seen miles and miles of freaks before

someone (more specifically, as i have found out from wikipedia, georges polti) once decided that in all of fiction, there are but 36 dramatic situations. essentially, all the stories in the world fall under one of the 35 categories, or is a combination of some of these 36 situations. while that makes for a pretty huge number of permutations, there is something strange about thinking that all happenings in life can essentially be filed under a list of 36.

why the interest in this? i watched parts of 3 different movies yesterday night. i caught the end of 'blood diamond', which i haven't seen before. it was obviously meant to be highly emotional, with leonardo dicaprio, despite the eccentricities of his character's speech pattern, conveying his affection for someone through a satellite phone will being hunted down by african militants. then i saw what was the start of the last act of 'children of men', which saw clive owen assisting in the birthing of the world's first baby in decades. then i saw the start of the rising action of 'walking tall', the horrible action film starring dwayne 'the rock' johnson of wrestling fame, which featured a rough fight scene that ended with the protagonist's defeat by a thug using a weapon that obviously gave him an unfair advantage.

and then i was struck by how life is essentially made up of a bunch of set-pieces. if movies reflect life, which i believe in a way they must in order to justify their popularity, haven't we seen all of these situations before? is polti right then? that all fiction, and hence all life, is made up of but 36 situations played out in infinite permutations. has it all been done before?

humanity struggles to be unique. we all want to feel that we are special, but at some point, we have to simply admit that there is nothing at all special about what we are going through. most of us are singularly unexceptional, and not worse off for that. but then what is the value of our life, if we are but silhouettes of each other? why live if we are doomed to follow in the path of our forebears for better or for worse?

there is perhaps a lot of logic missing in the above argument, owing to the fact that i probably do not believe it myself. what is the story of my life? right now, it's neglecting my sociology readings to write. what does that say? what kind of dramatic situation would that be? perhaps what i find hard to come to terms with is the idea that my relationship with another human being is not in some ways unique, in that it represents the meeting of two unique people in a moment in time which will never be repeated ever again. how true is that, given that our story would have already been told?

then i remind myself it doesn't matter, because i have yet to live through it, and since life is subjective, that's what matters. i still want to write my story, because even if it was also simultaneously someone else's, it would never diminish what it made me feel. there you go. an unexpected ending with some optimism for a change.

(as a side note: i have never wished for the ability to read minds as much as i do now. greedily, i hope this ability will work over the internet. i believe the bandwidth should be sufficient, even across a large span of ocean. i would settle for the ability to see subtext. either would be extremely helpful in resolving a certain issue)