Fiction That Explains Our Facts

What films and books would you choose to explain our present moment?

Sometime after our second (maybe our third) round of scotch, I posed a question to my friends, which became the basis of a game that occupied us for a solid half hour. “What four films,” I said, “would you give somebody to introduce yourself to them?” By which I meant what four films did they think best described them? And then I had an idea:

“Scratch that. Which four films would you give somebody to explain each other?”

So, if friend A wanted to explain our mutual friend B to a new person, which four films would best do the job? Our respective answers told us something not only about the friend being “explained” but the person doing the choosing. We used themes, characters, and storylines of various films to express something of the other person. One friend, instead, named a film whose production history represented something of his chosen person. There are no right answers here, only interesting ones.

Some days later, I read an interview with Henry Oliver, of the

The Common Reader

. Miller was asked, What three novels best explain our current moment? You can define that however you like — culturally, politically, whatever. His answers got me thinking about how I would answer the same question — although I made an allowance for films as well as books, and made the number four, if only for symmetry.

Just as in the game with friends, my answers here said as much about me as about the present moment. My selection leaves out many issues (democracy, populism, conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine, climate change), not because I think them unimportant but because they’re not what I’ve focused on lately. The following list is, of course, in no way definitive; it’s merely my contribution to a broader conversation.

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Arrival, dir. Denis Villeneuve, written by Eric Heisserer (2016)

Arrival builds some big ideas on a simple premise: twelve alien spaceships, shaped like half-deflated footballs, are hovering over Earth, and linguist Louise Banks must learn their language to determine whether the aliens are peaceful or aggressive. This is the binary that, of some necessity, the interstellar visitors are reduced to — are they here for peace or for war?

Inside one of the ships, Louise stands before a large screen, behind which the extraterrestrials sign their language at her. The screen itself is easy to overlook, just as they are in our digital lives. Their interaction through a screen isn’t so far from what we do on social media, which has simultaneously brought us into contact with countless aliens and made us aliens to others. Our common cause has become learning the languages of these human aliens on our screens, and even to build a shared vocabulary through which we can connect.

Just as in Arrival, learning to communicate with each other is what the survival of civilisation depends on. When it comes to resolving conflicts, humans have only two options — I can convince you or coerce you. Coercion requires force, whereas convincing you might involve setting a good example (an appeal to your better instincts) or tolerating your viewpoint (resolving the conflict by concession). But for instances where ideology prevents a good example being perceived as “good”, or where too much will be lost in assenting to the opposition, convincing another person is going to involve some form of conversation.

Arrival plays with this idea by showing us how miscommunications can be the catalysts for violence, and that language can be a tool of war. Louise claims that language is the bedrock of civilisation, and another character quotes her own book at her: “[Language] is the glue that holds a people together, and it is the first weapon drawn in a conflict”. This is why we need to practice talking with each other and get better at communicating, especially in this age where, every day, our screens bring us into contact with aliens from our own species.

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The Story Never Stays the Same

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Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut (1963)

I recently wrote about Cat’s Cradle for the Marginalia section of this substack, but I couldn’t leave it out of this list. First, there’s the way it dramatises one of the West’s core existential investigations. I’ll quote from myself here:

“In Cat’s Cradle, [the narrator] looks back on recent history in an effort to make sense of it. This has been the preoccupation of Western civilisation since the second half of the twentieth century. Conservative writer Douglas Murray has described our present moment as ‘a footnote to the twentieth century’ in which ‘we’re still trying to work out “what happened”.’ Future historians, Murray says, will look back on this era as the ‘post-Holocaust, post-World-War-II, post-gulag world’.”

If the present is a footnote to the twentieth century, then Cat’s Cradle is one of its key texts. Vonnegut’s novel was written “in the afterglow of the atom bomb, in the lingering smoke of the ovens at Auschwitz”. The stupefaction these horrors inflicted on us is captured in Vonnegut’s sardonic prose and manic storyline about ice-nine, a weapon of planetary destruction, bandied around by the grown-up (though not matured) children of its inventor.

Then there’s the novel’s invented religion, Bokononism, that celebrates what it calls foma, or “harmless untruths”. Postmodernism has been a dominant cultural response to the tyranny of dogmatism and the use of science in the service of evil, creating weapons of mass destruction and tools for genocide. Its method of critiquing what occurred in the first half of the twentieth century was to undermine the “grand narratives” on which dictatorships were built and to dethrone the scientific method. Its central claim is that we all live by various untruths.

At the start of the twenty-first century, scientists pushed back, and new atheism brought with it a kind of scientism (the conviction that the scientific method is the only route to truth). Cat’s Cradle has plenty to say on this front too: as I wrote in my piece on the novel, Dr Hoenikker is a cautionary figure meant to warn against the way we “deny our own humanity when we believe that matter is all that matters”.

New atheism has waned in recent years, and many prominent conversions to traditional faiths have tacitly turned on a rejection of the dichotomy between true and false. The beliefs of these new converts are often predicated on a conception of “untruth” that could also be called foma — neither explicitly true or false and that (as per the epigraph with which Cat’s Cradle opens) makes them “brave and kind and healthy and happy”. Cat’s Cradle reminds us that truth alone is not something on which you can build a life; there must be kindness too.

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"Cat's Cradle": Man Cannot Live on Truth Alone

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Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, dir. Michel Gondry, written by Charlie Kaufman (2004)

In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Joel discovers that Clementine, who recently broke up with him, has paid a company to erase all of her memories of their relationship. Distraught and somewhat vengeful, he goes to the company who wiped her memory and demands the same procedure.

This kind of voluntary amnesia has, over the last decade, become an undercurrent in progressive politics. Statues have been toppled and works of art censured then censored, as if the punishment for their alleged crimes is to expunge them from our collective memory. At the same time, the atrocities of the Soviet state are memory-holed, because the USSR practised the politics of those who, today, venerate communist dictators while denouncing everyone else as fascists. Meanwhile, it’s become de rigueur among the cultural elite to talk about how the British Empire traded in slaves, but passé to mention Britain’s unique role in suppressing slavery worldwide. The past has been anathematised and repressed with the same blitheness that Joel erases his memories of Clementine.

This self-inflicted amnesia (and its infliction on others, usually the young) isn’t partisan; before this left-wing emphasis on the sins of our forefathers, much of our culture was in a conservative fugue state. I came of age in an age when patriotism meant denial of any wrongdoing by the West in any part of its past. It often involved the simpleminded treatment of historical figures as demigods rather than fallible, complicated humans like Clementine, who says of herself, “I’m just a fucked-up girl who’s looking for my own peace of mind. I’m not perfect.”

I have a certain faith — not a certainty, but a hope held with reason — in the waxing and waning of extremes around a cultural equilibrium. When one force holds sway for too long, or when a set of truths is denied to absurdity, we begin noticing how we suffer for our attentional bias. Just as Joel realises, halfway through the erasure process, what he stands to lose by forgetting Clementine entirely, we see that retaining what we value of our heritage means making peace with the bad of our past.

Sometimes, the hardest thing to do when faced with these imperfections is to respond as Joel does to Clementine’s confession of fault — accept them fully as they are and say, “Okay.”

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Forbidden Knowledge

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Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro (2021)

Klara and the Sun is not Ishiguro’s best book (his masterpiece is, I think, The Remains of the Day), but his foray into the increasingly salient realm of AI mirrors my own view of the subject: that what’s interesting about AI is not AI, but what the technology says about being human. At the core of Klara is a single question, the kind that transcends the specificities of history and culture, and that digs right down to existential bedrock with the shovel of plot. Here’s how Ishiguro phrases the question:

“Do you believe in the human heart? [...] I’m speaking in the poetic sense. The human heart. Do you think that there is such a thing? Something that makes each of us special and individual?”

There’s a specific plot-related question nested within this grand question: if Klara — an artificially intelligent robot — is able to replicate a specific human and mimic her convincingly, would Klara truly “become” that person? Or would some ineffable spark always be missing? Does there exist (as I asked in an essay about the book a few years ago) “a soul, a poetic heart, without which each person is merely something like Klara — conscious, interactive, complex, but disqualified from being, in Nietzsche’s phrasing, ‘all too human’?”

Klara’s own investigation into this question yields some profound, often surprising, insights about what makes us collectively human and what makes each human singular. The ability and willingness to witness others — which goes so much further than merely seeing them — is one of her discoveries. She also learns something of the beauty in human limitations, those things we’re trying to overcome by building AI, yet that grant us the (uniquely?) human experience of mystery. Klara and the Sun won’t tell you much about AI, but it reveals so much more about who we are and what we value.

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"Klara and the Sun": On Friendship and Being Seen

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As I look back over this set of films and books, I notice that they’re all from within the last sixty years. There are no classics here, none of the Great Books that inarguably have much to say about where we are and who we are, and that can explain in some measure our current moment. My list wasn’t always like this; when I first drew it up, it began with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Henry Oliver isn’t wrong when (in the interview mentioned above) he describes Frankenstein as an obvious answer to the question, especially regarding AI, but sometimes an answer is obvious because it’s right. But as I thought more about my other choices, I decided to restrict myself from naming any classics, if only to make my selection say a little more about me and a little less of what any lit-crit undergrad would probably choose.

I also can’t help but notice that each of my selection is, or at least utilises, science fiction. They each depend to varying degrees on technologies that don’t exist (yet, in certain cases). This was entirely accidental; was it, I wonder, incidental? Did I begin with Frankenstein and subconsciously follow its imagined science to the fantastical technology of Eternal Sunshine, and so on?

This seems likely, but I’m not concerned about this unconscious self-restriction. Rather, I appreciate what it reveals about the things preoccupying me in this moment. Ask me the same question in a month, and you’ll likely get a different set of films and books for an answer.

So, what set of fiction would you choose to explain the facts of our current moment?

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