I Kill Giants (2017)

Conventional wisdom tells us that imagination is invaluable. Yet, it is not clear just how do we appreciate it and why. The answer to this question is not as straightforward as it first appears. Whilst many points to the role of imagination for great artists, scientists and entrepreneurs, we must not be oblivious to the fact that these exceptional individuals are just that: exceptions. As such, they cannot help us in supporting the intrinsic virtue of imagination as a general concept. Fascinating as they are, these trailblazers only demonstrate the fact that some qualities are essential for exceptionally talented individuals, yet having such qualities does not warrant the possession of exceptional talent. This is similar to the misleading statement about the relationship between creativity and mental illness: the fact that some geniuses are mentally ill does not mean that mental illness is a necessary condition for creative genius. Therefore, this near-universal ‘proof’ of the intrinsic virtue of imagination turns out to be nonsensical. In addition, there are reasons for us to be wary of stories which are the product of imaginations, not of the objectively verifiable facts. We are flooded with information of dubious veracity, and mere opinions are masquerading as factual reporting. In such an environment, it is harder for us not to take a scorched earth policy by which we abolish all non-factual notions, statements, and stories. Like W. V. O. Quine, we might embrace a ‘desert landscape’ as our ‘reality’. Interestingly, the reason we may resort to such an extreme measure is found in the manner in which we argue for the supposedly intrinsic virtue of imagination. When we single out exceptional individuals and their achievements as examples, we are evaluating this particular human capacity based on its utility. Yet, so long as our judgment of the virtue of imagination rests on its utility, contrary to common beliefs, we are not really thinking about the reasons why imagination is important in and of itself. And thus, we are still left with the questions: Is ‘imagination’ important? How is it important and why?

Careful reflection reveals the futility of this exercise. ‘Imagination’ as a general concept is neither intrinsically ‘good’ nor ‘bad’, and thus the question itself is based on a misunderstanding of the subject. As a linguistic concept, ‘imagination’ has no value of its own. We cannot evaluate whether ‘imagination’ is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in abstraction: our judgment is specific to the context in which this concept is represented, recognised and/or acted upon. This means that our judgment of the power of imagination as a general concept is practical, not metaphysical. And thus, taken this way, the virtue of imagination is indeed dependent on the specific effect it exerts over the context to which it relates. Moreover, the context itself is mutable: ‘imagination’ can be beneficial for someone at one point, yet it could prove harmful at another, depending on how the story unfolds. Whilst the context-dependency of our evaluation of ‘imagination’ as a general concept thus appears to reinforce an instrumentalist view on its virtue, we must note that the utilitarian evaluation of the virtue of imagination has already led us to a theoretical cul-de-sac. And thus, we must conclude that the way in which we conceive the subject is entirely wrong. The question is not whether ‘imagination’ is intrinsically ‘good’, ‘bad’ or ‘useful’. Rather, we must ask the reasons why imagination matters to us.

This avenue of inquiry is only possible when we abstain from evaluating the virtue of ‘imagination’ as a general concept. Instead, we must understand it as a quintessentially subjective activity made possible within the tension wherein the subjective Weltanschauung collides with the objectively possible experience. Before we proceed with our inquiry, it is important to note: our experience, both personal and objectively possible ones, are defined by linguistic norms practised within a Form of Life to which we belong. For instance, to experience a certain physical sensation as a ‘pain’, we must have learnt the linguistic concept of ‘pain’ in the first place. Imagining is a highly personal (yet not ‘private’) activity, and thus it is subjective by nature. Plainly speaking, it is something happening in your head, not in the world. This is not to say that it has no relation to the world wherein one inhabits. As Wittgenstein argued against the notion of ‘private language’, all linguistically expressible concepts are public in a very specific sense: we cannot create something from nothing, and thus, all linguistic concepts which we need to make sense of the world must have been already practised within a Form of Life to which we belong. For us to create a novelty, we need to know the rule of the game in the first place. What we can imagine is confined within our linguistic concepts, and thus, one’s thought is subjective only in so far as it is personal in a sense that my pain is not yours even though you might grasp the nature of my pain by knowing the concept of 'pain' as well as from your own experience of 'pain'. That being the case, our linguistic concepts are not private, for it has some basis on what we can experience in this world and the possible experience of the world is confined within the limit of our ability to put it into words. Whilst the parameter of one’s possible experience differs from one person to another depending on a multitude of factors such as cultural norms, personal interests, life experience, temperament, affective state, cognitive capacities, mental and physical health, we must recognise that such a personal experience is still a part of a particular Form of Life. No one exists external to all Forms of Life, and thus, in one way or another, a personal experience of someone is a part of a certain Form of Life to which she/they/he belongs. There is another reason for us to consider all personal experience, whether imaginary or concrete, invaluable. Personal experience is subjective by nature and often peculiar to a person in question. The reason why it matters to someone else is an ethical one. Without recognising and respecting the idiosyncrasy of a person, we cannot regard her/them/him as an end in itself, that is, a proper agent like ourselves. If we decide to disregard someone’s agency and treat her/them/him as mere means, we must accept to be treated as mere means ourselves. When this attitude is accepted as a norm, we must live by instrumentalism of the cruelest kind and will no longer recognise humanity in ourselves.

In order to recognise a person as an end, there must be a degree of opaqueness about her/them/him, for being a person is to have a mind of her/their/his own, and the thoughts and affections of a person must be inaccessible to others. The reason why the opaqueness is necessary to establish and maintain a personhood boils down to a simple fact: to treat someone as a person is to respect the said person’s inner life, and one cannot have access to the inner life, not the mere mental state, of another person; hence the opaqueness must be safeguarded. To dismiss this inaccessibility is to regard someone as a mere entity without inner life of her/their/his own, and thus to see someone as mere means in the manner in which Descartes dismissed non-human animals as objects, that is, machines that make noise. Without this opacity, the erosion of personhood becomes inevitable. If left on its own, this violation progresses to the point where an individual can be no longer recognised as a person who possesses a potential to become an agent proper. The reason for this phenomenon is quite simple: no one can regard someone as a person when the said entity is reduced to a profile which merely consists the descriptions of functions and known facts on ‘it’. (from my essay on Her Smell)

Therefore, as peculiar as the actual content of imagination may be, and the personal beliefs based on imagination must be constantly challenged within a linguistic community, there is no need to demonise the power of imagination, for denying the power of imagination to ourselves and others is to deny the possibility of agency upon which the very notions of social trust and civility rest. Incidentally, there is a little cinematic gem to exemplify how we may respect the power of imagination without allowing ourselves to indulge in solipsism and narcissism while refusing to demonise it. I Kill Giants is a truly rare phenomenon in that it treads a narrow path wherein the director and the writer commit themselves to fully respect the personal experience of the protagonist without letting herself fully contained in it. The result is a moving human story wherein the tension between the subjective and the objective enriches both without denying one another.

I Kill Giants tells a story of a troubled teenager, Barbara Thorson (Madison Wolfe). She is a middle schooler who lives in a sleepy coastal town. It appears that her older sister, Karen (Imogen Poots), is struggling to manage the household while keeping her full-time job as her siblings are engaging with their self-interests: Dave, Barbara’s older brother (Art Parkinson), spends all his time playing a first-person shooter game and Barbara escapes in the world of Dungeons and Dragons. The home is conspicuously absent of parental figures and Karen, shouldering all the weight of running chores, is approaching a breaking point. It is a bleak picture of young people being drugged through the dreary swamp devoid of enchantment. Except, that is not how our protagonist sees it. Whilst Barbara is an awkward nerd who is isolated both at home and school, she moonlights as a giant-slayer. She alone can fight monstrous creatures who threaten to destroy her hometown. Unbeknownst to her unsuspecting family and schoolmates, she has saved everyone, including school bullies such as Taylor (Rory Jackson) who sets her eyes on Barbara. Taylor and her ‘team’ relentlessly harass Barbara, and she has no one to turn to. She is an outcast and no one particularly cares when she is subjected to violence, be it physical or psychological. This is not to say that Barbara needs someone to save her from Taylor: she is more than capable of standing up for herself. She is not afraid of bullies or being misunderstood. When you are a giant-slayer, the peers at school do not intimidate you. Barbara fights giants by concocting various elaborate schemes to trace them, trap them, and ultimately slay them. She has created a ‘sanctuary’ in a broken boat lying upside down on the beach next to her house. This is where she studies and schemes countermeasures against these mythical creatures, who are nonetheless ‘real’. She yields her secret weapon called Coveleski, named after a former Phillies pitcher, to destroy these powerful creatures and save the town. Barbara fears not giants and bullies. She is not afraid to show the world who she is. Yet, there is something else that haunts her days and dreams. She lives in the basement and abandoned her room upstairs, for she is terrified of something, real or imaginable, on the second level of the house. It turns out that the mythological world she created for herself to inhabit is a vice with which she avoids the confrontation with the reality wherein she is powerless to save someone dear to her.

As a cinema, I Kill Giants faithfully dramatises Barbara’s world as she experiences it. In this sense, the film has the appearance of a modern fantasy film. With a sophisticated CGI, otherworldly creatures such as giants, harbingers, and a titan come alive and threaten to destroy the world-as-she-knows-it. We watch her confronting her fears and the demons. We witness how she completes her missions to save her hometown. In this respect, I Kill Giants comes dangerously close to being forgotten as a minor work of the contemporary fantasy genre which produced some of the most popular blockbusters such as the Harry Potter franchise and The Lord of the Rings trilogy. In these movies, the story is entirely contained within a fantastical world. Whilst we like to draw some comparison between these stories and ‘real-life’, that relation remains purely and often crudely allegorical. Whilst they have become parts of canon, and thus they are ‘objective’ in this specific sense, no one believes that these stories literally played out in this world. This is naturally what the authors of the original novels and the directors of these films intended: they are fantasies with which they intend to entertain and inspire the respective audience. I Kill Giants departs from this genre in a significant way: the story is played out on the delicate balance between Barbara’s personal experience of the world of myth and the objective reality from which the fantasy was forged in order for her to escape from it. The film exposes Barbara’s dilemma unflinchingly: she lives in a fantasy in which she feels empowered, yet so long as she avoids facing the reality, she cannot face what she fears and continues to undermine her own life. The story also demonstrates how her denial is dragging down her older sister, Karen. Whilst Barbra is a fearless warrior in her fantasy, she is making life truly miserable for her family because of her inability to confront her fear. By all account, Barbara may be loveable, yet she is nothing but brave.

Remarkably, I Kill Giants refuses to belittle her imagined world or simply diagnose it as a product of a mental health problem. By doing so, it eschews a commonplace trap exemplified by the likes of A Beautiful Mind wherein a mental illness and scientific genius are inseparable from, yet at odds with, one another. In this popular film, the protagonist overcomes his demons and famously declares: I stopped believing in imagination. Whilst John Nash in this movie needed to do so and his decision served everyone well, to make this narrative a dominant one is to do a great disservice to our understanding of the power of imagination and the role of subjectivity in the formation and the maintenance of selfhood which is personal yet not private. Given the polarised nature of our view on imagination and subjectivity, we are forced to either immerse ourselves into the world of fantasy or reject it in its entirety. Nowhere is this problem more starkly pronounced but in cinematic art. On one hand, there are outlandish fantasy blockbuster franchises which continue to dominate the screens and our attention. These ‘supers’ have captured our collective imagination to a degree where an ordinary human is no longer acceptable as a protagonist. It is as if humankind has found itself so uninteresting that it needs an outsized representation of itself to tell a ‘human story’, the description often used by the directors of these films to legitimise their products. For them, mere mortals do not cut it. It is as if they are stating: no one wants to see real humans. On the other, we have stories of exceptional individuals who achieved the feat unimaginable to the rest of us despite the mental disorder and the resulting delusions they suffered. In these stories, imagination must be tamed or cured so that these exceedingly talented individuals can continue achieving unimaginable feats. In A Beautiful Mind, the protagonist’s imagination is treated as a pure hindrance to his work and life. It is an illness that must be kept under control. Ron Howard seems oblivious to a possibility where the protagonist’s imagination was a positive contribution to his groundbreaking work as well as a detriment to his life. Howard uncritically separates the protagonist’s exceptional talent from his wild imagination: whilst both are attributes of his genius, one is ‘good’ and ‘useful’ whilst the other is ‘bad’ and ‘sick’. It is a mindless repackaging of a simplistic schematism, that is, the battle between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ played out inside the mind of a superhuman protagonist.

What separates I Kill Giants from these extreme attitudes toward imagination is a profound compassion demonstrated by the director and the writer of the story. They refuse to see Barbara’s struggle as a mere symptom to be cured. They also do not allow Barbara and the audience to escape into the world of fantasy: whilst they do fully respect and represent Barbara’s world on screen, they also show the effects her escapism has on people who care about her. Furthermore, they integrate compassionate characters into Barbara’s story so that they interact with her, they challenge her, and they help her face what she truly fears. Her older sister, her new and only friend from England, Sophia (Sydney Wade), and her school psychologist, Mrs Mollé (Zoe Saldaña), do not abandon Barbara despite the testing moments in their relationship. Whilst they demand Barbara face her demons, they do not dismiss her personal story as a mere delusion. They care about Barbara in such a way that they do accept Barbara’s story as her genuine personal experience, despite their reservations. It is because, in order to help Barbara, they need to understand her personal experience in its entirety. And thus, instead of simply dismissing her imagination as a delusion, they find time to follow her story and listen to what her experience has been and what it means to her. This is precisely how Sophia and Mrs Mollé discover what Barbara fears the most and why she needs to combat giants. Yet, I Kill Giants goes well beyond a story about the struggle and the redemption. The film never for a moment disowns Barbara’s personal experience with mythical creatures. When Barbara kills a giant, we see her action as a real event. When Barbara confronts a titan, we see how bravely she fights him with her Coveleski. Fittingly, the most remarkable aspect of the story crystallises in their climactic confrontation. Instead of giving us a neat diagnosis of Barbara’s mental health, the film fully respects and engages with her subjective experience as it unfolds as a reality, without allowing neither Barbara nor the audience to lose sight of her friends and family. In fact, I Kill Giants manages to find a narrow path wherein the protagonist, aided by the insight provided by her friends into the nature of her fear, finds a way to overcome it by confronting the most fearsome foe of all, the titian. The titan tells her that he has come for her alone, and in their battle, he gives her what she needs to overcome the most crippling fear of her life. In this respect, whilst it is categorised as a fantasy film, it has little in common with the standard-bearers of the genre. Here, the protagonist's story transcends the commonly held duality between the world of imagination and the world of objective possibility.

In this, I Kill Giants has more in common with an excellent ‘romantic comedy’ featuring Ryan Gosling as an odd-ball bachelor, Lars and the Real Girl (2007, Craig Gillespie). Whilst these two movies are completely different in their respective tones, the compassion with which they portray the subjective experiences of social outcasts is identical. In both films, the protagonists shock everyone by indulging in the strange world of fantasy, and they seem to be oblivious of the effects they have on the Form of Life to which they belong. Yet, the storytellers of these movies refuse to denounce their ‘delusions’; instead, they work hard to understand them and to find a path for them to integrate their personal stories with that of the communities to which they belong. By doing so, these storytellers show us: 1) selfhood is found in a balancing act of testing the delicate equilibrium of personal experience within the world of objectivity and sociality; 2) imagination plays a pivotal role in the formation and the maintenance of the personal experience; 3) imagination in and of itself has no value; 4) to prevent someone from indulging with the personal experience to the detriment of her/their/his well-being, there must be robust and supportive social interactions; and 5) if a Form of Life manages to find a way to support someone who dwells excessively within her/their/his inner life, the personal experience of the said individual and the lives of those who support her/them/him become enriched and more meaningful. Whilst Lars and the Real Girl tests the limit of the ‘romantic comedy’ genre, I Kill Giants is more ambitious in a sense that it makes its case by challenging two popular tropes of contemporary cinema, that is, self-indulgent fantasy franchises and biopics of troubled Übermenschen. By following a story of a teenage girl living in a sleepy coastal town, once again, we appreciate what the cinematic art does best: giving a face to the faceless, and a voice to the silenced. In this, I Kill Giants deserves to be recognised as a minor cinematic masterpiece of our time.