A Mighty Wind, directed by Christopher Guest and written by Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy, is an interesting movie. Generally described as a “mockumentary” and in some days a direct descendant of This is Spin̈al Tap, it’s a fun and light-hearted movie which lovingly pokes fun at folk music.

I say lovingly because, while many of the songs are intentionally bad, they’re bad primarily in an over-the-top way and include a lot of good elements that make them fun. And there are actually some genuinely good songs, too. (When You’re Next To Me being my favorite.)

If you haven’t seen it, the basic plot is that in tribute to the death of a man who had been a major producer of folk music back in the day, his children decide to put on a tribute concert featuring three of the major bands which he had produced. Those three bands are The Folksmen, The Main Street Singers, and Mitch & Mickey. The Main Street Singers are made up of nine people and aren’t available anymore, but there is a group called The New Main Street Singers which currently plays (primarily on cruises and similar small venues) and is only too willing to take the place of their predecessors. The Folksmen happily re-form, not having seen each other in decades, but have little trouble getting back together. And then there’s Mitch & Mickey, whose relationship became explosive and eventually separated acrimoniously. Somehow they are talked into re-forming for the performance, and do. (Mitch & Mickey have the best songs of the three groups, btw.)

The concert goes off, and is fun, though there are all sorts of back-stage issues which are the material for a lot of gags. This culminates in all three groups, after the main performance is over, taking the stage and singing what is obviously an old standard, A Mighty Wind.

The people and groups are not simple copies of any real folk singers, though you can certainly see elements of this or that group in them. For example, Mitch & Mickey certainly have some elements of Simon & Garfunkel, for example, but they’re also very much their own thing, both in having had a romantic past and also in singing mostly in counterpoint rather than in harmony.

The songs, also, though strongly representative of their genres, are not merely versions of some other songs. For example, the song A Mighty Wind seems to occupy the space of Blowin’ In the Wind, but it’s a very different sort of song. While Blowin’ In the Wind was a lament, if sometimes sung as a partially hopeful lament, A Mighty Wind is triumphant.

It is interesting how much the movie is about one brief, unsustainable moment. All performances are temporary, of course, but this one is even more temporary since it can never be again: it is a tribute to a past which has gone. The musicians work hard for it—most of them even care deeply about it, because these sorts of moments were what their lives were once about and they’re desperate for one last taste of that feeling. And yet, somewhat ironically, it is all blowing in the wind.

That the world is temporary is in many ways the primary philosophical problem faced by humanity. If everything is temporary, how can anything be real? There are only a few solutions to that question, and the ones that answer it positively generally look like either Platonism, Christianity, or Hinduism. However, even people who do not know the answer to the question can experience the fact that things are real, even if it is a mystery how they are real in spite of their temporary nature. This is what the climax of A Might Wind is about. Within the pretend world of the movie, the people are genuinely happy for a few moments, even if they soon won’t be, again, and in spite of all rational calculation, that happiness is real.

(I probably don’t need to add this, but it would be a disaster for any of the people involved to try to cling to that reality as the source of reality; to try to live in it or for it. This is the sort of mistake a great many people make. If one is wandering in the desert and finds a canteen filled with water it is an amazing gift to be given, but if one then sets up camp and tries to live off of the canteen forever, one will surely die, and quickly.)