"There's No Place Like Home": An American Koan
I use the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz as an occasion to reflect on the various ways a desire for ultimate fulfillment is configured in religion. Typically, the film's climactic motto—"There's no place like home"—is taken as a straightforward expression of the familiar view that fu...
| Main Author: | |
|---|---|
| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | |
| Interlibrary Loan: | Interlibrary Loan for the Fachinformationsdienste (Specialized Information Services in Germany) |
| Published: |
[2014]
|
| In: |
Journal of religion and popular culture
Year: 2014, Volume: 26, Issue: 3, Pages: 287-292 |
| Further subjects: | B
Buddhism
B Religion B The Wizard of Oz |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (Resolving-System) Volltext (doi) |
| Summary: | I use the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz as an occasion to reflect on the various ways a desire for ultimate fulfillment is configured in religion. Typically, the film's climactic motto—"There's no place like home"—is taken as a straightforward expression of the familiar view that fulfillment is the result of a quest, the yearning that takes Dorothy to Oz and back again. There is another religious paradigm, however, that presents fulfillment as a matter of "non-attainment," or a quality that is inalienably immanent. My argument is that the film as a whole (and this motto in particular) contains a sophisticated critique of its own surface meaning, in which the desire for "real life elsewhere" is brought into tension with the intuition of a meaning that can never be lost. |
|---|---|
| ISSN: | 1703-289X |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Journal of religion and popular culture
|
| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.3138/jrpc.26.3.287 |