Author: Jon

To die would be an awfully big adventure.

—Peter Pan

A Modern Myth

Peter Pan is one of the few stories that really qualifies as a modern myth. It has endured for over a century now, and is almost universally known in the English-speaking world. Director P.J. Hogan gives the tale wonderful impetus into its next century with this beautiful and intelligent film version. This is the telling of the Peter Pan tale par excellence, not only because it’s so professionally done, but also it brings out the undercurrents in the tale that have never really been expressed before, foremost of which is that Peter Pan is really a story of first love.

Why is this the first time the love story has been presented in Peter Pan? Because this is the first film version where Peter is played by a boy and not a woman! In addition, Peter has usually been shown as a very young child, which made his terror of growing up feel considerably “off,” not to mention his confused love for Wendy. Hogan rectifies this by showing us Peter on the verge of adolescence. This makes everything—the romance, his fear of growing up, and his mastery of the sword—ring far truer.  

While it definitely remains a children’s film, this Peter Pan is neither dumbed-down nor sugar-coated. The dark undertones of Barrie’s original are not glossed over. Peter is not cute and sweet, he’s a young warrior who longs to kill Hook. Mermaids are dangerous creatures. Tinkerbell is funny, crazy, and sometimes murderous.

Flying is presented smoothly and nonchalantly, as though it were the most natural thing in the world. There are no self-conscious interruptions like the “bullet time” in The Matrix. I highly recommend watching the DVD extras which detail the grueling months spent in flying practice and sword training to appreciate what an impressive accomplishment this was.

Wendy’s story

Hogan’s film brings home something else that generally escapes us—that this story isn’t about Peter Pan, but Wendy. Wendy Darling is wonderfully portrayed by Rachel Hurd-Wood, who might be the next Jodie Foster. As the story opens, her Aunt Millicent notices that Wendy is becoming a young woman, and persuades Wendy’s parents to give her her own bedroom, and begin schooling her in the arts that will help her to “marry well.” Wendy must soon stop regaling her brothers with pirate stories, and to start learning to prepare for what Mrs. Darling calls the greatest adventure, love. 

On one of the last nights she’ll spend with her brothers in their shared bedroom, she wakes up with a start, to see a half-naked boy floating in the air above her bed, who quickly vanishes. In school the next day, she draws a picture of him hovering over her bed, and her teacher dashes off a note to Mr. Darling regarding his daughter’s “unseemly preoccupations.” (We’re in the Victorian era, after all.)

When Peter returns the next night, Wendy learns that he’s been listening for months to her telling stories to her brothers. Partly, he’s enchanted by the story-telling, but mostly he’s enchanted by her. “One girl is worth more than twenty boys,” he says. When he tells her that the Lost Boys are children who fell out of their prams and went to Neverland, she asks why there are no girls there, and Peter replies, “girls are far too clever to fall out of their prams.”

Wendy is just as entranced by Peter. He’s charming, cocky, slightly surly, and has an oh-so-exotic American accent. She offers to give him a kiss, and Peter holds out his hand to receive it, thinking a kiss is an object. Not wanting to embarrass him, she gives him a thimble, and he reciprocates with an acorn. When she tries to give him a real kiss, Tinkerbell’s dangerous rage comes into play, so that will have to wait. Wendy asks if her brothers can come along to Neverland with her, and Peter agrees, clearly not because he wants to, but because he doesn’t want to disappoint her. (Five minutes later, he can’t remember their names.)

“The Wendy’s” Choice

When Wendy arrives in Neverland, she finds it full of adventure, although she’s unprepared for the level of danger in this world. Tinkerbell tries to get the lost boys to kill this strange visitor she calls “the Wendy;” her plot is foiled only by the acorn “kiss” that Peter gave her, which stops an arrow from piercing her heart. (That “a kiss is a powerful thing,” is a recurring motif.) When Peter finds her, she falls into her role of being mother to the lost boys (and her brothers), with Peter acting as the group’s father.

Peter is enamored with Wendy, and eagerly shares with her all the magic of his world. In one beautiful scene, he shows her a fairy dance inside a hollow tree, and the light from the fairies illumines their faces. Peter and Wendy move away from the tree, and begin to dance themselves, their happy thoughts lifting them into the air, as the fairies circle around them showering them in a golden circle of fairy dust.

Wendy, though, is growing up; she knows that no fantasy can satisfy her forever. She’s seen Peter’s world, but not his heart. Intuitively, she knows that the environment isn’t real, but the heart is. She asks Peter if it’s all just make-believe. He answers, “Yes, if I were a real father, I’d feel so old,” and they begin to spiral down. Wendy presses him to talk about his true feelings; he can relate his feelings of anger and his knowledge of jealousy, but nothing of love. Once his inability to love is exposed, he lashes out:“Why do you have to ruin everything? We have fun, don’t we? I taught you how to fight and how to fly! Go, and take your feelings with you!”

This scene is powerful. It speaks to all the boy-men (and their female counterparts) in the real world who want the benefits of love, sex, and relationship without giving themselves. Although Peter enjoys the feeling of being in love, he can’t give himself in love, which would meaning sacrificing his eternal youth. All real love entails some sacrfice, from the everyday sacrifices of couples to each other and parents to their children, to the profound picture of God’s love in Christ’s self-surrender.

Hook witnesses the scene and senses the enormity of Peter’s mistake, realizing that he is simply an older version of Peter Pan. He acutely feels the ache of having lived a loveless life, and schemes to make Wendy his own.

Wendy is tempted. Hook seems mature, while Peter wants to be a boy forever. With Peter, Wendy can only be a mother, but Hook offers her the more exciting role of piracy as “Red-Handed Jill.” Yet Wendy is able to sense that both Pan and Hook are playing at love, something neither is really capable of. Wendy decides to stop holding on to that which isn’t real, and return to real life, with its possiblity of real love, in London.

Fear of the next step

Peter isn’t the only one afraid, though, he’s simply the most honest about it. Peter is unafraid of death, but fears life—specifically the ordinariness of adulthood. That other lost boy, Hook, is afraid of death and old age. Time is after him and will devour him, symbolized by the ticking clock inside the enormous crocodile. Wendy is afraid of life choices. She’s excited by both Peter’s wildness and Hook’s debonair manners, but knows that both are wrong for her; she must leave Neverland and return to reality.

All fear is really fear of the future in some respect, and it’s often about the next change in our life situation—to put it broadly, about the next part of our “growing up.” This film can disturb you if you watch it openly, because you will likely see some of your own fear mirrored in the those of Wendy, Peter, or Hook. At some level, we all have this hesitancy about that next step in some part of our lives, and mere physical age is no evidence of not stopping in Neverland and refusing to go forward. Neither is having a family; many people go through the motions of development, while freezing huge parts of their lives, very often their spiritual lives, at a childish level. As Jed McKenna wrote in Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment, “a seventy-year-old is often an eleven-year-old with fifty-nine years of experience.”

Although there’s a happy ending of sorts—Wendy returns home along with her brothers and the Lost Boys, who also now have a home, there’s a profound sadness at seeing Peter turn back from her window to fly back to an emptier Neverland, with no Lost Boys to guide, no Hook to fight, and no Wendy to love. His last words are:

To live would be an awfully big adventure.

It would be, if he took it.

Movie stills © 2003 Universal Studios.

What the Bleep Do We Know?

A Dazzling Introduction to the Frontiers of Physics, Biochemistry, and Consciousness

About 20 years ago, I encountered quantum mechanics in The Dancing Wu Li Masters by Gary Zukav, and the Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra. Despite the relative popularity (note the emphasis on “relative”) of such books, the average person in the street has never read a science book that wasn’t assigned to them in high school or college. And those books certainly weren’t using the implications of quantum physics to speculate on the nature of Life, the Universe and Everything!

But I found myself very inspired by the fuzziness of the new science. It seemed to me to be showing the undefined edges of Creation, and left me with a conviction that the Universe is held together in God’s imagination. That, along with many other things, helped to start me on my study of Christian mysticism and other traditions. So imagine my delight when I learned What the #$*! Do We Know? (pronounced “What the Bleep Do We Know”) promised an exciting investigation into the cutting edge of science and spirituality. I couldn’t wait to see interviews with people like Drs. Rupert Sheldrake, Freeman Dyson, Amit Goswami and Larry Dossey!

Well, Goswami, physicist and scholar-in-residence for the Institute of Noetic Sciences was among the experts interviewed, and although they were new to me, all the other scientists chosen seemed capable speakers on quantum weirdness. Besides physicists, there are also a number of medical researchers and psychologists interviewed, who bring interesting information on the connection between mind and matter, as well as some “spiritual teachers, mystics, and scholars.” Strangely, What the Bleep didn’t identify any of the speakers until the final credits. (And only then does it become apparent why they made that choice.)

What the Bleep has a striking visual style, with razor-sharp photography, dazzling graphic effects, and it even escapes typical “documentary mode” by creating a small story of a woman encountering new dimensions in the world and herself. At times the style skirts the edge of being a little too hyper, and the directors clearly intend to go for breadth over depth. (If you want to actually learn something about the mind-blowing edges of science, a great place to start is with PBS’s NOVA production,The Elegant Universe.)

The story shows Amanda, a deaf photographer, going through a couple of frustrating days as she has some surreal encounters with quantum physics. In the middle of the film, the discussion shifts briefly from subatomic physics to neurochemistry, while the story takes our heroine into a Polish wedding sequence which is so hilarious, it might have you rolling in the aisles, as I was! More importantly, some the opinions shared may be eye-opening for many viewers who have never considered the inter-connectedness of mind, the universe, and God.

The Flipside: Ramtha will see you now.

The disappointment, (which is acute), came from the aforementioned “spiritual teachers, mystics, and scholars” used. Yeah, it sounds like an impressive lot, but there were only two. One was Miceal (or Micheal) Ledwith, former prominent Catholic theologian, whose retirement from Ireland’s Maynooth College in 1994 has been linked to abuse accusations (see the Irish Times article of June 1 2002). The other, a blonde woman who had more screen time than any other “expert,” was revealed in the closing credits to be—get ready—RAMTHA! Yes, Ramtha, the laughable 35,000-year-old entity with the pseudo-Sanskrit name, channeled by Ms. JZ Knight. No wonder names were withheld till the end!

Both Ledwith and “Ramtha” had little to do except bash conventional religion with vague, emotional mutterings about “the shackles of restrictive doctrine.” I was left wondering why would a group of people go to the trouble of creating an otherwise impressive film about the scientific plausibility of a mystical universe, only to undercut it with sophmoric dismissals and the spoutings of the queen of New Age nuttiness? Perhaps it’s because, as stated on their own FAQ page, all three filmmakers are students of Ramtha! Not only that but it turns out that Ledwith now happens now to be a lecturer for Ramtha, as well, and another expert, chiropractor and writer Joe Dispenza, is also a Ramtha student!

So it ends up being a mixed bag. It is a charming, beautiful, and entertaining introduction to quantum physics, and for thousands it may be the only glimpse they’ve had of mysticism. Overall, it’s well worth seeing, but I just wish this had some actual spiritual substance. It’s a pity. People are starving for the Wild Things of God, and are kept starving. With very rare exceptions, our teachers, preachers, priests, and imams don’t teach our own deep traditions of union with God. Furthermore, half-witted schlock like The Da Vinci Code, The Celestine Prophecy, and Ramtha drowns out the voice of authentic mysticism. Ramtha will see you now. Keep your ego, but bring your checkbook.

Update, January 15, 2005. What is Enlightenment? magazine has a penetrating review of What the Bleep? online. It’s excellent reading.

Here are my thoughts on the WIE review.

Movie stills © 2004 Lord of the Wind Films, LLC.

Last weekend at the Naro, I had the pleasure of watching the director’s cut of Donnie Darko. Simply put, it’s brilliant. I discovered Darko on video two years ago, rediscovered it with the deleted scenes last year (and watched it four times in two days!), and relished the short run of the director’s cut at Naro. (And it’s probably fair to say that no recent movie has needed a director’s cut more than Darko.

I’m going to have to post a full review of this. Till then, all I can say is you’ve got to see this. And if you think you’ve got it figured out, let me know!

Introduction

Mild spoilers follow. If you really have no clue how it ends, you might want to see the movie first.

Simply put, Spider-Man 2 is the superhero movie par excellence. Its effects are amazing, the action is thrilling, but beyond that, it actually transcends its comic-book origins, and succeeds as a moving human drama. I had the strong sense that 2002’s Spider-Man wanted to do the same, but failed. Whenever it seemed it was getting close, the Green Goblin would pop in, and Bam! there we were in cartoon-land again.

Thankfully, the villain in Spider-Man 2 is more believable and sympathetic. Alfred Molina’s masterful portrayal of Dr. Octavius is refreshingly human and appropriately chilling. Rather than being simply mad or evil, Octavius (Doc Ock) is actually a good man, but ambition and carelessness has caused him to lose control, and his mechanical arms now control his actions. As in the Matrix movies, machines symbolize the inhuman side of our passions, a mechanical force that keeps going of its own accord, using the human being just to power it (as in The Matrix) or just taking it along for the ride as it does here. Mechanical arms furthermore suggest the reach of amoral, inhuman ambition.

The superhero as spiritual warrior

But of course, Spider-Man / Peter Parker is who the movie is really about. What is so refreshing about this movie is that it shows the trials of the superhero in surprising detail. The superhero is a metaphor for the “spiritual warrior”—those who dedicate their lives to conquering the evils of fear, arrogance, violence, anger and greed in the world. In the comic book, these are usually depicted as external things, the superhero is already perfect.

In reality, spiritual warriorship is a learning path; the warrior first must conquer him/herself. While Superman showed the infant Kal-El as performing miracles from the time he came down from heaven, the Bible points out that Jesus waited till 30 to begin his ministry. Similarly, the Buddha spent years practicing yoga before he awoke, and even then, hesitated to teach what he had found. No matter how sudden the transformation may occur, work precedes it and it takes dedication to live the awakened life.

Christians are urged to “fight the good fight,” and Buddhists are taught to become bodhisattvas, and vow to save all beings. It’s a tall order, and Spider-Man shows the human struggle of the spiritual warrior very honestly. True, many spiritual warriors have been monks, nuns, and hermits, but far more have had to take on the call to be “in the world, but not of the world.” These spiritual warriors live in two worlds, the spiritual world of prayer, meditation and the awareness of what is really going on despite appearances, and the day-to-day world of bills, work, school, and relationships. Peter finds it impossible to be Spider-Man and attend properly to his life in the ordinary world. He is behind on rent, can’t hold a job, is failing his classes, and is about to lose Mary Jane forever.

His motivation to be Spider-Man largely stems from guilt—his uncle’s last words to him were “with great power comes great responsibility,” and soon after that, his irresponsibility caused uncle’s death. Spider-Man is slipping; except in life-and-death situations, his webs fail, he slides off of walls, and his vision blurs. Even his heroic, life-saving actions are slammed by the Daily Bugle which rants against him as “a public menace.”

Peter Parker ends up doing what most of us would do in such frustrating circumstances—he quits, and throws his costume into the trash.

There’s no going back

At first, Peter has a tremendous sense of relief in just being Peter Parker. But he cannot forget who he has been, nor what he could do, when he turns away from someone being beaten in an alley, or when he hears sirens tearing down the street. Finally, he can bear it no more—when he sees a burning apartment building that has a child trapped inside, he rushes in to save her. And the little girl ends up saving him.

This is just one of several instances that show Peter he must be able to accept the help, forgiveness, and advice of others. A doctor tells him that his loss of powers is probably psychosomatic. His aunt forgives him for his part in her husband’s death—and with what seems to be a knowing twinkle in her eye, she reminds him that heroes are vital to the world.

Behind the mask

Peter picks up his Spider-Man costume again to stop Doc Ock from destroying the city. In a stunning fight sequence, Spider-Man endures an agonizing crucifixion on the front of a speeding train. Instead of nails, his own webs stretch out his arms to save the innocent. As he falls exhausted, the passengers on the train gently pass him back and make room for him to rest. And since he lost his mask in the battle, everyone is astonished to see that the miraculous superhero is an otherwise ordinary, human, mortal youth.

It’s easy to believe that the savior is different from us in kind, since even when their deeds are known, they themselves are not. To anyone who didn’t know the shy, klutzy geek named Peter Parker, Spider-Man seems a being from another world, like Superman, with nothing in common with ordinary folks. Knowing the humanity of the hero is the difference.

Many Buddhists prefer to offer chants and prayers to the Buddha, rather than seek his enlightenment. Similarly, Christians are generally are more at ease worshipping Jesus as God, and largely forget about a Jewish kid named Yeshua who realized who his Father was—in fact, only a single story from his youth has been preserved. The ancient Christian teaching of theosis, that the consummation of the Christian life is to become Christ, just as Jesus did, is ignored by most churches. We prefer to trust him to lead the Christian life for us, and while he does, the call to awaken still sounds: “Awake, O sleeper, and Christ will shine on you.” (Eph.5.14) With great power comes great responsibility. It’s a little bit scary. No wonder we keep haloes on our saviors, and capes and masks on our heroes.

Never alone

But the hero also wants the mask, which represents the anonymity of the bodhisattva/spiritual warrior. True spiritual warriors don’t seek glory for themselves. Jesus repeatedly asked persons he healed not to tell anyone about him. But usually there comes a time when the mask has to come off. This can be frightening, but it’s also an opportunity for the warrior to gain the support he or she needs. Jesus needed the disciples, Gautama needed the sangha, Francis needed his brothers, Dorothy Day needed her friends. Similarly, awakening people need teachers and friends. In doing so, we discover that not only is there is a great, invisible communion radiating the love of God, an invisible web (yeah, web!) connecting all who have the Christ-mind or Buddha-mind, but there are also friendly faces ready to help us here and now.

The warrior’s victory

As Zen master and spiritual warrior Vernon Kitabu Turner wrote in Soul Sword, a modern classic on spiritual warriorship, the warrior seeks to save both the victim and the oppressor from whatever evil forces are bringing suffering into the world. A beautiful moment in Spider-Man 2 is Dr. Octavius’s redemption, as Peter (unmasked) is able to bring him back to his senses. Octavius declares “I will not die a monster!” and destroys his machine (and himself) before millions of innocent people would be killed.

In this scene, too, Mary Jane realizes that Peter is Spider-Man and that he’s in love with her. The painful secret is destroyed, and Spider-Man has a mate to help him in his difficult mission. As she says to him, “Isn’t it time someone saved your life?”

Movie stills © 2004 Columbia Piactures.