A Better Endings Love Story: An Affair to Remember

Why do so many people, myself included and maybe especially women, find Deborah Kerr and Cary Grant’s An Affair to Remember (1957) to be such a “classic” and satisfying love story? Apart from the dated elements from 50’s movies depicting men and women being almost different species (!), nevertheless the story still works for many of us today, as evidenced by the annual Christmastime reprisals and several attempted remakes which, however, never quite get the fabric or tonality of this story quite as well as Kerr and Grant did.

Terry McKay/ D. Kerr: “I was looking up; it was the nearest thing to heaven. You were there!”

…

Nickie Ferrante/ C. Grant: Why didn’t you tell me? If it had to happen to one of us, why did it have to be you?

Terry McKay/ D. Kerr: If you can paint, I can walk… Anything can happen, don’t you think?

(http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050105/quotes)

I believe the reason this story speaks so deeply to all of us admirers is simple: this is a classic version of a Better Endings love story. The star-crossed lovers are each otherwise engaged to be married in relationships in which they would be ‘”settling,” but kismet brings them together so they can realize true love; a love which supports and strengthens each of their deepest life ambitions.

 Sleepless in Seattle is the best contemporary version of the same underlying Better Endings love story theme as An Affair to Remember. Of course it is a parable with many allusions that refer directly back to the original throughout. It culminates with Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks meeting on top of the Empire State Building, so bringing to fruition a better-ending retelling of An Affair to Remember wherein McKay and Ferrante do meet up there as promised. And Sleepless in Seattle (along with You’ve Got Mail, which clearly is in the same genre of Better-Endings love tales) has the same classic longevity as An Affair to Remember, showing the universality of this theme; the archetypal character of this story.

images are from pixabay.com

Click below for your enjoyment: 

Better Endings News!

For regular or occasional readers of this blog: I’m happy to report that a Better Ending story appears to be brewing for my self-discovery/ personal development book, Your Life Path. My Super Agent (called as such in a recent article about her ), Linda Langton of Langtons International Agency, has received an offer from a publisher, and we are approaching a contract! This has been a labor of love for over 15 years in the making, with plenty of final polishing still in process but Whew! Thanks all for reading the blog and I will keep you posted. I’ll put up a widget to announce the book when that is appropriate.  My blessings to all of you and Better Endings to your Life Dreams, too!

Happily Ever After

 

What do we so love about classic love stories? We call true love of a romantic sort ‘kismet’; two wandering souls find in each other a magical congruence or mysterium coniunctionum that lifts each of them to greater at-One-ment not only with one another but within their unified Selves or however the story defines the enhanced quality of these ‘charmed’ lovers being able to Live Their Dream, Now! (i.e. to “live happily, ever after”).

Mythology and literature, drama and film and poetry—all artistic forms of expression—are replete with the image of predestined lovers finding each other and in the process, finding or completing their Selves.

Many of the great love stories bring major change into the lovers’ lives. They thought they would “settle,” but no, the Universe has another plan for them. They stumble upon each other as a form of serendipity and as if it is unavoidable, they take notice and take the plunge! “Happily Ever After” awaits—so we are told anyway—just around the bend.

Let’s review some modern love stories from cinema:

Casablanca

Here Bogart as Rick Blain sacrifices his own feelings of devotion to Ilsa, an old love, for the better, higher interests of all concerned. His heart changes as a result; he drops remorse for his earlier loss and attains a higher perspective.

An Affair to Remember

Here Deborah Kerr (as Terry McKay) finds her one true if unlikely love while on an ocean cruise, just before each of them is scheduled to marry the fiancees awaiting their return. Both are willing to make sacrifices in order to ultimately be together. Cary Grant (as Nick Ferrante) renounces his inheritance to earn a living through his art—forging a more authentic Self in the process—while Terry almost sacrifices the love affair altogether after suffering an accident that paralyzes her. She wants to be whole and able to carry her own part if she is to deserve to marry Nick. But Kismet has its way, weaving a pathway by which these predestined lovers are able to unite in the End.

Sleepless in Seattle/ You’ve Got Mail

Nora Ephron produced a pair of similar contemporary tales of Kismet, even casting the same two lover-actors with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan.  Sleepless in Seattle alludes back to An Affair to Remember, having the lovers eventually connect, as based on that film, at the top of the Empire State building, achieving an apex of higher connection. With You’ve Got Mail the star-crossed lovers meet online as well as outwardly, needing to each transcend their Pride (Joe Fox) and Prejudice (Kathleen Kelly)—yes, based on that Jane Austen allusion—before they can earn their own balanced love that will suit them from then forth, “happily ever after.”

In all three of these ‘classic’ films, Love does more than simply triumph by bringing appropriate partners together into longterm romantic relationships. It cancels the inappropriate, immature relations they had been settling for or holding onto in memory while preparing each lover to gain self-realization so that their ultimate, true marriage can ring true and benefit the Whole of their families and worlds.

Do you have a tale of kismet to share? I welcome your insights and stories!

Your Narrative Statement

 Have you ever taken ‘time out’  to try to encapsulate what your life is “all about”? Of course, it doesn’t need to be “about” anything, but at the same time, since you like everyone else have a Life Story, then there is a meaning and a message to YOUR story that is uniquely important, if only to you. This week’s Life Paths for Better Endings topic is about a way to uncover the underlying significance of your own Story and the potential benefits of claiming a personal Narrative Statement.

What I’ll call a Narrative Statement is known to authors as a “Throughline” or a “Logline”. E.G.:

The throughline is an invisible thread that binds your story together. It comprises those elements that are critical to the very heart of your tale — these elements needn’t be the same for every story you tell but should remain the same throughout a given story.  (Shot through the Heart: Your Story’s Throughline / Terrible Minds, by Chuck Wendig, http://terribleminds.com/ramble/)

To begin, let’s look at some fictional stories or mythic tales to explore how narrative statements can function to make a story cohesive and well-focused on the key protagonists’ character arcs and plotlines. Writers know they should be able to boil down their story into one brief, tense statement, usually one sentence that fully encapsulates the story in terms of characters, goals, oppositions and outcomes. Here are some feasible narrative throughlines just as a practice in devising narrative statements (though of course the authors would do a better job):

• An orphaned boy discovers on his 11^th birthday that he is a “wizard”, destined to master the positive potentials of magical abilities along with a cohort of friends, in order to thwart the evil rise to power of the megalomaniac wizard fiend who killed his parents.

• After witnessing UFOs firsthand a man becomes obsessed with replicating a mental image that turns out to be a UFO landing site to which he is being telepathically called by an alien race aiming to bring an Earth representative to their home world for interplanetary communication.

Here are some actual throughlines I have found online that are associated with well-known stories:

Sleepless in Seattle: A recently widowed man’s son calls a radio talk-show in an attempt to find his father a partner.- Written by Murray Chapman <muzzle@imdb.com>

Oedipus Rex: Sophocles’ most famous work about the King of Thebes (translated here by Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald) tells the simple tale of boy gets parents, boy loses parents, boy gets new parents, boy kills biological father and marries biological mother. http://www.pghcitypaper.com/pittsburgh/throughlines-oedipus-rex/Content?oid=1675058

The Wizard of Oz: After a twister transports a lonely Kansas farm girl to a magical land, she sets out on a dangerous journey to find a wizard with the power to send her home.  (from Gideon’s Screenwriting Tips: So Now You’re a Screenwriter…Tips to Improve your Film and TV writing and Your Career/ Writing Effective Loglines. http://gideonsway.wordpress.com/2012/03/10/writing-effective-loglines/)

 

I invite you for the next few days to practice writing narrative throughlines for some fictional stories that matter to you. This practice will prepare you to develop a throughline or narrative statement encapsulating your own Life Story, later this week.  So first, I encourage you to practice the method!

• What do you find yourself emphasizing about the stories you choose to write loglines for?

• What does the very fact that you can write a logline, even for what might be a rather complicated story, say about stories or about storytelling in general?

Throughlines or loglines are essential for writers. They are the very heartbeat of a story. In editing, it is often said that every line or even every word in a manuscript should propel or develop the logline; else, remove it! Hold that thought in relation to devising—later this week—a throughline for your own Life Story. What might be some implications? Stay tuned…

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As always, thank you for reading and I invite you to play in this life mapping sandbox!

Your Comments and Stories are welcome!