This afternoon, two friends and I went to see The Adjustment Bureau. It was kind of meh, decent if unremarkable, with some good chemistry between its leads but a little too much boredom and platitude in its action sequences. (Keith Phipps calls it “like The Matrix, as remade by the Hallmark Channel.”)
After the movie, the three of us went to a nearby bookstore for our weekly writing group, where I wrote something vaguely inspired by the movie:
There are three doors, none of them locked, even though strictly speaking at least two of them are supposed to be locked at all times. That, at least, is the tradition, and a tradition old enough that it has long taken on the appearance of formal law. There is no provision in the station’s written orders to suggest the origin of such a tradition, but all the same the station keepers have for centuries kept a log of the sequence and semi-random order in which they lock and unlock specific doors at the close of each and every night. Were such a log book to fall into your hands, you might at first appear perplexed, feel at sea in the face of such a knot of numbers and dates, stretching back through unlined pages for months or even years. But soon enough a pattern would emerge; you would learn an individual keeper’s idiosyncrasies, the specific ways in which she or he thinks about the doors, writes of their myriad destinations, and which specific destinations are most often kept under lock and key. Soon enough, you would learn how to anticipate these decisions, to recognize the patterns before they happen, and to know when the door you want — and you would not be at the station if you didn’t want a door — is unlocked. And then you could just slip inside and be gone, wherever it is that you wanted to be.
Faced with such limitless possibility, which door would you choose?
This is the fear that until now has kept two of the doors locked at all times: that if the doors are not locked, if some sequence or pattern or law is not unnaturally imposed — if only by the keeper’s whim — then all the station will be left with, in the end, is anarchy. Only by limiting the choices of its travelers can the station’s keepers impose some kind of order and balance. So says tradition, and tradition is one of the strongest forces in the world.
But tradition can be circumvented, short-circuited, and even burned to the ground if you know the way, if you have the means, and if the door you truly want is the one that leads straight to anarchy.
If they’d known what was good for them, they never would have hired me as the station keeper. Of all people. But I suppose they would have viewed it as some kind of fitting punishment for my original crimes. There, too, they were locked into the dictates of tradition. They would have viewed my appointment as an act of clemency, my tenure as keeper as rehabilitative, the very thing I most needed. I viewed it simply as the final seed of their destruction.
I suppose, in the end, all of us were fools.
There are three doors, leading anywhere and everywhere, and none of them are locked. Which door, then, would you choose?