post the forty-ninth, 2013

today we were watching "forrest gump" for the againth time. at the end of the movie, forrest opens a curious george book and a feather falls out then floats away. the way the camera follows the feather, it's clearly a symbol.

a symbol of what?

forrest's mother and wife die during the movie. while forrest is visiting jenny's grave, a small flock of birds noisily settle in the tree over her headstone. combine bird symbol with the single feather and together we get souls floating free. the feather demonstrates that we are all floating through life, moving from one situation to the next, alighting here or there. when we alight, we are bound up in that environment, that happening. we are featherweights, controlled by winds of change and circumstances we find ourselves in.

contrast this with the notebook symbol in "adjustment bureau". in that movie, notebooks carried by AB reps contain entire outlines of all our lives. there's no floating, no alighting. we're players in a plan and there's a bureau of adjusters working to keep us all on plan.

either way, we are controlled by outside circumstances. in the first case, the circumstances are random. in the latter, the circumstances are planned. either way, though, we have no free will.

or... do we?

i mean, do we in the context of these movies.

in forrest gump, at one point, jenny is driven by her circumstances to climb to the ledge of a building. about to jump, she slips, and in that split second, she realizes that all she wants is to live. she climbs back down. for her, climbing back down is a leap of faith -- it's a point where she isn't a feather, where she isn't blown around but is herself in control.

in adjustment bureau, david and elise come to a point where they can choose compliance to the plan or they can go off-book. they decide for off-book, make that leap, and elude the pursuing adjusters in a thrilling chase through the streets of manhattan until they literally run themselves into a corner where they stand their ground and earn the right to rewrite their mutual story.

in both cases, characters are better off for having decided to take matters into their own hands and work against the controlling forces.

(yes, people have written volumes about what i have barely touched on here, but this is a blog post not a thesis.)