Tag Archives: Love

Tales of Despair: The Road and the Unhappy Ending

There are so many creations in the realm of literature and art that draw inspiration from despair that they have, in some areas, grown a cult of their own. Entire genres are dedicated to these themes, and as far back as Shakespeare people have been fascinated by fate and the tragic ending. Macbeth is a perfect example of a tale which is very much doomed from the start – from the very beginning, we know there is no hope left for this man, and we follow him powerlessly to his doom.

In most areas of art, the artist is mostly, if not entirely, in control of their work. This allows a great freedom to take the story where it leads, regardless of the end. As a storyteller, it is with great relish – though also with great pain – that we can put our characters through a hell they sometimes don’t survive. Tolkien allowed Frodo to be scarred, physically and mentally, for the rest of his life. Orwell provided no escape for Winston Smith, and in the end he was powerless to stop himself from being reintegrated into the society he so hated. Stephen King is a master of the ability to push the darkness of a tale past the point of no return, whether it is Louis Creed graphically losing his son early in Pet Semetary and eventually driving him to insanity, or Paul Sheldon losing his entire leg to Annie’s madness in Misery. These are things that can’t be recovered from; for these characters, there will be no happy ending.

Yet there is one artistic medium in which it is much more difficult to avoid the inevitable ending upturn, and that is film. Particularly in the large-budget Hollywood industry, revenue is all-important in recouping the cost of developing the film, and the story ultimately falls to the demands of the crowd. In the end, most people just don’t go to the movies to feel bad.

What ends happening is that, with the exception of those few movies that are actually based upon novels (see the Stephen King examples above), it is almost impossible to find a movie that is willing to commit to the permanent destruction of their characters, and refuse to relent even at the very last moment. As scary as horror movies are, someone always survives. As moving as dramas are, someone always wins an insurmountable struggle.

Occasionally, you will come across a movie that goes halfway, and doesn’t quite provide quite the satisfying ending you might expect. Donnie Darko does this well – certainly not a happy ending, but one that somehow resonates nonetheless with a just fate. There are bittersweet endings, such as in Toy Story 3, with a conclusion we know is coming from the very beginning, yet somehow don’t want to face.

But there are very few movies that have the guts to go the full distance. In the end, there are few that can claim this credit as a stand-alone film (American Beauty springs to mind as an exception), but even in novel adaptations, the temptation to veer from the story can be overwhelming.

The Road, however, is not one of these. It is in every possible way as bleak and terrible as the novel it was based on, and doesn’t stray from its course even at the final stage. In a way, the shattered world in which our characters live give us little reason for hope form the outset, but a vast canon of apocalypse tales (thank you, John Wyndham) has taught us that at least some sort of redemption awaits at the end. At first, we want to believe that salvation may, in fact, lie at the coast, despite there being no evidence other than the father’s words. When the father becomes ill, we expect this as the twist, the seat-edger. What happens from there, however, is the push too far that casts the whole story into despair. There is no redemption, and even as we watch the boy watch over his father’s body, there is still some tiny hope that maybe we’re wrong, and that he’ll come back.

This ending has earned The Road the dubious accolade of being my favorite movie I would never want to see again. I fell in love with it visually from the very first scene, and the impeccably executed plot was riveting. But as a father, the ending cut a little too close to home, and I watched the credits roll through a pretty thick veil of tears. I want to watch this again…but perhaps not any time soon.

In the end, of course, we are allowed at least a brief reprise from despair in the form of the family that take the boy in. Yet they are a poor substitute, and the genuine love and caring the boy has lost in his father is irreplaceable. Ultimately, the closing message seems to suggest that kindness itself is irrelevant; in a world such as this, there is truthfully survival – or death.

Tales of Despair: My Dying Bride and the Destroyer of Hope

Weeping with you. Arms around them
Flowing with you. Without your men
Keeping with you. Feeling their shiver
Drowning with you. Deep in this river

Tired and lonely. Sitting and staring
Weak and filthy. No longer caring
Wasting to nothing. The rubble of you
Hoping for something. Poison where love grew

People. Feel her mind
She is broken
People. Fill your eyes
Her body is broken

Leave me be, with my memories
I can still see all the lovers of me
I still know those feelings

You’re still mine, my lover
I watch over you
Goodbye my lover
No sorrow. Please, no tears

Holy and fallen. Watch yourself die
Fade and wither. Long lost the fight
Tremble to sleep. Her man long gone
Years, and still weeps. Never forgotten

My Hope, the Destroyer

© 2001 My Dying Bride

It would be impossible for me to write of despair without at least mentioning the beautiful and doom-laden music of British band My Dying Bride. From a musical point of view, there is little else in all the canon of recorded music that is so inspiring of – and inspired by – despair and misery. Over the past twenty years, My Dying Bride have filled the world with misery, in a series of beautifully recorded and artfully written albums and songs. The mastery of these albums is, as much as the musical style itself (slow, morose, often heavy, with achingly tragic vocals), the imagery dredged up by their dark and evocative lyrics. Though they rarely tell a story (The Light at the end of the World is a wonderful exception), the visions painted by these terrible words have endured in my mind for years, and it is these I would share with you.

“My Hope, the Destroyer” is a part of their 2001 album The Dreadful Hours, and is the culmination of an hour-long soundscape of doom. Metaphor and reality blend interchangeably, and from the opening strings, a scene of such utter bleakness is painted that it blackens the very world around you:

There is a man, eyes red and swollen with many tears, arms out to a soul that is not there. In a room, dimly lit, he feels himself drawn ever deeper into a corner of blackness, and the world above fades into utter nothingness. So has he been for days, and now he has not the strength to crawl of the unlit void into which he has been carried away. Voices pass around and over him, and they are distant, unheard and meaningless. Their sound is cold, and bring no comfort.

As this man is ever drawn down a stream of unconscious and black, twisted claws of despair rise from the deep, and he comes to pieces, and is undone. In this dying, he sees his woman, in white on a ground of black stone, stained in red, and the bleak faces of people and demons gather and stare. He is there, again, and in his arms she is lifeless. In the rain, the gray and the red above, the twisted faces of the past stare down, and mock him.

He is carried away on the sea of ink, and there is a stone, upon it a word, and below it a death. The tree above is leafless, and the raven does not move. Water drips on the stone, and it is not rain.

And in the fading twilight of his life, his every thought has ever been bent upon this moment, and turning back on a life of many years, all hope failed that one night, and tears have filled all the nights since.

Such are the scenes in my mind, every time I hear this song, and I am given to wonder – what tragedies inspired music of such despair?

On the Nature of Selflessness

Note: Thanks to alexandracorinth for the inspiration for this post.

I want to propose a mildly radical concept. I do not believe there is such as a thing as selflessness. All humans are selfish.

Before you cry out in indignation, I want to acknowledge every selfless act you have ever done. Every time you allowed someone else to take the last chocolate truffle. Every time you didn’t buy a new pair of shoes, even though you really, really wanted them, because your boyfriend was worried about money. Every time you bit your tongue and allowed a friend to believe they convinced you of their opinion, even though you know they’re completely full of crap. Every time you’ve ever donated to charity.

I want to acknowledge your efforts in all of this, because it’s all a lie.

We are raised (at least in Western society) to believe that selflessness is the epitome of culture and manner. We serve others before we serve ourselves at dinner, and we stand to allow older folk to have a seat on the bus. Some of these things have been ingrained in our nature from a very early age, and are very nearly subconscious. Some things, however, are more difficult to reconcile; we might forego applying for a promotion at work, because our best friend also wants the same position. We might give up every friend and joy of a home town, because our spouse wanted to move to a different country. We might put ourselves in a position of danger, so that our loved ones might not be.

At the heart of all this is the notion of sacrifice. Ultimately, all acts of selflessness are the result of the deliberate abstaining of something we desire, for the sake of another person or entity. Perhaps it is an object or toy; perhaps a location or person we love. We may even make that ultimate sacrifice, and lay down our own life. The impetus behind this is the same: we are willing to give up something we desire, because we feel there is something else that is more deserving.

Yet why do we do this? Where on earth does this sense of altruism come from? Evolutionarily, it doesn’t seem to make sense; in a simplified way, the great natural law ‘survival of the fittest’ goes completely against this grain. If you have ever watched birds scrabbling for breadcrumbs, you would recognize this: not a one of them is willing to give up a tasty morsel for a compatriot. The very nature of survival presumes the endurance of the most selfish; the one who can eat the most, endure the most, procreate the most and live the longest, ensures the preservation of their genes into the subsequent generation.

Yet is this always the case? There can also be found examples in the wild of what we would call altruism; a mother cat might die in defense of her kittens. The reason here seems perhaps obvious – her genes have been passed on to the next generation, so there is now little reason for her continued survival. Would she die in favor of her mate, however? Perhaps not. Wolves in a pack might share a kill with each other, even if an individual has not filled their belly. Again, survival is at work here; wolves live by necessity in a pack, and the survival of one is inherently linked to the survival of all.

So what of human sacrifice, then? Outside of our race, there is little evidence for altruism that does not directly further an individual’s survival. Yet there are examples of people who would give up items or values of considerable cost, sometimes for the sake of complete strangers. Where does this come from?

In much the same way that a wolf must live in a pack, so must humans live in society. Our race has evolved to the point where it would be nearly inconceivable for an individual to survive without any other person at all. We rely on each other for food, for clothing and for shelter; we rely on each other equally for emotional survival – for love, friendship, and counsel. It could therefore be argued that there is a very strong human drive to ensure the survival of our people in general, even at the sacrifice of ourselves as an individual.

It is possible, even, that it is from this basis that the very concept of morals arises. What defines ‘good’ and ‘bad’? Again in evolutionary terms, ‘good’ represents survival, of either individual or society – ‘bad’ represents the opposite. Thus, killing is bad; children are good. Yet killing bad people is often be considered good; ridding society of those who would destroy it is a strong survival trait. This instinct as produced a strong reward in us; we feel good when we do good.

And so this relates to selflessness. When we sacrifice something we care for, we convince ourselves we do it for the benefit of others. Yet the subconscious is at the same time rewarding us – we feel good for our sacrifices. This in turn leads to the thought that, in fact, every decision we make is based on the outcome we believe will make us feel better about ourselves.

And therein lies to falsehood of selflessness; if each decision we make is ultimately for our emotional benefit, then could we not be considered as being ultimately selfish? Consider a simple scenario: you are at a party, and there is one last cookie on a table. You could take the cookie and eat it, because you want it, or you could leave it for another to take. Take a moment to think about what you would do; then take another to think about why. Then – take a third moment to think about your reason. If you eat the cookie, it is ultimately because your desire for the cookie outweighed your desire to be nice to others. If you leave it, the converse is true. One or the other does not make you a bad or a good person; it becomes a simple matter of choosing the path we can most easily live with the consequences of.

This is a terrible thought to consider, in a way, yet comforting at the same time. Every act of self-sacrifice we have have ever made was in fact driven by the subconscious desire to feel good about ourselves. Every act of selfishness was driven by exactly the same force. Ultimately, whatever path you choose, it will be the one that benefits you: if not corporeally, then emotionally. In this, then, there is perhaps little difference between altruism and selfishness – merely our perception of the result.

In a nutshell, you ask? Okay, here goes: don’t feel bad when you are selfish, because you are just as selfish when you are selfless. And so is everyone else. So there.