Falling in a Forest

“When you’re falling in a forest and there’s nobody around,

Do you ever really crash or even make a sound?”

Dear Evan Hansen (2016)

I have to say, when the basic premise of Dear Evan Hansen was first explained to me – henceforth be spoilers – I was definitely not sold on the concept. American high-school student Evan Hansen is told to write letters to himself as part of a programme of psychological therapy, only one such letter is stolen by one of his schoolmates – a hostile, drug-addicted, paranoid outsider called Connor Murphy, who subsequently kills himself. When this letter beginning ‘Dear Evan Hansen’ is found on Connor’s person, the grown-ups assume that he wrote it as a kind of suicide note, which leads them to the conclusion that Connor and Evan must have been intimate friends, despite there having been no prior indications whatsoever that this was the case. And Evan somehow can’t manage to tell Connor’s grieving parents otherwise. He goes along with the lie. In fact, he feeds it; he constructs and perpetuates an entire narrative of his and Connor’s secret friendship. Which definitely has nothing to do with the fact that he really fancies Connor’s sister Zoe and this is the first time he’s had a good excuse to talk to her.

 

A bus advertising the show in New York, kindly uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by Tdorante10 under the usual conditions.

So as I say, I was definitely not sold. Why exactly am I supposed to be rooting for this unprincipled, lying scoundrel as he plays games with the emotions of a mourning family? But then I took someone I know loves the show to see it in the West End as a birthday present,¹ and my scepticism waned. A cursory listen to the soundtrack had not prepared me for how moving and true-to-life and totally empathically understandable the portrayal of Evan was going to be (kudos to Sam Tutty who absolutely shone in the role). Evan struggles to articulate himself in any and every social scenario, so when he’s faced with two profoundly distraught adults who are not only convinced of their false assumption to the extent that they dismiss Evan’s first attempts to deny it (“Connor didn’t write this”) as, well, denial (“He’s in shock”), but also desperately wanting to believe that their son had, contrary to what they had seen for themselves, enjoyed some kind of meaningful connection with another human being before he died – a connection that they might be able to tap into to help deal with the pain of having had him so suddenly wrenched away from them – well, he really can’t manage to contradict them. And once the lie has been upheld that first time, it becomes unthinkable for him to come clean.

Plus, it turns into more than that. Check out the following chunk of ‘Disappear’, a track from the first act in which Evan’s mental projection of Connor makes a case for the value of maintaining the lie:

Guys like you and me,

We’re just the losers

Who keep waiting to be seen. Right?

I mean, no one seems to care,

Or stops to notice that we’re there,

So we get lost in the in-between.

But if you can somehow keep them thinking of me,

And make me more than an abandoned memory,

Well, that means we matter too.

It means someone will see that you are there.

No one deserves to be forgotten.

No one deserves to fade away.

No one should come and go,

And have no one know

He was ever even here.

No one deserves to disappear.

Even if you’ve always been that barely-in-the-background kind of guy,

You still matter.

And even if you’re somebody who can’t escape the feeling that the world’s passed you by,

You still matter.

If you never get around to doing some remarkable thing,

That doesn’t mean that you’re not worth remembering.

Think of the people who need to know.

They need to know, so you need to show them.²

On this basis, Evan sets up an initiative called the Connor Project, dedicated to honouring Connor’s memory and promoting the ideal that everybody should matter, and know that he or she matters. As part of the Project, Evan ends up sharing various of his faked emails on social media, and, at the end of the first act, delivers a speech all about his friendship with Connor in front of the entire school, a recording of which also makes its way onto the Internet and starts racking up views, likes, and comments like no tomorrow.

In his speech, Evan tells an entirely fictitious story – one of the first things he made up for the Murphys – about how he and Connor spent a day at an orchard and climbed a tree together. Evan fell and broke his arm, but Connor came and found him and took care of him. (In truth, Evan did fall out of a tree and break his arm, but it was on a summer work experience programme as a park ranger, and nobody came to find him.) This story pulses right through the entire musical as a metaphor for the human connection Evan – and, as it turns out, everyone else – so deeply craves: being seen, being sought, being remembered, being cared about; mattering to someone, not being able to merely disappear without a ripple. Not being able to fall in a forest like the proverbial tree that never makes a sound because nobody hears it.

The online response to Evan’s speech is overwhelming, with people from all over the world applauding his message, and the way the first act of the show ends feels so utterly uplifting, so good and wholesome and worthwhile and meaningful and real, that you sort of forget that everything Evan’s saying is based on a lie. Act Two, on the other hand, is marked by a rather more sombre tone, as Evan’s lie and everything he built on it comes crashing down around him the way it was always inevitably bound to. And yet even subsequent to that, there persists this strange, paradoxical notion that, even if the entire premise of the Connor Project was absolutely untrue, the Project itself was still a good and valuable thing. There’s this lingering suggestion that the lie did at least as much good as it did harm, that it produced things people needed, that it actually did honour to Connor’s memory to misrepresent his life story when he was too dead to offer corrections, because this was the means by which other misfits and losers like him might receive the message that they mattered.

 

The Project also raises enough money to buy the old orchard where Evan supposedly broke his arm and turn it into a memorial garden for Connor.

But, I mean, really? Can we excuse the entirely falsified basis of the message just because the message itself is a commendable one? Can the value of an idea supersede the validity of the foundation on which that idea is constructed? That has to be a no. It just has to be. Because fundamentally, how are we supposed to work out which of the myriad ideas out there are valuable ones, other than by assessing which ones most closely reflect the truth? Do we not want to believe things that are true and disbelieve things that are false? Is that not, of necessity, the route to discovering which ideas are worth upholding? How are we supposed to debunk a bad idea, moreover, except by demonstrating its untruth? Where does value judgement begin, if not with truth?

Surely the reason why it’s good to believe that everyone matters is because it’s true? After all, if you say it’s not true, you don’t, as it turns out, believe it. But the trouble is, finding a truthful premise on which to base that message isn’t necessarily a very straightforward task. If we’re all just accidents of nature, products of evolutionary happenstance who owe our existence to the deaths of those beings less well-adapted to their environments than us, and who will ultimately die and be forgotten and fade away, because that’s just the way this great big indifferent universe works – well, what basis is there there for the idea that everyone should matter, that no one deserves to disappear? You can perhaps try to justify that humans matter by finding worth in things they do – scientific and artistic endeavours, works to improve the lives of others, even mere perpetuation of the species – but that still doesn’t justify the notion that everyone matters, even if they never get round to doing some remarkable thing. It doesn’t offer much to a troublemaker like Connor Murphy, who, as far as we can tell, achieved nothing of note, had no friends, and caused his family such heartache while yet alive that in one memorable song in Act One, Zoe refuses to mourn for him and calls him a monster.³

And so Connor relies on Evan’s lies for his posthumous rehabilitation; the Connor Project and all it stands for relies on this myth of their friendship and their having been there for one another. Did Connor really matter in and of himself? Or was his only function to have his memory appropriated to the end of helping other people understand that they matter? Like, other, less troublesome people who aren’t hostile and paranoid and addicted to illegal drugs. When Evan says everyone matters, does he really mean everyone? What truthful premise can we find that someone like Connor doesn’t deserve to disappear?

Well, when you believe in the God of the Bible, finding that premise actually is a really straightforward task. It’s right there in Genesis 1: human beings are made in the image of God. Scoot a few pages forward to chapter 9, and you can see that principle being leant on to justify that every human life has worth, such that taking one warrants an equal penalty: whoever sheds the blood of humanity, by humanity shall his blood be shed, for God made humanity in his own image. No exceptions, no further qualifications. God himself is of supreme worth, and every human being contains some fractional echo of that worth. So as far as God’s concerned, everyone really does matter, whether they be Connor Murphys or Evan Hansens or whoever else. And whether or not anyone else heard you fall in the forest, God did, because there is nowhere you could go to flee from his presence.⁴

You don’t have to rehabilitate someone’s memory with made-up stories to justify that he mattered according to this premise; you don’t have to whitewash over the pain he inflicted on other people with invented tales of friendship. Indeed, part of mattering as a human being is being held accountable for one’s misdeeds: shed the blood of other humans and yours will be shed in turn. But it isn’t just ostensibly troublesome people like Connor who have misdeeds to be held accountable for; we have all of us exchanged worship of God who made us in his image for worship of mere images we have made; we all of us have blood on our hands. So God shows exactly how much human beings matter to him by paying for our sins with the blood of his Son, the truest, most perfect human image of the invisible God.⁵

This is our true premise for the message that everyone matters. God made humans in his image, such that anyone who sheds human blood must have his blood shed in turn; and on top of that, he then made himself in human image, so that he might meet that requirement by shedding his own blood. If you’re human, God says you matter. And given that he’s the ultimate measure of everything true and right, you really couldn’t ask for a truer premise than that. We don’t need any other premise. We don’t need to make stuff up, or to make people out to be better than they actually are, to be able to assert with absolute conviction that everyone matters.

And if we’re going to assert that, we’d better act like it. We’re to treat everyone as if he or she matters, Evan Hansens or Connor Murphys or whomever else we meet. We’re not to shut our ears to the sound of someone falling in the forest. We know that the message Evan gave in his speech is valuable, not in spite of the fact that it was based on a false premise, as if there were some other criterion that could provide recompense for that, but rather because it is, as it turns out, based on a true premise, even if not one Evan himself recognised. Our God says everyone matters. Think of the people who need to know. Who’s going to show them?

Footnotes

¹ Tickets available here if you want ’em: https://dearevanhansen.com/London/.

² An abridged but very nicely recorded version of the song, for your enjoyment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObE5GVCUF50.

³ For that one you can have a stunning animatic by beeyoungkah that’s actually kind of more moving than seeing the show live: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WT-8SDOwRh4.

⁴ I’ll give you Genesis 9 and you can click back to check if you don’t believe me about chapter 1: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=gen+9&version=ESVUK. Oh, and that last allusion was to Psalm 139, of course.

⁵ Primary Biblical allusions in this paragraph are to Romans 1:23 and Colossians 1:15.