Moana's Mixed Messages

“I had a professor once who liked to tell his students that there were only ten different plots in all of fiction. Well, I’m here to tell you he was wrong. There is only one: who am I?”

The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)

Here be spoilers. Lots of spoilers. All the spoilers. Also, the below may not make all that much sense if you haven’t seen Moana. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

 

The word Polynesia, which is the place where Moana is set, comes from the Greek for ‘many islands’. Original.

So I’ve seen Moana in the cinema twice now, and I’d just like to make it clear before I start bombarding its worldview with criticism that I think it’s a very enjoyable film, with entertaining dialogue, gorgeous animation, and the best overall soundtrack of any Disney animated classic released this century. Still, I’m afraid that I am, nonetheless, about to start bombarding its worldview with criticism, now that I’ve had ample time to ponder it. Said ample time was more necessary than one might, perhaps, have expected, much as I’ve never been one to disdain family-friendly animated films as necessarily lacking intelligence, nuance, or depth. The trouble with Moana was that I just couldn’t work out what it was the film wanted me to buy into, as it were. It seemed to be affirming mixed messages. If I was supposed to be invested in the idea of Moana as the Chosen One (standard),¹ then where did Maui’s constant sarcastic undermining of that idea, poking metacinematic fun at the trope, fit in? If I was supposed to agree with Moana that the loss of Maui’s fishhook didn’t alter his identity, then why did the situation seem to be so different in the case of the loss of Te Fiti’s heart? Well, I had a closer look and a harder think, and the closer I looked and the harder I thought, the less, I’m sorry to say, I liked what I discerned.

The big question of the film, I think, is this: how do I know who I am? Granted, that’s not exactly a massively surprising thing for the creators of the film to have chosen as the driver of the storyline, particularly if one agrees with Peter Parker’s English teacher that no other plot exists in the entire realm of fiction.² Still, I think it’ll be worth taking a look at some of the options the film presents, and the one on which it ultimately ends up settling.

Option One: My society tells me who I am.

Moana is the daughter of the village chief. Consequently, her parents and their subjects – the sum total of everybody she knows, in fact – expect her to one day fill her father’s shoes (does he wear shoes?) as the leader of her people, and until that day comes, to dedicate herself to preparing to take on that role. The society of which Moana is a member will happily tell her who she is – their next leader, the next slab of stone on top of the mountain, duty-bound to devote herself to maintaining her people’s health and happiness. Sounds straightforward enough.

However, much as Moana recognises the value of the role of chief, she harbours a longing for a different kind of life. Specifically, she doesn’t want to stay on her island; she wants to voyage.

I know everybody on this island seems so happy on this island; everything is by design.

I know everybody on this island has a role on this island, so maybe I can roll with mine.

I can lead with pride;

I can make us strong;

I’ll be satisfied

If I play along,

But the voice inside

Sings a different song.

What is wrong with me? …

See the line where the sky meets the sea? It calls me.³

The film quickly discards the option that Moana’s society will tell her who she is. The Voice Inside has contrary ideas, and will not be silenced.

Option Two: My history tells me who I am.

After a single disastrous attempt to pilot her canoe beyond the safety of the reef, Moana declares herself ready to lay her stone on the mountain and accept her society-given identity. However, she’s clearly looking for an excuse not to do so, and her grandmother, the self-proclaimed Village Crazy Lady, is happy to provide one. She directs Moana to a hidden cave where a number of huge old boats have been left abandoned, and Moana realises that the ancestors of her people were expert navigators who used to cross the seas discovering new islands as a matter of course. Moana dashes out of the cave exclaiming, “We were voyagers!” with an enthusiasm that tips over into ludicrousness.

The apparent weight given to this option intrigued me. Whereas the expectations of Moana’s current society had been entirely dismissed from being allowed to define her identity, the film seemed to afford a greater authority to these more antiquated traditions. Moana saw the precedent set by her forebears as a justification for her own ambition. Might her heritage be the source of her identity?

I think not. Moana was looking for an excuse to follow her own desires and that was exactly what she got. The fact that her ancestors were voyagers might add weight to her argument, but it wasn’t that that fostered the Voice Inside; it only happened to chime with it at an opportune moment.

Option Three: An external higher power tells me who I am.

So the Voice Inside is proved the supreme factor over both concordant and discordant external voices – but where does the Voice Inside come from? For the better part of the film, Moana seems to understand it as the call of the ocean. The ocean chose her to restore the heart of Te Fiti, thereby saving her island from ruin, and she must obey its call, whatever anyone else says.

 

Excuse for a pretty ocean picture! This is Hawaii, apparently, so pretty close to Polynesia.

The ocean is cast in a fairly godlike role here. It’s clearly pulling the strings so that Moana might succeed in her quest – by relentlessly depositing her back on the boat when Maui attempts to throw her off it, for instance – and that’s true even when things aren’t going the way she expected: she’s none too impressed when she initially ends up shipwrecked, but as it turns out, that’s the means by which she encounters Maui, whose help she is going to need to restore Te Fiti’s heart. The ocean has a plan and has decided to use Moana as a key cog in the machine. Or so it would seem.

The point at which this option gets blown out of the water – so to speak – is the dramatic “I Am Moana” scene towards the end of the film, where Moana, having failed in her first attempt to get past the lava-monster Te Kā and been abandoned by Maui as a result, engages in the traditional Chosen-One pursuit of Rejection of the Call by giving the heart of Te Fiti back to the ocean with a demand that it choose someone else. She’s all ready to set sail for home, even when the stingray-reincarnated ghost of her grandmother (yeah, I’m not totally sure how that’s supposed to work either) shows up – but she hesitates. Her grandmother responds with a reprise of the film’s exposition song, finishing as follows:

Nothing on earth can silence the quiet voice still inside you.

And if that voice starts to whisper, “Moana, you’ve come so far,”

Moana, listen: do you know who you are?

So this is it. We’re about to get Moana’s very own answer to the big question of the story whose protagonist she is. She riffs on the previous options we’ve encountered for a bit, before concluding, as the music swells climactically:

And the call isn’t out there at all; it’s inside me.⁴

Option Four: I tell myself who I am.

The Voice Inside, Moana declares, doesn’t come from the ocean at all. Its source is her own self. She dives to retrieve the heart of Te Fiti and sets off with her determined face on to make another attempt to restore it. She doesn’t need the ocean to call her. She does what she wants.

And, on top of that, she actually starts bossing the ocean about. When she realises that Te Kā is really just what Te Fiti becomes without her heart, she orders the ocean to let the lava-monster come to her, and it duly parts. Far from being a cog in the ocean’s plan, she turns it into a cog in hers. She’s not the Chosen One because the ocean chose her, it emerges: the ocean isn’t actually the one with the agency here. Rather, she’s the Chosen One because she took hold of the role for herself. And thus, Moana doesn’t rely on her society, or her history, or an external higher power to tell her who she is. She defines herself.

But what about when we bring other characters into the equation? Before she had her I-define-myself revelation, Moana told Maui that his magic fishhook isn’t what makes him who he is, which turns out to slot quite nicely into her worldview as subsequently revealed: one’s identity should not be placed in any external factor. But then, post-revelation, she tells Te Kā,

I know your name.

They have stolen the heart from inside you,

But this does not define you.

I know who you are – who you truly are.

Who is Moana, fearless advocate of self-definition, to tell anybody else what defines him or who he truly is?⁵ And isn’t a bit jarring to claim that the fact that Te Kā’s heart has been stolen ‘does not define’ her, when it literally turned her from a benevolent, life-giving, green island into a terrifying, destructive lava-monster with a different personality and even a different name? It isn’t as if all it takes is Moana’s reminder for Te Kā to recall who she truly is and revert to that form; her heart has to be put back in its place before that happens. In other words, Te Kā doesn’t get the privilege Moana enjoys of deciding on her own identity; she requires certain external factors to align in order to be the version of herself she wants to be, namely Te Fiti. So the hero is allowed to be whoever she wants, but the villain has to be who the hero says she is. Moana, as it turns out, doesn’t really buy its own conclusion to enough of an extent to apply it to all the characters equally.

The thing is, the I-define-myself option does not, cannot really work. If Moana defines Moana, if subject and object are one and the same, who is it that’s defining whom? By the time she’s finished defining herself, she is no longer the same self who did the defining, and so she hasn’t really defined herself at all. She’s doomed to chase herself round in circles forever, never actually able to settle into an identity. How do I know who I am? Well, if I define myself, the ‘I’ who does the knowing part can never be the same one who does the being part. I can never really know who I am.

This is not a new argument, by the way. It has all been said before, by lots of people much wiser and more worthy of your attention than I am.⁶ But I thought it would be useful to discuss it with Moana as a case-study. The ‘I define myself’ conclusion is a big favourite in current fiction, so much so that I think we’ve become quite numb to it, but in Moana – lovely, harmless, family-friendly Moana that surely couldn’t contain anything unwholesome – it’s especially overt. Just listen to the soundtrack again and attend to every mention of ‘who you are’ or similar ideas. ‘I define myself’ is kind of the theme tune of our culture and we need to be able to pick it out from the noise and name it for what it is – a big fat lie.

So, much as I reckon I’ve managed to sift through Moana’s mixed messages to reveal the ideas that it in fact wants me to buy into, I certainly don’t mean to respond by blithely buying into those ideas. If we’re talking in terms of the four identity-defining possibilities the film presents, you won’t be surprised to hear that I’d consider Option Three the one to go for, although with the external higher power in question not as a peculiarly sentient body of water, but as the living God who created us, sustains us, and has every right to define who we are. How blessed we are that, if we trust in Jesus as our saviour, he defines us as righteous, as beloved, as heirs to his kingdom, indeed!⁷ The way God defines us is infinitely superior to any identity we could attempt to build for ourselves.

And, to leave you with one last thought, isn’t it rather ironic that, by embracing the ‘I define myself’ mentality that our society so enthusiastically endorses, we’re really just drifting back into the uninspiring throes of Option One; that as it turns out, to determinedly define oneself is really just to let an external influence define one after all? To follow the Voice Inside isn’t to stand out from the crowd, but to play right along to society’s tune. To follow Jesus – unashamedly, unreservedly, unswervingly – that, on the other hand, is something really distinctive.

Footnotes

¹ One can happily add Moana to the list of characters fulfilling the Chosen-One type as laid out in the Honest Trailer for Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2n9358zVHwM.

² My thanks go to a friend who is currently staying with me for mentioning the scene in question when I told her the gist of what this post was going to be about. It makes, I think, a very appropriate opening quotation indeed.

³ And here we have a happy opportunity for me to provide a link to Jonathan Young’s rather lovely cover of this particular song, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ixCu-Vcu4o, with a view to recommending his work in general: I draw particular attention to his covers of ‘The Plagues’ from The Prince of Egypt, ‘In the Dark of the Night’ from Anastasia, ‘Hellfire’ from The Hunchback of Notre Dame and ‘Mine, Mine, Mine’ from Pocahontas, but I only discovered him recently (my thanks go to the friend who recommended his channel) and so am entirely prepared to believe that there’s some amazing stuff there that I haven’t yet got round to listening to.

⁴ A clip of the scene that some thoughtful human has uploaded to YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEiSF8HpyDg.

⁵ I use the masculine pronouns here to make it clear that I’m not referring to Moana. Te Fiti/Te Kā is actually also female, as I hope is made clear elsewhere in this post.

⁶ Check out this talk by Tim Keller, for instance, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ehw87PqTwKw, at which point I must yet again offer my gratitude to the friend who recommended it to me.

⁷ I’m going to give you Romans 8 for this jazz, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans+8&version=ESVUK, because I’m a bit obsessed with Romans 8, to the point where I’m kind of suspicious of anyone who isn’t also a bit obsessed with Romans 8.

If I Should Die

“What can I say about … this person? Well, they’re dead, obviously, otherwise they’re in for a nasty shock when they wake up.”

Miranda S2 E2, ‘Before I Die’ (2010)

 

A clock shaped like a coffin - how awfully clever. Oddly, I do find myself seeking out a quite excessive number of death-related images for this blog.

On account of having spent the past few days in Lyme Regis,¹ sans laptop (but with one of my favourite people in the world, so absolutely no complaints), I found myself unable to get round to composing a proper blog post for the weekend just gone – and you know what that means, O Suitably Apprehensive Reader: poetry! The below is conceived of as essentially an address to the world from the coffin. I hope you derive some slight enjoyment from it, but if not, rest assured next week I’ll be back in prose as usual. And also rest assured that I didn’t write this poem because I think it particularly likely that I’ll be in a coffin any time very soon – although I stress heavily that one can never, ever be sure, and it’s perfectly possible that I might have keeled over on some account or other before you even finish reading this sentence² – but because that’s the sort of notion my brain has a habit of throwing at me attached to a demand that I versify it, on pain of being intolerably distracted from other thought processes until I do. Make of that state of affairs what you will.

Mourn me not

                            as the world mourns. I lie still, and still

The world lies, says, “She’s not really gone, if you will

But remember her well.” But, well,

                                                                 isn't the need

To remember me born of my absence? Indeed,

It makes bad sense to claim that the ‘me’ in your head

Is the real one, the

                                     really-gone one. World, I’m dead.

You’d confine me to memory, life as a shade

Of the past, to present me as present? You’ve played

Quite a con. Fine. But know this: the kid in the casket’s

Not buying it. No, it’s goodbye, innit?

                                                                      Ask; it’s

A reasonable question: so why so blasé?

For this reason: I’m able, no question, to say

I know whither

                              I’m gone – not the vague ‘better place’

Of your platitudes, world. You’re just guessing, no bas-

Is in anything. Anything goes! Place your bets

Where I’m gone: I guess guessing’s as good as it gets

For the spiritually

                                   dead. That’s you, world. And I died

To you years ago – not my idea, though. I’d

Have held you dear – dead you – thought existence this dim

And dismaying the best

                                             that exists, but for him

Who has life in himself, signed death’s death-warrant, and,

With no warrant save love, saved

                                                               me. I understand

This may come as a shock, world, but plot twist: I’m more

Alive where I am now, having died, than before.

Life immaculate – I’ll be forever

                                                             removed

From your wrongs and the death they entail. It’s been proved

By kept promises – none of your fairytales. Praise

To the Lamb who was slain and the Ancient of Days!³

Three days lain, endless raised, and, by grace, I’m raised too.

Mourn me not

                             as the world mourns. It hasn’t a clue.

Footnotes

¹ Though technically we were staying in Uplyme, just upriver from where Lyme Regis sits on the coast, right at the Devon/Dorset border. The accommodation we sourced was absolutely lovely and so I feel quite able to recommend it here: http://www.lymeregis.org/accommodation-browse.aspx?dms=3&pid=8118462&at=SC&townid=369.

² Adam4d is as poignant on this subject as on many others: http://adam4d.com/soon-be-dead/.

³ So there are a few allusions to Biblical material bouncing about in my little poem, but this felt like the one most in need of a reference. You’ll need Revelation 5 (especially verse 13), https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=rev+5&version=ESVUK, as well as the middle chunk of Daniel 7, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=dan+7&version=ESVUK.

Apologetics is Not the Gospel

“Witness for the defence, Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore.”

J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2003)¹

I mean, don’t get me wrong, apologetics really is all well and good.²

 

*splutters indignantly* What do you mean, you’ve seen this picture on my blog before? Just you try finding a stock photo more appropriate to adorn a post about apologetics.

I do mean that. To be able to apologise on behalf of one’s faith, in the sense of to speak in defence of it – from the Greek ἀπολογέομαι (apologéomai), meaning, you guessed it, to speak in defence – is a really useful thing. To have developed a robust logical argument in favour of the truth of the resurrection, to have thought through and wrestled with frequently-raised conundra like the problem of evil, to keep a mental list of archaeological discoveries that corroborate the claims of the Bible – that’s all great stuff. I don’t disparage it. It’s great to be able to answer the accusation that

Christians are so stupid to just believe stuff without thinking about whether it’s actually true,

without acknowledging the existence of objective facts to which any reasonable person ought to conform his or her worldview –

as if by burying our faces in a comfort blanket of blind faith, we can somehow cause what we believe to spring magically into reality –

that we would rather choose some feel-good fairytale of a religion that suits our own unjustified preconceptions

than try to work out the right way to look at the universe, in accordance with reality.

It’s great to be able to turn round and say, no, actually, I have thought about it, and I believe what I believe not in spite of the facts but because of them, and here’s a robust logical argument in favour of the truth of the resurrection and a thought-through response to the problem of evil and a list of archaeological discoveries that corroborate the claims of the Bible – any questions?

But. (You knew there was going to be a ‘but’.) But – let’s not get carried away. Because often, the accusation isn’t like that at all. It’s more along the lines that

Christians are so arrogant to think that we have some kind of monopoly on what’s actually true,

that we are far too invested in unhelpful, antiquated notions that there exist objective facts to which any reasonable person ought to conform his or her worldview –

as if truth weren’t a multifaceted, subjective thing, as if what’s true for us has to be true for everyone else as well –

and that we are cruel not to make space for others to choose whichever truth suits them best in their own situations,

and to insist instead that there is only one right way to look at the universe, in accordance with reality.

You see what I’m getting at? Postmodernism, more’s the pity, is here, and, more’s the even greater pity, doesn’t look as if she’ll be leaving any time soon, and against accusations of this second, postmodernist type, apologetics is entirely useless. Apologetics says, “Look, I have a whole bunch of reasons why such-and-such is true,” and postmodernism shoots back, “Oh, how lovely, I’m so pleased you’ve found a version of the truth that feels right for you because it matches up with your own subjective experiences. Meanwhile, I’ve found a totally different version of the truth that feels right for me because it matches up with my own subjective experiences; isn’t that lovely too?”

Here’s the thing: apologetics, however well researched, however soundly argued, is not the gospel. In fact, as I once heard a very clever and godly person point out,³ apologetics is a very subtle and easy route to outright heresy, because it seeks to render the gospel more palatable to the world – and considering that the gospel is the ultimate expression of God’s glory and the world is enslaved to unmitigated rebellion against God’s glory, attempting to make the gospel palatable to the world is very likely to result in compromise of some description. That robust logical argument in favour of the truth of resurrection is all well and good, but does it imply that you reached this conclusion by your own cleverness rather than God’s work in you? That thought-through response to the problem of evil is all well and good, but does it rob God of his sovereignty? That list of archaeological discoveries that corroborate the claims of the Bible is all well and good, but – and I think this is probably the greatest danger zone – does it ascribe greater authority to human knowledge than to the infallible word of God, such that the former is necessary to prove the latter?

So let’s not let ourselves become too fond of our clever apologetic arguments: lest, for one thing, they cause us to sweep under the carpet those doctrines that are particularly difficult to dress up in a manner that makes sense to the world; and lest, for another, our preaching of the gospel ends up being reduced to clever apologetic arguments and little or nothing else, and so becomes not really the gospel at all. The real substance of the gospel is, I might mention, really not particularly complicated. This is how Paul puts it in the fifteenth chapter of his first letter to the community of believers in Corinth:⁴

Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you – unless you believed in vain. For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.

That’s the gospel – the gospel by hearing which we received salvation in the first place, and the gospel to which we must hold fast if we are not to turn out to have believed in vain. Christ died, Christ rose; it happened exactly as God had promised it would, and it happened to save us from our sins. Postmodernism might be able to utterly demolish apologetics, but she can’t touch the gospel, because it represents the very power of God for salvation. We might need to find new ways of having these conversations, but the substance of what we are saying should never shift from what it has been since Paul and the other apostles were preaching it two thousand-odd years ago.

Apologetics really is all well and good, as one tool in the metaphorical gospel-proclamation utility belt. But it is not the gospel, and if we find ourselves treating it as such, we will find ourselves unable to preach the gospel at all.

Footnotes

¹ All right, I struggled for an opening quotation this week, and decided to run with the idea of speaking in defence, and everyone loves Dumbledore’s excessive catalogue of middle names, right?

² So I briefly agonised over whether ‘apologetics’ ought to take a singular or a plural verb, but opted to take as reliable the word of my good pal dictionary.com: http://www.dictionary.com/browse/apologetics?s=t.

³ This was while I was doing a summer not-quite-internship programme at Tyndale House, a place absolutely choc-a with very clever and godly people: http://www.tyndale.cam.ac.uk/.

⁴ I love this chapter: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+cor+15&version=ESVUK. In fact, I think I would quite like this chapter (or a goodly chunk of it) to be read at my funeral. (Because that’s the sort of thing I think about in idle moments, you know.)