Heilkunst at the Movies : Timer, and The Adjustment Bureau

We watched a movie yesterday evening called Timer, which shared a common theme with another movie that we saw a while back called The Adjustment Bureau. Art, and film in particular, are great vehicles for illustrating various principles of Heilkunst though living, breathing, moving pictures.

The story depicted in the movie Timer is a world in a cultural transition to the adoption of a new technology, called “the Timer”, which could predict 100% accurately when someone was fated to meet “their one” – the love of their life. Through the primary characters in this movie, various complications were depicted, such as what the implications were of relationships which were not obvious matches according to their timers. Other themes include spontaneity, living in the here and now, and finding resonance from within.

In The Adjustment Bureau, the main character accidentally sees a world behind the curtain, which he is not supposed to, where the “angels of fate” are doctoring a scene in the world to conform to their map. After a chance encounter with a woman, he falls in love, and tries to find her again. Reconnecting with her, as it turns out, was not supposed to happen according to their fate, so these “angels of fate” work to interfere with their communing any way they can. This movie very strongly portrays the struggle of the free will of the individual against the forces of fate, as well as the triumph of true love and destiny.

The deeper theme underlying both of these movies relates to what we call the generative power in Heilkunst, which in these movies was represented through stories of romantic love. In each movie, there is some external force which attempted to regulate or control the activity of love, in the name of the world running as it is supposed to. The capacity for free choice, and playing an active co-creative role in shaping our own destiny always comes in contrast to the forces of fate, and is the core human struggle.

In various ways, I see this struggle in my patients as they come more and more into their true self, and are exploring how to express that in their life, in contrast to a history where it was suppressed. Our own life stories can be long and messy, and it is nice to get a bite-sized picture of these processes in a movie, to encapsulate these concepts in a more easily assimilable fashion.

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