No Sunshine Here

There are hours when you spill coffee down your best shirt and then fall down the steps on your way to the washer. There are days when you wake up late for class and then find last night’s gum between your library books. And there are weeks when you watch first one, then another, phenomenally terrible movie.

A few weeks ago, I had one of those weeks.

Two films: Sunshine Cleaning and Little Miss Sunshine. The former tells of a struggling single mother, who balances her time between her married lover and attention-deficient son and sister. During the film, she works through her relationships, particularly that with her sister, which is complicated by their different responses to their mother’s suicide in their youth. Little Miss Sunshine speaks of the Hoover family, a group of six who define the term dysfunctional. When the potbellied little girl has a chance to become California’s “Little Miss Sunshine”, the whole family, from the Nietzche-reading teen with a vow of silence to an unspeakably foul grandpa, must pile into a broken down van in an attempt to get her there in time.

Besides the word “sunshine”, both movies share the same producer, Marc Turtletaub, but other than that, they seem to have nothing in common. But both films were terrible, and for ultimately the same reason. I’m afraid my exposition will be rather brief, as I do not wish to dwell long on these vulgarly odious films.

It was noted in a previous Nota Bene from Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man how careful an artist must be when creating an image of terror, for terror is a very real thing. When such terrors are created, but not resolved, a ravenous lion has been released onto an unsuspecting populace. In a very real sense, an unresolved thing of evil echoes through all eternity with malicious tones. This was the problem with both of these films. The characters had essentially the same disgusting lives they possessed at their story’s beginning. There was no real character progression. Thus viewers were and are left with the same terrifying image they commenced with. I came away from both films with a darkness that pervaded the soul, and I tremble to imagine what movies like these could do to a viewer who had no hope in life.

Be careful, filmmakers, what you create.