Thursday, November 29, 2012
Sunday, November 11, 2012
Cloud Atlas: Hey, you, get off of my cloud
When a director (or team of directors) is obviously trying
to create a masterpiece, an invisible chip appears on the shoulders of critics. Masterpiece? Who the hell do you think you are?
Most critics bashed Kubrick's 2001 when
it first came out. (Harlan Ellison included -- who changed his mind but
never admitted it.) Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life got a similar treatment. Yeah, I'm sure a lot of you hated it. Big and slow. Some things are supposed to be big and slow.
I could multiply examples and start fights, but you get the idea.
Cloud Atlas has been bashed for being predictable, but that misses the point. This is a movie about reincarnation and eternal recurrence -- reflecting the belief system of about a billion people on this blue marble. I've always had a fuzzy notion of what reincarnation would look like. This makes it clear. Pods of connected people, moving through time. Based on their choices, some people get better, some get worse. Tom Hanks' character starts as a murderer, ends up as a savior. Hugh Grant's character is merely pompous and irritating. By the time we reach the dystopian far future, he's a kill-crazy cannibal. Karma at work, folks. Not exactly instant, but effective.
Structurally, the screenwriters took the six interlocking narratives of the original novel (six stories, interrupted then continued) and presented them as six parallel stories (six stories, going on at the same time). Each tale is a tale of repression and liberation. To reduce it to a Marxist fortune cookie: Solidarity is eternally at war with exploitation.
Now, imagine that war, going on for generation after generation, with a new cast of characters with the same old souls burning inside.
That's the movie.
It's not a materialist world view. It's not a Judeo/Christian worldview. There's no messianic savior. Just a congeries of souls, eternally linked together, their every decision resonating. That's a fair description of what Aldous Huxley called the perennial philosophy.
The critics have a problem with the philosophy, so they have a problem with the movie.
In future lives they may yet change their minds.
I could multiply examples and start fights, but you get the idea.
Cloud Atlas has been bashed for being predictable, but that misses the point. This is a movie about reincarnation and eternal recurrence -- reflecting the belief system of about a billion people on this blue marble. I've always had a fuzzy notion of what reincarnation would look like. This makes it clear. Pods of connected people, moving through time. Based on their choices, some people get better, some get worse. Tom Hanks' character starts as a murderer, ends up as a savior. Hugh Grant's character is merely pompous and irritating. By the time we reach the dystopian far future, he's a kill-crazy cannibal. Karma at work, folks. Not exactly instant, but effective.
Structurally, the screenwriters took the six interlocking narratives of the original novel (six stories, interrupted then continued) and presented them as six parallel stories (six stories, going on at the same time). Each tale is a tale of repression and liberation. To reduce it to a Marxist fortune cookie: Solidarity is eternally at war with exploitation.
Now, imagine that war, going on for generation after generation, with a new cast of characters with the same old souls burning inside.
That's the movie.
It's not a materialist world view. It's not a Judeo/Christian worldview. There's no messianic savior. Just a congeries of souls, eternally linked together, their every decision resonating. That's a fair description of what Aldous Huxley called the perennial philosophy.
The critics have a problem with the philosophy, so they have a problem with the movie.
In future lives they may yet change their minds.
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