Film: Electric Shadows, Part I

How is the weather where you are?  My Idaho friends are watching the red line head for zero. Here in Austin, we’ve had rain but pray and dance for more. We need a drought-buster! Cold, overcast and windy.  A perfect day for a film.

Let me suggest the Chinese version of Woody Allen’s, The Purple Rose of Cairo. The Mia Farrow character, who has nothing in her life but her imagination at the local theater, literally loses herself in the film.  Finally, the Jeff Daniels character joyfully steps off the screen, walks down the aisle, takes her by the hand, and they walk out of the theater and into life.  The question Xiao Jiang raises in his first directed film, Electric Shadows, is what is the role of the imagination in our lives?

You think that is a non-question, or one you’re too busy to answer during the Christmas rush.  Really? Your children, well the children in my time, “dreamed with visions of sugar plums dancing in their heads.” Actually, I’ve never seen a sugarplum and have never bought a single plum that I could eat. Too sour. Beware of such promising fruit as apricots and plums, unless someone is lucky enough to live south enough to grow them.

Ask yourself while you’re unloading all those electronic machines just what your children are dreaming about. Forget the sugarplums. Your children want more screens, more ways to escape into a world of imagination ready-made for them. They don’t have to slip into those “free and easy, apple orchard days” Dylan Thomas, the poet writes about.

A new Apple will soon replace those “apple orchard” dreams. Your children are entering a world Aldous Huxley already built for you in 1936:  A Brave New World. The new virtual reality isn’t even your own God-endowed mind moving you to other worlds of thought. The “Feelies,” he wrote of, will take you into a tactile experience more real than their minds could ever mold.

Sad—and true.  Does the human imagination have a function beyond escape? A friend of mine said that she didn’t think I would have “survived my life as I have without my lively imagination.”

Let’s settle for her definition: Imagination enables us to survive. Of course, a twisted, corrupted imagination sends us to crime, prison and death. Or if we high center on that screen filled with impossibly half-clad women [also seen on airport paperbacks], we are simply paralyzed. Those gals are not real, anyway:  They are pixels, dots that shape an image. You’ve fallen in lust with an idol.

I plea for a richly textured religious imagination. Such a shaping force builds a possible world for me:  One that is lively, inspiring. That shaping force William Coleridge, companion to William Wordsworth and poet, said the imagination is “esemplastic”—it shapes and informs our experiences.

Faith without an imagination is a kind of vague hope—a desperate trust. Our religious life without imagination is an exercise in patience, a plodding, trekking towards something about as real as a mirage.

Last night Elder Eyring added pictures to his Christmas devotional message. What happened?  We see Mary now. Beautiful, pure, dark hair [of course, she lives in Palestine], her skin clear [but not as brown as it really was]. We see the authentic looking blue dress. We see Gabriel enveloped in light, speaking. We watch Mary journey to Elizabeth, managing her own miracle. Mary lays her head in her cousin’s lap. Two women bound together for cosmic comfort—a moment in a sand-swept village, flies buzzing, the simple bread lunch and a small glass of wine.

Wombs of destiny.