“Predestination” Explained: An Allegory (Spoilers)
I saw the time travel movie “Predestination” last night. If you haven’t seen it, don’t read any further unless you don’t intend to.
Like any good time travel movie, the movie leaves you saying “Whaaa?” But I noticed a consistent theme: the movie is clearly intended on some level to be an allegory — for the life of Christ. I have not seen this theme discussed anywhere else on the Internet, so I thought I would discuss it here. (One important point: this post assumes your familiarity with the plot of the movie, which would be well-nigh impossible to explain anyway.)
“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son…”
The key event of the movie is that Hawke/Snook (or “John/Jane” if you prefer) sacrifices his son (which began life as his daughter) to save the world from evil. This fact alone starts one thinking about the possibility of a parallel to Christ, but there is much more to it.
Making the parallel much clearer is the fact that the son thus sacrificed is not just John/Jane’s son — but also John/Jane himself. The central conceit of the movie — and I warn you again, this is a major spoiler — is that the two main characters, played by Ethan Hawke and Sarah Snook — are in fact the same person. Indeed, a third character is also the same person: Snook’s baby that Hawke steals from the nursery. Three separate people are really one and the same . . . like the Holy Trinity. In this connection, I found it interesting that, in a conversation in the bar, Snook tells Hawke that the father of her baby and the baby itself are both ghosts . . . like the Holy Ghost.
The birth of John/Jane is problematic, and one of the jokes in the movie is the question: which came first, the chicken or the egg? The punchline of the joke is “the rooster.” In the movie, the birth is puzzling and miraculous: essentially, the baby is the product of two people who are the same person, which is impossible — leading Robertson to tell Ethan Hawke that he was special, because he was the only person in history without ancestry:
You are more than an agent, you are a gift given to the world through a predestination paradox. You are the only one. Free from history, ancestry. You must complete your mission.
A gift given to the world, free from history or ancestry. The parallels to Christ are unmistakable here. It is notable in this context that John/Jane, who gives birth to the baby, was (very pointedly) a virgin until she is impregnated by the male version of herself.
At the end of the movie, Hawke kills the older version of himself, to prevent a great tragedy from happening. Similarly, Jesus chose to sacrifice Himself — and on some level He knew it was going to happen and He embraced it. One can put the blame on Pilate or the crowd, but — although Christ had a choice — the self-sacrifice was, in a sense . . . inevitable.
After killing himself, Hawke gets back in the time machine — essentially rising after his own death to face an eternal life, looping back through the same loop, seemingly for all time. Similarly, Jesus rose again on the third day.
The movie says that Hawke helped spawn a small group of other time travelers, and that he made them better agents — people who were themselves able to go out into the world and do good works of their own. How many of these people were there? I do not think it is a coincidence that there were 11; the movie (again quite pointedly) says so. There were 12 apostles of Christ — but if you count only the ones appointed by Christ (this excludes Matthias) then there were only 11 after Judas committed suicide.
In the bar, Snook tells Hawke: “Let’s face it. Nobody’s innocent.” Everyone is tainted by original sin, in other words — which is the reason Christ came to Earth: for the forgiveness of (original) sin. Snook says everybody just uses other people for their own ends. Hawke says: “Maybe. Maybe not.” Because there is one person not doing that: him. (Both of him.) In the same conversation, Snook talks about looking for a purpose, and Hawke suggests that love could be that purpose — which was Christ’s central message. (Christ had two rules, and two rules only: love God with all your heart, and love your neighbor as you love yourself.)
As if to whack you over the head with the symbolism, the orphanage where the baby is left is called the “Good Shepherd.” Jesus says in John 10:11: “I am the good Shepherd.”
Just some food for thought, concerning what I think was a very interesting movie.
P.S. The story is based on a short story called “–All You Zombies–” by Robert Heinlein. Written in a single day in 1958, Heinlein’s story is just 13 pages; you can read it here (.pdf) in minutes.
Ding.
Patterico (9c670f) — 3/8/2015 @ 12:06 pmWell, I prefer RAH’s version, of course. Glad you liked the movie.
Simon Jester (c8876d) — 3/8/2015 @ 12:11 pmI also recommend RAH’s “By His Bootstraps” for more paradoxes.
But I did like “I’m My Own Grandpa” in “All You Zombies…”
Also one of the rules of the Time Patrol:
Simon Jester (c8876d) — 3/8/2015 @ 12:14 pm
Robert Heinlein: What can’t he do?
askeptic (efcf22) — 3/8/2015 @ 12:19 pmA completely different take on this theme can be found in Chris Roberson’s “Here, There & Everywhere”
http://www.amazon.com/Here-There-Everywhere-Chris-Roberson/dp/1591023319
He also puts paid to the whole “time patrol” thing. An excellent book even for people not keen on SF.
Kevin M (25bbee) — 3/8/2015 @ 12:34 pmPatterico:
Consider also the immaculate conception, which only has one possible source.
Kevin M (25bbee) — 3/8/2015 @ 12:36 pmOoops. You did, sorry.
Kevin M (25bbee) — 3/8/2015 @ 12:37 pmKevin, that is a fun one.
I alway enjoyed Leiber’s “Try to Change the Past,” as well.
http://www.loa.org/sciencefiction/biographies/leiber_try_and_change.jsp
Simon Jester (c8876d) — 3/8/2015 @ 12:39 pmMy take on changing the past:
If you somehow travel to the past, the future is as unknown as if you were born there. Go ahead, change things. But the “future” you return to won’t be the one you left.
Bradbury stated it best in “A Sound of Thunder.”
Kevin M (25bbee) — 3/8/2015 @ 12:58 pmAnd even if you don’t change things, the future is still unknown. A lot of what happens is based on random chance in a quantum-mechanical universe.
Kevin M (25bbee) — 3/8/2015 @ 1:02 pmSure, Kevin. I’m still down with Hugh Everett’s “Many Worlds” interpretation. Attempts to change the past would simply shunt the person off to a new universe. Not changing the past, but moving into a new universe.
Niven had a great short story suggesting it’s not possible to change the past (the “Cosmic Censor”) as seen in his great short story “Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation.”
It’s found in his collection “Convergent Series.”
Simon Jester (c8876d) — 3/8/2015 @ 1:07 pmMichael Crichton had a very good book, that was turned into a very meh film, along those lines,
narciso (ee1f88) — 3/8/2015 @ 1:11 pmthe protagonists go back to the Middle Ages,
Niven’s Law: “If the universe of discourse permits the possibility of time travel and of changing the past, then no time machine will be invented in that universe.”
Kevin M (25bbee) — 3/8/2015 @ 1:12 pmSimon,
Do you know what happened with Everett? Both he and his thesis advisor John Wheeler tried to get the Copenhagen bunch to investigate Many Worlds, but they called it heresy and refused, saying Everett was “indescribably stupid and could not understand the simplest things in quantum mechanics.”
Kevin M (25bbee) — 3/8/2015 @ 1:19 pmthe upcoming terminator film, faces the same problem, the timeline was altered much earlier, it’s a retcon.
narciso (ee1f88) — 3/8/2015 @ 1:19 pmJust read it.
That was fun.
Patterico (9c670f) — 3/8/2015 @ 1:46 pmGreetings:
Wouldn’t have Mohammad, and his “one religion to rule them all”, have been more “au courant” ???
11B40 (844d04) — 3/8/2015 @ 2:00 pmwell he died suddenly in 1982?
narciso (ee1f88) — 3/8/2015 @ 2:03 pmKevin, the thing that my students never “get” about scientists is that they are people, with all the foibles of people. They are not “above it all” in any way.
Bohr didn’t approve of pretty much anything that didn’t agree with his world view. The attacks on poor Everett are fairly typical. Sometimes, scientists come to believe the adulation that they receive. Sigh. The fact is, no one ever sees more than a tiny shadow of The Real.
Everett didn’t help matters. He was pretty bull headed about things. Wheeler was always a conciliatory sort, but I suspect things got a bit heated. Still, Wheeler didn’t “disapprove” of MWI until after Everett’s early death.
Interestingly, Everett’s son is “E” of the group Eels, and has written and performed quite about a bit about his later father.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eels_%28band%29
There is a great documentary out there about Everett and his father and the MWI:
https://vimeo.com/58603054
Me? I’m no physicist. But Everett was a polymath, and I suspect he has a part of the truth. It’s that or the Cosmic Censor, so far as I am concerned.
But you know how Einstein felt about quantum weirdness. “Spooky action at a distance.”
Again, scientists are humans, too. Reading how E felt about his father made me sad.
Simon Jester (c8876d) — 3/8/2015 @ 3:05 pmPat: that’s a take I hadn’t considered, and it works. Good pick-up.
The whole movie hangs on Snook’s performance. Surprised she didn’t get more nominations somewhere. I’m looking forward to The Spierig boys’ next project.
Craig Mc (299f38) — 3/8/2015 @ 3:14 pmPatterico, many years ago I got to meet the great SF writer and humorist Alfred Bester. Here is his take on trying to change the past. You will like it, I promise.
ftp://82.1.244.36/shares/USB_Storage/Media/Books/Non-Medical/Alfred%20Bester/Alfred%20Bester%20-%20The%20Men%20Who%20Murdered%20Mohammed.pdf
Simon Jester (c8876d) — 3/8/2015 @ 3:24 pmand then i used my time machine and went back to where my favorite lunch meat was on sale and i bought two packs and froze one so now I’m pretty set on sammiches for awhile
happyfeet (831175) — 3/8/2015 @ 3:34 pmI recall reading a novel – by David Gerrold, though I may be wrong – where the protagonist goes through a lot of what is talked about here, including having sex with a female version of himself from a different universe/timeline. She eventually gives birth to the protagonist (presumably) who is then raised by his “uncle” who actually turns out to be the protagonist. He also can never go more than 400 years into the past or the future because of language barriers; Shakespeare being about the limit for comprehensible English in the past.
David Crowley (970d6c) — 3/8/2015 @ 3:40 pmI also thought that there were some similarities to the Biblical story of Abraham in some of the same situations that you point out as being Christ-related.
I think that is “The Man Who Folded Himself,” David.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Folded_Himself
Simon Jester (c8876d) — 3/8/2015 @ 3:44 pmIf you go back to your past, you were not there-then now, so the universe forks there. One branch has you there-then, the other does not. To go back to the future you came from, you have to first go back to before you arrived (causing more forks) and then go forward to the universe you left. Finding it will be difficult, others are also causing forks. Go forward, and it (of course) forks when you arrive.
The idea of the universe as a computer program becomes more and more attractive.
htom (4ca1fa) — 3/8/2015 @ 4:03 pmy’know, I have a time machine, too. But every time I get in it, I come out of nowhere and pull myself out, screaming “don’t do that! You’ll regret it!” And I’m all “like, WTF, man? C’mon!”
felipe (56556d) — 3/8/2015 @ 5:06 pm#19:
If I were younger and a LOT smarter, I’d want to be looking at dark energy and Many Worlds.
Kevin M (25bbee) — 3/8/2015 @ 6:07 pmI think that is “The Man Who Folded Himself,” David.
Sometimes spelt with an N instead of an L.
Kevin M (25bbee) — 3/8/2015 @ 6:08 pmI wonder if anyone here is familiar with Robert Siverberg’s “Up tthe Line”? It is also based on a kind of “time police” theme, though it is not very serious – more of a comic novel. That said, it got me interested in the history of the Byzantine era!
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_the_Line
Ken Kelly (176eb5) — 3/8/2015 @ 6:24 pmHa, ha, ha! The time travel is redundant (not to mention impossible according to Einstein). Heinlein threw it in to turn a Freudian fantasy into a seeming science fiction story.
A perfect hermaphrodite, not likely but still less impossible than traveling back in time, with both fully developed testes that produce XY gametes and ovaries that produce XX gametes, could fertilize himself/herself. The child would not even be a clone, it would be like the product of brother-sister fraternal twins. The odds would be astronomical in humans, but it is found in nature. In snails for one example.
Heinlein liked these bait and switch literary devices (not to say straw men). He also liked stretching the envelope with weird Freudian-type sexual relationships. You can find them in more than one of his stories.
nk (dbc370) — 3/8/2015 @ 6:40 pmnk, “Time Enough for Love” has most of them.
Kevin M (25bbee) — 3/8/2015 @ 6:47 pmThere was another guy from the Golden Age who took parthenogenesis in a different direction. He had cancers being babies — that is they would develop into babies if properly nourished or into malignant tumors if not. I cannot remember who.
nk (dbc370) — 3/8/2015 @ 7:22 pm“Unbegotten Child” by Wnston Marks. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/32149/32149-h/32149-h.htm
nk (dbc370) — 3/8/2015 @ 7:34 pmAlmost, if not all, of RAH from Stranger in a Strange Land onwards, has various non-standard wedding/ marriage/ sexual/ inheritance/ governmental/ customs. This is somewhat explained in Number of the Beast where it seems that this Earth culture is not at all the Earth culture that any of his writing is based on (that is, the twister setting 000000 does not come to this fictal timeline.)
Not all of those are shown as happy or entirely functional. Friday’s New Zealand family perhaps being the best example of that.
htom (4ca1fa) — 3/8/2015 @ 7:36 pmTime travel paradoxes don’t happen. That we can talk about them is a defect of a language not developed with time travel in mind. The paradoxes are not produced by time travel, but by the inconsistent premises of those discussing time travel.
Let’s say you want to go back in time and kill Hitler. Lots of people were trying to kill Hitler; perhaps some or all of them were time travelers. It doesn’t make any difference. We know that Hitler was not assassinated, so time travelers who try to kill Hitler failed to do so just like the non-time travelers then.
The apparent paradoxes are due to the time traveller thinking that because he has traveled back in time the past is now somehow “unsettled”. Talking about the past as “settled” and the future as “unsettled” causes no problems for non-time travelers, because they all share the same perspective as to what is “past” and what is “future”.
If you travel in time to the past, the past events that are now your “future” are no more and no less “settled” than they were before you went. The universe is not making exceptions for you just because you traveled in time.
It is also not correct to say that the universe somehow “prevents” you from assassinating Hitler. Again, there’s no exceptions made for you just because you travel in time. You have the same chance of assassinating Hitler that Col. Stauffenberg did, but both of you are known to have failed to accomplish it. But it was not impossible for either of you to have done so.
Gabriel Hanna (a1cb3f) — 3/8/2015 @ 7:41 pmLike any good time travel movie
Too bad a time machine doesn’t exist. We desperately — quite desperately — need it now more than ever before.
Mark (c160ec) — 3/8/2015 @ 7:54 pmGabriel, if I understand Einstein at all, you do not travel through time but rather time travels through you. It is the increase of entropy, matter being converted into energy. If you want to travel back in time you would need to reconstruct the universe, converting matter back into energy, and the formula is e=mc2. Imagine reconstructing a candle not from the soot and melted wax but from the light and heat and on the scale of the universe. Turning the light from every star back into hydrogen in its core, hmm?
I’ll gladly accept corrections — I’m no physicist. But time travel is a fantasy. Larry Niven phrased it as the childish wish “Oh God, make it never happened”. Once you start with the assumption that it is possible, you can fantasize just about any pair of ducks you want also.
nk (dbc370) — 3/8/2015 @ 7:59 pmWell, nk, you are entitled to your opinion…but I would be delighted to debate you on RAH in another venue. I recommend you read the late Bill Patterson’s biographies first. Some folks call them hagiography, but I knew Bill for fifteen years before he died, and he was a true scholar. Not an acolyte. There is something about Heinlein that brings out the snark.
As for time travel…well, I try to be open minded. Einstein didn’t believe in many aspects of quantum mechanics that have been experimentally confirmed.
I’m with Kip Thorne on that.
Simon Jester (7088aa) — 3/8/2015 @ 9:48 pmAlso, I’m not so sure Niven would be quite so direct.
Simon Jester (7088aa) — 3/8/2015 @ 9:49 pmAll the way through this piece I was thinking “This sounds like All You Zombies“. Then I got to the PS.
Milhouse (9d71c3) — 3/8/2015 @ 10:00 pmWell, it’s in the introduction to his Theory and Practice of Time Travel, an excerpt of which was also quoted by Kevin M earlier. pdf file. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0xb4crOvCgTQVg5NDhObjRpNUE/edit
nk (dbc370) — 3/8/2015 @ 10:11 pmThis reminds me of the Book of Hebrews, which has a lengthy discussion of Genesis 14:18-20:
Hebrews says:
This Melchizedek was king of Salem and priest of God Most High. He met Abraham returning from the defeat of the kings and blessed him, 2 and Abraham gave him a tenth of everything. First, the name Melchizedek means “king of righteousness”; then also, “king of Salem” means “king of peace.” 3 Without father or mother, without genealogy, without beginning of days or end of life, resembling the Son of God, he remains a priest forever.
Just think how great he was: Even the patriarch Abraham gave him a tenth of the plunder!
In another place in Hebrews it says:
Every high priest is selected from among the people and is appointed to represent the people in matters related to God, to offer gifts and sacrifices for sins. 2 He is able to deal gently with those who are ignorant and are going astray, since he himself is subject to weakness. 3 This is why he has to offer sacrifices for his own sins, as well as for the sins of the people. 4 And no one takes this honor on himself, but he receives it when called by God, just as Aaron was.
5 In the same way, Christ did not take on himself the glory of becoming a high priest. But God said to him,
6 And he says in another place,
The Genesis passage is one of the more mysterious in the bible. Many have suggested Melchizidek was Jesus himself.
Gerald A (6b504a) — 3/8/2015 @ 10:29 pmThe site I linked in #42 has a fascinating document from the Dead Sea Scrolls: “The Coming of Melchizedek”. The parallels between that passage and Jesus are obvious.
Gerald A (6b504a) — 3/8/2015 @ 10:50 pmRabbinic tradition says Melchizedek was Noah’s son Shem. If you piece together the Biblical chronology, you will find that Shem, who lived to 600 (according to the Bible), outlived Abraham, who passed away at the age of 175, by 35 years. Shem in fact lived long enough to know the patriarch Jacob, who was 50 at the time of Shem’s death.
kishnevi (adea75) — 3/9/2015 @ 7:39 amIf you guys are looking for BC parallels of Christ, you will not find a better one than Hercules. Closer than any of the rest, from duality of nature to harrowing of Hell, and miraculous benefits to mankind in between.
nk (dbc370) — 3/9/2015 @ 8:00 am#35: Wrong. No one in 1937 knows that Hitler doesn’t die. You use knowledge of the future to “prove” that the future cannot change. Circular reasoning. The future is just a dream. One of many.
Kevin M (25bbee) — 3/9/2015 @ 8:59 amBut time travel is a fantasy
I actually heard someone say that within Richard Feynman’s hearing. Feynman was not amused.
Kevin M (25bbee) — 3/9/2015 @ 9:03 am@37. Einstein’s relativity says nothing about entropy or the direction of time, and is perfectly compatible with time travel. The Tipler cylinder is an example of a time machine that exploits general relativity; though Hawking proved (twenty years later) that a finite cylinder wouldn’t work, he did not refute the original conception nor time machines in general.
Entropy has nothing to do with matter converted to energy. If you are really interested in what it is, it is dervied from the number of ways to arrange the parts of a system so that the energy is constant. In most (but not all systems) adding energy to a system increases the entropy. Lasers are a notable exception.
Gabriel Hanna (64d4e1) — 3/9/2015 @ 11:22 am@46. No one in 1937 knows that Hitler doesn’t die.
The time travellers from the future know it.
You use knowledge of the future to “prove” that the future cannot change.
I did not “prove” that the future “cannot” change. What I asserted is that the future “does not” change, and that assuming it does leads to logical paradoxes. “Can” is about possibilities. The possibility to kill Hitler in 1937 is the same fro time travellers and non-time travellers, but only the time travellers are in a position to know it “won’t” happen. “Won’t”, of course, is totally different from “can’t”.
By going in back in time to 1937, how does the universe know that all bets are now off and that events from 1937 onward can all be changed? How does the universe reconcile that with the time travelers who are in 1936 and 1918 and 1899? What about the ones who didn’t come from 2015 but came from 2030, they can change the 2015 past.
Assuming that the past can be changed by time travel is the same thing as assuming that somewhere there is a “real present”–stuff that happens before then can be changed into a new “real past”. How does the universe decide which set of time travelers have the “real present”?
It’s easy to
Gabriel Hanna (64d4e1) — 3/9/2015 @ 11:30 am42, 43. Thanks. A deep an astonishing insight into Christology given in Luther’s surmise thru Apollos.
44. Nonetheless the ‘begat’ of the Toledot in no way demands a reading of ‘sired’. Many, many mortal generations may be comprised between exalted fathers.
DNF (73e8af) — 3/9/2015 @ 12:55 pm44. Cont. The likely prehistorical date of the flood is 5700 BC on the creation of the Bosporus flooding what is now the Black Sea.
Jacob’s office of vizier was 1750 BC dated by a major Solar minimum then obtaining.
Interestingly the dry basin of the Mediterranean was flooded on the creation of the Straits of Gibraltar 3 million years before the current era.
DNF (73e8af) — 3/9/2015 @ 1:15 pm# 49. The Universe notices the arrival of a time traveler and forks the timeline the time traveler is coming from at that point of arrival. His previous timeline continues as it was (without himZ); the new fork continues from his point of arrival, everyone in that timeline having a “second” chance (but they don’t know it.)
Of course, there’s this (from Charles Stross’s Singularity Sky):
htom (4ca1fa) — 3/9/2015 @ 7:04 pmI am the Eschaton; I am not your God.
I am descended from you, and exist in your future.
Thou shalt not violate causality within my historic light cone. Or else.
Not to go all lowbrow on this wonderful discusion of relativity and classical sci fi authors, but the old X-Files episode “Cold Lazarus” had an interesting take on time travel. A time traveler comes back near the end of the episode and talks about his future where time travel exists. Apparently it’s a mess. Nothing is constant, everything changes because someone is always back in the past changing prior events. They don’t explain how those in the future would know about all the invalid timelines that had been corrupted by time travelers, but probably because it’s a TV show with a ticking clock.
So anyway, the time traveler kills the person who is about to make the scientific advancement that will enable rampant time shenanigans and saves the future…….or does he?
Russ from Winterset (30a992) — 3/9/2015 @ 8:24 pm@52:The Universe notices the arrival of a time traveler
How?
forks the timeline the time traveler is coming from at that point of arrival.
What does that even mean? Why does the universe fork it then, and only then?
His previous timeline continues as it was (without him)
Why?
everyone in that timeline having a “second” chance
So now you have ANOTHER time, maybe a “perpendicular” or a “meta” time that we can use to order timelines?
That’s a hell of lot of physics to try to invent on the fly, and what are the implications for the laws of nature as we know them now? Can you predict new observations from these assumptions, or are they just ad hoc rationalizations made to try to harmonize incompatible premises?
Gabriel Hanna (a1cb3f) — 3/9/2015 @ 9:31 pmMagic. Really. We can imagine such things being possible, but have no idea of how they could be done.
htom (4ca1fa) — 3/9/2015 @ 10:50 pm@55:We can imagine such things being possible, but have no idea of how they could be done.
Tipler cylinders are one way it could be done, so it’s not really true to say that we have “no idea”.
Practical, no, but possible, yes, provided gneral relativity works the way we think it does.
Gabriel Hanna (64d4e1) — 3/10/2015 @ 1:27 pmwe don’t really know, that maybe one multiverse,
narciso (ee1f88) — 3/10/2015 @ 1:29 pmand in other entertainment news,
Jeremy Clarkson got suspended (until he is fired) by the BBC.
Think 5th Gear will be getting a bit of a makeover.
seeRpea (181740) — 3/10/2015 @ 2:27 pmReminds me of the plan to use a giant Klein bottle for anti-submarine warfare. Since the outside is inside, once you put the giant Klein bottle in the ocean you can trap any sub you want.
Math jokes usually require more explanation than lawyer jokes, or doctor jokes as well.
MD in Philly (not in Philly at the moment) (deca84) — 3/10/2015 @ 2:45 pmEither way, both the movie and the story failed to answer the essential question: If my grandmother had balls, would she be my grandfather?
nk (dbc370) — 3/10/2015 @ 3:17 pm