Nine Days (2021)

 

100 best Science Fiction Movies, Empire Magazine list

 

#93. Nine Days (2021)

 

All fiction, whether it wants to admit it or not, is to some degree plumbing questions regarding the meaning of life. Well-crafted fictions usually ignore the presence of that ambition for anything within regarding the meaning of life is heavily context-driven: what does it mean to your concept of the meaning of your life after getting married? or divorced? or the birth of a child? or the death of a parent? or being drafted into a war? or falling ill? or being driven to commit an act of revenge? 

 

Tackling the meaning of life is some broader sense is usually regulated to philosophical tracts because when narrative fictions try to bite that one off, it often proves to be more than a conventional fiction can chew. L.A. Paul explored the challenge of a philosophical fiction in the book, “Transformative Experience” (2015), which was really a broader critique of rational decision-making. We claim we make decisions based on observation and research, but an experience so profound as to be transformative will also change our values to something far different than before the choice and decision. The choice, beforehand, will rely on preferences that may not relate to the later reality and the input from others about their transformative experiences could prove unreliable later. Our preparations are limited to the “personally transformative,” including one’s own prior experiences, observations, and research, which Paul compares to watching a powerful documentary, “It changes your point of view, including your core preferences,” so clearly a fictional narrative serves us here because, though false, it’s akin to a journalistic representation of another’s experience. But a truly transformative experience must also involve the “epistemically transformative,” which Paul compared to tasting an exotic fruit, “The only way to know what it is like to have it is to have it yourself.” The truly transformative is that which you can only achieve through the experience itself, it is beyond the realm of preparing and larger than the personally transformative.

 

We fans of SF,F&H would be especially pleased by the example Paul chooses to build her case: She offers the hypothetical decision to become a Vampire. A person would be fundamentally transformed because they cannot know in advance what it would be like. Other vampires might offer some insights, and God knows there are plenty talkative vampires in fiction (Ann Rice’s “Interview with a Vampire” (first published 1976) as plenty of philosophical content), but all their advice would be stymied by the limits of language and the lens of the other’s experience -- another’s experience as a Vampire wouldn’t be your experience as a Vampire. Fiction is not the experience; therefore, fiction can be personally, but not epistemically, transformative. Yet, a philosophical fiction attempts to crash though that barrier, to basically do the impossible.

 

Of course, when one writes a philosophical tract one faces the same obstacle, but in the tract the entire argument would likely be built around analyzing its own epistemological limitations, while fiction’s first obligation is usually the vivid realization of an individual character, so fiction pretends to be epistemology.

 

The failures of a philosophical fiction’s attempt to reach beyond something akin to journalism helps explain why Ayn Rand’s philosophical novels are mostly so transcendentally awful, though the fact that her philosophy was so shallow didn’t help much either; the characters have no illusion of life because they are mere stand-ins for ideas and ideals. Most of Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s Horror fictions also count as philosophical fictions, and are superior to Rand’s piffle, but even his greatest fan will admit that his attempts to explore the meaning (or in Lovecraft’s case lack of meaning) of life left us with weak characterization. This is so common a flaw, it is parodied more often than attempted: Anton Chekhov’s play, “The Seagull” (first staged in 1896) includes a play-with-a-play by the doomed protagonist that mocks his philosophical aspirations. The Monty Python comedy troop used an entire feature film to lampoon the notion in “The Meaning of Life” (1983).

 

Part of the trap is that, more than any other subject, the meaning of life generally proves that isn’t about that at all, but really about the artist’s relationship with their art, or more specifically, the artist’s concern if he/she has the vision to take on a subject bigger and more abstract than a marriage. Somehow, the biggest questions keep collapsing into the simplest answers, and that makes most of such works insufferably pedantic.

 

When an artist pulls the seeming impossibility of taking on the biggest questions and still delivering engaging characters and/or a captivating narrative is something worth celebrating. Writer/Director Edson Oda pulled it off here, so let’s celebrate. (I should not that the film’s Executive Producer, Spike Jonze, made his reputation and a Director tackling similar difficult narrative territories.)

 

Though the film was on an SF list, it isn’t really of that genre. It’s a Supernatural Fantasy about a Way-Station where Souls arrive on the way to be born, so their Pre-Existence, and takes us through nine days that seem to exist outside of time wherein Will (Winston Duke), a sort of Guardian Angel, and interviews and tests these Souls.

 

Will is deciding which of their number will move onto birth and real life, also condemning the rest to never fully existing. Will also watches the lives of all he has previously approved on a wall of old TVs that are never turned off and further keeps records of those lives on video tapes. Part of the selection process has the candidates also watch those TVs as much as Will does. Will’s evaluations of the candidates address questions concerning what does it mean to live a good life, what are the different natures of violence, and how we respond to them.

 

The “big meaning” that the film is trying to convey is balanced between two lines of dialogue spoken by Will. The first comes more than halfway into the film, “Good memories, bad memories, they're all just the same right now. It still hurts... In a way that no one can see, and only I can feel.” And the second at the very end, when he is quoting Poet Walt Whitman, “Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems.”

 

Filling out the ideas that exist between those two statements are things that are equally ambiguous and specific, they represent Director Oda’s gropings through the exegesis of the story that we all live. Very likely Oda doesn’t fully understand what all the symbols he presents mean specifically, but his symbolic langue is rich enough, and his characters real enough, that you, the audience, are empowered to find meanings half-independently. This film is filled with verbal exchanges that that don’t have all the participants are gathered together at the same time, but the lines of these intercut dialogues still fit together in a smooth flow, as if all was a single conversation. It is akin to the conversation any Creator is trying to establish with his/her audience, where we in the future will encounter his words so long after he originally wrote them.

 

This Fantasy has an elaborate Mythos that is conveyed mostly through suggestion, not exposition. Our Way-Station is an isolated house either on a massive beach or in the middle of the desert (the actual location is the Great Salt Lake, in Utah, captured with the same romantic eye by Cinematographer Wyatt Garfield that he displayed towards the Louisiana Gulf in “Beasts of the South Wild” (2012)), yet when one character, Kyo (Benedict Wong), visits Will, he says he just “came around the block” -- but there is no “block” to come around. The observed reality must be different to different people, but still over-lapping enough that they all are comfortably in the same space, though that space might be slightly different for each. Also, though all the candidates for life are apparently in the small house at the same time, there are few scenes that any encounter another, they only interact with Will and sometimes Kyo, though, as stated above, these scenes are edited in a way suggesting that all are involved in the same conversation.

 

The Souls in Pre-Existence arrive at Will’s door fully adult; they maybe youngish or middle-aged but never children, they have full command of language, and developed personalities. Should they get a chance to be born though, they will, of course, become infants with no memory of this experience.

 

Will, both Guide and Judge, used to be alive before he got this job, while Kyo has never “lived” in our sense of the word. Kyo is jealous of Will having lived, but he seems all the better for never having gone through it as Will is clearly embittered by his former life’s disappointments, which maybe his main qualification for his current job.

 

Will is also in crisis. He’d started living vicariously through one of those souls who went through this process earlier, Amanda (Lisa Starrett), who Will watches die on TV, and that devastated him. Though Will shows great compassion to those Souls he rejects, it becomes obvious that what he says about their mere nine (or less) days of Pre-Existence having value is something he, himself, doesn’t believe. The film is more about Will than anyone else, and though he tries not to talk about his former life, his attitude and short testimonies become the insights that represent a personal experience that falls short of the transformative one that the Souls long to embrace.

 

These are the candidates we are introduced to during this nine-day-long-story:

 

Kane (Bill Skarsgard), who, during questioning and testing, reveals a strong instinct of self-preservation but also a streak of indifference towards the needs and pain of others.

Alexander (Tony Hale), who aims to please but is hiding desperation and pettiness.

Mike (David Rysdahl), a sensitive artist who doesn’t think his work is worthy of sharing.

Maria (Arianna Ortiz), who presents an image of compassion that is tinged with fear of inadequacy.

Emma (Zazie Beetz), who seems already full of life even as she walks through Will’s door. She displays the greatest curiosity and empathy than the others in this group, but soon she as much Will’s antagonist as much as she is her own protagonist, because she’s constantly trying to pry open the spirit of the man trying to dissect her.

 

All of the candidates’ characters are beautifully drawn and acted, but their role in this film is decidedly minor except for Emma; other than Will, only Emma and Kyo being given large parts.

 

The most exquisite moments are devoted to when the rejected Souls passing into non-Existence, where Will and Kyo stage some moment for them, an experience that they will never have but can still hold as precious, like a walk on the beach or a bike-ride through falling cherry blossoms, as they fade away. The story-telling relies heavily on technological artifacts on screen, but in an elegant gesture, all that technology is obsolete, as that is true in these scenes, where the experiences are created with the illusionism of the live-stage, not some high-tech VR-ish thing.

 

This movie is more tonally original than it is in its contents. The conceit of a Cosmic Bureaucracy over-looking all of us is a common enough theme in Fantasy, a common spring-board for tales of broader philosophical content instead of focused on a character’s responses to more familiar experience. In US cinema there was an especial love of tales of Pre-Existence and the After-Life during the 1940s, and these stories never really disappeared; this sub-genre is sometimes referred to as a “Heavenly Romance.” These films rarely wore its philosophical musings on its sleeve like “Nine Days” does, but one can see the attraction of using this kind of extreme artifice to strip down to universal ideas so often blocked by conventional experience. These films were most often eccentric Love Stories and there more than a little of that in Will and Emma’s platonic push-me-pull-me.

 

The same year this film came out saw at least one other film in this category, Peter Docter’s much-praised “Soul.” I admit I haven’t seen it, but Critic after Critic has cited highly specific similarities between the two, though their close release-dates suggest they couldn’t have directly influenced each other. Both had their releases thrown into chaos by the deadliest pandemic in a century … so much for metaphysics.

 

The film ends with Will forced to re-embrace the idea that life is worth living simply because it allows for savoring of itself. Throughout Will was severe and self-restrained, Actor Duke projects a compelling authority that enriches the contrast between Will’s professional distance, Emma’s vivaciousness, and Kyo’s pushy friendliness. The film closes with Will/Duke reciting the Whitman poem and being almost explosive in his passion of its revelation; the scene should’ve been silly, but Duke is so good, he makes it tender and uplifting. Will turns the poem into a gift to Emma, for she had displayed the power to never take any experience for granted.

 

Philosopher Paul argued personal experience is a shadow of transformative experience, but she never denied that the former was part of the path to the latter.

 

Trailer:

NINE DAYS | Official Trailer (2021) - YouTube