See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/330543781

Traumatic Bifurcation – Jaco van Dormael’s Mr. Nobody (2009)

Chapter · January 2013

CITATIONS READS
0 764

6 authors, including:

Zbigniew Białas Julia Szoltysek

University of Silesia in Katowice University of Silesia in Katowice
9 PUBLICATIONS   4 CITATIONS    13 PUBLICATIONS   3 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

QUEER(-ING THE) MIDDLE EAST: WRITERS, ARTISTS AND TRAVELLERS AND THE QUEST FOR REDEFINING GENDER(-ED) NORMS View project

Do you Bowles View project

All content following this page was uploaded by Sonia Front on 22 January 2019.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

Culture and the Rites/Rights of Grief

Edited by

Zbigniew Białas, Paweł Jędrzejko

and Julia Szołtysek

CAMBRIDGE
SCHOLARS
PUBLISHING
 TAELE OF CONTENTS

l.ist ofImages .

Culture and the RitesfRights of Grief, Thc Editors' Preface IX

Edited by Zbigniew Bialas, Paweł Jędrzejko and Julia Szołtysek

This book first published 2013 Introduction .

Grieving, Knowledge, Wisdom
Cambridge Scholars Publishing Wojciech Kalaga
12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK
~hapter One 8
Death is An-Other Country: Grieving for Alterity in "Post-Transitional"
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data South African Literature
A catalogue record for this book is available frorn the British Library Nedine Moonsamy

Copyright © 2013 by Zbigniew Bialas, Pawel Jędrzejko, Julia Szołtysek and contributors
hap ter Two 29
Post-Apartheid Literature as a Rite ofMourning: Empathy and Alterity
Reviewed by MeJunet Ali Celikel of Pamukkale University, Turkey in Selected Writings by Zakes Mda and 1. M. Coetzee
Paulina Grzęda
Ali rights for this book reserved. No part ofthis book rnay be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or hap ter Three 52
otherwise, without the prior perrnission of the copyright owner.
"Not to Get Lost in the Loss":
ISBN (10): J -4438-5059-4, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5059-9 Narrating the Story in Mourid Barghouti's I Was Born There, I Was Born
Here and in Deborah Rohan's The Olive Grove - A Palestinian Story
[lania A. M. Nashef

hapter Four 73
The "GriefRegime" Gatekeepers: "Victirnological Militarism"
and the Symbolic Bargaining Over National Bereavement ldentity
Udi Lebel

Chapter Five 100

Grieving the Loss ofNative American Califomia:
Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona
Katarzyna Nowak-McNeice

264 Chapter Sixteen
of his previous muIti-stream life come to him. Later on, however, as
mentioned before, he asserts to have lived only in the imagination of a boy
running after the train. According to Henri Bergson, these two states are
contradictory: "Imagining is not recollecting"." In Deleuze's
interpretation, attentive recognition, that is the one coming through
recollection-images, is much more acute when it fails. When one cannot
remember, his sensory-motor activity is arrested, yet the actual image does
not estabłish a connection with a recollection-image but with "virtual
elements, feełings of deja vu or past 'in generał', dream-images, fantasies
or theatre scenes. In short, it is not the recollection-image or attentive
recognition which gives us the proper equivalent of the optical sound
image, it is rather the disturbances of memory and the failures of
recognition't.F Mr. Nobody is thus a melange of apparent1y actual lives
with flashes of parallel circuits in their past, present and future in the form
of dreams, a photograph, seeing himself or seeing his parallei incarnation 's
wife's life on stage in the theatre. The film is abundant in time loops; the
pJanes ofpast, present and future are mixed up: the old man's voice shifts
between the old mode and the boy's voice, death precedes birth, death
recurs many a time as well as the water trauma and the scene at the train
station. Once a cause-effect relationship is preserved when the butterfly
effect is referred to, other times it is disturbed, e.g. when Nemo hears from
his neighbour, "I heard you were dead. You drowned", (which he has done
in the parallei trajectory) and then he is flooded at home. Referring to
Deleuze's terminology again, the status of the actual and virtual is blurred
in the film, "the real and the imaginary, the physical and the mental, the
objective and the subjective, description and narration".53 In Deleuze's
words,
each time description has obliterated the object, at the same time as the
mental image has created a different one. Each circuit obliterates and
creates an object. But it is precisely in this 'double movement of creation
and erasure' that successive planes and independent circuits, cancelling
each other out, contradicting each other, joining up with each other,
forking, will simultaneously constitute the layers of one and the same
physical reality, and the levels of one and the same mental reality, memory
Ol' spirit."
51 After Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2. The Time-Jmage, trans. Hugh Tomlison and
Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 2007), p. 54.
52 Deleuze, Cinema 2. The Time-Jmage, pp. 54-55.
53 Deleuze, Cinema 2. The Time-Image, p. 46.
54 Deleuze, Cinema 2. The Time-Jmage, p. 46.
265
Traumatic Bifurcation
For Nemo Nobody it is the reality ofhis traumatic loss.
References
Berg, C. R., 2006, "A Taxonomy of Alternative Plots in Recent Films:
Classifying the 'Tarantino Effect'", Film Criticism, Vol. 31, Issue 1/2,
5-61.
Bordwell, D., 1985, Narration in the Fiction Film, Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press.
_. 2002, "Film Futures", SubStance 97, vol. 31, no. l, 88-104
Borges, J. L., 1962, "The Garden of Forking Paths", in Ficciones, trans.
Helen Tempie and Ruthven Todd, New York: Grove.
Bortoft, H., 1996, The Who/eness ojNatL/re. Goethe 's Way ojScience, New
York: Floris Books.
Branigan, E., 2002, "Nearly True: Forking Plots, Forking Interpretations.
A Response to David Bordwell's 'Film Futures''', SubStance, vol. 31,
no. l, 105-114.
Buckland, w., ed., 2009, Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in
Contemporary Cinema, Malden and Oxford, Blackwell Publishing
Cameron, A., 2008, Modular Narratives in Contemporary Cinema,
Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Dannenberg, H. P., 2008, Coincidence and Counterjactuality. Plotting
Time and Space in Narrative Fiction, Lincoln and London, University
ofNebraska Press.
Deleuze, G., 2007, Cinema 2. The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlison and
Robert Galeta, Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press.
Deutsch, D., 1997, The Fabric ojReality, London: The Penguin Press.
Doane, M. A., 2002, The Emergence oj Cinematic Time: Modernity,
Contingency, the Archive, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard
University Press.
Dormael, Jaco van, dir., 2009, Mr. Nobody, France, Germany, Canada,
Belgium.
Draaisma, D., 2004, Why Life Speeds Up As fou Get O/der. How Memory
Shapes Our Past, trans. Arnold and Erica Pomerans, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Eco, U., 1984, The Role oj the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics oj Texts,
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Front, S., 2010, "Trapped in the Interiors - Julian Schnabel's The Diving-
Bell and the Butterjly and Umberto Eco's TheMysterious Flame oj
Queen Loana" in Sonia Front, Katarzyna Nowak, eds. 2010, Interiors.
 266
Chapter Sixteen
InterioritylExteriority in Literary And Cultural Discourse, Neweasll
upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 99-106.
Herman, D., 2004, Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities oj NarratiII",
University ofNebraska Press.
Lewis, D., 1968, "Counterpart Theory and Quantified Modal Logie", TlI"
Journaloj Philosophy, vol. LXV, no. 5, 113-126.
Lewis, D., 1986, On the Plurality oj Worlds, Oxford: Blackwell.
McGowan, T., 2006, Out oj Time: Desire in Atemporal Cinema. London,
Minneapo/is: University of Minnesota Press.
Mackie, P., 2008, "Transworld Identity", The Stan/ord Encyc!opedia ą/
Philosophy (Fal! 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta, ed., http://plato.
stanford.eduJarchives/faI12008/entries/identity_transworldl.
Newton-Smith, W.H., 1980, The Structure oj Time, London, Boston and Hen/ey:
Rout/edge and Kegan PaliI.
Ryan, Marie-Laure, 2006, "Prom Paralle/ Universes to Possib/e Wor/ds:
OntologicaJ PJuraJism in Physics, NarratoJogy and Narrative", Poetics Today
27:4,633-674.
Walters, J. R., 2008, Alternative Worlds in Hollywood Cinema. Resonance Between
Realms, Chicago, Bristol: Intellect Books.
ohar, D. in collaboration J990, The Quantum Self Human
with LN. Marshall,
Nature and Consciousness Defined by the New Physics, New York: William
Morrow and Company, Inc.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
GRIEVING MONSTROSITIES:
GRUDGES, TERRORS AND OBSESSIONS
OF ANTAGONISTS
IN INTERACTlVE ENTERTAINMENT
TOMASZ GNAT
What is monstrous? What particular eharaeteristie of body or mind
denaturalizes the entity to a point when it no longer exists within the
biologieal, psyehologieal or cultural framework tbat is deigned natura l,
aeeeptable and healthy? It would be a misconeeption to assume that the
monstrosity is, in fact, anything inhuman. That men tal conditioning would
encompass everything beyond our most intimate self and result in the truly
monstrous vision of reality. What monstrosity aetually represents is
abhuman. It travels through the uncanny valley of resembling us to that
point where we see not only the alien, but ais o something that is
distortedly mirroring ourselves. Jeffrey Cohen observed that "the monster
is that uneertain cul tura l body in which is condensed an intriguing
simultaneity or doubleness: like the ghost of Hamlet, it introjeets the
disturbing, repressed, but formative traumas [... ] The mon ster commands,
"Rernember me", restore my fragmented body'" The mon ster proper is
then an ambivalent ereation, its power to horrify stemming not from the
differences, but rather from tbe similarities to the terrorized. It is at the
same time alluring in our subeonscious need to pieee it together and
frightening since the pieees seem so shoekingly incompatible.
The monster deseribed here is, however, of the subspeeies "proper",
representing the "abhomo sapiens sapiens" in the widely branehing
hereditary tree of the genus diseussed. A sophisticated monster oft shares
the stage with the hoi polloi of the abhuman, the vulgar and erude mass of
l Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Monster Theory: Reading Culture (Minneapo/is:
University ofMinnesota Press, 1996), p. 9
VI Table of Contents Culture and the Rites/Rights of Grief vii

Chapter Six 108 Chapter Fifteen 235

"They Call This 'Organie Shrapnel"': Violent Closeness Between w.G. Sebald and the Vertigo ofMouming
"Victims" and "Perpetrators" in Don Delillo's Falling Man Sławomir Masłoń
and Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Julia Szołtysek Chapter Sixteen 251
Traurnatic Bifurcation: Jaco Van Dormael's Mr. Nabody (2009)
Chapter Seven 123 Sonia Front
Delightful Deaths: Nabokov and the Joys ofMortality
Anna Pilińska Chapter Seventeen 267
Grieving Monstrosities: Grudges, Terrors and Obsessions of Antagonists
Chapter Eight 135 in Interactive Entertainment
Representing Black Trauma: Bodies, Pain and Haunting in Beloved(s) Tomasz Gnat
Anna Iatsenko
Bibliography 277
Chapter Nine 148
In Search of the Lost Harmony: Notes on Contributors 298
Existential Grievances in the Fiction of Carson McCullers
Justyna Rusak Index 303

Chapter Ten 167

"The Many Strange Fruits in the Cornucopia of Grief":
Figures ofGrieving in Sebastian Barry's Recent Fiction
Leszek Drong

Chapter Eleven 183

fDeath and Grief, Johne The Savage, Aldous Huxley
and D.H. Lawrence
rzegorz Moro

hapter Twelve 192

Grieving or Denying Grief? Photography and Literary Realism
in Graham Swift's Out Of This World
Sławomir Konkol

Chapter Thirteen 208

"Year after Year, Blunder after Blunder":
The Compulsion to Repeat in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled
Wojciech Drąg

Chapter Fourteen 223

Vicarious Victimhood in Holocaust Literature
Jacek Partyka
 250
Chapter Fifteen

Sebald, wo., 1997, The Emigrants, trans. Michael Hulse, New York: New
Directions.
-. 2000, Vertigo, trans. Michael Hulse, New York: New Directions. CHAP TER SIXTEEN
-. 12 March 2001, "Ich furchte das Melodramatische", Der Spiegel,
-. 2002, Austerlitz, trans. Anthea Bell, London: Penguin.
-. 2003, On the Natural History oj Destruction, trans. Anthea Bell, New TRAUMATIC BIFURCATION:
York: Random House.
Sontag, S., 25 February 2000, "A Mind in Mourning: WG. Sebald's
JACO VAN DORMAEL'S MR. NOBODY(2009)
Travels in Search of Some Remnant of the Past". Times Literary
Supplemem.
-.2001, On Photography, New York: Picador.
SONIA FRONT
Sterne, L., 1998, The Life and Opinions oj Tristram Shandy, Gentleman,
ed. Ian CambelI Ross, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

One of the ways to express the interiority of trauma in cinema is

through a narrative that manipulates chronometrie time. To do that it
employs labyrinthine polyphonic plots, achronology, time loops,
repetition, eIlipsis, backward narration and/or paralleI time-streams with
equal or unequal ontological status. The emergence ofthis type offilm that
is told in a "wild way" (Tarantino ) in the mid 1990s Charles Ramirez Berg
calls the "Tarantino Effect" as it follows Quentin Tarantino's first films
Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994). The type ofnarratives has
been named "aternporal" (McGowan), "alternative plots" (Berg, Walters),
"modular narratives" (Cameron) or "puzzle films" (Buckland).' The films'
exploration of fuzzy temporality, featuring inexact temporaI sequencing,
which makes it impossible for the events to be arranged in a chronological
order/ constitutes structural and ideological undennining of classical
Hollywood narration, reflects the flexible temporality of the Internet and
digital production as well as distinctly modem attitude to time affected by
new physics, and, finally, mirrors the postmodem fragmentation of the
world and human experience.

l See Todd McGowan, Out oj Time: Desire in Atemporal Cinema (London,

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Charles Rarnirez Berg, "A
Taxonomy of Alternative Plots in Recent Films: Classifying the 'Tarantino
Effect"', Film Criticism, Vol. 31 Issue 1/2, 2006; James R. Walters, Alternative
Worlds in Hollywood Cinema. Resonance Between Realms (Chicago, Bristol:
lntellect Books, 2008); Allan Cameron, Modular Narratives in Contemporary
Cinema (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Warren Buckland
ed., Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema (Malden and
Oxford, Blackwell Publishing, 2009).
2 David Herman, Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities oj Narrative (University
ofNebraska Press, 2004), p. 212.
 252 Chapter S ixteen
This type of film is also a potent narrative structure to express thc
fragmentation of identity and life after the trauma. The variety of deviccs
mentioned above may be employed to represent the psychic symptom s of
trauma. The polyphonic films which deal with traumatic experience are
exemplified by such films as Adrian Lyne's Jacob ~ Ladder (1990), David
Lynch's Lost Highway (1997) and Mulholland Drive (2001), Chang-dong
Lee's Bakha satang (Peppermint Candy, 1999), Paul Thomas Anderson's
Magnolia (1999), Christopher Nolan's Memento (2000) and Inception
(2010), Tarsem Singh's The Celi (2000), Alejandro Gonzalez Ifiarritu's
Amores Perros (2000) and 21 Grams (2003), Cameron Crowe's Vanilla
Sky (2001), Atom Egoyan's Ararat (2002), Stephen Daldry's The Hours
(2002), Gaspar Noć's Irreversible (2002) and Enter the Void (2009), James
Mangold's ldentity (2003), Greg Marck's 11:14 (2003), Chan-wook Park's
Oldeuboi (Oldboy, 2003), Eric Bress's and 1. Mackye Gruber's ThL'
Butterjly Effect (2004), Brad Anderson's The Machinist (2004), Paul
Haggis's Crash (2005), Sarah Watt's Look Both Ways (2005), Darren
Aronofsky's The Fountain (2006), GuiIIermo dei Toro's El laberinto deI
fauno (Pan ~ Labyrinth, 2006), Julian Schnabel's Le scaphandre et 1('
papillon (The Dtving Bell and the Butterjly, 2007),3 Jaco Van Dormael's
Mr. Nobody (2009), Duncan Jones's Source Code (2011) and Tom
Tykwer's, Lana and Larry Wachowskis' Cloud Atlas (2012).
One of the subtypes of the polychronic film is a forking-path narrativc
which juxtaposes mutuaIly exclusive possibilities. The notion of the
multiplicity of universes has been present in many fields: in physics as
multiverse theory first proposed by Hugh Everett, in philosophy as
Leibniz's doctrine of monads, in computer technology as virtual reality, in
logic to analyse possibility, necessity, and other modal notions, in narrative
theory as possible worlds theory as weII as in art, film and literaturę" as
hyperreality, "a machine for producing possible worlds".' The first
forking-path narrative was D. R. Daniels's "The Branches of Time" in
which in 1935, twenty two years before Everett's many-worlds theory, he
3 For the discussion of temporality in the film see Sonia Front, "Trapped in thc
lnteriors - Julian Schnabel's The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly and Umberto Eco's
The Mysterious Flame oj Queen Loana" in Sonia Front, Katarzyna Nowak, eds.,
Interiors. InterioritylExteriority in Literary and Cultural Discourse (Newcastlc
upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 20 lO), pp. 99-106.
4 See Marie-Laura Ryan, "Frorn Parallei Universes to Possible Worlds: Ontological
Pluralism in Physics, Narratology and Narrative", Poetics Today 27:4 (winter
2006), p. 634.
5 Umberto Eco, The Role oj the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics oj Texts
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 246
Traumatic Bifurcation 253
employs quantum mechanics for a time travel plot." However, it is not
Daniels's short story that is usually mentioned as the first text iIIustrating
parallei time traeks, but more influential "The Garden of Forking Paths"
(1941) by Jorge Luis Borges. With this story Borges invented a hypertext
novel, but he also described a theory of the universe based upon the
structure of such anovel. The first films using this concept were short
Buston Keaton's films The Play House (1921) and Sherlock, Jr. (1924) and
Frank Capra's feature film lt ~ a Wonderful Life (1946).
Jaco van Dormael's Mr. Nobody employs Everett's theory of parallei
universes as a narrative framework. If we are to reject the physics, the
framework can be treated metaphorically as a what-if scenario, or a
counterfactual world, that is "a consciously virtual altemate version of the
worId constructed in a thought experiment"," The film refers to a variety
of concepts corrnected with time - apart from the multiverse theory, there
are also big bang, butterfly effect, entropy, string theory, immortality, the
Big Crunch, osciIlating in between physics, mathematics, theology,
astronomy and magical realism. The status of the events in the film is
unclear: they can be read as the enactrnent of parallei universes and/or
panoramie memory and/or the process of remembering and/or the figment
of imagination. In any case, the temporai orchestration' serves to reflect
the fragmentation of the protagonist's identity as a result of trauma, the
irreversibility of loss and the nature of temporai movement in psyche.
The film is a story ofNemo Nobody (Jaret Let09) who as a nine-year-
old boy is "faced with an impossible choice", forced to choose be twe en his
mother (Natasha Little) and father (Rhys Ifans) after the divorce. The
viewer is presented with alternative possibilities, conditioned by whether
Nemo stays with his mother or father; in Borges's words, "all the
outcomes in fact occur; each is the starting point for further
bifurcations"." The protagonist recounts his lives to a joumalist at the age
of 118 in the year of 2092 when the problem of eterna l life has been solved
6 Previous time travel stories, pioneered by H. G. Wells's The Time Machine
(1895), employ relativity theory as the underlying scientific framework. According
to quantum mechanies, however, travelling to the past leads to producing
alternative tirne-streams, which exposes attempts to change the past as futile.
7 Hilary P. Dannenberg, Coincidence and Counterfactuality. Plotting Time and
Space in Narrative Fiction (Lincoln and London, University of Nebraska Press,
2008), p. 53. Italics in original.
8 See Dannenberg, Coincidence and Counterfactuality, p. 50.
9 Jaret Leto plays adult Nemo, while Thomas Byrne is Nemo the boy and Toby
Regbo plays Nemo aged 15.
10 Jorge Luis Borges, "The Garden of Forking Paths", in Ficciones, trans. Helen
TempIe and Ruthven Todd (New York: Grove, 1962), p. 125.
 Traumatic Bifurcation 255
254 Chapter Sixteen

There have been quite a few films employing the forking-path conceit,
thanks to technology and medicine. In fact, Mr. Nobody is the last mortul
however, as Bordwell has observed, they mostly do not embody Borges's
who is determined to die of old age. His life can be watched non-stop on
idea of "an infinite series of times, a growing, dizzying web of divergent,
huge screens around the country.
convergent and parallel times. That fabric of times that approach one
In various trajectories Nemo chooses to be in a relationship with one ol
another, fork, are snipped off, or are simply unknown for centuries,
the three girls he meets in his childhood. Choosing one of the women
contain all possibilities".15 Bordwell characterises the films as limited by a
cJoses the possibility of being with the other one s in later stages of his life.
set of characters, locales and situations repeated in a11the parallei stories
e.g. even if he meets Anna (Diane Kruger) after Elise's (Sarah Polley)
because they do not fo11ow the rules of physics or philosophy but folk
death during one of the overlapping "touch points" ,II he does not start 1\
psychology to adjust to the limitations of people's cognitive processes. 16
relationship with her. This concJusiveness of the choice s he makes is
Bordwell has analysed some of the forking-path films and proposed seven
symbolised by the visual style of the film: each of the women has li
key conventions on which they depend. Mr. Nobody displays features
particular visual code connected with her narrative branch. Three girls
which do not accord with most of them, opening up new possibilities.
sitting on a bench are wearing dresses in di:fferent colours: Anne the red
While most films' bifurcating branches are linear and do not fork further,
dress, Elise the blue one and Jean the yellow one, and these colours
in Mr. Nabody they do fork further, "like a split hair",17 to use Deleuze's
become the dominant colour for each life respectiveIy. So for instance
phrase, and the linearity is local only - it is not possible to assign a
when Nemo chooses the girl in the red dress, red dominates in the mise-
sequence to a particular time-stream. Berg observes that the number of
en-scene while blue and yellow are omitted, and so on. The visual style
sub-narratives is limited in the paralleI plot films, never exceeding four" -
might also encode Nemo's unique way of remembering as, according to
this rule is broken in Mr. Nobody as we11.Furtherrnore, as opposed to other
the psychologist Douwe Draaisma, the rules ordering time relations among
films, in Mr. Nobody the forks are not marked by a 'reset' device at every
various memories are an individual matter and they have a specific mood
branch'"; forking paths do not intersect; the respective stories are not
and colour.f
integrated by traditional cohesion devices, such as appointrnents and
The special treatment of time and temporality makes the film an
deadlines; there are no replays of previous events; the future shown first
example of an art film, as cJassified by David Bordwell who takes into
does not provide any preconditions for later ones; the protagonist does not
account cinernatic style, fabula and sjuzet. Its characteristic features are
leam from his mistakes made in paralleI Iives?O Shreds of his other Iives
loose or no causaIity, story gaps, ambiguities, an unfixed ciosure or no
appear, however, in his dreams and phantom memories, and all memories
cJosure. I3 According to Berg's taxonomy of altemative plots where he
distinguishes twelve types, Mr. Nobody belongs to the category of ofhis parallel selves are available to old Nemo.
While in most forking-path films the last trajectory the viewer sees is
"Multiple Personality (Branched) Plot", together with for example Sliding
privileged as the 'real' one or the most possible one," in Mr. Nobody this
Doors (Peter Howitt, 1998), The Double Life oj Veronique (Krzysztof
is not the case. Yet, although the future(s) with Anna is not presented as
Kieslowski, 1991) or Melinda and Melinda (Woody Allen, 2005). One of
the last one in the film, it seems that the relationship with her is underlined
the variants of the type is characterised by multiple protagonists of the
here. The director devotes most of the branchings to Nemo's relationship
film being the same person or di:fferent versions of the same person, and
by their inhabiting the same or di:fferent space-time, or a different re ality
occupying the same space-time.!"
15Borges, "T he Garden ofForking Paths", p. 127.
16David Bordwell, "Film Futures", SubStance 97, vol. 31, no. 1,2002, p. 89-90.
\7 Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 49.
18 Berg, "A Taxonomy of Alternative Plots in Recent Films", p. 39.
II Phrase used by Berg, "A Taxonomy of Alternative Plots in Recent Films", p. 37.
\9 The return to the railways appears only in some ofthe circuits, and in the scene
12 Douwe Draaisma, Why Life Speeds Up As You Get O/der. How Memory Shapes
on the beach when Anna invites Nemo to swim with her the reset leads to various
Our Past, trans. Arnold and Erica Pomerans (Cambridge: Cambridge University
futures, depending on Nernc's answer, yet the whole thing takes only a few
Press, 2004), p. 218.
IJ David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of minutes within the film.
Wiseonsin Press, 1985), pp. 156-310. 20 See Bordwell, "Film Futures", pp. 92-100.
2\ Bordwell, "Film Futures", p. 100.
14 See Berg, "A Taxonomy of Alternative Plots in Recent Films", pp. 19-24.
 256 Chapter Sixteen
with her, devotes most of the narrative time to the beginning of their
relationship, then to the search for Anna when they are separated, whilst
the relationships with other women are shown mostly at their bleak time.
Furthermore, the fact that it is with Ałma that the relationship appears to
be happy, making it 'true love' privileges this narrative thread as well as
Nemo's saying her name as the last word on his deathbed. Still, similarly
to other fihns, also in Mr. Nobody "certa in components emerge as vivid
variants of one another?" (which is assumed by Everett's theory):
depressions, (car) accidents, death by water, water trauma. In al! Nemo's
parali el lives, he is afraid of water as a result of an incident of near-
drowning in his childhood. The water trauma repeats itself in the form of
the car accident which sends Nemo into a river and makes him die by
drowning. The film starts with this scene and then returns to it many a
time or just alludes to it by showing the protagonist under water in the
bathtub.
The multiplicity of temporaI dimensions situates Nemo outside of
chronometrie time. The train plays a pivotal role here as it marks the
moment when time erupts and breaks into two and then more circuits. The
railways iIlustrate here the parallei forked Iives of a protagonist, similarly
to su ch films as Sliding Doors, Blind Chance or Peppermint Candy. While
usually railways are a metaphor of fleeting life, unfułfilled wishes and lost
opportunities, here they become the articulation of all the possibilities,
taking place simultaneously. The railways, however, also stand for the
imposition of standardised time over a variety of locał times, and turning
time into a culturał construct. Mr. Nobody disrupts this rationalised time,
making the railways serve as a symbol of psychological time, multi-
layered time of consciousness, consistent with modern physics, rather than
time as a rational standard, according to which rigid social life is
organised. The railroad estabłishes a mode oftemporality oriented towards
the future, which Mary Ann Doane compares to cinema itself,
demonstrating "the inevitable nature of irreversibility't.P While the only
irreversible event in Mr. Nobody is the parents' divorce, the roads resulting
from the traumatic event are all taken. As 118-year-old Nemo explains to
an amazedjoumalist who asks which ofthe Iives is the right one, "Each of
these Iives is the right one. Every path is the right path".
Although he exists outside of temporality, time does not operate as a
release from the infinity of traumatic event. Time does not function as
healer but as the perpetuator of emotional wounds. Traumatic loss shapes
22 Bordwell, "Film Futures", p. 96.
23 Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence oj Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency,
the Archive (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 131.
Traumatic Bifurcation 257
Nemo's experience: his life is totally different when he stays with his
mother after the divorce from the one experienced by his Dopelganger
staying with his father on other quantum branches. Traumatic experience
is repeated in the form of memories and retrospections which impose
themselves on the psychic present." As a result, it seems that the memory
of the traumatic event moves with time. According to Jean-Marie Guyau,
the intensity of the trauma and the attention devoted to it are some of the
factors which influence the internaI optics of psychological time. He
compares focusing attention to the working of the binoculars: it brings the
event closer in nme."
The notion of multiverse makes the present abundant in possibilities,
yet, the elapse oftime exposes them as fruitless. Similarly to Gaspar Noe's
Irreversible (2002), in Mr. Nobody "all possibilities lead back to the loss
that constitutes the subject, and the film allows the spectator to see the
inescapability of this IOSS,,?6 In Nemo's parallei lives there are three
women, yet, a relationship in only one of the branches with one of the
women, Anna, is a happy one. Ali variations willi Elise are repeated
failures, which is heralded by her hysterical behaviour on the very first
night they meet and by the blue dress in a scene with three girls on the
bench, and consequent dominance ofbłue colour in the branches featuring
life with her (perhaps referring intertextually to Kieślowski's Blue (1993».
Trauma chases trauma: in one of the trajectories after Elise dies in a car
accident on the wedding day, Nemo lives grieving in his mausoleum-
house; in the trajectory where she does not die, she suffers from
depression constantly lying in bed and ery ing. In the variation with
another woman, Jean (Linh Dan Pham), Nemo is the one suffering from
depression, finally shot in a hotel room, There is also a ramification in
which he has an accident as a teenager and lies in a coma in hospital.
The film further destabilises the notion of time when after the Big
Crunch (the reversal of the metric expansion of space, that is intrinsic
expansion, and the ensuing recollapse of the universe) time becomes
inverted and the events run backwards. Jaco van Dormael renders the Big
Crunch by the momentary stasis and then the reversal of movements of
planets and clocks, people walking backwards, the vase getting unbroken,
and so on. Resorting to the natural clocks (planets) and artificial
chronometers as the only way to measure time and to situate events in time
becomes the expression of the helplessness in conceptualising time in the
face of the fact that - as physicists agree - there is no intrinsic, 'true',
24 Guyan after Draaisma, Why Life Speeds Up As You Get O/der, p. 205.
25 Draaisma, Why Life Speeds Up As You Get O/der, p. 205.
26 McGowan, Out of Time, p. 230.
 Traurnatle Bifurcation 259
258 Chapter Sixteen

snapshots of other times and snapshots of other universes".29 The

absolute, underlying time against which physical processes could be
multiverse is "a complex, multi-dimensional jigsaw-puzzle".30 This leads
measured. Asking the question about the events before the Big Bang or
to the definition of quantum time, formulated in 1983 by Don Page and
after the Big Crunch points to being trapped in the conceptualization of
William Wooters: "Other times are just special cases of other universes'Y'
time as the f1ow; in fact if time does not f1ow/move, it cannot start up or Mr. Nabody pictures this indistinguishability between the slices of various
stop.
universes, putting the slices in a jumbled order so that it becomes
In Mr. Nabody the Big Crunch might be interpreted figuratively as
impossible to assign them to a particular timeline of the protagonist's
Nemo's desire to undo the past. In fact, it is impossible to say whether the
lives. Deutsch explains that "The snapshots which we cal! 'other times in
inverted version is before or after the other one since a few backward
our universe' are distinguished from 'other universes' only from our
sequences are intercepted throughout the film (e.g. Nemo retraces his
perspective, and only in that they are especially closely related to ours by
steps, the clock runs backwards, tarmac is being folded back). After the
the laws of physics".32 There are many identical snapshots in the
Big Crunch the question, "Why do we remem ber the past, and not the
multiverse, and when we mean a certain num ber of universes, we mean a
future?" assumes a new dimension. By moving backward in time the film
proportion of the total number of universes in the multiverse. While in
resists the forward movement of traditional narrative, but again, "the
spacetime physics any snapshot is determined by any other snapshot, in
reverse chronology of the film as a whole transforms cinematic
quantum physics only "in some regions of the multiverse, and in some
spectatorship into a confrontation with a repeated traumatic failure rather
places in space, the snapshots of som e physical objects do fali, for a period
than a submission to a progressive movement toward wholeness"."
into chains, each of whose members determines all the others to a good
If the temporality in MI~Nabody does not offer a gateway from trauma,
approximation". In these cases (e.g. subsequent snapshots of the solar
the Big Crunch constitutes at least a respite from all the limitations of
system) the multiverse can be described as a col!ection of spacetimes and
human condition, such as ageing and deatb. The concept of cIosure is
c1assical laws of physics hold approximately, togetber with the c1assical
revealed as an empty dramatic construct then. Instead, the notion of fugal
concept of time as a sequence of moments, leading to the possibility of
time, described by Allan Rodway in The Truths oj Fiction can be applied
differentiating approximately between different universes and different
here. Fugal time refers to "time tbat can be treated Iike space and shifted
times.33 Accordingly, it is possible to arrange some of the events in the
about kaleidoscopically''." The film constitutes a kind of a jigsaw puzzle film into sequences, being aided by their cause-effect relationship and tbe
whose elements can be rearranged with no possibility to construct the
visual style of the film, stil!, these are local coherences only.
whole picture, frustrating thus the viewer's desire for causal-linear clarity.

Cinematic time
Quantum time
The film enacts analogy between psychological time and cinematic
Fugal time and fuzzy temporality enacted in the film rmmrc the
time. The scenes of drowning are filmed in slow motion. This stretching of
conceptualization of time in the multiverse, tbat is in the totality of the
cinematic time ref1ects the stretching of psychological time at the moment
infinite number ofparallel universes comprising everything that exists. On
of traumatic experiencer" as discovered by Albert Heim. Because the film
the basis of multiverse theory the physicist David Deutsch elucidates the
starts with the drowning scene, what fol!ows can be treated as a depiction
notion of quantum time. It is impossible to establish the common 'now' for
of the phenomenon in psychology called "panoramie memory", in the
all the parallei universes within the multiverse because there is no extemal
(to multiverse) framework in reference to which we would estimate this
'now'. In consequence, there is "no fundamental demarcation between 29 David Deutsch, The Fabric oj Reality (London: The Penguin Press, 1997),
p.278.
30 Deutsch, The Fabric oj Reality, p. 285.

31 After Deutsch, The Fabric of Reaiity, p. 278.

27 McGowan, Out oj Time, p. 197. McGowan refers these words to the film
32 Deutsch, The Fabric oj Reality, p. 278.
Peppermint Candy.
33 Deutsch, The Fabric oj Reality, pp. 278-285.
28 Allan Rodway, The Truths oj Fiction (London: Chatto and Windus, 1970),
34 See Draaisma, Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older, pp. 248-249.
p.126.

260 Chapter Sixteen
course of which the past life unfolds in front of one 's eyes as if it were a
film. The phenomenon occurs only in a life-threatening situation which
takes place unexpectedly." Psychology has noted most cases ofpanoramic
memory during drowning, car accidents and falling" The acceleration of
the course ofthoughts, the sense ofpeace, panorami c memory and slowing
down of the perception of time have been exposed as a copying
mechanism with too strong psychic stimuli. It can be explained by means
ofFreud's notion of"stimulus barrier"."
At the same time the events are presented as a process of remem bering.
The old Nemo suffers from amnesia, perhaps as the mind's defense against
the detrimental effect of memories. They return under the hypnosis.
According to the psychological rules of memory retrieval, it is the oldest
memories that return first, which, as Ribot has proposed, results from the
fact that older memories are repeated more often and therefore are
intertwined more strongly with other memories." Therefore, at the
beginning of hypnosis, Nemo is at once catapulted to the railway station
where he is to choose one of his parents. The protagonist is thus once
again plunged into the trauma in its endless cyc1e ofrepetition.
Apart from the events in the film being the enactrnent of parallei
universes and/or panorami c memory and/or the process of remembering
(including memory of the future), they can also be treated as figments of
imagination. l18-year-old Nemo invalidates the events, saying to the
journalist: "You don't exist. Neither do L We only live in the imagination
of a nine-year-old chiid ... faced with an impossible choice". Even so, we
as viewers witness all the forking lives on the screen, which becomes the
embodiment of the power of cinema: to present somebody's figments of
imagination in the form of hyperreality. Cinema also offers the freedom of
not choosing but trying out all the possibilities instead. After dec1aring the
boy to be the Architect and the presented stories as the only present in his
imagination, the mise-en-scenę falls apart in front of the journalist and
Nemo. Knowing what will happen, the boy cannot make a choice and
instead he walks in the third direction, away from the train, creating thus
still another time-stream whose contents we do not see.
The protagonist functions thus in the state of open existence, yet it
occurs also when he decides to remain in the state of suspension. He
comments, "In chess it's called Zugzwag when the only viable move is not
to move". He thereby seems to be in the position which Edward Branigan
35 Draaisma, Why Life Speeds Up As You Get O/der, p. 259.
36 Draaisma, Why Life Speeds Up As You Get O/der, p. 259.
37 After Draaisma, Why Life Speeds Up As You Get O/der, p. 252.
38 Draaisma, Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older, p. 234.
Traumatic Bifurcation 261
calls "the indefinable presence of a being-without-yet-possessing-thing-
ness, that is ... an 'in-between-existence', or inexistence, without being
encumbered by a fixed identity, body, or gender"."
Who are l?
The protagonist's state of open existence is also the consequence of the
fact that old Nemo has access to all memories of his parallei sełves, which
constitutes a violation of multiverse theory, often taking płace in film and
literature. Locke and his followers consider memory as a prerequisite for
the continuity of identity. Nemo's epistemic access to his paralleJ lives
complicates the rełation of memory to identity in the film, putting forward
the alternative notion of consciousness through time. Theories of identity
which coułd be utilized in possible wor/ds, such as David Lewis's
counterpart theory or its rivał, transworld identificarion.l'' cannot be used
here as they assume that the counterparts (or "versions", "copies",
"duplicates") of individuałs never have epistemic access to each other's
łives. Nor can the discussion on one of the cases of transworld identity, the
concept of fission," where an individual bifurcates (in a thought
experiment, as a resułt of brain transpłant or dupłication) from a common
temporai segment into two individuals numerically different (whiłe in
mułtiverse it woułd be into two or more one s) but qualitatively identical to
,
each other and to the pre-fission individual. Again, after fission the copies
do not have access to the other copies' world-lines.
As consciousness of all Nemo's counterparts at the end of his life gets
merged under one body (while before the character has inhabited many
identical bodies, which is underlined by the same actors acting in various
parallei stories), his identity becomes the manifestation of Goethe's
holistic notion of "multiplicity in unity", that is "One in the form of many
39 Edward Branigan, "Nearly True: Forking Plots, Forking lnterpretations.
A Response to David Bordwell's 'Film Futures"', SubStance, vol. 31, no. 1,2002,
p.l09.
40 See David Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986); David
Lewis, "Counterpart Theory and Quantified Modal Logic", The Journal oj
Philosophy, vol. LXV, no. 5 (1968), pp. 113-126; Penelope Mackie, "Transworld
Identity", The Stanford Encyclopedia oj Philosophy (Fal! 2008 Edition), Edward
N. Zalta ed., http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fa1l2008/entries/identity-trans
world/.
41 The term coined by W.H. Newton-Smith, see his The Structure of Time (London,
Boston and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980).

262 Chapter Sixteen
and many which are One",42 where each ofthe many is the very same One.
An example of a fuchsia plant can be useful to clarify this: when divided
into many parts, they grow until they flower, generating "multiplicity in
unity", the unity of wholeness." Similarly, Nemo's many world-lines
constitute One; he is both each of the incarnations separately and all of
them. The whole is treated as the sum of its parts since all the parts are
dependent on the whole. This dynamie structure of "multiplicity in unity"
can be described as "becoming other in order to remain itself"."
The notion of personal identity in Mr. Nabody violates thus both
physical (spatio-temporal) or psychological criteria for personal identity
(although there is no unanimity among philosophers about them).
Reflecting holistic approach, personal identity in the film is congruent
with Danah Zohar's conceptualization of the quantum self, that is the self
interpreted through the lens of quantum mechanies, which embraces a
volatile and fuzzy entity whose internal and external boundaries are in a
constant flux. While Western culture has stressed the particie aspect of
mind, holism underlines the wave aspect of experience and the relatedness
of every aspect of reality to everything else." Zohar elucidates:
Things and events once conceived of as separate, parted in both space and
time, are seen by the quantum theorists as so integrally Iinked that their
bonds mocks the reality of both space and time. They behave, instead, as
multipłe aspects of some łarger whołe, their 'individuał' existences
deriving both their definition and their meaning from that whołe. The new
quantum mechanical notion of rełationship follows as a direct consequence
of the wave/particłe duałism and the tendency of a 'matter wave' (or
'probabiłity wave') to behave as though it were smeared out all over space
and time. For if all potentiał 'things' stretch out infiniteły in all directions,
how does one speak of any distance between them, or conceive of any
separateness? Ali things and all moments touch each other at every point.
The oneness ofthe overałl system is paramount."
A person is
42 Henri Bortoft, The Wholeness 0/ Nature. Goethe s Way 0/ Science (New York:
Fłoris Books, 1996), p. 255.
43 Bortoft, The Wholeness of Nature, p. 256.
44 After Bortoft, The Wholeness of Nature, p. 357.
45 Danah Zohar in collaboration with I.N. Marshall, The Quantum Self. Human
Nature and Consciousness Defined by the New Physics (New York: William
Morrow and Company, Inc., 1990), pp. 72-73.
46 Zohar, The Quantum Selj, p. 34.
View publication stats
Traumatic Bifurcation 263
a 'point source' in space and time (our particie aspect) and at the same time
a compłex pattern woven from our com ingI ing with others (our wave
aspect). We, too, are patterns of active energy, patterns arising from within
oursełves (our genetic codes, the structures of our bodies, our senses and
all our experiences) and from beyond oursełves (the structures and
experiences of others, many of who m have lived before us and others who
will łive after). For each of us, there is no elear way to say where that
pattern begins or ends."
For Zohar, an intimate relationship with another person involves
affecting each other and partial overlapping of each other, as a result of
which a new whole comes into being, which is more than the sum of its
parts (relational holism)."
The rejection ofthe existence of the isolated self entails the rejection of
the concept of the self as "a link in the chain of process", resulting from
Newtonian concept of time as a series of moments. In Zohar's
conceptualization, each self is literally interwoven into other selves
instead, and they are not really separated spatio-temporally. Although we
are individuals, our individuality is to be understood in terms of belonging
to "a greater unity, a unity that defines each of us in terms of others and
gives each of us a stake in eternity". 49 Identity in the quantum world is
thereby identity smeared out in space and time, extended in time. To ask a
question about personal identity in the multiverse is somewhat pointless
when we take into account Zohśr's notion of quantum identity. Nemo's
identity is not only spread over time in the form of many selves but it is
also interwoven into other people's selves, particularly his parents and his
partner(s).
Also when we consider the concept of time in multiverse, for the
question to be meaningful, as David Deutsch argues, there must be an
external frame of reference outside the multiverse, yet, this externa1 frame
does not exist because multiverse is all that is, Because all of the copies of
an individual ask the same question, "which one am I?" Deutsch maintains
that the only answer that can be given is the same one to all the copies, and
that is the answer "I am, of course, all of thern". 50The subject constitutes
thus a sum of all the counterparts in parallel universes, becoming a kind of
a multi-subject in multiverse.
The status of the presented story is ambiguous then - first Nemo
suffers from memory loss and only under hypnosis do the bits and pieces
47 Zohar, The Quantum Selj, p. 150.
48 Zohar, The Quantum Selj, p. 113.
49 Zohar, The Quantum Selj, p. 151.
50 Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality, p. 279.