Why God Why

image courtesy of imdb.com

Children’s films.  What a horrible thing to happen to anyone.

Why do such horrible things happen in stories we love?  I was ‘doing research’ for this series (aka lazily surfing the web looking up examples I already knew of, instead of writing it) and semi-accidentally impelled both my wife and I to reminisce over the death of Mufasa in The Lion King, the death of Bambi’s mother in Bambi, the death of Artax (the horse) in The NeverEnding Story, the death of Ellie (Carl’s wife) in the first ten minutes of Up, the death of Littlefoot’s mother in The Land Before Time, and, worst of all, the sudden and utter heartbreak of a poor little lady squirrel in The Sword in the Stone.  The cumulative impact all these proxy disasters had on the mood of the evening was well... less than favorable.

What do all these have in common?  They rip your heart out, of course.  They’re some of the worst things that can and do happen to characters.  But, as sobbed by many of us while clutching pillows, for the love of wonder, why??

As in many cases, I think the cornerstone insight into my understanding of this matter comes from narrative commentary in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien.  In The Two Towers.  Frodo and Sam are in a situation that is the worst they can imagine (though not the worst they will encounter), and have been discussing heroes and unhappiness in their stories in order to pass the time (and at the same time of course their own story itself).  The following well-known appears:

“I used to think that [adventures] were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of sport, as you might say.  But that’s not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind.”

It’s not long after this that Frodo remarks,

“You and I, Sam, are still stuck in the worst places of the story, and it is all too likely that some will say at this point: ‘Shut the book now, dad; we don’t want to read any more.’”

(This second quote, incidentally, is right before one of my all-time top... fifty favorite quotes from the book, “I wonder if [Gollum] thinks he’s the hero or the villain?” But that’s another post.)

There’s an electric hum that runs through this whole passage as the two hobbits almost address the reader, as if the print is shaking itself awake and is about to address us about what we think.  But apart from that, I think the point that Sam makes is worth looking over, albeit briefly.

Sam mentions that stories with hardship in them, rather than being all pleasant and a kind of sport, are memorable.  They stay in the mind.  Is being memorable the best thing a story can do?  Of course not.  I can remember many, many stories that were told in a way that made them awful, or which were awful without needing help to be so.  They’re memorable because they were awful, and often hardship for the characters played no small part in what made them a lousy time.

But being memorable isn't the only thing Sam was getting at.  When he says that the good stories "stayed in the mind," he clearly is using simple words to try and indicate something almost inexpressibly profound (good old Sam).  To me it means that good stories are one with meaningful struggles for the characters to overcome, ones where the dangers seemed real, even to the reader, where we were running the risk of getting hurt right alongside the characters we cared about.  In order for this to happen, we not only have to know the author's not always going to pull their punches, but we have to believe that something good can come out of the bad, just like the characters do.

All the examples I listed above are good stories (with the possible exception of The NeverEnding Story), and (with the possible exception of The Sword in the Stone) I argue that all of the horribly sad things that happen in them are an essential part of how they’re good.

My forays into this territory, i.e. the drafts of this post I’ve churned up in the course of trying to get this nailed down, are at this point sprawling.  

Boil it down to the one question of the post: why.

First a very brief summary of why I think the tragic happenings in the above examples are what make the stories good.

Mufasa’s death was the real start of the story, everything before it was prologue.  The story is of Simba discovering his own identity, partly as the son of a great king, but partly as the new king who is responsible for the kingdom.  In the end he can’t rely on his father’s considerable strength to solve his problems anymore, but he can rely on his father’s example to guide him in discovering strengths of his own.  This is definitely glib, but hopefully you’ll bear with me in calling it only ‘very brief’ and move on.

Bambi’s mother’s death is worse, as it’s not the meaningful and interesting result of a villain’s machinations, it’s just a wild and horrible loss.  There’s no good reason for her to die, it benefits no one.  For a long time, I thought the movie, through that scene, as essentially an anti-hunting message, and this always bothered me.  Some mild close reading on the matter reveals that the movie is not, I repeat not, anti-hunting: as any deer hunter will tell you, does, that is deer, that is female deer, are decidedly out of season in early spring, because they still have babies that cannot fend for themselves yet.  And as we all know who have seen the movie, Bambi and his mother are rejoicing over the first new grass of spring right before she lifts her head because she hears...  Oh, oh God...

Anyway, this makes Bambi’s mother’s killer a poacher, not a hunter.  If the movie is anti anything, it is poaching, not hunting.  Hunting, as anyone who understands the natural world will tell you, is a necessary part of life.  The movie teaches us that, although it is sincerely unfortunate, poaching is a part of life as well.

But anyway, although it’s worse than Mufasa’s death, because there’s no prologue to help us see it coming, it nonetheless feels very real to us when it happens.  The poacher (I will not call him a hunter) represents the random sudden illness, or car collision, or .  We are ultimately in the hands of fate or chance, and when such terrible things happen we have got to pick ourselves up and do the best we can for each other.

Littlefoot’s mother in The Land Before Time is sacrificed along roughly the same lines as Mufasa.  The story begins where her life ends, and the kid has to find his way on his own.  The differences here are that first, she gives her life deliberately to save her kids from Sharptooth (a large tyrannosaur); second, that like Bambi, the circle of life itself is to blame, not a villain (although Sharptooth definitely keeps recurring only semi-probably as a antagonist, quasi-Jaws IV: The Revenge style); and third, that Littlefoot doesn’t get to spend nearly as much time avoiding his grief as Simba does.  His journey to the great valley and integrating his loss into his life happen at more or less the same time.  There’s none of the spiritual and moral procrastination of The Lion King’s second act (we all know it was based on Hamlet, right?).

And finally there’s Up.  Up’s first ten minutes and the emotions they evoke are, I think, of a far more sophisticated language and impact than simple sadness, and I will put off close reading, brief or otherwise, for another day.  Unlike the others it's clearly not a coming-of-age story.  Suffice to say that Carl experiences a loss that is so intensely sympathetic that the viewer is compelled into almost real grief right along with him.  The passage is almost like one of those rare, long, complex dreams, wherein we meet people so real that their loss, on waking, is a little heartbreak in and of itself.

I won’t dive into The NeverEnding Story here because frankly it’s been a long time since I last saw it, and yet for me the grief of Artax’s end is still too near.  As for The Sword in the Stone, well, maybe there are some wounds that never fully heal.  If I’m ever going to get this article done, I don’t have time for any more trips to the store for tissues, so that one will have to wait as well.

I started in on children’s movies because, as mentioned in the last post, I think we can find something in their tragedies to explain why most stories have happy endings.

The point of all these brief analyses is to show that in every case the stories with horrible sadness in them are stories where the characters are able to process their grief, and that grief becomes a necessary and meaningful part of their identity, and through them, a necessary and meaningful part of the story.  Everything still works out in the end, even though such terrible things happened to people we care about.  Suffering is universal, and it’s probably best if kids knew that, but it’s also good for them to see that it’s not necessarily the end of the story.

But what about our original question, why all stories these days have to have happy endings?  In the end, all this talk about kid’s movies has, apparently, done nothing but reinforce it.

What about the alternative to a happy ending?  One where the protagonist doesn’t succeed.  The bad guys win, or the trouble, whatever it was, isn’t solved in time.  Usually people get hurt, almost always the characters we sympathize with are unhappy, and with regularity somebody dies.

What’s the point of a story that has a sad ending?

We’re in overtime already, so this post ends here, but the last installment will have to deal with this question by combining a point from the first post with a point from the second.  There’s more than one way, after all, for an ending to be emotionally satisfying.