Wah, you know, when Kar Wee showed me this video, my heart broke into a million pieces. This, of course, was after I watched Changeling last week, when my heart broke into a hundred thousand pieces because THE FILM WAS SO GOOD BUT SO SAD.
Anyway.
THE VIDEO IS SO DAMN SAD TOO! Or so I thought. I watched it again when I returned to hall, and I wondered: is it meant to be sad, or is there another way for us to see the video and look beyond the initial grief we might feel? (WEI… Carrie Bradshaw-ly lah, as Yishu might say.)
The re-orientation of the Kiwi’s flight path reminded me of Ender’s Game, when Ender tells his Army that “the enemy’s gate is down” – one must reconfigure one’s paradigm of the enemy’s Achilles’ heel before one can defeat the enemy. The Kiwi thus demonstrates a paradigm shift in its drastically altered – and morbidly bizzare, of course – way of seeing the world and flying – if one cannot achieve flight through traditional means and within traditional constraints, then one must achieve flight by working with the constraints of gravity.
Though the Kiwi dies for its art, Camus argues that “[t]he struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart”. It is the struggle which holds meaning for Sisyphus’s life, and similarly for the Kiwi, it is the bird’s struggle toward the depths that fills its tiny heart with bittersweet joy. At the end of the day, it is the Kiwi who has achieved its own success – albeit in a final blaze of glory – on its own terms. One must imagine the Kiwi happy.
P.S. Please bear in mind that I’m not advocating suicide here. Life, like coffee, is beautiful.