Core Memory #159
Eight years old and I am on a mattress on the living room floor. It’s cool, and I enjoy the feeling of my bare legs against cotton. My head rests on half a dozen pillows my brothers and I have raced to collect from around the house.
A mattress on the floor is a special event. It’s movie night.
A neighbour has loaned us a VHS tape. It is labelled Star Wars IV.
Blue writing appears on the screen: a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…
Then the sound of horns.
Complexity theory is a field of mathematics that attempts to rationalize large and complex systems. It is a shockingly mystical branch of mathematics that attempts to describe everything. It helps map self-organising systems. The cells in a human body, a flock of birds, and an economic system: all have the traits of a self-organising system. When something gets big enough, it takes care of itself. It is both chaotic and ordered at the same time.
Core Memory #384
The Toowoomba City Library is my favourite place on Earth when I am eleven. My favourite visits are when my father and I go at night time. No one is in the youth section, and I feel I have the hushed upper floor all to myself.
In the A/V section are rows upon rows of a television programme I’ve never seen: Doctor Who. I pick a random title off the shelf and decide to give it a go. It’s a story called The Hand of Fear, starring Tom Baker and Elisabeth Sladen. I watch it that weekend, and I return to the library for more shortly afterwards.
Like almost everyone else, I’ve dropped off the Marvel Cinematic Universe at this point. I’ve promised myself I’ll return one day, but Avengers: Endgame felt like the equivalent of a long-held orgasm, and the refractory period hasn’t entirely passed for me yet.
This week The Wall Street Journal released a short podcast series documenting the history of the Marvel Cinematic Universe titled With Great Power. Its economic success is unprecedented (it’s earned about $25 billion at the global box office) and is the greatest example of capitalism and narrative storytelling ever known.
Once Keven Feige became President of Marvel Studios, he chased an ‘impossible dream’: to produce a string of superhero films that would eventually merge into a team. The Avengers became the most successful movie ever made in 2012. The ‘impossible dream’ became the driving economic engine of Marvel Studios. You can’t just see one film. Everything is connected into one giant story.
It’s more than a cinematic universe; it’s a multi-verse, where multiple versions of the same character sit alongside each other (Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield and Tom Holland were all Spider-Man in 2021).
There is something deeply soothing about connecting every story. I am a fan in the true sense of the word: a fanatic. I fetishize the chronology of a ‘canon’ that is half corporate-mandated, half democratically created by fans.
For the studios, it’s a great business proposition. It’s a self-perpetuating economic system.
Neil Theise is a diagnostic pathologist, an expert in complexity theory and a Zen Buddhist (and what precisely have you done with your life?).
For Theise, complexity theory is the rational gateway to mysticism. In much the same way that quantum physics has become the weirdest (but no less legitimate) branch of science, complexity theory opens doors to infinity.
The planets orbit the sun and never crash.
Our villages, towns and cities are filled with rampant human life.
The cells in my body exist in a constant dance with bacteria.
The atoms that make up the cells are in a swirling dance of electrons, neurons and plutons.
The great beyond, where particles dance in the un-ending quantum foam, collide and interact to build life.
The closer you look, the more borders disappear. Everything starts to become one.
Marvel stories exist in a multi-verse told across two mediums: comics and film.
The DC film continuity is trickier, but the comics have ‘reset’ their universe several times in their history with cataclysmic ‘crisis’ events where all realities collapse into a single Earth (just one version of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman etc) and begin again.
Star Wars exists along a single timeline but hasn’t always been well-policed. Attempting to leverage the massive success of the first trilogy of films, a small series of novels became available in the late eighties. Their success then drove an entire industry in Star Wars literature, where the ‘official’ story of the Star Wars galaxy was played out. This ‘expanded universe’ was officially trashed when Disney bought the rights to Star Wars. Nowadays an official Star Wars Story Committee works across all media properties to ensure the timeline behaves.
Thus, there are two versions of Star Wars: pre and post-Disney, complete with detailed timelines. For popular characters like Luke Skywalker, this has resulted in an almost daily diary for the entirety of the character’s life.
Want to know what was happening forty, a hundred, or two thousand years before the Death Star blew up? In both the pre and post-Disney timeline? No worries, there’s a Wiki that covers all of it.
It’s fascinating to compare Marvel, DC and Star Wars, all American corporate properties, with Doctor Who, a BBC-funded enterprise. Doctor Who is not without its extended universe. In fact there are more original radio plays then TV episodes, and indeed more novels (note: if I can track down whatever die-hard librarian purchased every single Doctor Who novel for the Toowoomba City Library in the late 90’s, I’d love to thank them). But an attempt to tidy this into a chronology is an impossible Rubix cube (although fans have made admirable attempts). This is partly because of the timey-wimey wibbly-wobbly nature of Doctor Who itself, but also the lack of an organising central corporate entity.
Still, it all makes a kind of sense. It’s chaos and order at the same time. Even the most hardened attempt to control a narrative as large as Star Wars ends in contradictions and narrative cul de sacs.
The capitalistic impulse of organising studios and producers is irrelevant to fans like me.
The truth is, organising these narratives makes these ridiculous fairytales seem more real.
Core Memory #895
We are in Religion class, and we are reading the Bible. My Bible’s paper is thin like dead leaves. The pages have a distinct smell that stains my fingers.
We are studying the gospels.
The teacher mentions casually that there are a bunch of other gospels that have been deliberately left out of the Bible.
Fans of Jesus Christ decided they were not canon.
Does even Jesus have an Extended Universe?
And if so, who’s in charge of the timeline?
Go far enough down the tunnel of complexity theory (order from chaos from order), quantum physics (light is both a particle and a wave depending on who’s watching) and microbiology (there is no individual, only a big blob of life), and time itself starts to disappear.
The cells in your body now were born from cells in your body a handful of years ago. The cells in your body back then were born from cells before then. Backwards and backwards until your birth, and then into the womb, and then into a sperm and embryo. Your mother was born with that embryo inside her already. And the same for her mother. Backwards and backwards through all of life…
There is one source.
One big bang.
An inherent one-ness to our entire history.
Grant Morrisson is a weird guy. When he isn’t practising magic and taking mushrooms, he’s a writer for comics. And a good one. He mapped the entire DC universe back in 2014 for his series Multiversity.
In his book Supergods, Morrisson offers a history of modern comics from his unique perspective. Morrisson has tripped the light fantastic enough that the membrane between reality and fiction (particle or a wave) has become fluid.
He takes, as an example, a conversation he had outside a comics convention with Superman.
In one reality, it wasn’t Superman. It was a fan dressed as Superman.
But for their short conversation together, both men believed that Superman was Superman. And no one else was there to observe it. And Morrisson asked Superman questions and received answers. He communed with the icon. Simple as that.
The closer you look, the more borders disappear. Reality and fiction merge.
I’m teaching a course about adaptation. And adaptation is everywhere. Nothing is an original work. Everything has been translated and edited.
Marvel comics were based on Greek and Norse Gods.
Shakespeare drew on history, myths and folklore.
Star Wars is a World War Two adventure film in space.
If we trace all stories backwards long enough, are they like the cells fueling our biology? Is there in fact one story, one source, told before anything or anyone had heard a story before?
Whispered to a child in the dark, safe by a fire. Stars above.
‘Once upon a time…’