Recently watched Finding Dory. Rambly thoughts and thorough spoilers to follow.
I watched this because of a review by Ozy a long while ago, noting that the movie is about character with a mental disability that has major affects on her. And at various key moments in the movie, she finds herself lost and alone, her mental handicap playing a major role in her predicament. And in other movies they might given her some way to… willpower through her disability, or somehow gain a superpower that makes the disability irrelevant or something.
And instead, she has to think, and figure out what skills she does have she can use to resolve her predicaments. And that this was beautiful/poignant from the standpoint of getting to see representation of characters with disabilities getting to be protagonists in a very real way.
I think the movie generally lived up to that review (with some caveats, see below). But I was also found myself looking at it through the recent “Elephant” and “Mythic” lens. This is “Self-Identify-As-An-Elephant” and “Live In Mythic Mode” The Movie.
Dory has a “rider”, maybe, but the rider can’t form longterm memories, which makes it much less obvious as the seat-of-identity.
She seems to have the ability to form system-1 impressions that gradually accumulate into familiarity, useful intuitions that help her find her way around, and the ability to form friends after prolonged exposure to them. (My understanding is that this is not a realistic depiction of humans with short term memory loss, but since the movie is about a talking fish I’m willing to cut it some slack).
Her intuition-powers strain credibility a bit. I’m also willing to cut the movie some slack here from the standpoint of “in most Everett branches, Dory dies very young, and the interesting story worth telling was about the Dory who had just enough natural skill and luck to skate by early on, and then develop S1 associations useful enough to continue surviving.
(Aside: this movie has loads of places where Jesus Christ everyone should have just died, and for some reason this was the most stressful cinematic experience I’ve had in a living memory)
The thing I found most interesting about the movie is the scene where she’s lost and alone and sad, and has to figure out what to do, and starts sharing her thought process outside, making it legible to both herself and the audience for the first time.
Recently watched Finding Dory. Rambly thoughts and thorough spoilers to follow.
I watched this because of a review by Ozy a long while ago, noting that the movie is about character with a mental disability that has major affects on her. And at various key moments in the movie, she finds herself lost and alone, her mental handicap playing a major role in her predicament. And in other movies they might given her some way to… willpower through her disability, or somehow gain a superpower that makes the disability irrelevant or something.
And instead, she has to think, and figure out what skills she does have she can use to resolve her predicaments. And that this was beautiful/poignant from the standpoint of getting to see representation of characters with disabilities getting to be protagonists in a very real way.
I think the movie generally lived up to that review (with some caveats, see below). But I was also found myself looking at it through the recent “Elephant” and “Mythic” lens. This is “Self-Identify-As-An-Elephant” and “Live In Mythic Mode” The Movie.
Dory has a “rider”, maybe, but the rider can’t form longterm memories, which makes it much less obvious as the seat-of-identity.
She seems to have the ability to form system-1 impressions that gradually accumulate into familiarity, useful intuitions that help her find her way around, and the ability to form friends after prolonged exposure to them. (My understanding is that this is not a realistic depiction of humans with short term memory loss, but since the movie is about a talking fish I’m willing to cut it some slack).
Her intuition-powers strain credibility a bit. I’m also willing to cut the movie some slack here from the standpoint of “in most Everett branches, Dory dies very young, and the interesting story worth telling was about the Dory who had just enough natural skill and luck to skate by early on, and then develop S1 associations useful enough to continue surviving.
(Aside: this movie has loads of places where Jesus Christ everyone should have just died, and for some reason this was the most stressful cinematic experience I’ve had in a living memory)
The thing I found most interesting about the movie is the scene where she’s lost and alone and sad, and has to figure out what to do, and starts sharing her thought process outside, making it legible to both herself and the audience for the first time.