What an old Lucille Ball and Bob Hope movie can teach us about the spiritual life
Or why new isn’t necessarily better
Recently I watched a movie from 1960 starring Bob Hope and Lucille Ball. The movie, titled The Facts of Life, has Hope playing Larry Gilbert and Ball playing Kitty Weaver. The two are long time friends, who see each other often at events hosted by the local social club. Beyond that, they are part of a group of couples who travel together to exotic locales on vacations.
One such vacation takes the couples on a trip to Acapulco. Except that, the three couples don’t all end up going. At the last moment, Larry’s wife stays home to care for a sick child. Kitty’s husband is forced to miss the trip for business reasons. Larry and Kitty both tell their spouses, if you’re not going I’m not going. But their spouses say, don’t be silly, of course you should go. Larry and Kitty sit together on the plane during the flight to Mexico, but are not particularly interested in each other. They chit-chat a little, but Larry finds reading a book preferable to speaking with Kitty.
When they arrive in Acapulco, they find that the third couple is violently ill, and cannot participate in any of the previously scheduled activities. The couples had booked a marlin fishing trip, so Larry and Kitty decide that since it’s already paid for, they might as well go out on the boat. During the trip, the two begin to bond when they learn that they attended the same high school. They further bond when both of them work to land a large marlin. After the great fish is safely aboard, Kitty impulsively kisses Larry—not a great idea, of course, but not done with any premeditation.
Coming back from the boat trip, they find the other couple still very sick, and the two of them still on their own. Larry suggests that they go to the resort bar for a drink, and Kitty dresses to the nines for the meeting. After some time in the bar, they decide on a late-night ocean swim. Not a good idea, but still not overtly adulterous. However, after getting out of the water, they cross from bad idea to morally wrong when they repeatedly try to kiss—the kiss prevented only by Kitty having a sneezing fit. Later that night, Larry goes to Kitty’s room, where they do kiss, although Larry leaves immediately after that. For the rest of the week, they spend all their time together, in a movie sort of “falling in love” montage.
When the two return home to their families, they start making clandestine plans to meet. Much of the middle part of the movie sees them attempting to consummate their relationship, but thwarted by various factors. Finally, when Larry schedules a business trip to San Francisco, he convinces Kitty to come with him for three days together, in the hopes that they can rekindle the connection they felt in Acapulco.
And that is what ends their relationship. Once they spend time together at a cabin in Monterrey, they learn that they are not so in love as they thought. They can’t rekindle the Acapulco feelings, because it was really only novelty that brought them together in the first place. They were never really in love, or found each other to be so wonderful; it’s just that they found each other to be different from their spouses. Not better, just different.
There is the old saying that the “grass is always greener” somewhere else. But it’s not the case that the grass is greener, it’s just that the grass somewhere else is different grass. Green grass, blue grass, yellow grass, or even desert sand—the point isn’t what it is, but that it’s new.
Although humans crave familiarity and permanence, they also crave change. Without change, people become bored. In the case of marriage, it’s easy to see how destructive that tendency can be, but the problem isn’t limited to marriage. For example, this longing for change and excitement likely explains why so many people refuse to evacuate during hurricanes.
On a broader world scale, I have often wondered how many wars have been fought mainly because people were bored. When declarations of war were announced in the capital cities of Europe during World War I, the crowds cheered. Although the war became a terrible unbearable slog, the idea of war was at first quite appealing to the masses. And its understandable why that was. War was new and exciting. If you were a farm hand performing hard work from sunrise to sundown, the romance of going off to war might seem a very good upgrade.
During the war, fervor of the young for something new was so great that entire schools or classes enlisted en masse. Universities especially were affected: “nationalism and longing for adventure explains why volunteer rates among university students were so high. Half of the students at Oxford University, 60 percent at Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität (Berlin), and 80 percent at the Sorbonne in Paris volunteered in the first months of the war. Mortality rates of university students were also high, exceeding those of regular recruits by as much as half.”
In The Screwtape Letters, CS Lewis talks about the human need for change. Screwtape, a demon trying to entrap human souls, says: “The horror of the Same Old Thing is one of the most valuable passions we have produced in the human heart—an endless source of heresies in religion, folly in counsel, infidelity in marriage, and inconstancy in friendship.” Lewis points out, however, that when God instills a desire in humanity, He also moves to fill that desire: “… since He does not wish them to make change … an end it itself, He has balanced the love of change in them by a love of permanence. He has contrived to gratify both tastes together in the very world He made, by that union of change and permanence which we call Rhythm. He gives them the seasons, each season different yet every year the same, so that spring is always felt as a novelty yet always as the recurrence of an immemorial theme. He gives them in His Church a spiritual year; they change from a fast to a feast, but it is the same feast as before.” (The Screwtape Letters, #25)
In the movie, the problem isn’t that Larry and Kitty wanted change—everyone does. It is that they are willing to sacrifice permanence to get change. And that is never a good trade. Novelty, by definition, cannot last. Permanence, by definition, always lasts.
Kitty and Larry eventually make the right decision and return to their spouses. In the end they see that the novelty was an illusion, and the permanence of the lives that they have created—permanence in homes, permanence in intertwined lives, permanence in children—is not something to throw away for an illusion.
For a last word on the beauty of permanence in marriage, we turn to a speech given in 1979 by Malcolm Muggeridge: “There is no beauty, there is no joy, there is no compensation that anything could offer in the way of leisure, of so-called freedom from domestic duties, which could possibly compensate for one-thousandth part of the joy that an old man feels when he sees this beautiful thing: life beginning again as his ends, in those children that have come into the world through his love and through a marriage which has lasted through 50 and more years.”