Translating Cloud Atlas Into Film

From Time’s Boomerang to Pointillist Mosaic: Translating Cloud Atlas into Film

Jo Alyson Parker

SubStance, Volume 44, Number 1, 2015 (Issue 136), pp. 123-135 (Article)

Published by University of Wisconsin Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2015.0002

For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/577276

Access provided by University of Washington @ Seattle (15 Jun 2017 21:01 GMT) c l i c k h e r e to a c c e s s t h e e n t i r e d av i d m i t c h e l l s p e c i a l i s s u e From Time’s Boomerang to Pointillist Mosaic: Translating Cloud Atlas into Film Jo Alyson Parker

Perhaps a novel contains as many versions of itself as it has readers, whereas a film’s final cut vapor- izes every other way it might have been made. . . . ––David Mitchell, “Based on the Novel by”

While my extensive experience as an editor has led me to a disdain for flashbacks and flash-forwards and all such tricksy gimmicks, I believe that if you, dear reader, can extend your patience for just a moment, you will find there is a method to this tale of madness. ––Timothy Cavendish in Cloud Atlas (the film)

Surely [Cloud Atlas] is one of the most ambitious films ever made. . . . And what a leap by the directors, who free themselves from the chains of narrative continity. ––Roger Ebert

In a Wall Street Journal article appearing prior to the U.S. premiere of the film Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell addresses the challenges of turning his complex novel into a film. Revealing that he considered the novel’s “there-and-back” structure as “unfilmable,” he comments favorably on the new structure devised by the screenwriters/directors Lana and Andy Wachowski (The Matrix trilogy, V for Vendetta) and Tom Tykwer (Run, Lola, Run; Heaven): “It [the novel] has now been adapted for the screen, but as a sort of pointillist mosaic: We stay in each of the six worlds just long enough for the hook to be sunk in, and from then on the film darts from world to world at the speed of a plate-spinner, revisiting each narrative for long enough to propel it forward” (Mitchell, “Translating”). Significantly, whereas the “there-and-back” structure—or “Time’s Boomerang,” as Mitchell calls it in a sly self-referential section of the novel (147)––suggests a dynamic state of affairs, the pointillist mosaic metaphor suggests a quasi- static one.1 I would argue that, through its restructuring, the film shifts its emphasis from a future in flux to a future that is fixed––as in a frame. The film certainly works on its own terms, the filmmakers deftly manag- ing the mind-boggling task of tying together the six separate storylines of Mitchell’s novel through cinematic means. The changes in key plot points and in temporal structure, however, transform the novel’s theme that one can change the future (a “virtual future,” in Mitchell’s terms) to a theme

© Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin System, 2015 SubStance #136, Vol. 44, no. 1, 2015 SubStance #136, Vol. 44, no. 1, 2015 123 124 Jo Alyson Parker that the future is fixed (an “actual future,” again in Mitchell’s terms), entailing a conclusion that is both less and more hopeful than Mitchell’s and that shifts the emphasis from global to local concerns.

Structure Mitchell’s “unfilmable” novel features six separate but thematically and imagistically linked stories: a travel diary written by good-hearted, naïve estate-agent Adam Ewing, set in the South Pacific of the 1850s; an epistolary narrative written by the unscrupulous, charming, and artistically gifted composer Robert Frobisher, set in Brussels in 1931; a mystery/suspense page-turner featuring intrepid investigative reporter Luisa Rey in 1970s California; the somewhat farcical memoirs of Timothy Cavendish, the venal owner of a vanity press, set in what appears to be contemporary Britain; the transcription of an interview with the “as- cended fabricant” Sonmi-451, set in a near-future Korean “corpocracy”; and an oral account by Zachry, one of the few surviving humans, set in the Hawaiian Islands several hundred years in the future after a “Fall” has wiped out civilization. Each of the first five stories breaks off partway through at a particularly suspenseful juncture and is then embedded in a subsequent story (the first embedded in the second, the second embedded in the third, and so on). As Mitchell explains, “the preceding narrative appear[s] as an ‘artefact’ of the succeeding narrative” (Mitchell, “Silver Daggers”)—artifacts, I might add, that in various ways impact on their readers/viewers. So, for example, Robert Frobisher finds the first half of Adam Ewing’s journal and begins reading it during the first part of his story, but, like the reader, is frustrated when it cuts off in mid-sentence. The sixth, chronologically last story (Zachry’s) is complete in itself and occupies the paradoxical position of embedding all the other stories while also being the most embedded. After it ends, the novel then boomerangs back through the preceding stories in a reverse cascade, bringing each to closure for the readers of the text and the readers inside the text. So, for example, Frobisher finds “half a ripped-in-two volume” under a bed leg and resolves to finish Ewing’s story. The six stories work together (some more successfully than others) to reinforce the theme that, in order for humanity to save itself, it must abandon its predatory tendencies––its adherence to the cynical philosophy of Ewing’s would be-murderer, Henry Goose, that “The weak are meat, the strong do eat” (Mitchell, Cloud Atlas 503)––and embrace instead the idealistic creed of Goose’s potential vic- tim that “If we believe that humanity may transcend tooth & claw”—and work to make good those beliefs—“such a world will come to pass” (508). In the novel, Mitchell pushes the limits of, well, reader patience regarding how far we can sustain the open-ended, thus reinforcing his

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point about the dangers of seeking immediate gratification by suspend- ing the closure we desire.2 As Lana Wachowski noted in an interview with Aleksander Hemon, however, “It would be impossible to introduce a new story ninety minutes in’” (qtd. in Hemon 2)—although it certainly might have led to an interesting film experiment.3 The challenge for the Wachowskis and Tykwer was thus finding a way to render Mitchell’s complex novel into a film that would simultaneously be accessible to a film audience and retain its experimental character—without sacrificing any of the six stories. As Hemon describes it, although the Wachowskis and Tykwer com- menced adapting the novel with a particular throughline in mind, they engaged in what sounds very much like a process of trial-and-error in attempting to put together the overall narrative: The filmmakers’ initial idea was to establish a connective trajectory between Dr. Goose, a devious physician who may be poisoning Ewing, in the earliest story line, and Zachry, the tribesman on whose moral choices the future of civilization hinges, after the Fall. They had no idea what to do with all the other story lines and characters. They broke the book down into hundreds of scenes, copied them onto colored index cards, and spread the cards on the floor, with each color representing a different character or time period. The house looked like “a Zen garden of index cards,” Lana said. At the end of the day, they’d pick up the cards in an order that they hoped would work as the arc of the film. Reading from the cards, Lana would then narrate the rearranged story. The next day, they’d do it again. (2) Viewers of the film may indeed feel as if the “index-card” approach per- tained in the shooting script of the film since the final product comprises approximately 200 narrative shifts, some seemingly only milliseconds long.4 Nevertheless, through these narrative shifts, the filmmakers manage to convey the essential plot elements of each of the six stories. The film opens with a scene of a cloud-like faraway galaxy in the night sky, and then the camera drops to the face of an aged, battle-scarred Zachry (played by Tom Hanks), who huddles over a fire and speaks to an unknown audience, proposing to tell of the first time he met “the fangy devil” Old Georgie (played by Hugo Weaving) “eye to eye.” Immediately following this sequence, the film shifts rapidly to brief, crucial scenes from each of the other five stories (a sort of previews-of coming-attractions effect) before we see a title card, in which lines converge across a map of the world to form the words Cloud Atlas.5 Thereafter, the longest sequences in the film follow—a substantial episode of four to five minutes apiece from each of the stories, identified by place and time, following the ordering sequence of Mitchell’s novel and featuring the initial action of each of Mitchell’s stories. Each of these segments culminates at a key, life-changing mo-

SubStance #136, Vol. 44, no. 1, 2015 SubStance #136, Vol. 44, no. 1, 2015 126 Jo Alyson Parker ment for each of the main characters: the treacherous Henry Goose (also played by Hanks) beginning to “treat” Adam Ewing (Jim Sturgess) for his fictitious Polynesian worm; the dried-up composer Vyvyan Ayrs (Jim Broadbent) engaging Frobisher (Ben Wishaw) as an amanuensis; Luisa Rey (Halle Berry) giving whistle-blowing physicist Rufus Sixsmith (James Darcy) her card; the goon-squad Hoggins brothers threatening Cavendish (Jim Broadbent again) with death if he doesn’t give them a cut of their notorious author-brother’s royalties; Sonmi~451 (Doona Bae) witnessing the killing of her self-aware fellow clone Yoona~939 (Xun Zhou); and the Abbess (Susan Sarandon) giving the suspicious Zachry an “augurin’” that pertains to his relationship with Meronym (Halle Berry again), one of the Prescients who still have technology and who attempt to maintain the knowledge of the past. Once we have been introduced to the main characters and their plights, the film shifts from story to story, sometimes letting us stay in the particular world for a couple of minutes and sometimes just seconds, the ordering principle seemingly based on imagistic, auditory, and thematic resonances between sequences. Although this juggling of six different storylines may be challenging for viewers, the film, as more than a few critics have noted, has affinities to D.W. Griffith’s classic 1916 film Intolerance, with its four stories taking place in separate times and places.6 As the description of rapid shifts might suggest, the film plays havoc with conventional chronology. In the novel, the stories proceed from earliest to latest chronological dating during the first pass (1850s to undated post-apocalyptic era) and proceed in reverse on the way back. Furthermore, the novel is insistently linear, each story, although interrupted midway through, proceeding from a clear beginning to a satisfying end. Indeed, if one were so inclined, one could read each of the stories on its own and make sense of it—although this is not a process that we lovers of Cloud Atlas would recommend. In the film, the stories also proceed linearly (except for Timothy Cavendish’s flashbacks to a youth- ful love affair), but they are so entangled that it would be impossible to separate the story strands without damaging the whole. Anthony Lane’s description that these strands “are tossed and tangled like noodles” (1) is an apt one. One moment we are in the far future with Zachry vowing to Meronym, “I will guide you through the devil’s door if that is where you want to go”; the next, we are in contemporary Britain with Timothy Cavendish as he enters the door to Aurora House, the nursing home in which he will be incarcerated. One moment we are in futuristic Neo Seoul as Sonmi’s rescuer Hae-Joo Chang (Jim Sturgess again) carries her across a narrow bridge to escape the forces that would “excise” her; the next we are on a mid-nineteenth-century sailing ship as the stowaway slave

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(David Gyasi), whom Adam Ewing has rescued, makes his way across the narrow beam of the mast in a test that will determine whether he lives or dies. The ‘artifact’ conceit of the novel appears in the film (Frobisher finds Ewing’s diary, Luisa Rey reads Frobisher’s letters, Sonmi is inspired by the film of Cavendish’s adventures, etc.), but, barring the frame story, the film’s structure necessarily precludes the story-within-a-story set-up of the novel. We viewers are propelled back into the past and forward into the future and vice versa, such things as doors and bridges often serving as links. The overall effect is one of omnitemporality––of all six stories taking place at once and impacting upon one another, rather than of each embedded artifact influencing its reader/viewer. Indeed, rather than employing a “willy-nilly approach,” as Peter Rainer claims, the filmmakers have carefully tied together the various story strands across time, with images and sounds providing links throughout. So, for example, as Sonmi listens to Chang’s heartbeat on the night of her arrest, she hears a knock––a knock that bleeds over into the subsequent sequence as Ayrs knocks on Frobisher’s door. (As reinforcement to this connection, during this sequence, Ayrs describes a melody he heard in a dream, which seems to have been set in the fast-food emporium in which Sonmi was—will be––enslaved.) Sometimes the connections are both auditory and visual: immediately after the threatening Nurse Noakes (Weaving again) tells Cavendish, “You do not wish to cross me,” we see Rey’s trusty Volkswagen crossing the bridge that will take her to Swan- neke Island, which houses the deadly HYDRA reactor and the corporate henchmen who are soon to threaten Rey’s life. Perhaps the most poignant instance of such connectedness occurs when we hear Frobisher narrating a letter to his lover Sixsmith (James D’Arcy, playing the only character who appears in two stories) in which he asks Sixsmith to find for him the other half of Adam Ewing’s journal. The scene is initially set in Frobisher’s bedroom, and we see him searching through a bookshelf for the missing half; gradually, however, Frobisher’s old-fashioned four-poster turns into a sterile hotel bed, on which Sixsmith sits reading the letter in Luisa Rey’s 1972. “A half-finished book is, after all, a half-finished love affair,” Frobisher’s voiceover concludes, as, for a moment, Frobisher seemingly shares the same space as Sixsmith, before disappearing as the film gives way entirely to a Luisa Rey sequence.7 Throughout the film, voiceovers indeed serve as a means for tying together disparate scenes thematically. One of the most significant of these scenes occurs when the Abbess reads from the hand-made book The Revelation of Sonmi~451: “Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb, we are bound to others past and present, and, by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.” As she intones these words, we see brief

SubStance #136, Vol. 44, no. 1, 2015 SubStance #136, Vol. 44, no. 1, 2015 128 Jo Alyson Parker scenes of Sonmi taking Chang’s hand as he helps her escape, Frobisher composing his masterpiece, Cavendish returning to the house of his long- ago love, Rey musing over Frobisher’s letters, and Ewing secreting food with which to feed Autua. The voiceover compels us to regard each of these brief scenes as similar instances of characters birthing their future, of engaging in actions that will impact not only on their lives but also on the lives of those who will follow.

Theme At a later point in the film, as Sonmi broadcasts her Declarations from a “Union-controlled satellite link,” watching, unsurprised but sorrowful, as Chang and the other freedom-fighters of Union are slaughtered by “enforcers,” she voices these same sentiments, prefaced by an additional statement about the impact of our present-day actions on the future: “To be is to be perceived, and so to know thyself is only possible through the eyes of the other. The nature of our immortal lives is in the consequences of our words and deeds that go on apportioning themselves throughout all time.” The repetition of Sonmi’s “revelation” underscores its importance for the meaning of the film, and the links that the filmmakers establish among the six stories enable them to drive home these key ideas of time- transcending connectedness and karmic consequences.8 Although Sonmi’s “revelation” does not appear in the novel as such, the filmmakers do not err in regarding these key ideas as integral to the novel. Throughout Cloud Atlas Mitchell enforces the idea of future- thinking, of doing good now in order to avert catastrophe—as Adam Ewing says, of spending one’s life “shaping a world I want Jackson [his son] to inherit, not one I fear Jackson shall inherit” (508; Mitchell’s emphasis). Each of the stories, to a greater or lesser extent, explores this theme, and the novel as a whole compels us to see that actions in the past may reverberate across time. The dehumanization of the slaves as described in Ewing’s journal seemingly leads to the dehumanization of the fabricants as detailed by Sonmi; the HYDRA faulty reactor threatening Rey’s world seemingly gives way to deadlands in Sonmi’s world and an effectually destroyed earth in Zachry’s; the “disney” of Cavendish’s ordeal seemingly provides Sonmi with crucial insights about the emergence of “corpocracy” and its evils. The comet birthmark that Ewing, Frobisher, Rey, Cavendish, Sonmi, and Meronym each sports seems to suggest that the characters’ souls have transmigrated across time—although Mitchell himself play- fully has Cavendish deride the idea as he reads the manuscript for Half- Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery: “One or two things will have to go: the insinuation that Luisa Rey is this Robert Frobisher chap reincarnated, for example. Far too hippie-druggy––new age” (357).9

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Mitchell may play somewhat fast and loose with the transmigrating souls motif, but it becomes integral to the film—even if, at times, similarly slippery. Hemon notes that, while struggling with how to make the film pull together, the filmmakers had a breakthrough: “they could convey the idea of eternal recurrence, which was so central to the novel, by having the same actors appear in multiple story lines—‘playing souls, not characters,’ in Tykwer’s words. This would allow the narrative currents of the book to merge and to be separate at the same time” (2). Several actors, in fact, appear in all six stories. Some actors play variations on a theme, such as Hugo Weaving and Hugh Grant, both of whom play evil or villainous characters in each incarnation. Others make cameo appearances in certain stories— for example, Halle Berry as “Indian Party Guest” in Cavendish’s story, Jim Broadbent as “Korean Musician” in Sonmi’s, or Ben Whishaw as Cavendish’s sister-in-law Georgette. As the last examples indicate, an audacious—and controversial––aspect of this multiple role-playing is that actors cross the lines of race and sex, variously assuming whiteface, yellowface, Maoriface, mustaches, breasts, and drag.10 The filmmakers exploit this multiple-roles aspect of the film to achieve both amusing and moving effects. The record-store clerk from whom Luisa Rey purchases Frobisher’s Cloud Atlas Sestet is played by Ben Whishaw, the same actor who plays Frobisher; “I just can’t stop listening to it,” he says as the record of the piece plays. Halle Berry, who plays Ayrs’s Jewish wife Jocasta, has an affair with Frobisher, the man whose soul apparently has transmigrated to her in her role as Luisa Rey—a somewhat mind-boggling situation. In the Ewing sequences, Jim Sturgess and Doona Bae (in whiteface) play Ewing and his wife, Tilda; in the Sonmi sequences, Sturgess (in yellowface) and Bae play doomed lovers Hae-Joo Chang and Sonmi. Near the end of the film, Sonmi tells the Archivist to whom she speaks that she will “always” be in love with Chang and that, “If I cared to imagine heaven, I would imagine a door opening, and behind it, I would find him there waiting for me.” While she speaks, the scene switches—a door swings open, Ewing appears, and Tilda rushes to embrace him. The doomed lovers of the future are happily reunited in the past. Ultimately, however, it is actor Tom Hanks who plays the most significant role(s) in the film. His role of Zachry, too, involves the most significant plot changes, with the filmmakers turning the adolescent Zachry into a middle-aged man, his mentee/mentor relationship with Meronym into a love story, and his embedded story into a frame story. Hemon explains that “the Wachowskis and Tykwer had viewed the dramatic trajectory of the script as an evolution from the sinister avarice of Dr. Goose to the essential decency of Zachry, with both characters embodying something of the Everyman” (4). The filmmakers “broke the story down into a simple

SubStance #136, Vol. 44, no. 1, 2015 SubStance #136, Vol. 44, no. 1, 2015 130 Jo Alyson Parker progression: ‘Tom Hanks starts off as a bad person,’ they said, ‘but evolves over centuries into a good person’” (4). Indeed, the tagline for the film on the official website emphasizes this point: “Action, mystery and romance weave dramatically through the story as one soul is shaped from a killer into a hero, and a single act of kindness ripples across centuries to inspire a revolution in the distant future” (“Story”)—presumably Ewing’s act of saving the stowaway slave Autua. Although Hanks (our modern-day Jimmy Stewart) plays the murderous Henry Goose in the chronologically first story and the ultimately heroic Zachry in the chronologically last, the notion of an evolving character is somewhat problematic. After all, he also plays the critic-murdering writer Dermot Hoggins in the Cavendish sequence. Nonetheless, we are invited to regard Zachry as the positive culmination of the past lives. When, early in his story, Meronym holds his gaze after she catches him spying on her, he is suddenly plunged into some sort of past-life experience as scenes from all the main characters’ lives flash before him in rapid succession. As he cowers in hiding while the Kona kill his brother and nephew, Old Georgie, who may be his in- ner devil, whispers, “You say all’a time, yeah? ‘The weak are meat, the strong do eat.’” Henry Goose’s aphorism is thus attributed to Zachry as well—although Zachry will come to reject this philosophy and engage in heroics during a later encounter with the Kona, thus helping save both Meronym and his niece Catkin (Raevan Lee Hanan) and enabling the continuation of civilization. Moreover, the film not only begins with Zachry but ends with him as well. The concluding scene takes us back to where we started, with Zachry huddled over a dying fire and saying, “My yarning is done.” We now discover that his audience comprises his numerous grandchildren, the result of his union with Meronym, and that he resides with them on an off-world colony, Earth just a distant star in the sky. The film concludes by suggesting that all we have just witnessed is a tale that Zachry has told, these scenes of a future set on a faraway planet a frame for the six interweaving stories. Structure and Theme Embedding the six stories in a frame narrative is the most drastic structural alteration that the filmmakers perform on Mitchell’s novel, so much so that we may be tempted to ask the questions that Monika Fludernik poses in her discussion of adaptations: Particularly in the case of mediation, this poses the question of whether a remediation of one story into another in a different medium . . . actually is a remediation, or whether film or cartoon versions do not in reality have different plots which relate to the plots of the source narratives in a framework of family resemblances. Does the process of selection,

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restructuring, and media-related refocalization create a new story through a new discourse, or is it still the same story? (111) With regard to the remediation of Cloud Atlas into film, yes to the first question and no to the second. As I have argued elsewhere (“David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas”), the boomerang structure of Mitchell’s novel, whereby the chronologically prior narratives end up swallowing the chronologically later narratives in the second half of the novel, destabilizes the temporal constraint implicit in most embedded narratives—that tales-within-tales are presupposed as antedating the narratives within which they are embedded. Adam Ewing’s narrative, which antedates all the others, actually encloses them. By trou- bling the temporally linear transmission implicit in traditional embedded stories, Mitchell suggests that history can be not only recounted but also reworked. At one point, Isaac Sachs, who provides Luisa Rey with the crucial report on the compromised HYDRA reactor, proposes a model of time as “an infinite matryoshka doll of pointed moment, each ‘shell’ (the present) encased inside a nest of ‘shells’ (previous presents) . . .” (393)—a model that suggests the oft-cited matryoshka doll structure of the novel. “The doll of ‘now,’” Sacks continues, “encases a nest of presents yet to be . . .” (393)—future presents that are shaped by what we do in the now. If we regard Zachry’s story in the novel—the chronological end––in isolation or as the culmination of all that has come before, the outlook is bleak indeed. Zachry’s people—“the last Civ’lized tribe o’ the Big I” (297)––have been wiped out by the Kona, Prescience Isle has been deci- mated by what Meronym’s fellow Prescient Duophysite calls “a terror- some sick what our Smart can’t cure” (295), and the five Prescients on “Ha-Why” may be all that are left. The hopes of reviving civilization may have perished with the Prescients on Prescience Isle, as Duophysite makes clear: “We anxed this plague’d reach Prescience an’ snuff out Civ’lize’s last bright light” (295). In the coda to Zachry’s narrative, we learn that he has died and that his son now has the “silv’ry egg”—Sonmi’s “orison” containing her knowledge––but, as the son points out, Sonmi “speaks in an Old-Un tongue what no un alive und’stands nor never will, nay” (309). But Zachry’s narrative is not the last word in the novel. Zachry’s son proffers the “silv’ry egg” that is Sonmi’s orison, and we go backwards in time, with Sonmi’s, Cavendish’s, Rey’s, and Frobisher’s narratives all coming to closure, one within the other—a reverse cascade. Thus the “doll of ‘now’” that pertains at the conclusion of the novel is Ewing’s. As Marianna Torgovnick reminds us, “an ending is the single place where an author most pressingly desires to make his points. . .” (19); we interpret events “in light of ‘how things turned out’” (5). “How things turned out” for Ewing is that he has been rescued by Autua from

SubStance #136, Vol. 44, no. 1, 2015 SubStance #136, Vol. 44, no. 1, 2015 132 Jo Alyson Parker the murderous Henry Goose and has made the following resolve: “I shall pledge myself to the Abolitionist cause, because I owe my life to a self- freed slave & because I must begin somewhere” (508). Thus, by ending with Ewing’s story, Mitchell suggests that the future is open-ended, a boomerang with an undetermined trajectory set in motion by Ewing’s final resolve and his hopeful awareness that, although his life may be “no more than one drop in a limitless ocean,” that ocean comprises “a multitude of drops” (509). In the future that Ewing hopes to initiate, Ayrs might not prey upon Frobisher, Seaboard might not build a compromised reactor, elderly Brits might not end up abused, a clone race might not be created and enslaved, and civilization might not wink out. Mitchell gives us a picture of a dystopian future, but it is embedded in a present in which a good man determines to help change the world for the better. The novel both offers the bleak vision of the future in the chronological ending and supplants it in the actual ending by suggesting a means for averting that future.11 In the film, Ewing also resolves to work toward such a change. The filmmakers indeed reinforce its significance by making his father-in-law, Haskell Moore (bad guy Hugo Weaving), the author of an influential “tractus” arguing for the “natural order” of enslaving non-whites, and by having the contract Ewing signs with Horrox (bad guy Hugh Grant), and later destroys, deal with transporting slaves. Too, the final words of the novel––“what is an ocean but a multitude of drops?” (509)––are the final words Ewing speaks in the film. Ewing, however, does not have the last word in the film. We are left not with the open-ended future we find in the novel but one fixed in and by a frame, for the film is bookended by scenes of an older Zachry recounting his story to his and Meronym’s descendants on a planet far from the––presumably––ruined earth. In discussing successful adaptations in the Wall Street Journal article, Mitchell notes, “All roads lead to closure. The unwritten contract between author and reader does not contain a clause saying, ‘I, the author, do faithfully promise to reveal the ultimate fates of the major characters,’ but films do. . . .” (“Translating”). Just as viewers might chafe at being given a new story after 100 minutes into a film, so too might they chafe at being left with an open-ended future such as we get in the novel. As Werner Wolf notes in his discussion of narrative frames: “The meaning established by mise en cadre [the frame story] is often a ‘framing’ in the cognitive sense” (65)—that is, it shapes how we perceive what has been framed. We might also consider Gérard Genette’s point about direct causality between embedded story and frame: “All these narratives answer, explicitly or not, a question of the type, ‘What events have led to the present situation?’” (232). The answer

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in the case of the film is that all of the events recounted in the embedded narratives––from the increasingly devastated earth to the redeemed soul of Henry Goose/Zachry––have led to the off-world conclusion. Tykwer and the Wachowskis have essentially made recourse to the traditional structure of embedded narratives as past events—as something that cannot be changed. As the film hurtles to its conclusion, each story comes to closure, but, rather than employing the reverse-cascade effect that we get in the novel, the film jumps between stories, reinforcing the omnitemporal quality and links we have experienced throughout the film—so, for example, as Haskell Moore scornfully warns Ewing that his actions may cause him to be “lynched or crucified,” the scene switches to the Christ-like Sonmi’s execution. Yet all that dynamic omnitemporality is enclosed, fixed in a long-ago and faraway past. When Zachry tells his listeners, “My yarning is done,” his words are like “the end” in a fairy-tale. Whereas the novel leaves open-ended whether the actions of Adam Ewing and his fellow forward-thinkers can avert what Frobisher calls “the unspeakable forms waiting around history’s corner” (460), the frame-narrative structure of the film closes off the potentiality of the future. Granted, the film’s conclusion is a more hopeful one than the conclusion of Zachry’s narrative in the novel. In the film, although Earth may no longer be viable, we learn in the frame story that Meronym was able to summon a “woahsome ship” from an off-world colony, so that she, Zachry, and the rest of the Prescients have transported the terrestrial knowledge base (both Zachry’s “yarning” and the space-traveling technology) to the colony. Civilization continues, and Zachry gets a happy ending; Meronym is “the best thing that ever happened to me,” he tells his granddaughter. What we discover in the final moments of the film is that, in some sense, it has been a romance all along. That’s “how things turned out.” Thus the novel’s global plot of reversing humanity’s drive for instant gratification gives way to the film’s local plot of solitary redemption. In the novel, erring humanity and our ailing planet may be saved if people resolve to work for the good of all. In the film, one erring soul is saved when he learns to act heroically. Saint Joseph’s University

Notes 1. I say “quasi-static” because the dots in pointillist paintings tend to shimmer, but the paintings themselves lack the dynamic quality of much Impressionist work. 2. Once again I thank Sabine Gross for this insight. 3. Mitchell concurs: “you can’t ask a viewer to begin a film for the sixth time after a hundred minutes and not expect popcorn to fly” (“Based on the Novel by” 512). Interestingly, this structure apparently proved challenging to some readers who bought the Cloud Atlas movie tie-in edition; its Amazon webpage features the following advisory: “This book

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does not contain a misprint on page 39: We have received complaints from customers that they have received misprinted editions because of the way the story changes direc- tion in the middle of a word on page 39. . . . This is not a misprint or error. It is the way the author has written the book. He returns to the seemingly abandoned storyline later in the book” (Amazon’s emphasis). 4. Some critics have deplored the film’s jumps from narrative to narrative; Richard Alleva complains, for example, that the “intercutting doesn’t work when the parallel stories have been chopped into narrative confetti right from beginning to end” (17). 5. Alleva, in fact, likens the entire viewing experience to “watching two hours and forty- five minutes of previews” (17). 6. Nick Pinkerton wryly notes in LA Weekly, “What does it say about studio moneymen when the innovations of a century ago still look risky?” The juggling of multiple story lines, with actors playing several different parts, also recalls the brilliant 1986 television miniseries The Singing Detective, written by Dennis Potter and directed by Jon Amiel. 7. Paratextual elements reinforce the notion of interconnectedness within the film. Under the “Everything Is Connected” selection on the film’s official website (cloudatlas.warnerbrothers.com ) is a lovely mural by Kurt van der Basch. It appears initially as a segmented square. Viewers are instructed to “Play each piece to complete the image and unlock the Cloud Atlas Sextet,” and when they do so, the full mural appears, along with a prompt that will allow them to hear the score. The mural links together the various stories—so, for example, the musical notes in the Frobisher section morph Escher-like into Sonmi servers. For those of us of a certain age, the mural may be reminiscent of the iconic mural that, in three segments, graced the covers of the 1960s paperback version of The Lord of the Rings. 8. Snippets of the “revelation” also occur when Meronym shows Zachry the Sonmi broadcast while they are in the observatory of Mauna Sol. 9. The reincarnation idea would hardly seem to hold up if we take Cavendish’s birthmark as a sign that he is a reborn Luisa Rey, for if the story is set in contemporary Britain (the filmmakers specify 2012), he would have to have been born before the events of her story took place. Mitchell additionally shakes up our suspension of disbelief by implying that Luisa’s story is a fiction penned by Hilary V. Hush. The filmmakers avert this potentially destabilizing implication of a fiction within a fiction by making the author ofHalf-Lives Javier Gomez, Luisa’s young mystery-loving neighbor now grown up. Interestingly, in the film, Zachry has a comet birthmark, as we see in one of the final scenes of the film. 10. In The Hollywood Reporter, Joshua Zakarin discusses the controversy over the filmmakers’ use of yellowface. See, too Mike Le’s discussion of the yellowface issue on the Racebend- ing.com website, wherein he argues that “Cloud Atlas represents simply another film in the long tradition of Hollywood exclusion.” In his Salon review of the film, Andrew O’Hehir provides a different take on the race- and gender-bending aspects of Cloud Atlas: “I don’t think it’s supposed to be ‘convincing’ to see Berry or Doona Bae playing 19th-century Englishwomen. Perhaps it’s supposed to remind us that personal identity, like embedded social categories such as race or gender, is something we make up as we go along. (In case you haven’t noticed, one of the directors of this film is a woman who used to be a man.).” 11. The only truly dystopian stories in the novel are Sonmi’s and Zachry’s—stories taking place in our (possible/“virtual”) future. Mitchell’s most recent novel, The Bone Clocks, may, however, seem to suggest that a ravaged Earth is inevitable. In an article about/ interview with Mitchell originally published in New York Magazine, Kathryn Schulz notes that “Mitchell himself views his novels as ‘chapters in an Uber-book’” and that “Each new novel causes the previous one to shape-shift” (Schulz). In The Bone Clocks we hear of the origins of Prescience, and the novel’s conclusion shows that by 2043 the Earth is already in the grips of “the Endarkenment” (560) that will seemingly lead to the later

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dystopias of Sonmi’s and Zachry’s stories. Schulz notes, “when I ask if he [Mitchell] regards the Armageddon in The Bone Clocks as an ‘if’ or a ‘when,’ he says, ‘I lean to the when’” (Schulz). Yet I would nevertheless argue that Cloud Atlas leans to the if.

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