Michael Ferris Gibson’s Numb is a thinking-person’s sci-fi film that is, at turns, insightful and chillingly honest in its proposal of humanity’s potential future while, at others, as soporifically languid as most of his secondary cast of addicts. In short, Numb serves as an example of a potential talent that has yet had the time to blossom.
After the advent of “The Drip,” a Soma-like substance readily distributed by the government, Yerba City is shrouded with individuals who are in a perpetually catatonic, soporific haze. The only people able to act are android attendants (persons who opted for immortality, achieved by voluntarily dying in order for their bodies to be implemented with programmable hardware), which are left to their rote tasks, and those who are immune to the narcotic. One such person, Claire (Jennifer Savitch), is attempting to locate a loved one amid the countless droves of users when she meets Miles (Dominik Overstreet), whom she is unsure whether or not she can trust. At the passing mention of Tiburon, a society purportedly comprised of “free” individuals, the duo decide to travel.
Numb negates, to a somewhat successful degree, the axiom that science fiction and the future must be chalked full of gadgetry, explosions, and hyperactivity as Gibson issues a very adult, dark and brooding, view of what is to come as he humors the possibility that the future could just as readily be boring and mundane. For example, one character lives in a semi-constant state of depression due to what he deems to be the futility of existence and, as a consequence of his existential predicament, nonchalantly contemplates suicide on a daily basis. It is within the confines of the filmmaker’s vision that parallel apathy is witnessed in an individual being murdered to no one’s chagrin, concern, or notice.
The gloomy state of the director’s futuristic realm is extremely plausible in the manner that Aldous Huxley’s portrayal of a society dependent upon Soma, a drug which induces apathy and thwarts empathy, is satirically convincing. At the open of the twenty-first century, when affluenza is at an all-time high and bankruptcy has slowly risen, almost entirely undetected, to the levels experienced during the Great Depression, Gibson’s world becomes a wake-up call, an almost belated cautionary tale which warns us that the time to act is diminishing at a frightening pace, the unmet deadline resulting in–like those in Yerba City–our openly and gladly welcoming a permanent reprieve from our already mundane and wasted lives.
Furthermore, Numb’s sparse narrative is thorough in its reading of humanity’s oxymoronic tendencies in that, though Miles is free from the allure of The Drip, he nonetheless opts to smoke. It is with this, the director’s unrepentant portrayal of what Freud dubbed the Death Instinct, that Gibson breeches the dichotomy of free will. Claire has willfully abstained from the omnipresent drug, due largely to her role in the creation of the narcotic and, thus, having been able to see its long-term consequences (which she suffers a crippling guilt complex as a result as she subconsciously yearns for addition as a form of penitence). This is in direct contrast to Miles, an ex-police agent who was modified to be unable to receive the substance in order to assure his ability to serve his position. In the wake of Friedrich Nietzsche statement in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “Verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws,” Miles nonetheless refutes the means to which he is clean as he diligently, arrogant proclaims that it is the ends that ultimately matters. Ironically, Gibson forces his viewer to consider Miles’s sentiment due to the fact that–during such spare, meager, and futile times–merely having an argumentative side in which to claim seems to be a graciousness in and of itself.
Yet, for all of the philosophic, sociological, and psychological nuances which Gibson offers–amid Savitch being a fair facsimile of Amanda Peet; Overstreet’s intonation, speech patterns, and voice being all but Jason Lee; and a character named Wilson (uncredited) being an African American rendition of Jack Nicholson in more ways than one–that the viewer loses interest. It is as if the filmmaker concurs with the unwritten academic rule that adult drama need be slow and distancing in the methodical exactitude of its plotting and characterization in order to mean something. As such, to put it bluntly, as insightful as Numb attempts to be, it is–much like tomorrow’s world–boring and uneventful, to say nothing of anticlimactic. Granted, everything of value doesn’t necessarily announce itself with bells and whistles yet, as Charles Bukowski states of Thomas Mann’s work, Gibson seems to adhere to the notion that boredom, in and of itself, is an art form. For example, the audience–analogous to the characters in proximity to the event–could easily miss the fact that a murder has been committed due to the fact that the unengaging nature of the film has induced viewer atrophy. As such, if you do not have an audience for whatever reason–needless to say–you cannot prove a point.
This is not to imply that Michael Ferris Gibson’s Numb is a failure, merely a work which evidences a potential as opposed to readily expressing it. While at times highly rewarding, while at others vastly disappointing, it leaves the viewer anxious to see what direction the filmmaker’s career will take. In the end, the work is by no means self-referential yet could stand a stiff cup of coffee. We’ll see if Gibson’s next work elects to go the espresso route or opt for another cup of decaffeinated.
-Egregious Gurnow
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
