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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) CLICK HERE TO ACCESS THE ENTIRE D AV I D MITCHELL SPECIAL ISSUE 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 SubStance #136, Vol. 44, no. 1, 2015 SubStance #136, Vol. 44, no. 1, 2015 Translating Cloud Atlas into Film 125 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.
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