The Multiverse and Meta-Narrative
By Cameron Lipp
Dublin, 1952. Three years before he will create his cat, Erwin Schrödinger warns an unsuspecting audience of his peers that what he is about to posit will “seem lunatic.” He describes a quantum superposition, the principle that a system of atoms or photons can exist in multiple states at the same time. Schrödinger believes that his equations and theories point to a shocking, almost inconceivable reality: there are multiple histories to this universe that are “not alternatives, but all really happen simultaneously.” It certainly does sound ludicrous, even 70 years later. What Schrödinger never could have guessed was that Benedict Cumberbatch in a cape would be addressing the same metaphysical question in something cryptically known as the “MCU.”
I found it odd this year that two mainstream movies in theaters simultaneously explained the mechanics of a reality shaped by multiple concurrent timelines and/or universes: Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness delves into these concepts, as did indie cinema darling Everything Everywhere, All At Once. I felt an onset of déjà vu. Or perhaps I was in another dimension?! No, just kidding. I will not be comparing the films (though we all know which one is better), but simply noting their simultaneity as an indicator of a cultural shift. Doctor Strange and Evelyn Wang are not the only two characters to traverse the multiverse with us. Other recent adventurers include The Avengers, Rick and Morty, and Dr. Who.
Our generation is well-equipped to talk about meta. We use it in our everyday lives, sometimes to poke fun at pretentious indie kids, other times to explain a mind-blowing twist in a film or show, and sometimes when we’re talking about Mark Zuckerberg’s latest tragedy. Meta media (as coined by the renowned computer scientists Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg) is defined as the new relationships developing between form and content as media and technology develop. While it has a broad application, here let’s narrow it down to instances like Ferris Bueller looking right into our eyes and saying, “they bought it.”
There is a new sect of meta-media hitting the scene, one which I will simply call Multiversal Media. (I know it’s on the nose, but you try and come up with a name that doesn’t sound corny as hell. Quantum Media? Whatever.) This new wave of art and media often features multiverses but is not limited to this. Multiversal Media features any sort of protagonist exploring a series of changes to their contextual, physical, and most importantly thematic surroundings. They may not be going through universes. They can also travel through dreams, time periods, planets––anything that provides a space for a new contextual and thematic change. Think Rick and Morty, Infinity Train, the recent reboot of Quantum Leap, Dr. Who, Inception, Ready Player One, and Happy Death Day. All of the characters in these media go through significant contextual changes in the rules, themes, and realities in which they initially begin. Undeniably there has been an upsurge in Metaversal Media in Hollywood, whether conscious or not. Why this pattern? Where is all this media coming from? Unfortunately, the answer lies in Vine (RIP). Hold your nose.
Almost one decade ago, the innovative social media outlet Vine opened its digital doors to millions. The platform was a revolution in entertainment. A six-second recording limit relegated any form of entertainment to bite-size increments that could be gobbled like popcorn. Vine’s lifespan was equally short-lived, as three years later Twitter announced that the app was to be discontinued indefinitely. But the damage was done. Vine had proved to the world that six seconds was enough. It marked a trend in decreasing attention span and increasing phone usage that only continued to worsen as the social media giant TikTok rose from Vine’s ashes––bigger, stronger, and here to stay. Swiping through TikTok often feels like a portal into another dimension. With every swipe surge we microdose other people’s lives. One second I’m with a Chinese laborer live-streaming themselves making toys on a factory’s conveyor belt for hours, and after the next swipe is a multi-millionaire taking me on a tour through her high-rise penthouse in Berlin. The context is non-essential. We enter another paradigm with the swipe of a finger. It is this constant shifting of culture, context, and content that so often reminds Gen Z that there are other lives out there. How often do we think of what else we could be doing right now? How often do we daydream about all of the wildly different paths our lives could take? Gen Z is more concerned with such things than any other generation before it.
It’s no secret that the internet has globalized and sped up the world like no other event in history. The evolution of media and art has been an exponential compacting, compartmentalizing, and abstracting of ideas and information into smaller and smaller boxes, posing an enormous threat to media like movies and television (which are now getting a taste of their own medicine). And, at the risk of being too poetic with the analogies, just as the Impressionists arose from the invention of the camera, so too rises Multiversal Media from the traditional. When extinction looms, there is nowhere left to turn but evolution.
In order to conform with a changing society, these films and television shows are thriving through their specific catering to the attentively challenged. In an interview with Salon, Daniel Kwan, one of the directors of Everything, Everywhere, All At Once, talked about the film’s relationship with ADHD, and how it even prompted him to get diagnosed: “When we started writing, we were like, ‘Oh, we should probably do a little bit of research about ADHD. Maybe the main character is undiagnosed and they don’t know it.’” As a Zoomer with ADHD, Everything Everywhere felt like a spiritual manifesto to how I feel all the time––how often I feel flung out of my boring office chair and into a distant daydream, just like Evelyn Wang. Multiversal Media provides this kind of maximalism for the masses. It sucks you in with a protagonist as an axle, and spins the context around them, scratching the itch that every iPhone addict needs. Every jump through a parallel reality is a swipe up, a brief little vignette into another style, texture, theme, world, person, anything, everywhere. This media is naturally more palatable and exciting for the modern viewer.
What truly thrives in Multiversal Media is parody. Often many of these shows and movies utilize, and sometimes hinge on, meta-narrative and tropes. The work of TV writer and producer Dan Harmon is the quintessential author of these works. Harmon’s first real foray into Multiversal Media was Community, which first aired in 2009. Community served as an early prototype for Multiversal Media, which explains why it has grown to be a pop-culture staple with Gen Z a decade later. The show began as a simple sitcom featuring a cast of quirky community college characters, but under Dan Harmon’s vision quickly became a vessel for parody, each episode a replica of some trope in film or television.
From a methodical parody of and homage to the standard Scorcese mobster films, to a blatant admission to utilizing the infamously lazy “bottle episode” of television writing, Community nails pop culture with scathing indictments of tropes and cliches in modern media. Harmon’s Rick and Morty takes parody even further. There’s a reason that these two shows are beloved by a generation of the most media-literature people in the history of this civilization. Generation Z’s lives are so ensconced in media and stories that we are immunized to genre and cliché from an early age. From a young age, we have been taught to treat everything on the internet with a grain of salt. This translates to bigger screens as well. This generation is more conscious of what is behind the screen than any other before it. This is what makes the explorations of parody and Multiversal Media so appealing to them.
Given the trend towards increasing meta-narrative in our media, it’s understandable to be afraid of what is to come. But I see the meta and multiversal as an artistic era, which like all eras will have a counter. There comes a point when meta-narrative becomes as dull and lazy as what it parodies, and it won’t be long before viewers demand more sincerity in entertainment again. Or not. We could just as easily see films and television wrap themselves deep in metafiction and multiversal media, refusing to ever come out of hiding again. We’ll just have to wait and see.