Predestination: musing on identity, purpose and whether our fates are predetermined

Michael and Peter Spierig, “Predestination” (2014)

Based on a short story by Robert Heinlein (“All You Zomvies” which features no zombies, disappointingly enough), “Predestination” is an intriguing if not always satisfying film about time travel, the nature of one’s identity and the possibility that linear time and space may depend very heavily on spatio-temporal Mobius loops. Ethan Hawke plays an agent employed by a secret agency within the US government: his role is to hunt down a serial terrorist called the Fizzle Bomber through time and space. If the viewer can suspend disbelief long enough and far enough, the agent’s time machine is a violin case with time and space co-ordinates that can be manually set; all a person needs to do is to stand within a radius of one metre of the machine and … ZIP! … ta-daah, you’ve arrived at your destination.

After an encounter with the Fizzle Bomber in New York in 1975 that results in horrific facial injuries, the agent undergoes surgical facial reconstruction and acquires a new face. His boss Robertson (Noah Taylor) sends him back to New York in 1970 where, disguised as a bartender, he meets a young man, John (Sarah Snook), who proceeds to tell him his life-story. The biography is fairly generic: an orphaned baby is taken in by an orphanage and grows up there, never being accepted by any family or receiving any love due to its peculiarities. The child becomes an adult and undergoes various trials which make John the man he is. The agent offers to take John back to a point in his past to confront the mysterious stranger who has ruined his life and made him the outcast and outsider that he is. After John is set upon his path, the agent resumes his search for the Fizzle Bomber and from that moment, his own search for the elusive terrorist becomes increasingly bizarre and the viewer is left to guess at the agent’s connection with John and the Fizzle Bomber and to solve the existential puzzle that his actions create.

The puzzle is not too difficult to solve and it does throw up an interesting conundrum about identity and how choices we make in life may or may not be inevitable. Identity is less stable than it appears: the film reveals that John was originally born female and was christened Jane. Jane grows up as a girl, albeit a highly intelligent and unusually strong one, and is trained to be a comfort worker dedicated to providing rest and recreation for astronauts on space stations. After being seduced by a mystery stranger, she becomes pregnant, gives birth to a baby girl and undergoes gender reassignment surgery when the doctors who deliver her child discover her intersex condition. Meanwhile the baby is kidnapped from hospital. Jane renames her / himself John and tries to adjust to his new identity and need to find a new niche in society. He becomes a writer churning out pulpy true-confession stories to women’s magazines until he meets the agent.

The bizarre plot unfolds gradually and plausibly – but only just – thanks to the performances given by Hawke and Snook and the care with which the Spierig twins recreate the ambience and ephemera of  the historical periods in which the action takes place. Through Snook’s performance as Jane / John, the film explores an individual’s need for connection to others and love and acceptance by society for what s/he is and brings to humankind as an individual and not as a representative of his / her gender. True identity and purpose come only when an individual is accepted as s/he is and the natural abilities s/he brings are also accepted, cultivated and directed towards mutually beneficial ends instead of destructive ones.  Hawke’s role as the agent forces consideration of one’s role in influencing people to take the paths they do and the consequences that arise: as the film progresses, the agent becomes a more sinister and less beneficent protagonist and by the end of the film, the agent is well on the way to becoming a dark figure while John is groomed and recruited by Robertson as a new agent and receives his mission: to track down the Fizzle Bomber; the time and place are New York in 1975.

From a philosophical viewpoint the film addresses the issue of determinism, whether we are or are not the playthings of fate. The conclusion arrived at turns out to be rather more complicated: we may not be puppets but the decisions we make, however consciously, end up imprisoning ourselves and put us on courses that shut off certain opportunities and open up others which in turn push us further into some directions but not others. Whether these directions we go into are morally right or wrong is another thing. For a film with this message though, the subtext suggests the opposite: the agent continually pops up at various points of Jane / John’s life to nudge the character onto certain paths and away from others, as if to justify a certain purpose or fulfill a goal  … which turns out to be his own life’s purpose and goal. Were Jane / John to do anything out of the ordinary, the agent and his employer may well cease to exist.

The film’s conclusion ends up rather … deterministic as Hawke’s agent descends into a life in the shadows, knowing that there is someone coming after him who will eventually kill him. Meanwhile Robertson and the agency he heads continue on their way, profiting from the misery they have helped to create by shaping and reshaping history into a giant Mobius strip. Perhaps life is more deterministic than we think it is … because our thinking and actions have made it so, and we are so immersed in it that, like the agent, John and Robertson, we fail to step outside our mental paradigms and realise we are trapped in a loop of our making which ends up having a life and force of its own that continues to lock us into the same old actions. The odd thing though is that the Fizzle Bomber, conscious of the circularity of his life, never tries to go after Robertson and the secret US government agency. It is only when he dies that he is finally free of the cosmic hamster wheel he has ridden all his life. Meanwhile Robertson and the agency he heads continue on their way, et cetera.