Sutured Lunacy

Rating: 9/10 (24 July 2019)

"Moon" is a clever piece of duplicitous self-reflexive filmmaking. It's less overt in its reference to its own artificial construction than director Duncan Jones's subsequent "Source Code" (2011), for which the repeated narrative is revealed rather early to be an artificial simulation. It takes "Moon" longer to unfold, as the cloned doubles discover the extent of their artificial making. Of course, on the surface, this poses as a science-fiction examination on the meaning of reality and being human, but there's a deeper introspection going on here for one who desires, as the Sam Bells here inevitably do, to look beyond that fake existence and to explore how we as the spectator are similarly sutured into the duplicity inherent in cinema.
Although not taking place on an imaginary train as in "Source Code," the lunar surface here serves about as well of a purpose for most--we know it exists, but we'll never go there. Thus having transported us to this as-good-as-imaginary artificial place, the picture sets about gradually exposing the fraud to Bell and us. Notice that Bell's first clues of the fraud are cinematic--part of a video from his wife is blatantly edited out and another clip of his double appears seemingly by glitch--read: edited--into his own video. It's as though the filmmakers are intentionally calling attention to what film theory describes as "suture," a word employed so as to speculate on how the spectator supposedly suspends disbelief in viewing something as utterly unbelievable as motion pictures. A movie is otherwise seemingly disrupted by the artificiality of editing--with jarring changes in camera perspectives, locations and time; techniques such as those of continuity editing suture those wounds. And, I wonder whether the filmmakers didn't intentionally include physical wounds for Bell, such as the business with his hand, to make a visual pun from this.
There are also the usual techniques, such as the shot/reverse shot scheme and POV shots, that associate the camera's look with that of the character, which leads the spectator to identify with the character. In effect, we're sutured into the picture. We are the Sam Bells. We're doubled, and they're our doppelgÃ¤ngers--making the scenes of Sam Rockwell's doubled exposure all the more uncanny. That Bell is manufactured in mass to assist an industrialized mechanical process may otherwise signify that he's similar to the basic filmmaking process of copying and the reproduced distribution of the products--in other words, Bells as movies--may be a comment of conflation on the role of cinema in our lives. In control of, or otherwise behind, these movies is Lunar Industries. Indeed, "Moon" begins with their commercial. The effect of these movies are so pervasive that they enter our minds and dreams. Bell repeatedly awakes with only stitched-together memories supported by photographic (or, more precisely, digital) evidence and is continually pestered by fragmented dreams. Fortunately, "Moon" includes filmmakers in the form of the surrogate GERTY robot that cares enough to support us in this journey--to deconstruct and unsuture ourselves--and to eventually launch us back to Earth.