Here is the writer’s problem: The audience will foresee anything the Dramatist has foreseen — they will beat you to the punch every time, and figure out that The Butler Did It, unless the writer is prepared to undergo the same process as the Hero, that is, to follow promising clues to the point where they, and thus one’s conscious mind, are proved risible, and carry one’s humiliation down the next avenue, and the next, until one is stunned by the uselessness of one’s own mind. This revelation is always accompanied by denial and then shame. “What?” one thinks, “The answer cannot be this obvious. How can I have been such a fool as not to have seen it, in front of me all the time?” The ending of a film may be so authentically shocking that we viewers realize we could not have foreseen the answer, as we (and the hero) DIDN’T EVEN UNDERSTAND THE QUESTION.

We’re fools whether we dance or not, so we might as well dance.

—Japanese Proverb (via samsaranmusing)