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Redemption: Theology From "Toy Story 3"

by James Barringer
7/14/2010 / Entertainment

First let me say that "Toy Story 3" was an amazing movie. I have heard several reviewers say that it is better than the original, and although I initially disagreed, the more I find myself thinking about the movie the more I become convinced that they are probably right. However, I think that one of the real dramas in the movie took place under the surface. In addition to the obvious protagonists, Andy's toys, there was a "closet protagonist," in the form of the movie's villain, Lotso Huggin Bear.

Truly great villains - I mean great from a literary point of view - are not the simplistic, mustache-twirling Snidely Whiplashes you see in cartoons. Truly great villains have a reason for being who they are, and the best-written villains make you wonder: "If I had been through what he has been through, would I be any different?" This is why I find Lotso's backstory to be so compelling. He was a toy, loved by his owner, as much as any toy has ever been loved. By an accident, he found himself lost and then replaced, a revelation which rocked him to the core of his identity. That's the reason he was who he was in the movie.

Yet Lotso is hardly a fictional creation. All around the United States we see people who are the way they are because they lacked a person who loved them, and are merely doing whatever they can to find love and acceptance. Kids don't join gangs because they aspire to a life of crime; they join gangs because they don't know what it means to experience brotherhood or acceptance from a father-type figure, and gangs provide what they (often don't even know that they) need. How many boys have been abandoned by a father, and reacted by shutting themselves off to emotion and intimacy? How many girls have been neglected, and tried to fill the void by throwing themselves at man after man after man?

Lotso's story could be taken from the page of any child whose parents have ever divorced. Lotso had his heart broken, so he stopped believing in the power of love. Because love let him down, he concluded that it didn't mean anything. He carefully built a new life for himself, a life where he was a real somebody, a power broker, the head of all the toys at Sunnyside Day Care, respected and feared but most certainly not loved. His identity used to be a toy who was loved, a toy who was loved more than any owner ever loved her toy, but he rejected that and tried to build a new identity where he wouldn't ever get hurt again. Replace "toy" with "person" and that sentence applies verbatim to millions - tens of millions? hundreds of millions? - of Americans.

But Lotso's story is very interesting. Near the end of the movie, he is actually the recipient of love. Trapped beneath some heavy trash and on the way to the incinerator, Lotso calls out to Woody and Buzz to help him, and they risk their lives to climb down and free him. At this point, he's on a teeter totter. He's had his heart broken, but he's just seen the power of love firsthand from toys who owed him nothing and would probably have been just as satisfied to see him incinerated for his villainy. And now he has a choice to make: will he go back to his evil, hiding behind the mask he created to hide himself from being hurt, or will he give love a second chance? Unfortunately, he chooses to willingly embrace his evil, and this - more than anything that happened before in the movie - is what truly makes him a despicable villain as far as I am concerned.

Lots of people in life do the kind of things that Lotso did - put other people down, manipulate others around them, flee from close friendships, and so on down the line. You know these people and so do I. Many of us assume, wrongly, that the best reaction is to treat them in a way that punishes them for the way they are. But really, they are no different than Lotso. They have merely reacted, the only way they knew how, to the pain and disappointment that life threw at them. Inflicting more pain on them is not going to help anything. The best way to treat them, and the way the Bible tells us we must treat them, is to love unconditionally no matter what they do. This is not merely because it's the right thing to do. It's also because they might see the power of love and find their faith in it restored. They might somehow come to believe that the pain they felt before is not the whole story, that maybe love is real and beautiful. They might come to the same choice that Lotso came to, the choice of whether it's really best to cling to the old broken self, the old shield against pain, or whether there might be a lot more pleasure and joy in giving love a second chance instead. Hopefully their choice will be different than Lotso's.

I took no pleasure in the way the movie treated Lotso. I am very upset that his final destiny was basically a hood ornament on the front of a dump truck. That might be what he deserved because of his actions - but at the same time it's not what he deserved, because he was a toy and he was created to be loved. Here we see the Christian parallel come at us full force. We deserve hell because of our actions - but at the same time we do not deserve hell, because we were created by God for the purpose of having an eternal relationship with him. Redemption is our destiny, so much so that God himself bridged the gap between his holy self and our sinful selves. He did everything: the Word became flesh, lived a perfect life, and took all our guilt and shame on himself so we could be reconciled to God, and all of this happened while we were still sinners in full-on rebellion to God. We did nothing at all: he alone paved the road back to himself and offered salvation to anyone who will have it. All we have to do is let it happen to us. We were made for redemption.

And God's redemption extends far beyond just our eternal souls. He wants to heal our whole selves. If we have built for ourselves a false identity like Lotso's, using sarcasm or manipulation or insults to keep people from getting close enough to hurt us, God is coming toward us with a sledgehammer to destroy it. He doesn't want us to be broken. He wants to fill our every need and become our everything. Every one of us faces the choice that Lotso faced: to stay the old person, or to become a new person, as terrifying as the change might be. Don't make the choice that Lotso made. Redemption is your destiny and mine; don't run away from it. Run back to God and let him teach you about love. Let him open your heart. Let him be the one to take you to infinity...and beyond! (I can't believe I just did that.)

Jim Barringer is a 38-year-old writer, musician, and teacher. More of his work can be found at facebook.com/jmbarringer. This work may be reprinted for any purpose so long as this bio and statement of copyright is included.

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