Spark & Purpose: Pixar’s Soul
By: Alexis Forss
Tags: Music, Film, Philosophy, Animation, Movies

Photo: Walt Disney Pictures, all right reserved.

Out among the stars I sail Way beyond the moon In my silver ship I sail A dream that ended too soon

When we meet Joe Gardner it’s both his last day on earth and the first day of the rest of his life, and he’s weighing up the prospect of a less contingent existence. Job security, medical insurance, a pension — he balks at these. Accepting a full-time position as a middle-school music teacher may have its benefits, but this restive spirit yearns for more than mere stability. We first see him presiding over the cacophony of band practice, subjected to the indignity of hearing his great love abused despite his best efforts. We learn that his father inculcated a passion for jazz and thus condemned his soul to sadness, which must stalk the great and desperate majority of those who dedicate their lives to disciplines at the margins of mass culture. If you’re going to give yourself over to jazz, opera, or literary fiction, you’d better hope that love is enough.

He could be a great educator and communicator: he sits down at the piano to show his students what it’s all about and, like Miguel at his guitar or Remy at his stove, he’s transformed — and so, for a spell, are they. His talent is undeniable but the world has repeatedly and comprehensively failed to take note. Success has eluded him on this plain of existence, but perhaps life in the great beyond will afford him opportunities that he has scarcely imagined. To create something out of your own mind and talent and see that it is good, wrote Roger Ebert: That is a joy that makes the rest of life seem shabby and transparent. Joe may find something greater yet.

From its inception Pixar’s best movies have been about men, women, and creatures trying to live up to some image of themselves. These stories resonate with audiences because they’re filled not just with vivid personalities but with characters who learn — often painfully — to live for and through others. But these aren’t just homilies about the redemptive power of family; these stories move us to tears because they understand that giving ourselves over to love and companionship means surrendering an idea of our self-sufficiency in solitude, of what we can achieve without the help of others. Crossing the gap between what we yearn to be and what we already are is agonising because it requires surrendering the easier and narcotising pleasures of life lived in the future speculative. Such an existence is always conditional, because for all that it rebukes the shabby workaday world it also depends on its ratification. We need the Anton Egos of this world to take note — and preferably while we’re still alive. How many of these movies are about their protagonists’ socialisation? For all their brilliance at their individual pursuits, Woody and Flik and Miguel must learn to temper their essentially antisocial genius, and to start playing better with others.

It would be cruel to deny readers the chance to experience this movie’s unfolding of plot and character for themselves. So for now let’s say that, like Coco, this is a story about the love of music which leverages the sheer eschatological scale of its worldbuilding to put an obsession with worldly success into perspective. That other movie syncretised a wide array of indigenous American mythopoeia for its vision of the afterlife. Soul, while lightly drawing on ideas taken from Gnosticism and Coptic Christianity, is an original fantasia.

Photo: Walt Disney Pictures, all right reserved.

When we die our essence is denuded of its earthly form, and it turns out that our souls resemble a fusion of WALL•E’s EVE and a Moomin. The vast majority of the departed are content to take their quiet places on the conveyor belt to the Great Beyond — and to who knows what final oblivion. Meanwhile, those who distinguished themselves with outstanding success in life are drafted into the education of the unborn. Counsellors preside over the fate of human souls before and after their earthly tenures: astral beings who manifest in forms charmingly reminiscent of some of Kurt Vonnegut’s drawings. (Anyone dreaming of having Vonnegut as their soul’s instructor has already had the pleasure, because they’ve already read his books.) In the Elysian creche variously called the Great Before and the U Seminar, the Counsellors prepare souls for corporeal existence.

Some viewers may bristle at the conceit that character is instilled antenatally and therefore pre-determined. Compassion, self-obsession, patience, recklessness — these aren’t accidents of heredity or circumstance so much as the whims of theosophical demographics, carried out by a cheery bunch of celestials who seem quite blithe about the personality types to which they’re confining the souls in their care. But virtues and vices are not enough to ready a spirit for earthly life. More is needed: a Spark, without which no soul can descend to this sphere. And this movie’s subversive and affirming spirit is to be found in how it defines this word. In the interest of talking around plot, let’s zero in on some theology.

“Where’s your spark now?”

For the Gnostics — ancient heretics, blending Jewish mysticism with Christian apocrypha and visionary speculation — the Spark was a byword for the Pneuma, the divine breath of life. To explain the existence of evil the Gnostics reasoned that the Creation and the Fall were the exact same event, and that the material world as we know it is a botched work by an imperfect smith: The Demiurge, who is often associated with the all-too-human Yahweh of the Jewish Bible. But Sofia (or Wisdom) was able to make a small intervention and snuck into each fallen human that Spark, that glimpse of the perfect fullness beyond the nightmare world we inhabit. The pursuit of Gnosis, of Knowledge, is the quest to actuate the divine within ourselves and achieve union with an unknown and alien Godhead, one whose plenitude and magnificence confounds the picayune anthropomorphism that passes for divinity in the representations of world cultures. But disturbingly, according to some Gnostic documents like the recently-discovered Gospel of Judas, the great mass of humans have no spark within them and will, upon death, pass into nothingness.

Photo: Walt Disney Pictures, all right reserved.

Like the Coen Brothers’ Llewyn Davis (or, if you disagree that his movies are bewilderingly fatuous and bogus, like Damien Chazelle’s posturing antiheroes), Joe subscribes to something like this severe vision of life. In his mind the spark is no more and no less than one’s purpose upon this planet. Music is his calling and his immortality project; anything less would be simply existing, never to leave a mark. It’s beyond his conception that it is otherwise than in music that he will be given his own one anonymous chance to perform something passionate and brave and austere not just in but into man’s enduring chronicle worthy of a place in it (who knew? perhaps adding even one anonymous jot to the austerity of the chronicle’s brave passion) in gratitude for the gift of his time in it (William Faulkner). But he is a teacher, and he is tasked with the preparation of one sullen and recalcitrant soul for life. Subverting itself, the movie shows us that if character is a prison it may also be escaped. People change — the forms of comedy and drama demand it — and just as Woody learns to share, Buzz to adjust, Marlin to let go, Joe learns that one’s spark is not one’s purpose but rather something greater and more numinous: a sense of wonder, something prior to and independent of whatever validation our efforts and perfectionism may secure us. A natural piety.

At the burnt out, bitter end of a year in which countless people have had their projects derailed and their best-laid plans left in tatters, this movie’s appearance could not have been more fortuitously timed.