You will always find me in the same camp with the sane people who don’t doubt that humans first visited the moon on July 20, 1969. In my opinion, which tends to side with non-violence, Buzz’s 2002 jaw-clocking of a conspiracy cretin is understandable. But I’m also in the camp that can’t deny Capricorn One. It’s a masterpiece of ’70s cinema. The film is about three American astronauts who, before a trip to Mars, are dragged out of their spaceship and forced to perform the journey on a flimsy Hollywood-like set. This is Nixon-era paranoia on turbo. And it’s fun, with great performances all around. There’s the father of Josh Brolin (James Brolin), Sam Waterston, and O.J. Simpson.
Now, we know that O.J. Simpson did this “something.” But no matter how you feel about the outcome of the “crime of the century,” is it really fair to blame it on Capricorn One‘s O.J.? What was done by this one? If truth be accepted, the star of this movie is exactly the man you saw: The most celebrated football star in the universe. To assume that there is only one O.J. reveals that, philosophically speaking, you adhere to the doctrine that there is no free will.
When the excellent Capricorn One was shot, O.J. was not accused of committing a double murder. What he had done at that point made him another man in many ways. To begin with, the atoms gathered into the O.J. Simpson of Capricorn One were mostly not the same as those that gathered in the mug shot taken on June 17, 1994. Indeed, it’s possible that the Capricorn One O.J. might even hate the mug-shot O.J. as much as most of America does today. He would be right there with you. He would look at this other O.J. and say the same as you: This bastard deserves to be in prison for life for those Brentwood murders.
One can hate who they become. It happens all of the time. The individual is not the same person. The flaw in our common thinking is to imagine that the individual is not composed of individuals. Each individual is responding to environments that are constantly changing. But these changing circumstances also change the individual. A person is a point in time and space and all of the factors that connect this his/her in a space and a time. The personal and social experiential factors of the late-1990s were not there for the O.J. of Capricorn One. But if you are convinced that these external personal and social factors mean nothing to the formation of an individual, then you believe that once an O.J., always an O.J. You may not know it, but this makes you a Spinozist, in the sense that you believe contingency (some things just happen) is an illusion and the real is always what’s predetermined.
If you can’t enjoy Capricorn One (a film you must watch on the weekend that we celebrate NASA’s greatest achievement—putting humans on the moon) because you can’t stop seeing in the face of one of its fictional astronauts a man who, 15 years later, will be accused of murder, then, in effect, you are saying that all humans are condemned. But if you can see the other O.J. (in the way Leibniz wrote of the other Adam), then you have recognized the key insight of Paul Verhoeven’s science fiction masterpiece Total Recall. The self is not a self-self but radically a series of selves.
