This essay contains spoilers for both the Frank Darabont movie “The Mist” and the Cormac McCarthy novel “The Road”. The spoilers are not subtle. Please don’t proceed if you care about either and haven’t experienced them yet. Additionally, there are many other themes and things in play in each of these works. I’ve chosen to explore but one commonality between them.

It’s an often used phrase: “where there’s life there’s hope.” The concept basically expresses the human desire to hope and believe that there’s a chance for improvement of some kind as long as you’re still alive. Throughout the years, many writers have tried to illustrate this in their writing. Two contemporary writers, Frank Darabont and Cormac McCarthy, have played with this idea to differing degrees of success.

Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” is a post-apocalyptic novel about a man and his very young son. They are two of very few people left after some kind of end of civilization event that McCarthy never specifically names. The man and his son take to “The Road” in the hopes of finding a place where they can be safe. “The Road” and the countryside itself are patrolled by zombie-like cannibals and rapists. There aren’t many of them, but every person that they meet (excepting one) on “The Road” is of this ilk.

McCarthy goes to the trouble of writing elements into the story that describe just how utterly horrible conditions are. There’s a sequence in which a group of people roast a baby on a spit for something to eat. Where did they get the baby? One of the women in the group just gave birth to it. The sole reason that they don’t eat the baby is that the man and his son scare them off. The baby is still dead; it just doesn’t get eaten.

There’s another sequence in which they discover a man locked up in a house. The man is missing several limbs. Cannibals are hacking his limbs off piecemeal while keeping him alive presumably so that the meat stays fresh longer. Clearly, he’s going to die anyway, and he’d be better off if death came quickly.

There is another sequence where the man and the boy finally reach the sea. They reach their goal and discover nothing positive for them there. As they walk along a street near the water, people in the surrounding buildings shoot arrows at them and steal their stuff. Their proverbial last hope sputters and dies.

There are a great many other incidents and sequences in the book that also show just how bleak and terrible life is in the world of “The Road”. There are cannibalism, rape, theft, and fear as far as the eye can see to read. There is truly no hope in this world. As the father lay dying at the end of the book, you’re forced to realize, or at least consider, that the boy has no hope. There is no chance that there is any kind of positive outcome waiting just around the corner for him. The summary of the plot to this point is admittedly sparse, but I think it’s plain to see that the kid is in some serious trouble.

How does McCarthy handle this? What does he do? The man knows that he must kill the boy. He knows that it’s his duty. He’s shown the boy how to use their gun in the event that the father is killed. He’s instructed the boy not to be captured. So … he follows through, right? No. He can’t bring himself to do it. He abdicates the single most important responsibility to his child that he has at that moment because he’s weak. The boy is inexplicably saved by sane, rational people soon after his father’s death.

“The Mist” is a movie based on a story by Stephen King. The screenplay was adapted by Frank Darabont. The movie spans the course of a few days after a disaster of immense proportion has taken place. The majority of the movie takes place in a supermarket that a group of people are trapped in after the military accidentally opens a portal to another dimension. Everyone who tries to escape the supermarket is killed.

After a few days, the man and his son, who attract most of Darabont’s focus throughout the movie, decide to leave the supermarket and try to drive to safety. They’re going to die anyway. They decide to at least die trying.

The movie ends with the man killing his son and the other three people that escaped with them. The man plans to kill himself too, but he’s out of bullets. He gets out of the SUV and screams for the giant bugs (from the other dimension of course ;)) to come and kill him. The army caravan begins coming through with trucks full of survivors as he stands there waiting to be killed by the bugs that will never come.

“The Mist” is a bad situation. It’s not however, McCarthy’s situation. In “The Mist”, the people that die do so horribly. They die quickly though. Darabont’s use of “where there’s life there’s hope” works because the people that the man killed had a chance. Even if they had died, they would’ve done so quickly while running. Darabont showed us that they were able to periodically run short distances safely. They could’ve gotten another car from those on the road after their SUV ran out of gas. They gave up, and the man’s choice was proved wrong. They had life. They had hope.

In contrast, it’s not reasonable to believe that the boy from “The Road” had any hope. His death might have come slowly and horribly – that is if he were lucky enough to die. He may have become a slave of cannibals. He might have been slowly eaten over the course of weeks while they kept him alive. I understand why McCarthy ended it that way. I understand why he chose to employ the “where there’s life there’s hope” theme. He chose it so that he could end his story on an up note; the boy is saved and McCarthy has theoretically proved his point. He hasn’t actually proved it though. He’s managed to destroy the impact of his point (assuming it was his real point and not just a crass cop-out to avoid ending the novel with the man killing his son) with the horror of the world that he’s created. He’s convinced us that there’s no hope. How can it end with life?