In ancient Greece, the word for the soul was psyche. It is likely related to psykhein, meaning “to breathe” or “to blow,” which may come from the Indo-European root -bhes, meaning “breath.” All of this is still with us in the idea of the divine breath that animates the flesh; in the related word “spirit”; and in the notion of inspiration—breathing life, excitement, joy into a person or a work of art.
Pixar’s new film, “Soul,” is shaped by these currents. It takes place in two worlds: the one we know, and an airy realm above that includes both the Great Beyond and the Great Before. In this upper realm, human souls are phosphorescent little blobs—half Casper, half sperm. Dead souls, on their way to the Great Beyond, stand on a transparent moving sidewalk that carries them steadily up toward a dazzling pointillist sun, which seems to be made up of them. In the Great Before, unborn souls, each given a number, bounce about through psychedelic fields of grass and soft buildings, collecting traits like “aloof” and “excitable” in the form of stickers on a badge pinned to the soul’s breast. Each new soul is assigned a “mentor,” a member of the dead, to help the soul find its “spark,” which, once discovered, fills the final slot on the badge, and confirms that the soul is ready for life on Earth. These ready souls hover around the edge of a pit, then leap and plummet through the universe like skydivers until they reach whatever body awaits them on Earth.
The souls are shuttled through this process by soul counsellors—all of them named Jerry—who are depicted as ever-changing modernist doodles, two-dimensional and translucent, the Platonic forms of Platonic forms. This twenty-first-century vision of the incorporeal is, it seems, a corporation. The Jerries carry clipboards; they hold redundant meetings and award ceremonies in a mini-auditorium. A soul counter named Terry numbers souls on an abacus and riffles through filing cabinets. Some souls find their sparks in the Hall of Everything, which resembles a giant indoor amusement park. The Great Before is also known as the You Seminar.
Meanwhile, the chaotic messiness of Earth is represented, naturally, by New York City. This is where the other meaning of the film’s title comes in: soul as in black, soul as in soul sister, soul brother, soul music—terms that originated in the jazz slang of the forties. Our hero, ostensibly, is Joe Gardner (voiced, initially, by Jamie Foxx), a jazz pianist who makes ends meet by teaching music at a public school. At the film’s opening, Joe scores the gig of his life, only to fall to his death in the gaping mouth of an open manhole. He finds himself a glowing blob with vaguely black features on the monorail to the blinding afterlife—and balks. He turns and runs, weaving through crowds of complacent souls, then slips past a membrane, plummets through a surreal laser show of dimensions, and lands in the Great Before. There, he meets Twenty-two, an unborn soul who has yet to find her spark despite thousands of years of counselling by mentors including Mother Teresa and Muhammad Ali.
Intrigued by Joe’s plight, Twenty-two takes him to yet another limbo, the place where the souls of musicians and artists float when they are “in the zone,” and where Lost Souls, encased in a black soot of depression and obsession, march in miserable circles. A group of Mystics Without Borders, their earthly bodies respectively in Berkeley, Tibet, Palawan, and New York, tune in for an hour-long weekly session here, via meditation and trance. Their souls traverse this spirit realm in a ship with tie-dye sails. The chief mystic—a hippie sign-spinning in the Village—helps Joe and Twenty-two get back to Earth in time for Joe’s life-changing jazz gig. The gag? Twenty-two’s soul lands in Joe’s body; Joe lands in the body of the therapy cat snoozing in his hospital bed.
They embark on the adventure nevertheless, hoping to swap souls in time for the show. In the meantime, Joe the cat watches Twenty-two, inhabiting his body, give his life new meaning as she experiences the ordinary glories of pepperoni pizza, a barbershop lollipop, a spool of thread, and, in the kind of low-sublime climax that Pixar has come to epitomize, the bliss of watching a tree at dusk in the autumn as a samara spins from it through the air and lands in the palm of his hand. Joe and Twenty-two, two souls on parallel journeys, are destined for the same revelation: that finding your spark doesn’t mean discovering your purpose or your vocation or the meaning of life. It means, in the parlance of contemporary mysticism that sounds so much like the attendance ritual of the classroom, being present.
The creators of “Soul,” Peter Docter and Mike Jones, experimented with different vocations for the protagonist before deciding that a musician would work better than a scientist, and a black jazz player better than a white one. As with other recent productions originated by white artists but (partially) executed by black ones—HBO’s “Watchmen” and “Lovecraft Country,” for example—the question of representation, in the writers’ room and in the final work, seems to have been fraught. How to make sure that this is how black people would really look, talk, act, feel? Docter says that he and Jones spent two years developing the character of Joe, Pixar’s first black hero, during which time they hired the playwright and screenwriter Kemp Powers for a twelve-week consultancy, later recruiting him as Pixar’s first black co-director. The company also created a “Cultural Trust” composed of Pixar’s black employees, and hired a team of cultural consultants, including Terri Lyne Carrington, Herbie Hancock, and Bradford Young.
Much of the buzz around the film has revolved around its efforts to capture African-American life accurately. Certain scenes do feel right—I suspect that they’re the ones with Powers’s fingerprint. There’s the fineness of Joe’s hefty barber, Dez (“When you’re in this chair,” he says, “you’re the boss”); there’s the gossipy warmth of the women who work for Joe’s mother, a seamstress. When Joe the (hep) cat tells Twenty-two how to hail a cab after they’ve escaped from the hospital, he says, “This would be hard even if I wasn’t wearing a hospital gown.” Yup. When he instructs Twenty-two, through the shower curtain, on how to get fresh and clean, he says, “I wouldn’t be mad if you put a little lotion on me when you’re done.” True that. The plausibility of black faces, black lives, and black personalities in these film is as welcome as Kool-Aid in a desert—refreshing, if a little saccharine.
At other times, the details of black life come to us not through the film’s black characters but, instead, through Twenty-two—or, as the film self-consciously puts it, through “a middle-aged white lady” (Tina Fey) with a voice chosen because “it annoys people.” At one point, Joe and Twenty-two consider a series of vignettes from Joe’s life, including his time as an adolescent in a rap group. Twenty-two, amused, does a series of pouting hip-hoppety moves. Later, trying to dupe a Jerry, Twenty-two fakes wanting to try break dancing to see if it’s her spark: “I think that’s gonna be my thing. Poppin’ and lockin’. Windmills.” Twenty-two’s fumbled attempts to puppeteer Joe’s body are excused as the ineptitude of any newbie soul, but they’re still played for laughs along a racial register. At Joe’s mother’s shop, Twenty-two misunderstands his instruction to kiss his aunty, planting a smooch on her mouth. At the barbershop, Twenty-two ignores his plan to stick to the script—sit in his chair, talk about jazz—and launches into a lengthy account of the mechanics of the Great Before that comes off as a tall tale about life’s mysteries. By the end of it, the staff and other customers are rapt.
Inexplicably, all of Twenty-two’s attempts at being black at first disconcert but then enchant others—including Joe, who takes Twenty-two’s innocence for granted, despite her long history of soul counselling. She means well. Twenty-two even knows how to dispatch Joe’s hater, a man named Paul, voiced by Daveed Diggs. When Paul jibes, “You’re not all that—anyone could play in a band if they wanted to,” Twenty-two replies, through Joe’s lips: “He’s just criticizing me to cover up the pain of his own failed dreams.” The barbershop audience exclaims, whistles, hoots; Paul, bruised, storms off in a huff. The idea that Twenty-two’s literalism would signify, as we say, isn’t funny; it’s laughable.
The filmmakers of “Soul” seem not to have noticed the proximity of their film’s title, and premise, to that 1986 embarrassment “Soul Man,” in which a white hero puts on a black body to learn a life lesson. There, too, simply donning black skin somehow changes one’s taste in music: the protagonist no longer likes the Beach Boys, except for “some of their funkier stuff.” There, too, a white person who has “learned what it feels like to be black” somehow absorbs that knowledge into his soul. “A part of me is black on the inside, even though I’m white on the outside,” he says.
Pixar’s “Soul” is, in fact, the latest in a long tradition of American race-transformation tales, each of which finds a pretext—a potion, a spell, a medical treatment, or simply makeup—to put a white person in a black body (or vice versa). One strand of the genre—which encompasses films like “Change of Mind,” “Watermelon Man,” and “Soul Man”—is obviously the legacy of minstrel productions like the 1927 film “The Jazz Singer.” But even recent, more ostensibly race-conscious works (see again “Watchmen” and “Lovecraft Country”) play with this theme in sometimes disturbing ways, as though unable to resist making white people the hero of blackness. The white desire to get inside black flesh is absolved as an empathy exercise. Blackface gets a moral makeover. It’s telling that, in most race-transformation tales, the ideal is presented as a white soul in a black body.
Well-meaning or no, that’s still slumming. “Soul” calls it “jazzing,” which would depress me were it not for the unwitting pun on, uh, jouissance. This erotic frisson is all over race-transformation films. (Penis size comes up a lot.) In “Soul,” prurience sneaks in around the shower curtain, the lotion, Twenty-two’s knowing comments about “someone named Lisa” whom she learns about while rummaging in Joe’s mind. The film dutifully desexualizes Joe by putting the figure of a grouchy white woman inside him. Twenty-two’s not there to try out the D; she’s there, as the film says, to walk a mile in his shoes. Yet Twenty-two, increasingly attached to sensory (if not exactly sensual) pleasures, grows fiercely possessive of the life she has accessed through his body—so much so that she tries to run off with it. “I’m in the chair!” she screeches, as she races down the street, the language she’s co-opted from the barbershop taking on a chilling, hysterical tone. Perhaps personhood is only meaningful if you can be robbed of it.
In this way, the film periodically erupts with the history of racism, of slavery—dark flashes of what Toni Morrison called “the ghost in the machine” and “the thunderous, theatrical presence of black surrogacy.” As Morrison writes in “Playing in the Dark,” the “Africanist presence” in white American cultural forms has long been “a way of contemplating chaos and civilization, desire and fear, and a mechanism for testing the problems and blessings of freedom.” So, in “Soul,” we find the soul counter hunting Joe down for messing up the count: “Gotcha!” Terry says after he lassos Joe’s soul with a set of square laser beams. A more literal net is used to try to capture Twenty-two, as well—but by then she is a Lost Soul, trapped inside a leaden, soot-black body. Whether on Earth or in the heavens, whiteness is ethereal, mindful; blackness is heavy, obsessive. Whiteness knows that the point of subway grilles is to lie on them and let the train’s wind rush up through you. Only blackness would be paranoid about the risks of such public whimsy. You might think that this is all leading to some Obamian synthesis of the two spirits. But surprise, surprise: Joe must sacrifice himself, must give up a life of jazz so that Twenty-two has a chance to “jazz” her life.
There was apparently some debate among the filmmakers about whether this was the right way to conclude a movie in 2020; in any event, they eventually chose to have the Jerries grant Joe another shot. “We’re in the business of inspiration,” one of them says as Joe prepares for the Great Beyond. “But it’s not often we find ourselves inspired. So we all decided to give you another chance. . . . What do you think you’ll do? How are you gonna spend your life?” Joe has seen the light; work isn’t everything. “I’m not sure,” he says, tepidly. “But I do know I’m going to live every minute of it.” Of a quiet life or a quiescent one? As in NBC’s “The Good Place,” the dirtbag, depressive white woman teaches the neurotic, brilliant black man how to stop fussing about ambition, cultivate gratitude for what you have, and just be. Not only does Twenty-two use Joe as a vehicle but the movie must also make the grandiose and grotesque claim that he has learned to live through her.
The most striking glimpse of Morrison’s “Africanist presence” in this film is its most seemingly subconscious. Shortly after the barbershop scene, Terry, the soul counter who is hunting for Joe, captures the wrong black man. Paul, Joe’s hater, is accidentally riven from his body and his soul is flung, for a moment, into a depthless outer space that looks like nothing so much as “the sunken place” in Jordan Peele’s “Get Out.” When Terry realizes his error, he brings Paul back into his body, and, with a dismissive “No harm, no foul,” leaves the poor man in an alley, crouched in a ball, shaking, eyes wide with horror. The film has already been playing obliquely with the idea of a Du Boisian double consciousness: Joe’s soul watching his own body taken over by Twenty-two, racial identity doubled within one entity. But this moment dabbles with the souls of black folk without truly reckoning with the kind of perversion that would rend personhood from human flesh. For a split second, the film cracks, yawns open, and shows us what it’s been working so hard to conceal: the limbo of black existence, the history of the slaveship hold, the terror of death at the hand of a mistaken cop.
Given the film’s philosophical bent, let’s try a thought experiment about it: Could “Soul” work in chromatic reverse? Could it be about a white classical musician’s body that is taken over by a grumpy black woman’s soul? What would a Great Beyond and a Great Before informed by black culture look like? Would greenish white be the right color for new souls? Would pitch-black be the right color for lost ones? Would the Beyond and the Before be on separate planes? Would soul counsellors be two-dimensional abstractions? Would Mystics Without Borders include an obeah woman or a bokor? Would people in a fugue state of flow float up to the spirit world, or would the spirits descend into them—ride them, as we say? What aesthetic possibilities would be opened up if the film played with a black cultural history of bodily possession?
The cultural assumptions on which a film is built infuse its aesthetic spirit, regardless of the finely detailed texture of its surface representation, its skin. “Soul” takes as its premise the idea that a soul, branded with a personality, might be swapped in and out of different kinds of bodies. Even if we ignore the problem that unborn souls seem already to have races and genders—it’s a kids’ movie, not Plato!—we have to swallow the still more fundamental premise that the soul is individual, is sole. This idea is built into how we generally use the word, in Standard English: He has a soul.
Black English says, He’s got soul. The most glaring artistic error in “Soul” is its misprision—its elision, really—of what soul means for black culture. The word is used to signify not just an individual unit but also an indivisible substrate, a communal energy, a vibe. For all of the creators’ efforts to thread the needle of racial representation, their desperate wish to be authentic without being stereotypical, “Soul” never utters a sentence like “She’s got soul,” never says “soul brother” or “soul sister” or “soul music.” Perhaps those terms are too antiquated, but there isn’t even a mention of the still popular “soul food”; the film’s universal delicacy is pepperoni pizza, not fried chicken, and we all know why.
One of the strangest aspects of the film is that, while Joe has a mother, a muted love interest, sweet and lazy students, and acquaintances at the barbershop, he doesn’t really have people. His epiphany, conjoined with Twenty-two’s, is a solitary one: the seed in the palm, an individual’s communion with vast nature. Similarly, each departed soul, once freed from its earthly body, shoots alone into a blur of blinding whiteness. In black American culture, a funeral is called a homegoing, partly owing to a syncretic conflation of the afterlife with Africa, the originary freedom. To cross over is to cross back, over the sea—which, by the way, is likely the origin of the English word soul, from the Proto-Germanic saiwaz, the idea being that water, not air, is the dwelling place of souls. And at the end of that voyage home there isn’t a spark of bright light but your people, welcoming you ashore.
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