I came out of the theatre numb, and not wanting to talk or
make eye contact with anyone for fear of what come of it. And, for the most part, the attempt to
suppress all of what I felt but could not explain was successful….. until I got
into the car. Then I started to cry, and
cry for maybe an hour without really know why.
The movie, Cloud Atlas, is bigger than life… or at least
bigger than any individual life, because it’s about all of our lives bound
together. Looking to the present, the
past, and the future in ways that blend them into a mind numbing – and mind
expanding – whole, the movie reveals a world where we all are bound to each
other in inexplicable ways. Each of our
actions has consequences that spread out and forward and even backward such
that present and future and past are all interwoven into a “fabric” that
spreads across time and space and beyond our individual births and deaths. While each of us acts individually, none of
our consequences are individual.
And thus there emerges a certain order to this world around
us, and in us. Things like culture,
religion, political and economic systems begin to embody – and then define –
normative beliefs and behavior. Eventually,
we find a certain kind of security in maintaining this order, even if and when
this order includes things like injustice, inequity, enslavement, and the like. In fact, this “order,” and the need to
maintain it, eventually justifies these things…
and the world that we construct to protect us becomes one and the same
with the world that imprisons us.
Cloud Atlas is about two things: The great interwoven complexity, and order,
and oppressiveness of the collective “we,” and the power of an individual act
to change it. Not just any act, but only
those that are disruptive to that order – acts motivated by things like courage,
and compassion, and love, and sacrifice.
And Cloud Atlas gives us beautiful, and comic, and tragic examples of
these acts and, as we cry (and rejoice) over amazing lives offered up in the moment,
we share in the hope that their ripples spread across time and space and beyond
their individual births and deaths, to make for something better.
But I now know that this was not the cause for my
tears. I cried in the revelation that we
- that I - too often choose order over
the opportunity and obligation that each of us has, in each and every moment,
to make this world we share just a little bit freer.
