On tying loose ends

Loose ends can be dangerous in life, both literal and figuratively: a rope that is not properly secure can inadvertently hit or seriously harm a passerby, but the case could be the same for that utility bill that you forgot to pay. Because, in both cases, an open end is essentially a source of potentially unpleasant surprises (and humans hate surprises, particularly if they are going to be unpleasant), so our natural trend is to try to neutralize as many sources of uncertainty as possible and retract to a predictable environment where the risk is under control.

This need for control manifests itself very clearly in the most common response to uncertainty: we pay attention. That is how we lose sleep over a big presentation for the next day, not because the presentation itself, which is in all likelihood ready and rehearsed several time, but out of simple fear of all the things that we cannot control. What happens if the laptop crashed halfway through the presentation, or if the traffic is jammed and I do not make it time, or if I spill coffee on my shirt just before, and so forth. We play these scenarios over and over inside our minds trying to find some relief in the idea that we will know how to react, but most of the time it is just humanly impossible to consider all the ways things can go awry, so we get the meta-worry of what happens if we find a trouble that we have not even considered.

Photo: NASA HQ PHOTO

It might seem surprising but, as I pointed out yesterday, the fear of unpredictability does not limit itself to future situations. Even for past events, the potential (future) ramifications can be an endless source of worry, and so people would endlessly revisit their memories to try to find hints in them to soothe their worries: did my boss actually smile when I presented our proposal? Did the client nod slightly when he saw it? The problem of this line of thought is that our attention capabilities are limited and seething in the worry about the past essentially depletes our ability to engage actively with the present or even to plan for the future. That is why we all eventually need to find closure for our business: a firm and (mostly) final statement about the problem in question that would help us to see it a finished, accept the result and move on with our lives. This does not means to succeed every time, just to be able to look at the situation with a certain perspective and decide whether it is won, lost or still worth pursuing.

In the world of entertainment almost every narrative technique make ample use of this need for closure, even as a physical manifestation: when the curtain falls in a theater it is an unmistakable sign that something has come to an end; the same happens when we close a book we are reading or fold a piece of paper; in music it is visible as a fading tone and in the movies as a transition to black; even in speech we tend to use a descending intonation whenever we are finishing a sentence. All these as indications of closure in different levels, because it is not the same to end one sentence than a whole act, but they are closings anyway.

These days it is also rather frequent to see cliffhangers, which are the exact opposite of a closure, signs that the action is far from over and that a deeper resolution is to be expected. This device is frequent in programs thought for television to be inserted right before the commercials so that the audience gets excited about what is to come next and stays with the program. The rise of Netflix and other streaming services has also made these cliffhangers popular at the end of an episode, when the main plot is done for the day but a surprise related to the overall narrative arc so that viewers feel compelled to watch the next episode.

But coming back to the concept of closure, it is remarkable how it is repeated not only across different media but also across cultures. In most languages (although not in all) it is customary to end children's tales with their idiomatic equivalent of "they lived happily ever after", once again as a signal that the tale is now done and nothing further should be expected. Many are semantically equivalent, but there are curious alternatives, such as Bengali, where they say "the story is told and the spinach is eaten by the goat" (that is, irreversibly), in Hungarian, where the formula is "whoever does not believe it shall investigate", some like Kurdish and Nigerian hint that the story "has returned where it came from" or "is gone to be told somewhere else". At any rate, all of them revolve around the fact that there is nothing else to be told, either because it is uninteresting or because there is no story anymore, just a beautiful way to state the end.

Today I came to think about closures because yesterday we watched the very last episode of the British epoch drama "Downton Abbey". In its almost two hours of (somewhat sappy) runtime, originally aired on Christmas Day in 2015, it manages to provide satisfactory closure for most of the unresolved issues of the previous six seasons: (spoiler alert!) the couple who could not have children finally has a son; the scheming servant admits his guilt and gets accepted by the rest of the crew; the snobbish daughter agrees to marry before her position; the prodigal son-in-law comes back from America to establish himself (and his daughter) in the estate of the family; the unlucky daughter also manages to find a husband, and many more. It is only fair to admit that the duration of the episode is fully justified by the number of plot lines that come to an end, and they do so in a careful and convincing way. Many series are forced to provide a rushed end or even stay open for ever because they ratings do not warrant a continuation, but this one not only manage to stay on air for six year, but it was closed in a masterful way that left nothing further to be wished for. As a humble writer I can only hope to provide to you (at least occasionally) similarly convincing closures at the end of my articles. Stay tuned.