Happy Endings and the Nonsense of Realism

Prepare to have a lot of endings spoiled for you.

Sometime in adolescence we learn disdain for the things we like. We still want to watch cartoons, play with action figures and have stories at bedtime, but these are inappropriate desires for ‘grown ups.’ Children grow to feign disgust for the things they actually desire, preparing them for adulthoods of denial. Often those adulthoods are spent desperately seeking childhood freedom, such as the necessary irrationality they can now only get through alcohol or pot. I blame that same anti-rational kickback for why so many people will watch a third awful Transformers movie.

Especially if you aim for an intellectual life, one of the things you learn to disdain is the happy ending. They’re unrealistic and trite. They don’t happen. When they do, it’s still more important to the cynical intellectual to write about when they don’t. Ours is a culture that disdains naïvety but cherishes cynicism, despite those being the same thing. They are bald-faced, oversimplisitic ideologies that prejudge people and the world, glomming onto any supporting evidence while blithely ignoring or making excuses for the exceptions. To be cynical is merely to be naïve in the negative direction. Like the sweetly naive, the cynics claim they know the real world and demand their realism.

Never mind that all fiction is inherently unrealistic – no matter how bleak, it’s just words on a page. Denis Johnson is one hundred percent as make-believe as J.K. Rowling. Not one word of it wasn’t made up at a keyboard. Many in my crowd are suckers for unhappy stories, leading them to universally rebuff me for thinking JT LeRoy was a fraud. That one had a happy ending, I guess.

True tragedy and moments of profound melancholy possess inarguable power. No distaste with darkness robs Of Mice and Men of its closure. Tor.com recently posted an editorial positing that 1984 is a classic because it’s depressing. I’ll freely admit that the best novel I read last year – final got around to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World – ended about as bitterly as he could make it.

Despite my fondness for Of Mice and Men and Brave New World, the worst of the unhappy endings is killing your main character. It’s typically a cop-out. Death, even in sacrifice or redemption, bails the character out from having to face future consequences. You’re at least fifty years too late to play the “but those consequences were so bad” card. It’s not deep; it’s the sick-note for Gym Class of fiction tropes.

One of the greatest offenders is the post-Burton killing of villains in superhero movies. Villains in particular should have to stick around in franchises and see what they’ve wrought or develop as characters. How nice would it be to have Doc Ock mentor Peter in Spider-Man 3? Or have Harvey Dent come to his senses after his rampage in Dark Knight? I grasp the desire to kill Osama Bin Laden, but it’s a far better story to have that man meet every widow he’s made.

Danny Boyle is making a career partially on subverting the crumby ending. In India, in a secluded canyon, and in the zombie apocalypse, he puts his characters through utter Hell so he can deliver that one moment of climactic relief. He plays the conventions of bleak fiction against its own crowd. He keeps getting nominated for awards, so thank goodness the wrong people haven’t caught onto what he’s doing yet.

Depressive folk always tell me, “That’s the way the world is.” FX’s Louie having no soundtrack, dull lighting in an airport as he laughs at someone else’s distress – this is, according to The New Yorker, “giving reality its due.” This is real life.

Bullshit. That is something that can happen in reality. A man in a Ronald McDonald costume humming show tunes can also happen. It’s less likely to, though art affords the possibility for it. To mindlessly or pedantically mimic some myopic reality any reader can experience more clearly by putting the book down and living – that’s more intellectually bankrupt than a thousand Happily Ever Afters.

This storytelling environment has left the “happy ending” malnourished. We’ll continue to see trite happy endings, where the heroes either win outright or by Deus ex Machina. RomCom Guy gets RomCom Girl. Harry Potter sends his magic kids off to magic school. In many cases these still satisfy. I’ll almost always side with a treacle positive ending over a treacle negative one, because my soul isn’t a black vortex that demands to be fed disappointment. If we’re going to be superficial, I want to smile through it.

But we should do more with happy endings, though. What else could be done with them? Examining what people want.

In my most recent #fridayflash, “She Danced,” the guy gets the girl. But all we hear is how awful she is at the party. The narrator is smitten; most of my audience wasn’t. Some readers questioned if him getting a date was even a happy ending. For the narrator? Yes, it was. Rather than making an objective value judgment, or lurching for something as universal as a death or finding an angelic object of affection, I wrote something where the character wanted a thing most of us didn’t. Your and his values form an moral  kaleidoscope.

I’m hardly the first to do this. Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle literally ends on the line, “we are so happy.” Their circumstances are tragic, psychotic, and yet, enthusiastically desired. The survivors are deranged and consenting to live in something as tragic as any Greek homicide.

Dared on by better literature, I’ll sometimes go weirder. “Up High” was also a happy-ending story. That one ended ambiguously, and despite some grand guesses, nobody picked my actual intention. That’s what I get for being so damned cheeky and metafictional. For those still curious, I’ll spoil what I meant to happen in the next three paragraphs.

It was originally written for an all-dialogue story contest. It remains a story without a single line of description. In it, our ledge-sitter just wants silence to think. The very existence of the interloper annoys him. All the interloper can do in the story is talk – making more noise. Our interloper gets a bright idea, one other than jumping and killing himself. What was his plan?

He quieted. No more dialogue, the story ended, and the ledge-sitter got his wish: utter silence in his world, which only existed on the page.

Jab me for being postmodern, but that’s a happy ending. Nobody dies, the ledge-sitter gets silence, and the interloper gets to help somebody for once after a year of performing layoffs. The “I’ll show you” ending is a gag, since we’ve never been able to see anything they’ve done. All you’re shown is the blank page below the last line, because that’s all there is.

So, great. John’s examples of neo-happy endings are dating a bitch, going crazy and ceasing to exist. He could have at least pumped the first for Princess Bride.

Rather than undermining my position, though, I see this as underlying the real truth: neither the happy nor the sad ending is intrinsically the best. The best ending is the one appropriate to its story. That’s the big tell, and what makes Of Mice and Men and Brave New World succeed: their deaths are wretched but appropriate closure to great stories. A lame story can’t seed and grow a good ending. No matter what you tack onto the end, it won’t be particularly meaningful.

Likewise, going against what’s built up can be harmful. The end of Batman Begins suffers for Batman letting R’as Al Ghul die, tarnishing the hard-worn altruism and aversion to the death of others displayed throughout the movie. “I don’t have to save you” sounds like hokum, or a screenwriter making up for Liam Neeson’s contract expiring.

Sorry. How cynical of me.