One of the most intriguing movies I came across in my year-long journey through the complete filmography of Tom Hanks was 2012s Cloud Atlas. This surreal sci-fi thriller had somehow escaped my notice when it was first release over a decade ago, so I sat down to it last year with next to no expectations, save what I’d learned from the first few lines of the synopsis on Wikipedia: that it is an “epic science fiction film” with a story that “jumps between eras, spanning hundreds of years, until each storyline eventually resolves,” and that “writings from characters in prior storylines are found in future storylines,” and that “characters appear to recur in each era, but change relationships to each other.”
I’d left off reading at that point, for fear of spoilers.
I’m not exactly sure what I had been expecting, I was completely caught off guard by the film's exquisitely structured and decidedly philosophical exploration of the interconnectedness of human life. From the harrowing journey of Adam Ewing, an American abolitionist in 1849, to the cloak-and-dagger exploits of an investigative journalist uncovering the corruption of Big Oil in 1970s San Francisco—from the poignant story of Robert Frobisher, a bisexual English composer creating his musical masterpiece in 1936, to the heartbreaking story of a humanoid clone named Somni-451, leading an uprising against her human over-lords in a dystopian Seoul, Korea in 2144—each story line is utterly distinct from one another in tone and tenor, and yet profoundly connected and intricately interwoven.
If you had the heart to trace the threads, for instance, you could see how Adam Ewing’s denouncement the 19th Century Slave Trade becomes a seed that will eventually bear the fruit of Somni-451’s revolution in Neo-Seoul, some 300 years later; or how the story of Zachry Bailey, who contacts an extraterrestrial civilization called the Prescients and so escapes a post-apocalyptic planet earth in 2321, has, as its historical impetus, the plaintive notes of Robert Frobisher’s 1936 magnum opus, “The Cloud Atlas Sextet,” which he composed almost 400 years earlier. As it weaves together these seemingly disparate stories, the film explores some profoundly metaphysical concepts, like the illusion of free will, the so-called “butterfly effect” of human action, the ephemeral nature of reality, and the meaning of history. There are even some mystical ideas with a distinctly eastern flavor, about the existence of the over-soul, the possibility of reincarnation, and the inexorable force of karma.
Although anyone of these ideas would bear a deeper discussion in a series about “spiritual reflections on the filmography of Tom Hanks,” what especially stood out to me in Cloud Atlas was the compelling questions it raises about the idea of destiny—the niggling sense we sometimes get that the course of our lives are actually being directed by forces beyond us, for purposes above us, and that the story we are living is really just a chapter in a much larger narrative that started long before us and won’t be complete until we’ve added our personal pages to the book. Whatever other questions Cloud Atlas may be asking, one of its core questions, it seems to me, is simply this: is there such a thing as “destiny” and, if so, how does it influence the course of individual lives?
Although it perhaps finds its most mystical expression in this film, the idea that one's life might be subject to the forces of "destiny" was a notion that had lingering in the background of a all sorts of Tom Hanks movies, long before Cloud Atlas hit the screen. Sleepless in Seattle wonders out loud, for instance, if there could be such a force pushing perfect strangers together until they become meant-to-be lovers. The characters in Forrest Gump find themselves unwittingly influencing the epoch-marking moments of American history in a way that could only be explained if there was some invisible hand directing them to do so. And in the final scene of Cast Away, Chuck Noland final delivers the FedEx package he had been carrying with him through his entire ordeal in a way that implies both that he was destined to receive the package and destined to deliver it when he was finally rescued.
If there were any connecting ligaments between all the movies in the Tom Hanks filmography, surely this question is one of them: Is destiny a thing, and do we, as individuals, have one?
As a Christian, I want to answer this question with a very qualified “yes”; certainly, the basic assumption of the Christian faith is that God is sovereign over his creation. Christians, of course, have arrived at a wide range of conclusions as to what God's “sovereignty” actually means, how to understand it, and how to explain it in relation to the many things that happen in the world that seem not to be God’s will. But even so, most Christians would agree in broad strokes with basic claim: that the Lord reigns (let the earth be glad). If God is sovereign, though, then in some sense we can say that he has a purpose for his Creation, and even for us his individual children. Each one of our days were written in his book, claims the Psalmist, before any of them came to be.
If there really is an unseen hand guiding the course of our lives, a Christian would say, the fingerprints of that hand must be those of the Lord God himself, and its shape is none other than the nail-pierced palm of His Son Jesus Christ.
I did, however, qualify my “yes" to the question posed by movies like Cloud Atlas. Because equally important to the biblical witness is the affirmation—a stunning affirmation, when you begin to delve its implications—that human beings actually have free will. Again: different Christians will explain this in different ways, and hold it in different kinds of tension with the Bible’s teaching on God’s sovereignty. But the idea that God created human beings with free will is embedded in the very first stories of the biblical text. Not for nothing was there a tree planted in the Garden that Adam and Eve were forbidden to eat from, and only because they had been created free did they choose to do so, having their eyes opened to the difference between good and evil.
I’m not exactly sure what I had been expecting, I was completely caught off guard by the film's exquisitely structured and decidedly philosophical exploration of the interconnectedness of human life. From the harrowing journey of Adam Ewing, an American abolitionist in 1849, to the cloak-and-dagger exploits of an investigative journalist uncovering the corruption of Big Oil in 1970s San Francisco—from the poignant story of Robert Frobisher, a bisexual English composer creating his musical masterpiece in 1936, to the heartbreaking story of a humanoid clone named Somni-451, leading an uprising against her human over-lords in a dystopian Seoul, Korea in 2144—each story line is utterly distinct from one another in tone and tenor, and yet profoundly connected and intricately interwoven.
If you had the heart to trace the threads, for instance, you could see how Adam Ewing’s denouncement the 19th Century Slave Trade becomes a seed that will eventually bear the fruit of Somni-451’s revolution in Neo-Seoul, some 300 years later; or how the story of Zachry Bailey, who contacts an extraterrestrial civilization called the Prescients and so escapes a post-apocalyptic planet earth in 2321, has, as its historical impetus, the plaintive notes of Robert Frobisher’s 1936 magnum opus, “The Cloud Atlas Sextet,” which he composed almost 400 years earlier. As it weaves together these seemingly disparate stories, the film explores some profoundly metaphysical concepts, like the illusion of free will, the so-called “butterfly effect” of human action, the ephemeral nature of reality, and the meaning of history. There are even some mystical ideas with a distinctly eastern flavor, about the existence of the over-soul, the possibility of reincarnation, and the inexorable force of karma.
Although anyone of these ideas would bear a deeper discussion in a series about “spiritual reflections on the filmography of Tom Hanks,” what especially stood out to me in Cloud Atlas was the compelling questions it raises about the idea of destiny—the niggling sense we sometimes get that the course of our lives are actually being directed by forces beyond us, for purposes above us, and that the story we are living is really just a chapter in a much larger narrative that started long before us and won’t be complete until we’ve added our personal pages to the book. Whatever other questions Cloud Atlas may be asking, one of its core questions, it seems to me, is simply this: is there such a thing as “destiny” and, if so, how does it influence the course of individual lives?
Although it perhaps finds its most mystical expression in this film, the idea that one's life might be subject to the forces of "destiny" was a notion that had lingering in the background of a all sorts of Tom Hanks movies, long before Cloud Atlas hit the screen. Sleepless in Seattle wonders out loud, for instance, if there could be such a force pushing perfect strangers together until they become meant-to-be lovers. The characters in Forrest Gump find themselves unwittingly influencing the epoch-marking moments of American history in a way that could only be explained if there was some invisible hand directing them to do so. And in the final scene of Cast Away, Chuck Noland final delivers the FedEx package he had been carrying with him through his entire ordeal in a way that implies both that he was destined to receive the package and destined to deliver it when he was finally rescued.
If there were any connecting ligaments between all the movies in the Tom Hanks filmography, surely this question is one of them: Is destiny a thing, and do we, as individuals, have one?
As a Christian, I want to answer this question with a very qualified “yes”; certainly, the basic assumption of the Christian faith is that God is sovereign over his creation. Christians, of course, have arrived at a wide range of conclusions as to what God's “sovereignty” actually means, how to understand it, and how to explain it in relation to the many things that happen in the world that seem not to be God’s will. But even so, most Christians would agree in broad strokes with basic claim: that the Lord reigns (let the earth be glad). If God is sovereign, though, then in some sense we can say that he has a purpose for his Creation, and even for us his individual children. Each one of our days were written in his book, claims the Psalmist, before any of them came to be.
If there really is an unseen hand guiding the course of our lives, a Christian would say, the fingerprints of that hand must be those of the Lord God himself, and its shape is none other than the nail-pierced palm of His Son Jesus Christ.
I did, however, qualify my “yes" to the question posed by movies like Cloud Atlas. Because equally important to the biblical witness is the affirmation—a stunning affirmation, when you begin to delve its implications—that human beings actually have free will. Again: different Christians will explain this in different ways, and hold it in different kinds of tension with the Bible’s teaching on God’s sovereignty. But the idea that God created human beings with free will is embedded in the very first stories of the biblical text. Not for nothing was there a tree planted in the Garden that Adam and Eve were forbidden to eat from, and only because they had been created free did they choose to do so, having their eyes opened to the difference between good and evil.
If there is such a thing as destiny, then, the biblical witness does not portray it as some nameless, faceless, inexorable force, pushing us to conclusions we simply can’t avoid—ultimately, the view of destiny we find in the films of Tom Hanks is a rather pagan idea. In the Christian view, destiny is what happens when a personal, loving God works wisely and patiently with our decisions, and actions, and circumstances, moving our stories forward towards his good purposes, genuinely honoring the freedom he gave us when he brought us into the world, while still, mysteriously, and inexplicably, working all things together for the good of those who love him.
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