In some respects, it has not been a good year for feel-good movies supposedly based on true stories. One of these movies, the 2009 film "The Blind Side," had already come in for criticism due to its "white savior" theme, but in the summer, news broke suggesting that the film may have covered over a case of old-fashioned white exploitation instead. Another recent news story involves the difficulties now being faced by the real-life person at the heart of the 2016 feel-good film "A Street Cat Named Bob," and that is the subject of this piece.

To deal appropriately with that subject, however, stories and their importance to us first need to be analyzed. Stories have such significance for human beings that the term "homo narrans," meaning "storytelling human," has been proposed. There is no known time or place in which human beings have not related stories to one another. Surely, the reason is that stories, whether narrated, written or acted out, play an essential role in helping us understand life and adapt ourselves to it. As such, stories reflect reality. That does not mean that stories are necessarily real in the strict sense of the word. Generally, the characters of our favorite stories, although presumably based upon single or composite individuals, are themselves works of fiction and the stories themselves may include elements of a most fantastical and unrealistic nature.

For instance, in two widely different stories, "Cinderella" and "The Metamorphosis" by Franz Kafka, such elements are evident and essential to the storyline. It is, of course, hardly to be expected that in real life, a fairy godmother will come and turn pumpkins and mice into coaches and horses or that one morning, a traveling salesperson will awaken to find that he has become a giant insect. Yet, what causes stories to take hold of us is that they are essentially relatable and, in that sense, genuine. The two examples above reflect the idea of exclusion and exploitation by family members and, as such, perhaps foretoken the alleged reality under "The Blind Side." Even if the reader has not directly felt such an experience, they will be highly fortunate if they have not felt similarly treated by others in a different context.

It is to be noted that "Cinderella" and "The Metamorphosis" represent two different kinds of stories. The first is a feel-good fairytale, while the other is a sad tale. I have avoided using the word "tragic" to describe it, as it has a specific meaning in the arts, though in its everyday usage, the term certainly applies to Kafka’s story. The difference between the two types of story concerns the ending and not how most of the plot plays out. For both a feel-good and a sad tale containing dark elements, there is a great deal of disturbing material in "Cinderella," for example. The difference is that in the tragic story, these elements overwhelm the hero by the end, as is seen in the meaningless death of Gregor Samsa in "The Metamorphosis," whereas in the feel-good tale, the hero surmounts them and as with "Cinderella," he or she gets to "live happily ever after."

Feel-good story

As "A Street Cat Named Bob" is a feel-good story, I will focus on this type. While "Cinderella" is a perfect example of a feel-good story, its archetype is to be found in "The Odyssey" by Homer. Here, the hero Odysseus passes through numerous hardships to eventually be reunited with his wife and son from whom he has been long sundered. Thus, it ends without the words being explicit, with a "happy ever after" moment. This type of story does not belong simply to the Western literary tradition. For instance, Sinbad the Sailor in "The Thousand and One Nights" follows a similar pattern and may owe something of its origin to the story of Odysseus.

As with "The Odyssey," a "happily ever after" ending does not need to be explicitly written; that is the prerogative of fairy tales. But explicit or not, it is an essential, indeed defining, element of the feel-good story and often, as in the case of Cinderella, entails the marriage of two lovers. In the novel Jane Eyre by "Charlotte Bronte," Jane goes through many hardships, but it is a feel-good story in that at the end, she is reunited with Edward Rochester, the man she loves, and when the final chapter of the novel announces, "Reader, I married him," it is an implicit, "and she lived happily ever after" if ever there was one.

Indeed, Bronte goes on to spell out exactly what this means. A perspective 10 years later, Jane states of her married life that "I hold myself to be supremely blest – blest beyond what language can express; because I am my husband’s life as fully as he is mine ... we are precisely suited in character – perfect concord is the result." A cynic might note that this ideal view of marriage was written while Bronte herself was still single. Be that as it may, the degree to which marriage may be seen as such a necessary ending for many a feel-good story can be understood from "The Story of Layla and Majnun" by the Persian poet Nezami Ganjavi. Failing to provide the two lovers of his masterpiece of a poem with an ending entailing marital bliss on earth, Nezami unites them instead in eternal happiness together in heaven.

It is arguable that in our age of greater psychological awareness, there has been a change in the nature of the feel-good story. The traditional one represented by "The Odyssey" and "Cinderella" is one in which the hardships overcome by the hero are external to them. In the modern feel-good story, the difficulties are either internal or a mix of internal and external. It is particularly noteworthy that even J.R.R. Tolkien, the most resolute foe of modern literature, has in The Hobbit his character of Bilbo internally developed as he progresses through a myriad of external difficulties before reaching his "happily ever after" ending. As such, Bilbo goes through a story whose frame is similar to that of Homer’s, but his odyssey is internal as well as external and indeed, it is his internal one that is of the greater significance.

Here, I wish to pass from literature to cinema, though I would like to point out that all of the stories above have been turned into films and all of the movies mentioned below, including "A Street Cat Named Bob," are based on books. This highlights that the nature of a feel-good movie is identical to that of a feel-good story.

For the psychological feel-good story, a prominent example must be the Academy Award-winning film "A Beautiful Mind." This film is also based on a true story and depicts John Nash, a genius who suffers a serious and lasting psychotic break. However, by the end of the film, he has mastered his situation not by ridding himself of the visions he has but by learning to live with them and overcoming them in that manner.

Yet, in the film, as in real life, Nash has schizophrenia. This can hardly be classed as a character failing. The more typical kind of psychological feel-good film is where the hero, generally a decent person, has, due to their experiences, fallen into a rut and got stuck in it before finally surmounting their difficulties. A good example here is the 2000 film "The Legend of Bagger Vance." In this film, due to his horrific experiences in World War I, the hero, Rannulph Junuh, has turned to drink and is psychologically unable to return to the promising life that seemed laid out before him prior to his enlistment. However, during a three-day golf tournament, he vanquishes his inner demons and is redeemed.

There is a factor linking the above films together. That is a figure who assists them in overcoming their difficulties. The titular Bagger Vance, played by Will Smith, is some spiritual figure – indeed, the film has been criticized for using the "Magical Negro" trope – who gradually gets Junuh to make peace with himself. A different trope, that of the long-suffering wife of genius, a subject I have touched on before, plays a similar role in "A Beautiful Mind."

‘A Street Cat Named Bob’ and its aftermath

However, as its name suggests, in "A Street Cat Named Bob," a different kind of figure of help, that of a cat, assists the hero. For ailurophiles like myself, this raises the feel-good factor of this movie to a whole new level.

Here is a brief synopsis for those who do not know this story based on real life. James Bowen is a homeless man recovering from a heroin addiction through the use of methadone and who is given a council flat to live in. A cat enters the apartment on his first night there. Bowen notices the cat has a wound and brings him to the vet. Now named Bob, Bowen forms a strong bond with him and, as a busker and later a seller of a homeless newspaper, finds people are more generous when Bob is with him. The presence of Bob in his life enables Bowen to put right all that is wrong with it, including coming off methadone and repairing a strained relationship with his father. He is also offered a book deal in which to tell his story. This is a classic "happy ever after" ending.

And, in real life, it initially turned out to be so. The actual Bowen had the book written together with Garry Jenkins and in addition to its own success, it was turned into the aforementioned well-received film. Bowen himself even had a role in the film, though not playing himself, and met the current Princess of Wales at the film’s premiere in London in 2016. Further books and another film followed.

However, Bob died in 2020, and the media in the U.K. now reports that Bowen, who estimates that his story has earned him about 1,000,000 pounds over the last 12 years, is about to lose his house as he can no longer afford the mortgage payments on it, that he needs the assistance of food banks to feed himself, that he has broken up with his girlfriend, that he has had thoughts of suicide and that he had relapsed into heroin use, although he is once again clean.

This may be an upsetting shock to fans of the book and film, as initially it did to me. In my case, it did not entail simply the feelings of sympathy one feels at the misfortunes of another. I initially felt as if somehow the film had been ruined. However, upon reflection, I quickly realized that such a feeling is actually a fault on my own part and I have written this piece to explore this issue. I came to see that as homo narrans, we can allow stories to affect us in an unhealthy manner. When life proves the story wrong, we may feel betrayed. But the true wrong is that in such a case, our predilection for stories has led us to misinterpret reality and that is the source of the betrayal. In short, we create stories to make sense of life, but then those stories, with their more or less fictional elements, take on a seeming absolute reality of their own, coming to influence how we view life itself and can lead us to view it wrongly.

The feel-good story with its "happy ever after" ending is necessarily problematic if it is based on a true story, for from its end, life is expected to continue but continue without any of the trials and tribulations that have led up to the final moment. When considered that way, it is a strange expectation indeed. Nevertheless, the clearly fictional feel-good stories such as "Cinderella" and "Jane Eyre" can also be viewed as problematic in that they instill a false expectation in the reader that a point can be reached in life from which all is plain sailing from then on, in their case that point being that of a marriage.

For those with psychological issues, amid which addiction such as Bowen’s is one, the feel-good "happy ever after" idea is especially problematic. It promotes the idea that certain experiences, such as the change undergone with Bob, are permanently transformative in such a manner that there can be no return to one’s previous condition, something like that of an inverse Gregor Samsa. While it is an attractive idea, it is an erroneous one. Addicts who have become sober count the days from which they have stopped using the addictive substance. There would be no point to this if the renouncement of the addiction were in itself enough. Yet they are aware that the pull of the addictive substance is ever-present and that a slip backward is always possible. Metaphorically, it is not a case of a one-off permanent vanquishing one’s demons but rather a life-long war of attrition with them, in which battles may well be lost.

So the fact that Bowen has experienced numerous difficulties recently, especially in light of the fact that he no longer has Bob, is something that feel-good stories may not prepare us for, but upon reflection, is something very understandable.

The point is that in real life, and necessarily unreflectable by stories that must have an ending, there is no cutoff point before which things are difficult and after which they necessarily will not be so. Although this may strike a pessimistic note, it is, in fact, a realist one that counters pessimism as much as optimism. For it is equally valid in the inverse case. Those who feel that they have reached a point in life from which anything positive is no longer possible to them may also find that the passage of time happily proves them false in line with the old adage "where there’s life, there’s hope." Let us hope that the future proves brighter for Bowen while remaining aware of the lack of a necessarily fixed positive or negative state in his or our own lives.