The Hidden Meaning of Charlie the Unicorn

Charlie the Unicorn is the title of a 5 min animation on You Tube. It’s from a website called FilmCow.com. If you haven’t seen it yet here is the oglink: http://oglink.com/2op. After the first watching I didn’t think much of it and forgot about it right away, then I joined a clan on AskaNinja that featured some of the Charlie the Unicorn art work, the clan is called The Believers and the slogan is “We are the believers of everything that is to be believed”, that was made up by the moderator not Film Cow. The slogan has certain religious undertones, which got me to thinking about the religious undertones in Charlie the Unicorn. From a Christian perspective the animation appears to be making fun of two believers, who believe in a place called Candy Mountain and are famous for uttering the one liner “shun the non believer”. To me the believers are Christians and Candy Mountain means heaven, while Charlie the Unicorn is the pragmatic atheist. The animation is a social satire on Christianity and judging by what happens to Charlie the Unicorn in the end, “They took my frickin kidney”, it leaves the impression that the end result of Charlie’s brush with the two Christian unicorns could only mean that Christianity is inherently harmful which echoes the message of Bill Maher. Also the representation of the two Christian unicorns made fun of their pie in the sky outlook on life as well as pointing out Christianity's weakness which is its seeming reliance on blind faith. When Charlie the Unicorn is interpreted this way it becomes a work of genius that is also funny, a masterpiece of atheistic writing.

It reminded me of another work called Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett. Before I started reading it I was told that it symbolized some of the concepts of existentialism. As I read I could definitely see how the minimalist writing style mimicked the existentialist statement existence precedes essence as the two main characters Estragon and Vladimir sought to put into words everything they saw around them and to postulate how they should act based on their observations. It also affirmed the existentialist value that our lives are only given meaning by our actions. The play did this by portraying the opposite of this, because Waiting for Godot is basically a play about nothing. Not being a tried a true existentialist I searched the web for other interpretations of the play and found that there was a different interpretation for each school of thought. The political scientists had political interpretations; psychiatrists had psychological interpretations; in addition there is religious and homoerotic interpretations; but which is the correct interpretation is what I wanted to know and the only way for me to find that out was to get it from the author himself. According to the explanation given by Samuel Beckett the answer was the only correct way to read Waiting for Godot is exactly as he had written it and no other way, that’s it.

Apparently minimalist writings have a propensity for multiple interpretations that can be completely different from what the writer originally intended. Samuel Beckett simply wrote what he wrote and when I extrapolated my own views on his writings I was reading too much into the work, usurping the writer’s views with those of my own.

So Charlie the Unicorn to me represented a great work of Christian satire from the atheist's perspective while Waiting for Godot was a philosophical marvel, but to someone else it was baby talk nonsense. It was great for a while thinking that there was deep intellectual meaning to be found in these works of art when in fact there was none. It would be great to be able to write like that, to be able to convey great thoughts and ideas in a few simple sentences, Raymond Chandler could do it and that Revelations guy John could do it. The technique looks simple enough and if you could reverse engineer the thing and go the other way from a level of simple understanding to a level of divine enlightenment then that would be magic. Just imagine being so divine that you could convey complex philosophical and religious ideas in simple to understand metaphors and symbolism. You could surpass Shakespeare in terms of greatness; but to do that you have to write what you know and what a writer knows is the self.

The idea of the divine or to hold one self above others and consider yourself the better so that you hold yourself in a lofty position from which you look down on the rest of mankind reminds me of Nietzsche's concept about the Ubermensch (overman in English). An Ubermensch is someone with a rationale and a code that leads to success, of winning and eventually victory. In other words master of his destiny and creator of his own reality.

A writer's self is their knowledge and wisdom, a writer is their thoughts. The self is the subject, so how good something is depends on the person. In order to be a writer it is not enough to simply be, in order to write well you must aspire to be great.