Jonathan Livingston Seagull is a film entirely featuring birds, but primarily human metaphor. Scored by music by Neal Diamond and impressive photography, the story almost seems reminiscent of the New Testament, from a slightly altered perspective.

After flying too high and too fast and violating other seagull traditions, Jonathan is outcast by his flock. The film is the story of a non-conformist reaching for self-actualization.

The bird protagonist is a representation of the human archetypal messiah-myth hero struggling with existence. Jonathan's story is one of individuation and the highest human strivings, cast in terms of a parable about the experience of a gull who apparently lived on the Pacific coast during the latter half of the twentieth century.

Some Excerpts

"One school is finished and it is time for another to begin," a brother gull informs Jonathan as he flies into his next plane of existence.

"Our purpose for living is to find... perfection and to show it forth," his guide Maureen informs.

The elder of Jonathan's new flock advises him: "Heaven isn't a place. Heaven is perfection. Wouldn't you think? And we don't go there as such as we express it. Don't you agree?"

Finally, the elder teaches him, "Perfect speed is being there."

After Jonathan learns this and other lessons, he returns to his old flock "to help others learn what it is they love to do."

"Our body is nothing more than thought itself. We are limited in what we do only by our thoughts."

"To Begin with," he said
heavily, "you've got to understand
that a seagull is an unlimited Idea
of freedom, an image of the
Great Gull, and your whole body,
from wingtip to wingtip,
is nothing more then thought itself."

 

By Tom Rue. From a handout distributed in a Humanistic Psychology class, Sullivan County Community College, December 9, 1989.