"Reflections" On A Near Death Experience- or, Why Mulan is the Last Movie I Want to See Before I Die

  

The thing about rice is that a single grain can tip the scale. In any given situation, the smallest of details can drastically impact an outcome. This is sometimes referred to as the Butterfly Effect. Sometimes you go right when you could have gone left. This could change the rest of your day, or even the rest of your life. If you decide to buy your groceries in the morning you might miss meeting your future wife because she buys her groceries in the afternoon. Hell, one little detail could change the the course of human history! Based on a typo, an army could attack when they were supposed to retreat, resulting in a victory and promotions of every officer. You might board a charter bus to New York for a bachelorette party that lasts the whole weekend. With the flap of a butterfly’s wings, that bus may never arrive.

 

This last Saturday, I was supposed to attend my friend's bachelorette party in New York City. She, two other friends, (one of whom had flown across the country for the weekend), and I all booked tickets on the same bus to get from Philly to New York. The bus pulled out on time at 2:00 pm from 30th street and JFK Boulevard in Philadelphia. Right around 3:30 pm the four of us were remarking how we were making really good time and would probably reach our destination earlier than expected. This was not the case.

Around 3:50 pm the front right-side tire blew out on the highway, half a mile south of Trenton. I heard the boom of the tire and people screaming as the bus veered right. I looked up just as we slammed through the guardrail and went careening down a steep ravine. Glass showered down with a roar from the entire right side of the bus. I then assumed the position you have read about on every airline barf bag, covering my head and putting it as close to between my legs as I could. Just as it felt as though the bus was going to tip over, we came to a stop, slamming into some trees that were too well rooted to be smashed through. You can read about it here.

Thankfully, of the 50 people on the bus, no one sustained major injuries. I only have a few superficial cuts. Only one person had to be carried off of the bus by paramedics. Two of my friends needed to have x-rays taken but neither of them broke any bones. One of them has a scratched cornea.

I won't mention which bus company it was, but if your first name is Usain and you've won a gold medal, you may want to consider suing for character defamation.

The thing about near death experiences is that they tend to put the rest of your life into perspective. You learn and rediscover a lot about yourself. I, for instance, reaffirmed that I tend to put the well being of others before myself. This was how I staved off the onset of shock before reaching the hospital; by making sure that other people were okay, my mind didn't have time to ponder why blood kept dripping into my eye or why my friend was wiping my face. Once I was by myself in an emergency room, (my friends taken in a separate ambulance), I started shaking and my heart rate sky rocketed. I'm pretty sure I broke at least one blood pressure machine (it was beeping like crazy and they asked me if I was wearing three long-sleeved shirts). I also learned that I'm either overly confident or a born survivor since at no point did I think I was going to die. I'm not saying I was ever certain I was going to live, my mind merely didn't process such large ideas in those moments. During the ordeal, I was only thinking ahead by about 5 seconds. My thoughts went something like, "I'm going to cover my head...I'm wet. I guess I need to swim... We're actually on land. I should stand." Even when I thought the water bottle that had poured on me was a river we had landed in (it wasn't) it didn't cross my mind how ludicrous it would have been to start swimming from a crashed bus. Overall, I learned that my instinct for self preservation is much stronger than my sense of fear or logic.

After recovering from these sort of events, you start to judge the things in your life you thought you valued as compared to the things of actual worth. The fact that I forgot to drop off my dry cleaning the day before suddenly didn't matter as much as the fact that I couldn't remember if I'd said "I love you" the last time I spoke with my parents. A self assessment commenced. How well do I know myself? Do I say "I love you" often enough to those I do love? Do I do the things I love on a daily basis? That brings me to Mulan.

Among things I love are movies. At the top of that list sits Mulan (1998). If you’re unfamiliar with Mulan, then I’m really sorry for you. You’re missing out, not just on a musical gem and the context of this post, but on a cinema gold. What other animated, female-driven film includes cross-dressing and kung fu? It should also be pointed out that before this point, most of Disney's female lead characters were either princesses or animals. It's hard for me to identify with royalty and four-legged creatures. Though Mulan is a character of legend, she is firmly placed in as historical a context as Disney is willing to put on screen. More than that, she’s a warrior. With a queer, feminist round-house kick to the patriarchy, Mulan decidedly shook things up in the Disney canon and lodged itself deep in my eleven year-old psyche and my current world view. 

There are a couple of things that make Mulan my absolute favorite film of all time. First are the deep levels on which I connect with the main character and central conflict. At its core, Mulan is a father-daughter relationship story. It's about each trying to do right by the other and, despite their best efforts, coming up short every time. Not gunna' lie- this hits pretty close to home. While my relationship with my dad is now slightly better than the one between Mulan and Zhou, I am the daughter of a Latin dad, and in certain lighting machismo doesn't look much different than the ancient male manifestation of the Five Constant Virtues. When this movie came out, it was like watching an animated, Asian version of my dad.

Daughter, why don’t you know your place?! Can’t you see we have bigger fish to fry? Giant, Hun-shaped fish! The individual doesn’t matter! It is only through fulfillment of our roles in collective action that we can defend our homeland from the corrupt forces of the foreign West! Yes, am I still talking about Huns!

The personal conflict  in the film comes to a head with the uber emotional ballad Reflections. Using self-reflection and literal image reflection, Mulan tries to understand the contradiction between what she sees inside herself (what her full potential is) and how the world (more importantly her father) sees her. Faster than you can say “ugly duckling with daddy issues”, Mulan flips the bird to sense and follows her gut, deciding to steal her father’s armor and conscription notice to masquerade as his son in a military battalion.

Is it raining? Is she crying? Or are you just balling your eyes out? All three? Got it.

My second major love of this movie is the look of it. The opening credits start as a water color painting on rice paper, fermenting into the setting of the film, but that quality of bleeding color never really leaves the images. The way smoke and fabric move in this movie is also phenomenal. I could spend a whole paragraph just discussing the flags! I mentioned earlier that cross-dressing and kung fu are what make it awesome. I argue that cross-dressing and kung fu ALWAYS make movies better. When done correctly, of course. I have always loved the beauty of choreography, particularly in martial arts, something my dad and I have bonded over. In fact, movies are one of the main things my dad and I have consistently bonded over. It's easier to let stories and emotions happen in a performance, to watch people's relationships unfold and grow, and to envy a world where people can just pummel each other with fists if the situation deems it appropriate. It's certainly easier than doing the work of trying to have a conversation with the person next to you.

Well gee. That might have been a moment of clarity.

As for the cross-dressing, well isn't that just a very literal way to make your outside appearance reflect your inside one? It's vindecating to see Mulan do as well, even better, than the guys she's training with. I challenge you to find one eleven year-old girl who wouldn't be satisfied to beat all the boys in all the games in gym class. Even though her true gender is a secret, Mulan is still a "She" who succeeds physically and intellectually in a hyper-male dominant environment. I could  go on about ebbs and flows of feminism in Disney movies, (and I'm sure I will at some point), but even on a superficial level, it makes for some great dramatic irony and one very awkward bathing scene. Crazy hijinx!

More than anything, Mulan taught me that I, individually, value. My weirdness will pay off and others will benefit from it. My oddball time to shine is going to happen (or has happened) and it will feel like I've trained my whole life for that moment. It will at least feel like there was a very elaborate montage depicting my development to that moment. I may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I am someone’s shot of whiskey. It also taught me to value my instinct. Mulan thought of immediate needs and simple solutions instead of what society deemed appropriate. Ultimately this what saved her, her father, and all of China

So just do you, 'aight? You'll die satisfied knowing you did.

Dig In

Peer pressure. That's why I'm writing this. I am caving in to the demands of friends and co-workers who listen to my ramblings (or pretend to listen). They are telling me to do this. So I am. Because I'm tired of arguing against them and the bridges they told me to jump off had fencing preventing me from jumping.

I can't place when, where, or why I fell in love with cinema, but here we are. Maybe, through some sort of cathartic process, I'll be able to uncover and identify that point in spacetime, but until then the musings I post here will need to be taken at face value, through the lenses of “now” and “me.”

Whenever or whatever “now” and “me” might be, at all those times and versions of self, I deeply love cinema. All of it- movies, films, high brow, low brow, grind house, art house- I'm a fan. This is not to say I love all movies. I will probably dedicate a healthy part of all postings to ripping apart films you love. I simply have an eclectic taste when it comes to what I watch and what I enjoy.

Note how I didn't say “good taste.” I'm the first to admit that I enjoyed The Third Man as much as Transformers II: Dark Side of the Moon, but I'm also fully capable of recognizing the significant differences between a noir masterpiece and two hours of giant alien robots. Both are dear to me, (like how I find dark chocolate truffles and cheetos to be equally delicious in the right situations), and I argue that cinematic equivalents of “gourmet food” and “junk food” end up on the same “plate” more often than is apparent.

Are you hungry yet? I'm hungry. Let's do this.