Happy Endings

I liked the Bollywood film, Slum Dog Millionaire. So did a lot of other people. Popular worldwide, the movie was nominated for ten Academy Awards and won eight, (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay among them). It also won seven BAFTA Awards (including Best Film), five Critic's Choice Awards, and four Golden Globes. It was a moving, heroic film. Some people, however, faulted it for a flaw most of us would find puzzling. 

I read a review of the film by several local critics. One of them, a philosophy professor at a local Christian college, said he liked it a lot but it had one major failing:  it had a happy ending.

His remark intrigued and baffled me. What’s wrong with a happy ending? Since he taught at a college that identified itself as operating on Christian assumptions, I felt even more bemused. Isn’t Christianity centered on the ultimate happy ending? Jesus Christ died but then came back to life. But this instructor’s sentiment is widely-held. Whether in films or books, and in certain areas of paranormal writing, a happy ending is unacceptable.

It is unacceptable, I think, because of the mind-set that many have today. Life, so many presently think, is grim and dismal. The pain, hardship, suffering, and disappointment in life are the only things worth looking at if we are to have a “realistic” view of life. To think life can foster happiness is childish and naïve. British author Aldous Huxley once comment that given the state of the world he did not see how anyone could say they were happy; novelist Evelyn Waugh once declared that any man who said he was happy was either misinformed or an idiot.

Of course, these guys were writing in a time of great suffering and loss. They had seen World War I, World War II, and the downgrading of Britain from a world power to a broken nation. I can understand how they were disillusioned. George Orwell, a writer from the same era, penned what has to be the most depressing piece of fiction ever written, 1984. Unfortunately, the viewpoints of these “vexed and troubled Englishman” seem to have set a trend. Many still believe that to be happy or optimistic indicates you are living with your head in the clouds. To be gloomy, pessimistic, and depressed is to perceive things clearly.

The corollary in speculative fiction is that evil is supreme and triumphs. Happy endings are under interdict. Evil prevails. Even if good has appeared to have won, evil will raise its head once more to show that it is, in reality, the thing that has come out on top.

Aldous Huxley

As I pointed out in the four blogs preceding this one, I think this is an incorrect idea. I believe it goes against the nature of things and that those who hold such a viewpoint are not hard-headed realists who see things as they are. They have a mistaken and inaccurate view of life and of the world. Will take this matter up further in my next bog.

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