Feeding our spirituality with fantasy films

“The creative process shrivels in the absence of continual dialogue with the soul. And creativity is what makes life worth living.”

That quote by Marion Woodman, a mythopoetic author and Jungian analyst, is from the page Spirituality.

One of the reasons films like “The Golden Compass,” “Beowulf,” the “Lord of the Rings” and “Harry Potter” films, and “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” can be so emotionally resonant and powerful is they effectively tap into spiritual, as well as political issues.

Quoted in the article Fantasy films? There’s truth in there too, by Sam Adams, Los Angeles Times Dec 10, 2007, “Golden Compass” writer-director Chris Weitz, who adapted the film’s screenplay from Philip Pullman’s novel, said “One’s always tempted to go the rather stock route of saying it’s escapist fare, and we really need that now.

“But if you look at ‘Lord of the Rings’ or ‘His Dark Materials,’ they’re not really escapist inasmuch as they deal, at least in analogy, with some of the things that are going on in politics and society.”

Guillermo del Toro, writer and director of “Pan’s Labyrinth,” says fantasy films are inextricably bound up with spiritual issues, no matter how hard filmmakers may try to submerge them. “In the same way that no movie can be nonpolitical, these genre movies cannot avoid being somewhat spiritual. They can be a crass, failed exercise in spirituality. But no matter how much they try to avoid it, they are tackling subjects . . . rooted in spirituality.”

The article adds, In a world dominated by rationality, Del Toro sees fantasy as the last refuge of the unknown, a place to address questions that still elude science.

“The more we get technology into our lives and the more we demystify our beliefs, the more we create a void,” he says. “As spiritual entities, we need to fill that with something, with some mythology or cosmology that allows you to believe in something beyond your next cellphone bill. . . . and the latest Nintendo game.

“I think that movies of the genre do that. They make the supernatural or the magical palatable to the supposedly jaded ‘here, now’ generation.”

[Related post: Guillermo del Toro on the power of fairytales.]

Related page: Myth & story – on which is a quote by Thomas Moore: “The soul has an absolute, unforgiving need for regular excursions into enchantment. It requires them like the body needs food and the mind needs thought. … We have yet to learn that we can’t survive without enchantment and that the loss of it is killing us.”