A Movie in Three Acts (That Falls Apart in the Third for the Lack of Experience)

Act I. Fade up on a woman screaming. The woman is unimportant, save that she is giving birth to our hero. We never see her again, nor do we need to. The childhood of our hero is summed up in a single scene where he is forced to choose duty over love. It's played up real sad. A tragic moment that demonstrates the incredible resolve our hero possesses when compelled.

Later, as a young adult, our hero is presented with a similar choice; more complex; more at stake. An inordinate amount of time is spent with the hero ruminating, going back and forth, showing how confusing and emotional it all is. Avoiding the painful choice of an adult, our hero returns with the rationalization that he can pursue both love and duty with equal fervor. He begins his journey confident that by leaving he demonstrates his loyalty, bringing honor to those left behind by finding the love he thinks he's chosen. He'll show them.

Act II. Our hopeful anticipation of watching the boy grow into a man is dashed rather quickly upon the rocks of our plot. Our hero's virtue is revealed as vice in disguise. He is not actually patient, but disconnected from his anger. His self-control but self-eviseration; we watch him discard any feeling he's not supposed to have. The contentment he displayed at the start of his trials was really the total absence of personhood. Indifferent to suffering because his preferences have long been slain, or weeded, or circumcised in some primitively naive attempt to please the gods of his cloistered little world. His noble quest for love a mere obsession with the only feeling he'd felt in years.

The bundle of emotional triggers that comprised his image of god suddenly seemed equivalent with the authoritative expectations of considerably more mortal creatures. His drowning self-surpression was based on spurious correlations with a divine noun. He throws up.

The desert is the only place he can be at this point, no other landscape can properly reflect the lostness. His battle with the cacti an austerely somber action. No one's crying. Depression is numb. He is cutting off every new emotion with each stroke of his weapon, and subsequently shuts down any ability to learn the world could feel differently than it does. His mind is cold and unadaptive. The limited experience from which his knowledge is crafted cannot predict the large reality he now drifts within. Duty conjures his feelings of betrayal. His search for love becomes a search for anything real.

Act III. The story's getting intolerably glum. Cut abruptly to a happy ending. Imagine: the threshold of the desert is crossed, sparks of virtue are discovered, love is found, rekindled, requited! The moral of the film becomes something about our mess, and how free we'll be once it's all been stripped away. Cleansed to the bone by the wilderness. This was a good idea until the realization dawns that there has been no cleansing. Only unpleasant revelations. The mess, if viewed as a set of neural configurations in our hero's head, is not so easily left behind.

Fine. We'll avoid the uninspired, disingenuous finale and go a different route. We'll let our hero die. Starvation, thirst, monsters of some kind, the means are unimportant; the idea is people can't live through states of such disillusionment. We need our mirage of goodness to survive. There is a certain honesty here, but this turn of events still begs the question. What if our hero didn't die? What if he had to keep on living? How do we end a story like that? It doesn't seem to fit into three short little acts when the climax becomes a long agonizing process that is generally unentertaining. The desert goes on. The hero goes on. The film goes on and on and on.

Our only real hope for finding a dramatic close comes from this observation: The desert is too peopled to wander unseen forever. When this perception manifests, our hero wakes from his stupor.