This past week I played Sea of Solitude (2019) and watched The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992). Sea of Solitude is a surrealistic game about loneliness and sadness. The Muppet Christmas Carol is… A Christmas Carol… with Muppets. On the surface, these two artworks would seem to have little to do with each other, but I found a significant thematic dissonance between them.
Everything in Sea of Solitude is an unsubtle metaphor for chronically sad people, their emotional states, or the triggers for those states. It uses environment and character designs that embody feelings of sorrow and emptiness to tell the story of Kay, a young woman with a troubled family life. While there are unique aspects to Sea, what struck me about it was this similarity it shares many other contemporary artworks: it does a good job describing sorrow, but it does not suggest any real remedy for it.
It does suggest a remedy, but that remedy boils down to that most trite and generic of self-help advice: “love yourself.” After her harrowing journey through the Sea of Solitude, Kay finds relief from her sadness, not in the building of relationships, the acceptance of truths, or changes in her behavior, but in self-acceptance. Kay comes to love herself, and then the game ends quite suddenly with a vague pronouncement that she is now happy.
This terse resolution contrasts with the lengthy sequences in which the sadness of Kay and other characters is described. Throughout the game’s ~3-hour length, we learn quite a bit about Kay’s parents’ rocky marriage, her little brother’s struggles with bullies, her boyfriend’s struggle with depression, and her guilt over her perceived culpability in these problems. The game spends 90% of its time either explaining why characters are sad, or describing what their sadness feels like.
But while the characters’ sadness is explored in depth, each either 1.) carries their unresolved sadness to the game’s conclusion, or 2.) has it resolved suddenly and completely in a magical moment. Kay has her magical moment when she literally embraces several other characters who are revealed to have been aspects of her own personality. We spend 3 hours learning why Kay is sad, but then she has singular “love yourself” moment and–poof!–her sadness it gone.
The general view of sadness and its remedy that is presented in Sea of Solitude seems archetypical of how these subjects are regarded by our society in general, and especially of how they are treated in our art.
Our popular psychology holds that a mentally healthy person is one who has self-love, which leads to self-actualization. Anything that is mentally or emotionally wrong with a person must in some way stem from insufficient self-love, which leads to self-alienation. Is a person chronically sad, selfish, or insensitive? Do they have bouts of murderous rage? They must not love themselves enough! All bad feelings and behaviors are believed to be either a result of or an attempt to compensate for a lack of self-love.
(Why did Ben Solo become a genocidal warlord bent on Galactic domination? Because he lost sight of Who He Really Is! He was really a Solo all along; he just needed the confidence to accept his True Self!)
This paradigm of self-love allows for elaborate and affecting explorations of why people are sad, because myriad factors could trigger a state of self-alienation, and that state could manifest itself in myriad ways. Accordingly, contemporary art is full of explorations of unhappiness and its consequences.
But while this paradigm allows for infinite ways to be sad, it only has one way to be happy. If happiness is exclusively a result of the internal, personal state of self-love, then happiness must originate within a person. Happiness cannot come from either internalization of or incorporation into anything outside of the self. It must result from discovery and expression of something innate.
If happiness originates within a person, then it is inherently mysterious. In the self-love paradigm, people can have reasons for being sad, but not for being happy. Sadness is rational. Happiness is mysterious, magical, and vague. That’s why Sea of Solitude can spend hours brooding over the causes of sorrow, but can only offer a meme-level explanation for the cause of happiness.
This modern way of understanding un/happiness is in sharp contrast to the much older paradigm witnessed in A Christmas Carol.
In Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge does not lack in self-love. Much to the contrary: Scrooge regards himself as the ideal man, finding no flaw or fault in himself at all, and his behavior is the perfect self-actualization of his perfect self-love.
Is the selfish, isolated, mean, scowling Scrooge happy? Yes, he is! Scrooge is fully content with both his internal and external life. He is as happy as he has the vision to imagine being. But Christmas Carol tells us that Scrooge’s self-love is bad. It is bad precisely because Scrooge’s happiness does originate within himself, and because it originates within himself it can only be as big as his personal vision.
The mission of the Ghosts is not to help Scrooge love himself, but very nearly the opposite: the Ghosts come to teach Scrooge that self-love is insufficient. The happiness that can be attained through self-love is meager and fleeting, but a much greater happiness can be attained by demoting oneself and loving others instead. Scrooge moves from perfect self-actualization to humble openness, embracing people and ideas that are of and from without. This other-lover is shown to be superior to self-love, and it gives Scrooge a happiness greater than he had been able to imagine.
This is a paradigm of integration. Happiness comes not from from some mysterious inner well, but from internalizing and being incorporated into goods which are both outside of and larger than the self. Far from embracing his “true self,” Scrooge finds something more important than his self, and embraces that instead.
This paradigm allows not only for myriad ways to be sad, but also for myriad ways to be happy. Not just sorrow but also joy can come from anywhere, and happiness can be explored as elaborately and affectingly as its opposite.
Dickens could explain the “why” of both sorrow and happiness. Modern artists can explain sorrow just fine, but happiness has become mysterious to them. To modern thinking, happiness is magical, and therefore opaque.
This inability to understand happiness is to be expected of a society which has rejected the concept of objective truth. If there is such a thing as objective truth, then happiness can be rational, because happiness comes from our relationship to truth. But if there is no objective truth, then happiness must be irrational, because it can only come from within, from a place no one can see, by a process no one can understand.