The trailer of Other Mommy intrigued me. A happy domestic scene, with an elementary-school-age girl surprised her mother’s home to make lunch, devolves into horror. As pasta cooks, the mother (Jessica Chastain) asks the daughter if she remembers when they were “one person,” not just during pregnancy but before, when “you were in my heart,” then asks ominously: “Can I go into your heart?” Pasta burns, dad runs in, and the creature with mother’s smiling face’s now under the table, limbs contorted into a spider-like shape.
I made a mental note to consider reviewing this movie when it comes out in October. I’m not inclined toward horror films, but there’s no denying the effect this trailer had on the audience awaiting The Odyssey. Researching Other Mommy, which is based on a novel Incidents Around the House, I came across the concept of “eldritch abominations,” which are grotesque mockeries of reality that defy natural law and human comprehension. That would include Chastain’s faux-mom, as well as the mythos of H.P. Lovecraft, who popularized the term eldritch, with monsters, such as Chthulhu, that “are impossibly old, and exist outside the dimensions that can be experienced by humanity.”
The term also can be used more expansively for paranormal, supernatural or otherworldly phenomena or ideas, as in science writer Curt Jaimungal’s post, “The eldritch things famous rationalists believed, doubted, and took seriously.” These include “God, spirit, telepathy, purpose, free will, and the limits of physics,” a wide net.
Kevin Singer, a friend who writes horror and sci-fi, evokes a sense of metaphysical angst in his stories, such as “The Only Possible Thing,” in which a narrator, who’s experienced a fateful encounter with aliens, recounts how the moments that truly matter to him were those spent with someone on whom he had an impossible crush. “With you I felt a newly possible thing, and it was all I cared about,” says the narrator. The aliens, however, had a different perspective: “They waited for us deep in the caverns of Belenus. They always knew how it would end. Still, they waited. Still, they let it unfold. Not let it, exactly. It was the only possible thing. They understood that fact of the universe, just as I do now.”
Is everything that happens the only thing that could happen, the course of the universe predetermined? It’s an age-old philosophical debate, unresolved by modern science. It’s among the conundrums discussed in a valuable upcoming book, On Time: The Physics That Makes the Universe Tick, by physicist Jim Al-Khalili (Princeton University Press). The book explores the gap between “manifest time” (our subjective experiences of time as flowing and having a direction, with present distinct from past and future) and “physical time” (science’s picture, based on relativity, quantum mechanics, and thermodynamics).
That’s a challenging task, as physics hasn’t attained a clear-cut understanding of time, in part because quantum mechanics and general relativity haven’t been reconciled via quantum gravity. “What is becoming clear,” Al-Khalili writes, “is that the meaning and origin of time may in fact lie at the very heart of the quantum gravity enterprise, because until we can solve the first problem of physical time, we will never reach our final theory of everything.” Whether such a “final theory” is possible is also debatable.
Regarding free will, Al-Khalili identifies possibilities including that it doesn’t exist, or that there’s room for it given indeterminism in the universe. He leans toward a view that the universe may be deterministic, but still impossible to fully predict, even in principle, contrary to “Laplace’s demon,” an imagined being that knows everything that will happen based on the current motions of particles; this “means that the illusion of free will is so strong that I am willing to acknowledge that it is indeed no different from ‘true’ free will.”
Horror often involves a feeling the universe is stacked against you. A belief in paranormal or supernatural monsters unbound by physical laws lends itself to such fatalism. Curiously, such entities, in horror fiction, must abide by other sets of rules, however murky. The creature in Other Mommy needs the girl’s permission to “go into her heart,” hence the pressure tactics. Even Cthulhu, so terrifying as to drive humans mad, is a middling figure in Lovecraft’s hierarchy of otherworldly beings, not one of the big-time cosmic powers.