Never Be Bored
21 March 2019
Nonlinearity
Mr. Nobody, 2009 Jaco Van Dormael film. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Arrival, 2016 Denis Villeneuve film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, 2004 Michel Gondry film.
I love nonlinear storytelling, because as surreal as it sometimes is, it also feels kind of feels like life. It's messy and complicated, and some parts of it seem to matter so much more than others, and we spend a lot of time thinking about things that have already happened and things that haven't happened yet, and sometimes we don't realize the importance of a thing until so much later and sometimes we think something will be so important until that thing happens, and it's not. I know I think a lot about the weird chain of events that brought me to where I am today. What if I hadn't met this person? What if I had done something else?
Mr. Nobody follows Nemo, now an old man, who made some choices at some point in his life. At least, he must have, everyone does. But which choices? He cannot say. How could he decide? Mr. Nobody, currently on Netflix, is a beautiful, crazy film, with a great soundtrack, a collection of vignette puzzle pieces that don't quite fit together from the life of Nemo. It's philosophical and it's weird, and definitely worth a watch.
"All this happened, more or less." So begins Slaughterhouse Five, one of my favorite books ever. Billy Pilgrim, World War II vet, has come unstuck in time, and is experiencing moments of his life out of order. There are aliens. Someone gets shot for stealing a teapot. Does any of it make sense? Has anything ever in life made sense?
Another common factor to all these, other than the nonlinearity bit, is that they're all sci fi, and all really good sci fi begins with a question, and then runs with the implications of the answer. Arrival, currently on Hulu, explores: what if aliens came to Earth and they wanted to talk? How could we possibly communicate with an entity so fundamentally different from us in every way?
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind's question is this: what if you could forget, completely, every single memory you ever had of the person who had broken your heart? Would you do it? This movie, currently on Netflix, is a cult favorite like Mr. Nobody. It had been on my to-watch list for years, and I'm so glad I finally saw it.