Closure

This one is a step sideways from the usual humor-inspired post.

We humans love a good story. Many of the ways that we as humans digest stories is as an arc that takes you from one set of circumstances to another set of circumstances. The challenge as a writer of movies, plays, books, music, or any other form of media is to communicate these arcs in a creative way to keep the audience engaged in your story.

Let’s face it though: if we invest the time into a story, we want closure. We want the proverbial “bookends.”

The biggest complaint people have about the acclaimed HBO series “The Sopranos” is the ending of the show which aired in 2007. Many people feel that David Chase left the ending open to your own interpretation, and this is something that many people do not like.

Likewise, earlier this year ABC’s “LOST” aired it’s final episode, in which, as far as closure to the story that the audience had been engaged in for the previous six years could not have been more explicit. The show on the island began with Jack opening his eyes; the story on the island ended with Jack closing his eyes. There’s your closure, your bookend. Unfortunate to this perfect ending, the writers of the show opted to incorporate a “sideways universe” which, at the end of the show, proved only to be an allegory for fans of the show needing to move on. Between this and the opinion that many of the important questions were unanswered, the quality of the ending is a big point of contention between LOST fans, as people either loved it or hated it. Although many questions that are important to me are still unanswered, I still feel that the ending contains that sense of closure that I need to be able to move on.

I strive for closure in all aspects of my life. Anything that I start, I totally intend on finishing, whether it be video games, books, television shows, etc. Right now, I’m waiting for closure on something eleven years in the making and, at times, it gets really frustrating, just because there’s nothing I can do to move the process along. Even though I feel that my life has already started the next chapter, I just want that feeling of closure on the previous chapter just to have those bookends and be able to completely move along.