Rage Against the Machine
Term 2: Play or Be Played; Module 1
Thesis: While it is possible to break free from the systems that confine us, each act of rebellion tends to chip away at something larger within us, leaving behind an uneasy sense of freedom. The characters we've encountered in this module may succeed in their maneuvers, but they are left forever glancing over their shoulders, haunted by who might pull them back or by the parts of themselves they've sacrificed along the way. It’s a freedom that often negates itself.
We’re Breaking Free
We live in a world made up of systems held together by rules, both explicit and implicit. Without many of these practices we would experience a descent into chaos. We’re asked to wait our turn in line, to cross when the walk sign tells us to, and to pull over for emergency service vehicles. It is expected that you pay your rent and bills on time, and that we all do our taxes and show up to work every day.
But what happens when the systems aren’t so obvious? Or, when the structures we’ve created in society are only visible to those trapped underneath the rules and regulations? How do we decide when it’s time to jaywalk (recently legalized in NYC, if you’re keeping up) or push past someone clogging the escalator’s left side? And what if the systems that glue society together most are exactly the ones meant to be broken? What are you willing to sacrifice to break free from what’s expected in search of a life you define?
While it is possible to break free from the systems that confine us, each act of rebellion tends to chip away at something larger within us, leaving behind an uneasy sense of freedom. The characters we've encountered in this module may succeed in their maneuvers, but they are left forever glancing over their shoulders, haunted by who might pull them back or by the parts of themselves they've sacrificed along the way. It’s a freedom that often negates itself.
In this module, we’ll explore how societal systems shape the players caught in their web, and the ways those players either bend the rules or outsmart the system entirely. But once these characters manage to “beat” the game—does it bring down the whole structure, or is it just a small win that does little more than chip away at the bigger fight?
Burning Down the House
In his 1884 novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain introduces us to Jim, a black man fleeing slavery who tags along with Huck on his journey to freedom. In the 2024 novel, James, Percival Everett introduces us to a different side of Jim (or as he’d prefer to be called, James). The two stories are different yet pulse with the same heartbeat. On the surface Jim/James both want the same thing: to flee their current circumstances; a system they were born into that doesn’t serve them and doesn’t want to. Everett’s layered portrayal exposes the limited, one-dimensional narratives that society (and especially white society) projects onto Black lives.
“At that moment the power of reading made itself clear and real to me. If I could see the words, then no one could control them or what I got from them. They couldn’t even know if I was merely seeing them or reading them, sounding them out or comprehending them. It was a completely private affair and completely free and, therefore, completely subversive.”
James is an educated man who purposely puts on the thick and bumbling accent our high school English teachers forced us to recite uncomfortably during popcorn reading. By concealing his intellect, James provides himself a small yet crucial tool that helps him in navigating a system rigged against him. Yet, even with this momentary triumph, James remains tethered to a system that will always try to dehumanize him. This choice also makes the audience (particularly the white audience) complicit, no better than any of the other white men and women of Huckleberry Finn who saw a one-dimensional portrait of a man and accepted it point blank. At the end of Everett’s novel, James rescues his wife and children from another plantation they had been sold to and lights fire to the house. He is stopped by a slave owner and James cocks a gun at him, speaking to him plainly in the dialect he has hidden for so long. Everett writes,
“I had never seen a white man filled with such fear. The remarkable truth, however, was that it was not the pistol, but my language, the fact that I didn’t conform to his expectations, that I could read, that had so disturbed and frightened him.”
James’s freedom comes at a high cost, and his final act of defiance forces the audience, especially white readers, to confront their complicity in an institution that values certain lives over others. He was forced to be a participant in a system he was born into – the stakes are higher, the loss greater if he should fail. The freedom James claims feels uneasy—it’s partial, precarious, and haunted by the lingering reality of being unequal within a deeply entrenched structure.
“White people often spent time admiring their survival of one thing or another. I imagined it was because so often they had no need to survive, but only to live.”
Becoming complicit in a system or turning your eye away from the way one can lift some and crush others can be lethal (as it was for the slave owner James shoots before fleeing once more). The people who are often the most dangerous to a system of society are usually the ones who are moving in silence they have been forced into before they strike. As James showed us, sometimes you just have to burn it all down to get out.
Who Dunne It?
Audiences were treated to one of the greatest twists of social arson in recent thriller history at the hands of Gillian Flynn. Gone Girl marked the end of the predictable “who-dunnit.” It played into your insistence that it is often–if not always–the husband who did it. We were served a cheating, oddly-beheaved, and often drunk male narrator in Nick Dunne. It felt like the case was closed. Until we flipped that page, or the scene moved us into the car with a very alive and not missing Amy Dunne. She had, in the words of a fictionalized Eliza Hamilton, erased herself from the narrative.
Amy Dunne broke free of a system of patriarchal marriage that asked her to be the perfect and chill wife. It’s the infamous “cool girl” speech you reblogged on Tumblr or might get served to you on TikTok in fifty parts. But Amy admits that she built the walls of the prison herself and then tried to ask for windows. In becoming the perfect wife for Nick, she didn’t successfully demand that he rise to the occasion and be the perfect husband, instead, she allowed him to throw out the blueprints for the house she was building and steamroll the entire foundation. They moved to his hometown, they took care of his family, he spent time alone with his friends and his mistress. But hadn’t she put herself in this position?
Yes, and no. Amy fed into the systems of heterosexual marriage that have been in place long before she said “I do.” Her mistake was assuming she could manipulate her husband into redefining the marital relationship with her, to make room for her in their marriage. So what could she control? Her own story. Faking her death a la Huck Finn and making her way down the Mississippi as well (only this time in a car and solo). But at what cost? To always be looking over her shoulder?
Amy returns to Nick covered in blood with a story to tell and the press behind her ready for her to dictate. She crafts the narrative of a woman captive, taken from her loving husband, plucked straight out of marital bliss and domestic comforts softer than a set of Skims pajamas. But will Nick comply moving forward? Has she retained enough of the upper hand to make her marriage finally bend to her will? The story leaves it vague, the couple metaphorically re-painting the white picket fence they’ve stained with blood. It’s easy to imagine a marriage that to the outside looks like a scoop of vanilla but hides a darker interior once you bite through the cone. The cat and mouse game may never end. Is that what marriage should be?
Bea, Our Guest
Like Amy, Stone Cold Fox’s protagonist Bea is certainly willing to hold onto an advantageous marriage, working with the same calculated desperation of the mothers in an Austen novel. Tired of a childhood of scamming and scheming alongside her mother, Bea decides to pull off one final trick: marrying into Colin Case’s old money family. Bea is willing to spend her entire adult life lying and conforming if only to break out of the frenzied chaos that was her tumultuous upbringing. Marriage is the easiest way in.
Bea executes her plans with the same tenacity and grit that Amy Dunne employs as she crafts her cool girl persona. Where they differ is perhaps Bea has more awareness as to how her marriage will look and feel. She doesn’t expect more from Colin than he is offering, she expects more of herself. She holds on with white knuckles as she tries to steer the ship out of rocking seas and onto a dock at Hyannis (or wherever the ultra wealthy use “summer” as a verb these days). Every day for Bea is a question of how secure a position in a society she was not born into - not unlike the quotidian life Alex of Emma Cline’s The Guest experiences just a couple dozen miles away.
The Hamptons, or “Out East” as locals call it, are known for being a summer playground for the elite (and for the iconic chicken salad at Round Swamp Farm). They are the backdrop for Alex, a twenty-two-year old on a seemingly relentless quest to climb the social ladder, even if it just means having a place to sleep that night.
Throughout Alex’s journey, we see her play the system, emulating those around her to appear as though she belongs. She starts by staying at the home of Simon, a wealthy older man she’s been dating who holds the key to her dream life. But when her plan A falls through, she is forced to get crafty, finagling her way into sleeping into a mansion by schmoozing her way through a party crowd. Thus begins a long journey of attempting to look the part and gain a spot in this world of privilege. But as she climbs down the ladder from one temporary situation to the next, Alex eventually finds herself unmoored, forced to spend a night on the beach. This moment is a stark contrast to the access she hoped to secure during her stay out east, signaling how she’s drifting further from the life so desperately wants.
The result is anxiety inducing for both Alex and the readers, as we don’t know her fate. She attends one final party in hopes of seeing Simon and getting him (and his lifestyle) back. However, an abrupt ending leaves you wondering if her scamming and scheming was successful in the end. If the goal was peace, was it ever possible for Alex to win the game?
The characters in this module all make different sacrifices to escape their confinements, each finding a precarious kind of freedom that can be as much about survival as it is about defiance. There is certainly a bigger degree of risk and injustice between James and the women of Module One, but the desperation and the need for something different often feel like notes in the same song. However, each of them, in their own way, reveals the irony that breaking free doesn’t always mean freedom. Instead, it leaves us with questions—about the costs of liberation, about the weight of systems and rules that cling to us even when we try to burn them down. And maybe that’s the point: true freedom isn’t easily won, and even when it is, the systems left in the ashes seem to linger, haunting each new step.
Study Questions
Is there enough acupuncture in the world to justify a life like Bea or Alex’s where you are constantly craning your neck to make sure no one is coming to expose you?
Are there skills you hide Hannah Montana style away from the world in order to maintain a slight upper hand should you need to use it?
What's a minor societal rule you rebel against? (e.g., always standing on the right side of the escalator)