The movie “Age of Adaline” has gotten some tepid marks from sites like Rotten Tomatoes. I thought it was a very well-constructed drama, with no wasted footage. For example, it shows Adaline’s dog growing old and dying. Then she goes and puts his picture in her photo album, and we discover he was like the 100th dog that she’s owned. Her grief over the dog helps us understand why she’s standoffish about relationships.
The pseudo-documentary narrator was a bit heavy-handed. They probably could have afforded an extra 5 minutes of play time to “show, not tell”. The pseudo-scientific basis of her immortality was also a bit hard to swallow. It may have been better to leave it unexplained (which would eliminate most of the narration).
To really scratch my science fiction itch, Adaline could have taken us into the future. Perhaps a mere 20 years forward, to 2035, when scientists discover the mechanism by which she became immortal. The she and her beau could be immortal together.
SPOILER ALERT
I have a philosophical bone to pick with the movie. In the happy ending she gets her mortality back. Basically, the movie says, “Immortality was not such a great idea, after all.” To be fair, it’s mainly because only one person, Adaline, is immortal. If everyone could be immortal, we might have a different kind of story. (I plan to write on that in the sequel to “Time of the Stones”.)
It seems like a literary trope that the lone immortal would rather not be. The Prince of India suffers a drudgery until the Christ returns. Bicentennial Man’s girlfriend tells him there is a time to move on. OTOH, Dr. Who seems fairly well adjusted to constant reincarnation, as long as he has a few friends around (mostly girls).
I once asked my mother-in-law if she would like to live for 200 years, like people in the Bible. She said no way! This response stunned me. It took a while to realize that in her imagination, the last 150 of those years would be spent in absolute decrepitude. Nonsense! If you live for several centuries, your decrepitude need not be any longer than someone who dies at 70, ie: only the last 10 years or so. Very long life also implies ongoing good health. Adaline got that part right.
So why this deep-seated cultural aversion to immortality? Is it that we in fact cannot live forever, so we comfort ourselves that death is actually better? We have stories about an afterlife where everything will be perfect. Death is the door to that life, something to be desired. Immortality is not for the present world. God put an angel to guard the way to the Tree of Life, lest man stretch out his hand and live forever.
Is it perhaps that we are mindless drones of our genes? They program us to start dying as soon as our grandchildren are born. When our great-grandchildren are born, our genes get serious and actively try to kill us off. There’s a good adaptive (evolutionary) argument for this. There is a tension between helping our offspring and competing with them. Clearly our usefulness to our children drops exponentially with each subsequent generation.
We don’t value human life equally. We view the aged as disposable, but enshrine our children. Those of reproductive age get a special spot in the middle. We accept this arrangement so passively that we create stories to justify the status quo.
For the first time in human history, we can conceivably create technology to live forever. We can specify the outlines of that technology and a practical program of research to get there. This is not like the pharaohs building large piles of rocks, or some witch chanting over a pot of bad oatmeal. Our science can describe (albeit imperfectly) the mechanisms of our body and intervene in them.
So why don’t we do it? Why isn’t everyone rushing to pour all our societal resources into avoiding death? Why do we keep making stories like Age of Adaline, where it is better to grow old and die?
We would have to defy our genes. Not only by blocking the aging process, but by resisting the urge to reproduce (which is an entirely different thing than the urge to have sex). We would have to shift our philosophy to value individual existence. A world where people live (nearly) forever is also a world where very few new people are made.