Two Cheers for Happy Endings
Discussing The King of Masks at San Quentin Prison
Joyce Carol Oates once said that the best way to experience a work of literature is to read it with a group of responsive students.
For the past decade I have taught humanities courses to incarcerated men enrolled in Mount Tamalpais College at San Quentin Prison. My course this semester is Film Appreciation, where students watch, discuss, and write about films from Battleship Potemkin to 400 Blows to Moonlight. Joyce Oates’ observation holds true for teaching film as well at literature, and San Quentin students have a range of experiences, a depth of soul, and an unfiltered honesty that make them a responsive audience for great films.
This was evident recently when we viewed and discussed Wu Tian-Ming’s 1996 film, The King of Masks. For those who haven’t seen the film, a synopsis is in order. Wang is an old street performer of the art of biàn liǎn, the lightning fast changing of vibrant, colorful face masks. He lives a hand-to-mouth existence traveling the river in his houseboat and performing for coins at towns along the way. Tradition dictates that the secret techniques of his art can be passed down only to a male heir, and he has none.
Passing through an alley where orphaned children are being sold, Wang is offered a little boy, who calls after him, “Yeye, Yeye” (Grandpa, Grandpa). His heart touched, Wang pays the price for the boy, and he now has a grandson and an heir to his art. He loves the child dearly, nursing him through an illness and teaching him to help in the street performances. The child — whom Wang names Doggie — is dutiful and hungry for love.
After some time, Wang discovers that the boy is really a little girl wearing cropped hair and boys’ clothing. Enraged that he has been deceived, Wang abandons her. When Doggie nearly drowns trying to swim after his houseboat, he rescues her and allows her to stay, but she must call him Boss, not Grandpa. When she accidentally causes a fire on his houseboat, she runs away and is kidnapped by outlaws trafficking in children. Doggie uses her wiles to escape, in the process rescuing a little boy kidnapped from a wealthy family. Determined to give Wang the grandson he wants, she leaves the young boy on the houseboat and sneaks away to live as a street urchin. Wang is arrested for kidnapping the boy and is sentenced to death. Doggie, who has been watching Wang from a distance, appeals to a famous opera star who knows Wang to help. When Doggie threatens suicide (an idea she got from an opera), the star convinces military officials to intervene, and Wang is saved. He accepts Doggie as his granddaughter worthy of being taught the secretes of biàn liǎn.
At the next class meeting, I asked students if the happy ending was a mistake. A couple of weeks earlier, they had agreed that Bicycle Thieves (De Sica, 1948) had to end as it did, with Ricci not only failing to recover his bicycle but also experiencing the moral fall of trying to steal a bike himself. We discussed deus ex machina, often used as a pejorative term for an unlikely save-the-day plot twist at the end of a story. They agreed it would have been a cinematic disaster for De Sica to take his film in that direction. Down with Hollywood endings. Better an honest tragedy.
As a teacher, nothing delights me so much as seeing students march down one road, only to realize they need to backtrack. The King of Masks changed their minds about the inferiority of happy endings. When I pointed out that the film could have ended as a Shakespearean tragedy with the execution of Wang and the suicide of Doggie (an option that appealed to me), no one liked that idea. One student said, “I thought about that film long into the night. I could not hold back my tears. I needed to see her happy.”
I needed to see her happy. His honest response took us to the central question about film: what is its effect on the audience?
Aristotle tells us that tragedies cultivate empathy for the characters, and we feel great anxiety over the destruction toward which they are hurling. For Doggie to pass herself off as a boy is to knock on the door of disaster. Are not we all — teachers and convicted felons alike — like little children, seeking the love and acceptance that threatens to elude us? Our own buried anguish is resurrected as we witness Doggie’s. But at the end, Aristotle instructs us, we feel catharsis, a purging of those emotions that put us through the wringer.
The ruined lives that mark the end of Oedipus or Hamlet characterize one kind of tragedy, but there are other kinds. When college professors outline Aristotle’s theory of tragedy on the board, they often overlook his admission that tragedies can have happy endings. Tucked away in book 14 of the Poetics, Aristotle even states his preference for tragedies in which the reversal of fortune occurs in the middle and the ending is happy. At least for this film, the San Quentin film class agreed with Aristotle.
When I told my students that the The King of Masks was never released in China, they were not surprised. They recognized that the happy ending extended beyond the saving of Wang’s life and his acceptance of Doggie as his granddaughter; victory also went to moral cause of gender equality. One student said the film was the best argument for women’s rights he’d ever seen. They recognized Doggie as a spiritual cousin of the protestors at Tiananmen Square.
Perhaps my student needed to see Doggie happy in order to keep the faith that dreams do come true — whether saving the planet or winning parole. While all tragedies teach us there is greatness in humanity, tragedies with happy endings nourish our hopes.
As another student wrote, “The ending reached the hearts of everyone watching.” With some tutoring from my students, it reached my heart, too.
