“No one was left who could remember how it had happened, how the world had fallen under darkness. At least no one who would do anything. No one who would oppose the robots. No one who would challenge their power, or so Dr. Wily believed…”
So the opening goes to the opening to act 1 of the science fiction rock opera, The Protomen. In this treatise I intend to ask a few very important questions: why did the world fall under darkness, how did this come to pass, and is this darkness totalitarian in nature? Furthermore, does The Protomen contribute anything new to the study of totalitarianism or is it just a mash up of existing works?
But before I go into any of that, allow me to give a brief background about what The Protomen is- and is not. The Protomen is a very dark work of dystopic fiction that happens to be loosely based on the classic video game series, Megaman. The artists of the band under the same name as their work have taken the basic plot and characters and overhauled them and added a heaping splash of drama and anti-authoritarian and Orwellian themes. This is not a simple video game cover band, and this is not a bunch of dweebs belting out nerdy tunes in their parent’s garage. The Protomen are artful and masterful storytellers and what they have created I think brings a great deal to the table of science fiction and the study of totalitarianism.
Allow me to also give a summary of events in the story- after all if you are not aware of the plotline that I am analyzing it will be rather hard to follow. Let us turn our attention firstly to Act II: Father of Death. We do this for a few reasons. It is a prequel to Act I, making the plot easier to follow chronologically. Also Act II divulges a great deal more detail about the society in question and precisely how “the world fell under darkness” while Act I deals more with the drama the unfolds with Megaman and Protoman and the nature of heroes and resistance. Act II will after my analysis paint a picture of a totalitarian society, and Act I will show us some deeper thoughts socio-auto-totality and hero worship in resistance to totalitarianism. (If you as a reader have any reservations about spoilers, and please read the lyrics [1] and listen to the music on youtube
[2].
We see The Father of death opening with two scientific colleagues quarreling in their joint laboratory. They are arguing over whether or not to make a historic decision: to turn on the machines. The two robotics engineers have spent their lives to relieve people of the toil of working the mines- so that “no son would ever have to say, my father worked into his grave.” For Thomas Light this is a kind of pact to avenge his father’s death. But for Albert Wily this is a quest of a much more revolutionary sort, he aims to replace human labor altogether with himself as master over the machines that guide production. Over the years he persuaded Light to change the designs and the day came that Light has dreaded, the day to turn on the machines. He has reservations about this, fearing that he will become the “father of death” but he turns them on. As Light walks home he laments,
“What have I done? Though I did not pull the trigger, I built the gun that he holds in his hand”.
At this point Wily’s plans go into full firestorm. He uses an assassin robot to kill the love of Light’s life, Emily Stanton, and then organizes a press conference accusing him publicly of her murder,
“What kind of man builds a machine to kill a girl? No he did not use his hands, like a smart man he used a tool. But just the same! Can you question who’s to blame?!”,
galvanizing the masses against Dr. Light. Through the mass media Wily is creating an ‘other’, is building a Goldstein to hate. A furious media circus is conducted and when the verdict of ‘not guilty’ is delivered Wily is able to easily convince the enraged masses that their judicial system has failed them. This is enormously significant, reeking of fascist and communist revolutions. Wily is suggesting that their modern liberal society has failed and that his robotist (not his term, but mine) revolution is the solution. Unsurprisingly, the masses call for Light’s head to roll.
“The lawyers and jury filed out of the courtroom, leaving Light, a free man, sitting silently behind the defendant’s table. The sound of the mob outside was deafening. Even from within the thickly marbled walls of the courthouse, their rage – their sense of injustice – were palpable. Throughout the trial, the telescreen had told them that their judicial system would ultimately fail them, that the laws of the city were flawed, skewed to shelter monsters like Light, powerless to protect the people. Impotent. Weak. Dangerously out of touch with the times. Obviously, the screen had been telling the truth. Now, it was telling the masses that they would have to take matters into their own hands if justice was to be served.”
Throngs of angry citizens screamed for blood, but Light escaped on a train. The italic text that accompanies the beautiful instrumental track “How the World Fell Under Darkness” reveals a great deal about the society that Wily builds in the aftermath. His revolution is not a violent or sudden one, but is accomplished over the course of many years. Over the course of time his machine workers replaced all labor. The factories become fully auto-mated, the mines are excavated by steel men, and the people of the city are relieved of the burden of working to survive. The population, now allowed a life of leisure crowded at the bars and other places of recreation. A generation of people grow up in this environment,
“The older generations never told them what the city looked like before the machines. Why would they? What good could come from telling the children of the type of dark, filthy, and dangerous world that men create when left to their own devices? That once men slaved away deep inside the earth, risking death for the sake of survival. That once women left their children, still asleep in their beds, to grind away mindless hours in the factories, sacrificing family to secure necessities.”.
Furthermore, even before the introduction of the secret police there is a socio-auto-totality that develops. The people so adore this new world that they regulate their speech and actions to avoid disturbing the teetering balance that has been achieved. Afterall, one man has given them paradise and he could take it away. Best not to rock the boat.
“An unspoken fear dangled above the heads of every man and woman. Keeping them silent. Keeping them safe … This new world was so perfect that it seemed dangerous to speak of the old world. As if this new city, sprung from a sea of darkness, was balanced on a single point, teetering on a crucial ignorance. It seemed that any misstep, any wrong word, could topple the city, sinking it back in the sea, that dark abyss of human suffering, leaving them with nothing. After all, they were not the creators of this world. They were merely the recipients of a gift. A gift given to them by a single man and his countless steel hands. And just as easily as it was given, couldn’t it be taken away?”
By this point because life itself is the control of one man, Wily, whatever government or institutions that existed before are now obsolete or subverted to Wily’s purposes.
It of course is not long until a secret police mechanism is put into operation. Rather than giving the secret police a distilled masculinity and a dehumanizing standard uniform or even a badge, Wily employs assassins as unofficial policy. In fact they are but a rumor, a ghost that will steal away the lives of dissenters in the night. It is characterized as supernatural, “A beast with a single red eye. He that would pluck you from your bed at night if you were found with a dissenting word on your tongue…”, rather than employing open intimidation and wanton violence Wily has used a psychological weapon of terror. This reinforces the existing socio-auto-totality and silences the people of the city, “Mothers told children to stay close as they traveled through the streets, keep a smile on their faces, and never speak ill of the machines.” By mystifying the assassin Wily is able to keep an entire population in check through fear, even though there is apparently only one assassin for the whole city- the very same machine that Wily used to murder Light’s beloved Emily. I personally think that only one assassin is mentioned, not because there is really only one, but as a effective tool to show how little force it takes to install a paranoid terror into the mind of a population. This is of course an echo of Nazi Germany’s secret police, and also the secret police in Russia. They didn’t have records on the whole population, but because people thought that they did the plan worked. Through the red eyed assassin, Wily is able to deal with any possible resistance while simulatniously maintaining his image of benevolence. This is what a totalitarian ruler must do- to have all crimes carried out in secret and detatched from the officiality of daylight. In this manner Wily is able to to protect the “rotten core of the onion” [3] of totalitarianism.
At this point we can see a clearer case for Wily’s society not merely being a technological dystopia, but a totalitarian one. But allow me, before jumping to conclusions, to address several of the classic requirements or hall marks of a totalitarian state. Much of the post World War II literature on totalitarianism warns of the role that new media and transportation technologies played in the advent of 20th century totalitarianism. The Protomen definitely have followed this school of thought. After all, let’s go through the laundry list technologies that Wily employed to take control. He used the existing mass media infrastructure to make Dr. Light into a 1984esque Goldstein figure and unravel faith in the existing institutions when they “failed the people”, he uses telescreens and intercom devices to communicate his face and message of dependency evenly throughout the city, and most importantly he now has an exclusive monopoly on the means of production. This is entirely unprecedented in the history of oppression. Critics of capitalism decry corporate oligopolies, but a centralization of this sort has never been seen. The communists seized the means of production and then at gun point told the people when, where, and how to work. But the people themselves still worked. The fascists usually allowed private production- but only when it served the interest of the state. Under Wily something new has happened- the people have been removed from the equation entirely. Under this system the population’s only function is to eat, sleep, poop, and maybe provide occasional entertainment. In fact, if Wily didn’t have a god-complex and have a psychological need for people his system would in fact need no people other than himself. The populous are in essence his pets.
Most totalitarian systems have a key ideology that galvanizes the population, whether it is upending social institutions or rabidly trying protect and re-establish them. The Bolsheviks had their perverse brand of Marxism, the Nazi’s had the building of the Aryan super-race and super-state, other fascists had institutionalization of war and violence, Pol Pot had his agrarianism, and so on and so forth. What then is Wily’s ideology? What separates him from a simple tyrant? Allow me to answer both objections. I propose that the ideology that guides Wily’s state is institutional ease and sloth and comfort. He has offered a life free from hard labor and work of any kind and the population has come to not only expect this, to rely on it, but to demand the work of the robots. This is the key distinction from a classical tyrant or junta for Wily, he has popular legitimacy. He only killed a few people to gain control of the city- and none of them publicly. He has established a system that is entirely dependent on him and his automatons and it is a system that celebrates this fact. So, with out a true “ideology” per se Wily is still able to perpetuate his system by establishing socio-auto-totality.
What of the size of Wily’s state? Hannah Arendt is famous for stating that totalitarian states must usually be large ones. The text seems to point toward a single city. Although with some interpretation this can be contended. Let us recall other works of science fiction like The Matrix that take place in a single unnamed mega-city. It is understood that there is a larger world beyond that city that is also part of the matrix, but the reason that the city is not named is because it is a storytelling device used to limit the setting to narrowed down location where the characters can play out their drama and that it is a metaphor for the larger world. We can see that this may be the case with Wily’s state in The Protomen from the line, “how the world fell under darkness.”, and the fact that no external locations are mentioned beyond this city. It is very possible that Wily’s “city” is in fact an entire nation-state, an entire geographic region, or even planetary. But even if Wily’s state was small, there are notable examples of small totalitarian regimes such as North Korea and Pol Pot’s Cambodia. As long as the other hall marks are there- it is possible that totalitarianism that operate on any scale.
What of the resistance? Is there any to speak of? The answer is a resounding yes and no. The final few tracks of Act II:Father of Death follow a youth named Joe who collaborates with Dr. Light on a plot to blow up Wily’s command center. Not all consented to the new system. The plot however fails when the bomb explodes prematurely, knocking Joe from the tower to the ground below-dead. Dr. Light is about to give in and let the mechanized enforcers take him away but he unfolds a letter from Emily that he hadn’t yet had the strength to read. She abdicates him of total responsibility for the darkness and says that it will pass it time because the world is too big for one man. Most importantly she says that the “city needs you now”. He sets himself to the task of building another robot, one to destroy Wily’s armies and save the world. This is where Act I opens, Light having just finished Protoman, who is to be the unbeatable champion of the people. However, Protoman is killed by Wily’s specialized warriors such as Bombman, Elecman, and Iceman. He is strong but is overwhelmed by their might. But the people of the city are not blind to this struggle. They gather there to watch the fight unfold- and they do nothing to aid Protoman as he is killed.
“The crowd had gathered there to watch him fall, to watch their hopes destroyed. They watched them beat him, they watched them break him, they watched his last defense deployed. There was not a man among them who would let himself be heard. But from the crowd, from their collective fear, arose these broken words: We are the dead. We are the dead.”
Light is crushed by this defeat emotionally, this was his son that he has spent 12 years building, not a mere machine. In his rage he builds another robot whom he names Megaman.
“There was the hatred again, the rage, welling inside of him. No more, he thought, as he tore down the tools and parts that framed his apartment workshop. Never again. “Mankind deserves the hell that they have brought upon themselves” He smashed and cut, metal against metal, metal against flesh, in an effort to destroy his own means of creation … He had set out to use these hands to destroy his workshop but he now watched as they seemed to be creating of their own accord. Pieces of machine from the floor were seized and fused. They began to take form – the form of Light’s anger, the form of his guilt, the form of his grief, the form of his love, the form of a son.”
But this is not another warrior; Light has resigned and given up the fight. He only wants to live in relative peace with his son Megaman who is all that he has left. Having lost his love, reputation, city, and his first son this can be said to be true. However, when Megaman is old enough Light tells him of his brother and his fate. Megaman is outraged and vows to avenge his death, but Light implores his son not to leave the safety of their tenement, saying that, “Protoman was forsaken by the ones he wished to save. And when he died he died in vain… His fight is not yours.” But Megaman will have none of it and he leaves their home to avenge his brother’s death. He travels swiftly to Wily’s headquarters and mows through hundreds of Wily’s automatons only to be confronted with a terrifying sight- his very own brother is commanding the forces. The dialogue between Mega Man and Protoman in the next two tracks reveals a great deal about the nature of resistance and what role humanity plays in Wily’s system. You see, Protoman was not killed in the battle against Wily but rather was captured and his will to fight was destroyed. Protoman plays the role of the cynical anti-hero who has completely lost faith in mankind. He believes that they will never throw off their oppressors that they will never fight, they will just stand about and watch abdicating the responsibility to a hero figure like himself or Megaman. He tells his brother,
“I’ve been here before. I’ve stood where you stand. They called me their hero, The Hero of Man. But why should we save them when they stand for nothing? If they deserve life, LET THEM STAND FOR THEMSELVES.”
Most importantly he says that, “They’ll watch you die to save their lives. They will not stand here by your side.”
Megaman the idealist believes that the people are good and is convinced that they just need more time. But as the conflict comes a broil and the two brothers fight the crowd calls for him to kill Protoman. As his brother lay fallen the people pronounce him as their hero. Megaman is so disgusted that he walks away from the crowd and allows them to be slaughtered by Wily’s forces. There was never an 
organized resistance to Wily’s totalitarian society because once the people were deprived of a sense of responsibility for their own survival- when they no long needed to work to live, they also psychologically gave up responsibility for their own destinies. They came to expect someone else to take care of all of their needs, leading to hero worship. This is the genius of Wily’s system, he has killed the spirit of individual responsibility and so the masses are now incapable of rising up against him in an organized fashion. Still the tale of Joe’s resistance suggests that it is possible. Maybe in Act III we will see humanity take control of it’s own destiny, but until then the message of The Protomen is rather bitter-sweet.
So I feel that I have demonstrated a strong case for Wily’s society being a totalitarian one. But … so what? Is this new information? Is this story relevant? If The Protomen is a story about totalitarianism, what does it contribute to the field? Allow me to return to my earlier commentary on the extensiveness of Wily’s use of technology. He used the conventional hallmark of totalitarian systems namely the means of mass communication. Usually totalitarian rulers avoid having an institutionalized military because it can wind up being a check on their own power. But as robotic technology advances and robots begin to replace humans in many fields, how much longer will it be until young men and women are relieved of military service- because the military will be automated, it will be mechanized. What does a totalitarian ruler have to fear from an army that follows his orders unflinchingly? Why should he or she fear mere metal puppets? The Protomen follows a great science fiction tradition warning of the coming Robot Revolution when the machines we create become superior to us. But instead of over throwing us and destroying us- The Protomen offers a much more realistic scenario which is that the machines will be guided by power hungry humans to destroy human freedom. That is why the message of The Protomen is worthy of every class room and worthy of the scholarly journals on totalitarianism, because it analyzes not what totalitarianism has been or what it is today but rather that it sees forward with a dark vision of what totalitarianism could be in a not so distant future.
Notes:
- [1] All of Protomen’s Lyrics, http://lyrics.wikia.com/The_Protomen ↩
- [2] Complete Youtube Playlist of Act I and II http://www.youtube.com/playlist?p=CBBA942C9A46C990 ↩
- [3] coined by Hannah Arendt in Orgins of Totalitarianism Pt 3 ↩
Tags: Music, Protomen, Rock Opera, Science Fiction, Totalitarianism
