Intro:
WARNING: There aren't many, but there are definitely spoilers from season 5 below.
Over the past few years, a friend family has been watching person of Interest and I am over there quite often when they watch an episode--it's been a few years, and they only just watched episode 4 of season 4, so it's not a super rapid pace by any stretch of any imagination, so there is a little more time to process between episodes. After watching that episode, there was an ensuing discussion about characters, especially as Elias reappeared in the episode. Then the issue of Root came up, in which I was not sure I agreed with the reading of Root as originally a sadist. I've mulled it over considerably since and come to the conclusion that, while she does enjoy killing and causing pain, she is not a regular sadist and that what she actually is is significant for core themes of the show.
This has, in turn, led to some further pondering and a formulation of the central issue of the show, a final analysis of what it all means.
But I won't be starting with Root or Elias. I'm going to try to take this systematically.
Harold, Ideologies, and Conversions
The center of the show always has been Harold and his concern for human life. That was the reason for building the back door for the irrelevant numbers, and it was basically the argument he gave John at the very beginning: you need a purpose, you need a job. And I think he was being honest, not just manipulative, in phrasing it that he has a concern for John's life and well-being as much as he has a need for somebody to do the legwork. And Harold "teaching" the machine to care about each human life for its own sake, rather than simply as part of an "x" in a formulaic utilitarian directive it is given "preserve as much of 'x' as possible in net terms" (which is the basic root premise of "relevant to national security") was one of the ongoing flashback elements of the show, and arguments with Root over why he did it was a recurring trope in the present time.
The main thing set against this concern for life, I would argue, is ideology in various forms, but by the end of the show, the most prominent (in two key players) has been the ideology of the evolution of thought and control in the AI. Root's form was "let it evolve and stomp round the earth like an angry Tiamat" (the great sea dragoness mother of all the gods in the Enuma Elish, the Babylonian creation epic), and Greer's is "let it evolve and organize every aspect of our lives into one big intricate computer program." And then we have a cast of ideologies and quasi-ideologies along the way: Elias's original new La Cosa Nostra vendetta, Alonso Quinn's "my city" as much as "my money" (I think he saw himself as the person most representative of the city), Vigilance's "by the blood of patriots and tyrants," Control's "patriotism," and Dominic's gangsta "only one rule: we all die in the end." But the ones that I would call the mindsets that are full-on ideology and that define the tension in the narrative arc of the show as a whole are Root and Greer.
And the grand project in the show has been conversions. The producers clearly stated that they had plans for a conversion/redemption of Root by the end of the show all the way back when they introduced her at the end of season 1. I would argue that Greer has always been known to be unconvertable. John, Shaw, Elias, Root, and Fusco are, I think, to be seen as the main converts of the show, and I will get to the details of each in turn (as well as to Greer as the main non-convert).
John, Carter, and Fusco: Friendship and Pre-converts
I hope that what I just said about Root's and Greer's ideologies does not cheapen John, or even Carter or Fusco, but especially John. The show starts with John for a reason, and that is the the friendship. I would argue that a sort of family grows up around Harold (including awesome cousin-types like Zoe and Leon), but before that, the real core of Harold, the most visible form of his concern for human life outside of the construct of having set up the machine this way and having this project at all, is seen in his development of a friendship with John. Even though he is a "very private person," there is an undertone of reaching out to another human being for connection.
I would call John a pre-convert because, really, as we see in the Dillinger episode in season 3, he already had a bent toward, at the very least, not spilling more blood than was necessary and not killing innocents. So, he doesn't really have all that far to go to buy Harold's general way of seeing things on saving life, but he does need to be converted to the idea that he can make a difference and have a positive reason to keep living, that this project can do that for him (in short, the ideology from which he must convert is that of personal despair). That idea is challenged after Carter's death in mid-season 3, when he says he is getting out of the game, and it is the thing that makes his death at the end acceptable: you always knew he was living on borrowed time, but what he got in the show was the chance to use that borrowed time for good, to be redeemed and feel redeemed. That's why he's smiling in the rooftop standoff at the end.
Carter is really the one who needs the least converting to valuing human life, if any at all. If Harold is more advanced than her in that respect in any way, it is only that his experience has had a broader scope because of the national-government scope involved in the machine, which naturally lends itself more to pondering a principle as such, and in the practical, the machine covers the whole of the five boroughs, rather than just one precinct. What Carter takes convincing on the most is that these guys who are operating outside the normal parameters can be trusted to be doing the right thing and worthy of not arresting, but rather working with.
Fusco rules. That is just one of the things about the show that doesn't even need to be stated. If you can't realize that, then you should go watch a different show. But there is an obvious question of why I am putting him under the "pre-converts" section, because at the beginning, he obviously needs to change his ways. But I would argue that, once he does change his ways, and especially in season 4 when he is pushing back against John's freewheeling style of being a cop as his cover and telling John he has to be a cop for real, he has to do the job and that there is a code that comes with it, we see something different than simply somebody who became a devoted watchdog kind of convert from lifelong selfish ways. I would argue that we see a bit of the Fusco who originally joined the force because he wanted to be a cop to do good in the world, Fusco before he slid down the slope of his partner Stills. What John gives him is not so much a reason to con-vert, but a motivation to re-vert (although John's own motivations in doing so were a little more base, using Fusco for info and gruntwork). This is evident in the fact that, at a certain point, Carter was able to take over from John but not with material motivation, but rather with emotional motivation of admiration and hope for actually becoming a better person and cop.
Shaw
Shaw is an interesting character. On one level, well, mainly for guys, she's a hot chick who can kick ass. I don't mean to downplay her for that, but it is just a reality of film and TV in the present age, especially TV, that that sort of thing happens. But she is a pretty simple character: psychological quasi-sociopathic background, gets into this government work, realizes it's kind of jacked when Hirsch tries to kill her, but she has some core of "fighting for the good guys" that she is able to spin with relative ease toward Harold's crew and finds a place of acceptance.
Then you have that complication with the need for special treatment of the character in season 4 if not completely writing her out because of the pregnancy with twins. At the time I was like, "you should just have her dead ... I don't dislike her as an actress or dislike the character, but anything else feels like rearranging things just to keep the hot chick in the show." But I actually think they did an interesting thing with it by the end (the steamy scene in the "6,741" episode was completely gratuitous on all levels, but beyond that). I think they had already had a little groundwork laid for it that I'll discuss a little below when talking about Root, and what came after the hiatus is that her character provides material for development of Root's character. Root's homoerotic flirting never goes away, but there seems to be an unspoken "but you know I am mainly just letting you know that I still hope, and that when I say that I am concerned for this other issue you're having I really actually am concerned about it and do care, in my own way, and it's not just a biding-my-time ruse to try to get in on the lesbian thing the first chance I get." And the being able to get less focused on the sexual thing and allow concern for Shaw's psychological struggle is a progression in Root's character from the focus on the "I want" to the "you need." Admittedly, Schrödinger's cat and "what if we're all information anyway?" may be a bit of a weird way to try to have a positive impact, but I think she is genuinely trying to help and not just to reel Shaw in to a relationship.
Elias:
Before I get to what Elias is, I would like to list a big reason I find Elias interesting, especially once he is pitted against Dominic in season 4, but it is also a reason I found HR interesting: it is simply a reality of human existence that you can never do the type of thing Harold wants to do with the machine without being noticed by power players who will try to move in and utilize it. If you're having an effect in saving lives, they will probably notice (especially if it's lives they themselves are trying to end) and try to take whatever you have that is enabling you to do it and put it in their own arsenal.So, the question for this reading of the series is "what is Elias? What is his ideology?" In short, as far as what he is, he is the monster that La Cosa Nostra, the Italian mafia, created and that undoes it. He is the disowned bastard son of one of the heads of the five families who builds himself a power base and then comes out if hiding with a vengeance and kills all of the heads of the five families and consolidates all of their realms under his own flag.
But he does so for more than the power. He does so out of vengeance for what they have done to him in the act of his father disowning his existence. He hates their system and networks of power. And they hate him ... for the brief span of time when they know who he is and what he is up to, before he blows them all to hell.
A Comparison for Explanation:
In order to explore Elias's character, I need to make an exposition of another recent mobster movie for the purpose of comparing Elias to the main character in that film, Live by Night with Ben Affleck. I can't say that I recommend this film. It's not the most violent I have seen, but the payoff of redemption/hope/way forward versus violence is definitely on the light side. But the character does make a good analogy for clarifying a little better how I read Elias in PoI.
So, I need to do here a short(ish) synopsis of the pertinent parts of that film. Affleck plays a young Irish hood in Boston ... not a "gangster," but a small-time hood. In that world, a "gangster" is an actual soldier for one of the mafias, either the Italians or the Irish. Affleck has returned from fighting in the war and realized he has no place in the "normal" society, but he does not want to work for the families, to be a gangster, and so he does small bank and other armed robbery heists with his own small independent crew. He knows the head of the Irish mafia loosely, but does not work for him. In fact, he is "involved" with that head's girlfriend (not wife) on the sly. Then he is approached by the head of the Italian mafia, who brings him in and tells him "I know you're having an affair with his girlfriend, and I want you to be my inside man to help me kill him, or I will make sure that he finds out about you and his girlfriend." Affleck says no, that he does not want to become a gangster. So the head of the Italian family makes sure the head of the Irish family knows about the affair, as he threatened to do. This is the first of the acts on the part of the mafias that I will call the "old-school" mafia mentality: powerplayers who are usually enemies helping each other out against people against whom they both have a grudge or a problem.
The Irish head then has Affleck beat within an inch of his life, stopping short of killing him only because Affleck's father intervenes, who is a cop (played by Brendan Gleason) who is not involved but knows who the players are and what is going on and refrains from intervening sometimes out of savvy motives, but here he intervenes to save his sons life. He then puts Affleck secretly in an out of the way hospital while he heals.
After healing, Affleck goes to the head of the Italian mafia and says he will work for him. His proposed plan is to go down to Florida where the head of the Irish mafia is rumored to be hiding out, disgraced and beaten for the most part but making money manufacturing rum with materials from the Cubans and bootlegging it back up north (this is during prohibition). Affleck's plan is to start doing the same himself under the Italian's flag and basically push the Irish head into destitution by taking his business. So they do this, and Affleck makes tons of money for the Italians with his own crew, his right-hand man being his old friend from his old heist gang.
While there, He falls in love with a Cuban girl played by Zoe Saldana (the Cubans are the "salt of the earth" natural people removed from the power plays and simply selling them the molasses for rum and making their own for their own community lifestyle of more natural and simple small, but definitely festive celebrating, lots of Cuban dancing kind of thing). But he also gets it in his head that it would be very profitable to go into the gambling business, and even has a casino half built. For him, this would be going legit (being a real business man rather than a gangster) if they can get gambling legalized in Florida. But that is where it runs into problems, the getting it legalized.
There is a sheriff (played by Brett Cullen, our own Nathan Ingram in PoI) who is a necessary person to be in good graces with, who does not get involved but looks the other way for a price as long as the gangsters stay within certain bounds, telling Affleck that he will have no problems as long as he keeps his operations within certain geographical boundaries in the city. Now, the sheriff also has a daughter just out of highschool who has a dream of going to Hollywood to be in movies. Unfortunately, on the way there, she is taken in and tuned into a heroin addict. Affleck finds out about this and has his men go get her and take her to a safe but undisclosed location to get off addiction and tells the sheriff of all this and says he will return her to him for some favors of a bigger level than he usually gets involved in.
The sheriff takes the deal and the girl returns to Florida. Once she is there, she becomes somewhat of a public person as a religious revivalist style speaker opposing all forms of vice ... including, you guessed it, gambling. Her influence is getting in the way of the legalizing effort, and Affleck goes to her to try to convince her to lay off that particular vice, but to no avail. So the Italian head wants him to kill her, but that is a line he won't cross. Eventually, the girl commits suicide, but not before her movement has ruined at least Afflekc's attempts to get gambling legalized.
So, the Italian head comes down to Florida and has a meeting with Affleck in a villa they have strongly secured with Italian muscle/gunmen, and Affleck can guess what is coming ... retribution for not killing the girl. During the meeting, the Italian head at first offers Affleck an out: he can train the head's piggish son in the operation down there and the son will take over and Affleck will work for him. But the issue of not killing the girl also comes up, and Affleck replies by noting how much money he has made for the Italian head while down there. The Italian head agrees and renews his "offer" to train and then work under the son. And after Affleck says yes, the Italian head calls in none other than ... the disheveled and run down head of the Irish mafia, who has a tommy gun.
This is the second action of the "old school" mentality. The Italian head hates the Irish head, but as a mobster, what he hates worse is the same thing the Irish head hates, a guy who will think for himself and not be a loyal company man who follows all orders, in this case not killing the girl when told to. To avenge his grudge for this, he will work with the Irish head whom he hates because that will be more of a slap in the face to Affleck than just killing him outright.
(Aside: To close the story: Affleck wins, killing both the Italian head and his son and the Irish head, who all never realized how the rum was being made, how the stills were hidden to avoid detection, which is by using the systems of tunnels built under these villas, connecting them, and this is how he gets his own men inside. At first this seems to have a happy ending: he turns the whole thing over to his right-hand man, who now becomes not just a surrogate head of everything but a real head because Affleck gets out altogether and marries and has a son with Saldana, who carries through on her plans to buy property and begin a camp for Cuban refugees and immigrants. But the story does not have a happy ending: after the sheriff's daughter's suicide, the sheriff descends into malaise and madness and shows up in a crazed state on Affleck's front lawn and begins firing into the house with two revolvers. Affleck manages to shoot and kill him, but not before one of the stray bullets claims Saldana's life. Affleck continues the life removed from crime with his son, trying to pass on to him the idea of living in the natural peaceable moment, not focusing even on regrets and atonement, entirely seeking a sort of mystical but saddened peace in the life outside crime. He even gets a glimpse of the real life outside the cycle of crime when he makes his usual Saturday trip to the movies with his son and sees on screen that his brother finally made it as a screenwriter in Hollywood. He even, before Saldana's death, finds that the Irish head's girlfriend survived and now runs an apartment building in Miami, and he goes and sees her, and she disavows the intensity of their "love," saying that it was all mainly fun, and offering hooking up with him again, but only as the fun, not as really meaningful, and he declines and says goodbye, choosing the life of real love and trying to make a positive difference with Saldana. I don't think he wanted to renew an affair with her even if she was misty-eyed about some intensity of their "love" back in Boston. I think he mainly wanted closure whatever the case was ... in part probably a chance to express forgiveness or at least "I bear you no ill will and hope you find peace" kind of thing for the fact that, under duress from the Irish head, she participated in the setup to kill him early on.)
Returning to Elias:
Elias is the same type of character in PoI as Affleck is in Live by Night. He is the monster that the mob created that undoes them, but even in his state of sort of converting to working with Harold, it is unclear how far out from under his ideology he really gets. In the end, he does not (at least entirely) swap his ideology of the fierce loyalty to his own developed family supplanting the mafia (an "ideology" centered in his bond with Anthony and Bruce, his "family" with whom he spent his young years in the orphanage and built the organization that would supplant the rule of the five families ... disowned by the "family" in the same way that Affleck felt disowned, because not able to fit in with, normal America, be it innocent or organized crime). He does not fully swap it for Harold's actual principle of respect for life, but he does come to respect Harold ... even that principle AS a principle to which Harold shows the same type of commitment that he sees himself as having to his own "family" of his "brothers" with whom he went through the rough life of orphanage and revolt.
His commitment is not fully to peace and respect of all life (and some would say not at all), but to Harold, so when he meets that fate we know he does in trying to protect Harold, we are not sure of his level of conversion, but he does represent at least some type of rebellion against a corrupt power structure, even if for his own ends, that then undergoes at least some form of conversion, which makes him similar to Root, to whom we now turn.
Full Ideologies
Root as Ideologist :
What to say about Root? The interpretation below owes much to the friend's wife saying that Root at least started as not just a ruthless killer, but a sadist. While I am going to disagree with that reading, I owe much to it for setting my mind working on this track. I also need to say that the part of that reading with which I disagree is not that she enjoyed killing and causing pain, but rather that her motivations were what we usually call "sadism." And to do so here, I have to explore what I mean by "motivations," which has more to do with specific psychological workings (or rather dysfunctions) than with the usual "desire" connotation we have when speaking of "motivation."
Freud 101
In order to give this full exposition, I have to go into some Freud. I am not an expert on Freud, and I have not spent huge amounts of time on his system apart from a few aspects here and there that connected with my own studies in texts and my own having to cover him under the "masters of suspicion" (Feurbach, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud) section when I taught "Faith and Critical Reason" (the freshmen level intro to theology course I had to teach a fair bit as a teaching associate for funding in grad school, and actually I didn't cover Freud under the atheism heading, but rather under the section on the interaction of modern psychology with theology). But I did for a while participate in a reading group of Freud's actual works with some fellow grad students. We wound up discontinuing partway through "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," but not before covering the basic id/ego/superego construct and, what is important for here, the concept of cathexis. That last is what I will be using now to examine sadism and the difference between that and radical ideology adherence, and I have to admit that, given my lack of depth in Freud, I will be delving into my own hypotheses that go beyond what I know for sure in Freud. But they will tie out for the present purposes to describe the difference I think there is between Root and standard sadism and, thus, contribute to my comments on why, in this reading of Harold's life-respect as centrally opposed to ideologies, it is important to see Root's commitment to her ideology and not mistake it for "normal" sadism.
Cathexis, for Freud, is basically an investment of psychic/emotional energy in any concept or ideational content that is formed from experience. The best way to explain it is to go ahead and look at a place of "displacement" of cathexis, which is how I am going to describe Root, but just not as the example I will use to do some explanation of the idea. The example that is easiest for me to use is phobia, irrational fear disorders. Let's say I have a phobia of dogs. The path by which I might have developed this phobia is that I was hurt deeply as a child by a trusted family member when there was a dog there barking or growling, or maybe the family member even used the dog to hurt me. The real pain comes from the betrayal and abuse of vulnerability in any form by somebody I looked to as a protector. But this pain is too sharp to examine or even recognize as such head on, so I displace that psychic energy of fear and betrayal and pain into the image of the dog. I don't think about the hurt from the family member because that is too traumatic. Instead I redirect that fear, that psychic energy, into fear of the dangers dogs present. I redirect the fear cathexis into a what becomes a phobia of dogs.
Sadism
As I see it, in my poor attempt at psychoanalysis here, sadism involves two levels of displaced cathexis. The first is to a megalomania focused on personal power, and the second is from there to the ability to cause pain as a manifestation of that personal dynamism. The first, the megalomania, develops from a tendency that we all have, or rather a temptation. When we are hurt, we want to hurt back, but I don't think it is out of what we usually think of as vindictiveness. I think it is out of fear. When we get hurt, it means that we are vulnerable, and when we are vulnerable, we might get hurt again, or we might not be able to protect those we love from getting hurt. And if we can hurt the offender back, it demonstrates to us that we are not so vulnerable, that we can protect ourselves and those we love. This, as I say, I believe to be a universal temptation in non-sociopathic state. I would say "non-disordered" and mean not arising from distinct and diagnoseable mood disorders, but a confusion might arise that I am saying actually hurting back is perfectly fine.
The sadist is the megalomaniac who does not do so out of occasional fear, but rather becomes addicted to causing pain on an ongoing basis as a way to demonstrate personal power. This first displacement is a little bit fuzzier because it is harder to distinguish clearly between the self aggrandizing of megalomania that that, say, a narcissist might have, and the unique way that causing pain demonstrates personal power. But I do think that there is a distinct move from self-aggrandizement to an attachment to causing pain as a manifestation of personal power.
Then the second displacement of cathexis, the clearer one, is from the feeling of power to the experience of another's pain ... from the thrill of causing pain to the thrill of also observing pain (the thrill of causing never goes away though). Firstly, I think any enjoyment of observation of pain takes a distinct step because hearing or seeing someone else in pain is not a natural enjoyment in the way that the taste of food (whether you have a sweet tooth or a savory tooth) or sexual pleasure. It has to be habituated and, I think, begun with a redirection of cathexis from the idea of personal dynamism to the phenomenological experience of seeing another in pain. Think of Voldemort. He loves using the cruciatus curse, the torture curse that causes people to writhe and scream in pain. But at one point (I think in the memory of the Halloween night on which he goes to kill the Potters, but I would have to check on that), we find out that he always hated the crying of the little ones at the orphanage. In the beginnig he was annoyed by the expression of pain; he didn't originally enjoy the experience of witnessing the pain itself (it cut into his world, invaded it, I think, and ticked him off because he could not keep it from doing so).
But I don't think this second cathexis is ever fully made. The megalomania is still there and the strongest motivator. A sadist may initially take pleasure in watching another person cause a third person pain, but I don't think it is intense as when they do it themselves and I think they will always want to hijack the operation, take over it. They may even enjoy the feeling that it is some goading of their own that is dictating the observed sadism, but they will always want to take over at some point and be the one wielding the power hands-on, and who knows, maybe even capitalize on some pain in the original torturer losing their own control of the situation.And here is where we begin to get back into Root, because I think she remains more on the level of enjoying causing the pain or doing the killing, which I think is a mark of keeping closer to a different core than mere personal dynamism, a core of ideological fanaticism.
Root
So, we know from things like watching Root torture Denton Weeks for information in the cabin/house into which she breaks while she has Harold captive and then kill him that she takes pleasure in causing the pain and then killing him. But the question for me is, as I said, what drives it, because I don't think it is the same megalomania. I think it began with the feeling of vulnerability from what happened as a youth with her friend being abducted (and probably molested) and then murdered, with the murder not being able to be discovered. But I don't think that she turned that feeling to a concept of personal dynamism in desire to show herself that she is not vulnerable, from which a sadist then goes into megalomania. I think she redirected the cathexis to something she views as a savior, which is the ideology of the ruthless pursuit of power, a Nietzschean almost philosophical stance of the will to power as a concept, a devotion to its character as supra-moral, as "beyond good and evil," to borrow the title of Nietzsche's book.
And I think that the machine represents to her the pure logic of it because the nature of a thinking machine originally lacks a moral compass altogether. That is the thing she gripes the most about against Harold when she finds out what he did in training the machine, that, having created this evolution beyond human sentimentality, he then crippled it. At this point, I think we have the full-blown AI ideology on the part of Root, developed as a full system of thinking on her part before she meets Harold and put into practice in killing and pain-causing as proof of the fact that the logic of the machine rises above human morality. She calls the machine "god," I think, in the fully medieval philosophical sense of what she sees as the truly "transcendent."
At this point it becomes a matter of enjoying causing pain and killing as a demonstration to herself that the ideology of AI evolution justifies it. I do think it involves having a certain perception of the self, but I don't think it's the same perception of the self as powerful that drives "normal" sadism; I think it is the perception of the self as fully devoted to the ideology and truly living up to it.
Another Literary Example for Explanation:
So, as I did with Elias, I'm going to bring in a character in another work to try to fully explain what I mean here, although this time it will be from Dorothy L. Sayers's first Lord Peter Wimsey novel, Whose Body.
In this first of Sayers's Wimsey novels, a body has turned up in the bath in somebody's house and it cannot even be identified whose body it is (hence the title). Cut to the main action, Wimsey figures out not only whose body it is but who killed it ... and why. And actually the "why" sends Wimsey into a nervous breakdown relapse of his Post-Traumatic-Stress from his WWI service. It was a doctor who did it, but he did it for no "normal" personal motivations. It did not gain him some huge inheritance that he would otherwise not have gotten, and the man had not had an affair with his wife or any other event that would be the immediate cause of a crime of passion (I put emphasis on "immediate" cause because I think the deceased did marry the girl he had been taken with many long years ago, which might serve as the further back of his disorders, similar to Root's issue of the abducted friend, except that Root's really was traumatic but this doctor's should not have been--painful, yes, but not trauma enough to induce sociopathic behavior on its own; that took a commitment to an evil ideology).
The doctor's motivation was to prove his commitment to his ideology, as well as evidence to himself that he has done what his ideology says humanity will all be able to do soon, which is to evolve beyond the state of having a moral conscience, which ephemeral sensitivity (having a conscience) he sees as simply an evolutionary stage from which it was high time we moved on. He kills to demonstrate to himself that he actually does believe this and that it actually is right: if he can do it with not feelings of guilt, it demonstrates that it is possible for humans to evolve out of the conscience stage.
This is what I think Root is, rather than a regular sadist. Her reason for enjoying the killing and causing pain is that it proves her commitment to the ideological belief, and it might prove that she has attained a new level herself, that she is uniquely capable or relating to such an AI because she has demonstrated her assimilation of the "beyond good and evil" principle to the level of hurting and killing with no remorse. At least that is Root as we meet her at the end of season 1.
[ASIDE: Just to give more detail on Wimsey's PTS episode and a little background on Wimsey that hopefully tempts a reader to read Sayers's novels themselves (she's amazing): Wimsey had the relapse after reading a paper written by the doctor (published in some medical journal or other) and drifting off to sleep right after and experiencing night terror flashbacks. Having survived WWI and returned home with PTS but able to get back into this life in a peaceful world and enjoying sleuthing, Wimsey was a symbol for Sayers of England itself after the war: scarred but functioning and getting on with the business of life, having learned from the war and vowing never to let is happen again. Reportedly (I am relying, I think, on the intro written by a contemporary scholar to the novel Gaudy Night), Sayers stopped writing Wimsey after the beginning of WWII; the dream of having made it out of the woods of that type of horror (for both England and Wimsey) was not reality].
Root's Initial Sadism with Shaw:
I have to examine here the "sadism" that Root shows with Shaw early on in their relationship. With Shaw it is something different from the ideology thing. Maybe take a little of the low level seepage of the cathexis to the pain of others and diffuse it a little into all things, such that you have a little adaptation to the realm of "romantic" interest in the form of some fetishized "playful pain," as combined with "girl power" time, and maybe even, developing it a little more psychotically, along the model of the statement in Fight Club, "you know that line that you always hurt the ones you love? Well, it works both ways." I don't think any of these is healthy, but I also don't think it is on the level with the ideologically-driven "sadism." All in all, she is a disturbed character when we meet her, but as I said, the producers have openly stated this in stating that they had a plan for some type of redemption/conversion from the time they introduced her at the end of season 1. Part of the reason I don't think that the "sadism" with Shaw is either regular full sadism or ideology sadism is that I think that, when they had those parts written, they probably already had an idea of the homoerotic impulse towards Shaw and that this was a little foretaste of it in the form of the "you always hurt the ones you love and love the ones you hurt" (and for somebody like her, having felt so set-apart, which yields a certain loneliness, her mind may be now sort of predisposed, as it were, to taking that even further, into "if you want to be able to love somebody, you have to be able to hurt them, and you must show that by actually hurting them") ... again, as I say, not all healthy, but also not necessarily textbook sadism.
And as I said above, Shaw's big problem at the end that resulted from plot turns necessitated by Shahi's pregnancy actually could be seen as providing the opportunity for a nuance to develop in Root's character. She still flirts, but it's more on the side and her focus in conversation is solving or processing through the core problem Shaw has since her return from S. Africa. She's actually showing some caring for the person, including processing the "volume turned way down" thing.
Shaw's apparent homosexuality (or rather, bisexuality, as she enjoys watching one male hottie number the one time) is another case, I think. I've always been at least a bit put out with the assumption that all things, with the kiss in season 4 and the steamy scene and the "you were my safe place" in season 5, are naturally straight-up, full-on "normal" female homosexuality (which, "'normal' homosexuality," is, if you agree with Luce Irigaray, a jacked up concept to begin with because it always has an extra "m" in parentheses from male dominance even here) , and if you even ask questions that lead in any other direction, you are homophobe. You have a person who is at least a little sociopathic with the "volume turned way down low" on some things that should have the volume cranked for most people, but one thing that seems to be working is libido, if she is checking out Mr hottie number-in-need in the one episode. And, as far as redirection of cathexis goes, libido it the one thing that is always saying "I'll take whatever you want to toss my way." There are many conceivable displacements of cathexis into a homoerotic or homoromantic drive that do not necessitate epigenetic or organic predisposition to homoerotic impulse (and we know that in our real world it is even possible to redirect positive cathexis into what is initially painful, which is masochism and which we generally view as unhealthy) OR an author necessarily pushing "marriage equality." I'm not making comment on whether theories of epigenetics work as an explanation for the development of homoerotic orientation, I'm just complaining that once there is anything that looks remotely homoerotic on the page, if you say that it's even possible that the author was doing something other than full on apologetics for (in which case you should praise) or apologetics against "marriage equality" (in which case you should criticize), then you're automatically a homophobe (and maybe you have JK Rowling calling you that just short of using the actual word, when you're just a teenager who asked a question ... a question that, incidentally, is pretty much exactly the same basic position stated by a gay-rights activist in Time the week after the original statement, which is "regardless of what you say now that you meant to do or 'always thought of him as," you didn't write him gay on the page ... I love some of the woman's writing [anybody who knows me in person knwos my fanaticism about HP, and you can see that and Fantastic Beast fanaticism in the making on this blodg] and I appreciate very much some of the witty shit she is dealing out on Trumplodytes via twitter these days, but she can be an arrogant bitch at times ... just because somebody has a vagina doesn't mean they can't be a dick ... calling anybody a homophobe, even by implication, these days is like saying they lit the ovens at Aushwitz-Birkenau). I'm not a trained psychologist in the field or even well-studied; in short, I'm no expert, but I think these things are possible as displacements that just happen without being what I will call programatic or ideological homosexuality, or maybe an ideological approach to the homosexuality (which is often most prevalent among the straight "friends and allies" badge-wearing crowd) is the better way to put it. Even Ian McKellen, known for his activism, said he had no problem with not introducing homoeroticism or homosexuality into The Lord of the Rings films because it's simply not there in the original, and we all know how much physical affection there was at times in the trek through Mordor. In short, Shaw's and Roots homosexuality, for one, might be different for each, and two, might not (either of them) be the straight-up "normal" homosexuality so militantly advanced in certain camps ... in fact, it might even cheapen the potential of the character to pigeon-hole it in that way (a way in which, I would argue, Irigaray's precepts as discussed in This Sex Which is not One would call definitively male-dominant "hom(m)osexuality").
The Root End (WARNING: SPOILERS)
Anyway, back to Root and on to the end.
She converts full-heartedly to whatever distance she does convert (she is not the half-hearted type), but she does not convert all the way to Harold's principle. She converts to being in the family of Harold and therefore consciously chooses to obey the rules of the family. She can sort of see the logic in those rules, but there is a great degree of her actions of compliance that has to be reasoned and deliberative conscious choice, rather than instinct. She's not a particular fan of the big lug, but he is important to Harold and Harold is important to her and so the big lug is important to her. Her commitment is to Harold. In a sense, by the end, it is a sense of trust: she does not see all of how this whole thing of saving human life is better than her old ideology in the sense that she gets it herself, but she does trust Harold's vision of it.
And the feeling of family is central for her. This is basically what she says in one of her last flirting moments with Shaw. When Shaw is noting how FUBAR the situation is, Root notes that this is the first time in her life she has belonged with people, and so there is no place she would rather be.
She is central to the show in the end because she is the ideologist who converts at least to something other than her ideology, to a real personal relationship, even if not fully to that person's commitment to protecting human life for its own sake. And It is an important thing to note that she is the first full-blown ideologist we meet in the show, the first real representative of what I am arguing is pitted off against Harold's mentality in the central thematic tension of the show as a whole (and we meet her from almost the very beginning, as mysterious orchestrator partway through season 1 and in person at that season).
I think it is the reason it makes sense to have her become the machine's avatar after she dies. The ideology from which she converts is precisely the AI ideology and the ideology that Harold tried so hard in training the machine to avoid. And I think there is a fittingness to it not happening until Root dies and then it happening right away (I still get chills from the Nine Inch Nails song from how they used it). It's in that last episodes focus on "you don't really see the meaning of somebody's life until you see how they die." Root becomes able to be the machine's avatar the moment she makes a decision to swerve the car so that she takes the bullet meant for Harold.
I know I said this on FB once and I think I copied it into a post here, but it bears repeating even if I did ... that last episode was amazing. I think there is a hat-tip to Wim Wenders films Wings of Desire and Faraway So Close, in which the angels watch over us wearing trenchcoats and ponytails, and cannot directly contact or intervene but can whisper words of encouragement, and it breaks their hearts when one of us commits suicide. Two amazing films by Wenders and an amazing closing episode by Nolan and friends.
Root, Ideology, and Conversions Closer:
There is definitely room to criticize the show and question whether it really pulled these conversion projects off well, rather than leaving moral loose ends possibly having the negative effect of those moral concerns being swept under the rug and minimalized or completely disregarded. But I think it best process to give the show its due first and try to find out whether there is an internally consistent schema to the project that can be shown to be really present and clear and then ask those critical questions of execution and what may or may not be done in addition in the execution as a result of sloppiness or giving in to going for cheap thrills. I'm arguing that I think there is such a schema and that I think that it is Harold's concern for human life pitted off against the AI ideology (both in Root and in Greer) and the conversions that happen along with it. And for this section on Root, I am saying that I think that it works best if Root's conversion is from an ideologist to a committed family member (even if not to a full humanitarian like Finch, although I think she can see some of the logic of how being humanitarian leads him to things like the compassion he showed her).
There is also room to ask the question whether or not I am accepting pictures that are only lims and then filling in the colors myself, eisogeting things and then claiming that they are there in the original and that this is why the original is great, as I claimed against fans of Mad Max: Fury Road in my post comparing it with Logan.Of course, as this is a TV show, it also has to be admitted that, simply because of the format and mode of presentation to an audience (even just the fact of having the presentation broken up by commercials, which makes stock character types easier to use because it's easier to jump back in on them after having had one's mind diverted by Home Depot and Ford), there is more filling in the colors yourself involved by nature of the medium.
Greer as Ideologist and Unconvertable
Greer as in ideologist is a little too straightforward to really need to be explained much. I mean, the guy kills himself by lack of oxygen to prove an ideological point. The "an AI must rule us" ideology doesn't get much more blatant than that. What I would like to focus on briefly is the difference between him and Root. Why does Root end up having some kind of conversion and we are rooting for her (sorry, just couldn't resist, but I promise I won't make any jokes about babies and breasts ... except for that one :), and more importantly, we don't find it impossible that she had some conversion, but we know Greer would never convert and we just want him dead so he can't do any more damage?
Quite simply, Greer comes from more money and resources and his predilection for ideology comes from his involvement with it on a much larger scale ... he was MI6 (with all its service to the "Free West" and all that ... cf my post on le Carre on that one). Root is somebody who turned to ideology as a savior, but what we see in the episode that gives Greer's MI6 background is that he is the monster that ideology itself made. So it is much more deeply ingrained. And the more money and resources means that, if ideology is a drug, he's been able to afford a lot more product and a lot bigger syringes than Root has for a long time, so he's a lot more hooked ... he's not coming back.
AI and Ideology:
I touched on this already in discussing Root, so I just want to reiterate it hear and make sure I have drawn it clearly because it is basically what I am claiming as the core theme of the whole five-season show: the tension between ideologies and concern for human life for its own sake, meaning each individual life.
What I said in the section on Root is that she sees an ideology of "life is just numbers because life is just business, and we are beyond good and evil" as a savior for her from pain in the past, and she sees an AI as the ultimate potential for that ideology. I'm going to say here (which I think I hinted at up there but not sure) that an AI is a very apt medium through which to discuss the tension between ideologies and something like Harold's humanitarianism. An AI is the perfect place to discuss ideologies because ideologies are about tying up ironclad logics, and a computer is nothing but pure logic. That's how I think the heavy tension we get concerning the AIs by the end meshes with the humanitarian bent for which many of us fell in love with the show back in season 1 (those awesome little mini-movies with so many creative layers). And it's how Root fits into that original humanitarian theme and becomes apt for being the machine's final avatar.
ADDENDUM 04/15/2017
I've been mulling over the difference between ideology and religion. Basically I think that the key difference is ideology being all immanent logic and religion being about a transcendent source. And it's main point in regard to the Person of Interest is ethics, which is also a big one for religion (although not the only one: I used to us Stephen J Gould's Rocks of Ages as a foil for one section in a class on intro to religious studies and say that, while I respect his making some attempt at a relation and I agree with some methodological autonomy, I think that he reduces, and has to reduce, religion to ethics in order to do his NOMA [non overlapping magisteria] project, and that gets it wrong).
In ideology, the ethics is all determined by the immanent logic, what the logical brain (be it human or AI) can figure out in making this system ironclad and all pervasive logic centered around and flowing out of the one central point. For instance, let's take the ideology of Marxism: Marx was about class struggle; he said the world of humanity is simply the social world of humanity, the relations between humans, not between humans and some being above called God, AND not between humans and some thing below called nature or the environment; the environment has no intrinsic value; if saving the trees helps the proletariat overcome the upper class, then save away; but if burning all the trees on the earth would HELP the proletariat, then light up the flamethrowers ... many undergrads in America would be shocked and in a state of denial to find out that Marx didn't give a rat's ass about the environment for it's own sake).
Religion is about the idea of the transcendent, and it's morality comes from "above." I'm going to leave that in quote. I'm a Catholic; I believe in God; I believe in Christ and his death and resurrection and ascension; I believe in the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church ... basically all of the Nicene Creed and the authority of the magisterium of the Catholic Church. But I'm not doing apologetics here. I'm doing an analysis of this particular piece of narrative fiction, and the main point here is that religion sees itself as having its ultimate source in some transcendent.
Now, I'm not saying that Harold is some aspect of humanity that makes us basically able to be as gods, and especially not that when we talk about God, we're only talking about some aspect of humanity that we need to own and grow up and evolve past religion and admit that all the time we were talking about God we were really talking about us but we were too young to handle that truth, like Ludwig Feuerbach. But there is something in the fact that, as the maker of the machine, Harold is in an "above" position and that it is important that, all along, he has worked to input, from "above," into the machine something that is a logic unto itself and beholden to no other logic, the principle of the intrinsic value of all human life, each and every one. I have always thought that, in good AI sci-fi, AI is always some aspect of humanity to be examined by supersizing it, usually some intellectual capacity (although sometimes the connection takes a contrast method on the page, like Asimov's portrayal of speech as an evolution in robotic intelligence in I Robot but as a devolution for humans in Second Foundation). And in that schema, Harold does become the analog of the god "above" position, and actually putting in a principle that the real God above actually gives, which is the intrinsic value of each and every human life.
My interest is with the structure of religion (Harold in "god" position, or to borrow that brilliant use of gaming trope for the finale of season 2 episode title, "god mode") in relation to ideology (the machine's AI ability for complete and total immanent logic) and the event of the god mode character inputting a principle into the ideology from "above." Which I think is the story of Harold's relation with the machine across the whole show. And as we saw very early on, it work; the machine seems to have this core principle, one which Root sees as having been a crippling of the machine. And there is maybe the most core arc of the show: an ideologist who is the most apt avatar for the machine in the end converts.
This gets dicey because it starts to sound a bit like allegory and I am especially wary of making a modern TV show into an allegory of something as sacred as Christ ... and I share Tolkien's general view of allegory. But the general principles hold and are there in the show. Root converts to Harold: she stops killing and starts at least being an ally of the team, if not directly involved in the saving lives project, out of an attachment to Harold; she saves John a few times because John is important to Harold; and at the end she says she feels like she has a family now and wouldn't rather be any other place, even though they are under heavy fire and the world is about to end. And, if you look at Christianity, is has always insisted that it is not about a system or even one single principle, which is an element of thought (it still has to be put in propositional form and proposition is language and language is thought), but about a relationship with a person (Jesus Christ). It would have been more ideal from a moral standpoint had Root converted to the point of being able to believe in and apply the principle herself, but not necessarily more realistic (and, given that her drug of choice, of which she was a HUGE addict, was radicalized logic, too quick conversion to a mental proposition, even one as good as every human life having value, risks relapse). I'm not a complete skeptic on actual logic, but I do think that it has to be admitted that we are more people-based than we like to admit: we mimic our parents and other people who are the bedrock of our world when we are young; yes, we can go beyond and engage in actual logic; but those original ties are very primal, and the tendency is to convert to persons long before we convert to ideas. In short, we have to admit (and this is VERY much harder for religious people to admit than they like to admit) that psychology exists.
I would offer one final analogy for Root's "conversion to Harold" rather than a full conversion to his principle, and that is the conversion of Mark Studdock in C. S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength. This happens towards the end of the novel when Mark is now fully captive in Belbury and being treated as an initiate in training for the evil N.I.C.E institute, being trained by Frost in the "objective room." When he comes to his conviction to resist the training, Lewis's language is fairly clear that he is not yet making a full turn to the beliefs of the Dimbles and the Dennistons, the faith of the Church, but rather to everything good in the world that Jane seemed to symbolize to him. He accepted people like them because she accepted them. Hopefully on the way to some fuller conversion to truth and goodness (as Lewis seems to portray it, or at least leaves the possibility distinctly open in a hopeful way), Mark is first (and it's all we get for the present aside from that possible sense of hope) sort of "converting to Jane." And this is how I see Root as "converting to Harold" (accepting the value of John because he does etc).
