Firstly, I’m sorry for the emotions, my childhood turning point evokes. The pic is an example of mine. I wasn’t going to include it, but I feel like it gives a good visceral example of deep messages in movies (of course actual philosophy, and non emotionally devastating examples apply, too). I just watched a clip on a study on some elderly men, taken to a time warp hotel, and asked to pretend it was that time, and it had huge positive effects on their physical capabilities and mental capacity. And it reminded me of the power of hope, it’s not just embedded in the happy ending, where everything works out ok. Or the promise of it. Hope is also the core of resilience, necessary for driving each step that carries you along the yellow brick road.
I’ll share mine here, so you get an idea what I’m asking. I was devastated watching the scene above, as a kid. But also, I saw Atreus ability to keep going, not only not giving up, and therefore not sinking in a place that takes you if you do, but then also carrying the weight of the grief of his life companion. And he was now alone, realising his mortality and facing, what he is told, are impossible odds. He still keeps going. I think, to child me, there was so much power in seeing something is possible. I believed I, too, could survive anything. And even if I were alone, I could still survive anything, because that power came from inside me, no one can take that from you. “Don’t let the darkness take you” the darkness is an external force. It wants to creep in and convince you to buy it’s snake oils.
There is so much power in convincing people the “darkness” is inevitable, there is nothing else. I see it all around me, embedded in the propaganda, convincing us not to resist, that resistance is futile. Half of the battle is in our own heads, and the brainwashing swamps we wade through, now.
What are your tools of resilience, your keys for undoing the fight or flight, all the horrifying videos around us are designed, to evoke, to keep our thinking brains detached, and only our “run hide” brains active, so we can’t think, so we can’t plan, so we just sink in and accept?
What’s helped you get back up, when you have fallen? From whatever sources, I just feel like, maybe now is a time, it’s important to share a shoulder to cope on. Or even just moved you, to an extent it changed your perspective or way of thinking?
CoCo fundamentally changed the way I think about death and the value of memory. I went into it knowing almost nothing about Día de los Muertos, so I wasn’t expecting it to affect me as deeply as it did.
The idea that someone can disappear forever only when they are no longer remembered hit me in a way I wasn’t prepared for. It was such a sad thought, but strangely comforting too. Sad because it means there is a kind of “second loss” that can come with time, but comforting because it suggests that the people we love are never truly gone as long as we carry them with us, speak their names, and keep their stories alive.
That idea stayed with me long after the movie ended. It made death feel less like a hard ending and more like a responsibility of love through memory.
Plus, the music is amazing.
That Japanese one from the Ghibli movies.
So whimsical!
South Park S3E10, Korn’s Groovy Pirate Ghost Mystery.
The whole episode is a Scooby-Doo parody, and it’s alright. But the joke that got me thinking was this:
Jonathan Davis: All right gang, we have to split up and look for clues!
Stan Marsh: How should we split up?
Jonathan Davis: I know! Let’s have everyone who enjoys having obstacles in their life which they can overcome go this way, and everyone whose insecurity sabotage their potential to overcome those obstacles go that way.
[Everyone says “OK!”, then splits up into two roughly equal groups]
Kyle Broflovski: Wow! That was easy!\The Kara No Kyoukai anthology influenced my imagination and how I view my inner world of art.
The perfect blend between minimalist, simple yet elegant design that is set in an urban setting.
The Groundhog Day taught be a lot about acceptance and trying to make the best of whatever situation I’m in.
Artax and Atreyu, this scene always made me cry. Luckly enough there is a Falkor
Two come to mjnd:
Star Trek 2 - The Wrath of Khan.
Spock gives his life to save his friends, willingly and without pause. And his best friend has to say goodbye to him.
Of course, the first time I saw it I didn’t know what was coming next, so to me it was final, and devastating.
It prepared me well for things that happened IRL later on.
Secondly, because I don’t want to be 100% on a downer, the finale of Labyrinth. “You have no power over me” nudged me towards the idea that many people who profess to be in charge of you only have that power because they say they do. And you can take that back for yourself.
Heathers taught me something. Maybe that smoking is cool? No no that’s not right… Something about bombs… Or… Hmmm.
What’s Eating Gilbert Grape gave me a good perspective on caring for my loved ones, especially ones who have a hard time caring for themselves.
The Matrix really made me understand where Descartes was coming from. When we say something is “real” it’s always subjective and cannot be objective. That’s an incredibly difficult concept for most humans to truly grasp.
It’s a great connection. Beyond Descartes, the Wachowskis explicitly cited Buddhist philosophy as a primary influence, specifically the concepts of Maya (illusion) and Samsara (the cycle of suffering which people unfortunately tend to misunderstand a lot).
The “There is no spoon” scene is a direct nod to Sunyata, or emptiness. It suggests that “reality” isn’t just subjective; it lacks inherent existence. In this view, it’s not just the world that is a construct, but the “self” perceiving it as well. Lana Wachowski has also stated that the trilogy was designed as a “meditation” on the nature of choice and the self, influenced by their interest in Eastern philosophy.
There’s also an Upanishadic mantra in the third movie soundtrack, appropriately:
Asato mā sad gamaya (from the unreal, lead me to the real)
Tamaso mā jyotir gamaya (from darkness, lead me to the light)
Mṛtyor mā’mṛtaṃ gamaya (from death, lead me to immortality)
Unpacked here (a bit, but it’ll correct the likely, immediate misconceptions people unfamiliar with eastern philosophy would get)
It also touched on the systemic oppression of the modern world, and showed how most people just go along with it … I was a young adult when it came out and that really shook up my word view.
We learned that in school, movies like that taught me that it was a difficult concept for humans to grasp.
Billie Eislish did say it more succinctly though, damn.
Wut?
The X-Files episode, “Beyond the Sea” made me anti-death penalty. Brad Dourif plays a mass murderer on death row who claims to have visions that could save two missing girls. The show doesn’t go for the easy out - he’s guilty of horrible things and he’s trying to cut a deal. Scully’s skepticism and faith collide - she thinks he’s playing a cruel game, but if she doesn’t go along, he will be put to death, which is against her Catholic beliefs. One of Gillian Anderson’s best (and favorite) episodes.
The end result is a surprisingly profound meditation on the value of life, the difference between justice and revenge, and the depravity 9f state-sanctioned murder.
Threads and The Day After taught me that there are people out there that would rather be right, than alive.
Threads and Where the wind blows taught me that there is no living after a nuclear war. Just a excruciating decline and collapse
The final scene of Threads really fucked me up, I already had birth trauma and that scene gave me proper wake-up-screaming nightmares for months.
Darlin’, forever is a long, long time. And time has a way of changin’ things.
The Fox and the Hound
For me it was the unalterable cyclic time travel in 12 monkeys, coupled with the rebellious themes. That movie hit hard and made me think when i was young (probs like 10?). Hands down favorite movie, and i credit it with a lot of my philosophical view of the universe. I believe everything is deterministic, and if you were to know all the information about every atom in the universe at any slice of time, you could entirely predict the future. Its completely untestable, of course, but it makes sense to me. After all, everything is physics.
But then there’s quantum physics
Thats fine, if you have the power to know where every atom in the universe is at a given time, as well as its trajectory and momentum, it would still be knowable. You’d need to have some pretty damned advanced knowledge for that anyway, so from a practical standpoint it doesn’t matter that we couldn’t reconcile it with our present models. They could be completely wrong, for all we know.
This classic xkcd led me down a long rabbit hole years after reading it that ended in the belief that the universe itself is an abstract instantiation of pure mathematics, and exists only in the sense that any such self-consistent mathematical structure must exist from its own point of view. I won’t get into the details here because it’ll turn into a long incoherent rant, but the general gist is that the idea in the comic should work - but then that the rocks themselves aren’t even necessary: The fact that a universe can exist is enough for it to exist, even if no one ever simulates it. Just like the question “What is the 10(10100)th prime number?” exists and has a definite answer, even though nobody will ever and can never calculate it, the answer to “What does a universe, with these initial conditions, and these laws of physics, look like at t = 13.7 billion years?” has an answer too, and it looks like you reading this comment.
