Futurama and Philosophy

by Young, Shaun P. , Lewis, Courtland

  Choosing Madness Over Sanity

  Like Fry, Quixote is notorious for both his delusions and for not letting obstacles stand in his way. For instance, Quixote confuses two flocks of sheep for two opposing armies, and he slashes at what he’s sure is a giant’s head, but is actually a wineskin. In these and other instances, Quixote always assures Sancho that some vile enchanter is to blame for his delusions. Whether the enchanter has simply cast a spell to trick Sancho’s senses or transformed demons into normal people, if anything clashes with the reality constructed by Quixote, he simply makes it fit into the narrative he prefers. It certainly doesn’t sound very sane, but it’s the path Quixote paved and Fry follows. If they let their fiction get proven wrong then it’s all over. So, instead of giving up, they let themselves slip further and further into their fantasies, in the quest to change their reality, to better themselves, and to be happy.

  This persistence pays off, especially for Fry. The holophoner returns as a tool to bring Fry and Leela together in the last episode of Season Four, “The Devil’s Hands Are Idle Playthings.” The episode tells the story of Fry writing an opera for Leela. This is only made possible thanks to Fry’s deal with the Robot Devil, where Fry trades his “stupid fingers” for the Robot Devil’s quick, capable robot hands. The Robot Devil’s dexterous hands combined with the holophoner’s expressive capacity give Fry a chance to compose the greatest opera ever, which will once and for all properly express his love for Leela.

  On top of being one of the biggest tear-jerker episodes of the series, it also performs some of the cleverest tricks to break the barriers between artist and audience. In the latter half of the episode, Leela’s upset she wasn’t able to hear part one of Fry’s opera—thanks to Bender’s own enhancements he gained from the Robot Devil. In her desperation, Leela also makes a deal with the Robot Devil to restore her hearing in exchange for her “hand.” With her hearing restored just in time for part two, the opera resumes. Part two catches up with events that occurred earlier in the episode, namely Fry’s deal with the devil, and it’s at this point that opera-reality collides with Fry’s-reality to elegantly demolish the fourth wall on several levels.

  The operatic story on the stage engulfs the audience, just as we often see Futurama and Don Quixote engulf our reality. Fry is the bridge between the reality of his opera, the reality of his life, and the reality of our—the viewer’s—lives. He’s the master creator of the opera, a normal person in his reality, and a character in our reality. By holding all three of these roles at once, Fry is able to merge all three realities together, until the line between fact and fiction is all but meaningless. The opera’s performance breaks free into the larger reality of the show, affecting the rest of the Futurama characters and making them sing and participate as perfectly as if Fry had parts written for them all along. The characters are all aware on some level that it’s happening too. This is particularly obvious when Hermes sings the question, “Is this really happening or just being staged?” A moment later, The Professor sings that he “can’t believe the Devil is so unforgiving.” Zoidberg sings out, “I can’t believe everybody’s just ad-libbing!”

  During this reality-transcending scene the Robot Devil trades hands back with Fry, leaving our hero with his old “stupid fingers.” Fry tries continuing his performance, but with his “horrible, human hands,” he no longer has the skill to perform to the audience’s expectations. They all leave, except for Leela who pleads for Fry to continue playing. She wants to see the ending. The holophoner’s images are a bit blocky and simplistic, and the tune is a bit uneven, but Fry finishes his opera, creating a scene of him and Leela kissing and walking hand-in-hand into the distance. At the time of this episode’s production, Futurama had been canceled as a series. The development team had no way of knowing that it would one day return. So when they chose to end the episode with this image of Fry and Leela holding hands, they knew that it could very well end up being the last image of the entire series. Even though the show did return, re-opening the question of Leela’s feelings for Fry, the scene implies that if the story had ended at that point, Fry might have finally validated his foolishness and gotten the one thing he truly wanted: Leela’s love.

  Living a Life of Enchantment

  So what changed? What did Fry do that was so different from all of his other failed attempts? Was it gaining the physical skill to accomplish feats like those performed by his fictional role models? It certainly didn’t hurt to have the strength and intelligence provided by the parasites in “Parasites Lost” or the dexterity of the Robot Devil’s hands in “The Devil’s Hands are Idle Playthings.” But in both episodes it was through the holophoner and its potential for creative expression that Fry finally got Leela to open up to him. The strength and speed were perks, but creating something beautiful is what really gets Leela to see his merits. She reveals this early in the “The Devil’s Hands Are Idle Playthings” while telling Fry about her saxophone-playing ex. “It’s weird. Sean was uneducated, unambitious. He was pasty and hunched. . . . But when he played, I could sense this incredible, beautiful creative soul.” When inner light is allowed to shine, other shortcomings become trivial.

  It would certainly seem that Cervantes would agree with this sentiment as well. During the conversation between the Canon and the Priest in Don Quixote referenced earlier, the Priest agrees with every criticism the Canon makes about fictional stories. Like the Canon (and Leela), he believes that the stories are good for diversion and little more. There’s one thing he appreciates about these stories, though:

  the opportunity for display that they offered a good mind, providing a broad and spacious field where one’s pen could write unhindered . . . the writer can show his conversance with astrology, his excellence as a cosmographer, his knowledge of music, his intelligence in matters of state, and perhaps he will have the opportunity to demonstrate his talents as a necromancer, if he should wish to. He can display the guile of Ulysses, the piety of Aeneas, the valor of Achilles . . . in short, all of those characteristics that make a noble man perfect.

  The stories may not be true, but they offer a unique glimpse into the storyteller’s mind, so viewers can witness virtues that might have never been given the opportunity to come to light otherwise.

  In the final chapters of Don Quixote, our hero is dejected after being defeated by another man of reading, one who was in fact inspired by Don Quixote to act like a knight. Beaten at his own game, Quixote returns home and almost immediately falls ill and takes to his deathbed. As he dictates his last will and testament, he expresses remorse for his actions, saying that he was a fool for trying to be a knight. But his friends and neighbors have all been changed by his journey, and the same people who spent the entire book trying to convince Quixote to end his charade, start begging him to return to arms and resume his adventures.

  In his own way, Quixote becomes the author of his own story, instead of merely a character in Cervantes’s. He, like Fry, inspires the characters of his whole world to consider that there may be real value in fiction after all, which further inspires readers. In the same way, by living and sharing his hopes and dreams, Fry inspires Leela to reconsider his fantasy of the two of them together. These wonderfully engaging stories let us see the beauty of how people think the world should be, regardless of the limitations reality has imposed on them. And when we tell the right stories the right way, sometimes we can make our reality a little bit more like our fantasy.

  22

  Hegel and the Phenomenology of Futurama

  JAMES J. MICIC

  Welcome to the world of tomorrow!

  —TERRY, “Space Pilot 3000”

  Futurama as a series is obsessed with the theme of time. The foundation of the series is based upon the implicit relationship between identity and time. The phrase Fry first encounters when he awakes from his thousand-year slumber—“Welcome to the world of tomorrow. . . . Come, your destiny awaits”—is emblematic of this fact, in that it makes the as
sumption that Fry is who he once was and still is that person. Take note, however, that for Fry those thousand years aren’t experienced at all, to him they are completely blank.

  Themes regarding the relationship between the passage of time and the role consciousness plays in time’s passing are presented throughout the series. In one of my favorite scenes to date, Fry nonchalantly rescues the attendees of an art exhibition from a fire about to engulf them all (“Three Hundred Big Boys,” Season Four). Fry achieves his cool and calm composure as a result of consuming one hundred cups of coffee, which is just enough to endow him with superhuman abilities, thus enabling him to quickly escort everyone out of the building unharmed.

  What’s most interesting about this scene isn’t Fry’s super-speed, but the two perspectives of events with which we’re presented. The first perspective is Fry’s own experience of what occurs. With Fry we can follow precisely the trajectory of a cork popping from a bottle, or trace the flapping wings of a hummingbird in flight. The second perspective is that of a third-person perspective; from this view things are a blur, a “mysterious orange blur” to be precise, in which nobody has any knowledge of Fry’s heroism, besides Fry himself.

  An example of the same phenomenon comes from the Season Three episode “Time Keeps on Slippin’,” in which the Earth is subjected to intervals of global “time skips”—produced by chronotons, of course! Although time seems to pass and happenings of various kinds occur, the characters can’t recollect the events taking place within these skips. Professor Farnsworth observes: “Interesting. It’s as if we all behave normally during the time skips but then we have no memory of it.”

  What’s most interesting in these examples are the breaks in experience. They seem to contradict normal human experience in which time, as an essential feature for making sense of the world, progresses from one event to the next. For instance, the time it takes for me to ponder time skips, to the time it takes for me to get naked and participate in a conga line is understandable because both have a linking of moments that allow me to make sense of them. However, if I can’t remember the linkage, then I’m unable to make sense of how both events fit together. To me and the Planet Express gang, us doing the conga naked is immediate and unexplainable. What I’m missing is the essential time linkage that explains the occurrence of Hermes’s and the gang’s impressive naked-conga skills. With the help of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s philosophy, we can come to a better understanding and, perhaps, resolution of the riddles presented by Futurama.

  I Exist but I Don’t Know It

  Hegel wrote a great deal on consciousness in relation to time, and these writings continue to generate much contention among philosophers. In The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel introduces his idea of consciousness as a process of division between two objects in no time at all, similar to the crazy conga line example above. As Hegel puts it,

  Consciousness simultaneously distinguishes itself from something, and at the same time relates itself to it, or, as it is said, this something exists for consciousness; and the determinate aspect of this relating is knowing. (Oxford University Press, 1977, p. 52)

  Simply put, relating is always an essential part of consciousness, and, in turn, consciousness is always knowledge—simple, right?! Hegel’s concept of Identity lies within this description of consciousness as simply the unity present in the relation of a subject (you, the experiencer) to an object (the thing being experienced). We call this consciousness. Consciousness, for Hegel, then is simply knowledge. This may seem contrary to how we commonly refer to knowledge. We usually think of knowledge in terms of statements. For instance, I know that the creator of Futurama is Matt Groening and David X. Cohen. For Hegel, however, knowledge just is what we are conscious of. We can’t question it, we can’t confirm it, nor can we deny it—It just is.

  In his Meditations on First Philosophy, René Descartes famously deduces his existence from his ability to be a conscious thinking thing—hence, his famous postulation “I think therefore I am.” Hegel sees Descartes’s deduction as problematic because it wrongly postulates the existence of something that’s not actually there. For Hegel, we shouldn’t infer the existence of an “I”—as a separate thinking entity. Instead, consciousness simply exists, and the apparent existence of a separate “I” is the result of its functioning. In other words, it feels as if there’s something existing above and beyond my experience of the world, but consciousness is simply the way we take the world to be. According to Hegel, the nature of consciousness is to split and unite an experiencer and a thing being experienced, which is why there seems to be a separate thinking entity. If Hegel is correct, then the “strange” time skips that occur in the episodes mentioned above are in fact representative of how consciousness actually works.

  To make sure Hegel’s unity of consciousness makes sense, think about picking up your box-set of Futurama DVDs. You, the conscious being you are, simply gets up, walks across the room, and picks up the box. If you describe your actions to others, you would say: “I did this and I did that.” But what and where is the “I”? It’s not as though something other than yourself—the conscious thinking being—is doing something. It’s just you. There’s no “I” apart from consciousness. Consciousness simply uses the mechanism of relating the subject (you as “I”) to the object (the box-set), which creates the illusion of a separate “I.”

  To help further explain why we think there’s an “I,” imagine the following. If I change my focus from the box-set to the second disc of said box-set, then to the laptop I’m about to insert the disc into, at each moment in time I duplicate the “here” and “there” of myself and the separate objects. Throughout the process I have a here1, here2, here3 (all the way to infinity) that’s always in relation to the objects. Consciousness is such that I combine this repetition into the concept of an “I.” It’s this feature of consciousness that will help us make sense of the time-skips of Futurama.

  To the Bend of the Universe! The Beginning Is the End

  If you’re still not convinced, think about Season Six’s “The Late Philip J. Fry.” Take U to signify Universe. Now, if we assume that the multiple universes in the episode are the same, as is suggested, then U1, U2 (not the band), and U3 all share the same attributes—the same suns and Slurm Worms, rocks and rivers, mammals and mountains—in their deepest and darkest regions, from the Earth to Omicron Persei 8, they’re identical.

  If we were to stand back and view each of them in succession, as we do when we watch the episode, each of the universes is equal to the following extremely straightforward equation: U1 = U2 = U3 = U4 . . . Because every universe is completely invariant in terms of its attributes and properties, their differences as wholes collapse. The difference between U1 and U84,587 would be no difference at all. If this is the case, we can strip each universe of its numerical value. Because they’re all identical, we can’t legitimately claim U1 to be the first, the fifth, or the last—they’re all the same! The numbers we assign the universes are fictions we add onto the account, but logically they don’t make sense, because they don’t denote anything different—again, they’re all the same! Hegel shows us that the same thing happens in consciousness. It’s just that we’re more intimately tied to our experiences, and so, combining them into a single unified “I” is much easier.

  I Am Knowledge, Please Insert Experience

  We’ve finally got to the point where we can make sense of our initial examples of gaps in experience; time skips on one side and Fry’s super-speed on the other.

  In the case of the time skips, we’re missing the interior or immanent appearance of the event. For this reason, the skips become external to the normal characterization of consciousness. Even though Hegel shows us consciousness operates in a similar manner to these skips, the skips in Futurama seem abnormal because we try to relate them to absent events. In other words, these time skips bother us because we don’t know what went on within them. However, as Hegel illustrates, we experi
ence time skips all of the time via our consciousness; we’re just used to it. If our conscious experience was spread out more, like the time skips seen in Futurama, we wouldn’t find them abnormal. We would be used to them, as we’re currently used to the gaps in our own consciousness.

  As for the other example, Fry’s experience is aided by the hundred coffees, which give him an enhanced consciousness. He has full knowledge of the events taking place in the soon-to-be-engulfed gallery. Everyone else experiences a set of gaps as Fry saves them—at one moment they’re inside the gallery, the next they’re outside. Like the previous case of time skips, everyone besides Fry is aware of a gap in experience. Fry shows us that they don’t actually lack the experience of being saved; they just experience it much faster than usual. Their consciousness is simply slower, so to speak, than Fry’s. If they were to experience such gaps over a period of time, their consciousness would become used to it and they would cease to notice the gaps. So, just like the time skips, Hegel shows us that the example of the party goers’ gaps is representative of our conscious experience of the world—we’re just used to our “speed” of existence.

  So, we began by looking at some abnormal examples of experience that exist in the world of Futurama. With the help of Hegel we see that such examples aren’t that strange after all. They’re, in fact, representative of natural human conscious experience. Now that you’re aware of how consciousness actually works, what do you plan on doing to test this new knowledge? Maybe you will use chronotons to create mutant atomic supermen, or drink a hundred cups of coffee? Or maybe you’ll reflect on the many gaps in your own experience. Of my slumber before I wake, is this not a gap? Of my not noticing Nibbler’s shadow in the cryogenics lab in the first ever episode (go ahead and look for it if you have never noticed it), is this not a gap also? There are gaps everywhere in experience, emanating from the most fundamental levels of life. We’re just so good at tying them all together (at least most of the time) that we don’t notice or question them. For instance, I don’t question the existence of the ground as I step upon it, nor do I normally question the existence of the stars that I gaze upon. In the same way, I don’t question the existence of my “I” as I experience each conscious event—that would be one hell of a laborious journey . . . or maybe a journey that never begins at all.