Strange Arrival, The Demiguise

If you hadn’t already guessed from the semi-cryptic title, this post is about the three most recent movies I watched in the cinema (as opposed to borrowing the DVD from the library): Doctor Strange, Arrival, and Fantastic Beasts. Hence today’s post will ruminate on Magic, Time and Magic+Time respectively. Let’s start with Magic.

Doctor Strange touches on the relationship between magic and science, as the main protagonist, a man of science who does not believe in magic, is forced to confront the possibility that there are magical ways of manipulating matter and energy. Interestingly, the channeling of such magic requires an object – like a wand in the Harry Potter series, except in this case it is a ring. The multiverse allows characters to access different dimensions, but what I think is more interesting is that the idea provides other sources of accessible energy. It’s hard enough to draw “quality” energy from one’s immediate earthly surroundings thanks to the second law of thermodynamics. Having parallel universes located in other dimensions, but in the same “local space” provides an immediate source for the magician who can access them.

Both light and dark magic are present in Doctor Strange, similar to the Harry Potter series. Equating magic with energy for a moment, this means the magician can draw either from light energy (photons of some sort) and dark energy. The physicists tell us that there is both light and dark energy in our universe, so presumably a similar situation exists in parallel universes. Of course, physicists don’t actually know what dark energy is, nor how to channel/manipulate the energy as they can photons. Dark energy is a source for prolonging life in the movie. In the Harry Potter series, Voldemort, he who flees death, does something similar by using dark magic to create his Horcruxes.

The visuals in Doctor Strange use light to represent certain types of magic – the creation of portals, shields, weapons. These “objects” do not look as physical but are rather outlined in pixels of light. Are these created only by “light” energy? Interestingly, in some scenes, when the bad guys create some of their sharp weapons, they do not have the same bright light but rather materialize in a ghostly, cold, hue – possibly resembling “dark” energy. I’m not sure if that was the intent of the special effects team creating the visuals. The Potter series uses different colors (e.g. red/gold versus green) possibly to represent different spells associated with Gryffindors and Slytherins. It’s hard to represent magical spells visually without having some “light” associated with it even if this is less realistic from an energy manipulation point of view. If anything, you want to absorb higher quality energy (i.e. low-entropy photons) so you can disperse it in some other (high-entropy) way.

Overall Doctor Strange was mainly an action movie trying to capitalize on its visuals, but had a much weaker narrative. Arrival, on the other hand, is mainly about the story. When the main protagonist Louise Banks (played by Amy Adams) encounters the aliens, they are shrouded in a mist. The theme however has to do with consciousness and time. Thanks, perhaps to the second law again, we experience the arrow of time with a particular direction. We remember the past but cannot see the future. But what if one could experience time in a non-linear way? The difficulty is how one could be conscious of two different time windows simultaneously while still being “in the stream of time”. Arrival does this masterfully. Now that I know the premise of the movie, I need to watch it a second time. (I’m waiting for the DVD to get to the local library, maybe six months from now.)

Instead of accessing the energy from interdimensional parallel universes in the same spatial locality, Louise accesses the timestream at different points along her own timeline. Her consciousness is localized in one time stream at any given moment in the movie. It is unclear what is happening simultaneously at a different point in the timestream. But perhaps that’s the problem: simultaneity isn’t what we think it is. Time has always been a slippery concept, as recognized back in by Augustine of Hippo back in the 4^th-5^th centuries, and articulated in a marvelous chapter of his Confessions. What would it be like to be outside a timeline looking in? The best way I can think of it is after reading a story. You, the reader, knows what happens to the characters anywhere along the timeline. Could you the reader enter such a timeline? What would that even mean? Choice, free will, and all matter of conundrums twist our thoughts in knots.

Could Louise manipulate events and change her timeline? Arrival leaves this question unanswered, but many other “time-travel” movies attempt to portray some of the philosophical conundrums. In the now-classic Back to the Future, Marty McFly starts to “disappear” or dissolve as an alternative timeline unfolds that might result in his parents not getting married and him not being born. I recently finished the Continuum series, which has its own share of twists. There is a small segment involving time in Doctor Strange, when Strange traps the evil antagonist in a time loop, although the now-classic Groundhog Day probably does this theme best.

Both time and magic feature in Fantastic Beasts when the Demiguise comes into play. Not having read the book or PotterMore (where I’m guessing it may have made an appearance), watching the movie was my first encounter. It’s an interesting beast with two powers that made it hard to “catch”. It can turn invisible, and it can predict the future – although it is unclear exactly how it makes the prediction and how accurate it can be. The trick to catching the demiurge is to behave “unpredictably”. This suggests that the prediction is based on probability and patterns, rather than certainty. Maybe it is particularly adept at advanced Arithmancy in a more practical realization rather than a theoretical one.

That is similar to what we are trying to do with Big Data. Build models, feed in large data sets, extract patterns, and predict the future. Or maybe the Demiguise thinks in the same way that Louise Banks comes to think – in a somewhat non-linear fashion being able to access the timeline at different points. No mention is made about whether the Demiguise can access the past. In fact, we have no idea how the Demiguise thinks and manages its feat of reasonably good futuristic prediction – which can be foiled by being unpredictable. Is the ability to be unpredictable part of what makes us human? This begs the question: Unpredictable to whom or what? Perhaps there is an omniscient being who can predict exactly what each and every human does and will do, and not just in a probabilistic fashion. The (probabilistic) latter could conceivably be accomplished by a very large and powerful computer, laden with data that tracks our every move in a dystopian future.

Should I predict if the Demiguise will feature in a future installment of Fantastic Beasts? I have no idea how to make this prediction. I’m going to say Yes, but only as a bit part and not a central character. The pattern of future movies having to “top” earlier ones will require elaborate and interesting powers. The Demiguise could have interesting roles to play, but the point is to introduce new and even more fantastic beasts!