Hearing what everyone else is saying about
Soul makes me feel like I'm a crazy person. Is everyone serious? Are we watching the same movie? You're seriously telling me that this inspired
you to feel better about your life? The movie that told you to not be sad about
your life and instead just enjoy the little things? Like a fucking Hallmark card? Soul is a technical marvel of a movie, with
the most incoherent plot I have ever seen from something Pixar or Disney have put out. It is the movie equivalent of a bunch of people
yelling over one another to try to get their point across. The movie has a lot of interesting, compelling,
and even important ideas, but couldn't choose one to focus on and ended up tripping over
itself constantly and butchering its themes. The explicit message of this movie, the thing
we are supposed to take away based on the things the characters said, is:
"Feeling sad? "Have unfulfilled dreams? "Just be happier! "Then you won't be so sad." Which is of course, nonsense. Despite that, of all the Pixar movies I've
watched, which is all of them, Soul hit me the hardest by far, because this movie spoke
directly toward my generation and the difficulties I, and pretty much everyone I know who's my
age, now have as adults. We've been told our entire lives that we're
all special and that our value comes from being successful at our jobs, so that should
be our primary focus in life, and that our job can be our dream job if we just work hard
enough. There was a lot of propaganda along the lines
of, "if you love what you do, you never work a day in your life." But then we grew up and entered the adult
world, and it turns out that not only does nobody actually care about whether or not
you're doing things you care about, but your dreams are actually completely unviable, and
instead you're just going to spend the rest of your life working menial jobs so you can
pay your bills so you can afford rent and food so that you can continue to be productive
at your menial job. There's no room for dreams or passion in industry
and the real world, but we've been taught that our dreams and passions should manifest
themselves in our jobs, and that our jobs are the only things that really matter. So we're sort of just left grasping for meaning
in a world devoid of it. And Soul addresses this chronic issue directly. Joe's dream is to be a professional jazz musician,
and he disregards everything else in his life that doesn't directly support that dream. When he dies and looks back on his life, he
feels that his life was completely unfulfilling because he didn't end up becoming a jazz musician
professionally. But as the movie continues, it paints us a
picture of Joe's life that shows how fulfilling it was even without jazz. It highlights the community he is already
a part of that he's been neglecting, the positive impact he's had on people's lives as a friend
and mentor, and the value he's derived from playing jazz even when he's not playing professionally. At the same time, we see how the single-minded
focus of passion has been extremely toxic for 22, how she and even other characters
like Connie are casualties of a bad system but blame themselves for its failure. The entire first half of the movie methodically
and relentlessly provides evidence that society is fundamentally wrong in its view of fulfillment
and purpose, and that it is actively undermining the importance of community in your life. And that hit me extremely hard. Everything else in my life, all of the other
people I know, and the movies I've watched, and even the value systems society has thrust
upon me, say that my purpose exists in my job, and that alone should make me happy,
and that my dream should be my job. But soul is showing the pain that can come
from that philosophy, and the other aspects of life that people neglect as a result, things
that I have neglected as a result. The movie tore open wounds and shoved them
in my face, in many cases with scenes I have directly experienced, and seemed to promise
that it was actually going to give me a solution, or at least some guidance to this unsolvable
problem of looking for meaning in places that don't have any. But then the movie takes a hard left, and
all of a sudden Joe has everything he wants just fall into his lap, and he realizes that
his problem all along was actually that he wasn't appreciating the little things. You know, like standing on a beach once, or
seeing fireworks when he was a kid, or watching a leaf float off of a tree. His problem was just that he took small things
for granted instead of giving them more meaning. And now he's going to enjoy every minute of
his new life. And when he said that, and the movie faded
to black, I went fucking apeshit. That's what I should take away from this? "Appreciate the little things?" That's what I was missing? "Appreciate the little things" is just a really
toxic message that inherently undermines all of your problems. "The little things" can mean literally anything
in your life that is even slightly positive, which is basically everything, so you technically
always have a reason to be happy instead of sad. "Appreciate the little things" really boils
down to, "you always have a reason to feel happy, so you should always be happy, and
if you're not, it's your fault." All this does is reinforce this idea that
if you're not literally on the verge of death and you're still feeling sad, there's something
wrong with you. Our culture, or at least American culture,
and social media in general really like to imply that message, even though it's objectively
wrong. Everyone experiences sadness, even people
who have everything going for them. Sadness is a valid feeling to have, and telling
someone to just ignore that feeling because of something unrelated is deeply unhealthy
and flat out cruel. And yet, that's the message that Soul landed
on. That was the point of the entire movie. Just "appreciate the little things." And that's why I really couldn't believe the
response to Soul. The movie showed me a reflection of all of
the problems I was having in life, in some cases shoved them in my face pretty aggressively,
and then explicitly told me the solution was to just not be sad anymore. Explicitly! What am I supposed to do with that? The answer was get very angry about the movie
and feel worse about myself for a while. But eventually that passed, and over time
I've been thinking more about what I can actually take away from the movie. The first thing is that it turns out that
most people don't really pay attention too closely when they watch movies. It seems like most people who watch this movie
have their own definition of what it means to appreciate life more that is tailored to
them, and the movie's ending is vague enough that they can just interpret it however they
want and leave feeling more optimistic about their life. The second thing, that I actually think is
a lot more interesting, is that it seems like Soul didn't actually know what it wanted to
say because it was too personal to the people making it. That thing I was saying earlier about the
plot sounding like a bunch of people talking over each other might have literally been
the production process for this movie. On the one hand, the movie is trying to show
how your life can be fulfilling even if it isn't possible to achieve your dreams. But then it goes and undermines that message
by showing that you can actually achieve your dreams if you just work hard enough, but then
actually your dreams aren't even that important in the first place. And the movie tries to show the importance
of community and how you can derive fulfillment from that, but no actually it's most important
to just appreciate small things in your life that you'd normally take for granted. Meanwhile, the movie also tries to address
how adults can ruin kids' lives by not accepting who they are, and the importance of having
a supportive environment. 22's entire story is about how adults keep
having expectations for what she should like and who she should be without ever taking
into account what she thinks about everything. We also have a scene with Connie talking about
how she feels a similar thing, that she doesn't like school and feels left out constantly,
but Joe's mentorship and support has empowered her and the drummer that Joe mentored in the
past to continue to pursue a passion that they find really fulfilling. But also 22 teaches Joe that passion is overrated. I know that the main point of 22's story is
that you need to be supportive of kids and not pigeonhole them into your ideas of what
they should be, or even expect them to know what they want to be, but that doesn't really
have anything to do with Joe's story or the scenes they show of Joe's life, and that's
the lesson that he takes away from all of this. In short, it's a mess. But the thing is, all of these scenes are
individually pretty powerful. It's clear that these were all personal experiences
that the creators had in their lives that they felt more important to have in the movie. But it's also clear that they each responded
to those experiences differently and took away different lessons, so they couldn't really
agree on what the takeaway of this movie should be. There's also this funny added layer that most
of the people working at Pixar right now are probably working their dream jobs, or something
close to it. Do they all feel fulfilled by their careers,
or do they still feel like something's missing from their lives, just like Joe did in the
movie that they made? Do some of the people who made this movie
think that your singular goal should be to work at your dream job, or do some of them
think that you should accept compromises along the way? Because Soul also doesn't know what to say
about that. Joe does get to become a musician at the end
of the movie, so his hard work is validated, but there are a lot of scenes that are focused
specifically on the fact that Joe needs to be realistic and get a quote-unquote "real
job" that is financially stable. The principal gives Joe the news he's working
full-time in person and goes over all of the benefits in a lot of detail; Joe's barber talked about how he originally
wanted to be a veterinarian, but couldn't afford to go to vet school because of his
daughter; And Joe's conflict with his mom centers around
the fact that she thinks Joe needs to be able to support himself financially because he's
been relying on her to pay his bills his entire life. She also points out that Joe should be satisfied
with having a stable job that's adjacent to Jazz. So it seems like the creators of Soul couldn't
really agree on the answers to even these fundamental questions about career, because
their answers probably depend on how exactly they got to work at Pixar and how they feel
about their jobs there. All of this is to say that I understand why
Soul couldn't commit to just one theme, and why the creators couldn't decide on an ending. But that doesn't excuse the fact that they
chose the worst ending possible and that the movie was still a complete mess, because Soul
went out of its way to bring up all of these real issues everyone's having and then undermines
all of them with a toxic message that just tells you to stop caring about your problems. And honestly, I really think this movie should
have just been about how you can or need to make compromises with your dream. The fact is, 95% of people won't ever have
a chance to work at their dream job, and a lot of the time it won't even be their fault. Success doesn't just come from hard work,
there's also a lot of luck involved. You have to be lucky to even be in a position
to do what you love, and by definition very few people get to be lucky. But I think my generation in particular has
been almost brainwashed to think that our jobs can and should be our dream jobs, and
it's really bad for our mental health. So a good movie showing both that it's okay
that you aren't following your dream and showing how you can make your life more fulfilling
in other ways would be really healthy for everyone. Pixar could have had something truly special
with Soul that could have fundamentally changed the way an entire generation viewed their
lives, but they couldn't commit to any of their ideas, so they ended up getting a movie
that tries to show a lot of ideas, but ends up not really saying much about any of them.
