Lucy (2014): Knowledge, Memory, and What Comes After Us
Lucy begins with a deliberately outrageous premise: a human being gradually gains access to more and more of the brain’s capacity.
The movie takes the familiar “10 percent” idea and the substance it calls CPH4 as the starting point for its science-fiction premise. From there, however, it moves toward much larger ideas about life, time, memory, and what human beings leave behind.
Lucy is forced into becoming a drug courier by a criminal organization led by Mr. Jang. A packet of the drug hidden inside her body ruptures, and from that moment her abilities begin to expand at an extraordinary rate. She gains control over her own body, then over other people, objects, and eventually even the physical world around her.
Yet the more powerful she becomes, the more important the question of what to do with her remaining time becomes.
Professor Norman provides a direction: what she has learned should be passed on.
That idea connects with one of the movie’s recurring themes. Life does not simply exist for itself. It preserves information and passes it forward. The film describes reproduction as a way for life to transmit what it has accumulated to the next generation. Lucy eventually follows the same principle in a much stranger form. Instead of having descendants, she gathers everything she has learned and leaves that knowledge behind.
In that sense, the device she creates near the end of the film functions almost like a form of reproduction. What continues is not Lucy’s body, but what she knows.
When Lucy reaches 100 percent, her physical form disappears. Soon afterward, a message appears on a phone:
I am everywhere.
In this reading, Lucy has effectively become a godlike being, no longer confined to a single body or location. Before disappearing, however, she makes sure that everything she has learned can be passed on to others.
The movie repeatedly returns to time for the same reason.
At one point, it questions whether the mathematical systems humans use to describe reality are reality itself. At another, it presents the example of a car moving so fast that it can no longer be seen. The disappearance of something from human perception does not necessarily mean that its existence has ended.
The movie connects existence with time, and from there another idea emerges: time accumulates as experience, experience becomes memory, and memory allows progress.
Without memory, every generation would have to begin again.
With memory, something can be carried forward.
This is also where the film’s treatment of biology and reproduction becomes especially interesting. Within the movie’s philosophical framework, biological inheritance becomes a way of thinking about continuity. Life survives by passing something onward.
Lucy does the same thing with knowledge.
The film’s emphasis on reproduction also brings to mind the issue of low birth rates. A movie repeatedly returning to reproduction, inheritance, and the continuation of life creates an interesting parallel with such concerns, whether intentional or merely coincidental.
The movie ultimately leaves behind a reflection on memory and progress.
Human beings face each new problem with knowledge accumulated through previous experience. Memory allows each generation to learn from what came before and carry something forward. Lucy is given an extraordinary shortcut: her brain capacity increases until she becomes something beyond an ordinary human being.
Such an opportunity is unlikely to come easily. For most people, progress follows a much slower path—building on the memories and knowledge passed down through generations and continuing forward from there.
The possibility of becoming a little more like Lucy may remain remote, but the film leaves that possibility open.