The protagonist of the Swiss Army Man movie is Hank, not Tom Hank but reminds his presence in Cast Away (2000), a resemblance of isolation on a deserted island. Hank tries to suicide by hanging himself by a rope attached to a top of rock protruding in the beach where he sees a body floated into the sea shore. Hank has a past of disappointment due to the inability of presenting his desire to a girl who travels with him regularly in the public transport. He collects her snapshots and social media data in his mobile, and continuously dreamt of being a lover of this beauty, Sarah Johnson. With time he realized his unrealistic passion of becoming her lover, withdrawn, decided to kill himself. He struggles to hang himself by the rope attached to his neck while he suddenly notices the body grounded on the shore, make his decision delayed and saved from the death trap but reaches to the body floated. Once examining the body, he finds not life but farting all the way, decomposing carbonic body, quickly given up salvation, he presumes to suicide at this time with stronger rope, by using the belt of a dead body. Again, suicide attempts succeeding and apparatus works well; farting continues densely, and the body starts moving around like a jet propeller attached to its back, gives an idea of escaping from this deserted island. Hank uses the farting corpse to return to the civilization where he lost for a while.
Movie traverses the entire interrelationship between Hank and the corpse, even in the details of getting corpse back to life, and how the life and death are becoming choices to switch between on demand of Manny the corpse. Ultimately Hank realizes a truth, which no one knows better than him or his father who comes in to find his son’s body but finding him alive. The movie ends up there.
This movie questions doxastic relationships, add a taboo dimension of objectivist aspects of the fart, juxtaposition of the real noise of fart or the voice of a fart in more precise form.
In the other hand, Hank the one destined to die changes forever to a reformed man, and what made this enormous change is the question of the movie.
The whole cinematic material could be analyzed in many forms of conceptualizations, and few of them are discussed here in brief.
In the first hand, if this movie is positioned in a Lacanian context, the start of its protagonist's action is the preparation of the demonstration of suicide. Suicide is the only completely successful act as per Lacan. This can be elaborated further such that differentiating the behavior and action which is supposed to be general to whole living beings. Behaviour is universal, but the action is unique to humans, as it belongs to Symbolic. The split subject or barred subject has its two forms of psychic matter as conscious and unconscious, of which the death drive belongs to the unconscious. Consciously there will not be any action which could address unconscious demand or command, unless the suicide itself, because of unconscious death drive and the conscious death attempt to follow the same time frame in a human subject to realize the suicide action. So in this sense, suicide is the most successful action that a human can perform.
Hank’s attempt to suicide is somehow interrupted, and the missing love or the lost object (or the object petit a) (Sarah Johnson) will remake itself as a ghost or a zombie, and emerges from the real as a corpse. In the other hand, this could be formalized in the context of the fundamental signifier, the “name of the father,” which Hank suppose to be missed in his symbolic, and become psychosis, and reappear the missing one in real as a corpse. In any means of reappearing the ghostly form of the real has a dramatic performance with the subject, Hank itself as his realization of the distorted unconsciousness. Hence the whole delusion of animated corpse is a hallucination due to Hank’s psychosis.
If it could be restructured the events into three entities, the best Hegelian dialectical idealization would have been the thesis, Hank’s attempt to suicide due to the causes, etc. The corpse floated into his visionary field become the antithesis, hence the enlightenment which the movie depicts at the final moments of the realization of inner desires and his fantasies become the synthesis.
Even if this movie is deconstructed in micro terms or the large terms canonically, it is still a deep treasure to an intellectual to pursue, a troublesome resource all the time to investigate, that much gigantic philosophical facts are intermingled with human subject; just escalated from a comedy to such incomprehensible levels of complexity.
Obejectivised voice, the sound of the fart produced by the corpse glimpses its obscene dimension of super human being becoming a human machine that becoming a micro scale propeller jet which Hank uses to escape from the deserted island to the world he belonged by the sea. This obscure dimension of the sound of the fart performing in the movie disruptively depicts somehow a freedom of expression or ultimate sovereign state of a human being which was a fantasy to the protagonist. All carbonic matter decomposes into primarily into the air, water and solid, this universality of decay had been in an exploration of Hank’s desires which are traversed with his fantasies about object petit a, Sarah Johnson.
Manny, the corpse metamorphosizing between life and death, having surreal in physical context opens the space to hyper-realistic spacetime. Manny could switch between life or death in the demand of Hank, plays the internal desires of Hank in a more sophisticated realm of symbolic which gradually Hank trapped into an enlighted state.
The name of the corpse given by Hank has a relationship to the western naming traditions based on theology, Emmanual, which means of Manny’s generic form related signifying “God among us.” At this signification, it could be depicted the helpless human being ultimately facing the form of God, meeting corpse. Lateral view of this nature could be derived and further elaborated somehow until the truth become obvious to Hank, finding his father at the end of the whole exercise.
Swiss Army Knife is a multi-purpose knife which is having resemblance with the corpse itself becoming a propeller jet once or twice. In another moment, it will become a water purification plant which will handily produce portable water (this water pouring from Manny’s mouth and drinking are triggering the disavowal of the truth in another aspect, the more disgusting dimension of facing real!). Few other cases it has demonstrated the mouth of the corpse acting as a canon machine projecting stones as ammunition into the air in finding food or another instance failure of performing the same at the incident of fighting with a bear in the dark.
However, this short paper discussed on the analytical point of views such a comedy could be framed in various contexts, but not limited, could be invented more.
p.s.
In an ironic context, someone can substitute certain real-world characters into Hank and Manny, and invent their private pleasures immensely. The author suggests one of that kind would be to plug a Prime Minister of a country the reader desired to Hank, and then President of the same assumed country into Manny the corpse, and sarcastically enjoy the movie, would open avenues of obscene desires dramatically staged by the protagonist and his subordinate.
