I had a funny sort of revelation tonight. I watched The Life Aquatic. Brilliant movie. If you normally asked me to summarise a movie, I’d run with a kind of plot scenario i.e. the adventures of a failing documentary film maker and so on, probably in a rather boring monotone. I’m not the social story telling kind. But I wasn’t asked to summarise it, why would I after all – surrounded by a group of people who were watching the exact same thing? A brief conversation flew around the ending and an individual’s dissatisfaction. I disagreed and gave a very short, sharp synopsis about the guts of the movie. I think sometimes more goes on in my head than I realise.  Or perhaps it’s just the articulation of what’s there that sometimes catches me off guard?

In truth, my concise proclamation of internal workings of the story is about as basic as you can get. Laughable.

Loser in life wins out in the end – not by the means excepted, but he still wins. End of story.

It’s the guts of most stories, probably a lot of lives, although winning occurs in stages and phases and not in some ultimate finale (talking life on earth here), and of course the stretch of the theory doesn’t glean all circumstances.

However stupid, strange or balmy the protagonist is, we can relate. Yes, I just called you a loser.

The whole of the creative world is somewhat unoriginal. I already knew that.

So. Does an good unpredictable ending always have to be an unhappy one. And if so, isn’t that predictable in itself?

Is there another alternative? Or does that wind up in ambiguity? Or is it simply an eternal ending? Can you run with a plot that never properly ends? Or does it still technically end where we stop looking at it?

There’s got to be some theological swamp in all that?