Film Futures

In the story by Jorge Luis Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” a character discovers that the sage Ts’ui Pen has devised a labyrinthine novel:

In all fictions, each time a man meets diverse alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the work of the virtually-impossible-to-disentangle Ts’ui Pen, the character chooses-simultaneously-all of them. He creates, thereby, several future, several times, which themselves proliferate and fork….In Ts’ui Pen’s novel, all the outcomes in fact occur: each is the starting point for further bifurcations. Once in a while, the paths of that labyrinth converge: for example, you come to this house, but in one of the possible pasts you are my enemy, in another my friend. (125)

Ts’ui Pen did not shrink from the ultimate consequences of this:

He believed in an infinite series of times, a growing, dizzying web of divergent, convergent, and parallel times. That fabric of times that approach one another, fork, are snipped off, or are simply unknown for centuries, contains all possibilities. In most of those times, we do not exist; in some, you exist but I do not; in others, I do and you do not; in others still, we both do. (127)

Borges’s conceit has its counterpart in quantum physics, which has played host to the idea of parallel universes-an infinite array of possible worlds, each as real as the one we apparently know. ¹