How to be a happier person

There’s this excellent bit of the otherwise TOTALLY MISERABLE AND WRETCHED Neil Gaiman short “24 Hours” (it’s the one I told Robyn and Anna not to read because everybody in the diner gets brutally slaughtered and it’s not that necessary to the story arc and you might as well just give it a miss and take my word for it that the whole amulet thing works out and Dream is fine and can carry on having bread thrown at his head (in case you were wondering, I do own that single issue. The bread-throwing one. The really really good one. I have that. It’s mine and I have it. My lovely sister Anna gave it to me.)) where the waitress’s stories “all have happy endings. That’s because she knows where to stop. She’s realized the problem with stories — if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death.”

Basically that is my approach to flims and books. My sister Robyn and I have decided there is no point in watching the miserable ends of flims when we can stop them sooner and enjoy them so much more. The classic example is Moulin Rouge, which appears to be designed for people like us. Robyn and I like to watch it right up to when the curtain falls, and then we turn it off. It’s so simple!

Okay, think about it. The real ending is that adorable Ewan McGregor sobs helplessly over beautiful and charming Nicole Kidman’s tuberculosis-ridden corpse and then is probably wretched for the rest of his life. But if we turn it off right when the curtain falls, that doesn’t have to happen! See? It could just be that the doctor was just wrong, and Satine isn’t dying at all! or that she was CURED by the INCREDIBLE JOY she felt at being with Ewan McGregor forever! (That’d cure me of tuberculosis.) And that whole thing at the beginning with Ewan McGregor being all the woman I love is dead, that was just to fool us! Teehee, good one, Baz Luhrman, you totally had us going for a while there! Yep. It’s better that way.

Similarly I don’t necessarily need to watch all of Felicity. If I just watch it up to the end of the second season, imagine how happy I would be! Whereas if I watch the third and fourth seasons, there’s all that stuff with Felicity cheating on Ben and Ben cheating on Felicity and having a KID (don’t they know about condoms? the big stupidheads!), and why would I want that to happen? (I wouldn’t.)

See, there’s an episode of Friends where it turns out that Phoebe’s mother turned off all the sad movies before the sad endings happened, and Phoebe grew up thinking that Old Yeller was a happy movie, and it was like a joke! Why is it a joke? That’s a very sensible idea! That’s what I do! Who needs the stupid dog to die? I stopped reading the end of Where the Red Fern Grows when I was quite young. Why not stop reading Romeo and Juliet right when they come up with The Plan, and assume that it worked?

And some things you really shouldn’t read/watch at all because there is no point at which you can stop and have it be okay. Stop reading Lord of the Flies before you begin. Return City of God to the flim shop/rental place. (Seriously — I saw three minutes of it and in that time two people got shot dead and a girl got raped while her boyfriend was forced to watch. Just skip it.)

Obey me and your life will be better. And don’t get attached to anyone in the Harry Potter books. After July of this year I will let you know whom it’s okay to love. It’s okay to love Lupin. It is okay to love Lupin. HE IS IN LOVE WITH TONKS AND HE IS NOT GOING TO DIE. (she said hysterically)

(Incidentally, I think that Moulin Rouge would have been better if they had made Satine’s death more understated. Have the curtain fall and then have her do the cough thing and Ewan McGregor would turn to look at her anxiously, and then cut back to his older self with the typewriter - they could do second-long shots and done a contrast with the insane joyous clapping of the audience, and then bits of the typewriter Christian bits - that would have been a better way to do it. I think. I mean, I’d still stop the movie with the curtain-fall, but at least it wouldn’t be quite so melodramatic.)