A Brief History of Time DIR Errol Morris; PROD Gordon Freedman, Colin Ewing, Steven Spielberg (uncredited), Kathleen Kennedy (uncredited), David Hickman, Jan Euden, Steven Seidenberg. US, 1991, color, 80 minutes.
Errol Morris brings an existential sensibility to Stephen Hawkings’s A Brief History of Time book, itself an inquiry into macro cosmological issues of space and time, the Big Bang, and the mind of God.[1] The title of the book was beautifully, poetically succinct with an irony that captured the attention of the general public in 1988 like few general science books had. It was only a few short years afterwards in which the book was turned into this film. As he did with The Thin Blue Line [1988], Morris examines the subject matter in the film A Brief History of Time [1991] with an almost curatorial perspective in which the nature of things are pondered in and of themselves thereby taking on an almost transcendent existence—the same feeling in which one might ponder an ordinary word by repeating that word to one’s self over and over again until the word has been stripped of all normal context and has taken on surreal proportions.[2] That Morris is focusing his curatorial perspective on the origin of the universe and the nature of existence intensifies things just a bit.
The concepts of Hawking’s A Brief History of Time are expressed through stunningly beautiful metaphorical images as designed by Balsmeyer and Everett who also created hyperrealistic images for Morris’s The Thin Blue Line.[3] The film’s hyperrealistic aesthetic is further emphasized through Ted Bafaloukos’s production design in which the interviews’ living room sets look real but are set off in an unnatural distance behind the interviewees as to make the interviewee somewhat detached from their surroundings in an effort to emphasize the person’s presence—indeed, emphasize the person’s very existence. This hyperrealistic emphasis on the interview is in keeping with Morris’s tradition of emphasizing the presence of his interviewees; however, in his earlier films Gates of Heaven [1978] and Vernon, Florida [1981], Morris’s hyperrealistic emphasis was expressed through a minimalism in which his human subjects were filmed in a squarely placed, carefully composed frame.[4] The combined cinematography of Stephen Czapsky and John Bailey in this film layers the hyperrealistic presentation of the film’s human subjects in a beautifully subtle, stylized light, and the photography of the visual objects that are used as scientific metaphors throughout the film give those objects an almost transcendent glow of naked actuality. The finishing touch upon the hyperrealistic mise en scene is the exquisite, relatively minimalist Philip Glass film score—music that allows one to practically hear the chaotic scrambling of sub-atomic particles and the ponderous, awe-inspiring weight of the large-scale structure of space and time.[5]
Added to the film’s hyperrealism is the surrealism of Morris’s choice of stock footage to give visual example and, sometimes, visual counterpoint to interviews. Morris was one of, if not, the originator of using stock footage in humorously ironic and often slightly surreal ways. Imitators over the years have abounded, and as with the paradigm of creative imitation, each generation is a faded copy of the original. The use of stock footage to this effect has been copied by other documentary filmmakers ad infinitum and is so commonplace now and is done in such a blunt, obtuse way as to render this particular cinematic trope almost useless. Nevertheless, Morris is the master of this, and it still is amusing to see footage from Disney’s The Black Hole [1978] to punctuate the film’s description of the public’s growing fascination in the ‘70s with the emerging concept of black holes. Morris’s use of Ernest Borgnine’s goofy declaration, “Why, that’s crazy! Impossible!” is inserted with a deftness that surpasses the similar attempts by other filmmakers who have so often crudely jammed such ironic footage into their documentaries driven by lazy formula rather than original inspiration.
The scientific concepts from the book have been distilled into easily digestible petit fours throughout the film without comprising their intellectual integrity, and are examined in a manner that allows the surreal, poetic nature of the concepts to emerge. The nature of time, the structure of time, and the origin of the universe are concepts that are investigated with the most prominence with an emphasis placed on black holes. Hawking made his mark in the world of theoretical physics by using black holes as the model for understanding the origins of the universe. Hawking theorized that the collapse of black holes into a singularity might be like the collapse of our universe, known as The Big Crunch. Reversing The Big Crunch and going from a singularity to a larger system would possibly provide a model for the origin of the universe—The Big Bang. Inquiries into the nature of time and whether or not time would go backward during The Big Crunch are interesting side alleys while the origin of the universe is by far the most fascinating and significant.
To humanize the documentary though, Morris made the film about Hawking’s personal life as much as he made it about his concepts of theoretical physics. And rightfully so, for there is as much existential mystery and poetry to the human experience as there is in the cosmological framework of the universe. And Morris is one of the best documentary filmmakers to capture that mystery. A primary narrative thread runs through each of Morris’s films, but the good stuff is always in the little moments and details in which the film’s human subjects reveal random truths about the weird nature of the human experience. One of the film’s interviews is with Hawking’s sister, Mary. Mary’s description of a childhood game of finding different ways of getting into the childhood house is a strange and beautiful aside at first as she ultimately describes how to this day doesn’t know all of the eleven ways that Stephen could get into the house. “I still don’t know what the eleventh one was,” she surmises, snickering and looking at the camera in brief befuddlement, her short story seemingly having no ultimate point of significance. Yet it’s these asides and narrative astrays that lead to the delicious underbelly of his films. It is in this sensibility that A Brief History of Time‘s flourishes: the coldness of the otherwise fascinating theoretical scientific concepts is grounded by the warmth of odd, everyday human existence. And yet Morris’s asides never seem to be extraneous especially in this film because many such moments ultimately serve the film’s biographic and even scientific thematic focus. Mary’s description of their childhood game and her acknowledgment about still not knowing the eleventh entrance serves as a metaphor for Hawking’s ability to gain entrance into the theoretical universe in ways that other people—very intelligent people—can not. It is in moments like these that Morris’s poetry and narrative combine into a elegant, seamless cohesion.
Processed through Morris’ hyperrealistic mise en scene and his affinity for the surreal, any person’s life could be embued with the light of existential significance. Yet Hawking’s existence is fascinating even without this added observation through Morris’s microscope. The whole essence of Stephen Hawking almost completely immobilized in his chair with an electronic voice communicating—revealing—the ultimate nature of the universe presents the kind of omnipotent figure that Hawking himself wonders about through the film. Hawking’s electronic voice is like the voice of God who is revealing the ultimate absolute truth of existence through a synthesized form of pure thought. Hawking’s physical condition and his physical struggles with the devastatingly debilitating Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) is by itself an interesting tale; to combine that with the ability to sit collapsed in his wheelchair and travel to the edges of the universe is an even more amazing narrative. That a woman wanted to marry him knowing full well the future that the disease was to bring makes the narrative almost unbelievable—the kind of thing that only happens in the movies.[6] Hawking’s mother attributes the relationship with the courageous Jane Wylde as the impetus for Hawking to not only continue scientific exploration but to begin serious exploration at all—a counter to Hawking’s admittedly lazy approach to academics up to that point. Of course the spectre of death was also an impetus as Hawking’s mother notes that “the knowledge that you are to be hanged in the morning concentrates the mind wonderfully. ”
As a result, in 1965, Hawking began serious research into The Big Bang. Roger Penrose, another theoretical physicist, had at that time recently developed the concept of a dying star collapsing under its own gravity to the point of a singularity with infinite density and zero size. Hawking applied this concept in reverse and began to think of The Big Bang that begins in a singularity as the opposite process of a dying star that eventually ends in a singularity, a condition that was eventually coined with the term “black hole” in 1967. Black holes were soon described as “the ultimate prison,” yet it was later discovered that anti-particles escape from a black hole through the quantum mechanical effect—a corollary to Hawking’s body as a prison in which the unseen particles of his thoughts are the only way for him to escape. The allegory of an astronaut falling into a black hole is used in the film to great effect not only as a way to describe the sheer power and the sheer horror of the crushing nature of a black hole but as a poetic way to convey the sense that the astronaut gets redistributed into the universe in particles; we all are, in effect, infinite.
Throughout his scientific career through to the publication of the book that changed his entire career, Hawking continued to examine whether the creation of a black hole can be conceptually reversed to understand the nature of The Big Bang. He also began to conceptually reverse The Big Bang into The Big Crunch leading to absurd notions about historical events in the space-time continuum simply going in reverse so that yesterday’s cup of tea dropping onto the floor falls back up onto the table from whence it originally fell.[7] But the nature of time gives way to more prominent meditations on a theory of everything, who created the universe, and of the nature of existence itself. In 1981, Hawking’s visit with the Pope culminated in a warning that it was okay to inquire about the universe after The Big Bang, but it was not okay to inquire about the universe before The Big Bang “because that was the moment of creation, and therefore, the work of God.”[8]
And yet Hawking along with many other theoretical physicians continued to pursue the mind of God. The mind of God means different things to different people: it is the ultimate structure of the universe, it is the source of the universe, or it is why we exist at all regardless of how everything is structured and comes into being. Scientifically, the Theory of Everything is an effort to join the General Theory of Relativity (which deals with large scale and high mass) and Quantum Field Theory (which deals with small scale and low mass). From another perspective, the Theory of Everything is an effort to combine the four fundamental forces of nature: gravitation, strong interaction, weak interaction, and electromagnetism.[9] But the Theory of Everything in a larger mindset is an effort to understand the reason for the universe’s existence through a single, unified equation—that is, if the reason for the universe’s existence is to be found in a single equation.
Towards the end of the film, Hawking asks the question, “What breathes fire into the equation?” It could be that the origin of the universe is not the most significant question to ask, and the most significant thing to consider is not a question at all. Aldous Huxley in his 1954 book The Doors of Perception under the influence of mescalin described his experience with “naked existence” and “is-ness.”[10] He spoke of seeing a “…bunch of flowers shining with their own inner light and all but quivering under the pressure of the significance with which they were charged;…the rose and iris and carnation so intensely signified…nothing more, and nothing less, than what they were—a transience that was yet eternal life, a perpetual perishing that was at the same time pure Being, a bundle of minute, unique particulars in which, by some unspeakable and yet self-evident paradox, was to be seen the divine source of all existence.” 2001: A Space Odyssey [1968] explored this as well. The film began with a jump in physical evolution and ended with a jump in consciousness. The embryo (as a symbolic representative of humankind) at the end of 2001 was symbolic of this rebirth into this higher level of consciousness—a consciousness that is like the mind of God or is the mind of God. It can be argued that the astronaut whose former sense of self dies and who is figuratively reborn as the symbolic embryo was seeing the is-ness, the naked existence of the universe. In this perspective, discovering the mind of God is not understanding the single backbone equation of the universe but an increased awareness of existence. Huxley wrote about the vibrant being of the flowers that he saw, and Morris’s documentary work as existential detective has intensified the vibrancy of his human subjects and concepts and never more appropriately than in A Brief History of Time. Theoretical physics may be searching for the theory of everything and even the mind of God, but the mind of God—the is-ness of things is right there before us—in Huxley’s flowers and in Morris’ microscope.
And yet, in The Doors of Perception, Huxley also addressed the idea put forth by Cambridge philosopher, Dr. C.D. Broad, “ ‘that the function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the in main eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe…[so] the function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful.’ According to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at Large. But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet.” In this sense, communing or becoming the mind of God (“Mind at Large”) is not what we are supposed to strive for–we need to survive. Pondering the is-ness of everything at all moments will eventually get us killed. But people want to do more than just survive—they want to live, to live with meaning. So, living with meaning must be somewhere in between the polar extremes of brute survival and perpetual contemplation of the is-ness.
Mindwalk [1990] is a film that attempts to answer the question about where living—meaning—can be found between those polar extremes.[11] Mindwalk is based upon the works of theoretical physicist Fritjof Capra in which Capra draws parallels between eastern religion and quantum physics and expounds on Systems Theory, which states, among other things, that everything is connected at the sub-atomic level and everything, therefore, is part of a larger system and that to understand the nature of physical phenomena is to only understand it through its relationships. You can not view reality, any component of reality, in isolation. These ideas are expressed through a long discussion among the three archetypal characters: a politician, a poet, and a physicist, their meandering discussion increasingly building upon itself in the same way that the discussion in My Dinner with Andre [1981] builds upon itself. The discussion eventually leads the characters to an epiphany that the perpetual ponderance of the larger picture of the universe, even the constant ponderance of a beautiful theory of connectedness, can leave one empty—”a fish trapped inside the wind.” One must eventually ask the question: where are all of us inside those abstract scientific theories—“the real people with their qualities, their longings, their weaknesses…”? Mindwalk leads to a conclusion that is stunning in its simplicity, a conclusion that may be even more elegantly simple than the simple, elegant Theory of Everything.[12] In 1977, Charles and Ray Eames produced the short film Powers of Ten, “a film dealing with the relative size of things in the universe.” The film traverses the entire universe beginning with a loving couple having a picnic in the park and moves to the theoretical outer edge of the universe, 10 to the 24th meters from the couple having the picnic—or 100 million light years away. At that moment at the edge of the universe in the bleakness of space, the narrator pauses and says, “This lonely scene, the galaxies like dust, is what most of space looks like. This emptiness is normal. The richness of our own neighborhood is the exception.”
Justin Baker
End Notes
[1] Hawking, Stephen. A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes. New York: Bantam Dell Publishing Group, 1988.
[2] Morris has written essays for The New York Times on the nature of photographs and how stripping them of their context strips them of the absolute truth—they are completely open to interpretation. Stripped of context, stripped of connection, perhaps everything is meaningless until a meaning is arbitrarily and, sometimes, erroneously applied. The work of theoretical physicist Fritjof Capra has addressed the issue in the context of physics that the meaning of objects lies in their relationships; this has interesting parallels to Morris’s commentary on the nature of photographs being stripped of their context and losing their meaning. This line of thought also has interesting implications for examining something too much under a microscope, figuratively and literally speaking, because that what is being examined in isolation could possibly lose its meaning—that is unless you are going through the pin hole to the other side of this extreme focus and relating the examined phenomenon’s existence to God, or existence itself like Huxley’s flowers or Morris’s transcendent concentration, which is the ultimate connection because God is connected to everything; existence is everything. Morris is the perfect documentary filmmaker for Stephen Hawking because they are both searching for God—Hawking through a cosmological framework and Morris through the existential essence of objects.
[3] Balsmeyer and Everett is now Big Film Design, a design firm that did the title design for Magnolia [1999], another film that deals with cosmic forces. (website link: http://www.bigfilmdesign.com)
[4] Morris eventually devised a cinematography device known as the Interrotron in which Morris’s face was shown on a conventional teleprompter. This not only allowed Morris to sit in another room while interviewing his human subject but allowed his human subjects to look directly into the camera lens, thereby magnifying the framing of the human subject and producing a sometimes unsettling, intense intimacy between subject and viewer.
[5] The film A Brief History of Time was released in 1991 and was given a proper release on VHS, but the film was not released on DVD during the late 1990s and throughout the 2000s when the production of DVDs was at its peak. Because this documentary was the only one of Morris’s films that he was hired to do, Morris did not own the rights to the film and, therefore, had little legal ability to push for the film’s release onto DVD. On April 24, 2010 at 8:00 p.m., Morris tweeted that he had been trying to buy the rights to A Brief History of Time . It wasn’t until March 2014 that the film was released on DVD (and Blu-ray) through the Criterion Collection (spine #699). An excellent making-of short documentary titled The Making of a Brief History of Time was produced in 1992 (dir. Edmund Coulthard) but was conspicuously absent from the Criterion Collection DVD extras. A companion book to Morris’s film was published in 1992 titled Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time: A Reader’s Companion. While the title gives the impression that the book is a reader’s digest version of the book A Brief History of Time, it is essentially a transcript of the film. In the book’s foreword, Hawking humorously states, “It is The Book of The Film of The Book. I don’t know if they are planning a Film of The Book of The Film of The Book.”
[6] In addition to Morris’s A Brief History of Time, there have been other films and documentaries about Hawking’s life and work. A dramatic television movie titled Hawking was produced in 2004 (dir. Philip Martin) with Benedict Cumberbatch as Hawking and a dramatic theatrical film in 2014 titled The Theory of Everything (dir. James Marsh) with Eddie Redmayne as Hawking. While Hawking has appeared, in part, in numerous documentaries on cosmological science, there are a handful of documentaries that have been made solely about his work in the same comprehensive vein as Morris’s 1991 film: Stephen Hawking’s Universe [1997], Stephen Hawking: Master of the Universe [2008], Stephen Hawking’s Universe [2010], Stephen Hawking’s Grand Design [2012], Stephen Hawking’s Fate of the Universe [2016]. A Beautiful Mind [2001] is not about Stephen Hawking but rather another real person, American mathematician John Nash who suffered from schizophrenia and yet eventually won the Nobel Prize. As it is portrayed in that film, Nash’s tenuous hold on reality was strengthened by his marriage to Alicia Nash. This narrative has interesting parallels to the The Theory of Everything [2014] and Hawking’s real life.
[7] One remarkable passage in the film is something that briefly veers away from Hawking’s own research into something from the 1970s called The Bowl Theories of the universe’s origin in which our observable universe was neither created nor destroyed: any expansion and contraction did not begin and would not end in a singularity but would “begin” and “end” in a curvature of plains sliding around each other annihilating the previous universe and beginning another without the sense of a clear beginning or end.
[8] Hawking has made allusions to a complete theory of the universe quite possible leading to the mind of God. At the end of the film A Brief History of Time Hawking states, “If we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason—for then we would know the mind of God.”
[9] I believe that the initial universe actually began as an infinite three-dimensional plane of quantum energy in every direction. (This could be considered the “original” universe.) At particular times in this infinite three-dimensional field, there are statistical anomalies–gaps in the infinite quantum energy field, if you will–that appear, which this infinite sea of quantum energy tries to fill immediately but yet only succeeds in creating a vacuum bubble that seals itself off immediately but not before some of the quantum energy gets into the bubble, the initial force of which propels the expansion of the vacuum bubble–the inflationary event otherwise being known as the Big Bang. The difference between this model and other models is that the universe that we think of, which is mostly empty space, is actually a bubble “within” the aforementioned infinite three-dimensional plane of quantum energy, which is the larger end-all-be-all universe. Our observable universe is in a womb in an infinite sea of quantum energy. This model may place particular phenomenon in our observable universe in a new light: Black holes might actually be a mechanism for the larger infinite quantum energy universe to regain an equilibrium within this “vacuum-bubble universe” that we exist in. In other words, black holes are an attempt to break down the matter in our vacuum-bubble universe back into sub-atomic energy in order to fill up the vacuum bubble and once again have nothing but quantum energy in every direction and no vacuum bubble. Perhaps the singularity of a black hole is actually where the “outer” membrane of our vacuum-bubble universe comes very close to touching the infinite three-dimensional plane of quantum energy that surrounds our vacuum-bubble universe. The magnificent and powerful draw of the “outside” infinite sea of quantum energy creates this singularity, but there is never any transference of matter or energy from our vacuum-bubble universe into the larger three-dimensional plane of quantum energy that “surrounds” our vacuum-bubble universe. It all gets ground up and transferred back into our vacuum-bubble universe in the form of radiation. Dark matter may actually be the general magnetic pull of the infinite amount of quantum energy from the “outside” universe of quantum energy on everything that is inside our vacuum-bubble universe and that the reason you don’t see this dark matter is because it is actually the the force of quantum energy “outside” of our vacuum-bubble universe. The so-called membrane between our vacuum-bubble universe and the larger quantum energy universe is an oversimplification–this membrane of separation is actually everywhere at once in a subatomic sense (similar to the notion that the center of the universe is, at once, everywhere and nowhere); the dark matter is not on the outer edges of our vacuum-bubble universe because there is no outer edge. The dark matter is everywhere throughout the vacuum-bubble universe because, paradoxically, the “edge” of our vacuum-bubble universe lies at every point throughout our vacuum-bubble universe. The dark matter is not matter at all but, rather, the magnetic pull of quantum energy from the “outside.” Atomic energy explodes from such a tiny point because it might be releasing an infinitesimally small amount of the quantum energy from the infinite three-dimensional plane of quantum energy that is from the “outside” of our observable universe.
[10] Huxley, Aldous. The Doors of Perception. United Kingdom: Chatto & Windus, 1954.
[11] Philip Glass composed the music score for Mindwalk in addition to composing the score for Morris’ A Brief History of Time.
[12]
“You, the woman; I, the man; this, the world: And each is the work of all.
There is the muffled step in the snow; the stranger;
The crippled wren; the nun; the dancer; the Jesus-wing
Over the walkers in the village; and there are
Many beautiful arms around us and the things we know.”