We caught the movie Lightyear which was supposedly the favourite movie of Andy (the kid from Toy Story) and where the character Buzz Lightyear came from, which of course resulted in the toy figurine which he got. While it did turn out to be a flop for the strength of the Disney-Pixar brand name as well as the Toy Story franchise, I felt that there was a pretty important and relevant message that the story had.
The struggle I believe was the slow pace of it, the fact that the message wasn’t really properly emphasized repeatedly, and the problem of introducing controversial distractions (such as things like representation, etc.) Anyways, the message that I thought was important is that our mistakes can be the fertile soil for many good things and we should not subject ourselves to trying to correct or redeem mistakes without observing the true nature of the impact our mistakes had.
We’ve been conditioned to think of mistakes as a problem rather than a way to learn what would be right. And there’s also the idea of redeeming one’s mistakes – trying to make things right. These are all probably well-intention-ed but an unqualified belief in those principles would be disastrous and in the movie, the Buzz who became ‘Zurg’ was exactly one who acted in that manner. Clearly, we pick that up and it appeals to us because we are so focused on ourselves. We are able to try convince others to look past their mistakes but we are unable to do so ourselves when we are the ones making that mistake.
I’ve written substantially about what our culture tells us about mistakes and how we should be taught about them. Because mistakes are telling us something valuable about the world and ourselves, but if all we want to do is rush to make things right – sometimes we truly miss the takeaway.