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(happy music)
What's up Wisecrack, Michael here.
I don't know about you but my favorite part about Christmas
is the forced pressure to spend money on gifts
for people I don't care about.
To bring to family gatherings that often make me consider
moving to a Desolate Research Station in Antarctica.
Not really, but one thing I do love about the holidays
is all the new movies that drop on December 25th.
So I was bummed when we only got
two new well-publicized options this year.
One was some weird parable about not wishing
for more wishes that presumably took place
in the cats extended universe and the other deals
with the life after life and pre-life
of a jazz musician named Joe.
Today I wanna take a look at the latter film, Pixar Soul.
The film clearly sets out to ask
some all important questions about the meaning of life.
So allow me to ask an equally important question.
Does the movie actually offer any smart answers?
Let's find out in this Wisecrack edition on Soul,
deep or dumb.
And there's always spoilers ahead.
But before we get into it
I wanna give a shout out to this week sponsor,
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and now back to the show.
So before we dive into the great abyss of existence,
let's do a quick recap.
Soul is the story of Joe,
a middle school music teacher in New York,
who moonlights as a jazz pianist.
His dream is to make his living performing
but he hasn't gotten his big break.
But then a former student calls
to offer him a last minute opportunity
to play with a famous saxophonist.
Joe crushes the audition and lands the gig.
- First show is at nine soundchecks at seven.
We'll see how you do.
- He's walking on sunshine
until he's walking over an open manhole.
And then he's walking
towards a non-denominational version of the pearly gates.
The rest of the film revolves
around Joseph's various attempts to get back to earth
in time for his show.
All the while he's unofficially mentoring, a soul named 22,
who's been unsuccessfully trying to earn an earth badge.
IE the right to become human for thousands of years.
- The world doesn't revolve around you 22.
- Along the way, Joe becomes a cat,
meet some cosmic hippies, dies a couple more times
and eventually overcomes some pretty big
existential obstacles.
So does Joe's journey teach us anything
about life existence or why I will always
regret giving up on my high school garage band?
Let's jump into the abyss and see.
One of the key themes of life for fledgling Souls
in the grape before, is that they need to find their spark
before they're ready to fly down to earth and become human.
For most of the film Joe equates the spark
with the sort of passion one can turn into a career,
rather than the spark you feel when you discover
a double rainbow and definitely aren't on mushrooms.
Oh my God, it's a double rainbow all the way.
Now, Joseph, kind of makes sense given our society
which places so much emphasis
on building a successful career doing what you love
but here's the question.
Does the film use Joe's obsession
to show how the logic of do what you love
and you'll never work a day in your life might be?
Well kind of stupid?
Joe's life revolves around the idea
that if you could just make his living as a musician
he would be happy.
So when he gets offered a full-time teaching job
with a salary and benefits he interprets this as a failure
rather than as an amazing opportunity
much to his mother's dismay.
- You can't eat dreams for breakfast.
- And that's why the stakes for his audition are so high.
In his mind this is a once in a lifetime opportunity
to actualize his dreams of jazz start-up.
But in a series of events
that Alanis Morissette would call ironic.
He nails the audition and then dies on his walk home.
So what does Joe learn from this?
Not much.
He carries this, do what you love philosophy into death
as he tries to help 22 find her spark
which he assumes means her passion
the thing that she should professionally pursue
and this mindset affects the way Joe sees everyone.
When he visits his barber, Dez,
he tells 22 that this guy was born to be a barber
but we quickly learned that Dez's real dream
was to be a veterinarian.
After his daughter got sick though
he needed money to take care of her
and barber school was cheaper than veterinary school.
But he has a good attitude about it
and he's found joy in the fact
that his work allows him to make a living
chatting with all types of interesting people.
- I'm happy as a clam ma man.
Not everyone can be Charles Drew
and fit in blood transfusion.
- This is a nice counter to Joe's limiting perspective,
that happiness only comes when your passion
and profession are perfectly aligned.
Of course, this suggestion seems to low key be,
settle for whatever job you can get
and find a way to be happy
which is maybe not the most inspirational.
Besides Dez didn't give up his dream
of becoming a veterinarian just because.
He did it because of extenuating
social and economic circumstances
that were completely beyond his control.
All of that aside, the damaging ramifications
of the do what you love mentality
have similarly been explored by a host of recent writers.
In her book,
"Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation"
writer Anne Helen Petersen says,
"The rhetoric of do what you love
"and you'll never work another day in your life
"is a burnout trap.
"By cloaking the labor in the language of passion,
"we're prevented from thinking of what we do
"as what it is: A job, not the entirety of our lives."
Of course, Joe stands in stark contrast to this.
His whole mission is to turn his passion into his career.
And later in the film we have some hints
that Joe has been avoiding other aspects of his life
in pursuit of that career.
- I'm telling you, Joe, you really should call Lisa again.
- [Joe] I don't really have time for relationship right now.
- In this way he's hardly an outlier.
As Miya Tokumitsu, author of "Do What You Love" rights,
"Work has held up as something that is more regulatory
"about your character than the interest you have
"or the way you care about other people
"or care for other people."
And this describes Joe's worldview to a T.
In his striving to be all he can be as a musician
he's lost sight of what actually makes life meaningful.
It's not that jazz is bad
or he needs to give up his passion,
rather that life is about so much more.
Unable to see this Joe spreads his misguided notion,
telling 22 that she needs to find a specific interest
to earn her earth badge
- Croissants, cakes, bacon could be your spark.
- Yeah
- Here he conflates the spark for life
with the passion for a career.
Of course, the film eventually proves him
and our broader cultural logic to be wrong.
- A spark isn't a soul's purpose.
Only you mentor's in your passions
your purpose is your meanings of life.
So basic.
- So pretty deep. Well, maybe.
The film's conclusion seems to suggest
that Joe realized that searching for meaning in his work
would never leave him feeling fulfilled.
Instead in reflecting on his time with 22
he realizes that much of what makes life worth living
are the people, places and things that bring us simple joy.
What's the point of landing your dream job
if you can't enjoy a lovely autumn day
or a walk around town with a friend?
Which we think means that Joe is going to be able
to head back to earth and accept his job as a teacher,
knowing that his career isn't the end all be all
for his happiness
or maybe the movie is just telling us
that we should accept our lot in life
even if our job treats us like crap
because leaves are pretty.
Which would suck.
Since we're not totally sure how to read these final moments
we're hesitant to make a conclusive call,
but since avoiding a verdict would make me a coward
and a liar.
I'll say not super deep
but also not too dumb unless we're wrong
in which case I take it all back and beg forgiveness.
Regardless, there's another way to view the movie.
Through the eyes of dead German philosophers.
See, nestled within all this do what you love business
is another simple message.
Maintaining a narrow-minded view
of what life can and should be
will lead you to miss out on lots of cool stuff.
I mean, the world is full of beautiful things
from the simple joy of a slice to the miracles of nature
to all those things combined in pizza rat only in New York.
Now this one will take some explaining
but I think the film might accidentally
be making the approximate point
of one Martin Heidegger,
philosopher and author of the criminally dense
and needlessly and wordy, "Being and Time."
Here's, Heidegger's take very condensed.
"A defining feature of our existence is thrownness"
as in, we're literally thrown into the world
with no choice or control over where we land, like this.
But you're getting pushed over the edge
by the weird line, people.
But if the connection where jazz isn't the concept
of thrownness exactly like the total confusion,
the characters experience in this colorful animation
our argument would be pretty flimsy
but rest assured I was forced to read the whole book
in a week during grad school and there's more to it.
For Heidegger, being thrown into existence
means that we don't really have a starting point.
We're just sort of there.
And because of that
our existence isn't feels kind of arbitrary.
However, being thrown into existence also gives us freedom
which is cool in all
but it also means we're responsible for our own lives.
And this mix of freedom and responsibility makes us anxious.
As we can get freaked out by all the possibilities
and retreat into ourselves, hiding from the world,
or we can open ourselves up to existence
and all the possibilities it offers.
Put simply if I were to view my surrounding,
my friends and family solely as means
to the end of furthering my jazz career
I wouldn't really get to sit down,
open up to the world and appreciate how dope trees
and chewing gum and pizza rats are.
For much of the film, 22 and Joe are closed off like this,
by viewing passion solely as means to get your earth badge
22 isn't able to experience the world in a healthy way
and see all the possibilities.
In Joe's case, a singular focus on his career
often obscures the greater beauty inherent in his life.
For Heidegger, opening and closing ourselves
off to the world has a lot to do
with what he called, moods.
Which are how we experience existence.
We can relate to it through fear, order or joy.
Something we see in 22, is she realizes
that maybe earth isn't the trash fire she thought it was.
It's gonna be a rough journey for her
when she becomes a human
and realizes that she's now more kindling
for the org shaped trash fire, we all live on.
Maybe the best case for this movie
is accidentally super philosophical is in this moment.
After Joe's gig, when he feels empty
and tells Dorothea about it.
In response, she tells a story about a young fish
who was looking for the ocean.
- The ocean says the older fish.
That's what she's in right now.
This? Says the young fish.
This is water.
What I want is the ocean.
- In a sense Joe has closed himself off from existence,
the ocean in the metaphor,
by his preoccupation with the immediate water around him.
He's limited his perspective so much
that he hasn't considered that happiness
and meaning might exist off stage.
So while it might not have been intentional,
though who knows, maybe Pixar has a full room
of dusty old German philosophy books.
This part of the film is actually pretty deep.
Joe's journey isn't just about figuring out
what sort of job he wants but rather
it's one that leads to an interrogation
about the very nature of existence.
It's heavy stuff, and while in the film,
Joe has an extra lives he inherited
from his brief stint as a cat,
philosophers like Heidegger emphasize that our lives
are finite and if we're not going to live forever
reckoning with these existential questions really matters
if we wanna live an authentic life.
So yeah, pretty, pretty deep.
Finally, let's consider a theme
that's at play throughout the whole film.
Jazz, so as 22 refers to it.
- We are jazzing.
- Haha, okay jazzing
- Rather than a mere excuse to fill the movie
with amazing music.
Jazz can be understood as a conceptual motif
that brings all thing together.
Unlike most music you might see at a concert, you know
when those existed, jazz places a strong emphasis
on improvisation, in short,
anyone who has seen a guitar solo
may have experienced musical improv
but jazz musicians famously make a point of winging it
over complicated chord changes.
Kind of like when Joe is thrown into his audition.
In this way jazz is more
like the experience of human existence than pop music.
Musicians are free to explore where the music takes them
rather than strictly following sheet music.
So when 22 refers to her experience
of being human as jazzing,
it's not just a cute misuse of a term,
but an apt analogy for existing in the world.
And of course it makes sense
that a film exploring existential themes would use jazz
as its unifying motif.
Much like how jazz is a reaction
to stuffy musical conventions.
Existentialism is a reaction
against the rigid structure of modern philosophy
and a way of thinking that prioritizes
the dynamic nature of existence over the fixed nature
of ideas and concepts.
And hey, more than one academic thinks jazz
and Heidegger form an odd Alliance.
This all brings us back to our original question.
Is Soul deep or dumb?
When the movie is down on earth
trying to teach us that it doesn't matter
if we get our dream job
as long as we learn to like make the most of it
without acknowledging the real problems
with the logic of do what you love.
It gets a little dumb.
But when we jump up to the grate before
the film has a lot to say about the anxieties inherent
to human existence.
And sheds light on the ways in which taking hold
of our freedom can be a struggle.
And by bringing it all together under the motif
of jazz improvisation, Soul has a lot to say
about how the philosophy of jazz is a really a philosophy
for the existential improvisation of life.
So final score deep-ish and absolutely worth a watch.
But what do you guys think?
Should Joe have stayed a cat forever
and taken advantage of all the sunspots in his apartment?
Let us know what you think in the comments.
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as the band plays a C minor nine.
And don't forget to ring that bell.
As always thanks for watching.
Later.
(upbeat music)