Twist of Plot

The star of the soap opera dies sud­denly, but he returns as his long lost iden­ti­cal twin the next day. It is absurd but holds our inter­est. The rea­son the show is not laughed off the air is because it is actu­ally too much like real life. Long run­ning seri­als have to keep the plot chang­ing. Those that do it well keep their place on the dial. The ridicu­lous is too much like the real. We con­tinue to watch to see how close to the edge of insane it can become.

A good movie includes a lit­tle of this (and some­time a lot). The same goes for a good novel. No one likes any­thing too pre­dictable — even our own lives. Peo­ple seek their pain. Tedium is not tol­er­a­ble. For as much as we com­plain of change, we wel­come it. From Adam and Eve to the Apoc­a­lypse, the mas­ter story is filled with just such shifts. The first cou­ple lives in har­mony only briefly. One son kills the other. The world goes so out of con­trol that all but eight are killed in a freak storm (the Noah story).

A young boy kills a giant of a war­rior with a sling­shot and becomes a nation’s favorite king. He cov­ets another man’s wife (Bathsheba). He has the man killed. The baby of adul­tery dies. One of his other sons rises to oust him from office. The coup ends with the attrac­tive young man (Absalom) hanging by his long hair from a tree. (And all of this hap­pens long before there was ever a Hollywood.)

On the edge of being the great­est world leader, he is exe­cuted. Much to everyone’s sur­prise, he does not stay dead. After a few weeks, he ascends into a cloud and is never seen again. Strangely, he seems to return in var­i­ous art forms. Bil­lions of peo­ple seek to imi­tate his life.

Then there is YOUR life. Look at the absurd twists and turns. Who could have ever dreamed these things would have hap­pened to you? Is life a “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury sig­ni­fy­ing noth­ing” or is your life part of the meta-story that could only be imag­ined by Deity?

Stay tuned. Your story is not yet over.