This is just my opinion, feel free to say anything :)
Max needed to be saved 'cos he still hasn't understood why his life was spared from the tragic plane crash, that he was looked up to as a "Hero", he was sooo confused about his invulnerability that he needed to feel vulnerable, and human again.
I don't know that his understanding of his wife surviving was an issue. I kind of interpreted his being saved as, the experience of the crash, while it took away his fears, also separated him from her and from people in general. So your comments about needing to feel human and vulnerable again make sense.
Grrrrrr!!Aaargh!!
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I think Max was truly scared. I think, like the shrink said toward the beginning of the movie, Max had a unnatural feeling of "fearlessness" though to me, it looked like shock, shock to mask his fear. I noticed through the movie that whenever he felt threatened, he pushed himself to *prove* that he was strong enough, like when he forced himself to stand on the ledge of a tall building when he felt boxed in by his attorney. However, he never took the time to truly deal with what he had just gone through. Instead, he dedicated his time to helping those around him truly deal.
In the end, when his friend broke off from him, and he was alone in the hospital, I believe he finally took a moment to consider what had actually occurred to him. When he asked his wife to save him, he finally articulated what he had been masking all along, that he was afraid, and that he needed help to deal with his feelings.
In the final scene, he made a 180 turn, from following only himself, to giving in and allowing a person he trusted to lead. He showed that he finally was beginning to heal.
The main problem for Max, I think, was that he had prepared for death as the plane hurtled towards the cornfields. "This is the moment of my death," he says in internal monologue. To the young boy he sits next to he says, "It'll will be over soon. Close your eyes. Everything will be wonderful." I think this can be seen from either a Christian perspective, the understanding that their deaths are certain and that they will be in heaven, or, at the other philosophical extreme, the atheistic view that all pain and terror will cease, to know this is paradise. Because Max then survives what had seemed inevitable, he suffers the existential angst caused by the fact that he has become emotionally and spiritually detached from the world around him, from all that he has loved and worked for. Within this state, medically recognised as post-traumatic stress disorder, is the guilt that survivors of war, accidents and disasters often have to endure post-event : "Why me; why should I survive ?"
For the rest of the narrative, Max has to reasses his life and his take on existence. Even when buying gifts for the dead, he and fellow crash survivors accept death as the unavoidable fact of living, it's what we will all do; therefore it should be embraced in order to deal with the intolerable knowledge and fear of this, even to the point of celebrating it.
He is tempted to believe he is beyond the reach of death, daring God or providence to try to kill him again and again. Afterall, he says at one point that they all died on that plane, which from this spiritual view, is true; they have faced their certain moment of death and yet have come through into a twilight world where they are untouchable.
But he must return to the land of the living, and the only way he can achieve this is to prove he can physically die through being saved, to stare at the certain abyss and know life is indeed mortal and limited, and be brought back from the brink, if fate is to be kind, by the mercy and rescue of other mortals. He has to prove what Shakespeare's Hamlet calls this mortal coil, and so he consumes the strawberry, knowing it would most likely cause a reaction that could asphyxiate him. But he is saved, and his closing words are said in near orgasmic joy, "I'm alive, I'm alive." This is not just a statement of obvious fact, but one with vast existential implications. This, I argue, is what the film is about.
Well, this is what I think.
Gary, your post is beautiful.
1.Because Max then survives what had seemed inevitable, he suffers the existential angst caused by the fact that he has become emotionally and spiritually detached from the world around him.-
please expound upon why surviving inevitablity equals becoming emotionally/spiritually detached.
2.He is tempted to believe he is beyond the reach of death, daring God or providence to try to kill him again and again.-
Hasnt he accepted his fate as being "dead", in that, nothing could affect him at this point, as he's already dead- therefore making him fearless? or at least, fearless of death/dying?
I was in a fatal car accident years ago, the car spun into an icey river and there was at least 1 to 2 minutes where I knew I was going to die, and I accepted death with open arms, because this overwhelming feeling of comfort came over me. I just saw this film for the first time about 2 hours ago and I pretty much cried through the whole thing. It has been about ten years since my near death experience of seeing the light and I still struggle knowing that this whole "life" thing is just a ride, Ive missed out on a lot of living because of what I saw and felt. Being a filmmaker myself I am really dissapointed I never saw this film before, and am now going to take a while and think about it.
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Hi Crystal.
By inevitable, I mean the crash, not his reaction to it. As the plane hurtles towards the ground, and he sees the sunlight through the window as he sits with the boy, as far as he is concerned it is the moment of his death; he's resigned to it and a calm comes over him. Although the film opens with he and the other survivors tramping through the corn crop, spiritually he has reached a no man's land, a state of limbo. It's as if he has crossed the river Styx but has been left high-and-dry. It is this "post-death" existence that he deals with for the remainder of the film. I believe survivors of great disasters or bloody battles experience something similar.
He then "tempts" death because he comes to believe, not so much that he is beyond it, but to expose himself to mortal danger to find a life-affirming experience; a kind of defiance of life and death that people who go in for extreme - and often very dangerous - sports for. He should be dead, but he has to find a spiritual way back if he is to "live" again. He has become what Nietzsche called the "superman" - moreover, his physical existence has lost in some part its meaning in the light of his own individual insignificance.
As I say in my original post, the final words spoken - "I'm alive, I'm alive!" - define his goal throughout the film - that is, he has returned from the "dead".
I just saw this movie for the first time and here's my take on it.
I figure the state he's in could be described as a "living death". He's technically "alive", but as he says himself, he's died on the inside and is now in an altered state of existence that has made him fearless but isolated him from his family and from this very world. After Carla leaves him, he realizes that he has to come back and be alive again and not a "ghost" (as he put it) anymore. As opposed to before when he embraced it, he now wants to be saved from this altered state of being, but like Carla, he needs someone to save him, he can't save himself. As such, he later tells his wife that he needs her to save him, which happens when his wife resuscitates him after he almost dies from his allergic reaction to the strawberry. Coming face to face with death a second time and knowing for sure that he would have died had he not be saved finally takes him out of his altered state of living death and fully returns him to life, as it makes him realize that he's not invulnerable and therefore, not a "ghost". That he can still truly die. He's no longer dead on the inside and isolated from the world, he's now truly alive again, like he says at the end of the film.
His euphoric state at the end of the film is how he should have been like after the plane crash. So in the end everything comes full circle for him.
I think the OP meant "needed" to be saved.
A lady in the film mentions that Max said he was afraid of flying, even before the crash. My interpretation is that he had a death instinct before boarding the plane and willed his own death on when the plane lost control. His wife later mentions the "14 wonderful years" they had together, but he looks nonplussed. Max could have been suffering from some sort of guilt complex before the crash as it's suggested that he had a broken relationship with his father ("I never bought him anything"). I'm curious to know more about this. Maybe his father transferred guilt onto him that led him to reject responsibility towards his family, denying the good that everyone in the film associates him with.
"You get me the real money, and i'll bring you the real diamonds."
He did indeed accept his own death as a way of coping with his fear but the reason he looks "nonplussed" (about his marriage) is because he's in a state of extreme shock (this is why his wife insists that it had been great, she's not just being argumentative or in denial).
Also (irrational) guilt is extremely common in PTSD, it doesn't mean anything in terms of people's preexisting lives really (this is part of why the plot has him feel bad about not buying anything for his father even though he was only fourteen when he died, how many 14-year old boys ever buy anything for their fathers? [How are they supposed to? They're generally too young to work and only get pocket money *from* their fathers in the first place.])
I think garyahampton summed it up brilliantly and he didn't even pay me.
shareI think Max needed to be saved (by someone else) because he realized that his powers to heal didn't apply to himself (that's why he tells his wife she has to do it) and that Carla wouldn't be his soulmate in a state of semi-death (she forces him to say good-bye at the hospital, and that she has returned to the land of the living).
But I agree he did someone recognize that in order to be alive he needed to "descend" from his state of (apparent) fearlessness.