The last few years have seen the concept of the multiverse move from the realm of esoteric theoretical physics, a conversational topic of almost complete abstraction among vitamin D-deprived professors who spend their lives dirtying blackboards trying to square the implications of quantum theory with the circle that is our reality, to the world of popular culture and the blockbuster movie. The conversational topic now of equally sunlight-shy superhero film fans and those who seriously debate the relative merits of the Oscar nominations.
The superhero world
Marvel has grown from its lowly origins as reading material for underdeveloped adult children and low-budget television content (Lou Ferrigno’s Incredible Hulk, once seen, is unforgettable) to become the mafioso figure of the film industry. The movie world is the superhero world now. After all, this is a market-driven economy: what makes money is what you get. Or, rather, what you want. The families of Marvel and DC, run by dons at Disney and Warner Bros, feud and fight for market dominance like the families of Mario Puzzo’s Godfather, making irrefusable offers to ‘smaller’ players like Sony and Universal who get in their way.
The sprawling nature of the source material and the innate exigency of the genre to endlessly churn out variations on the same theme (what Orwell saw as “fantasies of power, and… magic and sadism”), has led to the creation of a cinematic multiverse to accommodate all the characters, storylines and abortive attempts previously condemned to history. Inventive? Maybe. Intellectually lazy money-grab in the age of artificial intelligence, striking writers and neoliberal austerity? More likely.
Not only is the multiverse here to save Marvel’s seemingly terminal decline (DC was never a very healthy child to begin with) but the industry itself. Your feeling that there is almost nothing worth the once nostalgic and semi-ironic but now utterly odious trip to the sticky floors and ten pound-popcorn buckets of the cinema is completely right. Figures in the movie business are down on every metric as we are fed flop after flop, remake after remake. And while this decline has existed since the apogee of cinema-going in 1946, suggesting a diversification of services is much to blame, a decline in quality must be admitted, too.
Long gone are the days of the good bad film. Now they’re just bad bad. Gone, too, are the days of Kubrick and Coppola the Elder, or when Ridley Scott could make a decent film. (The thought occurs that we may now occupy a parallel universe in which Scott makes films like Gladiator 2, itself an ironic caricature of the state of modern cinema.) Now we have Deadpool and his ‘fresh’, self-aware take on the multiverse. Marketed as ‘Marvel Jesus’, apparently not a reference to the dire state of the company, it could be argued that he’s actually ‘Box Office Jesus’ instead. But whatever the artistic merits of modern cinema, or the intellectual merits of resurrecting and repackaging dead franchises, it is interesting to note just how quickly and easily new and often universe-shattering concepts of science can be absorbed into the culture of the mainstream.
The many worlds of the superhero universe is just one example of a trend that is seemingly only going to continue. The co-creator of the Avengers Mulitiverse himself, Joe Russo, even warned against the dangers of an ‘oversaturated market’ as recently as 2022, referring to the multiverse idea. (Nobody listened, clearly. Not even Joe Russo.) Just take last year’s Best Picture winner, Everything Everywhere All At Once. So readily accepted was a concept that deeply offended Einstein (God doesn’t play dice and all that) and puzzled some of the greatest minds ever to exist, from Heisenberg to Pauli, that it formed the basis of a mediocre Oscar-winning (now essentially a tautology) film about love, loss and identity. While Christopher Nolan used as accurately as possible the predictions of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity as the basis of his film Interstellar, which made it no more science-fiction than, say, films like The Martian or Gravity, but rather more like fiction-with-science-in-it.
Art, science, and truth
Contrary to the modern view of science and art as representing mutually exclusive modes of human thinking – a result, perhaps, of the increasing atomisation of the educational system in the postwar world, encapsulated, albeit slightly reductively, by C. P. Snow in his 1959 essay The Two Cultures – both are fundamentally concerned with the same thing: truth. The difference lies in the method. The one invigorates and inflames the other; and the mutual synthesis of science and art is the history of Western culture at least since Plato wrote that “the tragic poet is an imitator, and therefore, like all other imitators, he is thrice removed from… truth”.
But art is only imitation in the same way that empiricism is an imitation of the real thing: this alone says nothing about its truth value. As Nabokov said of Tolstoy: “Whether painting or preaching, Tolstoy was striving, in spite of all obstacles, to get at the truth. As the author of Anna Karenin, he used one method of discovering truth; in his sermons, he used another; but somehow, no matter how subtle his art was and no matter how dull some of his other attitudes were, truth which he was ponderously groping for or magically finding just around the corner, was always the same truth — this truth was he and this he was an art.” So, you may ask, where is the truth in the Marvel Universe? What are the executives at DC “ponderously groping for”, if anything?
It is with the renaissance that science and art were combined into the mutually reinforcing union which would lead to the Enlightenment. Inspired by what Marie Boas Hall calls the “Scientific Renaissance” – the advances in astronomy, physics, mathematics, engineering and human anatomy – artists turned their attention from the external world of God and the gods to the internal forces driving man and nature, from the mechanical aspects of motion to its more organic features, and from the external appearance of the face and body to people’s inner qualities. The great artist and inventor Leonardo Da Vinci, whom the historian Herbert Butterfield referred to as “the scientist doomed to be like a fish out of water… stranded in the pre-scientific age”, opened his Treatise on Painting with the words “Let no one who is not a mathematician read my work”.
And with the Enlightenment, philosophy and science stripped away the authority of revealed religion, and though mysteries certainly remained, it was assumed that the surest route to their explanation was through the empiricism of Bacon and the reason of Descartes. This new ‘mechanical philosophy
reached its apotheosis with Newton, whose universal laws represent perhaps the greatest single intellectual leap in history. With the publication of his Principia the curtain was pulled back, and the mysteries of the universe were reduced to a trick, such that Alexander Pope would even quip that,
“Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night: God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.”
And if Newton’s work was the culmination of Enlightenment thought in natural philosophy (what we now call science), the novel represents the equivalent in the arts. In his book Rise of the Novel Ian Watt argues that, “the novel is the form of literature which most fully reflects [the] individualist and innovating reorientation” begun by Descartes in his Discourse on Method. It is the logical literary vehicle of a culture which, in the last few centuries, has set an unprecedented value on originality.’ In Robinson Crusoe and his “total subordination of the plot to the pattern of the autobiographical memoir”, writes Watt, Defoe asserted an epistemological statement “as defiant an assertion of the primacy of individual experience in the novel as Descartes’s cogito ergo sum was in philosophy.”
The symbiosis of Enlightenment science and art is encapsulated by Descartes’ conclusion, or realisation, in his Meditations that the only difference between man and the divine is the degree of complexity: “Art imitates nature and since humans are capable of fabricating various automata in which there is motion without cogitation, it seems reasonable that nature should produce her own automata, far more perfect in their workmanship, to wit, all the brutes.” Not only did this philosophical reorientation emphasise the position of the individual in the vast emptiness of the cosmos, but it also made clear (or less clear, depending on how you look at it) the distinction between human and automata.
Thus the steady demise of divine authority and the concurrent rise in human control of the material universe begun by Galileo, progresses through Descarte, Hume and Kant into the archetypal
God-complex in Dr. Frankenstein and continues to evolve into the commodified replicants of Blade Runner and those outdated models resigned to the trash pile in Spielberg’s Artificial Intelligence. The theme progresses with science from Man-is-God to Man-creates-God. Take the vengeful Old Testament-style God AI of The Terminator, or the more desitic lower-case G god of, say, Prometheus’s David. Or in the real world, read the fearful column inches reacting to the simultaneously incredible and slightly banal tricks of ChatGPT, just as the citizens of Oz reacted to the seemingly divine theatricalities of the Wizard.
Understanding the universe
But the continued empirical success of science came at the cost of the earlier aim of philosophers to actually understand the universe. Thus in Physics and Philosophy, his brief exegesis of the new physics of relativity and quantum mechanics, Werner Heisenberg wrote that in the 19th century our conception of natural science as a system of knowledge was so rigid that it found it “difficult to find a place for many concepts of our language that always belonged to its very substance, for instance, the concepts of mind, the human soul or of life”. By the beginning of the 20th century, science had sterilised the soul, and the truth-seeking union was broken: “Why preyest thou upon the poet’s heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities”, wrote Poe in his sonnet To Science, not 100 years after Pope’s dedication to Newton.
The human yearning for spiritual fulfilment was provided by the novelists of F.R. Leavis’s ‘Great Tradition’, the Romantics, the impressionists, who all sought new ways to find meaning in a universe that, seemingly, had none. Silas Marner rediscovers his faith not through the church but by chance through human connection; Dickens’ London is one of unbounded technological and industrial progress, of those same ‘marks of weakness, marks of woe’ Blake observed, where the divine is still to be found in the random human encounters, and human sacrifices are made not by Gods but by men like Sydney Carton. “God is dead,” wrote Nietsche, but the artist tried his very best to reanimate the corpse.
Explaining the universe
The dual-scientific revolution of the early 20th century saw the foundations of 2000 years of philosophy and science completely uprooted. The lasting influence of Einstein’s Relativity and quantum mechanics has been to throw away all notions of intuition as a basis for explaining… well, anything. For example, Claudia de Rham’s recent book The Beauty of Falling details how, despite our many empirical successes in the field of gravity – the detection of gravitational waves, the observation of black holes – our understanding of the force is no further forward than when Newton himself was confused by its very nature. His Principia explained the motions of the planets and, in essence, everything in the universe; yet he admitted “that gravity should be innate and essential to matter, so that one body may act upon another at a distance, through a vacuum, without the mediation of anything else… is to me so great an absurdity, that I believe no man who has a competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it”. And the great mystery of modern science is how two mutually incompatible models – quantum mechanics and general relativity – both explain the universe (at different scales) with incredible empirical precision. Or take linguistics: ChatGPT can replicate human language production like nothing else, but it works completely differently to our brains, it seems. If a human were to learn a language in the same way as models like ChatGPT – by sorting through enormous amounts of random data and looking for probabilistic solutions – it would take about 900 years; yet all children with no training or guidance will learn at least one language by the age of five just by being exposed to a fraction of the amount of data. That is to say, despite the fantastic successes of modern science, it cannot explain very much about the universe we occupy (in fact, 95% of the universe is either dark matter or energy: a complete mystery) or the magnificent lumps of fat that allow us to question it.
The result of this is The Multiverse of Madness and Interstellar. That is, using scientific concepts merely as a plot device rather than as another tool for getting at the truth. This is the age of the advert after all, the democracy of the consumer, where even the poorest can participate in some way. If science can’t offer an explanation, or even a hint of guidance about our place in the universe anymore (other than a shrug of the shoulders and a casual ‘you’re on your own’) what else is there to do?
Package it up and sell it, of course. One is reminded of the scene in Annie Hall, in which the young Allen says to his mother, ‘well, the universe is everything, and if it’s expanding, some day it will break apart and that would be the end of everything!’ The reply could easily be made by the movie execs to the thoughtful writer of this age: ‘What is that your business?’ But let’s hope that when science inevitably slices the Gordian Knot that is the relativistic quantum universe we are both alive and blessed with creative minds ready to take full advantage of its deeper implications. Until then, let’s hope Christopher Nolan’s next film isn’t too ridiculous.
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