I'm pretty literal-minded, so symbolism can be difficult for me. You may have to forgive my being unable to see the broader picture or theme if I have missed the mark. For example, one layperson's review of TNES said that it is clearly about the fantasy world we have to give up in order to move into the world of adulthood. I have always interpreted it to be about humanity's loss of meaning and hope as a result of the broken promises of modernity - but that may be because that is how Ende framed it. Although children are the protagonists throughout, and it is allegedly a children's book, he does not say the Nothing is encroaching due to the end of innocence and childhood. He says it's because "people have begun to lose their hopes." So I have a hard time detaching from that.
Several years ago, after probably my twentieth viewing of the movie, I finally noticed the duality that springs up at several points, even though, in my final opinion, the movie's narrative does not hinge on it. This is likely due to the concessions made in the script in order to make the first third of the book filmable. I think that the instances are worth acknowledging.
Morla the Ancient One - Morla (aka my spirit animal) is a giant turtle on whose back exists the Shell Mountain. Atreyu treks through the Swamps of Sadness (losing his horse in the process) to ask her if she knows of a cure for the Empress's illness. When she refers to herself as 'we' and Atreyu asks if there's anyone else there, she says "We haven't spoken to anyone for thousands of years, so we started talking to ourselves." She, perhaps due to her persistent loneliness, has become pretty nihilistic, repeating the line "Not that it matters, but yes" and also this timeless gem: "We don't even care whether or not we care." I realized it's probably no coincidence that her home base is a swamp where people and animals drown when they give in to its palpable sadness.
The Sphinxes - the first gate Atreyu must pass to reach the Southern Oracle is two stone sphinxes (sphinxii?) who glow golden in the night, and who look into the heart and judge the worthiness of anyone who attempts to pass between them. Those who are unworthy are eliminated via simultaneous beams from their eyes.
The Magic Mirror - the second gate Atreyu must pass. He doesn't stick around to hear Engywook's portent about the terror of the gate, which shows you your true self. "Kind people find that they are cruel. Brave men discover that they are really cowards." So the gate as presented in the movie serves two purposes of duality, the first being the dual nature of humankind, most of whom are incapable of accepting their true, darker selves and 'run away screaming.'
The second is that when Atreyu peers into the mirror, his true self is revealed to be...Bastian, the little boy reading the story. This, to me, speaks directly to a reader's penchant of slipping into the story they're reading and 'becoming' the protagonist. Here I think literalism works. A nice touch is that the scene places the image of Bastian directly inside of Atreyu's reflection, and I love the two orbs of candlelight in Bastian's eyes in that moment. (The light of revelation???)
The Southern Oracle - here are two more sphinxes, made of glowing blue ice (and situated on such a vast, lonely plain with the whole cosmos hanging in the sky; it's so desolate and beautiful). They give advice rather than murder, but they also speak with one voice and refer to themselves as 'we.'
Gmork - this was an exciting discovery for me: that the creature Gmork was voiced by the actor who played Koreander early in the movie. Except...a check of IMDB revealed that I was wrong. I thought it made sense, that the grouchy old dude who didn't want Bastian to get his hands on the portal to Fantasia would have his dual in the craven wolf who spent the movie seeking to destroy Atreyu (Bastian's dual). Oh well. I feel like the voice acting is evocative enough that I will believe that is what director Wolfgang Peterson was going for.
These instances of duality each serve to further Atreyu along his intially pretty hopeless task. Morla directs him to the Southern Oracle; the mirror alerts him to the presence of the 'earthling child' (which he doesn't actually wrap his head around until almost the end); the Southern Oracle informs him that the child exists beyond the boundaries of Fantasia; and Gmork reveals that Fantasia has no boundaries (quite the predicament).
***
What about the symbolism in the movie? People gripe about the film ending right where the book really begins to take off, but it is a fantasy novel and I felt when reading it that it was comprised of vignettes, each straining to make an ultimately odd point and, really, cram as much of the fantastical into one book as possible. Not that it is poorly written or incoherent - not at all. But as a work of art, it is unfilmable in that the movie would be about three-and-a-half hours long and feel very disjointed.
What remains in the bulk of the film, then, is the single theme of hopelessness. Fantasia is being ravaged by the Nothing, and the character Rockbiter is careful to explain that it is not just a lack: "A hole would be something, no...it was - nothing." Over an hour later Gmork clarifies: "It is the emptiness that's left. It is like a despair." You can forgive me, I hope, for feeling that what Ende worked to describe is deeper than just the existential angst of growing up.
The Nothing has been wiping out everything in its path, which - though literal 'nothing' is difficult to envisage - gives us some perception of it spatially. However, it has other effects. It does more than annihilate matter; it causes people to welcome death.
Atreyu's horse Artax, a gentle creature with no natural defense against hopelessness, gives in to the Swamps of Sadness no matter how Atreyu pleads with him, berates him, sobs. Morla after thousands of years of loneliness gets weirdly excited about the Nothing, claiming that death "would at least be something!" Once Atreyu becomes hopeless through the logical futility of his situation - the Southern Oracle is ten thousand miles away and he has no horse - he too becomes susceptible to the swamps.
Perhaps the most poignant display of the Nothing's effect is Rockbiter's defeated speech late in the movie, the lone survivor after the Nothing took each of his friends away. "They look like good, strong hands, don't they?" A creature like him would never guess that he couldn't save his friends, but the power of the Nothing was simply too strong. He admits, "I will just sit here and let it take me away, too." Damn.
And during the first climax, Atreyu's meeting with Gmork, he again returns to the welcome of death through the logical futility of his situation: "If we're all going to die anyway, I'd rather die fighting!" And maybe it's an accident of editing, but after he says that, with kind of a wild look in his eyes, when the camera cuts back to him his face is expressionless. He is calm, he is ready. And when you think about all that he's been through during his journey, it makes sense.
If we situate the symbolism of the Nothing in the literal, it is about depression, nihilism, and suicide, and how various kinds of us - the strong, the brave, the kind, the lonely - can fall victim to its oppressive tearing away. "It is the emptiness that's left. It is like a despair." Gmork by contrast loves the Nothing - or does he fear it, and know that it is better to be at the right hand of the devil than in his path? He tells Atreyu, "People who have no hopes are easy to control. And whoever has the control, has the power." He states that he is "the servant of the power behind the Nothing."
Here we have even more clearly a link to the world of humans, and an accelaration of the philosophy of the Nothing right before the first climax - now it is not only despair, but it has a purpose: Power. Now there is a consciousness behind the Nothing, and that revelation is almost too much when in the next moments, Gmork is killed and we are left feeling suddenly directionless, knowing what we now know.
***
Those who complain of tonal dissonance in the movie may be speaking of the shift that occurs once Fantasia has finally almost completely succumbed to the Nothing, save for the Ivory Tower inside of which still resides the Childlike Empress.
I am only now mentioning Falcor because his purpose as a Savior plays more into the religious undertones of the second climax. He first saved Atreyu from death in the Swamps of Sadness (and if the swamp didn't swallow him whole, Gmork was there to rip him to shreds). He was the 'god in the machine' who took Atreyu from ten thousand miles away from the Southern Oracle to just one hundred and nine. After Atreyu fell off his back during their flight too close to the Nothing, Falcor found the Auryn in the seas and retrieved it; and when Atreyu had killed Gmork and was caught up in the swell of the Nothing (characterized on screen by tornadic winds) Falcor was there to rescue him again.
At this point in both the book and the movie, Bastian must begin to reconcile his need to "keep my feet on the ground" with his overwhelming desire to lose himself in the fantastical. It becomes obvious that the very existence of Fantasia, and the Empress and Atreyu, are contingent on Bastian's belief in them, as we see the remains of Fantasia (giant rocks) smashing together in the void of space each time he voices doubt (and in one troubling scene, Falcor is no longer at the tower. The sense of isolation and impending doom is pretty intense).
"What if he doesn't appear?" Atreyu yells in frustration.
"Then our world will disappear...and so will I," the Empress says.
Then Bastian insists it's not real, that it's only a story, and another tremor dashes Atreyu to the ground and, apparently, kills him.
Is this not a depiction of the struggle most humans encounter regarding belief in God? But more tellingly, it seems to lean a bit toward that contingency on belief - that if you believe in God, then he is real, but if you don't: "God is dead, and we have killed him." If you'll allow me to really stretch this, we could see the all-knowing Empress as God, Atreyu as the son going forth in the world, and Bastian as the spirit, existing beyond the boundaries of comprehension but also residing inside, as we saw at the Magic Mirror gate.
As the metaphors and symbolism accelerate, the end result seems more of a mish-mash of the mystical and religious. The power of the Word or in this case, a name, as the cure for the Empress is Bastian giving her a new name; Moonchild's explanation that "in the beginning, it is always dark"; creation ex nihilo as Bastian wishes Fantasia back into being.
It feels like everything but the kitchen sink to me, and for a long time I didn't see how the grand narrative of hopelessness from the first three-fourths of the movie fit together with such overt religious symbolism. And what of 'the power behind the Nothing?' It seems almost too easy to see it as the devilish counterpoint to the Empress's holy nature, but such is never discussed. But then I remembered: the Auryn.
The Auryn is what we would call a double ouroboros. An ouroboros is a depiction of a snake or dragon eating its tail, and represents wholeness and infinity. But we are already familiar with reality being a neverending series of death and rebirth, and so the ouroboros also represents that constant cycle inside of infinity.
Here, perhaps, is the accounting for duality that I've been seeking. Traditionally the ouroboros is a single snake. Why invent a symbol using two snakes? What does this achieve that a single snake cannot? Or is it a simple doubling which recognizes the dual forces at work in our lives, a la Jung's concept of the shadow - kindness hiding cruelty, bravery hiding cowardice?
Overall I realized that the entire journey - and the necklace with the Auryn pendant being the only thing Atreyu could take on his quest - was symbolic of the spiritual (but not religious) cycles of death and rebirth within our own lives. The Nothing appears as a despair and annihilates everything that currently exists piece by piece until there is nothing left but the darkness of a new beginning, in which we receive, unconsciously, a new spiritual name (our old self having passed away) and the ability to create from seemingly nothing - ex nihilo - the next cycle of life and growth. This is in fact the task set before us if we are to recover from the inevitable deaths that approach us in various stages of life; whether we recognize that, or fall to annihilation, is the question. I would be remiss if I didn't mention some similarities here with the existentialist philosophy.
Of course, you can always say that this interpretation doesn't truly work because the book doesn't end there, and I would agree to a point. I'm not sure how much credit I should give the movie for taking source material and becoming its own insulated philosophy (especially when word is, of course, that Ende hated the theatrical interpretation). But having read the book, it really is from what I remember just further vignettes of Bastian's trials all winding down to an inevitable rebirth in magic waters and finally the return home.
***
Even considering the various possible interpretations of the symbolism of the final act, I find The Neverending Story movie to be imminently watchable, entertaining, and worthy of considerable philosophical conversation. Though it contains heavy themes, I highly recommend it to children, as I can still remember the sense of awe I felt, watching it on VHS when I was six or seven, when Rockbiter said "A hole would be something - no, it was nothing." There are plenty of kids out there who are mesmerized by such concepts, so let them try it on for size. I promise they won't become nihilists until many years later. ;)
I also want to mention the production values; I think the filmmakers did a great job with the set pieces, the landscape images, and the puppetry. The music is ravishingly beautiful, composed by Klaus Doldinger with later additions by disco giant Giorgio Moroder*. His theme to the Swamps of Sadness truly, truly rivals anything the great romantic composers achieved. All of the child actors were brilliant - Barret Oliver as Bastian nailed reaction after reaction, Noah Hathaway carried the movie on his back and almost died twice, and Tami Stronach as the Empress is to this day the oldest soul I have ever witnessed.
Maybe one day I'll re-read the book...and write an even longer blog post.
Editors note: the third section on religious symbolism was updated on 1/26/20.
*Moroder has a clear 'sound' that he revisits in his compositions. He wrote the music for the Neverending Story theme song, and if you listen closely to the line "There upon the pages -" you can hear Donna Summer sing "Spring was never waiting -" in "MacArthur Park." YOU'RE WELCOME.
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