"We tell ourselves stories in order to live" (Didion 1979, pg. 8), but "the only stories that really help are the true ones" (Orion 49:25).
The last thing I expected to reminisce about when watching a DreamWorks animated film was Joan Didion's core argument in her essay, The White Album. Yes, I know what you are thinking. Who even thinks about that when watching a funny, animated movie? And while we are at it, which twenty-one-year-old watches animated movies? In my innocent defense, the film was surprisingly refreshing - it almost took me back to my childhood. Nearly - because I am not sure if what I was transported to was my childhood or just yesterday. Nonetheless, as Orion and his daughter, Hypatia, traverse the stories of his childhood adventures, he attempts to understand her recommendations, ultimately highlighting the complexity of history in our narratives.
The film, released in early 2024, focuses on Orion's encounter with his worst fear, an entity named 'Dark,' when he was eleven. We see the movie shift consistently into the future, where an older Orion conveys the stories to Hypatia, who is surprisingly also afraid of the dark, trademarking a generational trend. The passage begins with Dark aiming to augment his reputation as an isolated and shunned being. Later, Orion accompanies him on a trek into the starry night, and is introduced to other working entities that alleviate his tasks, like Quiet, Sweet Dreams, Insomnia, Sleep, and Unexplained Noises. While understanding Dark's significance, Orion misinterprets his value as opposed to Light (the daytime entity) and loses him at what he thinks is the end of his story - later regretting when all Earth has left is Light. Hypatia then embarks on a journey back to the past and assists her father in recovering his friend, Dark. Consequently, before happily leaving for the night again, Dark remarks that Orion will continue to see him in "new ways" (Orion 1:14:05).
Likewise, in her essay, The White Album, Didion suggests that all individuals are storytellers, shaping their narratives to instil meaning and purpose. She adds that they live entirely by the "ideas with which they have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is their actual experience" (Didion 1979, pg. 8). However, she refrains from touching upon the weightage of elements of one's narrative in detail and allows subjectivity. Nevertheless, her notion is similar to Orion's experiences with Dark; he frames his stories into a simple, predictable narrative as he continues, all away from reality. However, when he travels back to real-time, he finds his daughter actively objecting to its course. She requests that he allow the complexity of his relationship with Dark to prevail to substantiate the story instead of simplifying it to reach a nuanced conclusion, which is only sometimes necessary (Orion 48:46-49:25).
(Orion and the Dark 49:25)
Funnily enough, I then looked at Dark not as a physical facade of Orion's fears, but as a surface appearance for other abstract concepts to interpret Hypatia's words better - like history. While history itself has concrete foundations, one-half of it is abstract interpretations. Its complexity deems it intimidating, much like Dark's presence in Orion's story. I'm sure we have all heard - or ourselves mentioned - that we don't like to 'look at the past' but instead prefer 'focusing on the future,' hereafter oversimplifying and abandoning our histories, like Orion abruptly ending the story and disregarding Dark's absence. Compared to the future (or Light in the film), history (or Dark) then embodies a relatively subordinate position, occupying an insignificant presence in an individual's narrative or story. Subsequently, his daughter isn't able to make sense of his future, and truthfully, we aren't either. What the movie then teaches us, in essence, is that without Dark, Light isn't logical; without the complexity or truth of our 'history,' the future isn't plausible. Orion did not truly know how his story ended but knew how it began. We do not see how our stories will end, but we know how they started. By inserting weight into history and stitching those distinct pieces into our future, we create a unified narrative that allows us to understand our lives as truthful - a fact I'm sure Joan Didion would approve of.
No matter how complex, unpredictable, or unsavory, it's time we humanize history - instead of oversimplifying it to reach an unobligatory end. Ultimately, Hypatia was right to add to Didion's point - the only stories that really help are the true ones, no matter how simple or complex. After all, the future is just history in "new ways."
All movie credits (including the stills) go to Netflix 2024.
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Sources Cited
Didion, Joan. The White Album. 1979.
Orion and the Dark. Directed by Sean Charmatz, DreamWorks, 2024. Netflix.
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