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Article Dans Une Revue Épistémocritique. Revue de littérature et savoirs Année : 2024

Language after the Fall in the film Cloud Atlas (2012)

Résumé

Cloud Atlas is a 2012 film directed by the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer. It presents the viewer with six different stories, set in different eras: 1849, 1936, 1973, 2012, 2144 and 2321. The main actors and actresses play different parts in the various sections and the different characters that they play seem to be connected through reincarnation. The 2144 section is set in a city called Neo-Seoul and takes place before what is referred to as “the Fall”, which we understand to have been a nuclear disaster. The 2321 section is set 106 years after the Fall. It focuses on the tribespeople of the post-apocalyptic Big Island of Hawaii, renamed “Big Isle” in the film. It is therefore a part of the world that we know today, except that it takes place in the very distant future. Three different peoples interact on Big Isle: the Valleysmen, the Kona and the Prescients. The Valleysmen are a peaceful tribe who worship the goddess Sonmi. One of them, named Zachri, is the protagonist of the 2321 section. He is played by Tom Hanks. The Kona are a violent tribe of cannibals and appear to be the archenemies of the Valleysmen. Hugh Grant plays the part of their bloodthirsty chief. The Prescients are non-natives of Big Isle. They still wield pre-Fall technology and come to the island aboard floating ships. Meronym, played by Halle Berry, spends time among the villagers to carry out environmental research. A fourth category is simply referred to as the “Old Uns”, the people who lived on the planet before the Fall. One of the challenges of this futuristic world is that the language spoken needs to have changed enough to create a sense of defamiliarization while it needs to be comprehensible enough for the viewer to make sense of the story. The English of 2321 can be baffling for viewers, who at first may be confused as to whether the story takes place in the past or in the future. Indeed, the Valleysmen’s language has a quaint quality, in the sense that it sounds both unusual and old-fashioned. It takes on a defamiliarizing strangeness for present-day viewers, who naturally expect a much more mainstream sort of English to be used, one closer to contemporary English and maybe one that shares more features with standard varieties. Therefore, the language of Cloud Atlas fully partakes of the creation of a distant world that has XXIst-century viewers momentarily lose their bearings. The future variety of English that is carefully crafted for the film seems to be based on an observation of the mechanisms of linguistic change, on the way present-day English varies across dialects, as well as on phonetic, grammatical and lexical processes. It also seems to draw from the uniformitarian principle (Romaine, 123), whereby the processes that were at work in the past are still at work today and would therefore most certainly continue to operate in the future. However, the English spoken in Cloud Atlas is not so much a linguistic construct as it is a very creative and artistic proposition. Yet, it has been described in rather negative terms, as “a post-apocalyptic pidgin, which is frequently difficult to understand” (Wickman), as “disjointed English” (The GradeSaver study guide). This idea of regression is reminiscent of the view commonly held among laypeople that language change is synonymous with regression or “degeneration” (Whitney, 84), under people’s misconception that there was a linguistic “golden age” in the past (Labov, 214). This view is not shared by linguists, for whom this golden age is nothing but a myth. About Cloud Atlas, Sorlin (“A Linguistic Approach”, 76) writes that “English seems to have regressed just as humanity has” (my emphasis), but she proceeds to demonstrate that it is not the case. This myth about language is reminiscent of the Tower of Babel, where language was in some sort of prelapsarian perfection until God confounded it. In Cloud Atlas, the English spoken by the tribesmen of Hawaii “106 winters after The Fall” may be perceived as a way of linguistically representing the catastrophe of “the Fall”. In that sense, language is as much constitutive of the reader’s cognitive and perceptual understanding of the film as are the characters or the diegesis. This is a recurrent trait of contemporary dystopian novels that depict post-apocalyptic worlds. In such works as Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker (1980), Will Self’s The Book of Dave (2006) and of course David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), language may be seen as the main character because it is fully alive, having continued to evolve while the rest of the world is struggling to recover (Sorlin, La défamiliarisation). However, this paper is based on the 2012 film, not on the 2004 novel by David Mitchell that it is adapted from. Some of the encoding chosen by Mitchell is very effective on the page but it does not work when considering oral English. Therefore, I will concentrate on the specificities of the spoken variety created for the film as used by the actors and actresses. The choices behind the spelling that I use when quoting the dialogues of the film are based on the script written by the directors. First, I will see how the principle of internal change that is known as the principle of economy seems to be at work in the language of Cloud Atlas and how it is partly counterbalanced by the principle of expressiveness, another mechanism of change. I will then explain how analogy also underlies some of the changes created for the film. Next, I will show that the linguistic construct of Cloud Atlas is also based on the observation of present-day variation and on archaic forms of the language. This will allow me to conclude that the variety created is not entirely realistic and that it is therefore essentially an artistic proposition.
Lorsque l’on présente des mondes lointains dans la science-fiction ou le fantastique, l’un des procédés courants permettant d’accroître l’expérience de défamiliarisation pour les lecteurs ou les spectateurs consiste à les immerger dans des environnements linguistiques non familiers. À cette fin, les écrivains ont même créé des langues entières (par exemple, Tolkien et ses langues de la Terre du Milieu). Cependant, lorsqu’il s’agit d’un passé ou d’un futur lointain, on s’efforce rarement de reconnaître le fait que la langue évolue avec le temps. La section post-apocalyptique de Cloud Atlas s’appuie précisément sur le changement linguistique pour dépeindre un monde futuriste, à la fois dans le roman de David Mitchell de 2004 et dans son adaptation cinématographique de 2012 par les Wachowskis et Tom Tykwer. Dans une perspective de linguiste, il est frappant de constater que certains des changements créés pour Cloud Atlas sont tout à fait plausibles si l’on considère l’avenir réel des variétés d’anglais. Dans cet article, je montre comment cette langue futuriste est rendue dans le film et j’analyse les mécanismes de changement qui auraient pu être à l’œuvre s’il ne s’agissait pas d’une fiction. Certains aspects de l’évolution proposée ne sont pas très plausibles (par exemple, l’absence de variation vocalique), mais l’encodage de la variété est une représentation linguistique, une proposition esthétique et artistique, qui n’a pas besoin d’être complètement réaliste. Néanmoins, les caractéristiques linguistiques créées aident les cinéastes à produire un effet de réel (Barthes), probablement parce que la construction linguistique de Cloud Atlas repose sur l’observation de la variété actuelle et sur l’histoire de la langue anglaise.
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Dates et versions

hal-04617343 , version 1 (19-06-2024)

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  • HAL Id : hal-04617343 , version 1

Citer

Olivier Glain. Language after the Fall in the film Cloud Atlas (2012). Épistémocritique. Revue de littérature et savoirs, 2024, Représenter la catastrophe au XXIème siècle. Pratiques et enjeux contemporains (24), https://epistemocritique.org/16-language-after-the-fall-in-the-film-cloud-atlas-2012. ⟨hal-04617343⟩
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