The Little Prince of K-PAX
by Kathryn Crewe on November 19, 2001 in Culture
Remember that lovable childhood tale, The Little Prince, written by French war hero Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in 1943? Remember how the cute little prince and his trailing yellow scarf tumbled to earth and showered wisdom of the planets on a hapless pilot whose plane had crashed in the Sahara Desert before giving his life to a poisonous silvery snake? Wasn’t it trippy?
Now imagine Jeff Bridges as the pilot and Kevin Spacey as the little prince-only the setting is not the Sahara Desert of Africa, it is The Manhattan Institute of Psychiatry. The pilot is actually Dr. Mark Powell, and instead of a yellow scarf, the visitor wears dark sunglasses and assumes the name ‘Prot.’ Now toss in the psychotherapeutic undercurrent of the 1976 made-for-television drama Sybil, along with an extraterrestrial dash of the 1985 feature film and geriatric love-in Cocoon, and, voilà, you have the movie K-PAX.
Call me crazy, but K-PAX is the modern day version of Saint-Exupéry’s ageless ode to love and peace on earth with a bit of an identity crisis. Trippy indeed.
The plot of K-PAX straddles at least five genres: patient enters mental hospital, claims he is an alien, undergoes regression therapy, and leads doctor on a nationwide search for his patient’s true past. Meanwhile, the patient empowers and positively transforms the lives of other patients and the doctor forever, reminding us all that the personal bonds we develop and agonize over are the fruits of life and human vulnerability on earth. The film amounts to something of a comedic family sci-fi psychological thriller drama. (Okay, that’s six genres-maybe even seven if we count the mystery crime element.)
However, far from a weakness, K-PAX’s identity crisis is its strength. Just when the audience expects sappy drivel, the film turns suspenseful. Just when suspense turns rough-and-tumble, the tension melts into reflection. This movie evokes empathy in a way that AI failed to do, and delivers social commentary like few hospital ward dramas have in recent years-with the exception, perhaps, of Awakenings. Accordingly, this trans-genre voyage is worth the journey.
Packaged as an outsider’s commentary on the blunders of modern civilization, Prot’s wisdom, if not aloofness, reminds us that humanity’s entanglements and interdependencies are earth’s blessings. Much like Saint-Exupéry’s little prince did for his forlorn pilot, Prot opens a new world for Dr. Powell to embrace, both literally and figuratively.
Granted, the parallels are not exact: while the little prince made his inter-planetary travels by harnessing a flock of migrating birds, Prot traveled on light beams; whereas the little prince once inhabited his own small globe-so small that the unruly roots of a baobab tree could tear it apart at the core-Prot reportedly parted on a five-year hiatus from his highly evolved and reasonably populated planet in another solar system. Furthermore, although both visitors are homesick for other worlds, Prot longs for the rational detachment of his fellow K-PAXians, while the little prince actually misses his coquettish and endearingly dependent rose.
Still, Prot and the prince’s earthly interactions have nearly the same effect on their pupils. As the little prince symbolically explains to the pilot the daily maintenance needs of a personal planet-the cleaning out of burgeoning volcanoes, and the de-rooting of baobab trees required to prevent inner-planetary splitting-Prot leads Dr. Powell, who has neglected his personal life for professional pursuits, to re-engage himself in the lives of his young family and distant elder son from a previous marriage.
In the end, Dr. Powell’s pursuit for truth leaves him perhaps more perplexed in the ways of the universe, but less uncertain of his role on planet earth, than when he started. The patient he identifies is not who he suspected. He learns, as the little prince would posit, that, “What is essential is invisible to the eye.”
K-PAX’s message of human interconnectedness is not lost in the current world climate. As it turns out, while twists of fate may tear us apart, we are all, for better or worse, dependent on one another. Though death, above all, remains out of our control, life, at its most complicated and frightening, is there for the taking-or giving as one chooses.
The moral is the same in both the pilot’s and the doctor’s stories: “It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.” And if you don’t know what that means, pick up a copy of Saint-Exupéry’s loveable childhood tale-it’s more ‘grown-up’ than you might think.
Comments
Got something to say?
