CAPC Magazine, April 2017: Realistically Ever After

Letter from the Editor: Bianca’s in Town for a Reason

Poor Lars. Life isn’t going the way he wanted. He’s lonely and longs for love; it doesn’t help that he’s shy and socially awkward or that he lives in a small town with few options. This is the premise of Lars and the Real Girl, a drama-comedy starring Ryan Gosling as Lars. But then a new girl comes to town. Bianca and Lars fall in love and become inseparable. You’d think this was happily ever after. But as Lars introduces Bianca to his family and the community’s cast of characters, all are greatly alarmed. Bianca happens to be a life-size inflatable woman. Lars treats Bianca like a real person, however, leaving us viewers to wonder how far his crisis will go. When his family seeks advice Lars from a therapist, she encourages them to be supportive because “Bianca’s in town for a reason.”

That line has come in handy for me over the years. It’s a favorite catchall phrase to label the often-inexplicable ways we cope with life’s difficulties. Although no one actually sat me down and told me life would be easy, I can still be caught off-guard when life behaves the way it does. Life isn’t a fairy tale for any of us. Our lives are full of trials that we didn’t ask for and don’t know how to deal with. We all have a Bianca in town, a way that we are coping with the discrepancy between the way life is and the way we wish it would be.

In this issue of Christ and Pop Culture Magazine, “Realistically Ever After,” the features and support articles speak to the realness of life in all of its glorious imperfection. Olivia Ard kicks it off in her article, “Willing to Wait for It.” Ard shares her struggle with infertility and how the music from Hamilton has helped:

Until recently, I didn’t know why I listened to [Hamilton’s] “Wait for It” on repeat almost every day. Of all the songs in Hamilton, it seemed a strange choice on which to fixate—a ballad from the villain’s perspective, justifying adultery and maligning the eponymous hero? Shouldn’t I have been rocking out to the fun, catchy notes of “The Schuyler Sisters” instead? But as I scheduled yet another series of doctor’s appointments and prepared to pick up yet another round of fertility medication, my love for Burr’s anthem clicked into place. Of course I sympathize with Burr, bitter and vengeful though he is. I sympathize with anyone whose circumstances dictate waiting.

Waiting for the ideal life isn’t easy for anyone, whether it’s waiting for children or love or work or an anxiety-free heart. Society paints perfect pictures for us to wish for, planting in us the assumption that we need to make our lives look a certain way. We falsely assume that the ideal is possible for us all. But for the majority of the world, that ideal is unattainable. D. L. Mayfield points to the TV show Superstore as a way for us to see the very real lives of those who will never achieve this version of happily ever after. She presses us in her article, “The Island: A Longing to Be Real in a World of Inequality”:

Superstore … is asking us to consider what it means to live in a divided country like America. It is asking us to stop pretending like we are all the same.

[…]

[T]he America I live in is not the same America that exists for many others. I have been in proximity to people who are similar to those on Superstore—people for whom there will be no vacations apart from cigarette breaks, people who use all of their earnings to support countless relatives, people who are one bad break away from disaster at all times.

Facing the realities of life with all it’s dysfunction and mess isn’t easy. This is why we get busy tending to our own personal Bianca, whatever that may be. She becomes a distraction from our trials, an outlet for our sorrows, a way to live the ideal instead of the reality. Facing reality is not what viewers were expecting from award-winning film La La Land—another Ryan Gosling film. In “Learning about Life, Love, and Dreams from La La Land and The Intern,” Tim Briggs explores the endings of two films that are full of both success and sorrow:

[The Intern] ends with Jules joining Ben for a Tai Chi exercise group in the park. And as the viewer, you’re giving this sense that it’s all going to work out great.

But is it? I don’t think Tai Chi is going to magically make everything work in Jules’s life (in fairness, I’ve never done Tai Chi so maybe I’m underestimating it). Nothing has changed. … [It] communicates that you can have your cake and eat it too. Unfortunately, that’s not how it always works out.

Which leads me back to La La Land. Yes, we were denied the fairy tale ending. Mia does not end up with Seb. But quite frankly, the fairy tale ending would have been just that. Perhaps it would have been satisfying at some level, but we have to acknowledge that it would have also been cheap and disingenuous. The reality is that dreams and love rarely coexist well. The situations where they do work well together is when one, or both, is somewhat sacrificed, if not entirely.

But reality is hard to swallow, which is why so many found La La Land greatly disappointing. Real life, the one we are in, the one that isn’t happily ever after, includes a whole lot of heartache—and death. Erin Wyble Newcomb wraps up our features with “A Good Life, a Good Death, and Good-Bye,” sharing the loss of her beloved cat Sula:

Both of my girls wanted to come with us. My husband and I explained what would happen and why. We tried to reinforce that veterinarians do other things for animals too. We tried to remind them that Sula was elderly, that not all sicknesses lead to death and that not all shots kill. We wanted them to understand, to contextualize. They still wanted to come, and my mother expressed her concern. Won’t it be hard for them, especially the littler one who cries about everything? Yes. It will be hard for them. It won’t get easier. There is no life that is never marked by loss. The longer we live, the more losses we accrue. It doesn’t get easier.

Real life isn’t easy. The fairy tale isn’t possible in this life, in this world. But real life is more vivid than the fake ideal we think it should be. Like Lars, we need to put Bianca aside if we’re going to live for real, letting our hearts ache and love the way God created them to. Living this real life won’t be easy, but it will be full, and we will be fully alive.