Post by schizophrenia on May 2, 2006 18:12:37 GMT -5
I didn´t see the director´s cut version until a week or so ago, and I always presumed that in the end Donnie was laughing because he did not walk the path of god. (Pre-determined, not saying that God doesn´t exists.) However reading these posts and the PoTT has raised many interesting questions, regarding not only the movie, but also general philosophical questions easily debated because of the very concrete basis the movie gives. I decided to put all my questions/theories in on thread because it touches alot of the subjects discussed in several threads scattered in different categoriess around the board. If it gets to messy I´ll just move the discussion to the appropriate thread, if (hopefully, when I get a response. These are comments mainly to issuess debated by Bigboy and ProvidencePortal in multiple threads I´ve read the past days, but I´ts pretty general so everyones thoughts on this are most welcome.
Ok:
First I´d like to addresss the issue of Frank traveling freely in the 4th dimension. Bigboy, I´m too much of a dimwit to understand your schematics, so my questions here may already be accounted for. But if the Bunny can travel through time as he will in the TU, then he will have no chance of failure because he does not have 28 days to fix the problem, but all eternity to figure it out. So in TU then, Donnie will actually be traveling through the Bunnie´s channel/path. Frank is God in the TU. As to the speculation of it being "the One true God", I mean whats up with all the theatrics? Why would God want to fuck with Donnie's head like that, a corpse in a bunny costume? And if Donnie made the wrong "choice" he would simply go back to add another function (in lack of a better word) to make him (Donnie) change his mind. Why would God go to all this trouble to enlighten Donnie to something he would´ve discovered as soon as the jet-engine crushed him anyway. Showing him all this and take him away from the only place he could put his "discovery of goodnesss" to good use?
Free will is always constricted, through heritage and environment. (I don´t know the english wording for this, but it´s commonly used in the evolution theory.) So the only way to exoneratee God here would be if he simply put in a few more things inDonnie'ss life, like him meeting Gretchen. So in the end Donnie is making an informed choice of sorts. Whenever we make any choice what things leads us to making this choices. Is it our previous experiencess who makes us who we are, and tells us how to act. For example: If you were "outside" time, and could see all of time stretched out before like a picture, every split second will "always exist" for you. If you chose to focus on a specific place in time, a persons life from birth to death, for example an untimely death through suicide! Would you in interfering with this persons life by adding or removing a factor which made this person as an example commit suicide, make you constricting or adding to this persons free will, by giving him/her more references. One choice a person makes often excludes another. Later one may see things from a different perspective, and utter, "had I only known this or maybe that I may have acted differently".
So while your interference may have led this person to act differently, by not removing anything, but by adding something, then would you not simply have given this person another choice thus giving him a better possibility to make a (more informed or unbiased) decision of what to do? Providing that you have no personal interest in the final outcome of course. By the way, if there is absolute free will, and time is a dimension (which it is in DD.) would it not exist an indefinitee amount of parallell universes containing each and every thinkable outcome of any living things possibilities? How could there be a linear flow of things (in time, observing it, like Frank in TU) in the case of free will?
In most cases you are also able to deduct with some accuracy the possible outcome of a hypothetical act. This will also help in making your decision. Also, is a thing "good" if you had good intentions only that the outcome was bad or vice versa? What constitutes a Good thing? If there is a moral at all, somethings that are alwayss right and alwayss wrong. It seems to me, and to most people I guess, that kiddie-porn is a bad thing. But if theres no God to say whats right and wrong then it is up to each and everyone to make up their minds of what is right and wrong, and no one can claim that their moral and ethical values are more "correct" than others. If Donnie had not been given the opportunityy to love and be loved, he might have decided against saving the world, because he could only see the shitty side of things. The hypocrisyy of Jim C. and his school for one thing. Where if you don't accept things aren't just black and white, you get punished. Seems to me that the only people who are willing to do this are the ones with the greatest fear themselves. Not the dude with the mullet and his friend, who seems to be mostly assholes, but the school and much of society where Donnie lives in general. People know this, but pretend they do not, so they don`t have to face the inconvenience of "cleaning" it up.
Uhm..in any case. Is it possible for Bunny-Frank to jeopardize his own existence? Shouldn´t his "reason" or "birth" lie outside the world in wich he operates, because if it´s a time thing he would not have existed in the first place? Would he not have destroyed himself by "outing" the destiny of TU Donnie? More on this later as I stumble onto the same problem when Donnie hurls the engine back to PU. On a side note: MDFrank could not have been created by Donnie shooting him (in the TU we know, at least.) Following this logic you can also say that humans went back in time and created the Universe, as I see it. (Kind of an inverted Grandfather paradox.) I believe it was none other than capt. Jean Luc Picard who did exactly this in TNG episode "All good things". If you have multiple Universes where things doesn´t necessarily (or it cant) happen the same way , this is apossibilityy.
The Engine(s):
Why is Donnie needed to tear the engine from the plane in TU, when no one was needed to do so in the event in PU? The only reasonable explanation I can come up with is that he does this moments or minutes before the actual event takes place in PU, this closes the wormhole in time so that the plane in PU never looses its engine. If the engine had been the reason for the TU being created, then Donnie by making sure it (PU engine) never fell would have made sure it never happened. Grandfather paradox, I think. But since there seems to be generall consensus that the TU came into beingsomem time before this, what now? I think Bigboy asked the question what if an artifact doesn´occur? Well, what if all is peachy,(Stable TU) and this was in fact Donnie´s time travel? It´s been speculated that Sparrow, may have had her facts wrong before.
What if Donnie secured his life in this "side-tunnell" while perishing and saving everyone else in the PU. Could this be true for Sparrow as well? Or else he must have made sure somehow that the TU never spawned in the first place, but this again is problematic. Grandfather paradox?
Ok, some of this may seem to stray a bit away from the movie, but they are meant to illustrate the problems I have with the time traveling-Frank. Especially free will.
Ok:
First I´d like to addresss the issue of Frank traveling freely in the 4th dimension. Bigboy, I´m too much of a dimwit to understand your schematics, so my questions here may already be accounted for. But if the Bunny can travel through time as he will in the TU, then he will have no chance of failure because he does not have 28 days to fix the problem, but all eternity to figure it out. So in TU then, Donnie will actually be traveling through the Bunnie´s channel/path. Frank is God in the TU. As to the speculation of it being "the One true God", I mean whats up with all the theatrics? Why would God want to fuck with Donnie's head like that, a corpse in a bunny costume? And if Donnie made the wrong "choice" he would simply go back to add another function (in lack of a better word) to make him (Donnie) change his mind. Why would God go to all this trouble to enlighten Donnie to something he would´ve discovered as soon as the jet-engine crushed him anyway. Showing him all this and take him away from the only place he could put his "discovery of goodnesss" to good use?
Free will is always constricted, through heritage and environment. (I don´t know the english wording for this, but it´s commonly used in the evolution theory.) So the only way to exoneratee God here would be if he simply put in a few more things inDonnie'ss life, like him meeting Gretchen. So in the end Donnie is making an informed choice of sorts. Whenever we make any choice what things leads us to making this choices. Is it our previous experiencess who makes us who we are, and tells us how to act. For example: If you were "outside" time, and could see all of time stretched out before like a picture, every split second will "always exist" for you. If you chose to focus on a specific place in time, a persons life from birth to death, for example an untimely death through suicide! Would you in interfering with this persons life by adding or removing a factor which made this person as an example commit suicide, make you constricting or adding to this persons free will, by giving him/her more references. One choice a person makes often excludes another. Later one may see things from a different perspective, and utter, "had I only known this or maybe that I may have acted differently".
So while your interference may have led this person to act differently, by not removing anything, but by adding something, then would you not simply have given this person another choice thus giving him a better possibility to make a (more informed or unbiased) decision of what to do? Providing that you have no personal interest in the final outcome of course. By the way, if there is absolute free will, and time is a dimension (which it is in DD.) would it not exist an indefinitee amount of parallell universes containing each and every thinkable outcome of any living things possibilities? How could there be a linear flow of things (in time, observing it, like Frank in TU) in the case of free will?
In most cases you are also able to deduct with some accuracy the possible outcome of a hypothetical act. This will also help in making your decision. Also, is a thing "good" if you had good intentions only that the outcome was bad or vice versa? What constitutes a Good thing? If there is a moral at all, somethings that are alwayss right and alwayss wrong. It seems to me, and to most people I guess, that kiddie-porn is a bad thing. But if theres no God to say whats right and wrong then it is up to each and everyone to make up their minds of what is right and wrong, and no one can claim that their moral and ethical values are more "correct" than others. If Donnie had not been given the opportunityy to love and be loved, he might have decided against saving the world, because he could only see the shitty side of things. The hypocrisyy of Jim C. and his school for one thing. Where if you don't accept things aren't just black and white, you get punished. Seems to me that the only people who are willing to do this are the ones with the greatest fear themselves. Not the dude with the mullet and his friend, who seems to be mostly assholes, but the school and much of society where Donnie lives in general. People know this, but pretend they do not, so they don`t have to face the inconvenience of "cleaning" it up.
Uhm..in any case. Is it possible for Bunny-Frank to jeopardize his own existence? Shouldn´t his "reason" or "birth" lie outside the world in wich he operates, because if it´s a time thing he would not have existed in the first place? Would he not have destroyed himself by "outing" the destiny of TU Donnie? More on this later as I stumble onto the same problem when Donnie hurls the engine back to PU. On a side note: MDFrank could not have been created by Donnie shooting him (in the TU we know, at least.) Following this logic you can also say that humans went back in time and created the Universe, as I see it. (Kind of an inverted Grandfather paradox.) I believe it was none other than capt. Jean Luc Picard who did exactly this in TNG episode "All good things". If you have multiple Universes where things doesn´t necessarily (or it cant) happen the same way , this is apossibilityy.
The Engine(s):
Why is Donnie needed to tear the engine from the plane in TU, when no one was needed to do so in the event in PU? The only reasonable explanation I can come up with is that he does this moments or minutes before the actual event takes place in PU, this closes the wormhole in time so that the plane in PU never looses its engine. If the engine had been the reason for the TU being created, then Donnie by making sure it (PU engine) never fell would have made sure it never happened. Grandfather paradox, I think. But since there seems to be generall consensus that the TU came into beingsomem time before this, what now? I think Bigboy asked the question what if an artifact doesn´occur? Well, what if all is peachy,(Stable TU) and this was in fact Donnie´s time travel? It´s been speculated that Sparrow, may have had her facts wrong before.
What if Donnie secured his life in this "side-tunnell" while perishing and saving everyone else in the PU. Could this be true for Sparrow as well? Or else he must have made sure somehow that the TU never spawned in the first place, but this again is problematic. Grandfather paradox?
Ok, some of this may seem to stray a bit away from the movie, but they are meant to illustrate the problems I have with the time traveling-Frank. Especially free will.