Opinions

When just pursuing happiness is not enough

Our celebration of feel-good stories like ‘The Pursuit of Happyness’ speak volumes about where we stand as a society

In print | September 17, 2009

Have you seen the movie “The Pursuit of Happyness”? Did you like it? I didn’t. (Spoiler alert: I know it’s old, but in case you still haven’t seen it, I am going to be discussing the end.) Admittedly, it is a feel-good movie — certainly not meant to challenge anything or push boundaries.

After the last scene when father and son stroll triumphantly toward a setting sun, telling cute jokes, right when the audience is supposed to feel all warm and fuzzy because the good guy wins and everyone ends up happily ever after, I didn’t feel warm and fuzzy. I felt skeptical.

The story line is basically this: the smart but poor guy has had a pretty hard life. He is a single father; he and his son sleep in homeless shelters. The odds are against him. Then he gets a shot to enter the lucrative world of finance, and so he works his ass off, gets his foot in the door with an unpaid year-long internship, and makes millions. The end.

If it weren’t a true story, it would reek of a lack of realism. Critical reviews of the film were overwhelmingly positive; Will Smith, who plays the main character, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor.

Not that he didn’t deserve the nomination; given the plot, the movie was objectively superb. What I find problematic is the story itself. To those of you who rebut with the fact that it is a true story, I say there are a lot of true stories in the world; only some of them are told on screen. Which true stories our society decides to highlight with Hollywood dramatizations is telling about the values that we hold.

For every Chris Gardner, there are thousands, millions, billions, of other people coming from disadvantage who are never able to escape it, try as they might. There are those who are so worn-down through centuries of oppression that they never even attempt to escape it, because they take their oppressive standard of living as a given condition of their existence. And then there are those who don’t have the tools to escape.

Chris Gardner, whose life was the basis for this movie, was able to escape his poverty due to a combination of incredible perseverance and a pretty strong set of math skills. In a country in which an alarmingly large portion of high school graduates have seriously deficient math and reading skills, few of those who come from disadvantaged backgrounds would be able to make the same leap into prosperity that Gardner made.

This film, geared toward the mainstream of American society, promotes the attitude that poor people are poor because they lack motivation. It feeds into the idea — more popularly held than we would like to believe — that if only poor people would just get up off their asses and find a job like Chris Gardner did, they wouldn’t be poor anymore. It seems to me to be a testimonial to the wonders of the capitalistic system, rather than a criticism of the system which led Gardner to be in his initial situation of poverty.

The fact that the powers that be in Hollywood decided that this particular story would be a good holiday-season feel good story is meaningful. When we go to the movies, we go with certain expectations, and we choose which movie to see based on which expectations we want fulfilled.
When a person chooses to go see a movie like “The Pursuit of Happyness,” she chooses it because she wants to be moved by an inspirational story and leave feeling good about the world. She is looking for a sort of escape; rags to riches stories are always fantastical but well-received because they give us hope. And by collectively agreeing that the story was in fact inspiring to us, we are in turn validating that particular story as inspirational. You could imagine other types of “success” stories that would be less well-received in our American society than one about making millions on Wall Street. That this is the success story that we choose to be touched by reveals much about our value system.

Another example of a problematic-but-true story on screen is “The Blind Side,” slated to be released in time for the coming holiday-season. Based on the synopsis on the movie’s website, it is based on the story of an upper-middle white class family that takes in an African American teenager from a “broken home” and helps him achieve “his potential,” which apparently is to become an NFL star. It appears to transcend criticism of being a typical paternalistic depiction of privileged white people taking the poor black boy in and reforming him because it is a true story.

However, I don’t think that it can escape that label by virtue of being true. I encourage readers to watch the previews. In the previews, the family is portrayed as very conventionally mainstream American and wealthy; meanwhile, all depictions of the African American teenager and the people from his mysterious and tragic past appear violent and menacing or passionately emotional. The African American teen wears a look of constant despair on his face and appears to lack even basic social skills. Based purely on the clips in the preview, his character has no more depth than the simple role of the “victim” in the movie.

I am not saying that it was a bad thing for a wealthy white family to take in an underprivileged teen; on the contrary, I think it was extremely large-hearted. My problem is with the way the story appears to be depicted on screen, and with the choice of this particular story to be turned into a movie. Rather than focusing on the story from the perspective of the teen, the movie appears to be told from the perspective of the white woman who invites him into her home, which indicates to me that the movie is directed toward other such benevolent privileged people, with the intent of making them feel happy and warm and fuzzy. Rather than choosing to portray an uplifting story about an underprivileged African American teen who becomes successful in any arena outside the stereotypical world of sports, the Hollywood powers that be decided that mainstream Americans would find this particular story inspirational. And that if it is well received, we will be legitimizing this definition of success.

Ultimately, my concern with these types of movies is that they fail to address the underlying problems that created the situations which the protagonists find themselves needing to escape. That our society creates these islands of poverty and despair and applauds those who manage to escape through luck and personal determination, but fails to take any action to tackle the fundamental reasons for their existence in the first place is what keeps me from being able to relax and enjoy myself when I go to the movies.

Sofia is a senior. You can reach her at ssaiyed1@swarthmore.edu.