LIFE AS A HOUSE
(2001, 126 minutes, R)

Its title doesn't leave us guessing about the general purpose of this film. Obviously, the story reflects the metaphor that life is like a house. But what kind of house? The answer is revealed in the film--it's a house that the individual is responsible for constructing out of Spirit-supplied materials.

Two apropos biblical quotations come immediately to mind:
"Set thine house in order." II Kings 20:1
"Except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it." Psalms 127:1

The first thought makes our responsibility as builders clear, and the second quote suggests that unless we are consciously co-creating with God energy, what we build won't be worth anything in the long run, in the Big Picture.

What is the first thing that must be done to build a "life house" properly? A person must become aware at a deep level of what it means to live a truly worthwhile, meaningful life--namely, knowing the spiritual unity of all life and sharing unconditional love. How does one become aware? The movie gives one example.

In the film, written by Mark Andrus, George (Kevin Kline) has been working in an architectural office for twenty years. The work has not been soul-satisfying, and when he is fired, George admits, "I hate this job." Outside of his job, George's life also is less than satisfying. He is divorced, but still loves his remarried wife, Robin (Kristin Scott Thomas), and he is estranged from their teenage son, Sam (Hayden Christensen). The mental, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of George's house are in shambles. Physically, too, George's house is falling apart: he is diagnosed with cancer and given only three or four months to live. The shock of losing his job and the diagnosis, however, spur George to change his consciousness and to think about what is truly important to him. Often, as in George's case, it takes a shock or a tragedy to get us to reevaluate life. George realizes that what he most wants is to fulfill a lifelong dream of building a new house on his Pacific Ocean-front property, to let Robin know the depth of his feelings for her, and to help and love his son.

George is figuratively and literally setting his house in order. And he is building his new house, his human life or self, with "the Lord" or the consciousness of Love.

When we are building from such a consciousness of Love, wonderful things start happening in our lives and in the lives of those whom we touch. As George works to transform himself, he helps to transform others.

After firing George, his boss tells him, "You're a miserable human being." Actually, George has been miserable for many years, even going back to his childhood and his father's successful efforts to make him feel "small." In his new awareness, however, George starts proclaiming that he is happy. George shares his own realizations in an attempt to help Sam: "I don't want you to be smaller. I want you to be happy. You're not. " You're barely alive." George knows that feeling all too well.

This story is frequently emotionally painful to watch, but it provides a lesson that out of 'bad" things that happen to us, "good" can come. "Everything happens for a reason," George says.

The wonderful joy of the film is in seeing an unhappy, unsatisfied person turn his life around by waking up to what is most important in life, so that as his earthly life draws to a close, he is proud, happy, and full of love.

"I always thought of myself as a house," George says, adding with satisfaction, "I built myself a life. I built myself a house."

Vanilla Sky
(2001, 134 minutes, R)

Visionaries like prophets aren't always appreciated in their own time and land. One character in this mesmerizing puzzle-of-a-film says, "They laughed at Jules Verne, too." Verne, of course, was the nineteenth-century French science-fiction writer who accurately predicted such inventions as airplanes, televisions, submarines, and space satellites.

While Verne was dealing with the material world and its manifestations, the writers and makers of Vanilla Sky are concerned with the inner world of reality and with the relationship between dream worlds and waking worlds. Some will no doubt laugh at the metaphysical ideas and the science-fiction plot so cleverly presented -- but remember, they laughed at the explorations of Jules Verne, too.

Vanilla Sky is director Cameron Crowe's adaptation of Alejandro Amenabar's hit Spanish film Abre Los Ojos (Open Your Eyes). Tom Cruise, who stars in the film as wealthy playboy David Aames, brought the project to Crowe. From the beginning, the film has many lines and occurrences that suggest all is not what it seems to be in David's life, and the viewer is challenged immediately to try to differentiate between so-called reality and dreams. It's no accident that the first words in the film are "Open your eyes."

"Open your eyes" is exactly what the characters, especially David whose idyllic life quickly falls apart in unsettling and logic-defying ways, and the audience are invited to do. Open our eyes about what? Life, meaning, reality, Spirit, the Big Questions that include What is real? What is illusion? Who is responsible for what is happening to us? Who is really creating life? What is the purpose of life? To what extent are we victims of the emotions of guilt, hate, shame, revenge, and love? What is happiness? Even if your eyes are only partially opened, you must be aware that the film is begging us to look for answers to all of these important questions — look for answers within the story, but more importantly within the self.

David's eyes begin to be opened when he meets Sophia (Penelope Cruz) while trying to avoid an obsessed admirer, Julie (Cameron Diaz). It soon becomes clear that reality and dreams are dangerously blurring and David's life may be outside the regular confines of space and time. What's David doing? "Living the dream, living the dream," he says. Later, "My dreams are a cruel joke. They taunt me. Even in my dreams I'm an idiot who knows he's about to wake up to reality." And then there is this exchange:

Sophia: Is this a dream?
David: Absolutely.

When a prison psychologist (Kurt Russell) asks David if he can tell the difference between dreams and reality, David replies, "I don't know what's real."

Obviously, the film is concerned with dreams -- in a major way. Clues point to interpretations of what is going on within the expanded concepts of the characters' realities and dreams. A recurring clue is advertising for a cryogenic project called Life Extension that promises "eternal life." A technician with Life Extension finally shows up to offer more reality-dream hints about what is happening: "You can take control of all of this" Everything is your creation." Another Life Extension employee asks, "What is any life if not the pursuit of a dream?"

With such observations, the film leads us to consider the mystical idea that the mind is somehow responsible for creating our reality, all levels of our reality. Is anything too far-fetched for us to create? Could we create states and worlds of dream and waking consciousness? Through science and technology and human imagination, could mortal life really be extended -- and at what price? Wow, serious issues are lurking within this sexy thriller.

Even Sophia suggests the impact of personal responsibility and the power of the mind: "Every passing minute is a chance to turn it all around." Director Crowe and star Cruise also paired on the film Jerry Maguire (1996), which is about a high-pressure sports agent who has a spiritual "breakthrough" (Jerry's words) when he realizes that meaning, not money, is most important in life.

In Vanilla Sky, Cruise's David is another Jerry Maguire learning painful lessons about what is truly meaningful in life, but David is taking the search for meaning to new, surreal heights -- or perhaps inner depths. Like the inventive animated film Waking Life, Vanilla Sky doesn't have all the answers, but it does a mind-boggling job of posing some of the important questions of life. Jules Verne was rather mind-boggling for his time, too.

Warning: Don't read past here if you haven't seen the film, but I just have to conclude the discussion with one of the most wonderful exchanges in any movie. The conversation comes near the end and, in a humorously understated way, sums up all the intense frustration and dreamy confusion of the characters -- and the audience:

David: I'm frozen and you're dead and I love you.
Sophia: It's a problem.

Waking Life
(2001, 99 minutes, R)

"The ongoing WOW! is happening right now," exclaims a psychedelic man in this amazingly surreal, insightful, intelligent, questioning film. The film itself is a "WOW!" -- a revolutionary vehicle for examining the meaning of life and ultimate Truth, whatever it is, that is eerily realistic and amusingly comic book-like. Through a new technique that involves filming live actors and then animating them, Waking Life not only captures our known reality but also revels in abstract thought and conversations about the nature of reality.

The plot is deceptively simple -- as deceptively simple perhaps as reality itself? -- but the structure opens up ideas and topics that are certainly not simplistic, at least to the human mind. The film, directed by Richard Linklater and written by him and members of the cast, follows one unnamed young man (played by Wiley Wiggins) possibly stuck in a dream in which he encounters an engaging variety of people with all sorts of opinions about life, spirituality, metaphysics, quantum physics, psychology, morals, and society.

What the film has to say about these topics is another "WOW!" -- a virtual buffet feast of ideas rapidly served but not necessarily carefully prepared. That is, the characters' thoughts are sometimes reasoned and articulately presented, but sometimes scattered and spontaneous, off the top of their heads. Some ideas are rough, wild conjecture, and startling, from characters equally wild and startling (such as the man who sets himself afire "to let my own lack of a voice be heard"); these ideas can be difficult to digest. Other ideas seem seasoned and settling, from characters who obviously have contemplated much; these seem naturally pleasing at a gut level.

The really big "WOW!" is just having all these fascinating people wondering about life for an hour and a half and offering observations on important ideas basic to who we are and what we are doing on this planet. Like most of us, the characters don't claim to have everything figured out or to have all the answers. But it is enough -- a big enough -- that they have questioning minds and the desire to think about life itself. It's enough that they care about the Big Questions and not just the mundane world of matter, money, politics, and sexual relations. Waking Life has the potential to jumpstart people to think more for themselves about the meaning of existence.

Here are some of the most intriguing "WOW!" explorations which the film artfully presents about what could be termed the waking life of our dreams:

"Your life is yours to create."
"When we communicate with one another and we feel that we have connected and we think we're understood, I think we have a feeling of almost spiritual communion . . . I think it's what we live for."
"I believe reincarnation is just a poetic expression of what collective memory really is."
"I'd rather be a gear in a big deterministic physical machine than just some random swerving."
"Maybe I exist only in your mind."
"It's like we're all telepathically sharing our experiences."
"The quest is to be liberated from the negative, which is really our own will to nothingness " To say yes to one instant is to say yes to all of existence."
"They say that dreams are only real as long as they last. Couldn't you say the same thing about life?"
"The worst mistake that you can make is to think that you're alive when really you're asleep in life's waiting room."
History is "the playing out of subatomic particles."
"Whatever you do, don't be bored. This is absolutely the most exciting time we could have possibly hoped to be alive. And things are just starting."
"On really romantic nights of self, I go salsa dancing with my confusion."
"Doesn't it make sense that death, too, would be wrapped in dream? That after death, your conscious life would continue in what might be called a dream body?"
"It's the dream -- it's like I'm being prepared for something."
"There's only one instant, and it's right now, and it's eternity."

WOW! Think about those concepts and then see Waking Life to connect the people to the quotations and the quotations to your own waking/dreaming life.

And remember through all of your own explorations to appreciate the present and its wonders because that "ongoing WOW! is happening right now."

Raymond Teague is the author of Reel Spirit: A Guide to Movies That Inspire, Explore and Empower, from Unity House. He is an award-winning journalist, an editor of spiritual publications, a popular New Thought speaker, and a lifelong movie buff. His book is available at bookstores; on-line at amazon.com, bn.com, borders.com, and by phone at
1 (800) 669-0282.