Martian Chronicles

Having now read the whole book I can say for sure the first scene in Cloud Atlas is "-And the Moon Be Still as Bright" in 2001 and final scene is "The Long Years" in 2026.

In the first one we see Astronaut Hathaway sitting by the fire as in TMC devastated by the cold, wind and loneliness and 25 years later he has brought his [virtual] family up where they are the last remaining humans on Mars [having missed the last flight back to Earth, and death].

You can see the dead city behind which he lights up at night to ease loneliness and the house architecture and location are as described in TMC, so everything cross checks, especially the twin moons as described in TMC.

But in TMC there is more [with interest to 2001 A Space Odyssey] where his captain from 2001 returns FROM A 25 YEAR JUPITER trip and stops off at Mars on way back to Earth [if it's still there], and having aged just as Bowman does in ASO.

now Kubrick used the [Earth?] Moon as the 2001 start point and not Mars [for obvious reasons] but one can only guess if the scene where he eats asparagus and spills the wine is intened to be on Earth OR was this in fact intended by Kubrick to replicate the scene from TMC where Captain Wilder has a meal with the Hathaway family on Mars [where in fact the family are androids explaining in a metaphysical sense (as per several of the TMC stories) why Bowman eats alone and sees nobody but Hathaway].

It's food for thought and the projection to the old man in bed dying [same as Hathaway does] followed by a spot of Zarathustra's Eternal Recurrence certainly fits very nicely in a Kubrick sort of way.

Nietzsche Philosophy #2 - Apollonian and Dionysian

This Philosophy is fairly obviously reflected in Cloud Atlas by the TRAGEDY of Frobisher.  This is some of what Wiki has to say:

The Apollonian and Dionysian is a philosophical concept, or dichotomy, based on certain features of ancient Greek mythology: Apollo and Dionysus. While the concept is famously related to The Birth of Tragedy, poet Hölderlin spoke of them before, and Winckelmann talked of Bacchus. One year before the publication of The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche wrote a fragment titled "On Music and Words". In it he asserted the Schopenhauerian judgment that music is a primary expression of the essence of everything. Secondarily derivative are lyrical poetry and drama, which represent mere phenomenal appearances of objects. In this way, tragedy is born from music.

Nietzsche found in classical Athenian tragedy an art form that transcended the pessimism found in the so-called wisdom of Silenus. The Greek spectators, by looking into the abyss of human suffering depicted by characters on stage, passionately and joyously affirmed life, finding it worth living. A main theme in The Birth of Tragedy was that the fusion of Dionysian and Apollonian "Kunsttrieben" ("artistic impulses") forms dramatic arts, or tragedies. He goes on to argue that this fusion has not been achieved since the ancient Greek tragedians. Apollo represents harmony, progress, clarity and logic, whereas Dionysus represents disorder, intoxication, emotion and ecstasy. Nietzsche used these two forces because, for him, the world of mind and order on one side, and passion and chaos on the other formed principles that were fundamental to the Greek culture. Apollonian side being a dreaming state, full of illusions; and Dionysian being the state of intoxication, representing the liberations of instinct and dissolution of boundaries.

The relationship between the Apollonian and Dionysian juxtapositions is apparent, in the interplay of tragedy: the tragic hero of the drama, the main protagonist, struggles to make order (in the Apollonian sense) of his unjust and chaotic (Dionysian) fate, though he dies unfulfilled in the end.

So the author has cast Sixsmith as Apollonian [but with "a twist" of "love conquers all" in there] and Frobisher as Dionysian, and has the two as homosexual lovers [Paglia explains this trait per: "Rejection of – or combat with – Dionysian by socially constructed Apollonian virtues accounts for the historical dominance of men (including asexual and homosexual men; and childless and/or lesbian-leaning women) in science, literature, arts, technology and politics], with Sixsmith the dedicated scientist, not afraid to be the one off whistleblower, and Frobisher the "intoxicated" Tchaikovsky facsimile, albeit most of their relationship is via letters [a reference to Tchaikovsky and his letters to Mde von Melk].

Of course the tragedy does get played out eventually but not before some very entertaining scenes including a Dionysian plate smashing scene [where Sixsmith allows himself some "slack"] that puts Lester Burnham to shame in the asparagus scene as he morphs from Apollonian to Dionysian.

Nietzsche Philosophy #1 - Master–slave morality

Cloud Atlas explores this concept throughout the 500 year time span of the movie and [apart from the "Mars scenes" at start/end] the movie starts and ends with this matter.

It starts with the signing of a "slave contract" for the benefit of Haskell Moore in America and ends with Ewing burning the contract in front of Moore and his famous "ocean is made of drops" statement.

Here is a Wiki summary of what Nietzsche had to say about "The "slave revolt" in morals, Master–slave morality":

In Beyond Good And Evil and On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche's genealogical account of the development of modern moral systems occupies central place. For Nietzsche, a fundamental shift took place from thinking in terms of "good" and "bad" toward "good" and "evil."

The initial form of morality was set by a warrior aristocracy and other ruling castes of ancient civilizations. Aristocratic values of "good" and "bad" coincided with and reflected their relationship to lower castes such as slaves. Nietzsche presents this "master morality" as the original system of morality—perhaps best associated with Homeric Greece. To be "good" was to be happy and to have the things related to happiness: wealth, strength, health, power, etc. To be "bad" was to be like the slaves over which the aristocracy ruled, poor, weak, sick, pathetic—an object of pity or disgust rather than hatred.

So at the luncheon on the Chatham Islands Reverend Horrox is extolling the "perspicuity" of Moore as to what is called "the natural order", ie what Nietzsche was to soon define as "master morality" as above, and we already saw Horrox at the contract sealing say Moore is a GOOD man, ie the master morality version of good [when Nietzsche was but 5 years old and yet to seek to question that].

Cleverly there is an aside where the "slavery of women" is brought up by Madame Horrox and ridiculed by the men which was taken up 144 years later by Spielberg in Jurassic Park where the 2 men are dumbfounded by the female paleontologist casually ending their own prolix ramblings with "and woman inherited the world" to signify that for all intents and purposes women DID take over in 1970, giving us the "Beauty" depicted in American Beauty in 1999.

Wiki continues:

"Slave morality" comes about as a reaction to master-morality. Here, value emerges from the contrast between good and evil: good being associated with other-worldliness, charity, piety, restraint, meekness, and submission; and evil seen as worldly, cruel, selfish, wealthy, and aggressive. Nietzsche sees slave morality as pessimistic and fearful, values for them serving only to ease the existence for those who suffer from the very same thing. He associates slave-morality with the Jewish and Christian traditions, in a way that slave-morality is born out of the ressentiment of slaves. Nietzsche argued that the idea of equality allowed slaves to overcome their own condition without hating themselves. And by denying the inherent inequality of people (such as success, strength, beauty or intelligence), slaves acquired a method of escape, namely by generating new values on the basis of rejecting something that was seen as a perceived source of frustration. It was used to overcome the slave's own sense of inferiority before the (better-off) masters. It does so by making out slave weakness to be a matter of choice, by, e.g., relabeling it as "meekness." The "good man" of master morality is precisely the "evil man" of slave morality, while the "bad man" is recast as the "good man."

Nietzsche sees the slave-morality as a source of the nihilism that has overtaken Europe. Modern Europe and Christianity exist in a hypocritical state due to a tension between master and slave morality, both values contradictorily determining, to varying degrees, the values of most Europeans (who are motley). Nietzsche calls for exceptional people to no longer be ashamed of their uniqueness in the face of a supposed morality-for-all, which he deems to be harmful to the flourishing of exceptional people. He cautions, however, that morality, per se, is not bad; it is good for the masses, and should be left to them. Exceptional people, on the other hand, should follow their own "inner law." A favorite motto of Nietzsche, taken from Pindar, reads: "Become what you are."

A long standing assumption about Nietzsche is that he preferred master over slave morality. However, Nietzsche scholar Walter Kaufmann rejected this interpretation, writing that Nietzsche's analyses of these two types of morality were only used in a descriptive and historic sense, they were not meant for any kind of acceptance or glorifications.

So the scene moves to Autua, the slave in revolt and we go straight to Nietzsche when his complaint is not simply "I don't want to be a slave" but "I no make GOOD slave", ie the slave morality concept, which he finally achieves by his good deeds, which rub off on Ewing, rendering the "good" man Moore as EVIL.

This theme, in various forms, has already permeated throughout the lives of the people over the 500 years time span.

Summary

Cloud Atlas is a movie that can be viewed and enjoyed on many levels and it is left to the viewer to match the level of complexity with their own level of "life experience" and perception [or nihilism].

And the more common reaction is to simply give up on the American Beauty "Look Closer" task, get angry in the All American "Poor egotist, he has no way of knowing" manner and blame the movie, which is the reason it was not a huge box office success.

But that is up to the viewer because as we learn from The Happening "But he's as good as anybody going"