come now what's a reviewer I reasoned
one who reads quickly arrogantly but
never wisely ouch
Cloud Atlas deserves praise if only for
not being the baggy Tangis disaster it
could have been other hands it is an
extremely honorable failure but it is a
failure you're supposed to spend the
whole time going whoa but you're
constantly spending the whole time going
whoa whoa JA yes Cloud Atlas saw its
share of niceties written on the back of
a lot of hands as critics and audiences
alike tried to make heads or tails out
of this ambitious adaptation of David
Mitchell's novel no no not not him him
and it's time spanning location hopping
truism explaining life-affirming
head-scratching post-modernism and all
the clones and tattoos and wackiness
therein contained I mean yes it's
breathtaking at scope but then again
Hugh Grant cannibal that I'm just a boy
standing in front of another boy asking
him not to eviscerate me ultimately
Cloud Atlas is a movie which demanded to
be talked about when with chaski
siblings came up with Tom Tykwer
United in their love of mildly
understood philosophy and awkward group
sex scenes to make a movie which is
about no less than the interconnectivity
of human existence across time and space
populated by a household name after
household name that movie begs to be
discussed so I'm going to talk about the
book first Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
is a goddamn masterpiece not meant to my
opinion about it the book is ingenious
in the structure profound with ideas and
nothing short of masterful in its
language if you've seen the film you
know that it costs you around between
story lines like going through TV
channels giving you snippets of films
like not quite Amistad all British
people are wacky in the future yellow
face we watched Jackie Brown after this
the really cute gay couple fall out goes
Hawaiian to the point where you wonder
what movie isn't just called bullet the
master of the last of the summer Brides
head of a row revisited and command
electric sheep the book similarly has a
unique structure
not the movie structure of six
overlapping stories but something much
more deliberately arranged David
Mitchell wrote Cloud Atlas has six
self-contained stories pared back from a
more unwieldy nine spanning centuries
but connected by theme motif and most
importantly by in-universe
intertextuality rather than being a
collection of short stories the six
stories in Cloud Atlas are nested within
one another
inspired by at a local Vino's if on a
winter's night a traveler which had
several stories begin but interrupted
for finishing Mitchell decided to start
six stories then interrupt them and then
finish them each in musical terms the
structure is ABCD he have PDC ba and so
reading the novel is like riding a
bullet being shot through a matroyshka
doll going through each layer before
exiting the other side and the
connection between them is the cleverest
part as each story gives way to a new
one the character from the next story
reads the previous story character a
chronicles his adventures which are then
read by character B as he tells his tale
which is then told to character C and so
on each character's interrupted half way
through as the reader is before getting
the story F story F finishes and then F
finishes the story of e who finishes D
all the way back to a so what the hell
actually happens in the movie well and
here goes Adam Ewing is an American
Lawyer sailing across the Pacific who
saves a stowaway Polynesian map from
execution as he lays dying from tropical
parasite while he's treated by a doctor
he writes a journal about his voyage
which is then read by Robert Frobisher
disgraced son of a wealthy family who
runs away to enter war Belgium to become
the apprentice of a great composer as he
works on his masterpiece and warms bed
of composers wife he writes letters to
his lover sick Smith in Cambridge when
sick Smith grows old those letters
Holmes the hands
Luisa Rey is reporter for spyglass
magazine as environmentalists protesting
building a nuclear plant in the
Californian city some key figures start
to disappear adds up to Luisa to get to
the bottom of conspiracy that could
endanger millions of lives for
investigation is then turned into a
thriller novel which is reviewed by
Timothy Cavendish a cranky old
london-based publisher who finds himself
in a pickle when a writer he manages
kills a critic causing his coke sales to
skyrocket when the writers criminal
family knocked down his door he flees to
Hull and finds himself accidentally in
turn in a home for the elderly after he
escapes Rita's is a movie from his
ordeal which is then watched by Sunmi
4-5-1 waitress of Papa songs diner and
member of the genetically modified
underclass of what was once Korea when a
fellow fabricant rebelled against her
state she is rescued from the diner and
taken under the wing of a rebel faction
aimed to reveal the shocking truth that
keeps the core kradic regime running and
she's captured by the state the
interview she gives for her execution
becomes the holy text for a new religion
and is worshipped as a goddess by
valleys man Zachary a shepherd on the
island that was once called Hawaii
before the fall after seeing his family
murdered by the cannibalistic Kona tribe
he needs with one of the last survivors
of fallen civilization as she
desperately tries to preserve the last
vestiges of advanced technology Zachary
tells a story around a campfire to a
Narragansett who tells a story to a
mallard who tells a story to a Rhode
Island Red
it's an historical star-crossed thrill a
satirical cyberpunk elliptic turducken
the stories interlock and communicate
with each other in various ways the most
obvious motif is the birthmark shaped
like a comet always in the same place on
the left shoulder which appears on a
wing Frobisher ray Cavendish son me and
not Zachary in the book oddly enough but
the prescient woman meronym essentially
it's a signifier of a single soul being
reincarnated across different lifetimes
fighting the same battle struggling
against the same oppressors yearning for
the same freedom and that yearning
crosses genre it's a story told by a
chameleon ik rider effortlessly hopping
from air SATs melville to faux evil in
hua to variations on a theme by philip k
dick i don't know what genre i'm going
to do so i'm going to do all
ma'am and although each story is told in
a different genre look closely and there
are some neat bits of symmetry in six
stories a strongly immoral woman learns
about a great injustice committed by
greedy businessman tries to set it right
dies a strongly moral woman learns about
a great injustice committed by greedy
businessman tries to set it right lives
an artist creates an artwork and then
gets screwed over by his supervisor a
supervisor sells in artwork then gets
screwed over by the artist a person from
an advanced civilization meets a
desperate Pacific Islander and they save
each other's lives a Pacific Islander
meets a desperate person from an
advanced civilization and they save each
other's lives each story features a
major a cent or descent from some may
finally seeing the outside world via
elevator to gangster turned author
Dermot Hoggins
throwing a critic off a roof characters
have dreams by the future headed in a
dream as Anna nightmarish cafe blaring
bright light underground and no way out
and the waitresses all had the same face
and they hear echoes of the past I've
been working on this piece for weeks now
and I suspect you heard it and
incorporated it into your dream
called the Cloud Atlas sextet
though this part was invention of the
film you see the Cloud Atlas sextet in
the film is this lilting de Busey esque
pretty bit of post-impressionism while
in the book it's a far more avant-garde
ditty that Frobisher compares to
Stravinsky and scriabin like this
version isn't even a sextet we perspect
that you need six players I mean that's
White's wretched they actually in the
novel the beasts you're zoning out
because this is all tangential to the
actual themes of the book and you're
right moving on back to the thing
eagle-eyed viewers might notice that
cannibalism shows up in most every story
this Beach was watching a cannibals
banqueting home
recycled fabricants are a cheap source
of protein made people that's deliberate
David Mitchell said of the novel that
it's about crude asti the way
individuals prey on individuals groups
on groups nations on nations tribes on
tribes greed is a common theme you can't
believe what people will pay to look up
that pair it's easy to connect the dots
between the slavers and Pacific story to
the energy company in the thriller story
to Cork rats in the future story every
bad thing happens because of someone
trying to get economic leverage over
someone else so with Mitchell framing
the history of all existing society as
the history of class struggle it's
tempting to suggest Cloud Atlas as a
Marxist reading of history one marked by
the oppressor fighting with the
oppressed and all that but the biggest
philosophical influence is not marks but
Friedrich Nietzsche in particular his
concept of eternal recurrence now marvel
as I suck at explaining eternal
recurrence
the idea shows up in Nietzsche's the gay
science as well as also sprach
zarathustra where it's mostly posed as a
hypothetical question what he called the
greatest burden what are the demon crept
after the in july loneliest loan in a
some day or night and said to thee this
life as thou live east now liveth okay
thou live east at present and hast lived
it
thou must live it once more and also
innumerable times there'll be nothing
new in it the eternal sandglass of
existence will ever be turned once more
and the vow with it thou speck of dust
thou wouldst thou not throw thyself down
and gnash die teeth and curse the demon
that so spake or hast thou once
experienced a tremendous moment in which
thou what's answer him
thou art a god and never did i hear
anything so divine she said this is less
pretentious in German Nietzsche's saying
that an infinite time all things that
eventually repeat
and so that means that um because our
bodies become the grass and the animals
eat the grass and so we're connected in
the great circle oh yeah suck at
Nietzsche though I do know that eternal
recurrence is different from running
amil reincarnation which is another big
theme of Cloud Atlas the soul marked by
a comet is reborn into many lives in
many stations into existences marked by
struggle it's a very Buddhist notion of
existence that actions in one life will
mark actions in the next the book is
four-dimensional and a constant state of
samsara which in sanskrit roughly means
wandering through samsara a concept
found in Hinduism Buddhism Jainism and
many other Asian religions describes the
soul's journey across the bhava chakra
or Wheel of Life
also the fact that the Wheel of Life has
six realms and there are six stories in
Cloud Atlas is probably just coincidence
or at least I hope it's coincidence
because my brain is frying and please
send help the third big idea of the book
is self conscious recursive
intertextuality I already mentioned that
every man character tells the story read
by the next character but it's even more
complicated when you realize that every
story is a fiction half lives the first
Luisa Rey mystery is unequivocally a
work of fiction in the cloud outlets
novel letters from Zell Kelm shares a
character with half lives and therefore
is also fictional in letters approach'
remarks that the Pacific journal Adam
Ewing might be a forgery but gasps the
ordeal of Timothy Cavendish is peppered
with notes for the future director of
the film adaptation I'm thinking for the
role of the hero one parts of Lords
Olivier with a dash of Michael Caine
Saamy herself admits that she
embellished parts of her story for the
sake of propaganda and sloosha's Crossan
ends with Zachary's son offhandedly
saying oh boy my dad sure talks a lot
huh but despite their inaccuracies they
still build off and take inspiration
from the text they consumed Frobisher
Ponder's the convictions of viewing
Cavendish imagines himself to be the
protagonist of a thriller novel and
Zachary worships on the as a deity this
isn't so far-fetched you may think it to
consider how action
Media builds up itself Ovid writes a
story of Pyramus and Thisbe which 1588
years later gets parodied by Shakespeare
in Midsummer Night's Dream which 393
years later provides the basis for a key
subplot in the Dead Poets Society which
20 years later gets mercilessly mocked
in the first season episode of community
all your lives or don't don't stand on
your desk well why not it took two
thousand years of setup to get to that
punchline each character is drawing
inspiration from media much in the same
way that Mitchell is drawing inspiration
from the past genres of adventure and
romance and thriller and science fiction
to quote French literary theorist Roland
Barthes
the writer can only imitate a gesture
forever anterior never original his only
power is to combine different kinds of
writing to oppose some by others so as
never to sustain himself by just one of
them life can only imitate the book and
the book itself is only a tissue of
signs a lost infinitely remote imitation
that quote is from Barth's 1967 essay
the death of the author but in this
novel the author is not dead the author
is the protagonist Mitchell heavily
implies that all the birthmark carriers
are the same soul let's call the soul
robic Cavan for death he winged wait a
minute mm I got this okay let's call him
um birthmark when actually Mark Cloud
Atlas is about a guy named Mark and Mark
is male and females depending on you
meet them young and old rich and poor
African European Asian all things in
between because Mark is a soul
transmigrating from realm to realm all
the way from David to naraka
and mark keeps running into himself or
rather he keeps getting to know himself
cuz mark is a very busy soul he keeps
leaving things behind journal entries
letters novels and films and artifacts
and he keeps rediscovering what he left
himself even though he's not
particularly good at record keeping but
each time he finds himself he builds off
his own idea
and make some new ones so that he may
find them again in his state of eternal
occurrence or samsara or whatever mark
is a soul learning about himself there's
the moment in the book where Zachary
looks up the sky and says in his wonky
Cajon like future speak Souls cross ages
like clouds cross skies and though a
cloud shape nor hue nor size don't stay
the same it's still a cloud and so is a
soul who can say with the clouds blowed
from or who the soul be morrow only saw
me the east and the west and the compass
in the atlas yay only the Atlas of
clouds tidal drop and bark can't
possibly know nor can we Cloud Atlas
which in many ways spout predation is
also about infinity and the
impossibility of understanding infinity
from the vantage point of the finite our
lives exist only briefly and from only
one vantage point like I'm a body named
Kyle Calvin who will only know what it's
like to be Kyle halgren but in that
finite time we study the past and
imagine the future and in doing so we
make that past and present our own to
fiction through history through studying
imagination we wonder we converse we are
educated by time and life outside of our
own all done through our fictions
through the stories we tell ourselves we
codify the universe through stories but
those stories are inherently erroneous
attempts to capture a moment in time so
evanescent it has changed when we give
it a second glance yes some things
remain eternal struggle and hope love
and death predators and prey but changes
there always and whom that struggle is
in defining that struggle in
contextualizing it and that's an
impossible task we can make a decent
representation of a moment but the
picture shatters when we put it in a
frame we are moved by eternal occurrence
samsara whatever you want to call it and
we have the impossible task of mapping
the ever-changing solidifying the
eternal and it is as impossible task as
making an atlas of clouds
Sadler movie do all that