Sun-Shiny

American movies have happy endings 99% of the time. You cannot say that for European or Asian movies. So I was thinking about why American movies are happy, and this is what I came up with with some help from my mom.

I watched a European movie once about several sisters and the hardship of their lives. I didn't like the movie because it was depressing and ended the film by the narrator voicing over all the bad things that continued to happen in the sisters' lives until they died. There was no mention at all of anything good that came from their trial. I was left with the feeling that their lives had had no happiness. It was not even suggested that one of their daughters or granddaughters had learned from the sisters' hardship.

In almost all of the wars the United States has been in we have had happy endings--the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the World Wars. Our military has been victorious. We can have happy movies because our history has been filled enough with encouraging prospects. It is like The Incredibles--Bob Parr (Mr. Incredible) surmounted all of his battles, with his struggling marriage, his archenemy, his job, his physical shape, his confidence: he won.

We have chosen to be optimistic. From our ability to work ourselves up and become better than what we were economically to educationally to socially we have decided to be positive. Our Founding Fathers wrote the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution, and we have carried on in their spirit and we have chosen to be happy. In The Incredibles, Violet really helps a boy to ask her out; she decided that she was going to have fun.

The United States was built on the foundation of a small group of people who believed in God. They believed that good would triumph over evil. Our country was built by a people who believed without a doubt that God was good and that he would win over everything that was not good. At the end of The Incredibles (I really like The Incredibles) there was a new villain, but everyone in the audience had no doubt that he would be toppled, that good would triumph over evil. Why shouldn't we think so? The family had already done it once.

I like American movies. I like happy endings. I believe that if a movie has a sad ending then it did not finish the point it was trying to make. A film that ends unhappily is not a finished story--they are leaving something out. If there is a story, then there is always something good that comes from it, even if you need to look generations farther or think in a different way to see the good.