Ender's Game and Unbreakable

 

Bruce Willis in Unbreakable

I had a post on the film Ender's Game (http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2013/11/enders-game.html ) , and I think it was messy; I suppose it was due to my thrill at seeing the film. But I tend to throw things together in my posts, so maybe I should have waited and worked on it, essay-like, a little more.

It does not matter.
I had read the book a few years ago, so my experience of the film was enhanced, I think. It was a very good story.

I emphasized the importance of Play versus Work, and Play was very important in Ender's Game; endless simulations of battle - games - were run, and these games were how warriors learned, and in deep actuality it was how the children warriors fought, but that rreality was hidden from them.

Ender resented how the adults kept changing the rules of the game. That resonated with me.
But upon reading Orson Scott Card's memoirs of writing the story, that aspect was subsidiary to the business of finding and developing military leaders; he had specifically mentioned the search for a leader of the Army of the Potomac in the Civil War.

That was his focus. Yet he knew how important Play was.
I gave it too much importance in his story. In my version of Ender's Game, it is emphasized a bit more.

Play is more than learning without serious and deadly consequences.

It is the Lilies of the field, who neither toil nor spin.

It is Cowboys and Indians who deathlessly shoot, die, and rise up to play more - a playing at the archetype of the Resurrection: a war in peace, and a peace within a war.

Elementary particles play when they are entangled; they dance together on separate sides of the universe.

When we play, we are like Bruce Willis in Unbreakable, serious and working hard in life, yet not of it in the same sense that other people are enmeshed in the coils of their mortality.

I wish us to be Unbreakable.

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