Tuck Everlasting Paper

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Cornelius Sims
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1 43 Romance and Myth in the Search for Immortality: Commentary on Tuck Everlasting by ert Diehl 43 The film, Tuck Everlasting * (2002), presents us with two hero myths (that of Winnie Foster and that of Jesse Tuck) and offers us several teachings about life, death, and the nature of time and change. We have two very different hero s journeys occurring in this film: Winnie is on an adventure of spiritual awakening and self-actualization, whereas Jesse Tuck is on a quest to both redeem Winnie, and to reconcile his own tragic condition by finding everlasting love (a conquest of sorts). Winnie s journey is a journey from a dependent, sheltered life to independence and actualization. The beginning of the film shows us Winnie in a state of restlessness: she is a rebellious adolescent, seriously questioning the values of her parents for what we may assume is the first time. This is not an uncommon state of mind for many young people, and it is a classic motif in the hero s journey; witness the young and restless Luke Skywalker who wishes to leave his home planet, or the tender Siddhartha Gautama, uneasy with his princely state of existence in the warrior caste. In the same way, Winnie wishes to break ties with the lifestyle of her stuffy, culturally refined parents and begin to blaze her own trails, to leave the farm so to speak. This motif is most clearly exemplified in the scene where Mr. and Mrs. Foster tell Winnie that they would like her to attend a prestigious school which Winnie clearly does not want to attend. This conflict between her parent s wishes and her own * The film is based on the book of the same title by Natalie Babbitt, published in 1975.

2 44 44 Janua Sophia illustrate the essential tension at the beginning of the movie. Winnie s official call to action occurs when she adventures into the woods on her parents estate even though it is forbidden. The woods are mysterious and earthy, in contrast to the high, culturally elevated home lives of the Fosters. Here she meets Jesse, who is an interesting and independent individual who appears about the same age as Winnie. This draws attention to the fact the she, Winnie Foster, is 15 and living under the tight of grip of her parents rules, whereas Jesse, who is (it appears) 17, is independent, lives a large part of his life on his own, and has done wonderful, exciting romantic things like visit Paris and climb the Eiffel Tower. Of course Winnie is enthralled, and her resolve to assert her independence is strengthened. In a particularly symbolic scene, Winnie and Jesse tend to a campfire in the woods at night. Jesse taps out a beat on a boulder, and Winnie dances to it. The imagery in this scene is highly reminiscent of Nietzschean aesthetics, specifically, it is rich with Dionysian symbols music, dancing, stars, nature, and even a swirling, rotating camera shot which gives the impression of blurred, intoxicated, swirling motion. The youths are barefoot and at one with their primordial, adventurous, natural selves. In this moment, Winnie is able to experience the sort of freedom she now clearly perceives that she desires, though she still feels an obligation to return home. She does not get that opportunity, however, because she has been kidnapped and begins to uncover the truth about the Tuck family.

3 45 Existential Commentary 45 During her time with the Tucks, there is some minor surface-level drama as a mysterious man in a yellow suit attempts to track down the Tuck family and uncover their secret. Although the role of the mysterious man does not play heavily into either of the two prominent Hero s journeys, it does deliver a separate teaching regarding enterprise and greed. From the Tuck family, the man in yellow wants to extort the location of the magic spring which gives them their immortality. He hopes then to sell its magic water to people for a substantial profit. The problem is that, as the Tucks will attest, living forever is not all it s cracked up to be. In fact, as we will discuss shortly, it s downright awful, and that s why the Tucks have worked so hard to keep the location and nature of the spring a secret they don t want anyone else to be subjected to the horrible state of life they endure. The man in yellow ignores these simple humanist concerns and presses forward with his quest to find the spring, more concerned with profit than with the ethics of what he s doing, or plans to do. If we globalize the case of the man in yellow, we get a teaching about unbridled profit motive, and how it often dangerously trumps simple ethical concerns. In the same way, unchecked enterprise capitalism often values zerosum success in the free market over the non-zero sum pursuit of moral action. Whether this globalized teaching is intended is uncertain, but it is one we can derive nonetheless, especially for those inclined toward Marx. Regarding immortality itself, the patriarch of the family, referred to only as Tuck, delivers trhe following teaching: You can t have living without dying don t be afraid of

4 46 46 Janua Sophia death be afraid of the unlived life. This is a classic lifeaffirming teaching, which is why the presence of Dionysian symbols in the campfire scene are so significant. We will address the nuts and bolts of this life-affirming doctrine shortly, once we consider the following. Winnie returns (or, is taken) back home (whether she wanted to be there is left ambiguous), and witnesses the death of her grandmother. She aids the Tucks in breaking their mother out of jail in the interest of keeping their secret safe. Shortly after, the Tucks go into exile, and Jesse, who by this point is a major love interest, tells Winnie to go and drink from the fountain of youth and wait for him to return. This is, notably, the opposite of the advice that Tuck gives. This is the climax, the high point of conflict in Winnie s journey. She is confronted with the essential choice between mortality and immortality. She chooses mortality and eventually dies, but her choice not to drink from the magic spring is significant because it represents her taking control of her own life, and choosing to face death regardless of her fear. In the process she lives the worthwhile life, thereby affirming her life as valuable in itself and validating the elder Tuck s teaching. But how do we arrive at the conclusion that life can be valuable independent of eternal life or other metaphysical assumptions? The argument proceeds with the economic principle of scarcity in mind. For the sake of brevity, we will start with an assumption that each and every moment is valuable at least in so far as it participates in being over not-being.

5 47 Existential Commentary 47 The will to being takes on value in other contexts too, such as in evolution, and our intuitive notion that, assuming the existence of a god, it is better for God to have created the universe than to have foregone creation. Next, our economic principle of scarcity value tells us that, assuming something x has value, the relative value of x will increase in positive relation to its level of scarcity. This makes intuitive sense to us. The less available that a particular good we desire is, the more we want it. For example, we all value water, because it helps us to survive. For a person living in an urbanized part of the United States in 2015, it is generally not difficult to find clean drinking water. Thus, we attribute a very low relative value to water, that is, we probably aren t willing to pay very much to get it, ceteris paribus. But, for someone in the middle of, say, the Sahara Desert, who has run out of supplies, the availability of clean water is dangerously low, and thus, the relative value of water skyrockets, ceteris paribus. A person in that situation would likely pay a very high amount to get even a small amount of clean drinking water. Now, keeping our two assumptions in mind (1) that life-moments are valuable insofar as they participate in being over not-being, and (2) that the economic principle of scarcity value is true, we can argue that because in the absence of eternal life, the amount of time we have to live is finite (thus scarce) we will, ceteris paribus, value life more when we know it has a finite end and will not go on forever. In this context, life is to be viewed as a gift to be treasured rather than as a waiting room, as many

6 48 48 Janua Sophia metaphysical belief systems imply. This is the central teaching of Tuck Everlasting. It is the great truth uncovered by Winnie on her heroic journey which allows her to self-actualize and make the independent, personal decision of not drinking from the magic spring and joining Jesse in eternal life. She chooses to embrace life itself, and thus says yes to herself, and to all of eternity. She has freed herself from the influence of her parents and from Jesse. Facing death is not an easy thing to do the fact that going into death necessarily entails an element of confronting the unknown (what lies beyond the grave?) makes it a fundamentally challenging and intimidating prospect. Willingly taking on death, as Winnie does, is a highly significant action, and marks the completion of Winnie s journey. Jesse s journey is much more tragic, and is largely secondary to the overall plot. It is traditional in Greek drama for tragic heroes to have a tragic flaw. Usually, this flaw is a character flaw (for example, Oedipus hubris or Hamlet s indecisiveness). In Jesse s case, it is a combination of his own immortality and a sort of unrestrained lust for existence. His quest is very personal, and more material than Winnie s it is a conquest of sorts, wherein he seeks to reconcile his own immortality with his desire for closeness and love. In Jesse s case, this entails convincing Winnie to become immortal and become his eternal companion. In accordance with the pattern of the monomyth, Jesse s journey follows an ascent from complacency to action and conflict, followed by a decisive moment where

7 49 Existential Commentary 49 the hero either succeeds or fails. The Tucks have been living off the radar, in a free and discrete manner up until the moment that Jesse and Winnie encounter each other in the woods. Jesse is called to action he can no longer simply float along. He is attracted to Winnie, and must act on his attraction. There is no need to recount the exact events of what occurs next, but when the decisive moment comes, we discover that Jesse has failed to convince Winnie to become immortal with him. He tragically fails in his journey, and perhaps this delivers a teaching about conquest and usury, though it is more likely that Jesse s quest is simply a convenient literally prop for Winnie s more important and more pedagogical journey of selfactualization and life-affirmation.

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