The great fix

An absolute shock came over the diminutive young adventurer as he saw his bearded sage towering over him.

“Gandalf!” Sam exclaims in the final pages of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Return of the King. “I thought you were dead! But then I thought I was dead myself. Is everything sad going to come untrue?”

Note that Sam’s hopes are set not on bringing some rain of riches down from the heavens but instead on removing some existing pain, something that ought not be there. Samwise Gamgee: gardener, hobbit, philosopher.

The wizard kindly laughs at this question and replies to his war-torn friend: “A great Shadow has departed.”

And then, to Sam’s ears, Gandalf’s laugh is “like water in a parched land,” Tolkien writes.

It’s as if this sound of joy is far more meaningful, more transformative, for having been absent for so long.

Like the redemptive themes streaming through Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings novels, the films that resonate the most often are those that celebrate some grand and arduous process of restoration.

Generation after generation we crave stories of institutional injustices abolished, empires overthrown, severed relationships renewed, warm lights shined into the cold of darkness, curses lifted, death defied.

Our thirst, it seems, is not for perfect things but for imperfect things repaired.

Some might call this escapist. But it runs deeper.

It is as if we are wired to desire a kind of correction that day in, day out feels just out of reach. The best movies offer a sustaining glimpse of this process. And experiencing it can feel like being given a promise or whispered secret too good to keep.

Could this longing suggest that the recurring myths of narrative art forms are mightier even than our own history?

Joseph Campbell, author and scholar of comparative religion, would have argued yes.

“Mythological symbols touch and exhilarate centers of life beyond the reach of reason and coercion,” he writes in The Masks of God: Creative Mythology.

And to encounter these myths, our culture turns to the movies.

We enter a theater. We lean back. The lights go down.

Is there anything more appropriate to do at this point than dream?

“I have a theory that movies operate on the level of dreams,” Meryl Streep once said.

Movies invite audiences to suspend their disbelief, to open their imaginations to new possibilities. This trait is the very D.N.A. of the medium that is the culmination of all art forms that came before it–including writing, photography and performing, musicianship, design and all manner of costuming and construction. Film is cumulative, one of life’s universal languages. And as such its resourcefulness knows no bounds, and the reaches of its pleasures are unending.

Even as other modern media stratify, movies still hold an unsurpassed ability to bring people together. Film remains, to a great degree, an extremely collective and hopeful medium. Because the real power of movies lies not in their aptitude for showing us who we are, but in their remarkable reminders of who we ought to be.

We see a great restoration on screen and just maybe a tiny bit of ourselves can be fixed, too.