Zero Theorem

In terms of dramaturgical import, Tilda Swinton's collapse to the floor is a repeat pattern maneuver with Dionysian potential. In The Beach, it has no relevance within an already fragmented and contradictory climax, not as a signifier of colonial conquest  and its destruction which fomented the anger of Achebe's productive years; it rings hollow as an expressive gesture, and yet it hearkens back to Michael Clayton, much starker, bleaker, an existential implosion where all one can do is drop to your knees and pound the carpet. It is a distinctive motion, a signature only Swinton can enact, learned in the rough on the set of Orlando, which itself is less a responsible to Woolf's satirical aim and more pastiche, aping the farce masculinity in the loss of her Russian lover, because our fool proof procedures turn out to be flawed after all. This is why she is amply suited when cast as the foil against individual identity in our futurist speculations, a modern Medea melded within the characteristics of a rodent-like opportunism, utilitarian, grasping for power.

Clayton was a slap in the face to those who believe in due process. We're exposed, the audience, to how things truly operate in the alpha world. As in house counsel, Swinton is the lawyer who thinks corporate insulation will allow her to override the annoyances of victimization, disavowing personal loyalties over lapsed ethics. In The Beach, muddled as it is, she is a comical version of Conrad's Kurtz who cannot seem to grasp that agrarian harmony is contingent on the metropolis, and it is the city, invariably, which leads to the anxiety of transhumanism. It may be resisted by self-determination, but the city state is the collective power of human intelligence, as well as our downfall, the mechanization of rote efficiency, but that collapse brings us back to the mythos of origin, snake like, hubris buckling in upon itself toward the Oedipal pathos of dramatic exaggeration, with the chorus in the background beating its breast as triumph fractures. We either abandon it or put it under lock and key.