For a brief time, I had the pleasure of residing in the commonwealth of Kentucky, and travelling up and down interstate 65 several times a year. My mother was from Kentucky, near the place where the Cumberland and Tennessee rivers near each other in the southwestern part of the commonwealth. I felt some affinity for the for the place outside the decay urban center where I happened to be studying.
The affinity I felt for the real place drew me to a work of art. That work of art resonated deeply with inner world of thoughts and imagination. As studied things too great for me, and tried to help a few souls, I also studied this artistic narrative intently.
It was game, but it was different in its presentation. You never really had control, only agency to interpret and respond to the event presented. The story could only play out one way, and I never actually played it at all. I watched it being played. I never felt the need to play it myself, I was happy just to watch. The scenes were atmospheric, the music ethereal yet familiar. The characters were people I knew in real life. The secret underground highway, robots, and glowing orange skeletons were perfect representation of the things that happened everyday made more real by a magical interpretation.
The great debate was all about the meaning of the piece, the message it was meant to convey. I do not believe there has ever been a definitive answer, and that is probably best for the longevity of the work. A mystery solved is not nearly as compelling as a mystery which remains mysterious. It leaves room for each new player, or viewer to explore the possibilities. Yet, there must be some ultimate meaning, some true interpretation in the mind of the creator. I wouldn’t claim to have any insight into that, but I do have my own pet interpretation.
The first character we meet is an aging man who has a rough life. The bottle kept him down, and it is only with help from friends that he has scraped by. Now, those friends are passing on, and he is facing his last delivery job before he is sat adrift. He hasn’t really got anything beyond that last delivery that we known of.
Then he meets a girl chasing the ghost of a cousin with a future. A little boy and his brother looking for parents who disappeared suddenly. And two performers determined to live free. All of these people take up the cause of the old man. They join his mission, because they feel they are directed, or it is something to do, or they owe it to the others.
The old man doesn’t make, his age finally catches up with him, and his leg is badly hurt. He gets help, but the cost undoes him. He turns back to the bottle to cope, and that finishes him. He comes to owe a debt to a company that reaches nearly everywhere in the world of the story. No one can save the old man. All that can be done is to finish what he started.
In making the delivery everyone else finds a place to live. The purpose of their elder delivered them. There is something here, a passing of a torch from a generation that knew how to work for living to a generation who knows that living is more than work. Each one lacks something, and while it is too late for the old man to learn and gain, it is not to late for the others.
Some say the story is really about death, and think that is half-right. I think it is about dying while you still live. Dying through addiction, dying through aimlessness, or through recklessness, or through looking backwards, or through feeling sorry for yourself.
If just a few lines were altered there might be a virtue at the end, a true lesson for living; but that isn’t the way it goes. At the end is just a bunch of theories. Maybe the real lesson is that there are a lot of people out there feeling lost in the night, and looking for a little magic in the mundane to make life feel worth living again.
Christianity has magic for the mundane, in the most wholesome and wonderful sense. We have a direction through the darkness. We have answers to the problems, real answers. What we seem to lack is the ability to reach the resonate level of people’s day-to-day struggles in a compelling way, and guide from that place we all start somewhere in the night to the place we belong in the light of a new day.
