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8 January
* Contains spoilers *
I must have been quite dim when I saw Another Earth. (We say 'He is bright', 'She's so dim', as if the intensity of a light is all that matters, when, of course - as any photographer or cinematographer will tell you - it has other qualities.) It's just that I was musing to myself why, when Rhoda was wandering around, largely at night, the other Earth that was being talked about on the night that she, by trying to look at it out of the window whilst driving, killed the wife and child of John Burroughs seems so improbably huge - if it appeared that big, it would either have to be enormous (and so not a mirror Earth) or very close, many times nearer than the moon (with which, maybe for technical reasons, it seemed to appear).
The less-dim may have realized the symbolic nature of its size, reflecting - almost in an expressionistic way - the depth of Rhoda's guilt. As I have said, the probable cannot be pressed too far with this film, or it would not have taken scientists four years (the term of Rhoda's prison sentence) to try communicating with the other planet. And, as John Burroughs asks, when he is arguing against not escaping from Plato's cave and knowing the truth, would its inhabitants be calling it Earth 2, as those on his were.
His initially unselfish response to learning that Rhoda has won the prize of a trip to Earth 2 is not what we expect, and, when he comes to appreciate that he doesn't want her to go, we have not expected her to tell him the truth about why she came there. (We know that she is a bright girl, who had a place to go to MIT before her foolish act (and which of us has not done foolish things in a car and got away with it?), and her quick-wittedness came out in thinking of the explanation that she had called to offer a free trial of a cleaning service, faced by the awfulness of telling John the truth - and then in claiming to come from Maid in Haven, which, of course, sounds almost like something else, the thing that maybe John comes to believe her to be.)
The final unselfish act - again, a complete surprise to me - was giving John her flight-ticket, and again I was being slow. (I've talked about Rhoda's quick-wittedness - what makes us turn extremes of a spectrum into pejorative terms?) I knew that she had given him a family photograph, and that she had told him that the latest theory was that Earth 2 became visible when its synchronicity with this planet broke, but I did not know then that the flight-ticket was also being given, or why John, with the views expressed before (which may have been an intellectual cover, of course, for his real feelings), would have wanted it.
I came to understand, as I meditated on the apparent hugeness of Earth 2, that, if the theory were right, then it might be that, on that otherwise hitherto identical planet, the accident hadn't happened, and John could see his family again (whatever the other John Burroughs might think).
Whether others 'got all of that' as the film played out, I don't know, but it has in no way spoilt it for me to have been reflecting on what I could not follow...
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