Only Life is Important
Autistic burn-out, queer joy, hyper-empathy and saving the world in The Fifth Element
In launching AutCasts, I was determined to make this newsletter a weekly event. For the last three weeks, however, I’ve been stuck on this essay, unable to put my thoughts in order or write anything coherent. It’s not the movie, so much as life itself, that has me stuck. The chaos of the last four months and competing work commitments finally caught up with me and I went into burn-out. I was just about able to cover the most urgent tasks on a rather extensive ‘To-Do’ list, while my writing fell by the wayside.
One of the first signs of burn-out for me is the overwhelming sense that there is so much to do but so little time to do it in and all I really want/need to do is sleep. That’s usually when I begin to feel that some things which seemed very important - like meeting a self-imposed weekly deadline - maybe aren’t so life and death after all. And perhaps I need to cut myself some slack and focus on the things that really have to get done while making some space for rest and self-care.
Time, and the sense that life is slipping through my fingers without me ever achieving what I mean to achieve, has dogged me my whole life. Every birthday sparks an existential crisis where it’s easier to focus on all the things I’ve failed to do rather than actual achievements. So I fill my life with tasks and activities and goals until I reach breaking point. In the midst of all this chaos I find myself ruminating on the ‘what-ifs’ of the past and future, rather than managing to stay grounded in the present and live my life in the here and now. In light of this, the message from this week’s movie, The Fifth Element, feels all the more resonant: time is not important, only life is important.
The Fifth Element (1997) is a sci-fi romp directed by Luc Besson set three hundred years from now, when the Earth is threatened by destruction from an ultimate evil which manifests every 5000 years. The Mondoshawan are an extra-terrestrial race who have built a weapon to destroy evil made of four stones representing the four elements – earth, wind, fire and water – placed around a fifth element. They are on course to return the stones to Earth and arm their weapon when their ship is attacked and destroyed. The stones are presumed stolen and the Surpeme Being dead. Leeloo (Milla Jovovich), aka the Supreme Being, survives the destruction and must reunite with the stones in order to save the world. Her contact on earth, Priest Cornelius Vito (Ian Holm) and a retired US space fighter Korben Dallas (Bruce Willis) join forces to keep the stones from falling into the hands of corporate overlord, Zorg (Gary Oldman) and arm the weapon before ultimate evil is unleashed.
Everything you create, you use to destroy…
The Fifth Element premiered the year I turned 13, just as I was about to enter secondary school and on the cusp of what would become a very turbulent adolescent. I was a very serious child and an even more serious teenager with multiple and profound concerns about the fate of the planet and its people. The Fifth Element, with all its camped-up shenanigans, captured my imagination like few other sci-fi movies. Apart from harbouring a crush on most of the cast, the quest to save the world and Leeloo’s deep well of compassion for a very flawed human race spoke directly to my inner social justice warrior.
Leeloo, who has presumably lying dormant for the last 5000 years, is catapulted into the late-capitalist dystopia of New York where pod-like apartments teeter above layers of smog and the world is held hostage by the insatiable greed of a single corporate overlord. Though delighted by some modern conveniences, like instant microwave chicken, Leeloo is also confronted by the full weight of five millennia of human cruelty, self-interest and violence. The shock of all that has happened, or all that humans have allowed to happen, sparks a tearful crisis and makes her question whether or not the world is actually worth saving.
From childhood, my encounters with the world’s injustices through books, films and documentaries would regularly bring me to tears. During my last years in primary school I was already involved in multiple altruistic iniatives - many of which were rooted in Ireland’s very problematic approach of bestowing charity on the “less fortunate” - to the bemusement of my family. My parents were socially conscious but not particularly proactive about it, and I gained a reputation as the insufferable “bleeding heart” of my family. Throughout my teens my consumer boycotts and micro-protests against injustice received many eye-rolls and became the butt of many jokes.
By the time I left school all I wanted to do was “help make the world a better place.” This included many misguided volunteer projects and some less-problematic activist initiatives while also pursuing a career in human rights. After five years of working between the UN and international NGOs, I was thoroughly disillusioned with the institutionalised and bureaucratised world of human rights and development and had gotten my fingers burned one too many times negotiating egos and power dynamics in supposedly progressive and feminist in activist spaces. I returned to writing as one of the few safe ways I found to channel my often overpowering need to contribute something to ending this late-capitalist dystopian nightmare of the present.
‘We call it human nature…’
James Baldwin, writing of empathy in 1977, said ‘people can cry more easily than they can change.’ What are Leeloo’s tears, or my tears, if we do nothing about them?
Empathy, without responsibility may even be dangerous, “a gateway drug” writes Namwali Serpell, “to white saviourism, with its familiar blend of propaganda, pornography and paternalism. It’s an emotional palliative that distracts us from the real inequalities, on the page and on screen, to say nothing of our lives.”
The neurotypical world upholds empathy - the ability to feel what others feel, to put yourself in another person’s shoes - as one of the maximum expressions of humanity. One of the most persistent myths autistic people face is that we lack empathy, the implication being that autistic people are not fully human by failing to perform empathy in the expected ways. Often the reality is the opposite: we can have so much empathy and feel injustice so deeply that it makes existing in this troubled world extremely painful.
But perhaps it is our common-sense understanding empathy that is flawed? We can be moved by another person’s story but, can we ever really pretend to know how it feels to be them? Perhaps we should abandon our aspiration to empathy as the ultimate expression of humanity, in favour of response-able practices of care and affect?
‘I was built to protect not to love…’
We are never really told what the Fifth Element is, nor how she is supposed to work. When our heroes arrive at the temple in Egypt to assemble the weapon, they are lost as to how to turn it - or rather her - on. Leeloo in the meantime has lost her faith in humanity and fails to respond once the stones are armed:
What's the use in saving life when you see what you do with it? (…) I don't know love. I was built to protect not to love, so there is no use for me other than this.
Dallas tells her he loves her and the Fifth Element comes to life when they kiss.
As cringe-some as this feels, message is not the worst ever: our universe is powered by and can be saved by five elements: fire, water, earth, wind and, crucially, love.
Even with all of the destruction in the universe, the potential for humans to feel and act out of love may be our one saving grace. As burned-out and cynical and jaded as I may have become after 38 years on this earth, I too am convinced that love, care, and affect make us worth saving. In fact, love, for ourselves, the planet and our human and non-human kin, might be the one thing powerful enough to save us from this nightmare of our own creation.
Negative, I am a meat popsicle…
To wrap up with some less philosophical musings, 26 years since premiering, The Fifth Element, still sparks much joy in me. The two hour romp has everything: a post-Borrowers, pre Bilbo Baggins, Ian Holm, a radiant Mila Jovovich, a monosyllabic Bruce Willis, gender-queer icon Ruby Rod (Chris Tucker), an extremely 90s conception of futuristic fashion alá Jean Paul Gautier and an equally 90s soundtrack.
Leaving aside the nostalgia factor, The Fifth Element is not without flaws. I’ll leave it to the queens at The Bechdel Cast to breakdown all the ways this film fails when viewed through an intersectional feminist lens. It would also be remiss not to mention the accusations of rape and domestic violence against director Luc Besson and actor Gary Oldman, respectively. As is the tendency when it comes to violence of this nature, multiple women’s claims have been dismissed by the courts.
Next week we’ll return to our scheduled programming with a look at the harsh realities of (un)employment, bowling and home decoration in the 1998 neo-noir, crime comedy, romp The Big Lebowski!
In the meantime, if you have any thoughts on burn-out, hyper-empathy, saving the world or Leeloo’s thermal bandages and the male gaze: