Only connect.

The Star Wars logo, the one we have all seen thousands upon thousands of times in our lives, links both the initial S and T and the final R and S. I was reminded of this (not uncommon) typographical approach while re-watching Cloud Atlas for this essay.

I was watching the film on Netflix, and every time I paused it (and given that I have three kids and very little time to myself, and with this being a three-plus-hour movie, this was often) the logo would come up, superimposed over the paused image. I noticed (eventually) that the letters in the Cloud Atlas logo are also connected, each to the next. But where the connectors in Star Wars are as thick and bold as the font itself, the upper curve of the S just continuing into the cross-bar of the T, with no interruption to the line at all, the connections between letters in the Cloud Atlas logo are wispy, almost fragile-seeming—thin tendrils that connect letter to letter tenuously.

It occurred to me that this serves as a clear and poetic connection to the film itself. For, if the message of Cloud Atlas is that it is only how and when we connect to each other that we demonstrate the real value of human life, that message is also a very qualified one, with the same dynamics repeating throughout history of humans seizing power and using that power to subjugate and dominate and discriminate against their fellow humans. Yes, Cloud Atlas insists, we must connect. But we are oh-so-very bad at it. So, the letters are connected—but just barely.

In re-watching Cloud Atlas, I had to marvel at my memory of it as a fundamentally hopeful film. It’s not that I found my memory incorrect, its just that watching the film you are reminded of how strongly it insists upon not downplaying the reasons we seemingly should have abandoned said hope long ago. Over the course of its running time, we see a slave whipped and face execution-by-drowning; cannibals murder and consume human blood; clones murdered, ritualistically, to create food for their fellow clones, on a whim and at the merest sign of disobedience, and as political theater, all to maintain the power of the ruling class; sadistic beatings and power plays executed in a home for the elderly, with those in power seemingly delighting in subjugating; unfeeling executions driven by capitalist greed; and a suicide. The movie never lets us forget that the history of mankind is a history of brutalism and of humans refusing to connect with each other as humans. Indeed, the ways in which humans create tribes that then dehumanize other tribes they have deemed “lesser” is a common theme throughout the film—across all six stories.

Which brings us to those stories. The film’s structure feels maybe a little less surprising today than it did thirteen years ago, with shows like Sense8 (from the same creators) and movies like Moonlight telling stories across time and connecting characters across continents. But Cloud Atlas uses its structure, of telling six distinct stories across millennia, to hammer home its themes in a very satisfying way.

We are unfortunately not surprised to see the stories that take place in the past evince ruling tribes behaving monstrously towards disadvantaged tribes. A story set in the South Pacific of the 1840s featuring slavery is not a surprise. A story set in 1936 that nods at the virulent and festering anti-Semitism bubbling up in Germany at the time is not a surprise.

But some of us may have hoped that a story set in the Korea of 2144 would show some potential for human progress. Instead, we encounter a future where clones are treated as sub-human slaves and literally fed to each other. And the last story of the set, temporally speaking, set in 2321, is home to the aforementioned cannibals, with one tribe preying on another as violently as one could imagine. The film seems to be almost daring us to believe in humankind’s better nature, in that fabled long arc of moral justice. “Three hundred years from now we will fucking eat each other. There is no arc.”

?And yet.

?“‘One day’ ain’t but a flea of hope.”

?“Yay. And fleas ain’t so easy to rid.”

20 years ago, I directed a production of Man of La Mancha. The most famous song from that play is “The Quest (The Impossible Dream),” a song that has been neutered by decades of lounge and inspiration-porn renditions, so that the message of the song, in the popular imagination at least, has become an anodyne ?and syrupy “dreams come true.”

But the song’s real message is much harsher and harder. It is about hope—and how important hope is, not when the goal seems difficult, or far, but impossible. The song is about the impossible dream, and its message is that hope in face of defeat, no, in spite of defeat, is one of humankind’s powerful weapons.

Cloud Atlas tells us much the same thing. No, it doesn’t sugarcoat the realities we face—or the odds of surmounting them as mankind keeps pushing on. But it does take pains to point out how when we connect with each other—when we allow for love—we can, and often do, transcend those human traits that keep us hurting each other down the eons.

At some point in each story, a character makes the choice to love—to connect—and often at his or her own peril.

In 1849, Adam Ewing, a lawyer charged with procuring slaves for his father-in-law, makes the decision to save the runaway slave Autua’s life.

In 1936, it is the love of Robert Frobisher for Rufus Sixsmith that animates the former’s great work, “The Cloud Atlas Sextet.”

?In 1973, the scientist Isaac Sachs gives up critical information to Luisa Rey because he decides to trust—and maybe love her.

In 2012, Timothy Cavendish realizes how much time he has wasted in refusing to honor the love he had as a young man for Ursula, and returns to her at story’s end.

In 2144, it is love that pushes Somni 451 to betray her makers and assist the revolution.

And in 2321 it is her connection to the goat-herder Zachry that makes the much more advanced Meronym return to him, against her tribe’s dictates, and save his and his niece’s life.

?The Wachowskis and Tywker are making the case that humankind, however much we revert to the tribalism and brutality captured in the saying “The weak are meat and the strong do eat,” which recurs throughout the film, has the potential to move beyond those divisions. They are insistent that if we can see each other as humans, beyond anything else, that we can come together across those very artificial tribal boundaries. Indeed, the message is emphasized when you consider how many of the stories feature these connections taking place across those tribal boundaries.

This is why, for me, the film’s oft-criticized cross-racial casting is in fact, essential. If the filmmakers believe, if their film is meant to tell us, that the racial and gender and sexual boundaries we place between us are mere chimeras, then they cannot allow those same boundaries to limit who plays what role in each story. And the double-casting that has, for example, Doona Bae playing a white woman, a Mexican woman, and a Korean clone, or Halle Berry as a native Pacific islander, a white Jew, a Black woman, an Indian man, and a Korean doctor, become an essential part of the message.

?Because by connecting all six stories through a host of mechanisms—casting, the repeating “comet” birthmark that appears on one character in each story, characters reappearing from one story to the next, the in-world composition of the “Cloud Atlas Sextet” reoccurring throughout history, the ways in which one story appears, as a story in another—the film also makes the point that, as humans, we are more the same than we pretend. We keep reliving the same stories and conflicts and mistakes and moments over and over and over again.

That notion of repetition is both a blessing and a curse. A curse because, as the film makes painfully clear, we keep making the same mistakes over and over. A blessing because, as the film also makes clear, we also keep connecting, and finding moments of grace and triumph, over and over. As it is put several times, by several characters:

“Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb, we are bound to others, past and present. And by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.

And finally, as the film also makes clear, hope in the face of defeat is as powerful a weapon as we have.

“No matter what you do, it will never amount to more than a single drop in a limitless ocean.”

“But what is an ocean but a multitude of drops?”

Sometimes it takes an optimist to be really honest about the ways in which we continue to fail each other. I believe the Wachowskis and Tywker are optimists, and that their film is a stunning statement of our potential to transcend those failures and connect—one human relationship at a time.

?

?