Ep. 55 - Happy? Sad? What Makes the Best Ending to a Film?

Anna Thalman: 0:26

So welcome back. We've been gone for a little while and. We feel like we had good reason to take a break. We've mentioned on the podcast before that we were expecting a little baby boy

Kent Thalman: 0:43

And we think we talked also about the complications regarding the pregnancy, not in detail, but basically it was complicated. And It was keeping it in the hospital for awhile. We recorded some podcast episodes apart from each other, or over

Anna Thalman: 0:59

zoom

0:59

while

Kent Thalman: 1:00

I was in the hospital, we did one that way. Um, so we've been making it work and we've been going okay. At, uh, 26 ish weeks gestation. and I had an emergency C-section, and she. Recovering. Well, you can hear her voice. So she's doing very well. Our little boy did not live more than about an hour. And, so he passed away very shortly after birth and the emergency C-section. We won't go into super tons of detail. but it, was caused by an infection and when they had to take her. There were certain developmental things, particularly regarding or relating to his lungs that didn't finish. And so he was not able to maintain a heartbeat and his heart wasn't responding to, the efforts of doctors, to train. maintain a heartbeat.

Anna Thalman: 1:59

We were with him when he passed, we stayed with him until his heart just slowed down and stopped completely, this was not expected, even though we had the pregnancy complications. The plan was just to keep me in the hospital until the baby came. And I was sort of a living NICU for the baby, trying to keep him developing an inside of me as long as possible. And we were really heartbroken when, when he passed away, but we also were able to feel a lot of peace and. We give the credit to our religion and our religious beliefs, our spiritual beliefs for that, that we, we personally believe that we'll see him again, that will we'll have the chance to raise him and that he's part of our family forever. So it's still all feels completely worth it. But we took a couple weeks off of work to say the least to allow ourselves to grieve, to process all of the emotion, to heal, to be with our family during this time, and to do a burial. It was all really sweet. We had so many people reach out and help us and offer their condolences and support. In the end, it was a really beautiful experience and something very special to us that we will always remember and keep close to our hearts. We named the baby Seth. So maybe

Kent Thalman: 3:39

Seth, I don't think we need to go into tons of a meaning behind his name, but, we felt really strongly that, his first and middle name were very significant, for us. So. That's somewhat of an update, but it does tie into what we want to talk about today and it relates to storytelling. We also feel that it relates to life in general and hopefully it's not. I don't know, hopefully it's not pretentious of us to, to talk about the meaning of life in the. Podcast. I'll just say, because it's something I'm self-conscious about, so I'll just say it. You might be wondering if we sound really good for this being only about just less than three weeks ago that this all happened. That we sound, maybe a little over it. The grieving process for us was pretty, intense and it's probably not over. And that's okay. And I don't know if we'll ever truly be over, because we're waiting for the rest of our lives for something. and, and everyone's going to deal with this stuff differently, but. You know, we've definitely grieved. And, sometimes I feel like people who just hear the news are more emotional than I am and it's, it's our family, it's our, our loss, so to speak. and so I sometimes feel self-conscious, that maybe I don't seem as emotional in front of other people, but we want to talk about. Things like happiness and sadness. And we want to talk about endings of stories a little bit. And so we'll get into all that through the course of this podcast episode. but we want to start by just saying, Life is more than happiness. Better than happy is a, is a title of a podcast. We like, by Jody Moore. And, the concept is simple that, all human emotions are meant to be experienced and not just happiness.

Anna Thalman: 5:32

We have this mistaken belief that we want to be happy all the time. And a lot of people. Are believing that that's possible or they want it to be their reality

Kent Thalman: 5:45

if it's not

Anna Thalman: 5:46

the case. Yes. And I just want to draw your attention to the fact that you

5:52

Probably.

Anna Thalman: 5:54

don't actually want to be happy all the time. There are things that we don't want to be happy about. We don't want to be happy about murder. We don't want to be happy about bad things that happen in the world. That would make us psychopaths, right? If we're just like, oh, I'm just happy about everything. No matter what. Oh, you are going through. Grief. I'm still happy. There are things we want to be sad about. This is healthy. This is human. This is part of our earth experience. And it's part of experiencing the full spectrum of human emotions and life to its fullest. So we want to talk about that today. This was very clear to me, obviously in the wake of our personal family tragedy, I didn't want to feel happy. I mean, I felt peace at times and comfort, but I don't want to feel happy about losing my son and, and going through a pregnancy and bearing him and not being able to hold him a little longer or be with him and raise him like our other children. And if I tried to pretend that everything was fine, or I tried to hold that all in it. It felt terrible, but there is a clean pain. There's a kind of pain that feels good. And it actually cleanses us. It feels like, you know, like crying after we lost her baby. And some of our, our long nights of deep sorrow felt really good. And that's a hard feeling to describe, and I

Kent Thalman: 7:33

will, and I really want to. Jump and piggyback off of what you just said. It felt really good. That's, I'm always worried about being judged for the wording or, or how we describe these things. Maybe because I think we all carry a lot of shoulds and shouldn'ts about this stuff, but I think it's a good time to mention, there's a quote by Victor Frankl, who he survived four death camps throughout the Holocaust and wrote man's search for meaning. He wrote it is the very pursuit of happiness that Swartz happiness, and even says that it's a big part of American culture specifically that he's observed that Americans want to feel happy all the time or that we're taught sort of deep in our culture. Now that he was writing this in the fifties and sixties, you know, after world war two, I think things changed or maybe become more nuanced in the 21st century. But I still think that a lot of us, particularly, people of deep faith, sometimes certain religions have a little bit of a, I won't say doctrine, but culture of, we should always be happy because we're following Jesus or, or whatever, and he's saying the very pursuit of happiness, which is. Sort of a phrase from Thomas Jefferson now it's still a right that we can pursue it. But he's saying that if, if our lives are focused on trying to get happy that that's going to thwart our happiness. And, and so I think if we were trying to get happy through this experience of tragedy, right. Personal tragedy, which you can choose what is, or isn't tragedy to you. But if you were trying to get happy through this, I do think that would have. We would have found ourselves resisting natural emotions for loss. And, and to go back to what you said about it, feeling good. That's the irony of it is that instead of pursuing happiness, what we did was we pursued, we pursued two things. I think we pursued trying to feel anything and everything that came naturally. And second thing I think was just pursuing what the meaning of this whole experience was for us. And we didn't try and do that on day one necessarily, but several days, maybe a week or two later, we started to discuss a lot about what, what are we learning? What are we never going to forget from this experience? What do we want to do differently? Because we experienced this hard thing and why do we wanna do it? And why don't we want to do it for Seth? And why did he come and what was the purpose of his life? And as we dug deep into those questions, I do think that there were moments where we experienced exquisite joy and I really deep meaning. And I think finding meaning in our lives, even the hard, sad stuff in our lives has resulted in deep joy. It really has. And, and I, you know, and I don't say that so that everyone says, oh, I want deep joy in any, any circumstance. What we want is to feel. Deeply any emotion that's coming naturally and try and learn from the experience and the joy will come as we learn right. When we find the meaning of it.

Anna Thalman: 10:42

I think there's also this alignment that we're trying to achieve, which is not, not always with happiness, but it is kind of an intentionality I want to feel sad. I want to grieve in this circumstance and because that is. The feeling that I want to have. It feels right and it feels cleansing to have it. It feels aligned with my values and what I would like to feel in such a circumstance. There are times when I want to feel compassion when I want to feel, different emotions, even when I want to feel fear and allow myself to feel that there are times when I want to feel. Joy. And there are times when I want to feel sad, kind of like I'm thinking of that scripture, a time for weeping in a time for dancing and a time for

Kent Thalman: 11:31

whatever. Well, and I think that it's not just there are times where we want to feel blank. It's that there's times where these feelings are going to come upon us. And while we can control our thoughts, which is what controls our feelings. I also think that we can't change the thought right. In the very moment. Right. And so what we first need to do is process the emotion. We've talked about this before, as we process emotions, those emotions lead us to the thought, and then we can learn from the thoughts that we're thinking. And if we want to, we can change them. But, in matters of grief like this. Some thoughts you'll want to change in some you'll won't and you'll, you'll find lots of thoughts, right? When you're going through something big like this. And so we're not trying to advocate wanting something other than happiness. We just want whatever is coming and you want to let yourself feel those feelings all the way, all the way until you can find what it is you're thinking. And that's where you can start to discover some meaning. It's a pretty natural process. And if you're talking and processing these things out loud with someone. Luckily, we have each other, but it's really important to talk. And I've been blessed to notice that people have texted and reached out to me. And I think both of us like crazy. And one of the things I've noticed is that they're always saying, if you need someone to talk to, if you want to talk about anything, I'm here for you. And I thought that was interesting that they were always offering that. And I'm realizing that that is truly valuable. In the end. I think I mostly just wanted to talk to Anna, but I've tried to share some things that I've learned with my friends and closer family members and whatnot, but mostly the real processing thought came either personally writing stuff down, writing really helps and talking with Anna, with each other. It

Anna Thalman: 13:19

w the trouble comes when we try to avoid. In to any degree, whether this is big or small and negative emotion or any negative emotion, where we think that by trying to push it away, it's going to go away and we're not going to have to feel it. Or sometimes we're afraid that if we let ourselves really go there and feel the emotions that will never get out. Be stuck in those emotions. And that's actually the opposite of what's true. If we allow ourselves to process the emotions, they will go and run their course. And then we don't have to be stuck in them. We're able to feel them and then move through and move past them and be more intentional. Like you said, there's going to be waves of maybe anger or shock or, or emotions that we don't want to keep forever. But if we let ourselves feel everything that comes and work through it, then we can start to look back and say, okay, what do I want to feel when I think about this part of, yeah. And we

Kent Thalman: 14:25

can learn more and learn faster, and it's not, if we're trying to avoid all the emotions, what we're doing is we're really stopping ourselves from learning about ourselves because we're not learning what's actually going on inside our minds and what we believe. And so we can't grow and see. It's interesting. One of my favorite films is the film inside out. I think we saw this twice in theaters. We found some young teenage people from our church. Like I called them teenager people, teenage human beings. And, and we went and saw it a second time. Cause we liked it so much. We, we brought some young young folks, with us because you don't remember that. Oh yeah. I loved that movie. And so. I just, I really love that film and I love how she introduces sadness. Right. Joy is narrating the film and she introduces sadness and then says, I'm not sure why she's here or what she does. Like, she just doesn't see any point to negative emotions. And so she's always trying to Dom. She doesn't want so much discussed, even though there seems to be a point to that she doesn't really want anger to overdo it, you know, cause anger, you know, she doesn't want any sadness, you know, there's so there's all these emotions that she's trying to balance, but really take over. And then she realizes that there's actually at the very end of the movie, this really important role that sadness plays and that letting those emotions come, leads to even just. Right. Sometimes a negative emotion can lead to joy, just like we've talked about. And, so it's interesting. we've learned, and this is something we've learned, I think over many, many years, if not that we have that many, I don't want to sound pretentious. We're kind of young. But the deeper we let ourselves love, really opens up our heart to a lot of emotion. And if we're going to block our hearts from feeling. Close ourselves off from loving, and there's a lot of destructive side effects to that. But when we open up our hearts, let them be really soft. Let them be very vulnerable and love. Very deeply. We're making ourselves very vulnerable to heartbreak. And I think what I've learned is to not be afraid of experiencing that. Now I am probably still, you know, I naturally want to avoid that, but, I'm trying to let myself, let my heartbeat as soft as possible and let myself experience these things as much as possible. And I've found that I'm experiencing more love and I can experience joy that way, but I don't experience happiness or joy by gunning after it. I'm experiencing it by just letting these feelings come and when the happiness comes, it comes. More more fully.

Anna Thalman: 17:07

Yeah. Hiding doesn't protect us. So even if you managed to feel less pain or try to live small and keep yourself away from some negative emotions, you're also going to feel less joy. Living big means you're going to live everything out bigger. You're opening yourself up to more pain and heartache and failure, but you're also opening up. To more joy and your capacity to feel grows in every area together. My mom, when I was growing up loved to listen to an artist, a Christian artists named Sheree call Sherry call. I'm not sure exactly if we were ever saying her name. Right. But she would listen to her in the car all the time. And there was a song that she would say. That has a lyric that always sticks in my mind. She said broken hearts are deeper. They've been opened wide and the tears become containers to hold more love inside. And that image has always stuck with me. I feel like that's a really true principle that even when something tears our hearts open. Those containers can be filled with love that deeper part of our heart or that, emptiness even inside our heart can then be filled with meaning and joy it's a hard thing to articulate, but these deeper emotions come together. And if we allow ourselves to love deeply, we allow ourselves to hurt deeply. We're able to experience everything more deeply.

Kent Thalman: 18:55

I think you articulated it well. So I'd like to. Steer into sort of the ending thoughts. This podcast is all about film and family, right? And so we thought about how does this apply to film? It obviously applies to family and in our own personal feelings, we could probably go in more into, into more depth about all these things, but we'll conclude a little bit by talking about storytelling and happy endings. There is sort of an unspoken rule for a long time and a lot of movies that you had to make happy endings. And then someone got a bright idea and they said, well, I'm just going to not do that. Well, there's only other one option. Right. And it's sad endings. And so now it's just, should I make a happy ending or a sad ending and which one's more original. And really the answer is when you have two options and thousands and thousands of movies, there really isn't a very original option. And I think what we've learned is that. Life is more than happiness, but it's also more than sadness. It's more than any single given emotion. It's not about if you're being nuanced and making the ending sad well, and that suggests sadness isn't intrinsically

Anna Thalman: 20:02

nuanced. It suggests that the purpose of a character. Experience. And the story that you're telling is to find happiness in the end. And that leads us to believe that that's the purpose of our existence is to find happiness and happily ever

Kent Thalman: 20:17

after, you know, Victor Franco going back to the very beginning of our discussion, he was onto something, in his title, even man's search for meaning, he talks about. People are not motivated by power or truly motivated by money or sex or whatever else. I don't know, Freud and many others have postulated. He said people are motivated by meaning that that's truly what we're seeking. Now we can seek any number of those things. We can seek. Power happiness money, sex. We can seek those things, but that's not actually what's keeping us alive. What he said is, what is actually going to keep us alive through truly living is our search for meaning. And so as we experienced this in our own personal lives, it really helps us become better writers, I think. As you think about the stories that you have told are in the middle of writing or shooting or acting or whatever you're doing in terms of your own storytelling or the ones that you're planning for the future, or hoping to tell, think about what transcends a happy or a sad ending. It's not, it's not as simple as that spectrum endings aren't defined by happiness or sadness. They're defined by meaningfulness. So we should be looking for our characters to grow as much as possible. And we should be looking for the film's ending to be as meaningful as possible. That might be happy Saturday in between, but that's just irrelevant as our point. And it's the same with our lives. Any given moment or any given experience, doesn't have to end happy or sad. We're trying to learn, and we're trying to allow ourselves to feel. Any and all emotions and, meaningfulness I think is really the object of storytelling because it's the object of life. It's the object of learning. We're learning meaning. I think that's why some of my favorite films are the ones where I feel like. I understand something deeper every time I watch it. Cause the ending isn't just really cool or really sad or really happy it's that it's so meaningful that rewatching it over and over again. I'm reminded of the principles that are on display as this character learns and grows and figure something out by the end or doesn't, but the audience does, and so you feel like you've learned something by the end and, and when you learn something. Watching it again, just helps you remember it or learn it more, and feel with these characters, all those feelings as you open up your heart, through storytelling. Yeah,

Anna Thalman: 22:44

I agree. I think this is why we love stories.

Kent Thalman: 22:48

Yeah. There's an insatiable appetite in humankind. It will never get

Anna Thalman: 22:51

old. We're all going through circumstances that we're trying to make meaning of. We're trying to understand and find something that feels good to them. That makes sense about why we're going through what we're going through. We connect with characters who are trying to reach goals and having a hard time doing it. And they experienced trials and they experienced hardships either along their way or just that happened to them. And by the end, there's an arc. There's a character arc. I think if it's a meaningful story, You're a different person or your character is a different person by the end of the story. And the reason they're different is because the meanings or the thoughts that they have about what they're going through, their beliefs have changed. They might still be in the exact same circumstance by the end. They might not have changed their circumstance, but they have changed the way they look at it and the way that they feel about it through the course of events. And so. I think it's good to think about as we're writing stories and as we're making meaning out of our own lives, to first of all, just allow ourselves as we go through things, to feel all the emotions, to process those emotions and let them go through us and run their course.

Kent Thalman: 24:09

It doesn't have to be something as hard or as tragic as what we've experienced. And we hope. I don't know, oversharing or anything inappropriate. We're hoping that our story can help or be a value to someone or have meaning, but you know, yours might be a job you were hoping to get hired for the false through, or it might just be. A date that you planned that didn't go the way you wanted it to, you know,

Anna Thalman: 24:34

there's no right or wrong thing to grieve or feel loss over, we

Kent Thalman: 24:38

feel emotions constantly and we should be allowing them to come as they come. And that's something that I've learned at least, through this,

Anna Thalman: 24:46

as soon as we shared what had happened, so many people shared their own experiences and it became this beautiful avenue for connection, which is what storytelling does as well, where people. Even that we had known for a long time told us stories. We never knew before about their own experiences and their own sorrows and loss. And we felt deeply connected and we could share, have shared meaning about what we had learned or what we still hold onto, or believe that keeps us going. And that's something I wouldn't trade. That's part of what makes it so worth. It is to go through trials and to. And to come out of them different something that has been another process of our grieving and our stages of, moving through this has been kind of returning back to a normal and realizing that life is never going to be the same for us. And that's okay. We don't want it to be. Hopefully this helps you as you go through whatever. Things are going through through your own life that you can give yourself space, to feel whatever you need to feel. There's no right or wrong way to feel in any given circumstance and let yourself feel clean pain. And then think about what you want to make it mean and what you want to pull from this experience, how you want to be different because of it. And then maybe to share that in some way too

Kent Thalman: 26:20

many different ways we can share them. And that doesn't always mean like saying exactly what happened to running a movie that's autobiographical, but you can, you put your experience into, into all the stories you tell. And so I hope

Anna Thalman: 26:31

meaning into yeah. And to the outlets in your

Kent Thalman: 26:34

life. Yeah. And I want to just be clear that I really believe that the better all of us as storytellers. At allowing ourselves to feel emotions, deeply, process them and learn from them, the better storytellers we're going to become. And if we don't allow ourselves to go through life and feel those emotions and learn and find meaning through that way, our storytelling is going to, it's going to be hard pressed to write something that's not derivative. We are going to be hard pressed. So it's a valuable thing for us as storytellers.