When Odysseus confronted the one-eyed Cyclops, he cleverly told him his name was NEMO (Nobody) and soon proceeded to assault him in such a way that he lost his only eye.  It was a clever move. When the blinded cyclops' friends arrived and inquired who carried out the gruesome deed, he told them NOBODY did it.

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But what does it mean to be somebody? If we truly are free, then we stand apart from any possible concrete decisions we ever make, and people we become, we are differentiated from any way "somebody" we might have at one point chosen to be, and hence we stand apart from the life we lead, so that we have the ability to extract ourselves and choose a different path at any given moment. In this sense we're not actually any particular somebody, since we could always choose to be somebody else, and in this sense, precisely speaking, we're all no-body.  The 20th century French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre went as far as to say we don't exist, that we are a "hole in being." If we are free, then we stand in relation to our lives and identities much like the viewer/player of Bandersnatch stands in relation to the story that unfolds, able to make a different decision any any (well, certain), points.

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Yet we forget about this freedom and no-body-ness fully identify ourselves with the characters we at some point chose to be. We are in this sense like the audience in the movie of our own lives: sometimes, like every cinema-goer, we forget and merge with the characters and the plot, seemingly unable to disambiguate ourselves from the characters we play.  We are no-body, and that's why we're free -- or, to put it another way, being nobody would be the condition of the possibility of our being free. Yet we forget and think we're somebody.

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Or we are like a 118 year-old man, sitting in bed waiting for his meals, not doing anything at all?

 

So which is it -- is it that we think we're free but we're really not (a la Bandersnatch) or that we think we're not free, but we actually are?

 

Or is this movie not about any of these issues? Is it simply about the multi-verse? The butter-fly effect? Time? Love?

 

Or is it about watching movies itself -- the confused journalist in the future as a stand-in for us, helplessly demanding coherence and meaning, insisting on knowing "what this movie is about"?