Cloud Atlas Revisited

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