Being Coherent about Coherence (2013)
Credit: Bellanova Films/Ugly Ducking Films. Distributed by Oscilloscope Laboratories
Coherence (2013) makes the first impression of a philosophy major but turns out to be a lab supervisor in the psychology department. This Twilight Zone-style thought experiment is a brilliant, multi-layered examination of character. In particular, its use of the doppelganger tells us a lot about desire and how life feels.
Plot
Coherence is about eight friends at a dinner party. The group meets on a night when a comet appears to trigger a series of strange happenings. The characters soon meet versions of themselves (doppelgangers) who mirror their behavior. To make sense of this, the characters postulate a figurative use of the Schrodinger’s Cat thought experiment and conclude that they are facing a potentially infinite series of iterations of the dinner party (which for some reason play out in a void).
We meet multiple doppelgangers; it was only on the second viewing that I came to appreciate how many different versions of the characters make an appearance. Em (Emily Foxler) is our primary focus across the various universes. When we meet her, she’s struggling to decide whether to go to Vietnam with her boyfriend, Kevin (Maury Sterling), while navigating an awkward evening with Kevin’s ex, Laurie (Lauren Mahr), who for some misguided reason, party guest Amir (Alex Manugian) brought to the party.
The exact terms of the thought experiment aren’t particularly important or lucid. Coherence is a dialogue-driven film that’s really about character. Much more than the details of quantum mechanics or the metaphysics of alternate worlds, the film’s point is what the characters’ attempts to manage their surreal situation reveal about them.
Coherence was shot on a nearly non-existent budget in director James Ward Byrkit’s living room and was almost entirely improvisational, based on a skeletal script of only twelve pages. The resultant choppiness of its found-footage cinematography is a small price to pay for what that improvisation provides. The actors’ unrehearsed, spontaneous responses add additional depth to the dialogue in a film that is heavily invested in its dialogue. We often say more than we mean when we speak, and Coherence harnesses the spontaneity and subtlety of its improvised cinematography to provide considerable depth.
What Does it Mean?
Choice
What is that depth about? Well, on a first pass, Coherence is obviously about the complexities and ramifications of choice. From the start, the characters are revealed to either be preparing to make a significant choice (e.g., Em deciding whether to go to Vietnam with Kevin) or accept the consequences of past choices (e.g., Mike’s alcoholism — one of the film’s many entertaining meta-winks that the viewer’s reality may be one of the film’s alternate universes; real-life actor Nicholas Brendon (Mike) has famously struggled with drugs and alcohol). Thus, on one account, the film addresses the question of the path not taken and what it means to be saddled with the baggage of what we’ve done.
Self
Coherence also touches on more traditional doppelganger territory. In classic psychoanalysis, the doppelganger as a figure is about unacknowledged desires and the darker parts of one’s psyche. Unlike above, this is less about what one does than what one is. The film makes this theme explicit when Mike, lost in a self-pitying haze, says to Em, “This whole night we’ve been worrying there’s some dark version of us out there somewhere. What if we’re the dark version?” The metaphor is clear: through the doppelganger, we distance ourselves from our inner darkness by externalizing and projecting it onto other versions of ourselves.
Experience
Notably, neither interpretation fully explains Em’s behavior at the film’s end. By that point, the house is an emotional disaster zone. Em has realized that the only versions of the people in the house from her original world are her boyfriend Kevin and his ex, Laurie, who clearly still have feelings for one another. The group is in an uproar as an old affair comes to the surface. In the midst of this chaos, seemingly apropos of nothing, one of Mike’s doppelgangers spontaneously enters the home and beats him.
In response to that hopeful scene, Em decides to cast her lot in the parallel universes. She wanders the void, literally looking in the window at different versions of the night before settling on one that she attempts to enter through violent, homicidal force by killing the version of herself from that world. While her own universe might be a wreck without much space for her, she seems to reason that she might be able to force her way into something better.
Note that what finally pushes Em to search for a different world isn’t the choices she’s made or the darker sides of herself per se. Rather, it’s her fit with the world that is the issue. In this case, the alternate universes represent a menu of potentially improved life opportunities.
We can think of this in a few ways. One is to side with Mike that the film’s default world does indeed reflect darker impulses and desires. From that vantage point, regardless of whether Em is herself the physical manifestation of those darker impulses or is pushed to them by the pressures of a crazed universe, the result is that tragedy happens when she tries to force her way into a better world.
Pushing further, one wonders if the film isn’t hitting on a type of uncanny lived experience. In the most immediate rendering, this could speak to the experience I think we’ve all had of wanting to escape to a less damaged version of the lives we know.
Beyond desire, this could also point us toward a certain uncanny experience — something akin to Heidegger’s conception of a mood in the sense of a particular lived atmosphere or vibe. There seems to be a common if not universal experience of feeling like one is living a life that runs parallel to other versions of that life. This is a visceral feeling more than a conscious thought (cue “Once in a Lifetime”).
Seen from this perspective, much as Beckett’s Waiting for Godot captures the fact that waiting is a foundational facet of what it is to be human, Coherence might capture a common, surreal feeling that we’re living out one of many versions of some approximation of the same life. One would think not every sentient creature would have that experience, but who’s to say. I’m unsure how common it is, but at least in some cultures, it seems like a basic facet of human experience.
Conclusion (Introduction’s Doppelganger)
We started by downplaying the philosophical dimensions of Coherence, and yet we’ve found our way back to them through philosophy’s boots-on-the-ground wing of phenomenology (which on some meta-level might track the development of a field that treats phenomenology and its ilk as philosophy’s malformed doppelganger).
In this sense, and perhaps in the spirit of the film, we’ll close with a modified doppelganger of the sentence we started with: Coherence (2013) makes the first impression of being a lab supervisor in the psychology department but turns out to be a philosophy major. It tells us about how life feels and what we desire.