What's Wrong with the Multiverse
Infinite worlds promise total freedom. But what if they’re quietly teaching us that nothing matters?
This is a guest post by Joseph Holmes.
“Why did you decide to explore the multiverse?” is maybe the single most common question I’ve been asked promoting my new film Jim vs the Future. (Available on DVD and digital everywhere.) The film–which is the first feature film I wrote and directed–follows a man who gets kidnapped and held hostage by people from multiple possible futures who all want him to make the choices that will preserve their future–at the cost of the others. (I spoke about the film more with Aaron Renn here.)
The answer, simply put, is I wanted to tell a story about how our ordinary choices are an important part of ultimate reality’s cosmic drama. And the multiverse is the modern-day way we talk about ultimate reality. We used to use Heaven and Hell to talk about reality, such as in Dante’s Divine Comedy or John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Or we’d use space in shows like Star Trek or time travel like Terminator. But now the multiverse is king. Whether that’s the latest Marvel or Sonic the Hedgehog movie, TV shows like Rick and Morty or Peacemaker, or Oscar-winning films like Everything Everywhere All at Once.
The fact that our culture sees the multiverse as the best way to talk about reality is not a coincidence. It’s driven by our experiences of the promise and tragedy of the postmodern world. This also makes it fertile ground to subvert with a more Christian imagination, which is exactly what I tried to do.
Multiverse as Freedom
Freedom has always been a motivation for the multiverse creatively. One of the earliest pop culture examples of the multiverse was “The Flash of Two Worlds” in The Flash #123, published September 1961. It featured DC comics’ modern-day version of the Flash–secret identity Barry Allen–meeting DC’s original version of the Flash–Jay Garrick. Jay Garrick was replaced by Barry Allen as the Flash after DC Comics’ first company-wide reboot. So the multiverse was an excuse to have him still exist and get to tell stories about him and other similar characters. Likewise in the modern Marvel movies like Spider-Man: No Way Home and Deadpool & Wolverine mostly use this concept to bring different previous Marvel franchises (like the different Spider-Men played by previous actors) back together to meet each other.
But in Loki the multiverse is used to explore deeper themes of freedom. The titular Asgardian god and Marvel antagonist discovers the whole universe is ruled over by the TVA, a multiversal police force that exists to prevent the one true universe from branching off into a multiverse. The show treats this as a form of fascism. Cosmic jackbooted thugs come into universes deciding to be born and go their own non-prescribed path, only to be destroyed or manipulated into the correct “sacred timeline”. Loki and the heroes eventually overthrow the TVA’s master “He Who Remains” and both the TVA and the multiverse are set free.
Gilles Lipovetsky’s Hypermodern Times notes that the history of the modern world is the result of a bunch of men who tried to reform our world by remaking our institutions to expand human freedom. We made governments democracies, economics free markets, religious freedom, free speech, etc. Initially we used that freedom to choose between institutions (this church or that church). But in the 60s and 70s, partly driven by technology like the pill and the ability to travel and live in cities, people took that to the extreme. You didn’t have to choose between the meanings assigned to you by others–whether it was your family, your faith, or community–but could invent your own meaning or identity however you wanted. This often meant “sorting” yourself into the kinds of communities of people who are most like you, whether in cities or especially online.
No franchise captures finding a community of people like you better than Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Into the Spider-Verse centers on Miles Morales, a black Spider-Man who feels alone until he meets other Spider-Men from across the multiverse. It’s within this community of Spider-Men that he finds himself able to find the people who “get him” and build shared friendship around the part of himself that he most values. He gets a Spidey-Mentor. He gets a Spidey-Girlfriend.
Multiverse as Nihilism
While the superhero genre primarily appeals to the positive parts of the multiverse and postmodernism, other sci-fi material has used it to explore the darker sides of the idea and human freedom in general.
Rick and Morty, the popular Adult Swim show, follows the genius but arrogant alcoholic scientist Rick and his well-meaning but dim-witted grandson Morty as they embark on darkly comic adventures through time and space. One of the primary drivers of Rick’s character is that he’s so jaded and cynical because his genius has allowed him to see the farthest reaches of all existence and see how meaningless life is. When there’s an infinite multiverse, including an infinite amount of Ricks and Mortys, none of them really matter. One of the most famous episodes follows Rick and Morty accidentally destroying their world with no way to fix it. Their solution? Rick finds an exactly identical universe where the only difference is that their Rick and Morty died, and then hops in to replace them. This traumatizes Morty, who has to act for the rest of his life like these are his family and friends when they’re not. This follows the worldview of the show’s creator, Dan Harmon, who argues that life is meaningless in the big view but can be meaningful in the close view.
The Oscar-winning Best Picture film Everything Everywhere All at Once comes to a similar conclusion. The film follows a mother and a daughter who battle throughout the multiverse with the meaninglessness of their lives, seeing all the other–even more desirable–lives they could have had. What’s the solution they find? To just choose to appreciate the life they have in front of them, ignoring the multiverse reality.
Lipovetski notes that after the excitement of our newfound freedom died down, it was quickly replaced with anxiety. After all, if you have freedom to create your own meaning and happiness, you also have responsibility for doing so. Likewise, constantly seeing people in cities, on TV, and especially online, who have the life you wish you could live, gives you so many more opportunities to envy people than you used to.
Modern economics also makes our choices seem meaningless because we rarely see the results of our labors. We make a widget that eventually becomes a part of a machine that someone else uses whom we never see, rather than making a horseshoe and watching that horse walk by every day. This is why the people who are most satisfied with their lives are those who are married or embedded in tight-knit communities, as sociologists like Brad Wilcox and Jonathan Haidt have spoken about ad nauseam online and in their books Get Married and The Anxious Generation. Because when a bigger proportion of your life is made up of people in your immediate circle, and whose lives you have a bigger effect on, then more of your life feels meaningful.
There’s also a darker side to “sorting” our communities based on being like-minded. We start to see ourselves as inhabiting different universes. In the latest season of the superhero TV show, Peacemaker follows a low-grade reformed supervillain who wants to be a superhero, but nobody takes him seriously. So in season 2, he goes to a universe that seems like a perfect world. Only for that world to turn out to be one where the Nazis won and ruled over everything. The show treats the “Nazi” world as a stand-in for conservatives in our world. And Peacemaker’s response to this world? He has to kill them and escape. That’s what happens when we don’t talk to each other. We exaggerate our differences (as people do with each other today politically) to see each other as the enemy.
Subverting the Multiverse
As a Christian, I don’t believe in a meaningless universe. And my faith changes how I experience the modern world. But I am still a part of the modern world, and the multiverse is so popular because it reflects our experiences of modernity. So as I looked at telling a story as a Christian that reflected my experiences, I asked: how does my Christian imagination change how I would explore the multiverse idea?
In Jim vs the Future, the multiverse is one where every possible future already exists, and every choice you make creates a future where you made the opposite choice. Jim–the protagonist, and also a Christian–would be at a crossroads with his fiancée Kathy. And multiple people from multiple future timelines would be trying to force him to either break up with her or stay together with her to preserve their future where he either broke up with or stayed with her. This creates a multiverse story where stakes are real, and human action is part of the cosmic drama that God has put in place.
This is very similar to the Christian view of human freedom described in “Molinism.” The 16th-century Spanish Jesuit theologian Luis de Molina theorized that there was a middle space of possible futures that humans could choose that God had “middle knowledge” of. These creatures had free will to pick between those possible futures and God had the freedom to tip the scales through their action and will. It’s a controversial view–very often opposed by more Reformed types who see its emphasis on human will as denying God’s sovereignty. But it is a distinctively Christian view of reality that accommodates human experience and subverts modern multiverse nihilism. So it’s perfect for an imaginative take on the multiverse.
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Multiverse stories work because they are helpful languages to understand reality. We only abandon them when we find better ones, or our world changes so much that we have to create new ones. In a time of substantial change, with technologies like AI reshaping the world in ways that may be as profound as the internet–if not more so–we may need different pop culture myths to discuss our place in the universe.
Whatever the future holds for conversations about reality, I hope that Christians are a part of making it, not just talking about it. We have a belief system with the resources to show a better way forward in describing the world we live in. I’m excited to see what we can make if we enter the arena.
 | A guest post by
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My grandchildren gave me a subscription to a guided memoir. Nice gift, you get to do all the work and the result is a book you can give them back. I love it.
The prompt for one of the chapters is "what advice would you give your 20-year-old self." This is part of the chapter I wrote, using Everything Everywhere All At Once as the theme:
"The premise of the movie is that every decision we make creates an alternate universe and all of those alternate universes are out there creating other alternate universes. Somehow, this multiverse got broken and Evelyn must fix it. Because her life decisions were so mundane, she is the only person in the whole multiverse who can do so without destroying everything.
I think.
I searched online for an explanation of the film. This Google AI synopsis seemed as good as any: “The Movie Is A Celebration Of The Freedom A Meaningless Life Brings. Though never expressly stated, Everything Everywhere All at Once suggests that what makes life meaningful is the recognition that, because life has no inherent meaning, all things and moments are equally meaningful.”
Hmmm. When I watch a movie, I try to go along with its premise. Really, I do.
But life has no meaning? Every moment has the same meaning as every other moment? Can’t do it. Can’t wrap my head around it.
Existentially, the most meaningful moments in our lives are the moment we are born—which we do not remember—and the moment we die, when we leave this physical world and can’t report back. I concede that between those significant events all moments are equally meaningful, as each second after birth brings us one second closer to death. Cheerful, huh?
But on a lived basis, the moments of our lives do not and cannot be equally meaningful. In fact, if they were equally meaningful, the entire concept of meaningful could not exist. There cannot be meaningful without meaningless. There cannot be life without death; happiness without sadness; light without darkness; warmth without cold; either love or hate without indifference. How would we know we are happy if we had never experienced sadness? Happy would not be happy; it would be normal—which we could not have without abnormal.
A question: if every moment has the same meaning, how could the multiverse have been broken in the first place? If there is only one person in the entire multiverse who could fix it, then there must have been some moment, somewhere, that had meaning.
As I see it, the thesis presented by the movie is the antithesis to life. If we could go back and fix it, why do it at all? An absurd example: if we wanted to kill someone to see how it feels, we could—and then we could go back and fix it. There would be no consequences to anything. The fact that there is no multiverse, there is no chance to go back and do it over is exactly what gives our lives meaning. It is exactly what motivates us to do good, or evil if that is what we prefer.
So what advice would I give to my 20-year-old self?
If there were a multiverse; this question would make sense—sort of. If you’re not happy with your life, go back and fix it. But even in a multiverse, there’s a problem: when you change one thing, the cascade of changes that follows may not be what you expected or wanted.
To wit. I dropped out of college after one semester. I flew out to Massachusetts where my fiancé was stationed, and where he and I each married the wrong person. I was 18 years old; he was 19. Besides being too young, we were completely mismatched and, as a result, our marriage was not happy. We fought (a lot) and, ten years later, we divorced.
Should I go back and not get married? Seems like a good idea. Stay in Janesville. Finish college. Date other people. Marry the right person. But wait! In those ten years, we brought two children into the world. And now, more than 50 years after getting married, I also have four grandchildren. I love my children. I adore my grandchildren. Knowing what I know now and looking back, would I wish my children and grandchildren away? Not a chance.
I am contented with my life. I’ve experienced great pain and great happiness. I have done good things and I have caused pain to others. I am happy with the first and I regret the second. But they all add up to who I am now.
All of those moments good and bad, terrible and wonderful, make us who we are today. If we aren’t happy with who we are today, we can’t fix the past, we can only change what we do now and hope it works out better."