[mythistorian]

Once again, I want to stress that we need to “stick to the images,” as James Hillman would say, and try not to bring in any further hypothesis or concepts extrinsic to the film. That the Christian myth is written all over the movie, we can readily demonstrate as we have begun to do with the image of the Last Supper, where Yule, who gives the final prayer, plays the role of the Savior.

But the Christian myth is also leveraged by BASH itself, right from its initial presentation, with image of the creation of Adam from the Sistine Chapel, where God himself holds the new iphone in hand, thus positing Isherwell as an “ape” of God, all the way to the finish line, with the image of the Garden of Eden painted on the naked Golden Age that Isherwell imagined.

Letting the film speak for itself, I will keep uploading its imagery, concrete data we should be thinking with and not about. The mythological trick is to think within the film, avoiding modes of “external reflection” (Hegel), as the latter only take us closer to our own beliefs rather than what the film may be actually saying. So let us proceed with the conviction that everything we are looking for to make an argument is already contained within the film, down to its last details.

There are a couple of such key details which may reveal to us the film’s hidden optimism, ones that, in my opinion, outstrip the depressive tones of its apparent pessimism. I would call them “Easter Eggs” were they not so obviously out in the open. And yet they are consistently overlooked, together with the “happy ending” alleged by BASH’s arrival on another, even better planet—22,000 years later!

Since in my mythblast I’ve already made reference to the latter, I will in my following posts focus on these two details: 1) Randall Mindy’s final Redemption and (2) the final song, which started the credits, entitled “Second Nature,” written by Brittel and Bon Iver. And I will try to show how the latter is offered as an interpretive key for the former. For they come one after the other as kind of complementary structure.