World Book Day

Was March 2. Oops. As usual, I'm two steps behind the rest of the world, or really, let's be honest, the UK, since this was the only place that I can tell really celebrated this holiday. As the Guardian reports, one notable achievement of this day was the release of a study showing that 41% of readers participating in the poll prefer happy endings, compared to 2.2% who prefer sad ones. Additionally, Britain's librarians released a list of the top 30 books every adult should read before they die. (The oddly morbid phrasing of the question doesn't hide what this really is--a tired retread of the same old inexplicable best-of lists that everyone likes to crab about, myself included. I mean, the top three choices are To Kill a Mockingbird, the Bible, and the Lord of the Rings triology for heaven's sake.)

But I'm in a mood to crab about all this love for happy endings after the ridiculousness of the Oscars. (Am I ever! Things that make me mad about that ceremony include: the terrible Best Picture win, Charlize Theron's dress, the fact that Louis Gossett Jr. is no longer the default black man that editors cut to whenever someone says something "racial" (we miss you, Lou!) and of course, the fact that I am still wasting time thinking about this.) George Clooney is a handsome and charming man, sure, but his assertion that Hollywood deserves props for giving Hattie McDaniel an Oscar is justifiably getting ripped apart. Let's thank the civil rights movement first, please, George, and then we can talk about the mammy and the tragic mulatto that are Hollywood's idea of roles for black women.

The happy escapism of popular entertainment, whether literary or filmic, works precisely because it doesn't cross over to real life. In our regular lives, sad endings are much more reliable than happy ones, and race differences don't get solved by calling one group Orcs and killing them all off. How can an industry lead the way in enacting social change when their product defines itself by giving closure where none exists elsewhere? The fundamental story that popular culture tells is the one of how we all learned to stop worrying and get along, and that's a story that can, in theory, be done very nicely. But it's not all there is, and, for this reader, movie-goer and mother at least, it's not even close to enough.