DEPRESSION 2021 and Disney Pixar’s SOUL

I feel increasingly estranged from the world, or the picture in my head I had of the world; which can only ever be a limited impression, a deliberately miniature diorama, a petit tableaux in which to place myself. In a microcosm finding myself more empowered than a more extensive consideration of the ‘facts’ could ever allow. Anyway. The world I’d been living in, with it’s hard-earned absolutes and textures, is changing, I can feel changing, in as much as it’s rules and pulses feel more opaque to me, less legible. The things which used to operate as it’s determining attributes, it’s calling cards, seem less obvious. I have to painstakingly remind myself what certain feelings and behaviours matter, and how they matter. It’s that seasonal reflexivity I’ve been waiting on, which I’ve been looking out for like a sage scarred warrior keeping guard on an embattled pa-site (which isn’t to conflate being of Maori descent with some martial code or spirit; ugh). Suspicious of the calm which has lasted a supernaturally long time (I am). My brushes with depression to date have been camouflaged, mostly. Hidden by external dramas and dynamics which I have mostly been the architect of (except the death of my father obvi). Foresight, prevention. Premeditating causes with theatrical habits, generating so much noise that introspection becomes impossible. These things have been my m.o.. That’s the craven beauty of something like grief. The reasons for sadness are evident, sanctioned. It’s responses and rip-tides are known, are socially acceptable. Hideous as grief might be, it’s legible, it’s canon. But what about when a crippling sadness or despair strikes without warning, even without reason, stronger for being so divorced from evental-logics, for being so disembodied; for lacking graspable context, becoming demon, becoming spectre. Some (most) would argue that this year has been disruptive enough that a vague darkling resignation to the entropy of the universe, an apparently rootless depression, is a sensible and even expected response. That mental health would obviously collectively dive considering the wrenching transitions we’re in, the harrowing uncertainties whereby the western world’s presumptive ownership of the future is, for the first time in a long time, not set in stone. Up for grabs even. *clear stage for potential super-powers to audition their leadership capabilities, which have less to do with benevolent governance and more to do with willingness to exploit, systemic disparity, undermining of public discourse and other preventions of democratic dissent (if only for the American-lead example).

The unconscious is a thing so obviously when a feeling or ambient state strikes and reasons seem initially opaque, then some enquiring excavation of latent factors is a good idea. The ‘talking cure’. I’ve never had therapy because it’s always been out of my budget. And whenever I have brought this up socially some people (richer ones who can afford lives of navel gazing and fifty dollar vanilla-scented candles for the guest-rooms) always scoff and say ‘if you were really serious about it then you’d find a way’, as if prioritising rent and groceries over good mental health was some sort of character flaw, as if my limited means were a flimsy excuse, proof of some inherent pathology lurking in my otherwise benign demeanour of lower-middle creative-class (lol). One of my favourites is when people recommend I get on the sickness benefit and then therapy is free, as if performing debilitating instability, stressing fictitious traumas for the medical panopticon, were nothing more strenuous than early morning yoga at the local rec-centre. Jesus fucking Christ. I’m not a car, requiring a ‘service’. Neither do I so readily embrace the neoliberal agenda lurking in wellness, the embrace of many credos and services which preach optimum health/experience which actually mean optimum productivity, that wellness is exclusively measured in profitable economic contribution. Sheer nonsense and lacking in discerning, this approach; the imperial histories of our success paradigms somehow matter less than excelling within them, or perhaps only matter when their doors of affluence/comfort are closed. That everyone’s a naysayer until their own wealth arrives in life’s nepotist lottery is the cynic’s assumption. Though I’m sure in some cases this proves true.

Disney Pixar’s Soul was great. Seemed slightly thin on the first viewing but by the second I’d had long enough to contemplate beyond it’s saccharine pretences. Which I know is how Disney operates; an unspoken assurance to the more surface viewer that any film bearing the proverbial beast-mark will be light, joyous, asking nothing more of an audience than gentle suspension of disbelief and love of the cute. But Pixar, with plenty of commercial success, has also pioneered the art of subtle subversion, less as a radical statement around childhood and the genres we use to coddle and uphold kids in an arguably arbitrary construct of ‘innocence’, and more as a necessary subterfuge of execution and delivery to elevate the usually one-track Disney standards of production to something more textured, nuanced, and decidedly adult. The film’s about this guy (as most films are) called Joe who is unhappy in his life, a jazz-musician who hasn’t achieved the swinging heights of dancehall fame his younger self coveted; instead he’s a middle-aged music teacher for middle-school kids who are mostly despondent, resisting his obvious passion for the swagger of indifference. Such is youth culture. Finally Joe gets his dream gig with the effervescent Dorothea Williams . . . only to die prematurely (stepping blindly into a manhole, doi!). Finding himself in the afterlife literally surging towards the holy light of The Great Beyond, Joe finds the realm’s clerical workers and strikes a sort-of deal, agreeing to ‘mentorship’ of young souls who require a full license before they can commandeer a body on planet earth. If only to serve his own end of stealing this license from said-soul so he can ride the pass back to his own earthly body. Easy enough. The only problem is his assigned soul (the defiantly indifferent 22, voiced by Tina Fey, who neatly resembles the grumbling kids in his music-class) has famously never completed the process of getting her full earth-license, despite having been mentored by some of earth-history’s greats (Abe Lincoln, Muhammad Ali, the freshly guillotined head of Marie Antoinette). 22 is apparently a soul that cannot grasp the novelty of taking up residence on the earthly plane, who has adapted nicely to the endless transit of The Great Before, and feels no urgency to move in any direction. An existential stasis of the most literal kind.

I was struck by several things in this movie, but maybe most interesting was the bureaucratic efficiency of an afterlife which resembles a video-game in it’s slick topography and cool synth-soundtrack pairing. Overseeing The Great Before is Gerry, a constructed interface without which Joe’s ‘feeble human mind’ would not be able to comprehend this soul terminus where fledging souls are readied for the adventure of life. Gerry describes themselves as a profound unifier whose comprehension transcendently straddles both space and time. But they are not alone in operating this Before/After-life. In fact, there’s a team of Gerrys and an accountant Terry who might present as unique beings but which I got the impression were folds in a singular fabric, their treatment of one another as separate entities a mere performance for their human witness. The Great Self splicing itself into smaller Selves, a heavy self-alienation only performed to enrich the Whole, eventually. In this way, the transcendent Whole splits itself to gather data, generating that data by traversing self-inflected void (the illusion of separateness, of individuality), strengthening itself to chart that which remains uncharted as the universe expands into the unfathomable scale of un-being. Souls themselves, like the bureaucratic agents of the soul-mentor program, are broken-off gradients of this vastly and inconceivably-sentient Whole, only unlike the debatably angelic Gerry’s human souls will synthesise the distinct alienation and resistances of matter; presumably generating a richer data for harvest.

This type of metaphysical ambition is not even new for Pixar. Remember Inside Out? That was another story which split it’s setting between hypothetical ‘inner’ space, visualising mechanisms in a substrate which evade consciousness (and even time as we materially know it) and the Real World; except of course Inside Out depicts the emotional life of a young pre-teen girl, and Soul the neuronal-storm of death; the mind having it’s lurid swan-song, the proverbial DMT-trip etc. It’s a family-friendly Jacob’s Ladder.

As his mentorship commences Joe takes 22 into the Everything Room, hoping that here they will find something that enthuses the young soul enough that they’ll get their full earth-licence, what’s termed the Spark; it turns an unfinished stamp-wheel into a sanctioned ticket to the earthly realm. More on the Everything Room; the idea is that new souls are chaperoned in this spatially impossible hall where literally everything you can have/experience on earth is represented, and hopefully from this living archive some ‘thing’ will imprint enough that it translates as that soul’s Spark. We see new souls playing basketball, exploring the intricacies of food, navigating space in a rocket ship; doing things which ironically, 22 notes, cannot be wholly grasped without a body. The archive only offers pale imitations of these earth baubles. Without a body they’re mere suggestions, confused indicators of categorical goods premised on a consumerist metric of interest/taste. Holding none of the magics which Joe expounds lyrically on when discussing his relationship with jazz music. Their profundity is inaccessible without the bodily instrument.

It’s interesting to note here where a profile of evil might fit into Soul’s almost computationally efficient theology. For example; is evil really an aberration, or do souls with a penchant for violence and harm find these directives in the Everything Room before arriving on earth through the earth-portal? Or is evil perhaps born of the soul’s latent frustrations that between their experiences in the Everything Room (an unconscious imprint after the trauma of birth which is mercifully erased) and the material counterpart of their Spark in reality, there’s a dissonance. Perhaps, a will to evil is born of this bodily trauma, the trauma of a soul falling into the body which can never be replicated in The Great Before, only hinted at, palely indicated. Evil as a metaphysical mal-adaption to the physical. The film itself seems to point at this.

As the film progresses there’s a (typically comedic) mishap when Joe tries transferring himself back to his body. Eventually Joe finds 22 so incorrigibly indifferent to everything in the Everything Room, so contentedly malcontent, that he seeks an alternative route back to earth. 22 alleges that there’s someone who can help him. Enter the mystics, souls of the living that through their spiritual sensitivity can travel to The Zone, an overlap between the worlds. An In-Between. Here they do meet someone who says he can get Joe back. Only when he opens a portal Joe accidentally brings 22 with him, the latter falling into his original body while Joe dismayingly finds himself stuck in the body of a tabby cat. This is classic switcharoo which anyone familiar with eighties movies and the Disney channel’s compulsively remade Freaky Friday will already know, and presumably love. And Soul’s use of the device differs very little from it’s many predecessors, in that the switch leads both parties to profound appreciations for, and new perspectives on, their respective lots. The only difference is that 22’s lot is yet to happen, is seminal, in the wings; while Joe’s lot is not only well commenced, but as he observes 22 playing himself he realises his life has stalled, becoming stifled by what he thought was his earnest passion. Jazz. It seems that in his monomaniac’s romance with jazz music Joe has disconnected from everything else in life which might otherwise be meaningful and fulfilling; whereas 22’s brief time in Joe’s body forces them into close proximity with the fullness of physical being. And it’s apparently a heady flavour because one taste and 22 decides they’ll hijack Joe’s body until they’re satisfied, or at least until they’re in possession of a legible Spark. It seems earth-life has some appeal after all.

Kind of amazing that a kids movie could subtly introduce this type of higher thinking in regards embodied consciousness, beginning with a seemingly tired trope of Cartesianism in which ‘soul’ or consciousness is the mere driver of physical being, only to collapse this insinuated primacy of the mental over the physical by giving primacy to materiality instead; or at least stressing how synthesis is what matters. Not just of the idealistic with the realistic, but also synthesis of ‘mind’ with a preparedness for the messily exhilarating modalities of embodied being. It ends up being a predictably anodyne approach of physical pleasure in order to be suitable for younger audiences, but attempting such a coda for kids at all is to my mind properly subversive. The cultural value of this film lies between the lines, in the swirling channels between it’s high-resolution pixels. Between the seeming simplicity of it’s feel-good narrative and it’s cheery grappling of Death (as the organising value of Life). Rather than blindly prescribing a ‘better attitude’, it interrogates ideas about the value of life, saying without overtly saying that an existence deprived of pleasure is an existence not worth inhabiting. Period. It has more to do with Camus than it does anything preceding it in the house of Disney, concerned as it is with asking an inverted Sisyphus-question; not whether or not to take one’s own life, but whether one should be born at all. A fairly useless question to ask but for Soul’s fantastic multi-dimensional setup.

Another thing I wondered watching Soul a second time. The Everything Room (or what I’m now remembering might actually be called the Hall of Everything; meh) must be filled, by definition, with everything; thusly, it contains the benign pastimes in the featured montage (basketball, pizza etc.) but must also house recreations and vocations deemed illegal, unsavoury, and downright twisted. I’m wondering what the archives of murder and pedophilia look like, for example. This is assuming that Soul’s theology varies from the classical binary of Heaven and Hell, which it does, which the film even gases about when Joe first arrives to The Great Before. And this is also presupposing the idea that evil occurs in the world as a spiritual dissonance between embodied being and the soul’s expectations, from when it perused it’s options for earthly delights in the Hall of Everything. This would also be suggestive of morality’s metaphysical exemption, that the logics of the body are somehow different from those of the ‘soul’ and subsequently the soul’s culpability is nullified in the instant of death, when all that matters is being expedited to The Great Beyond for the soul’s earth-accrued data. Suck it, Old Testament God!

I had put off getting Disney+ for so long but here I am, mainlining monthly funds to a corporation that makes my skin crawl, whose omnipresence is reason to pause with holy dread. But perhaps I was over hasty in my demonising. Sure, the majority of product we’ll get from Disney hews to familiar codes and tropes, and even in Soul there’s a familiarity, a ghost of boredom in the pixelated shadows if only for the company’s compulsively maintained demeanour (smiles, hugs, clear protagonists facing off against obvious villains and everyone getting what they deserve before the credits roll). But whatever. If the world’s going to hell in a hand basket then I want to be able to watch Star Wars when and as I please.