In his beautiful film Tree of Life, Terrance Malick attempts to tackle philosophical issues such as the meaning of life, the problem of evil, and humans’ relationship with the divine, and he accomplishes this grandiose feat by following the everyday lives of an ordinary family. By doing so, Malick illustrates that our ordinary experiences can be a window to understanding the mysteries of existence. This goal is also achieved via a surprising medium in the episode “Flat Pack” from the widely popular preschool show Bluey. In this brief seven-minute episode, the writers tell the mundane story of parents Bandit and Chili Heeler, struggling to put together an Ikea-like porch swing while their girls, Bluey and Bingo, appropriate the material from the packaging to play pretend as a mother/daughter duo. Below the surface, however, “Flat Pack” is about the relationship between parents and children, the evolution of humanity, and our relationship with our creator(s).
As Bandit and Chili build their newly purchased furniture, Bluey and Bingo take turns pretending to be fish, frogs, lizards, dinosaurs, birds, ice-age animals, monkeys, cavepersons, and finally, humans who discover tools and use them to create buildings (a library in particular) and explore space. During their pretend time as cavepersons, the girls “discover” religion by portraying their parents as deities on the “walls” of the cave (really a cardboard box). Their playtime comes to an end when Bingo, now pretending to be a fully-grown child, tells her “mother,” Bluey, that she has built a ship with plans to travel into space. Bingo hugs Bluey goodbye and thanks her for looking after her, as she then flies away to explore a whole new world. In what is undoubtedly a tear-jerker for many parents (myself included), Bluey, having devoted her entire life to raising her child, sits quietly and alone, asking herself, “Now, what do I do?” From behind her, she hears a whisper from her mother, Chili, calling to her to come to the porch and sit with her parents on the new swing. Bluey walks through the arches she and Bingo built and takes her mother’s outstretched hand. The episode ends with Bluey swinging with her parents while watching over Bingo, as Bandit sighs and exclaims: “Ah, this is Heaven.”
This analysis of “Flat Pack” is not original to me. The Bluey Wiki Fandom webpage notes that “the episode is an allegory to Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution and the evolution of Earth and life in general.” It confirms that Bluey’s “mom” character does indeed die of old age and “ascends into Heaven” with her parents. There are also many YouTube videos that echo this analysis. What I can add to this is an illustration of how I have used this episode to explain the differences between (mono)theism, polytheism, and deism to my beginning philosophy of religion students, as well as noting how the episode attempts to harmonize science and religion.
Some essential attributes of a theistic God (in addition to omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolent, transcendent, eternal, and immutable) include that He is a personal creator with whom humans can have a loving and intimate relationship and who remains providentially active in the world. This conception of God is shared between the three main Western religions: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam (as well as other religions, such as the Baháʼí Faith or Zoroastrianism). In these religions, God is metaphorically referred to as a “Father”—the first person in the Trinity (the second is “The Son” and the third is “The Holy Spirit”). Isiah 63:16 in the Hebrew Bible refers to God as “our Father” and “our Redeemer.” Theists are encouraged to understand their relationship with God as analogous to the parent/child relationship. In “Flat Pack,” Bandit and Chili are sometimes portrayed as theistic gods. They are personal beings who watch over their children with care and devotion and lovingly affirm themselves as their creators (“we made them,” Chili muses to her husband). When Bluey ascends up the porch and onto the swing, symbolizing her transition to Heaven (confirmed by Bandit’s last line), she spends her days with her creators watching over her own creation. This mirrors Psalm 33: 13-14: “From heaven the Lord looks down and sees all mankind; from his dwelling place He watches all who live on earth.”
During their caveperson play, Bluey specifically draws her parents as deities who rule over the heavens and are the creators of all life. Bluey and Bingo’s progression (symbolizing the evolution of all life on Earth) is not portrayed as a purely natural event. On the surface, the girls are only using their parents’ furniture packing to create their imaginative world. Symbolically, Bluey and Bingo are only able to play, i.e., survive and evolve, because their parents are continually sustaining their activities by providing them with the necessary raw material. According to theists, God both creates and continually and actively sustains the world. Islam refers to God “Al-Qayyum”; as “self-subsisting”, and the “sustainer” of all forms of life. In this way, the episode illustrates that belief in evolution and God are not mutually exclusive; yes, life on earth evolves, but not without God, as a sustainer, routinely giving that life the materials it needs for survival. While “Flat Pack” clearly affirms evolution, it rejects what philosopher Alvin Plantinga calls “unguided evolution, the idea that neither God nor any other person has taken a hand in guiding, directing or orchestrating the course of evolution.”
According to theism, “God is constantly involved with his creation, sometimes wondrously (like the resurrection), sometimes more ordinarily (like providing food for the birds).” The second pillar of Islam emphasizes that humans and God/Allah have a direct relationship with each other, and in Judaism, God has a covenant with His people and is actively involved in their lives. This conception of God is not limited to Abrahamic theism; however, in Hinduism, Brahma “doesn’t just create the world once; he does it over and over again… Brahma as a cosmic builder who keeps building, taking care of, and then rebuilding the universe. This is important because it shows us how Hindus understand the world: it’s not just made once, but it’s constantly being remade.” All this is in opposition to deism, which holds that while there is a creator, He is not active in the universe; God is neither involved in the everyday function of the world nor in the lives of people. Consequently, deists deny that God performs miracles or acts of divine intervention, nor has God revealed Himself in any way other than through the natural world. Thomas Jefferson, for example, so rejected the supernatural beliefs about Jesus that he constructed what is known as the Jefferson Bible (officially titled The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth), which consisted of him removing all the parts of the New Testament that attributes divinity and miracles to Jesus while retaining the sections that emphasized his moral character and teachings. Deists believe that God created the universe as one would watch: once it’s put together and set to go, God just let it run on its own with no intervention necessary. Deists were often very critical of organized religion, as well as revealed religion, arguing that the existence of a creator could be ascertained purely through natural theology and the use of reason. Thomas Paine, an avid deist, declared: “I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.” Insofar as “Flat Pack” portrays the creators as continued sustainers of life who tenderly watch over their creation and who welcome persons into Heaven after their deaths, the episode contradicts deism and illustrates some essential theistic beliefs.
However, the episode diverges from Abrahamic theism in two important ways. Insofar as Bandit and Chili are portrayed as equal co-creators of all life, the creation story in this episode does not portray monotheism—the belief in only one God. Isaiah 43:10 reads, “Before [the Lord] no god was formed, nor shall there be any after me”; 44:6 reads, “I am the first and I am the last; besides me there is no god.” The New Testament further upholds this view. In Mark 12:29, Jesus says: “‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one,” and James 2:19 reads, “You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that—and shudder.” In Islam, the oneness and unity of God is referred to as “Tawhid.” The Qur’an 2:163 reads: “And your Allah is One Allah. There is no god but He, Most Gracious, Most Merciful,” and the first pillar of Islam is “There is no God but God, and Muhammad is the Messenger of God.”
In other religions, however, creation is sometimes attributed to multiple deities, for example in the Mayan creation stories. Oftentimes, the deities are male and female and come together to generate creation. There are the Shinto deities Izanagi and Izanami, who “gave birth to Awajishima, and then Shikoku and Kyūshū, each with their four faces, and then to all the rest of the islands of Japan,” in addition to other deities. There are several pairs of male/female creators in Egyptian mythology, such as Huh and Hauhet, and Shu and Tefnut, and in the respective Babylonian (the Enuma Elish) and Māori (the unification of Ranginui and Papatūānuku) accounts of creation. In certain Hindu creation accounts, Brahman separated himself into a male and female form from which all life emerged. In this sense, portraying Bandit and Chili as male/female co-creators of all life is reminiscent of these more ancient creation stories than traditional theistic ones.*
In the Abrahamic theistic religions, God’s decision to create the world was deliberate and with intention (although the nature of those intentions remains a topic of discussion). Many varieties of intelligent design arguments (for example, William Paley’s watchmaker analogy in his Natural Theology or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity (1802) or Peter Van Inwagen’s version of the fine-tuning argument in his Metaphysics (1993)) typically hold that God created the world with some specific telos in mind. This does not appear to be the case for Bandit and Chili’s “creation” of the world in “Flat Pack.” They are first presented as bungling and fallible architects who squabble as they attempt to put their furniture together. While they provide Bluey and Bingo with the material they need for their play, they do so by haphazardly throwing it into the yard and sometimes even taking it back. Bandit and Chili have no intention to make Bluey and Bingo’s world; rather, they do so as a mishap or byproduct of their actual goals.** In certain non-theistic creation myths, the universe, too, is created pretty much by accident. For example, there is the story of Mbombo and his three sons, from the “Kuba people of Central Africa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo” who vomited the universe and its life into existence. In the Yoruba religion, the deity Obatala begins creation deliberately and carefully but then becomes intoxicated and goes on to create “imperfect and disabled individuals” (his mistake is rectified by another deity, Oduduwa). In Aztec creation myths, our world is the result of a fifth attempt at creation. The idea of creation as an accident of the gods, rather than a deliberate act, is even found in works of fiction. For example, in his book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams tells the story of the Jatravartid people, who believed that “the entire Universe was in fact sneezed out of the nose of a being called the Great Green Arkleseizure.” Far from the creation of the universe being an intentional act of a perfect and personal God, as is the belief in Abrahamic religions, in these myths, the creators are fallible, oftentimes clumsy, deities who just fashioned the world in happenstance. This most closely approximates how Bandit and Chili “create” Bluey and Bingo’s world.
By telling a concise seven-minute story of parents working together to assemble furniture and their small children playing pretend in the front yard, Bluey’s “Flat Pack” chronicles the creation and development of all living things from the primordial soup to the ascension of humans into space (in this sense, Bingo seems to be following the steps of David Bowman in 2001: A Space Odyssey, as he evolves from mere human to Star Child). It’s a story of life’s relationship to the divine. For those of us teaching philosophy of religion (or just religion in general), “Flat Pack” is a fun way of introducing students (and maybe even preschoolers!) to concepts central to a wide variety of religious beliefs and traditions. Using a (totally awesome) cartoon to teach philosophy also challenges the stereotype that it is nothing more than an erudite, inaccessible, and ivory-tower discipline. Philosophy can be found everywhere, even in the least likely places, and can enrich your experiences of the mundane.
*Thank you to my friends and colleagues: Ken Applebaum, Nathan Eric Dickman, Dara Hill, Bonnie Jean Kurle, Aramis Troche, and Michael Walker for their help in identifying these stories for me.
**Thank you to my student Chad Jackson for helping me realize this plotline.
Bertha Alvarez Manninen
Dr. Bertha Alvarez Manninen is a professor of philosophy at Arizona State University’s School of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies. Her primary areas of research are ethics, applied ethics, philosophy of religion, philosophy and film, and philosophy and popular culture. Her main passion is teaching and introducing her students to philosophy and how it permeates so much of our everyday lives - even in kids’ shows!
