Mike Cahill do you feel seen? The 41-year-old science fiction writer and director has already made three films, each more prominent than the last, about ways of seeing. This is literally literalized in the second of these efforts, i origins, which is also, not unrelated, the worst title. Launched in 2014, it is about vision scientists looking for the origin of the human eye – look, a pun – which, if you didn’t know, is “the window”, as a character literally says, “for the soul”. They find him in the genes of a blind worm, but not before Karen, played by Brit Marling, warns her lab partner that she, at least, has no interest in becoming famous, in being seen: “Recognition makes me sick” , she says.
Recognition, for Cahill, meant two things: more money and less Marling. She starred and co-wrote Cahill’s first science fiction, Another land, which was launched in 2011 and would have only cost 100 thousand. i origins it cost 10 times more, and Marling just acted on it. In Cahill’s last film, happiness, unknown budget, but starring Owen Wilson and Salma Hayek and now on Amazon Prime, she is nowhere to be found. (In recent years, you may have seen Marling on the Netflix show OA, her baby.) I’m not saying she’s your inspiration, but the money exchange / Marling seems to have clouded Cahill’s cinematic vision.
Another land it was the best type of science fiction with little money, conceptual, but contained. Of the Cahill trilogy, he is also, not unrelated, the best titled. All science fiction is metaphorical made literal, but most of the time, it is out of proportion. (Or it just explodes, 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 nowhere, in the sky. It is a planet, apparently identical to ours. When she looks up, she crashes into another car, extinguishing two lives in an instant. Hence the question raised by the title: Is there another world in which this has not happened? One where Rhonda didn’t just ruin her life? The film suggests an answer, but does not commit itself, leaving instead of a surprising sigh of possibility.
This would become Cahill’s signature – ambiguity in response to his extravagant ambitions. He is hopelessly committed, like all science fiction creators, to investigating the wonders and misfortunes of existence, the who and who and the why. Therefore, he cannot be blamed. Most conventional cinema does not ask such challenging questions. But Another land it worked because the ambiguity was not absolute. The viewer detects, thanks to Cahill and Marling’s gentle and guiding hands, a way to see a possible solution. Up until i originsdespite its visual literalities and the slow condescending ending, it manages to enrich and complicate the old cliché of seeing and believing. So Cahill did happiness, that no amount of vision will make you believe.
Wilson plays Greg, a nobody without an office job who spends his days dreaming of other lands, other lives. Then, a witch named Isabel (Hayek, unrestricted) appears, claiming to have powers over reality. Which is not really the reality, she tells him, but a computer simulation, and Greg can see that for himself, if he just takes these shiny 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 Wachowski don’t have a monopoly on simulation theory. Thirteenth floor, eXistenZ, the new documentary A matrix failure—There is a lot of space in the virtual sandbox. But in a red pill / blue pill world, Cahill’s pharmaceutically-mediated reality seems, well, a second-rate simulation of the real thing.