PAMELA, a hyperstressed, single Australian journalist, churns out sudsy articles about love and relationships, all the while wondering what her life would have been like had she married her high-school beau and had children instead. She soon finds out when, after a freak accident, she becomes her fantasy self, complete with neglectful husband and annoying kids. But the appearance of this second self hasn't effaced her normative, career-track self, so Pamela finds herself at somewhat of a disadvantage: She's expected to lead both lives. An example of extreme multitasking, Pamela files a story and then runs to feed her kids and cook dinner, has an affair with a cute guy her journalist incarnation met in an elevator, and argues with her husband. This is the premise behind Me Myself I, Australian director Pip Karmel's interesting tale of intertwined destinies, and it epitomizes the latest trend in cinema: domesticated sci-fi films.
In Blade Runner, it's called a "skin job" -- an android that thinks it's human. Of late, the film world has been besieged by the cinematic equivalent of "skin jobs": films that think they're sentimental family dramas and personal stories when they're really science fiction. The skin job invasion started surreptitiously last year with films like Being John Malkovich, a tale about an unemployed puppeteer lusting after a manipulative coworker who ultimately uses a celebrity brain portal to make his dreams come true. In Fight Club, an Ikea-dependent working-man throws in his lot with a destructive visionary -- only to find that this alter ego already inhabits his schizophrenic personality. Fight Club was Jekyll and Hyde for the tree-hugging, angry-white-male set. Raiding sci-fi's arsenal of thematics and narrative devices, films like Stigmata, Stir of Echoes, The Sixth Sense, Run Lola Run, and Magnolia conducted postmortem odysseys, posited transfixed states of being, transcended physical reality, and even invoked the occasional frog shower to tell personal stories about individual or family estrangement. It's a kind of genre-blurring that would occur if the Sci-Fi Channel were to fuse with Lifetime to produce another basic cable station, The Transdimensional Family Channel.
The application of a sci-fi model to traditional family dramas continues in this year's most notable trend in fanciful films: alternate-destiny movies. Set for release later this year is a Hollywood carbon-copy of Me Myself I -- Family Man, which covers the same ground but with a male protagonist, played by Nicolas Cage. Then there's Frequency, a Dennis Quaid time-travel film opening this month, in which a cop converses via ham radio with his long-dead dad and the two try, ever so delicately, to alter history to their advantage. Frequency's tag line -- "What if?" -- perfectly captures the current cinematic repudiation of a single, immutable destiny.
Science fiction has always functioned as extreme sports for the mind, its narratives stocked with characters who hurl against the limitations imposed by life span, dimensionality, chronology, the aging process, and the human body. Within this overall mandate, the quest for a variable destiny has been an overriding sci-fi thematic -- one of the genre's innate fixations. Because of its broad scope, sci-fi favors scenarios in which the collective destiny of the human race is somehow subverted, rerouted, imperiled, or reversed. In Ray Bradbury's classic 1952 short story "A Sound of Thunder," twenty-first century men time-travel back to prehistoric times where they bond with each other during Tyrannosaurus Rex hunts. During a hunt, one time-traveler freaks out and steps on a butterfly, then returns to the future to find that a totalitarian dictator has taken power instead of the democratic leader who was in charge when he left. In Philip K. Dick's Counter-Clock World, a glitch in the universe causes time to run backwards, redefining destiny in the process. Cinema has occasionally engaged in a cross-pollination of genres, applying sci fi's obsession with altered destiny to more prosaic human scenarios, as in It's A Wonderful Life(1946), Peggy Sue Got Married(1986), and Groundhog Day(1993). Yet, overall, the "what-if" story line has been strangely underutilized in non-sci-fi film narratives.
Some cinephiles espy in the current infatuation with alternate realities and multiple personae a heartening sign of -- dare we say it -- an expanding cinematic grammar and vocabulary. "Words have always been able to move into conditional and subjunctive tenses -- "should have," "would have" -- and not simply "I eat," "she sits," "he moves," says Mitchell Stephens, Professor of Journalism at NYU and author of The Rise of the Image the Fall of the Word. "But film language has too often been restricted to the present indicative, and films are only now beginning to claim for themselves their entirely legitimate right to speculate, to dream, to jump about." For sci-fi novelist Paul Levinson, author of The Silk Code, adopting sci-fi's more inventive storytelling parameters may give cinema a new pertinence to viewers: "In our minds we imagine ourselves to be a thousand different people, and the new technologies have increased our sense that through our imaginations we can change our identity, become other people," says Levinson. "The Internet can make our fantasy worlds slightly more real, but films are in the best position to align our real and imaginative lives."
Two films anticipated this year's alternate destinies wave: "Run Lola Run" which revealed the potential of a narrative emboldened by sci-fi conventions, and "Sliding Doors," which revealed its limitations. "Sliding Doors" followed the two divergent realities of a British-accented Gwyneth Paltrow, who, in Scenario One, discovers her boyfriend cheating, and, in Scenario Two, doesn't. This inventive premise, however, ignored the mandate of developing the central character -- otherwise the audience may end up not caring about what happens to her in either reality. By contrast, the lack of character development in last year's hyperkinetic hit Run Lola Run seemed almost welcomed by many critics, who likened Lola to a video-game character who "dies" in Game One only to be instantly resurrected for Game Two. "These movies are completely antisentimental, they're not asking you to identify with the characters in terms of what's going on in their minds or in their lives, but simply with the choices they make," notes Jennifer Kramer, Coproprietor and lead film critic for the Picture Palace (www.picpal.com), an on line video outlet for the cinema intelligentsia. "It's more like animated game theory. We're not rooting for Lola the person, we're rooting for Lola the set of actions."
Me Myself I, opening this week, presents the rare example of a character who acquires more texture as a result of plural dimensions. For director Pip Karmel, the alternate destiny concept proved an ideal way to explore the often facile assumption that women no longer face the career-versus-family dilemma. "I think that you can have it all if you're a woman," she said, "provided that you're willing to do twice as much work. I think it's by and large easier for men to have it both ways. After all, women are still grateful if they find a partner who contributes to the housework, which is why you still hear things like "Oh, you're so lucky your husband cooks dinner." The film bears a superficial resemblance to Sliding Doors in that both films share a one woman/two destinies plotline -- except that in Sliding Doors Gwyneth One and Two's destinies never converge, making the film more about the contingency of life and roads not taken, while Karmel's film sinks its teeth into the adage "be careful what you wish for." (In any case, Karmel resists too many comparisons to the "tedious and gimmicky" Sliding Doors. "It's a little bit of a sore point," she admits. "When I started Me Myself I seven years ago it seemed like it would have been very original. But then came Sliding Doors, and it seems now that [alternate destinies] is the thing that everyone's doing.")
Ultimately, Karmel sees Me Myself I as a meditation on "the futility of regret." "It's a waste of energy to obsess over what might have been," she muses, "because you actually never know the variations and permutations." Yet, for all its general applicability, the film does play on an eternally American malaise that takes on fitful proportions against the backdrop of sustained economic prosperity -- the frustration of living out only one destiny. It's the same sentiment that's so perfectly captured in the TV ad for Internet job site careerbuilder.com: An attractive, frustrated woman in an office is engaged in the mind-numbing process of making photocopies, followed up by the text blurb "When is Your Future?" The message, of course, is that there is a better life out there waiting for you, which speaks to the particular plight of the destiny-challenged living in boom times. Culture and economics are perpetually renegotiating their relationship through the and/or calculus, with boom times emphasizing plenitude in the form of "ands" ("Who Wants to Be A Millionaire?") and recessions underscoring scarcity in the form of "ors" ("Girl, You Might Just Make It After All," the original Mary Tyler Moore theme from recession-plagued 1970). After ten years of economic boom, and amid a consumerist rhetoric that emphasizes that job, career, pleasure, sexual orientation, body, and mind are all a matter of choice, the idea of being saddled with only one destiny in Y2K seems both anachronistic and unnecessary.
One of the more exotic cinematic narratives used to propel characters beyond the confines of normative destiny is the hypnotherapy-as-epiphany device, which is fast emerging as a cult favorite. In both Office Space and Stir of Echoes, characters undergoing hypnosis are propelled into a fugue state of self-actualization, discovering a second self while remaining (at least physically) a single person. Bob King, director of this year's kitschy Sundance hit Psycho Beach Party, chose this formula to tell the story of a 16-year-old virgin tomboy whose "chief alternate personality" is an S&M dominatrix. "Psycho Beach Party is the sixties beach party movie and fifties psychothriller that couldn't be made until now, as well as the seventies slasher film that could have been -- and was -- made before now," King says. "It gave us a chance to mock all those films like Good Will Hunting where characters have deep-seated, severe psychological problems that go away after one therapy session."
Cyberculture pundit R.U. Sirius detects in such films the fingerprints of an emerging "multiple personality culture." "As our work lives, our home lives, and our pleasures are kind of fused together, and then as 'free agents' we change 'jobs' frequently, or we have multiple jobs, our psyches tend to bifurcate," muses Sirius. "We find ourselves operating different personalities at the same time. And if we're having multiple identities on-line and through media, if my caffeinated brain is multitasking and I'm projecting out in all kinds of directions at great speed with my cell and my e-mail et. al., why must this damned fool body be ultimately confined to one destiny? And, in fact, there is now a technological discussion involving being able to upload ourselves and then make infinite copies."
The current cinematic infatuation with multiple personalities and destinies may be, as Sirius argues, part of a broader cultural revolt against "ordinary human constrictions," even as it reconfirms the historical American mythos of shedding Old World confines and breaking free of inherited conditions. Take the Horatio Alger myth and fuse it with cyberculture role-playing and MUDs, present this cultural complex to a new generation of directors and writers intent on discarding old forms of storytelling, and you arrive at the current cinematic jihad against any preformatted conception of destiny and identity. If today's cinema has given birth to an unprecedented fusion of sci-fi and ordinary life, it may be because the hubris-inspiring cocktail of prosperity and technology is eroding the "fiction" in "science fiction" -- and, in doing so, has made the fantastic seem downright earthly.
Peter Braunstein writes frequently about technology, film, and culture for L.A. Weekly, Forbes American Heritage, and The Village Voice, and is currently working on a book about American nightlife.
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