The Congress (11/5/24)

The Congress then flashes forward twenty years later to her travels in the studio's animated utopia world, where anyone can become an avatar of themselves using hallucinogenic drugs to enter a mutable illusory state. The Congress premiered at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival on 15 May 2013.  

The Congress is perhaps more relevant and timely today than it was just a few years ago. Despite its rather messy narrative structure, The Congress is the perfect film to understand the Post-Truth era we seem to find ourselves in. Our societies have become deeply fragmented and divided into squabbling sub-realms of hard-right, hard-left, and inept centrists, whilst the most important thing now is the promotion of the individual and what the individual desires, society be damned. The Congress seemed to know where we were heading and where we still might be heading. And it’s a dark place.

In the film, Wright attends an event called the Futurological Congress, a conference organized by Miramount in Abrahama City, a vast place where the surroundings and citizenry are completely animated in a kind of surreal cartoon hellscape that Wright herself describes as “Cinderella on heroin.” When it becomes clear that the massive conglomerate Miramount plans a massive program to allow every person across the globe access into these digitally animated worlds, Wright uses the opportunity to denounce the proposal, imploring the audience to “Wake up people wake up” from the nightmare and instead to direct the vast resources to means other than entertainment and distraction.

Lindsay Brandon Hunter is Assistant Professor of Theatre.  She holds an MA in Performance Studies from NYU and a PhD in Theater and Performance Studies from UCLA, where she was awarded a 2012 teaching fellowship from the Colloquium of University Teaching Fellows and the 2011 Aaron Curtis Taylor Memorial Scholarship.  Her current research project focuses on performances of authenticity and realness in intermedial theater, reality television, and immersive and pervasive gaming.  Her published work includes a chapter on alternate reality gaming in the forthcoming Framing Immersive Theatre and Performance (Palgrave) and essays and reviews in Text & Presentation and Theatre Survey.  She is also a past editor of UCLA’s Extensions: The Online Journal of Embodiment and Technology.