Since I last checked in to Blogger I have acquired 5 viewers! What a surprise--welcome. I feel motivated to continue writing, now that I see folks are reading. It's very exciting.
What Kieran and I have been doing lots of, is watching movies on Netflix. We don't own a television machine, so we watch movies on the computer.
So...my plan is to now and again post a review of a movie that has a particularly shamanic theme. Shamanic themes in movies, if you will.
Tonight's selection is the the Spanish movie, "The Orphanage." Old-style orphanages seem to have died out sometime in the 1970's, but this movie, despite its anachronisms, plays upon the very fertile spooky possibilities of orphanages and the poignancy of neglected children. (Even though in this film, the wife is currently 37 years old, she appears to have grown up on an orphanage last decorated in 1910.)
A middle-aged couple with a young son purchase and move into an abandoned 19th century villa, with the intention of opening an exclusive center for a small group of special-needs children. The villa had formerly served as an orphanage at which the wife had grown up until she was adopted around age seven. The couple have adopted an adorable HIV-positive son, from whom they keep the knowledge that he is adopted and (possibly) terminally ill. This seven year-old has invisible friends, and begins to add more of them to his life when they move to this villa, which his parents find unsettling. Supernaturally-tinged things start to happen: spirits appear to move objects and inform the son of his situation, despite the parents' best intentions of keeping him unaware.
During an opening party for the center, the son disappears, and the parents begin a months-long search for him which involves local police searching for his body along the beach, as well as mediums who can feel the presence of unhappy children on the grounds. The medium (a fluent-in-Spanish Geraldine Chaplin!) reveals to the wife the importance of setting belief before evidence, and tells her to use her intuition to find out what happened to her son. Meanwhile, a strange former employee of the orphanage provides a logical backstory for the events which ultimately gets buried in the otherworldly elements of the story. What gripped me was the last quarter of the film.Emotionally unable to take any more weirdness, the husband leaves, and the wife asks for just two more days in which to find out what happened to their son. Making use of the medium's advice, she follows her intuition to create a shamanic/theatrical ceremony in which she calls forth the spirits of the abandoned children with whom she grew up. The movie shows better than any other, to my mind, how the wife enters a shamanic state of transcendent consciousness brought about by sustained grief, desperation, and sleeplessness, which she works with and sustains in order to contact the spirits who alone have the ability to inform her of what has happened to her child. She both enters an altered conscious state, AND makes it physical: truly, she walks between the worlds. She creates a sort of (dumb, in the traditional speechless sense) meal to call forth the missing children, and then she engages in a childhood game during which the spirits appear and lead her to to hints that reveal what has occurred in ordinary reality. She enters a sort of shamanic-metaphoric situation during which she goes underground into the cellar (a classic underworld journey) to both discover what happened to her child, and retrieve his soul.
The movie takes a Catholic turn, focusing on self-sacrifice and redemption, which I won't reveal to curious viewers. However, the film was quite interesting in how it expressed the possibility of communicating with the dead through consciously-created ceremonial ritual, and how the Spirits can reveal to us what normally remains unseen.
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