Little Miss Sunshine

Little Miss Sunshine Fox Studios

The other night, for the first time in I-don't-even-know-how-long, I watched LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE. I was hunting for movies that are secretly quests…the kind nobody clocks as a quest on first watch.

I love digging through production notes when I'm doing this kind of research, and I found this little nugget about where the whole thing came from. Before he wrote a word of the script, Michael Arndt read a newspaper story about Arnold Schwarzenegger telling a room full of high schoolers, "If there's one thing in this world I hate, it's losers. I despise them." And something about that broke Arndt open in the right way…he wanted to take a blowtorch to the whole idea that life is just up or down, winning or losing, and a child beauty pageant seemed like the perfect stage for showing just how stupid and empty that competition really is.

There's a scene where Greg Kinnear's character asks his daughter, essentially, why bother entering if you don't think you can actually win.

That. Right there. That's the exact garbage I spend my days trying to undo in my classroom. Somebody…everybody…has already drilled into these kids that winning and not-trying are the only two moves on the board.

Laziness gets blamed a lot, but that's not usually what's happening. It's kids who already know they won't be the best, and somewhere along the way somebody turned everything…everything…into a contest. Nobody asked them if they wanted to learn something instead. Or make a friend. Or make something beautiful, just because.

I lose constantly, by the way. Every single day. Capital letters EVERY SINGLE DAY. Between the writing life and the teaching life, my whole existence is try, fail, learn something from the wreckage, try again…and that goes for me and for every kid sitting in front of me.

That's why we play art bingo in my class. Nobody wins on skill. One kid wins on luck, and the rest of us get to practice the very unglamorous feeling of not being the best at everything all the time.

Does that make us losers?

Nope.

Because by the end of the film, you find out what a real loser actually is…someone so scared of losing that they never even try.

That's the whole quest, really. Not winning. Finding their way back to being a family, after they'd spent so long chasing individual "winning" that never once showed up.

It's still funny as hell. There's still a kid in it. And it is NOT a family movie night pick, so don't get cute and put this on for the youngens expecting something cheerful.

It is, still, completely full of heart. For all of us losers.