A film worth watching for the poetic statement of the last few scenes on existing during a time of economic precarity, over-determined by a logic of utilitarian expediency. Starring Ethan Hawke.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Tesla is timely. It's not the best film, and watching Tesla, played by Hawke, meander around in barely articulated linguistic utterances, isn't easy. But it is worth watching for the final few scenes, in which it becomes apparent the point the film is making.

Objectively, inequality now is at the highest level since the Gilded Age. And like that time period, our society is once again dominated by a certain economic logic. New Economy companies have cannibalized legacy service jobs and steady careers and displaced them into temporary, contract-based work-on-demand. This is a process that has followed the hollowing-out of manufacturing in advanced, formerly industrialized countries like the United States. Work itself has become transformed into an intensely individual pursuit: either online in one's labor as some kind of modern-day medieval apprenticeship, or in the real-world, patching-together disparate forms of labor into a provisional assemblage of partial incomes. Economic insecurity has produced a form of bleeding-edge inventiveness that has been honed to near perfection as, on the one hand, basic survival mechanism and, on the other hand, as elaborate sycophantic parasitism. Short-term economic calculus describes both the clamoring of the masses of the dispossessed just as it describes the thoughtless exploitation of monopoly power by rent-seeking parasitic corporations, hedge-funds, banks, healthcare providers, and governments.

Tesla is about this context. It is a reminder that one of the greatest, most inventive geniuses in human history himself labored under the same conditions, in the late 1800s. At a time when the second wave of industrialization was sweeping the planet, electrifying production, connecting countries in a global telecommunications network (the telegram) Tesla's inventions defined themselves in opposition to short-term profiteering. They were inventions that sought to solve longer term problems of human inequality and indenture to forms of working that stunted human potential. Rather than exploiting popular perceptions of safety, effectiveness, cheapness of construction, the simple genius of Tesla's motor and its A/C current redefined economic logic and reshaped infrastructure around it. The story of Tesla's inventiveness, as portrayed in this film, is a story of the sacrifice of profit, notoriety, and expediency according to the predominant economic logic of exploitation in favor of the pure science his inventions were based on. Tesla is the story of authentic inventiveness concealed within a pervasive simulated inventiveness.

The most interesting way in which the film makes this point, though, is not through its strange time-traveling documentary-like structure; rather it is through the way in which Tesla himself is portrayed: through the annoying and inexplicable way in which he refuses or is unable to take command of any situation in which he finds himself. He never seems willing to do what it takes to exercise the authority he has: he is over-talked and drowned-out by anyone else in the room. He is portrayed as eccentric and his experiments in the desert as mystical in nature: cast outside a fence surrounding a tennis court pleading with his financier, J.P. Morgan, for another round of funding, his past success with his motor no longer gives him any legitimacy: the funding won't be given because it's not clear that the mystical visions Tesla has had out in the desert with his experiments will amount to anything: the world has already moved on to the next most obvious technology to be exploited for profit.

All of this culminates in the most poignant scene of the film, where Hawke covers the Tears for Fears song 'Everybody Wants to Rule the World'. Tesla is construed here as a man out of time, living in another future, perhaps the future in which we now live. His broken-speech rendition of the song is a perfect distillation of the zeitgeist of then as it is of today. His song is of the future, a future we now know came to pass. But it is also absurdly poorly performed and not something one would expect to find success, particularly in a world over-determined by a logic of immediate economic utility. He is at once disinterested loser (because the singing sucks) and historical luminary (because we know the song turned-out to be a hit).

The story of Tesla is a reminder to all who labor today, in a similar moment of vast social, cultural, economic, and political transformations, that their labor may never be experienced by them as of their time. Perhaps, one might ride on coincidentally aligned currents for a moment, or their work be siphoned-off into expedient profiteering. But, the truth of such existences is that they can express a profoundly disinterested resolve with their lot in life. Rather than looking for ways to construct oneself as a salesman or marketeer of themselves and their work, this film invites them to consider the possibility of being at peace with the abjection of their alienated labor in the knowledge that even the most significant themselves endured the same. And while many films have made this argument in one way or another, what Tesla accomplishes is the poetic expression of the way our moment manifests itself today: as a cacophony of honed messages with calculated intent.