In spite of the ridiculous imagery, I still want to rescue my princess

By David McElroy · January 6, 2022

I’ve always wanted to be the hero. Even more than that, though, I wanted to be her hero.

It’s the oldest fantasy in my childhood memory. I have no idea how it started. I don’t remember what could have put the idea into my thoughts, but I was still a very small child when it became an obsession for me.

The girl was always in trouble of some kind. I made up all sorts of stories each night as I went to sleep. The specific dangers changed, but the pattern was always the same. The girl I loved was in trouble. She needed to be rescued. I came to her rescue in her moment of need — and she adored me as her hero and rescuer.

As an adult, this sort of story comes with all sorts of baggage, of course. Mature adults aren’t supposed to take such stories seriously. Some even claim that this historical and mythological imagery is sexist — that a woman shouldn’t need to be rescued and that a man shouldn’t want to be her hero.

But I don’t care. At my core, I still want to be her hero. When my princess is deepest in distress, she calls out for help and I rescue her. It’s a need that’s deeply embedded in culture and possibly genetics. And even though it’s ridiculous imagery from a child’s fairy tales, I still want to rescue my princess.

I used to put myself to sleep each night creating a theater of the mind. The stories really were all variations of “the knight protects and saves the princess.”

I remember stories in which the girl was in a burning building and I save her. There were others in which I commanded a spaceship that rescued the girl from various sorts of danger. And I can remember one variation in which she didn’t even love me anymore, but I still risked my life to save her and get her to safety — and she found out that I had saved her only after I was gone. (And that made her regret not having loved me, of course.)

It might sound odd to say, but I guess I assumed that every little boy was having the same fantasies of saving the girl — the princess who would grow up to become his one true love.

I have no idea why this old imagery is on my mind tonight, but it’s been powerful, almost as though something had awakened one of the old stories.

Even when I strip the medieval imagery from the stories, I still find myself wanting to play this role in a modern setting. The truth, though, is that there’s very rarely a princess who needs rescuing from a dragon today — or even from a burning building or space creatures or an invading army.

The adult version of the old story is far simpler. More mundane. It’s more about rescuing someone from an unhappy life or from circumstances which seem impossible to escape. These sorts of “dragons” are far more likely to threaten the heroine today. They’re far more realistic stories.

And there’s something else which I never realized when I was fantasizing about being the brave hero rescuing my love when I was a child. I really did want to rescue my love for her own sake, but I also wanted to rescue her so she could rescue me.

I’ve argued before that the best relationships are a form of mutual rescue, and I still believe that. Everybody needs something. Everybody has emotional holes that need to be filled. Everybody has hurts which mostly go unseen and unhealed.

But if two people can ever be honest enough — with themselves and each other — about where those hurts and needs are, they can find healing that neither could ever find alone. And I think that’s the real underlying truth of all those tales of rescue.

Even though our legends are about the princess who needs the brave knight to come rescue her, it’s obvious beneath the surface of the story that he needs her just as badly as she needs to be rescued. I think these stories survive in our culture and in our collective unconscious because they represent something which is deeply true for many of us.

I need my own kind of rescue. I need to be good enough — worthy enough, valuable enough, brave enough — to rescue my princess. And I need to rescue her so she can be my cherished queen who rescues me in her own way.

I don’t know if I’ll find the princess who wants and need me to rescue her — the princess who matters enough for me to risk it all on her behalf. Maybe it will forever remain just a piece of cherished romantic imagery from my childhood. Maybe.

But there’s part of me that is still childlike enough to believe in magic. Part of me still believes there’s some truth in the old legends. Part of me still believes that my princess is still out there somewhere — waiting for me to slay her dragon and rescue her from evil.

And part of me even still believes that we can live happily ever after.

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Six years ago this evening, a scared young dog came to live with me. She was so terrified on the ride to my house that she pooped in the back seat of the car. She had originally lived her life on a chain as a puppy. Then she lived among far too many other animals in a cramped apartment, where she was pushed around by bigger dogs. I was told she would always be a “special needs dog” and would probably never be much more than the scared girl she was then. But with a lot of love and patience, a very different dog emerged in the coming months. Now that she’s been with me for six years, it’s hard to imagine her any way other than she is today — as the World’s Happiest Dog®. One day, she’s going to tell her own story on her own podcast. You’ll subscribe when she gets started, won’t you? This loving girl deserves it.

It was obvious to me in the late 1990s that western society is heading toward social and economic collapse. When I told other people back then, most thought I was crazy, because they saw their society as stable and booming. But more and more people have slowly been coming to the same conclusion. And now, even the wealthy and powerful seem concerned. A new report from the World Economic Forum says the erosion of “social cohesion” is what we should fear right now. (Full report here.) Although I disagree with a lot of political spin that these elites put on the dangers ahead, I feel certain that we are headed toward social collapse. And most people will not prepare for it. The book that started me down the road of thinking about this came out in 1993. I thought its reasoning was impeccable, but that the time frame would be longer than the book expected. I still find that book a useful foundation for thinking about the issue — “The Great Reckoning,” by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg — even though its predictions are out of date. Dark days are coming. Smart people are going to have a plan to get out of the way of what’s coming. Will you?

Since I posted my audio discussion a couple of nights ago about some recent realizations I’ve had about myself, several people have asked for more about what I quoted from Jordan Peterson. The Canadian psychologist is controversial to some — and I don’t always agree with him — but I’ve found his lectures about art and its relation to psychological archetypes very useful. You can find him here talking about art being more about process than just result, which contains the material I quoted. Here’s another video from a lecture in which he discusses how artists mediate for the rest of society between the known and the unknown. And here’s another portion of a lecture at an art exhibition in which he talks about the necessity of artists for society. And if you missed my audio from two nights ago, here’s a link to my discussion about some things I’ve learned about myself and some things I need to change about myself as a result.

I just realized it was four years ago today when I came uncomfortably close to dying. I don’t remember how blunt I was publicly about this at the time, but the surgeon who operated on me made it clear afterward that I had been much worse than he had thought. My gallbladder was inflamed and I had been in tremendous pain, but what the doctors didn’t know until they started is that the organ was close to rupturing. Surgery that was supposed to take half an hour took two or three hours, because my gallbladder was so diseased — the surgeon’s word — was falling apart as he tried to remove it. I had gone to the emergency room at St. Vincent’s Hospital (the same one where I was born) and was kept for emergency surgery the next morning. I should have been home that night, but I had to stay in the hospital three days instead. The weird thing is that I never really believed I could have died. Maybe it was just denial, but I didn’t feel as though it was my time. I thought I still had a lot of life left to live. Four years later, I’m grateful to be alive, but I feel as though my life is still on pause. It’s been a blur. I still feel as though I’m waiting for “the rest of my life” to start.

Is “The Nightmare Before Christmas” really a Christmas movie or a Halloween movie? It’s both, making it a delightful mashup of themes and images from two very different holidays. Although Danny Elfman’s score was nominated for several different awards, Elfman wasn’t a typical composer for film scores. Up until he started working on films with Tim Burton, Elfman had been a rock-and-roll artist best known as the leader of the new wave band Oingo Boingo in the 1980s. Just this week, I heard an interview on the podcast Song Exploder on which Elfman explains how he came to write the music for the movie, including why he approached the music for the film very differently than he had approached writing rock music. I enjoyed the 20-minute interview and if you happen to love the film, this Christmas would be the perfect time to learn more about how the score came to be. Tap or click below to listen. Listen here.

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