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Rating: One ordinary day, for whatever reason, the banality of your existence will be revealed to you, and you will feel its entire weight.
The new life you will choose, there is no escape, will be the negation of everything you were.
That's the way it goes.
You will trade the warmth of family for the cold vagabond life. You will destroy a house with a garden, turning it into a lazy dump. You'll shoot at bottles on the Coca-Cola truck, a symbol of capitalism, from a small sports car in motion, to obscure the void that you have dug inside yourself and deny your responsibility for it. Ways to feel alive.
You have a Self, you will cut it in two to have what is and what is its opposite, but it will no longer be possible to reunite the parts. It's just another way of dying.
What you believed you controlled controls you. What you love slips away like sand through your fingers. And you have no power.
It was a nice game but it was also someone else's game, deluding yourself that it was only yours.
But you had fun, in the role of god.
You won, by losing.
Something remains inside the empty shell, inside your skin without identity.
The essential is there, like the heartbeat, precious like the breath.
You look at it but you don't see it.
You see it but you don't recognize it.
You recognize it but you don't remember it.
Hide it with an unknowing smile, you can neither rejoice nor suffer from it.
You lost, by winning.
Now wait and fix your victorious dead gaze into nothingness.
A leaf will settle on your still eye and it will be all that you see. For eternity.
Post scriptum
The novel is born in a complex phase of the author's life. He's not doing too well, in fact. Never much luck in his life, in truth. But at this particular moment, he seems to lack real affection, so much, too much solitude seeps through the work.
It is usually said in certain cases, "it's just a crisis, a moment, it will pass..."
Robert Arctor is a policeman, an ordinary "respectable" man: beautiful house, wife, and little daughters, he performs office duties and has nothing to complain about.
One day, by some triggering reason, Robert becomes aware that he is going through a crisis, realizes he hates what he has and desires a completely different existence, another reality.
And we are projected into this new reality from the first page of the novel.
It is good to know that for a "respectable" person, i.e., the average American citizen in the novel, the completely different life, the new reality, translates (it seems) into the life of a "drug addict."
Bob, therefore, we know, has abandoned his family but kept his job and, consistent with his choices, has become infiltrated into a group of drug addicts: his job is to find out who produces (and how) the mysterious Substance M.
The effects of this drug are very severe. It's impossible to control its consumption as addiction becomes strong immediately from the first use, and the need to gradually increase doses is as urgent as it is inexorable.
Substance M also causes organic damage to the brain of those who use it. Personality and sensory responses connected to the brain are compromised until the actual splitting into two distinct parts of the same. The result is two contrasting "minds" that want to dominate or replace each other in the functions perceived as lacking, leading to the final effect of what we could call a short circuit, that is, the dissolution of the SELF.
At the end of the "games," the person will become similar to an automaton, or a vegetable (as, with contempt, they are defined in the story) without any will, vital drive, or awareness; some, before reaching this level, will end it themselves. Hence the name M as in death.
People who suffer this permanent damage are brought into some recovery communities specifically set up by the government. The methods of managing these places are unknown to those not inside the communities themselves, so much so that they fuel urban legends among habitual consumers of the substance. The most severe cases, the victims of this substance, will obviously be guests (or detainees) of these recovery communities, indefinitely, hidden from the entire society which, for obvious reasons, they no longer know what to do with, as would happen in a hypothetical afterlife.
Robert Arctor, paradoxically and symbolically, already encapsulates within himself a dual existence mentally difficult to manage:
- Fred represents his socially acceptable version, that is when he is a policeman in uniform, totally deindividualized, meaning made unrecognizable by a super-tech suit (perhaps one of the few truly science fiction elements of the narrative, at least by our contemporary standards) that modifies the features and voice of the wearer, completely denaturing the person.
- Bob represents his socially unacceptable version, when he is outside the station, in his civilian version, (note: his life is therefore made up only of work), practically most of his time, when he shows his real appearance.
As in any infiltrator story, I cite for example Nikolai in D. Cronenberg's Eastern Promises, even Bob Arctor becomes indistinguishable from the criminals he wants to "combat" and undergoes the same obsessions, devastations, abuses, estrangement from colleagues, friendships, and loves... of any other junkie, tragically sharing their existence.
The development of the story will take off at the only moment when Bob and Fred act as a unit: Fred speaks as Bob and Bob speaks as Fred.
A society that demands - from everyone, indiscriminately - the duplicity of the facade mask can only have tragic consequences. What we are at work or in any public context doesn't take into account our truest and deepest self, our subjective and objective dramas, deindividualizing us completely and with the will to do it, overbearing us. Arctor thus becomes the emblem of this.
And Substance M, fought as a cause of discomfort, reveals itself to be the effect of a far more severe problem. In the novel, it is only suggested and put in the protagonist's mouth as a delirium or momentary rebellion, pushing him to very serious reflections on his actions, but then, metaphorically, the reality of the facts is clearly delineated, and it turns out that, in the end, he was right...
For this reason, Substance M is, for me, the metaphor of the tragedy that is life to the same extent that this is not a novel about drugs, at least not in an exclusive sense. Very current and with a strong pessimism, I add a sarcastic "immortal."
The narrative alternates between tragicomic moments, flashbacks, digressions, delusions, cultured quotations, mysteries to unravel, and... twists that render a terrible final picture of the story but with some weak hope, very deep down.
For those interested in reading the novel and have not seen the movie... well, don't watch it.
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