The King of the City

Underneath the backdrop of a tired city there operates an army of machinery, tools of commerce extending for miles in either direction, all part of a network serving the modern gods and goddesses of the international lathe.  So, they’d finally gotten their wish, and all their industries could return home from those third world shitholes clear across the ocean.  Now they could exploit workers and cut transportation costs in their own backyard, without having to deal with all the hassles of labor laws and government infringement. 

Here’s Walter Martin leaning on a fence and marveling at his masterpiece, as great gaskets of chemical towers reach for the sky under a paranoid night.  This industrial zone is the nation’s leading manufacturer of goods now, spreading its disease to all corners of our great nation, feeding the masses with processed extractions and salty pharmaceuticals.  He’s the CEO of Globecorp, and lead disciple of the Chicago School of Economics- where it all began.  Martin Friedman is his idol, Ayn Rand is his favorite author, and Atlas Shrugged is his Bible.  Objectivism is the only modern philosophy for true men of power.  Men capable of buying off congressmen.  Men capable of speaking the truth.  The Chicago Boys are the most influential progenitors of black karma, its blowback written off as insubstantial accounting and re-evaluated with corporate handouts. 

Walter was there when good ‘ole Dubya declared war on a country without Congress’ approval.  The real weapons of mass destruction were all those pinup dolls on PM television airwaves, spouting off the same war cries that their fellow networks spouted.  Turtle-shelled army tanks rolled into the Mesopotamia with blank flags of freedom to introduce to the frenzied populace.  He was there in New Orleans when the investors were given free rein to establish hurricane debris contractors.  That way Halliburton and Blackwater could take all their foreign reconstruction firms and charge enormous sums to rebuild infrastructure right here at home.  Then of course he was there in 2008, after the roaring late 20th century computer boom had finally flatlined Reaganomics and the cavity of credit widened so much that the bubble finally burst.  All his bankster buddies and friends in the auto biz pushed legislation for bailouts that transformed their bankruptcies into hard earned work.  He was there standing on a podium preaching about enterprises that were too big to fail and merges that would save their asses from the substrata of faded investment firms and retail outlets.  That’s ‘Merica for you: follow the money, and you shall be saved. 

Burn baby burn, increase those profit margins.  Suck the middle class dry.  Save your billions.  And if your profits haven’t increased- if a million-dollar quarterly return isn’t enough for you- outsource your labor to cheaper foreign countries, so you can stash away millions more and leave your money just sitting there.  Actually, you better call some investors, maybe give a little bit back to the community and create some jobs for the commoners, because we don’t want it to look like Trickle Down Economics doesn’t work.  How much should we give back d’you think?  I don’t know, 20%?  Nah, so-and-so saved over 90% of his profits last quarter, so we can’t go any higher than that or we’ll be losing the game. 

Because the game is all that matters in these parts.  The stakes are high, and the winnings are big, so don’t throw an excessive amount of money at uncertainties when you’ve already made a fortune off a certainty.  Anybody who knows anything knows that.  Pennies fallen, children dancing in the dusk, commoners foraging the promised land begging for a chance, listing in the wind like golden apples in the summer.  Shrines of polyethylene copper, shards of crimson capital, students lobotomized by the promise of extravagant earnings.  The golden-headed icons of American Providence parade over the Earth, from Kamchatka to the barrens of the Sahara, lacerating the medium through which monarchs and vagabonds tipped the scales of power, compromising their judgements, their idioms, their mythologies.  Land of the free, home of the brave, and all that lies between- liberty and justice and the right to happiness- hypocritically referenced only for the benefit of one nation.  All nations under God are not immune to the transnational diaspora of twinkle-eyed bandits, intelligence operatives, and free market disciples that pillage resources and import conditional democracy to civilizations that were already beaten, genetically modified, and charged at with the weapons of mass destruction. 

All this Walter sees, and all this he knows.  The Wall Street bigwigs are the Egyptian Pharaohs of yesteryear, safe and sanitary inside their cuboid pyramids, delegating mnemonics to all the slaves of consumerism below their ranks.  The time has come for an adjustment to be made.  New technologies are brewing out on the nano-organic frontier.  Soon they’ll never be able to tell the difference anymore; the difference between an idea and the reality that pulls its strings.  The educators, the libraries, and the non-profit whistleblowers won’t know what hit them, and neither will the foreign agitators that corrupt them. 

 

Georges Lemaitre, Sugar, the Black Count

"The evolution of the world can be compared to a display of fireworks that has just ended; some few red wisps, ashes and smoke. Standing on a cooled cinder, we see the slow fading of the suns, and we try to recall the vanishing brilliance of the origin of the worlds." ~Georges Lemaitre 

 

    Lemaitre was the guy who shook up the world with his proposal of The Big Bang Theory back in 1950.  What’s interesting is that he was a devout Catholic.  How ironic then that we have such a division of science and religion when the man who first conceived of The Big Bang was a Catholic physicist, a man who seemingly stood by both theories of origin as parallel interpretations.  But after doing some research I found that this isn’t the case.  When Pope Pius XII referred to the new theory of the origin of the universe as a scientific validation of the Catholic faith it alarmed Lemaitre.  

 

“As far as I can see, such a theory remains entirely outside any metaphysical or religious question.  It leaves the materialist free to deny any transcendental being... For the believer, it removes any attempt at familiarity with God.” 

 

    Huh, what a strange conclusion to make.  I get the feeling that Lemaitre isn’t praised at Einsteinian levels for his ideas simply because he was recognized by The Church as proving God's work scientifically.  Why else would a man with an insight so clearly rooted in science not be extolled by scientific historians?  Why isn’t Lemaitre a household name like Einstein’s is?  Einstein himself was quasi-religious, so whatever world. 

    On an unrelated topic, I need to say that I find it fascinating that sugar was used to treat a number of illnesses back in the 19th century.  In fact it was used to cure so many illnesses that it became one of the most sought after resources of that century.  And here I have my 21st century mother thinking that sugar causes cancer.  *Smh*, lol.  I have always felt that sugar was good for people.  Too much of it is what you need to watch out for, but the same applies to any other staple food, so I don’t see why it is so frowned upon in our society.  If people ate more sugar the world would be a better place, just as if people smoked more weed.  True, you might not live as long due to increased energy levels, but I’d sure as Hell rather live a shorter, funner life than a longer, more boring one. 

    I found this information about sugar while reading a book called The Black Count by Tom Reiss.  It’s about the real Count of Monte Cristo, the real Edmund Dantes; the author’s father, Alex Dumas.  He was one of the best fighters of his generation and a valued commander in the French Revolution.  What’s striking is that the man was black at a time when black slavery was rampant.  Pretty damn cool.  I’m only 5o pages in but I can tell I’m going to be highly recommend once it’s finished. 

Cloud Atlas Explained: How Adam Ewing’s Single Act of Kindness Ultimately Saved Humanity

 I wasn't sure if it was post-cinematic shock or a bias to my feelings for the book, but after several days it's starting to sink in that Cloud Atlas is the best movie I have ever seen.  I already knew from reading the book that each hero and narrator is experiencing the previous hero’s story through some medium.  Frobisher, the young composer, is reading Adam Ewing’s journal; Luisa Rey is reading Frobisher’s letters to Sixsmith; Cavendish, the editor, is reading a novel called “The Luisa Rey Mystery”, which was written by Javier Lopez, the kid who helped her in 1975; Sonmi is watching the Cavendish story on film; and valleysman Zachry is watching something called an orison, which is a recording of the Sonmi interview with the Archivist.  The connections I’ve found in the film are beyond these simple ones, if you can even call them simple. 

I would first like to point out that there is a method to the way the film is fractured.  Every scene is connected to the one before and after it in some way visually or thematically.  Even though the scenes jump from one story to the other, they were not chosen randomly to purposefully confuse people.  Rather, the scenes flow into and out of each other like a symphony (more on that later).  For example, a visual connection came about when the black slave was running across the ship's narrow platform right after the Neo Seoul commander was running across the narrow bridge he created.  Also, Luisa Rey escaped from drowning in her vehicle right after the Neo Seoul revolutionaries escaped from being drowned in water.  Then, thematically, there were congruent scenes of love making, heroes being trapped in institutions, the opening of doors, and defiance of the social order.  This new type of art-form is remarkable in itself, but Cloud Atlas is a revolutionary film in other ways. 

The actors play different roles in different stories to suggest that they are reincarnations of the same souls, and their karma is being jeopardized by the choices they make.  The birthmarks on different actors don’t signify the same soul being reincarnated; they signify both the soul that is seeking liberation in each story and the narrator that the hero in the next story is being inspired by.  If the comet birthmark really indicated the same reincarnated soul, then the lives of Timothy Cavendish and Luisa Rey would not overlap.  Cavendish is approximately 65 in 2012, which means he would have been about 28 in the mid-70s, when Luisa's story took place. 

There is a specific way that a single act of kindness altered a timeline in the distant future, and this is only possible when you consider that the characters played by Jim Sturgess and Doona Bae are reincarnations of each other.  Adam Ewing owed his life to a self-freed slave, a slave he'd helped to begin with, which had improved his karma.  The initial act of kindness was his decision to feed the stowaway and not turn him in, setting off a chain reaction that saved his life later in timeline 1.  Since he was saved by a slave, he joined the Abolitionist movement, and I believe this resonated through his future lives, inspiring him to free the fabricant slave in the Neo Seoul timeline, who turned out to be the same soul as his wife in story one.  This fabricant that he saved, Sonmi, changed the whole world and ultimately saved humanity, and she couldn't have done that if her lover hadn't changed his mind about slavery in the distant past.  The way she saved humanity is basically how the story of Jesus happened, only this time in the distant future.  Sonmi was crucified and became a martyr for revolutionaries against a totalitarian regime.  This regime (and probably others) poisoned the Earth with nuclear waste.  This is how Sonmi became the goddess of the valleysman in the post-apocalyptic timeline; she was an inspiration for revolutionaries and her death stood as a testament of The Fall.  Let’s put that on hold for a moment and analyze how valleysman Zachary’s soul had been hanging in balance between good and evil since the beginning. 

Tom Hanks played Dr. Goose in the Adam Ewing story, a man who betrayed Adam and tried to kill & rob him by poisoning him.  Every character that Tom Hanks plays in the film is a reincarnation of this same soul.  Sometimes he makes a good choice, sometimes he makes a bad one, and this balance is perfectly illustrated in the last story.  Zachry’s struggle with the voice of Old Georgie (Hugo Weaving’s soul, which degenerated and got worse through each of the six stories, all the way to Devilhood) and the prophecies brought to the abbess by goddess Sonmi are a perfect illustration of the struggle that this soul has made with making the right choices throughout his incarnations.  In this timeline he commits two crimes, but he also becomes a hero by saving Meronym twice.  Meronym is a Prescient who is trying to save humanity's extinction from radioactive poisoning by climbing Mauna Sol (Sol, Seoul, soul, get it?) and sending a beam to outer space to signal help from off-world alien colonies.  She couldn’t have done this without the help of Zachry, and the way in which Zachry improved his soul through his lifetimes and overcame the evil power of Old Georgie suggests that he reached a cosmic awareness in this lifetime.  Mauna Sol is a place of evil, where Old Georgie lives, according to the valleysman tribe.  Zachry chooses to take Meronym up the mountain to repent for his previous sin of cowardice, when he listened to the demon and let his brother Adam die (interestingly, his brother shares the same name as Adam Ewing, and both men are played by Jim Sturgess). When Zachry is on Mauna Sol there are two voices battling in his head; Old Georgie the devil wants him to let go of the rope that he is holding Meronym with, while the voice of Sonmi is telling him to pull her up.  That Zachry makes his decision based on what Sonmi said (and his love for Meronym) is the truest act of heroism in the story.  The building on Mauna Sol that transformed into a lotus flower after it was activated is one way the directors symbolized this.  They also symbolized it by placing the comet-shaped birthmark on back of his head.  The lotus flower and the seventh chakra, the mind chakra, are both symbolic gateways to enlightenment in eastern philosophy.  All the other birthmarks in previous incarnations were on lower parts of the body, so it sort of suggests a transformation of this soul and a completion of the cycle that the whole story illustrates (the rise and fall of civilization).  And by the way, his birthmark is easy to miss; you only see it in focus at very end of the film. 

To summarize, Goose tried to kill Adam, but Adam was saved by a slave, and he made it home safely to his wife Tilda, who was the same actress who played Sonmi.  Hae Joo, the reincarnation of Adam in timeline five, fell in love with Sonmi, a fabricant slave, who was his wife in timeline one.  This couple indirectly ended up saving the world by showing outstanding resilience against the corpocratic infrastructure in the Neo Seoul timeline.  Sonmi was crucified, became a martyr, and was the embodiment of good in the Goose/Zachry soul.  In this way all three of these souls overcame the greed and oppression of centuries passed to regenerate the human race on another planet.  By saving Meronym on the mountain there are two acts of kindness, one in the present by Zachry and one in the distant past by Adam, that allowed the human race to survive on this distant planet.  The single act of kindness can be traced to Adam's decision to feed the slave instead of turning him in to the ship's captain; if he hadn't done that, he wouldn't have owed his life to a slave and helped free them in his future lives.  It’s also interesting that the valleysman slanguage uses the word “judased” to describe any type of betrayal.  It really strengthens the suggestion that Sonmi, a genetically modified clone and partially robotic fabricant, turned out to be a Christ-figure.  Meronym even described the “Old Un’s with the Smarts” as judasing Sonmi.  Furthermore, we have the connection of the blue buttons Goose stole from Adam’s coat.  Zachry found them on the ground in Hawaii and wore them as a necklace.  The buttons saved him when the Kona warrior tried to strangle him.  Goose would have taken those buttons all the way to a market in the USA if Adam hadn’t smashed his barrel of gold over his head to save the slave.  And Zachary wouldn’t have had the defenses to survive that attack.   

If this is already a lot to digest, then brace yourself, because there are three more stories I have yet to point out all the connections with. 

Ben Whishaw played a cabin boy in The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing, so that's why Robert Frobisher, Ben Whishaw's second incarnation, felt a special connection to Adam when reading his journal.  That also may have been why Frobisher instinctively knew that Goose was poisoning him when he was reading his journal; the cabin boy may have suspected that Goose was poisoning Adam.  Incidentally, in the book the cabin boy committed suicide, but this isn't shown in the film.  I'm betting that the director's cut will show his brief suicide because it complements his suicide in timeline two.      

Anyways, in his second life, Whishaw is creating a symphony, which is the only thing he believes he's done that has value, and he ends his life after he completes it.  This symphony was heard by Luisa Rey in the music store, when she walked in and met the store owner, who happened to be Ben Whishaw's third incarnation.  It's no wonder he couldn't stop listening to it; it was his own symphony!  It was also heard several times in the Sonmi timeline.  The Cloud Atlas Sextet was the song that the clones sang after one of their sisters was chosen for Exultation (unbeknownst to them, Exultation really meant something completely opposite).  It was also heard when Sonmi was sitting at a window and an old man was playing it on the violin outside.  This can only mean that the Frobisher symphony survived the muck of history and became popular in the Neo Seoul future.  The connection here is not that the symphony itself inspires any acts of cruelty or kindness, but how it is a metaphor for the themes and visuals of the stories interweaving through each other.  Someone described the film’s souls as being different instruments and the themes being different notes.  The melodies of the sextet are the themes being played by different souls as the movie unfolds.  It’s simply brilliant.  Throughout the film Frobisher is constantly talking about breaking boundaries and becoming music after his suicide.  Unfortunately, his suicide had dire repercussions for Sixsmith, the love of his life.  Sixsmith keeps the letters he wrote, and Luisa Rey finds them after he is murdered.  Luisa's fondness for Frobisher's letters are the result of her being his lover in the Ayrs mansion when he was a composer.  This connection is made when Luisa Rey is reading his letters and a scene follows where Jocasta Ayrs, Halle Berry's second incarnation, is making love to him.  Jocasta fell in love with Robert, so Luisa was reading the letters of someone she fell in love with in her previous life; that's why she was seen crying while reading his letters, presumably because she'd reached their tragic ending. 

Speaking of Jocasta, her husband, the opportunist composer, is the last soul I must outline here.  It’s obvious that Vyvyan Ayrs himself is the Cavendish soul, both of whom are played by Jim Broadbent.  Both stories are set at the Ayrs mansion; apparently the mansion was changed into a nursing home during those 80 years.  This soul is tarnished by greed, just like the Tom Hanks soul, but this soul is showing improvement.  These two souls actually meet in this life; Dermot Hoggins' (played by Hanks) freedom is compromised because of greed and murder, while Cavendish's freedom is compromised by greed and adultery.  There's a bit of a wild circular drama here.  When Cavendish is reading The Luisa Rey Mystery, he’s reading about the soul who was his wife in his previous life, the same one who was cheating on him with Frobisher in the life before that.  How ironic it is then that his brother Denny had him "locked up" because he begrudged him for having an affair with his wife, who was played by Ben Whishaw, the same actor who played Frobisher!   Curiously, in order for the chronology to work, Ben Whishaw's character in the Cavendish frame had to have been a cross-dresser back in the 70s.  This actually makes sense because, being born a woman, she probably felt like a man after living her previous life as one, and she cross-dressed as a young woman because she had been used to being a man.  Back in the 70s, she must have met Hugh Grant's character, the CEO of Swannekke, because they were living in the same area.  In the book his name is Grimaldi, who wasn't even close to Cavendish's brother, but this is never stated in the movie, so I'm assuming the directors intended them to be the same person.  It's not all that mind-boggling that Frobisher's third soul would marry a corrupt CEO, since he'd had an infatuation with a grumpy musician twice his age in his previous life.  Perhaps she loved him because he was the brother of Vyvyan Ayrs's reincarnation, and she was indirectly reminded of Ayrs.  When she met Timothy, she would have been directly reminded of him, hence the affair.  The only thing that makes me dubious about this is that Hugh Grant had an American accent in the 70s and a British one in 2012.  Did I miss something there? 

This isn't consistent with the theme here, but I also think the Cavendish soul was Yoona-939 in the Neo Seoul segment, because she repeats a line from the Cavendish film, “I will not be subjected to criminal abuse”, right before she’s killed.  It explains why Ayrs had a dream precognition of hearing The Cloud Atlas Sextet being played in a “nightmarish cafe where the waitresses all had the same face.”  He was foreshadowing a future life that the music enlightened him with. It might also be why Sonmi was so enraptured by the Cavendish film; she was seeing someone play her friend's previous life. 

So, there is a method to the madness, Mr. Cavendish!  I think I can finally rest and let the greatness of this movie come to pass.  It will probably be my favorite movie for a long time.  There's a fantastic moral design here, which seeks to inspire the goodness in people by illustrating how any ordinary act of kindness in the daily course of our lives can be the root of a cosmic butterfly effect which leads to the saving of thousands of lives in the distant future.  The film is Buddhist Chaos at its finest. 

 
Typical plot related questions: 

 

What was the paper that Adam burned?   

 

Adam was a lawyer and he was sent by Haskel Moore, his father-in-law, to retrieve a contract allowing the deportation of Maori blacks for the North American slave trade.  The contract is the piece of paper he decided to burn (right in front of the man who employed him) after he decided to join the Abolitionists with his wife. 

 

Why did Robert Frobisher commit suicide?   

 

Vyvyan Ayrs had threatened to ruin his reputation in the musical society, and he'd felt useless after completing the only thing in his life that he felt was worth anything.  The sense of rejection, both by his parents and the old man (whom he'd had an infatuation with), made his feelings of hopelessness even worse.  True, he still had Sixsmith, but loving a gay man in that time and setting wasn't socially acceptable.  I was disappointed in the directors' decision not to include Eva, the daughter of Ayrs, in the drama, because her rejection of Frobisher  had an enormous impact on his sense of loss.  I think they had to do this because of timing issues.  You should read the book if you're interested in a more elaborate version of this timeline. 

 

What was Luisa Rey trying to expose? 

 

Swanekke was a Nuclear Power Plant facility that had faulty operations that threatened to poison the local community with radioactivity (connection: nuclear war poisoned the Earth after timeline five).  Big Oil hired a hitman to silence everyone who knew about it.  They did this on the theory that a nuclear disaster would make everyone flock to the oil companies to find safer energy and increase their profits. 

 
What was Sonmi's connection with Yoona-939?  

 

Fabricants weren't supposed to know about the "outside" world, and Sonmi was the only fabricant Yoona had shown it to.  If the DNA tracers had found out they were friends, Sonmi would have been excised.  She chose to go with Hae Joo because she didn't want to risk the danger.