What drives the Literati – the lovers of what is commonly identified as Great Literature – absolutely crazy?
It’s the fact that the vast majority of ordinary people would rather enjoy a fairy tale than dig into a “serious story.”
The Academy Award for Best Picture is annually granted to a movie that is brilliantly written and skillfully acted. Members of the Academy also tend to favor films with a deeply serious tone.
Oppenheimer, which won the Oscar last winter, certainly checks all those boxes. It was also a commercial success. But the four previous winners – Everything Everywhere All at Once (2023), CODA (2022), Parasite (2021), and Nomadland (2020) – have registered a collective “huh?” from the movie-going public.
Millions of people, however, are on pins and needles to get their first look next year at Avatar 3, Captain America: Brave New World, and Tom Cruise’s latest death-defying stunts in Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part II – all of which are sequels, and none of which is likely to be mentioned when the next awards season rolls around.
People who actually buy theater tickets clearly prefer heroes, heroines, and high adventure.
J.R.R. Tolkien, who wrote The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, and who almost singlehandedly invented the fantasy genre known as the Great Quest, explained in his famous essay “On Fairy-Stories” why this really shouldn’t surprise anyone.
In his essay, Tolkien (1892-1973) suggests that secular modernity has tended to dismiss certain “primordial human desires.”
But those desires haven’t thereby disappeared.
They include a yearning to “survey the depths of space and time,” and to escape the finality of death. Tolkien calls the hope of surviving death “the oldest and deepest desire.”
As Tim Keller puts it in his book Making Sense of God: “We want to live long enough to realize our artistic and creative dreams, we want love without parting [that is, to experience a love that doesn’t end when our loved ones die], and we desire to see the final triumph of good over evil.”
Where can such things happen?
In fairy tales. In fantasies. In stories of courageous women and men who vanquish their darkest fears and fiercest enemies.
People aren’t naïve. They know that Harry Potter and Star Trek and Beauty and the Beast are just works of fiction.
But there’s something in a well-crafted story that stirs our hearts. Tolkien believed that fairy tales point to a reality beyond themselves.
Keller comments: “We have intuitions of the plotline of the Bible, that the world was made to be a paradise but it has been lost. The tales bring us joy, because deep down we sense that they describe the world as it ought to be and what we were made for.”
At the end of his essay, Tolkien lays his cards on the table.
He believes that the account of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus is “a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories.”
That doesn’t mean Tolkien thinks the Gospel is a made-up narrative no more historically valid than Superman, Beowulf, or Wonder Woman.
Keller again: “[The story of Jesus] is the story to which all the other joy-bringing, spell-casting, heart-shaping old stories only point. Why? This is the one story that satisfies all these longings yet is historically true. It happened.”
People are hard-wired to love great stories. And great stories fill us with hope that maybe there really is a Story in which everything turns out right at the end.
Wouldn’t it be great if there really was a Hero who died to save everybody, but who somehow came back from the dead so he could go on living with us?
That’s no fairy tale.
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