Captain
Fantastic: Living, Breathing Truth
“May
the Light bless us all, and make true our tongues,
and
truer our hearts, and truest of all our deeds.”
(Alison
Croggon, The Riddle,
p.64)
The
new movie, Captain Fantastic,
is fantastic
because it actually tells us a story our world needs to hear and see
and understand right now. And it tells it to us with beauty, grace,
wit, sorrow and keen insight. It is a story about Truth
and how we never know what that Truth
really is until we fully live it, especially when it comes up against
another's Truth.
The
cast is amazing as well. Viggo
Mortensen
is intense as Ben, the father, wholly believing in his philosophy of
our modern world. He's the old hippie, unwilling to bend to the
world. He's dedicated to enriching his children's minds and hearts
and bodies. He's a drill sargent, a college professor, a trickster
and a loving father all roled into one character. As I mentioned.
Intense.
He believes in the rightness of his truth, even when others see it
as wrong. He is a revolutionary and he is raising his kids to be
revolutionaries as well. When he holds a celebration with his kids,
it's called Noam
Chomsky's birthday.
Every time. Enough said!
The
children are all a delight: training, learning, creating, being
brave, speaking the Truth.
The oldest, Bo (George
MacKay
) is brilliant and brave and kind, and yet socially inept for an 18
year old. The two older sisters, Kielyr (Samantha
Isler )
and Vespyr (Annalise
Basso),
both redheads, look and act like sisters, and both take on the older
sister mothering role—fierce and creative and wise—very much as I
imagine the priestesses of Artemis were back in ancient Greece. The
troublemaker Rellian (Nicholas
Hamilton
) is just as smart and creative as the others, but the secret Truth
he knows is eating him up. The two youngest kids, Zaja, (Shree
Crooks
) and Nai (Charlie
Shotwell)
are still young enough to show us the rigorous standards Ben sets for
all of them, regardless of their ages or strengths. And how well
they learn and prosper, especially when life, including sex, is
explained to them matter-of-factly. Truth
is the central value of this amazing family.
And
then there is their missing mother. In a fairy tale, when the mother
or queen is dead, it indicates a lack of the feeling values of life,
the waters of life having vanished. There is something brittle about
life without the nurturing Mother's presence. And so it is in this
'off the grid' primal paradise Ben and Leslie (Trin
Miller
) created once she's gone. We discover that Leslie is being treated
for bi-polar disorder. The kids miss her but Ben is stoic about it;
she's sick. A fact is a fact is a fact... But as a astrologer, I'd
rather think that she's got some Gemini doubts going on. We find out
that she goes back and forth, changing her mind, about the rightness
of this life they've created. She gets excited and then depressed
about their life experiment. And the writer/director Matt
Ross
chose a perfect metaphor for the shadow aspect of this rigorous
lifestyle—its extreme position gives rise to its opposite.
Every
Truth has a shadow.
Too rigidly holding to our Truth
can hurt and even kill life.
When
Leslie takes her own life, Ben and the children leave their Pacific
Northwest forest home and travel down to Las Vegas (?) for the
funeral. This is the journey and the testing for both Ben and the
children. For Ben, we see that his memories of Leslie are all about
her love for him. Is this the total truth or
just part of it? For the
children, we get to see how well they deal with the world their
parents left behind. We see how they hold to their father's moral
sense of right and wrong by stealing food from a store since there's
no game off the roads to be killed and cooked. When they meet their
aunt's family, we see the depth of their education and knowledge of
life as opposed to two adolescent boys playing their video games and
being jerks. As Ben says, his children will be philosopher kings –
and queens.
But
it's when they get to the funeral that we meet their biggest
challenge. Their mother's parents. We've heard that their
grandfather, Jack (Frank
Langella
) doesn't want Ben at the funeral. So when he shows up with the
children, we expect a showdown, which Ben percipitates by reading
Leslie's will at the altar, which states she wants to be cremated and
doesn't want to be buried by the Church. He is taken out of the
church and the kids follow.
But
the surprise comes when we see the love Leslie's mother Abigail (Ann
Dowd
) has for Ben and the children. And that Jack loves them too.
That's why he's going to sue for custody of them. He's worried for
their safety. Then Rellian says he wants to stay with his
grandparents. He's the most upset over his mother's death and the
secret he's carried makes him turn against his father. The secret:
that they argued over the life they'd created for themselves and the
children. That Ben hadn't listened. And now Mom was dead.
This
is what happens when we can't see how our Truth might not be someone
else's truth. Perhaps Ben couldn't compromise his truth even though
Leslie needed him to hear her. Something about their life was too
hard and Leslie couldn't sustain it. But Ben wouldn't listen.
There
is
a feeling componant
that is missing in Ben and his teaching and truth. It's only when
the family tries to kidnap Rellian back and Vespyr gets hurt that he
understands that his children are vulnerable and could be hurt by his
truth. Then he steps away and actually cries for his wife and
children. And that's when he gets everything back, even Rellian's
love. Because Love is
just as necessary as the Truth.
I
won't spoil the movie by letting you in on what happens. But I will
say that I was living in the desert when they filmed this movie
and there's one shot of the night sky that I remember quite well.
The Moon, Venus and Jupiter in Leo formed a bright triangle in the
sky in June of 2015. Look for it in the movie. It's magical! You
might also think about how we express our truth, faith and love in
the most generous and open-hearted way. Isn't that what this movie
is about?
Speaking
of this unusual configuration in the sky, I'd like to speak a bit
about how this movie resonants with what's happening in our skies at
the present moment. Once again, sychronicity comes into play. As
Above, So Below. As Within, So Without.
Whenever
we compare the connection between two planets, we talk of cycles
because of their orbits around the Sun. Since November 26, 2015
(Thanksgiving), Neptune and Saturn have been at a roughly 90* angle
to each other, in what we call a waning square. If you think in
terms of the Moon's cycle with the Sun, it is like the last quarter
Moon that rises after midnight. At this part of the cycle, we
astrologers say that we have to face a crisis in
consciousness, an important
turning point in our beliefs. We have to look at what we know and
believe and see if it's still viable. If you think of the cycle of a
plant's life, this is the time when the plant dies and drops its
seeds to be the beginning of a new cycle of life. What's important
enough to seed the future?
This
is what is happening between Neptune in Pisces and Saturn in
Sagittarius. Saturn is at its last quarter square to Neptune while
in the sign of the Truth-speaker and Truth-seeker. Sagittarius is
where we look at Cosmic Law, the foundational truths of the universe
we live in. Saturn sets limits and tests us to make us responsible
for ourselves and our choices. In Sagittarius, Saturn asks us to
stand up for our Truth.
For what we really believe
in. Of course, it is only
our truth, perhaps a
part of a larger Truth,
so the test is how we use that truth
to shape our lives.
Neptune
in Pisces invites us into the world of Spirit and the Creative
Imagination. On one hand, it takes us deep into the Collective
Unconscious, those aspects of collective Life that our culture
rejects and ignores, while on the other hand it invites us into the
storehouse of Life, the repository of life experiences here on Earth,
the Anima Mundi or World Soul.
The
aspect between these two planets calls for some kind of action—the
action of conscious choice. We can fall into delusions and illusion
and martyrdom
(Neptune in Pisces) about our beliefs
and our truth (Saturn in
Sagittarius) or we can open ourselves to new possibilities that our
imagination shows us (Neptune again) and find ways to integrate this
new awareness and possibility into our belief system (Saturn).
That's what Ben ultimately does. He takes in both sides of the story
and finds a new balance so the kids get to be both brilliant and
socially adept. He does this by bringing in the feminine feelings
that were missing before. He
listened to his children and saw their needs.
This
face-off between Neptune and Saturn is about our apparent reality vs.
our true reality. The question is, 'What is true and what
is false?', not just about
American politicians but about our own lives. Sometimes we hold onto
our truth without thought of real-life ramifications, like Ben does.
Sometimes we can look at our truth and let our imagination take us to
new places and new visions of that truth. Just like Ben does. The
lesson of this Saturn/Neptune square is to value both realities and
find the transcendent third way that Jung spoke about. It's about
finding the balance.
This
month of August will bring us face to face with the challenge of this
Saturn/ Neptune square, as Mercury, Venus and Mars all come into
contact with these energies.
How will our minds (Mercury),
our hearts (Venus)
and our actions (Mars)
address our Truth?
These planets met for a 2nd
time on June 17th
and will meet for the 3rd
and last time on September 10, 2016. We are faced
with the cosmic task of finding and owning our Truth, because
the planet is at a tipping point.
Will we make true
our tongues, and truer our hearts, and truest of all
our deeds? This story, like the
old mythic stories, can be a
guiding light for that task.
Weaving
the magical unity of Above and Below, I urge you to go out and see
this marvelous film. And then think about your own relationship to
your Truth.
From
the Bard's Grove,
Cathy
Pagano
