Let’s begin in the middle, at a point of connection, and then work our way backward: Kris (Amy Seimetz) and Jeff (Carruth) meet on a train and are instantly drawn to one another for reasons they cannot explain, seemingly for something beyond mere physical attraction. Despite this being their first encounter, they both seem to sense that they know each other, which makes for a somewhat testy meet-cute: Kris appears perturbed by her vague familiarity with Jeff, whereas he romantically pursues her immediately and aggressively—to the point of stalking her—, as if their match were preordained and their coupling a fait accompli. What is the nature of their magnetism, their simultaneous push and pull from and to one another? We come to find that they were both victims of an unnamed character (Thiago Martins), listed in the credits only as “The Thief,” who brainwashes his targets by introducing, by hook or by crook, strange
13 Tobias, “Upstream Color”
worms into their bodies, worms he harvests from rare blue orchids he purchases at an exotic flower shop. His primary means of getting his victims to ingest the worms is to slide them into medicine capsules, pose as a drug dealer, and pass them off on unsuspecting buyers. Unfortunately for Kris, she happens to be in the same bar as The Thief on a night when he fails to land a sale. In a sequence of events that disturbingly resembles a sexual assault, The Thief incapacitates Kris with a taser while she waits in line for the
bathroom, drags her to the building’s backalley, straddles her body, and using a bag valve mask filled with water, forces a worm down her throat. This parasite, we learn, renders their hosts especially open to suggestion, and The Thief exploits this vulnerability by directing Kris and his other victims in a series of monotonous tasks (gluing strips of paper into long daisy chains, stacking poker chips, transcribing Thoreau’s Walden [1845] in its entirety) in order to make them docile and robotic, at which time they, at his behest, obligingly drain their bank accounts.
Once robbed, the Thief’s victims awake from their trances with no memory of the crimes perpetrated against themselves, by themselves, and since they signed over their own assets, they have no legal recourse for recovery, no plausible scenario to give to the police as to why they liquefied their assets. Indeed, Jeff, formerly a stockbroker, handed over not only his own money but also that of his clients, leading to his being fired for embezzlement; and Kris, unable to account for her absence from her job as visual effects supervisor in the film industry, is likewise terminated. Unemployed, broke, and doubting their own mental stability, Jeff and Kris are effectively reset to zero.
Now working as a clerk at a copy/print store, Kris moves through her post-theft life as if in a foggy haze. Yet in Jeff, she seems to detect something kindred, like a faint signal only she can hear breaking through what is otherwise a world of noise, and ditto for him. The characters thus gravitate toward one another not (only) because of physical attraction but (also) on account of shared but not consciously recalled experiences of their conditioning at the hands of the Thief. Indeed, much of the couple’s bonding, such that it is, revolves initially around their gradual discovery that they both have similar, sizeable gaps in their personal histories for which they cannot account.
As their courtship continues, other oddities start to crop up. Memory, for instance, becomes a site of contestation. They bicker, at first teasingly then later more heatedly, about the “ownership” of certain recollections. For example, Kris and Jeff both tell stories of family vacations in Vermont and of being almost drowned by an overweight neighbor name Renny, similarities which seem to them beyond
coincidence. They each begin to suspect that the other is purposefully intermixing their personal narrative, a charge they both deny.
Stranger still, Kris becomes convinced she is pregnant even though tests reveal that not only is she without child but also that she is unable to conceive, a conclusion doctors reach when they discover scars on her uterus consistent with a surgical intervention for cancer, a diagnosis and a procedure for which she has no recollection. But while she is probed at her doctor’s office, Jeff doubles over at work, clutching his abdomen as if he, too, had suddenly become aware of something amiss internally, as if he were experiencing something akin to the symptoms of Couvade syndrome (“sympathetic pregnancy”)— this despite Kris not actually being pregnant.15
It is evident that the bond that unites Kris and Jeff is not simply metaphorical; indeed, there seems to be some sort of material bond between them, with the thoughts and sensations of one half of the couple intruding upon the other. Unlike the brief coital unification of Samantha and Theodore in Her or the boundary-blurring contortions of Oscar and his fellow performer in Holy Motors, the “affiliation” between Jeff and Kris is far more prolonged and perhaps even indissoluble. To refer back to some of the conceptual language from elsewhere in this study, we might say that the two lovers in Upstream Color “resonate” with one another in profound ways, or that they are deeply “intertwined,” or perhaps that they have incorporated at a molecular level into a single body or “assemblage.” This latter term is closer to the mark, for it acknowledges the material circumstances—more on that shortly—of Kris and Jeff’s
15 See Arthur Brennan, “Morning Sickness Isn’t Just for Women: Expectant Fathers Really Do Get Pregnancy Symptoms,” The Washington Post, September 26, 2014,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/09/26/morning-sickness-isnt-just-for-women-expectant- fathers-really-do-get-pregnancy-symptoms/.
connection, but it doesn’t quite go far enough. A better description, I think, for this strange state of exchange in which these two lovers find themselves? Entangled.
In quantum physics, entanglement names a type of particle-level phenomenon that “def[ies] the physics governing life at human scale.”16 A popular podcast recently explored entangled states by describing for a lay audience an experiment conducted at the University of Maryland. As the hosts reported, two atoms were isolated beneath metal boxes on opposite ends of a table. Then, with a complex assortment of lasers and mirrors, scientists were able to accelerate the motion of these atoms so that they each emit a photon. The researchers forced these photons to collide with one another, which in turn caused the two atoms from whence they came to become linked or “entangled”.17 Now, every atom possesses an intrinsic angular momentum that physicists call “spin,” the direction of which can be altered under laboratory conditions by scientists. Here’s where it gets interesting: “bizarrely, if the direction of one atom’s spin is altered, its entangled fellows will change their spins accordingly, and
instantaneously.”18 What happens to one, in other words, affects the other instantly, no matter the distance between them. They no longer operate as discrete entities but as a single object—even though they are separate from one another in space. The entanglement experiment at the University of Maryland spanned a mere four feet, but to date, similar results have been obtained across a distance of just over 186 miles (300km).19 “Theoretically,” though, “you could fly one atom to the moon, and still if you affected it in some way, the other atom back on earth would be affected instantaneously in the same way.”20
16 Devin Powell, “The Race to Prove ‘Spooky’ Quantum Connection May Have a Winner,” Popular Science, August 29, 2015, http://www.popsci.com/race-prove-spooky-quantum-connection-may-have-winner. 17 “Entanglement,” Invisibilia, January 29, 2015, http://www.npr.org/podcasts/510307/invisibilia.
18 Clara Moskowitz, “Quantum Entanglement Creates New State of Matter,” Scientific American, September 24, 2014, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/quantum-entanglement-creates-new-state-of-matter1/.
19 Takahiro Inagaki, et al., “Entanglement Distribution Over 300km of Fiber,” Quantum Express 21 (2013), http://arxiv.org/pdf/1310.5473.pdf.
As evinced by his famous public debates with Niels Bohr in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the notion of quantum entanglement greatly troubled Albert Einstein, for he contended that the theory was either flawed or incomplete because it failed to account for how entangled atoms could “transfer” information with one another without physical contact and faster than the speed of light. The implication was that “particles do not take on physical properties until they are measured or observed in some way. Until then, they can exist simultaneously in two or more places. Once measured, however, they snap into a more classical reality, existing in only one place.”21 Einstein’s derisive term for this strange
phenomenon: “spooky action at a distance.” But since the time of the Bohr–Einstein debates, quantum entanglement has been proven, first with some qualifying assumptions by John Stewart Bell in 1964 and definitively by Dutch physicist Robert Hanson and others in 2015.22
“To be entangled,” writes philosopher of science Karen Barad, “is not simply to be intertwined with another, as in joining separate entities, but to lack an independent, self-contained existence.”23 How fitting this line is for the situation Kris and Jeff finds themselves in in Upstream Color, for they not only feel one another’s pains and emotional highs and lows but also share an almost telepathic link and what amounts to a shared pool of experiences and memories from which they indiscriminately draw. Jeff and Kris do not consciously or willfully seek to affect one another, but they are affected by one another nonetheless. For this reason, I prefer Abner Shimony’s term “passion at a distance” over Einstein’s “spooky” action at a distance. Shimony’s phrasing harks back to Aristotle’s distinction between “action” and “passion” found in his Categories and Physics. In its contemporary usage, “passion” connotes strong emotion, suffering (specifically in the context of Jesus Chris), or great enthusiasm. In Aristotle’s usage, however, “passion” is meant to convey a sense of passivity: one is either the “mover” (action) or the
21 John Markoff, “Sorry, Einstein. Quantum Study Suggests ‘Spooky Action’ is Real,” The New York Times, October 21, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/22/science/quantum-theory-experiment-said-to-prove-spooky- interactions.html?_r=0, my italics.
22 Ibid.
“moved” (passion).24 Far down the list in its entry in The Oxford English Dictionary one will find these meanings for “passion”: “the fact or condition of being acted upon” and the “way in which a thing is or may be affected by external agency.” In his election of this term, Shimony shifts the emphasis away from causality in quantum entanglement to effect, the receiving end. In other words, he is underscoring the role of affect in entangled states. Shimony, in 1983, argued that altering one atom of an entangled pair does not cause an alteration in the other;25 rather, as physicist M. P. Seevinck explains, one atom “passively comes to know more about a faraway situation, [i.e., its entangled partner] but [it] cannot actively change it. […] Instead of ‘transmission of a message’ think of ‘extra information being available’.”26 This conception of entanglement aligns better with Upstream Color than the active thrust of Einstein’s. What happens to Kris is not duplicated in Jeff in a one-to-one correspondence, or vice-versa. Rather, the experiences of one are felt as a vague percept or even a premonition, and even then only sometimes. Moreover, it is not as though Jeff or Kris seeks to intentionally affect the other through their own self- affectations. Jeff does not, to contrive an example, place his hand in the fire so that Kris might feel the burn as if he were some corporeal voodoo doll. Finally, and conveniently for me, outside the context of quantum physics, “passion” tends to conjure the image of romantic love or erotic desire, which syncs up nicely with the love story aspects of Upstream Color. In fact, in one scene Jeff entangles these two meanings in his highly unconventional marriage proposal to Kris: “I want to marry you. I’m already married to you.”
What I hope to achieve with this discussion of quantum entanglement is to frame Upstream Color as a film that uses the science-fiction form to ponder the philosophical implications of a science fact—that at the particle level, discrete bodies interact with one another and that this impacts how we might think
24 Aristotle, Physics, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, trans. by Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941): 256.
25 Abner Shimony, “Controllable and Uncontrollable Non-locality,” in Foundations of Quantum Mechanics in Light
of the New Technology, eds. Susumu Kamefuchi et al (Tokyo: Physical Society of Japan, 1983): 225–230. 26 M. P. Seevinck, “Analyzing Passion at a Distance: Progress in Experimental Metaphysics?” (paper presented at the symposium on Decoherence and No-signalling: Current Interpretational Problems in Quantum Theory, Bern, Switzerland, October 2009), http://mpseevinck.ruhosting.nl/seevinck/Brussels_October_2009.pdf.
about the supposed circumscription of the self. In the controlled environment of the laboratory, physicists can force quantum entanglement to occur—but the implication is that entanglement can and does happen “in nature.” We can make entanglement happen, but it can happen without our intervention—invisibly and outside our conscious awareness. As one of the hosts of the podcast mentioned above put it, “[Y]ou don’t even need lasers to get [entanglement] to work. It … probably happens all the time in the natural world. Like, there could be one particle of you right now entangled with the person you just passed on the street.”27
Even though Upstream Color contrives an extraordinary set of circumstances to entangle its characters, it nevertheless goes to great lengths to attribute them to “natural” (albeit fictional) processes. For the sake of comparison, though not exactly the same thing as entanglement, forms of telepathic communication as depicted in cinema tend to be tied to supernatural (The Shining [Kubrick, 1980]), extraterrestrial (Independence Day [Emmerich, 1996]), or otherwise “cosmic” occurrences (The Double Life of Véronique [Kiéslowski, 1991]). In contrast, Carruth depicts the film’s mysterious organism as something that occurs in nature and is only subsequently utilized by humans who happen upon the organism’s affective powers by chance. Furthermore, the characters wind up entangled with one another not because of some vast conspiracy or some malevolent mastermind but as a result of a trio of unrelated parties operating not in concert but in pursuit of their own economic self-interests. So what, in the final analysis, is the driving force behind the strange entangled states in which these characters find
themselves? Capitalism.