The Thing With Feathers That Perches on the Silver Screen

I hope I can make it across the border. I hope to see my friend and shake his hand. I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams. I hope.

About an hour before we were going to check my daughter out of the hospital and take her home, she stopped breathing. She got resuscitated and taken to the NICU up in Tacoma, about half an hour north of us. The first night, they sent us home again; the second night, I spent alone—my partner and son still home—in a room we rented from the hospital for me to be near her. The hospital had really good cable, so I turned on TCM. They were playing The Deer Hunter, and there’s no way. I checked the schedule, and AMC was playing The Shawshank Redemption.

It is my considered opinion that The Shawshank Redemption is the finest ending Stephen King has ever written. For a lot of reasons, but highest among them is the way I feel when I read it. I always tear up when reading it aloud, generally, right as I get to the word “blue.” Because you can feel it, can’t you? What Red has survived is nowhere near as bad as what Andy Dufresne survived, but they both did, and there is a chance of that meeting, of the two men seeing one another and shaking each other’s hands. Either way, they have survived.

This is a dark time and we all know it. We hold our trauma to us, each with our own pain. Everything costs too much. People we love are in danger—people I love lost everything a year and a half ago and are still trying to figure out what to do now. We’re afraid, and deservedly so, and it can be overwhelming. It’s hard and it’s painful and it’s easy to feel an impenetrable sense of doom.

I’m also not claiming the movies are a cure-all. You finish Kiki’s Delivery Service, and Kiki may be in a much better place, but that doesn’t mean you are. Nani and Lilo have built their found family, but these days it’s hard not to wonder about how Pleakley would handle a conflict with ICE. (It’s easy to figure how Jumba would, and a little satisfying.) George Bailey may be the luckiest man in town, but the economy here and now is falling apart.

It is worth noting that, sometimes, the hopeful movie is based on a true story. Katherine G. Johnson really did do pivotal and inspiring work for NASA. The 1980 US Olympic hockey team really did win in an astonishing underdog story, if sports is your speed. And Tom Hanks as Mr. Rogers is hope by anyone’s standards. Movies like that can help remind you that there is hope that isn’t just coming out of the mind of a screenwriter.

Movies with hope in them are a light in the darkness. Scott and Fran can win the Pan-Pacific Grand Prix Dancing Championship dancing their own steps. Carl Fredericksen can find a reason to live again even without Ellie. The Tramp and the flower girl can fall in love. Jamal and Latika can find one another and have a huge Bollywood-style musical number. Scads of plucky British people can do whatever weird thing they do to raise the money to do whatever they want to do. Scads of plucky children can triumph to sing or dance or whatever else they want to do.

Roger called movies the empathy machine, and they are that and we do need them. Empathy is what pushes back on the darkness in the first place. Thinking about each other instead of just ourselves makes life better in the long run. But movies about hope remind us what better things can look like and that we can hold out for it. Not all of us will survive; that’s a hard and awful truth. Five hundred yards, just shy of half a mile, is a long time. But sometimes, the rain is on the other side, and the road to the blue Pacific.