to advocate for a world devoid of logic or reason, nor is it to say let’s throw language out the door because who needs it anyways. Rather, I hope to have demonstrated how communication and our place in the world is sometimes very illogical, very sensory dependent, very emotionally charged, and to have demonstrated how one show brilliantly captures that. Emotions are not the one flaw of human kind, they aren’t just silly feelings, and in fact almost every decision we make is influenced, whether we know it or not, by unconscious forces acting on our bodies. After all, we’ve all met people who get “hangry” or people who get grumpy when they are tired.
Sadly, 1899 was cancelled and will not be making further seasons. As such many questions that season one set up will never be answered. Despite this, it is still worth it to watch this incredible show and its attention to detail.
I hope, again, that if nothing else this post will convince you to go watch this amazing show. If you do, tell me what you think! As always, I appreciate and value any feedback on my writing and style. I am very new to this medium, so any feedback you might have is helpful!
Until next time, HP.
Michael A. Gilbert, Coalescent Argumentation (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1997).
Sarah Ahmed, “Happy Objects,” in The Affect Theory Reader ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 34-35.
The simulation takes place in 1899, but where the father is trapped has access to the modern technology of the time outside the simulation which takes place in 2099.
Amazing and insightful review of 1899! I’m glad we watched it. Is that “hangry” observation from personal experience haha!
That was a skillful way to work in Friends. 😎 (<-- note my use of extralinguistic communication).
Be on the lookout for a car with UK plates and a Guardian logo on the door driving slowly past your apartment.