Bliss Is the Worst Kind of Open-Ended Sci-Fi Movie

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Bliss Is the Worst Kind of Open-Ended Sci-Fi Movie

The director Mike Cahill loves ambiguity—and he used to be good at it.

 

Owen Wilson plays Greg, a nobody with a nothing office job who spends his days dreaming about other earths, other lives. Then a witch lady named Isabel (Selma Hayek, unrestrained) shows up, claiming to have powers over reality. PHOTOGRAPH: HILARY BRONWYN GAYLE/AMAZON STUDIOS

 

DOES MIKE CAHILL feel seen? The 41-year-old writer-director of science fiction has now made three films, each higher-profile than the last, about ways of seeing. This is literalized most literally in the second of these efforts, I Origins, which is also, not unrelatedly, the worst titled. Released in 2014, it’s about vision scientists searching for the origin of the human eye—look, a pun—which, if you didn’t know, is “the window,” as one character literally says, “to the soul.” They find it in the genes of a sightless worm, but not before Karen, played by Brit Marling, warns her lab partner that she, at least, has no interest in getting famous, in being seen: “Recognition makes me nauseous,” she says.

 

Recognition, for Cahill, has meant two things: more money and less Marling. She both starred in and cowrote Cahill’s first sci-fi, Another Earth, which came out in 2011 and was reportedly made for a scant 100 thou. I Origins cost 10 times as much, and Marling only acted in it. In Cahill’s latest film, Bliss, budget unknown but starring Owen Wilson and Salma Hayek and out now on Amazon Prime, she’s nowhere to be found. (In more recent years, you may have seen Marling in the Netflix show The OA, her baby.) Not saying she’s his inspiration, but the money/Marling tradeoff seems to have muddied Cahill’s cinematic vision.

 

Another Earth was the best kind of sci-fi-on-a-shoestring, conceptual but contained. Of the Cahill trilogy, it’s also, not unrelatedly, the best titled. All sci-fi is the metaphorical made literal, but so much of the time, it’s blown out of proportion. (Or it just blows up, in space, in the last act.) Here, the scale is human. One night, Marling’s character, Rhonda, gets drunk at a college party and decides to drive home. On the way, something appears, out of the blue, in the sky. It’s a planet, seemingly identical to our own. As she looks up at it, she slams into another car, extinguishing two lives in an instant. Thus the question raised by the title: Is there another world in which that didn’t happen? One in which Rhonda didn’t just ruin her life? The film hints at an answer but doesn’t commit, going out instead on a startling gasp of possibility.

 

This was to become Cahill’s signature—ambiguity as the answer to his oversized ambitions. He’s hopelessly committed, like all creators of science fiction, to investigating the wonders and woes of existence, the whos and huhs and whys. For this, he can’t be faulted. Most mainstream cinema doesn’t ask questions half as challenging. But Another Earth worked because the ambiguity wasn’t absolute. The viewer detects, thanks to Cahill and Marling’s gentle guiding hands, a way to see a possible solution. Even I Origins, despite its visual literalities and condescendingly slo-mo, burst-of-sunlight ending, manages to enrich and complicate the old seeing-is-believing cliché. Then Cahill made Bliss, which no amount of seeing will make you believe.

 

Wilson plays Greg, a nobody with a nothing office job who spends his days dreaming about other earths, other lives. Then a witch lady named Isabel (Hayek, unrestrained) shows up, claiming to have powers over reality. Which isn’t actually reality, she tells him, but a computer simulation, and Greg can see that for himself, if he just takes these sparkly crystal pills. In other words—you’ve been here before. You Greg, but also you the viewer, who remembers this from The Matrix. Look, the Wachowskis don’t have a monopoly on simulation theory. Thirteenth Floor, eXistenZ, the new documentary A Glitch in the Matrix—there’s a lot of room in the virtual sandbox. But in a red pill/blue pill world, Cahill’s pharmaceutically mediated reality reads as, well, a second-rate simulation of the real thing.

 

That’s the problem with Bliss, as it stagnates like tepid water around a clogged drain: It doesn’t go anywhere new. It also doesn’t have much to say—about The Matrix, about simulation theory, about anything. The main question of the film is whether Isabel is a homeless junkie or a liberated truthteller. “They’re not real,” she screams at Greg, pointing like a crazy person at strangers in the street. He wavers, he accepts, he rejects. He is us, never sure what to believe, a haziness made all the less effective by Cahill’s camera, lingering on literal signs and symbols. A billboard. The name of a bar. Another billboard. Yes, those things are easy to see. But the point of this film is not.

 

Bliss “works best,” Cahill said in a recent interview, “if there’s a bistability of interpretations.” It’s a fancy, physics-inflected way of saying: I’ve made a movie that rewards two competing views of it. They each, being bistable, work equally well. Absolute ambiguity, achieved. Though this might strike Cahill as a worthy, even artistic goal, especially for a filmmaker so obsessed with mirrors and doubles, it’s not. At best, it’s an intellectual achievement, not an emotional one. At worst, it registers as a kind of narrative tautology: so equal as to be uninteresting.

 

Science fiction doesn’t need to offer straightforward answers. It’s the genre of speculation, of infinite possibilities. But it must have perspective, a thought at its core. In a decade, Cahill’s sci-fi cinema has slid from provocative to plodding, from ambiguity that feels organic to ambiguity that feels manufactured. At the end of Bliss, Greg realizes he might never know the truth. Ignorance, we practically hear him realize, really is bliss. Another cliché. For all his investment in unknowability, Cahill seems to like it neat. Ignorance is bliss. Seeing is believing. One thing is the same as the other, and no real meaning is conveyed.

 

 

Source: Bliss Is the Worst Kind of Open-Ended Sci-Fi Movie