The Forgotten

This past weekend I went to see an excellant movie called The Forgotten starring Julianne Moore. It was a psychological suspense movie in which a mother loses a son in a plane crash; then one day no one else can remember her son ever existing, and all physical evidence of him disappears. I'd rather not reveal much about the plot, but I found the symbolism very interesting in the creepy way it resonates with this post-9/11 world we are living in; and I also found some of the events of the movie interesting to analyze in terms of my musings on consciousness and spirituality - but that could be my own idiosyncratic weirdness at play. At any rate the movie symbolically raises the same kind of question I found present in The Others with Nicole Kidman: what if reality is other than what it appears to be on the surface? What if there are deeper truths?

WARNING: I am now about to commit a spoiler! Read no further unless you've seen this movie!

There are two things I found particularly interesting. One is the way people would suddenly be sucked up into the air and gone. That reminded me of death, which is essentially just like that: one moment you're here - the next, inexplicably, you're gone forever. The other thing I really liked about this movie is the idea of powerful forces shaping our lives, memories, the physical world in ways we cannot even comprehend, for purposes which are obscure. It seemed to me that this could be a distorted apprehension of higher spiritual realities (distorted in that it is seen as being sadistic heartless manipulation, and also because it is totally dissociated rather than seen as our higher self). It also seems to me that one could see the cruel manipulation by higher forces as a sort of pathological rationality divorced from the heart - the Mean Orange Meme endowed with super-powers. Or it could just be that reading so much Wilber and Spiral Dynamics is really starting to warp my mind...