The Human Fantasy in the Mirror of Discworld
by Liv | Published on July 24th, 2009, 9:07 pm | Arts
Had the opportunity to watch SkyOne's Terry Pratchetts's Hogfather a truly remarkable fantasy film based on the book. It's really difficult to describe this movie. It's really about humans beliefs, false and true- religion and fairy tales all rolled into one. It a mind-juggling concept of a new reality called Discworld, a "flat-earth-like" world floating through the universe on the backs of elephants upon a giant turtle. See what I mean. The one Liners are worth a million bucks, and I capped one of my favorite monologues from the piece, above.
Death: Humans need fantasy to *be* human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape.
Susan: With tooth fairies? Hogfathers?
Dea
th: Yes. As practice, you have to start out learning to believe the little lies.
Susan: So we can believe the big ones?
Death: Yes. Justice, mercy, duty. That sort of thing.
Susan: They're not the same at all.
Death: You think so? Then take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder, and sieve it through the finest sieve, and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy. And yet, you try to act as if there is some ideal order in the world. As if there is some, some rightness in the universe, by which it may be judged.
Susan: But people have got to believe that, or what's the point?
Death: You need to believe in things that aren't true. How else can they become?
The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head.
Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree. But people have always been dimly aware of the problems with the start of things. They wonder aloud how the snowplough driver gets to work, or how the makers of dictionaries look up the spellings of words.
This is very similar to the suggestion put forward by the Quirmian philosoper Ventrre, who said,"Possibly the gods exist, and possibly they do not. So why not believe in them in any case? If its all true you'll go to a lovely place when you die, and if it isn't then you've lost nothing right?" When he died he woke up in a circle of gods holding nasty-looking sticks and one of them said, "We're going to show you what we think of Mr Clever Dick in these parts...".
YOU MAY ASWELL KNOW THIS. DOWN IN THE DEEPEST KINGDOM OF THE SEA, WHERE THERE IS NO LIGHT, THERE LIVES A TYPE OF CREATURE WITH NO BRAIN, NO EYES AND NO MOUTH. IT DOES NOTHING BUT LIVE AND PUT FORTH PETALS OF PERFECT CRIMSON WHERE NONE ARE THERE TO SEE. IT IS NOTHING EXCEPT A TINY yes IN THE NIGHT. AND YET... IT HAS ENEMIES THAT BEAR IT A VICIOUS, UNBENDING MALICE, WHO WISH NOT ONLY FOR ITS TINY LIFE TO BE OVER BUT ALSO THAT IT HAD NEVER EXISTED. ARE YOU WITH ME SO FAR?
"Well, yes, but - "
"GOOD, NOW, IMAGINE WHAT THEY THINK OF *HUMANITY*.
Honestly it's hard to tell if Pratchett aims for you to believe in fantasy and religion or the argument is completely against. It's ambiguous at best, which should impress the religious folk while enticing the science types. That dichotomy even plays out in the Hogfather on several levels of the plot just like the author himself:
"I think I'm probably an atheist, but rather angry with God for not existing." In a 1999 interview he told Anne Gay, "I'm an atheist, at least to the extent that I don't believe in the objective existence of any big beards in the sky. That is a religious position, by the way." He has also referred to himself as a "Victorian-style" atheist, in the sense that he rejects supernaturalism but consiers himself culturally and morally Christian.