The latin root of the word “decide” means “to cut off.” What you do when you decide to do something is to literally cut off other options. When you decide to go out to eat at Chipotle, you are saying, “I am not going to eat at McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, etc.” You make thousands of these decisions every day. Every book you read from your bookshelf means not reading all of the other ones. Working in one profession means not working in all the others. Possibility is laid out before us every single moment of our lives. We constantly take one path among the infinite. Have you ever stopped to wonder what your life could have been like if you had decided differently?

Nemo Nobody (Thomas Byrne, Toby Regbo and Jared Leto) stands on a train station (called Chance Station), deciding if he should go with his mother (Natasha Little) or stay with his father (Rhys Ifans). This decision is the core of the film; Mr. Nobody. It shows various possibilities and scenarios that derive from making this decision, all taking place within his imagination.

There are multiple lines of possibility that all branch out from the original decision at the train station. While it can be difficult at times to keep track of them, there are three women that are part of the different timelines. One is Anna (Laura Brumagne, Juno Temple and Diane Kruger). Anna is the choice permeated with passion. Notice the way that Van Dormael (the director) plays with color. With Anna, the color scheme is red, the color of passion. For Elise (Lea Thomus, Clare Stone and Sarah Polley), who suffers from bipolar and depression, it is blue. For Jean (Anais Van Belle, Audrey Giacomini and Linh-Dan Pham), who lives in the timeline of material wealth, it is yellow.

Søren Kierkegaard was a Danish philosopher who lived from 1813 until 1855 and is considered to be the father of existentialism. He wrote prolifically and with great verve and spirit. But Kierkegaard was also a Lutheran, and was incredibly critical of what he called Christendom (the Danish Lutheran Church). In spite of this, most of his philosophy is still centered around his Christian faith. While he is a highly regarded theologian, much of his philosophy is able to be secularized. In fact, much of his philosophy happens before the leap into Christianity. Mr. Nobody examines the ideas that Kierkegaard wrote about only over a couple of pages, but which are the essence of the film, that of possibility, necessity, and the choices we make.

Kierkegaard often pulled two different concepts that seemed dialectically opposed to each other and showed how they were, in fact, both necessary. The self was a synthesis of different concepts. He writes, “Personhood is a synthesis of possibility and necessity. Its continued existence is like breathing (respiration), which is an inhaling and exhaling.” The self is only truly itself when it has both aspects, both possibility and necessity.

For Kierkegaard, when only one of possibility or necessity is present, the self is in despair:

“When a self becomes lost in possibility in this way, it is not merely because of a lack of energy; at least it is not to be interpreted in the usual way. What is missing is essentially the power to obey, to submit to the necessity in one’s life, to what may be called one’s limitations. Therefore, the tragedy is not that such a self did not amount to something in the world; no, the tragedy is that he did not become aware of himself, aware that the self he is is a very definite something and thus the necessary. Instead, he lost himself, because this self fantastically reflected itself in possibility. Even in seeing oneself in a mirror it is necessary to recognize oneself, for if one does not, one does not see oneself but only a human being. The mirror of possibility is no ordinary mirror; it must be used with extreme caution, for, in the highest sense, this mirror does not tell the truth. That a self appears to be such and such in the possibility of itself is only a half-truth, for in the possibility of itself the self is still far from or is only half of itself. Therefore, the question is how the necessity of this particular self defines it more specifically. Possibility is like a child’s invitation to a party; the child is willing at once, but the question now is whether the parents will give permission-and as it is with the parents, so it is with necessity.”

When one has possible futures ahead of them, it can seem so hopeful, so bright. Early on in our lives we all have that feeling, where the world is our oyster. It is ours to do with as we wish. Many of us live in our dreams of greatness, whether it be a major sports star, a musician, an actor, or a scientist who makes an essential discovery. Nemo says,

“If you mix the mashed potatoes and the sauce, you can’t separate them later. It’s forever. 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.”

At a certain point, however, we lose ourselves in the dream. Kierkegaard writes,

“Thus possibility seems greater and greater to the self; more and more it becomes possible because nothing becomes actual. Eventually everything seems possible, but this is exactly the point at which the abyss swallows up the self. It takes time for each little possibility to become actuality. Eventually, however, the time that should be used for actuality grows shorter and shorter; everything becomes more and more momentary. Possibility becomes more and more intensive-but in the sense of possibility, not in the sense of actuality, for the intensive in the sense of actuality means to actualize some of what is possible. The instant something appears to be possible, a new possibility appears, and finally these phantasmagoria follow one another in such rapid succession that it seems as if everything were possible, and this is exactly the final moment, the point at which the individual himself becomes a mirage.”

If we spend all of our time in possibility, we lose the sense of reality that we live in, as a concrete human being. We forget to spend our time in the present moment. As Kierkegaard writes in beautiful and poetic style above, we also need to be able to obey the physical world, to know our limitations, our humanness, for to lose ourselves in a dream world of the possible is to lose half of ourselves:

“But if possibility outruns necessity so that the self runs away from itself in possibility, it has no necessity to which it is to return; this is possibility’s despair. This self becomes an abstract possibility; it flounders in possibility until exhausted but neither moves from the place where it is nor arrives anywhere, for necessity is literally that place; to become oneself is literally a movement in that place. To become is a movement away from that place, but to become oneself is a movement in that place.”

Necessity is the grounding we need upon which possibility can stand. Without necessity we become abstract clouds. That is to say, we become children flailing about wanting to go to the party. It’s possible, but we also need the ability to physically go. That ability to go is necessity.

Of course, we cannot live with only necessity. Kierkegaard writes, “The self of the determinist cannot breathe, for it is impossible to breathe necessity exclusively, because that would utterly suffocate a person’s self.” In the same way that a full self cannot only live in possibility, to live only in necessity is suffocating. It does not leave any hope for the individual. It leaves nothing to look forward to. Human beings are creatures eternally on the move.

We see this throughout the film. In one possible timeline, Nemo is married to Jean and has everything as far as material wealth, but he is in despair. This is because he lacks possibility. There is no openness in his life, no room for maneuvering. Everything is controlled tightly and rigidly, to the point where Nemo loses his desire for life. He attempts suicide by jumping in his pool. Jean finds a note that Nemo wrote, and reads it:

“There comes a time in life when everything seems narrow. Choices have been made, I can only continue on. I know myself like the back of my hand. I can predict my every reaction, everything is predictable. My life has been cast in cement with air bags and seat belts. I’ve controlled everything. I’ve done everything to reach this point, and now that I’m here, I’m fucking bored. The hardest thing is knowing whether I’m still alive.”

His life is so predictable and rigid, so controlled and planned out, that there is no hope in it for him anymore. There is no enjoyment, no spontaneity. He doesn’t feel alive anymore. Compare this with a short passage from Kierkegaard:

“To lack possibility means either that everything has become necessary for a person or that everything has become trivial.”

For Nemo, everything is trivial. It is dull and boring, predictable. Kierkegaard also writes,

“If losing oneself in possibility may be compared with a child’s utterance of vowel sounds, then lacking possibility would be the same as being dumb. The necessary is like pure consonants, but to express them there must be possibility. If this is lacking, if a human existence is brought to the point where it lacks possibility, then it is in despair and is in despair every moment it lacks possibility.”

Another character is also in despair over her lack of possibility. In another of the timelines, Nemo and Anna become step siblings when their parents meet each other. They find themselves falling in love, however, and have a passionate relationship. When their parents split up, they promise to find each other. They later find each other by chance, and while sitting on a bench in a park, Anna says,

“When we were separated at 15, I said I would never love anyone else. Ever. I would never become attached, I’d never stay put anywhere, I’d have nothing for myself. I just said I didn’t…I would pretend to be alive. And this is what I’ve been waiting for, all this time. Renouncing all possible lives, for one only, with you.”

Anna voluntarily denied all of her possible lives except for one: the life she wanted with Nemo. She says that she would pretend to be alive, because while she denies almost all of her possibility, she is in despair. She refuses both her possibility and necessity, denying the physical, grounded life before her in reality, as well as any other possible life she might have.

We should also talk about how this distinction between possibility and necessity contribute to anxiety. Kierkegaard wrote, “Anxiety is the dizziness from freedom.” This is a wonderful way of saying that with possibility comes uncertainty, an uncertainty about what choice is right. Which path should we take down the road of possibility to necessity?

When we have so many choices and possibilities in our lives, it can be terrifying. How do we know which choice is right? How do we know what to believe? How do we know who to marry? What career path to take? Where to live? The choices are infinite. As I have written before, this is a reason why many people simply refuse to think or act for themselves, but depend upon some kind of group to tell us how we should live. History has shown us that when we are in moments of great chaos and uncertainty, people gravitate towards authoritarian or cult-like movements, whether they are political or spiritual.

Amanda Montell is a linguist who writes books about language. Her latest, released in 2021, is called Cultish. She examines the language that cults use in order to catch our identities and manipulate us into pulling us in in order to take advantage of people. She further explains this phenomenon:

“Modern cultish groups also feel comforting in part because they help alleviate the anxious mayhem of living in a world that presents almost too many possibilities for who to be (or at least the illusion of such). I once had a therapist tell me that flexibility without structure isn’t flexibility at all; it’s just chaos. That’s how a lot of people’s live have been feeling. For most of America’s history, there were comparatively few directions a person’s career, hobbies, place of residence, romantic relationships, diet, aesthetic – everything – could easily go in. But the twenty-first century presents folks (those of some privilege, that is) with a Cheesecake Factory-size menu of decisions to make. The sheer quantity can be paralyzing, especially in an era of radical self-creation, when there’s such pressure to craft a strong ‘personal brand’ at the very same time that morale and basic survival feel more precarious for young people than they have in a long time. As our generational lore goes, millennials’ parents told them they could grow up to be whatever they wanted, but then that cereal aisle of endless ‘what ifs’ and ‘could bes’ turned out to be so crushing, all they wanted was a guru to tell them which to pick.”

Montell is writing poignantly about this historical moment, where everything is driving human life at warp speed. With issues like climate change, political partisanship and volatility, the financial crash of 2008, and a social media atmosphere that presents everyone with the possibility to become famous overnight for just the right video going viral, anxiety is high. With a multitude of decisions to be made, anxiety about succeeding and not being left out keeps rising. Alan Watts spoke about this eloquently. He said,

“You do not know where your decisions come from. They pop up like hiccups. And when you make a decision, people have a great deal of anxiety about making decisions. Did I think this over long enough? Did I take enough data into consideration? And if you think it through you find you never could take enough data in consideration. The data for a decision in any given situation is infinite! So what you do is, you go through the motions of thinking and what you will do about this. But worriers are people who think of all the variables beyond their control and what might happen. Choice is the act of hesitation that we make before making a decision. It is a mental wobbling. And so we are always in a dither of doubt as to whether we’re behaving the right way, doing the right thing, so on and so forth, and lack a certain kind of self confidence. And if you see you lack self confidence, you will make mistakes through sheer fumbling. If you do have self confidence you may carry get away with doing entirely the wrong thing.”

A worrier is someone who thinks about all of the possibilities that could come from a decision. It is someone who lives constantly in possibility and refuses to entertain necessity. This adds another dimension to the conversation, however, and that dimension is ethical. We have to make decisions, and sometimes those decisions will have ethical implications. In the film, all of the possibilities examined have the same moral import. They are all possible love stories, determining which woman Nemo will love. However, many other decisions have ethical dimensions which have moral ramifications in the real world. Will buying jeans made in foreign countries support the businesses and those jobs that allow those workers to build up their wealth and overcome poverty, thereby liberating them? Or does it prop up a system of injustice that takes advantage of people in poor countries-in essence, stealing their labor and making them worse off? It doesn’t take long to realize that many choices we make several times a day have these subtleties baked into them.

But this is a step beyond where Kierkegaard thought and wrote. He was thinking more about the literal decision right before your eyes. What should we do with our time tonight? What should I read? Who should I marry? These are all possibilities that must collapse into necessity, but still retain some possibility, otherwise we shall live in despair. “The person who gets lost in possibility soars high with the boldness of despair; he for whom everything became necessity overstrains himself in life and is crushed in despair…”

Anxiety is intrinsically linked to possibility and the need to make choices. So does Watts give us a remedy, a way to think about it that helps us act in the end? He does, and it is quite beautiful:

“You have to regard yourself as a cloud in the flesh. Because you see clouds never make mistakes. Did you ever see a cloud that was misshapen? Did you ever see a badly designed wave? No they always do the right thing. But if you will treat yourself for a while as a cloud or wave, and realize that you can’t make a mistake, whatever you do, cause even if you do something that seems to be totally disastrous, it’ll all come out in the wash somehow or other. Then, through this capacity you will develop a kind of confidence, and through confidence you will be able to trust your own intuition. This is the middle way of knowing it has nothing to do with your decision to do this or not, whether you decide that you can’t make a mistake or whether you don’t decide it it’s true anyways, that you are like cloud and water. And through that realization, without overcompensating in the other direction, you will come to the point where you begin to be on good terms with your own being and be able to trust your own brain.”

Everything is going to happen in some way. When we make decisions, you have to be okay with the outcome, because if you’re not, then you will live in despair of the way you wanted reality to be. There is no way that reality is destined to turn out, no way that our lives are supposed to go. Fortune, destiny, any sense of pre-destination? It doesn’t exist. We tend to see events as destined after the fact, when, in actual fact, we would still have seen them that way even if they happened another way. At one point, a producer tells Nemo, “In life, you get one take. If it’s bad, you just deal with it.”

Watts is saying that whatever is going to happen, will happen. You have to learn to accept it. You have to be on good terms with yourself to meet reality where it is. There is no wrong decision. It’s similar to a conversation that the journalist has with Nemo when he is an old man:

“Journalist: Everything that you say is contradictory. You can’t have been in one place and another at the same time.
Nemo: You mean to say we have to make choices.
Journalist: Of all those lives, which one…which one is the right one?
Nemo: 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.”

Near the end of the film, Nemo tells the journalist, “You don’t exist. Neither do I. We only live in the imagination of a 9 year old child. We are imagined by a 9 year old child faced with an impossible choice.” That impossible choice is whether to go with his mother or stay with his father. In a moment, he examined all the possible lives he could live depending on which choice he makes. How is he supposed to know which one is the right one? “Before, he was unable to make a choice because he didn’t know what would happen. Now that he knows what will happen, he’s unable to make a choice.” The entire film takes place in that moment of possibility. He says, “In chess, it’s called Zugzwang when the only viable move is not to move.”

Should he move or not? Should he decide or not? Time will move forwards no matter what he chooses, for isn’t not making a choice also a choice in itself? Nemo does not recall that to not decide means to not live. Sure, it includes moments of pain and indecision, recollections of what life could have been had he made a different choice, but what else is there to do? Stand on the platform for the rest of time? Then he has no actuality, no necessity, and he lives in despair. Isn’t it better to live, no matter how messy?

As Nemo says, “I’m not afraid of dying. I’m afraid I haven’t been alive enough! It should be written on every schoolroom blackboard. Life is a playground, or nothing.”

While talking with a friend of hers at a dance, Irene (Tessa Thompson) says, “We’re all of us passing for something or other, aren’t we?” It’s the line that stands out the most in the film, the one that universalizes the search for identity and security in our ever shifting experience. Passing is the directorial debut of Rebecca Hall (who also wrote the screenplay) and is based on the novella from 1929 by Nella Larsen. It is a film that not only looks at the issue of race in America in the 1920’s, but delves deeper, interrogating the ways human beings have always played with identity and belonging.

The film begins blurry. We don’t have a sense of who we are, where we’re going. We just hear voices, and see feet ahead of us walking. We arrive at a store, where a man drops an object and the two women whose feet we were following help him pick it up. We extend our hand and help them as well. We ask about a toy at the counter, which is unable to be found, and walk outside, only to see a man across the street collapse. His crisis is our crisis. Stepping back from the first-person experience, we learn we are a Black woman. This first scene has her passing as a white woman in an upscale area of Chicago. Irene has taken a moment and stepped out of her identity as a Black woman, functioning as someone else. Does this man’s crisis symbolize the momentary death of her identity? Has her identity temporarily collapsed, or is this what happens when we attempt to go beyond identity?

Irene lives in Harlem with her husband, Brian (Andre Holland), who works as a doctor. They live what appears to be a happy middle-class life. They live in a beautiful brownstone with their two children, and make enough money to have their own maid. The film depicts what happens when an old friend of Irene’s from school, Clare (Ruth Negga), comes back into her life.

In a literal sense, the film tells the story of passing in the sense that it has been understood in American history. Passing refers to the way that a member of an oppressed group will pretend to be a part of the dominant group to gain social advantage. In this instance, Black Americans would pretend to be white in order to gain social advantage. In the 1920’s, Jim Crow laws were still dominant in the US, which meant that Black Americans were denied the basic rights they should have had for being human. They were legally barred from many of the privileges awarded to white Americans, simply for the dumb luck of being born white. Lynching was still happening regularly. Racial violence and destruction were common throughout the US at this time, with mobs of white people destroying property and murdering Black people in order to safeguard their power. Throughout the film, Brian keeps talking about wanting to move out of the country, and at one point, he tries to teach his two sons the hard truth about racism in the US, so that his sons can stay safe.

The film goes beyond the historical circumstances, though. It asks the questions of how we construct identity, what it means for us as we live our lives, and the poignant questions that arise when we feel that sense of identity start to crumble, like a castle built of sand.

Human beings learn about reality through experience. They take in and assimilate information about the world in order to better predict how to get to where they want to go, and to know how to act in future situations. We generalize about people and situations in order to effectively move through them in the future. We put people in boxes and categories to be able to know who they are and how we should act around them. But is reality so simple?

Reality, as it is, is messy. It cannot be schematized through clean and crisp categories. We do this to be able to understand and make sense of the world, but it will always break down upon finer examination. Boundaries are fluid and porous. Categories are always shifting, ever breaking down and re-assembling themselves into new creations and understandings of the way things are or can be.

James Baldwin understood this truth. He was one of the finest writers of the 20th century, and a brilliant defender of the rights of Black people. One of his most remembered moments is a famous debate at the University of Cambridge with the creator of modern conservatism William F. Buckley. His most famous work is probably The Fire Next Time, a powerful invective against racism. In it, he writes,

“Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty in our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death – ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us.”

Baldwin’s choice of words here is fascinating. He says that we “imprison ourselves” in these identities. Baldwin saw these identities as ways of holding us back, keeping us from being fully fledged humans. In other words, identity holds us back, limiting our freedom by creating walls and barriers beyond which we cannot go. Think of the way the film is in 4:3 aspect ratio, as well as black and white, to suggest a claustrophobic experience of social categories. During a conversation, Clare says to Irene, “I don’t expect you to understand. You’re happy. You have a true, good life. And you’re free. Free and safe. Safe. I don’t even know what that is anymore.” Irene responds, “I’m beginning to believe that no one is ever completely happy, free, or safe.”

Baldwin explores this freedom in his novel Giovanni’s Room, about an engaged man who has a passionate affair with a man he meets in Paris. He writes,

“…nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom….But people can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, any more than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.”

The freedom to be whoever you are, whoever you want, whoever you would like, is liberating in many ways, but it can also be overwhelming, especially when you live in a society like the US, where maximizing the amount of choices possible is a sacred creed. But at a certain point anxiety sets in. Who should I be? What should I do for work? What should I read? There are hundreds of incredible movies to watch on Netflix, which one should I watch? Watching one means not watching all the others. Choosing one career means forgoing others. Same with spouses. Without anchors in our lives, the waves of reality pull the boat away. With so many choices in who we could be, how are we supposed to know what the right answer is?

In the novella, Larsen wrote,

“Above everything else she had wanted, had striven, to keep undisturbed the pleasant routine of her life. And now Clare Kendry had come into it, and with her the menace of impermanence.”

Impermanence. Constant change. The flux of experience and the ever-shifting nature of how human beings imagine their society. This impermanence is what afflicts Irene in the film, when the root, the anchor, the mooring post, of the life she believes she should have falls apart when Clare enters back into it.

While the concrete details of the film examine the idea of passing in racial terms, there is much to suggest that this is not the only commentary it is making. Many shots, including one during the dance scene which tenderly lingers on Clare’s open back, suggests a mutual physical attraction between Irene and Clare.

This opens up the idea of passing into a much broader veranda, opening up to us the ideals that we all try to aspire to be. The US has an ideal of the perfect middle class family. Picture the Leave It To Beaver family, or the opening sequence of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, which shows perfectly manicured lawns and a picket white fence, a perfect family with a dog as a firetruck drives by, with the firefighter smiling and waving in suburban bliss. Clare does what she can to maintain the perfect housewife image; a doctor husband with two sons living in a beautiful brownstone while coordinating community dances and having perfect family dinners. But is this what Irene wants? Or is this the life she believes she is supposed to have? Being a part of the LGBTQ community was a taboo subject in the 1920’s. They could not be nearly as open about their sexual orientation for fear of violence or social expulsion.

In the novella, Larsen wrote,

“Security. Was it just a word? If not, then was it only by the sacrifice of other things, happiness, love, or some wild ecstasy that she had never known, that it could be obtained? And did too much striving, too much faith in safety and permanence, unfit one for these other things?”

The safe option for our lives is to live how everyone else lives. To find a partner, a good steady job, and have children. To stay within social bounds of belief and thought, meaning and behavior. What is it we would give up for security and safety? A life of passion? A life of true love, perhaps with the person that society tells us we should not be with?

Passing examines the eternal question of identity. Throughout the film we feel imprisoned within these prisons that we have created ourselves, barring ourselves from seeing the full and terrifying picture of humanity. The film does not give us answers, or show us how we should be living, but it does a brilliant job of asking the questions.

Youth begins with a dance. A cover band on a rotating platform playing the song “You Got the Love.” The singer croons:

Sometimes I feel like throwing my hands up in the air
I know I can count on you
Sometimes I feel like saying “Lord I just don’t care”
But you’ve got the love I need to see me through

This is our human existence. Exhausting. Frustrating. Trying. Overwhelming. Sometimes it all seems too much. Yet we persist, and keep living. Why is that? What is it that drives us? Most people would give one of a few answers, such as love or passion. These are the two themes that pervade the film, mostly delivered through metaphor.

The film is a mishmash of ideas and truths, longings, and aching. Melancholy is an apt word to describe it. Fred Ballinger (Michael Caine) and Mick Boyle (Harvey Keitel) are old friends, having grown up together long ago. They are both currently staying at a Chateau in the Swiss Alps. Ballinger, a composer and conductor, is relaxing and working on his health, while Boyle, a famous director, is working on his next script with a team of young writers. Ballinger’s daughter Lena (Rachel Weisz), who works as her father’s assistant, is also staying with them. Lena is about to take off on a vacation with her husband, only to find that her husband has left her for another woman. This brings up memories of affairs had by her father.

There is not one philosophical idea or question that the film centers around. It functions piecemeal, in random chaotic bits of metaphor and dialogue which function, significantly, like our lives. Our lives never play out just like a movie. There is much more banality in between the moments of significance.

Throughout the film there are two characters who act as symbols. One is the recently crowned Miss Universe, who is awarded a week at the Chateau for her win; the other is Diego Maradona, the soccer star. Miss Universe is young and beautiful, in the prime of her youth while Maradona is nearing the end of his life, overweight, and dependent on an oxygen tank and his wife.

We see Maradona in situations where his age is emphasized. He is swimming in the pool when he gets worn out, and needs help getting to the edge for his oxygen tank. He juggles a tennis ball on the tennis court, just to get worn out after a few kicks, short of breath. This emphasizes the frailty of human beings as we get older. Our bodies break down, and we start to take stock of what we have done, what we’ve accomplished, the relationships we’ve forged, over our lifetime.

Jimmy Tree (Paul Dano) is an actor also staying at the Chateau. He is known for one role that he took many years before, where he played a robot. He is disgruntled about it, always annoyed at how it is the only role people seem to know him from. He tells Ballinger at one point that they are similar, because they are both known for only one thing, among a career of many symphonies and roles. He is taking time to relax, while observing the guests and thinking deeply about his next role, which we learn is Hitler.

In a powerful scene, dressed as Hitler and talking with Ballinger, Tree says, “I have to choose. I have to choose what is really worth telling: horror or desire. And I choose desire. You, each one of you, you open my eyes, you made me see that I should not be wasting my time on the senselessness of horror….I want to tell about your desire, my desire, so pure, so impossible, so immoral but it doesn’t matter because that’s what makes us alive.”

It’s passion that makes us alive. Passion that drives us to do the things we do, whether good or bad. Passion is what makes our life worth living, it is what gives light in the darkness, puts stars in the dark sky, and what makes a novel so vivid that its characters jump off the page or the guitar lines of Jimi Hendrix soar. After Tree says those lines, we see passion play out. We see the monk staying at the Chateau levitate, and Miss Universe join Ballinger and Boyle in the hot tub, nude.

Miss Universe is the core symbol of the film, the metaphor upon which almost the entire rest of the film stands. She is young and beautiful, in the prime of her life, intelligent and driven. She is on a professional high, having just won the Miss Universe contest. She is everything that all of the other characters want to be, and embodies the optimism and energy of having the rest of her life ahead of her while still young. When she gets into the hot tub, Ballinger asks, “Who is she?” Boyle replies, wryly, “God.”

The scene in the hot tub is interrupted when Boyle is told he has a visitor, an actress that he has worked with for decades, Brenda Morel (Jane Fonda). He gets out of the hot tub to go talk with her, and learns that she is dropping out of the movie that he is making. He doesn’t take it well, understandably. This starts a cascade of emotions which culminates in his final scene.

Lena’s subplot is one of the most intriguing aspects of the film. Early on, we find out that her husband is leaving her for another woman. Understandably, Lena gets angry, and spends the rest of the film languishing around the Chateau, simmering under the surface. Her life has just been dismantled; her security taken from her. Early on, her father says, “I find the monarchy so endearing…because it’s so vulnerable. You eliminate one person and all of a sudden, the whole world changes. Like in a marriage.” One person can make a world of difference.

In a scene where she goes to the pool and lays on a couch, a man who works at the Chateau and teaches climbing lessons comes over to her. They converse for a bit, which eventually leads to the climber telling her, “It is an amazing feeling climbing, you know? A real sense of freedom.” Lena responds, “All I feel is fear.” The climber says, “That is an amazing feeling too, you know?”

This is similar to the existential style of thought that I have written about before in this column. When you have real freedom, a plethora of choices, it tends to produce fear and anxiety. Which choice is right? How will you know? What if you make the wrong choice? It is understandable that Lena feels fear when climbing (a metaphor for taking risks when moving forward in life), but the climber’s response is telling.

We tend to believe that fear is a bad thing. Often it is, because it can tell us what we are feeling about a certain situation we may be in, that maybe for our own safety we should leave. We hear that fear is the mind-killer, and again, perhaps in certain situations it is. But the climber’s response suggests that fear can be an exhilarating feeling. In some situations, people like to be scared (why would people watch horror movies otherwise?), but maybe it is just one other peak in the range of human emotions, and we have to remind ourselves how interconnected all of our emotions are. In a later scene where the climber is giving a lesson, he is holding tight to his student, a young girl, and says, “Now as we climb, look down. See how beautiful the world is from up here?” Fear and beauty intermingle, often acting as shadows of each other. How many cliches can you think of that say, in essence, that anything in life worth having is pretty terrifying in the first place? Love is terrifying because it opens us up in all of our vulnerability, but do any of us want to live without love?

Is fear, in and of itself, something that is awful, and should be avoided at all costs? It’s a bit of a cliche to say that it’s impossible to enjoy the good times without also feeling the bad times, but that doesn’t make it untrue. Life is filled with so many emotions, so many different peaks and highs, lows, and dull middle grounds that it wouldn’t be right if it were any different. To know true joy, one must experience despair. The climber is saying here that the point of life is not to only succeed and feel good things, it is not just to eliminate or minimize the hard times (as impossible as that is anyways), but to feel anything at all. Human existence is made significant just by the fact that we feel anything at all, it is what gives our measly little lives value and worth, these passions which bubble and sizzle throughout our bodies while we live.

Boyle is the character who embodies this best throughout the film. While sitting with his writing team, trying to think of ideas for the script, he says, “Most men die not only without a testament, but without anyone even noticing.” One of his underlings responds, “Most men aren’t great artists like you are.” Boyle snaps back, “It doesn’t make a difference! Men, artists, animals…plants! We’re all just extras.” Humans are small. Extras in a film which will never get made anyways. In his final scene, just before jumping out of the window, he tells Ballinger, “You say emotions are overrated, but that’s bullshit. Emotions are all we’ve got.”

Passion. The word in its original Greek was pathos, meaning “suffering,” or “feeling, emotion.” In Latin, it means close to the same thing, with some slight variations depending on which time frame and area of Europe we are talking about. The general notion, however, is “that which must be endured.”

One of the early scenes in the film is Ballinger saying no to a request from the Queen to put on a concert, but he never gives a good reason. In the end, Ballinger finally agrees to conduct for the Queen, where we get to hear the Simple Song that we hear about throughout the film. Ballinger wrote it for his wife, who, despite all of his affairs, was his true passionate love. We find out that the reason he was saying no to the concert in the first place was because it was always meant for his wife to sing. She had long ago lost her singing voice, so Ballinger refused to let another woman sing it. There is no better way to end this article, to summarize the passions and losses, than with the lyrics to the song he wrote, in passion, for the love of his life:

“I feel complete
I lose all control
I lose all control
I respond

I feel chills
I wake
I know all those lonely nights
I know all those lonely nights

I know everything
I lose all control
I get a chill
I know all those lonely nights

I die
I hear all that is left to be heard
I wish you would never stop
I’ve got a feeling

I live there
I live for you now
I leave no sense behind
I feel complete

I’ve got a feeling
I wish you’re moving like rain
I’ll be there, I’ll be there
I lose all control

When you whisper my name
When you whisper my name
When you whisper my name, whisper my name
When you whisper my name”

The Dark Knight, directed by Christopher Nolan, is, on the surface, a superhero noir. The Joker begins causing mischief, and good ole Batman must rise to the occasion in order to keep Gotham safe. Families depend on him, your average citizen believes in him to keep criminals in line. Underneath the simplistic moral notions of the average comic book movies, however, The Dark Knight seethes with tension. It is a gritty, salt-of-the-earth style of philosophical examination, delving into issues surrounding order and chaos, certainty and uncertainty, and moral ambiguities that have been the realm of human thought, debate, and human experience since before recorded history.

We get our first glimpse of this right away, at the end of the bank robbery that opens the film. The bank official, lying on the ground after being shot, shouts at Joker (Heath Ledger) while he’s walking away, “Criminals in this town used to believe in things. Honor. Respect. Look at you. What do you believe in huh? What do you believe in?!” The Joker responds, “I believe whatever doesn’t kill you simply makes you…stranger.” This is a clear reference to one of Friedrich Nietzsche’s most famous aphorisms. It tells us something about the character we have just met.

Every group of people has a code. In greater society, there are obvious rules that we all function around. Social niceties, if you will. We all take part in several different code systems every day. We have our home life, and often different codes for different members of the family. We have work, friends, acquaintances, retail stores, internet message boards, etc. As the bank official says, even criminals have a code. The mob needs to have a social system in order to function. If they didn’t, it would be every man for himself. Joker believes these codes to be mere ornament. He tells Batman (Christian Bale), “See their morals, their code, it’s a bad joke. Dropped at the first sign of trouble. They’re only as good as the world allows them to be. I’ll show ya. When the chips are down, these civilized people, they’ll eat each other. See, I’m not a monster. I’m just ahead of the curve.”

It makes sense that every group of humans to have evolved has these codes, because you need a way to determine how society should function so that it actually can. But what happens when a group of people have no code? When all rules go out the window? Chaos. The old types of criminals are out. The Joker is in.

Throughout the film Joker submits the people of Gotham to excruciating moral tests and puzzles. Near the end of the film, two boats are stranded out on the water and are unable to communicate with each other. One is filled with prison inmates and one is filled with residents. Both boats have bombs on them, for which the trigger is held by the people on the other boat. Joker gives them time to think about whether they want to blow up the other boat and live with being a murderer, but survive, or not blow it up and risk being killed themselves. If neither hits the trigger, then both will blow.

This is the classic prisoner’s dilemma. This dilemma is thus: say two people robbed a store and were caught, then put in separate rooms for interrogation. Both of them were offered the same deal. If they both confess then they will both go to prison but will do a small amount of time. If one confesses and implicate the other, and the other remains silent, the other will go to prison for a long time and they will walk free. If they both end up staying silent, they will still go to prison, but for not that long. The stakes in Gotham are much higher, obviously, but the principles and questions are the same.

The other interesting aspect of this moral qualm is the idea of initiating the death of several hundred people. Despite those in the film acting in a moral sense and not killing each other, lots of psychological research has been done on this question, and it seems to conflict with what happens on screen.

This is, more broadly, the trolley problem (again, this might not fit exactly, but it’s related). You have probably heard of it. It’s only one of the most famous philosophical thought experiments to have ever been devised. Imagine this: you are standing near some tracks with a lever next to you. You see a train coming and you notice down the tracks that there are five people who are not paying attention, and are going to be hit and die. The switch right next to you is connected to the tracks, and will switch the train to a new track where there is one person. This is the crux, will you hit the lever for the track to switch, killing one person but saving five? Research shows that most people would hit the lever.

Now consider a twist. You are standing on a bridge above the train tracks, and there is a very large person standing next to you. You have the option of pushing them off of the bridge to stop the train, and saving the five people further down the tracks. Would you push that person? Research shows that most people would not.

What is the difference between these two scenarios? They both end up with the same result. You have sacrificed one person to save five people, yet the difference between the scenarios is the way it is done. In one you pull a lever, and in the other you physically push a person.

The philosopher Philippa Foot, who developed the trolley problem, notes the distinction between the two. She said the reason is one is active while the other is passive. In hitting the lever you do not cause direct harm to a person; it can remain abstract. When you push a person off of the bridge to stop the trolley and save five people, you have entered the realm of direct consequences; it stays definitive in your senses. In other words, you can see exactly how your action caused the death of that person you pushed.

This research is often give in support of the idea that people are not rational; that our moral intuitions can be flexible and not consistent. In this version set up by Joker, we can see that those on both ships link hitting the button and saving their own lives with the murder of those on the other ship. They engage with a humanism that is deep and secure, understanding that their actions, even if they would be for the purpose of saving their lives, would ultimately end the lives of others. They are not willing to make that exchange.

The uncertainty and struggle that those on the ships experience is powerful. In a world where there is no objective moral standard, where ethics are debated and continually renegotiated, big questions like this are prone to anxiety and fear. Philosophers and political scientists have often linked the psychology of authoritarianism and its followers to an inability to deal with an incredibly complex reality. For a human being to outsource their thinking and their answers about all of human existence to someone else is a temptation many will give in to. Eric Hoffer, the social philosopher, wrote in his most famous book, The True Believer, “To obey is then the only firm point in a chaotic day-by-day existence.”

This is also a way to ease anxiety, which often comes out of an inability to control the world around us. One of the most universal cravings of humanity is the ability to control the events that happen around us, so that they happen the way we desire them to. Obviously, the world is too large, too random and chaotic to be able to effectively do this, not to mention that there are billions of people acting out their own wills, over which we have little to no control. Joker comments on this lack of control, telling Dent, “The mob has plans. The cops have plans. Gordon’s got plans. Ya know, they’re schemers. Schemers trying to control their little worlds. I’m not a schemer. I try to show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are.” The relationships between certainty and uncertainty, control and anxiety, have been teased out for centuries.

The existential novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote elegantly about these relationships throughout all of his work. His most famous novel, The Brothers Karamazov, was written as a serial piece in a magazine, and is now considered a classic of world literature. One of the most famous sections is called The Grand Inquisitor. In this chapter, Jesus has returned to Earth, and is going to be put to death the next day. Most of the text is the inquisitor speaking to Jesus about the role of freedom and conscience. The following section is the inquisitor speaking to Jesus:

“Without a stable conception of the object of life, man would not consent to go on living, and would rather destroy himself than remain on earth, though he had bread in abundance. That is true. But what happened? Instead of taking men’s freedom from them, thou didst make it greater than ever! Didst thou forget that man prefers peace, and even death, to freedom of choice in the knowledge of good and evil? Nothing is more seductive for man than his freedom of conscience, but nothing is a greater cause of suffering. And behold, instead of giving a firm foundation for setting the conscience of man at rest forever, Thou didst choose all that is exceptional, vague, and enigmatic; Thou didst choose what was utterly beyond the strength of men, acting as though Thou didst not love them at all – Thou, who didst come to give Thy life for them! Instead of taking possession of men’s freedom, Thou didst increase it, and burdened the spiritual kingdom of mankind with its sufferings forever.”

We see this in The Dark Knight. Think of each character in the roles they play. The Joker is chaos and uncertainty, Batman is order and certainty, and Dent (in the beginning, at least) represents the good, the White Knight. Joker (chaos) never really interacts with the public in the sense of being a villain everyone is afraid of, his only goal is to entangle himself with Batman (the sense of order). Batman allows himself to become the villain, and this allows Dent to be the good man that everyone looked up to and believe in. The certainty of that moral arrangement, Dent being good, Batman being bad, was worth the certainty and moral clarity to Batman, even though he was shunned and hunted afterwards. He accepted being the villain if it meant that the people of Gotham felt safe and knew who to blame. Alfred (Michael Caine) tells Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal), “Perhaps both Bruce and Mr. Dent believe that Batman stands for something more important than the whims of a terrorist, Ms. Dawes, even if everyone hates him for it. That’s a sacrifice he’s making, he’s not being a hero. He’s being something more.”

Humanity lives between these two poles, in the land of constantly negotiating truth and clarity, good and evil. If the world was only order, we would have the same old tried and rusty structures as have existed for all of history. This would be awful. With the amount of injustices in the world right now, to believe in a world that could not get better and be forced to stay the same is a world with nowhere to go, with no hope. The catch is that if we change the system too fast, or in the wrong way, then things could go wrong and get even worse, becoming chaos. Oscar Wilde wrote that, “Without order nothing can exist-without chaos nothing can evolve.” Where is the middle point? Where is the stability of the base of the mountain, but with enough variability and, yes, chaos, to give us new paths upon which we can find different peaks? Joker tells Batman, “I think you and I are destined to do this forever.” It is a tension that human beings have been negotiating for all of time.

Acting is a common theme within existential philosophy. It makes sense, when you think about it. When there is nothing essential or permanent underneath the constant flux of reality, is there any concrete sense of self? Or are we all just playing different parts and roles, the accumulation of which adds up to something seemingly solid? When were you truly your most “authentic” self? When you were five years old, or 20, or 50? Does one action define who you are?

For instance, if you do one very bad thing, say, cheat on your spouse, are you permanently a cheater? Is that who you are, does it become part of your identity? We tend to remember and emphasize the worst characteristic of others, so human nature would tend towards remembering you that way. But if this happened early on in your relationship, after which you spent fifty years together in bliss with no stepping out of bounds, would it be fair to you to be known as a cheater, forever defined by that one event? Albert Camus wrote, “Yes, hell must be like that: streets filled with shop signs and no way of explaining oneself. One is classified once and for all.” One could translate that into saying that one is destined to be one thing for their life, boxed in by walls which destroys the complicated and ever-shifting nature of human beings. One is no longer free to become who they want to be. There is no more freedom, no more hope. Nothing towards which we are reaching.

Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is a depressed man. Just watching him breaks your heart and soul. A theater director and hypochondriac, he cuts his head on the mirror while trying to shave and his wife, Adele Lack (Catherine Keener), fantasizes about him dying so that she can start over without feeling the guilt of leaving him (which she eventually does anyways).

Not much else can truly be understood about the film. In a realistic sense, that is. The film moves in and out of surreal absurdism, metaphor stacked on metaphor stacked on shaky metaphor. The sense of continuity and character building is brittle; some are suddenly replaced by others playing the same character. Most of the plot takes place within Cotard’s mind (maybe).

No movie has ever been so honest about human experience. Not just the stories that people experience, those we tell to younger generations when we get to be old, but the real, visceral, moment to moment experienced reality. The philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote an essay about what it is like to be a bat. This movie presents what it is like to be human.

People have a tendency to interpret their lives in one fell swoop, with simplistic storylines and other characters who boil down to cardboard cutouts. It takes a lot of hard work to remember that every other person you meet has a story just like yours, filled with love and loss, passion and dullness, enjoyment and anger. Cotard says, “There are nearly thirteen million people in the world. None of those people is an extra. They’re all the leads of their own stories. They have to be given their due.” When you put all of these stories together, the world becomes a lot messier. These walls and compartments we build in our mind start to break down and blur into each other. The other actors in our lives are not the neat and cleanly categorized beings we think of them as. They have their own wills and desires, their own hopes and dreams, their own humanity.

How does the mind deal with it all? We build walls and compartments, in order to organize our experience into neat categories so that we can move through the world and have a sense of what we are doing and need to do, to be able to say “this experience was bad” or “maybe next time I’ll do it differently.” We wear different masks and play different parts depending on the situation, despite the fact that most situations are too complex for any of these simplistic masks we don. Here’s what the writer Karl One Knausgaard wrote about the self, in his book So Much Longing In So Little Space:

“But what is the self beyond the story? One way of seeing it is as a place that is continually becoming, where what is happening is continually merging with what has happened in ways and forms determined by previous experiences more or less powerful and decisive, but regardless of how rigid they might become eventually, there will still be movement, albeit along the same channels. The self is a work in progress, it understands itself through its memories but lives its life between them, in bits and pieces, in the present and in the past, in thoughts and emotions. And that is my story about the inner: something chaotic that one seeks to control through habits and experiences, sketch-like, unfinished, raw and unrefined.”

Compare this with Millicent, who is auditioning for one of the roles of Cotard:

“Caden Cotard is a man already dead, living in a half-world between stasis and antistasis. Time is concentrated and chronology confused for him. Up until recently he has strived valiantly to make sense of his situation, but now he has turned to stone.”

Cotard gives her the role of himself right away, because she understands. Cotard barely lives, spending most of his time obsessing over his memories and trying to make sense of his experience. Time is frantic and confused, and life too grand to truly understand. Imagination, while often a wonderland of beauty and creativity, can also seed a darker side, where anxious thoughts and obsessive worries can mold someone into a sense of paralysis and inability to move. It can also create delusions of the mind that infiltrate all of our waking experience.

It is worth noting the psychological delusions that Charlie Kaufman works in throughout the film. The most blatant of these is Cotard’s delusion, which has profound implications given that the main character is named Cotard. This is a delusion where the sufferer believes that they are either dying or dead, or possibly even don’t exist.

This brings to mind questions of the reality of the film. Is Cotard actually dead? Or is there a point where he dies? You have to wonder at what point the real turns surreal, or objective exterior turns subjective interior. Strange things are happening throughout the film from the beginning, for instance, very early on when Olive poops green poop. Or perhaps Cotard is sleepwalking through his life and interactions, and the film portrays his attempt to wake up and truly live, however that looks.

The other delusion is Capgras delusion. This appears when Cotard is entering Adele’s flat, with the name on the number reading as “Capgras.” This is a delusion where someone believes that all of their loved ones and friends have been replaced by identical doubles. For this reason it is also known as Impostor’s Syndrome.

This also has an obvious relation to the sense of warped reality as experienced by Cotard, where actors are found to play people familiar to him, and then actors to play those actors, creating a stack of false identities. This is something we all have. Humans live many different lives, in many different capacities, with different goals and ideals. Others come in and out of our lives from time to time. Sometimes they are in it for an extremely short amount of time, but it might be long enough to change the outcome of the play. Sometimes they are in it for a long time, for the rest of the play. But just as the actors playing different people in the film keep changing, so do the others in our life, whether in our “real,” waking life, or in memory. Those we live our lives with are not static. Just as we are ever changing, growing, experiencing new things and evolving, so are those we live our lives with.

We should bring up the meaning of the title, at this point, the end, fittingly enough. Synecdoche, New York is clearly related to Schenectady, New York, a city near Albany in upstate New York where the film takes place. However, it is a clever play because the definition of synecdoche is, “a figure of speech in which a part is used for the whole or the whole for a part, the special for the general or the general for the special.” Cotard’s experience in this film is everyone’s experience. “What was once before you – an exciting, mysterious future – is now behind you. Lived; understood; disappointing. You realize you are not special. You have struggled into existence, and are now slipping silently out of it. This is everyone’s experience. Every single one. The specifics hardly matter.” We are all just trying to figure life out. Cotard, throughout the film, keeps saying that he knows how to do the play, as if he has just figured out this life, even right up until the end. We create stories to simplify reality and the events that happen to us to better understand and give our lives meaning, which, in the end, is different for everybody. As Hazel tells Cotard at one point, “Everyone has to figure out their own life, you know.”

You can feel the immensity of this in everything. We are constantly being reminded of the smallness of ourselves, how minuscule we truly are in light of everything (Adele’s paintings). This is perhaps best shown in the lyrics of what is, arguably, the theme song:

I’m just a little person
One person in a sea
Of many little people
Who are not aware of me
I do my little job
And live my little life
Eat my little meals
Miss my little kid and wife

And somewhere, maybe someday
Maybe somewhere far away
I’ll find a second little person
Who will look at me and say-
I know you
You’re the one I’ve waited for
Let’s have some fun

Life is precious, every minute
And more precious with you in it
So let’s have some fun

This film is a masterpiece. Some critics were harsh, calling it self-indulgent and narcissistic. Perhaps it is. But it is also an anxious fever dream, obsessed with finding the significance in life, meaning in relationships, and truth in reality. If it succeeds is a matter of interpretation, just like our own lives. Metaphor and allegory pervade it with a sense of tension, dread and wonder. The city is built up, only to erode at the end, which is built into the beginning.

The Master begins with a group of men doing what they end up doing with too much time and nothing to do: drinking, wrestling, talking about their privates, and creating a naked woman out of sand. One man takes it a little too far, exciting himself a little too realistically, and ends up masturbating into the ocean. From other shots of him drinking himself under the bar, seeing every Rorschach blotch in terms of virility, and a gruff interaction with an army doctor wanting to know about his dreams, we get a picture of a man who has never had a serious thought about life in his entire…well…life.

Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) is a navy man and a drifter, a lost soul. He jumps from alcohol tinged job to alcohol infused job. After poisoning a farm worker with his own alcoholic brew, he hops onto a ship where some form of party is taking place, only to wake up the next day and learn that he had to be subdued out of aggression. He quickly finds out that he has entered a cult. The cult leader, Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), describes himself as “a writer, a doctor, a nuclear physicist, a theoretical philosopher, but above all I am a man.” The film documents the story of these two men; their entanglement, their fights and their love, their anger and their hope.

Much has been speculated about the influence of Scientology on this movie (although supposedly Paul Thomas Anderson is quite tired of the comparisons). This is, perhaps, one valid interpretation. However, the film can be viewed in a broader, more capacious way. To boil it down to one particular story is simplistic and particular, and bastardizes a human story; one in which there is frustration and despair, desire and want, creation and destruction, angst and hope. It is the universal story; how do you make sense of both yours and the worlds existence, and how do you reconcile the two? And after this, how are you supposed to live?

Albert Camus was a French philosopher who lived from 1913-1960. Two of his most famous works, The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus, are classics of a style of philosophy called existentialism. The core tenet of existentialism is that, in the phrasing of Jean-Paul Sartre, existence precedes essence. There is no ultimate type or ideal human that you are supposed to be. There is no universal you are trying to grasp at. You can decide who you are and what you do. It starts with the particular, with you as an individual.

Existentialism is opposed to essentialism, which is the idea that there is an ideal Form of human being that you should be trying to attain. This school of thought derives from Plato. He believed that there are universal Forms beyond the material realm that all classes of objects participate in. For instance, there are many different kinds of particular horses. The reason we categorize them all as horses is because they all participate in this essence of horse-ness. It starts with the universal.

Essentialism is top down, and existentialism is bottom up. An overly simplistic way to describe it is that fridge magnet that reads, “Life isn’t about finding yourself, it’s about creating yourself.” There is no you out there you are trying to discover and live up to. You are, right now, creating yourself by every choice you make.

This view has many different logical outcomes, which go by many different names. For Camus, it was referred to as absurdity. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus lays out his vision of absurdity. He writes that, “This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.” Alienation is a common theme in Camus’ thought. There is a disconnect between humanity and their existence; a sense of ennui that is embodied in a constant drum beat of what would colloquially be “going through the motions.” To never really feel that you belong, the feeling that you never quite fit in anywhere, or that you are just going along with what everybody else is doing while never feeling truly connected or invested in your existence; this is the sentiment he is describing as absurdity.

This is made worse by the fact that the universe does not give us meaning. Camus writes, “I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I cannot know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it.” The absurd is the confrontation of trying to live in a world with no meaning or purpose. This is also what the title of the book is a reference too. Sisyphus was punished by being forced to roll a boulder up to the top of a mountain, only to never have it reach the top. Camus uses this myth as a metaphor for the fruitless labor of attempting to discover ultimate Truth. We are incapable of understanding and knowing everything there is to know and living life correctly. What results is absurdity.

Because of this emphasis on the unknowability of absolute truth and the right path for living, existentialism emphasizes possibility and creation. When there is no right path for your life, you are free to be whoever it is you want to be. You can live the life you desire.
When Freddie first meets Dodd the morning after he jumps on his ship, Dodd invites him to his daughter’s wedding which is happening later that day on the boat. The last thing he tells him is that his memories are not invited. With this statement, Dodd is allowing him to create himself anew. Freddie is no longer a prisoner to his past, he can break free of what is holding him back and create (become) a new self; the self he wants to be. In a scene that shortly follows we see the difference between who Freddie believes himself to be and who he actually is, as we have seen in the film thus far. Therefore, this temptation to create a new self keeps him on board the ship, continuing to pull him along with this new group he has discovered.

The most poignant scene of the movie happens in the desert. Dodd brings Freddie, his daughter and her fiancé, and a motorbike. In a beautifully shot scene, Dodd tells them to pick a point on the horizon, and drive towards it as fast as they can. It’s exhilarating. The sun glides off of them. The crisp, dusty air breaking open for them as they ride. Freddie doesn’t want to come back, he keeps going. He wants to leave the familiar behind, and rush on towards the future, towards what is next, towards hope and freedom.

In a world of uncertainty, where no path is absolutely right, where no world view has all the answers, isn’t this what we do? We pick a point and we go. Who knows if it’s right, who knows where it will take us, who knows if we hit a bump along the way and fall off? It’s human existence. Isn’t that the only thing we can do?

It is worth quoting here what Dodd says to Freddie near the end of the movie:

“Freddie, sailor of the seas. You pay no rent, free to go where you please. Then go, go to that landless latitude, and good luck; for if you figure a way to live without serving a master, any master, then let the rest of us know, will you? For you’d be the first person in the history of the world.”

Compare this with a quote from Camus’ novel, The Fall:

“Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful. Hence one must choose a master, God being out of style.”

World views and ideological constructs are a type of home. They are an identity which gives us a sense of self and direction in the world. Dodd is telling Freddie here that he has no home, no identity. Freddie is wandering through life, he has no clear ideas about the reality of the world or his existence, or about how people should live their lives. He is free to go where he pleases, by which Dodd means that Freddie is free to jump from one way of life to another; he has no commitments, he is the absurd man.

The second half of what he tells Freddie is important, and illuminates another important aspect of Existential thought. Most people do not want to do the hard work of discovering reality as it is, or changing the way they live. Most of us fall into patterns and routines that we have inherited from our parents and friends, our cultural mores and values. Most people do not think that deeply about what they do or why they do it, they go through the motions, believing themselves to be thinking actors who knowledgeably and justifiably do what they do.

This is a paradox we cannot get out of. To a certain extent, we inherit these ways of living from everyone around us. It is impossible to completely separate ourselves from them. If we were able to do that, we would suddenly stop living. In this sense, we all have masters. To live without a master is to be so radically different from those who came before you as to be almost alien.

But others will fall into line with no thought at all. It might be that their identity is so strongly tied to a single person that they will believe everything they are told by that person. For others it might be a movement, or a cause, or ideology. Human beings were not made to handle too much uncertainty, because it is impossible to live with it. It can be more comforting to forfeit your own critical thinking skills and follow along with a group, losing your sense of self in identifying with those around you.

Freddie never quite fits in with Dodd’s group, The Cause. He doesn’t really think about it. He finds the group, discovers how he can fit in with them, and plays the part. He tries to do things that he thinks would make Dodd happy, like beating up a skeptic who challenges Dodd for scientific proof at a party. But is he ever really a believer? Does he follow through with their prescribed acts and rituals? Freddie has a tendency to ignore how people tell him he is supposed to act, and so gets ostracized from the group. Freddie has no Master. Or, perhaps, he is his own Master.

The Master is a brilliant film because Anderson takes a familiar archetype, the seeker, and universalizes it. We all grow up within world views; systems that give our life purpose, direction and meaning. But not only that, he alters the end. Freddie never finds what he’s looking for. Our hero is on a quest which never resolves. Sisyphus continues to push the boulder up the mountain. Freddie never finds his answers, but one must imagine him happy.

Meet Kazuto (Kazuto Osawa), an aspiring actor. There’s just one problem: confrontation makes him weak. So weak, in fact, he tends to faint and recovers only to severe embarrassment. This sets him apart from his childhood hero and career inspiration, Rescueman, a ridiculous caricature of superhero fame who appears throughout this cartoonish comedy.

After Kazuto loses his job as an inefficient security guard, he serendipitously runs into his brother Hiroki (Hiroki Kawano), who introduces him to a new acting concept: Special Actors. This is a company that employs actors to pull off everyday acts to make others’ dreams come true. Need someone to cry at a funeral? Laugh at a bad movie? Get beaten up by your boyfriend for show? Call Special Actors.

After a hodgepodge of cheesy but charming scenarios that further illustrate the line of work Kazuto is to take part in, Special Actors is called upon to help a young woman Miyu (Yumi Ogawa) whose sister has come under the influence of a cult. Her family’s inn is at stake as the cult is quickly sinking its claws into it as a home base. In order to save the inn and her sister, Miyu employs the troupe to infiltrate the cult and expose its lies.

It’s easy to tell those involved in the making of Special Actors did so with a sense of camaraderie and loyalty to director Shinichiro Ueda’s brand. That being said, not all players are created equal. The film’s slapstick comedy falls short more often than not due to a limited performance by the lead, and the plot’s attempt at twists and turns is more tired than exciting.

Those looking for light-hearted comedy may be impressed with it’s hijinks, goofy music and dialogue. As a follow-up to One Cut of the Dead, Ueda’s surprise cult-favorite of 2019, Special Actors unfortunately disappoints but is not without heart.

Taste of Cinema Rating: 2.5 stars (out of 5)

Author Bio: Becky Belzile is a freelance writer living in Vancouver, Canada. She has contributed to film writing for Bright Wall/Dark Room, Bloody Disgusting, and Audiences Everywhere. When she’s not cooking, she’s devouring horror movies or napping competitively.

Proving once again beyond any shadow of a doubt that he’s one of modern cinema’s most unpredictable, prolific and provocative of filmmakers, and perhaps one who’s also touched with an otherworldly grace, Abel Ferrara (Ms .45, Bad Lieutenant, Tommas) busies himself exorcising some strange cinematic demons while unleashing his own inner force in his new film, Siberia. Once more reteaming with his current mainstay and ready muse Willem Dafoe, this surreal digression feels like a subarctic delineation of James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake” and is also perhaps just as polarizing.

Siberia finds our somewhat quixotic protagonist Clint (Dafoe) dutifully posted at an unruly bar in the titular Russian province. It’s the kind of place where demanding and rather volatile customers suddenly transform into snarling bears, spilling beer and carelessly carousing in a rather dangerous manner. As the denizens of Clint’s establishment pay him tribute it quickly becomes clear that we, the viewer, are privy to someplace far more celestial and hypnagogic than your typical tavern or gin joint.

As Ferrara’s allegorical and byzantine-like film unfolds, one he co-wrote with five time collaborator Christ Zois (New Rose Hotel, Welcome to New York), it becomes the kind of deep dive where it’s very easy to lose track of all the narrative threads and digressions, and that may well be part of Siberia’s elaborate duplicity. Clint’s many doppelgängers, brushes with sorcerers, lactating women and naked dwarves all depose such fascinations.

Is it pretentious? Absolutely. Is that a problem? For some, maybe, but not for this writer. Siberia is so in succession lovely and startling to look at (thanks in large part to the studious lensing of DP Stefano Falivene), as well as being often quite comical, frequently baffling, and with meanings so heavily obfuscated, it becomes an engaging and fascinating fantasy/nightmare that is also almost the quintessential festival film. VIFF audiences are certain to be divided directly down the middle, and I’ll bet Ferrara wouldn’t want it any other way.

Admittedly I could seldom make sense of what was happening on screen a large part of the time, but I didn’t let that dampen the enjoyment I felt splashing around in these strangely surreal waters with the consistently wonderful Dafoe and the odd assortment of dreamlike no-goodniks, alluring sirens and dangerous visions that suck him and us into the sly abyss. It’s a dark deathtrip, maybe, and some kind of vivid and sequential coup d’etat.

Taste of Cinema Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)

Author Bio: Shane Scott-Travis is a film critic, screenwriter, comic book author/illustrator and cineaste. Currently residing in Vancouver, Canada, Shane can often be found at the cinema, the dog park, or off in a corner someplace, paraphrasing Groucho Marx. Follow Shane on Twitter @ShaneScottravis.

Father is director Srdan Golubović’s Serbian drama which memorably opens with a scene that’s very unsettling to witness. A mother with her two children in tow, arrives at the former workplace of her husband Nikola (Goran Bogdan). Unable even to afford food to feed them, she comes demanding to be paid the long overdue money owed for Nikola’s last weeks of work, or else she will pour a bottle of gasoline on herself and her children and set them all on fire.

Fortunately the flames are quickly extinguished and the children unharmed. She is taken to the hospital, the children are taken into care by the state and someone is sent to find their father where he is doing low paid menial day work. State authorities tell him that he can get his children back only if he can upgrade their home to certain standards. Sadly, after struggling to meet these demands, he finds out that the corrupt official in charge of their case refuses to return them to him. From here the film becomes a road movie as Nikola, penniless, sets out on foot for a 200 mile trek to Belgrade, to hand his appeal in person, to the Minister in charge of the National Ministry of Social Services.

This is a bleak and heartbreaking tale of the struggles of the poorest in society to meet even the simplest and most basic of necessities, the lack of help available to them from their government and the corrupt and greedy officials looking to profit from their misfortune. Although it is a very grim story, there are also some light and endearing moments during Nikola’s journey. The film features a powerful, quiet, understated, award worthy performance from Goran Bogdan as Nikola, who just continues to slowly and steadily move forward, one step at a time, doing everything in his limited power to provide for his children. His love and devotion are a constant; the glue that holds the film together. Although in more limited appearances in the film, the children too are a delight.

With Father, Golubović recalls the social realism in UK cinema that we’ve come to love from the likes of Mike Leigh and Ken Loach. This is the same kind of sensitive look at the plight of the working class, and Golubović is to be praised for this solid, tasteful and poignant work. It’s definitely a movie to be included in your VIFF 2020 viewing, but remember to have a tissue handy.

Taste of Cinema Rating: 4.5 stars (out of 5)

Author Bio: David “old grumpy guy” House, now grumpily but happily retired, devotes his time to his loves of cinema, literature and music. His tastes include many different genres, from documentaries, horror, sci-fi and foreign films. David is a member of the screening committees of several film festivals, including VIFF, DOXA, Spark Animation and New West Film Fest.

The deceptively simple premise of a tense weekend in the woods with a small group of headstrong but emphatic characters gets mined for all its worth in this chamber piece from Lawrence Michael Levine (Wild Canaries), and the results are paradoxically satisfying and inconclusive in Black Bear, a film that, when it’s working, plays out like a mumblecore Mulholland Drive or a Noah Baumbach variation on Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? If either of those ideas sound appealing then the film might work well for you, but if you have to work in the morning you might want to give this one a hard pass.

The best reason to wrestle with Black Bear is to see and appreciate the three leads who each take a turn in the spotlight, though it’s largely Aubrey Plaza’s showpiece, and she hasn’t had a chance to chew scenery and illicit both sympathy and laughs like this since Noah Hawley’s short-lived but much loved tv series Legion. Here Plaza is the somewhat self-destructive DIY director and former indie starlet Allison, on a bucolic artist retreat in the Adirondack Mountains. The retreat is run by Gabe (Chris Abbott) and his pregnant partner Blair (Sarah Gadon). “We’re NOT married”, he blurts out to Allison, in Blair’s company, and the conjugal tension starts to steam.

Allison, in her pursuit for artistic inspiration, isn’t above playing the couple, and as Black Bear chugs along, she proves to be rather vicious and sarcastically domineering one moment, then vulnerable and benevolent the next. The interplay between her, Gabe, and Blair regularly makes for charming complications, awkward innuendo and some enjoyably juicy moments, but when a literal black bear muddles past (a recurring motif that’s a little too on the nose) like a comet portending certain doom, or in this case perhaps some very forced Lynchian melodramatics and Möbius strip messing around. Soon the movie becomes a skewed Hollywood satire that’s too meta for its own good.

There are some very funny quips and blackly comic moments throughout Black Bear. The indie film crew trying to get Gabe’s vision on film and on time is hilariously upended, for instance, with some weed that was deceptively downplayed as “mellow” is a great gag, and watching Allison and Blair basically “Betty and Veronica” Gabe leads to several amusing and embarrassed bits.

Sooner or later, and it largely feels like later, Black Bear plays itself out, having stayed too long while letting too many unanswered questions hang over it. It’s a movie that film school students and filmmakers will find more amusing than the rest of us, with themes and fixations better expressed elsewhere. Plaza is the main reason to be at this pretentious picnic, and as it shambles onward through the bushes with its maw full of trash, history licks a finger and turns the page on this minor and decidedly rather average bear.

Taste of Cinema Rating: 3 stars (out of 5)

Author Bio: Shane Scott-Travis is a film critic, screenwriter, comic book author/illustrator and cineaste. Currently residing in Vancouver, Canada, Shane can often be found at the cinema, the dog park, or off in a corner someplace, paraphrasing Groucho Marx. Follow Shane on Twitter @ShaneScottravis.