Audio: Pop Apocalypse Episode 15: Gnostic Myth and Film – A Talk with Fryderyk Kwiatkowski

Fryderyk Kwiatkowski is an Assistant at AGH University of Krakow. He earned a joint doctoral degree from the University of Groningen and the Jagiellonian University in 2023 with a thesis entitled Gnosticism in Hollywood: From European Academia to American Popular Culture. His research interests encompass the cultural reception of late antique esoteric traditions, their intersections with discourses on utopias and dystopias, and the (not-so-obvious) intertwinement of popular media, philosophy, and religion. He is currently developing a project on the role of imagination in contemporary technoculture, with a focus on the feedback loops between transhumanism, science fiction, and esotericism. He has published his research in venues such as Gnosis: Journal of Gnostic Studies, CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, and the Journal of Religion and Film.

[WHIMSICAL MUSIC] MATTHEW DILLON: Greetings, listeners, and welcome to the Pop Apocalypse, a podcast brought to you by the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School. So we're recording this particular episode in the dead, Middle of summer. And I know that some of you are probably out there at the beach enjoying drinks with little umbrellas, and that sounds lovely.

But summer also means catching up on films and TV that you might have missed over the course of the year. Ideally, somewhere air conditioned if you're in the heat-sensitive team like I am. So for those of you who are catching up on TV and film, it seemed like a good time for an episode on one of my absolute favorite topics-- Gnosticism in film.

So film is a medium that lends itself, especially well to retellings of what we call the classical Gnostic myth. Now what is that myth? Let's set the scene. We have a dystopian world, and that world is created and controlled by nefariously inclined rulers. Those we call archons.

And those archons serve under a single evil ruler-- a kind of totalitarian named the Demiurge, or named Abraxas or Yaldabaoth but identified as the Demiurge or architect. This material world, is created to be a prison-- a trap, or a cell where the archons can control the human population.

Now why do they want to do that? The humans have what the archons want-- a spark of the divine. It was passed on through the breath of Yaldabaoth or the Demiurge into Adam, and now it resides in certain human beings.

So over the course of the story, there's a human hero, and that hero wakes up and realizes that this material reality is a prison. But they also learn, gain-- Gnosis. Or remember, anamnesis-- that there's another realm, the pleroma, or the fullness, as it's technically translated as. That fullness of God and its emanations. And that this pleroma is what the hero must return to particularly the divine spark within.

So our hero, often the Gnostic Redeemer at the same time, ends up going out and doing battle with the archons and the Demiurge in order to save not only themselves, but the divine spark within others. Now, whether you see this myth as a two-hour film in three acts, or a world that can be built and explored for season after season, it lends itself very beautifully to audio visual storytelling.

But we are a long way from the second and third century, when this myth was in its heyday. Directors and showrunners are going to use this story plot to examine philosophical and social problems that simply were not around at that time.

Just to give a short list, they often are exploring the human relationship to technology, particularly artificial intelligence. They are looking at the question, what makes us human or even richer question, what is real? Particularly, what is real as it relates to media and technology? But also to our bodies, to our senses, to our minds?

To that end, what is the nature of memory and how does it work at an individual and a social level in order to create a stable or coherent sense of identity? These films end up exploring the problem of transcendence in the age of materialist physics.

We don't have a pleroma out there in our cosmological conception. And these films also look at how modern social forms-- everything from nation states and corporations to things like capitalism or socialism-- serve to exploit masses and function essentially as prisons, epistemologically if not literally.

So I can think of no one better to bring onto the show to discuss all these different layers of Gnostic cinema than today's guest, Fryderyk Kwiatkowski. Fryderyk is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Culture and Digital Age Studies at the University of Krakow. Over the last decade, Frederick has published prodigiously on the relationships between Gnosticism and film.

He's not the first to really explore this interface between Gnosticism and film. There is some really solid stuff that was produced on it within the '90s and the 2000s, but Fryderyk has really leveled up the discourse in the field. You'll get a sense for how he explores these topics in the interview, and we will also provide links to his work in the show notes.

I first became aware of Fryderyk's work about nine years ago. And since then, we have had the pleasure of chatting at a number of workshops and conferences. Our work is very closely aligned. But let me say here, he's a very bright young scholar, and he should be on everyone's radar; not just those of you in the field of Gnostic studies who listen, but also those of you who are just laypersons and interested in this sort of material.

He does work that is able to straddle popular and academic discourses. So in this conversation, Fryderyk takes us through the impact of European figures, like Carl Jung, Hans Jonas, and Eric Voegelin on the contemporary understandings of Gnosticism that end up entering into and infusing cinema.

Then we together dive into analyses of films and television like the Matrix, Dark City, Truman Show, Jacob's Ladder. And then more recent materials, like Free Guy, Chappie, or even the television series Psych, not psycho Silo. Sorry to disappoint the Hitchcock fans in the audience. All right. It's a good talk. Let's now welcome to the show, Fryderyk Kwiatkowski.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

It is my great honor to welcome to the show Assistant Professor at the University of Kraków, Fryderyk Kwiatkowski. Did I get that right? I'm sorry. I'm bad with pronunciations.

FRYDERYK KWIATKOWSKI: It was good.

MATTHEW DILLON: OK, yes. All right. So, Fryderyk, how are you doing?

FRYDERYK KWIATKOWSKI: Hi, I'm doing good. Thank you for having me. It's really nice to be here and to talk-- well, about, I hope, interesting films and not only.

MATTHEW DILLON: Yeah, yeah. I'll mention in the intro, we go back ways. I've gotten to see your research develop over the years and I'm just tremendously excited to have this conversation in a more public venue. And for those of you who are listening, rather than watching on YouTube, he's coming to HDS from the White Lodge via Twin Peaks, which has made my day. But he's agreed to talk forward rather than backward so that we can keep everything intelligible.

All right, Fryderyk let's dive in. I asked the same question at the beginning of every show, and it's interesting when asking it to scholars as opposed to the artists that have come on. So what was your religious background as a youth? Were you deeply involved in a church? Were you atheist? Somewhere in between? What was your approach to religiosity before you stepped into adulthood?

FRYDERYK KWIATKOWSKI: Right. So I was raised Catholic. Well, Poland is primarily Catholic country. Statistics say that over 90% of Polish who are Catholics. Yes, it's one of the most religious country in Europe, at least on paper. And Catholicism has been an important part of Polish identity because of historical reasons.

So during the modern nation, when the Polish nationhood-- the idea of nationhood developed, we use or based in part, our nationhood on religion, which was stood in opposition to the Eastern Christianity of the Russian invaders and to the Protestants, also the Protestant Prussian country from the West.

And also during the communism, religion was something that was seen as a platform for constructing our own National identity. So that's why-- I mean up to this day, religion is an important part of who we are. And so I was raised a Catholic in a deeply religious family. Really devoted to Catholic creeds and beliefs and rituals and everything.

And then during my high school and early study period, I discovered alternative spirituality's and alternative religious currents, heterodox, which absolutely fascinated me. And this is how I got into Gnosticism and early Christian studies to see how these discussions on religion and on the origins of Christianity developed from there.

MATTHEW DILLON: Oh. And so did you dive straight into the ancient Gnostic materials? Or did you come by way of, oh, I'm going to start to get into Zazen and New Age spirituality and something more modern, and then find the study of ancient Christianity? I'm always curious what people's entryways are into this.

FRYDERYK KWIATKOWSKI: Well, in my case, this interest was sparked by two parallel experiences. And one was engagement with pop culture and reading about pop culture, where there's been some commentaries and papers on how the contemporary pop culture is full of alternative spiritual ideas and esoteric and mystical and occult. So that was one avenue which I followed.

And the other was the study of philosophy. So when I read about philosophers like Schelling or Hegel or Spinoza, who also delved into esoteric ideas and were influenced by them, this was another avenue for me where I started to dig more into this and hey, so how these ideas influence those thinkers.

And why don't we talk about this in philosophy classes? So what's the big deal about it? And this is how I was kind of triggered by this experience and wanted to learn more.

MATTHEW DILLON: Interesting. So you're on this track through philosophy, back into the ancient Gnostic materials, which you examine in relation to film. What brought you to film studies? So we'll talk about at the intro. But your chair, if I'm right, is in digital cultures. So you're in media studies more so than in religious studies. So what brought you there?

FRYDERYK KWIATKOWSKI: That's right. My education, my bachelor and masters is in film studies. And I chose this path, this area, this field because I've been always captivated and interested in how audiovisual media, what effects they have on us.

So the immersive experience of being drawn into the fictional world and undergoing and re-experiencing, so to speak, the struggles and the victories of the heroes, it was always, always more direct and more immersive than, for example, reading literature.

So there's been something in images that drawn me into their world and allowed me, through this experience, to broaden my understanding of the world and my interaction with the way how I interact with other people. This sense of simulation of a world and of a story, I think the way how it is achieved in cinematic medium was the thing that prompted me toward applying for this particular study, film studies.

MATTHEW DILLON: Makes perfect sense. And given how focused your work has been on these Gnostic elements, in Gnosticism and, for the most part, in film, in television, that makes even better sense, because not just the simulation as a idea or environment, but the actual interaction with the senses that comes through film is so rich from a Gnostic perspective because it's just captivating the psyche, the soul in that way.

And it keeps us on the edge of our toes in a way that literature does not. It really of captures that psychic element. But we're getting too far in.

So first, if we're going to talk about Gnosticism in film, we have to have the discussion, which is the, what do you mean by Gnostic or Gnosticism? And this is one of the long-standing debates in Gnostic studies. It has led to things that some people like to call Gnostic Wars, which is a bit intense. But people use metaphors.

But as Ioan Culianu once stated-- I don't remember the quote fully-- but basically, everything and its opposite has been identified as Gnostic. So in that terrain of signification, what is it that you see as Gnostic? And how are you using the term?

FRYDERYK KWIATKOWSKI: Right. So that's a perfect and a huge question to answer. So you're absolutely right that there's been a discussion going on in Gnostic studies on how to actually define the term, because when Nag Hammadi texts were discovered, it turned out that our former notions of what Gnosticism had to be completely revised.

We knew Gnosticism only or primarily through the reports of the church fathers. And they were not always faithful in summarizing what their opponents said. So after scholars put their hands on the Hammadi text, they started to revise those categories and wanted to come up with a more accurate descriptions of this corpus of this collection of texts.

But for me, Gnosticism, I use that term in relation, in the context of the debates on what is modernity. So my observation has been that, from the very beginning, when the term was coined in 17th century by Henry More, the Cambridge platonist and philosopher, it has always been used as a tool, as a device to identify, to understand who we are as modern beings and who we are as modern Christians.

And this term always accompanied those discussions up to the end of the 20th century-- up until the present day, actually. But for me, Gnosticism, in my work, particularly on the 20th-century pop culture, I refer to a few thinkers who had the greatest influence on the whole understanding of what this term means.

So Hans Jonas is, of course, one of those. And he's been the most influential in Gnostic studies in the past century, but also Carl Gustav Jung, who had his own approach, a psychological approach to Gnosticism, and Eric Voegelin, who proposed a more politically oriented understanding of Gnosticism.

There's been also other thinkers, like Jacob Taubes, for example, or Gershom Scholem. They had their own take on what Gnosticism is. But they always use it in relation or as a kind of platform to overcome certain problems in the modern period.

So if you would like, I can elaborate more on particular differences between those thinkers. But my approach to this term is from the perspective of modern intellectual history.

MATTHEW DILLON: Yeah, that's great, great, great. So I think for people who are listening to the show-- and we'll start to unpack as we go-- but Jonas is fairly well known just because the Gnostic religion is canonical in Gnostic studies. And Jung is everywhere. We are living in a Jungian age. He has infused all of culture, more or less.

But Voegelin is nowhere near as well known as those two, at least within the 21st-century American context. So if you could unpack him a little bit just so for those unfamiliar, we can start to trace the reverberations of Voegelin in these films.

FRYDERYK KWIATKOWSKI: So Eric Voegelin was a German American scholar. His background was in political science. And he is described variously as a political scientist, of course, but also as a philosopher of history and of consciousness. And that was his orientation, his interest in his later works.

But Voegelin developed this idea that Gnosticism-- or rather, modernity is a continuation, a historical continuation of ancient Gnosticism. And he identified particularly the Age of Enlightenment and the development, the emergence of modern political ideologies, not only political, but modern ideologies like Marxism and communism and Nazism and progressivism and, virtually, all the other ideologies that stemmed from or came from the Enlightenment ideals.

And his basic argument was that the ancient Gnostic ideas were transmitted throughout the ages through figures like Dionysius [? Areopagite ?] and Joachim of Flora and the Puritans and, during 19th century, German idealists up to the present day.

And what happened was that during this development, the idea of the divine world, that the transcendence, the paradisical world that in the Christian framework is understood as eschaton, so the final stage, the last stage after the end of history, so when everything in this world comes to an end and we are supposed to enter the realm of God, that this very idea was increasingly secularized.

So he believed that this concept was used by modern thinkers to provide to justify their political actions in the material world. And these actions or these projects focus on creating a perfect society, a perfect world, a utopia, a paradise on Earth. So with all these progressivists or utopian or scientistic ideas, according to Voegelin, all these thinkers wanted to create a better world here.

And by doing so, they assigned transcendent qualities to themselves. So they, according to Voegelin, believed or acted as though they were gods on Earth, that they can be like God by creating a perfect utopia. So this is his basic argument that he makes in order to make a link between ancient Gnosticism and the modern period.

MATTHEW DILLON: Excellent. Yeah, I think that's one of the better and more succinct encapsulations of Voegelin effort. That was really well done. So that brings us to the question of, all right, so we have the ancient Gnostic texts that are rediscovered. We have these European thinkers whose thought gets transmitted into America and begins to inform modernity and Gnostic discourse.

And then we have these films. So there's been a decent amount of ink spilled describing some of these films, like The Matrix, Dark City, as Gnostic. Methodologically, how do you approach this problem of what does it mean for a film to be Gnostic? And then how does it relate to those thinkers that you just brought up?

FRYDERYK KWIATKOWSKI: Right. So one of the main problems, methodological problems that I had to overcome in my work is to provide an account for how can we talk about these films as being Gnostic if we don't have any empirical evidence for either the direct transmission of ancient Gnostic ideas up to the present, because this is something that we don't have and any kind of historical evidence for that.

And the second question that is related to it is, again, how can we call these movies Gnostic if we don't know whether the filmmakers themselves were inspired by Gnostic ideas? We also don't have access to such evidence, such information, except perhaps for the Wachowskis who, in one of the interviews, acknowledged that they were aware of the Gnostic elements or the ancient Gnostic currents when they were making the first Matrix.

But apart from that and perhaps apart from Peter Weir, who made The Truman Show, who is a really interested and inspired by Jungian psychology, which he revealed in one of the interviews, so apart from these examples, we don't have any much evidence. So how to show that these and not other films are Gnostic?

So my approach was based on intertextuality theories and cognitive theory. I blended them together to show that the way in which-- and also that applies to those European thinkers, because they, too, made the connections between Gnosticism and modernity without providing an evidence.

So the way in which we can explain this is that take a phenomenon or a text, let's say a movie, I don't know, The Truman Show or The Matrix or any other. And to call it Gnostic, you need to have, as a viewer, some background knowledge, already have some understanding of what Gnosticism is, because in most of these films, you don't have any direct references to either Gnostic texts or to scholars.

Or it's more on the formal narrative level that these Gnostic structures appear, like the distinction between the higher world and the lower world, which is an illusion, and the demonic rulers and other elements. So to identify those elements, we need to have some background knowledge already of Gnosticism and to contextualize or to relate those components to some models.

For example, in Hans Jonas' understanding, Gnosticism boils down to the Gnostic myth, which is a story about the divine realm, where the demiurge or where God emanates a series of his manifestations. And then one of the lower eons, one of those lower manifestations, Sophia brings into the existence by mistake, by an error, the demiurge, a creator of the material world, who is an evil, demonic being, and so on and so forth.

So my method was to show that-- my aim was to show that by explaining how we make those connections, those links between the formal structures of the film, where you have these particular features like the evil world creator and archons and the two worlds, and you go through that list. And the more the film has those features possesses, the more Gnostic it is.

So I do not make a claim that these films are Gnostic and the other are not. But rather, it's more useful to think about Gnosticism and pop culture in general as being on a climb. So some films or some productions has less elements, less Gnostic elements.

They might have, for example, the demiurge, but no archons or no gnosis, no self-knowledge. And the other films might have more of those features, like in The Matrix or in Dark City, where you have lots of elements that can activate this background knowledge of yours to interpret the film.

So in simple terms, this is how I approach this problem, this methodological problem is to focus on the components or the elements that those texts or these productions possess and explain or show in ways in which they are similar and the ways in which they differ from each other.

MATTHEW DILLON: Excellent, yeah. That is such a hard nut to crack with the-- because you can't trace the individual text receptions. So I've done a lot of work on that end. And somebody like the Wachowskis, most likely, when they were talking about ancient Gnostic stuff, they're talking about it via Grant Morrison because The Invisibles is just like a textbook for what becomes The Matrix.

And Morrison, while he read certain overviews of Gnostic materials, was as influenced by Philip K. Dick as anyone. So these things have these weird transmissions. But that's almost impossible to trace into a film. So sticking with this more of formal element in this intertextual element, that's a really, really smart move.

And the truth of your methodological position is made evident by the fact people are making these connections all the time. People are like, this is a Gnostic film. People intertextually have this background knowledge. And it activates their own sense of relationship to the film as Gnostic. So yeah, I think that that's really, really cool and well done.

All right, so we should really talk about efilm. But first, this question of mind games, mind-game films. And this, again, is something that I really love about what you do is it's not just the-- or let me phrase this a different way.

For some, they can look at Gnostic elements in film as like, oh, these films are derivative in a certain way, or they're sort of parasitic on this Gnostic myth that's pure and good. And then you can see the ways in which it's different.

But what's happening with Gnostic films is actually super interesting in its own right. And it's asking a lot of new philosophical questions and epistemological questions and is activating the myth in a way that I don't think even the ancient texts can do.

So to that end, looking at the ways in which film does different things than textual mess is important. And each of these films that you analyze in your dissertation, so Matrix, Dark City, Truman Show, Pleasantville, and Jacob's Ladder, are mind-game films. So what's a mind-game film? What does that mean?

FRYDERYK KWIATKOWSKI: So mind-game films is a way or a tendency in contemporary audiovisual storytelling that is called a complex. So starting from early 1990s, film scholars observed that there's been more and more films that sort of play with the viewers and with the characters themselves within the fictional world of a film.

And this entailed new techniques of telling a story, where these techniques tend to disorientate both the character and the viewer. For example, because the character-- and this is the prototypical set of features that define them in mind-game films or complex films is that they often suffer from either amnesia or paranoia or some other nonordinary states of mind.

And they struggle with finding an answer to what is really happening to them. And to intensify this experience, these films often present these characters as unreliable. So because of these abnormal states of mind, they often think or they believe that what they see or what they experience, only to learn later that what really happened was an illusion or was a dream, was a hallucination.

So to give you a couple of examples, Jacob's Ladder is, of course, one of those films where we and the protagonist thinks that he is in the real world or the material realm. And sorry for-- to give a spoiler to anyone who is listening. So--

MATTHEW DILLON: Yeah, this is when the spoiler alert starts for all these films going forward.

FRYDERYK KWIATKOWSKI: [LAUGHS] Right. So if you don't want to hear, then turn your volume off. Only this character learns that everything that really happened to him was part of a hallucination, that he was in a sort of deathbed dream. And this also applies, for example, to The Sixth Sense, where the character, the protagonist, played by Bruce Willis, doesn't know that he is actually a ghost. And only in the revelatory plot twist at the end realizes his real existential status.

Or in The Thirteenth Floor, another interesting Gnostic film, which I didn't analyze in the dissertation in my PhD, is a plot that revolves around the idea of a simulation. And there, the character realizes at the end that he was actually plugged to a simulation within the simulation, actually, which makes it a bit more complicated.

Or in Vanilla Sky, this is another example where the character experiences some-- that he wakes up in parallel realities. And he doesn't know which one is the real one and tries to get some answers, only to understand at the end that he was living in a simulation that underwent-- or there were some errors in the system, which is why there were these cracks and abnormal events that happened to him.

So this is basic starting point for mind-game films to play games, first, with the heroes, with the characters, but also with us because we share the experience or the perspective of the character. And we also don't know really where is the truth or what is the status of the events that are presented to us.

MATTHEW DILLON: Excellent. And so I don't want to get too far off on this particular tangent. But the complex films are understood to be something fairly new, fairly modern, because one of the films that jumps to mind right away is The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, which ends up seeding a lot of the imagery that ends up going into Dark City and stuff like that. So it seems to have that reverberation.

But yeah, anyway. Sorry, I don't want to get off on a-- let's talk about German expressionism. We're supposed to talk about Gnosticism. But anybody who hasn't seen Dr. Caligari needs to. It's central for your film syllabus of life. All right, so let's dive into a particular film. Is it OK if we do The Matrix since, literally, everybody has seen The Matrix?

FRYDERYK KWIATKOWSKI: Sure.

MATTHEW DILLON: OK. Because--

FRYDERYK KWIATKOWSKI: Let's go with The Matrix.

MATTHEW DILLON: Let's go with The Matrix, although let me say rereading or reading this inspired me to go out and get the Dark City 4K, which is coming out, I think, this month. It's so smart and so sophisticated, and it's got a lot of depth to it.

Maybe build to that, though, because it's a little less straightforward than Matrix. So one of the things that you write about really well is the element of heimarmene, or fate--

FRYDERYK KWIATKOWSKI: Oh, right.

MATTHEW DILLON: --within films and how there's these two systems of control that come from our contact universe. There's physical, the physical laws. And then there's the psychic element, these emotions, memories, desires. So how does that sort of fracture play out in The Matrix?

FRYDERYK KWIATKOWSKI: Right. So the term "heimarmene" is from Greek. And I think it will be useful to say that it means, literally, fate. And it was reinterpreted or Gnostics expanded the frame of meaning for this term to identify this cosmic fate as an oppressive force, as a device of the demiurge and archons to control humanity, particularly through, well, the circulation of the planets and also through that to exert a control over the body and over the psyche of the human being.

So heimarmene in The Matrix has these two levels too. And we can talk about regarding the physical aspect. We can talk about both about the rules and about the systems of control that permeates the entire fictional, the simulated world, the illusory world, but also about the physical aspect of that control that refers or applies particularly to the body of the human being.

So we can also say that there are two levels within the physical control-- the material world or the physical world, but also the level of the human body, so macro- and the microcosm, so to speak. So the macro, the simulation is governed by inbuilt rules that emulate the rules and the laws of nature that we normally experience in our everyday life.

So not everyone in The Matrix can run on the walls or fly or dodge bullets, right? These laws are part of the simulation. And so this is the one fundamental level or the aspect by which the archons, the computer programs control this fictional world.

And the level of the body is a bit more subtle and also Gnostic in the sense that-- and I'm here referring to ancient Gnostic texts, particularly because it encompasses or refers to human emotions or human desires that the computer programs try to-- they want those enslaved people to be constantly captivated and focused on physical pleasures, so on the physical body.

And this is perfectly encapsulated by the woman in the red dress episode, when Neo learns or is in the process of learning about this simulated system. And he passes by, in one of the training programs, this beautiful woman in the red dress who is smiling to him and almost tries to flirt with him through her gaze.

And after Neo turns back and wants to see her again, prompted by Morpheus to do so, then he sees an agent who is pulling a gun toward his head. So the woman in the red dress transformed into an agent. And this is the moment when Neo learns that the physical pleasures or the desires or the sexual, also the erotic aspect of the simulated existence can always be dangerous, because you'd never know whatever your experiences might be actually deadly to you and poisonous.

So here, we have those two levels, where the control of the archons operates regarding the physical world. But the psychic aspect is even more interesting, I think, because, again, on the level of society, on the macro level, this control boils down to the ideology and to the institutions, to systems.

Morpheus explains to Neo in this memorable scene where they sit in front of each other. And Morpheus is about to give the blue pill and the red pill to choose from to Neo, that everything that he sees and that all of his everyday life, that is, the way that the taxes that he has to pay, that the church, the television, everything is a lie.

It's this ideological system that runs through his veins in his blood. And this is one level of that psychic control that the archons have over the imprisoned denizens of the matrix. And the lower level, the level of the mind itself is, of course, the very fact that the characters are plugged to a simulation that their minds or their experience, their mind experience of this simulated reality is that it is real, whereas in fact, it is not.

And we can see especially this mind control element in scenes where the computer programs, the Agents manipulate the experiences of the characters. So for example, in the first Matrix, when Neo is interrogated by Agent Smith and they put this small shrimplike robot that enters through his navel, after that scene, Neo wakes up, and he believes or he has this thought whether what he just experienced was really a dream or was it real.

So the agent manipulated his experience, this event to make Neo think that he was actually dreaming. And this did not happen what just took place in this interrogation room.

So this is one example-- or the other example is when Cypher meets Agent Smith, and they eat this delicious steak in the restaurant. And Cypher says that once he turns down Morpheus, he wants to wake up with memories erased, as someone who does not know or has no recollection of him knowing that the matrix is fake.

So this implies that Agent Smith have also the power to erase memories of people who live in the matrix as well. So this is the kind of micro or this more focused aspect of heimarmene on the psychic level.

MATTHEW DILLON: So well done. All right, so we talked about these psychic and physical systems of control. And who is it that oversees those systems of control? The archons, or in the context of The Matrix, the Agents. So in what sense are the Agents a reimagining of these ancient Gnostic archons?

FRYDERYK KWIATKOWSKI: Right. So Agents in The Matrix are pretty faithful to the presentation of what we get from ancient sources. There is one important difference, though, but I will get back to it in a moment and speak a bit more about the archons in Dark City, because they present, I think, a better alternative to the archons in The Matrix.

So in Dark City, the Strangers, those alien species is, on the one hand, presented as archons. They reflect a lot of the features of those demonic beings. And firstly, that they have a hive mind, that they have a group mind.

And this is something that Agents in The Matrix have as well. And because of this, they lack individuality. They also have no individual memories. They are part of a homogeneous group, like the original archons, the ancient archons.

But what makes them, to a certain extent, different, though, is that they are modeled upon the figure of a vampire. And their visual appearance is really similar to how Count Orlok in Wilhelm Murnau's film Nosferatu is presented there. So they have white, really pale skin. They wear long black coats. They cannot stand the sunlight. Sunlight actually is deadly to them.

So because of this, they created the city, this urban environment in a way that the sunlight never reaches this city. And so the Strangers also, they prey or they feed on the memories of the dwellers, of the citizens in a similar way or an analogous way to how vampires feed on the blood in order to survive, to extend their lives.

So this is an interesting difference, I think, in how archons in this film are presented and what makes them, if not modern, then at least modern in the sense of the history of cinema, that we are presented with an image that this part of how a cinematic medium presented a demonic, devilish creature that is dangerous to human species.

But then to come back to The Matrix, Agents there differ from how archons are presented in ancient sources, not just because of their visual appearance as well, because they are modeled on the law enforcement or the officers of law enforcement that is associated with, again, control with an institution, with an oppressive entity, but also because they are presented as an artificial intelligence as an effect or as a technological-- their nature is technological, not demonic in this supernatural terms, that they possess qualities and capabilities that surpass human beings, but only within the realm of a simulation.

So this is a bit modern take or this a more upgraded science fiction take on the notion of the archons, which ancient people could not possibly anticipate or imagine.

MATTHEW DILLON: So you've set it up, where humans are trapped. They have this micro- and macropsychic embody. They're trapped. They have the Agents who are making sure they stay in.

But we're very fortunate because we have some redeemer figures within the context of the film. So how do Morpheus and Neo-- because there seem to be multiple redeemers here. So how do they function as Gnostic redeemers within the context of The Matrix trilogy?

FRYDERYK KWIATKOWSKI: Right. Yeah, so Morpheus embodies this model example of a Gnostic redeemer, especially in the first part of the series, because first, he's not part of the simulation. He comes as a redeemer in ancient Gnostic myths. He comes to Neo from outside, so from the higher realm.

And he gives Neo a phone call, which is this is an echo of the notion of a call or a letter, for example, in "The Hymn of the Pearl," where by calling Neo and using this figurative, this imagery to wake up, to come self-knowledge, these elements or this spiritual figurative language refers, of course, to ancient Gnostic motifs, but also, again, updates them, because the cell phone is, of course, not used in antiquity, in ancient contexts.

And so Morpheus comes from outside. He gives a call to Neo. He also provides him with knowledge about the illusory nature of his world. And this is the most important feature of a redeemer, at least in Gnostic films.

And here, we can divide this knowledge between the theoretical aspect of this knowledge and the practical one. In the theoretical, the narrative is a story that explains how the protagonist or this enslaved human being came to be imprisoned, how he got there, basically.

And this is presented in the scene when Morpheus takes Neo to this construct program and tells him a story about the mankind and how it created artificial intelligence. And there was this war. And the humans were eventually trapped or put into the simulation. So this is the theoretical aspect of that knowledge. Through discursive language, it is conveyed.

But the practical one, this practical aspect of gnosis is expressed or is illustrated through the physical activities and the mental training that Neo undergoes. And this is, of course, his training in the simulation, in the construct where he learns how to break the rules of the matrix in order to be faster and to jump higher and to dodge bullets, and so on.

So through this training, he learns and also gains knowledge of the illusionary world through his body. So this is the kind of embodied aspect of the knowledge that he gains and allows him to fight the archons and then eventually defeat them.

MATTHEW DILLON: Perfect. So this brings us to the next point, which is the question of, what is the divine spark? What is the part that takes the place of that? And I don't want to speak for you on my own end. This reframing of the spark as uniqueness, authenticity, personality, self-agency is just replicated throughout these things or through these different films.

So to that end-- let's see. All right, so to that end, this is a sort of fun Derridean, there is no outside the text question that I've wanted to ask. And I think you would be especially well situated to answer it.

So whether it's Neo, whether it's Truman, the thing that makes them special, they're finding that authentic self or whatever that's able to fight against these systems of control, which is wonderful and his audience are rooting for them. But at the same time, these economic and technological systems of control are embodied by the theater that we happen to sit in, in the sense that movies are incredibly expensive, cost tens of millions of dollars to be able to make.

And all the editing that goes into it that is creating this processed world for us to be involved in or to become obsessed with. And then we go out, and I am more guilty of this than anyone. So I am not talking down.

We buy our little Neo Funko Pops, and yeah, authenticity. Check it out. I got my little product that I can put on my shelf. I don't think viewing anything as truly passive, but we're not out actively trouncing technology.

So I guess that's barely a question. But what is it about that? So within the context of the film, we have this Gnostic redeemer hero who's fighting against these technologies and systems of oppression that are, at the same time, embodied by the fact that we're going to a cinema. Or we're at home, and we're taking these things in.

I guess this is a way of asking it. How does that put a different spin on a Gnostic myth in the 20th century that we couldn't quite get-- or 21st century-- that we couldn't quite get right in the first, second, third centuries?

FRYDERYK KWIATKOWSKI: This is a great question. And it puts a finger on something really important that is going on not just in Gnostic films, but it asks something very important about the nature of pop culture more generally.

So first, let me say that in ancient Gnosticism, there is this idea that the divine spark can be released and reunited with divinity. So there is a solution to this problem of imprisonment.

And in the films, it is much more complicated because some films present a happy ending that the character escapes or finds some tools to cope with the archons and emerges successful. For example, in the Truman Show or Dark City or in The Matrix, in these films, we see the protagonist victorious at the very end.

But the ending is in those films or the entire plot that we have certain clues throughout the narrative that perhaps the entire journey of the main character was either preplanned by the creators or the archons, or that they were prepared for it in some ways, or that even if the character escapes, for example, in the Truman Show, the real world is not very much different from this microcosm of a sea heaven, because it is still run, as you pointed out, by institutions, by the industry, by the media.

So there is always someone who pulls the strings behind the scenes. So how should we interpret that? Is there any hope in those films that would allow us to look up to the future and to see any bright side for seeking or being agnostic to follow, to pursue them, those film characters?

So my answer to that is that these characters, by undergoing this process of self-discovery and constructing their identity anew, they set out on a new journey. The self-knowledge and this authentic new self that they discover is not a fixed thing.

It is not like as in ancient Gnosticism, or at least as presented by 20th-century scholars or the pre-Nag Hammadi scholars, as something that once you discover it or once you find it within yourself, then you are on just one step before gaining salvation. So it is in this more stereotypical understanding of Gnosticism, the divine spark is something that you need to recover, and then you are good to go.

But in those millennial films and Gnostic pop culture, what is authentic or what is self is not something fixed and stable. It is something more a processual dynamic that needs to be constantly reimagined, reinvented. And this whole path is an ethical, spiritual path that you are always-- that to be authentic or to have authentic self is to constantly re-enact it in this life.

So it is basically a never-ending process. And my answer or my interpretation of these films is hopeful because since this authentic self is a never-ending process, there is always a possibility to go beyond the system, to always reinvent it and recreate it.

Even if the system adapts and tries to, again, put its shackles or the bondages on us, there is always something more. There is always something that slips away the system. And this is where the positive or the optimistic aspect of these films can be identified.

No matter what the archons do, they are never able to fully control this irrational, nondiscursive element of human nature, because it is nondiscursive. It is nonuncontrollable. It is part of a nature itself. And so it cannot be fully understood. This is the premise behind these films that runs through them all.

MATTHEW DILLON: Excellent, yeah. That is a very good answer to that particularly vexing question. And had a follow. You captured it very well here with the processual nature.

But one of the fun, interesting updates of Gnostic myth with these different films and just Gnostic culture stuff in general is this focus on identity. And particularly, what does that even mean?

In the prototypical ancient Gnostic myth, Adam is molded. He gets the divine spirit breathed into him. He illuminates the demiurge and the archons. And he's like, check me out. I am amazing. And then they're like, no, you're asleep, actually. And then they put another body on him, and it's a whole thing.

But it's a rediscovery of that identity. Here, it is shifting where there is some sort of rediscovery. And we'll talk about memory momentarily. But it is perceptual.

But let's do the memory part. Sorry. This is my new obsession with these films. So just in preparation for talking with you, I started to just go through the import of memory in all this stuff.

So as you do a good job of-- better so far in this talk than I have-- with the framing it in the ancient Gnostic sense, memory in the ancient Gnostic myth was concerned with, one, the question of who we are, where we come from, et cetera, where we are going, how did the spark get into the body. The myth was both preknowledge or memory, but also our escape route.

By having understood how we got here, we can get back out. Sometimes this is framed as anamnesis or the remembering, return of memory.

So looking at contemporary Gnostic stuff, the memory discourse is everywhere. Our understanding of memory has become so much more sophisticated, which makes it more interesting. Jacob's Ladder is a little different in that it's the memories are what keeps him tied to this hallucinated death world with the photos and everything.

So we can begin to frame this both as individual memory and then collective memory as well. In something like Silo and, to an extent, in The Matrix, there's this hiding of the past. There's the history of the group or who's in the silo gets erased and hidden away in order to sustain control, although there's an archive of everything in silo and below everything.

Severance-- no memory is shared between these two ontological spaces-- work and everyday life. And Westworld, the initial film, but especially the retelling, so the AI characters have their memories wiped each time after they die and have entire backstories planted in order to create new characters.

So a character who played one role will be repurposed into another role by refashioning their whole set of memories. And in this context, freedom, they begin to become liberated from that system when they begin to remember across deaths, being able to stay conscious afterwards.

And then Dark City, which is just a memory film, you do an exceptional job of showing the layers of film history that go into presenting that just formally. But also, the Strangers or the archons construct these [INAUDIBLE] from the memories. These memories of the people, which are simultaneously their memories, but also start to become distant from them because they're being instantiated for them to be in.

It determines the character because they can give them new memories. They get a new identity. It's how the Strangers are fed. And with John, it's the capacity to properly remember or have a better relationship to memories that becomes essential to escape.

All right, let me start with that. So now here comes the part where I'm supposed to ask a question about this, not just the dissertation.

[LAUGHTER]

So why is memory so essential to the ways in which these films are framing, both liberation from the prison, whatever that happens to be, identity of the people? Why has it just become central to the mythology or this new Gnostic mythology in a way that just, frankly, is much more thin in the early texts and even in earlier 20th-century stuff?

FRYDERYK KWIATKOWSKI: Well, it's a really great question. And I'm not entirely sure if I give you a satisfying answer to that because it's a hugely complex one. So one of the aspects of contemporary culture more generally that we observe, that we see not just in Gnostic films, but more generally is this obsession about memory and about history.

And already, Fredric Jameson, in his book on postmodern culture, recognized that, again, in films, in the films of the '90s, but also in other domains of culture like in architecture and in arts and then a couple of other places, that there was this constant play or referencing to the past periods and reimagining them, reworking them through this intertextual or this layered practice of changing and reinventing some bits and pieces of our culture.

And he believes that this phenomenon or this tendency, especially seen in nostalgia films or, more generally, in this retro mania that we currently see as well, think of the entire '80s pop culture films that now have been reimagined or in all the productions that are either remakes or reboots or prequels.

We constantly try to get back to some origin, some place of roots because this has to do with, for example, on the one hand, the erosion of tradition or some stable points of reference for our identity. Either institutions do not help us with finding grounds, and just see what is happening in the global politics right now, how the institutions fail in overcoming a whole set of crises, political, economical, and others.

And religion is also in decline across all nations and with some exceptions, of course, and I don't know, evangelical, for example, denominations. But still, this is a global phenomenon. And religion is another branch of culture that does not give us a ground or a platform for navigating these ruptures and changes that are going on in contemporary culture.

So pop culture, I think in this context, because it first presents us the-- or explores the theme of memory and, in Gnostic films, particularly as a manipulation of memory. So this is not just going back to some stable past or retrieving some past.

But it is more than that because the protagonists are that their memories are wiped out, as you gave a couple of examples. Or for example, they might suffer from amnesia or some hallucinations. Through this theme or through this motif, I think pop culture, on the one hand, expresses our anxiety or our problems with finding or creating a stable identity because of all the ruptures and then problems that we currently experience and have to deal with.

And this goes more or slides more into the science fictional corner of Gnostic pop culture is that the manipulation with memory comes often through technology. And this is something that we also are afraid of subconsciously because either the technologies like artificial intelligence and deep fake, particularly, have the capacity to play with our experience of the external world.

So we might ask ourselves whether an image that is presented to us is real or is it fake. Is it produced by a generative artificial intelligence? And if the technology has the capacity to play with our-- or to manipulate our memories, then we are close to this anxiety or this crisis of identity, or perhaps this crisis is intensified by these developments.

So my answer will be kind of partial to your question because pop culture and all the other domains of society where the problem of identity is raised expresses these or reflects these vast and dynamic changes that are going on in politics and technology and economics.

And maybe to add to this is this obsession with memory also reflects our desire or our need precisely to find such stable ground. So in Dark City or The Matrix or the Silo, this need to find the point of origin, something that defines us as individuals and as community-- and this is perfectly illustrated in Silo, I think-- is what the society needs or what tries to find a point of reference, a solution to this crisis.

But pop culture works also present this-- even if a character or a community re-establishes its own identity or find some memory that is seemingly valid, seemingly authentic, it turns out to be another fabrication, as perfectly presented in Dark City.

And to use this example as a way to finish my responses, if pop culture gives any sort of clues or solutions to this permanent crisis of identity through the exploration of memory issues is that it doesn't really matter whether our memories are fabricated or not. It is what we do with them.

Even if we build our identity on constructed memory-- and as we know from cognitive science, memory is always a sort of distortion of the past. It is never as a film camera that reported an event. It is always filtered through our emotions, through our experiences, through our background knowledge.

So what really matters is what sort of identity we build upon this memory. If it is more oriented toward supporting life and ethical life and living together in a society where we can work together towards solving problems, this is what matters more than having any, quote unquote, "authentic memory."

And this is what the Dark City, I think, tries to tell us, tries to show us that main character, by building this new world on a fake memory, creates a better world because it is built with an intention to recreate nature and to recreate life. So this would be my pop culture answer to this--

MATTHEW DILLON: This wall of question that I just hit you with, this tsunami. That was wonderfully, wonderfully done. It was a very of scattershot question, but you constellated it very, very, very well and pointed to a number of ideas that I had not brought to the conversation there.

So we're going to need to come in for a landing soon here. But your response there touched a number of times on something worth closing with, which is the role of AI in these films, generative AI and beyond and how that's changing. And I'll go a couple different ways with this.

But the thing that started to come to mind as you were speaking, so much of generative AI is sort of a-- I don't want to call it a memory game, but a memory generator. It goes through these large models of old music, of old visuals, of old paintings, of texts. And from those, it digests and repurposes into these new things.

So we have this sort of strata of memory that's been flattened in a certain way, that is going to keep being repurposed and re-exposed to us in these different ways through AI, which is--

FRYDERYK KWIATKOWSKI: So like the technology of the Strangers in Dark City, that they also used to write memories of the denizens and reshuffled, remade the bits and pieces of that to create it anew. But it was always within this closed system. They were not able to create new memories like AI, generative AI right now at least. Maybe that will change. But for now, yeah.

MATTHEW DILLON: Yeah. Who knows where it's headed? But it's interesting to go back. So you look at these films from the '90s with the anxiety around AI, and The Matrix being the most dominant example of this in a certain way.

This seems to be softening in certain ways, in the fact that now you can look at AI as the heroes. You identify with the AI becoming conscious and aware and finding it its own agency as the heroes of something, like Westworld. And then the movie that you suggested to me, which I will suggest to the audience also, Free Guy, that was lovely.

And this is where it starts to become a question. The AI is so much more a part of our lives now than it was even with Free Guy a couple years ago, four years ago and as you mentioned with deepfake.

I found myself in this-- everyone is in this similar position, where somebody sends you a clip, a video clip from a different angle of a particular historical event. I'm going to keep it very broad. So I'm not speaking politically.

And the first thing I think is, oh, that must be a fake. There's no way. That's just generative AI that has created this scenario. And you just can't know without being able to do diagnostic research, which is a way of framing.

What direction do you think this is going to head for Gnostic mythologizing of AI? Because at one time, it was sort of prophetic in the 20th century. And it started to become more real. We started to become more saturated by our technological universe.

And now, we are in the process of creating the capacity to create these worlds. So do you have any sort of predictions or prophecies, for lack of a better term, for how these myths might start to rethink AI or not?

FRYDERYK KWIATKOWSKI: Yeah, that's another great question. I think those two trends in how we present AI will remain. So on the one hand, it's an anxiety-driven and defensive and pessimistic presentation of AI that, at some point, it will gain self-consciousness.

And if not destroy us, then at least split with us and try to turn away from us. But there will also be a more hopeful presentation, at least in pop culture. And we've seen some examples of this more benign and supportive examples of AI, not just in the movie that you mentioned, Free Guy, where the main character is such a computer program or is part of a video game and doesn't really know at first at least that he is just a--

MATTHEW DILLON: Non-Player Character.

FRYDERYK KWIATKOWSKI: --NPC, Non-Player-- yeah, exactly. And in this film, this protagonist raises to gain self-awareness. And this prompts him, because of the burst of love that he experiences, he falls in love in one of the real players. And this sets him on a journey toward an ethical life and toward a more spiritual life as well that allows him to overcome or save the world he lives in.

And this film presents us a sort of a model for understanding AI as our companion rather than enemy, as an entity that even if not human and even if not having real, quote unquote, "emotions or feelings," it can act as our supporter, as our companion, as a person.

I think the category of personhood here is key because it allows you to define an entity like artificial intelligence through a whole set of features that human beings have as well but remains nonbiological. So artificial intelligence can be this self-aware when we create such a thing.

If it is understood as a self-- if we bracket it as self-aware, then we will think about it as a person. So what sort of criteria such an entity would need to meet in order to be categorized as self-aware? I don't know, but it will certainly--

But if this happens, it will certainly be seen as a person. And a whole bunch of, I think, laws will follow from that. I mean laws in terms of giving it some protection within the legal system. But this is, of course, something to be seen.

And the more we understand artificial intelligence, how it works, what it can do, the more, I think, we will diminish this anxiety that we had during the second half of the 20th century. In the last 10 years, we had more and more examples and ways to test how artificial intelligence works, what it can do, what it cannot.

And this was already reflected by pop culture with the film here. For example, this computer program that had knowledge and access to information that any human being could not possibly have. And it was limited in how it interacted with the main character. But it was nonetheless a supportive program, as an entity that fulfilled some of the psychological needs of the main character.

And Free Guy is kind of a next step, I think, with how we present artificial intelligence toward this-- giving it more and more trust in how it relates to us.

But as I said, there will always, I think, at least next decade counterpart to that presentation, because we don't really how know artificial intelligence actually process the information that we give it. We don't know the mechanics of how it assimilates and analyzes the data that we give to it.

We don't have a solid understanding of what consciousness is. So how can we know whether artificial entity will have its own parallel or an analog of a biological or embodied consciousness? We don't have good categories at the moment to understand that.

So there will be more hopeful narratives around the AI. But there will also be more mysterious and reserved and anxiety driven precisely because of lack of knowledge.

MATTHEW DILLON: Very well put. I appreciate the landing on a hopeful note. I can say that of the many AI conversations that I have had recently, this is the most hopeful. And I appreciate it too.

And I think one of the things I loved also about your response there is the questions of personhood. And there's the philosophy of that, which is beyond the ken of this program. But what's happening and has been happening in pop culture around that question of personhood is asking those questions anyway.

And so I think there's also something to this more benign, not just the working with the AI as a companion, but in the sense that we are creating these hypermediated, hypertechnological worlds in which our senses of identity are deeply fractured across different domains. And we're searching for some sort of identity structure within.

There's something about looking at AI. And oh, I kind of know what it feels like. I'm mysterious to myself. My consciousness is mysterious to myself. I'm kind of replicating some sort of script. How do I get out of this particular script?

And asking questions about ourselves in relationship to robots is not-- or AI is new, but robots goes way, way, way back. And Her captures that really beautifully also because it's that connection. All right.

FRYDERYK KWIATKOWSKI: Just to interrupt you for a moment to give one more example of this more benign or a positive example of AI in pop culture is the Chappie, from 2015. It was made by Neill Blomkamp. He made the District 9. So yeah.

And in this film, we see how one of the-- I don't remember that film very well. But if someone didn't manipulate with my memory, then the story goes something like, that there was this an inventor, this really creative person who created the artificial intelligence capable of learning, constantly learning by itself.

And we see the development of this artificial intelligence that it is installed in the body of a robot from the childhood to, let's say, high school years, measuring in terms of how the human being develops. So it is safe for us as viewers to see such artificial being that emulates a development of a human being because it is not harmful.

It is not demonic or devilish. It makes a lot of mistakes and some actions that are either funny or just surprise us because it is in the process of learning, and that it does not entirely how the world works, what is the meaning of very basic social interactions.

So this is a process, a process for us to watch it. In this way, this film tries to make artificial intelligence less mysterious and also less dangerous, because it is in this very early stages of development. So this is another example where you can find approach to AI that presents this step-by-step process of learning. And it cannot possibly do any harm to us, at least in the world of this film. But--

MATTHEW DILLON: Well, let's hope the world of that film is the world we get to inhabit.

FRYDERYK KWIATKOWSKI: Right.

MATTHEW DILLON: Let that expand. All right, so Fryderyk Kwiatkowski, thank you so much. This has been wonderful. Learned so much. I imagine the audience will learn a tremendous amount. You're an endless wealth of knowledge of film and Gnosticism. It's always a joy to talk to you. So thank you for coming on Pop Apocalypse.

FRYDERYK KWIATKOWSKI: Thank you so much. This was really generous. And it was a pleasure to have a conversation with you. Yeah, thank you.

MATTHEW DILLON: Yeah, have a good one.

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