The Great Cake* Experiment

Happy Endings

My mother loves films with sad endings. The double suicide, the abortion gone wrong, the terrible decision that leads to an inescapable, unhappy marriage or a life of quiet, unfulfilled desperation. She spurns the typical Hollywood movie with its tacked on, cheerful resolution and deliberately seeks out obscure, slow-paced Chinese and Russian dramas, where the only way you can tell the movie is over is because everyone is dead. She watches them late at night on a small, black and white television, almost as if doing penance.

The happy ending is, to me, largely a Hollywood construct. It rejects reality, where things are never black and white, in preference of the fantasy. It elevates fantasy as the goal, as the ideal, saying “if we’re playing pretend here inside this theater, we may as well give it our all!” It is obsessive compulsive in the way that I myself am obsessive compulsive - I cannot close a book on a sad note. I cannot let my eyes fall at last on a word not entirely hopeful, entirely upbeat. Whatever came before, I must end happily. It would be flirting with disaster to do otherwise.

There is a silent film from 1924 called The Last Laugh (Der letzte Mann), by German director F.W. Murnau. The triumph of this film, and why it is still talked about, is that Murnau made it almost entirely without intertitles. Every bit of the story is told wordlessly, through pantomime. Every bit save one explanatory title card, and then this: There is an intertitle toward the end that says

“Here the story should really end, for, in real life, the forlorn old man would have little to look forward to but death. The author took pity on him and has provided a quite improbable epilogue.”

The protagonist we last saw jobless, forlorn, hopeless and sleeping in the bathroom of the hotel he used to work for is now shown inheriting a huge sum of money and treating himself and all his friends to champagne and caviar. It is absurd, and the director communicates how absurd it is by finding it so worthy of mention he seems to apologize for it in the intertitle. In fact, Murnau wanted his film to end in that bathroom. Instead, he was forced to add this false ending for economic viability.

I will tell you right now that I love happy endings, if that weren’t already obvious from my obsessive compulsive habits with the closing of books. The happy ending always rings false to me, it always seems like a cop-out, yet I yearn for it. I am a child of America, where we are taught from birth that if we just work hard enough, we can do anything, in this land of milk and honey where the streets are paved with gold. And more importantly, I am a child of Hollywood, which has taught me that what is ugly is evil and what is beautiful is good, and the beautiful and the good will always triumph over the ugly and the evil in the end.

We know this isn’t true, though. Life teaches us that this is a lie. We all know something beautiful but ugly, or ugly but good, or beautiful but evil. We know life isn’t like it is up there on the screen. We know it, yet we long for it. We want it to be true, if only in that two-dimensional universe of narrative inside the cinema. That universe that follows rules, that makes sense, that is predictable and therefore brings us comfort.

We know that, just because we’ve completed twelve weeks of a writing project, that doesn’t mean we’ll keep on writing. Hollywood would have us all end this project and learn some deep life lesson from it, and we’d all go on from here to write, every day.  One of us would keep a meticulous and engaging daily journal, and in the epilogue we’d learn that this great diary would be discovered hundreds of years from now and held up as one of the best contemporary documents describing life in the 21st century. One of us would go on to be a successful critic for the New York Times, and that biting analysis and razor-sharp wit would be quoted for years to come. Several of us would go on to write the great British, Irish, and/or North American novel, and twelve year olds would begrudgingly begin reading our work for school, only to wholeheartedly love us by the end.

I once had an idea for a movie I wanted to make, when I was around eighteen years old. It was about a girl who lives in New York, or really any big city. She becomes frustrated with her life and how it seems to be going nowhere, so she takes to the open road. She’s heard about this wonderful place in British Columbia, a sort of Shangri-La for artists where creative people disgusted with modern life are building a community all about art and music and poetry and fanciful architecture (I was 18). Along the way she meets a cast of characters who are also frustrated with modern life, and have all heard bits and pieces about this wonderful place in the middle of the forests. They all become buddies and band together on this long, winding road trip to get to this magical place, where their lives are suddenly going to be fulfilling and they’ll live in gingerbread houses and paint pictures and eat marzipan animals and recite poetry every day. It will be grand.

Then they arrive, and they’re standing on the edge of the forest, at a clearing. You’ve been thinking all along, this place can’t be real, they’re never going to find it. But they have. The camera pans and it’s this incredible, glorious fantasy of a place, all laid out before them. Except there’s been a colossal fire. It’s deserted, it’s gutted, with just faint outlines remaining. It WAS there, and it was glorious, but it’s gone.

I wanted to leave it there, them standing and staring in disbelief over what once was, but is no longer. I wanted to defy the Hollywood happy ending, to face up to reality as I feel my mother is attempting when she forces herself to watch all those sad movies. But just as the Hollywood happy ending often seems false, just because something is sad, that doesn’t make it true. And if I made that movie now, I’d do it just the same, except for one thing. I’d have them stand there in silence for several minutes, but my last shot would be of them all, as one entity, begin picking up the pieces and rebuilding that place. It would be slow, it would be hard. There would be arguments and disagreements and there would be moments where everything felt easy and everyone burst into song. It would be life.

I think that’s what I hope for us all. Nothing unrealistic or instantly life-changing. But a subtle, internal growth over the course of this project where we’ve learned we can do this. We can write. We could write every day, but we probably won’t. We could write a brilliant novel, or a life-changing poem, or even an oft-cited article on Wikipedia. Maybe we will, maybe we won’t. But whatever we write, there are at least fourteen other people who would love to read it.

  1. thegreatcakeexperiment posted this