5 Movies About Recurring Lifetimes

The U.S.A. has always been a racial and cultural melting pot. Due to the internet, social media, and the spread of yoga throughout Western culture, Eastern concepts have been taking root in the West for some time now. Back in 1969, when John Lennon wrote “Instant Karma,” nobody knew what he was talking about. Now, formerly sacred eastern concepts, such as recurring lifetimes, are showing up as cute quotes on food labels in American supermarkets.

Such concepts have long been making their cinematic debuts as well, in even the most innocuous fare—“Back to the Future” is hilariously riddled with esoteric concepts. Let’s pick an Eastern topic, shall we? Let’s take a look at how it shows up at the multiplex.

Recurring Lifetimes

Let’s start with past lives. Recurring lifetimes. It’s now firmly anchored in American culture as something to have an opinion about, an example of which can be found in the hilarious conversation between Crash Davis (Kevin Costner) and Annie Savoy (Susan Sarandon) in 1988’s baseball hit “Bull Durham“:

https://youtu.be/drmDNzgbt9A

Without further ado, here are five movies that deal with the concept of recurring lives.

‘Groundhog Day’

https://youtu.be/GncQtURdcE4

Bill Murray plays Phil Connors, a surpassingly rude, narcissistic Pittsburgh television weatherman, who falls into a cosmic temporal wormhole in a small Pennsylvania town, and gets stuck in an endlessly repeating time loop. He’s shackled, fairy tale-like, to Groundhog Day, waking up to the exact same day—over, and over, and over, and over again, for all eternity.

“Groundhog Day” kicked off the time-loop movie genre. The number of time-loop movies now stands at 63. Clearly it struck a chord with movie goers; clearly our culture has demonstrated a thirst, consciously or subconsciously, to understand more about this concept. The idea, in a nutshell, is that by becoming a better person, one can get out of here and go back to heaven.

Bill Murray’s Phil demonstrates this exceptionally well in “Groundhog Day,” only his improvement is tied to a romantic theme. He only gets the girl, when, after a few thousand repetitions of Groundhog day, he lets go of his scheming ways, and slowly becomes a good man. It happens thusly:

Recurring Lifetime Do-overs Reveal the Meaning of Life

Once Phil comes to accept the time loop, he’s forced through a range of philosophical life changes. First, he realizes that without consequences for his actions (karma!) he can wallow in hedonism (the philosophy that the pleasurable satisfaction of desires is the meaning of life). He seduces women, he robs banks, he feeds his face with all the comfort food he can cram in.

When the hedonism eventually becomes empty and meaningless, as it inevitably does, he arrives, along with some of the movie’s darkest (and funniest) moments, at nihilism; the belief that life itself—is ultimately meaningless. Who can forget Phil falling to his “death” off the clock tower, and getting in the bathtub and throwing the toaster in? But of course, self-destruction doesn’t provide a way out either.

Finally out of options, Phil finally begins to change for the better, as he is forced by the circumstances of recurring lifetimes (er, daytimes) to pursue what actually does give value and meaning to his life—the Aristotelian concept that human happiness derives not from pleasure but the doing of virtuous deeds.

And so, over thousands of recurring daytimes, Phil becomes fluent in a variety of languages, learns medicine, learns musical instruments, carves expert ice sculptures, forces himself to stop looking down on dorky life-insurance salesman Ned Ryerson (Stephen Tobolowsky) and buys up all Ned’s insurance to give Ned tremendous salesman joy. Phil cultivates moral and intellectual virtues.

Phil is forced to realize that the ultimate meaning in his life is to be found in the dedicated activity of building the habit of virtue, in the present moment, every single day.

Further Monkey Wrench

It must be said, that while “Groundhog Day” can be said to have accurately summed up the meaning and purpose of recurring lifetimes, from an Eastern perspective, as far as it goes—it doesn’t go far enough. It’s too tidy and neat and succinct. Where it differs from traditional explanations, is that Phil wakes up everyday, on Groundhog’s day, remembering exactly what happened the day before. And all the previous days as well.

If you made a movie where, every time Phil wakes up, he has no clue what happened the day before, well, then it becomes clear why in ancient Indian literature, the chances of a human being figuring out how to exit the time-loop cycle via the path of enlightenment are as follows: the chances are the same as those of a singular turtle, swimming through all the world’s seven oceans—coming up for air precisely inside a 3-foot wooden hoop that’s also floating randomly on the surface of all the world’s seven oceans. Just imagine the staggering odds.

And it becomes even more clear why the ancient Indians said that if a man, in one particular lifetime, did chance upon discovering how to exit the cycle of recurring lifetimes—he should seize the opportunity with the same urgency and alacrity as a man whose hair is on fire seeks a pond.

‘I Origins’

https://youtu.be/sEGppIgwKf0

In “I Origins,“ Michael Pitt plays a molecular-biologist Ph.D. candidate. He’s an eye specialist. He wishes to disprove religious doctrine by examining the evolution of the human eye, and seeing if he can outwit evolution by developing eyes for blind worms. Flying the geek flag, Ian shows up at a Brooklyn hipster party in a lab coat, toting a camera and taking pictures of people’s eyes. There, he falls in love with a pair of eyes belonging to a stunning girl, only to have the girl disappear.

He marries another girl, an eye specialist soulmate, and their work eventually leads them to this concept: No two pairs of eyes are the same, but if a match does occur, it can only mean one thing: namely, a person having the exact eye structure as another—can only mean the rebirth of its previous possessor! “I Origins” is particularly fun in that one witnesses a devout man of science having too many coincidences and synchronicities pile up for science to be able to exclusively explain the happenings.

Movie poster for "I Origins."

Cloud Atlas

The directors who brought us the game-changing film “The Matrix,” followed it up with another paradigm shifter—the powerful “Cloud Atlas.“ Tom Hanks recently said that the three movies he enjoyed making the most were ”A League of Their Own,“ ”Cast Away,“ and ”Cloud Atlas.”

This thoroughly engrossing film encompasses six story-lines spanning five centuries. As author David Mitchell mentioned in the film’s press notes, “I thought of it as a menu with courses from different cuisines.” There are a couple of dramas, a romance, a crime thriller, a comedy, and a futuristic sci-fi adventure. Yet it is all one story.

Meaning that all those storylines can only span five centuries due to the concept of recurring lifetimes. It’s a character actor’s dream project; playing people who die and then get reborn later on, involving tons of wigs, prosthetic noses, make-up, costumes, and using different gaits and voices.

Unmistaken Child

https://youtu.be/gy9AFwvzmok

In the 2008 documentary “Unmistaken Child,” monk Tenzin Zopa of Nepal goes in search of the alleged rebirth of Geshe Lama Konchog, his former master. When he finds him, the Dalai Lama is summoned to confirm.

The Dalai Lama tells the child’s parents, “Keep him clean! Keep him clean!” In other words, in order for the child to more easily regain his former state of moral purity, he should be kept separated from current human society and its murky moral morass.

Watch “Unmistaken Child” in order to get a sense of the deep faith and respect for the topic of recurring lifetmes, as they are honored in the Eastern traditions.

Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner

“Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner” is particularly delicious in terms of past lives. This tiny Inuit village from the 1300s only has a few dozen families. When the couple at “end of the road” has a baby, a woman on the other side of the village dreams that her recently deceased husband will soon be reborn nearby.

When she hears of the birth, she goes for a visit, and of course knows, through mother’s intuition and ancient tribal wisdom, that the newborn is the reincarnation of her husband. She holds the baby, exclaiming, “Ahhh, my little husband, I immediately knew it would be you, returning soon.”

The concept of recurring lifetimes is not science, but these are a few enjoyable movies that give one pause.