One scene in particular gets to me from the film, the part near the end where Sonmi~451 is explaining to an Archivist that she envisions heaven as a door opening and her dead lover Hae-Joo walking through it, and as she narrates this the film cuts to the character Adam Ewing opening a door and seeing his lover Tilda, both of whom are Sonmi and Hae-Joo in former lives. And I just lose it.
The entire film is about people crossing each others' paths in one way or another over and over again through different lives and in different worlds. It paints a rather beautiful picture that everybody we come across in our life is bound to us and us to them for eternity, and at the end of each life we will meet again in the next. That girl you were too nervous to ask out? You may be married to her in another life. That friend who you've lost touch with? The two of you will battle aliens together side by side in a future lifetime. You know, probably.
Even if there isn't an eternity of reincarnation like that, it's still a comfort to know that our lives mean something in the grand scheme of things. I like watching movies and reading books where every single character has a purpose, and by "purpose" I don't mean comic relief or the fat one. A great writer, for film or for books, brings in other characters as they are needed to fulfill something the main character can't do alone. Once that something is complete, the character can either walk away or get horribly and unfairly killed (the latter seems the most popular these days). Still, that person did something before disappearing forever. No one else could come in and do that instead, it was a purpose designed solely for him or her. That's what I like to believe we are to this world.
Because author David Mitchell isn't a prophet from the heavens as far as I know, I'm open to the idea that the Cloud Atlas thing isn't the end all explanation of the mysteries of life. Still, we as a species like to believe that our lives are being carefully planned by someone far more patient and with much better decision-making skills up above. Every bad thing that happens to us is a lesson, every wound makes us tougher, every Andrea means we won't get another Andrea.
However, with hope also comes the possibility of no hope. Maybe this is it, these 80 or so years, and that's only if you don't get bumped off between then and now. What if there is no purpose or plan for us? That job interview you blew? You might blow the next one and the next one too without getting any better at it. That relationship that didn't work out? What if it's just the first of many more to come? Every failure could just be another failure with nothing to take away from it. When a tree falls in a forest without anyone to hear it, it makes a sound whether you're there or not. Maybe shit just happens and doesn't stop to think about what will happen next.
Of course that's all bullshit because we live in a world where this happened:
Someone had that idea, and someone else agreed to pay that person to film it, and now it's ours. So no matter what life throws at you or how big your eyes get for that bottle of sleeping pills, take solace in knowing that the entertainment industry will be there when God isn't.
Which brings me back to the beginning...somehow. This worked out nicely for this blog post. Gives it a nice circular fee--anyways, that brings us back to Cloud Atlas. One of the many, MANY themes of that movie is that our lives are not just for ourselves and that we affect others and they affect us, and this cycle does not stop at death but continues on into another life. I mean, Ben Whishaw's character (well, one of his characters) kills himself with the comfort that he will meet his lover again in "another world...a better world." That or he was quoting Morrissey.
If you've watched Lost, remember that scene in season 4 where we first see Daniel Faraday and he's watching that news report about Oceanic 815 and he starts crying? When his caretaker asks what's wrong, he replies, "I don't know." Daniel really doesn't know at the time but in his heart he's still sad. He just can't remember why because his mind has been fucked up by his many time travel experiments. Sometimes you hear a song that just gets to you even though the lyrics may not be relative, but for some reason it means something to you. Sometimes we meet people we either feel like we've met before or feel already connected to. Some people abuse that belief by using it as a pickup line but nevertheless it is a feeling I know you've had too.
That's Cloud Atlas in a nutshell, that whole feeling I just described. It's like deja vu but stronger. I think the reason I feel such a connection to this movie is because it gives me comfort that maybe that deja vu is more than just a feeling. If this means that I'll get to see the people I love again in future lifetimes and meet them all over again, that's quite a comforting feeling.
See you then,
Tyler
P.S. Who wants to see Guardians of the Galaxy with me?
