This evening, I had a chance to see a movie called The Greatest Showman, which stars Hugh Jackman and a bunch of other really good actors and actresses. The movie is a very interesting musical which was inspired by the life of P.T. Barnum, and it details how this person rose from being a very poorly treated boy in the lower classes to someone who lived out his dreams through the circus. For me, the movie tells a story about how in fulfilling a dream, there is a temptation to go into other dreams, which fall into the trap of losing the sense of one's innermost dream. I am saying: the dream of sustaining a family and having a home for Barnum's wife and two daughters eventually morphs into something else, namely, the need to address the demons of his past: being treated poorly by an elitist upper class whom he and his father had to serve, and trying to prove oneself to those old ghosts from the past. In the end, Barnum needs to literally and metaphorically "come home" to the people and things he cares about the most, return to the original motives for his circus, and appreciate the relationships that sustain it. One of the most poignant lines in the movie comes from actress Michelle Williams, who plays Barnum's wife, where she remarks something to the effect that being loved and cared for by a few good people is enough; trying to please everyone is impossible. That's a very good point.
I have to admit that the philosophical part of myself kept hearkening back to Rousseau's concept of amour "en soi" and "amour propre" which I described in a previous blog. In fact, this movie's love triangle does remind me of that found in Stendahls' book Red and the Black which was also somehow inspired by Rousseau's philosophy of love. One kind of love is the love that is the key to a person's heart and home; the other kind of love is the key that promises to open the hearts of the whole world. Rousseau (and decidedly this movie's producers and writers) ultimately side with the first kind of love, since it connects with the more authentic parts of our souls, and it brings out the best virtues in a person: love of friends, loved ones and family. The second is more like an impossible dream, which plays out as a wish to heal a wound that never really gets fully healed, and that is the wound of never feeling fully loved by the public or by the "greater social world" (read: upper classes, popular images, stereotypical "normal"), and it often manifests as a desire to be "respected" and accepted without the shadow of hatred or stigma. Barnum (at least in this movie anyway) needs to learn the hard way that this kind of respectability is not worth the ruin of the things that matter the most to his heart and which reflect his true loves, namely family and entertainment. They also don't allow him to be who he truly is, yet another key theme in this movie.
The other philosophical thought I had came from a Buddhist perspective. I begin to reflect that as long as Barnum doesn't realize that he is always in a dream, his desires keep proliferating. It's as though each time he becomes more successful, he is tempted to use that success to fulfill another desire. I think this is somehow the human condition, but this interpretation also makes me reflect that we are always interacting with dreams, and there is never a point where we reach the authentic "me", since these dreams and fantasies are continually changing-much like the kaleidoscopic instrument that projects light images which Barnum gives to his daughter as a birthday gift toward the beginning of the movie. Are we going to turn dreams into nightmares (the way Barnum's nemesis critic does, at least until later when he starts to respect Barnum's visions a little), or do we use dreams to uplift each other and see into our situation as fellow dreamers? This is a question that continues to recur throughout the movie, and it suggests that all dreams are tricks (or "hoodwinks") but they needn't be harmful ones as long as they are benefiting people and making their lives happier and healthier.
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