Unexpected Happy Endings: My New Favorite Kind

Alright, I know I was a bit hard on Frozen in my last post, but really, generally speaking, I quite like Disney's animated movies. There are some that I love, and some that I enjoy, and some that I grew up with, and some I need to watch again, and some that I still need to watch for the first time. Most of them are beautifully animated and well-acted. They have great characters and great music. And they're safe. If you're having a bad day, it's probably a good idea to watch a Disney movie, because even if you've never seen it before, you know going in that everything's going to turn out fine in the end.


I think it's sometimes easy to forget how many luxuries come with being little. People feed you, your summers are always full of fun activities, you're provided ample opportunities for making friends and having life experiences, no one expects you to have your life planned out beyond the next week, and the stories always end exactly as they should. Once you hit your teenage years, a lot of that goes away - especially the stories. You hit the grown-up section of the library, and suddenly characters are dying, dreams are going unfulfilled, the bad guys don't always lose, and the prince doesn't always end up with the girl he should've. Eventually, you learn to stop counting on a happy ending.


The single upside of this newfound cynicism is that it makes the happy endings feel even better when they do show up.


In the past week or so, I've encountered no less than three unexpected happy endings. The first was, oddly enough, found in a horror movie (which I was watching for - reasons). Up until the last five minutes or so of the movie, everything was dark lighting and cruel intent and gruesome imagery and heartbreak and abuse and insanity. And then, suddenly, we were in Italy. And it was sunny. And everybody was wearing white. And dancing. It was awesome.


Then, on Thursday night, I got to see the musical Wicked live for the first time (I'd heard the soundtrack, but never seen it). That was fun for a lot of reasons. We had great seats, the singers were all wonderful, it was nice to finally hear the dialogue between the songs and thus have the gaps in plot left by the soundtrack filled in, the costumes and set pieces were fantastic, etc. 'Course, Wicked is kind of a dark musical, dealing with the consequences of prejudice and propaganda and, weirdly enough, political corruption; and it's the story of the Wicked Witch of the West, whose story arc in the original Wizard of Oz doesn't end well for her. So I went in expecting a great journey more than a heartwarming conclusion. And yet - spoilers, I guess - while it's a far cry from dancing in white in sunny Italy, the ending to Wicked is actually pretty hopeful and even fairytale-like.


Then, today, I finished a book that conveyed the impression that its author's intended purpose in writing it was to caution people to think long and hard before making rash decisions, because the whole book is about people making rash decisions and thereby bringing ruin, grief, and worry down upon themselves and the people around them. Throughout the whole book, there was one ending I was hoping for, one absurdly, even incongruously happy ending that seemed less and less likely to come about the further I got into the book. And then, fifteen pages from the end - there it was. Some characters had unhappy conclusions to their stories. It wasn't universal joy. But the best characters, and the book itself, ended up right where I wanted them to. I'd become so convinced that the book was going to end unsatisfactorily that to have it end in precisely the way I'd been hoping for felt surreal.


And it's an amazing feeling.


That second in the movie that the fireshot night scene jump cuts to a perfect spring day - the moment at the end of Wicked when you realize just how much brighter everything is than you thought it was the moment before - the sentence in the book that tells you your often-rough road through the story has all been worth it - they're moments to be remembered. One feels like laughing from sheer, stunned delight. Because a happy ending you expect is merely satisfying; it's what you came for, and you never had to reason to doubt its coming. A happy ending you didn't expect, that you weren't sure you were going to get, that you positively despaired of during the lowest points of the story, is not only satisfying, but surprising. It doesn't just safely and comfortably bring the characters around to their natural conclusion - it seems to change their fate, and in the process, brings you up from a place of concern and sadness into one of joyous optimism.


For me, these unexpected happy endings mesh with the very reason I watch movies and musicals and read books in the first place: they take stories plagued by the sorts of depressing calamities people encounter in their day-to-day lives, and by calamities far worse and more seemingly insurmountable than anything we inhabitants of the real world are ever likely to encounter, and dare to suggest that those stories can have happy endings.


I think that's why they're my new favorite kind of ending.


~Pearl Clayton