We thwart the deep wishes of the audience at our peril. Movies that deny the wishes of the audience to see the heroes ultimately happy or fulfilled may not perform well at the box office. The audience will inwardly cheer for poetic justice — the hero receiving rewards proportionate to his struggle, the villain receiving punishment equivalent to the suffering he has inflicted on others. If that sense of poetic justice is violated, if the rewards and punishments and lessons don't match up to our wishes for the characters, we sense something is wrong with the story, and go away unsatisfied.
We have wishes for our villains as well as our heroes. I remember my mother, an astute critic of popular movies and books, muttering under her breath phrases like "I hope he dies a horrible death," when a villain had done something particularly heinous to one of her heroes on the screen. If the movie didn't deliver a poetically appropriate fate for the villain, she was disappointed and that movie went down in her books as a bad one.
Once in a while, the strategy of thwarting the audience's desires is effective, to challenge the assumptions of the watchers, to reflect a harsh view of reality, or to depict a tragic, doomed situation as a kind of warning to the audience. For example, in the novel and movie Remains of the Day, the butler to the family of a British lord spends his entire life failing to connect emotionally with other people. His wish, we might say, is to have a sense of tight control over his personal life, one area where he does not compromise. This masks a deeper desire, the need to make an emotional and physical connection with another human being. The audience forms a strong wish for him to be happy, to seize an opportunity for intimacy that comes his way late in life. But, true to his tragic character, he doesn't take the chance for change, and the movie ends with the feeling that though he has gotten what he wants (privacy and control), he will never get what he needs, or what we wish for him and ourselves. It plays as a cautionary tale, a warning to us — if we don't take up the opportunities that life offers us, we could end up frustrated and alone. In this case, our wish to see the character happy is superseded by our need to realize that we could end up in the same sad situation if we don't open up to opportunities to love.
The focus on wishing that gives life to many tales is but one of the verbs that activate the emotional mechanisms of story. Wishes must be translated into action, dreams must be made real, or else the story, and perhaps a person's life, will stagnate, stuck in an unrealistic, endless fantasy of daydreaming. Wishing is important, for it is the first step in a pyramid of mental states, the yearning of a seed to grow into something great. It forms the initial intention of a story, or the beginning of a new phase of someone's life. "Be careful what you wish for" applies in a multitude of cases, as stories show us over and over that a wish is a powerful act of the imagination. The idea is constantly affirmed in stories that human imagination is extremely powerful, especially when focused into a wish, but that it is difficult to control. The wish and the imagination work together to create a mental image of the desired thing, person, situation, or outcome, so vivid that it calls the adventure into being, and launches the hero in the direction of seeing how the wish will actually be fulfilled, usually in an unsuspected and challenging way. The image may be faint and hazy in the beginning, or detailed but highly idealized and unrealistic, a fantasy of the future uninformed by real experience.
But for a story or a person's life to move along it is necessary to pierce the bubble of fantasy, and to convert wishing into something else — doing, the next step of the pyramid. The essence of movies is the director's command, "Action." Do something, actors. The root of the word "actor" is "do-er," someone who does something. Dreams and wishes must be tested in the crucible of reality, in action, by doing.
PROGRESSING FROM WISHING TO WILLING
Encountering conflicts and obstacles can force characters to evolve to a yet higher level on the pyramid of emotions, that of willing, which is quite a different mental state than mere wishing. Martial arts and classic philosophies teach people to develop a strong will, so that wishes can be transformed into actions, so that even when distracted or set back by obstacles, the developing personality can return quickly to the center line of its intention. Will is a wish concentrated and focused into a firm intention to achieve a goal step by step. Wishes can evaporate at the first setback but the will endures.
Willing is a kind of filter, separating those who only wish from those who actually take responsibility for improving themselves and pay the price of real change. With a focused will, a character can take the blows and setbacks that life hands out. Martial arts strengthen the will, as stories do, by delivering a series of blows and falls that toughen the student. Challenging and stressful situations are repeatedly introduced so that the developing person becomes more resilient, accustomed to conflict and opposition, and determined to overcome any obstacle.
Like making a wish, making an act of the will calls forces into motion. A strong act of will sends out signals to the world. Here is someone who wants something and is willing to pay a high price to get it. All sorts of allies and opponents will be summoned by such a declaration, each with its lesson to teach.
Like wishing, the will must be managed. A will for power can be dangerous, and an overly strong will can overpower and victimize weaker ones. But the development of a strong will, outgrowing the stage of simple wishing, is a necessary stage of human development.
There is a connection between needs and willing. Both evolve from the idea of wishing or wanting. Once you progress beyond wishing to knowing what your needs truly are, you can focus your vague wishes into much more concentrated acts of the will. All the levels of your being can be aligned in the direction of achieving a clear and realistic goal. The girl in "Rumpelstiltskin" starts as a passive victim, just crying her eyes out and sitting alone in a room wishing to be anywhere but there. When she is a little older and realizes she needs to protect the life of her child, she develops a will and applies it again and again until she accomplishes her goal.
The language of movies and fantasy, particularly that of the Disney variety, tends to show us the magical power of wishing but often stops short at that point, leaving the other steps of the pyramid unsaid but implied. Often fantasies are dedicated solely to exploring the mechanisms of wishing, developing the "Be careful what you wish for" concept to show that wishes might have to be refined or re-stated to adjust to reality, without necessarily evolving into the more powerful and focused mental state of willing an outcome. Sometimes an entire story remains in the wish mode by ending not with the development of a strong will, but the forming of a new wish, simply transferring unfocused desire from one object to the next.
Wishing and willing can be selfish mental states, and there are undoubtedly other possible steps higher on the pyramid of human emotional development, which might include learning to love, learning to have compassion for other beings, or in a few highly spiritual stories, learning to transcend human desires entirely to merge with a higher form of consciousness. But it's clear that wishing and its more evolved form, willing, are important tools for storytellers and necessary stages of everyone's development. Wishing in particular seems to invite a story to come to life and consciousness, launching an adventure that may teach us valuable lessons in survival.
And what about poor Rumpelstiltskin, tearing himself in two because he can't have the child he wants for unknown purposes? The outcome of the story doesn't seem fair. True, he has tried to kidnap a child from its mother, but what if he has a right to the child? The Queen has a bad record of motherhood, having bartered her child's life for her freedom, and the presumed father, the King, would make a menacing role model for a child, having threatened to behead his future wife. For all we know, the little man might have made a better parent to the child than either of them. Rumpelstiltskin loses the child because the young Queen is able to meet his seemingly impossible conditions, but what if he has a right to custody of the child, and not because of the deal he made with her that night? After all, what is there to do in an empty room for three nights when all the straw has been spun into gold?