Cloud Atlas Revisited

     I saw Cloud Atlas again.  It’s still as powerful now as it was when I first watched it, maybe even more so.  In fact a couple of times while watching it it felt like I was having a religious experience, which is something I’ve never experienced watching a film (although in books and music I have).  In addition to all the connections I made eight months ago I noticed a few I hadn’t seen before. 
 
1.  When Sonmi was in prison she made eye contact with her father (Hugo Weaving) from a past life.  Then he backed away from her as if he had deja-vu.  It was right after he gave her a similar lecture during the “multitude of drops segment” with her husband Adam in timeline one.  It was as if the disinherited daughter was reminding him that she wouldn’t yield to his philosophy or threats even after centuries of being apart.  When I realized that it sent chills down my spine. 
 
2.  The Cloud Atlas Sextet can be heard twice near the beginning of the film.  The first is in the introductory Luisa Rey segment, when a rock interpretation can be heard playing from the balcony.  The second is in the introductory Cavendish section, which is a jazz interpretation and is also being played on a balcony.  You have to listen carefully both times to hear them.  What’s also interesting is that Dermot Hoggins throws a critic off the balcony in his timeline and Luisa Rey wants to throw a guy she interviewed off the balcony in her timeline. 
 
3.  When Robert Frobisher commits suicide, the future Sixsmith asks Sonmi if she believes in the after-life in timeline 5.  It's interesting how it's the future Sixsmith who's the first to believe in Sonmi.  In this segment he seems to be wondering what happened to his long lost love, Robert Frobisher, whom he (presumably) never meets in his future lives because of the way Robert left him.  You can see it in his eyes when Sonmi talks about meeting HaeJoo* in "another world".  It's almost as if he redeems Robert by simply believing in another world for them to exist in, the same way Sonmi does, which in turn changes the course of history after he leaks the interview and propels all her other beliefs.  Robert's own opinion in his letter supports this; "I believe there is another world waiting for us, Sixsmith, and you will find me there." 
 
 *HaeJoo is Adam Ewing in a future life, and Sonmi was his wife Tilda in a past life (yes, that red-head really is Doona Bae).  Their reunion is illustrated beautifully here, and when people first see this connection they are often enamored by the power of the film. 
 
4.  Most importantly, I finally gathered up all the influences each story must have had on the others.  In the Frobisher story I noticed that after shooting Ayrs, the bullet from the Luger rolls on the floor in the direction of a torn book that is holding up a corner of the bed.  On the binding, it says The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing, which means that it was the second half of the journal Frobisher was trying to find.  This is important because I think Frobisher’s despair was influenced by Adam Ewing’s story.  We are shown that he never read the second half of his journal and therefore must have assumed that Adam Ewing eventually died from the poisoning of Goose.  Before his suicide he’d written a letter to Sixsmith saying, “I feel as hopeless as Adam Ewing, blind to the fact that his friend is poisoning him.”  If he’d read the second half of Adam’s journal, would he have taken a more optimistic outlook on life and not killed himself?  What does this say about the influence of each story on the one following it?  Luisa Rey asked herself, “Why do we keep making the same mistakes over and over?” while reading Frobisher’s letters.  To me that translates into telling herself not to give up the way Frobisher did.  It wasn’t until Cavendish was reading the Luisa Rey Mystery that he got the idea to spend the rest of his life with his long lost love.  As he was reading Luisa's manuscript he got the notion that he’d been here before, in another lifetime ago... Ursula.  Reading his previous wife’s story (Jocasta was Luisa Rey, both played by Halle Berry) must have softened his heart and made him remember his true love.  Also, if it weren’t for Cavendish’s heroics, Yoona wouldn’t have persuaded Sonmi to think about the outside world.  Cavendish's outburst, “I will not be subjected to criminal abuse!”, may have inspired the whole fabricant revolution.  Even with Zachry, the orison of Sonmi revealed to him the truth about his home, which is why he ended up leaving with Meronym.  I guess this whole domino effect is another way of tracing Adam’s single act of kindness that rippled through centuries.  Originally I’d thought that the slave who’d saved him inspired him and his wife to make Sonmi into a martyr centuries later, thus becoming the embodiment of good in Zachry’s soul- a person whose decisions prolonged human life on another planet.  I’m now thinking it’s a combination of both, that both the heroes finding the stories and their subsequent actions- that fate and free will- are what shaped the future stories.  The bottom line is that if you do good things, you might indirectly save the world centuries from now.  That’s what Adam is talking about when he says, “What is an ocean but a multitude of drops?”  Even though he didn’t directly save humanity on Earth, his drop is connected to the one that did, Zachry’s, because his actions centuries ago changed Zachry’s thinking in his timeline.  It means that all the drops in an ocean blend into one another, and all our thoughts are mirrored by actions in the eons coming before us.  In the preface Zachry said, "Wind like this, full of voices... ancestry howlin' at ya, yibberin' stories... old voices all tied up into one."  The stories are all part of a chain reaction in which all of them together round out Zachry's tale.  He must have had mystical powers, since he was able to hear the voice of Old Georgie and had dreams in which he had visions of the other six stories. 
        Now I also understand what Frobisher meant when he said that "the boundary between noise and sound are conventions... all boundaries are conventions waiting to be transcended".  It's a metaphorical reference to Adam Ewing's "multitude of drops" quote.  We are born as drops and once we enter the ocean we are boundless.  Therefore we are subject to Oneness, transcendence, and the integration of other drops so that we may break free of all barriers, including prison, truth, social pressure, poison, forbidden love, and death.  "Nay the dead never stay dead.  Open your ears and they never stop a yibberin'", says Zachry.  Like currents in the ocean, we are clouds drifting on an atlas that is as unpredictable as it is orderly.  Free will is one variable and fate is the other.  The direction of the cloud is predetermined but the shape it takes is not, just like a drop in the ocean.  Is that all we are, clouds and drops... dust in the wind?  Free to shape our lives yet bound to the stories of ancestors and our actions in the past?  Sonmi said, "We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness we birth out future."  That seems to be Cloud Atlas' most powerful message, and a profound one it is.  All of the greatest quotes in this film are a part of the same message, which makes all six stories more complete as a whole and not a random mess when separated. 

Ichiro Reaches 4,000 Career Hits and Why His Japanese Ones Should Count

    Every Mariners fan misses the days when Ichiro Suzuki put an absolute clinic on Major League Baseball pitching.  In his first 9 years in the league he batted over .330 and had a staggering amount of hits thanks to playing in 99% of his games, leading off every single time, and hardly ever drawing a walk.  Ichiro would swing at everything and still manage to get base hits, and the most remarkable thing about it is that he hardly ever struck out.  He is by far the best hitter I’ve ever seen, and in his prime he was arguably the best in the game next to Albert Pujols (who has mysteriously paralleled his career batting average over the years).
    A lot of people are debating whether or not Ichiro’s Japanese hits should count, saying that their league is like triple A and that it’s easier to hit over there.  I agree that it’s easier to hit in Japan but it is still unfair to take away those hits for several reasons.  They only play 144 games per year there, not 162, so if he’d played in America he’d have had 18 more games to gain ground on the hits he wouldn’t have had facing better pitching.  Also, it’s not like Ichiro ever had a hard time against American pitching.  After he came here he had one of the best rookie seasons of all time and consistently batted .330+ with over 200 hits per year.  Not only that, but he set the all time MLB record for hits in a single season at 262, indicating that his stats are legit if you want to put him in the top five hitters of all time category.  Basically if Ichiro had played in the MLB during the years he was in Japan I think he'd have nearly 4,000 hits anyway, and might even have more.
    He was truly a joy to watch in his prime- a sort of reincarnation of Ty Cobb, with the arrogance to boot.  I won’t deny that his personality is flawed, but that shouldn't take anything away from his talent and his accomplishments.

Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

I’m rating this based on its memorability and not on how much I enjoyed it. The bone-chilling ending threw my thoughts on it sideways and I can't say I'd recommend it to anyone due to its sheer unbelievability. It also takes a long time to get into, partly because the main character isn’t introduced until halfway through the book and partly because the subject material jumps around. Huxley has created here a “utopian dystopia”, in which everyone is happy but for all the wrong reasons. Brainwashing, cloning, conditioning, and class stratification are all morally compromised in order to make the world a “better place”. The writer does a tremendous job undermining the philosophy of the World State by making examples of his characters. Supposedly it's a satire, but I only found it moderately funny. Books like 1984, Gravity’s Rainbow, and Infinite Jest must have taken ideas from Brave New World, so its influence cannot be ignored. 

 

*Spoilers* The dynamic between Lenina and John is particularly interesting to me. John was affluent in Shakespeare and Brave New World ended up being sort of being a cross between Othello and Romeo & Juliet. It is a doomed romance, but only one of the lovers ends up committing suicide- the male one, for his guilt in raping (not killing) the woman he “loved”. You have to feel sorry for both Lenina and John. Lenina was this empty beauty queen who’d finally found a man that didn’t just want her for sex, and in the end, we see her crying and holding her heart because she clearly missed John. Then John broke her heart by doing what he did, but was it really his fault? John had to succumb to the conditioned masses because someone had released soma into the air. Then they harassed him into doing the very thing he sought to exile himself from. It begs the question: if drugs and conditioning made rape orgies socially acceptable, praised even to the point of glorification, would people still do it? I like to think not.