Last week I wrote a blog about dancing and freedom, and this
week I couldn’t resist a few thoughts on the catchiest, most-popularest song
about freedom I’ve ever heard.
‘Let it Go’ has now
got 1.7 billion views on YouTube. People like what it has to say about freedom
it seems.
Here’s a few of the key lines on the subject:
The snow glows
white on the mountain tonight
Not a footprint to
be seen
A kingdom of
isolation,
And it looks like
I'm the queen.
… It's time to see
what I can do
To test the limits
and break through
No right, no wrong,
no rules for me: I'm free!
It’s actually a brilliantly captured snapshot of how our
culture thinks about freedom! Let’s see what I can do – no right no wrong no
rules – nothing to hold me back or tell me what to do, I’m just going to be
myself – let it go! And there is something really beautiful about that: no
constraints, no restrictions, just pure freedom to express ourselves and fulfil
our potential.
But then, you actually watch the film…
And if you have seen the film you’ll have noticed the
problem with this song. Because when Elsa sings this, what’s actually happening?
She’s running away from home, from her kingdom, and from her sister Anna to
live in an ice palace all by herself. So, is she free? Is she free because
there’s now no one to get in her way or stop her doing what she wants?
Well here’s a question, imagine that was the end of the film: “Let it go! The cold never bothered
me anyway” - she flicks her hair and walks into her ice palace and the credits
roll.
How would we feel? Would that be an uplifting story about liberation? Or
actually would it be a depressing story about isolation?
A mate of mine tweeted
ages ago with this playlist that he’d made:
And as you can see, this song was top of his list.
Do you see his point? It’s the hit single because we love
that message, but the actual story of the film says something completely
different – what makes us happy at the end, what feels meaningful and beautiful
to us as a story, is the two sisters being reconciled and coming back together!
It’s Elsa saving her people and becoming their queen rather than living for herself and by herself. And ultimately the powerful ending – ***SPOILER ALERT***
- is about Anna sacrificing herself to save her sister, not about Elsa
sacrificing her relationship with her sister to save herself.
And I think it’s really important to notice that! The
message about freedom and individuality that we hear a lot in our culture and
we love in theory – when it comes to real life or even just a full length film,
deep down we know it doesn’t work! If all freedom means is me being at the
centre, and no one getting in my way, then it’s not necessarily what we
actually want or need.
And this isn’t just something we sense in storylines, it’s
something actual psychologists have studied – there’s a psychologist called
Jean Twenge who expresses this so perfectly just in the title of her book that
you don’t even need to read it:
“Generation Me: Why Today’s Young American’s Are More
Confident, Assertive, Entitled – and More Miserable Than Ever Before”
And that’s surely just as true in the UK as in America –
self-confidence and assertiveness is drilled into us at school and in films and
songs from the minute we’re born, and yet with all our confidence that “this is
me”, with all our belief in ourselves, Generation Me is not enjoying life very
much.
Why? There’s a New York Times columnist called David Brooks
who wrote an article recently which argued that if we believe what most
inspirational speakers say about being “true to yourself” we end up with
“a
vision of life that begins with self and ends with self”
and that leads us
gradually to
“an unconscious boredom, separated from the deepest meaning of
life and the highest moral joys.”
Or we get the same thing in a bit more depth in a
mind-blowing speech written by the late David Foster Wallace, a fascinating author
and thinker. He says that
“[The] world of men and money and power hums merrily along
in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self.”
So however anxious or frustrated it makes us the marketing
executives are very keen to sell us a particular kind of freedom, the ‘Let it
Go’ kind of freedom:
“The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized
kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation.”
But he says there are different kinds of freedom that are
actually more important, and
“The really important kind of freedom involves attention and
awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and
to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.”
Interesting idea, isn’t it? And in many ways, although none
of those three writers are Christians, they’re drawing on the insight of one of
the strangest teachings of Jesus:
“For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but
whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it.” (Mark 8:35)
I think there’s a deep paradox here. It’s there in Frozen,
in all these writers and then it’s there put vividly by Jesus himself: if we
try to live for ourselves, to “save our lives”, grasp hold of them, we end up
losing our lives, wasting our lives, miserable and stressed and bored. But if
we give our lives away – if we live for someone else, if we truly care about
someone more than ourselves and we’re willing to sacrifice things for them –
that’s when we come properly alive! That sets us truly free. We have to choose:
either we lose control of our life by giving it away, or we just lose it
altogether. We can give our life away and find that we get it back transformed,
or we can try to cling on to it and watch it slip through our fingers like
sand.
And Jesus is saying that’s true on a deeper level than Foster Wallace or
Brooks or Disney even realise – that it’s true not just in our relationships
with each other but, underneath that, it’s true in our relationship with him.
Real freedom isn’t just no one getting in our way, it’s not just God not
getting in our way. And It’s not letting go of everyone else like Elsa does –
real freedom comes when we’re able to let go of ourselves.
This is great.
ReplyDelete