For those of you who pay attention to new movies that have been released in the past year, a Disney/Pixar release called Soul has been getting some recent attention (available only by streaming on Disney + channel). The reviews have been good, so Judy and I watched it last night. It raises many, many philosophical and theological questions, many of which shoot past in dialogue or situation very quickly, but the story is charming and the graphics are amazing.
For example, one of the characters is 2-dimensional. When was the last time you saw an actual 2-dimensional
character in a movie? (Hint: comic
characters in the newspaper are only lines on paper, hence 2-dimensioinal. The movie characters in Soul have been
reduced to the absolute graphic minimum, and they are fantastic.) I’ve
teased out one of the major threads presented in the movie, “What is your
essence?”, and I think we can make a pretty good BQ out of it. If you have a chance to watch the movie
before we have our meeting it would be best, but isn’t totally necessary.
In the movie, newly formed proto-soul’s have a short series
of attributes they need to obtain before they are fully formed and ready to
fall to Earth to start to inhabit a body.
One of these attributes is an essence.
They are allowed to find whatever their essence is through a process of participating
or observing anything that happens or can be done on Earth (a pretty fun scene),
and once identified, their soul is complete and off they go.
The hero of the movie is Joe, a former living human with a
fully formed soul, but things have conspired to place his adult soul among the
newly formed little souls who are gathering attributes. Joe knows exactly what his passion is as a human
has madly pursued it, and only learns of his essence later, upon reflection. He learns that the conflicts and
disappointments in his life that he has been fighting all along are because his
passion blinded him to the greater good he was actually doing with his essence.
This passion vs essence conflict jumps off the screen to me
as it is a manifestation of Fredrick Nietzsche’s famous quote, “Become who you
are!” This sentiment ran its course
philosophically in the 1800’s and 1900’s and influenced notable thinkers like
Carl Jung and Albert Camus, among many others.
Read about it here.
This topic has been done before, in the Being vs Becoming topic
we did last Sept 3. Seeing it presented
so well in this movie drags it up again for me.
I hope you get a chance to see it before we meet.