Reality

Oh what a terrible word that is. Reality. If you were to ask me on any day of the week in any week of any year, is I prefer reality over a fairytale, I'd answer fairytale every time. In a fairytale, the good guy always wins. You're ensured of that. Not only are you promised that the good guy wins, but also that the guy gets the girl and vice versa. In reality, we're not so lucky.

I think people began fairy tales in order to provide an escape for those who feel the same about reality as I do. People saw how broken and imperfect the world is so they devised a way to make characters who seem real have extraordinary stories and happy ever afters. In case you didn't notice, all fairy tales end the same way basically, the prince marries the princess and they live "happily ever after." It doesn't show you ten years down the line when prince gets tired of princess and divorces her, or when princess meets handsome foot-soldier and has secret rendezvous with him that the prince knows nothing of. Something like the Notebook, where husband and wife are "taken" together and die next to each other...that's all fine and dandy and tear-jerking, but when has that actually happened? Never. It's closer to reality though. Now take Atonement with Keira Knightly and James McAvoy. Great Movie. Girl and guy know each other since childhood, sparks fly, the "make love" once in a library and then guy is falsely convicted of rape. He goes to prison, then to war, they meet only a couple times again before he dies of disease the day before his army is shipped back home and she drowns as a bomb attack bursts a water main. Much closer to reality then, say Snow White. But then again, who can love someone continuously for years without ever seeing the person? Not many, that's for sure. I suppose people can do it, but it takes a special two people and it's vastly difficult.

Now, look at the English Patient. Amazing movie. Brilliantly directed, acting superior, and storyline wonderfully tragic. A woman is married, meets a different man, falls in love with him, commits adultery on her husband repeatedly, husband finds out, crashes a plane with him and his wife on board, new guy carries badly injured woman for miles across desert in Africa until finally leaving her in a cave while he gets help. He walks for three days until finally finding help only to be locked up for being a German spy. When he finally escapes and returns to the cave, as promised, she's dead. He lives with that knowledge AND a burn that covers his entire body. He's burned so badly that he will never walk again, looks like a raisin, and needs morphine the rest of his life. He lives this way until he convinces a nurse to give him a deadly does of morphine. That's reality. Sad it may be, but it's reality.

I'm like most of you out there, I prefer Disney classics where "guy gets girl the end" is the ending of choice.