Flasz On Film

Directed by Pete Docter, Soul was released on Christmas 2020. Owing to the raging pandemic and the fact in many jurisdictions cinemas were shut, we got to see it in our homes on Disney Plus, housebound and filled with all sorts of anxieties relating to the uncertain future. We didn’t know how the next year would play out. However, the movie itself was seemingly trying to guide us towards something. Some kind of change.  

After all, it was hard to miss the message Soul was attempting to advance. I think many of us could identify with the film’s central character Joe, a man who always dreamed about being a jazz pianist but instead of following his passion, he chose the safe and reliable path of getting a stable job. A job he grew to despise over time. Because it truly takes a while to realize that sometimes what we see as the right decision at the time may quickly lead us down the path towards a life of seemingly inescapable quiet desperation. Joe had to die and move into the astral plane to realize just how much he wanted to live. He needed to meet 22, an old soul, to find out what truly mattered to him. Consequently, the movie as a whole was engineered to make us depart its embrace with a sense of hope, which many of us could map onto our own lives disrupted by the pandemic.  

We had a unique opportunity to re-evaluate our lives, gain some perspective on what we hold dear to our hearts, and maybe realize that the lives we had led up to that point weren’t aligned with what we wanted them to be. I suppose the pandemic may have been the necessary catalyst for many people to push them from the twilight zone of “comfortable discomfort” – a limbo where many of us persisted thinking our lives were not great but they were not bad enough for us to do anything about it – into action. Thus, some kind of a critical mass was reached. For some it was the moral recalibration itself. For others it was a realization they wanted their lives to matter. For others yet it had to do with finally becoming sick to their back teeth with the lack of appreciation, options or compensation where they currently were. And starting in 2021, millions got up and quit their jobs. Some looked for other opportunities. Some changed careers. Some others made even more radical changes. But the point was, it all added up to a mass movement of millions to quit their jobs and make changes to their lives, a phenomenon termed The Great Resignation Wave.  

I noticed this trend immediately and quickly came up with an idea for an essay about how Soul became the herald of The Great Resignation Wave. However, I didn’t write it. And it was only because I too thought I could maybe do something about my own life, so I decided I’d try to publish it in a respectable outlet with mass circulation, hoping it would also become a pivotal moment in my own life. I hoped for poetic symmetry, which never materialized. Nobody wanted it and I shelved it.  

But I’m not one to give up, am I? Now, a few years removed, it is no longer timely to write about The Great Resignation Wave, because the times have changed. In fact, it would have been a perfect time to re-visit that piece I could have written. Today would be a good day to write a commentary essay looking at how the world changed between 2021 when Soul could be seen as a de facto herald of a massive societal shift, and now when we could clearly see that after all, one swallow does not summer make. But again, I never penned that essay. So, in a way what I am doing now is writing my own Jodorowsky’s Dune. In 2013, Frank Pavich directed a documentary about a movie that never happened and now I am writing an essay about an essay I never wrote. Which seems like a pointless endeavour, but here we are. As I said, I’m not one to give up, am I? 

Therefore, let us have a look at how Soul conned me into thinking that it could have been read as a grand societal premonition, or even a potent call to arms. I won’t lie, I watched this film multiple times since its release and its power never ceases to take me aback. It harbours a truly powerful message about the importance of the little things – you know, touching grass, listening to birds singing, playing with your kids – and forces us to look upon our own lives to see if we make enough time for these things at all. And in case we don’t, I believe Soul has enough gravitas to push the viewer into motion. That’s what I thought was happening. The pandemic wore us all down enough that we all thought our lives could be about more than just working till we drop on things we don’t like, buying things we don’t need and trying to impress people who don’t even know we exist because they are just as consumed with their own problems as we are with ours. I thought that Soul captured the collective malaise of our mid-pandemic existence and projected it back onto us in hopes it would snap us out of our listless slumber.  

And it looked as though it worked. For a second there, you could honestly convince yourself that maybe the COVID pandemic would somehow precipitate a grand civilizational shift. That we’d emerge from it as an evolved species – more compassionate, calibrated to appreciate the beautiful singularity of our existence, and geared to renounce our addiction to immediate gratification or consumerist tendencies. People looked at their careers. Their jobs. Their lives. And left.  

Sadly, nothing good ever lasts because now, just two short years later, the pendulum is swinging back, and it seems we are on our way to where we were before someone in Wuhan ate a pangolin-fed bat or smuggled a virus on the bottom of their shoe on their way out of the lab. I’m not an expert, I’m not judging. What I think we all noticed is that the buzz of excitement surrounding The Great Resignation Wave has long subsided and instead we are staring down the barrel of a global recession, a cost-of-living crisis, a succession of tribal wars over literally any topic (be it a presidential election, public health policy, the fate of Palestine or anything else) and a potential conflict between global superpowers, which may be brewing on the horizon.  

“I know things are bad. Worse than bad. They’re crazy.” Somehow, in the span of two short years, Soul has become completely incompatible as a reflection of societal animus and instead we find ourselves – again – in a world better reflected in Sidney Lumet’s Network. We seem to have squandered completely the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to remake our world because at the end of the day, people only do what is in their own best interest. And the minute situation worsens, compassion and altruism are sidelined to make space for the old-fashioned survival instincts. We have again reverted into our own echo chambers where the discomfort is once more comfortable enough for us to just bear it. And from there we continue to be fed a steady diet of misinformation, propaganda and braindead overstimulation. Is it because it is easier than to do the heavy lifting required to make a lasting change?  

Could you imagine Joe Gardner at the end of Soul going back to his old life as a teacher who hates his life? Wasn’t the pandemic enough to convince us collectively that we have but one life and it is way more fragile than we thought? Maybe we need Peter Finch to shout at us from our phone screens and force us to open our windows and yell “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!” Maybe that’ll do the trick because Pete Docter’s fairy tale treatment wasn’t powerful enough to make us fall out of love with our gadgets, our quelled our pursuit of short-lived pleasure for long enough to make any new habits stick.

If anything, that essay I didn’t write about that film that reflected that change that didn’t last taught me that the activation energy to precipitate a lasting shift in anything is only a part of the solution. Just getting off your backside and making a change is only a start. Sure, without it, nothing else will happen. But you have to learn to embrace the process and stick with it. I suppose we have a lot to learn about ourselves as a species because even though we may be able to institute lasting changes locally and on a personal level, we are far and away from doing so on a global scale.  

Maybe one day, someone at Pixar will make a movie about it and something will give. Maybe then I’ll write an essay about it in addition to writing an essay about an essay I would have written had I stuck to my guns and persevered with that short-lived ambition to publish it in The Guardian or IndieWire.