What makes a happy ending so undesirable? Specifically the kind of happy ending you get when characters in a piece of media resolve their differences by holding hands and singing Kumbaya. It’s leaves you with a terrible taste in your mouth, not because you hate yourself or the world, but because in this life there are no happy endings. At least not the kind you can find in a 90min runtime. According to most peoples lived experience, interpersonal conflicts are difficult, messy, and sometimes unresolvable. So when you see a happy ending in a movie or novel, you feel cheated by weak writers who have nothing to say. If two people can come together by something as simple as having mothers with the same name, then was there anything of substance in their fight with one another? What differentiates these two characters truly? Is this a reflection of ourselves?
What I have come to realize is that the wall that distinguishes ourselves from the other is both 1. Something of our own construction, and 2. something fragile and wholly fungible.
This distinction we have between ourselves and the “other” is only an illusion of our material constraints (physical being) that we build to rationalize what our senses cannot concretely map out. That being “being” is everyones experience, that we all draw from and refill the same well of subatomic particles in our universe. The argon I breath now is the same that Jesus Christ did 2000 years ago and that the dinosaurs did 2 million years before him. There truly is no conflict between people because to have conflict, there needs to be different interests.
So in some sense the happy ending is in fact the most true to life outcome. If we can see past the illusion of the distinction between ones self and the other, we can walk together hand in hand and sing.
This is all assuming no class interest is at play. Maybe all of these other conflicts are just a poor substitute, and if we had no class we would have no true conflict. Or maybe class consciousness is how we break down that wall. And much like a poorly written story, the conclusion is really that simple.