Happiness

BY DR. AGONSON

I recently rewatched “The Happiness Patrol.” Whereas all incarnations of the Doctor are my favorite[i], Sylvester McCoy is one of my favorite favorites. Though his stories are full of great ideas, there’s often a want for more development, a feeling that both time and money are in short supply, and yet, even though there’s an unavoidably goofy and cobbled-together aspect to the show, there is always something meaningful in the menagerie.

The perfect phrase eludes me. I want to say there is a depth there, almost a sense of danger, especially after Ace boards the Tardis. A dimension I would almost call sadness, a melancholy. To me, it tastes very similar to David Suchet’s portrayal of Poirot; something seemingly a worn out trope that, nonetheless, has a sinister undercurrent, a dark desperation, like someone fighting a lost cause. This element is cranked up to eleven throughout these three episodes, almost to the point where I wonder how intentional the writers were. It was as if they took whatever flavor makes the 7th incarnation unique and distilled it into an unnatural intensity—thankfully not as deadly a product as the Candyman’s sweets.

This adventure, on the face of it, is nonsensical, as is most of Doctor Who, but only in the manner that a fairytale is nonsense. So, once upon a time, there was a queen who wanted people to be happy. She wanted people to be so very happy so very, very badly that she would do anything. So, she decreed that people should be happy, and she would torture anyone who wouldn’t comply. If torture didn’t help, and it never seemed to, she would kill the “killjoy” so that misery wouldn’t spread to other happy people. After all, there were too many people anyway. Strangely enough, as brothers and sisters and parents kept vanishing mysteriously, a mystery that everyone understood all too well, people were only growing more and more miserable every day. Then one day, one magic day, a great wizard came to her kingdom and turned her whole world upside-down. The people deposed their tyrant and, strangely enough, were finally happy.

If one can put off certain nerdy questions like how she came into power or why anyone would ever follow her in the first place, there is hidden beauty in the story, and truth, but those two often travel hand in hand.

An initial interpretation might posit this as allegorical, a sort of psychomachia. I think we all have known, or at least I have, a type of person (though not to the extremes shown in the show) who seems completely miserable but for the trappings. A smile that’s too much of a smile, or a conversation that will never go beyond surface pleasantries—certainly never so much as approach a disagreement or uncertainty. Certainty is certainly, if I might coin the term, fascimillated. Any part of the person that might go into a metaphorical darkness is killed in that person, until all that’s left is darkness, for there is no longer anyone who will bring light into the shadows. It is a wonderful touch that there is no silence allowed in this world, no corner of the city where “lift music” isn’t playing. This type does not suffer silence in silence.

As the Doctor says, there are two sides to every coin. On a practical level, one cannot have happiness without sorrow, for happiness comes from having what one wants, and sorrow is the wanting that makes happiness happen. The happiness, the type of surface happiness Helen A is so determined to perpetuate without sorrow, doesn’t exist. She isn’t happy, no one who follows or fights her is happy, and I don’t think she actually knows what happiness is. I don’t think she ever asked. Of course, those who sit around and ask those sorts of dumb questions, the philosopher type, are just the sort that Helen A would be quick to have disappeared.

To be happy is of course the goal, that is to say, contentment, but contentment with what? So, what is happiness? If I were to wish for happiness, I’m not wishing for my face to be frozen into a perpetual smile, the muscles agonizing under a strain they cannot keep up. Nor, perhaps, to be forever laughing, laughing till my sides hurt, laughing and unable to stop or breathe. That is not happiness, that is a nightmare.

“And it must be remembered that the most purely practical science does take this view of mental evil; it does not seek to argue with it like a heresy but simply to snap it like a spell.”

~Chesterton

The Doctor does not try to argue with Helen A. He simply gives her a practical demonstration. There is a sort of reverse stoicism, a determination in the antagonist to keep smiling as her world crumbles around her. She will grin and bear it, and she keeps the mask on until the very end. The Doctor gives her that final push, the dam breaks, and the tears fall.

I wish, in some respect, I had written this episode. I wonder if there is a novelization of it yet. The thing is, a few years ago, as I turned the last pages to Bradbury’s “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” I felt as though something was wrong, something left out, and for a few moments, I tried to contemplate what sort of novel I might write in reply only to recreate this story from Doctor Who.

As I finished reading the book, it was as though I had only read half of the story. Bradbury’s novel is almost the reverse of “The Happiness Patrol” where a put-up job of a smile and laughter is the only way to defeat the grim forces of the unattainable desires that leave people so dissatisfied in life. The protagonists have to simply pretend to be happy until their situation actually becomes a happy one.

It makes sense in the story, and there is a truth to both. However, those desires represented by Mr. Dark and his henchmen are presented as wholly evil. Helen A, I think, would agree with Bradbury, though I give Bradbury more credit than agreeing with her:

“‘It’s all right,’ said dad. ‘Have a small cry. We’re out of the woods. Then we’ll laugh some more, going home.'”

~Bradbury

Those desires, though, that unfulfillment woven into every happiness found in this life, are surely and truly my friends, for they have always been my desire for God. I have wondered now what Happiness is, not the outward signs nor even the inward feelings so easily created by mental fortitude or drugs, but the reality. In a healthy mind, happiness or sorrow is not merely a state of being, but a state itself, a place, a situation. A healthy mind feels sorrow where sorrow is warranted, and knows joy where there is joy. Happiness and sorrow are, in some sense, a sense. That is the problem with Helen A, she lies. If she sees something that should make her sad, she won’t see it. She kills those who are sad because she does not want reality barging in on her kingdom in the same way a snobbish hostess might turn the cold shoulder toward a guest who made some inconveniently true remark.

What is happiness then, if it is not heaven, and what is sorrow if it is not the knowledge that we are not there yet? Thus it is on earth that we find a sweetness in sorrow. You see, all the happiness down here is so very fleeting, a striving after the wind. In sorrow, we may rest from such labors, if only for a moment, and look up and remember that we long for something more.

Happiness will prevail.

[i] See “No True Scotsman Fallacy“