Infertility on screen, part 3: The Importance of Grape Soda

This is part 3 in our “Infertility on screen” series. You can read part 1 here, where Brandy discussed Up, Beetlejuice, and Julie & Julia, and read part 2 here, where C. J. explored The Help, Trying and Black Widow. 

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Greetings, sisters, from your favorite resident TFH movie critic! While each of the movies that I have written about so far has a very special place in my heart, the one I am reflecting on today is perhaps the one that is the nearest and dearest. In fact, I am writing this while wearing my own Grape Soda pin. If you couldn’t guess by the title, 2009’s Up is getting the spotlight. So grab a bottle of grape soda (or whatever beverage and snack you choose), get comfy and let’s begin. 

(Trigger warning: miscarriage and loss of spouse.) 

If anyone knows anything about Up, it is the famous opening sequence. We open on 10 year-old Carl Fredricksen wearing aviator goggles and hat, watching a newsreel about famed explorer Charles Muntz’s legendary trip back to the almost mythical Paradise Falls after the fossil he brings back is mocked as fake by other scientists. Within the first two minutes, we see the word “adventure”: “Adventure is out there” is Muntz’s motto, and the now disgraced explorer leaves on his blimp called “The Spirit of Adventure”. 

Rushing out of the theater, Carl then follows a runaway balloon and stumbles upon a treehouse, and the fellow 10 year-old who made it named Ellie. A chatterbox to the silent Carl, Ellie also dons the same aviation gear that Carl and their joint idol Muntz wears, and Ellie lives by the “adventure is out there” creed. After deciding she likes Carl, Ellie shows him her “Adventure Book,” where the main goal for the young girl is to visit Paradise Falls. She then also shows him that most of the scrapbook is reserved for “stuff I’m going to do”. Ellie then bestows upon Carl a makeshift little pin out of a grape soda cap. Now bonded, Ellie demands that Carl promise that they will make it to Paradise Falls one day, even making him cross his heart. After Carl does so, she then declares “Good, you promised! No backing out now!” 

And then begins one of the most beautifully heartbreaking segments in movie history, and all under 5 minutes. In the next scene, we see a now grown Carl and Ellie get married. The music (aptly called “Married Life”) is the only sound we hear as the newlyweds start life together. The bouncy theme carries them through buying a rundown house they renovate together, including buying two reading chairs and painting a mailbox. While painting the mailbox, Carl accidentally gets his handprint on the white mailbox, and then Ellie laughs and puts her own handprint on the mailbox as well. The house becomes the vision that young Ellie had in her scrapbook. We see Ellie racing up a hill with Carl dragging behind, to them laughing and pointing out shapes in clouds or quietly holding hands when reading together, and both of them working at a zoo where Carl hands out balloons and Ellie brings out birds for kids to pet. The music gets more wistful and exciting when, during one cloud-watching session, all they can both see are little babies in the shapes of the clouds above them. We see them next eagerly painting a nursery. The next moment, both the music and story darken. What had been all beautiful bright colors and light humming music, turns into a dark grey doctor’s office and a softer, wounded variation of the same theme. Without any words, we know exactly what fate befell Carl and Ellie. Grieving the miscarriage, the normally buoyant Ellie is sitting outside on the lawn, eyes closed as Carl approaches her with the Adventure Book.  It is the only thing that makes Ellie smile. Refocusing their efforts on the trip to Paradise Falls, they start saving up money that repeatedly then gets drained year after year for things like surgery or house emergencies. As they get older, Carl decides to go ahead and buy tickets to Venezuela so they can start their journey. Wanting to surprise Ellie with the news, the elderly Carl eagerly leads the way up the hill, with Ellie collapsing behind him. Again, without words, we are forced to sit with the reality of Ellie’s cancer diagnosis. The music and montage end with Carl sitting alone with Ellie’s casket at the same church where they had become a family all those decades ago, holding a balloon identical to the one that brought them together. Their Adventure Book forced into an end neither of them could have ever thought or wanted. 

While I do want to touch on the rest of the movie, let us stay here for a moment. In my own infertility journey, I have had to sit in the doctor’s office and have my world completely changed. I’ve had so many planned ideas for my life - whether it was kids, what I wanted to be when I grew up, even when I wanted to be married - shattered. The day I received word that I passed my master’s comps was the same day my beloved grandmother died. The same stray balloon that leads us to the love of our life is then the bittersweet reminder of all that life has cruelly taken away. None of us are prepared for what deep wounds life will give us, and to be forced to mourn the life we expected being taken away is something that is so profoundly, heartbreakingly human. There is a reason why Andrew Garfield, in reflecting on the loss of his mom and grief in general, said, “This is all of the unexpressed love. The grief that will remain with us until we pass because we never get enough time with each other, no matter whether someone lives until 60 or 15 or 99. I hope this grief stays with me because it’s all of the unexpressed love that I didn’t get to tell her, and I told her every day, she was the best of us… we all know, somewhere deep down that life is sacred, life is short, and we better just be here as much as possible with each other, holding on to each other.” 

Whatever your experiences are, sisters, know that it is ok to sit in the pain, to mourn the loss of what could have or should have been. Infertility is a wound that will never fully go away, even if with the help of God and our loved ones we can come to a place of healing. Refusing to acknowledge the loss, the absolute grief that comes with this cross, is exactly what prevents the healing.

We see that refusal to fully mourn and heal play out in Carl, now a widower fending off developers trying to buy the house that he and Ellie had made a home. From the multiple pictures of Ellie, to the still set dining place, the companion reading chair, and to Carl gently pressing his hand against Ellie’s faded mailbox handprint and wearing the “Ellie Badge,” her presence is still very much felt in the house. And that pent-up emotion plays out when someone accidentally knocks down the mailbox and Carl attacks the man. Immediately, you see the pain and regret in Carl’s eyes, but the damage has been done. Sentenced to now live in an assisted living home, Carl then has the brilliant idea of planning his escape by filling his house with balloons that then lift his house up and away toward the intended destination of Paradise Falls. Little does the cranky elderly man know that there is a stowaway onboard by the name of Russell, who is a young Wilderness Scout determined to get his “helping the elderly” badge so he can be a senior scout and then his neglectful father may take him camping. Reluctantly accepting the stowaway, Carl eventually gets the floating house to the outskirts of an apparently very real Paradise Falls. Perhaps now he can finally fulfill that promise to Ellie. 

What follows in the movie over the next little bit is perhaps the most comedic part of the movie, where Carl is forced to adjust to not only a chatty Russel, but also the discovery of a huge new bird that Russell names Kevin before they realize that Kevin is in fact a female bird who was trying to find food for her chicks. During this time, Carl is also annoyed by Russell’s constant talk about the things his dad used to do with him. The young boy even remarks that things like getting ice cream and then counting cars “may be boring. But it’s the boring stuff I remember most.” Determined to bring the floating house to the waterfall that Paradise Falls is named after, Carl does his best to shut down any deviations from the plan until a pack of trained dogs forces the trio to meet their owner: the long-forgotten and disgraced Charles Muntz who has made a headquarter out of his old “Spirit of Adventure” blimp. 

At first, Carl is delighted to meet his idol and is excited to see all the different fossils of animals Muntz has collected over his time in Paradise Falls. The mood grows darker though as Carl (and we as the audience) come to the realization that, like Carl, Muntz has not let go of his deep-seated desire to find another specimen of that same bird that the scientists had mocked him for all those decades ago… and that Kevin is exactly what Muntz wants to trap and kill. Once Kevin is discovered, the following chase leads to not only Kevin being trapped and injured, but Carl giving the bird up in order to preserve the now burning house, the house that holds everything that connects Carl with his beloved Ellie. Betrayed, Russell argues with Carl that they need to go back and save Kevin, to which the grief-stricken widower replies “I’m going to Paradise Falls if it kills me.” 

“If it kills me.” How many times have we desperately clung to a dream, a relationship, a vision of how we determined life should be… even if it spiritually and emotionally kills us? When God does not give us a child, or the job we wanted, or takes away a family member or friend too soon, how often do we refuse to see the good in the path Love Itself has set forward, or to weep tears of joy as well as grief for the memories we do have with a loved one who has passed on? If, as the movie Up reminds us, “adventure is out there” and the “wilderness must be explored,” why is it so hard to take those steps? Maybe for you, the wilderness is a barren desert, or a jungle so overgrown with choking vines and towering trees you can’t see the sun. Maybe for you, the adventure feels long gone, a discarded dream that you can’t continue on but also can’t let go of.

Sisters, this is not the life Love or our loved ones want us to have. And it is certainly not the life Ellie would have wanted for Carl, though it seems to be the one he is stuck in as he sits alone in the house after Russell runs away to try and rescue Kevin. Finding the Adventure Book, he stops at the page where Ellie had marked for “stuff I’m going to do.” Expecting blank pages, Carl then sees that Ellie has filled in the rest of the scrapbook with moments from the entirety of their marriage. Those very little “boring things that I remember the most” that Russell was talking about earlier. On the last page, which holds a picture of an elderly Carl and Ellie, there is a handwritten note that simply says, “Thanks for the adventure, now go have a new one!” Ellie was able to do what Carl until this very moment hadn’t been able to: see the joy and purpose in the life… in the adventure that God had given her and Carl, even if it wasn’t the one she had planned on having. 

Sisters, I pray you find those boring moments that you remember most. Maybe it’s remembering exactly when you and your spouse or significant other made it official, or when you and your sibling find an inside joke and never cease to reference it. Or maybe it’s the little hand squeeze or hug from a loved one after another unanswered prayer, or painful baby shower or pregnancy announcement. Discover those little moments on your own adventure sisters.

It is because Carl finally learned how to appreciate the life he had as much as the life he mourned, that he was the one to rescue Russell and Kevin from Muntz. Muntz literally destroys the rest of his work and then falls to his death because his heart remained so twisted and rooted in the past. In a life that he could not let go of until it killed him. Even if Carl lost the house he and Ellie built, he had found a new family and an adventure worth living for. 

The movie ends with Russell’s pinning and promotion ceremony. Unlike the other scouts being promoted, Russell does not have his dad standing behind him. Until Carl steps up to pin the final badge onto Russell’s sash. But instead of the standard badge, Carl takes that old grape soda cap pin, which he tells Russell is the “Ellie Badge” and that it is “the highest honor I can bestow,” and pins it onto the sash. And that same gentle music from the beginning and that we hear faintly throughout the movie, which happens to contain the motif called “The Ellie Badge,” plays again. 

Up is a movie about so many things, but I argue that it is above all a movie about the dangers of not mourning and then being unable to see the life around and ahead of you. My life will never be the way I wanted it to be in terms of motherhood, but at the end of the day, even if I still ask God what His plan is for me, I know it is the life I am meant to be living. I will always mourn the loss of my fertility, but I also live every day for the “boring stuff” as well. Maybe it’s a rewatch of a favorite show with the love of my life after we cook dinner, or appreciating a sunset with a friend. Or maybe it’s listening to “The Ellie Badge,” and remembering all the little things in my life that fill up my own Adventure Book. Maybe it’s a silly little soda cap pin, maybe it’s a certain food or flower, but sisters, I pray you find the little things day to day that remind you of the adventure that Love has set you on.