My husband and I were discussing which movies to watch with our kids for our family movie nights, and I thought it was time to show them some of the old fantasy movies from the 1970s and 80s like Rankin and Bass’s The Hobbit and Jim Henson’s Labyrinth.
We both mentioned The Neverending Story, but then we thought, “Uh oh. Artax.”
Both of us had the same experience as probably every other kid who watched that movie, and that’s the experience of intense grief after watching Atreyu and Artax try to get through the Swamps of Sadness.
Our daughter is tenderhearted and loves animals deeply, and we both know that if we showed her The Neverending Story, she would be absolutely wrecked by the Artax scene.
So what do we do? We both love the movie; it was formative for us. And we were both devastated by the Artax scene as kids. I mean, that scene still gets me. Just thinking about it earlier made me tear up.
Do we pass on showing her the movie? Or do we tell her that even though there’s a really sad part, the rest of the movie is amazing?
In some ways, I want to shield her from that kind grief. I don’t want my daughter to cry.
But then I think of my own experience as a kid watching this movie, and how the intense sadness I felt at Artax’s death was somehow important to my development as a person. It showed me that death happens even when we don’t want it to. Even when it’s someone we love. Going through the process of weeping over Artax’s death, and watching Atreyu continue his quest despite the loss of his friend, was a kind of growing-up moment for me. The story revealed an important truth. Wouldn’t it be wrong to shield my daughter from that truth simply because I don’t want her to cry?
Of course, we could always wait a year or two before showing The Neverending Story, but I don’t think a year or two will matter. I still cry when I watch that scene. It will be sad at any age.
Should we avoid stories that make us so sad? Should we keep those kinds of stories at bay because they cut too deeply?
I don’t really know the answer. I know that I often cry when watching movies or listening to certain songs, and that I feel intense emotions when experiencing stories in all their various forms. This is the catharsis the Greeks believed was so important. We need to let out our emotions, even the really big and troubling ones. I wouldn’t want to stop watching movies just because they might make me cry. In a weird way, I like that experience.
But I know not everybody does. I know from my teaching experience that many students really didn’t like to read a sad book or watch a sad movie. They were uncomfortable feeling those feelings. For them, the crying and sadness didn’t lead to catharsis, or if it did, it was an unsatisfying catharsis, a stunted one.
Maybe their negative reactions were due to never having watched movies like The Neverending Story as kids. Maybe their discomfort with sadness was because they didn’t experience it in the stories they read and watched in childhood. Because they never had to process something as traumatic as Artax’s death when they were little, they couldn’t find value or meaning in some of the sad books that were part of the curriculum in high school. Maybe for them, stories needed not just a happy ending, but a kind of pervasive always-happiness that never allowed for anything too bad to happen. There might be danger and peril, but nothing would ever go too far.
Or maybe their discomfort with sad movies was because their lives were already too difficult and traumatic, and there truly was no value in living through someone’s fictional trauma. Maybe they needed those always-happy stories because they needed a total escape from whatever bleakness was in their lives already.
I honestly don’t know why some of these students rejected the sad books for their sadness, but I don’t think their rejection of them was illegitimate. I just know that for me, these sad stories made me feel less alone. Sometimes the danger and peril went “too far,” and the characters had to suffer, but that suffering connected me to them in ways that went very deep.
Artax’s death is a “too far” moment: a horrible, shocking event that has no last-minute save. When he dies, he dies. And Atreyu must mourn.
But his death isn’t the end. The quest must continue, or else the entire universe gets destroyed by the Nothing. That was a powerful moment for me, watching Artax die and seeing that Atreyu couldn’t change or fix it. And that he still needed to keep going even after his friend’s death.
Maybe if we talk about it as a family and help our daughter both prepare for the scene and also process it afterward, maybe then we can watch The Neverending Story. One of the joys of being a parent is sharing my favorite stories with my kids. We’ve listened to some of the Little House on the Prairie and Chronicles of Narnia books on audio, we’ve read all the Frog and Toads, we’ve watched all the original Muppet movies, and we’ve spent many a Saturday morning watching Pee Wee’s Playhouse.
Now, perhaps, it’s time to ride on the back of a luck dragon and watch The Neverending Story. And we can all cry together.
