Brit Marling - Netflix The OA Part II

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At the end of the second season of The OA, the series' protagonist falls from a great height.

Then the lights go up. We see that she's in a film studio. Concerned crew members rush around the lead actress, calling her by her actual, real-life name — Brit. She is pulled into an ambulance.

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The OA | Official Trailer [HD] | Netflix

With her breakout Netflix series The OA, Brit Marling captivated viewers with her storytelling abilities and resistance to stereotypical hero's journey narratives.

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Photo by: Matthias Wagner / Unsplash

Reigning weird white women Lana Del Rey, Grimes, and Brit Marling sat down to have a conversation for Interview Magazine, and the result was as futuristic and multidimensional as you might expect.

Grimes, who's in the midst of promoting her forthcoming album Miss_Anthropocene, spoke to Del Rey about everything from ancient religions to artificial intelligence and beyond. Their conversation revolved around artmaking, womanhood, and fame in the Internet age; and like their art, it was characteristically inscrutable. When Del Rey asked if Grimes' work was inspired by personal experience or "the overculture," Grimes launched into a discussion of ancient Egyptian gods and anthropomorphization. "If you think about it, god-making or god-designing just seems so fun. The idea of making the Goddess of Plastic seems so fun to me," she said.

Lana Del Rey and Grimes: Variations on Femininity, Faith, and Critics

Though they're both creative spirits who play with religious symbols and cultural iconography, Grimes and Del Rey are known for representing femininity in different ways (and for dating problematic men). While Del Rey has been linked to classic archetypes of femininity, Grimes' early work seemed to present a futuristic, androgynous image. "On my last record, I was in this gender-neutral mindset," Grimes told Del Rey. "I was an asexual person. F*ck my sexuality. F*ck femininity. F*ck being a girl. I was having this weird reaction to society where I just hated my femaleness. It was like, to be a producer, I felt like I had to be a man."

But Grimes' next album seems like it will lean deeper into feminine and goddess archetypes, while Del Rey's latest, Norman F**king Rockwell, found her comparing herself to great male artists and challenging those who labeled her work as artificial.

Both were full of surprises and were critical of the press, which have always viciously criticized each of them in turn. "In terms of what I'm writing, in my personal life I have to be really, really happy," said Del Rey, contradicting thousands of critics in one fell swoop. They also lamented outrage culture, with its tendency to pluck headlines from interviews and its preference for catchy misinformation at the price of nuance.

Grimes and Brit Marling: On Politics, Artificial Intelligence's Impending World Domination, Capitalism, and Hyperobjects

In the second part of the interview, Grimes spoke to Brit Marling, another futurist whose recently-canceled show, The OA, presented an alternative mode of storytelling and connected technology to environmentalism to the multiverse theory. Together, the two lamented how their work and visions sometimes wind up being incompatible with reality.

Like their work, their conversations spiraled through various dimensions, though one could only imagine what they'd speak about off the record. "We're always negotiating the cost versus the craziness, which is why we always end up editing ourselves," said Marling, hinting at dimensions left unseen.

Both expressed appreciation for the mind-bending nature of each other's work, and Grimes quickly dove back into history and archetypes. "In the medieval times, when literacy was at its lowest, everything got really symbolic, like the cross. Nuance got lost," said Grimes. "I feel like we're going back to a time like that, where everything is symbolic. No one reads past a headline because our attention spans are so short. The same symbols are being fed to people, and they're gathering completely opposite meanings from them, and it's creating chaos."

Marling pulled things towards the politics of the present. "The American flag means one thing to one group of people, and one thing to another," she said. "To one, it's a metaphor for freedom. To another, it's an image of oppression. That duality of symbolism applies to so many things. But we live in an increasingly complex time where it's hard to grasp things in symbols. We're having to deal with all of these hyperobjects. Climate change is a hyperobject that people cannot wrap their minds around, because, among other things, it involves a contemplation of time that is off the scope of the human body. We're at a moment when we need nuanced, layered thinking more than ever, and somehow the moment is being met with a real shrinking away from context or depth."

They also discussed artificial intelligence and its impending world domination, a favorite topic of Grimes'. "There will eventually be a sentient technology that is smart enough and strong enough and has access to take everyone's sh*t, and then can make anyone do whatever it wants," said Grimes. "I might be wrong, and I might be aggrandizing here, but I feel like this might be one of the most important times in history. Especially in the last two years, it feels like we've walked right up to the edge between the old world and the new world. It's like before the pyramids and after the pyramids. We're at a 'pyramids got built' moment. We're going to be digitizing reality and colonizing space simultaneously, which may be two of the craziest things that will have occurred in the history of humanity. It's going to happen while we're alive and while we're young, which is nuts."

Marling has previously written about the need for a better story, one that unifies the scattered threads of our era and critiques hero worship, but the idea that artificial intelligence might write this story is definitely a threat to all of this. She replied, "If the objective of art has often been to be a lighthouse in the dark, to say, 'Hey, come this way,' or to expose fraudulent things for what they actually are, what does it mean if something other than human beings is authoring that force of rebellion?" A valid point—though on the other hand, what if artificial intelligence could improve upon some of the flaws that define the human condition, such as our general inability to understand what asexuality actually is?

Grimes returned to a topic she'd addressed with Del Rey. "We're always looking for our maker: 'Who is our god? Who created us?' What's interesting is, for AI, we are their god," she said. "That will be the first intelligent being that knows its creator, and knows everything about us."

Marling proposed that maybe AI isn't our worst fear—maybe something else is already controlling us. "Capitalism, even if there wasn't corruption, is a model that doesn't work for most people, because its only goal is the increase of profit, which means that there's somebody at the top of the pyramid and most people at the bottom who get paid less than their work is worth for profit to be extracted," she said. "I think part of the reason there's been so much climate change denial is that if you acknowledge that this economic system leads to ecological ruin, you have to acknowledge in the same breath that it's broken. Right now, we put value in growth, and everything is just endless, ridiculous growth, even though we're on a finite planet with dwindling resources and more people every day. Let's say, just for a moment, you put the value on caregiving."

"I was just thinking the other day how much I didn't appreciate my mom growing up," said Grimes. "I remember thinking, 'Why did you wake me up for school? This b*tch. F*ck.'"

There's only one conclusion to be drawn here. Lana Del Rey, Grimes, and Brit Marling should collaborate on a visual concept album with an interactive artificial intelligence component that crafts a new story outside the bounds of capitalism and neoliberalism and that motivates everyone to fight climate change, promote ethics in Silicon Valley, and call their mom.

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TV

The Similarities Between Black Mirror's 'Bandersnatch' and 'The OA' are Too Strange to be Coincidental

There are also major parallels between these shows, Russian Doll, and Stranger Things. (This article contains spoilers).

(This article contains major spoilers for both Black Mirror's Bandersnatch and The OA Season II.)

For a moment, the camera remains focused on the protagonist's bewildered face.

Then it pans out to reveal that the entire world of the show we've just been watching was nothing more than a TV set. Cameramen and directors scurry around; the actors fix their costumes. The main character stares, open-mouthed.

If you make a particular series of choices, you'll arrive at this scene in Black Mirror's Bandersnatch. You can also see it in Season II of The OA, when—extreme spoiler alert—detective Karim Washington finally peers out the mysterious Rose Window, and sees a dimension in which everyone he knows is only an actor in a movie set.

In Bandersnatch, this revelation occurs in a therapist's office, and in The OA it happens on the top floor of a San Francisco mansion, but despite these immediate differences, the two scenes are uncannily similar.

Black Mirror: Bandersnatch -- Neflix Fight Scenewww.youtube.com

The OA: Part II - 2x08 - Ending Scene (1080p)www.youtube.com

This is only one of the many major parallels between two of Netflix's most mysterious, mind-bending shows. Initially, they start with very different premises. Charlie Brooker's Bandersnatch is a two-hour-long roller coaster, notable for its "choose your own adventure" feature, which allows viewers to design their own plot by making various decisions at different points. (Choices range from which kind of cereal to choose to whether the protagonist should kill his father). The protagonist in question is a young computer game coder named Stefan, and the show follows him as he descends into madness while designing an ever-more complex computer game.

The OA is Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij's ambitious, fourteen-episode brainchild. Its first season follows Marling's character, Prairie, as she tells the story of her near-death experience and subsequent abduction by the show's villain, Hap, a scientist who has become obsessed with studying the brains of people who have brushed close with death. The first season ended on a major cliffhanger; the second begins in a new dimension, when Prairie awakens to find herself inside the body of Nina Azarova, a Russian socialite and medium living the life she would have if not for her NDE.

Objectively, the shows aren't that similar—after all, Bandersnatch takes place in the '80s and mostly focuses on an isolated Stefan as he descends into homicidal madness. On the other hand, the ultra-modern cast of The OA includes everyone from Zendaya to a massive, talking octopus named Old Night.


Still, upon closer inspection, the similarities are undeniable. Here are some of the most notable places where the two shows' universes meet.

A Computer Game as a Portal to Multiple Realities

In The OA's second season, children lose their minds as they attempt to win money by playing a computer game, which leads them into a mansion that's actually a portal to other universes. The mansion itself is designed to work as a continuation of the game, which allows winners to reach the Rose Window and its mind-bending, reality-altering view.

Similarly, in Bandersnatch, Stefan loses his mind while designing a game that leads him to question every aspect of his reality. While attempting to understand these games, both the kids in The OA and Stefan draw cryptic illustrations on their bedroom walls, isolate themselves, and wind up harming themselves and everyone around them. In each show, the central game lures characters in by promising greatness and wealth—but instead leads them towards either a state of enlightened understanding or paralyzing madness.

Ultimately, both shows use games and technology as vessels that can be used to leap between worlds. Both identify alternate realities that run alongside each other and that intersect at certain points; and both claim that—through deep science, communion with nature, or a few well-placed dance movements—it might be possible to cross from this world to the next.

A Charismatic Tech Guru with Dangerous Theories

One of the most memorable moments in Bandersnatch is the scene where Stefan drops acid with Colin, the Steve Jobs-esque brains behind the tech company Tuckersoft. As soon as the drug kicks in, Colin delivers one of the trippiest monologues in modern television history.


Colin is a prophetic source of wisdom throughout the show—just like The OA's leading tech guru, Silicon Valley 'prophet' Pierre Ruskin, orchestrator of the game that leads children to the house. Ultimately, both gurus are firmly convinced that there is more than one reality, and both are dedicated to reaching it, no matter the cost.

Childhood Trauma as a Point of Divergence

At the heart of The OA and Bandersnatch—amidst all their static and science—are specific instances of childhood trauma, which are identified as the points where the characters' lives began to diverge into multiple pathways. In The OA, that moment is Nina/Prairie's NDE, an experience she's forced to revisit when trying to re-access Nina Azarova's memories. In Bandersnatch, that moment is when the young Stefan spent too long searching for his toy, causing his mother to miss her train and catch a later one, which derailed.

Prairie lost her father and her vision in her traumatic event, and Stefan lost his mother, but both shows give their protagonists the ability to revisit these traumas and, effectively, to undo them, to experience lives in which these moments had never happened. Prairie's moment of recollection and reversal is in a bathtub, where she relives her own drowning; Stefan's is in the reality in which he has the choice to accompany his mother on the fatal train ride.


An Extremely Meta Ending

Bandersnatch not only breaks the fourth wall—it shatters it. In one scene, viewers are literally able to choose whether or not to tell Stefan that his actions are being controlled by something from the future called Netflix.

Then, of course, there's that television set-scene, the moment where the whole illusion collapses and we're faced with the reality of what's happening: all that we're seeing has been filmed in some Hollywood studio. Stefan's therapist is an actor. Stefan himself is an actor. Nothing is real. That same exact idea is at the crux of The OA's finale; in its final scene, Brit Marling and Jason Isaacs call themselves by their real names, effectively annihilating the line between our reality and the one(s) onscreen.

So, Is Netflix Using the Same Algorithmic Plot for Many Shows On Purpose?

Though The OA and Bandersnatch might be particularly alike, they aren't the only shows on Netflix that revolve around the concept of other realities and alternate, interconnected universes.

Recently, Netflix's Russian Doll made use of a nonlinear view of time, giving its protagonist the ability to transcend death in order to correct her mistakes and—you guessed it—make peace with a childhood trauma, which had to do with blaming herself for her mother's death. The show also uses concepts based on quantum physics to explain its multiple timelines.



Another hit — Stranger Things—also relies on quantum physics-based ideas to explain its Upside Down, a parallel universe that operates similarly to the alternate dimensions in The OA.


Millie Bobby Brown's character Eleven is also a startlingly similar figure to Brit Marling's Prairie/Nina; both were trapped by scientists for many years, and both emerged from their imprisonment endowed with the ability to create portals between dimensions (and sometimes, to levitate). The list goes on.

It's not that these shows are copies of each other. They all seem to utilize similar plotlines, ones that revolve around suppressed childhood traumas and a quantum-physics-inspired tangle of dimensions. In a way, the shows themselves seem to be parallel universes to each other. In each, the traumas and the multiple realities both unveil themselves about three-quarters of the way through, sparking climactic endings that, ultimately, imply that the bonds between humans are strong enough to transcend time and death.

So what's the draw to the multiverse idea? Is our era of catfishing, fake news, and mediated simulacra making us feel like we're living in many realities once? Are we all just seeking ways to escape our linear lives, to escape the passage of time, or to change the past? Can we all sense that this isn't the only world, that we're not the only ones here (after all, what's religion other than a poetic promise that other worlds and greater forces exist)? Does this subject just make for great television?

Regardless, people are into it. YouTube just announced that it will be creating interactive content like Bandersnatch; Season 3 of Stranger Things will officially drop on July 4, 2019; and Black Mirror's fifth season will also be released this year. It seems like TV's journey through interconnected parallel universes has just begun. (Though of course, it's probably already finished in the universes next to this one).


Eden Arielle Gordon is a writer and musician from New York City. Tweet your best conspiracy theories to her @edenarielmusic.


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