The Bones That Aren't So Lovely

There is such a thing, I think as an inauthentic story.

To be authentic a story must meet specific criteria.  Storytelling Power describes a good story as meeting the following criterion:

1.  A good story touches people in some way; it "resonates with some basic universal aspects of being human."

2.  A good story has substance.  "Even young listeners want to hear a story with direction and purpose."

3.  A good story needs conflict and resolution, but the resolution cannot be too neat or easy, or people cannot trust the story.

4.  A good story creates visual images.

5.  A good story is one that is perfect for your audience.

6.  A good story is one the teller loves AND loves to tell.

Storytellers that craft inauthentic stories are often writing for self-serving purposes.  Their stories are lacking in one or more of the listed criterion.  They may have told the story for the shock value or for other personal motives.  Upon the completion of their stories, people leave feeling bothered or uncomfortable.

Last night we saw the movie The Lovely Bones.  It is a terrible story.  A young girl has been murdered by a serial pedophile.  She is suspended in some sort of personal heaven and cannot seem to move into heaven until she resolves her connection with earth.  As the movie progresses, the victim's sister catches the killer's eye and her family unravels. 

Most moviegoers enter into the theater willing to suspend their disbelief and sacrifice their own world for one of the producer/director's creation.  I'm usually very good at that.  I've enjoyed many a Disney-created production and we all know how marvelously the Disney world differs from the real world.  I was even willing to suspend my disbelief enough to believe that old and weary-appearing Mel Gibson actually captured the love of his young ladyin Braveheart.  Best example of my willingness to believe?  When I saw The Passion of the Christ I leaned over to my mother-in-law and sobbed, "Why won't someone save Him?"  We all know how that story ends.

I could not enter into Susie's world because a beautiful vivacious real girl was on the screen as the pretend victim of a heinous crime, one I would have tried to shield my own thirteen-year-old child from as long as I could.  Don't get me wrong; I've had conversations with my children about the potential for people to do bad things and cautioned them to keep a safe distance from strangers.  But that someone allowed their daughter to be a "victim" for the several months of filming...  I couldn't stop wondering what the girl, the real girl, thought about the story and what she would think in years to come.  I thought the same thing when I saw Lolita. 

Next I was bothered by the "personal heaven" Susie enters.  What is a personal heaven?  Does it come from some religious doctrine I haven't studied?  Is it biblical?  Is the tree Susie sometimes visits the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil?  Is it symbolic of some sort of manufactured Garden of Eden?  Where is God or guardian angel or spiritual leadership?  Has this child been abandoned to find her way alone?  Why is it another young teen is the only one to help Susie?  I couldn't find traces of typical Christian orthodoxy, which in itself doesn't make a bad story.  But I couldn't understand what I was seeing either, and that does make for a bad story.

Finally, the movie was brutal not only visually, but mentally.  We catch glimpses of Suzie's terror, and it's chilling.  (I assume the young actress, Saoirse Ronan, will be recognized eventually for her brilliance.)  We see her murderer sitting in front of a safe containing her bones and imagine her parents' aching longing to put her to rest; then we watch the same murderer handling the safe violently as he moves it to a location where it will never be discovered and wonder if Susie will ever have rest.  We see Susie's father beaten by a scared teen he's followed into a corn field.  We see Susie running through her personal heaven encountering the other victims of her murderer in the places he left their bodies.  And yet it's the things we don't see that are the most brutal.  What happened to Susie between the moment fear first strikes and the moment she realizes she's dead?  What happened to the other eight girls murdered by Susie's killer?

The Lovely Bones didn't touch me; it horrified me.

If the story had any message, it was that there is no moving to a better place while consumed with the need for revenge or constantly living in the past.  It may be a good message, but I think there are other ways to send it.  I don't think this story has substance.

The Lovely Bones has conflict, but lacks clear resolution.  Susie's killer flees and is never brought to earthly justice.  His justice, if it is that, comes to easily and practically painlessly.

Though there are visual images, both real and imagine.  They are too brutally bloody for me to consider them part of an authentic story.  They were shocking and dragged me too far from where the story wanted to end to be valuable.

I cannot imagine a perfect audience for this story.  Parents of young children will hide their children away from neighbors to keep them safe.  Parents who've experienced the loss of a child will be grief stricken, able to imagine their own child's trusting participation in their own disappearance followed by their final pain and terror.  Parent's who've never experienced it will hate it too.

Who on earth can love this story except someone who profits from it?