Milo Rambaldi, Alias, Popular Culture and the Sacred
When we consider the numinous and a sense of the sacred we would normally be thinking of the mystics, poets and theologians, or of great works of art and music. It would be less familiar to seek or discover this within popular culture and, in particular, film and television. But after all: why not? Cinema has been described as “dreaming in the dark”. It is a collective dream shared for a time by the audience, so when that dream strikes a nerve it suggests to us some deep longing, some need, even a fear, which is common to many people at a particular time in history. German expressionist such as Nosferatu (1922) and The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919) hinted at something that could surface within the German psyche. Decades later we saw films that reflected the fear of nuclear annihilation.
What I want to reflect on here is the success of the TV series Alias, starring Jennifer Garner as Sydney Bristow, and, most importantly the character of the fictional monk Milo Rambaldi. The reason for the success of Alias clearly lies in its fast moving plot, choreographed fight scenes, conflicts of character and loyalty and the attractive personality of the central star. There is also the underlying theme of a life spent within an organization which may, in the end, turn out to be an illusion. That what appears to aspire to one set of values is the very reverse.
This should be our first clue that something more significant is going on. Is our present world a true reality, does it really hold meaning for us, are the values held by our society truly genuine, and what of the role of ethics, loyalty and truth in our daily lives? This is also the theme of the Matrix series of films; that our waking world, our jobs, our friendships and even our cities are a persistent illusion within the matrix of some vast computer. It is as if, at the level of popular culture, we have begun to question the meaning of our modern world, as if we suspect that perhaps it is no more real that an dream, and being a dream it has no substance to it. It has no true values, no deep meaning, no ultimate satisfaction. Maybe we have become, as G.I. Gurdjieff once suggested, people asleep on a runaway horse. The issue is not only how to awake the sleepers, but how to keep them awake long enough to take control.
So is this one lesson of Alias, that SD-6 of the first series, for example, is a little like our contemporary world. It purports to be one reality, with one set of values but in reality is quite other and once we begin to suspect this we do not know whom to trust.
But beneath the SD-6, The Alliance and the Covenant lies something else. It is the Holy Grail that Arvin Sloan has spent his life seeking – non other than the works of Milo Rambaldi. Sloan’s personal mission over three decades has been to collect and assemble parts of Rambaldi’s machine in order to discover Rambaldi’s underlying message. When this is finally achieved Sloan finds it a deeply transforming and numinous experience - he refers to the experience as "transcendent" and "divine". What lies at the roots of Alias, is the deepest key to its success. That is to express within a work of popular culture the sense that we all seek the deeply spiritual, the inner mystery, and something that will transcend the surface reality of daily life to fill us with meaning.
The Italian monk, Milo Rambaldi, supposedly lived between 1444 and 1496. This fictional character anticipated much of modern technology. His ideas were so feared that he was excommunicated, his workshops destroyed and his name expunged from documents. So propose the creators of Alias. But I would suggest that Rambaldi is heir to a much older tradition and that he was merely the instrument, or vehicle, of knowledge that dates from European contact with Arab scholars at Cordoba and Toledo. Just as Maynard Keynes claimed that Isaac Newton was both the first modern scientist and the last great Mage, so Rambaldi is both a technologist in the modern sense of the world and a link to the greatest alchemists and their secrets of the inner working of nature. Here is where the heart of Rambaldi’s myth lies, that the alchemists with their occult knowledge were the midwives to nature. They worked simultaneously at the inner psychic and the outer material levels. This was something well known to the great physicist of the quantum theory, Wolfgang Pauli, who said that the true physicist was like one of the alchemists of old – carrying out the work for his and her salvation. This the Great Work was to seek the wholeness in nature in order to discover wholeness within. Likewise the discoveries and inventions of Rimbaldi are the outward expression of a deeper inner working in that crucible where matter, psyche and spirit meet.
In this sense a exciting and satisfying television series strikes the public imagination for they sense a much deeper message about our need to integrate science and the spirit, matter and psyche, the numinous and the everyday.
(As a footnote one could perhaps add that two other successes of popular culture, the Harry Potter books and films, and Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code have also explored related themes. That is, of mysteries that are hidden behind mysteries, and hints at what may lie beneath the surface of everyday reality.)
THE RETURN OF THE SACRED: ART, SCIENCE AND THE SACRED.
.