#THE ENTIRE STORY STEMS FROM ONE INSTANCE OF A MORTAL MAKING A MISTAKE AND BEING UNREASONABLY PUNISHED FOR IT BY A GOD

[willow-p012]

I was making a post about how Odysseus revealing his name is a case of dramatic irony. And then I realised all my tags just became me ranting about how more people need to blame Poseidon for the shit that happens. I do not know how exactly it turned to that.

[rosiewaddell]

Mr. Nobody: The Universe in Flux

The essential philosophical claim in the film Mr. Nobody is paradox of choice.  There are an infinite amount of possibilities that could arise from that one choice; the entire plotline of our lives and the potentially endless different paths are reliant on one moment.  This prospective endless course of action in turn creates an inability to function, a sort of inability to make decisions.  Nemo Nobody’s entire retelling of his many different outcomes over the course of his life show not only this quest for making the right decision, but also the nature of time and the imagination.  In this twisted yarn of Nemo’s mind, a sort of lyrical fantasia, it isn’t the truth that keeps him alive, but his lies.

To summarize, The 2009 film Mr. Nobody stars Jared Leto as the 35-year-old incarnation of the title character, Nemo Nobody (“nemo” means “nobody” in Latin), whom we also meet at other life stages: age 9, age 15, and on Nemo’s 118th birthday.  As his 118-year-old self, he is the last mortal on Earth.  With the advent of what the movie calls telemerization, the world population now consists of quasi-immortals, each of whom has a personal lifeline to his or her own “stem-cell-compatible pig.”  Somehow, Nemo has the seeming ability to rewind time and correct past mistakes, and he also apparently splits, like an amoeba, into multiple versions of himself. Once he reaches adulthood, at least three different versions of Nemos exist simultaneously, with different houses, different kids and three different wives.  The story hops around chronologically as well as from one location to the next, with Nemo consciously inhabiting each role and version of himself all at the same time.

The film deals with these topics through the notion of reality through simulacra.  There are layers upon layers of reality in which Nemo exists simultaneously.  This can be seen throughout the film, starting with the moment at a dance, where 15-year-old Nemo either falls in love with Elise, who really loves someone else, or settles for Jean.  Alternatively, he also fell for his one true love, Anna, his step-sister and daughter of his mother’s new boyfriend.  But when his mother and her boyfriend split up, Nemo loses Anna until he’s 34.  When he’s 34, Nemo has a myriad of lives, including being happily married to Elise who dies in an accident, not being happily married to Elise, who is suffering from relentless depression, being married to Jean in a loveless marriage, finding Anna by chance in a packed train station, finding her with a husband and two kids, finding her and rekindling their love, then losing her phone number when the ink runs after getting wet in the rain.  The three women also all represent different things.  The union with Jean, though loveless, has brought him the most material success.   In his life with Elise, Nemo experiences the consequences of depression and despair.  Anna is the one true love of his life and the only one with which he experienced a passionate meaningful relationship.

We as an audience are aware of the concept of artificiality, that Nemo’s reality is one with a skewed sense of time and a lack of continuity that creates a dizzying disequilibrium.  We know there is an original somewhere, but the distinction between the two has broken down.  These different outcomes, such as who he ends up being with (Anna, Elise or Jean) and the endless possibilities that then arise with each woman all ultimately come from one moment in Nemo’s life.  That one moment for Nemo is at age 9, at a railway station, he is forced to choose as his mother leaves on a train while his father stays on the platform.  In one case, he manages to board the train while in another he stays with his father.  

So what does this all mean?  For one, it’s about that universal sense that life has passed you by, a sort of buyer’s remorse, and the longing for the nonexistent reset button that will allow you a second chance.  This is where causality, and the notion that many — perhaps infinite — different paths might coexist at the same time and the subsequent inability to function comes into play.  As 5-year-old Nemo describes, “The smoke comes out of Daddy's cigarette, but it never goes back in.  We cannot go back.  That's why it's hard to choose.  You have to make the right choice. As long as you don't choose, everything remains possible.”  Actions have universal consequences, how the past inevitably shapes the future in a very impacting way – every single choice, no matter its simplicity or complexity can make, alter or change a lifetime.

This brings up the question of whether paradox of choice may not be choice after all, but rather determinism.  Does Nemo actually have the possibility to choose?  Or are his ‘choices’ predetermined by whatever it is that occurs in his environment?  An instance of environmental factors can be found in Nemo losing Anna’s number because the paper he wrote her number on becomes wet from a single raindrop and therefore unreadable.  In other words, these conditions seem to force, or at least nudge, Nemo in the direction of a life without Anna; a circumstance that ultimately results from an unemployed Brazilian boiling an egg.  This, in conjunction with chaos theory, string theory and the butterfly effect all highlight the lack of control that humanity as individuals possesses.   

Finally, the concept that ties everything together is that of the nature of time: the fact that we cannot alter the past but can influence the future.  It is this particular characteristic of time, the fact that it moves only in one direction, that makes the free will versus determinism issue so difficult, if not impossible, to resolve.  If we could simply go back in time and see whether we would have behaved in the same way, regardless of the absence of any circumstances, we might have a much better understanding of the nature of free will and would appear to experience the ability to choose between different possible courses of action.  

In the end, Mr. Nobody poses the question does it even matter in the end what choice or direction we choose?  Is any of this even real?  “I don’t get it,” the reporter tells Nemo in frustration, after his narrative has, once again, contradicted itself.  “Did Elise die or didn’t she?  You can’t have had children and not had them.”  This film explains that absolutely nothing is certain – everything is pure imagination. It is like daydreaming: a single thought pops into your head and before you know it, you find yourself falling down the rabbit wondering what it would be like to be married to that guy you exchanged glances with in the crosswalk, growing old together and having grandchildren.  As Nemo came to understand at the end of his life, “Each of these lives is the right one!  Every path is the right path.  Everything could have been anything else and it would have just as much meaning.”