Divergent: I Just Want To Do What I’m Told

A few nights ago I decided to watch the 2014 Dystopian Young Adult movie “Divergent”. I had heard the name, in a sort of vague “oh it’s a teen blockbuster thing”, but I wasn’t at all familiar with it. As it turns out, the movie purports itself to be about a young woman who is displaced by society and has to find her own way. I don’t think it achieved that goal, and I think what it did achieve is pretty frightening on a thematic level, even if it is undoubtedly unintended. It is, simply put, one of the most baffling pieces of film I’ve ever wanted to turn off almost immediately.

Having done some reading about the movie after watching it, it seems to have garnered some pretty harsh criticism, and it turns out that the planned fourth movie (cribbing from The Hunger Games final book being turned into two movies, among other things) was never released. There are video essays on how nonsensical the worldbuilding is, there are discussions on the work’s many, many plot holes. It’s a bad film, and it’s a thin premise that was openly cashing in on the teen/YA dystopia craze of the late 2000’s and early 2010’s. But I wanted to talk about the particular part of the movie that I think really drives home what not to do when creating a dystopia of this sort: it keeps letting the protagonists just kind of do what they want, and the result of that makes for some possible readings of the story that are… let’s just say not great.

This is your faction…?

At the beginning of Divergent, narration lets the viewer know that in the past, all the things were bad and not good, but then they built a wall, and divided themselves up into factions, and then everyone was happy, or they survived, or something. In this way the setup actually makes a large divergence (heh) from other YA dystopias of its ilk: it’s being advertised to us by the protagonist as a Utopia. In the Hunger Games and other examples of the genre, we know the protagonist is feeling the crushing weight of their society, even as the corporate entity or the government in question is declaring how much better it is now. In Divergent, It’s only after the faction test that Tris has the realisation that society is, actually, totally not cool man.

This is presented as a tight set of shots between a woman administering a test which will tell her what personality, and therefore faction, Tris is. It’s revealed that the test has resulted in a “Divergent” result. Tris has too many personality! Woe betide those who have book smarts but also enjoy running and climbing trees in future Chicago! She’s ushered out a back entrance, and our heroine is shocked as the perfect society collapses around her and she is forced into exile. She is forced to live with the factionless, and from understanding the experience of those outside the system she begins to understand that the perfect society she’s grown up believing in is broken and shady and awful.

Except that isn’t what happens. She’s ushered out the back door, yes, but for all intents and purposes her life doesn’t change at all in the immediate term. Tris goes home to her parents, and her brother reminds her that making the right choice for the family “but also for yourself” is important in the faction choice ceremony the next day (this is a fake out for the frankly batshit choice for the brother to defect and go to another faction? Why does he do it? Basically as an excuse for Tris to get her eyes inside that faction later. Storytelling, Folks). She goes to the ceremony, picks the Dauntless faction, a bunch of warriors with a hatred of staircases and walking at normal speed, and begins training with them.

Wait, what?

This is a world where psychological tests are administered to determine which of five personality types you fit into. The strict structure of this hierarchical system should be called into question, and the ethics of forcing teenagers into choosing their life’s work based on a singular test could be a really interesting satire of the education system in the real world. However all we see is some tokenistic hoo-ha-ing from Tris about what faction she wanted to be in, and then she picks it and… that’s about it. The fact that she’s a divergent doesn’t materially affect the decisions she makes with regard to her future. The fear, then, is that Tris is not going to be able to return to the status quo.

The other thing about this process is that it’s twofold — there is the aptitude test… but then the initiates can just select their faction anyway. This is a problem that the movie seems to have: the dystopia would work unnervingly well if there was just the test, and your result was the faction you had to be in. The understanding (and maybe even acceptance) of the fundamental lack of choice in the system would be a hideous reflection of societal norms. Instead of an interminable scene of initiates dripping some blood into a bowl (arcane rituals as an initiation to society eh? I’m sure I’ve never heard of anything like that), you’d have scenes of children being torn or numbly taken from their families after their test results indicate that they’ve been sorted into a different faction. The idea of sorting itself would become terrifying, and instead of Tris and Co vaguely wondering what it’d be like in other factions, there would be palpable tension about the outcome of the test. Suddenly, being divergent isn’t a quirk that can be covered up by pretending, and your identity as such becomes a real, existential threat to your existence. Tris’s attitude of “it’s a system that works” can still exist, even if she’s scared of it, right up until the moment that she finds out she doesn’t fit even in the flawed world she is subject to.

Divergent continues to do this throughout its runtime; it lends its characters an agency that it would be far more narratively effective for them to be without. Tris, as a character, is repeatedly given the option to continue to just do whatever she wants in a story that ostensibly keeps telling us about how much the world is oppressing her, and it starts right here at the beginning, with the supposed world ending news that she has, like, a normal personality. This starts here with the scene that is supposed to be setting up the world, but it keeps happening, and the next time we see it is shortly after Miles Teller beats the absolute snot out of her and she wakes up in a hospital bed.

Exile, except not really

Once Tris has made the god-given, inalienably free selection of her faction, we are informed of a set of “new rules” for the recruits to Dauntless. There’s a montage-inducing scoreboard, where the red names at the bottom are to be kicked off. They’re dead, they’re done, they’re factionless. Useless bozos that are to join the great unwashed. The great unwashed that is, in this story, criminally underutilised as a narrative device. Man, why are we not talking about the masses of people forced into abject poverty by this system? Imagine what you could achieve if you made some sort of commentary about those in society who have the least also being those who get the least help and also being the people who are most actively vilified by the system. Wouldn’t that be a great way to talk about how things are in our own world? Maybe highlight that casual injustice? Make some commentary? Nah, that’s commie talk. Let’s keep on about how Tris is gonna get kicked out of karate class.

Tris, perhaps by dint of selecting Dauntless on more or less a whim at the bleedy-hand ceremony, is completely rubbish at being a trained militia police force person (incidentally, the fact that this movie sees a mostly autonomous, highly trained paramilitary force with a codified lack of empathy as the aspirational group for the protagonist? Yikes, man). Nevertheless, through the power of montage and a very strange scene where the heart-throb of the movie throws knives at her, we see Tris develop into a fairly decent simulacrum of a cop in a world that industrialises and commoditises human violence and control. Good for her.

Unfortunately, after making it through the first round of training, she’s made to fight Miles Teller’s character because the lead bad guy Eric has decided that we haven’t seen her character development explicitly enough yet. She loses (badly) and the next scene is her waking up and being informed that she has been cut from the group after all. Here, again, is an opportunity for the movie to show the truly brutal nature of this caste-based society, by removing the agency of the character to enable her own change. Once again though, the move pulls its punch. Tris runs to meet the train (she has broken ribs and an extremely high pain threshold apparently), and the man who has just evicted her from the faction lets her on, because she’s a Strong Brave Character™ or something.

It’s really embarrassing for this to be case — the point the movie so desperately wants to make is that this kind of forced striation of humanity is bad, but then it just turns around and we watch the characters embrace it. The storytelling is once again hindered by the fact that as soon as the protagonist is actually faced with the reality of what would happen in a world where she doesn’t have that kind of agency, it’s abandoned immediately so that she can push herself back into the dystopia. She wants to be Dauntless, so she is. There we go.

The climax of the story throws this all into sharp relief when the metaphorical control the state has over its people is made literal, and the Dauntless faction is made into actual slaves.

Mindless drone for thee but not for me

… But not Tris. obviously. Due to her being a Divergent, the magic potion that gets injected into the necks of all her fellow soldiers/police/representation of fascistic control doesn’t work. Apparently being Divergent makes you different enough from the population that a mind control drug doesn’t work. This, as it turns out, is the reason that Divergents are being hunted. The Erudites, who are explicitly not in control of the government at the start of the film, know that their mind control drug doesn’t work… and so they’ve told the current government of Abnegation to… hunt them down? It’s not clear, it’s a plot hole, it’s dumb, and it doesn’t makes sense. Point is, here’s our villain’s motivation for hunting people like Tris: because they can’t be controlled.

The scenes where Tris is moving carefully through entire carriages of blind automaton Dauntless drones who have been injected with the control serum is supposed to be chilling, but it isn’t. Know why? Because finding out that she’s got control at this point of the movie isn’t a revelation — it’s a continuation of the exact characterisation we’ve seen the entire time. At every stage, she’s had the agency and ability to move secretly through the others in society, who are completely blinded to the presence of the divergent in their midst. Hell, Four, our token heart-throb who in no way looks far too old to be dating a teenager, has risen to his own position of power within the Dauntless tribe. He’s been divergent for ages! Nobody noticed or cared despite the fact that he has a tattoo of all the factions on his back, in a faction that just looooves to take their shirts off. What do they do with this ability to walk around an openly corrupt society? Nothing. Done differently, this realisation that the control juice doesn’t work on Tris and Four could be completely effective. Or have a scene where they sneak out and have to run away from the control juice, and have them scared of syringe-wielding drone slaves for the rest of the movie. As it is, what we see is people that exist in the society… continuing to go about their business while others don’t, and again, the desire for the protagonists isn’t revolution, its a return to the status quo. It’s sapped of all its life and tension, and the people we’re supposed to be rooting for are revealed to be idealising the society that’s already in place.

I Didn’t Want a Scary Movie Anyway…

So, to recap: this is a society run on strict societal structure, built to separate out personality types into monofactional ideals to run the population “efficiently”, and it administers tests to inform which of these factions is best suited to you. If you don’t fit into this, or you fail somehow, you become factionless, and if your brain structure is too different from the norm, you are Divergent and hunted down for reasons that only make sense from the other side of the veil of the coup that is being carried out.

Except it doesn’t work. Our protagonist Tris is allowed to select her own faction. She’s successfully living as a Divergent for ages. She’s explicitly fine with this level of state-sanctioned separation, and wants to be part of this control hierarchy. When presented with an opportunity to escape, she doesn’t.

The story is not one of characters wanting to break out of an oppressive regime, it’s a story of characters wanting to break in. They want the fascism, they resent the agency they’ve been afforded, and they think that if they defeat Erudite, they can get things back to the way they were. Let’s put this in theatres, the kids’ll love it.

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