Moana: Curls, Call and Prophecy

***SPOILERS

When you go to the Magic Kingdom, as I have been fortunate to do several times (yet only as an adult, and til recently without children), the Disney philosophy creeps in at every turn: If you can dream it, you can do it. You hear it in the songs and shows, the fireworks announcements and see it on posters and souvenirs. A dream is a wish your heart makes. WDW-where dreams come true. You get marinated in a magical land of secular humanist philosophy - where you are the master of your own destiny. Where the happiest place on earth exits through the gift shop, and extols human achievement. The Disney park experience is permanently archived in its films. The main character always wins because s/he believes in themselves, has a little bit of luck, and goodness wins out. I know it sounds like I'm criticizing Disney and the dream. To some degree, I am. But I also love the place (and the films)... I like to know I can really escape into a land of fantasy. I am inspired by the art and creativity. And, more often than not, Disney films make me think and that's a good thing.

Moana interested me.

Not in the OMG I AM GOING TO SEE THE LIVE BEAUTY AND THE BEAST THREE TIMES IN THE THEATER kind of way. But in the - hey, this seems beautiful, thoughtful, different. I was happy today to be proven right.

Here's the disclaimer. Now I know that when I work a response or two to the film through a Christian lens, I am adding to its purely secular-and-pagan landscape. I know full well that my presumptions about the characters/plot are very unlikely to have been the artists' intent. But I want to share them anyway, because I think it's really important to recognize Truth where it lives. Sometimes that Truth is in all its splendor, in the places where Heaven and Earth meet. But most often, I think, we encounter Truth in beauty, in goodness, in mystery, and in the heart. So with Moana. This is not a full-on review the film at all- no worries. But there are three things I took away from the film that I am still pondering. (Don't keep reading til you've seen it if you want to see it.)

1. Her hair. There are two Disney princess films (these have very specific parameters to be called such, and Moana fits) that do not have a prince/ princely love interest. The first of these is Brave - one of my favorite films, precisely because Disney got out of its own way and made the central female character a girl growing to womanly independence (thus risking her relationship with the other woman in her life, her mother). Lots of folks didn't understand Brave, I fear. Maybe the boys-as-bears got to them. Maybe it was just the lack of swooning. I'm not sure. Having immersed myself quite thoroughly in Celtic mythology by the time I hit high school, the bears and arrows and old hag in the woods shacks didn't faze me. Artistically, one of the most stunning and noticeable things about Merida is her HAIR. She's the first Disney princess who doesn't have perfectly coiffed (Snow White) or shiningly straight (Jasmine) or enviably configured (Cinderella) locks. Even Mulan and Belle, arguably the least twitter pated of the Disney princesses have hair that behaves. Merida does not. It is thick and curly and gets in the way. Apparently the art department is quite proud of it. Hair is hard to do. Merida's hair was the Hardest. But it was necessary for the ages of work, because it had meaning.
Moana's is also curly and full. While it (mostly) stays out of her face, it is prone to getting drenched (unlike Ariel) and just being fluffy and free. In several scenes she wears a flower, a nod to Polynesian custom, but otherwise her mane is waved and unencumbered by pins and sprays and ribbons and combs. (How DO those other princesses keep their hair so perfect?) I suggest that Disney is telling us something - using the hair of these more recent princesses to help tell a tale of daring, of independence, and of that desire for freedom... and more than that: those wayward curls signal to us that these women's bodies are part of their personas. Their very hair is a sign of their personal and unique being.

2. Her Vocation. Moana is above all, a story of vocation. It is no mistake that her song about calling comes at about the center of the film. She hears her call. She sings her call. She claims her call. There are foreshadowings in her grandmother's wisdom. But she has to grow past the expectations of her village in order to truly listen and respond.
I think it is no mistake that this wisdom about what it means to be her - to be woman - to be Moana - comes from her grandmother. In fact, if I were to look purely through a Christianized lens, I would draw a strong parallel between her grandmother's return as a glowing Ray with the movement of the Holy Spirit. Both always there, both giving courage and hope, both life-givers. (which we will have to look at later)

3. Moana as Prophet. Near the film's end, Moana meets the raging and stony Te Fiti who has become Te Ka without her heart. THIS was an epic moment for me. Moana turns to the ravaged goddess, and speaks to her wounds. Here is where the pagan/secular tale and Christian perspective resonate with the same truth. Moana returns the core of her being, the heart, to her. Moana says to her: I have come across the entire sea to find you. I call you by your name. You know who you are. Isaiah popping through my brain. Song of Songs, anybody? Here we have a strong woman who is listening to the voice in her heart (God), who is answering the call to restore life (Holy Spirit), who is risking life and limb... She walks down the mountain, strong and confident and with a quiet power and speaks Life to Te Fiti. Her words help heal. Her words are life-giving. It is the voice of the Lover to the Beloved in this proper sense - that restoration of her name (from Te Ka to Te Fiti) and the return of her heart to its life giving force reveals Moana as prophetic - her words reveal and represent the One in whom the Island goddess "lives and moves and has her being."

The feminist in me loves the wisdom of the grandmother, who tells the monster tales, never afraid. Her character is odd and beautiful: she is drawn to the water - she protects the tradition - she does not concede to her son's stagnating fear.
I love that I have just witnessed a female adventure story! While still (like Brave) set in a pagan mythology, it has passion and hope, adventure and escape, clever solutions, risky moments, hard work and determination and friendship. It's not a film in which all the action belongs to prince Charming - in fact, none of it does. And I think it's high time for such a story. High time for a young woman who can run and climb and swim and sail and be her self - with her necklace and flower and hula dress.
And let's not ignore the beautiful mythology of the island TeFiti, the goddess who, by taking her place in the ocean, allows the islands to grow and teem with life and the oceans with goodness. She is a life-giver... an icon of woman in a larger than life way.

Thank you for giving me this space to share my thoughts... for not taking me to task for mixing - if not metaphors- then symbols and theologies. I was very touched by this film's heart, by its clear-headed treatment of the protagonist, by its respect for tribal lore, and by those many, many places where its beauty pulled back the curtain to let Truth shine through.

Deadpool: The Wheat in the Weeds

The unprecedented opening numbers of Marvel's rated R comic book anti-hero film Deadpool has been exciting to a subculture of committred cosplayers, geeks, nerds, fans and Ryan Reynolds groupies, yet remains disturbing at best to family values advocates, parents who failed to be informed before being their children to a rated R movie (seriously, folks?!), and those concerned with the moral latitude and apparent cultural decadence of our day. With their culturally stringent anti-freedom and narrowly dictated morality clauses, it's really no wonder it was banned in China. I cannot condone the violence, sexual deviance and outright disregard for life audaciously paraded through the film as holding moral goodness, nor the ferocity of foul language as simply a good in itself despite the first amendment (and my personal embrace of the roundness of human language). I am painfully aware that is it written in such a no-holds-barred manner as to be thoroughly offensive on every front, with a character who has seemingly a 12 years old's sense of humor, and a complete disregard for civilized behavior or public decency (or even the ubiquitous "superhero" responsibility and heroic deeds). BUT.

But like a friend of mine has often said regarding the sometimes twisted-beyond-recognizable immoral sexual and cultural notions in the genre of rock/pop music for decades, I want to find the wheat in the weeds. I hesitate to throw the whole project in the waste bin of moral turpitude.

Let's mention first the brilliant explanation done by Mike at the Idea Channel on the phenomenological nature of this brutal and unusual character in the red spandex suit. I agree. This is ultimately a film about bodies folks, and what it means to be a body. Deadpool's character is a typical Gen X character, driven by the zeitgeist of the age toward a meaningless drive towards excess in the form of alcohol and sex. He has the extreme nostalgia and desire to find meaning in cult following typical to his generation (Hello Kitty, anyone?) and the song track of his teen years (I remember swooning at Careless Whispers, hate to admit). The first inkling that he has a deeper soul is exposed in his passionate- though remarkably capricious- relationship to his girlfriend, whose story we won't delve into further, but who also has... body issues. (Spoilers:Vanessa is a mutant)

What is vital to remember here is the phenomenological study that is going on here. 1. This is a man whose entire body becomes riddled with cancer that will kill him 2. This is a man who seeks a cure through technological experimentation and 3. This is a man who cannot die.

Let's take these one at a time. Since the comic book figure is released as title character in 1993, and reveals dozens of times through cultural references in the film alone that he is a product of his generation (the X men character Negasonic Teenage Warhed, a millennial teen, calls him "old" because of his frame of reference), we can assume he has been formed by the latchkey Gen X norm of REM's "Losing my religion"status who later crumbled under failed dot-coms leading to generational angst among the first group of US kids largely affected by high divorce rates, as well as an Internet age that ushered in the normalization of porn (just watch Friends if you doubt me.) Without religion, with disillusionment about family and security, with normalized deviant or at least casual sex, with the isolation of his age, Deadpool is pretty much a Generation X cultural icon. The One and Only Good in his life comes in the form of the woman, Vanessa- the woman who inspires him to rejoice in something; even to consider commitment... His match, his companion, the one who offers him a sense of meaning, and a telos of marriage, of life. And cancer strikes. Out of misguided love he walks away from Vanessa, closes himself back inside his own isolation, chooses to make a decision in the depths of painful solitude, and in rejecting their (even broken) unity, turns to technology as his savior.

2. This narrative is a product long in the making - since the Enlightenment certainly, which in many ways sets up humans to be their own gods. I am inclined to insist that though technology does offer us much goodness (I am painfully aware I am writing, a technology in itself, on a laptop that you can read because of the internet) it, as all things, can be used to manipulate. What the comic addresses is not a moral judgement on technology as much as what I see as an argument for personalism whether you prefer the Kantian version - that humanity must never be a means to an end, but an end in itself or the Wojtyla version - that added to that view is the idea that the only proper response to the person is love. But in this case, the whole purpose of the experimental labs is far from love. It is a way of manipulating those in fear for their lives by promising them something more - a cure (even super-human status). It is a technology that proclaims its practitioners as gods on earth, flexing their chemical knowledge and using people's fear and desperation against them. How indicative this is of our age! Technology qua technology will save my life... Even as we risk isolation to gain it. (Think of all our reproductive technologies and how many of them isolate a single human being from another.) But the film is is NO WAY silent about this use of the person. It is a product of it, but does not make the scenes anything other than the horror they are. In fact, Deadpool leaves that dungeon of chemical and psychological torture like a phoenix rising from the ashes as he burns his way out of the torture of use and manipulation - burning the false promises and false hope to the ground in his wake.

3. I think so much of the character of Deadpool moving forward is the result of a character who is in constant pain (in his whole person, ensoulled body), and cannot die. His only hope, really, to get back to Love. His great despair, really, that his body has been taken from him. His new fear is no longer the cancer disfiguring his insides (that continues, btw, to riddle his body, just being healed at the same rate as it manifests) but the gross disfigurement of his outer flesh. Deadpool is not - not in any way- a spirit inside a machine. He is a body. As a constantly healing body - as a body that cannot die - he experiences an inhuman freedom: a freedom that removes all the rational (and irrational) fears of bodiliness. He is not afraid to fall, to be cut, hit, maimed, even have limbs severed. He has a new, inhuman kind of audacity that rivals stories of the early martyrs. And I will not shy from the comparison - that they, with the assurances of Heaven - could demonstrate the audacity and freedom that comes when we do not fear death. Only Deadpool has been offered on the altar of the age. He is free from fear. But he is alone, and in pain. His sarcasm displays his unease in the world. (Yet also - also his humanity that remains somehow, even though the thugs assured him humor could not prevail against the torture.) He deals with the fact that death is robbed from him - and hence in some great measure, his humanity - the way he knows how: through sex, through violence... through the most visceral attempts to claim his own body.

This film resonated with me. I can hardly help it. It was like seeing a darker humanity, twisted, fallen, broken, precariously mended in all the wrong ways. It used raunch and subversion and deviance and manipulation to deal with the inhumane reality of cancer and the inhumanness of deathlessness. (Without Death, what Hope???) It tapped into a generation - maybe two -in a way that was incisive and didn't shy from the angst and the darkness and the loss and the isolation that is real for so many many people.

But what if we untwisted it. Let's not do the comic violence... it needs to be what it is, but can we not learn from the unsaid? The between-the-lines?

What if in the untwisting, we learn some things, and see where beauty lies? What if we see the beauty that comes from a lover loving the beloved even as he dies, and from the beloved allowing himself to be loved? What if in the untwisting we see the sparks of unity and understand why it is not good for the man to be alone? Why death has no sting? What if in the untwisting, we glimpse the remarkable and awkward and redeemable and gratuitous dignity and majesty that is the body, and the way it is who we are? And the way it reveals our souls? And the way it acts in the world, and senses the world, and co-creates the world around us?

What if in the untwisting, beyond the swear words and low humor and anger and darkness and sexual immorality and drunkenness and pain, we can see what it means to be human? What it means to use vs. love? What freedom is and what it is not?

I think in a very real sense that this character speaks to so many people because he struggles to be a body in the world - a body that doesn't belong, but desperately seeks meaning, seeks love. And, my friends... it seems to me that that isn't more than a couple of steps away from a body that might yet have reason to Hope, to do Good, and to find Love.

***p.s. I know this will bother some people. You are responsible for your own conscience. Please don't see this film if it will lead you down the primrose path.... I just think we need to be patient with contemporary art, test everything, as Thomas said, and cling only to what is good