Creativity and Bringing the Dead to Life– Night at the Museum 2

I don’t watch a lot of movies, but last night, I went to go to see “Night at the Museum 2.” I am no Roger Ebert, but I would give the movie a 5 thumbs up. As with the first “Night at the Museum,” this one was creative, exciting, hilarious, and adventuresome. And it also made me think.

The gist of the movie centers around a special golden tablet that brings the museum characters (mostly statues of famous people in history) to life at night. The first “Night at the Museum” movie took place in the New York Museum of Natural History. In the sequel, the Museum of Natural History is undergoing changes, and some of the characters that we got to meet in the first movie are being shipped out to the federal archives at the Smithsonian Institution in D.C. A few of the main attraction characters are going to stay behind in New York, along with the golden tablet. However, an impish capuchin monkey (one of the museum displays that comes to life at night) steals the golden tablet, and thus the tablet goes with the shipment to D.C. The problem is that the Federal Archives are home to many, many interesting (and not all so friendly) characters (watch out for the paintings!) that come to life in the presence of the golden tablet. The conflict arises with how to get the tablet and the shipped out characters at the Smithsonian safely back to the Museum of Natural History in New York. Larry to the rescue. And I won’t tell you how it ends, because I highly encourage you to go watch it for yourself.

But about the thought-provoking parts. At one point, whenever the characters (some power-hungry and evil and famous people from the past…Pharoah, Ivan the Terrible, and Al Capone) in the Smithsonian discovered the power of the golden tablet, one of them stated that “this tablet is powerful– it can bring the dead to life.” And the rest of the movie was about the good guys and gals trying to win the tablet, with its power of life, from the bad guys. The excitement initiated over this tablet and the fascination revolving around the power to bring the dead to life made me think of the central claim in Christianity, which is that death has been defeated by Life in the event of the crucifixion and resurrection of the God-man, Jesus. But in watching the movie, it seemed to me as though this power to come from death to life was presented in a hopeful yet unpromising way. Such a theme is OK to be the material of movies, of fantasy. It’s welcome and even splendidly exilarating there. However, I think this theme does something more…at least it did something more to me. I think seeing death overcome by life on the movie screen ignites within the moviegoers a hope that maybe the same could be true for real life. But I think that almost without fail that is as far as it goes. I don’t know how many of us, even myself, really believe that death is defeated. It’s not concretized in our lives. In the movie, we see a tangible occurence of once dead people (although not the “real” people, but statues) coming to life. In our lives, there is no such concrete occurence– we must take it in hope. Although to use the words of John Knowles, I often find this attraction to death being defeated by life to be a “hopeless joy” or an “intolerable promise,” because such hope is so beautiful that if it cannot be realized in some way, then it is the ultimate cause for despair.

Furthermore, as with every good movie that I see, I was left with a feeling of being let down once I walked out of the theater and returned home. There is something about the human spirit that is captured by great movies, literature, and artwork; and of course, there is something amazing about human creativity that can produce such novel works. Encountering these beautiful pieces of creativity always leaves me with a burning and somewhat despairing question: Why must “reality,” as we know it, be so boring? Wouldn’t reality be at least as creative as products that come from our own minds? Put in a different way, if our imagination can be so creative in movies, fantasy, and literature, why is our theology, our philosophy, our worldviews– our sense of reality– so dull? Would reality and God really be less exilarating than our movies and novels? Maybe this concern and these questions are an indication that reality is indeed not so dull. But here, I feel stuck in the box of my conditioned mindset to percieve reality. What’s “real” to us is what society says is “real”– our heritage coming from Enlightenment-based hyper rationality that enthrones the automonous human intellect within a mechanistic world. That can make for a dull worldview. A dull theology. A dull philosophy. A dull reality. Is there not more?

Cosmologists say that the cosmos is not only stranger than we can know; it is stranger than we can imagine. Wouldn’t reality, and all that feeds into our sense of it, be the same?

(Photo credit: The Film Stage.com)