The movie Cloud Atlas was released on DVD recently, reminding me again of its complete Oscars snub. The lack of even a single nomination certainly reflects more on the Academy Awards than on the quality of the movie. This movie is arguably one of the greatest ever made, in the scope and range of its storytelling, imagery and vision. If I had not seen it (twice), I would not have believed that anyone would have dared to translate this complex narrative into a movie, and far less, pull it off so well. Everyone who has been touched by this movie can readily see this as a powerful portrayal of the human spirit and of the perennial conflict between those who wield power that inevitably corrupts and those who rebel against the injustice and evil that springs forth from such power. But there is a deeper principle at play in the movie which I wonder whether even the creators realized, and that’s what I would like to mention here.

While the notion of reincarnation in the storyline is highly speculative, there is another idea also implicit throughout that actually touches on a profound truth of the quantum universe – that of entanglement. In the classical Newtonian view, there is a fundamental separation between the observed and observer, between individual objects that are physically distant, and more importantly, the range of influence of any object is intrinsically finite and localized in space and in time. But not in the quantum universe where everything is literally entangled with everything else, so that everything in this universe is connected to everything else by a quantum wavefunction, so that what happens to one entity at one point in space-time has some repercussions, however infinitesimal, on everything else in the universe. Substitute ‘everybody’ for ‘everything’ and we see it play out in the entangled drama of the various lives and characters in Cloud Atlas, across vast periods of human history, where seemingly minor incidents can have major repercussions centuries later.

There is another aspect of this movie that ties in with this idea of entanglement. Most who disliked the movie complained about the movie being incomprehensible because of its fragmented narrative and multiple storylines. But such is the nature of reality – reality is indeed fragmented and reality is indeed multi-threaded. The simplified linear narratives we see in typical movies are like one-dimensional projections of the infinitely complex reality of human lives. Appreciation of this movie is like that of one of Bob Dylan’s deeper songs – the individual lines very often make no sense, yet they each create a vivid image and together they convey an intense feeling: That’s the sort of communication that defines great art, where one can go beyond words, sounds, colors and physical shapes and connect via something akin to an entanglement of our various consciousness.