When you retire, you may imagine the trajectory of your final chapters in Hollywood terms because Hollywood has spent your entire life telling you what life is supposed to look like, regardless of how little its stories resemble reality. You may picture yourself as one of the endearing geriatrics in Cocoon, blissfully swimming with friends in a pool that functions less as a swimming pool than as the Fountain of Youth. Hollywood has been selling you fantasies all your life. Eventually, those fantasies seep inside you and become your own.
It is therefore imperative to understand the kinds of stories Hollywood tells. Hollywood essentially gives us two: the Centripetal Story and the Centrifugal Story. When I explain these narratives to my students, I draw two diagrams on the board.
The centripetal diagram consists of circles moving inward, becoming progressively smaller. One arrow points toward the center. I call this Circle A. The centrifugal diagram consists of circles moving outward, becoming progressively larger. One arrow points away from the center. I call this Circle B.
Without explaining what the circles mean, I ask my students to raise their hands if they want their lives to resemble Circle A or Circle B. The overwhelming majority choose Circle B.
Hollywood has taught them well.
The Centrifugal Story dominates Hollywood because it offers what audiences want: transformation, expansion, heroism, and redemption. With notable exceptions, Hollywood has little appetite for the Centripetal Story.
To explain the difference, I begin with a movie Hollywood rarely makes anymore: Citizen Kane. It is not a traditional Hollywood movie because the protagonist is rotten at the beginning and proceeds to rot more thoroughly. My college fiction professor N.V.M. Gonzalez called this process centripetal development. The character does not fundamentally change; he becomes an increasingly concentrated version of what he already is. Charles Foster Kane begins as an egotistical, controlling man hungry for love and recognition. Wealth and power magnify these qualities until they consume his relationships and leave him isolated. Kane does not become someone else. He becomes more completely Kane.
American moviegoers generally don’t want to watch a character rot. They want transformation and redemption. They want the Centrifugal Story. Casablanca provides the classic example. Rick Blaine begins emotionally closed, cynical, and committed to self-protection: “I stick my neck out for nobody.” Unlike Kane, whose defects become increasingly concentrated, Rick moves outward from the imprisoned self toward other people, moral responsibility, and sacrifice. His love for Ilsa initially tempts him to retreat further into private desire, but in the end he relinquishes her so she can leave with Victor Laszlo and contribute to something larger than any of them. Rick becomes less enclosed by the ego.
Rick has undergone the classic Hollywood character arc. His old life is finished, and he enters a new world as a new man. Hollywood did not invent this narrative. It inherited it from the conversion story, most famously Augustine’s Confessions. Meghan O’Gieblyn calls this narrative structure the Autobiography: thoughtful reflection on a former life followed by a new life vastly superior to the old one. The structure is seductively tidy. You were lost. Then you were found. The movement is linear. There is no returning because you are dead to the person you once were. Revelation has compelled you to let go of your wastrel existence.
The problem, O’Gieblyn observes, is that “You cannot understand the meaning of your life while you are still living it.” The conversion narrative solves this problem by allowing you to die without actually dying. Once dead to the old life, you can stand outside it, interrogate it, and contrast that decrepit existence with the person you have become. As O’Gieblyn writes, “Augustine is the father of the genre because he is the one who discovered the crucial loophole: die, then go on living.” Renounce the old life, be born again, and you acquire a second life from which to narrate the first.
The conversion narrative is also the Hollywood narrative, and if you’re retiring, as I am, you want your final chapters to resemble that unmistakable Hollywood circle: centrifugal, with the arrow pointing outward.
But after struggling with addiction, recovery, and relapse, O’Gieblyn finds this narrative as hollow as it is seductive. She fought like hell to beat her addictions and make her life “a perfect dovetail of conversion and deconversion narratives.” She wanted a trajectory as tidy as Augustine’s. Life refused to cooperate. She fears that instead of moving confidently outward, she may be traveling in circles. “My life has lost its arc,” she writes, “and I fear that it’s become less a narrative than one of those demented children’s songs that goes around in circles.”
Yet O’Gieblyn is no nihilist. She still burns for understanding. She still feels compelled to write autobiography as a way of making sense of her failures and triumphs. She still hopes to find some form of wholeness within her contradictions.
Perhaps those contradictions should not discourage her. Perhaps Augustine’s narrative is simply too neatly ordered to be true. Perhaps children crave cozy narratives while adults learn to tolerate the real stuff, even when the real stuff refuses to provide a feel-good ending.
Dara Horn explores this problem in her provocatively titled People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present. Jewish literature couldn’t care less about my centripetal and centrifugal circles. Life is too unruly for either trajectory. It is a mishmash of paths. Horn considers our hunger for satisfying endings after a reader complained that her novel The World to Come, centered on the survivor of a pogrom, wasn’t “uplifting” enough. The complaint revealed something curious. Even sophisticated readers want stories to gather their loose threads into a satisfying knot. We want endings that reassure us that the universe is fundamentally coherent, that every life can finally be rendered as Circle A or Circle B.
Horn is suspicious of this craving.
Drawing upon Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending, she argues that our expectation of tidy resolution owes much to Christianity. Christian history moves toward fulfillment. Its central drama is redemption. The scattered fragments of existence are ultimately gathered into a meaningful whole. Jewish storytelling, by contrast, is often more willing to refuse closure. The Hebrew Bible ends not with final resolution but with an unfinished journey. Questions remain unanswered. Promises remain unfulfilled. The story continues beyond the final page.
That difference fascinates me. Christianity often invites us to see history as one enormous redemption arc. Jewish literature is more willing to leave us standing inside the mystery. Rather than explaining suffering, it asks us to endure it. Rather than dissolving ambiguity, it teaches us to inhabit ambiguity with patience and humility. These stories do not pretend that chaos can always be conquered. They suggest that wisdom may consist in remaining faithful while chaos refuses to yield. I wonder whether remaining faithful amid the madness resembles the kind of attention Simone Weil asks us to cultivate as we approach our problems with calm, patience, and perhaps even faith.
Perhaps that is the more mature vision. Perhaps the Augustinian character arc can infantilize us when we mistake it for a description of how life actually works. Hero stories easily become propaganda because they give us the emotional resolution we crave, whether or not reality warrants it.
Hollywood has little incentive to tell us otherwise. It traffics in grand mythologies designed to activate our deepest cravings. Consider the 1985 movie Cocoon. It offers a saccharine myth of centrifugal time in which old age becomes an opportunity for expansion rather than contraction. Its elderly characters escape physical decline, rediscover vitality, romance, friendship, and adventure, and ultimately transcend mortality itself by leaving Earth with aliens. Instead of time narrowing their lives toward death, time opens outward toward limitless possibility. Hollywood takes aging, one of life’s great experiences of diminishment, and transforms it into liberation.
The Centrifugal Story is alive and well.
The trouble is that it may be more myth than life.
