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Hey, dead people, let's have some creativity-on thinking out there
I just watched part of a movie I found on the Internet where some people die early on, blown to bits in a terrorist suicide bombing. They awaken in a place called Riverworld, which is not heaven, we are told, but more like a wayside en route to someplace else.
This is what gets to me about some movies like this: the people who have died kinda wake up and lament having died. Like, “Oh, we died. Woe are we…”
Well, hello?
Call me Crazy Josh. But it just seems to me that if I can be conscious enough to think, “Hey, I’m dead,” then I wouldn’t actually still be dead, now would I? Dead to me implies a permanent state of no brain activity. Like dead battery dead.
If I woke up knowing that I was dead, I would know (cue the light bulb and make a little tinkle sound) that I survived death. I think, therefore I am undead.
And God said, "Let there be light in my movies!"
Recently I did a blog piece about same ol’ movie plots. I call them movies stuck in Idea Jail because they stay imprisoned in a philosophical jail cell. Avatar, for example, despite it taking place in 2154, plays a lot like Dances with Wolves. I remember chuckling when one of the characters said, “What’s wrong with this picture?” as if that expression had survived 150 years of new slang.
Here I want to explore some movies I would like to see.
I would like to see a romantic comedy (or even drama) where you have a smart female lead who is happily single. She doesn’t hunger for “one true love.” She has great self-esteem and an open heart. She isn’t angry at men and while she’s not monogamous, she has a deep spiritual connection with her God. Her sexual expression is intimately connected with her desire to channel love to heal the planet one heart at a time.
Idea Jail keeps the mind stuck in a death rut
(Disclaimer: It’s a good point here to say that if you haven’t seen Avatar and plan to, you may want to bypass this post until after you’ve seen it.)
Despite what this may seem like, this is not specifically criticism of blockbuster films like Avatar. They’re fine. Rather, as someone who has studied the media for decades, I am acutely aware that much of what I’d like to see in movies hasn’t made it to the big screen. I would love to see movies step out of Idea Jail and break new ground by overcoming stereotypes.
I recently wrote about the nature of conflict in drama, that creating dramas is usually about creating artificial conflicts for characters to deal with. I questioned the long-term impact of a movie-goes, TV-watcher, and book reader mentally digesting the subliminal messages that life is constant conflict.
Let’s talk about this from a law of attraction perspective. If our media does not give us positive, exciting visions, it does not help us create positive, exciting futures. It has been my long-held view that a great service the arts could perform is to provide positive visions that can inspire people. As it is, the formula is to sometimes show happy-ending triumph, but along the way characters are often beaten up something fierce. Avatar is a great example.
