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Merry Christmas Bedford Falls! In the evergreen It's a Wonderful Life from 1946 James Stewart is the recipient of a second chance at life. Having seen what could have been, had he not taken the course which leads him to the brink of suicide, one version of Stewart’s George Bailey - and the film’s audience - is allowed a happy ending.
Decades later the romantic comedy Sliding Doors
(1998) applied a deft plot twist to follow the twin paths the central
character's life could take depending on whether she catches a train. (Three
years earlier Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise took the same idea but
allowed his strangers on train to pursue just one path of ‘what ifs’).
Incidentally, editors and some filmmakers (Christopher
Nolan) will tell you that cinema’s greatest superpower is the ability to play
with time and that this is achieve by compressing, expanding and juxtaposing
timelines in the edit.
Now cinema is awash with diverging timelines and story forks
happening to the same characters at different (or same) ages in multiple
universes.
Marvel has gone down the rabbit hole completely, arguably as
a cynical exercise in keeping more plates of the MCU spinning. There’s an
article about this here https://amplify.nabshow.com/articles/create-complete-chaos-theory-building-everything-everywhere-all-at-once/
Sony’s animated feature Into the Spider-Verse
provided a template for Spider-Man: No Way Home which featured three
Spider-Man (men?) to become one of the highest-grossing movies of all time
($1.8 billion and change). Christian Holub writing at Entertainment Weekly
notes that the upcoming Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness looks to
continue the trend by incorporating Patrick Stewart's Professor X from
Fox's X-Men movies.
The new movie from Everything Everywhere All at Once
takes wormhole timelines to its logical conclusion but, as reviewers have
noted, carries with it a lesson or two about how we might approach the noise of
the now and the impending chaos of the metaverse.
“What makes Everything Everywhere All at Once so
powerful is the multiverse, a dazzling antidote to the fact that real life
these days feels like it’s been designed to blur and pummel our emotions into
dullness,” says Alex Abad-Santo.
The multiverse as depicted in the movies, is a world full of
endless potential; multiple parallel universes spinning in synchronicity; and
the possibility of alternate, powerful, seemingly better versions of ourselves.
“At a time when a pandemic, wars, and political cruelty have
become constant, inevitable presences in our daily lives, it’s the ultimate
fantasy for this moment,” adds Abad-Santo.
It turns out that the multiverse actually makes a great
metaphor for the internet too, where people can inhabit the same physical space
but have wildly different perceptions of reality based on which online spheres
they flock to.
“Living on the internet every day as so many of us do, it's
easy to feel like you're living through a never-ending crisis,” says Holub.
“Every feed you check makes it seem like another world is ending: distressing
updates about the climate or a new war breaking out or a public shooting
ripping through families and communities. We have access to more information at
any time than ever before in human history, yet this abundance leaves us
feeling more alienated and depressed than uplifted and inspired.”
He argues that all of this knowledge can be helpful; if only
we can use it in the right way. Here’s where the fictional concept of the
multiverse encourages thoughtfulness by showing us what could've been, he says.
“The beautiful thing about Everything Everywhere All
at Once is that it reminds us that we're all capable of traversing
(and saving) reality. Humility, empathy, a willingness to admit mistakes —
these are the things that stop [the villain in the film] from destroying the
multiverse, not a cosmic fistfight (as you might find in run of the mill
superhero fantasies).
But what if it weren’t all a fantasy? What if we’ve been
living in the multiverse all along?
In the realm of quantum physics a lot of things are
theoretically possible so let’s indulge this train of thought as Abad-Santo
does in conversation with Spyridon
Michalakis, a mathematical physicist at the California Institute of Technology.
Michalakis is no random boffin – “I’m the science consultant
for Ant-Man and I introduced the quantum realm [to Marvel],”
he explains. “When I consulted with [star]
Paul Rudd and [director] Peyton Reed, they wanted to know what happens when you
shrink.”
He continues, “If you really shrink you get to the source
code of reality itself. Space and time just don’t operate the same way at that
level. I tried to infuse the movies with as much actual science as possible. At
some point, the writers were more excited about the real science than the hocus
pocus-like stuff.”
Having established his credentials, Michalakis then explains
that basically the multiverse is grounded in Einstein’s quantum mechanics.
“Space and time are one single, singular construct,” he
explains in a 101 of Einstein’s theory. “There’s not like you have space and
then time; it’s space x time. Moreover, quantum space time is a
superposition: a quantum superposition of an infinite number of space times,
all happening at the same time.
“This illusion — basic physical reality — is the fact that
human beings have very specific points of view, ways of observing the
superposition.”
It means also that we’re kind of stuck in observing just one
reality, not the multiplicity of them – but we could if only we had a brain the
size of a planet.
He makes this startling observation by mixing science with a
cinematic metaphor.
“The frame rate of the human mind is so low relative to the
frame rate of the universe,” he says. “Let’s say we only perceive 100 frames
per second. We can be aware of our lives and choices we make, but then the
frame rate of the universe (where you could be flicking between different
timelines) is 40 orders of magnitude above that.
“We’re all trying to figure out the plot of the universe by just watching the beginning and the end of the movie, the first and last frame. We’re just reconstructing the in-between the best we can. That’s where the multiverse hides; it hides there in between frames. Honestly, I think that the frame rate of the universe truly is infinite, not even finite, very, very large. And we’re so far away from that.”
“The whole point, and what we’ve seen, is that our intuition
just breaks so badly, so badly at every scale. We’re just missing
most of it. But we try to make the best theories about it as we can.”
It’s enough to make you despair. As Abad-Santo points out
the key word is fate. “A lot of storytelling wrestles with the idea of destiny
and our choices, and whether we have control of our future,” he says. “The
multiverse seems like it offers a freedom from that, in that your fate could be
anything that you choose, or whatever your quantum superposition is.
But we don’t have the mental capacity – the frame rate – to
see round the corner let alone into a parallel universe.
That doesn’t mean we should give up, as everything is out of
our control and we can’t go back to a junction like George Bailey and reset the
outcome.
“At some point, there’s a really tempting choice to just be
cynical and say there’s nothing I can do and that no version of me makes a
difference here,” says the physicist.
“I want people to know — especially young people trying to
figure out where they fit in this world — that they have power to make anything
happen, and make that world where they can do amazing things. They can really
take control and become that version of themselves that unlocks their true
potential.
“I feel like the buzz phrase over the past two years has
been “existential crisis.” There’s been a general feeling of like, what does it
even matter if I exist?
“The multiverse fantasy, to me, feels like the inverse of that. There’s something beautiful in the idea of existing everywhere all at one time. The idea that this life, your life, everything everywhere matters so much right now.”
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