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Q: I thought Donna Murphy, the voice-actress who played Mother Gothel in Tangled, was FANTASTIC! I’ve seen pictures of her, and I know I’ve seen her before, but I can’t think where. I know she’s a Broadway actress, but that’s not it. — Marcy, Fairbanks, AK
Donna Murphy in "Star Trek"
The Oracle Speaks:
It was driving me crazy too. The two-time Tony-winning was Picard’s love interest in Star Trek: Insurrection (she was also Octavius’ wife in Spider-Man 2).
And I agree that Murphy was fantastic in Tangled — one of the best Disney villains ever. I thought this recent interview with her was interesting, because she points out something I wish I’d written in my review: unlike most Disney villains, Mother Gothel has no “powers” — just her intelligence, her ruthless scheming, and a complete lack of conscience.
Murphy also mentions how the character’s great dialogue was created. “[The folks at Disney] polled many people who worked [there] about their relationships with their mothers and the things that annoyed them — the things that they’re mothers would do that made them feel trapped or made them feel smothered,” Murphy says. “Or made them feel like their mothers were trying to manipulate them. So they used a lot of that in the film, so it wasn’t just a woman who had stolen this child for her own purposes would do, but what a certain kind of mother might do to prevent her own child from having her own life, which is much more relatable and familiar to your average audience.”
I thought they got the “mother” thing spot-on!
Q: How do you think heaven looks/works? – Jaimie
The Oracle Speaks:
Um, well, gee. Truthfully, I personally think the odds of an afterlife that is anything like how we imagine it are virtually nil.
The way I see it, the existence of a heaven requires some manner of a literal “soul” — some part of the human experience that exists apart from the physical. But everything we’ve learned to date about ourselves and the universe suggests that there is no such thing. Do we all agree that single-celled organisms have no souls? What about houseflies? So the existence of a soul requires intelligence, right? But if humans evolved from less intelligent animals, doesn’t that imply that there was once a being that didn’t have a soul that gave birth to a being that did? Or did our evolutionary ancestors have a degree of a soul?
Or maybe all living things do have a soul, and they grow more sophisticated as beings evolve intelligence. But speaking evolutionarily, where’d the souls come from — and why? They could be a by-product of intelligence, but if a soul is linked to intelligence, does that mean a mentally-impaired or catatonic person has less of a soul, or none at all?
People say there must be a heaven, that there has to be something after death. But why? There’s nothing before birth, is there?
The whole thing doesn’t make a lot of sense when you think about it in modern terms.
Sure enough, most of our notions of “heaven” were formulated in a pre-scientific era. Science has since proved that almost everything else that pre-scientific humans believed about the physical world was wrong. As a result, we no longer believe that the sun revolves around the earth, or that every body is made up of “humors” — so why do we persist in holding fast to a pre-scientific view of the afterlife?
The answer is obvious: our belief in heaven isn’t about logic or reason; it’s about some long-standing human need for an “answer” to the greatest mystery of all. And that’s perfectly okay, even if it does require a little bit of willful ignorance.
Still, if we’re going to apply full-throated logic to the whole idea of heaven, here’s what I think is the best-case-scenario: since energy never ceases to exist (it simply changes forms), when humans die, our psychic energy somehow blends into some sort of cosmos, but we also somehow manage to maintain some form of consciousness.
But regrettably, even this seems like a really long shot to me.
Q: The ads for the new Narnia movie coming out last week say its going to be in 3D. Was the movie made in 3D from the very beginning or was it converted after the fact? — Angela, Mooresville, NC
The Oracle Speaks:
It’s a 3D conversion, done after-the-fact.
Here’s James Cameron, the director of Avatar, on the idea of 3D film conversions, and I think he’s spot-on. “After Toy Story, there were ten really bad CG movies because everybody thought the success of that film was CG and not great characters that were beautifully designed and heartwarming. Now, you’ve got people quickly converting movies from 2D to 3D, which is not what we did. They’re expecting the same result, when in fact they will probably work against the adoption of 3D because they’ll be putting out an inferior product.”
In fairness to The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, however, this was not a “rush” conversion (like the widely-panned Clash of the Titans). They’ve had plenty of time to presumably get it as right as they can after-the-fact.
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