An ending rooted in reality

by Olivia Foster

As Forrest Gump’s mother always said: “Life is like a box of chocolates: you never know what you’re going to get,” except in the film world you do always know what you’re going to get.

The guy is going to get the girl, the dying child will make a miraculous recovery and the broken family will eventually live happily ever after. Sure, there will be trials and tribulations along the way, but it’s all got to work out in the end right?

Well maybe the problem with this picture-perfect world is that in reality, life isn’t always so peachy. Peoples’ lives do fall apart, and sometimes they don’t get put back together again, so we ask: do happy endings just provide some form of escapism, or are they setting us up with unrealistic goals in a life less perfect?

From a young age we are conditioned to believe that happy endings do exist. Fairy tales like Cinderella - who gets her Prince - and Red Riding Hood - who miraculously escapes the big bad wolf - make us believe that against all odds, in the end good will prevail, and this is something that for a long time has been perpetuated on the silver screen.

Happy ever after

In the 2001 film Vanilla Sky, the notion of eternal happiness is challenged when the main character, David Aames, has to choose between living his life as a ‘Lucid Dream’, (a fantasy state in which life can be everything you want and more) or living a normal life, in which decisions are hard and things may not always go his way. 

His friend, Brian Shelby, encapsulates the predicament he faces, saying: “You can do whatever you want with your life, but one day you’ll know what love truly is. It’s the sour and the sweet. And I know sour, which allows me to appreciate the sweet.” 

The idea being that David should keep alive in the real world because, although there he may face failures and disappointment, he will never truly be able to appreiciate happiness without these experiences.

Disaster makes us happier

In recent years, there has been a spate of apocalyptic films. Shunning the typical Hollywood happy ending we have all become so accustomed to, movies such as The Day After Tomorrow and the recent box office smash 2012 depict the world at its end.

It could be argued that these films, so deep-rooted in disaster, are used to make us feel more normalised. At a time when there is great unease and economic upheaval within Western society, titles like these bring our worries into perspective. It is almost like they’re saying “look how bad life could be.”

Speaking to Paul Harris of The Observer in 2009, Jamsheed Akrami, a film professor at William Paterson University in New Jersey, said: “We live in angst-ridden times, and so the appeal of these movies is further amplified. Most of us seem to seek mental relief by drowning ourselves in a sea of doom and gloom for a couple of hours. The experience can be some sort of catharsis.”

Perhaps it is just a case of ‘the grass is always greener’, because if life really were to imitate art, wouldn’t we all just tire of the perfection?

Whether the ending be happy or totally disastrous, we use films as a form of escapism, whether it is to restore faith that sometimes life can turn out well in the end, or to make us feel more normal in the face of disaster.