Moonfall and the Denaturalization of Nature

Let me confess one of my guilty pleasures, for which the contempt of almost all my friends befell me: I quite like Roland Emmerich’s Moonfall. The premise is that our Moon is an artificial megastructure constructed by the ancestors of humanity (who were more technologically advanced than their present-day descendants) to regulate life on earth and populate it with humans. These ancestors were hunted by rogue artificial intelligence (AI) that grew too strong.

Two features I find interesting in the film are: (1) the conflict that structures the entire human history is the one between two strands of AI, not between humanity and AI; (2) the denaturalization of what we spontaneously perceive as a gigantic natural object—the Moon’s ragged surface is just a mask aimed at deceiving humans and concealing a complex machine inside.

What if we universalize this premise for our conception of nature? The most “natural” features (spontaneity, chaos, etc.) are instead a deceptive appearance concealing a machine. Therein resides the lesson of the latest biogenetic discoveries: We are entering a new phase in which nature itself melts into air. The main consequence of the scientific breakthroughs in biogenetics is the end of nature. Once we know the rules of its construction, natural organisms are transformed into objects amenable to manipulation. Nature, human and inhuman, is thus “desubstantialized,” deprived of its impenetrable density, of what Heidegger called “earth.” This compels us to give a new twist to Freud’s title Unbehagen in der Kultur, which translates to Discontent, Uneasiness, In Culture. With the latest developments, the discontent shifts from culture to nature itself. Nature is no longer the “natural,” reliable, “dense” background of our lives; it now appears as a fragile mechanism that can explode at any point into a catastrophe.

Crucial here is the interdependence of man and nature. By reducing man to just another natural object whose properties can be manipulated, we lose not (only) humanity, but nature itself. In this sense, Francis Fukuyama is right: Humanity relies on some notion of “human nature” as the thing we have inherited—the impenetrable dimension in/of ourselves into which we are born/thrown. The paradox is that there is man only insofar as there is impenetrable inhuman nature (Heidegger’s “earth”). Access to the genome opened the prospect of biogenetic interventions and with that, species can freely change/redefine themselves and their own coordinates. This prospect effectively emancipates humankind from the constraints of a finite species, from its enslavement to the “selfish genes.” However, this ultimate freedom (of genetic self-reconstruction) coincides with ultimate non-freedom: I am reduced to an object that can be endlessly refashioned.

Here, we come to the other interesting feature of Moonfall (which allows the film to blur the radical implication of the denaturalization of nature): The conflict that underlies the story is the struggle between two kinds of AI, which both act as entities with an active will and intention. What is thereby lost is something that one cannot but call the utter stupidity of nature. Nature is stupidly indifferent toward our (humanity’s) plight, and conspiracy theories aim precisely at obfuscating this stupidity, as we saw with the Covid pandemic.

Moonfall ultimately celebrates conspiracy theorist K. C. Houseman, the only one who knows what is going on, even though he is totally excluded from the official academic sphere. In order to save the world, Houseman joins forces with a disgraced astronaut and the boss of NASA (played by Halle Berry) who also has doubts about the official version of what is going on. Here things take an almost Freudian twist. At the film’s end, the astronaut and the boss of NASA decide to give themselves another chance and form a couple again, but for this to happen, Houseman has to sacrifice himself and die in the bosom of the Moon to terminate the bad AI. Houseman does this to impress his mother and prove to her that he can do a really great thing. At the end, they are united forever in the virtual space of the Moon’s good AI. So the couple can only be produced through the self-erasing sacrifice of Houseman—there can be no happy couple without the sacrifice of the subject obsessed with incestuous links. We also learn that Houseman’s self-sacrifice is the same self-sacrifice of the primordial “good” AI, which erased itself as an actual agent to enable life to flourish on Earth. We are up to our knees in sacrificial theology: Humanity owes its existence to the sacrifice of a supernatural intelligence.