Spoiler Alert: I built this post on a plot
twist in the great new Pixar/Disney film Inside out, which, though predictable,
is moving and deserves a spoiler alert. Also,
I didn’t do much plot summary, so this might not make a ton of sense without seeing
the film.
I knew it was coming.
From the moment our Pixar guides introduced the valley of
forgetting,[1]
where memories pass into oblivion, moments lost, buried forever beneath the tyranny
of the present, I knew Bing Bong[2]
would end up there.
Call it Chekhov's pit of cognitive
purge.
You don’t foreshadow the violence of forgetting unless
someone's gettin’ forgot.[3]
But seeing it coming didn’t change the weight of it. When Bing Bong’s face changed, resigned
courage rising in his twinkling pachadolphin eyes, just before he lets go, falling into
the pit of unbeing, sacrificing himself so that Riley could literally get Joy
back, the theater gasped.
I gasped with them.
But no one over 12 gasped for the surprise of it. We gasped under the weight of it.[4]
A beloved companion, unkindly cast aside, offers the one last
thing he has to give to save his beloved friend,
himself.
Now, I get that Christological types are tired[5]..and
this one is decidedly imperfect[6]…but
three days later, [7]
I realized I’d heard this story before.
A beloved companion, guide, and source of wonder from years
of innocence, steadfast in his love, finds himself cast aside and marginalized. He finds his beloved in trouble, battered by
her world and loss of wonder, and instead of bitter “I told you so’s”, he casts
himself into oblivion, whatever lays at the other side of forgetting, trading
his life – and in a mysterious way, his very ontology – to vouchsafe joy. He trades himself for his beloved’s joy to
rebuild her crumbling identity and moral lostness.
I’ve heard this story before.
But unlike candy/elephant/dolphins, oblivion could not hold
Jesus. He breaks the monotonic
trajectory of forgetting, offering us the same escape from the valley of unknowing that he forged,
an ontology that surpasses whatever ephemeral marks we make on human memories.
This post was written while listening to the We Were Romans station on Pandora
[1]
This deserves its own post. The primacy
of future memory in our choices is a really interesting idea, highlighted by
the great section in Kannaman’s book (TFAS)
where he asks, “Would you accept an all expense paid one week vacation anywhere
you’d like if you would not remember it when it was over?” He argues we have two selves, an experience
self and a remembering self, and disentangling their motivations helps us
understand our always complex, sometimes counter intuitive, and often self
destructive choices. The pit of final
forgetting leaves us with the question: Do forgotten things matter? Are the only relevant actions remembered
actions? The answers to these questions
tell us a lot about celebrity culture and our own aspiration.
[2] Bing
Bong was Riley’s obsolete imaginary friend, found wandering the halls of her
long term memory, defined by his love for her and his recognition that she no
longer considered him.
[3]
The same night I watched Birdman in a sublime family movie night/reading group
movie night* double header – which does the whole “Checkhov’s gun thing’ so
heavy handedly that it was surely ironic.
*My friend Kyle doesn’t read fiction, so when he came
up in the draft order to select fiction** he picked a film.
**We have changed our reading group format. Now we have a draft order and whoever is up
picks unilaterally from whichever of our three rotating categories (fiction, theological
non-fiction, secular non-fiction) is up.
This new format has been wildly successful in my opinion, giving us a
wide range of books we wouldn’t otherwise read instead of familiar stuff we can
all agree on a priori.
[4]
Incidentally, I’m assuming that it was the elephant/dolphin portion of him that
made BingBong’s song/weight ratio sub-optimal, because a creature made largely
of cotton candy would be pretty light.
[5]
And I
go there often, incautiously and unrepentant.
[6]
Feel free to go ahead and comment about Jesus being an ‘imaginary friend’ if,
you know, you’re a troll.
[7]
Poetic timing for the reappearance of one who resigned himself to oblivion to
redeem joy.
