Eternal Recurrence and Edge of Tomorrow (2/4)

This is Part 2 in a series examining Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence through film and literature. Expect spoilers.

“Live. Die. Repeat.” –Edge of Tomorrow tagline

The recent science fiction movie Edge of Tomorrow (2014) provides an excellent example of recurrence as a plot device. The film, based on the novel All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, stars Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt as soldiers fighting an invasion by aliens called gitai, and it has more Nietzsche in it than just eternal recurrence.

 

The device of repeating the same day over and over functions similarly to Nietzsche’s thought experiment of eternal recurrence. We see how Cruise’s character, Major Cage, changes when faced with repeating the same events, many of them horrifying, on endless repeat. He’s scared witless at first but then embraces his situation and uses it to improve himself. This from the novel (translation mine):

 

I can take something with me. I will take the best of this world with me to the next day. I’ll narrowly dodge enemy bullets and kill gitai with one blow. Rita Vrataski gained overwhelming combat skill, and I will use infinite time to do the same. That's all I can do.

Cage, known as Keiji in the novel, begins improving himself as a soldier and eventually masters the large blade that hitherto was Rita Vrataski’s signature weapon. She too was once stuck in time and used the successive loops to polish her combat skills. Eventually, she became the hero and legend known as the Full Metal Bitch. Both Cage/Keiji and Rita turn a life of suffering and death into an occasion to shed their old selves in favor of new ones.

Nietzsche may not have been a systematic philosopher, but his ideas have a way of grouping up. With Edge of Tomorrow as a lens for viewing his philosophy, the close relationship between eternal recurrence and the Übermensch, or Overman (previous post), comes into focus.

The Overman has often been portrayed as a concept elevating some individuals over others--indeed Nazi intellectuals mined Nietzsche for quotes to justify their idea of a master race, and works by Nietzsche tend to show up in the libraries of America’s mass shooters, whose psychoses seek an authority elevating them above others--but Nietzsche only meant something akin to what in today’s common parlance we would call self-realization or personal growth. The Overman is master at overcoming his or her own individual limitations so that yesterday’s horizons give way to new ones. The person who needs to lord it over others would--like Brandon and Phillip in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, which explicitly refers to Nietzsche--be a poor example of the Übermensch indeed.

Eternal recurrence as formulated by Nietzsche would not allow for any such overcoming from one cycle to the next, for everything repeats in exactly the same way, but the thought in this cycle that you will live the same wretched existence in the next cycle could--as it does for Cage in Edge of Tomorrow--inspire reform this time around:

 

Live. Overcome. Live better.

Previous posts in this series:

Eternal Recurrence and Nietzsche (1/4)