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SPIRITUALITY BETWEEN INTERPRETATIONS OF THE TRUTH AND TRUTHFUL INTERPRETATIONS IN LIFE OF PI
Abstract
The glance we threw at the cinema production Life of Pi intended to reveal various aspects connected with the topic of spirituality and the problems raised by the story in this sense and in connection with the concept of truth. We had taken up this analysis because we noticed the predominance of aspects linked with the spiritual, which is an ever-present strain at the back of the characters’ minds no matter how trivial the subject of a given conversation. Also, the way the notion of truth became problematic but at the same time obsessive – be it more or less straightforwardly – was plentifully apparent. From the perspective of cultural studies, we analyzed all the meaningful moments in the film in profundity and detail to identify the attitudes towards the concepts in question. In this way, we detected layers of philosophical depth and meaning in simple realities such as a character’s name, the personality and even ostensibly simple words of a guru, the appearance that a Bengali tiger makes in a certain manner and the act of dancing. We found that what seemed to be an involuntary lie, occurring as a consequence of trauma, could ambivalently be intentional mystification as well. We analyzed the reasons for the preservation of this ambiguity and its relevance in the economy of the story and in relation with the spiritual, detaching the overall intention of a moral conclusion. We expect to have highlighted the complexity and wisdom of a cultural object which thus reveals in Life of Pi more than just a cinema production that awes by its otherwise incontestable artistry and aesthetic beauty.
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