Sense8: The Wachowskis' Opus of Love
The Netflix series Sense8 feels like the culmination of the Wachowskis’ decades-spanning body of work. Told across twenty-four episodes and eight countries (each representing a member of the show’s ensemble), it is their most vibrant and exceptional genre-straddling treatise on love, identity, and sexuality yet. The sisters manage to pack the Hong Kong-influenced gunplay and sci-fi worldbuilding of the Matrix films, the gangster melodrama of Bound, the narrative ambition and playfulness of Cloud Atlas, and the rebellious progressive politics of V For Vendetta onto one messy canvas. As with the aforementioned projects, even when specific scenes or narrative strands failed to ignite me, I couldn’t help but be moved by the grand passion and hopefulness on display in Sense8.
The central conceit of the show isn’t entirely dissimilar from X-Men. Eight evolved beings called “sensates” who hail from different corners of the globe gradually awaken to the fact that they are mentally and emotionally linked to each other. A deep state organization led by “Whispers” (a warped member of their own kind, chillingly portrayed by Terrence Mann) pursues them from the shadows to rein them in. This main “cluster” of multicultural men and women are shepherded by Naveen Andrews’ Jonas and Daryl Hannah’s Angelica. Serving as the group’s de facto father and mother, each effectively lends their gravitas to mentorship roles as they explain the rules of this heightened world to the protagonists and to us.
The Wachowskis (with a showrunning assist from Battlestar Galactica’s J. Michael Straczynski) manage an effective slow burning tension as the g-men close in on the sensates, but gratefully the story is much more interested in the beauty and power of its heroes than the scumminess of its villains. More than anything, Sense8 is about grappling with that central question of self-identity using the conceit of psychic superpowers. No matter how many times I see it, I never tire of expressions of how our strength as individuals is measured best in the depth of our connection to each other. Even before their lives are complicated by their newfound abilities, the point-of-view characters struggle to live in the light and to own their identities. As hacker and trans woman Nomi (Jamie Clayton) says to gay actor Lito (Miguel Angel Silvestre), “The real violence is the violence we do to ourselves when we're too afraid to be who we really are.”
These characters and themes are represented cinematically through a dizzying breadth of narrative and enormously scaled location work, contrasted with a low-tech and intimate approach to the psychic powers. As the sensates begin entering each other’s mental spaces, subtle cutting and blocking is used to place us inside their minds, so we more or less see what they see. The psychic connections first take the shape of simple conversations, but later expand into elaborate sex and fight sequences. The ass-kicking is typically channeled through Sun (Cloud Atlas’ Bae Doona), a kickboxer with a foot in the executive class, Wolfgang (Max Riemelt), a Berlin gangster, and Will (Brian J. Smith), a Chicago cop. As the group begins to get the hang of their powers while stepping into each other’s narratives, they each bring their particular life skills to bear to solve conflicts. To name one example, when a drugged-out character needs to be swiftly revived, Kala (Tina Desai)’s skills as a pharmacist come in handy, as do Lito’s flirtation skills to sweet talk a nurse in a locked down hospital.
Many of the characters go through some sort of sexual awakening, which I found a welcome surprise in an era where so many of our mainstream entertainments seem fairly chaste. In the pilot episode a close-up of a wet dildo slapping the ground after a lesbian love scene announces the show’s lusty intent. Sense8 isn’t shy about full frontal nudity, masturbation, and group sex as well as frequent scenes of heated physical and mental foreplay, and kissing between straight and gay couples. I can imagine young people finding this show and being encouraged by the positive depictions of sex for men, women, gay, straight and trans couples. Or throuples. Or quadrouples.
As the series progresses and the lines between the sensates begin to blur, the storytelling becomes more elliptical and music-driven to encompass wedding and holiday sequences that intertwine with intimate character moments. In addition to the excellent throbbing electronic/symphonic score by Johnny Klimek and Tom Tykwer, pop music from Sigur Ros and covers for “Mad World” and “Hallelujah” (to name a few) are brought in to lend the show a feel hovering somewhere between a music video and a seance. In the show’s most singularly powerful sequence, the sensates attend an orchestra together and simultaneously witness their own childbirths, which themselves are depicted in all their miraculous bloody detail. I’ve only seen TV narrative and tonal audacity on par with this from Bryan Fuller, who brought sexuality to the fore in his Hannibal and American Gods, similarly without scrimping on the violence.
Having watched The Matrix Resurrections by the time of this viewing, I was able to interpret Sense8 as a stepping stone towards Lana Wachowski’s later interest in directly commenting on the conversation occurring between work, author and audience. As Lito’s boyfriend Hernando recites in one scene, “Art is political. Never more so than when it insists it is not. Art is dialectic — enriched when shared and impoverished by ownership and commodification. It is a language of seeing and being seen.” Within the same scene, Hernando turns a moment of bigotry back on his assailant in a beautiful demonstration of compassionate strength culminating in his claim that “art is love made public.”
This affectionate spirit flows through each character and storyline. At the occasional expense of dramatic urgency, the Wachowskis’ opus is less concerned with narrative tension and more interested in depicting the human experience as an ecstatic dance party, where the better angels of even heavily flawed characters usually prevail and only the most fallen individuals are relegated to the sidelines. This quality most of all makes Sense8 a warm and life-affirming destination that I’ll undoubtedly endeavor to return to in the years ahead.
