Choosing to Believe
What The Polar Express and its theme song understand about hope
Hope Chosen
A boy stands in front of a large train, debating if he should get on. He is filled with awe and astonishment, but also apprehension and skepticism. He must decide what to do quickly, or he’ll be left behind for good. Will he choose the safety and logic of staying at home, or will he choose the potential magic and mystery ahead? He pauses while his fear and longing collide, and reluctantly he takes a few steps back. His cynicism seems to have won the day. The train whistle loudly hisses, the brakes are released, and the train begins to slowly roll away. For a moment, the boy watches the train start to pass him by. But suddenly the boy changes his mind, runs forward, and leaps aboard the train. He chooses wonder.
Choosing hope is an act of will which overcomes our doubt. We deliberately turn towards hope as an act of faith, even when the evidence does not fully compel it. This act of will is not optimism, and it is not merely a trait that comes more naturally to some of us than to others. This is also not a passive wish that somehow automatically manufactures our desires. Hope chosen is much stronger than optimism; it is intentional faith in what we believe. Choosing hope is an act of courage, our reaching for an anchor in the dark. The decision to hope might have been made against all logic, and yet somehow we know we have chosen wisely.
The Polar Express
Robert Zemeckis directed the 3D performance capture animated movie The Polar Express in 2004, which was adapted from the 1985 children’s book of the same title by Chris Van Allsburg. The movie follows the story of a skeptical boy who takes a fantastical journey aboard the Polar Express train to the North Pole. The movie was nearly complete when Zemeckis realized it still didn’t have a clear theme. He wasn’t just looking for a pretty, light-hearted theme centered on a shiny bell, but a multilayered concept with emotional character. Alan Silvestri, the film’s composer who had previously written the music for Back to the Future and Forrest Gump, among many others, set out to write a theme song to explore the complex psychology of belief.
Working from a leitmotif (a recurring musical theme) he had already scored in the music for the film, Silvestri worked with accomplished songwriter and lyricist Glen Ballard to develop the song. That eleventh-hour collaboration quickly produced the song “Believe,” sung by Josh Groban over the end credits of the film. Groban, whose “Closer” album had reached number one earlier that year, helped propel “Believe” to number one for five weeks on the adult contemporary chart beginning in December 2004. This last-minute addition to the movie surpassed expectations and was nominated for an Academy Award and a Golden Globe, and it won a Grammy for Best Song Written for a Motion Picture in 2006.
Doubting Thomas
In the Gospel of John, Thomas earns his nickname by refusing to believe until he sees the physical evidence for himself, in the original case of “seeing is believing.” It is not until his face-to-face encounter with the risen Jesus that his unbelief finally disappears. The boy in The Polar Express is a “Doubting Thomas” figure, and he remains skeptical throughout most of the film. While on his journey he continues to doubt, yet he keeps taking small steps towards his eventual belief.
In the pivotal scene where Santa Claus arrives to greet the large crowd in the North Pole town square, the boy picks up a stray bell fallen from Santa’s sleigh and shakes it to see if he can finally hear it ring. He cannot hear it. Instead, an eerie whisper repeats, “Doubter, doubter,” as he shakes the bell. It is then, and only then, that the boy closes his eyes, willingly lets go of his demand for proof, and makes a deliberate decision to believe. He shakes the bell one more time, and he clearly hears it ring. His belief is the prerequisite for the evidence, not the other way around. The boy does what Thomas could not: he believes without proof.
The Sound of Belief
“Believe” by Silvestri and Ballard is a moderately slow ballad that begins softly and tenderly, like a music-box lullaby, with its first verse setting a scene of children dreaming while bells ring from afar. The structure of the song is verse, chorus, verse, extended chorus, and coda, and the score is written for a full symphony orchestra. The opening melody is the film’s central musical motif, which appears as an instrumental theme throughout the movie, including the very opening scene, as well as the closing scene where the once-skeptical boy confirms his belief in Santa Claus and the spirit of Christmas. The full song, with Groban’s vocal, never plays during the film itself, and it does not further the boy’s narrative. The placement of “Believe” after this pivotal closing scene and during the end credits aims to reinforce the listener’s belief and to leave its hopeful resolution settled in us.
The first chorus begins with an orchestral swell and an ascending stepwise bass line, which makes each rising note in the bass feel like another step forward towards belief for the listener. The lyrics of the chorus begin and end with the same word, “believe,” and this pivotal word will be used eleven times throughout the entire four minutes and eighteen seconds of the song. The second verse revisits the quieter, dreamlike state of the first, calling up images of locomotives and ships moving through the dark, guided by the light of hope towards their destination. The familiar swell of the orchestra at the beginning of the extended chorus moves the listener towards a sense of wonder and rejuvenation, urging us to follow feeling rather than proof and let it carry us upward.
The climactic moment of the song comes at the end of the extended chorus. The phrase with the highest note in the entire song, which appeared only once on the word “if” during the first chorus, now sounds three times in succession with full orchestration. It strikes the same peak again and again, denying the melody any escape and pressing the listener to choose. As “Believe” begins to contract from its high point, the grammar at the very end of the song shifts from conditional to imperative, as the word “believe” appears for its last three iterations, and the opening “if” has become a command. This recurring “just + verb” imperative model is frequently found in advertising, and this kind of language is built to move you to act without deliberation. If you have not made your decision to believe by the time that peak arrives, this coercive grammar, with the imperative paired with the repetition of “just believe,” presses you to choose anyway.
Without Proof
By the end of the film’s credits, both the boy and the audience are ready to believe. The boy’s emotional journey from skepticism to belief is the listener’s too, as the music and lyrics of “Believe” mirror the movement from uncertainty to conviction. Hope here is a willed choice, not a passive expectation. Just as the boy loses the empirical evidence when the bell slips through the hole in his pocket, the emotional echo of the song leaves us with the same paradox: belief outlasts proof.
We only need to remember how to listen.
Sources and Further Reading
The Polar Express by Chris Van Allsburg. The original children’s book that inspired the movie.
The New Oxford Annotated Bible (5th edition) by Michael Coogan, Marc Brettler, Carol Newsom, Pheme Perkins (Eds.). Academic study bible widely used for scholarly work.
The Psychology of Hope by C.R. Snyder. Outlines Snyder’s Hope Theory defining hope as a cognitive process.
Listen Along – Recommended Playlist
Listen to the original “Believe” recording by Josh Groban from the The Polar Express soundtrack, along with versions of “Believe” from other artists, along with additional music from The Polar Express soundtrack and from Josh Groban.