Cloud Atlas’ Postmodern Take On Freedom
“All boundaries are conventions, waiting to be transcended,” intones one of Cloud Atlas’ ubiquitous voiceovers. It sounds trite or, worse, meaningless, a point the film’s harsher critics have delighted in making. But for all of Cloud Atlas‘ bombastic presentation, its actual argument is a subtle meditation on the tortured relationship between power and emancipation, one that marries two seemingly inconsistent approaches to the world into a novel notion of human freedom. That the film dunks this argument in a vat of sentimentality obscures the point, but it’s there. And it’s entrancing.
If this analysis of power sounds familiar, that’s because it’s straight out of influential social theorist Michel Foucault’s work. Foucault’s mantra is that “power is fluid,” by which he means that it’s a mistake to think that force, constraint, and privilege are the only avenues to change the world. In his view, the power to change the world can be found anywhere; those who seem beaten down often have unexpected and unpredictable ways to turn the tables. But there’s a dark side as well — because power (understood as the ability to direct the behavior of others) is everywhere in human interactions, it also can constrain those who believe themselves to be free. Methods of domination, for Foucault, can often be as unexpected and invisible as opportunities for freedom.
Foucault’s understanding of power is nearly omnipresent in Cloud Atlas; many of the stories critically involve finding power in unexpected places.
Human nature is at its core a desire to be free. Cloud Atlas represents this abstract idea quite literally, by taking six stories involving people of different races, classes, and genders, and making every hero’s quest about freeing themselves and others from bondage and oppression.
So Cloud Atlas, then, is doing something quite ambitious – attempting to sympathize two competing strains of 20th century thought into one consistent strain; developing, in essence, a universal Foucaultian theory of human freedom, opposed by the declarations from Hugo Weaving’s various villains that “there is a natural order to things” where one group of people control the fates of the rest. That’s hardly the intellectually anemic film some critics would have you think!
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Sonmi-451 and Yoona-939, born into slave labor, limited to service, and destined for a future in which they’re recycled as meat, are genuinely oppressed in a way that and by means of technology Cavendish couldn’t possibly imagine. Asserting their humanity takes courage he never could have mustered.
A cloned servant who’s been raised with the maxim “Honor thy consumer” as the first commandment that governs her life, Sonmi-451′s world is radically expanded first by her colleague, who shows her the fragment of the movie based in Timothy Cavendish’s life, and then by Chang, who takes her away from the restaurant that’s been the center of her world, giving her clothes of the kind reserved for humans born through biological means, and even more importantly, the opportunity to learn. “Knowledge is a mirror, and for the first time in my life, I was allowed to see who I was and who I might become,” she says.
The closest Cloud Atlas comes to an argument about the purpose of these reincarnations is a suggestion that many of us are working towards personal and social liberation, while a few remain tragically and influentially resistant to change.
http://thinkprogress.org/alyssa/2012/10 ... oud-atlas/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
About halfway through the epically-long (and straining epic) movie, a character played by Jim Broadbent off-handedly says the line, “Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.” It’s a nice little, easy to overlook piece of dialogue, and considering the entirety of the film, with its plot is set across five time periods, loosely telling the story of a recurring moral choice reenacted by a number of individuals played by the same recurring actors – a kind of reincarnation metaphor straight out of central casting – it is an appropriate bit of dialogue. After all, in the moment Broadbent’s character Timothy Cavendish is trying to begin his life “afresh, afresh, afresh,” sneaking up on the home of a lover from his youth he let get away. And in the wider context of the film, all of these characters, in one way or another, are searching for new beginnings. They all run up against the same obstacle: oppression loosely write, and manifested alternatively as slavery; homophobic bigotry; a corporate conspiracy; a nasty, vindictive family member teamed up with a health institution; a dystopian, Orwellian government; and a Darwinian, primordial social order set in a post- apocalyptic future.
http://frontrow.dmagazine.com/2012/10/m ... hievement/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Cloud Atlas and Essential Human Nature
Some films beg to be discussed philosophically. But many of these films are dismissed by professional philosophers as pseudo-philosophy.
The filmmakers are rejecting what is called gender and racial “essentialism” in favor of the view that gender and race are “social constructions” – not surprising given the fact that one of the filmmakers is transgendered.
This is all pretty standard queer theory, which makes use of the postmodern method of deconstruction. And, yes, Cloud Atlas is postmodern, despite its claim to objective truth. In the novel one character responds to a query about her “version of the truth”, by saying “truth is singular. Its ‘versions’ are mistruths” (p. 185). Another character affirms that “the true true is diff’rent to the seemin’ true” (p. 274). This sounds like an odd thing for a postmodernist to say, but, contrary to popular belief, postmodernism is not all about rejecting truth claims; it is fundamentally about the pursuit of justice, which deconstructs power plays that mask themselves as truth claims.
Film critics have been stumped trying to follow the different characters played by the same actors in an attempt to discern some pattern of progress across the stories. But the point is that there is no progress. Human nature is unchangeable. Cloud Atlas argues that we may try to “civilize” ourselves and adopt new technologies in the name of “progress”, even eventually acquiring the ability to genetically alter our bodies and create “fabricant” clones, but we can never leave behind the (fallen) human nature of the will to power.
http://christianthought.hbu.edu/2012/10 ... an-nature/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Three-View Review: Cloud Atlas Swirls With Ambition
How ambitious is Cloud Atlas, the cinematic adaptation of David Mitchell’s 2004 novel that weaves together six seemingly unrelated stories from across space and time? The film spans the globe — and multiple centuries, from the 1800s to the distant future — as it unreels its cosmic message of interconnectedness.
http://www.wired.com/underwire/2012/10/ ... as-review/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Postmodernist Intertextuality in David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas
Martina Hrubes, Thesis (M.A.), 2008, 129 Pages
Introduction
The title of this study is “Postmodernist Intertextuality in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas” and is based on the following hypotheses:
1. There is a particular kind of intertextuality specific to postmodernist literature that differs from previous uses of intertextual references.
2. Postmodernist intertextuality is deconstructive, self-reflexive and critical of Western hegemonic discourses and metanarratives.
3. This specific kind of intertextuality is a key element of postmodernist art.
http://www.grin.com/en/e-book/94473/pos ... loud-atlas" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
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