M. Night Shyamalan’s Old never references Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (the film is an adaptation of a French graphic novel called Sandcastle), nor does it attempt to create visual equivalents of Carroll’s impossible objects, as Disney did in its 1951 adaptation. Nonetheless, there remains a strong affinity between Carroll’s stories and Shyamalan’s film, for Old—which follows an American family on a tropical getaway who are unwittingly brought to a beach that makes them age at a rate of one year every 30 minutes—is primarily concerned with a problem that was often gobsmackingly explored by Carroll: What is the structure of nonsense?
Or, to put the question more concretely: what makes Wonderland and the beach such strange and unnerving places? Consider an early episode in. When Alice grows, she is larger than she was; but by consequence, she is smaller than she becomes. Certainly, Alice was smaller before and bigger later, but what is she —who is “Alice?” In his analysis, Gilles Deleuze calls this the paradox of pure becoming, the outcome of which is always to elude the present. We can say what Alice was before, what she is later, but not what she is without tugging her back towards the past or pushing her forward towards the future. In Wonderland, this paradox is exacerbated by the fact that both external relations—Alice is smaller before and larger later—can be affirmed at one and the same moment; she can be both bigger and smaller at a single present time. The White Queen sums up this law of Carroll’s universe when she tells Alice her menu: “jam tomorrow and jam yesterday—but never jam today!”
