1899 & Meaning of Life

A Review by Magicthreadworks

antje Friese knows something and she is leaving no stone unturned to make you find out about it. All three of her projects so far — Who am I?, Dark and now 1899 are on similar themes. It’s essentially a quest of finding yourself and meaning of life. If you really think about it, this theme is now recurring a lot in modern pop culture — the beginning scene of every episode of 1899 was giving me very “Westworld” vibes. Then earlier this year, “Everything everywhere all at once” was also based on similar philosophy. What is fascinated me how suddenly, the meaning of life has caught the fancy of people. Why Captain Fantastic, Into the Wild, even They Live are suddenly everyone’s favourite. They know these films reveals something, even though they are not able to pinpoint what or how of it.

The trope of mental illness is something which has been traditionally used to make you think beyond the rules set by the society and realise the reality of the world. 12 Monkeys, Fight Club were the forbearers of similar genre. Aldous Huxley in his “The Doors of perception” writes how human mind is connected to every living and non living being in the world but there has been a control valve put in, in our mind. This valves lets us access only a part of human mind and hence its limited potential. For person with schizophrenia this valves are slights loose hence they are able to access the corners of their mind at times which are otherwise inaccessible. This gives them a better hold of the reality for some time.

Mental Illness, Time Travel or even AI are just tools of meditation to realise what is causing the major conflict in human life. The answer as “Dark” summarised it or even Herman Hesse’s Siddharta pointed out is “attachment”. All stories are same in the sense their major conflict lies in attachment — in terms of love, position, fame and even purpose or meaning. As it gets resolves mostly when protagonist grow internally as someone who realises that they are creating loops which could be broken only when the monkey opens his wrist and let the treat in the box go.