43
Tuck Everlasting Paper
43
Romance and Myth in the Search for Immortality:
Commentary on Tuck Everlasting
by Robert Diehl
The film, Tuck Everlasting* (2002), presents us with two
hero myths (that of Winnie Foster and that of Jesse Tuck)
and offers us several teachings about life, death, and the
nature of time and change. We have two very different
hero’s journeys occurring in this film: Winnie is on an
adventure of spiritual awakening and self-actualization,
whereas Jesse Tuck is on a quest to both redeem Winnie,
and to reconcile his own tragic condition by finding
everlasting love (a conquest of sorts).
Winnie’s journey is a journey from a dependent,
sheltered life to independence and actualization. The
beginning of the film shows us Winnie in a state of
restlessness: she is a rebellious adolescent, seriously
questioning the values of her parents for what we may
assume is the first time. This is not an uncommon state of
mind for many young people, and it is a classic motif in
the hero’s journey; witness the young and restless Luke
Skywalker who wishes to leave his home planet, or the
tender Siddhartha Gautama, uneasy with his princely
state of existence in the warrior caste. In the same way,
Winnie wishes to break ties with the lifestyle of her stuffy,
culturally refined parents and begin to blaze her own
trails, to “leave the farm” so to speak. This motif is most
clearly exemplified in the scene where Mr. and Mrs. Foster
tell Winnie that they would like her to attend a prestigious
school which Winnie clearly does not want to attend. This
conflict between her parent’s wishes and her own
The film is based on the book of the same title by Natalie
Babbitt, published in 1975.
*
Rob
44
Tuck Everlasting Paper
44
Janua Sophia
illustrate the essential tension at the beginning of the
movie.
Winnie’s official “call to action” occurs when she
adventures into the woods on her parents’ estate even
though it is forbidden. The woods are mysterious and
earthy, in contrast to the high, culturally elevated home
lives of the Fosters. Here she meets Jesse, who is an
interesting and independent individual who appears about
the same age as Winnie. This draws attention to the fact
the she, Winnie Foster, is 15 and living under the tight of
grip of her parents’ rules, whereas Jesse, who is (it
appears) 17, is independent, lives a large part of his life on
his own, and has done wonderful, exciting romantic things
like visit Paris and climb the Eiffel Tower. Of course
Winnie is enthralled, and her resolve to assert her
independence is strengthened.
In a particularly symbolic scene, Winnie and Jesse
tend to a campfire in the woods at night. Jesse taps out a
beat on a boulder, and Winnie dances to it. The imagery in
this scene is highly reminiscent of Nietzschean aesthetics,
specifically, it is rich with Dionysian symbols – music,
dancing, stars, nature, and even a swirling, rotating
camera shot which gives the impression of blurred,
intoxicated, swirling motion. The youths are barefoot and
at one with their primordial, adventurous, natural selves.
In this moment, Winnie is able to experience the sort of
freedom she now clearly perceives that she desires, though
she still feels an obligation to return home. She does not
get that opportunity, however, because she has been
“kidnapped” and begins to uncover the truth about the
Tuck family.
Rob
45
Tuck Everlasting Paper
45
Existential Commentary
During her time with the Tucks, there is some minor
surface-level drama as a mysterious man in a yellow suit
attempts to track down the Tuck family and uncover their
secret. Although the role of the mysterious man does not
play heavily into either of the two prominent Hero’s
journeys, it does deliver a separate teaching regarding
enterprise and greed.
From the Tuck family, the man in yellow wants to
extort the location of the magic spring which gives them
their immortality. He hopes then to sell its magic water to
people for a substantial profit. The problem is that, as the
Tucks will attest, living forever is not all it’s cracked up to
be. In fact, as we will discuss shortly, it’s downright awful,
and that’s why the Tucks have worked so hard to keep the
location and nature of the spring a secret – they don’t
want anyone else to be subjected to the horrible state of
life they endure. The man in yellow ignores these simple
humanist concerns and presses forward with his quest to
find the spring, more concerned with profit than with the
ethics of what he’s doing, or plans to do.
If we globalize the case of the man in yellow, we get a
teaching about unbridled profit motive, and how it often
dangerously trumps simple ethical concerns. In the same
way, unchecked enterprise capitalism often values zerosum success in the free market over the non-zero sum
pursuit of moral action. Whether this globalized teaching
is intended is uncertain, but it is one we can derive
nonetheless, especially for those inclined toward Marx.
Regarding immortality itself, the patriarch of the family,
referred to only as Tuck, delivers trhe following teaching:
“You can’t have living without dying…don’t be afraid of
Rob
46
Tuck Everlasting Paper
46
Janua Sophia
death…be afraid of the unlived life.” This is a classic lifeaffirming teaching, which is why the presence of
Dionysian symbols in the campfire scene are so
significant.
We will address the nuts and bolts of this life-affirming
doctrine shortly, once we consider the following. Winnie
returns (or, is taken) back home (whether she wanted to
be there is left ambiguous), and witnesses the death of her
grandmother. She aids the Tucks in breaking their mother
out of jail in the interest of keeping their secret safe.
Shortly after, the Tucks go into exile, and Jesse, who by
this point is a major love interest, tells Winnie to go and
drink from the fountain of youth and wait for him to
return. This is, notably, the opposite of the advice that
Tuck gives.
This is the climax, the high point of conflict in Winnie’s
journey. She is confronted with the essential choice
between mortality and immortality. She chooses mortality
and eventually dies, but her choice not to drink from the
magic spring is significant because it represents her
taking control of her own life, and choosing to face death
regardless of her fear. In the process she lives “the
worthwhile life,” thereby affirming her life as valuable in
itself and validating the elder Tuck’s teaching. But how do
we arrive at the conclusion that life can be valuable
independent of eternal life or other metaphysical
assumptions?
The argument proceeds with the economic principle of
scarcity in mind. For the sake of brevity, we will start with
an assumption that each and every moment is valuable at
least in so far as it participates in being over not-being.
Rob
47
Tuck Everlasting Paper
47
Existential Commentary
The will to being takes on value in other contexts too,
such as in evolution, and our intuitive notion that,
assuming the existence of a god, it is better for God to
have created the universe than to have foregone creation.
Next, our economic principle of scarcity value tells us
that, assuming something x has value, the relative value
of x will increase in positive relation to its level of scarcity.
This makes intuitive sense to us. The less available that a
particular good we desire is, the more we want it. For
example, we all value water, because it helps us to
survive. For a person living in an urbanized part of the
United States in 2015, it is generally not difficult to find
clean drinking water. Thus, we attribute a very low relative
value to water, that is, we probably aren’t willing to pay
very much to get it, ceteris paribus. But, for someone in
the middle of, say, the Sahara Desert, who has run out of
supplies, the availability of clean water is dangerously low,
and thus, the relative value of water skyrockets, ceteris
paribus. A person in that situation would likely pay a very
high amount to get even a small amount of clean drinking
water.
Now, keeping our two assumptions in mind (1) that
life-moments are valuable insofar as they participate in
being over not-being, and (2) that the economic principle
of scarcity value is true, we can argue that because in the
absence of eternal life, the amount of time we have to live
is finite (thus scarce) we will, ceteris paribus, value life
more when we know it has a finite end and will not go on
forever. In this context, life is to be viewed as a gift to be
treasured rather than as a waiting room, as many
Rob
48
Tuck Everlasting Paper
48
Janua Sophia
metaphysical belief systems imply. This is the central
teaching of Tuck Everlasting. It is the great truth
uncovered by Winnie on her heroic journey which allows
her to self-actualize and make the independent, personal
decision of not drinking from the magic spring and joining
Jesse in eternal life. She chooses to embrace life itself, and
thus says yes to herself, and to all of eternity. She has
freed herself from the influence of her parents and from
Jesse.
Facing death is not an easy thing to do – the fact that
going into death necessarily entails an element of
confronting the unknown (what lies beyond the grave?)
makes it a fundamentally challenging and intimidating
prospect. Willingly taking on death, as Winnie does, is a
highly significant action, and marks the completion of
Winnie’s journey.
Jesse’s journey is much more tragic, and is largely
secondary to the overall plot. It is traditional in Greek
drama for tragic heroes to have a “tragic flaw.” Usually,
this flaw is a character flaw (for example, Oedipus’ hubris
or Hamlet’s indecisiveness). In Jesse’s case, it is a
combination of his own immortality and a sort of
unrestrained lust for existence. His quest is very personal,
and more material than Winnie’s – it is a conquest of
sorts, wherein he seeks to reconcile his own immortality
with his desire for closeness and love. In Jesse’s case, this
entails convincing Winnie to become immortal and become
his eternal companion.
In accordance with the pattern of the monomyth,
Jesse’s journey follows an ascent from complacency to
action and conflict, followed by a decisive moment where
Rob
49
Tuck Everlasting Paper
49
Existential Commentary
the hero either succeeds or fails. The Tucks have been
living off the radar, in a free and discrete manner up until
the moment that Jesse and Winnie encounter each other
in the woods. Jesse is called to action – he can no longer
simply float along. He is attracted to Winnie, and must act
on his attraction.
There is no need to recount the exact events of what
occurs next, but when the decisive moment comes, we
discover that Jesse has failed to convince Winnie to
become immortal with him. He tragically fails in his
journey, and perhaps this delivers a teaching about
conquest and usury, though it is more likely that Jesse’s
quest is simply a convenient literally prop for Winnie’s
more important and more pedagogical journey of selfactualization and life-affirmation.
Rob