The Monuments Men

What’s interesting about The Monuments Men is that despite having an impressive cast, fine production values, and a story that seems made for the movies, it is in fact not terribly good. It’s not unwatchable but it’s not really worth watching either.

If you haven't been here before, please take a look at the Introduction to Generations, the Generational Attributes and the Four Stories in order to get up to speed on how all this works, and the terms being used.

It even follows the outline of this story model, where we have a story set in the Fourth Turning, a heroic story, with teamwork and  sacrifice -  and still it doesn't quite work in this way.  It’s unexpectedly like Manos, the Hands of Fate - which similarly doesn’t work despite having a story that is  well-suited to its era. The issues are perhaps more obvious in The Monuments Men because they are not obscured behind poor sound and awful acting. 

In The Monuments Men, George Clooney and an all star cast tells the story of Americans attempting to save works of art that had been pillaged by the Nazis during World War II. Because there is intelligence that the Nazis will destroy the art if Germany falls, and also that the Soviets are grabbing what they find as recompense for their substantial losses in the war, the Men are practically on the front lines as the war in Europe is coming to a close. The setting, then, is a Fourth Turning - World War II. The characters - played by Gen X and Boomer actors such as George Clooney, Matt Damon, Bill Murray and Bob Balaban - are based loosely on G.I., Lost generation members of this real-life team. We can expect an Heroic story, and that is ultimately the film’s story: Working together on the edge of the World War II battles, a group of volunteer art experts risk their lives in an attempt to preserve and recover artwork stolen by the Nazis.

What does go wrong then seems like the easy place to start. Broadly the tone seems off:  as if it can’t decide if it’s a heist film or a war film, a tragedy or a comedy. There is sacrifice to be sure but. (notwithstanding comments later) they don’t help the story get to where it’s going. One sacrifice is made by a man who sneaks in to confirm Michealangelo’s Madonna of Bruges, surprise the Nazis sneaking off with it, and gets shot. The other death is similarly a surprise as our heroes find themselves caught between American and Nazi forces. 

This stumbling into mortal danger is a common trope in the film, and it may be the tonal problem. We find out as we go what has happened to these works and it’s not arranged in a way that heroics are clear. We see some artworks packed up - sometimes by the Nazis, others by the owner - and then we don’t see them again until found. There s no sense of danger - and so when these artworks ARE put in danger late in the film, it’s shocking but not involving. 

The film focuses quite reasonably, on a few primary artworks: The Ghent Altarpiece and the Bruges Madonna. This would give us a way to connect with the mission, but it’s difficult to see that they are at risk.  Perhaps we see the altarpiece being n transported and always a moment or two from destruction. Perhaps early on we see a Picasso burned, rather than being told that’s what happened. An early scene refers to the Battle of Monte Cassino, a medieval abbey that was destroyed -by the Allies - during battles in Italy. It was really a tragedy, one that was based on the fog of war as much as anything, and it a few minutes focus on it could have been used to get the audience involved in the stakes and how they mattered.

Because here’s the deal: Monte Cassino was on a mountaintop abbey, and as such was a perfect place to defend this area of Italy. Because it was so important architecturally and historically, both sides were avoiding anything that could impinge on its status as a neutral and important work of art. But the allies, after an extended attempt to move past it, concluded that the Axis soldiers were using it as a defendable position. After a month of fruitless attacks, the allies bombed it, destroying it completely. But the truth was, they weren’t using it in that way - until it was destroyed, which allowed them to continue to hold off the allies for another three months.

So we have here the inevitabiilities of war leading to he complete destruction of artwork that was historically important, and for nothing. By making the allies the source of the destruction, the broad-based problems with the goals of the Monuments men could be made clearer. 

But can we use the model to help with this?  To start, it should be more explicitly heroic. This shouldn’t be difficult: It’s a World War II movie, the opponents are Nazis, the dangers are real. There should be an expectation of success and the realization of it. This is muddled perhaps because the artworks, while recognizable, are not necessarily well known, like say the Mona Lisa or even Michelangelo’s other sculptures. The description of the Madonna of Bruges overcomes this nicely, but it is relatively late. Setting that up earlier might be helpful. Perhaps a similar one for the Ghent Altarpiece, and a third for some piece of art known or believed to have been destroyed. (Monte Cassino might work for that purpose, too.)

Continuing to the notion of sacrifice, and specifically that it is helpful for the sacrifice to drive the story. The platoon in Saving Private Ryan loses a man at a time in different ways but always as a way to save others and to save Ryan. Frodo is “wounded, wounded” early in The Lord of the Rings, as he and his friends try to escape the Nazgûl, escalating the stakes. But here, the losses make practically no difference in the story and their final resolution. Alternatively,   it could be instead about “if you have a war, people die and art is destroyed, and choices must be made.”  To the extent that they are about the inevitable losses in war - the natural result of being in a place where men get killed and treasures get destroyed - the film could instead be  focused on that. it’s mostly a tale about the reclamation of these works of art, rather than the sacrifices needed. 

Finally, there is precious little teamwork here. There is a leader, but the individuals keep going off on their own adventures which hardly tie together. Not only would it make the film hang together more if everyone was after the same things, it would enable more interesting conflict. Bob Balaban’s character, for example, is notable because he’s given a private’s rank and seems generally annoyed with that situation. If the team was working as a team more, it would not only make sacrifices more tangible and goals more heroic, it would highlight interpersonal conflicts - personality, goals, relative importance - in a way to make the story more involving overall. 

Agent Carter

Yes, this is really rather late: Agent Carter was a 2015 ABC series, on the air for only two years -  cancelled over three years ago. It was surprisingly unsuccessful, although the generational story analysis gives some indication of what the problem may have been.

If you haven't been here before, please take a look at the Introduction to Generations, the Generational Attributes and the Four Stories in order to get up to speed on how all this works, and the terms being used.

The title character, Peggy Carter, was introduced in Captain America: The First Avenger, and reprised her role once or twice after. This series is set shortly after the end of World War II, when the Strategic Scientific Reserve (SSR) is transitioning to become S.H.I.E.L.D., which would have a large role in the Marvel Universe about 60 years later.

There were only two seasons, and they were done well enough. Not well enough to stick around longer, though. Paradoxically enough, that may have been because it had similarities to Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (and also, perhaps, to Buffy) in that there were season-long arcs, facing down a Big Bad as each ended. There's nothing wrong with that, it's a simple way to enforce a Hero story. And - like Buffy, and Skye & most of the team on the Bus, and Steve Rogers for that matter - Peggy Carter is a member of a Hero generation. Shouldn't she have a Hero story?

This was one of the key insights of looking at this analysis: Heroes have a different sort of story after the Crisis has passed. They are no longer attempting to right wrongs, or create a new world. That time of their life is behind them. They aren't taking on Big Bad, or at least not in the same way. This was fundamental to the best-known espionage stories, from James Bond to (at first) Jack Ryan: The struggle is about keeping the status quo going.

It’s post-war. It’s the First Turning. It should be an Artist story i.e. about the futility of change. Having a season-long Big Bad sort of arc makes it too much about Heroic Success, and that simply doesn’t match with the era. People are avoiding new sacrifices, ignoring previous successes - they want to survive, they embrace the absence of change. Stories where You Can Do It if you just keep plugging along, no longer work as they used to. 

And it’s not that Carter can’t make it work that way, it’s that we expect a different sort of result in this new era. Nothing's going to change, she can’t fix anything - with Hydra defeated and the war over, we should be grateful when nothing DOES change. And setting up Carter as a woman who is going to make things happen, well, we have some idea of what SHIELD becomes eventually, and her failure is surprisingly complete. 

So don’t try to force her into that Hero garb. Accept that she is going to be unable to make changes. Conversely, accept that the bad guys aren’t going to succeed either. 

(It was a truism in spy novels of the era that everything happened behind the scenes, no change to the over-riding narrative - nothing that you did really mattered, because nobody saw a difference. And this was a feature, not a bug.) 

Embrace that, and the first thing to go will be the Big Bad narrative. You have small successes each week, and the big success has to be in the infrastructure build or the discovery made that will enable the next small step. Carter can’t get past the sexism of her era - that won’t change - but she can be the person who makes S.H.I.E.L.D., for better and for worse.

And don’t start saying “but we want her to change it” - it’s a story set in the past, we know she doesn’t change it, pretending that she can is twice as hard for that reason.  Just give in and find a different way to go. Get her out of this earth-boiling danger, and make it about building up S.H.I.E.L.D.  She’ll have difficulties along the way, she’ll keep finding that people don’t like her in this position: Embrace that, and do it with something more than “A guy tells her she can’t do something, and she sneaks around and does it anyway.” 

She’s not building anything here, and that makes it hard to be interested in where she is going.

It’s almost like Agent Carter makes more sense like The West Wing, with minor problems to be overcome and ….and didn’t we want to see how she built up S.H.I.E.L.D? Don't we want to find out who is going to oppose that, and why? How would they do it? How could she outsmart them? That’s not as easy a show to write as Big Bad Intro and Out, but it would work better with where she is at. 

(Heck, it’s what she DID in Captain America: She was support, certainly, but that’s why she was effective.)

In fact, by the time Agent Carter was on the air, we already had seen the first season of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and the accompanying Captain America - The Winter Soldier. Those gave us some clues about what Carter had done, and that it would ultimately have some big problems. Certainly there wasn't anything wrong with having a Big Bad sort of arc in the first season - you want to get people involved - but even then the more interesting questions to go after were
* How did that secret base that Steve Rogers found get built?
* What did Agent Carter do that earned her equal billing with Howard Stark and Colonel Philips?
* What went so horribly wrong that an organization that started as only Carter and Stark could become infiltrated by Hydra, and eventually destroyed by it?

The way to do this seems obvious: Figure out where you want it to end up in five seasons, then work towards that.That would likely mean  working on deep cover, always able to show why what Carter had done was just what they had wanted her to do.  Then it becomes about fate and faith and whether it makes sense to put yourself out there to save the world, when it seems to resist any attempts at being saved.

And that doesn't mean it can't have some action, that we can't show her kicking ass and taking names - it just needs to work with what's there. Her actions are actually subversive, then, and also believable and that's more subversive yet.

It would have been more than a period-piece clone of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.  These changes - built around the idea that Peggy Carter, sadly, ultimately won't change anything - would yield a story that couldn't be described anywhere else.

The Giver

The Giver is an 2014 film that is an adaptation of a 2013 "Young Adult" novel about a future utopian world that (spoiler alert) turns out to be dystopian. It's a good example of what starts to look like a Hero story (mostly because it's focused on character played by a Millennial actor, with mentor played by a Prophet actor) but turns out to match well with First Turning/Second Turning transition.

If you haven't been here before, please take a look at the Introduction to Generations, the Generational Attributes and the Four Stories in order to get up to speed on how all this works, and the terms being used.

The setting of the story is a utopian community with a short set of rules ("Use Precise Language," "Take Your Injections") that is a standard view of First Turning community. While it is more circumscribed than, say, the United States in the 1950s, the combination of a strong ruling organization with a the view of an outwardly perfect world is often how First Turnings appear. This is reinforced by the idea of The Ruin, clearly a Fourth Turning sort of event that led to society's current status.

The story focuses on Jonas, the new Receiver of Memory, learning from the existing Giver, played by Boomer Jeff Bridges (b. 1949). As he learns about how people lived before the Ruin, he starts to see that his current world is not as perfect as it initially appears. People used to have emotions, connect with their families, and engage in other behaviors that seem, to Jonas, reasonable and worthwhile.

It's worth noting that corruption, and the perception of corruption, is common in First Turnings. As a Second Turning begins, this becomes an obvious and convenient enemy for those proposing society-wide change. He eventually goes off on his own to return memories to the rest of society. He is learning who he is, opposing a corrupt society, and achieving victory through sheer moral superiority: It's a Prophet story.

The generations included here are harder to really say, since most of the available attributes are tied up in the story and the setting. Jonas and the other young actors are Millennials, while the elders (like Meryl Streep, b. 1949) are Boomers. Is Jonas selfless, competent, rational? No more than the others his age, who help him escape.

As previously shown, though, there's no reason a Prophet story can't do well during a Crisis, so that's not the main reason it didn't do as well as hoped. One possibility is that it's just too on-the-nose, too convinced of being right about what should happen to a society such as this that it keeps hammering the concept home - they kill babies! they watch everyone! - that it's predictable and has no tension.

Silicon Valley and Betas

One of the first Amazon Prime shows produced was Betas, about a Silicon Valley startup, four young males with a big software idea. It was in the first batch of pilots that were made available for viewers to pick, and was selected (along with Alpha House) to have a full run of 11 episodes.

It was not picked up for a second season, however, even though another show with much the same premise was launched by HBO that year:  Silicon Valley, which follows a Silicon Valley startup with a ... yeah, big software idea. Starting with a team of four, yeah, guys, trying to work within the...well, take a look at both and it's clear how much they share in basic premise.

They are very different shows, however. A fundamental difference between the two can be seen as:

• Silicon Valley is about Generation X 
• Betas is about Millennials

But it can take some looking to understand why.

If you haven't been here before, please take a look at the Introduction to Generations, the Generational Attributes and the Four Stories in order to get up to speed on how all this works, and the terms being used.

First, let's check the Setting: It's the modern era, after the dot-com bubble, in the era of social media including Twitter and Facebook. The current Crisis/Fourth Turning is not much in evidence - no war, although everything about both of them is about major changes happening all around. Silicon Valley is about big choices every second - who to trust, how to avoid getting crushed. The more minor dating app in Betas, called BRB, isn't the focus of quite as much durm und strang, although most of the team does see it as their big chance.  Let's accept Crisis for now, in either case.

Both teams are primarily Millennial, although the people in Silicon Valley's are mostly older, with several on the 81/82 boundary between Gen X and Millennial.

How about Story? As television series, the episodes are self-contained stories that are likely to be different from how the series proceeds as a whole. Silicon Valley is still ongoing, so the ultimate Story could change.  Betas we can see as a more Heroic story, primarily because we see to an ending point: The team works together and succeeds in the end through sacrifice - agreeing, without even needing to go through it, to forfeit the easy and definite payday of acquisition in service to greater values.

Silicon Valley focuses on Richard Hendricks, the developer of a compression algorithm that could change the Internet. One of the running jokes of the series is the way that EVERYone thinks their business will Make the World a Better Place, no matter how obscure or narrowly focused their actual product. That this sort of idealism is mocked says a lot to start about the attitudes of the show’s creators.  Early on, Richard is offered millions of dollars to sell his company - consisting of himself and three other male developers - to an enormous Google like company for an enormous immediate payday. Instead he decides to pivot his company to focus on his software. Since he's a developer, though, his ability as a CEO is limited -  a frequent source of conflict in the series. 

That conflict is often over the other members of the team deriding, disrespecting, and over-riding Richard’s decisions - often with good reason, truth be told, but in multiple cases they seem to do so simply to be jerks or push their own agendas and goals. The members of the team, that is, are not interested in the good of all, and so their success is not a result of teamwork. They figure out an improvement in their algorithm, get a lucky break in an Intellectual Property lawsuit, and manage to survive what should have been a major breach of contract because of a fortuitous hack on a "smart" refrigerator.

And there’s nothing wrong, from a narrative point of view, with these. They are more indicative of a Redemptive story, rather than a Heroic one. As such, it's a story usually populated by a Nomad archetype - like Gen X - rather than a Hero archetype - like the Millennials. 

Well, then, what does Betas look like?

In Betas, like Silicon Valley, the developer team - including Mikki, a young lady who joins the team later - are mostly Millennials by habit and age. The exception is Hobbes, who is about to “age out” of the startup culture at age 35 - making him a late GenXer at the time of the series - and who is often  treated as a pariah. The software being developed is a dating app called BRB, and one frequently contentious issue is how much it is -not- going to change the world. The team’s mentor is played by Boomer Ed Begley Jr. as George Murchinson, usually known as Murch, a successful company  founder who now runs an incubator. In true Prophet archetype fashion, he sends the BRB team on a team-building exercise -slash- vision quest, one intended to show them what they could become.  

With Betas  - which ended in 2103 - we have the additional advantage of knowing the overall arc of the series. The team bonds early on over a prank on a local hipster bro - which is to say they pull together as a team in order to attack someone deserving outside of it. At the end, facing an acquisition by a friendly but malign software giant, the team pulls together, faces it down, giving up their million dollar paydays in defense of what they see to be right.

And with this we can see how Betas deserves to be called truly a Millennial story. The BRB team is much more of a team than the Pied Piper developers, who work at cross purposes, have fundamental moral flaws, and frequently attack each other. Even though  Pied Piper’s team are Millennials by age bracket or birth cohort, they act more like members of Generation X. That might be because Mike Judge, born 1962, is Generation X - although the creators of Betas, Evan Endicott and Josh Stoddard, appear to be Gen X as well, if closer to the 1981 end of the cohort.

Ultimately,  BRB works together more like Millennials are expected to - and they take part in a story that matches with what everyone expects Heroes to do. 

Seeking a Friend for the End of the World

A 70 mile wide asteroid will impact Earth in three weeks. The last attempt to save humanity has just failed. People are coming to terms with reality in a major way. Steve Carell plays a man deserted by everyone, even his wife. Keira Knightley is his neighbor Penny, whose boyfriend has just caused her to miss her very last chance to see her family in England.

It could be called a romantic disaster film. 

If you haven't been here before, please take a look at the Introduction to Generations, the Generational Attributes and the Four Stories in order to get up to speed on how all this works, and the terms being used.

No way to talk about this without spoilers, so consider this your final warning. 

Early on, it seemed clear that this would be an Artist story, about the futility of change. The  meteor mentioned in the first scene would strike the earth as planned, leaving the protagonists only that limited amount of time to resolve their issues. It's not surprising that this would not be a popular direction, and in fact the film had mixed reviews and was a flop at the box office.  It is surprising that the creators actually went through with it - that there was no attempt to turn it into a heroic or transcendent rescue of some sort. 

What it is is a romantic comedy and road trip movie. It's about a relationship that is doomed, but not because the couple is incompatible. As such it's successful, if imperfect. The opening works very well, as we see ordinary people doing exactly what might be expected if there were only a few weeks to live.  There are a few sections where the road movie slows down more than it should. There are other stretches where different reactions and coping strategies is impressively done. 

It's not quite a Crisis movie. It's showing the last stages, the descent to madness and the after-effects. Perhaps it's a post-Crisis world. The ultimate source of its trouble might have been trying to tell an Artist story set in the midst of a Crisis, whereas people seem to respond better to movies where the Setting, Characters and Story Type match with each other. Penny even alludes to this in the final scene, thinking that they'd be able to save each other. In Crisis periods, we want to hear about stories of success, not of failure.

Nonetheless, as its gifts and Artist story start to catch up with the world around it, it seems quite likely to become a cult classic.

Wild Cards

I started reading Wild Cards soon after it came out, in 1988, primarily because science fiction legend Roger Zelazny was one of the people involved with it. Under the guidance of George R.R. Martin, who has since become well known for another book series, Zelazny and others wrote stories of an alternate Earth that was infected by an alien virus, one that (sometimes) gives superpowers to ordinary people. And sometimes....not.

It's a very rich and interesting world where superheroes and supervillians and all sorts of people in between exist. I continued to read until the 6th book in the series a few years later. When I stopped, it probably was for no reason other than other things to take up my time while I was waiting for the 7th to come out.

When Martin announced earlier this week that the series would be adapted for television, the big surprise was that it took so long. It's superheroes, it's anti-heroes, it's Mr. Game of Thrones, who was saying "No"?

But I'm not here to talk about that. I'm here to clarify something that EVERY SINGLE SITE I've checked - none of whom include people who have read any of the books, clearly - is getting wrong.

That alien virus was developed by an alien race called the Takisians. Their home planet is Takis. They look human, can speak English, you wouldn't look twice at them except, perhaps, for the flamboyant fashions they prefer - at least if they are noble Takisians, not the serfs that make up most of the population.

These noble Takisians, many of them anyway, have psychic powers of various types and levels. One noble family develops a virus that enhances them - or should. They hadn't tested it yet.

And then they found Earth. In the year 1946, the virus is released, and it works. Using a broad definition of the word.

• Ninety percent of the time, infected humans die, often in messy ways, like dissolving away or bursting into flame. This is called "drawing a Black Queen." 
• Nine percent of the time, infected humans end up horribly deformed. These people are called Jokers. (Yes, it's rude to call them that - the civil rights of Jokers is a recurring plot point.)
• One percent of the time, infected humans gain extraordinary powers. These people are Aces.

Which you will get depends on...well, nobody is exactly sure, although the manifestation of the effects often depend on each individual's self-image. You can even get an Ace power, like flying, combined with a Joker deformation - like bat wings. Because it's so unpredictable, the virus is dubbed the Wild Card virus. And those are the cards that are dealt.

Let me take a moment here to say that the individual stories vary in terms of what generational story they represent. JetBoy, one of the first characters introduced, has a story that could be called a Heroic tragedy of failed sacrifice. The story of Croyd, the Sleeper, is definitely about the futility of effecting change, even as the virus changes him over and over. There is room for all of the generations and all the stories, throughout. Sometimes they bind together into larger narratives, which similarly may be stories of Redemption or Sacrifice or Self-Actualization or Futility.

But that's not my point here.

As mentioned, ninety percent of those infected draw the Black Queen. This has somehow been inferred, BY EVERY SITE I WENT TO, that most of the world is dead.

This is not the case.

The Wild Card virus is not that infectious. If you catch it, it gets to work altering your DNA, expanding your internal psychic potential, and letting the cards fall where they may. It doesn't make more copies of itself. It doesn't spread from person to person, at least not easily, and almost everyone who was ever infected caught the virus when it was first dispersed into Earth's atmosphere.

What this means is that there was a wave of deaths in Manhattan, where the virus was first released. Enough was blown into the atmosphere to spread around the world, leaving pockets of Jokers and Aces where it touched. Most people, though, never catch it. These remaining normal people, a population about the same size as we have today, have to figure how to live in a world with people who can increase gravity around them or teleport people by pointing their finger; where Mick Jagger is a werewolf and there really is a Lizard King; where the homeless encampment down the way includes a guy always covered in slimy mucus and another with tentacles growing out of his face.

That's all I want to say. Except that I am glad that more people will find out about Croyd and Dr. Tachyon (a Takisian who tries to stop the virus but...doesn't) and The Great and Powerful Turtle and Walrus and the Swarm and all the other fun characters to be found there.

Annie Hall

The title for Woody Allen's Best Picture-winning 1977 film was going to be Anhedonia.

That term means "inability to feel pleasure," and well describes the lead character of Alvy Singer, played by (and evidently based on) the writer and director. Supposedly that title was nixed by the studio, probably for making a romantic comedy seem like a weird foreign art film. Even though, when spoken, it's a nice double pun, as the first syllables sound like "Annie." It also makes a good fit with the writer, the setting, and the unapologetically Artist story of futility and inability to change.

If you haven't been here before, please take a look at the Introduction to Generations, the Generational Attributes and the Four Stories in order to get up to speed on how all this works, and the terms being used.

An internet search for the film indicates that Anhedonia was not only an earlier name but an earlier vision for the film.  It would have been a wide-ranging look at the life of Alvy Singer, of which the relationship with Annie was only one part. In a press conference many years later,  Woody Allen said that everyone focused on that relationship, and that's how the film ended up as it did.

 (His comments on Annie Hall are at about the 44 minutes point in that video.)

It's set in the mid-1970s, with topical references such as the near-bankruptcy of New York City, so Setting and Generations are simple. It's during the Consciousness Revolution, an Awakening period, and shows all the uncertainty and change happening around the characters. Since Alvy appears based on Woody Allen, using his 1935 birthdate seems reasonable, making him Silent generation, an Artist archetype. Diane Keaton is Boom generation, born 1946. Their on-screen disagreements appear generationally related, with Alvy dismissive of Annie's marijuana ("...will make a white woman more like Billie Holliday") and Annie not quite getting his interest in death and therapy. 

The Artist story being about the doomed and the damned, perpetrators and victims, the futility of change, this unexpectedly not only matches, but does so as a comedy. Told as a description of an already-ended relationship, Alvy appears doomed to a life alone, Annie damned to the sunny hell that is Los Angeles.

And, like life, it is "all over much too quickly."

This doesn't sound as if it should be funny, but there is still plenty of room for humor in such a tale. It might even be humor's natural place. Steve Kaplan does a course on comedy writing that says comedy requires a conflict where the tools required to succeed are not available, yet there is still the possibility of success. As an example of being able to win, Kaplan specifically uses the example of Alvy, in line at a movie theater, countering the claims of an overloud intellectual by literally pulling media philosopher Marshall McLuhan into the conversation. Alvy is similarly struggling to be in a relationship with Annie, without the tools needed to let others love him, but he is still  - in parts and places - able to succeed. Alvy even forces a win at the end, when he writes a play about their relationship, one where he gets the last word with Annie, and she still loves him. He seems a little sheepish at the "cheat," noting that an artist wants his art to work out, since life often doesn't.