Dear Evan Hansen (2021) is a film adaptation of the Broadway musical of the same name, which began playing in 2015. The film follows the eponymous Evan Hansen, a high school senior with a severe anxiety disorder, attempting to navigate a rather elaborate lie he creates around his relationship to fellow student Conner Murphy. While it suffers from many of the problems typical of stage musical adaptations and tends to overplay Evan’s mental illness for dramatic effect, it also explores the issues of the subjective meaning of a life, specifically how meaning is created by both ourselves and society around us.
Evan Hansen, high school senior, reflects on his current circumstances at the opening of the film.
Synopsis
The film opens by introducing us to two characters: Evan Hansen and Conner Murphy, both seniors at the local high school that struggle with mental illness. Evan suffers from an unspecified but severe anxiety disorder, particularly in social situations. He feels isolated from his peers, an effect compounded by the fact that his single mother is overworked and therefore emotionally unavailable in order to make ends meet. He has an assignment from his therapist to write letters to himself to boost his confidence and self-esteem and an assignment from his mother to make friends by getting people to sign the cast on his arm. Conner’s issues are even more nebulous than Evan’s are, but he struggles with substance abuse as well as what appear to be mood swings or significant irritability. He has strained relations with his sister Zoe and his wealthy and well-meaning but largely disconnected mother and stepfather.
After a particularly poor first day of the school year (due in part to a tense encounter with Conner), Evan writes a therapy letter to himself expressing his disappointment but also his hope that his crush on Zoe will be requited. As he is printing it out, he encounters Conner again, who offers to sign Evan’s cast (the only person to do so) so that, “Now we can pretend we both have friends.” Unfortunately, this touching moment is cut short when Conner sees Evan’s letter, assumes that Evan has been stalking his sister and is now trying to mock him, and storms out with letter in hand despite Evan’s protests.
After a particularly poor first day of the school year (due in part to a tense encounter with Conner), Evan writes a therapy letter to himself expressing his disappointment but also his hope that his crush on Zoe will be requited. As he is printing it out, he encounters Conner again, who offers to sign Evan’s cast (the only person to do so) so that, “Now we can pretend we both have friends.” Unfortunately, this touching moment is cut short when Conner sees Evan’s letter, assumes that Evan has been stalking his sister and is now trying to mock him, and storms out with letter in hand despite Evan’s protests.
Conner Murphy signs Evan’s cast in an apparent gesture of reconciliation just before disaster strikes.
A couple of days later, Conner’s parents come to the school to meet Evan, where they reveal that Conner had committed suicide and Evan’s letter was found in his pocket. They assume the letter is Conner’s final message and invite Evan to explain his friendship with Conner over dinner at their house. Evan goes fully intending to tell them the truth, but once there realizes that the family, especially Mrs. Murphy, expects him to tell them about the good times he had with Conner, confirming to them that, despite his flaws, Conner was a good person deep down. Evan does not disappoint, weaving a fiction from the details the Murphys unwittingly provide him about how he broke his arm while climbing a tree on an outing with Conner.
Following this, Evan continues to build up the lie, creating a series of fake emails between him and Conner on a “secret account.” Fellow student Alana Beck convinces him to help her with the “Conner Project,” a student group dedicated to suicide prevention awareness by keeping Conner’s memory alive. At the group’s kickoff event, Evan gives a speech in which he recounts the fiction about him and Conner, which goes viral online almost immediately. Then, he gets everything he ever wanted. The Murphy parents begin treating him as a surrogate son, Zoe reveals her own affections for him and the two begin dating, and he becomes a minor celebrity in his school.
It is here that the cracks start appearing in the façade Evan has created. His mother, whom he has not told about any of this, becomes suspicious of him and their relationship is strained over Evan’s relationship with the Murphys. As interest in the Conner Project dies away, Alana begins to notice inconsistencies in Evan’s story. To get her off his trail, Evan shows her the therapy letter that started the whole mess, maintaining the pretense that it is Conner’s final message. However, hoping to revitalize interest in the Conner Project and its fundraising efforts, Alana publishes the letter online. This provokes significant backlash against the Murphys, as people believe that, since Conner’s final message was addressed to Evan not them, that they must be responsible for his struggles. The Murphys begin to bicker and blame each other for what went wrong before Evan steps in and reveals the truth. The Murphys decide to keep this hidden for the sake of their son’s memory, but largely cut ties to Evan.
It is here that the film slightly diverges from its stage counterpart. Evan decides to learn what he can about the real Conner, largely by tracing Conner’s social media accounts to get in touch with people who knew him. His search does not yield much, with the exception of video footage of Conner performing music in a rehabilitation facility. This he sends to the Murphys, hoping that they can gain closure through it.
Analysis
Dear Evan Hansen (both film and stage production) appears to be mostly focused on a couple of related themes: mental health, social isolation, how society tends to provide sympathy and performative actions rather than meaningful help to those who struggle, etc. But there is also something else going on here, just below the surface. Strip away the trappings of mental health and the American high school aesthetic and what you have is a story about the meaning of a human life and how this meaning is created.
The inciting event of the plot is Conner’s death by suicide, and from there the story can be framed as a dialogue about the meaning of his life. The audience does not know much about Conner and neither do most of the other characters; even his own family disagrees on this question because they seem not to have known him very well. This dynamic is most clearly seen in the song “Requiem,” in which the Murphy family attempts to process their grief. His mother, Cynthia, is desperate to believe that her son was basically a good person and because of that, she accepts Evan’s fabrications unquestioningly, claiming to “hear [Conner’s] voice and feel [him] near” in the fake emails Evan gave her. Zoe, however, is more skeptical. She expresses frustration at what she calls “remembering through a second-hand sorrow.” She is expected to mourn her brother, but the person her family and everyone else around her is mourning is a very different person from the Conner she knew. She reveals that she had been a frequent victim of Conner’s explosive anger and goes as far as to call him a “monster.” Beyond this, Alana also has a different view on the meaning of Conner’s life. She sees him as a martyr to the systemic failure of mental health care in the school and society at large; therefore, she (with the best of intentions) instrumentalizes his death to raise awareness for suicide prevention through the Conner Project. But by far the most interesting is Evan’s perspective, not only for what he does with Conner, but also for what this does for himself.
Following this, Evan continues to build up the lie, creating a series of fake emails between him and Conner on a “secret account.” Fellow student Alana Beck convinces him to help her with the “Conner Project,” a student group dedicated to suicide prevention awareness by keeping Conner’s memory alive. At the group’s kickoff event, Evan gives a speech in which he recounts the fiction about him and Conner, which goes viral online almost immediately. Then, he gets everything he ever wanted. The Murphy parents begin treating him as a surrogate son, Zoe reveals her own affections for him and the two begin dating, and he becomes a minor celebrity in his school.
It is here that the cracks start appearing in the façade Evan has created. His mother, whom he has not told about any of this, becomes suspicious of him and their relationship is strained over Evan’s relationship with the Murphys. As interest in the Conner Project dies away, Alana begins to notice inconsistencies in Evan’s story. To get her off his trail, Evan shows her the therapy letter that started the whole mess, maintaining the pretense that it is Conner’s final message. However, hoping to revitalize interest in the Conner Project and its fundraising efforts, Alana publishes the letter online. This provokes significant backlash against the Murphys, as people believe that, since Conner’s final message was addressed to Evan not them, that they must be responsible for his struggles. The Murphys begin to bicker and blame each other for what went wrong before Evan steps in and reveals the truth. The Murphys decide to keep this hidden for the sake of their son’s memory, but largely cut ties to Evan.
It is here that the film slightly diverges from its stage counterpart. Evan decides to learn what he can about the real Conner, largely by tracing Conner’s social media accounts to get in touch with people who knew him. His search does not yield much, with the exception of video footage of Conner performing music in a rehabilitation facility. This he sends to the Murphys, hoping that they can gain closure through it.
Analysis
Dear Evan Hansen (both film and stage production) appears to be mostly focused on a couple of related themes: mental health, social isolation, how society tends to provide sympathy and performative actions rather than meaningful help to those who struggle, etc. But there is also something else going on here, just below the surface. Strip away the trappings of mental health and the American high school aesthetic and what you have is a story about the meaning of a human life and how this meaning is created.
The inciting event of the plot is Conner’s death by suicide, and from there the story can be framed as a dialogue about the meaning of his life. The audience does not know much about Conner and neither do most of the other characters; even his own family disagrees on this question because they seem not to have known him very well. This dynamic is most clearly seen in the song “Requiem,” in which the Murphy family attempts to process their grief. His mother, Cynthia, is desperate to believe that her son was basically a good person and because of that, she accepts Evan’s fabrications unquestioningly, claiming to “hear [Conner’s] voice and feel [him] near” in the fake emails Evan gave her. Zoe, however, is more skeptical. She expresses frustration at what she calls “remembering through a second-hand sorrow.” She is expected to mourn her brother, but the person her family and everyone else around her is mourning is a very different person from the Conner she knew. She reveals that she had been a frequent victim of Conner’s explosive anger and goes as far as to call him a “monster.” Beyond this, Alana also has a different view on the meaning of Conner’s life. She sees him as a martyr to the systemic failure of mental health care in the school and society at large; therefore, she (with the best of intentions) instrumentalizes his death to raise awareness for suicide prevention through the Conner Project. But by far the most interesting is Evan’s perspective, not only for what he does with Conner, but also for what this does for himself.
Evan and Alana Beck work on The Conner Project.
Evan essentially creates an entirely new version of Conner over the course of four songs: “For Forever,” “Sincerely, Me,” “If I Could Tell Her,” and “You Will Be Found.” He is not intentionally trying to manipulate the Murphys here, but it appears that since before they even met, Cynthia had seen Evan as the sole lifeline back to her son and he cannot bring himself to disappoint her. However, it also becomes clear as Evan gets more invested in his fabricated friendship with Conner that he is also using the fiction to influence the meaning of his own life. Evan is largely isolated from his peers. He projects onto Conner all his desires and fantasies for friendship. “For Forever,” where he first creates the fiction for the Murphys, is based on a real incident. Evan did, in fact, break his arm falling out of a tree. However, the real incident happened in a park where Evan was interning as a ranger, with him going unnoticed for several hours before his supervisor found him and drove him to the hospital; in the fiction, the fall happens while Evan is on an outing with Conner at an abandoned orchard that the Murphys used to picnic at, and Conner is there to immediately help and comfort him. This phenomenon is even more pronounced in “Sincerely, Me,” in which Evan and his tech-savvy “family friend” Jared create the fake emails to give to the Murphys. “Sincerely, Me” is unique as it is the only upbeat, fun song in the entire musical, a chaotic, mischievous romp while most of the others are slower, either character pieces, love songs, or actively trying to make you cry. The chorus spells out Evan and Jared’s intentions clearly:
‘Cause all that it takes is a little
Re! In! Ven! Tion!
It’s easy to change if you give it
Your! A! Tten! Tion!
All you gotta do
Is just believe
You can be who
You want to be.
Sincerely, Me.
Re! In! Ven! Tion!
It’s easy to change if you give it
Your! A! Tten! Tion!
All you gotta do
Is just believe
You can be who
You want to be.
Sincerely, Me.
Evan and Jared create fake emails between Evan and Conner during “Sincerely, Me.
At Evan’s request, they do more work than strictly necessary in order to “show that [he] was … a good friend …” In reinventing Conner, Evan also reinvents himself as something like a kind of martyr in the original Greek sense of the word, a witness. The reinvented Evan was witness to Conner’s struggles and can thus act as his mouthpiece, a sentiment which culminates in “You Will Be Found.” (In the stage production, the reinvented Conner sticks around after this song, acting as something between a ghost, a hallucination, and a personification of Evan’s conscience, but this aspect is missing from the film.) “You Will Be Found” is the big inspirational song of the film, swelling with hope. Because of this, it was, of course, used in all the marketing and promotional material for the film despite the fact that it is, in context, a lie. The song is a speech Evan is giving at a school memorial service for Conner. In it, Evan uses the (fictional) tree incident to assert that, no matter how dark things may seem, there are people all around you waiting to help. If you only reach out, “you will be found.” But Conner was not found. Neither was Evan for that matter; he fell into his current position by chance. The song can only make sense if it is seen, not as a description of how reality actually is, but as Evan asserting what reality should be and trying to bring it about by force of will. He wants a world where people like him and Conner are “found,” rather than slipping through the cracks of society into isolation. So, he uses the song to challenge those who are struggling to reach out and those who are not to be responsive. While it generates much attention on social media, it is unclear how much it actually helped things.
Evan uses his fictional version of Conner to inspire hope in “You Will Be Found."
But there is one person left out of the conversation around the meaning of Conner’s life: Conner himself. After his death, Conner is left voiceless as the other characters define and redefine him to suit their purposes. No one bothers to look beyond their own experiences and Evan’s letters to find the real Conner, at least, not until the end of the film. After the situation has escalated beyond his control and his fabrication has come undone, Evan begins to search for Conner’s voice, largely by combing Conner’s social media accounts for people who may have known him. After many dead ends, Evan finds someone who knew Conner while they were both at a rehabilitation clinic and a video recording of Conner from said clinic. In it, Conner performs a song called “A Little Closer,” a film only piece, in which he expresses how, despite the Sisyphian nature of mental illness, he feels like he is making progress, albeit slight. This is how he defines himself, not as a martyr or friend but as someone who struggled against his own mind, and this is what the other characters robbed him of in making their own meanings for him.
At its heart, Dear Evan Hansen can be read as a story about the power of storytelling and narrative in the formation of personal identity. Evan remakes Conner, and in doing so remakes himself, in the eyes of others through the use of a story. As this dynamic shows, personal identity is not formed in isolation. It is formed in relation to others, relations which Evan desperately craves. This perspective mirrors the theory of self put forward by Existentialist philosopher Sören Kierkegaard in his work The Sickness Unto Death. He believed that humans had a spiritual or eternal side and a material or temporal side and that the self was formed of the synthesis between the two. In his own words, “relation is the human self, a relation which relates itself to its own self, and in relating itself to its own self relates itself to another” (Kierkegaard, 10). In other words, personal identity is formed through the connections and distinctions one makes between oneself and others, as well as the way the mind interacts with itself internally. Dear Evan Hansen adds the storytelling component, where narrative is the vehicle through which this is accomplished. Evan’s great misdeed is that the narrative he creates is disconnected from reality, fueled instead by the desires and fantasies of both himself and others, particularly the Murphys. The version of Conner he creates is not Conner at all but in fact a projection of Evan’s idea of a perfect friend, resulting in a blurring of their identities. As a result, the new identity Evan creates for himself is unsustainable. Kierkegaard discusses this phenomenon in The Sickness Unto Death as part of his discussion of despair. According to him, one of the main causes of despair is dissatisfaction, or even disgust, with one’s self and the desire to be a different self. “The self which he despairingly will to be is a self which he is not … he wills to be rid of himself, to be rid of the self which he is, in order to be the self he himself has chanced to choose” (Kierkegaard, 18). This describes Evan’s psychological condition remarkably well. His first few lines in the film involve him telling himself to “just be yourself … but like a confident version of yourself,” along with a list of other qualifiers like “interesting” and “approachable.” He wants to be a different person than he is now, and the narrative he builds around Conner becomes his vehicle for doing so. But, as Kierkegaard and the film indicate, a new identity cannot simply be willed into existence. The story is not the same thing as the real, and when it strays too far from the real, it falls apart, in the process causing even more despair. So how does one get out of this cycle of falsehood and despair? The film suggests that this can be done by acknowledging reality, in some cases seeking it out as Evan does with Conner at the end of film and incorporating it into the story. Only then is one able to move forward.
At its heart, Dear Evan Hansen can be read as a story about the power of storytelling and narrative in the formation of personal identity. Evan remakes Conner, and in doing so remakes himself, in the eyes of others through the use of a story. As this dynamic shows, personal identity is not formed in isolation. It is formed in relation to others, relations which Evan desperately craves. This perspective mirrors the theory of self put forward by Existentialist philosopher Sören Kierkegaard in his work The Sickness Unto Death. He believed that humans had a spiritual or eternal side and a material or temporal side and that the self was formed of the synthesis between the two. In his own words, “relation is the human self, a relation which relates itself to its own self, and in relating itself to its own self relates itself to another” (Kierkegaard, 10). In other words, personal identity is formed through the connections and distinctions one makes between oneself and others, as well as the way the mind interacts with itself internally. Dear Evan Hansen adds the storytelling component, where narrative is the vehicle through which this is accomplished. Evan’s great misdeed is that the narrative he creates is disconnected from reality, fueled instead by the desires and fantasies of both himself and others, particularly the Murphys. The version of Conner he creates is not Conner at all but in fact a projection of Evan’s idea of a perfect friend, resulting in a blurring of their identities. As a result, the new identity Evan creates for himself is unsustainable. Kierkegaard discusses this phenomenon in The Sickness Unto Death as part of his discussion of despair. According to him, one of the main causes of despair is dissatisfaction, or even disgust, with one’s self and the desire to be a different self. “The self which he despairingly will to be is a self which he is not … he wills to be rid of himself, to be rid of the self which he is, in order to be the self he himself has chanced to choose” (Kierkegaard, 18). This describes Evan’s psychological condition remarkably well. His first few lines in the film involve him telling himself to “just be yourself … but like a confident version of yourself,” along with a list of other qualifiers like “interesting” and “approachable.” He wants to be a different person than he is now, and the narrative he builds around Conner becomes his vehicle for doing so. But, as Kierkegaard and the film indicate, a new identity cannot simply be willed into existence. The story is not the same thing as the real, and when it strays too far from the real, it falls apart, in the process causing even more despair. So how does one get out of this cycle of falsehood and despair? The film suggests that this can be done by acknowledging reality, in some cases seeking it out as Evan does with Conner at the end of film and incorporating it into the story. Only then is one able to move forward.
Works Cited
Kierkegaard, Soren. The Sickness Unto Death. Princeton University: Princeton University Press, 1941.
Kierkegaard, Soren. The Sickness Unto Death. Princeton University: Princeton University Press, 1941.
