The Red Balloon (1956 film): A Misunderstood Eucatastrophe & the Christian Ethos of Hope

Midnight found me slumped on the bathroom floor, totally forgetting my illness as, mesmerized, I watched The Red Balloon (Le Ballon Rouge; 1956, 34 min. French film).  The story line is simple, as most profound stories are.  [Spoiler alert.]  A boy and a balloon establish a sort of playful understanding and loyalty between them.  Just as you begin to delight in the innocence of this whimsical relationship, antagonistic figures emerge out of the grey backdrop of this painting to destroy the little boy's happiness.  A teacher disciplines the boy for distracting others at school with his toy, and the other boys in the class first envy him for his balloon, and then they seek to destroy it when they realize the balloon will not respond to them, as it does to the little boy.  The "death scene" of the balloon is surprisingly evocative.  The final moments of the film are overwhelmed with beautiful images of bright balloons coming to cheer the boy and carry him away, above the forces that threaten his innocent joy.

Reading reviews of this film, viewers often love it or hate it.  Those who dislike it tend to see it as predominantly grey, depressing, painful (especially if they themselves were bullied as a child), and either nihilistic or, at best, artificially existential in its ending.  On the contrary, I would argue that the true beauty of this film lies in its ending, neither reduced to a plain tragedy or a falsely optimistic denouement, but as a euchatastrophe.

Eucatastrophe is a brilliant term, coined by J. R. R. Tolkien.  He explains it much better than I could paraphrase:

"But the 'consolation' of fairy-tales has another aspect than the imaginative satisfaction of ancient desires. Far more important is the Consolation of the Happy Ending. Almost I would venture to assert that all complete fairy-stories must have it. At least I would say that Tragedy is the true form of Drama, its highest function; but the opposite is true of Fairy-story. Since we do not appear to possess a word that expresses this opposite — I will call it Eucatastrophe. The eucatastrophic tale is the true form of fairy-tale, and its highest function.

The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous “turn” (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially 'escapist', nor 'fugitive'. In its fairy-tale—or otherworld—setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.

It is the mark of a good fairy-story, of the higher or more complete kind, that however wild its events, however fantastic or terrible the adventures, it can give to child or man that hears it, when the “turn” comes, a catch of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart, near to (or indeed accompanied by) tears, as keen as that given by any form of literary art, and having a peculiar quality."  [from "On Fairy-Stories"]

However, in a world where few understand the operations of grace, never mind the ultimate image of grace in the Resurrection of Christ, this sort of hope is lost upon us.  We are taught that joy in sorrow is either a type of self-delusion or hardness to the world.  We also think of the triumph of justice as properly taking place as a public act.  A euchatastrophe transcends these limited concepts of suffering and redemption.  Rather, the joy is found in grief, and what seems to the world to be failure and a "stumbling block" is the seed of our hope.

"Eucatastrophe is a neologism coined by Tolkien from Greek ευ- 'good' and καταστροφή 'destruction'" (source).  Like many truths in Christianity, this paradox is actually truer to our experience in the realm of grace than either term in isolation.

Tolkien adds:

"I coined the word 'eucatastrophe': the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with a joy that brings tears (which I argued it is the highest function of fairy-stories to produce). And I was there led to the view that it produces its peculiar effect because it is a sudden glimpse of Truth, your whole nature chained in material cause and effect, the chain of death, feels a sudden relief as if a major limb out of joint had suddenly snapped back. It perceives – if the story has literary 'truth' on the second plane (....) – that this is indeed how things really do work in the Great World for which our nature is made. And I concluded by saying that the Resurrection was the greatest 'eucatastrophe' possible in the greatest Fairy Story – and produces that essential emotion: Christian joy which produces tears because it is qualitatively so like sorrow, because it comes from those places where Joy and Sorrow are at one, reconciled, as selfishness and altruism are lost in Love." [Letter 89]

Some of the best art contains this sort of ending.  Beowulf, The Death of Ivan Illych, Crime & Punishment, Brideshead Revisited, Parker's Back (and many other O'Connor stories), The Wasteland . . . these are among the great works often mistaken for tragedies because the main character loses life, freedom, material goods, a spouse, or something else dear to him.  What is missed is that the sacrifice was made in order that the character might obtain the Pearl of Great Price (not always as Christianity per se, but as the greatest truth that the character has encountered to that point in his life).

I am not making a claim that The Red Balloon is a Christian metaphor.  But I do think it has an awfully lot to do with innocent love.  

All post-war art necessarily portrays a world that is broken, often cruel, and too "experienced" in hate and desperation to preserve innocence for long.  Yet, some of the most beautiful post-war masterpieces show the flowers growing in the ashes.  The greyness of post-war Europe was iconic: “Immediately east and north of Verdun there lies a broad, brown band ... Peaceful fields and farms and villages adorned that landscape a few months ago - when there was no Battle of Verdun. Now there is only that sinister brown belt, a strip of murdered Nature. it seems to belong to another world. Every sign of humanity has been swept away. The woods and roads have vanished like chalk wiped from a blackboard; of the villages nothing remains but gray smears where stone walls have tumbled together... On the brown band the indentations are so closely interlocked that they blend into a confused mass of troubled earth. Of the trenches only broken, half-obliterated links are visible.” (source)  But John McCrae and others noted that soon "In Flanders fields the poppies blow / Between the crosses, row on row" (source).  A bright red patch of innocence and beauty in the midst of a grey, embittered canvas of destruction--sound familiar?

The Red Balloon captures the imaginative bliss that a child can have despite his surroundings.  The hard realism of the world resents his joy, not because he has escaped pain, but because he has found a way to transcend it, while they have not.  A child's soul is sensitive and hopeful.  The world may try to crush this innocence, but what despair will never understand is that true love does not cease with death, true freedom does not cease with physical restraint, and true joy gives us a perspective that makes a dreary city more than a labyrinth filled with nightmares.  The boy's escape is not really an escape at all; it is an affirmation of who he has been all along.