A series of musings on movies, memories, and storytelling.
by Cassie Hayes, Fiction Editor
The only movie I’ve ever started and been unable to finish is Bambi.
Yeah, that’s right—the animated Disney movie with the cute forest animals. When my parents put it in the VCR and I settled in to watch it as a small kid, I was really into it until that stupid song “Little April Shower” starts playing and—*spoiler alert*—Bambi’s mom dies. I then proceeded to start bawling, moaning, and chastising my parents for allowing me to watch a film that I believed at the time children should never be exposed to.
Yeah. Bambi. The one kids all over the world adore.
To this day I cringe when I hear “Little April Shower.” I still, although I like to think I’m quite a bit more stable than I was as a kid, have not watched the full movie, perhaps out of some distant childhood fear carried over into adulthood but more likely because I’m lazy and just haven’t bothered to put it on if only for a degree of closure. I can only imagine what my poor parents were thinking when I had a giant meltdown over a Disney movie—I bet they wondered how in the world they managed to bring into the world such a messed-up kid.
You would think maybe I just didn’t like dark movies. But my favorite childhood movie was The Lion King—a.k.a. Hamlet for Kids. So we have our death, betrayal, and revenge bases covered. Perhaps I cried because I didn’t think Bambi really had the gumption to get revenge—he was a little momma’s boy set adrift into the big bad world with nobody but that stupid rabbit to guide and protect him.
Or maybe I cried because, for some reason, in that moment I felt a surge of uncontrollable empathy.
Stories will do that to ya. Like with relationships and fatty food, sometimes you go in looking for a good time and end up feeling more than you bargained for.
In movies and screenwriting, there is often “stingers” at the end of scenes—sharp lines that wrap up what a scene is trying to do or say. Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn. Door slam. Cut. And ta-da the scene is complete. These stingers drive home the point of the scene and are often emotionally charged.
In real life, endings are sometimes emotionally charged, and sometimes not. I actually kind of wish there were stingers marking some of the endings that have happened in my life—many of the endings that haunt me the most are the ones where things sort of just drifted away. No Rhett Butler. No door slam. No cut. Sometimes I think real life is like the movies, or at least could be. Other times I think I’m too much of a wishful thinker.
I can’t remember the last silly show me and my sister put on to entertain our parents and grandparents before me and my sister grew up. I don’t know what my last high school class was before I graduated or who was in it. I couldn’t begin to tell you what I was really thinking when I was a little kid ordering my parents to turn off Bambi.
I could have used a stinger for each of those moments, cementing them into my reality.
But instead they’re just lost, blurry memories that I know must exist, but I can’t exactly bring to mind, that I can’t exactly conjure in THIS moment right now today as I sit here at age twenty-two, by some twist of fate at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway, Arkansas instead of at my home in Waxahachie, Texas.
My, my I can be such a bummer sometimes. But fear not—good news is on the way:
In stories, we can find what is lost, cement what has crumbled, prime for action what has long lay dormant. I feel like writing down those moments now makes them real somehow, validates them as reality. I feel like the simple act of telling the story is the door slam, the stinger, and the endings have been clarified.
And even better, every time I feel great empathy from a story well told, I feel like my feelings about the endings have been validated as well. I feel connected to humanity. I still feel like a total mess, but like everybody else is a total mess too.
And being a total mess can be wonderful.
That shared sense of messiness pops up in great stories of all shapes and sizes. I feel it every time I open a book, read submissions or what we’ve published in Arkana, or watch a movie. Dysfunction is reality. Dysfunction is life. Dysfunction is interesting. And people are horribly dysfunctional, horribly interesting.
So, as my stinger for this post, here are a few reading suggestions from the pages of Arkana, featuring the human condition’s captivating messiness:
A flash fiction story about growing up, “The Life Cycle of a Human Girl”
A short story including a magical deer, “Be Thou Ravished Always With Her Love”
And a poem on the power of creative writing, “Creative Writing in Oman”
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