**Spoilers for “The OA: Part II.” You’ve been warned.**
**
Homer appears to be on a much different path and in a much different dimension in Part II. Who does this mysterious woman in the hut with the human torsos represent?
Batmanglij: That’s a dream that I had once. I was in a store selling skin. I called it, “The Skin Store Dream.”
Marling: Zal told me that dream once when we were in the writer’s room, and I was fascinated by it. Just riveted by the idea of a space that is sensual; it’s about touching as a sense. At the same time, it also, eerily, feels to me like the anxiety about living in late capitalism, where all of us are asked to commodify ourselves. And we now do that on Instagram. We mine our own lives and we put it on the internet, and that changes the nature of the technology in San Francisco. The Gold Rush drew everyone here, and then the gold was gone, and it became about just the apparatus of digging the gold out. So, it was a tech-center, even then. Now, the digging isn’t about digging out of the Earth. The mining is about mining yourself and giving up the resources of your own experience. And when you told me that dream, it just felt like that feeling made into moving images.
Batmanglij: What was great is we thought it dovetailed nicely into the idea that we believe that Homer is there, the Homer we know, suppressed by this consciousness. So, what if in a dimension, you’re dreaming your other dimension’s dream, your other self’s dreams? The woman in the skin store, I don’t know if you recognized her, is Evelyn, the sheriff’s wife from season one that they wake up. You’re getting a repertoire of people. It was fun to invite her to come. And she’s so good with her English accent [laughter], it makes her feel like she’s not the sheriff’s wife.
Khatun is a very interesting character. In German Braille, her face says, “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the hierarchies of angels?”
Marling: How did you figure that out? Oh my god.
Batmanglij: We can’t spoil what that is for you.
It’s the first line of the first poem from–
Marling: Rilke’s “Duino Elegies.”
One of the main themes shared in both “Duino Elegies” and “The OA” is the limitation of humankind’s fractured consciousness. Rilke describes the beauty in this poem as, “Nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are barely able to endure, and we are so awed because it serenely–“
Marling: “Disdains to annihilate us.”
Is this revelation, this terrifying beauty on the other side of the Rose Window that the engineer and the medium’s story refers to?
Batmanglij: Oh, you are getting really close [laughter]! You are getting really close. Though, you won’t even know how close once you do see what’s on the other side, which you will see in Chapter Eight.
Marling: But you are really deep digging in the place. You’re so right to bring up that poem. What’s so stunning about that poem is that the vision of the angel as a moment of also terror that threatens to unravel you because it’s unraveling all the scaffolding in your mind for how you perceive reality, and then you’re having this moment in which it is shattered.
Batmanglij: Totally. Which is exactly what’s on the other side of the Rose Window.
Marling: How–? Who are you [laughter]? How did you–? I’m in awe.
Batmanglij: Where the story goes is– Brit and I always imagined that you would jump dimensions. We’re not being “Quantum Leap.” So, we’re not going to repeat ourselves. You’re jumping dimensions in two dimensions, and we’re about to add a third access.
Marling: A diagonal rather than a horizontal.
Could that third access be time travel? It seems that, with Zendaya’s character’s appearance throughout Part II, that could enter the story.
Marling: We can’t answer that. This is my favorite conversation because I was just saying earlier; Toni Morrison says really beautifully, somewhere, that there is a difference between data, information, knowledge, and wisdom. And that at your very best as a storyteller, you’re just somebody who collects data, hopefully, synthesizes into information, maybe, on a good day, knowledge. But it’s the audience that gives you back wisdom. And just hearing you piece this stuff together and talk about it–
Batmanglij: It makes all the hard work worthwhile.
Marling: It makes the two years of sleeping only four hours a night feel worth it.
Have we seen the last of Roman and The Voi in the series?
Batmanglij: I don’t think so. I think her dad’s an important part.
Marling: Yeah. It’ll return in a different way.
It’s nice to see Elias with a clearer set of motives. Is he an experienced traveler?
Batmanglij: I don’t think we should answer that, but I will say that I think that he gives a very good piece at the end of six about spaces. And that that’s a crucial puzzle piece to them, but to the audience, who are also being trained, hopefully, in Part II, to start seeing it as a puzzle.
That line was profound. “You just find new rooms in–“
Batmanglij: Your mind. But it’s also Zendaya’s line from Chapter One when she was like, “There are no winners or losers–”
Marling: “The puzzle makers teach you how to think.”
How does the Tree Internet fit into the larger narrative?
Marling: Part of it is, of course, thematically, in part one, you get the sense, in some places, that Prairie may have an ability to listen or lean into the natural world or a certain kind of feminine intelligence, maybe. And some of that comes out through her prophetic dreaming or her encounter with the dog, when she has that encounter with Steve in the beginning. But Prairie’s life is obviously so limited by the trauma she suffers in her experiences. And in ‘Part II,’ we were playing with the idea of, “What if the consciousness jumped into a body that didn’t experience that intensity of trauma and, in fact, a body of somebody who had been given all of the resources and gifts that Nina Azarova is given?”
The freedom and ability to study, to think, to daydream, the resources to build a dream collective where she’s getting to harness the collective power of the unconscious mind. And then, also, the gift, of course, of leaning into her mediumship, which happens with Old Night.
There’s a wonderful book called ‘The Hidden Life of Trees,’ and [Peter Wohlleben] talks so beautifully about how difficult it is because of the hubris of humanity; we really think that we are at the top of the intellect pyramid, that our intelligence is the best and the only kind. And he has spent this time doing a deep study of trees and how they operate, how they communicate, and the symbiosis between the mycelium mushroom fungi network under the Earth, and how in San Francisco, all the trees of San Francisco are connected by this mycelium network, and they are sending information–
They are communicating. And they’re allowing for interspecies cooperation even between trees. So, if one tree is dying, and it will threaten to break the canopy, and then strange weather and temperatures and pestilence can come in, the other trees will feel that, sense that, get that tree’s signal, and then begin to send nutrients and resources to trees that are not even in their species. It’s so cool because for so long, we’ve been told this narrative that nature reflects capitalism. That it’s a dog-eat-dog world, and it’s survival of the fittest, and every man for himself, which is true here in nature and true here in nature.
And then you’re starting to read these scientists now who are being like, “Eh, actually, there are a lot of examples of systems in nature where working in concert with one another is the way for everybody to survive. The way to actually maintain existence.” And when we read that about the trees, they invented the internet long before we did. There’s an underground internet amongst the trees. That is fact.
Batmanglij: That is not our wild imaginations. The artistic representation of it is part us, but also our partners in London who are the effects partners. They did a beautiful job. They did all this research on slime mold and all this stuff, and it’s all in there. All that stuff breaking open – that’s all from research. We should get The Playlist their research for having built the Tree Internet. [It’s] so beautiful.
Marling: And this is the part of storytelling that gets us so jazzed. It’s the most exciting. You sense that you’re closing in on something, as writers. And then, you’re inviting all of these other people into it, and everybody together is trying to get closer to something at the center. At the effects house in London, we had an idea, we shot some stuff, but they helped dig that story out.
