I may exceed my word limit doing what I’m about to do, but here I go.
*deep breath*
Everything Everywhere All At Once. Spider-Man: No Way Home. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. Dark. Loki. What If…? Several episodes of Community. The Flash movie. The Flash TV show. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Rick and Morty.
Off the top of my head, that’s every piece of media I can think of that makes multiverses a bedrock part of the plot.
A long time ago, I watched a video from Wisecrack called “How Horror Movies Changed.” To save you twenty-five minutes, what’s supposed to be scary in a horror movie is what’s scaring people in the real world at the time. So in the ‘70s when the reproductive rights debate was beginning to turn its wheels, we got Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives. In the ‘80s, the decade of stranger danger, malevolent strangers like Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees haunted audiences. In the 2010s, when American politics reached the kind of ugliness we as Americans haven’t seen since the Civil War, in came “elevated horror” and “social thrillers,” films like Get Out, The Purge and The Invisible Man that make horror out of real-world issues.
So, if we take this theory outside of the horror genre, what about modern times have made people hungry for content involving the multiverse?
Here’s a hint: it started in the spring of 2020.
I was “fortunate” during the pandemic. The only person in my family who passed away from COVID-19 was one of my mom’s cousins who I had never met. But a sense of loss comes from more than death. My social life, which was on the up-and-up, came to an abrupt halt. Several relationships changed irrevocably when people I knew bought into conspiracy theories. Having to come back home due to campus closing down was a kick in the face to my sense of independence. I was hard at work with several personal goals, but they all stopped when quarantine started.
A lot of people didn’t like Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, but Wanda in that movie represents what’s so appealing about multiverse stories and the idea of a multiverse in general. Wanda lost everything, including the children she conjured from thin air in a reality-breaking act of grief. When she learns of the multiverse, she pulls out all the stops to gain the power to jump dimensions. Not only could she get back everything she lost, but she could never lose what’s precious to her again, with an infinite number of universes having whatever she doesn’t.
That’s why, if the multiverse is real, I’m glad we don’t have the ability to travel it.
There are so many things I wish I could do over: opportunities I wish I’d taken, hurtful actions I wish I could undo, things I wish I could say to people who have passed on. But here’s the thing: growth comes from finality. Doing something that ends a relationship hurts, but it’s also an indelible reminder: don’t do this thing if you want to be a good friend / brother / son / employee.
The foundation of grief is love. To love is to risk. Risking losing who or what you love. Risking being hurt by showing what you hide from others. But that risk isn’t for nothing. Intimacy—lifelong friendships and marriages, communities, family units—can only happen when the people involved are willing to take risks and open up to one another.
If the multiverse was real, I think we’d be an immature society, if we had one at all. Would we even be able to build communities and relationships if the possibility of a clean slate via jumping dimensions was an option? I don’t think so.
The past is the past. What is now will become the past. There are no do-overs, no alternate dimension or timeline you can escape to.
We all have one life.
Let’s live it well.
Noah Keene graduated from Calvin University in December 2021 with a major in creative writing and a minor in Spanish. He currently resides in his hometown of Detroit, Michigan. He spends his free time reading and putting his major to good use by working on his first novel. See what he’s reading by following him on Instagram @peachykeenebooks and read his other personal writing by going to thekeenechronicles.com.
