21 Grams

21 Grams

21 grams of “soul”, this is the theory of the film. If we die, we will lose 21 grams due to our soul comes off from our body. This is a thing I was never aware of, which is why I did some research and I found the noun: Duncan MacDougall, the “father” of this theory. But I do not want to talk about it, as it is a theory already exposed and criticized. Instead, I want to talk about the religion because one of the main actors, Jack, changes his views as a consequence of it.

 

In the beginning of the film Jack talks to a boy and says: “God knows every hair on your head.” He uses the sentence twice: once when he believes in God and his healing power and another time when he is in prison and strongly believes God does not exist, because he is asking himself why He did not do anything to avoid the accident. However, I wonder whether God should really avoid such a great catastrophe. Should He (assuming he exists) “intercede” in all the matters of our life? Well, I do not have answer to these questions but many years ago I saw one of this typical American series and it surprised me in the way it talked about issues which are so relevant. The chapter’s title was Godfellas (from minute 15) and there, “something similar to God” says to Bender (the main character): "When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all”. So, we can suppose that those who govern us sometimes have not got the possibility to do good and if they have this possibility, it may be better to do nothing or maybe believe in Karma’s theory and wait for things turn better to us causes we neglect the most important things. Therefore, we do not have to be worried about whether something exists that governs us and decides over the development of our facts, but we should try to do our best in all we do and do no forget that we are the main responsible for our acts.

As a conclusion, and after this great sermon about “good and evil”, I would like to mention one of the comments by Alejandro González Iñárritu, who says something like: “he has made a film which has all the important and most difficult things in our life: the love, the addiction, the lost, the faith, the hope, …” , and his conclusion is: “we are contradictory people and nobody is good or bad, we just float in a circumstances space”. Therefore, this film reflects the real life, the real prejudices we have, and this stupid habit to put good or bad labels on people’s actions without knowing the background these may have. As my history teacher said one day: if we define people throughout history as good or evil without knowing the reasons of their acts, we would be talking about a film of Chuck Norris.