ABSTRACT
Figure 4.1 Antz (Eric Darnell, Tim Johnson, 1999. Credit: Dreamworks LLC.
Courtesy of the Ronald Grant Archive).
The animated film Antz (Eric Darnell, Tim Johnson, 1999) opens in the heart of the ant colony, with the central character Z-4195 (voiced by Woody Allen) lying on a couch in a psychiatrist’s office. Z (Figure 4.1) is finding it difficult to
adjust to his role as a worker in ant society: ‘It’s this whole gung-ho superorgan-
ism thing I can’t get…I’m supposed to do everything for the colony, and what
about my needs?…The whole system makes me feel insignificant’. To which his
psychiatrist replies: ‘Excellent. You’ve made a real breakthrough. You are insignifi-
cant!’ Z offers one kind of perspective on the relationship between the individual
and society, a perspective that we also find in the existentialist picture we have
just been looking at. On this view, individuals stand essentially in opposition to
society. Social demands and constraints are threats to the individual’s freedom, to
their very identity. To succumb to them, to conform to social expectations, is to
lose one’s individuality, to become part of the herd, to disappear into the faceless
crowd. The proper role of society is to be the backdrop against which heroic indi-
viduals can stand out, rebel, and assert their individuality. This tendency to see the
individual as having priority over society is a distinctively modern view of social
and political existence, one that has a powerful hold on our thinking. On this view
we are first of all individuals and only secondarily members of society. But before
saying any more about this, it will be helpful to look at a view in which it is society
that comes first and the individual a distant second.
