It’s All Right Now // on “the present,” in perpetuity
a loose, anecdotal, emotional meditation on how the “present,” a perpetual now, manifests in certain films, what this means, how it bridges a number of my favorite works of art, and what to consider going forward. for what it’s worth, there are spoilers for the network drama LOST, and less overt narrative details about Waking Life, The Grapes of Wrath, and Zack Snyder’s Justice League, herein — I promise it does not matter that these things will be spoiled for you
| a cold open |
LOST (2004) concludes in a church. Actually, no, it concludes on an island…well, sort of. I guess it concludes in both. It doesn’t matter. There is no “here,” no literal location, in which LOST can conclude. It can’t even actually conclude. It deals in allegorical space, in metaphysical space. “They were dead the whole time,” yeah, okay, sure — only insofar as we’re all dead, all the time. That sounds extreme, maybe more gothic than I intend. What I really mean is
Before directly discussing the notion of the present, I want to discuss the notion of the real. These two concepts are closely connected; indeed on my view they are one and the same concept, and the present simply is the real considered in relation to two particular species of unreality, namely the past and the future. (A. N. Prior, The Notion of the Present)
In 2012 (approximately) I took an Introduction to Metaphysics class, which was a drastic shift in my undergraduate education in the wake of taking historically-oriented philosophy courses like Intro to Philosophy or Intro to Political Philosophy, which dealt with figures and histories of ideas. In classes like these latter kind, we would ask and attempt to answer questions like “What was Plato’s theory of ideas in relation to Aristotle, and how are these older ideas reflected and refracted in the later ideas of people like Descartes or Hume or Kant or Kierkegaard?” In Metaphysics, we’d ask and attempt to answer questions like, “Are holes real?”
“Are holes real?” was a day one question!
A couple years earlier I took an English composition class where the instructor had long black hair and a beard, he looked a lot like Jeremy Davies in the LOST series finale “The End” actually…I can’t find a screenshot unfortunately so ifykyk*…but regardless, one of the books he taught in that fall semester (my first full semester as a college student, in fact) was John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.
| the grapes of wrath |
I was quick to love the novel, which — despite some liberal skimming, as is the wont of a college undergrad who had cultivated some useful shorthands in high school English classes — became my favorite novel, and one I was ready to declare the finest one ever written (other choice masterpieces, canonical or otherwise, have entered my purview since and perhaps sit alongside it, but honestly, still none totally best it).
What truly stood out to me, as I increasingly favored the abstract over the literal and the impressionistic/expressionistic over the concrete, were Steinbeck’s “intercalary chapters,” the shorter segments that break up the main narrative about the Joad family and their odyssey west to escape the dust bowl of Oklahoma and find work in California. These interchapters broadly sketch the geography, politics, culture, and overall atmosphere of the novel’s world; they include meditations on the gradual death of the earth due to excessive mechanization and the ignorance of the companies that scoop the land up and away from its original inhabitants, forays into the systems and linguistic maneuverings that manipulate and dominate the underclasses, sometimes full-on polemics against the oppression and hardships faced by people like our protagonists, and sometimes, even still, there are operatic, ecstatic reveries on the small kindnesses and beauties that people still experience amid and despite all this hardship.
The instructor for this class had the misbegotten notion, as so many (likely underpaid and overworked and underappreciated) college instructors do, that MEDIA was crucial in supplementing and complementing the reading of this novel. So he treated us to two bits of supplementary material: a YouTube supercut of still images invoking the dust bowl (including many of the iconic photographs taken by Dorothea Lange) set to Bruce Springsteen’s song “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” which quite literally and liberally adapts dialogue taken not from the novel itself, but from Springsteen’s personal exposure to this material, and our instructor’s second supplement, John Ford’s 1940 adaptation The Grapes of Wrath.
Tom, there’s a whole lot I don’t understand. But goin’ away ain’t gonna ease us. There was a time we was on the land. There was a boundary to us then. Old folks died off and little fellars come. We was always one thing. We was the family. Kind of whole and clear. But now we ain’t clear no more. There ain’t nothin’ that keeps us clear.
I did not like the film (I thought the song was okay, but that the live version with Tom Morello was better). I had certainly not yet had my sensibilities tuned to the wavelengths of John Ford, whose work was everpresent in the canons from which I built my film knowledge but in spheres I had no interest in — Westerns, classic Hollywood, classicism…aesthetic spaces it would take me much longer to approach with real, earnest consideration. To me, Ford’s adaptation was painfully literal, completely lacking in the abstracted beauty of Steinbeck’s prose, tied too closely to the story of the Joads, and even then, their psychologies and specificities, so beautifully rendered by Steinbeck, felt lost in favor of simple bumpkin personas and a solitary, admirable performance from Henry Fonda (who I at least appreciated at this point in my life for his performance in 12 Angry Men, very often adolescence’s first good black and white movie experience).
It is a blessing that we can change, that our perspectives shift, that our memories morph and adjust, that we learn and grow and reconfigure our understandings. It’s probably been 12 years since I watched The Grapes of Wrath, it could be to the day for all I know, it would have been in the Fall semester, right around this time of year. But revisiting it, now with more awareness of John Ford, and appreciation for his vivid, geometric images, his remarkable synthesis of silent expressionism with the advents of sound, music, performance and contemporary montage, and his stark, palpable humanism, there is now no doubt that the film is a triumph, and that it indeed adapts Steinbeck’s less obvious prose with considerable skill and beauty. It restructures the material so that its lyricism can be reoriented into the context of the main narrative, so that its rapturous evocations of the earth, crumbling civilization, human against — and human in solidarity with — human, is all contained in the images and gestures that surround the Joads.
Most crucially, it successfully captures the timelessness of the novel. For the longest time, I conceived that the perfect adaptation of the novel would be set in some exaggerated near future, rather than in its specific time and place; its narrative felt as if it had no specific temporal location, that it truly stood for all time, right now as much as right then. But this in itself was a too literal and limited consideration, because in its vast, dark landscapes, its crumbling buildings, its nomadic action, and the perpetual relevance of its sociopolitical messaging and humanism, Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath does indeed feel relevant right now, as much as it feels of the past, as much as it feels futuristically dystopian.
Rich fellas come up an’ they die, an’ their kids ain’t no good an’ they die out. But we keep a’comin’. We’re the people that live. They can’t wipe us out; they can’t lick us. We’ll go on forever, Pa, ’cause we’re the people.
| how soon is now |
History, and progress, is a fiction, of course, is what this means: the end is always near, the end is always here, because of the worlds that always coexist, the underclass that, as Ma Joad describes, will perpetually live on, a single spirit unbroken, among the superficial churning of “civilization.” This is happening right now, which is to say, it has always been happening.
This is an idea I have fixated on for a long time. In the aforementioned Metaphysics class, I was met with the notion that only the present exists, which is to say, the past and future are unreal concepts abstracted from the only real thing, which is right now. To expand this further, and hopefully make some sense of it**:
We can call some moment in history “Event A”; with our language and our narrativizing of history, we imbue this event with ephemerality, otherize it, make it a totem in a longer span of events that we can point to as having already happened, that is no longer happening. It is the past. Next we name a moment we expect to happen, and call it “Event C.” This is some point in the future that Event A and our present moment, which we can call “Event B,” are moving toward. A leads to B leads to C, naturally, as is the trajectory of time.
This trajectory of cause and effect is dependent on our perception of time as a series of discrete individualized moments, a concept that is rooted in our specific physiology/psychology (like, literally our sense perceptions and our conscious linguistic narrativizing of those perceptions). Our atomization of moments in time is what makes up the past and the future, not any actual reality of those as distinct moments in time. What’s real is — and this phraseology was employed by my very smart and very professional Metaphysics instructor, who was the head of my college’s philosophy department and was also my undergraduate advisor ***— the sausage of time, that single, cohering tubular tapestry of interconnected events that makes up all of existence / space-time. I do not recall why “sausage” is what was settled on to embody this idea, but because it also evokes one of the more enigmatic and memorable visual ideas in Richard Kelly’s own illustration of time in Donnie Darko, it has stuck with me.
| waking life |
For the longest time, I said Richard Linklater’s Waking Life was my favorite movie. Number one with a bullet. The best one. As with so many dogmatic declarations, especially those made by movie nerds like me with one hundred lists of all-time favorite movies, this is speaking more toward an overarching feeling that sticks with me over time than it is a sober recognition of one work of art’s objective superiority over another. But so often I ponder that eternal cinephilic question: what is your favorite movie? And almost just as often I consider the many ways my personal perspective, my aesthetic, my sociopolitical convictions, my spirituality and/or lack thereof, my attitudes, my interests, my brute emotional digestion of art, intersect and intermingle in Richard Linklater’s 2001 existential opus.
Upon release Waking Life was partly a bit of an outlier for Linklater, and partly a sort of state-of-the-oeuvre recalibration. It was shot on digital video and then animated over with a technique called rotoscoping, where frames are individually painted over with digital illustrations, and the result is a strange, off-kilter, alt-comics-invoking metaphysical odyssey through a dreamscape that calls back to the director’s early film Slacker. Like that film, which jumpstarted Linklater’s career in 1990, Waking Life follows a sort of stream-of-consciousness trajectory of interactions, conversations, ambient interludes, and other narratively-unconventional non sequitors. The ostensible protagonist, a perpetually dreaming young man played by Wiley Wiggins, moves from place to place without a coherent direction. A few early conversations involve characters speaking directly at him about fundamentals, from the looseness and strangeness of language to the sociopolitical state of the world, and eventually he begins to participate in these discussions — he asks questions, shares opinions, makes declarations of intent. The discourse takes on increasingly melancholy, strange, and despairing tones; it becomes almost apocalyptic, though always in the loose, laid back tenor that characterizes almost all of Linklater’s work.
For much of its runtime, it’s easy to see Waking Life as a lot of non-narrative navel-gazing armchair philosophy. But Linklater understands the structure of the tale he’s telling, and he’s guiding us, if we’re willing: from its basic foundations to its eschatological conclusions, he is taking us on a journey to one single place, one single time. Linklater himself shows up in one of its closing scenes, and he describes, in a gloriously off-the-cuff yet captivating fashion, that what the protagonist is experiencing, what we’re all experiencing, is a single moment, a moment that all of existence, all of history and narrative, can be reduced to: as he describes it, a single movement from “no” to “yes.” All is an illusion, except for that one single choice: wake up, a perennial awakening to the conditions that drive the world, of the structures and language that can contain or free us, and that awakening, that continual reawakening, as a continual beginning…the universe begins with our recognition of its conditions, and that requires recognition of the other, finally, over the self, recognition of the need to rejoin the “out there.”
| where are we |
The final season of LOST is an enigma. Controversial, and oft-declared a perfect contemporary exemplar of a television conclusion that royally fails to satisfyingly bring its series to a close, it was met with a repeated, exasperated declaration that followed the show from its premiere: “They were dead the whole time!”
LOST is an action-adventure-scifi-melodrama about a diverse group of individuals stranded on a mysterious island after their plane crashes there. Its format, give or take a wrinkle here and there, was structured around each episode following a particular character, with a storyline set on the “present day” island, where they were stranded amongst many others, and a storyline set in their lives off the island — sometimes before the crash, sometimes after escaping from the island, sometimes…somewhere else, some other “time.” These off-island stories were “flashbacks” or “flashforwards” in the first five seasons, but this last kind, off-island storylines during the sixth and final season, became known as “flash-sideways.”
These flash-sideways stories seemed to depict an alternate timeline for the show’s characters, one in which they never crashed on the island — in which it seems the island never existed — and therefore the myriad ways their lives would be different, and yet how they would nonetheless be brought together in strange and impactful ways. For much of the final season it plays as a farewell to the show’s large cast of main characters, with reprises of some of their narratives’ key thematic concerns and motifs and visual callbacks to past episodes—like a clip show, but one where the clips are given their own metaphysical space upon which to play out while the main narrative continues to unravel.
I can’t describe all the ways LOST works or doesn’t work, recount all its successes and failures. But this final season, and in particular its final episode, throws into relief a thematic and structural element of the show that transcends conventional qualitative examination, is both good and bad and everything in between.
The show has a vast an ensemble, but it does, ultimately, have a main character: Jack Shepherd, a surgeon with deep-seated daddy issues played remarkably over six seasons by Matthew Fox. “The End,” the series finale, concludes through Jack’s eyes. We witness twinned endings: on the island, an overarching antagonist of the series has been defeated, all has been set right with the world and its characters, and Jack, having fulfilled his purpose, lies dying in a spot in a field of bamboo reeds where we first encounter him in the show’s very first moments. In the flash-sideways, Jack has been summoned mysteriously to a church, where he finds his father, Christian Shepherd, long dead, waiting for him. Jack realizes as he speaks with his father that he too has died. Christian explains that everything we’ve seen in these flash-sideways, all of these tertiary stories in season six, have been episodes in a kind of manufactured afterlife that the characters have metaphysical designed for themselves in order to reckon once more with the pains and triumphs they faced in their waking life. In describing this place, this state of being, Christian declares:
There is no ‘now,’ ‘here.’
All of the show’s ebbs and flows, ups and downs, successes and failures, all considered — this statement is allegorically pulverizing. In a landscape where almost all mainstream media is, to one extent or another, postmodern, calling constant attention to its falsity and fabrication, LOST stands alone here: its finale, one of its final lines, is a declaration of purpose that emanates back through the entire series: “they were dead the whole time,” a literal misrepresentation of what has occurred in the universe of the show, becomes starkly accurate: this is all dead. This is all nonexistent. This is a TV show. It is all, ultimately, flattened, a solitary set of principles and ideas and emotional considerations compacted into one metaphysical platform upon which all can play out. All of its simplicities, its clichés, its stereotypes, its reductions, all in the span of a single line of dialogue are reconfigured into this idea: you, we, have been bearing witness to allegory. Time to wake up, or let go, or move on. Time to move from “no” to “yes.” Time to make the choice.
| it’s all right now / it’s alright now |
There is much to make of these ideas through the larger tapestry of cinema, mainstream and not — as I wrote this, I remembered a key moment in cinematic spectacle from an unlikely source that has become ever more memetic in the short time since it emerged.
I was one of a comparatively scarce few watching the Academy Awards this past March — yes, unbelievably, the awards aired in March 2022, less than a calendar year ago. CODA won Best Picture and Will Smith melted everyone’s brains, but long, hours or days or years or moments, before these two more notable moments in the broadcast occurred, a Twitter-driven viewer-voted award for “Best Cheer-Worthy Moment” was presented and instantly memeified: “The Flash Enters the Speed Force” became the victor in a contest that ran the entirety of cinematic history (runner ups included Neo dodging bullets in The Matrix and all the superheroes running out of portals in Avengers: Endgame). With no irony, no regret, but certainly no shortage of shock and confusion at what I was witnessing and why it was happening, I leapt from the couch and did, indeed, cheer at this cinematic moment’s victory.
The narratives and discourse around Zack Snyder’s Justice League are, like the qualities of LOST or the more elaborate philosophical underpinnings of metaphysical presentism, not worth expounding upon right here and now. But regardless of the toxic online fandom that allegedly dragged it towards release or the subsequent personal and professional implosions of the sequence’s star Ezra Miller, the film, and the scene, is an astounding, beautiful accomplishment in blockbuster filmmaking.
The hours of myth-making and muscle-bound fantasia that precede “Flash entering the speed force” are Snyder operating at his very best, with effects-driven superheroics married well to funereal operatics; this is slow cinema colliding with the blockbuster maximalism of Peter Jackson, George Lucas and George Miller. In contrast to Snyder’s brooding and Michael Mann influenced Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, which decries a systemically corrupt world that can find no space for genuine heroism, Justice League presents a world in desperate need of heroism, where death and decay simply must be defied or else are sure to envelop everything. This is exemplified best by the character Cyborg, a human wrenched back from near-death who uses his newfound cybernetic spiritualism to seek good in a world overwhelmed by evil.
Near the film’s close, all seems lost; the villains emerge triumphant, heroes have been destroyed, the planet is crumbling. Destruction literally moves in a wave through space, and facing the imminent chaos, just on its edge, is Ezra Miller’s The Flash; he needs to make a decision, now, to make a leap that can reverse everything, change everything, recognize the possibility for an alternative to destruction. He makes the choice. He runs in the direction of the chaos, so quickly that time starts to reverse, in the vein of Superman in the 1978 film of the same name that helped birthed the superhero movie boom. As the world reforms around him, he speaks out, to his father, to no one, to everyone: “It’s all right now.” Or maybe he’s saying, “It’s alright now.” As with Christian Shepherd’s “There’s no now, here,” a single, simple statement in its context becomes rich with metaphysical purpose.****
| an epilogue, a consideration of further research, a recognition of all this as merely another beginning |
We could call this the “perpetual now,” the status of film and other cinematic art as atemporal spaces which are allegorically reflective of the existential act — which is to say, the decision to act at all, but most crucially to see, to join the community of which we are all a part, but which we forget to be a part of, and to bear witness to.
Inklings of this idea and its implications can be seen all over film history. In his revolutionary film La Chinoise, the recently late Jean-Luc Godard considers that the earliest possible purveyors of film art, the Lumieres and Melies, each in their own way used the newborn cinematic art form to depict a reality more real than and outside of any time or place. In his Gospel According to Matthew, radical (and notably atheist) Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini depicts the life of Christ as intrinsically outside of time and space, the most allegorical life elevated to a timeless platform upon which the words of Christ are given fresh weight and purpose — or at least are able to be witnessed in their original purpose without the baggage of world-historical specificity. Outside the arthouse sphere, and much more recently, we see these interests in the works of Christopher Nolan, whose Inception, Interstellar and Tenet each treat of time as a fluid notion that contracts, blossoms, is reoriented by context, and the heroes of these films recognize that every action is made in recognition of the necessary simultaneous existence of every preceding and successive action. The Wachowskis’ masterpiece Speed Racer employs atemporal montage to depict that each moment is composed of every other moment in a life; Baz Luhrmann invokes this same idea, with a touch of Walk Hard, in Elvis — we literally, necessarily, have to think of every moment of our life before going on that stage, which is to say, to act.
*if you know, you know
**I learned this in a philosophy class like ten years ago — my account can and should be generously considered impressionistic in its own right. If there’s one thing I truly know and remember from being a philosophy major in college it’s that all I know is that I know nothing!
***This same instructor would refer to his relationship with his cat as “erotic,” I think both keenly, provocatively aware of the perversity of such a description but also innocently referring to a more broad kind of “eros,” insofar as the term can refer to a touch- and sensation-oriented relationship with other entities
****Much later, reeling over the beauty of this scene and going full galaxy brain, I recalled that Mick Jagger proclaims, over and over, “it’s all right now,” in the chorus of The Rolling Stones’ “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.”
