Oct 29 2009
Desiring for More
We always desire more, more and more until there is no more.
In the industrialized and technologically advanced city in More (written and directed by Mark Osborne), people abuse the ability to purchase “happiness.” One of the factory worker for the company invented his own product called “Bliss,” a pair of glasses through which you can only see colors and happiness. The orange “stuff” used to make the product comes from inside the people themselves, which represents youth and energy. When they put on the glasses, they create false hope for themselves and escape from reality. They seem to be addicted to this orange stuff and keep using it and really enjoyed the experience. However, at the end of the film, one of them realizes that he has ran out of the orange stuff, or, youth and energy. The last scene shows a group of kids laughing and playing with the orange stuff, wasting their youth and energy. The film emphasizes that there is a limit to our youth and energy, so take advantage of it wisely when we still have them.
We have to fight because there is no limit to happiness if we seek the right one. If we seek happiness through material things, then there is an end. If we make a change to our lives and dig deep withing, and realize that something greater is missing, then there is hope to achieve true happiness.
Many times, we feel desperate and want happiness as quickly as possible and we do things like but shoes, clothes, and jewelry. Although it is okay to do this once in a while, there’s only so much it can do. We will only feel happy for the moment in which we have the items. Now what? We have to seek real things that are true values, not something that is sold to us over a counter.
That is really a different way that you looked at the last scene with the children. All along, I thought the pure and innocent happiness of the children represented by the last scene is the ultimate goal that the adults can never reach in the film.
I actually thought that the orange stuff could also be the thing that kept him true to himself. When he created the “bliss” machine, he no longer seemed to be himself because he turned into the same tyrant that had forced him to work initially, and so he lost what made him, him.