Wonderland by Powers of Ten
The opening of Powers of Ten — the full title is Powers of Ten and the Relative Size of Things in the Universe—the short film by Charles and Ray Eames, has a similar structure to Alice in Wonderland. The film opens with a couple seated on a picnic blanket on a warm and “lazy afternoon” The camera begins to pull away from the earth as the man loses consciousness, while we, the viewer, begin to pull away from him, viewing him from a greater and greater distance and then moving back towards him and entering a cell of the skin of his hand. As Mark Dorrian notes in his essay about the film, Alan Lightman describes the experience of the film like this:
We feel dizzy and overwhelmed. Suddenly the camera begins compressing, shrinking in powers of ten: we fly through galaxies, solar systems, planets, are back in our park, back to the familiar and the comfortable. We want to stop here and recuperate in the warm sun, but the camera won’t let us, it keeps galloping to smaller and smaller scales: to microscopic tissues, molecules, atoms, the interior of atoms, and we see the unknown grinning at us from this side as well. The unknown has surrounded us. The world of the everyday seems now like an illusion.
In falling asleep, the man enters into what Dorrian describes as a “vertiginous, abyssal collapse of the everyday reality.”
Alice, begins her story in the same way, seated by her reading sister on what Disney later dreamily called “a golden afternoon.”
Chapter 1 opens, “Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, ‘and what is the use of a book,’ thought Alice ‘without pictures or conversation?’” Alice, feeling “very sleepy and stupid” due to the hot day, notices the White Rabbit running past her, taking a watch out of his waistcoat pocket, as he passes her. In leaving her sister behind in the world of reason and reality, Alice’s exit is via a vertical fall that she estimates at about 4,000 miles — the distance to the centre of the earth — but which she lacks the tools to gauge accurately.
`I wonder how many miles I’ve fallen by this time?’ she said aloud. `I must be getting somewhere near the centre of the earth. Let me see: that would be four thousand miles down, I think — ‘ (for, you see, Alice had learnt several things of this sort in her lessons in the schoolroom, and though this was not a very good opportunity for showing off her knowledge, as there was no one to listen to her, still it was good practice to say it over) ` — yes, that’s about the right distance — but then I wonder what Latitude or Longitude I’ve got to?’ (Alice had no idea what Latitude was, or Longitude either, but thought they were nice grand words to say.)
The book that the male picnicker in Powers of Ten is reading when he dozes off is a study of time (The Voices of Time) by scholar Julius Thomas Fraser. The book lying next to it, unidentified, simply displays an enormous clock face on the cover. As we zoom away from the man, in an upward trajectory, he falls away from us until we are looking toward him from a vantage point of 100 million light years away, unable even to make out the planet on which he has fallen asleep.
Lewis Carrol, in his original illustrations of Alice, uses “the caricature technique of comic comparison, [positioning] Alice next to objects and creatures that are smaller and larger to make her appear, in turn, taller and littler.” Alice’s scale keeps changing relative to the characters and structures around her, as she eats cakes and mushrooms in an effort to control her size, trying to navigate a changing and surreal landscape with reason and determination. The Eameses use the picnicking man in a similar way, transforming him into an invisible speck in the universe in the first part of the film, and later into an enormous entity in comparison to the single proton within his hand that we visit in the second half of the film. In Powers of Ten, though, rather than looking at the world from the point of view of the character whose scale is relative, we assume an omniscient view, empowered by scientific precision as the camera (and animation) give us consistent control over both time and scale.
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This is really an extended footnote from an essay about the form of the book in the 21st century, The Book Unfolded.
