Once You've Gone Without, Can You Ever Have Enough? — Wanting and Desire in Dallas, The Thorn Birds, and the Before Sunrise Trilogy
Hayley and I are currently watching the original Dallas television show. We just finished the episode “Triangle” (season 2, episode 11) guest-starring Kate Mulgrew (best known as Captain Kathryn Janeway on Star Trek: Voyager). For those who haven’t seen the episode or if you need a refresher, here’s the plot synopsis of “Triangle” from Wikipedia:
Ray has become serious about country singer Garnett McGee. When Jock leaves Ray some land at Southfork, he pops the question to Garnett. Garnett wants more than Ray can offer and hooks up with J.R., who negotiates a music contract for her. Ray is furious and heads for Garnett's. He finds J.R. with her and a fight begins.
As a character, Garnett McGee is an interesting contrast to the Ewings, just as the Barneses are: characters who have grown up making do without all of the luxuries and privileges that the Ewings have always had. A portion of the dialog between Garnett McGee and Southfork Ranch foreman Ray Krebbs stood out to me as insightful:
Garnett McGee: When you grow up like we did, dirt poor, everyone seeing you own not a blanket, not a dollar toy, it ain’t easy being satisfied. You’re lucky; you learned how. For me, the wanting’s like a disease. Nothing ever cures it. Nothing’s ever enough.
It seems to me that there are two different ways that people generally respond to having done without: either you become stoic and learn to do without entirely, or an insatiable, incurable hunger and a desire grown within you, unable to be satisfied no matter how much of the object of your desire you manage to obtain.
This theme and character trait, of always wanting and never being satisfied, is present in several of my favorite films as well. For example, in the 1983 television miniseries The Thorn Birds, based on the book of the same name by Colleen McCullough, Richard Chamberlain’s character, Father Ralph de Bricassart, has an endless unquenchable ambition to rise through the ranks of the Catholic Church hierarchy, which blinds him to the immediate happiness he might have had with his love interest in the film, Meggie Cleary:
Father Ralph de Bricassart: I'll never have what I want! Never be what I want! And I don't know how to stop wanting!
Father Ralph, like a good Catholic, seems to view wanting as a moral character flaw, believing that it is better to want for nothing and to be thankful for God’s provisions, however modest they may be and no matter how much internal pain and struggle it may cause within to do so. As he says a moment later:
Father Ralph de Bricassart: It's all right, Meggie. It's all right. It's just that sometimes, God's lessons are very hard for me.
Although Father Ralph does not have a high opinion of wanting in general, despite his own incessant wanting and ambition within himself, other characters in other film franchises have a much more positive view of wanting and the role it plays in human nature. For example, the two protagonists of the Before Sunrise feature film trilogy, Jesse and Céline, discuss wanting in a fairly positive light in the trilogy’s second film, Before Sunset:
Jesse: Yeah, but that's so hard! You know, to be in the moment. I just feel like I'm...designed to be slightly dissatisfied with everything. You know? I mean, like...always trying to better my situation. You know, I satisfy one desire, and it just... agitates another, you know? Then I think, to hell with it, right? I mean, desire is the fuel of life, I mean, do you think it's true that if we never wanted anything, we'd never be unhappy?
Céline: I don't know... Not wanting anything, isn't that... a symptom of depression? Yeah, that is, right? I mean, it's healthy to desire, right?
Jesse: Yeah... I don't know, I mean, it's what all those Buddhist guys say, right? You know, liberate yourself from desire and you'll find that you already have everything you need.
Céline: Yeah, but I feel really alive when I want something more than just basic survival needs. I mean, wanting whether it's intimacy with another person, or a new pair of shoes, is kind of beautiful. I like that we have those ever-renewing desires.
Jesse: Well, maybe it's just a sense of entitlement. You know, like whenever you feel like you deserve that new pair of shoes, you know. It's okay to want things as long as you don't get pissed off if you don't get 'em. Right? Life's hard. It's supposed to be. If we didn't suffer, we wouldn't learn a thing, you know?
Both Jesse and Céline seem to have a much healthier relationship with their own desires and their own insatiable longings than either Garnett McGee in Dallas or Father Ralph in The Thorn Birds. And therein lies the fundamental question: is it healthy to desire, even if those desires go unsatisfied, or is incessant desire the source of much of our unhappiness and uneasiness as human beings?
My maternal grandfather, Roger Forssell, like three out of four of my grandparents, grew up during the Great Depression. As such, he seldom got to have ice cream while growing up. Later in life, when he could actually afford to buy ice cream, and up until his dying day, he always kept at least one large tub, sometimes more, of ice cream in the freezer. And, to my knowledge, he never told anyone that they couldn’t have any ice cream. Although it’s a significant overstatement to say that my grandfather had an unquenchable thirst for ice cream, for him ice cream became symbolic, a metaphor for self-sufficiency, the desires that went unfulfilled in his childhood for which he would err on the side of excess as an adult.
My own experience, both personally and in observing the lives of others, tells me that each of us has some secret longing, the hidden desires of our hearts, that are yet unsatisfied. For some it’s ice cream. For some it’s sex and physical intimacy. For other’s it’s money or success. For still others it’s to travel the world or to make a lasting contribution.
Some people give up on those secret desires and learn to quench the thirst that lurks within; they learn to bury their desires, hopes, and dreams deeper and deeper, learning to be content with whatever life has thrown their way, being content with scraps from the table of life. Others, however, hold fast to their dreams no matter the disappointments, hurts, or struggles they encounter along the way. If their hopes and dreams get dashed, they keep on dreaming, wishing, hoping, and longing, while their desires fester and burn ever-stronger within them.
I, myself, have always fallen into the latter category. I spent most of the first 40 years of my life dreaming of and longing for the type of immersive passion and intimacy with another person that always seemed so elusive, except perhaps in fleeting moments or small stretches of time that always seemed too short, too finite and time-bound to truly satisfy the hunger for intimacy, both physical and emotional, that has always burned within me. And I, myself, have been told that no matter how well things are going, it never seems like it’s enough, that I am always waiting more and am never truly satisfied.
The correct answer to the conundrum of taking a stoic approach to desire versus embracing and holding on to one’s desire may very be a kind of Aristotelian middle ground between two extreme approaches. Abandoning one’s desires for the sake of being stoic or for the sake of living an ascetic lifestyle, giving up on one’s hopes and dreams and learning to rein in the wanting and longing for the object of unfulfilled desires, may lead to a type of happiness, but a type of happiness that I find it easy to pity because it is a type of happiness that is too constrained and too fatalistic for my taste; it offends my existentialist sensibilities that we do have free will to make our lives whatever we want them to be, and to pursue the objects of our desires to our heart’s contentment. On the other hand, however, incessant wanting that is literally never satisfied can poison one’s mind and heart and soul, as is arguably the case both in J.R. Ewing and in Garnett McGee in Dallas, and arguably also in the case of Ralph de Bricassart in The Thorn Birds.
Jesse and Céline in the Before Sunrise trilogy seem to have fared rather better. Even though they each had a lengthy period of time, nine years, of unfulfilled desire for each other, they were successful at finding each other once again. They somehow held on to the desire for each other inside their hearts despite having every reason not to and to give up on the innermost dreams of their hearts. Even when things aren’t perfect in their lives, as is seen in part three of the trilogy, Before Midnight, they have somehow managed to find the middle ground between being happy with each other in the present moment while still struggling for maximum fulfillment when day-to-day life doesn’t live up to their romantic ideals of life and love together.
After this brief reflection on the nature of wanting and of desire, the only practical advice I can come up with is to do both at the same time. Hold on to your dreams and continue to let them burn inside you, to fuel you with passion, fire, and zest for life, and with longing for the things your heart most authentically craves. But don’t let the absence of the objects of your desire, or the struggles along the way, keep you from finding happiness and contentment in the often-less-than-perfect realities of day-to-day life and of the climb up the mountain to reach the summit and the heights to which your heart has soared so often in your dreams and desires. There is often as much beauty and joy in the struggle and in the climb as there is in actually reaching the summit, for at the summit there is often nowhere else to go but downward, and it’s always better to look up toward the future and to your hopes than to look downward and see only the disappointments and unfulfilled yearnings of life.
In closing, I leave you with a final thought about wanting and desire. As the poet Langston Hughes once said, “Hold fast to dreams.” (The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes)
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