Never do Yesterday,
What should be done Tomorrow,
If at last you do succeed,
Never try Again
I watched a movie titled Predestination (2014) and I wonder if I understood the story right. The movie begins with Ethan Hawke talking to John – “The Unmarried Mother”. He shares his story about how she used to be a woman (Jane). As a young woman, raised as an orphan, Jane meets a man who impregnates her, but leaves her after a one-night stand. During child birth, there were many complications which result in a sex change. So, Jane becomes John. In the hospital, her baby was stolen.
Time travelling Ethan Hawke was the one who stole Jane’s baby! I don’t know why. The baby was dropped off at an orphanage. The baby is actually Jane from the orphanage. How is that even possible? Her baby is herself from the future? When Ethan Hawk returns in time with John, John has a one-night stand with Jane. She has sex with herself as a man. Both John and Jane are the same, have sex and produce a baby that is actually Jane. If I tell the story in the manner above, it would be confusing. Please understand that this movie is philosophical. It is not at all confusing if you understand the philosophy right.
1975: Temporal agent has face burnt whilst trying to stop the ‘Fizzle Bomber’ who escapes. A faceless stranger appears and helps badly burnt agent to activate his portable time machine.
1992: The Agent travels forward in time to the Temporal Bureau, an organization founded in 1985 after the invention of time travel. There he has reconstructive facial surgery, and there he finds out the Fizzle Bomber killed 11,000 people in New York in 1975.
1970: Temporal agent goes back to New York posing as a bartender and engages a man calling himself ‘Unmarried Mother’ in conversation. The man explains he was originally a girl called Jane who was left at an orphanage in 1945. In 1963 Jane fell in love with a mystery man, who then disappeared after impregnating. Jane had a baby who 9 months later was stolen. She then had a sex change and became a writer called John.
The temporal agent says he suspects the mystery man was the Fizzle Bomber and offers John the chance to go back to 1963 and kill the man who ruined his life. In return he insists John must then join the Temporal Bureau. They then travel back to 1963 together.
1963: John accidentally meets his younger, female self-Jane, falls in love, and impregnates her with a child that eventually would grow up to be them. Meanwhile, the temporal agent travels 9 months into the future, takes Jane’s baby and drops her off at an orphanage in 1945. He then drops John off in 1985 to enlist in the Temporal Bureau.
1975: The temporal agent retires to 1975 but he retains the use of the time machine which fails to deactivate itself. The retired agent soon tracks down the Fizzle Bomber, who actually turns out to be him in the future. He became insane from using the non-deactivated time machine too often as he sought to travel in time and avert disasters from occurring. However, his actions actually caused thousands of other untold deaths to happen in the process. Disgusted with his future self, the agent shoots and kills the Fizzle Bomber, thus ensuring he becomes him.
The Fizzle Bomber and John, both are same, both are creation of an endless time loop. Whatever choices they made, they would be kept repeating themselves in the loop.
The movie is called Predestination because it eliminates the interpretation by saying that everything is under a spatial time loop, stuck inside an original time loop. To put it simply, it is like circles upon circles. The circles being timeline. The bigger circles engulfing the other timelines. Whatever choices you make, you will be stuck in a loop and continue to do the same choices. If you choose to observe a different timeline, you would think you made a different choice, but choice has already happened in a different timeline or circle.
Happy Watching!
About the Author
Dr. K. Raja Gopal Reddy is a seasoned internationally qualified Insurance professional. What you are reading here, may not answer all the questions we have, but has the absolute power of asking unsettling questions which increase the interest in the strange world, and show the contradictory wonders lying just below the surface of the commonest things of life. Look at this disturbing but beautiful thought of Friedrich Nietzsche “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him”. Dr. Reddy can be reached at: raja66gopal@gmail.com
