Metacrisis and Mission Impossible

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Curious to hear thoughts on the surprising (even to me!) idea that the latest Mission Impossible film points to the metacrisis. If true, this would be further evidence that the ideas around here are hooked into the Zeitgeist.

Here’s the key part of the argument for convenience:

The clearest example of this is the retrospective framing of the “Rabbit’s Foot” from Mission: Impossible III as a precursor to the AI entity. As his rival Gabriel (Esai Morales) gleefully tells him, this means that Hunt’s earlier success, powered by his usual conviction of moral heroism, unwittingly helped create the very threat he’s now trying to save the world from.

This in turn suggests that regardless of whether he finally beats the entity, true success may be no more than a chance outcome, in a world that is simply too complex for it to be possible to predict the second-order consequences of one’s actions.

This reading is bolstered by the fact that Ethan’s whole strategy in the film derives from an intense virtual mindmeld with the AI, including a visceral experience of potential nuclear annihilation (a highly creative riff on the iconic dream sequence in James Cameron’s 1991 classic, Terminator 2: Judgement Day ).

Crucially this technological merging of minds is essentially a unidirectional message from the entity, leaving us with the question of whether Ethan’s whole strategy of solitary heroism in fact plays into the Entity’s hands.

So while Hunt does appear to emerge victorious at the end of the film, there’s a strong suggestion that this is a pyrrhic victory.

By drawing together the previous films in the sequence in a final reckoning, we suddenly see a clear pattern whereby crisis routinely follows crisis - so that the only way to end the sequence of impossible missions is to recognise this very sequence as a symptom of something deeper, something that includes the methods and worldview of Hunt and the Impossible Mission Force (the abbreviation for which - IMF - also stands for the International Monetary Fund, a similarly ambitious organisation at the heart of the global capitalist system, that could also be seen as partly responsible for the catastrophes it tries to prevent).

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Nice piece @JonahW

To answer your question about where it “points to the metacrisis”. In short, i’d say it points to polycrisis but not metacrisis.

Grappling with complexity and the unwitting consequence of our actions for me is more polycrisis – it is about about complex interplay between factors at the same (surface) level.

For it to point to metacrisis it would need to be more than that and have something in the narrative or theme the explicit idea that the crisis (aka AI) has its source in our cultural foundations. You suggest that it might:

By drawing together the previous films in the sequence in a final reckoning, we suddenly see a clear pattern whereby crisis routinely follows crisis - so that the only way to end the sequence of impossible missions is to recognise this very sequence as a symptom of something deeper, something that includes the methods and worldview of Hunt and the Impossible Mission Force (the abbreviation for which - IMF - also stands for the International Monetary Fund, a similarly ambitious organisation at the heart of the global capitalist system, that could also be seen as partly responsible for the catastrophes it tries to prevent).

However, this seems like it could be a generous reading … At least from watching the first film I didn’t get that was the case. (NB: haven’t yet seen this second one).

What i did feel was that MI (and many other movies) increasingly show a growing awareness of of collapse/breakdown, and, more significantly, of self-doubt about the nature and direction of society.

However, in my view, this is more post-modern than meta-modern / second renaissance-esque. The disenchantment with modernity and the sense of ambiguity about “progress” is already there in post-modernity.

Increasingly for me, movies like MI and others seem nihilistic. Maybe this is better than the modernistic triumphalism of, say, early James Bond delighting in its techno-gadgetry and simplistic good (west) defeats bad (east). But it is largely darkness without a light – both in the sense of tracing the disease to its true source (which just leaves us with perplexity and overwhelm – they’ll just keep be more world-ending threats for the MI team to deal with) and in the sense of not offering any hopeful path to transformation.

All that said, i think engaging with popular culture in this way is a really great to get metacrisis and second renaissance views a wider audience :clap:

[This is an outflow without much editing!]

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  • Current culture embodies past practices.
  • When past practices fail in novel circumstances, chaos ensues.
  • Innovations emerge.
  • Through a contest of innovations, new culture arises.

That’s the theory of cultural history I’m working on off to the side. Honestly, the only things especially different about current culture-in-crisis compared to, say, the Bronze Age collapse, are geographic scope, human population numbers, and technical sophistication. Otherwise it’s pretty much an off-the-shelf epochal transition.

My specific research question is - “what should anyone do in current circumstances”? The short answer to that is “work the Ikigai”. The longer approach to that involves deeper root cause investigations for more targeted systemic leverage. In pursuing this line of argument, I found neither term “polycrisis” nor “metacrisis” necessary so far. My current thinking certainly has its genesis in response to numerous thinkers aligned with metamodernism and expressive of the metacrisis. But in other ways, my model feels postpartum. Less the challenge, more the response.

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Yea the first part (Dead Reckoning) is definitely not metacrisisy, I’d agree there. I do think this latest one has quite a different vibe, a sort of genuinely apocalyptic mood I was also trying to gesture at. But I also agree that even this latest one is far from a full-blown metacrisis film. That’s why I just say it points to the metacrisis rather than constituting an explicit engagement with the idea.

But I do think it goes beyond polycrisis. Polycrisis is sort of what you get when you string the whole series together and see how there’s one crisis after another that the world needs saving from, and maybe they’re connected in various way. But the idea that the reason you get one crisis after another is partly because of the methods you previously used to address an earlier crisis (e.g. the Rabbit’s foot retcon) takes you a step beyond that, and towards the idea of a cultural root cause. Not all the way to the metacrisis, sure, but headed in that direction.

And glad you agree about engaging with popular culture, I think of it as a kind of cultural diagnosis in its own right as well, a sort of temperature check of where we are at in the sphere of cultural production - a familiar critical theory idea, of course.