October 5, 2013

  • I hate happy endings

    "Good job. I didn't hate it."
    "I did. Or well. Just that ending though."
    "You just don't like open endings."
    "No, I don't"
    "I love that shit."

    At the start of our summer film, I remember detailing to two of the crew members about the one week period during the summer when I didn't sleep and just reread and rewrote the scripts that I had written since middle school. Something that stuck out to me as I was doing this was the fact that every character based on me ended up alone for some reason. It wasn't always that something had gone bad, it was just that for some reason things wouldn't work out. Initially, there was much panic. As if I was looking to end up alone at the end of my life, as if I didn't want to eventually settle down. But I know myself. While I am unafraid of walking the rest of my life without a husband, I want to eventually marry and have the thousand kids I long for.

    It took me a couple of hours, and by the time I told the crew about this I had figured it out, to realize it: I like open endings. Maybe at the end of each piece things fall apart (not just romantically), but the end is still open. It insinuates that anything could happen at that point. The end of each story is really just a beginning. It recognizes that there is more to the story than what is. I never know the ending to any story so I never write one.

    It's not necessarily that I don't like happy endings. It's that I feel like happy endings aren't realistic. Or. Not necessarily that they aren't realistic but implies that that is the end of the story. There is never coverage of what happens AFTER the happy ever after. It implies "this is it, everything is perfect, nothing more to see here" but really there is ALWAYS something more to see. A happy ending is much too black and white while there is an entire universe of complexities waiting.

    Happy endings leave people happy, sure, but it leaves them all chasing after that nonexistent happy ending. No one realizes that there will still be hardship after that second of complete happiness and just don't want to take on the hardship. That's why people end up believing they will never be happy — because they just don't know how to find happiness in what is rather than what isn't. That's how we have so many people unhappy. This is why I would prefer a sad ending versus a happy ending: after a happy ending, we all assume the story ends there, but after a sad ending we are still left with the hope and belief that everything will get better.

    Really, anything that ends with "we'll see what happens next" has a good ending in my book. As long as the premise is tasteful, of course. Because the reality is, that the story never really ends.

    The reality is as the lovely Mitch Albom puts it is that "all endings are also beginnings. We just don't know it at the time..."

    And really, your story is never really just your own. "...each affects the other and the other affects the next, and the world is full of stories, but the stories are all one"

    Z.