My Take-Aways From Watching Divergent Many Times

One of my favourite movies is Divergent – I watch it at least once a month – and the more I watch it, the more I learn from it.

Before I start, I should point out that I am one of those people who will read books and watch movies many times. Even though I know what’s going to happen, it does not ruin the experience for me and, in fact, often enhances it.

My late wife would rarely watch the same movie twice – it was only ever a fall-back option if there was nothing else to watch.

And I wonder whether this is related to how our brains worked – she was a highly visual person, and I think that ability helped her to have a consistently much better memory than I do. She often talked about “mapping” things – over 12 years after moving to this house, she could still pinpoint exactly where items were that had not yet been unpacked.

On the other hand, I am not visual at all – I’m one of those people whose “mind’s eye” is apparently totally blind. As for my memory, it’s hit or miss – sometimes, it’s dreadful, and on other occasions (sometimes augmented by mnemonics), it’s anywhere from good to great.

But back to the re-watching point.

In a well-constructed movie, everything should be there for a reason, and that is why I find it useful to watch movies multiple times. The first time around, you may miss things that only start to make sense on subsequent viewings (and the same goes for books too) because you don’t understand the significance until later. I also accept that this may have more to do with my ability to pay attention (I’m somewhat ADD) than anything else.

So, what are my thoughts about Divergent, and what are my take-aways from it?

Language

The word that stands out more than any other in this movie is “faction”.

A faction is “a party of persons having a common end in view”, but what is represented in the movie are five groups who are all supposed to have the same common end (i.e. a harmonious, peaceful, productive society).

The difference between those five factions is not their end goal, but the means they use to achieve it, based on preferences and talents.

The problem for me is that the word “faction” has come to have negative connotations – groups of people who disagree with each other’s goals.

On that basis, it seems like a strange word to use when creating a society where people need to use their different abilities so they can all thrive together.

And it isn’t until the third movie in the series, Allegiant, that you begin to wonder whether the word “faction” was chosen precisely for that reason.

Also, use of the word “factionless” might only mean that a person does not fit within the five recognized groups, but that should not mean they are useless to society – even though that is how the movie portrays them.

At some level, it even seems naively simplistic to think that a society only needs five types of people in order to function.

But the larger point is that the words you use are important – subtle nuances can alter how others interpret your message in significant ways.

After saying something they know they shouldn’t have said, people often claim that “it just slipped out”, but we all have the ability to choose the words we use all of the time – and we should make sure we are using the best words we can.

Personal Growth

The heroine grows significantly during this story – from an apparently meek young girl into a woman with an inner strength that few others saw coming (and which she maybe didn’t see in herself either).

From the choosing ceremony onwards, she makes decisions that seem out of character, until you realise that her character was never what we were led to believe.

That is one of the problems with putting people in boxes rather than allowing them to develop as individuals – they come to accept other people’s definitions of them and how they should believe, without maybe questioning whether any of it is true or accurate.

In the movie, the heroine demonstrates that she is brave and courageous, and has the integrity to do what she knows is right, even when her own life is at stake.

Facing your fears, which is a key part of the middle part of the movie, is important if you want to grow, and those sequences show that being brave isn’t about having no fear – it’s about dealing with the fear anyway.

Being Woke

What the movie refers to as divergents has, for me, a close parallel with life today.

There are those who, to use the current vernacular, are “woke” – i.e. they see what is really going on behind the scenes and are not taken in by all the smoke and mirrors.

Sometimes these people may be called conspiracy theorists, but that is a derogatory term, coined by the government, to make such people look crazy.

The fact is, many so-called conspiracy theories later turn out to be the truth after all.

And, like in the movie, people who do not follow the rules or swallow the propaganda or refuse to be put in boxes are a threat to those in control.

Such people are seen as the proverbial bad apple – a single such individual can slowly turn everybody else, and that is, of course, not what those in power want at all.

As George Carlin once said, “they want obedient workers – people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shitty jobs.”

In the movie, we see Tris, the heroine, tell herself, during the fear tests, that “it’s not real”, and that is an important message to everybody today – almost nothing that you see or hear is what you think it is.

The fact is, most of the media in the USA is controlled by about half a dozen individuals or organizations.

When I was young, newsreaders told you what had happened, and it was up to you to evaluate what you thought about it, whereas these days, newsreaders tell you what to think, and you have to decide whether it’s even real or not.

Fake news is everywhere, and working out what is the truth and what are all lies is becoming more and more difficult.

There are also parallels here to The Truman Show, because the majority of the people in Divergent do not realize what it really going on. In the Jim Carrey movie, he finds out right near the end, while in the Divergent series, a select few don’t discover the larger big-picture truth until the third movie, Allegiant.

But in both cases, nobody likes to learn that they are merely somebody else’s puppets, and that is why the “woke” people today are so vociferous – they’ve discovered what is going on and it angers them, as well as drives them to let others know the truth.

Killing

In the movie’s introduction, we are led to believe that the people living in what you might call New Chicago are all that is left after a massive war that wiped out most of humanity.

You’d think, therefore, that the people would recognize that killing each other is wrong and wasteful – after all, according to the movie’s timeline, it’s only about 100 years since the war ended.

And yet we see two of the five factions setting out to murder all the members of one of the remaining three factions. In other words, they’re trying to kill close to 20% of the population (not taking into account the so-called factionless, whose numbers are unknown).

This seems to be a common thread in many movies, and I find it sad that with all of the technology and all of the experience that humanity has endured, people still cannot appear to refrain from killing each other, often over something as intangible as unproven (or unprovable) ideas.

Family

A key message within the movie is “faction over blood” – i.e. your role in society is more important than family.

I would imagine this really goes against the grain for a lot of people who believe family is everything.

But what this message from the movie is really saying is equivalent to Spock’s line near the end of The Wrath Of Khan, i.e. “Logic clearly dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”

And it has to be said that life today is nothing like the environment in which humans evolved – for most of our history, people have lived in small, almost tribal units of a couple of hundred people or fewer.

And in those early societies, people looked out for each other, regardless of whether they were related by blood or not – because survival of the tribe was important.

These days, society is very different – we probably don’t even know most of the people who live within a hundred yards of us.

So maybe clinging on to family, whether they are close by or not, is a modern substitute for the way we humans developed long ago.

But when society is at stake, as it is in the movie, then however difficult it may be to hear, family should take a backseat to the needs of the many.

Love

Amongst many other things, Divergent is a love story.

This aspect becomes more apparent in the following two movies in the series, but you can see its birth during this first one.

It is, of course, a sub-plot, and to me it illustrates the way love should grow.

It is my opinion that, today, most of what people describe as love is really just lust – people are highly swayed by physical appearance (either by the natural body or by the way people accessorize, with plastic surgery, clothes, hair styles, etc.).

In the movie, however, the friendship and love grow because the two lead characters begin to appreciate that they share the same principles and ideals, and they think in the same sort of way.

Maybe I’m biased here, because that’s what happened with my late wife and me (as I write about here), but approaching a relationship from that perspective seems to me like it has a greater chance of success.

Conclusion

In spite of some of the negative aspects of the movie, overall, I find it uplifting because it’s a tale of:

• personal growth under difficult circumstances
• right over wrong and integrity
• how two people learn to trust each other, become friends, and find love

As a final aside, I haven’t yet read the books (which I do plan to do), and I find the first of these movies by far the best – the second, Insurgent, is disappointing (as is often the case with sequels), and the third, Allegiant, is OK but not great.

But if you haven’t seen Divergent yet, I highly recommend watching it – at least twice.

Additional Resources

These are suggestions for those who wish to delve deeper into any of the above:

1. Divergent (Books)
2. Divergent (Movies)
3. Star Trek Original Motion Picture Collection
4. The Truman Show