Fly to Heaven

A review of movies and life in which I describe my new super-power and repeatedly breach the fourth wall

“The time bounce has happened. People don’t grow up. They don’t stay dead. You’ll never see another flower bloom”

It turns out, much to my surprise, that I have a superpower: the ability to break into other writers’ stories and rescue their characters from needless pain or grief. I realize that, to the real, this might not seem like much, but in a world gone mad with destruction and misery perhaps every little bit helps. I like to think so, anyway, and why should even fictional characters be subjected to pointless agony? One of Stephen King’s characters even came to the same conclusion – I think it was the writer/narrator in Bag of Bones, but don’t hold me to that, who decided that he had to change his habit of inflicting needless death and gratuitous pain on the characters populating his stories. So you see the sentiment animating my power is not unique though, to my knowledge, I’m the only who actually has done something about it other than changing my own writing patterns.

Timeless Love

I’ll give you a for instance. In a movie I watched a week ago, Timeless Love, a romcom if you can believe it, the main character, Megan, wakes up from a coma. While her body was in the coma, however, her psyche was visiting another dimension – specifically her own life several years into the future, where she had a husband (Thomas) and two children, a very happy family life and love. When she wakes up, her primary feeling, not understanding what happened, is the loss of separation rather than joy at having rejoined the land of the living. A certain amount of pain is necessary to such a story given the apparent loss of family and of course whatever feelings engendered by the fact that no one will believe you or respect your loss. No one’s going to understand your grief – they’ll just think you’re kind of crazy.

Well, Megan finds Thomas, and of course he’s not with the program yet. She’s just a stranger to him, and he even has a girlfriend, a very sympathetic character, too, as it happens, so that creates some navigational issues. The girlfriend, though sympathetic as a character, is a little oblivious in certain ways, as required by her role of temporary girlfriend, but really she’s very nice, and the author handles her inevitable loss deftly, sparing her any unnecessary pain, as is the way of romcoms.

Along the way, Megan has made a list of the things she knows about Thomas, to persuade herself that her experience was not “just a dream,” and it is naturally his discovery of this list that forms the basis for the inevitable conflict between lovers, as required by genre, when he sees the list and thinks she might have been stalking him. There are things on that list that no stalker could have known, however, and a reasonable person would be compelled to think more broadly. His lack of reason is forgivable under the circumstances, though, so Megan doesn’t point out that he’s really being a jerk by not hearing her out. Romcoms are always a little thin on this point because they require the conflict that separates the true loves not to be very substantial, because true love unites people already identical in all the important ways, they just have to see that, and they don’t, temporarily.

Okay, that’s all fine, we’re traveling the road well laid out by the medium, but here’s where the author blows it. Megan decides that her activities during the coma weren’t real and didn’t mean anything. That’s what everyone is telling her, but any idiot can see that they were real and very meaningful, and Thomas, even after he decides he loves her, still states a belief, contrary to all reason, that she “imagined it all,” the big dope, although he acknowledges she was “right about everything,” including things he knows she couldn’t have imagined.

That was just stupid in view of the evidence. So Megan is left believing her experience was invalid, and Thomas comes to some patronizing but unformed ideas about what happened. That’s where I exercised my super-power: I stepped in a little before the ending and clarified for Megan the real facts, easing her self-doubt and the pain caused by all the gas-lighting, because what kind of happy ending leaves a character in fundamental doubt about her ability to perceive some very significant fact? I left Thomas in the dark, though. Megan can fix that if she wants. It’s up to her.

Just a Quick Note on Breaching the Fourth Wall

The “fourth wall” in theater (and by extension literature) is the (imaginary) wall existing between audience and performers — there’s a wall behind the stage and two beside it, but where the fourth wall would be in a room, there sits an audience). Normally performers in a drama do not encounter the audience, speak to them, or hear them. When I address you directly, dear reader, I am breaching that wall, and you may be aware of many such instances. But these instances relate to characters addressing the audience, not the audience addressing the characters within the drama itself, much less exerting change in that drama. That’s why I refer to my power as a super-power. I argue that my interfering with the drama itself as a disgruntled member of the audience likewise breaches the fourth wall. My daughter, on the other hand, asserts that I am merely resorting to that most pathetic of devices, fan-fiction, but she does offer one helpful reference, namely Agamemnon, by Aeschylus, in which Cassandra, cursed by Apollo to foresee the future but never to be believed when she speaks of it, has an interaction with the Greek Chorus – they speak to each other. I’m not aware of a single other instance in which the Greek Chorus is heard by the characters of the play or addresses them specifically, and of course my interaction goes much further than that.

But let us leave such a frivolous digression.

It will be apparent to the careful reader that exercising my superpower requires discernment. I mean yes, sometimes a writer wantonly distributes pointless death as a way to pass time – that’s what needs to stop. It’s careless and inartistic as well as unjust. It brings to mind Bertie Wooster, a P.G. Wodehouse character who, whenever there’s a lapse in conversation with a young woman feels compelled to propose marriage just to get the conversation going again (forcing him to spend the rest of the book persuading the girl to break the engagement). It is a silly device leading to a silly story, plainly intended as such by the author and in no need of correction.

On the other hand, some writers kill or hurt people with the same obvious abandon, not as a device to forward the plot but merely to pass the time and generate words. This is irresponsible. All the events in a drama should be, in the words of Aristotle (although he said it in Greek), probable or necessary. Probable at first to set the stage in real-life terms, but then necessary as the drama takes effect, however improbable the necessary may be. This creates the essence of tragedy, which is a terrible outcome rendered inevitable despite an essentially well-meaning protagonist and the catharsis that comes from the realization that bad shit can happen, and must happen even, to good people. Pointless deaths and needless gaslighting miss the boat.

I realize that decisions are frequently influenced by pain, and pain is a necessary part of life that provides, often enough, the guidance we need to make correct decisions. I can’t be stepping into a well-crafted story and trying, like the good fairy of the North, to wave a wand that makes that pain disappear without ruining the story. What kind of power would that be? I’m sure the reader can understand, from the foregoing, how much discretion is required. With great power comes great responsibility.

The Fare

One movie that didn’t give me much room to exercise my new superpower was The Fare (2018). In that movie a taxi driver picks up a woman in a deserted area and drives her to another fairly deserted place. Then there’s an electrical storm of some sort, she disappears in a poof, and then he’s back picking her up again. For some reason he begins to be aware that it’s all happened before, and the driver and the fare begin to develop a friendship as they do the ride over and over again. I think I should give a spoiler alert here, although I doubt many people will work their way through this movie, not that it wasn’t good. The movie blurb claims that the movie is science fiction and “will change your perception of time,” but I don’t think either of those things is correct.

If you know the story of Persephone, the goddess daughter of Demeter, you know she is granted a yearly reprieve from the underworld, and if you’re familiar with Greek and Roman mythology you know that such reprieves, or practically any time out of the watchful eyes of the godly spouse, are usually the occasion for some extramarital sport, shall we say. The taxi driver is, or rather was, a mortal who had an affair with Persephone and got caught – the gods are notoriously careless regarding the welfare of their sex toys – and Hades punishes him by making him his “ferryman” for eternity. The job of the “ferryman” (a.k.a. Charon) is to transport the dearly departed over the river Acheron into the underworld. The bottle of water he sips is of Lethe (the river of forgetfulness or oblivion), so the taxi driver is trapped in a perpetual present. His memory comes back because for some reason he didn’t sip enough Lethean water to keep him without memory, and suddenly he can remember meeting the dead and talking with them, particularly Persephone, who crosses the Acheron twice a year. No doubt these meetings had always occurred, but without memory, what is experience? A fast time loop, a temporal bounce and every day is a new experience unaffected by what happened before. It is MEMORY, not meaning or purpose, that makes the difference.

The ferryman, after he finally throws away the bottle containing the water of Lethe, begins to have a fuller life with memories. Of course it is still a cursed life, spent ferrying people into the underworld, a life mostly spent hearing the dead bewail their fate and disappointment. Can you imagine what it must be like hearing almost nothing but people realizing how they failed and how much time they wasted in life as they discard their hopes and dreams in the passing waters and approach judgment in the afterlife?

But, like Albert Camus’s version of Sisyphus, the taxi driver chooses this life, complete with its curse, and discards the water of Lethe. As Camus put it, “one must suppose he’s happy,” and he does get to look forward to seeing Persephone.

I don’t know about all that, but it was beyond my power to intervene. I only remove the unnecessary pain inflicted by careless writers, not the existential pain necessitated by the human condition. I think I’d have found the movie more satisfying if the taxi driver had rebelled a tad more about his fate. As a femdom writer I can certainly live with dishing out Tantalus’s punishment (iykyk – it’s my bread and butter you might say), but even in that capacity I prefer a struggle. A happy ending with such meager satisfaction left me unfulfilled, but it was true to the story, so I left it alone.

12:01 (as in one minute past midnight)

Another movie that hardly required my intervention was 12:01. That’s a movie that has the same basic conceit, one may call it, and came out in the same year (1993), as Groundhog Day, to wit, the main character (Barry Thomas) finds himself in a “time bounce,” where events of a certain day keep repeating, and he’s the only person who knows it and remembers from day to day. Perhaps the reader begins to suspect a theme or perhaps even another sort of time loop in operation here. On the most superficial level, a movie where time repeats allows the main character to do much of the repair that normally would call for my quasi-divine intervention.

In my opinion, 12:01 is a much better movie than Groundhog Day because it spends much less time on the trivial. For one thing, although the science isn’t convincing, it actually attempts to explain the time loop or “bounce.” More importantly, Barry Thomas is attempting to save, rather than merely seduce, his love interest (Lisa Fredericks) who, for reasons intrinsic to the plot, would be assassinated in the normal course of events. And she’s a physicist who plays a decisive role in figuring out what’s going on and how to get out of it, so there’s that: the woman is not merely an ornament, but also an agent.

A very ornamental agent, it must be said, this being a Hollywood movie, after all.

The problem with time loops, according to Barry Thomas, is that “people don’t grow up. They don’t stay dead. You’ll never see another flower bloom.” Well, that’s true if you don’t drink the water of Lethe and are cursed, or blessed, as the case may be, not to remember events from day to day. In 12:01 the time bounce performs the Lethean function of memory erasure because the whole universe resets, including the minds of all the people. This would just be Nietzsche’s time recurrence theory (that in an infinite universe everything will happen again and again) except that Barry is exempt because he was shocked at the moment the time loop re-looped the first time. According to the movie’s theory, his consciousness was moved to a different energy level by the shock, and this allowed him to remember things from previous incarnations. Everybody else in the movie, other than Barry, is blissfully unaware of the time bounce; they’re just living their lives unconcerned by the fact that flowers no longer bloom. Granted, the scope of the lives they’re living is much narrower than they realize, as the day keeps repeating and therefore denies them any real progress in an objective sense, but in a subjective way they’re living perfectly fulfilling lives. How different is that from what we do? It’s just Nietzsche’s theory sped up a gazillion times. Or our daily lives lived in real time.

Memory makes the difference, however, and Barry Thomas is living a different life because he’s aware of the recurrence and retains the freedom to change his actions in the stream of a recurring external world. Like the taxi driver he wants to develop a relationship with someone trapped in the recurrence – he wants to get on with getting it on, so to speak, and in order to do that he has to persuade Lisa that the time bounce has occurred and to get her help in stopping it. The movie doesn’t ask, so I was not confronted with the question of whether Barry Thomas is acting selfishly by breaking the time-loop so he can have his relationship with Lisa, but I wonder: his choice meant that people would age and die; did he have the right to inflict that on the rest of the world? You may argue that it was just the natural thing and of course he had that right, as the movie seems to assume, but one might think that the time link had also rewritten what was the natural thing and he had no such right to interfere.

I let it slide, in any event.

In Groundhog Day the main character uses recurrence to learn something about a cutie so he can seduce her on false premises; Barry Thomas does the same thing for purer and better reasons. He learns Lisa’s favorite color and number, and her favorite music group (the Carpenters). Unaware that Karen Carpenter had one of the best voices of all time, he makes disparaging comments about Lisa’s music choice, but he’s moved by the story of her canary, which died when Lisa was nine years old and, as the epitaph to its grave Lisa wrote “Fly to Heaven.”

It is this “Fly to Heaven” epitaph that becomes the key to putting an end to the time bounce, and at last we come to the point of this essay.

This Year in a Nutshell

This has been a very tough year for my family, and I am more than ready for it to end. We have lost two parrots already, and a third, already suffering from a frequently fatal disease (avian bornavirus), was just diagnosed with cancer that will probably have her flying to heaven within a month or two. Meanwhile, I haven’t even had enough time to finish grieving the first, much less the second, loss.[i] None of us have. My heart is breaking.

It’s all well and good to watch movie after movie where people choose memory, but the loss of so many beloveds, and the witnessing of so much horror, marks the survivors in a way my superpower is powerless to remedy. If one could stop the passage of time and prevent the endless river of senseless and horrifying deaths that have occurred this year, would that be so bad? Or conversely, if one could forget those deaths and step into a memoryless life of the ever present, would we choose it? That seems to be what our political masters want of us.

Most people reading this will probably not understand the grief of losing a parrot any more than they understand my grief for the murdered in Palestine. Parrots have humor, can play, can be mad and can love among many other things, and losing one you love is a terrible loss. Losing three is well-nigh unbearable. This year has confronted me, repeatedly, with the incredible value of life and with its transience.

Having been confronted daily with the scale of the genocide being conducted by the Israelis on Palestinians and the depravity of the whole world in that regard, and with the scale of several other ongoing calamities throughout the world, it can seem selfish to mourn the loss of so small a thing as your own child or a bird. I struggle to reconcile those things every time I see a photo of a Palestinian child’s body or any of the other evidence of Israeli inhumanity, as I do see, every day, often many times a day. It is mind-boggling to reconcile the enormity of the loss of one single beloved creature with the pain, many multiples of magnitudes greater, of an actual genocide. And what of the concurrent ecocides and the billions of lives being destroyed so extravagantly?

Thankfully the winter solstice has finally come and gone, and henceforth the days grow longer. Is it possible to hope that time and memory will bring some improvement this year?

Happy New Year.

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[i] For several reasons I do not think people should make birds pets, as delightful and wonderful as they are. We foster and adopt birds that have been neglected or mistreated, and we take them as we get them, including what is called “fospice,” a merging of “foster” and “hospice.” The one who was recently diagnosed with cancer was a fospice bird, since adopted, but this does not in any way reduce the grief and sorrow losing her will bring. It may make losing her worse.