Genuine optimism meaning movie#
The key insight of each movie is, whether their creators realized it or not, grounded in a growing body of scientific research, which Brody and Scott overlook. Their themes of resilience speak to each of us-and there is a reason for that. First, they fail to understand why these two strange and idiosyncratic movies, both based on novels, resonated with so many millions of people. Scott made a similar, if predictable, criticism of Life of Pi: “The novelist and the older Pi are eager … to repress the darker implications of the story, as if the presence of cruelty and senseless death might be too much for anyone to handle … Insisting on the benevolence of the universe in the way that Life of Pi does can feel more like a result of delusion or deceit than of earnest devotion.”īut these criticisms miss the point. The New Yorker ’s Richard Brody criticized Silver Linings Playbook for its sentimentality and “faith-based view of mental illness and, overall, of emotional redemption.” The New York Times’ A. Did you respond by venting, ruminating, and dwelling on the disappointment, or did you look for a faint flash of meaning through all of the darkness-a silver lining of some sort? How quickly did you bounce back-how resilient are you? Think back to the last time you experienced a loss, setback, or hardship. This questions turns out to matter a great deal if you are trying to figure out who grows after trauma and who gets swallowed up by it, a question that each movie addresses and that psychologists have been grappling with for years. “Which story do you prefer?” he asks at the end. His parallels what really happened, but is beautiful not bleak, transcendent not nihilistic. Though what really happened is terrible, Pi chooses to tell a different story. There’s more to the story than the boy and the tiger. Pi’s resilience is incredible once you realize what happens on board the lifeboat and how Pi copes with the tragedy that he witnesses and endures. And as a result I perked up and felt much better.” Pi says, “You might think I lost all hope at that point.
Lost at sea in the Pacific Ocean for 227 days -starved, desperate, and forced into a game of survival with the tiger-Pi pushes forward, even though he, like Pat, has lost everything. Pi finds himself aboard a lifeboat with a ferocious Bengal tiger in the aftermath of a shipwreck that has killed his entire family. Can’t someone say, ‘Hey let’s be positive”? “Let’s have a good ending to the story”?Īnother Best Picture nominee, Life of Pi, employs a similar device. You think he ends it there? No! She dies, Dad! I mean, the world’s hard enough as it is, guys. He survives it and he escapes to Switzerland with Catherine. And he does, he does, he survives the war after getting blown up. This whole time you’re rooting for this Hemingway guy to survive the war and to be with the woman that he loves, Catherine Barkley. When he gets to the last pages, and discovers that it ends grimly with death, he slams the book shut, throws it through a glass window, and storms into his parents’ room in the middle of the night, saying: Which is why the Hemingway novel, which is part of Nikki’s syllabus, is such a buzzkill.
This is what I believe to be true: You have to do everything you can, and if you stay positive, you have a shot at a silver lining.” For many years, psychologists, following Freud, thought that people simply needed to express their anger and anxiety-blow off some steam- to be happier.
Pat takes up a personal motto, excelsior-Latin for “ever upward.” He tells his state-appointed therapist, “I hate my illness and I want to control it. He exercises, maintains an upbeat lifestyle, and tries to better his mind by reading through the novels that his estranged wife, Nikki, a high-school English teacher, assigns her students. But he tries to put the pieces of his life back together. Home from the hospital, living under his parents’ charge, Pat has lost his wife, his job, and his house. (Bradley Cooper) has come home after an eight-month stint being treated for bipolar disorder at a psychiatric hospital, where he was sentenced to go after he nearly beat his wife’s lover to death. One of the most memorable scenes of the Oscar-nominated film Silver Linings Playbook revolves around Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, a novel that does not end well, to put it mildly.
0 kommentar(er)
