Cloud Atlas - epic film about karma and reincarnation

Exploring Theravāda's connections to other paths - what can we learn from other traditions, religions and philosophies?
User avatar
Monkey Mind
Posts: 538
Joined: Sat Dec 05, 2009 8:56 pm
Location: Pacific Northwest, USA

Re: Cloud Atlas - epic film about karma and reincarnation

Post by Monkey Mind »

gavesako wrote:Someone who saw the film wrote about it:

the movie is typical in that it teaches us that there is suffering, which is blatantly obvious from start to finish, but neglects the cause, the end, and the path. good guys kill bad guys and love conquers all.
it teaches us about kamma, and rebirth, but not how to break the cycle. in fact, it does the opposite. all the characters fall in love and can't wait to be reunited after death.
i do like that it showed humans being born on both earth and in other galaxies over time, that the kilesas will be cause for our destruction, and that we can become better people. i was even reminded of the Aganna Sutta, which i believe was referenced a lot.
the Mara character had a great role and so did the character overcoming him. i also enjoyed seeing the skills, and realizations, each character develops in each life continue on into future rebirths
Yep, that sums up my response. I wish I had read this thread before seeing the movie, though. I would have taken notes, which is the only way to make sense out of how the different plots are interrelated.

There are two scenes in the movie, that were priceless for their comic relief value. Too bad I had to sit through the cannibalism to see them, though.
"As I am, so are others;
as others are, so am I."
Having thus identified self and others,
harm no one nor have them harmed.

Sutta Nipāta 3.710
User avatar
gavesako
Posts: 1794
Joined: Sun Jan 04, 2009 5:16 pm

Re: Cloud Atlas - epic film about karma and reincarnation

Post by gavesako »

"The 'world' is not made out of facts, it is made of stories"

I found Ven. Thanissaro's talks touching on this same theme and very relevant to it:

Going back into the past and trying to dismantle the stories about us and other people, we need to get beyond those narratives that we make up for ourselves. Otherwise we will be just going pointlessly back and forth, following some agendas that lead to suffering. Use the breath to bring attention to the present. There is no need to try to tie all the loose ends, because this is an endless project and we can leave the thoughts unfinished and untied. We can dissolve the old narratives and stop feeding on them, when we see them in a larger context.

Dissolving Narratives
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWDNcgs5dBI" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

:reading:
Life is like an endless poem with an episode after episode after episode... relationships between beings affected by love and hate go on and on, life after life. Like fish struggling with each other in a small pool of water.

The Arrow In The Heart
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScjiWH4ubQU" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Bhikkhu Gavesako
Kiṃkusalagavesī anuttaraṃ santivarapadaṃ pariyesamāno... (MN 26)

Access to Insight - Theravada texts
Ancient Buddhist Texts - Translations and history of Pali texts
Dhammatalks.org - Sutta translations
User avatar
gavesako
Posts: 1794
Joined: Sun Jan 04, 2009 5:16 pm

Re: Cloud Atlas - epic film about karma and reincarnation

Post by gavesako »

from Reading Emptiness: Reflecting on Buddhism and Literature

...Such perceptions resonate with the ideas explored by many literary critics of the last half-century in debunking conventional ideas about substance, meaning and reality. A novel or a play creates an artificial world, they realise, and establishes a sense of value and meaning. But that reality is an illusion and the values and meanings are constructions. Critics like Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, saw their job as revealing the illusion and deconstructing the thought-world of a text. For others, this insight also illustrates a broader pattern in how we make sense of the world beyond the text, for example in the ways of thinking that validate social structures and gender roles.
What should Buddhists make of these developments? Buddhism, itself, has a tradition of deconstructing what it calls ‘wrong views’, regarding most philosophies and belief systems as unrecognised expressions of underlying mental states. That suggests a tantalising affinity between Buddhism and these sophisticated intellectual approaches; but for Jeff Humphries, a literary theorist who practices Zen, there is a fundamental difference. The limitation of critical theory, in his view, is that while meanings are deconstructed, these academic readers do not examine or deconstruct themselves.
In answer to deconstruction’s query, ‘does a text exist?’ Humphries poses the Buddhist question, ‘Does the reader exist?’
While Buddhism shares analytical approaches with deconstruction, it escapes the nihilism of critical theory because liberation comes in the realisation that this self, like the objective world it observes, is dynamic, shifting and ungraspable. What’s more, Humphries finds an ally in literature itself with its aims of teasing us out of thought and holding up a mirror. Indeed, *Reading Emptiness* is fired by the belief that ‘the closest thing we have to the Middle Way in the West is the practice of literature – both reading and writing.’ Reading and writing, he suggests, can be spiritual practices when literature is regarded through a Buddhist perspective.
This perspective grows from considering the element in literature that defies exposition. For Humphries, a text is not an inanimate object, but the product of a mind, so that in reading one mind encounters another and sees its own representation. Both consciousness and literature are mysterious, and there is nowhere ‘objective’ from which to analyse. The encounter of reader and a text is a paradigm of the meeting of self and world, and also an encounter with the mind’s representations.

http://www.wiseattention.org/blog/2012/ ... iterature/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Bhikkhu Gavesako
Kiṃkusalagavesī anuttaraṃ santivarapadaṃ pariyesamāno... (MN 26)

Access to Insight - Theravada texts
Ancient Buddhist Texts - Translations and history of Pali texts
Dhammatalks.org - Sutta translations
User avatar
gavesako
Posts: 1794
Joined: Sun Jan 04, 2009 5:16 pm

Re: Cloud Atlas - epic film about karma and reincarnation

Post by gavesako »

The story of Cloud Atlas seems to puzzle many people, the ones who think in traditional ways and cannot understand it. But more and more people are also realizing the deeper meaning in it, because it is a non-linear pattern and more like a chaotic fractal structure.
The common theme that binds these stories together soars above and beyond the comet-shaped birthmark. It’s a story about power, domination, and the ultimate quest to rule. The stories stress on the selfishness of people, and how ultimately, this will lead to the inevitable apocalypse.
Yes, the devil shall take the hindmost until the foremost is the hindmost. In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction.
http://anothercookiecrumbles.co.uk/?p=1676" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


It seems that his other book, Ghostwritten, continues this same pattern (of kamma and its results) and some of the characters even appear in it:
I couldn’t get to sleep afterwards, worrying about the possible endings of the stories that had been started. Maybe that’s why I’m a ghostwriter. The endings have nothing to do with me.

You know the real drag about being a ghostwriter? You never get to write anything that beautiful. And even if you did, nobody would ever believe it was you.

We’re all ghostwriters, my friend. And it’s not just our memories. Our actions too. We all think we’re in control of our lives, but they’re really pre-ghostwritten by forces around us.


The above quotes illustrate another prominent aspect of the book: the role of fate, of chance, of the chain-reaction. The sheer randomness of the stories, and the way the characters inter-connect is pivotal to the novel, and keeps the reader completely engrossed. Of course, the other side is, by the time the reader actually starts relating to the narrator or nodding in agreement with their sentiments, a new narrator is introduced and the old narrator a thing of the past.
http://anothercookiecrumbles.co.uk/?p=2448" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

The music is also quite appropriate to this theme and the image of clouds too. They are unpredictable in their chaotic movements.
Ghostwritten: a Buddhist Novel?

David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten is a novel for the interconnected, globalised times in which we are buffeted among billions; it offers not so much an answer as a neural network of thought, not so much an argument as ideas whirring like minds, and interacting like electrons. Was it the first Dharma novel of the millennium? Why do things happen? That’s the big subject for novels.

Having lost the belief that we can ever really know the causes of an event, we have also lost faith in omniscient narrators. They peered down on the lives of their creations like spy satellites fixing their lenses, or they pried into their consciousness like a migrating spirit (both cues that Mitchell picks up). Contemporary novels tend to follow or be narrated by a character who participates in the story, who cannot know the context in which they were living (just as we can’t know the contexts of our lives). They cannot know their true motivations, nor the consequences of their actions that ripple out beyond their view.
Beneath character and plot lie the mysteries of subjective experience and causality. This is where Buddhism comes in. Or at least it could and should, because these are its abiding concerns. A Dharma novelist worthy of the name will know that things arise in dependence upon conditions: some of the conditions we know, some are mysterious – and both kinds are important.
Think of the universe of human consciousness as it exists right now: seven billion minds whirring away, trying to make sense, trying to cope: loving, fearing, desiring. Why are they the way they are? Let’s say it’s conditions (knowable, and mysterious). But you cannot separate the conditions that impinge on someone from the way those conditions are experienced. So imagine you could download into a consciousness, like a computer file downloading from the internet (and Mitchell plays with this, too) into any one of those six billion. You could know how it felt to be Chinese or Russian, you could switch sex, experience growing old or dying, and then switch out again. But could you both inhabit that subjectivity and at the same time step back to see the causes and the effects?
That is what David Mitchell attempts in Ghostwritten, and he is a candidate to be the first real Dharma novelist in the modern world. The book comprises 10 linked monologues, each character occupying a radically different set of values, drives and pre-occupations. It starts with a Japanese fanatic who has set off a subway sarin gas attack. Then come a Japanese teenager falling in love, a financial lawyer in Hong Kong whose shady dealings are catching up with him, a Chinese peasant, a St Petersburg criminal, a London musician and ghostwriter, a quantum physicist on the cusp of a breakthrough, a New York late-night chat show host. And there are two disembodied consciousnesses whose identities I shall not divulge.
Ghostwritten also shows a world shot through with Buddhism, from the millennial distortions of Aum Shinrikyu, to the giant Buddha in Hong Kong, a long-suffering Chinese devotee, a Gelugpa performing consciousness transference, a ‘sort-of-Buddhist Londoner’, and a computer called Arupadhatu (which is the sphere of no form, because we might as well say that is where a computer consciousness would exist).
Each has a wonderful story to tell, and Mitchell has a generous imagination. He could have devoted a novel to any of these characters, and a lesser writer would have hoarded the ideas that pour out of each page of Ghostwritten. ...

Establishing each voice is important because it articulates a worldview. Mitchell writes others’ lives like a ghostwriter. But, as one of the characters suggests, our lives are themselves a form of ghostwriting, scripted by forces beyond us, even though we claim to be their authors.
This was Mitchell’s first novel, and it reminded me of other first novels like Catch 22 or A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.It creates a form tthat is able to express a new kind of consciousness, and a new experience of the world. This is a novel for the interconnected, globalised times in which we are buffeted among billions; it offers not so much an answer as a neural network of thought, not so much an argument as ideas whirring like minds, and interacting like electrons.
http://www.wiseattention.org/blog/2012/ ... ist-novel/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Bhikkhu Gavesako
Kiṃkusalagavesī anuttaraṃ santivarapadaṃ pariyesamāno... (MN 26)

Access to Insight - Theravada texts
Ancient Buddhist Texts - Translations and history of Pali texts
Dhammatalks.org - Sutta translations
User avatar
Viscid
Posts: 931
Joined: Fri Jul 09, 2010 8:55 pm
Location: Toronto, Canada
Contact:

Re: Cloud Atlas - epic film about karma and reincarnation

Post by Viscid »

The movie really isn't all that deep and complex. The idea that someone who is close to you was part of a past life is common among people, and so is the fact that all events form a complicated, intricate web of consequence. I don't really think it's important for people to romanticize these ideas any further than they already do. Also, movies like this do not make people take the idea of reincarnation/rebirth any more seriously-- they will just be more likely to associate it with fantasy fiction.
"What holds attention determines action." - William James
User avatar
Aloka
Posts: 7797
Joined: Wed Jan 21, 2009 2:51 pm

Re: Cloud Atlas - epic film about karma and reincarnation

Post by Aloka »

Viscid wrote:I don't really think it's important for people to romanticize these ideas any further than they already do. Also, movies like this do not make people take the idea of reincarnation/rebirth any more seriously-- they will just be more likely to associate it with fantasy fiction.
I agree - and one can sometimes hear or read people making casual comments such as : 'It's his karma,' or '' I think we must have been related in a past life,lol ! " which are completely divorced from knowledge of any kind of Buddhist teachings and more likely to have been learned from fantasy and the supernatual novels, or video games, because they're not serious remarks.
User avatar
gavesako
Posts: 1794
Joined: Sun Jan 04, 2009 5:16 pm

Re: Cloud Atlas - epic film about karma and reincarnation

Post by gavesako »

I would see this kind of book and film as helpful in creating a Western "popular Buddhism" which is easy to understand and appeals to people without an intellectual background. This would be equivalent to the Asian "popular Buddhism" which is the most widely form of Buddhist belief and practice that supports the daily life of the Sasana and maintains what we could call a "Buddhist culture" in which people share a similar outlook on life. I would also see it as counter-balancing the tendency to embrace "Buddhist scientism" as the de-facto metaphysical theory of many Western Buddhists. Of course, the popular understanding of kamma and rebirth will tend towards a kind of fatalism and eternalism (which is inevitable for anyone who has not developed deeper insight), but I think this is preferable to the nihilistic tendency of "one-life-only" materialists. Historically such a story could be compared to the epic Jataka tales which have largely shaped the Asian popular understanding of Buddhist social values and core ethical teachings showing the workings of kamma over a large time-scale, stretching into cosmic proportions. This would counter-balance the post-modern fragmented individualism with its corresponding crisis in the social sphere.

:group:
Bhikkhu Gavesako
Kiṃkusalagavesī anuttaraṃ santivarapadaṃ pariyesamāno... (MN 26)

Access to Insight - Theravada texts
Ancient Buddhist Texts - Translations and history of Pali texts
Dhammatalks.org - Sutta translations
alan
Posts: 3111
Joined: Wed Sep 30, 2009 12:14 am
Location: Miramar beach, Fl.

Re: Cloud Atlas - epic film about karma and reincarnation

Post by alan »

It's just a book. A good one, no doubt, but it is entertainment, and nothing else.
User avatar
gavesako
Posts: 1794
Joined: Sun Jan 04, 2009 5:16 pm

Re: Cloud Atlas - epic film about karma and reincarnation

Post by gavesako »

It is interesting to read some of the reactions from people like this:


“CLOUD ATLAS” WAXES ON MULTIPLICITY; REINCARNATION; TWIN-FLAMES; CAUSALITY.

Central to “Cloud Atlas” is the notion of reincarnation and karmic return. That is, the idea that each character creates realities based on their respective thoughts, actions, and beliefs, no matter how seemingly “small” or “large”. For instance, when Jim Sturgess incarnates into a slavery-era notary (Adam Ewing) and suddenly has an awakening whereby he terminates his career and vows to work for the abolitionist movement, his slavery-wielding father in-law (Hugo Weaving) angrily scolds Ewing, exclaiming, “No matter what good you think you’re doing, it’s still but a single drop in an ocean.” Ewing responds, “What is an ocean, but a multitude of drops?” This telling exchange characterizes a provocative idea introduced by Cloud Atlas: the idea that our present incarnations, actions, thoughts, and beliefs are not randomized and without consequence, but laden with causality and ripple effects – even if we are yet to understand the full extent of such effects. (.....)

http://www.resistance2010.com/profiles/ ... e=activity" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


“Our lives are not our own, we are bound to others, past and present. And by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.”

I'm sure there are many ways to interpret this film but I walked away from it with this understanding. It is a story about us, the human race, from every age and background, from every race and gender, future and past scenario, present incarnation, all possibilities that we are capable of.

It tells a tale of the universal life force, the energy of All That Is. The story of humanity that we have been telling and retelling since we first were capable of sharing with each other. It is too simple to say it is a story of good vs evil, or even positive vs negative, I personally do not like to use those terms. It is a story about duality, the dark and the light, the high and the low. For eons, some humans have been compelled to turn to the dark, to attack their brothers and sisters, to attack the earth itself, for various reasons that range from greed, corruption, fear and hate. And for eons, that low energy has created in turn, a higher one, one that responds to it by living and speaking truth, justice, empathy and love. Every event sets forth a reaction of related events. Dark compels Light to shine. Light compels Dark to follow. The Ying and Yang, the wheel of Dharma continually spinning. As the energy builds on one hand of the scale, it creates inequality, so to restore balance, energy is built on the other, creating equality again, and so on and so on and so on....

Cloud Atlas takes this theory of the universe with no judgement, this is neither good nor bad, it just is. We each have our own part to play, this is the consciousness of the universe. The most important part I took away from this film is that there is no winner and no loser, there is just energy, dharma spinning over and over again. For those who are moved to action, we must speak our truth, we must act, we must live our lives according to our practice. This act alone is all that is required. Not to win, not to make everyone or everything believe what we believe, but just to act from our hearts and not worry about the result. The result is of no importance to us, the act alone is all that matters.

The act of love, of truth, inspires more love and truth, which inspires more and then more, until the balance again needs to be restored. The same is true of the opposite. If we live in total darkness, we are blind and cannot see but the same can be said if we live in total light. In both scenarios, we are blind. We need a balance of the two, a complete union, to be able to act in a mindful compassionate way.

Where the Matrix showed us how our world is an illusion, Cloud Atlas shows us the truths behind the illusion. It is a great feat of storytelling, one that on the surface seems beautifully complex but is actually quite simple. The purpose of living out the expressions of love and truth is to not defeat hate and lies but just to simply live love and truth. No expectation on outcome, on winning, of proving points. Love for love's sake and knowing that the act alone makes all the difference in the world and the universe.

http://thirdeyecyclops.blogspot.co.uk/2 ... atlas.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


“The Pythagorean doctrine prevails among the Gauls’ teaching that the souls of men are immortal, and that after a fixed number of years they will enter into another body.”

The most compelling aspect to the movie for me was seeing what I am now calling, “the long development of the soul”. Watching each character during the course of the movie wearing different clothes and faces, yet all with some essential element that is “them”. You get to see the choices each one of them makes and the repercussions of each choice. As each of the characters moves through each incarnation you see the tendencies of the choices they made in previous lives show in the current one. In some characters like Adam Ewing (played by Jim Sturgess) these choices lead to greater virtue and liberation, in others like Lloyd Hooks (played by Hugh Grant) they end in selfish savagery.

What fascinates me about this portrayal is that is “feels” right. Watching this movie was like some part of myself recognizing that choices I had made in past lives were still with me, shaping my tendencies and perceptions. Every life gives us opportunities to radically alter our course and discover our uniqueness; our gift. This movie tied in well with my work on the Book of the Weaver in that I could see the bindings present in all the characters and how some made choices that overcame them.

My favorite character was Zachary, played by Tom Hanks. I could relate to the fear and doubt that plagued Zachary through his incarnations. Evil, in my opinion, does not exist out there. Evil is a story we tell ourselves, a story that twists our actions and makes us act out of fear. I think we have all been there; the gods know I have. But what I loved about Zachary was how his love for the people in his life shaped him and made him more and more true to himself. All the while dealing with his own demons (externalized as Old Georgie, brilliantly played by Hugo Weaving), past tendencies, and fears. Like in all great stories it is love that saves this character and propels him to new worlds.

http://coloradocelt.wordpress.com/2012/ ... oud-atlas/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Bhikkhu Gavesako
Kiṃkusalagavesī anuttaraṃ santivarapadaṃ pariyesamāno... (MN 26)

Access to Insight - Theravada texts
Ancient Buddhist Texts - Translations and history of Pali texts
Dhammatalks.org - Sutta translations
User avatar
JeffR
Posts: 269
Joined: Fri Nov 20, 2009 3:54 am
Location: Minnesota, Lakota Nation (Occupier)

Re: Cloud Atlas - epic film about karma and reincarnation

Post by JeffR »

I just did a search for the book/movie at my local county library: 45 copies of the book and there is a waiting list of 431 requests. Clearly in demand. They don't have the movie.
Therein what are 'six (types of) disrespect'? One dwells without respect, without deference for the Teacher; one dwells without respect, without deference for the Teaching; one dwells without respect, without deference for the Order; one dwells without respect, without deference for the precepts; one dwells without respect, without deference for heedfulness; one dwells without respect, without deference for hospitality. These are six (types of) disrespect.
:Vibh 945
User avatar
gavesako
Posts: 1794
Joined: Sun Jan 04, 2009 5:16 pm

Re: Cloud Atlas - epic film about karma and reincarnation

Post by gavesako »

This is quite a detailed analysis of the story and some philosophical implications:

Reality and Perception in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas
by Mark Woodring


David Mitchell’s postmodern exploration of perception and its influence on reality, the story within a story (within a story…) Cloud Atlas. Mitchell combines six distinct narratives in an interlaced storyline, nesting each section within the others, each section directly referencing the one preceding it while also hinting those that lie ahead.
Whether revolutionary or gimmicky, this presentation of intertwined narratives demonstrates that human reality is not determined by actuality or factuality, but rather by the perception of events and how those perceptions are presented and interpreted. Cloud Atlas clearly demonstrates the fragility of reality, which is manipulated both by perception – eyewitnesses – and by time...
The idea that an individual’s perception can be made to change by forces outside of themselves, regardless of how much time elapses between the event and the individual perceiving it, is both a powerful and disturbing one. The idea is very explicit here: what we see, or hear, or read, is always what we get, but may not be what actually was. When our interpretation of the world is dependent on information not directly ours, we must accept that the resulting perception of reality is not accurate.
The use of the phrase “elastic moment” reinforces the idea of the fluidity of time and perception, and the idea that the “ends” disappear “into the past and the future” is another method of shifting our perspective. Here, the past and future that are the beginning and ending of the novel, both adrift on a ship in a more primitive time than those eras related between them. By completing this circle of time and events, the “ends” of time disappear into one another, which drives us to examine the cyclical nature of the realities of the novel.
In “An Orison of Sonmi-451,” Mitchell presents a bleak future in which cloned workers called fabricants perform various undesirable tasks for humanity while being kept in a mentally oblivious state designed to keep them from questioning the system in which they serve. Because their owners control the clones memories, they rob them of unique experiences, leaving them with no past and with only hope for a future. That future is solely dependent on what the masters of their society grant to them and is based solely the information provided by them. When pressed by Sonmi about his role in the charade that is her trial, it is the archivist who ironically makes the most telling declaration yet about the fluidity of perception and history: “A duplicitous archivist wouldn’t be much use to future historians” (Mitchell 189). The young archivist never stops to consider that an archivist could be loyal to something other than the truth of an event. This is the fallacy of recorded history. Since future history is dependent solely on what is recorded in the present and on its recorder, how can we believe anything, much less know it, to be accurate? The Utopia that all societies hope to achieve exists only as an idea, living among the virtual past and future, but becoming lost among the actual.
Clearly, then, what we see in Cloud Atlas is an interrogation of the accuracy of reality, specifically due to man’s tendency, consciously or unconsciously, to mold it to conform to his current needs or expectations. As a result, no version of reality is able to function as anything but a story which may or may not be accurate to any significant degree.
Or put more simply: “does it matter?” That answer can only be: no, for regardless of the reality in which we find ourselves, virtual or actual, it is the reality in which we find ourselves, and is thus the reality in which we must live. Fenced in by perception’s assumptions and assertions, we can only act on what we believe we know. All other action is irrelevant.

http://faculty.weber.edu/vramirez/mark's6010.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Bhikkhu Gavesako
Kiṃkusalagavesī anuttaraṃ santivarapadaṃ pariyesamāno... (MN 26)

Access to Insight - Theravada texts
Ancient Buddhist Texts - Translations and history of Pali texts
Dhammatalks.org - Sutta translations
User avatar
Monkey Mind
Posts: 538
Joined: Sat Dec 05, 2009 8:56 pm
Location: Pacific Northwest, USA

Re: Cloud Atlas - epic film about karma and reincarnation

Post by Monkey Mind »

JeffR wrote:I just did a search for the book/movie at my local county library: 45 copies of the book and there is a waiting list of 431 requests. Clearly in demand. They don't have the movie.
Jeff, the movie is playing in theaters now. It will be awhile before it comes to your local library.
"As I am, so are others;
as others are, so am I."
Having thus identified self and others,
harm no one nor have them harmed.

Sutta Nipāta 3.710
sanblvd
Posts: 10
Joined: Thu Dec 27, 2012 6:05 am

Re: Cloud Atlas - epic film about karma and reincarnation

Post by sanblvd »

This is such an epic movie, this is actually the reason that brought me here to learn more.

For those that uses bit torrent, you can already find this on blueray quality download with subtitles.
User avatar
gavesako
Posts: 1794
Joined: Sun Jan 04, 2009 5:16 pm

Re: Cloud Atlas - epic film about karma and reincarnation

Post by gavesako »


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!

http://thinkprogress.org/alyssa/2012/11 ... n-freedom/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


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;

:reading:
Bhikkhu Gavesako
Kiṃkusalagavesī anuttaraṃ santivarapadaṃ pariyesamāno... (MN 26)

Access to Insight - Theravada texts
Ancient Buddhist Texts - Translations and history of Pali texts
Dhammatalks.org - Sutta translations
User avatar
mirco
Posts: 450
Joined: Mon Jun 07, 2010 2:12 pm

Re: Cloud Atlas - epic film about karma and reincarnation

Post by mirco »

In my opinion, if a Bhikkhu starts recommending media with no obviously Buddhist contents, something is really going wrong.

What's wrong about teaching Dhamma with not more than some simple analogies instead of advancing dilution?

Regards :-)
Last edited by mirco on Sun Dec 30, 2012 2:05 am, edited 1 time in total.
Post Reply