A few months ago I was at dinner with some professors and administrators from Pepperdine and Cambridge, and the topic of the spiritual significance of nature came up. Pepperdine’s provost Darryl Tippens proposed a theory that estrangement from nature and the fading of religion/spirituality among young people might be linked. He observed that each time he has the chance to speak to students about powerful spiritual experiences in their lives, they almost always recall a moment at a retreat in the mountains, a time of solitude on the beach, or another quiet moment away from the city and suburbs. Perhaps if more people spent more time in nature, its mystical ability to encourage reflection and introspection would produce a generation more inclined toward the spiritual.The other night my mom was talking about an interview she saw online with a man (I wish I knew who this was) who reexamined the sentiment that we are a group of evil humans destroying a self-sacrificing and benevolent planet as we plunder its resources for our own dark purposes. I strongly believe that the earth is worth protecting and must be respected, but man’s charter to exercise dominion over the earth and its creatures should not be forgotten. The earth is not a weak and submissive bleeding albatross – it is dangerous and volatile, and we seem to do all we can to cling to its surface in flimsy shelters to survive. It is a difficult task to try to subdue the earth, and a joy to be able to use its materials to carve out our little civilizations. As far as the earth is concerned, we and our empires are just a flash in the pan.
There is one little three-second clip on the Disney Earth preview that shows three or four dolphins peeking out through the surface of glassy, still water with an enormous blue-white iceberg in the background. It is crushingly beautiful. It strikes me that the amazing thing about this film is that it involves no sets, no actors, and no special effects. It’s all real. It all already exists, and scenes like this one occur every few seconds, completely unnoticed, all over the world. This film looks at the family relationships between animals, how they care for each other, experience distress on one another’s behalf, and, it would seem, even love each other. It is beauty that moves us and changes us, although it is just the everyday world of the critters on screen.
So now: does this mean that our distant, authoritative relationship with the animals we’re watching translates to the far away, higher beings who watch us? If we lived in some other realm and got to see shots of footage of the human world, would we still be moved and changed by the beauty we beheld? I think so. This perfectly describes the root of my desire to make movies. Movies enable us to look at our own world from a “distance” – when it’s projected onto a screen, somehow the mundane things we look at every single day of our lives become captivating and powerful. This is the special gift all artists give the world; they extract, package, and present scenes from our own world to remind us of the beauty that surrounds us every time we draw a breath.
2 comments:
A) You are an incredible writer B) The late Michael Crichton came to my high school to speak in November of 2003. His views on global warming and the Earth were addressed the. He made me laugh when a geeky impassioned 17 year-old boy in assembly attacked his politically conservative views on global warming. Crichton effectively said that to think that we, as the human race, could in any way tarnish the planet was the most pompous thing he had ever heard. He made more of a pyschological response than scientific but I have shared the same reaction since the day I heard it. We are just a blip on the radar...
so powerful. thank you for sharing.
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