Robert K. Johnston, Meaningful Meaninglessness of Multiverse Movies

About This Event

Robert K. Johnston, Senior Professor of Theology and Culture, Fuller Theological Seminary, presents the talk "The Meaningful Meaninglessness of Multiverse Movies: Everything Everywhere All at Once, Ecclesiastes, and Camus, Thursday, September 28, 7 pm at Wolff Auditorium (JEPSON 114) on the Gonzaga campus.

Over the last decade or so, the multiverse has become an important topic both in theoretical physics and in popular culture. What might be the significance of there being parallel universes to our own? While physicists are divided on the topic, filmmakers, in particular, have increasingly embraced the notion. This year’s Academy Award winner, EEAO, uses the multiverse as a deeply affecting metaphor, one particularly suited to the Asian American immigrant experience, but also one suited to the absurdity and chaos of contemporary life, which we all feel. While the filmmakers humorously use the multiverse as a gigantic symbol of life’s meaninglessness, paradoxically they also invite viewers back to the need to accept and love one another despite our different values, experiences and orientations. In this way, the film invites an intertextual dialogue with Albert Camus and his commitments both to life’s absurdity and to a stubborn humanism rooted in love, as well as to the book of Ecclesiastes in the Hebrew Scriptures which recognizes that all our efforts to make life meaningful are “vanity,” while also recognizing that joy in life is both good and possible. Life is meaningless, absurd (perhaps all the more so because of the multiverse); but it is simultaneously meaningful, wonderful!