Figure 7

Unless of course you like it faster, or if that is just the way it is for you. Then your life is really is like the movies, which is more like this: Movies are all about change, the graceless dance. Almost every movie you see will follow the three-act formula illustrated in Figure 7. The little line to the left is Act One, representing the last days of a stable state, just before some disaster strikes, before something happens, some "News from Elsewhere': the leaving, the loss, the imperilling, the new arrival. The Event. The bulk of the movie is taken up by Act Two, the desperate dance of adjustment. That's what we pay to watch. The struggle to re-establish equilibrium, not the old one, that won't happen, and that's the real struggle at first. The new reality clashes with the habits of the old one, the inbuilt, ingrained physiology of denial that continues to perform the old gestures in response to new demands, continues to reach for what is gone.

........ People reduced to desperate measures, gestures and moves, trying and falling, not even knowing what a new equilibrium would feel like; no rhythm, comfort or ease. That's what will take up most of the screen time, most of Act Two and the first part of Act Three: increasing struggle against increasing difficulty. This is what we want. Men and women contending with a new order. We go to the movies to watch characters being recast through crisis. We watch them squirm, watch them until they begin to learn, and learn to begin anew. That's where we arrive at in the denouement of act Three, the little solid line at the top of the right. It's the start of a new season; it signals in brief the rhythms and colour of the new equilibrium, as Act One did the old. But we don't want to see stability and ease. Act One and the end of Act Three, the new normal, take up a little screen time as possible and these days the former is often over before the end of the opening credits. May be we should be glad that life isn't more like the movies. ~ Page 113