Cloud Atlas, and us....

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.