Have you already seen the movie Déjà Vu? The term déjà vu is French and means literally “already seen.” The explanation in the movie (recently released, garnering mixed reviews, and starring Academy Award winner Denzel Washington) makes heavy use of this as captivating visual phenomenon. Denzel is easy on the eyes, just as recurring scenes must be easy on the budget. Make your philosophical point already.
Déjà vu: Etymology: French, adjective, literally, already seen 1 a : the illusion of remembering scenes and events when experienced for the first time b : a feeling that one has seen or heard something before 2 : something overly or unpleasantly familiar (Merriam-Webster online). The second definition seems to be in abundance in the movie by the same name. What did Denzel and the other actors experience that is so eerie and unthinkable? I don’t know, I haven’t seen the movie. Why should one see a movie already seen?
Hollywood pimping philosophy in the guise of Déjà Vu pushed the author into divining a connection between the word déjà vu and its philosophical twin eternal recurrence. I saw it as sneaky mental theatre (watch the trailer). The movie Déjà vu has spawned an evil TV twin, Day Break, starring the handsome Taye Diggs.
This is not a review of either the film or TV special. It is instead a cultural observation of American fascination with things they don’t understand. The idea of déjà vu, or its philosophy, proposed by these two silver-screen offerings, is nothing new. It is not even American. The German philosopher Frederick Nietzsche popularized the physics of God and science in his prolific writings. He put déjà vu on the mental map of psychologists and anthropologists around the world. He called it eternal recurrence.
I have an old recall of a Time or Newsweek cover with the words “Is God Dead?” The phrase heard ‘round the world. In the 1980s there was rabid debate on this weighty issue. The consensus — Dan Brown’s book, The Da Vinci Code, probably sums it up as well as anything else this century — is let’s make it up as we go along. This still seems to be the code many well-known atheists live by. Darwin, Gould, and Dawkins come readily to mind. These thinkers might well prove the existence of God rather than disprove it.
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