How Soul is Anti-Capitilist
Pixar’s film Soul struck a lot of chords for me personally, pun both unintended and intended. As someone who grew up loving music, but haven’t been able to play due to finances over the last several years, I felt a yearning to remember what it’s like to be in the zone while I play music. What’s absolutely beautiful about this film is the overwhelming representation given to people of colour, both in the characters as well as in the voice actors. But what I found myself dwelling on the days following my watching was the factors of life Soul digs up. Soul explores the role of vocation and predestination, and through it explores the underlying factors of modern capitalism.
Soul focuses on Joe Gardner, a middle-school music teacher who ultimately dreams of making a living as a jazz musician. After scoring a gig with famous jazz musician Dorthea Williams, he dies. Finding his soul headed to the Great Beyond, he is unwilling to give up on life and his gig with Dorthea Williams. He escapes, and finds himself in the Great Before, where unborn souls are prepared for life. Mistaken as a mentor, Joe is paired up with an old cynical soul, Soul 22, who has yet to find the final spark which would lend them to be ready for life.
Despite beginning with the concept of an afterlife, Soul spends most of its time on the Great Before, rather than the Great Beyond. In fact, there’s no information given about the Great Beyond - but we understand intimately the functions of the Great Before. In the Great Before, we see souls being given personalities and seeing elements of what life is like on Earth before even being born.
So we’re going to approach this through the lens of sociologist Max Weber. Weber wrote a piece called the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. In this, he linked Protestant viewpoints, mostly those of Calvinists, to the growth and emergence of modern capitalism. Calvinism evolved with the idea of predestination - that whether or not you are going to hell or heaven has already been decided prior to your life. This created a problem: how does someone know when they saved and when they are damned?
Success and wealth in life became the determining factor for ultimate afterlife salvation. If you’re doing well in life, it must mean God likes you, and therefore means you are saved. This is when the concept of “vocation” shifted from something purely meant for clergy, and stretched to fit secular work. God meant for you to be a barber, therefore you’re very successful at being a barber, and therefore you are saved.
We see elements of predestination in Soul’s Great Before. Personalities are being attributed to souls before they are even born, deciding what it is the person is like regardless of wherever they find themselves and whatever family they end up being a part of.
Who they are as people is predetermined before race, gender, or any other aspect of their physical humanity is set. Tied to this is also the last element their personhood they must find before being sent to Earth. Mentors helping these new souls sometimes call it the Spark.
Joe Gardner, our protagonist in Soul, sees this as the important aspect of what he’s meant to do. As someone who loves music, and particularly jazz, Joe experiences the search for the final element as the search for a person’s purpose. In Weberian terms, the final element, the spark, the purpose, is the vocation - the element of our lives that we are meant to do, and that will, therefore, mean we are successful and saved. Joe felt he never had the right opportunities to make his purpose the successful element he should. Standing in the hall with Soul 22, he sees a variety of sections of his life in which his vocation goes unfulfilled. By not living his vocation, he feels his life is a failure which has not lived up to anything.
His failure is considered as only failure due to not being successful at what he determined to be his vocation. He dreams of what finally achieving this will look like, and when he does fight through much to achieve it, he’s left feeling slightly disappointed
This disappointment is tied to the vocation of protestantism and its connection to capitalism. Loving what you do doesn’t change, but the reality of doing it every single day can alter a perception of the apparent life-changing alteration that is supposed to occur when the vocation is achieved.
Success, according to the protestant ethic of capitalism, is tied to financial reward, and the notion that you’re born to do a particular act. While Soul begins to build on this expectation, the point of Soul is that this expectation is false. We first get a sense of the vocation/disappointment element when one of Joe’s students, Connie, comes to his apartment to tell him she’s quitting music. She plays a solo before giving it up, and through the act of playing realizes she should stick with it. When Soul 22 asks about why she would give it up if she loved it, Joe responds that she’s “meant” to play music. It’s what she’s born to do. But 22 is confused as to why she would, then, seek to quit. In Connie, we see the struggle to connect other elements of life to joy in music. The pressure of needing to perform at her purpose is too much for her, so she thinks about quitting. But the joy of playing keeps her present. The vocation of music is actually damaging to her.
We see how damaging the deep love for something can be. While in the world of spirits, Joe sees people floating in the sky. They are “in the zone” - a feeling of being so connected to something that you actually feel yourself leaving your body. But there’s a damaging aspect to these. His guide in this area, Moonwind, informs him that many lost souls actually become lost through the process of being in the zone. They become too obsessed with their joy that they become anxious and unable to regain themselves. An obsession with one’s purpose can lead to your soul becoming lost.
We also see the change in expectation happen at the barbers. 22 find themselves speaking openly about their philosophical problem with vocation and purpose in regards to capitalism. What if you never find out what it is you’re supposed to do? It must mean you become a failure, because you have never achieved the ability to even find out what your vocation is, then you cannot be successful at your vocation. The customers at the barbers all listen intently and admit to feeling similarly lost when it comes to capitalistic purpose. 22 mentions that the barber, Dez, was meant to cut here. Dez corrects them, saying he actually wanted to be a veterinarian, but had to change his approach due to financial restraints. 22 expresses that it must be sad that Dez has to do something that doesn’t make him happy, but Dez says that, actually, it does make him happy.
The expectation of vocation has shifted. Dez was expected to fulfill the vocation of veterinarian, but when life circumstances kept him from achieving this, he became a barber instead. But he still found joy in what he does, even though he is not a successful vet.
Soul 22 comes back to the Great Before with their badge filled up - ready to be used to get to Earth. The difficulty they find is a lack of knowledge of what it was specifically that provided the “spark” which led to the finality. Joe appeals to the Jerry’s that they still don’t actually know 22’s vocation.
The idea that the spark is one’s entire purpose - their vocation - is a misunderstanding wrought by people affected by Protestantism and modern capitalism. The stress of needing to find one’s purpose sent 22 into a deep depression in which their failures at finding it are thrown back at them repeatedly. The stress of capitalistic vocation got to 22 before life had even begun. And its not even the purpose of the spark.
The purpose of the spark is only finding joy in what life gives us: music, food, sport - these things that we use to fulfill ourselves though not necessarily financially. In fact, financial success bears no marking on what makes the souls into persons - at no point does financial success render any point in the making of the person. We are our personalities, and what makes us happy - whether or not these make us money is not important.
The point of the spark is to make sure we are ready to live life, and find joy in the small things that surround us. Things like pizza, or standing on air vents, or watching autumn leaves weave beautifully in the wind.
What Soul is telling us is that this spirit of capitalism is wrong - we are not determined by our vocation, and we are not successful based on financial gain. We are only individuals meant to find meaning in conversations with one another, in really good food, in music, and in enjoying a breath of air.
Soul, therefore, is anti-capitalist in the sense that it breaks the expectations that built capitalism up. By destroying some of the pillars that we understand success in a capitalist society, we are able to begin to tackle other elements of the system. These assumed truths are called axioms - beliefs assumed real which are then used to defend and build up more complex thoughts. When we question the axioms, everything else it is built on becomes questionable as well.
Soul questions the role of vocation - the role of purpose and its connection to our successes in life. Soul’s discussions of finances are tied to Joe’s conversations with his mother, who never fully accepts her son’s attempts to make a living as a jazz musician because of the lack of financial security. But when Joe finally has a confrontation with his mother, they seem to be talking about two different aspects of life: while Joe argues for his vocation, his mother argues for security and happiness, as she sees constantly chasing the dream of musician as potentially damaging. The point where his mother relents is not when he makes a point about his vocation and purpose, but when he says he worries about his life never being worth it. In this argument, Joe has connected his life worth to his achievement of vocation, while his mother doesn’t. She, however, does not want him looking back on his life in such a negative way.
What’s most compelling about this argument is not Joe’s success in the argument - a point in the movie that is assumed to be a growth moment - but because of argument reveals a trouble aspect of Joe’s understanding of vocation: without achieving it, his life is not worth living. This stress of vocation and purpose is put on 22, and which results in 22’s depression.
Soul is a very life affirming movie - its ending urging us to live life positively and with an enjoyment for every aspect of it. In doing so, it breaks apart some of the foundational aspects of capitalism. These elements are the ones that cause ultimate stress, anxiety and depression. It questions the worth we ascribe to ourselves through our financial gains, and the hefty importance we put on our chosen career paths. Through its exploration of purpose, Soul has also questioned some of the foundations that capitalism lies on.
Soul is far more than a movie with a jazz soundtrack that makes me miss music. It’s also a movie that questions the stresses we put on ourselves when it comes to how we measure our success. It implores us to stop measuring ourselves based on our assumptions of other people’s life purposes and to allow ourselves to go where we find joy. We should stop and listen to subway buskers and ask for lollipops when we want one. We should ask others about their lives and listen with genuine interest. And we should watch maple seeds pinwheel through the air.