The recent Taapsee Pannu starrer Hindi movie ‘Looop Lapeta’ is the Indian adaptation of a German film ‘Lola Rennt’ (‘Run Lola Run’ in English), Tom Tykwer’s celebrated 1998 cult classic. It certainly provides an opportunity to revisit the original movie and the complicated philosophy of randomness portrayed therein that drives our lives. And the world, and the universe.
In the movie ‘Run Lola Run’, the protagonist Lola receives a frantic phone call. She has just 20 minutes to collect 100,000 Deutschmarks (the Euro era would start after a couple of years!) to save the life of Manni, her boyfriend. Lola had to run, run, and run – she races against the clock, avoids obstacles, and tries to rescue her boyfriend just like a video game. And like a video game also, each time the run is over, it starts all over again. Lola’s run is repeated three times in the movie with different outcomes.
In fact, ‘Run Lola Run’ is often termed as a ‘video game’ movie – as video games allow one to ‘restart’ following a death or a blunder. And like playing a video game, Lola uses knowledge acquired in previous iterations and anticipates some of the obstacles which essentially makes her replay smoother. For example, in the first run, Lola’s boyfriend Manni tells her how to use her gun, and she knows that in the second run. The film ‘Run Lola Run’ certainly depicts the tremendous role of chance in people’s destiny, and it focuses on obscure cause-effect relationships.
Interestingly, more than a century ago, the depiction of ‘randomness’ in life had been tackled differently by O. Henry in his short story ‘Roads of Destiny’. The book containing this story was published in 1909. The story revolves around a young French poet and shepherd named David Mignot. After fighting with his lover Yvonne, David decides to leave his home village of Vernoy in search of fame and adventure. David arrives at the intersection of two major roads and the dreamlike narrative follows him down three paths. O. Henry described three different tales of what would have happened had David gone down each of three different paths.
However, O. Henry possibly believed in destiny, and this story is an ode to the inevitability of that as David is eventually attracted towards exactly the same fate – that he was destined to have – in each of the three paths. While O. Henry’s world, although accepting inherent randomness, at least in the path of life, is ruled by implacable classical determinism, Tom Tykwer thrives in a post-modern, chaotic universe rhythmically controlled by numerous uncertainties poised by every flap of a butterfly’s wings, and hence concluding that destiny is not prefixed either.
The idea of the ‘butterfly effect’, however, is borrowed from the concept of ‘Chaos Theory’ and was propagated by MIT mathematician Edward Lorenz through a seminal lecture entitled “Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?” at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1972. It essentially indicates that tiny changes might result in unpredictable effects. So, when Tom Tykwer portrays the exact opposite of O. Henry’s idea in his dramatic story, it captures the exponentially fast divergence of realities from near-identical initial states.
That destiny can be controlled and changed to some extent is again another hypothesis that is also beyond verification. For life is just one simulation by nature, there’s no way to get any replication. And hence it is impossible to prove or disprove destiny – whether the way of life in alternative realities converges to the same eventual fate or not. There is no alternative reality to judge this. How random is the world or the universe? In this context, I’m a bit tempted to refer Woody Allen’s 1987 drama film ‘September’, which is again modelled on Anton Chekhov’s 1899 play ‘Uncle Vanya’.
In Allen’s film, a writer asks a physicist, “Is there anything more terrifying than the destruction of the world?” The physicist replied: “Yeah, the knowledge that it doesn’t matter one way or the other – that it’s all random, radiating aimlessly out of nothing and eventually vanishing forever.” The physicist, however, pointed out that he was not talking about the world. “I’m talking about the universe,” he said. “[A]ll space, all time, just a temporary convulsion.”
How random is our life then? Let’s quote Nassim Nicholas Taleb from his 2007 book ‘Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets’. “No matter how sophisticated our choices, how good we are at dominating the odds, randomness will have the last word,” Taleb writes. This book explains how luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision-making work together to influence our actions. Also, in his 2009 book ‘The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives’, American theoretical physicist and mathematician Leonard Mlodinow considered “the central ideas of randomness within their historical context and describe their relevance with the aim of offering a new perspective on our everyday surroundings and hence a better understanding of the connection between this fundamental aspect of nature and our own experience.”
Are the world and its phenomena random and completely unpredictable then? Or, are they predictably random, some events just simply have larger odds than the others? The lessons taught by nineteenth-century physicists James Maxwell and Ludwig Boltzmann simply say that randomness does not mean complete unpredictability. While the courses of life and its numerous paths are random, they are not all equally probable, for sure. Our struggle is probably towards identifying the preferred paths and tilting the odds in their favour as much as possible, as per our belief, at least.
Also, whether God plays dice with the Universe or not, and whatever way this Einstein quote should be interpreted, our life doesn’t give us the chance of throwing the dice repeatedly for the same game. And as life is just one simulation by nature, there is no way of gaining knowledge from previous simulations. Certainly, there are an almost infinite number of alternative paths our lives could have taken. And, in reality, there is no scope of experiencing different cycles or “looops” in course of life, for sure. Lola (or Savi in ‘Looop Lapeta’) would definitely run to save her boyfriend, but only once.
Life is a one-time chance, a one-shot experiment. No ‘Lapeta’ – a Hindi word that roughly translates to ‘wrapped’, ‘intertwined’, or ‘trapped’ – of the ‘Looops’ is possible; no ‘informed’ repetition of a run is allowed. However, had the wings of a butterfly flapped differently on the opposite side of the globe half a century ago, history could be differently written.
(The writer is Professor of Statistics, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata.)