Setting aside feel-good movies and inspirational works, in general we frown upon movies and stories where everything works out and all ends happily. It’s not that we enjoy suffering, but happy endings are fairy tales—what do they tell us about our lives? It’s easy, after all, for an author to write a happy ending. Realizing one in real life, that’s a different matter. A different, much more complicated matter.
A work of art should, theoretically, stand on its own. In some cases, though, knowing the biographical context in which the work arose can enrich our appreciation of it. This couldn’t be better illustrated than in A Single Man. Though an interesting movie on its own merit, knowing the context in which the story was written enriches its value exponentially. Another film, Chris and Don: A love story, provides that context. Christopher Isherwood wrote A Single Man during a crisis in his long-term relationship with Don Bachardy. Fearing the relationship would fail, he wrote A Single Man to come to terms with the devastating loss he was potentially facing. In the end, the relationship did not fail. These films represent two potential paths Isherwood’s life and the relationship between he and Don could have taken, two paths many lives and relationships can take, two endings. Only one becomes reality. While commonly we juxtapose happy fantasy against real suffering, in these two films this is reversed and the suffering and loss is fantasized while in reality love carried the day in the best fairy tale style. The beauty and richness of each film, and of each possible ending, can only be fully realized and appreciated in the context of the other.
A Single Man, set in the 1960s, follows a middle-aged professor who has lost his younger, long-time lover of 16 years in a fatal car accident. Having endured months of grief and wishing to escape his suffering, the film starts when he awakes in the morning and resolves to end his pain through suicide. We then follow him for 24 hours as he prepares to carry out his plan. Resolved to die and moving through the day as if it were his last, each encounter is loaded with significance. As you might expect, during the course of his planned last day on earth, he achieves insight. I won’t tell you whether he goes through with the suicide or not. It’s not actually germane to the real drama of the movie, which is his struggle to arrive at resolution and obtain a sense of peace after the loss of his lover. Like the protagonist at the end of Michael Cunningham’s Home at the End of the World, he does achieve acceptance and peace, a sort of zen-like appreciation for life, its joy and tragedy inseparable, accepted whole.
This final moment of Zen, however, is problematic and doesn’t entirely make sense. Like Shakespeare’s so-called problem plays, if you look at it too closely, the interpretation that appears to be intended starts to slip. First, it is not clear what sort of insight he has achieved. He reports a sense of clarity, but the events preceding and contributing to this lucidity are, at best, highly improbable. Specifically, he gets hit on by a series of cute, young guys, almost magically, the exact day he decides to kill himself. That younger men might be interested in him is not difficult to imagine. It is the timing that is suspect here. Importantly, though, he refuses their advances. These and other encounters throughout his day seem to reflect an inventory of possible ways of connecting to people in a world without his lover. Although the narrator appears to achieve some sort of peace by the end of the film, how each of these encounters contributes to his insight and solace remains unclear. And like Shakespeare’s problem plays in which ‘and they all lived happily ever after’ gets tacked on with little respect to the events preceding it, so in this movie the ending seems arbitrary and unrelated to the unfolding psychological drama that preceded it.
Understanding the story behind the story significantly changes interpretation of the film. Chris and Don: A love story chronicles the relationship between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy. Despite a 30 year difference in age—when they first got together Chris was 48 and Don 18—they remained together for nearly 35 years until Isherwood’s death in 1986. This is both a remarkable documentary and a remarkable story of love. Narrated by Don Bachardy, himself an older man now, the film provides incredible scope and perspective on the passage of time and lives.
After more than a decade together, Don, realizing he had never had a relationship with anyone other than Chris, decided to explore relationships with other men. It was during this time that Isherwood thought he might lose Don and wrote A Single Man to grapple with this loss. The problems in the film— the uncertain insight, the improbable events, the arbitrary ending— no longer reflect an unsatisfactory progression of events to a specific conclusion. Rather, they reflect the continued struggle and lack of resolution on Isherwood’s part; that is, it is precisely those things that don’t make sense in the narrative that provide the most profound insight into Isherwood’s state of mind and his struggle, gauging the depth of his grief. In this light, the apparent resolution in the film is false, but not hallow. We are left wondering, undoubtedly much like Isherwood himself, whether or not he really could overcome this loss. The ending, which I promise not to spoil, answers very clearly: yes. And no. The ending of the movie only makes sense when viewed from the perspective of Isherwood struggling with this question.
The irony is that while Isherwood wrote A Single Man to cope with the potential loss of Don, it is Don who had to deal with the real loss of Chris when he died. From age 18 to 53 he shared his life completely and totally with Isherwood and then, now middle-aged himself, he became a single man. Remarkably, it is not as horrible and depressing as you might imagine. You don’t walk away from the documentary feeling sorry for Don. On the contrary, you leave with a sense of awe at the way in which two people can shape and transform each other’s lives and the richness of what they experienced together. Don achieves, in real life, what Isherwood seemed to be struggling to achieve in his story but couldn’t quite pull off, at least not believably. But there’s a difference: Christopher never left Don, he just died. And even that they shared.
Viewing these two movies together turns our literary expectations upside-down. We believe the happy ending, not just because it really happened, but because we understand what made it happen, even if such endings are all too often elusive in our own lives. In contrast, we are suspicious of the fiction because at some level it feels false. Both movies tell a story of love and loss but the real-life story had the one thing that, at the time, Isherwood couldn’t write into his story. And that made all the difference in the two endings.
