Angelina Jolie in Wanted.
© Universal Pictures
The Manic Maniac: A WANTED Universe
By: Joe CrosbyDate: Thursday, July 10, 2008
Wanted has been out for a couple of weeks now, so I feel comfortable letting loose a few spoilers for argument's sake. And the argument is this: Wanted is unintentionally the best science fiction movie of this year or most years. More to the point, Wanted is an accidental parable for what is arguably the most significant and belief-bending scientific pursuit of the last century, and the last two decades in particular: quantum mechanics. I actually wish it could be distilled so evenly and so simply into those two words, but it can't be. It associates much more than that, just as quantum mechanics encompasses much more than its definition alone.
Quantum mechanics is, on a basic level, the study of subatomic elements and their function. It attempts to paint a molecular picture of our world that, structurally speaking, defines what we understand as tangible existence. The "real world," this tangible existence, is a world of perceived cosmic order. Physics provides for us "laws" that explain space, time and our interaction with the two. They are called laws because they are unyielding, unbending truisms: Gravity prevents us from drifting into the ether; for every action, their is an equal and opposite reaction; the moon revolves around the earth, the earth around the sun, and now we have days, months, years and so on. Order.
But brimming beneath all of that order, beneath all of these things that make sense because physics proves they do, is a chaotic and random soup of molecules. Quantum mechanics studies that soup, trying to find order in it. This is important, presumably, because if there's no order in the soup—and there currently isn't that we can see—then it's logically befuddling for there to be order in the universe. But is there, currently?
That brings us to The Loom of Fate.The Loom of Fate is the absurd name for Wanted's fate weaver that threads the fraternity of assassins' orders. Through a series of random stitches, it spins together a code—similar to binary—that reveals the names of the fraternity's targets. If someone's number is up, then no questions asked, they must be killed. For generations, this systematic, yet entirely inexplicable process has supposedly created order in the world. If the rules are fudged, even a hair, a missed target could drive the world into chaos.
But the rules are fudged, and quite a bit, at that. The random stitch code is no longer so. The code becomes controlled, ordered by the fraternity's patriarch, Sloan. In spite of this, the world during Sloan's control curiously has order from the onset. Wouldn't this imply that the random stitch was in the past creating chaos—say, the Holocaust—and the controlled weave now creates order? Or does it mean that order inherently exists in the world? Maybe that's a logical mishap in the script. Maybe. Or maybe it's no more illogical than, say, the expansion of the universe.
While the laws of gravity say that a ball thrown in the air falls to the ground, and a planet is bound to its solar system by an intangible but powerful force, it doesn't erase the fact that the universe is stretching apart. The expansion of the cosmos, it's said, is a result of the Big Bang. And years ago, scientists believed that at some point, the universe would reach it's limit and condense on itself. Like a ball thrown into the air and crashing to the ground. After all, gravity—our laws, our order—said so. They thought that was the case until they realized that the rate at which the universe is expanding is actually increasing. As the universe grows outward, it's accelerating. Or, as New York Times science reporter and MIT alum Dennis Overbye says, galaxies are essentially "falling up." This contradicts what we know of as gravity. And it's been given a term: antigravity.
Gravity, as our rules dictate, is a product of matter emitting energy. So, antigravity would come from the opposite of that: negative matter, or negative mass. Physicists figure that matter—you, me, this table I'm typing on, the sun, the moon, the stars and even measurable gas—makes up a mere 4 percent of the universe. The other 96 percent is closer to negative mass, coming from an uneven combination of dark matter and dark energy. We can define these two concepts only because their existence is implied by ours, not because we can actually detect them. We don't exactly know why, and we don't exactly know how, but we think their explanation lies within that subatomic soup, as random and chaotic as they are. That's what things like the particle accelerator—the Large Hadron Collider opening at CERN in September—hope to discover. They want our "order" to extend outward (the universe) by establishing order inward by mapping out the subatomic structure (quantum mechanics).
See, right now the unexplained subatomic level—Wanted's randomly woven code—creates a universe that is 96-percent chaotic, or at least unexplained, despite our perceived order and universal laws of physics. But if we could explain how the subatomic level exists—if we can control its definition, like Sloan controls that stitch—then all of a sudden, everything else makes sense. All that we can't currently define has a definition.
That's what makes Wanted, an otherwise above-average action flick, symbolic of something more. Was there really order before, when the stitch was random? Or does the random stitch—the unexplained soup—actually beget chaos, even though we're told our world universally makes sense? I would argue that the random code that drove the fraternity for years, like our laws of physics, has less order than chaos. It's not until we define the code ourselves—see it not as random, but as tangible—that the universe begins to have order.
I don't think the scribes had the cosmos in mind when they were pinning cheap dialogue and logical contradictions (though perhaps the comic book writers did). But maybe by explaining the latter, we find out what the movie actually means.
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