This was a rare case in which the other Skandie voters broke with the host, Mike D’Angelo: he picked Coherence as his top film of 2013, but when it became Skandie-eligible the following year, his vote wasn’t enough to even get it into the top twenty.  I try to avoid learning anything about the movies on my to-watch list, so I had no idea why there was such a disjunction.  Now that I’ve watched Coherence, it’s obvious.  Mike D’Angelo spent most of 2004 talking up a then-obscure time travel movie called Primer, which is still pretty obscure but has gained some notoriety for its ludicrously complex timeline that led enthusiasts to create some equally ludicrous diagrams.  If reverse-engineering an entire antikythera mechanism from the three gears you get to see is your idea of a good time, then Primer might well be your top movie of 2004.  And Coherence will likely be your top movie of the subsequent ten years.

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Except that isn’t even the half of it.  Because just when we think we have a handle on the situation, the lead character in the ensemble, Em, discovers an artifact from a green universe.  It’s not just a single split into live cat and dead cat: every time someone enters the dark area past the driveway, that person gets shunted into a random universe.  The crisis is taking place on infinite Earths.  We’ve been following Em around; it turns out that she’s not even in the same house where she (and we) started!  When the partygoers around her do a quick poll, it turns out that they’ve done enough ambling between universes that none of them are from the same reality.  The differences are slight, but telling⁠—how do you carry on when some of the most important people in your life have been replaced by evil twins… and others have been replaced by nicer ones?  The answer is not “you all return to your own worlds”: outside the house is a cosmic roulette wheel, so they can’t just sort themselves out.  All they can do is get further scrambled.  So with no way to get back to her reality, and uncertain that she’d even want to, Em does what the kids in William Sleator’s The Last Universe do: she goes shopping for a better one.  Except unlike in Sleator’s novel, she doesn’t just magically become her alternate self.  She has to dispose of her and take her place.

I was going to talk about the themes of this movie and how the fact that there even are themes puts it ahead of Primer, but I was going off memories from fifteen years ago and didn’t trust that they were accurate, so since Primer is only 75 minutes long, I rewatched it.  I still found it to be largely about its own impenetrable mechanics, but I suppose you could make a case that there is some human content in the way the (never particularly tight) friendship between the techbros dissolves as they keep trying to outmaneuver each other in manipulating the timeline.  That a successful caper busts up the old gang due to greed and paranoia is a perennial theme in movies⁠—three that come to mind off the top of my head are Goodfellas, A Simple Plan, and The Social Network⁠—but it’s not one I find particularly captivating, perhaps because my life has not featured too many successful capers (or old gangs).  But part of the chitchat at the beginning of Coherence is about some bad decisions Em once made, and boy howdy, my life has featured plenty of those!  It’s hard to make it into the coveted 30-to-60 demographic and find that your life has turned out exactly as you might have hoped.  Again, these characters have done pretty well for themselves, but no one grows up dreaming of being a Skype executive.  Many people these days do dream of becoming celebrities, and we learn that one of these characters gained some fame for his leading role on Roswell, a TV show that had a decently long run on the WB and UPN⁠—but that was a generation ago, and now he’s a has-been.  So how do we deal with our dissatisfaction with the way our lives have unfolded?  Some cling to fatuous philosophies: “Everything happens for a reason!” “Good things have to fall apart so better things can come together!”  But for those of us who spend unhealthy amounts of time dwelling on roads not taken, the idea of being able to window-shop for an alternate universe, even one whose divergences from our own are relatively minor, is an appealing fantasy. 

One of the fatuous philosophies I mentioned a moment ago is “I don’t regret my mistakes, because I wouldn’t be who I am without them!”  One of the interesting points Coherence raises is that, indeed, if you’d had different experiences, you wouldn’t be the same person.  There are a handful of baseline personality traits that seem to be hard-wired to at least a certain extent⁠—introversion vs. extraversion, for instance⁠—but the fact is that the same consciousness can hold radically different beliefs, have wildly different interests, and exhibit completely different behavior within the same lifetime and even within a short span of time within that lifetime.  (When one character says that her husband is “not the man I married,” she’s talking about how he’s changed since their wedding, not about whether he’s a blue guy or a red guy.)  Swap in different decisions and different life experiences, and you could be almost anyone.  And it’s pretty arrogant to think that who you are at the moment is so great that a version of you who made different decisions couldn’t possibly be better.  I would love to erase some of the mistakes I regret, not just to live a better life, but to be better than I am.  The tragedy of Coherence is that we don’t just live in a universe, nor are we even merely products of it⁠—we are the loci that make it up.  Poor Blue Em can’t fit into her chosen home because, in order to be itself, that world requires a better Em than her.

"Once in a Lifetime" (Talking Heads, 1980)

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