Must have Flying House, and Dogs

Got any favorite movies you'd like me to discuss? We should discuss them! Movies are another great way of growing in faith and exploring how it applies to our own lives. I think I want to go back to a film I reviewed some time ago because I think if offers some insight to many things concerning our spiritual walk.

Up (2009) is an animated film centered around the character Carl Fredrickson, a widower and retired balloon salesman, who escapes his fate of losing his house and being forced to live in a retirement home by turning his house into an airship: the image of the house at the moment of escape (juxtaposed with one of the best musical scores) floating on thousands of bright-colored balloons might prove to be one of the most aesthetically-pleasing images in cinematic history.

In the movie, Carl decides to take his house to Paradise Falls, a remote and exotic location in the South American mountains, and he is joined by Russell, a boy scout from a broken family, Dug, a Golden Retriever who can talk with the aid of an interpretive collar, and Kevin, a giant flightless bird who is actually female and searching for food for her offspring while protecting Carl and Russell. Carl’s inspiration for his adventure to Paradise Falls comes from a dream his wife, Ellie, had for them when they were children and avid fans of the adventurer Charles Muntz. Ironically, the adventurers come across Muntz himself, and Carl must defeat his childhood hero in order to save Kevin from being abducted from her habitat.

Carl must also choose how to honor Ellie’s memory: to keep their past sterile, or to draw strength from it to begin new friendships with Russell, Dug, and Kevin. Carl’s house is a metaphor for his personal past, which poses a question for us viewers: how should we deal with periods of our lives that we cannot return to, yet remain inseparable from who we are? Should we preserve these moments (as we would a museum or shrine) so they remain static and unchanged, or should our pasts be the materials and tools for constructing our current relationships and confronting our present situations? Both choices have risks, such as the alienation Carl feels when he lives alone in the shadow of the life he and Ellie lived in a neighborhood that no longer wants him, or later when Carl chooses to use his floating house to retrieve Russell and Kevin and must sacrifice it in order to rescue his new friends. However, the difference between the two paths is that when Carl chooses to risk his house to save Russell and Kevin, he gains new companions and (more importantly) a new life that is worth living. Carl’s previous mausoleum life, the film suggests, was not worth living and had long deviated from the spirit of the life he had lived with Ellie.

However, what the producers of Up do best is to create within the film a small world with its own rules and ethos so that the audience can enter and vicariously experience everything to the same degree as Carl. This point might seem redundant to some, but this is the greatest quality of Up, and I would argue this is something which often separates the classics from the movies that are merely ‘entertaining.’ Tolkien felt authorial creation of another world was not a miniscule detail, and he profusely wrote about this creation in his celebrated essay “On Fairy Stories”: What really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful “subcreator.” He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is “true”: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken: the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside (Tolkien, 132).

To put Tolkien’s argument in another way, a literary text must (to paraphrase Aristotle in Rhetoric) persuade the reader to decide to accept this Secondary World as (at least momentarily) true. The author can only succeed, Tolkien and Aristotle imply, if the author can anticipate the expectations of the audience. In this way, a balance in Up is maintained by a fusion of (1) fantastic elements that appeal to our senses and (2) a detailed portrayal of human devotion and courage that appeals to our emotions and our sense of character. All of these essentials make it easy—even desirable—for us forget that we are even watching a film and accept our invitation to share this world with Carl, Russell, Dug, and Kevin.

The producers at Pixar Animation Studios seem to have a knack for creating films that appeal to families—movies that children can love and parents can more than just endure, but actually enjoy. However, Up might be their best film so far. Directed and co-written by Pete Docter and Bob Peterson, Up grossed $731,338,164 globally and won the 2009 Academy Awards for Best Animated Picture and for Best Original Score: the musical themes of the movie are character-based and are associated mainly with Muntz or Ellie. Up was also nominated for Best Picture, becoming the first computer animated film to be nominated, but lost the award to The Hurt Locker (2009).

These honors are well and good for Up, and its nomination beside Peter Jackson’s rendering of Tolkien’s The Return of the King (2003)—which was the first and remains the only fantasy film to win Best Picture—shows that fantasy adaptations at least have a better chance at the Academy Awards these days. However, I doubt anyone was stunned that a film about an Iraq War veteran who defuses explosives trumped an animated film about an elderly man and a boy who lift a house off the ground using thousands of colorful balloons to fly to a place where giant birds eat chocolate and dogs use special collars to talk. But the unusual situation that put these two films, Up and The Hurt Locker, against each other is an opportunity to ask a couple of questions: when we view a film, what is more realistic, and what is more real? Often people (many of them critics) assume that these two things are the same, but in film and literature this is a specious claim.

First, what is realism and why isn’t Up realistic? Here we have to move beyond the obvious (floating houses, dogs flying airplanes, Carl’s mega-agility in the airship scene) and into the realm of what our culture takes for granted as ‘real.’ Fantasy scholars such as Michael D.C. Drout differentiate between the fantastic and conventional in fiction by saying “fantasy and science fiction are about things that physically cannot happen.” While I am unsure what research is available to tell us how many birthday balloons are needed to make a house float to South America (though the National Geographic Channel's "How Hard Can it Be" did an amazing experiment that gives us some indication), it is safe to conclude that the amount of balloons that move Carl’s house violates the laws of physics, and is thus not ‘realistic.’ However, as C.S. Lewis argues in his essay “On Three Ways of Writing for Children,” often the stories where “children have adventures and successes which are possible, in the sense that they do not break the laws of nature, but almost infinitely improbable, are in more danger than the fairy tales of raising false expectations” (Lewis 29). In other words, the ‘realism’ that is depicted and even marketed in films is far more of a rhetorical appeal than the representative objectivism that we in the audience assume it to be.

For example, in The Hurt Locker, the idea of a soldier who can only love the thrill and rush that war provides feels authentic, but it is probably not something most Iraqi War veterans would view as ‘real’ or ‘realistic,’ and this occurs because often the films that are called ‘realistic’ deal with an ethos that is peculiar rather than universal in experience. We see evidence of this from the various criticisms of The Hurt Locker from Iraq War veterans such as Brandon Friedman who said “if you know anything about the Army, or about operations or life in Iraq, you’ll be so distracted by the nonsensical sequences and plot twists that it will ruin the movie for you. It certainly did for me” (par 2). To top it all off, while most film critics praised the film’s realistic depictions of the battlefield, Friedman went on to scathe them caustically, saying that “in real life, EOD techs don’t conduct dangerous missions as autonomous three-man teams without communications gear” and “you’ll rarely hear in combat…an EOD E-7 suggesting to two or three of his guys that they leave the scene of an explosion in an Iraqi city by saying: ‘C’mon, let’s split up. We can cover more ground that way’” (par 9).

This begs another question: if the battlefield scenes and psychological conditions in The Hurt Locker are not believable to the very veterans that the film supposedly depicts, then what makes this film more real than Up?

When discussing fiction, Drout takes issue with the contrasts that are often made between fantasy and ‘realism,’ which he sees as ‘problematic’ because “literary scholars have shown that almost everything about realism is actually convention rather than any specific fidelity to any one kind of language,” and therefore “Works are realistic because we think they are realistic” (6-8). What Drout says about literature also applies to film, not to mention that fantasy in fiction and film can, as Drout reminds us, use “very realistic physical descriptions (often of landscape),” it “can examine deep psychological motivation in the same way that realistic novels do,” and as a final parting shot, fantasy “sometimes bears a closer relationship to the realities of physics and biology than do contemporary realist novels” (6-7). Indeed, I can recall a plethora of films with romantic storylines, conspiracy narratives, cinematic representations of violence and sex that only the most puerile imagination could believe to be realistic, and are usually understood by the people who enjoy them (unconsciously or not) as a form of ‘wish fulfillment.

’ Fantasy, however, can remain more true to reality in these respects because it fulfills a different sort of wish, or a deeper, more transcendent ‘longing’ as Lewis calls it, which is what we have in Up. Fantasy manages to externalize our deepest anxieties, hopes, and joys in the form of narration, images, and characters. Therefore, even at its most exotic, fantasy always draws on what is most familiar and real. In the end, the fantastic elements in Up might not make the film more ‘realistic,’ but the confluence of fantastic elements and human experience makes Up one of the most ‘real’ films I have seen in a long time. Up should be a delight for adults and children, to the minds and the hearts of all.