'I'm a flibbertijibbit.... '

lmao! My brother says that to me all the time. Then he does a spot on impression of Meg Ryan saying, "I'm Patricia Granamore." It's efing hillarious!

I watched the movie again last night, and it was the first time I noticed that all three of Meg Ryan's characters have their own version of "I have no response to that" (which would seem to be the standard response of "soul-sick" people when the topic of their own mortality comes up).

Dede's version is to withdraw in fear once Joe explains his condition to her. "I'm sorry, Joe, I just can't handle it" is how she puts it (or something close to that).

Patricia's version is to go temporarily slackjawed and silent (she has no response to having heard Joe tell her about his condition), and then to excuse herself and withdraw to the relative safety of her cabin and bed. Of course, to her credit, it turns out not to be a showstopper for her, and she joins Joe in the volcano leap-of-faith at the end.

The idea of facing one's mortality seems to be the central idea of the movie. Dr. Ellison reminds Joe that in his previous work as a fireman, he had faced death before, but it seems to be that having to do that is what drove Joe away from being a fireman; at that point in his life, he couldn't face it, so he eventually ended up working at the soul-killing rectal probe factory instead. Evidently, he hasn't really faced up to accepting his mortality, so now, with his "brain cloud", he gets another chance.

And Patricia actually tells us what the "brain cloud" consists of: "My father says that almost the whole world is asleep. Everybody you know. Everybody you see. Everybody you talk to. He says that only a few people are awake and they live in a state of constant total amazement." It's the amazed few who don't have a "brain cloud". Everybody else has one.

So is the message of the movie that we must either stare death in the face and accept our mortality, or risk losing our soul by avoiding the question? When you think about it, this movie is just filled with death. There are all of the living zombies working at the rectal probe factory (as Joe puts it, "These lights give me a headache; if they don't give you a headache, you must be dead, so let's arrange the funeral!"), all of the crew of Patricia's boat go down with the ship in the typhoon so far as we know, and all of the Waponis go down with the island at the end as well.

Now maybe I'm taking this too far, but the inability to face his mortality would seem to be Captain Kirk's problem in "The Wrath of Khan". Mention is made of Kirk's "legendary" solution to the Kobayashi Maru scenario, but it really just consists of his finding a way to avoid facing his mortality; he doesn't believe in the no-win scenario, facing death is just not an option for him. That was the point of the original series, of course: every week, we tuned in to see how James Kirk was going to cheat death again. It takes the death of Spock in "TWoK" to finally bring him all the way to accepting that you can't cheat death forever (even though he still manages to pull it off on a regular basis until "Generations" finally kills him off).

no, no...it HAD to be Patricia for the bulk/meat of the movie...Joe could have NEVER found happiness and meaning to life with Angelica...