I'm going to rant for a second about the "ambiguous ending" of Soul

It is absolutely necessary that it be ambiguous and that we not be given any more information than we're given

If the point of the story is there are no right choices then the filmmakers can't still pick one

This is most obviously true for 22's fate - does she become a man or a woman or an enby, does she become a brilliant musician or someone who hums happily with the radio but can't carry a tune, does she become a famous celebrity or a nobody who lives with her cats

This is why the ending Pete Docter said they workshopped where one day in the future Joe meets 22 again as a white lady who looks and sounds like Tina Fey and wants music lessons is wrong wrong wrong

The whole point - ANY life is worthwhile, she could be ANYONE - is gone

But it's even true for the more mundane question of what Joe does with his life

Does he take the teaching job or does he keep on playing with the band

A lot of people feel very strongly that one or the other of these answers is "correct" but I think they're misguided

The point of the movie is the answer to this question, in and of itself, is not important

Not the way they think it is

Joe and his mom, caught up in the fears and passions of mortal life, think these choices are what make a life worthwhile or worthless

The point is they can't

That was the delusion that made Joe so unhappy, one that ironically he SHARED with his mother that was what made the conflict with her so painful

The idea that a life of failed auditions and trying for a dream that never happens is a "wasted" life

That Joe has, one way or another, "wasted" his time until now he's in his mid-40s and still an unmarried poor struggling nobody

Joe thinks the only way to redeem his life is to get the brass ring

He is desperate to have that one night of success to "pay off" his worthless past

His mom thinks the same thing from a different perspective

She thinks he's never going to get the brass ring, it's a pipe dream, chasing sunk costs

Which means he's lost out on all the stuff he could've had with a normal life - money in the bank, a nice place, a wife and kids

But they agree that he needs some kind of redemption, some kind of big change

That the life he's been living now is terrible, it's shit, it's pitiful and painful that he's 45 now and this tiny lonely apartment is all he's made of himself

And the whole journey of the movie is understanding that this is wrong, that this is what Buddhists call dukkha, it is a wrong way of thinking

22's lesson to Joe was that the life he'd already lived was beautiful, precious, so wonderful she couldn't bear to leave it

ALL of it

Every slice of pizza, every surprisingly decent guitar player on the subway, every beam of sunlight and cool breeze, every maple seed spiraling down to the sidewalk

Both sides of it

When Joe telescopes his life into biographical chapters in his Hall of You, reducing it to what each part "meant"

"And this is me teaching middle school band to a bunch of bored kids"

"And this is me hustling for gigs and striking out for 20 years"

The incredible violence our brains do to reality constantly with this aggressive compression

Twenty years of life distilled down to a yes or no question, "Well did you get the thing in the end"

Can you really say that all those years teaching were garbage, that it was never fun or funny wrangling these dumb kids to try to stay in the same key for 10 minutes at a time, that there were never surprising moments of grace like Connie's solo

But it's true of the other side of it too

WAS none of the auditioning or gigging worth it? Should he have just hung it up after the first ten times he was told no?

I mean yeah in real life as a human being I have to agree auditioning is shitty and can't help but be shitty

And being told no again and again about something you desperately want to do - your "spark" - sucks ass and really hurts and is depressing as hell

But the people who survive doing it manage to bracket that off, keep it at bay

An audition is still a performance

You get to go out there and you get to do the thing, even if it's just for a bored audience of one guy with a clipboard, or even if you get the gig and it turns out to be an audience of twenty drunk people in a basement

The irony of the movie is that he gets in "the Zone" and has his moment of pure transcendence *during the audition*

And when he gets the dream gig, and everything goes well and he hits every note and everyone congratulates him on how awesome he did, his feet stay firmly on earth

(I have had exactly this experience

Feeling a sudden lightning bolt go off just reading sides for an audition, getting cast, doing the show, being praised a lot for how well the show went, and yet never again feeling that connection with the same intensity as that first read)

(I've had many more experiences having a really great audition and not getting the role, of course, and I'd like to say I'm a centered enough individual I can appreciate the joy of just getting to do the audition anyway

I'm not, but it's a goal to aspire to)

Hell

The one moment that really, really got me in the epiphany montage was the slice of pecan pie

The detail they put into that thing, the thickness and texture of it, your mouth watering as you see his fork dig into it anticipating that first bite

And then you get that one cut to show the context (that thing our brains always do to ruin everything if you let them, give context)

Alone, in a booth in a diner in the middle of the night, hunched over, face dull and blank

You instantly know why he bought this piece of pie and what the overall situation is

This is one of his endless cascade of rejections

This is after he lost a gig he'd been really pinning his hopes on, and rather than go home he told himself he'd get some pie to "treat himself"

To an outside observer viewing it with "context" it's sad as fuck, everything about the memory surrounding this piece of pie is pitiful and painful

Joe, in the moment, clearly was not enjoying himself

In his Hall of You this moment just got buried in the twenty years of failure

And yet no matter how much your brain tries to hurt you, your body has a way of fighting back

As 22 learned when she briefly inhabited it

The real Joe obviously thinks of his relationship with food as weakness but 22 doesn't care because it all tastes so damn good

However many years have passed since that audition, however much that lost gig has blurred into all the other memories of failures past, that piece of pie is still there

The look of it, the smell, the taste more real than anything else from that day

And think, if he'd never gone out for that audition and he'd never failed at it he'd never have bought himself that pie

And maybe if he hadn't been hurting so bad and looking for something to take his mind off it he wouldn't have savored it so deeply, remembered every bite

(One of the best meals I remember ever eating was a direct result of a frustrated, tearful "Fuck it, I drove all the way out to fucking Columbus, I'm getting something nice before I go back")

Does the piece of pie actually "redeem" the years of failure? Is all that struggle and pain worth it for a slice of pie that cost like $4.59?

I dunno

The point seems to be that moments don't redeem or give context to or provide meaning for other moments

They just happen

A human perspective would say that the idea that treating yourself with a piece of pie makes up for years of humiliation is pathetic

But the one night you get a standing ovation on opening night absolutely *should* redeem those years and saying it doesn't is ungrateful

The problem is the soul doesn't get sparked according to the rules we set

It follows its own rules

The spark of that little self-indulgence that one lonely night kept Joe living

The *lack* of any spark after his standing ovation almost made Joe give up on life

So the point of the ending seems to me to be that it's okay whatever he does

It's okay if he closes the door on the opportunity of a lifetime and gets the steady paycheck and the simple life

It's also okay if he goes for it, fails, and stays a sad striver until the day he dies

It's even okay if he goes for it *and gets it* and finds out even after all your dreams come true life is still the same bullshit it always was and even as a famous celebrity the stuff that's annoying and shitty about performing is still there and the void never really fills

(Discovering that if you fundamentally weren't okay before, millions of dollars and a Grammy Award and crowds of shrieking fans will not make you okay is why we find so many famous people ODing in their bathtubs)

Whichever path he takes, whatever his spark for the next ten years turns out to be, is fine

As long as he's being kind to himself and the people around him

Poor is okay, rich is okay, famous is okay, obscure is okay, loser is okay, winner is okay

There'll always be more pie