Releasing Happily Ever After

In a widely popular TED Talk, classical conductor Benjamin Zander points our humanity’s desperate desire for resolution, referencing Chopin’s Prelude in E. The piece dances around the E chord without giving the resolution of playing the actual chord. It plays every dissonant variation of E until, when the true E chord is finally played, the room lets out a sigh of completion. Zander compares this final resolving chord to the feeling of arriving home from a long day at work and turning off the car—the movement from away to home. It is this same movement, what Zander calls “the long line” of the work, that carries us from the recognition of a desire to the finding of its resolution. If Chopin had gone straight to E, not only would he have had a very short song, but he would have lost the sense of desperate longing that makes the piece so hauntingly beautiful. It is longing that keeps the audience listening with bated breath until they all release it on the final chord.

From an early age, we are taught to love this “happily ever after,” this final resolution. The prince finds his princess, the thief is arrested, and the wolf is cut open so grandma can pop back out. The E chord is played, and we can all now relax. We develop patterns of story that assure us everything will turn out fine, as it inevitably must. The allure of this perfection is so seductive that it is easy to find ourselves approaching stories—both our own and others—with expectation. There just has to be a happy ending, doesn’t there? And as artists, especially in the Christian realm, we feel great pressure to conclude with a picture-perfect ideal. The couple on the brink of divorce must find reconciliation. The absentee father will see the error of his ways. The murderer in prison ought to repent and start a highly effective Bible study. Echoing throughout the church is an ingrained demand for redemption. As we have been redeemed, so must the characters in our stories be.

Our stories start to fall apart, however, when we push for tidy closure so stringently that we begin to tell them untruthfully. I once read a story about a family on the brink of divorce, struggling in the face of the father’s atheism when suddenly, in the last ten pages, everyone changed. They reinvested their trust in God and the couple found reconciliation for their marriage, but for no apparent reason. It was as if someone had thrown a switch and now everything was fine. I closed the work feeling cheated; the author had traded an opportunity to show the process of redemption for an arbitrary picture-perfect Christian ending. It was as if Chopin had gone straight to E; it just didn’t make sense.

There comes a point in some stories when we cannot give a happy ending or we cease to tell stories of integrity. When we let go of our fixation for happy endings, we open ourselves up to a compelling avenue for story: the power of the unsettled ending. We long for resolution, and every dissonance chord only accentuates our desire. When stories spark our desire but don’t give us the ending all tied up in a pretty ribbon, the desire lingers after the book is closed. By crafting endings that leave the audience with unresolved questions, we invite them to enter more deeply into the stories we tell.

John Patrick Shanley demonstrated the potency of this form in his play Doubt: A Parable about a nun at a Catholic school who suspects a priest of sexually abusing the boys there. The play follows her attempts to find any shred of evidence with which to indict him, but to no avail. She ultimately pressures him into leaving the school, but without any verifiable proof, and the play closes on her sobbing, declaring, “I have doubts! I have such doubts!” Shanley strings the audience along on a desperate hope for certainty, but ultimately even his bastion of right and wrong has doubts. Shanley’s viewers leave the theatre still longing for proof..

Playwright Lee Blessing approaches a similar problem from a different tack. His play Two Rooms tells the story of Lainie, whose husband is being held hostage in a foreign country, as she struggles with her government to convince them to negotiate for his freedom. The play repeatedly questions the balance between the weight of injustice and the appeal of the greater good. Does the government have the right to jeopardize a citizen’s life for the sake of maintaining the status quo? Lainie is tirelessly pressured by both government and media, officials telling her to endure silently and reporters urging her to speak out, and the bickering goes back and forth in a jumble of aggressive opinions. Tensions rise until she chooses to make a statement, but her husband is killed by the terrorists and the unending tightrope comes to a sudden conclusion. In the end, there is no answer of right or wrong, of how Lainie or the government should have acted. Blessing closes with simply grief at the loss of a life so highly valued. Like Shanley, Blessing’s abruptness propels his audience to ruminate further on the dilemma he has presented precisely because he has not spoon fed them an answer.

In both of these plays, the stories offer us no glimpse of redemption. Instead, they offer us  the insight of how desperately we long for it. They incite our desire to find the missing resolution. The chord progression left incomplete stimulates the listener to find the final answer and arrive at home.

So, do we cut out happy endings altogether? Throw out the baby with the bathwater and kick Winnie the Pooh to the curb? Of course not. This is no absolute rule, but a reminder to evaluate our reasoning. Stories that tell redemption are still vital. We need Mr. Banks to come back to his children to remind us of our longing for a father’s love; we need Scrooge to buy a massive turkey to give us hope that anyone can change; ultimately, we need to see redemption lest we forget the truth of paradise.

But if we have to force a respectable resolution out of our characters at gunpoint, if the only possible impetus for our story’s conclusion is heavy-handed deus ex machina or a mind-altering blow to the head, we probably should check ourselves. By embracing the reality of a broken world and putting it into words without slapping a sham bandage on it, we tap into our longing for redemption. When we tell stories that don’t give that final E chord, everyone knows that the story, the song, the dilemma is undone. They can feel, just like Zander’s listeners, that there must be more to come. We create closure that unsettles our audience so much that they can’t forget the problem. But we leave the resolution up to them.