You would think that with a name like "Soul" and the premise of pre-existing souls waiting to be (temporarily and seemingly randomly) united to a body, there can't be much "theology of the body" going on in the new Disney and Pixar movie. Well...If there's any hint of Theology of the Body somewhere, trust me to sniff it out even in such an unlikely setting.
S P O I L E R A L E R T
PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK
This being a Disney and Pixar film, there's a lot to like in Soul. There's also a whole lot to question. Starting with the pre-existent souls. We don't watch animated films for the theology, generally speaking, but they do reveal our culture's assumptions in a "least common denominator" sort of way. The truth is, we don't need an explicit divine revelation to teach us the immortality of the human soul. This is something human reason can figure out. But we do need divine revelation to tell us the source, the meaning and the worth of that immortality.
As much as I enjoyed the movie (and the music!), it struck me that there were two competing messages. The explicit take-away is "follow your bliss" (or in the movie's term "spark") to "live life to the fullest." But that is only the superficial take-away. The theme that drives the story at a deeper level is "the one who seeks his life will lose it; the one who loses his life [through a complete gift of self] will find it." This is pure Gospel: so much so that we find this theme of losing one's life to find it in Matthew (16:25), Mark (8:35), and Luke (17:33), and even in John (12:25).
Soul's Joe Gardner is a music teacher who can barely make a living as a public school teacher. And yet one of his students, inspired and encouraged by Gardner, has himself become a prominent jazz musician. Joe can't quite find his joy in his student's flourishing (which is, after all, a sign of his own musicianship continuing in the next generation), but goes off in search of his old dream of joining a jazz group. And that's when he literally loses his life: it is taken from him unawares and he finds himself wandering among nameless souls, mistakenly identified as a Nobel Prize-winning mentor for the most cynical of the pre-existent, Number 22. Gardner's continued search for his own flourishing will be necessary to keep the plot going for another hour.
Gardner claws his way back to life on earth (ahem; if you saw the movie, you will get the pun), this time bound to another's soul, but not willingly, not freely. He has died, but he has not yet died to himself. Eventually, Joe will find life to the full: after receiving the gift the other soul was for him. Put another way, it is receiving and living the gift of fatherhood (a fatherhood he did not recognize in his student's success) that gives Joe his life.
As one of the sisters remarked at breakfast the other day, "Pixar can't help telling the truth, because they're such good storytellers." And the truth, in this case, is that wonderful expression from Vatican II's document Gaudium et Spes that Pope John Paul turned into the poetic refrain of his years-long Theology of the Body series: Made in the image of God, "man can only find himself through a complete gift of self."
No matter what the concluding verbal message of Soul declares, I am convinced that the pivotal scene in the film was Joe's "complete gift of self" which established the definitive restoration of his true life in full freedom and flourishing. That makes a life worth living!
No comments:
Post a Comment