Once in a great while I come across a great article that penetrates to the heart and soul of something that I'm intimately involved with but could not articulate equally well. The Washington Post staff writer Philip Kennicott's great article " The Surprise Ending? It's the Absence of One" published on July 9, 2006 is one such seminal essay that ignited an a-ha! moment as I was reading it. The premise of the article is simple enough that, almost all films made today still stick to the over-two-thousand years old Aristotelian paradigm of 3-Act Structure. Thanks to the Aristotle's "Poetics," we still reward those stories with a "beginning, middle and an end." We refer to movies that do not have a well defined beginning, middle and an end as "art movies," or sometimes as "European movies," both phrases used in a disparaging way. As Kennicott points out with great precision, this complicates the job of professional movie critic because the ending carries such a high cash value that you are supposed to talk about a movie without talking about its most important element its ending. It's almost a "mission impossible" but we are all extremely disappointed when a critic gives away the ending of a brand new thriller, arent we? All this is because a movie is as much about collective therapy as art. We want these stories to be told in moving pictures because we want to see the order, beauty and justice that we cannot readily observe in our daily lives. We would like to see that the principles we live by, the founding tenets of our civilization, still count for something. Without a discernible ending, we feel lost. We think it is unfair for the director leave us "twisting in the wind" with the number of unresolved threads and possibilities. That's why we pay our good cash to see a good movie. We want the screenwriter, director and the actors do the heavylifting on our behalf, order the "chaos out there" for us and not dump that mental load on our shoulders. We do not feel that a film is supposed to be a "reflection" of "real life," do we? Who needs that? We all are already familiar (to say the least) with our own "real lives" and mostly it is a routine between home and work. Who wants to watch one's own daily routine blown up on a gigantic screen although it is "the perfect story with no ending"? Like hunters too close to the trees, we still want to be assured that the forest exists in all its majesty, complexity and beauty. And we expect movies to deliver us that "forest" by depicting all the other trees, their branches, and their leaves, with all the fauna and flora that we are not even aware of yet. We want a film to show us (without preaching if possible) the ecological harmony that keeps the "universal forest" alive. That takes structure, intentionality and design. That takes scenes, acts and plot points. That's not a "natural object' in itself, existing independent of human desires and volition. And that's what "culture" is all about anyways. The 3-Act Structure is not here by accident. It's a precious human invention created to protect our values, beliefs and sanity against the "chaos out there." That's why I think as long as the world exists, the neat linear ordering of "the beginning, the middle and the end" will be with us to stay. I raise my glass to all the good endings in movies and life. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
