For a while now, I've had the random, recurring urge to watch the 1984 movie Never Ending Story. It must have been 15 years since I last saw it and it left little impression on my memory as a child except for having a boy who rode a flying white dog. Last night, some friends came over and after a couple drinks, I got the urge again. So I pitched it to them as follows: "Would you like to see a movie that will blow your mind?" It was a compelling enough ploy to cover up for my complete ignorance of the film. We watched it, and much to my unsurprised dismay, it was terrible. Poor dialogue, abrupt and poorly rationalized plot developments, and the cheesiness of the whole thing caused us to cut it out 2/3 of the way through and go to bed. The next day, however, I watched the remainder of the film and was blown away – not by the film itself, but the creative framework in which the writer constructed to communicate several very profound ideas that are worth sharing.
In the storyline, a boy picks up a book and begins to read it, thus framing the rest of the narrative. The Nothing, a seeming placeholder for a diabolical destructive force – imagined as a hurricane of sorts – encroaches on the world of Fantasia, the Alice-in-Wonderland-meets-Middle-Earth mythological realm of the story's setting. Only the empress can stop The Nothing from destroying the world, but she is sick, so a young warrior must venture out to find the cure for the empress that the world may be saved. That's the plot, and its execution is rather boring, in my opinion. What is fascinating, however, is the symbolism employed and to some degree explained at the very end.
The Nothing is explained to be the metaphysical manifestation of the lack of hope and imagination in humanity. The implication is that because people are reading less, they lead dull and unimaginative lives. Fantasia is revealed to be a composite land of the the human imagination, and so the encroachment of The Nothing signifies the death of human imagination and capacity to dream. While it's a brilliant allegory signifying the take over of the technological age and the eschewing of classical pastimes such as reading, the kicker is even better.
The first lair of the kicker is that boy reading the book is as much in the book as every other character, and the feels all the emotions and thoughts of the characters. This is a wonderful and rare Western rendition of one of the themes in the Mahabharata, that the reader is every character in the book. Not only that, but the reader can influence and interact with the story to the extent that the empress at the end reveals that she can stop The Nothing if the boy will but give her another name. As inane as this sounds, it signifies the reader's admonition that he is not just a passive observer, but an active participant in the story. By acknowledging this in the act of orally naming the empress, the boy accepts his role in the story.
The second lair of the kicker is that the reader is the writer of the story itself! This goes further than simply imagining what the words play out in unillustrated pictures, but that the story being read is but one of as many stories as the boy chooses to imagine. This message is signified when the boy finally yells out the name of the empress, all goes dark, and the boy continues to converse with the empress as he was struggling with her suggestion that the story was in fact real and the boy, Bastion, could therefore impact it. As the light returns, the empress and the boy continue talking for a few moments before the boy realizes that she materialized in front of him – rescued from her immanent destruction. The implication I draw from this is in the power one has in imagining the possibilities. The empress then presents the boy with a grain of sand – the last remnant of the realm of Fantasia – and tells him to make a wish. He asks how many he can make, and she says as many as he wants. The half-stated implication of this is that we all live never ending stories so long as we're willing to imagine new adventures and possibilities.
It's a thoughtful lesson of which America would do well to be reminded.
Lastly and as more of a tangent, the film reminded me of the power of names. While the old Shakespearean query comes to mind – "What's in a name? Were a rose called by any other name would it not smell just as sweet?" – we see in this film why it doesn't hold true. As I learned in studying Hinduism, names convey power, often in the form of access. By this I mean that when you see something and don't know what it is, and then it is named, you suddenly can place the object or event in an existing schema from which you can draw upon to understand the already learned properties of the object or event. Put differently, let's say you have a cough, a slight fever, and several other symptoms. You then search online for illnesses that match your symptoms, and upon finding the name of one, can then look into treatment for it. Similarly, in many mythologies, knowing a character's name gives you access to the reputation and lore of that character. The more names a character has, the more powerful and important he or she tends to be. Sometimes characters also have secret names that, when learned, give access to some vulnerability or control over them. In Never Ending Story, every character is named, and with each name we learn something about them. When the warrior reveals his name to the wolf, the wolf acknowledges his mission to kill the warrior, and so attacks. More tellingly, when the empress beseeches Bastion to name her and he does so, the acknowledgement of the act of naming brings forth a reifying power that saves the empress from destruction. It is romanticized, to be sure, but the trope of the power of names is a valuable and often overlooked literary device embedded in the narratives of our lives.
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