Trains: Like Stories, Like Life

There have been many trains throughout entertainment history. Trains going nowhere, but fast. Bullet trains, leaving Tokyo. Slow trains, conquering new frontiers. Great train robberies, terrorism, and time travel. They carry hobos, reluctant cannibals, feuding samurai and ninjas. All being watched by a never-ending parade of onlookers. Scottish heroin addicts, grieving lovers, and emotionally unstable parents. But none could unblow that conductor's whistle. Whether we like it or not, that train is building up speed and starts rolling towards an uncertain future. Maybe it's Hogwarts, Istanbul, or the Western Front. Who knows.

Stories are a lot like trains, I figure. Not just in the topical sense, but in terms of going from A to B. Honestly, the very nature of fiction seems to be linear. At least that's how stories are told. We don't remember infinite amounts of parallel histories and alternative futures, like Everything Everywhere All at Once, but we recount causality chains (with some creative liberties). Even the most nonsensical write-up of seemingly unrelated events follows linearity. Text goes from left to right, up and down, whatever. Either or, there's invisible rails guiding your very own train of thought. Non-linearity for that matter seems like an impossibility, as far as human consciousness goes.

You could argue perception itself might be an illusion. How it's supposed to be an approximation, or a rough estimate meant to produce results (rather than depicting reality as such). Like the notion of linear time. Insert some space time mumbo jumbo about relativity and time traveling twins (I don't get it either). Nevertheless, right now we're stuck with common assumptions of past, present, and future. Like that passenger on a train, noticing a lonely tree on the horizon of rural Italy. It vanishes about as quickly as it appeared, but where did it go?

Stories feature departures, detours, and arrivals. There's people to meet and things to experience. Smells, sounds. Maybe a young woman that's being harassed by a stranger. A few laughing children. Tunnels, rivers, hills. You name it. Every journey implies a territory. Something to traverse, both internally and externally. Like the movie GoodFellas passes through the landscape of organized crime and paranoia. Apocalypse Now takes Heart of Darkness and applies its premise to the Vietnam War. Mad Max covers the collapse of civilization and shoots across a wasteland of escalating degeneracy.

Take another example, Die Hard: At the beginning of the first movie John McClane is a soon to be divorced disgruntled middle aged asshole. For all intents and purposes a vindictive one, too. Him and his wife Molly are living separate lives. He's mad about her taking the kids and pursuing a career in LA, being wooed by coke addicted corporate pussy hounds. In turn she feels like doing her own thing. Granted, John McClane doesn't change much. Still, he ends up fighting for his family, like a man who's too stubborn to die. Then after lots of cathartic violence involving German terrorists, pretty much like a metaphor for their domestic dispute, Molly and John reconcile and enter a new equilibrium.

In terms of the consequent sequels John McClane's new found work life balance didn't last long. By the third movie his marriage had finally fallen apart and not even terrorism could mend it. Hell, Molly even stopped being a character. There were a few so-so sequels and a potential spin-off, featuring Bruce McClane's now equally disgruntled assholes son, but it was the franchise equivalent of an uncomfortable afterthought. Grandpa sitting in his chair, rocking back and forth, talking about how things used to be as life keeps passing him by. His kids? They stopped listening a long time ago.

In the end it doesn’t matter if it’s a marriage, a movie, or a cross-country trip towards new opportunities. Nothing lasts forever. The train keeps moving.