Dennis Biba

Ratings generally have a very limited informative value, as the very attempt to translate the quality of a film into a quantitative scale entails an enormous reduction in complexity. The Zero Thereom, Terry Gilliam’s crowning finale of his Orwellian triptych, has not received the best ratings on internet rating platforms, but is more relevant than ever in the 2020s and, looking back, is perhaps even the most important contribution to the Science Fiction cosmos of the British underdog director. The Zero Thereom is not a film about the meaning of life – for which we can only be grateful to Gilliam – but one about the existentialist overload that comes with asking about it. Because anyone who asks about the meaning of life must also consider its potential meaninglessness.

The computer genius Qohen Leth, played by Christoph Waltz, works at the IT company Mancom, a workplace that looks like a casino but doesn’t give Qohen the slightest pleasure. Like a madman, he labours over his tasks in order to get back as quickly as possible into the disused church that serves as the eccentric’s home. For many years he has been desperately waiting for a call that will reveal to him the meaning, not only of his own insignificant life, but of everything. When he finally manages to apply to the boss of his company, aptly named Management, to work from home, he has no idea how much his new task will push him to the limit. He is to work on Mancom’s secret core project and find the so-called Zero Theroem, a formula that provides mathematical proof of the Big Crunch hypothesis, the idea that the universe will ultimately collapse in a reverse Big Bang, i.e. from nothingness to nothingness – an idea that leads directly to nihilism. However, Qohen fears nothing more than meaninglessness, which haunts his dreams in the form of a black hole. In the midst of a loud and colourful fun society that has declared the consumption of material and immaterial goods to be the ultimate meaning of life, he forms the antithesis to the Zero Theroem, as he is deeply convinced that existence must have a meaning. The film doesn’t skimp on religious analogies to mark Qohen as a man of faith waiting for redemption. Asceticism, seclusion and self-flagellation form the everyday life of the loner. The old church forms a fantastic contrast to the garish cyberpunk backdrop, but the all-seeing eye of God has been replaced by surveillance cameras. The world that Terry Gilliam paints here is as oppressive as it is absurd, a world that, like in Brazil, does not even attempt to appear realistic, but instead aims to critically and ironically reflect on the present.

However, precisely because the film does not claim to depict an actually possible future, it is all the more frightening how it has become even more drastically topical twelve years after its release. It is not only Qohen’s work in the home office that is likely to evoke unpleasant memories of the Covid pandemic for many viewers. The Zero Thereom is a film about the loss of meaning in modernity and the loneliness that results from it. The old religious communities have disintegrated, Qohen is the last of a dying breed who has failed to adapt. However, it is not conservatism that prevents him from participating in the social world, but rather the disappearance of social structures in capitalist society, the process of digital isolation and the crisis of self-realisation, as described by sociologist Andreas Reckwitz, for example. Qohen’s escape from loneliness ultimately leads him into the virtual sphere – and into the arms of a call girl. Feelings are shifted into virtual space and become a commodity. The economisation of love relationships – as can be read in the work of sociologist Eva Illouz – is too much for Qohen. His escape into the virtual idyll of an erotic platform, which is vaguely reminiscent of Onlyfans, but for Qohen does not serve to satisfy his sexual urges, is a capitulation to the omnipresent loneliness in the real world. His inner turmoil finds linguistic expression in the personal pronoun ‘we’, which he consistently uses instead of the singular. Where society no longer exists, but has disintegrated into countless individuals, Qohen keeps himself company.

The question of the meaning of life is undoubtedly as old as humanity itself, but the crisis of meaning described in the film is a very recent phenomenon in historical terms. Loneliness has become a widespread illness (and not just among the elderly or marginalised groups), the full extent of which can hardly be predicted. The fact that Qohen does not belong to one group or the other in intersectional terms is by no means due to the director’s ignorance, but rather anticipates the crisis of meaning experienced by increasingly younger men who have lost their role models and who feel abandoned by feminism (whether justified or not) because their loneliness either cannot be articulated or cannot be heard. It is therefore also convincing that Gilliam opts even more strongly than in Brazil for a very character-centred narrative style that is not interested in major social issues because these have long since ceased to be accessible. While feminism has politicised the private sphere, no political connections are recognised here. Qohen’s loneliness remains a sad individual fate for which he himself must take responsibility.

In Brazil, the director was still concerned with designing a totalitarian control state in a classic dystopian manner, in which the individual is subjugated to the greater whole to the point of self-abandonment. 12 monkeys shifted the scenario of total closure from a spatial to a temporal axis and in this way negotiated an ‘epistemic determinism’, which, however, amounts to a circular argument from which there is also no escape for the time traveller. After dealing with being and knowledge (i.e. ontological and epistemological problems) in the dystopia, Gilliam finally devotes himself to the philosophically long-neglected category of emotion in The Zero Theorem. Instead of the totality of the control state based on the communist model (see Orwell), the focus here is on the fragmentation of society under capitalism, the dissociation of the actually indivisible individual, who has been torn from his social contexts and left to himself – and this makes The Zero Theorem Gilliam’s most topical film, despite the greatness of its predecessors.