The Liberation Theme in my favorite movies

2:10 PM 10/18/10

The Liberation Theme in my favorite movies

Several years ago I noticed that my favorite movies usually had a liberation theme. Somebody has to be freed from a world or a bad situation.

Shawshank Redemption
The Matrix
What Dreams May Come
The Truman Show

Inception (I don't know if I'll buy this when it comes out on video, but I watched it two or three times in the theater)

The Polar Bear King (This is an obscure, underappreciated movie with tacky special effects. Look beyond the bad special effects and appreciate the movie itself, and the landscapes, and the beautiful music, and the cold loneliness of it with the warmth of the family and the community.)

Titanic

There are a lot more movies that I saw and enjoyed, but I never bought them on DVD or video, because I didn't like them enough to watch them a hundred times. I don't buy a lot of movies. I will probably think of more examples as soon as I post this and get offline.

Yes Man

There isn't much of the liberation theme in the Harry Potter movies, yet they are my favorite movies and I watch them again and again and have them mostly memorized. Harry Potter is liberated from his terrible family life with the Dursleys, but most of the movie isn't focused on that. You only spend a brief time at the Dursleys' place and then most of the time is spent with the theme of solving mysteries and fighting bad guys.

Fighting Bad Guys Theme:

Lord of the Rings
Harry Potter

Those are more of my favorite movies that aren't as focused on freeing somebody from a bad world and putting them into a better world. That theme does occur in these movies but it's a minor theme, not the central theme.

(Actually, now that I think about it, Harry Potter frees you from the boring muggle world and brings you to the world of magic, so the whole thing is about liberation.)

I had a few movies that were sort of 'human interest' movies that I watched a long time ago, and I don't have them on video or DVD.

Antonia's Line - I watched this in college. It's a foreign movie. It's about love and sex and family and it's mostly focused on women. I don't see much about liberating anybody from a bad situation and putting them in a better situation (although maybe that applies to the mentally disabled girl), and I don't see anyone 'fighting the bad guys,' not really. But it used to be one of my favorite movies.

Horror Movies:

I never liked horror movies very much, but for some reason, I really, really liked the Freddy Krueger Nightmare on Elm Street movies. I watched them with my best friend Rachael when we were kids. They were scary, exciting, and fascinating. Other horror movies seemed dumb and boring to me. Why would I want to watch an ordinary human being killing other ordinary human beings?

But Freddy Krueger lived in the world of dreams, and everyone was having the same dreams. There was a paranormal, supernatural mystery to solve, something psychic, something happening inside people's minds. I like movies that are psychological or psychic or mystical. Freddy Krueger wasn't just an ordinary human being. He was some kind of demon in another world, with magical powers and magical weaknesses. That made him more interesting. And anybody has the ability to go to his world and see him. All you have to do is fall asleep. It could happen to you.

I wonder what would happen if you tried to combine several different themes into one movie. Try to combine liberating someone from a bad world and setting them free in a better world, while fighting bad guys who have magical powers, in order to raise a family and fall in love and have sex and have babies, so that we can enjoy our time together with our friends and we can learn and study together and have adventures and explore amazing new things we've never seen, while also coming home to a comforting, familiar place.

That would be a long movie. It would be kind of like real life. It might take ninety years or so to finish watching the movie.