'Pig' Movie Review
I recently watched the movie Pig , albeit a bit apprehensively, given such a silly title. Little was I prepared to experience something profound. The premise of the movie is about a man who is looking for his stolen pig. The odd title and basic plot of the story play into the movie’s themes of how reality is sometimes different from what we imagine, a person’s life is not what we may think it is, and we must challenge our beliefs to find out if what we believe is real.
Rob’s hermit lifestyle is a sharp contrast to what you or I experience day-by-day. Already we are intrigued to know who this character is, and why he has chosen to live off the grid. Then, we get to know another character, Amir who is the opposite of Rob in most ways. Amir owns a fancy car, comes from a powerful family and wears expensive clothes. Rob challenges Amir’s claim that a person’s value comes from their reputation, material gain, and worldly success.
Amir considers his father as someone who has “his life together” because he is a wealthy, powerful, and successful businessman. His mother, other the other hand, seems to have struggled from mental illness and ended up attempting suicide. However, when Amir visits his mother behind a closed door, we can see that his mother’s love is what draws him to visit her. He doesn’t enter because he is afraid to face her at death’s door. When we compare this to when Amir is at his father’s closed door, we see that he is afraid of his father due to his father’s lack of love. Amir’s love for his father along with his hope to save him from a living death strengthens him to enter the room.
In the eyes of the world, Amir’s father has more value than his mother, but through the truth of love, both Amir’s father and mother have a value that cannot be taken from them, because not even they possess it. Rob reminds Amir of the futility behind the world’s muddled judgment in placing meaning in one’s life on reputation, homes, careers, cars, etc.
“Every 200 years we get an earthquake, right along the coast. One’s coming up. When the shockwave hits, most of the city will be flattened. Every bridge will fall into the Willamette. So, there’s nowhere to go, even if we could. Anyone who survives that’s just waiting. Five minutes later, they’ll look up, and they’ll see a wave, ten stories high. And then all this, everyone, it’s all gonna be at the bottom of the ocean. Again.”
Amir was taken aback at what Rob said and over the course of the film, you can see his value system start to change, but what made Amir adopt the materialistic mindset in the first place? Why did Rob’s comment so easily shake him? Let’s reflect back to what the waitress at Finway said when she introduced the main course from rote “We all have a set of beliefs about the world around us. To challenge them is to acknowledge our foundation is sand”. A “foundation of sand” harkens to the biblical passage from Matthew 7:24-27 that talks about a wise man who acted on Jesus’ teaching as building his foundation on rock whereas the foolish man who merely listened and did not act on the teachings, built his foundation on sand.
When we challenge our beliefs we realize what meaning we hold at the center of who we are, and what we choose to live by. This is our “deep foundation”. Likewise we can detect what we passively accepted as meaning without a clear act of the will, which is where we get our “sandy foundation”. Without challenging our beliefs, we risk getting lost in the various meanings that the world tries to push on us. As a result of passively living by these misguided meanings, we become less of ourselves like our friend Chef Derek, who dreamt of opening an English pub and traded his dream for the cost of modern success, steeped in empty, postmodern philosophies.
What does this have to do with art or artists? Artists have a special calling to communicate truth and beauty to the community through a particular medium. Like a chef at a restaurant, we serve our customers. As someone who would like to “make it” as an artist someday, who uses social media to promote my work, I have come to understand the temptations that exist in the world for artists. Without questioning why we took up the task of art in the first place, or what art is, or what the “art world” tries to define art as, we, like chef Derek, can wake up everyday and “there’ll be less of you” – there’ll be less reality because we are trying to bend to something contrary to the truth, contrary of who we are meant to be.
Towards the end of the movie, we learn that Rob isn’t looking for his pig because she is a source of income for him. It turns out that he doesn’t even need the pig to find truffles. Rob searches for the pig, because he loves her. Her value does not depend on her usefulness or popularity; her value lies in her unique existence. Rob’s pig is one of the few creatures left in his life that he cared about.
The movie ends with Robin facing the reality of his pig’s death, which, in turn, helps him to face his wife’s death. He is able to listen to the recording of her song and sit with the love he has for her. We forget that each person we encounter is irreplaceable. We forget our responsibility to love one another, and to receive love. If we lose sight of our neighbor as we create art, we lose sight of our purpose. Amir's parents went out for dinner all the time, yet only once did they return happy, and that is because they were fortunate enough to eat at Robin Feld’s table. They were fortunate to encounter love in action. They were fortunate to encounter a man who built his foundation on rock.
“I remember every meal I ever cooked.
I remember every person I ever served.” –Robin Feld.