Staring out our back windows at the brown acre of hill and grass that separates our house from our neighbors', green tea in hand, I felt several key thoughts coalesce. First is the Common Man. Frank Capra was a humanist; he believed that man's being made in God's image means that he is in some small way divine. Each and every person is an individual with a purpose. Every person's opinion is valid, though it may or may not be sound.

In contrast, I have been prone to say that I don't trust other human beings - or myself - because we have sin natures. I would assert this idea a bit smugly. Now, however, I am beginning to think that the truth is somewhere in between. God gave us the faculty of reason; we can use it and trust it to a fair extent. He has also given us talents. It would be ingratitude to deny them for the sake of false humility; they are to be invested and used. In the same way, all the men, women, and children around me have their own talents. To deny that is either to deny my own gifts as well or to claim that I am a different sort of creature from everyone else. I don't think all humans are good, but I do think we are all rational. Thanks to God's divine law at work in the world, the most "rational" behavior is also "good" behavior. People need people, and others like you better when you are "good." Only a very few people can get away with chucking the whole mess and trying purposefully to be evil.

Admittedly, the last few paragraphs lead off into several probing questions, which any readers should feel free to take up in challenge. I don't have time to answer them all at this moment, for I wanted to bring up my second thought: the depth and validity of happy endings. While various critics would challenge Capra's films, calling them "Capra-corn" for their happy endings, the common man at the box office loved them. Now, you can chalk this up to the stupidity of the masses versus the true artistic knowledge of the critics - but if, like Capra and now myself, you don't automatically assume that the average consumer is an idiot, you conclude differently. Perhaps the average consumer finds a truth in happy endings that the artistic critic has analyzed away. At any rate, even these days it is extremely unlikely to have an enduring box-office hit with an unhappy ending - even in a horror movie.

Why is this? The problem of pain is prevalent everywhere you look. Murder, suicide, sexual diseases... Yet still people want their endings happy. Is this mass escapism - or does the common man find in the happy ending a realism deeper than the portrayal of suicide or death?

When I think about it, all of life is hope for a happy ending. We Christians know that the happy ending comes after death. Other religions have their own explanations. But this is why the actual fact of death so startles people when they meet it face-to-face for the first time. It seems out of place, a strange contradiction to the way they live, unless there is hope beyond.

Suicide and unhappy endings do not match the attitude of a living, breathing audience. Those who have already died are gone and buried. If a man has lost all hope, he has already committed suicide. He doesn't turn movies about suicide into box-office hits. No, the audience is still alive because it hopes for something more. The happy ending keeps the energy of hope alive.

Besides, as a Christian I believe a happy ending is either the shallowest or the deepest possibility because of the very fact of the problem of pain. Life as we see it ends in death; pain is the line on either side of which the happy ending may fall.

If all goes well for the hero without serious difficulty, if he is absolutely faultless, the story is melodrama. This is a happy ending that falls shallow of the line of pain. Many comedies also fall short because their characters are purposefully too innocent or stupid to understand pain. Or, because the plotline only covers a short period of their lives, there is no need to touch on much pain. Tragedy, of course, bucks right up against the line of pain and can go no farther, no matter how the characters toss against their fate.

Then there is tragicomedy. In a tragicomic plot, something in human nature or in God Himself allows characters to truck on through and right on past the line of pain. And I contend that most of the classic stories of all time have been tragicomic. Heroes face real, impossible difficulties - and transcend, because they have to. I want to write stories like this.  ¶ 12:37 PM