How to fulfill an audience?

I mean, really fulfill.

I think I know what nourishes me.

The romantic genre, for example. Boy meets girl – boy loses girl – boy gets girl back. We’re meant to swoon at the “getting back.” And we do, sure, kind of.

But honestly, do we consume fiction to see characters simply get what they want? How banal. How everyday. How superficial. (I’m getting depressed just writing this.)

Case in point—the movie Perfect Sense.

Here’s a story that almost comes true. The film is on a trajectory for greatness, but with the final shot the writer turns his back on the story. He gives us the standard romantic convention—boy gets girl back—roll credits.

The writer opts to merely sate the protagonist’s desire. And for this we have given up two hours of our precious time?

Perfect Sense makes perfect Hollywood sense

Perfect Sense is your standard romance—boy meets girl, etc.—except that the story unfolds during a global epidemic in which the afflicted become deprived of their five senses. Smell is the first to go, then touch, then hearing, etc.

I saw it coming and was excited—billions of people rendered deaf, dumb and blind. Wow! Humanity will discover that the habitual doors of perception have actually been obscuring life’s true beauty. With the senses gone, pure consciousness will prevail…

And love will have its way with the world.

The perfect sense is love

(Didn’t I just write about this just last week?)

All over the world—in India, Mexico, Thailand—whole populations are moving beyond themselves, helping each other, falling into each other’s arms.

This isn’t boy-meets-girl love, this is impersonal love.

This is Big Love.

The best stories end with Big Love

We saw it in Casablanca, where the hero sacrifices the love of a woman for a higher cause. Love for the wider world—this is Big Love. And it doesn’t just satisfy an audience, it nourishes.

But look again—it’s not even the love that melts our hearts, rather it’s the pain of the sacrifice. It’s Bogart emerging out of smallness. It’s the escape from the small self.

It’s the birth of an evolved consciousness.

Okay, just call it “growing up.”

Oh, yeah… almost forgot… we were talking about Perfect Sense.

The boy, who has met girl and then lost girl, is just about to find girl again. They’re on a trajectory to fall into each other’s arms at the moment the disease renders them blind. Excellent. The screen will go black just before they find each other.

It’s a clever twist on the usual ending, which worked for Crocodile Dundee and When Harry Met Sally and scores of Hollywood romances before and since. But wait a minute! Something’s radically wrong here in Perfect Sense.

While the Big Love disease is sweeping the planet, our protagonists only crave each other. Their love is small, puny. No way I’m buying this ending.

I WANT MY MONEY BACK!

Can’t the director see what’s wrong with this picture?

Let this pair of protagonists find each other, sure, good. But by now they’re infected with Big Love, aren’t they? Petty personal preferences take a back seat to a world that so badly needs love to have its way.

These two characters have proven themselves to be great lovers in the standard, carnal, self-interested sense. Now it’s time for great love to serve the wider world.

That’s how the best stories end.

The degree to which Big Love prevails in the climax, that’s what determines our satisfaction with the story.

That’s what fulfills me, at least.

What more can I say with any certainty?

What satisfies you?

The final 1/4 of a story carefully builds in tension with several "above-the-line" scenes that culminate at the Climax with an ultimate emotional release.