Firstly, I'm sorry for the emotions, my childhood turning point evokes. The pic is an example of mine. I wasn't going to include it, but I feel like it gives a good visceral example of deep messages in movies (of course actual philosophy, and non emotionally devastating examples apply, too). I just watched a clip on a study on some elderly men, taken to a time warp hotel, and asked to pretend it was that time, and it had huge positive effects on their physical capabilities and mental capacity. And it reminded me of the power of hope, it's not just embedded in the happy ending, where everything works out ok. Or the promise of it. Hope is also the core of resilience, necessary for driving each step that carries you along the yellow brick road.
I'll share mine here, so you get an idea what I'm asking. I was devastated watching the scene above, as a kid. But also, I saw Atreus ability to keep going, not only not giving up, and therefore not sinking in a place that takes you if you do, but then also carrying the weight of the grief of his life companion. And he was now alone, realising his mortality and facing, what he is told, are impossible odds. He still keeps going. I think, to child me, there was so much power in seeing something is possible. I believed I, too, could survive anything. And even if I were alone, I could still survive anything, because that power came from inside me, no one can take that from you. "Don't let the darkness take you" the darkness is an external force. It wants to creep in and convince you to buy it's snake oils.
There is so much power in convincing people the "darkness" is inevitable, there is nothing else. I see it all around me, embedded in the propaganda, convincing us not to resist, that resistance is futile. Half of the battle is in our own heads, and the brainwashing swamps we wade through, now.
What are your tools of resilience, your keys for undoing the fight or flight, all the horrifying videos around us are designed, to evoke, to keep our thinking brains detached, and only our "run hide" brains active, so we can't think, so we can't plan, so we just sink in and accept?
What's helped you get back up, when you have fallen? From whatever sources, I just feel like, maybe now is a time, it's important to share a shoulder to cope on. Or even just moved you, to an extent it changed your perspective or way of thinking?
There's a scene in Wings of Desire... but before I tell it to you, let me set the scene...
Wings of Desire is set and filmed in Berlin while it was still divided. Angels are silent observers, able to read the thoughts of its citizens.
One old man is fixated on a town square he was fond of, but has been demolished during the wall construction:
"I can't find Potsdamer Platz. Here? This can't be it. Potsdamer Platz is where the Café Josti used to be. In the afternoon I'd go there to chat and have a coffee and watch the crowd after I'd had my cigar at Löhse and Wolff, a famous tobacconist, right around here. So this can't be Potsdamer Platz."
As I get older and more landmarks slip away, this resonates even stronger.
"The Lotus Card-Room? What a great place that was... people had been going there, oh, almost a hundred years. And that bar! Brought around Cape Horn they say, such a marvelous place. Bought by a developer and torn down for a hotel that never got funded."
(the bar survived)