Heavy Metta Review – Kung Fu Panda

I’m pretty sure this is my new favourite movie. I watched it a couple of months ago but its genius only just descended to meet me when we rewatched the other night.

As an aside, I am an obsessive rewatcher. I’m not content until I memorize all the dialogue of a movie so I can then irritatingly repeat it at only vaguely contextually related times to my friends, who are already sick of said movie having been forced to rewatch it WITH me for the duration.

So we rewatch Kung Fu Panda and my God, it’s beautiful. Apart from the pure aesthetic satisfaction at some excellent animated mise en

scène and some kickass sound editing, I’m blown away by the fact that it’s basically a yoga class. The best kind of yoga class: a hilarious, passionate, physically challenging, heartwarming one. The kind that lets you walk away thinking, Wow, something really happened there. Only it’s a movie. An animated movie. What’s the connection, you, my edumacated blogreadership ask?

I was chatting with some of the YYCCTT immersion students when Chris was last in town and we were discussing my ambivalence towards the Bhagavad Gita. Yes, it’s true, I can really take the BG or leave it. I read it years ago and it left me actively cold, especially the bits about women. I’m on my way to a Gita intensive with John and Ram Dass and I’m hoping that in spite of their uterally-challenged status they can lay some more insights on me; after all, that’s what I paid for; I promise to be as open-minded as I can be. In the meantime, it remains opaque. It actually remains opaque in the same way that a lot of these Dramatic Princely Hero Saves The Day stories leave me cold. So much overblown language, so irrelevant to my circumstances, which are neither princely nor heroic. I have rarely been inspired by such stories. It just occurred to me that this might be why Tolkien is so inspiring to a certain segment of the population, but perhaps that’s a post for another day.

It is clear, though, that there is a huge spiritual demographic who is absolutely inflamed by these dramatic stories. These overarching narratives that detail a man’s triumph/struggles against: pick one: nature/womankind/his passions=his weaknesses/his foes/his

circumstances/his teacher/his God. I haven’t read Hermann Hesse in years but I remember it as being that sort of story, which ensured that I never read Hesse again [OMG so tedious]. And it’s always a dude. I felt similarly about the Gita, and indeed most of the kung fu opus my Dad would watch when he was into karate, and I felt similarly about Moby Dick [incredibly tedious]; I felt similarly about Into The Wild [dude, grow up] and Thoreau [dude, ur mom does ur laundry and cooks ur dinner] and Paulo Coehlo’s The Alchemist, where he leaves overly romantic chicks drowning in the wake of a passionate traveller [dude, at least give them ur number] only to end up back where he started [BORING]. My fave authors are usually male, lest ye confuse me for one of those hairy-legged man-hating feminists; I am a hairy-legged man-loving feminist.

I’m still more enamoured with the kinds of stories that talk about day to day life; that is, the picayune details that never make the pages of Steppenwolf cause dude is too into his visualizing his ideal woman to do the dishes. How do we cope with life, REAL life, with all its mundane steps? That always seemed like way more of a problem than dealing with these engineered faux-ethical crises. It’s so princely-heroic dudely to invent a fake problem and then gnash your teeth and rend your garments trying to solve it, instead of addressing the problems that are already there

So KFP begins with the most grandiose tale. Legend tells of a legendary warrior, whose exploits are the stuff of legend! Much grandiose buttkickery ensues in the initial dream sequence, whereupon our hero awakes to find himself merely the son/employee of the local noodle shop. And for him it’s a comedown, but for us civilians, we think: shoot, that noodle shop is like MY work. Panda’s desire to snack is my desire to snack. His weird relationship with his seemingly adoptive parent is our weird relationship with our seemingly adoptive parents.

[SPOILERS!]. Panda [hereafter known by his name, as a radical change of pace, "Po"] eventually comes to actualize his dream. Only instead of all the fancy talk and elaborate animation, it’s very straight-ahead, and he tells the truth the whole time; for the most part he snacks when he wants to and sleeps when he’s tired, and his teacher motivates him in a way that is relevant instead of all this ivory-tower/Jade Palace hoo ha. So his path is to the stuff of *LeGenD*, but his path is very mundane.

All right, Sjanz, what’s your point? We hold these truths to be self-evident, this contrast and these powerful dynamics between dream and reality. My point is that I delight in Po’s triumphant realization of his legendary dream, but more so in the context of his day-to-day life: his cooking for his fellow students, his relationship with his father, and most importantly his pursuit of his identity and truth. So when I read the Gita, I hear it as the overblown, farcical cliches of KFP’s intro. Yet, it is in fact the truth of Po’s story. He does execute the legendary legends of legend.

Maybe it is the contrast between the two that gives the stories their rub, and maybe that is why the Gita lacks depth for me: because I lack the context of the Mahabharata that surrounds it, and from a critical perspective, the mundane details of life at the time the Gita was written were so overwhelming as to be irrelevant in a literary sense. One of my first blog posts was about how I related more to Peyton Manning than Tom Brady, because Tom Brady as the victorious princely hero, well, we expected that guy to win…Peyton Manning a.k.a. Joe Yoga was a sleeper hit. I am never surprised that Arjuna sorts his act out. The odds are stacked in his favour, and I have yet to be convinced of the alternative pathetic fallacy: that his own manufactured doubts are equivalent to his circumstances. We’ll see what John and Ram have to say. Will report back.

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