By Michael Woolf
Harold and the Purple Crayon hit theaters this week to mostly mixed reviews. The story follows the eponymous Harold (Zachary Levi) as he journeys from the world of the classic children’s book written by Crockett Johnson, dubbed the “old man” and narrator in the movie, to our world with its three dimensions, intractable problems, and vibrant color palette. At the center of the story is the absence of God—specifically the movie articulates a vision for what it is like to make meaning without a narrator.
The rules of Harold’s world are simple—with his purple crayon he is able to make anything he draws come to life. While that works well in the 2D, purple landscape full of imagination that illustrates Johnson’s book, it makes for a more complicated existence in our 3D world. Perhaps the best scenes in the movie come when Harold draws something to solve a problem, but unintentionally makes things worse—confusing Puma sneakers with a live puma, for instance. But Harold only knows how to make his way in the world with the narrator telling him what to do. Absent that, he simply makes chaos, even if it is beautiful and funny chaos.
Harold’s purple crayon, we come to find out, is imagination distilled, which might just be the most powerful force in the universe. However, that power attracts both people who could use a little bit of magic in their lives and those who would use it to accomplish dark ends. Of the former, there is an exhausted single mother and widow, Terri (Zooey Deschanel), who is trained as a concert pianist and works a dead end job at a big box store, and of the latter, there is Library Gary (Jemaine Clement), who wants to use the purple crayon to make his failed magical world come to life.
The movie does not shrink from the sort of dreary realities that make our lives what they are under late stage capitalism. Terri remarks, “when you’re young, you have all kinds of dreams but the world just kicks it out of you.” The film wrestles with something that Harold figures out in real time but that adults live everyday—in real life, there is no narrator. No one comes to your rescue, or narrates you out of the jams that we regularly find ourselves in. Truly, Harold and the Purple Crayon contends with the absence of God.
Even if God-The-Narrator is absent, that doesn’t mean that life stops. We make our own way, and this is where the movie’s message truly shines. Harold finds that when he stops believing in himself and the magic of creativity, his purple crayon doesn’t work. It is only through finding faith in others and in himself that he is able to help those around him and find meaning through connection. For Harold and for us, “life isn’t something that happens to you; it’s something you create—the trick is in the journey.”
Harold encourages us to find a sort of re-enchantment with the world around us, arguing that we have all the tools right here that we need in order to make a vibrant life, if only we would look around and harness our imagination. That may sound simple, or worse, it may sound trite, but our political and religious landscape is in serious need of some imagination at the present moment. Religion, as a whole and traditionally understood, is in decline in the West. Our politics is marred by violence, racism, and the rise of white Christian nationalism. Perhaps some imagination is just what our present time needs. After all, there is no narrator who is here to step in and save us: what happens from here is up to us. We need to find faith in each other and ourselves, if we want to safely navigate the present moment.
[SPOILER ALERT]
Near the end of the movie, Harold visits the narrator’s house, but Johnson is long gone, having passed away in 1975. Instead he finds a museum, where he reads a letter from the author to Harold about his place in the world and how we will always need imagination: “we only have so much time in the world, but we make a mark by the people we change.” I couldn’t help but think that this museum was a bit like our houses of worship, which are increasingly museum-like despite protestations from senior leaders, but it is here that Harold receives precisely the sort of inspiration to make the changes he needs. Perhaps, religion can play a positive role in helping us out of our personal and national crises by encouraging us to make precisely the mark that Johnson recommends.
All work at The Commons is published under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
The Rev. Dr. Michael Woolf (he/him) holds a Doctor of Theology (ThD) degree from Harvard Divinity School. He graduated summa cum laude from the University of Tennessee – Knoxville with a BA in Religious Studies in 2011 and completed his Master of Divinity degree at Harvard Divinity School in 2014. Michael is also an ordained American Baptist Churches USA and Alliance of Baptists pastor currently serving as the Senior Minister at Lake Street Church of Evanston in Evanston, IL, a progressive congregation with a commitment to social justice and interfaith dialogue. He also serves as Co-Associate Regional Minister for White and Multicultural Churches with the American Baptist Churches of Metro Chicago region. Before that, he served rural and suburban churches in Massachusetts.
He currently teaches theology as an Adjunct Theology Professor at Lewis University. He also teaches American Baptist theology, polity, and history for the American Baptist Churches of Metro Chicago and has served on subcommittees addressing racial justice and white supremacy in both the Alliance of Baptists and the American Baptist Churches USA.
Michael’s first book, Sanctuary and Subjectivity: Thinking Theologically About Whiteness in Sanctuary Movements, is part of T&T Clark’s Studies in Social Ethics, Ethnography and Theologies series. The book focuses on white supremacy within a progressive, interfaith social movement and includes an autoethnographic chapter from Michael’s experience as a white pastor in the New Sanctuary Movement. In paying attention to the narratives of recipients of sanctuary, Michael proposes a reorientation of the discipline of practical theology using Judith Butler’s theory of subjectivation. https://www.michaelcaseywwoolf.com/
