The award winning Three Billboards is a metaphorical movie about Christ, but you have to suspend judgment and connect the dots like Sherlock Holmes. That’s the way metaphors work: the transcendent whole—which is unconscious—is revealed to. you when you suspend belief that the movie is a story about someone other than you. All movies are metaphorically about you. You are the ghost in the movie, but our minds are conditioned to belief you are sitting in the audience watching the movie. You are not the movie.
Yet when we watch a movie and suspend the thinking mind, we experience the movie as us, but when the lights go off on the screen, we wake up to our separate self in the audience and to our movie about us in the world. So there are two movies: the one on the screen and the one you live in everyday as the character of You. These two movies appear to be disconnected.
The metaphorical finger of good movies bridge the chasm between the two movies, and you are the movie and the movie is you. BAM! This is a sudden revelation, a Eureka! or Zen Satorie when the Zen Koan is solved suddenly, spontaneously, and without effort.
For me a good movie, especially the award winning movies, are an adventure. I watch the movie with a still mind, and then I let the movie germinate . I’ve been impregnated with a metaphor. Something nags me. A voice cries out: What shall I ice? At some unknown point, the seed metaphor bursts into consciousness like the first kick of a fetus. Something is alive in me!
From then on its a matter of surrendering to this blooming bud of a metaphor that reveals the inner secret of the movie petal by petal.
Leave a Reply