The quantum narrative

Rating: Null/10 (1 January 2013)

The Wachowskis are nothing if not ambitious.
The film is in the form of a cloud of narratives, fragments of mini- films. These are threaded together in several simple ways; objects carry over, characters or their offspring, on a more fundamental level, the same struggle through the ages. You might think of this as in the vein of DW Griffith's 1916 film Intolerance (similarly: a layered film with a humanistic message, shuffling between eras, vast in scope), substituting the struggle for love with one for freedom.
The recurring notion in each segment is that of a narrator who is trapped in someone else's (a gnostic demigod's)storyworld, and looking to apprehend liberating truths behind the prisonmatrix of illusion. Here's how it plays out:
1) in the High Seas story (Herman Melville is referenced in a later segment) the narrator is at the mercy of ship captain and doctor, 2) the young gay composer is trapped by his old and famous mentor, 3) the Vietnam-era journalist stumbles across a conspiracy in the energy world, 4) the aging editor is locked up by his brother in a nursing home (a cuckoo's nest), 5) a replicant in the future of the Bladerunner world experiences a Matrix-like awakening and joins the revolution against the totalitarian machine, 6) in the Waterworld segment, a superstitious villager breaks the spell of fear and prophecy (and so, indoctrinated tradition), and this reunites him with lost humanity.
It helps to know that the core philosophy that connects these is what the Buddhist have been saying for millenia: we are trapped in self-perpetuating illusion that alters or distorts reality, have fashioned artificial realities to that effect which we inhabit daily (social structures, hierarchies, self), and every step we take within those, for good or bad, has far-reaching imports that karmically propagate through the world (karma meaning 'action'. In Buddha's time, Die Hard would be a 'karma' film, rightfully so).
That's all fine.
The decision to use the same actors in different roles is in line with this proposed malleability of self and causal interconnectedness of energy. They are not all of them great, but Hanks stands out. Hugh Grant as warpainted cannibal? Count me in.
Each of the stories culminates in a spiritual breakthrough of sorts, in that inspirational way I personally find trite. That's not the main issue with the film. It sporadically entertains, but that's not the reason to watch it either.
Like Inception, it is an essay on structures of consciousness done with Hollywood money and sensibility. The author of the book wrote it with explicit reincarnation in mind, which only clouds his premise—lo, confused viewers are trying to figure out who is reincarnated as who. Doesn't matter one bit.
Here's the core idea of the essay: Hanks as a nuclear scientist explains about the quantum unpredictability of arising phenomena, the science of it probably needs more fleshing out at this point, but the idea that the same should apply to matters of mind is exciting and one I've been investigating myself in the context of meditation.
Thought (dreams, memory) really work that way, in a stream of quantum phenomena that arise and disappear, and these phenomena are in the form of fragmented mini-films like we have here. The paradoxical trick? It's not the self that forms these internal films, but the other way round— the images over time acquire a narrator who begins to shape a story. (Zen Buddhists meditate to kill that narrating self)
From the perspective of the filmmakers, the point is suggesting that each subsequent event is in mysterious ways only possible because of unpredictable actions that precede it—my favorite bit is an actual mini-film (a public broadcast) whose message 'awakens' humanity in the stars.
But simply, I don't think you can sufficiently illustrate any of that in the context of 'hero's journey' mythadventure. Because in that mode you have to have the rousing battles, lessons of wisdom and archetypal grapple with destiny, all of which cloud clear focus away from life as we know it.
It doesn't help that Jungians and a score of literary scholars have further ruined that with metaphor. It's why the Dune movie failed. Why Lynch—who has been meditating since the 1970's—abandoned this external, costume-y mode for internal shuffling of phenomena.
That is because it is not metaphor to graft from the outside. It has actual mechanism, a pretty puzzling one at that—what is turbulence to classic physicists. I am talking of the illusory matrix-space where consciousness comes into being, where films are first sparked into life.
This space of waking consciousness is an imperfection of mind, is a prison, hence our-selves as the narrator who is trapped in it, spending our entire lives looking for transcendence, in sex, in movies, in some shared experience with something other than self.
I propose a quantum cinematic narrative that is possible to be conceived on and mirror that level. This is not it. Moreover, this is why it fails to work on the scope it aspires to. It is all from the outside, more Frank Herbert than Dogen.
Each story-particle that forms the film is about a grand leap against oppression, and in so much noise the film misses the small steps. On top of that they have jumbled the chronology, but each story has ordinary progression and logic. And whereas Buddhism thrives in the illogicality of spontaneously arising life, that life has been bulldozed here in favor of clean reincarnation.
I am only raising these issues, because the film strikes me as more ambitious than anything we have seen in some time. Someone (I think Time) has already proclaimed this the worst of the year, which is just a small view.
If you want to see a film that successfully does this quantum narrative, watch Tarkovsky's Zerkalo.