Art affirmation at its best

In the movie Hugo, the title character is an apprentice clockmaker and he speaks about the world and people in clockmaker's terms; he says that everyone has something that they are meant for and that a person who is not doing what he is meant for is broken and in need of fixing. Some may be resistant to this notion, especially as it is coupled with a comparison of people to machines, ya know those manmade things created with a purpose in mind? However, the initial simplicity of Hugo's metaphor has a striking resonance that likely causes many audience members to quietly ponder, "am I broken?"

This element is just one of many that make Hugo a beautiful masterpiece. After the curtain came down (not that that literally happens anymore), I was left contemplating the nature of our "purpose" as individuals. Many think of this concept as a sort of religious one, as in a purpose bestowed upon us by a high power. The sort of purpose the film left me contemplating, however, is not one involving a deity; rather it is the sort whose origin is all but beside the point. Every one of us does at some point or another feel a sense of purpose, a sense of direction in life, a drawing towards one thing over another, a calling of sorts, and it really does not matter where that feeling comes from because it certainly exists.

Hugo explores what can happen to a man, in this case Georges Melies, when he completely follows his passion or, in the words of Joseph Campbell, his "bliss" only to have the world and life shit all over him (sorry, I couldn't think of any more eloquent way to put that). I won't say much more about the details of that for those who have not yet seen the film. Suffice to say, Melies, as played by Ben Kingsley, is broken in his bitterness and his belief that everything he created is now gone, burned up by a cruel world.

Melies' plight calls into question the belief that people become bitter and complacent in old age and that there is no defensible reason for the onslaught of these emotions. No one who sees the movie could say that he does not have a good reason for feeling the way he does and for lashing out at the world. He has not simply turned his back on what he once loved; rather circumstances, such as war and suffering, have torn him away from it. Melies' suffering is not, as you may first suspect when watching the film, self-inflicted.

This got me thinking about a lot of things, one of them being the fact that so much art and expression has been either lost or prevented all together as a result of war and suffering. A concept that is beautifully conveyed, and I think undeniably true, in Hugo, is the notion that the creation of art gives us our most profound sense of self and purpose. What happens to the people who, for any number of terrible reasons, have their creations seemingly obliterated with time? When Georges' art is destroyed, a part of himself goes with it.

So Hugo posits that if the world is like a machine, then, like all machines, every individual has some purpose in the running of the machine. Whether you believe that or you find that a bit too lovely to take seriously, it is difficult to deny that each of us either has something to create or something to fix. Every aspect of Hugo, down to its setting (Paris, of course), upholds the notion that our ability to create art, in all its forms, is an essential aspect of what it means to be human.