Eureka – Nicolas Roeg (1983)

Archimedes may have joyfully exclaimed, “I have found it” (eureka) in Ancient Greek and Edgar Allan Poe may have stared into the heavens and said “Eureka, I can do no more” shortly before his death, but in Nicolas Roeg’s Eureka the words “I never earned a nickel from another man’s sweat” echo around the Yukon as the earth ejaculates its gold. In this eureka moment Klondike prospector Jack McCann (Gene Hackman) finds his ecstasy (like Archimedes) and a subsequent life in which he can do no more (like Poe) while at the same time declaring his sovereign autonomy, which justifies his success (in the moment) and his later delusions of self-determination that lead to his eventual downfall.
What McCann ultimately finds, then, once an orgasm of gold has spat out onto the land, is not a lasting ecstasy but an ecstasy that produces death, both the death of a meaning for McCann, once the search for gold is over (most of the film occurs in the troubled aftermath of this moment) and a literal violent death brought on by his stubborn refusal to earn by any other means. In Freudian terms Eros may have driven Jack towards the ecstasy of gold but Thanatos equally drives him, and his delusions of being self-made and self-ruled, towards his own extinction.

            However, far from merely being a parable on the destructive force of wealth (unfashionably produced in a decade that glorified affluence) Eureka is a story that presents self-determination itself as a destructive impulse. Tracy McCann’s (Theresa Russell) ecstasy is not gold but sex and the desire for her husband Claude (Rutger Hauer). This desire consumes her with such an elemental force that her partner is not able to match her committment, and (like her father) Tracy finds her own kind of gold too soon until she can eventually do no more and her resolve publicly reveals her husband’s inadequacies, in a courtroom of all places, because he is “guilty of innocence” (or does not have the same kind of drive or determination for personal ecstasy as Tracy and Jack McCann). However, like her father before her, Tracy’s Eros attains her desire but her Thanatos also destroys it, because their relationship doesn’t survive the court and the brutal revelations that surface within it.

            Eureka, therefore, is not just a cautionary tale on finding your ecstasy too soon and having to live in the shadow of that moment until the drives that propelled you towards it, in the first place, destroy you or the thing you desire, but also a depiction of the kind of single-minded self-determination and commitment required reach your own personal ecstasy. Moreover, to be able to shout eureka at the heavens, once both the sex drive and the death drive have got the absolutely determined to the point of no return, the ecstasy inheritor has to also ask what happens after this moment, if there is anything meaningful that follows once the ultimate meaning has been accomplished.

            In some respects Eureka is one of Nicolas Roeg’s last films to display the kind of bravura visual grammar he was known for. The last of his fragmented narratives loaded with symbolic meaning and profound human insights, which were not necessarily easily digested but also not constructed around a staid theatrical tradition either. Eureka is full of germane visual juxtapositions of loss and gain, life and death and repetition and renewal, and considering this may have been, stylistically at least, a concluding piece in a body of work that pushed the cinematic medium for over a decade, maybe Roeg himself had also reached his own eureka moment, which required an enormous amount of self-determination (in a commercial business that more or less created obstacles for him) until, like Poe, he could do no more.  However, despite this fulfillment Roeg has left some gold behind, for all of us, waiting to be found. Long may we shout eureka when we find it.