When Geraldine Chaplin announces that, at her age, one sane thing to do is to take a middle aged man who has a child and a wife, to possibly sedate him (so he feels no pain) and then to crucify him on the door of a church, so that humanity can finally wake up and ask itself what the fuck is this life all about, we feel instinctively that she may be right somehow.

Chaplin declares her vision playing a femme nouveau, mother to a lonely man, in Arnaud des Pallières’ Parc. She, like her son, finds the current state of the world an undramatic sequence of banality and consumerism. She is no preacher, nor is she a saint, but she poses a valid question indirectly: can humanity sustain itself without an inner understanding of its incapacity to act, and hence the recognition of a power greater than itself? Neither Parc nor Michel Houellebecq’s futuristic Possibility of an Island endorse the existence of God as such, yet both manage to construct the world as we refuse to see it: void of human agency.

Parc is based on John Cheever’s 1969 novel Bullet Park. Its characters live in a wealthy gated community that grants them safety from the outside world. They eat healthy meals, play golf, do their gardening; they enjoy visiting their neighbours and they enjoy letting their partners speak about their professional successes.

The Clous (‘nail’ in English) is such a family. George (Sergi López) and Hélène (Nathalie Richard) are a good looking couple, they seem to love each other, despite the wrinkles, but routine has settled into their life naturally, and so not even the occasional sex (both adolescent and bestial) on weekend afternoons can cut through the façade they’ve imposed upon themselves. Their son Toni (Laurent Delbecque) is a troubled teenager who one day refuses to get out of bed. He is to lie there for 22 days, and the parents encourage him to stop his ‘sadness’, yet they refuse to understand him. His father would strike him rather than have him become a garbage man. Money can be tiresome, but at least it means the security one requires to set a respectable child into the world.

In this quiet community comes Paul Marteau (played by Jean-Marc Barr with a pristine beastliness). He is married to a woman who doesn’t love him. Evelyne Marteau (Delphine Chuillot) is young, sexy, and an alcoholic. She revels in telling her new neighbours that her husband is a lonely man, incapable of passion, and yet apt given to falling in love with everything. In a sensuous scene, abundant in colour and sexual appetite, she ventures through his sexual contests in minute detail. Women, men, children, even animals, are part of his past, along with years in mental asylums. She forgets to mention his obsession with yellow interiors. Paul feels at home surrounded by yellow walls, living in perfect harmony.

What is Marteau’s reasoning when he chooses the Clou family to fulfill his mother’s vision of a crucifixion? One could say he finds them retarded, deserving of their place on the edge of a society that consciously chooses to exclude them, despite them thinking the reverse. Their acts are contradictory. A man of science calls a witchdoctor (László Szabó) to raise his son out of bed, by making him repeat the word ‘Love’ one hundred times - hardly a rational approach to medical depression? Marteau sympathises yet is intrigued by George and Toni, the mutually antagonistic father and son. The overriding sense of tranquillity they share is false, as their conflict does not arise from simple generational differences, but from the degenerative process humanity has created for itself.

It is quite easy to spot the religious symbolism in Parc. In a nutshell, God has sent his only son to bring salvation to a fallen world. In des Pallières’ world, however, we are watching the story trough a negative lens. The Clous are the angels living in Paradise, and Marteau is the ‘redemptive’ demon. The effect is chilling because the reversal of the picture has the same consequence as the picture itself. The society still fails to change when given the possibility of redemption, simply because humans believe so strongly in their notion of personal goodness. Through choice man acquires absolute power over his destiny, and therefore even the belief in God becomes a direct conscious choice that helps man justify his goodness.

Marteau understands that his actions are meaningless because he cannot change human self-perception. The existence of a supreme power is paradoxically a non-subject, as humanity is purely interested in the potential a belief in that power might have for an understanding of oneself. Arguably, it is this conundrum that elicits the sheer failure to comprehend, which the spectator experiences at the end of Parc.

Michel Houellebecq’s adaptation of his own novel, Possibility of an Island, tends to offer a similar vision, except that in this case the analytical debate is more evident. The story centres on a sect whose creed closely resembles Raëlism, the belief that sexual self-determination will save humanity in future generations. What the prophet (Patrick Bauchau) requires is a team of scientists capable of ‘cloning’ human matter while maintaining the informational baggage carried by an adult individual. Essentially, successful cloning can exist only when the mind is given the chance to exist into eternity. In other words the same human mind could carry a different body composition, but it would be able to grow beyond a single generation.

The neo-human will thus become a physical replica of the ancestors, yet their brains will process the information that accumulated in the mind of the human they derived from up to the point of the cloning process. Daniel (Benoît Magimel) is in essence both the original human and the subsequent replicas that had adapted to world conditions allowing them to survive two world extinctions (one following an ice age, the other following a dry-up).

If the film itself boasts little in terms of narrative structure, its psychedelic pace adds a lot to our understanding of Houellebecq’s vision. The writer-director is not so much interested in the validity of the arguments posed by the followers of Elohim, but is rather intrigued by the circular determinism this belief imposes over the generations to come. When Daniel, the neo-human, leaves his primeval cave, he finds a world free of predators. After each of the world endings, he tells us that the neo-humans have developed always starting with tribal set up, filled with supernatural beliefs, only to end up in a rather stable society that has learned to reinvent the desire to reproduce itself in order to be saved. The game is thus driven by the fact that the supreme cloning ability (that of creating man in our image) is always lost with the generation that acquired the technical skills to achieve it.

Houellebecq lets us see the paradox that is created at the exact moment of cloning an adult human being. When Adam and Eve are created, their initial reaction is to try to understand their existence. The mental baggage they inherit from the creator is limited in the fact that the creator has no knowledge or experience of being created with an already fully functional mental process. So, the initial reaction is not to go-live-procreate, but to challenge their creator for denying them the possibility of understanding their own origin and existence. This internalisation of meaning causes the cloned beings to question from the very start the full spectrum of human existence and experience, and thus a new informational stream opens, leading to the instant abolition of the old one.

Both des Pallières and Houellebecq bring to focus the Nietzschean idea that man created God. The issue is that, in this process of creation, God ceases to be the true supreme entity and becomes a simple system of belief. Through stating the existence of God, man talks about his relationship with oneself. The creator becomes a logical necessity in trying to analyse the complex web of emotions and organic structure the human life encompasses. The acceptance or rejection of God is then nothing but a choice given to ordinary humans. This very choice is based on the knowledge each individual has about the world, and therefore the system of beliefs one chooses to adhere to. God, the essence itself, is but a meaningless concept in the debate. 

The question of human agency is thus left unanswered. The human inability to see the world outside the restrictions imposed on themselves by their limited existence, leaves the true creational debate in a vacuum. Like characters in a film, we are unable to escape our immediate concerns, and hence we let ourselves go, and we live lives that we convince ourselves of being ours. The irony is that rebelling against this life is nothing but another system of belief that leads us back to where we started.