So Much for My Happy Ending

DISCLAIMER: This post discusses key plot points of Into the Woods (the musical), Twin Peaks (the tv show), The Bourne Supremacy (the movie), and the following novels: Max Barry's Lexicon, Henry James' The Portrait of a Lady, and Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence. If you don't want any of these spoiled I would probably skip this post.

One of my favorite musicals is Into the Woods, a fairy tale mash-up in which JackFrom Jack and the Beanstalk., Cinderella, Rapunzel, a Baker and his wife, and even the Witch find their happy ending before intermission. The Baker and his wife are able to break the curse the Witch placed upon their home and conceive a child. Cinderella goes to the festival and marries Prince Charming. Jack becomes rich beyond his wildest dreams. The Witch’s youth and beauty are restored.

But despite all the hilarity and good times in Act I, Into the Woods is my favorite musical because Act II shows what happens after Happily Ever After. The wife of the giant Jack slew follows him down the beanstalk and begins wreaking havoc. The Baker’s wife is seduced by a straying Prince Charming. The latter abandons Cinderella (he was raised to be charming, not sincere) and the former is killed by the Giant. Jack’s mother is killed. In other words, shit gets realAct II starts with the characters singing a song entitled So Happy, which ends abruptly when the giant's wife starts raising hell. The song can be found here. Shit gets real at 1:58..

My wife loves Act I and wants to leave at Intermission. I love Act I, but I have to admit I’m always anxiously awaiting the carnage that awaits in Act II. For whatever reason, the unhappy ending is what seems most powerful to me. The stories that resonate with me are the ones that are not wrapped up in a nice tidy bow at the end. I don’t want the star-crossed lovers to overcome the obstacles placed in their way and live happily ever after. I want Newland Archer, sitting on the park bench looking up at Madame Olenska’s apartment unable to knock on her door. I want Agent Cooper slamming his head into bathroom mirror, possessed by the evil demon BOB. I want Isabel Archer getting on that train and heading back to her son of a bitch husband. Endings like this just seem to have a greater impact on me. They have more emotional kick. I think about them long after I've finished reading them. They feel more real.

Which bring me Max Barry’s Lexicon. The book is one helluva ride. The first chapter starts with two guys kidnapping a man named Wil and the reader has absolutely no idea what is going on. The next chapter focuses on a sixteen year old girl named Emily who is recruited to join a special schoolLike Hogwarts or Xavier Institute For Higher Learning but this school teaches kids how to use special words to persuade people to do almost anything they tell them to do.. Wil and Emily’s stories continue to alternate chapters and part of the fun is figuring out just how their stories relate. When I realized that Emily was the bad guy hunting down Wil I was blown away. I felt it was an awesome choice for Barry to make. Instead of retelling Harry Potter’s story he was giving us Voldemort’s origin. But then it was all a lie. Emily had unwillingly been under the control of Stock Villain #1 (creepy old man who wants to remake the world in his image). Ugh. Then I thought Barry salvaged it by having Emily sacrifice herself by persuading Wil to shoot her to save the worldIt’s complicated, just roll with me here.. That’s a powerful ending right there.

Then I turned the page. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. Somehow Emily survived (Wil probably just shot her in the shoulder through and through) and they are currently living happily ever after. Booo! I hope all you happy ending lovers are pleased. Just know that when Barry writes the inevitable sequel I will be rooting for Wil to get waxed Bourne Supremacy Style in the first chapter so Emily can spend the next 400 pages following her current prime directive: KILL EVERYONELike I said, it’s complicated..

The Age of Innocence

“Not to understand the doer is to have no certain knowledge of what has been done, or why it was undertaken” – Philip Wylie, The Disappearance

In the last chapterWarning! I am about to spoil the ending of a book published in 1920! of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence Newland Archer, after the death of his wife, has traveled to Paris, where his true love Ellen Olenska, who he has not seen in over 30 years, resides. When Archer arrives he finds himself paralyzed, only able to look up at Ellen’s window on the fifth floor:

Archer sat down on the bench and continued to gaze at the awninged balcony. He calculated the time it would take his son to be carried up in the lift to the fifth floor, to ring the bell, and be admitted to the hall, and then ushered into the drawing-room. He pictured [his son] entering that room with his quick assured step and his delightful smile, and wondered if the people were right who said that his boy "took after him."

Then he tried to see the persons already in the room--for probably at that sociable hour there would be more than one--and among them a dark lady, pale and dark, who would look up quickly, half rise, and hold out a long thin hand with three rings on it. . . . He thought she would be sitting in a sofa-corner near the fire, with azaleas banked behind her on a table.

"It's more real to me here than if I went up," he suddenly heard himself say; and the fear lest that last shadow of reality should lose its edge kept him rooted to his seat as the minutes succeeded each other.

He sat for a long time on the bench in the thickening dusk, his eyes never turning from the balcony. At length a light shone through the windows, and a moment later a man-servant came out on the balcony, drew up the awnings, and closed the shutters.

At that, as if it had been the signal he waited for, Newland Archer got up slowly and walked back alone to his hotel.

On its own, this passage is powerful enough, a tragic ending for the reader who has been hoping against hope that true love would finally triumph and Newland and Ellen would be united. But a little more insight into Wharton's possible source for this scene truly makes this passage tragic. Wharton named Archer after two characters in novels by her good friend Henry James: Christopher Newman (The American) and Isabel Archer (The Portrait of a LadyDiscussed in depth here.). In fact, a character in The Age of Innocence says to Archer, “You’re like the pictures on the wall of a deserted house: ‘The Portrait of a Gentleman.’”.

Wharton goes even further than referencing James’ work. In his wonderful examination of The Portrait of a Lady and its relation to Henry James’ lifePortrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece., Michael Gorra describes this heartbreaking story:

“[James] had once stood at dusk on a city street, watching “for the lighting of a lamp in a window on the third storey. And the lamp blazed out, and through bursting tears he strained to see what was behind it, the unapproachable face.” James had stayed there for hours, wet from the rain and repeatedly jostled by the hurrying crowd, ‘and never from behind the lamp was for one moment visible the face.”

The similarities between this story and Newland Archer’s vigil seem so clear that one assumes James told this story to Wharton as well. We do not know for sure who James was looking for in the window. Perhaps it was Paul Zhukovsky, a Russian who James had developed “a most tender affection for”As described in Gorra's book. as Colm Toibin in his fictionalized version of James’ life, The Master, speculates. Whoever it was, it is almost a certainty that it was someone James loved, a love that due to the social norms of the day was doomed to be unrequited. In this wondrous passage Wharton has not only captures the emotion James must have felt standing there, paralyzed in the rain, but has passed it along to us, her readers. For three hundred pages we have yearned for Newland and Ellen to finally be together. And we, like Newland, like James, are left wanting.