Oh dear...

It's not meant to be uplifting, though. It's surrealism. The same kind of visions that propelled Kubrick to make 2001: A Space Odyssey are the same visions that propelled Hall Bartlett to want to make Jonathan Livingston Seagull: take a genre book and adapt it into something beautiful, something, gorgeous, something sweeping.

The story isn't complex, but then again it doesn't need to be. Some fans of the story have theorized that Jonathan is supposed to "resemble Jesus", but that's not the case--especially since Jonathan himself laughs off rumors that he's the "Son of the Great Gull" and insists that he's just like any other seagull.

Above all, I think it's an anti-conformist story. The Richard Bach book stresses a message of "no limits", and Hall Bartlett expands on that vision by providing an unlimited aesthetic. That 12-minute stretch in the middle of the film without dialogue, when Jonathan is off on his own traveling in the mountains and very near death, blows me away each time.

Another way of looking at the film is reflecting on what it took for Bartlett to make it. In the 50's and 60's Bartlett did a lot of freelance, studio-for-hire work directing commercial films. Then with this film, after he had saved enough, he invested in his very own dream project, and wrote and directed the whole thing himself. The movie was a flop, of course, and he never got another such chance again, but what he left us was a masterpiece.

"What I don't understand is how we're going to stay alive this winter."