Await Further Instructions
Await Further Instructions
How a pre-pandemic film perfectly encapsulates the 'realities' of lockdowns
Await Further Instructions is a British film about what happens when a mysterious force locks a family inside their house, for an indefinite amount of time while it beams seemingly random ‘instructions’ for the family to take, through their television set. The basic premise is simple enough. A family holiday get-together turns into a nightmare when a black, ribbed plastic-like membrane totally covers the family home, making it impossible to leave. The television then begins to order to ‘await further instructions.’ As these instructions start to appear and get more bizarre the situation between family members quickly degenerates as the head of the family turns into a sadistic tyrant obedient only to the TV screen. When the commands continue to get more sinister the family turns on one another, alliances are formed and a bloodbath ensues. By the end of the film the monster is finally revealed and the only survivor is a small infant baby that is then ‘adopted’ by the monster. The end.
Many IMDB commentators have suggested various theories about the possible meanings of the film, though I’m afraid that many of these, though not incorrect, are nonetheless missing the mark on a larger issue. In some ways the film anticipates and prophesizes the Covid-19 pandemic (though there are many films that could be reinterpreted to fit the Coronavirus). Await Further Instructions is a psychological body-horror film and will not appeal to everyone, especially the more squeamish in the audience, but it is worth watching for the way it distills certain tropes (the abusive father figure, the caring yet inept mother, the racist grandfather, the rapid ‘inner’ growth of the son, and so on). True, issues of racism and xenophobia are present, commentary on our addiction to technology is definitely here as well, as are jabs at fake news, blind obedience of authority, toxic masculinity, and a plethora of populist social issues are being used as a vehicle for a much larger, if invisible, problem. The invisible force turned tentacle/cable monster is obviously allegorical and if not seen properly in the light of a discourse on the nature of power, it can come off as a heavy-handed and ultimately failed attempt at a critique of the corrupting power of television and technology. What is much more subtle, is the notion of the ways that power is used and the way it insinuates itself into every corner of our lives.
The first half of the film, or at least until the ‘monster’ is truly revealed, what we get is a group of people, and this could’ve literally been any group of people, they just happened to be a British family, are locked together inside a house by a mysterious ‘force’ preventing them from leaving. This ‘force’ is actually a kind of a ribbed plastic film that seems to be wrapped around the whole house like shrink wrap. It is impenetrable, black, but most importantly, nobody knows its origin, its ultimate purpose and goals. Is it a government plot to keep people locked down and impotent, is it an alien civilization slowly taking over, is it an experimental corporate project gone haywire, or is it something much more abstract? Tied to the television, the black plastic film projects onto the television screen commands like ‘decontaminate yourselves’ and ‘extract information from sleeper agent,’ commands that, ridiculous as they seem are precisely the kinds of prerogatives that absolute power demands. When punishments are meted out indiscriminately to all the family members, some turn to be the enforcers of that power while others try to resist, and all are doomed to fail in the end. In real life power is experienced in a form of abstract commands and injunctions, such as constantly checking one’s phone, to follow fashion trends, to be fit and in shape, to be happy and so on, in essence we are always in some ways ‘forced’ to participate in the abstract notion of the ‘project of culture.’ Unsurprisingly, today’s power is invariably channeled through technological devices, phones, TVs, computers, AI and so on. This same abstract power also metes out justice in forms that are mostly incomprehensible. The very idea of resisting or questioning such power is precisely the grounds for the most severe punishment and this is where the film is strongest. It gives us a sense that the impossible commands that come out of the television must be obeyed absolutely, otherwise chaos ensues and the meaninglessness of the acts of the father figure as enforcer-of-the-law cement the absolute authority of the invisible abstract power that is surrounding the house. Could we not read the Coronavirus pandemic in this same precise way? Most of us have been experiencing commands and injunctions to obey or disobey the orders to quarantine, lockdown and to wear masks as emanating from our devices. A command appears on the screen and it is up to us what to do with it and how to react to it. Even the unemployment crisis was experienced via series of emails or text messages, coming down from above, the magical symbolic order of upper management.
Absolute power does not care whether one is politically or socially aligned or non-aligned with that power’s ideology. By the end of the film, the cable monster kills everybody, whether they are a post-modern multiculturalist liberal or a turgid racist reactionary. In a sense, power doesn’t even require that you simply obey, because if one obeys one must be aware that power exists in the world. If one knows that power exists, even if one obeys, one is also able to resist. This is the subtle point to the ending that I believe was missed. The newborn baby is saved by the cable monster because as a blank slate, the baby will never be able to understand and challenge its position within the coordinates of the power relation between it and the ultimate primordial authority symbolized by the monster itself. This is of course a commentary on humanity’s not so nuanced relationship with technology today. Authority is projected through technology, but because most of us that were not born with screens in our face and have not grown up being absorbed into it, we have the ‘sacred’ knowledge of the power itself, because we were the ones that made and developed it. If the Coronavirus was accelerating anything at all, it was definitely this dimension in our personal lives. The cable monster is not an alien entity, it is an entirely human construction, with alien dimensions. Technology functions in a homologous way, it is purely a human endeavor and as such it should be something that is simply an extension of humanity, like a supplemental appendage. The problem is that in today’s runaway world, technology has taken on an abstracted form, and rather than move humanity forward it is decidedly alienating and isolating. Raw corporate and political power has taken over the vast majority of available space including the internet and occluded it from the possibility of tampering, even from the creators themselves, by a dizzying network of algorithms. From this point of view, everything that happens with technology and on the internet, including the deep web, is beyond human, it feels alien. Every once in a while stories surface that jar the human mind with terrible things, murder, beheadings, proxy wars, corporate bailouts, child rape, sex trafficking, while we also find out terrible stories about innocent people being shot, tortured, incarcerated, and beaten, all in a world that is claiming to be decidedly more ‘civilized’ than at any other time in the past and has endless amounts of data and charts to back it up. One can therefore think of technology as a rational system created by rational individuals, which produces irrational results, so much so that they do indeed appear as alien in nature. It takes a new humanity, the next generation of humans, that will not only accept this set of coordinates as something entirely natural, they will grow up within this system, their very being permeated by it and they will be as alien to us as we will be to them (which is actually how all generations see each other already, technology is simply an externalization of this dynamic). It will be entirely unnecessary for the new humans to obey or worship at the feet of technology because they will be entirely absorbed into it. The old generations are in a way also absorbed into technology, but unlike the baby in the film, they/we are at the level of religious supplicants, worshippers and executors of the will of this ‘higher authority’ and therefore deemed unworthy and expendable. The film suggests that we must be sacrificed in order for the new technological world to emerge.
I am not sure whether this was the true intention of the filmmakers, but that was my initial reading of it while watching it. Psychologically speaking, there are no ‘rational’ human beings in this film. Nobody acts in accordance with whatever we may think would be appropriate in this kind of situation, because the situation is from the very beginning absurd. The acting out of some forms of inner desires, like the Freudian symbolic ‘murder’ of the father, do not apply here. The father is not an absolute authority, but rather an impotent executioner of meaningless orders and impossible demands. All hierarchical structure within the family is disintegrated from the very outset of the film and that is the point. Power held over us may use the forms of hierarchy, such as patriarchy, but in the end that is not the means by which it exercises its authority. When it does, power reveals itself in its full impotence. It was the father-son torture scene that ultimately broke the father in the eyes of the rest of the family as a weak figure whose only method of exercising any sort of authority was through raw brutal violence. The final ‘birth’ scene is crucial in that it lays bare the ultimate ‘end scenario’ which is not another version of the power dynamic, but rather a symbiotic relationship between technology and humanity. It is a dark vision but only because we have not yet experienced technology the way that future generations will.