When everything is as it was in my childhood
Violent, vivid, and of infinite possibility:
That the sun and the moon broke over my head.
--Richard Eberhart, 20th century American Poet
If Frodo doesn’t get that ring to Mount Doom, it will be the end of Middle-Earth!! If the X-Men don’t defeat Magneto, all Earth will be enslaved to his will!! If Picard doesn’t convince Q that mankind has value, he’ll destroy all humanity!! If the Doctor doesn’t stop Davros, all of space and time will cease to exist!!
The highest of high stakes usually drive the tales we love. Epic, heart-lifting stories demand epic settings--we don’t long for the telling of the stirring saga of the struggle of Nicholas, Son of David, to get his homework done on Tuesday night. You’d think the High-Stakes Story would become a dull cliche (And we can all think of the times we’ve groaned at things like Armageddon or risible Bond villain Max Zorin. What are we going to do tonight, Brain? The same thing we do every night, Pinky--try to take over the WORLD! Mine is an evil laugh!!), but apparently we have a boundless not only tolerance but appetite for life-or-death challenges.
Some of that appetite is physiological. Military personnel and journalists can come back from war zones turned into adrenaline/dopamine junkies. Our bodies put the high in “high stakes.” Physically, mentally, and emotionally, we feel good when we are pressured to respond to extremely demanding stimuli. And when those stimuli are fictional, we don’t even have the negative aspects of stress and anxiety to take the edge off--just the thrill of having saved the world! Call of Duty? Nazi Zombies? Oh, yeah!!
The real problem, though, is the problem of civilization. For many people, life is made up of two intractable situations: everyday life can be mastered, but the stakes are low (Nicholas is in fact going to get that homework done on Tuesday night. And Wednesday night. And Thursday night. And next week. And next year.) and humanity’s larger problems carry very high stakes, but they cannot be mastered (I personally can’t stop global warming. Or save the whales. Or end economic injustice. Or reform factory farming. Or stop human trafficking.). Both of these situations are depressing--the scope of our personal lives can seem small and tedious, and the gap between our understanding of vitally important crises and our ability to address them is anguishing. All of a sudden, hopping on a rocket and trying to deflect an asteroid before it hits the Earth looks like a relief--at last a problem I can solve! Yippee-kai-yay!
That said, I am not trying to dismiss the romance of Saving the Universe as escapism for people who are discouraged by reality. On the contrary, I think many of us would in fact be willing to walk into Mordor, and long for the chance to be that heroic, to show our quality. And, in our adult lives where heroism is so abstract and the colors are muted and the unicorns and glitter can be hard to find, tales where the stakes are no less than all of space and time let us become again our mad, mad child selves, burning in the fire of infinite possibility, with the sun and moon breaking over our heads.
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