Ever since Wordsworth’s 1804 “But trailing clouds of glory do we come/From God, who is our home” entered the LDS cultural consciousness via Conference talks and Gospel Doctrine manuals, the Saints have come to regard the Pre-Existence as not only one of our most unique doctrines (where is the equivalent in the broader Christian liturgy, we challenge, to “O My Father”, or even “Saturday’s Warrior”), but perhaps also its most self-evident.  Surely we’ve always known that we’ve always existed, haven’t we?  Anecdotally, most missionaries can report endless investigators who would challenge them on every point of doctrine, who would nevertheless nod along nonchalantly to the Plan of Salvation and the Pre-Mortal world—even if they’d never been taught it, they’d all thought it or felt it, it seemed.  “Every man has forgotten who he is,” wrote GK Chesterton in 1908’s Orthodoxy, “One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star…We are all under the same mental calamity; we have all forgotten our names.”  Whether you think Joseph Smith was somehow distantly plagiarizing Wordsworth, or Wordsworth was intuitively anticipating Joseph Smith, will always be the sort of Rorschach test that reveals more about yourself than about either of them.

Add to that conversation the latest offering from Pixar (the studio already so beloved among the LDS family-friendly set), 2020’s Soul.  The lion’s share of the criticism thus far has (quite understandably) centered upon the fact that this is somehow Pixar’s first film in its quarter-century history to feature an African American protagonist: we meet struggling, middle-aged Jazz pianist Joe Gardner (voiced by no less than Ray himself, Jamie Foxx) as he finally catches his lucky break, when he is offered a chance to sub in for a prominent Jazz quartet in New York, only to abruptly fall down an open manhole.  (One is reminded of Mel Brook’s famous quip: “Tragedy is when I stub my toe. Comedy is when you fall into an open manhole and die.”)  His soul ripped from his body, he finds himself floating on an escalator towards the Great Beyond.  Panicked at missing his one shot at greatness, he decides to make a run for it. He ends up stumbling into The Great Before, where the souls of the famous and influential (the “Noble and Great Ones”, if you will) can volunteer as mentors to the spirits preparing to enter Earth life, shaping and molding their personalities before they are even born.

In the madcap comedy that ensues, Joe Gardner is mistaken for a recently-deceased Swedish Nobel Prize winning scientist, and is assigned to mentor the cynical soul 22 (a sarcastic Tina Fey); she is one of the oldest souls in existence, yet has never crossed the threshold into mortality because she has stubbornly never found her “spark,” or purported reason to live.  Joe naturally assumes his own “spark” is to be a Jazz musician, and so forms an alliance of convenience with 22 to get him back to his fallen body and make his big gig on time; shenanigans ensue when 22 accidentally falls into Joe’s body while Joe lands in the hospital therapy cat.

Bracketing for now any further plot summary, one can already anticipate all the imminent late-night dorm-room conversations that are sure to take place across the BYUs and MTCs concerning Soul’s representation of the Pre-Mortal Existence.  And to be fair, the parallels are certainly tantalizing: a series of immortal entities in charge of the Great Before (all named “Jerry”) appear to mirror the full pantheon of Gods across eternity; there are those aforementioned “many noble and great ones”, Post-Mortal Spirits coaching the Pre-Mortal; a tri-part procession of existence that encompasses the pre-existence, our mortal probation, and the next life, with hints of an “eternal progression” throughout.  

Of course, Soul’s cosmology does not perfectly map onto the LDS Plan of Salvation, and the parallels break down the moment one pokes at it: the “Jerrys’” for example, though impressively powerful, are neither omnipotent nor omniscient, and even provide a fair amount of the comic relief when they lose track of Joe on Earth; certainly there is no hint that these souls in training will one day become Jerrys themselves; for that matter, there is no governing Heavenly Father (or Mother) overseeing the proceedings—it is a strangely atheistic pre-mortal existence we encounter; the next life is left a literal blank slate, with no hint of what is to come or what it could possibly look like; Salvation cometh not by faith or repentance or the grace of God, but by the far vaguer “living every moment”.  The film, though quite delightful—even inspiring—on its own merits, nevertheless lacks what Hugh Nibley called “the plot”, or the master-narrative for why we are here.  Why souls are born, and towards what ends, is left as big a question mark at the end as it is at the beginning.

But then, life itself seems to be the meaning of life in Soul.  For in the finale, after Joe Gardner of course makes his big gig at the last second, plays his heart out, wins over both the crowd and the band leader, he nevertheless still feels strangely unfulfilled.  He soon learns from one of the Jerrys that the fabled “spark” has nothing to do with finding one’s “purpose”, but simply one’s desire to live.  “Live every moment” in this analysis turns out to be another one of those cliches that (as David Foster Wallace might argue) appears so banal on its surface, but covers a great and terrible truth: life has intrinsic value, and to lose that sense of intrinsic value is to lose one’s very soul.  That is, life is an end, not a means; and all of our misery and suffering is rooted in how relentlessly we try and make life a means instead of an end.  

We are to make friends not because it’s important to network and leverage our connections, but simply because it’s good to have friends; we are to fall in love and get married, not because it’s important to the economy for the establishment of a replacement population, but simply because it is good to fall in love; we are to create beautiful spaces, not because it will increase the resale value on our homes, but simply because it is good to be surrounded by beauty.  By contrast, the moment we use our friends for something, they cease to be our friends, and we have lost something immeasurable; and the moment we convert life into profit and gain, we have ruined something infinitely precious.

There is even LDS precedent for this reading: Brigham Young once declared in Conference that this life was as important as any other in Eternity—the implication being that we should glory in it as much as any other.  Such a sentiment is also reflected in that old Seminary scripture mastery: “Adam fell that men might be, and men are that they might have joy”.  Or, if God Almighty were to make himself manifest in all his majesty among Soul’s premortal halls, he might say as simply as he also once said to Moses, “This is my work and my glory, to bring about the immortality and eternal life of man”.  And why?  Simply because it is good to be alive.