Never Be Bored
17 August 2022
In this smoking chaos
Devs tv show. Everything Everywhere All At Once 2022 Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert film; Actual Life (April 14 - December 17 2020) by Fred again...; Reality Is Not What It Seems by Carlo Rovelli.
There's a way of thinking about tragedy that I really like—tragedy explores an imperfect, perfectly human character, who acts in ways consistent to who they are, and in this way is led to a downfall of some kind. It was all over before it began. In this sense I think Devs is one of the truest pieces of tragedy I have ever seen; as one character says to another in the very first episode, "This is forgiveness. This is absolution... You could have only done what you did."
I struggled so much writing this one, because I don't want to spoil anything. Briefly, it starts when Lily's boyfriend Sergei gets a promotion to the mysterious Devs team at Forest's company, Amaya, but I went into it not even knowing that much, and I think approaching it with little to no expectations is the way to go here. Devs is the kind of show that you can really engage deeply with if you want—I took stream of consciousness notes while watching and it was so fun to think critically about the themes as they were presented and come up with questions and theories about what might happen next.
Here's a few out of context selections from my notes: man she went into detective mode like Right Away; yo that's a nice apartment for san fransisco right; i love u doublespeak; GHOST IN THE MACHINE; omg kenton go away; was it shakespeare though?? there's no way; FOREST YOU PRETENTIOUS MOTHERFUCKER. Spoilers, obviously, but you can also read the full version here.
I don't really know how to wrap this one up. I loved it and it made me feel insane.
In Devs, Forest is obsessed with this world, his world, he doesn't care about any other. This is the world where he loved, this is the world where he lost, and although his life could have gone very differently in some other world, we mostly don't get to see that. Everything Everywhere All At Once explores sort of the opposite—in this world, Evelyn is a failing laundromat owner whose relationships with her husband and daughter are strained to say the least. Then over the course of this truly excellent movie, she becomes aware of all the other lives she's had across the multiverse—where she's an actress, a kung fu master, a chef—and is also called upon to save the world. Do watch, bring tissues.
In Devs, we flash forward and back as echos of past and future events are felt by characters in the present. Forest in particular returns again and again to one specific memory. We catch tiny glimpses of what might have been, like variations on a theme. For something like that in sonic form, try Actual Life (April 14 - December 17 2020) by Fred again..., an album of songs that sample found audio, fragments of conversations, combined and recombined. "I want you to see me, Fred" comes a voice in the opener "April 14 2020," repeated in "Julia (deep diving)," "Adam (interlude)," "Angie (interlude)." My fav is "Me (heavy)," repeating some of the same snippets of spoken word poetry as "Kyle (i found you)," which also has a gorgeous music video.
In Devs, the sort of central piece of technology is a massively advanced quantum computer that can [redacted for spoilers]. Narratively I think this works great since the point isn't really how this computer exists, how it works, or how it first came to be—it's about the desire to build this kind of technology and what people might do with it when they have it. But if you'd like to learn about a bit about how quantum physics actually works, I cannot recommend Reality Is Not What It Seems by Carlo Rovelli highly enough. This book takes the reader from early scientific thought in the times of the ancient Greeks up to the absolute edges of how physicists think the universe might work today. It broke my brain in the most beautiful way—I've never read another physics book that made me want to go read Dante.I also wrote an extremely spoiler-y essay thing, One/Many/Fewer/Finite.