DEFENDING YOUR LIFE (1991) vs. WISH (2023)

HAMLET
A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.

CLAUDIUS
What dost you mean by this?

HAMLET
Nothing but to show you how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar.

Hamlet, Act 4, Scene 3

Is it fair to compare a 32-year-old Albert Brooks dramedy to the latest product off the House of Mouse’s assembly line?

Probably not — but we’re doing it anyway!

Defending Your Life (1991) is, perhaps, Albert Brooks’ magnum opus. Written, directed and starring the acerbic comedian (who had already established his filmmaking bona fides with Real Life [1979], Modern Romance [1981] and Lost in America [1985]), he plays Daniel Miller, a lonely advertising salesman who dies on his 39th birthday. He wakes up in Judgment City, a corporatized and bureaucratic sweet hereafter. This non-denominational waypoint to the afterlife is neither heaven or hell. There is no punishment for sin, but there is judgment of if Daniel’s life choices kept him from reaching his full potential. Did he let fear rule his decisions? If he did he’ll be reincarnated in a new life to try and improve the next time around. During this nine-day trial he meets Julia (Meryl Streep), a kind of saintly Manic Pixie Dream Woman with whom he falls in love but also feels he doesn’t deserve. Daniel will have to be bold if he hopes to spend eternity with her…

I watched this movie for the first time within a few days of Walt Disney Animation Studios’ newest release, Wish (2023). And as I am the same age now as Daniel in 1991, I can’t help but ponder how these movies — created by and aimed at audiences several generations apart — approach their positions about being your “best self.”

One might think the easiest juxtaposition to Defending Your Life in Disney’s oeuvre would be Soul, Pixar’s 2020 exploration of life and death. But that movie — about a music teacher, Joe Gardner (Jamie Foxx), who dies before he can fulfill his dream to play piano in a jazz band — has a very similar theme to Defending Your Life about living with passion, no matter what that passion may be.

Wish, by comparison, posits that each person has a unique role in life that tethers them to the divine. The movie takes place in a fantasy version of the Mediterranean, in the kingdom of Rosas. Spunky and intrepid 17-year-old heroine Asha (Ariana DeBose) interviews to be an apprentice to King Magnifico (Chris Pine) in hopes that he’ll grant her grandfather’s wish. You see, Magnifico is a powerful sorcerer who “protects” the citizens of Rosas’ wishes once they turn 18, and grants one of them once a month. He uses this leverage to maintain control of the masses by only granting “safe” wishes that won’t influence change or cultural upheaval. Realizing this sets Asha on a path to making her own wish on a star, which actually descends from the sky and manifests as a sentient and very precocious sprite. Together they team up to free the wishes and end up basically democratizing the kingdom.

Let’s talk about the wishes. Characters in the movie describe wishes as “the most beautiful part of a person,” “what drives your heart,” and “what makes you who you are.” The glimpses of wishes are people striving for major achievements — to be explorers, to be the first to climb a tall mountain, to be a knight of the realm or even to fly like Superman. The catch is that once you give your wish to Magnifico, you forget it and become a shell of your former self, like Asha’s friend Simon (Evan Peters).

As laid out in the song “I’m a Star,” the wishes also seem to hint at a form of predestination stemming from humans being made from celestial matter:

We eat the leaves and they eat the sun
See that’s where all the balls of gas come from
Hey, you still look like you’re hanging on by a strand
But if you just see the mushrooms then you’ll understand
So your dust, is my dust?
Fantastic, huh

Well, you don’t have to look too hard It’s all around and not too far
If you’re tryna figure out just who you are
You’re a star

Magnifico even backs this up later in his song “This is the Thanks I Get?!” when he says, “I can’t help it if mirrors love my face. It’s genetics! Yeah, I got these genes from outer space.”

But the movie isn’t arguing for the Big Bang and evolution, that the Earth formed around 4.5 billion years ago when a red giant collapsed into an interstellar molecular cloud that became our sun and around that a disc of gas and dust appeared, out of which our solar system would coalesce and that one seemingly insignificant hunk of rock would eventually produce single-celled organisms that over eons achieved multicellularity through a series of adaptations so that your ancestor could shuffle out of an antediluvian soup on a path that would end with you reading this essay on your phone.

At least, that’s not all Wish is saying.

No, what the movie is saying is that everything is empyrean and, critically, everything is equal. Like the Hamlet quote above says, there’s no difference between a king and a beggar — in the end we’re all worm food. Realizing this, Asha decides to take the fight to Magnifico, who has no right to keep people from what’s rightfully theirs.

Defending Your Life’s more introspective view on how the universe measures a life’s worth is very much informed by Brooks’ background. Brooks’ religious upbringing certainly informs his outlook on existence, explains Lindsay Goldwert of RogerEbert.com:

While [Daniel] doesn’t claim any religious affiliation, he is very much the product of a post-WWII Jewish comedian’s imagination. Jewish comedians (and Jewish people in general) don’t hold a patent on guilt and shame around sex, food, and money; they’re used as examples to show all the ways that we deny ourselves pleasure in the name of being good and how we allow ourselves to believe that all of the above should come with a happiness guarantee.

Curiously, even with Brooks’ religious background Defending Your Life removes any sort of creator from the equation. There’s no God to be seen — though maybe He or She is part of whatever comes next after the way station. This conception of an absentee God is not unlike the deus otiosus — a Creator who withdraws from the universe after setting it in motion — that was so popular with Deists during the Enlightenment.

Judgment City is also imperfect. The caretakers are called “Big Brains,” spirits who have become super intelligent after several lifetimes on Earth, but the place is still a work-in-progress. Daniel’s lawyer, Bob Diamond (Rip Torn), explains at one point that while children don’t have to defend their lives, at one point the city incorporated teenagers. “Too much trouble,” he says. “They go elsewhere. We tried for a while, but they damaged the tupas. Too rowdy.” And after the judges decide that Daniel did not live a worthwhile life and will be sent back to Earth, Bob comforts Daniel by saying, “Just because they’re sending you back, doesn’t mean that they’re right. They can make a mistake.”

The climax of the movie is even predicated on the fallibility of this system. As Daniel is inbound to his next life, he breaks out of his seat when he sees Julia in the next trolley over and fights his way to her to declare his love. The big twist is it turns out the entire scenario was orchestrated by Bob to test Daniel’s bravery. The judges agree and allow Daniel to progress on with Julia to whatever comes next.

Even after depicting a flawed system, Brooks can’t conceive of substantial change and, in a roundabout way, damns millions if not billions of his fellow souls. After all, this is an apparatus that Bob explains does not offer up infinite mulligans. “Eventually, they’ll throw you away” he mentions in an offhand comment. Souls might get a few hundred chances at self-actualization, but presumably at some point they just cease to be! A rather chilling thought.

Brooks instead settles for personal growth. In his defense, he was trying to advocate for people to take their mental health seriously. “Self-examination got a bad rap with all the yuppies turning inward,” he told The Globe and Mail in 1991. “I think it’s an important thing to do.” That’s pretty enlightened for a middle-aged Baby Boomer, who probably grew up with emotionally distant parents and a society with impossible standards for masculinity.

Wish stands apart from Defending Your Life with a very modern and exigent ideology. Once Asha realizes the depths of Magnifico’s corruption, she rallies her friends and even Queen Amaya (Angelique Cabral). In the song “Knowing What I Know Now,” they declare their intention to overthrow the king: “I don’t think he’s prepared for what’s coming. A revolution hit the ground runnin’!”

Within this context, Magnifico can function as many metaphors for contemporary frustrations. He is a fearmongering government that has disillusioned people after Trump, COVID, the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the list goes on. He is capitalism, promising a trickle-down effect but hoarding everything for himself. He is toxic masculinity, obsessed with dominance and denying his own fears. Most importantly, he is organized religion, increasingly alienating with archaic practices and hypocrisy.

Asha and eventually the entire kingdom of Rosas reject these hierarchies, which is a stark contrast to Defending Your Life. They overthrow Magnifico, restore all their wishes into their hearts and install Queen Amaya on the throne. She appears to rule with much more of a spirit of collaboration, though, working with people to accomplish their dreams on their own rather than having them granted magically. Amaya directs the woman who wants to fly, for example, to a man named Peter (one of the many on-the-nose Disney in-jokes in the movie) to help her build a flying machine.

One must wonder if Wish was intended to have such radical politics. The movie has two directors, Chris Buck and Fawn Veerasunthorn, and two credited writers, Jennifer Lee and Allison Moore. There’s not so much a coherent vision as a cobbling together of Disney references and familiar tropes celebrating the company’s 100th anniversary. And yet, in an attempt to appeal to the humor and attitudes of Zoomers and Generation Alpha, the filmmakers couldn’t help but produce a product that encourages its audience to seize the means of production.

Albert Brooks told a story about one man trying to be a better person. Defending Your Life is a bit navel-gazing, and perhaps oblivious to some of its sinister implications, but it can be commended for presenting an aspirational journey. Wish, however, feels much more cynical. It wants to inspire but instead is shallow and haphazard in its messaging.