“Who Will I Be?”
Continuing my 16 year feud with a Disney movie
I’ve probably watched Camp Rock half a dozen times, at the very least.1 This belongs to a funny period in my life. As a teenager, especially in the early days, I spent a great deal of time thoroughly enjoying the music and characters on the Disney channel while engaged in a totalizing ideological war with almost everything it produced. Nowhere, perhaps, is this dynamic more clearly represented than in my relationship to Camp Rock.2
My problems with Disney at the level of moral philosophy and worldview were among my first adult blogging topics. The easiest way to summarize the problem is perhaps with the horrifically overused term “expressive individualism.” To quote my 18-year-old self, 2010s Disney seemed to focus on these values more than any:
Master, which is the greatest commandment in the law? Disney said unto him, Thou shalt believe in and express thyself with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt help thy neighbor believe in and express himself as thou dost thyself.
Even as a teenager, I knew perfectly well the idea of moral value lying chiefly in authenticity and self-expression was absolutely bonkers, but I still enjoyed the Disney music and those silly actors. Camp Rock was a special case. As reviews noted at the time, its relatively understated music was already slightly passé when it came out, but that only suited me all the more as the perennial reverse-hipster. The simple and earnest acoustic sounds appealed easily to my tastes.
Yet what the songs actually expressed was often highly objectionable. The opening song, “Who Will I Be?”, is the second worst example of that, and for some inexplicable reason it has been running through my head now for half the past week.3 Thus I have also spent the past few days in rather vigorous criticism and argument with it, noting its complete moral and philosophical absurdity. This is the matter to which I wish to turn.
In order to understand everything amiss in this song, you should probably peruse the first verse, bridge, and chorus:
How to choose
Who to be?
Well, let’s see:
There are so many choices now:
Play guitar, be a movie star.
In my head, a voice says,“Why not, try everything?
Why stop, reach for any dream?
I can rock, cause it’s my life
And now’s the time.”Who will I be?
It’s up to me—
All the never-ending possibilities
That I can see.
There’s nothing that I can’t do.
Who will I be?
Yes, I believe
I get to make the future what I want to.
If I can become anyone and know the choice is up to me,
Who will I be?
There is hardly any limit to what one could say about the ethical and philosophical problems of the above verses. But two particular issues have claimed my own attention:
First, there is the practical absurdity. The idea that we have before us an endless buffet of things we can do or become, and it is simply up to us individually to select among them, is in no way true to life. The reality of creatureliness and finitude is utterly lacking here. Stephen Hawking did not have the option to become an Olympic swimmer. A man, however much the executives at Disney may not be willing to admit this, does not have motherhood as a viable path before him. Children with developmental delays or neurological disorders are often cut off from innumerable vocations or stations. A once-in-a-millennium genius born into the wrong time or place will never the chance to revolutionize mathematics, physics, or computer engineering.
While I have highlighted here mostly only extreme or obvious cases, the same is true of more simple or subtle ones. A series of unfortunate events can render it nearly impossible for many an ordinary person to even get a certain ordinary job or accomplish some fairly ordinary task, or, even if it does not eliminate the possibilities, may render them such that only an extraordinary person would be able to realize them. Our possibilities are often quite narrow, and there are in almost no respect equal for everyone.The only truly universal possibility is to cultivate virtue, a theme about which the song has basically nothing to say.
This leads to the second point, namely the moral absurdity. Here Demi Lovato sings as though the future is entirely a matter between herself and the future. There are no outside obligations, accountability, loyalties, limits, or restraints. The goal is to find, as the song elsewhere states, “who I am inside” and to let that shine before men, that they may see your expressive works and glorify your self inside. But this is stupid, and even the movie knows it. Though the stories moral turns are often framed in terms of people being true to themselves, the parts that actually work, to the extent that they do work at all, are better understood in terms of loyalty, justice, integrity, honesty, and participation in universal order.4 In real life, our choices to be and do other things are limited not only by practical possibility but moral obligations. As a husband and father, for example, I am not at all free to simply pursue a new career in Twitch streaming: even if I were to do so5 I would have to count the cost and reckon it against the obligations I already have.
When you consider what we owe to other people, our options are often quite limited indeed. We have posts—stations and vocations God has assigned us—and we do not have the freedom to enter the identity closet and come out with whatever we feel like, even if what we feel like presses us with deep inward compulsion. “Who will I be?” is a question we cannot answer on our own in a vacuum, but instead the answer can only take its proper shape from our givenness, our existing relations, our responsibilities and duties, our families, our constitution, our location in time and space, our characters as they currently exist, and ultimately our submission to God.
Anyway, this may all sound obvious, but I’ve been arguing with Demi Lovato’s voice about it in my head for several days, so now that I’ve written it down, hopefully she will shut up.
I’m not proud of this, but, TBH, I’m also not quite ashamed of it, either.
Though the dissonance between my enjoyment and my ideological warfare is most pronounced with Camp Rock, by far the most serious target of my theological, philosophical, and moral ire was Lemonade Mouth, which I hate with a passion.
As I discovered from this experience, apparently I still remember almost every word. Here I come slightly closer to being ashamed, but I was also surprised.
The most quasi-idolatrous songs, “Play My Music,” “We Rock,” and even “Start the Party” all gesture toward music as a site of quasi-religious orienting transcendence. This seems in some sense to be a kind of return to a species of corrupted natural religion, discerning rightly that the cosmos is intrinsically ordered in a kind of musical harmony that points up and beyond, but unable to see past the music itself to the Composer.
After suffering from some kind of mental break.