*This post contains spoilers*
“Does anything ever happen without a reason?” This is the central question at play in Devs, the latest project from writer-director Alex Garland about a mysterious tech company run by Forest (Nick Offerman), an enigmatic genius who develops a quantum computing system capable of making backward and forward projections, the latter of which we colloquially refer to as predicting the future. Like all good sci-fi stories, Forest’s obsession with time and space is motivated by the death of a loved one, specifically his daughter, Amaya, whose legacy lives on as the namesake of Forest’s operation and in the form of a massive, tributary statue that disturbs more than it comforts.
As the titular Devs team slowly perfects Forest’s system, taking it from fuzzy projections of Jesus being crucified on the cross two thousand years ago to a crystal clear simulation of one second into the future, their work is governed by a single defining principle of determinism, or rather, that everything happens for a reason. If I roll a pen across the table, the pen rolls because I pushed it. If I blink, it’s because my eyes are dry or I’m nervous. If an otherwise perfectly healthy person develops cancer, it’s due to an abnormality in their DNA.
Forest’s chief designer and romantic partner Katie (Alison Pill) uses these examples to explain the reality of Devs to Lily (Sonoya Mizuno), the series protagonist who believes Forest is behind the sudden death of her boyfriend: “Roulette wheels spinning. Misfortunes suffered. They can all be unraveled…Nothing ever happens without a reason. Everything was determined by something prior.” Put simply, there are no random events. And while the idea that everything happens for a reason may sound comforting to some, Devs explores an unsettling consequence not often contemplated by those looking for meaning in what they deem as arbitrary phenomena – that free will doesn’t exist.
Filmmakers and authors have been fixated on the idea of free will, or lack thereof, for as long as either medium have seemed to exist. It’s the type of itch you can’t scratch that keeps you up at night wondering whether all of this is somehow preordained or if we actually have a say in the things that happen to us. Naturally, as one of this generation’s defining science fiction voices, Alex Garland doesn’t limit his personal philosophy to a reductive, binary worldview of “do we or don’t we” have free will. He understands that the truth is far more complicated than that. And even though Devs may be Garland’s first foray into television, he’s been preoccupied with the dilemma of free will for some time now.
Back in 2015, Garland released his debut directorial feature – Ex Machina – which in hindsight is now very clearly the proving ground for what would come later in Devs: Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), an unwitting software engineer, finds himself caught between the most significant technological breakthrough in human history and the sinister motives of its creator, Nathan (Oscar Isaac). Instead of an omniscient quantum computer, the plot device is the first artificial intelligence to pass the Turing test, otherwise known as Ava (Alicia Vikander).
Over a series of conversations designed to test the presence of consciousness in Ava, Caleb debates the efficacy of Nathan’s experiment, observing his methodology as manipulative and unethical at best. As Ava’s affection for Caleb grows stronger, he begins to suspect that she was programmed to flirt with him as a distraction maneuver to steer Caleb toward believing that she’s “real.” Ignoring how this may compromise the test, Nathan sidesteps the question to pose his own – what’s Caleb’s type? Regardless of what Caleb actually thinks, his personal preference in women is irrelevant, because he never really had a say in the matter.
Rather, Caleb’s type, as Nathan explains, is “a consequence of accumulated external stimuli that you probably didn’t even register as they registered with you.” Unsatisfied with that response, Caleb pushes back again and demands to know if Nathan programmed Ava to like him. Nathan finally admits, “I programmed her to be heterosexual, just like you were programmed to be heterosexual.”
Naturally, this answer only serves to further provoke Caleb. He retorts, “No one programmed me to be straight” at which point Nathan, entirely fed up with Caleb’s pestering, delivers the final word on the issue: “You decided to be straight? Please, of course you were programmed, by nature or nurture or both…” Even Nathan, a megalomaniac, concedes to the fact that creating Ava was no more of a choice than Caleb’s sexual predilection: “The variable was when, not if, so I don’t see Ava as a decision just an evolution.”
So it isn’t just the active decisions we make like rolling the pen across the table that are determined by a collection of prior catalysts but our unconscious biases too. As the only truly sentient beings in the universe, it’s easy to mistake that uniqueness for freedom from a grander cosmic plan that began billions of years ago at the moment of creation ushering humanity along to this exact point in time. The people we love, the food we like, the movies we watch and music we listen to – these things are not random. They’re built upon years of experience or exposure to a particular set of conditions that we otherwise observe as ordinary givens.
Garland reinforced a similar idea three years later in his second film – an adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer’s novel, Annihilation, which follows Lena (Natalie Portman), a biologist, who joins an expedition to uncover what happened to her husband (also Oscar Isaac) inside a mysterious phenomenon known only as Area X. Burdened with the guilt of her own infidelity and accompanied by the only other person who may have had insight into his condition prior to entering Area X – psychologist Dr. Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh) – Lena must face the reality of what drew Kane to participate in what she refers to as a “suicide mission.” But Ventress doesn’t actually see it that way. In what becomes the thematic crux of the film, she tells Lena:
“I think you’re confusing suicide with self-destruction. Almost none of us commit suicide, and almost all of us self-destruct. We drink, or we smoke, we destabilize the good job… and a happy marriage. But these aren’t decisions…they’re impulses.”
What Lena perceives as a deliberate act in response to her adultery was really just the culmination of a marriage that had been in trouble long before either Lena actually cheated or Kane entered Area X. It’s easy to blame our vices on the most immediate obstacle or betrayal, but the source of these destructive habits are rooted much deeper in the past and crystalized when we weren’t even paying attention.
By the time Garland gets to Devs, his deterministic message has evolved beyond a debate over compulsions into something evocative of religious iconography and the most abstract of quantum science concepts like simulation theory and the many-worlds interpretation. The resentful cynicism present in Ex Machina and Annihilation is replaced with a resolute acceptance that the thing we refer to as “free will” is not what it seems – “The sense that you were participating in life was only ever an illusion. Life is just something we watch unfold,” Forest tells Lily. This is bleak stuff. But it doesn’t have to be.
As Forest projects the image of his daughter Amaya onto Devs in the finale, perfectly alive in another world where she didn’t tragically die, Lily rejects the notion that what they’re seeing is real. Forest emphasizes that it is not merely a “film” as Lily calls it. It’s really her. No less than two minutes after telling Lily that she’s effectively been on autopilot her entire life, he goes on to say:
“Determinism may be strange, but it’s also beautiful. A small piece of information provides all information. The state of every particle is related to the state of the particles around it. Understand the state of one. Understand the state of the other. Keep going. Know the state of everything.”
If we ascribe to a belief system without free will, it doesn’t automatically render our lives meaningless. By this very definition of determinism explored in Devs, it inherently promotes the interconnectedness of all life. We are inextricably bound to one another through an infinitely complex string of moments that inevitably formed the person we are today.
And in the end, Lily does the one thing that Forest believed to be impossible: she makes a choice. A choice to not kill Forest as the Devs system had shown him countless times before, and in the process exerts the very thing that Forest vehemently claims does not exist – free will. Because in a world where anything and everything can happen, it’s impossible to know exactly what will happen.
Does this mean that Garland had some life-changing epiphany and realized he was wrong? No. His ideology still clearly leans toward a deterministic outlook, but maybe he isn’t quite the nihilist that films like Ex Machina and Annihilation would seem to indicate. Maybe there’s a middle ground where our actions are influenced by forces unseen but every now and then we get a chance to make a real decision untethered from the invisible path that propels us forward. Neither Alex Garland nor myself will ever have the right answer. If Devs has proved anything, we’re probably better off not knowing.
Big Cat's Cradle 