Persistence of Vision

Now I'm thinking I should've put idea # 2 above idea # 1 in the last post, just so anyone could have a chance to notice and comment on it.

(I do rather want comments as it is from the other perspectives on the dance thing, too... Gah.)

Finally saw Corpse Bride: Beautiful, and the right amount of morbid. (The moment with the living little boy and the dead is so perfectly right.) I have a version or two of the original Jewish Folk tale that inspired it, but isn't the movie -- and not in the Disney cleaning up the story way so much as simply being another story, the way my Snow White story has so very little to do with Snow White. (In the folk tale, the young man never does come around to liking the corpse, and the whole thing is resolved by a Rabbi finding the right points of doctrine to annull it.)

Funny thing about animation of any kind. When I'm watching a live action movie, I may believe in the character for the length of the movie, but afterwards, I'm fully aware of the actor as his/her own entity. I discuss the character if I'm dealing with story or plot elements or the like. But I'll discuss the appearance and convincingness of the actor. And that's as it should be.

In animation, most of the time, I can't even remember without effort who the heck the actor was, and I almost never discuss their performance. (The exception is Eddie Murphy, who for some reason is especially good at breaking the illusion. This does kind of work in the Shreks, where the broken fairy tale landscape allows for it and even works with it - but it darn near killed Mulan.) Even in my pending Disney review, the voice actors get no mention by name.

I also found myself thinking a little about the whole afterlife concept.

Religiously, I'm not quite sure what I believe about 'after death'. It's the one part of Christianity that's the biggest sticking point. I can believe in Jesus, in its basic moralities (although obviously not some of the interpretations real people have made of the abstracts).

I can't believe in Eternal Hell. Some of it is that question of who a merciful god would put in Hell for Eternity, rather than dropping into Purgatory (I have no trouble with believing in really really long purgatory, or the Hell of some forms of Buddhism, where after a certain length of stay, one gets back on the wheel of life...). Mostly it's Eternity that bothers me, though eternal heaven is easier to believe in, conceptually.

At one point I wrote out an argument for reincarnation for a class debate that almost convinced me, but that idea has its own problems in sheer mathematics.

The one thing I've always believed is that death isn't the end; I don't know what's after, but nothing at all is almost as hard for me to conceive as Eternity. I feel too much connection with things.

But, aside from the mouldering (and the perfectly alive spiders and ravens who seemed to be able to pass between worlds without issue), there was something in the scene depicted within the movie that I kind of like.

... basically, it's another version of "Hell is other people". Except so is Heaven. What you get down there is so directly linked to what you did up here; so the folk who liked their work work, they drink and rest, and they find it basically okay to be where they are, dead.

The villains have to face the people they killed, they stole from, etc. So the hell part is having to face that down. I might have been reading too much into some things there (It's not exactly a theologically deep movie, any more than these are deep thoughts), but it did seem as if the dead too, had got a few answers on the way to death about who did what to them.

I don't know if it would work on a true sociopath, unless part of death is becoming aware that all those people you killed were real, because hey, here they are again.

Anyhow, I thought it was a cute idea. Not sold on it, or anything, but hey, the more images of possible afterlives I see, the more likely it is I'll ever decide which guesses to believe.

Persistence of Vision

Now I'm thinking I should've put idea # 2 above idea # 1 in the last post, just so anyone could have a chance to notice and comment on it.

(I do rather want comments as it is from the other perspectives on the dance thing, too... Gah.)

Finally saw Corpse Bride: Beautiful, and the right amount of morbid. (The moment with the living little boy and the dead is so perfectly right.) I have a version or two of the original Jewish Folk tale that inspired it, but isn't the movie -- and not in the Disney cleaning up the story way so much as simply being another story, the way my Snow White story has so very little to do with Snow White. (In the folk tale, the young man never does come around to liking the corpse, and the whole thing is resolved by a Rabbi finding the right points of doctrine to annull it.)

Funny thing about animation of any kind. When I'm watching a live action movie, I may believe in the character for the length of the movie, but afterwards, I'm fully aware of the actor as his/her own entity. I discuss the character if I'm dealing with story or plot elements or the like. But I'll discuss the appearance and convincingness of the actor. And that's as it should be.

In animation, most of the time, I can't even remember without effort who the heck the actor was, and I almost never discuss their performance. (The exception is Eddie Murphy, who for some reason is especially good at breaking the illusion. This does kind of work in the Shreks, where the broken fairy tale landscape allows for it and even works with it - but it darn near killed Mulan.) Even in my pending Disney review, the voice actors get no mention by name.

I also found myself thinking a little about the whole afterlife concept.

Religiously, I'm not quite sure what I believe about 'after death'. It's the one part of Christianity that's the biggest sticking point. I can believe in Jesus, in its basic moralities (although obviously not some of the interpretations real people have made of the abstracts).

I can't believe in Eternal Hell. Some of it is that question of who a merciful god would put in Hell for Eternity, rather than dropping into Purgatory (I have no trouble with believing in really really long purgatory, or the Hell of some forms of Buddhism, where after a certain length of stay, one gets back on the wheel of life...). Mostly it's Eternity that bothers me, though eternal heaven is easier to believe in, conceptually.

At one point I wrote out an argument for reincarnation for a class debate that almost convinced me, but that idea has its own problems in sheer mathematics.

The one thing I've always believed is that death isn't the end; I don't know what's after, but nothing at all is almost as hard for me to conceive as Eternity. I feel too much connection with things.

But, aside from the mouldering (and the perfectly alive spiders and ravens who seemed to be able to pass between worlds without issue), there was something in the scene depicted within the movie that I kind of like.

... basically, it's another version of "Hell is other people". Except so is Heaven. What you get down there is so directly linked to what you did up here; so the folk who liked their work work, they drink and rest, and they find it basically okay to be where they are, dead.

The villains have to face the people they killed, they stole from, etc. So the hell part is having to face that down. I might have been reading too much into some things there (It's not exactly a theologically deep movie, any more than these are deep thoughts), but it did seem as if the dead too, had got a few answers on the way to death about who did what to them.

I don't know if it would work on a true sociopath, unless part of death is becoming aware that all those people you killed were real, because hey, here they are again.

Anyhow, I thought it was a cute idea. Not sold on it, or anything, but hey, the more images of possible afterlives I see, the more likely it is I'll ever decide which guesses to believe.