San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
The multiverse is all around us in shows like “The OA” (above) and “Russian Doll.”
Parallel realities are all the rage in modern stories
How do you tell the story of your life?
Is it a long chain of choices made or not made? Of happenstance, and luck, and right places at the right time? Maybe it feels reactionary, like things happened to you and you parried left or right, and waited for the next offense.
Now: Are you who you are because of that story, or is that story a result of you?
The answer, of course, has to be both. Also, neither. Watching Natasha Lyonne chain-smoke her way through Netflix’s “Russian Doll” and navigate unsettling time loops in what may or may not be the afterlife (Harry Nilsson, bless him, echoing somewhere in the background), or catching the long-awaited return of “The OA’s” (not so) merry band of death-defiers, it becomes difficult to shake the feeling that there are important things hiding in plain sight; loose threads around the edges of our existence that we’re meant to pull.
In this universe, here in the last chapter of the decade, we dream of Upside Downs and Spiderverses, of rips in the fabric of our reality. We gladly descend into metaphorical
matryoshkas, tearing open our own chests to see what might be inside. We consider the validity of inter-dimensional travelers unlocking the infinite with near-death experiences and synchronized movements with near-religious fervor. Even “The Twilight Zone” is back. Why? What are we trying to tell ourselves?
The idea of the multiverse, in forms both scientific and spiritual, has permeated our imagination from the moment the word sprang into being in 1895, from the mouth of American psychologist William James. It was a heady, industrial time: Bikes raged so hard in the zeitgeist that they inspired a guy named Herbert George Wells to dream up a machine that whuffed you back and forth through time. ( Jury’s out on whether electric scooters shall incite a similar cultural shock wave.)
James may not have meant the term as we take it today — as both a scientific rabbit hole to be proved or disproved or a never-ending creative buffet — but by the 1960s the multiverse idea had become a recurring literary motif — Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” series, C.S. Lewis and his coat-filled portal, and Philip K. Dick’s nightmarish alternate histories. And many, many, many more in the years to follow.
Modern storytelling is what you might call a multiverse of multiverses. The multiverse, loosely, is the concept that our universe is only one of an infinite number, stacked like slices of bread or woven like a quilt or squished right up against one another — like that scene you’re still not totally sure you get from “Interstellar,” where Matthew McConaughey communicates using Morse code from the fourth dimension. Shades of it can be seen in everything from science fiction to fantasy to simulated reality, like “The Matrix.”
The Many Worlds Interpretation, or the MWI as it’s known in quantum circles, tells us that we have multiple selves living out every possible timeline overlapped in the same physical space — but destined to never meet. There is no path not taken. But whether or not it’s possible to jump into another iteration of your life (it isn’t) or casually slip into another dimension (not likely) is beside the point. We have a habit of treating our creative visions as prophetic; by turning the dial a fraction of a degree in either direction, we imagine a world strange enough to shed new meaning on the one we inhabit.
But whether or not we dreamed the multiverse, or if we’re just living in it, what are we actually doing when we picture ourselves in other realities? In novelist Kate Hope Day’s debut “If, Then,” released in March, four neighbors in a small town clustered around the base of a dormant volcano begin to catch glimps
es of themselves in those parallels. It’s a handful of paths-nottaken as potential gate-crashers, upsetting notions of self and spurring impulsive action, paranoia and unflinching honesty.
The effect is unsettling in print, and haunting once applied to real life: How to react, for instance, if another you entered the room when you thought you were alone? If they couldn’t seem to see or hear you, but almost seemed to sense you before they disappeared? Even further, what to make of the possibility that this life, the one in which you’re reading these lines, might be one such apparition for another-another you? And so on. It’s a visual manifestation of that thought we all have from time to time: the dangerously alluring what if ?
For Day, the initial seeds of “If, Then” sprang from more personal ground than dense metaphysical theory: new motherhood. Specifically, the early days, when the concepts of self and time melt into a maddening blob and re-form into something unfamiliar.
“The central emotional impulse behind the book was trying to understand the way having a child splits you in two,” says Day, as she watches a rare snowfall outside the window in her corner of Oregon.
After completing a doctorate and preparing for a life in academia, she found her world beginning to split with the arrival of her first child and a move across the country. “I suddenly always needed to be in two places at once. Or, I wanted to be. I had been working; now I wasn’t. I wanted to be with my son, but I wanted to spend time with my husband in the way that we had, too. I’d always been interested in the idea of parallel realities, but I don’t think it felt personal until that moment.”
Day partly anchored her story around the theories of modal realism, which grants any possible world the same level of plausibility as our own. “I was really interested in the idea that if you can write the sentence, it’s true,” she says. “The best argument for the multiverse is the fact that we exist. If evolution thrives on infinite possibility, the fact that we’re having this conversation is an argument in favor of it.”
There’s an environmental unease that winds ever tighter through the pages of “If, Then.” Micro-tremors from the mountain shake the ground, upsetting the pilings of reality, allowing its intricate, infinite web to bubble up from beneath the surface. The earth knows things, Day seems to suggest, things that we’re running out of time to decipher.
“The words ‘alternate reality’ have just been spoken more over the last few years, right? I think we’re in a moment where a lot of people are uncomfortable being in linear time, (especially) in terms of climate change,” she says. “Time just keeps going, and there’s nothing you can do about it. There’s an anxiety around what the alternatives are.”
She’s right: Statistically speaking, crime rates continue to fall and quality of life continues to improve over time, but people continue to talk about how the world feels increasingly violent and unpredictable. The breadth and speed with which we consume information has altered our perception of danger and of consequence: Who are we, in this vast, teeming human race? We know our planet is on fire and our oceans bob with plastic, but we can’t seem to agree on how to rewrite what we’ve done.
“Everyday life in our country and culture right now feels surreal and fueled by paranoia,” “Russian Doll” director and co-creator Leslye Headland writes in an email to The Chronicle. “The idea that somewhere, in an alternate dimension or timeline, our souls have already worked through whatever we needed to resolve here and righted past wrongs is pretty appealing.”
The multiverse as an internal salve is perhaps a new function. Where before the concept reflected new horizons brought by advances in technology, or warnings about the fragility of victory or political recklessness, one comfort of these contemporary narratives is confirmation that none of this is fixed. All we’d have to do is act, and we’d have, in essence, heralded a “new” dimension.
“How else do you notice the detail of your own life? I think that’s what great fiction does,” Day says. “Books or shows that engage with this question can really sharpen your eye to things that you might not have noticed — and those things are the best things about being a human being, I think.”
In August 2017, a video was uploaded to YouTube of a small flash mob assembled before Trump International Hotel in New York City. It’s during winter, or maybe spring; the trees are bare and the dancers are in coats. The group begins to perform the Five Movements featured in Netflix’s “The OA” — movements (choreographed by this dimension’s Ryan Heffington) that have the power to open a portal into another dimension.
“Would the power of the Five Movements work to protect us all from the darker forces at work in our country and the world?” the description wondered. We want to believe it could be that simple.
Just shy of two years later, in a black car bumping along the streets of SoMa on the eve of the series’ return, “The OA” co-creator and star Brit Marling considered our current obsession with hidden worlds. “I think one of the things the internet does is create a sense of fractured reality,” she says. “And the more you experience that, the more you feel that reality has this sense of opportunity cost. It’s almost a digital version of what Borges was talking about.”
What Argentinian writer