Have you ever watched a movie or show that delved into the idea of an alternate universe?
One of my favorite movies about alternate realities is the movie Coherence. It has a largely unknown cast, and you don't realize what is happening until pretty far into the film. I won't give it away, but this is a fantastic movie that you might need to watch more than once to grasp. The sci-fi show Fringe eventually evolved into a tangle of alternate realities. In season 2, the existence of a parallel universe becomes the obvious source of 'occurrences' which is plagued by singularities occurring at weakened points of the fabric between worlds; over there, scientists have developed an amber-like substance that isolates these singularities as well as any innocent people caught in the area on its release. Sliding Doors is a movie with Gweneth Paltrow. The film shows two possibilities for her life happening simultaneously. In one reality she misses a train and winds up at home where she discovers her husband having an affair. In the other reality, she makes it on the train and never finds out about her husband. Family Man with Nicholas Cage is one of my favorite Christmas movies. In the film, he wakes up one Christmas morning with a wife and kids in the suburbs. In the previous reality, he had been a powerful business man in NYC. The new Cloverfield Paradox movie on Netflix. The main characters are orbiting the planet which is on the brink of war as scientists test a device to solve an energy crisis, and end up face-to-face with a dark alternate reality. They also find a woman entwined with wires behind a bulkhead of the station and they learn she worked in an identical Cloverfield Station in another dimension. 1Q84 is a novel that I listened to last year by Haruki Murakami. At one point, a character argues against the existence of a parallel world, but the two main characters in 1Q84 (Q=”a world that bears a question”) are absolutely convinced that they live not in a parallel world but in a replica one, where they do not want to be. The world we had is gone, and all we have now is a simulacrum, a fake, of the world we once had. “At some point in time,” a character muses, “the world I knew either vanished or withdrew, and another world came to take its place.“ Sometimes I wonder what my life would be like in a parallel universe. Would I be the same person? What if I had never gone to meet that guy who worked at a gas station that my mom said was so 'cool'? I would've never met Jeremy. If I would not have gone on a blind date with another guy that my step-mom set me up with, I would've never called Jeremy afterward to tell him how horrible it was and we would've never had our first date. (Our first date was dinner at Babe's and the movie Napoleon Dynamite). In a parallel universe, who knows what my life would look like or if I would be the same person, or some other 'alternate' version of myself. I don't know if my decisions would've let me to the same conclusions ultimately or if I would've gone down another path altogether. I guess I will never know, but it it fun to think about and I definitely enjoy books, shows and movies that delve into this idea.
2 Comments
Julie
3/11/2018 06:33:40 pm
Hmmmm! You certainly have the wheels turning in my head!! I will have to watch one or two of these movies you suggested. I'm glad you met that guy at the gas station!!!
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Mary Sears
3/12/2018 08:22:59 pm
I love the movie Sliding Doors.
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Mrs. Mitchell
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