Do Stories Need Happy Endings?

In this essay, we are going to explore a question I have been thinking about: do stories need a happy ending?

This question came to mind after watching a video with Terry Gilliam where he discussed Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List alongside the work of Stanley Kubrick. In that discussion, Gilliam said:

The great difference between a Kubrick and Spielberg is Spielberg is more successful, his films make much more money, but they’re comforting. They give you answers—always the films are answers, and I don’t think they’re very clever answers. And 2001 had an ending—I don’t know what it means, I don’t know, but I have to think about it. I have to work, and it opens up all sorts of possibilities. And probably the next person I speak to has a different idea of what that ending means, so now suddenly we’re in discussion, now we’re talking, ideas come out of that.

And that’s what I always want to encourage. Spielberg and the success of most films in Hollywood these days, I think, is down to the fact they’re comforting. They tie things up in nice little bows, gives you answers even if the answers are stupid. Their answer is, “Oh, you can go home and you don’t have to worry about it.” The Kubricks of this world and the great filmmakers make you go home and think about it.

He then cites a wonderful quote from Frederic Raphael’s book about the making of Eyes Wide Shut, titled Eyes Wide Open. Raphael was talking with Kubrick about Schindler’s List and the Holocaust, and Kubrick remarked:

The thing is, Schindler’s List is about success. The Holocaust was about failure.

Gilliam thought that observation was spot on. His critique was that Schindler’s List focused on saving a few people—a happy ending where a man can do what a man can do to stop death for a small group. But in his view, that is not what the Holocaust was fundamentally about; it was about the complete failure of civilization to allow six million people to die. And Gilliam concluded that he knew which side of filmmaking he would rather be on.

Resolution, Redemption, and the Biblical Pattern

To address the question directly: do stories always need a happy ending? My answer is: most of the time.

“Happy” is probably not the best term here. A better term would be something like resolution, redemption, or transformation. Do stories need that sort of ending? Yes, most of the time.

Why can we say this? When we look at the Bible, the overarching narrative is a story of redemption. Even when you break the Scriptures down into their constituent parts—taking the whole story and dividing it into individual books, and then breaking those books down into sections, episodes, and scenes—the same pattern holds true. When you get down to the fundamental narrative unit, an actual scene with its own small narrative arc, most scenes in the Bible are redemptive and provide some sort of transformation.

Of course, those resolutions are not complete until the very end of history. But what God is continually doing is stepping in, changing circumstances, sanctifying, and making things better. It is like Genesis 1: day after day, He makes creation better and better and better. That is what He is doing throughout the narrative.

Or consider the Book of Psalms. There is only one psalm in the entire Psalter that lacks a positive resolution: Psalm 88. It is sometimes called the “black sheep” of the Psalter. It is exceptionally dark, because sometimes dark things happen in life. You might think of it as a fitting psalm for Holy Saturday, when Christ lies in the grave. But most of the time, the psalms move toward a resolution.

Even in narratives where resolution is present, it is often not a complete resolution immediately. This reminds me of the Joseph narrative. Throughout that story, you encounter paired scenes where full redemption does not arrive until the end. Yet the narrator repeatedly steps in with perspective, noting that while Joseph was forgotten by men, God remembered him. There is a persistent sense that despite the genuine evils taking place, God remembers His servant and is actively working. So as a Christian, do stories need that kind of redemptive ending? Yes.

Depth Versus Resolution

I think Terry Gilliam conflates depth with a lack of resolution.

How one answers whether stories need happy endings is ultimately determined by your worldview, which is something Gilliam does not directly acknowledge. If you believe there is no objective meaning or purpose, and that the universe will simply terminate in heat death when the sun burns out into a black star with no transcendent meaning whatsoever, then art does not have to resolve anything. But if your prior framework is a Christian, redemptive worldview, then your art must reflect the true nature of reality.

Furthermore, Gilliam seems to treat depth and resolution as mutually exclusive. He insists that stories ought to make the audience think and wrestle. But making an audience think, possessing genuine depth, and having layers in a composition that require careful unfolding do not exclude resolution.

One of the great insights I learned from David Bentley Hart in The Beauty of the Infinite is that for the Christian, what lies in the depths is more permutations and variations on the theme of what is already on the surface. That might sound abstract, but God plays on the surface, and the deeper you go into biblical narratives, the hidden or deeper meanings turn out to be further permutations and deepenings of the surface theme.

This serves as a reliable interpretive tool whenever you read a text. If you want to be sure you are not wandering off in a wrong direction, pull back and ask: what is on the surface? On a first reading, you should be able to grasp the main point of a story. You read it and understand what it is about. Yet there are always further depths beneath it. You have to keep going down into the details and coming back up—moving between the forest and the trees—to ensure you are heading in the right direction and that every detail harmoniously follows the main narrative spine. You can possess profound depth alongside genuine resolution.

There are fascinating ways biblical authors accomplish this balance; my studies on Proverbs or the story of Zacchaeus are clear examples of how scriptural narratives achieve deep complexity without abandoning redemptive resolution.

Finally, there is an interesting inconsistency at the very end of Gilliam’s comments. After arguing that filmmakers should leave audiences with open questions rather than neat answers, he turns around and diagnoses Spielberg’s supposed error by defining precisely what the Holocaust meant and insisting it should have been communicated in that specific way. In doing so, he adopts a dogmatic view about the true nature of the event and its proper interpretation, criticizing Spielberg for violating it. Even on his own terms, the demand for unresolved ambiguity gives way to a very definite interpretation.

Watch the original episode.