Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real? What if you were unable to wake from that dream? How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world?
Morpheus, The Matrix (1999)
What are the things that define you as a person?
Are you the memories of your past actions, the choices that you’ve made along the way?
But what if you for some reason don’t have access to your memories? Are you still the same person that you were before? Are you still a person?
Those are some of the questions posed upon the viewers by Lost in Time, a film by director Henry Colin starring Alexa Morden and Holly Stevens.
[Mild Spoilers Ahead]
Leda (Alexa) lives all by herself in a beautiful house by the sea. As she contentedly engages in the cozy pleasantries of the Holiday season (wrapping presents, playing with a snow globe, drinking hot cocoa with marshmallows) she awaits the visit of Jane (Holly), an old friend of hers.
Jane arrives with a gift for Leda, wrapped in blue paper—a Sci-Fi book.
“Is it postmodernist?” asks Leda tentatively while flipping through the pages of the red-covered book. By now the viewer might be asking the same question about the movie itself. Rather than ‘postmodernist’, the best adjective for Lost in Time would be ‘posthumanist’: the script (written by Colin and our friend Paul Kimball) is based on the 2006 stage play Doing Time, which Paul co-wrote with the late author Mac Tonnies (1975-2009).
Mac, whose old blog’s name was Posthuman Blues (remember Jane’s gift?) and is still online, was interested in many heady topics such as extraterrestrial contact, the colonization of Mars, and Transhumanism—the possible future merger of human consciousness with artificial intelligence that many Silicon Valley pioneers have been promulgating for decades.
Lost in Time is, hence, a Sci-Fi movie; though one deprived of any flashy visual effects, which in this day and age feels as ballsy as a standup comedian performing onstage without dropping any f-bombs. Any lack of CGI candy is compensated with fine acting by the two protagonists, and deep philosophical ponderings which remain the backbone of any memorable movies like The Matrix, or even Groundhog Day, which seem to be inspiration for Colin’s film.
But perhaps a bigger inspiration for Lost in Time is to be found in French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre’s No Exit, an existentialist play in which three characters are sent to Hell for their sins. Rather than fiery pits and red demons carrying pitchforks, the eternal torment of Sartre’s characters is realized by the fact that they are trapped in a small room, where they can’t escape from the judgment of their companions—or their own. Thus, they all become each other’s tormentors.
Lost in Time plays with a similar setting, but throws in two big posthuman wrenches: Leda doesn’t seem to have any memories of her previous life, hence how can one torment oneself for things you can’t even remember to have committed? And the second one is that Jane, the friend, seems incapable of casting any judgment on Leda. She shows concern for her wellbeing, without projecting any real empathy, which makes Leda question if she’s altogether human.
The only thing Leda can be certain about, is that Jane is holding things from her. But is that done out of malice, punishment, or is there an ulterior motive behind it that escapes her comprehension?
Lost in Time juggles with deep existentialist conundrums: how can you be certain of who you are, where you are—or even when you are—if you are trapped in an evidential void, with only a trickle of information you cannot independently verify, from a source you can’t fully trust because you are not privy to their ulterior motives. In an age in which AI algorithms are beginning to flood the internet with slop that is slowly eroding the foundations of our consensual reality, Mac would have probably been both flattered and deeply disturbed, by how prescient his writing has become less than twenty years later.
Colin also makes smart use of different symbolism throughout the movie: there’s for example the initial Holiday setting, perhaps the one time of the year in which we are keenly aware of the passage of time; how cruel an irony it would be then, to be stuck on that same timeframe indefinitely— “always Winter, but never Christmas” as poor Mr. Tumnus laments in C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
There are also three colors that at key moments dominate the scenes to highlight Leda’s ordeal—Red for Intrusion, Yellow for Confrontation, and Purple for Reconciliation and Resolution.
Mac and Paul had already inserted plenty of symbolism within the original play, starting with Leda’s name. In Greek mythology, the god Zeus falls in love with a beautiful mortal woman, Leda, and seduces her while transformed into a white swan. No doubt Mac found great interest in this story, and perhaps even saw inklings of alien abduction and ‘’screen memories’ embedded in it. Remembering the scene of Leda happily wrapping presents in that winter scenario that may or may not be real—especially since the house, lovely as it may seem, is devoid of any pictures or family photos— one wonders: is she herself meant to be a gift for someone… or something else?
There is one picture in Leda’s make-believe house, which is also charged with heavy symbolism: A photo of the sea and the waves crashing down on the rocks. Humans have what seems to be a universal attraction toward the sea and the mesmeric nature of waves rolling back and forth; a rhythmic chaos following a pattern set forth eons ago, which will continue on long after we cease to exist. If the dream of the transhumanists come to pass, and post-humans colonize other worlds, will our descendants hold the same fascination with the Earth’s seas, even if it becomes but a distant memory of our species, the same way modern babies instinctively react with fear when presented with representations of snakes, an ancestral relic of our tree-dwelling beginnings?
There is a song, by the Mexican group Café Tacvba, called Olita del Altamar (Little Wave from the High Sea) that I love. It speaks of how we, ourselves, are nothing but waves on an ocean, that gain motion and shape for only a limited amount of time. And once it crashes down the wave ceases to exist, yet its essence is not lost; for it returns to that immensity from whence it came.
Amid a sea of uncertainty, where we no longer know what’s real or unreal anymore, that is still the best metaphor for Consciousness and the Afterlife I can think of.
I do not know if Mac Tonnies would have shared my love for that song. I independently asked two of his close friends, Paul Kimball, and Mike Clelland—was Mac an atheist? Neither of them could answer that question with any certainty; they both replied that, at best, Mac was an agnostic.
We thus don’t know if Mac had any spiritual beliefs about survival of consciousness after physical death, even after dismissing the shallow answers provided by mainstream religions. Most transhumanists are hardcore materialists, hence the wealthiest among them engage in a frantic search to seek immortality through technological means; even if it’s just a limited, fragmentary one in which their mind and memories are ‘uploaded’ into a digital world. Will they be the lucky ones who escape entropy, Will they be the lucky ones who escape entropy, or will they find themselves trapped forever like the fake snow particles in Leda’s snow globe?
If anything, after watching Lost in Time, I get the impression that Mac remained a cautiously optimistic transhumanist. He didn’t seem to have envisioned AI as an inherently menacing force threatening to enslave and torture humanity, but a potential ally to help us endure the challenges ahead: crossing the vast voids of interstellar space, where they may be other forms of intelligence expecting us.
Whatever—and whenever— is out there, beautiful films like Lost in Time are there to remind us that in the here and now, Heaven and Hell remain ours for the making.
Lost in Time, directed by Henry Colin, was produced by Paul Kimball and Ron Foley McDonald. The film has already been shown at the Athens International Monthly Film Festival, and the New Jersey Film Awards. Hopefully it will soon gain international distribution.
