Every time I finish a work of art convinced that I understood what it meant, my brain spends the next few days furiously going back over it to make absolutely sure.
I suspect that Room 237 had a bigger impact on me than I’d originally thought. I’m still haunted, not by the ghosts of murdered Native Americans or the participants of a conspiracy to fake the moon landing, but by the image of people so confidently and forcefully asserting interpretations that were just batshit nonsense.
With Lauren Beukes’s excellent Moxyland, I’m wondering whether I put an overly simplistic and optimistic spin on a story that was intended just to feel like a brutal gut punch.
I don’t normally enjoy stories like this, so I’m not exactly sure how to interpret them. I don’t like dystopian (and especially post-apocalyptic) fiction, since the nihilism always feels like a pointless waste of time. I’m always left feeling like Ebenezer Scrooge, yelling at the Ghost of Christmas Future and asking what was the point in forcing me to see stuff that’s such a downer. And I don’t like stories with unlikeable protagonists, even when they’re trying to teach me something. I read slowly enough that it feels like having to spend too much time with people I hate.
So the question is: is Beukes deliberately manipulating the audience’s sympathies and empathy (and sense of morality), to leave us with the unspoken idea that even if it’s too late for these characters, it’s not to late for us, since we haven’t yet had the humanity crushed out of us?
Or did she simply write a book assuming it would be read by an audience of emotionally mature adults, so my belief that “I got it” is really nothing more than a sign that I’m not a sociopath?
A key scene for me is the one in which Kendra finds herself inexplicably drawn to a homeless woman who’s been reported by a shopkeeper and is lying helplessly on the street after being tasered by the police. She’s compelled to lean in and stare at the woman for reasons she can’t explain. She’s not giving assistance, but she can’t pull herself away even as the shopkeeper threatens her.
I interpreted this as Kendra finding herself with a sense of compassion, one that’s so alien to her she doesn’t know where it’s coming from. Especially in this society, street people become invisible to everyone else. They (we) practice a kind of learned cruelty and lack of compassion, or else we’d be overwhelmed with problems that we’re individually unequipped to solve. I thought that this scene showed that Kendra — whether due to some heightened sensitivity, or merely coming out of the bubble of depressed self-absorption she’d been living inside — was being reminded of how we’re all connected as human beings.
A much simpler and more straightforward interpretation, though, is that the nanotechnology she’d been injected with was having the same effect on her that it does on the police dogs. We learned earlier that they’re drawn to people who’ve been taken down by the police, instinctively standing watch over them. That idea is reinforced at the end of Kendra’s story, when she sees a more direct comparison between her and the police dogs, and she suffers the same fate as the dogs that have outlived their usefulness.
Another lingering question for me was simply why the book was titled Moxyland. Once the character and the Roblox-like children’s game were introduced, I’d assumed that it would become a lot more prominent in the story from then on. But we only get a chapter describing Toby getting repeatedly griefed by vicious, spawn-point-camping eight year olds, and then the game is hardly mentioned again.
My interpretation is that the book is basically saying that these characters were doomed from the start. Their lives and ultimately their fates aren’t necessarily the result of any moral failing on their part, since the system is designed to take advantage of them.
We saw explicitly that Lerato was a product of a system that funneled orphaned “Aidsbabies” directly into a lifetime of indentured servitude to a corporation. But the Moxyland game is designed to indoctrinate even the more privileged kids into the mindset required to function in this society. They’re trained to be selfish, desensitized to violence, consumerist, and willing to exploit the work of “lesser” people to get them the items that they didn’t earn.
And finally, my other big question was about the morality of the book: are the protagonists rewarded or punished for the things that they do?
It could seem to be completely nihilistic: Kendra and Tendeka are the characters who seem to be the most deserving of sympathy, at least initially, and yet they both have tragic endings. Tendeka’s is particularly gruesome, almost as if he’s been punished for his idealism. But Toby and Lerato would seem to be the most flawed and the most corrupted, and they’re rewarded with the closest thing Moxyland has to happy endings.
Lerato is overwhelmed with a feeling of doom as she finally learns how broad and deep the corporation’s corruption and lack of humanity goes, and there’s a strong suggestion that forced suicide would be the only way out. But in the end, she’s offered not only a kind of promotion, but a relocation to a different continent, which is exactly what she’d wished for earlier as she resolved to get farther away from her sisters.
And I said that I don’t like stories with unlikeable protagonists, and wow, does Toby come out swinging in the second chapter trying to establish himself as the most obnoxious character imaginable. But at the book’s end, he’s not only recovered from the trauma he just experienced, but he’s already thinking of how he can spin it to his advantage. Not just getting back to square one, but seeing the potential for the financial independence that he’s never known. Plus, he’s apparently been gifted with Kendra’s improved healing and immune system, since I’m assuming that her nanobots have been sexually transmitted. (Which has the especially dark implication that the ad company designed the campaign to be, literally, viral marketing).
But it also seems evident that a “happy ending” in Moxyland is actually a fate worse than death, since success in this world requires giving up the last remaining bit of your humanity. Toby and Lerato’s “rewards” will result in losing any remaining contact with their own families. And both give in not just to their own sense of self-preservation — which seems to be required for anyone to even survive — but their own selfishness. Each of them makes a final decision to take advantage of the people around them so that they can get ahead.
Meanwhile, neither Kendra nor Tendeka are as sympathetic as they seemed initially. We mostly hear their stories told from their perspective, and it only gradually becomes evident how much self-delusion they’re operating under, and how much spin they’re putting on the truth.
Tendeka has the more gruesome ending, but he’s also the most hypocritical. Early on, his major flaws seem to be his short temper and his blindly naive idealism. As the book progresses, we start to see that he’s arrogant and self-righteous enough to go against everything he supposedly stands for. He’s convinced that he’s helping Emmie by giving her a path into the country, a job, and health care during her pregnancy. But we see how selfish he actually is, showing little concern and instead treating her as nothing more than a surrogate to deliver his baby. It’s even worse by story’s end, as his claims of wanting to help underprivileged kids are proven false, since he’s perfectly willing to put so many of the kids in mortal danger. He has Zuko set off a bomb inside a clinic, and he has no concern about the safety of Zuko or of any of the people in the clinic.
We learn the extent to which Tendeka has been manipulated by the corporation (in the form of skyward*/Stefan) to create terrorists in order to justify increased suppression, so you could say that Tendeka was driven mad and was no longer responsible for anything he did. But I think it’s significant that up until the very end, he was so thoroughly self-righteous about his own belief that the virus was a hoax, that he refused anything and anyone that suggested otherwise. A freedom fighter who’s lost sight of (or never truly cared about in the first place) what he’s fighting for invariably becomes a tool for the oppressors.
I thought that Kendra’s characterization was a lot more subtle and open to interpretation. Initially, I thought it was obvious that she was the most sympathetic of all the protagonist. She didn’t seem to be driven by selfish ambition; she was simply lost. She frequently said that she felt like she was drowning under black water. Her art was the only thing that she had that was hers, the only way that she could express herself. It took the form of an analog format, an attempt to get back to something that was real, unpredictable, natural, and not so tightly controlled.
But as the book went on, I started to wonder how much of that was her self-delusion, which often seemed more innocent and disingenuously self-deprecating than the way that other characters saw her. Is she really as passive as she makes herself out to be? Does she keep getting involved with domineering, unavailable, or otherwise toxic men because she’s looking for human connection, or is she more manipulative than she’s willing to acknowledge to herself? Is she more ambitious than she’s letting on? She made herself a brand ambassador in an attempt to be seen; is she just less self-aware than Toby is when he’s trying to do the same thing?
Then again, when the book is suggesting that these characters were doomed from the start — an idea that’s made explicit by the end, when we learn just how far the corporations will go — isn’t it just a prudish, simplistic, slasher-movie morality to try and figure out whether the characters deserve their fates?
By slasher-movie morality, I mean that it’s absurd to suggest that a character (especially a young woman, heaven forbid!) being promiscuous or using drugs somehow makes them more deserving of being murdered by a killer. At the most charitable, it’s a vain attempt to convince ourselves that we can avoid catastrophe if we abstain from sin. At worst, it’s an attempt to convince ourselves that it’s fine for us to watch people being murdered for entertainment, because it’s all just a morality play, and besides they had it coming.
So it’s pointless, if not outright ghoulish, to look for good guys and bad guys in a story that’s all about a society that’s built to squeeze the humanity out of us. Even by that measure, though, Kendra is the most blameless of the protagonists, in that she tried to live by the “rules” of a dehumanizing society and did the least harm in the process.
So does that make it bleak and nihilistic that she meets such a cruel and dehumanizing end? I was left with a strange sense of peace from the whole thing, not horror. If my interpretation of the rest of the book is valid, then it’s actually Kendra who had the closest Moxyland gets to a happy ending: in a world that is constructed not just to rob you of your humanity, but to make it so that you have to take advantage of other people just to survive, then the greatest reward is to finally be free of it.