No Other Choice: Plot vs. Structure (And the Secret to Making Us Care)

Episode Transcript: No Other Choice

This episode, we are going to be talking about Park Chan-wook’s fabulous new film, No Other Choice, written by Park Chan-wook along with Lee Kyoung-mi, Don McKellar, and Jahye Lee. We’re going to be talking about the difference between plot and structure.

Plot, at the end of the day, is boring. If you go read the plot of the greatest movies ever made — go read the summary of The Godfather — you’ll notice that when it’s abstracted down to plot, it seems boring.

Whereas structure can feel riveting, and structure can make us care about sometimes the most unlikely characters. In this case, we’re literally watching a guy killing off innocent people so he can get a job. And the reason we care about him is not the plot. It’s the structure. I’m going to show you how that works.

We’re also going to be talking about how to navigate towards the love in your characters and why that’s important, and how that all intersects with theme in the construction of this incredible film. Fair warning: I am going to spoil some of this movie — I’ll let you know before we get to the really big spoilers, but I am going to talk about the plot.

If you know anything at all about the film, you know it is about a man who loses his job and starts to kill off his likely competitors as he tries to get a new job. With a premise like that, the advice of looking for the love seems odd. But I’m going to show you how looking for the love in this character — even in this incredibly dark character, in this incredibly dark comedy — elevates the script, helps us fall in love with him, and helps us see ourselves in him.

In the end, it helps Park Chan-wook land the very complicated theme he’s trying to land. Because No Other Choice might be a broad comedy, but it’s a broad comedy of profound meaning — and perhaps the first really serious look at some of the transformative choices that are happening in our society right now as they’re starting to be reflected in film.

“Losing Your Job Isn’t the Problem”

There’s a wonderful moment right before the death of Bummo, the first person to actually die in No Other Choice. Ironically, Bummo does not die by the hand of Man-su, the main character, despite Man-su’s plan to kill him as a competitor he must take out in order to get his chance at a new job.

Bummo actually dies at the hands of his wife. And shortly before murdering him, his wife says this incredible line — and this is me paraphrasing from memory, so hopefully I’m getting it right: “Losing your job isn’t the problem. The way you deal with it is the problem.”

We have been watching her deal with the problem of her husband from the very first scene where he’s introduced — basically introduced with a giant fart. What we find out is that he has been laid off from his job and has basically given up all meaning in his life. Because like every other male character in No Other Choice, Bummo’s entire view of who he is, his entire identity, is connected to his work.

And it’s a really interesting choice, because all of these male characters work at paper factories. They’re paper guys. Their dream is to win the Pulp Man of the Year award. These are people who take working at a paper manufacturer the way that we take writing a screenplay — people of great passion for their job, whose identity is wrapped up in their job, whose whole meaning is wrapped up in their job.

Over the course of No Other Choice, we’re going to watch all of these characters — not just Man-su, who loses his job and with it loses all meaning, but all these characters he is either killing or attempting to kill. And we’re going to see what happens when the value of your life grows entirely from these toxic masculine ideas about the purpose of your job.

See, the line that Bummo’s wife delivers is not just for Bummo. It is for every character in this piece. It is actually the theme. All of these men, with the exception of the very last murder — who actually has a job — have lost their jobs. And of all of them, there is only one who’s dealing with it in any kind of reasonable way: the second-to-last murder, who is working at a shoe shop and making the best of a bad situation. He’s the only character dealing with it in any way related to practicality, or humbleness, or what’s actually going on in his world.

But our main character, when we meet him at the beginning of this film, is a man who literally has it all. He has a great job. He has the most amazing wife, Miri. He has two wonderful kids he loves — one of whom is on the spectrum in some way, but has a gift for playing the cello. He has two beautiful dogs and a beautiful home. He’s purchased and restored the family home where he grew up, which was lost when his father lost his pig farm — and, we’ll find out later, committed suicide because of it.

So this is about toxic masculinity, and the idea of connecting your job to the meaning of your life. For the most part, the only words of reason in this piece are spoken by the wives. And at the center of it is this one line that ripples through all of these stories: the problem is not that you lost your job. The way you deal with it is the problem.

Plot vs Structure: The Crap That Happens to Happen

With this brilliant thematic line, this character — and of course these brilliant writers — are illustrating the difference between plot and structure.

The plot of your movie is not the problem. We’re so focused on plot; we think plot is the problem. But the plot of your movie is not the problem — how you deal with it is the problem. And similarly for your characters: the plot of the movie is not the problem, and it’s also not the solution. The way they deal with it is the problem, and it’s also the solution.

In other words, plot is just the crap that happens to happen. Whether your character loses their job, loses their wife, loses their family, whether your character wins the lottery, wins a new car, gets their dream job — it’s all just plot. It’s just the crap that happens to happen in your movie, your TV show, or your life.

Structure is the choices the characters make in relation to the plot. It’s how they deal with it. That’s the heart of plot vs structure screenwriting — and structure is actually what we’re connecting to in our scripts. Plots are interchangeable. They’re not that important.

What’s exciting about No Other Choice is not watching this man kill a bunch of people. We’ve seen a million movies that do that. What’s exciting about this piece is watching the problematic ways that he deals with it.

In fact, this is what a character’s change is. A character’s change is watching the problematic ways they deal with the plot that happens to happen in their lives. In a TV show, we often watch them repeat the same problematic choices again and again in bigger and bigger ways. In a feature film, we almost always watch the character make the same mistakes again and again — watch them deal with it in all the wrong ways — until finally something new happens.

So the concept I want you to keep in your head is that plot and structure are different. Plot is the crap that happens to happen — and pretty much almost anything you make up will work, as long as you are attacking the character where they live. Structure is the choices characters make in relation to what happens to happen.

What Your Audience Is Actually Connecting To

This is also true in our lives. We think it’s our plot that’s going to give us meaning, but it’s not true. It’s actually how we deal with the plot in our lives that’s going to give us meaning.

And that’s what your audience is watching when they watch your movie. Because here’s the thing: most of your audience is never going to kill a bunch of people like Man-su in this movie. Most of your audience is never going to rob a bank, never going to war, never going to get caught up in a thriller or a horror movie. Most of your audience is never going to have the experience of the characters you are writing in most genre movies.

Which means that what they’re actually connecting to, even though they’re being entertained by the plot, is something different. The thing that allows them to look at your character, bond with your character, and go, that’s me up there, is not what’s happening. It’s the choices your character is making in relation to it that allow them to go, “Oh my God, I get it. I know what that feels like — to feel like your whole identity is caught up in this one thing.”

Looking for the Love, Even in a Dark Character

That’s one of the reasons why it’s so important to look for the love. Even when characters are doing really terrible things, when you look for the love, it allows you to get underneath the character.

All of these characters deal with what happens in different ways. But how does Man-su deal with losing his job? Well, he kind of deals with it like Hamlet. In fact, the structure of No Other Choice is kind of reminiscent of Hamlet.

At the beginning of Hamlet, Hamlet gets charged by his father’s ghost: Hey son, I love you, man, but your uncle killed me. I know you love him. I know you’re kind of a spoiled prince and you’re not used to taking revenge — you’re more of a thinker, dude. But your uncle killed me, and now he’s sleeping with your mom, and you are the only one who can do anything about this.

And what’s really interesting about Hamlet is that he doesn’t rush out to do something. He thinks about it. He comes up with a plan. He kind of does it, he kind of doesn’t do it. He hesitates. It takes him time to decide. He wrestles with it. And that’s part of what’s so beautiful about this Man-su character, and what allows us to connect with him and care about him.

I’m not saying that’s the only way to do it. Dexter does a brilliant job of this with a different kind of character: a sociopath trying to live the code his father taught him. But you can see that’s also connected to beauty. Yes, Dexter happens to be a sociopath, but what’s beautiful is watching him try to live up to the code his father gave him — watching him try to feel and love and care like other people can. That’s what we’re watching when we watch Dexter.

Man-su is not a sociopath, at least as far as I can tell. Man-su is a lot more like us. He’s a dude who is, in the Buddhist sense, attached to his job — meaning he can no longer differentiate between who he is and what his role is. He can no longer see the value of himself outside of his Pulp Man of the Year award.

His company’s been bought by an American company, and when we first meet him, we see the love in him. They’re going to lay off a bunch of his people, and he is practicing a speech to protect them. He’s not just going to fire these people — he’s going to defend them. He has no other choice. These are the people he’s worked with for the last twenty years.

So we start off and we meet a beautiful man. A man who has love underneath him. This is his starting point, and we’re going to move that character to murder.

Backing Your Character Into a Corner

He goes to give his speech, and the American guy who’s bought the company doesn’t even listen. He drives off in the middle of what he’s saying, and the next thing you know, Man-su is fired along with all the other guys. His plan to protect these people did not work.

And like any normal human being, how does he deal with it? Well, he’s real sad about it, but he starts applying for jobs. But he’s not getting any jobs — because despite being eminently qualified, there are other people who are also out of work, and some of them are even more qualified than he is.

Now all the things he actually cares about are starting to get attacked. He’s at risk of losing his house — this precious possession, this house that his father lost, that he repurchased and rebuilt, with his precious greenhouse where he practices his bonsai, his art form. We meet a man at the beginning who literally hugs his family and says, “I have it all.” So we know he’s going to fall.

Despite all his success in his career, he’s working at a warehouse, and he ends up losing that job because he has to leave for a job interview — and the interview doesn’t even work out. Now he’s going to lose his house.

And his wife — his wife, who unlike him is dealing with things in a practical, real way — is such a wonderful character. She takes control: we’re going to make some changes around here. She goes and gets a job. We’re going to cut back this spending. We’re going to cancel Netflix.

The only thing she’s not going to cancel is her daughter’s cello lessons. Because even though her daughter will not play a single song for her or her husband — even though they only hear her play scales — this is the one gift her daughter has that may someday lead to her being independent. That’s the one thing they will not compromise on. So you can see the mother’s love. The dad’s love.

But of course Miri does insist: we are going to have to sell the house. Because if we don’t sell the house, they’re going to take it from us anyway.

What’s really interesting, as you can see, is that Man-su is backed into a corner where he feels he has no other choice. He cannot sell the house — his dad’s house. It’s his identity. He cannot let this happen to his family. He’s been raised in a culture and a society, just like our society, that tells a man he must protect and provide for his family — that that is his identity and his role, the only thing that matters.

And to make it even harder, his daughter’s teacher comes and tells them: I can’t teach your daughter anymore. Not because she’s not good enough, but because she’s too good. She’s too gifted. She needs a world-class teacher who’s going to be much more expensive, and she needs a $50,000 cello. And you want her to be independent, right?

It’s this love that drives our Hamlet character towards murder. It’s not ugliness, it’s not darkness. The problem is not the plot. The problem is the way the character’s dealing with it.

Unlike his practical, pragmatic wife who’s dealing with their new reality, this is a character who’s trying to hold onto things as if the world weren’t changing — and in the process is going to lose everything that was once his morality.

What’s also really interesting is that as he starts to stalk his kills — very carefully choosing only the people who are true competitors, who have better qualifications than he does — he’s going to start to see himself in all of them. Because they are also men who feel like they have no other choice. They are also men for whom the real problem is not that they lost their job; the real problem is their toxic masculinity, the way they’re dealing with it. He’s going to start to take on their problems as if they were his own.

Bummo, whose wife will ultimately end up murdering him — one of the things Man-su oversees is that Bummo’s wife is having an affair. And he takes that information and starts to wonder: is my wife having an affair? He starts to take the ideas he’s seeing in other people’s lives and apply them, attach to them, act as if they were true in his own. So this is a man who, at the center of it, is not dealing with reality — who believes there is no other choice, and who’s building a tighter and tighter vice for himself.

You can see the hook of it: at the center is a guy trying to protect his home, his daughter, his family. The problem is not the desire. The problem is the way he’s dealing with it.

The Flower Pot: Isolating Visual Moments of Action

For his first attempt at murder, he plans to kill the man whose job he wants. And I want to point out this scene, because it’s one of the truly brilliant examples of a concept I talk about all the time called isolating visual moments of action. It’s also a great opportunity to see the Hamlet of it all.

He’s tracking the man, and because it’s a comedy, it’s done in a very funny way. He’s not great at this. His plan is to stand up above the man with a flower pot. And this is a man, Man-su, who loves gardening — who loves his bonsai trees. So his passion is getting turned and twisted into an object of violence, because he believes he has no other choice.

And we watch him wrestle with it. First he picks up a plant, then he sets it down — he can’t quite do it. Then he picks up a bigger plant, and he can’t quite do it. Then he picks up an even bigger plant. And this is just such a brilliant moment: the disgusting water from the plant drips down all over his body and face.

I want to point out this moment because this is one of those moments that elevates you as a writer, if you can see this level of specificity. Often as writers, we think the job of the scene is to move the plot forward — in this case, does he kill the guy or not, or what plan does he come up with next? And it’s hard sometimes to stop and realize: no, the job of the scene is to be the scene. Moving the plot forward is just something that’s going to happen to happen.

What’s going to make us fall in love with the scene is its specificity — watching it closely in your mind’s eye, letting each moment really matter. Sitting with that pot and realizing pots have water in them. Sitting in that thematic moment where he’s literally covered with the filth of what he’s about to do — where this metaphor for the objects he loves almost becomes an object of ugliness.

And yeah, the guy he’s trying to kill seems like a real jerk, but he’s also an innocent man. He’s not deserving of murder. And our Hamlet character, just like the Hamlet in Hamlet, fails to go through with it. There’s something about that moment that stops him — and there’s a woman who notices him, who stops him. Instead of murdering the guy with the plant — it’s a pepper plant — he buys the plant from the woman and takes it home.

And this becomes the next step in his plan. He realizes that even if he kills this guy, there are better candidates out there. He’s got to figure out who the better candidates are before he takes this guy out.

This is actually the plot of the film, and it’s extremely simple: he’s going to create a fake company called Pepper Paper. He’s going to get the resumes from all the out-of-work guys, figure out which ones are better than he is, take them out, and then kill the guy with the job. He’ll be the best applicant. That’s his goal, and it’s an ugly fricking goal.

And we’re actually dealing with the reality for him of how ugly and hard this is. Because he’s not Dexter. He’s a normal human being, pushed to the extreme, feeling like he has no other choice.

Almost Every Movie Could Be Called No Other Choice

This, again, is what you are doing as you build your structure. In a way, almost every movie could be called No Other Choice, because this is your job with your character: you want to drive them to a place where they feel like they have no other choice but to make a choice that is going to have a huge impact on them, positive or negative.

Drive them to a place where their belief systems about the world — better said, the fragmented, broken, and confused way their reality is put together — push them to make the worst decision. But that decision is going to feel inevitable, because for them it feels like there’s no other choice. You’re going to move them through that vice of their own making to see what exists on the other side for them. You’re going to change them.

In this case, we’re going to take this sweet guy, and at this point we’ve moved him all the way to Hamlet — except a slightly darker version of Hamlet. Because it’s not a nice daddy ghost that tells him to do it, and it’s not evil Claudius he’s trying to kill. It’s the innocents.

But of course, that’s what happens to Hamlet too. Ophelia, Laertes — all these people he actually cares about are the ones who end up dying. Yes, he happens to get the bad guy at the end, but even Gertrude dies. This is what happens when you pursue the wrong thing because you feel like you have no other choice.

Feeling a Character Lose His Soul

And just like Hamlet, we’re going to watch this character struggle with it. We watch him struggle with the first murder. Then we watch him go to pull off the second murder, which also goes badly. He gets bit by a snake. All kinds of things go wrong. And then the wife ends up in the middle of the melee, pulling off the murder in a fit of passion, with his own gun.

So even the second murder — he certainly instigated it, and it would not have happened if it weren’t for him. But everything’s gone wrong, he’s barely escaped with his life, and he’s driven a woman from a place of frustration with her husband to a place of murder. But we’re moving the character.

In fact, the first actual murder he pulls off is potentially the ugliest of them, because the man he murders seems to be a really kind man. This man also has no other choice, but he’s dealing with it much more like Miri — practically. Yes, he may have been a great paper man at one point, but now he’s doing what’s necessary. He’s working at a shoe store, working real hard, and people aren’t being nice to him.

And he thinks Man-su is going to buy some shoes from him. In fact, Man-su says he’s going to buy the shoes for his daughter — bringing back that love, even in this darkness, because it is that love for his daughter that’s driving all of this.

And that moment where he executes that man — where he shoots him — is brutal. Because Bummo was a farting, lazy, grumpy, miserable dude who’d driven his wife to another man’s arms — almost as messed up in his own way as our main character. But this man is humble. He has a child that he loves. This man is someone we can see ourselves in. And so we get this brutal murder at the center of the film, where we can really feel our main character lose his soul.

When Love Turns Into Horror: The Bonsai Wire

He sticks the man he’s killed in the trunk of his car. Everything goes wrong, because everything has to go wrong. He’s about to cut up the body to dispose of it, totally Dexter-style — in the greenhouse, of course. But he can’t cut it up. He’s not Dexter. It’s too disgusting. And again, that’s the theme.

What he doesn’t know is that his son is watching through the top of the greenhouse. And to make it more complicated, more complex, his son is going on his own journey, trying to deal with the poverty. He’s getting involved in some petty theft with his friend, trying to rip off his friend’s dad’s store so they can resell some iPhones. Why? Again, from love. He wants to help his mom. And he’s also, by the way, smoking — which mom would be really upset about.

Throughout this, we’re finding out that Man-su is an addict who kicked alcoholism. In fact, almost all of these men are addicts — almost all of them are alcoholics. And one of the really cool things we watch is that he does not violate that. No matter what’s going on, he keeps himself clean. But he does start smoking again.

And there’s this really cool, complicit moment where he gives his son back the pack of cigarettes and says, “I didn’t tell your mom.” So they have this weird complicity where dad has hidden the kid’s secret. That is a tiny little mirror for what must have happened way back when with this main character and his own father — fathers passing down their little secrets to their kids and unwittingly grooming them in their own image.

So his son’s up on the roof smoking a cigarette, and he sees his father’s secret, which is horrifying. He sees his father with a chainsaw, about to cut up a dead body. Dad ends up not using the chainsaw — he just can’t bring himself to do it. What he does instead is he uses the wire that he uses for his bonsai trees, and he binds the body up into a ball.

And this is a shockingly beautiful image. Just like the image with the plant earlier, once again the object of what this man loves has been turned into an image of horror. This movie is about what happens when love gets turned into ugliness and horror because the character feels they have no other choice.

So we get this unbelievable image of this bound-up body that he ends up burying in the ground and planting a tree over — which is in fact what he’s doing throughout this whole movie. He’s trying to bury a body in the ground so he can build a beautiful tree.

Earlier in the movie, Bummo’s wife complains that their pear tree, I believe, is infested and dying — and how can Bummo do nothing about it? And here’s our main character, Man-su, trying to build something beautiful out of something ugly, because he feels like he has no other choice.

The Hamlet Moment: Justifying the Final Murder

So he buries the body and plants a tree over it. And then he goes off to pull off his final murder: he’s going to kill the guy who’s got the job he wants, because now all the top competitors are out of his way.

But again, the scene is not about advancing the plot. It’s not about what happens; it’s about how the character deals with it. And what we’re watching is basically Hamlet.

We watch him connect with this guy. They kind of bond, and it even seems like — it’s not certain — the guy might talk to his boss and see if he can get our main character a job. Because the truth is, the job is eating this guy alive. He’s lost his wife over this job. He bought this beautiful house with the money from this job, thinking he was going to barbecue outside every day, and he hasn’t had a single barbecue. His first barbecue is while getting drunk with Man-su, the guy who’s planning to kill him. He’s lost everything for this job he’s trying to hold onto.

It looks like maybe he might recommend Man-su for the job. But then again, he’s very, very drunk. It’s possible he won’t. And Man-su has his Hamlet moment, where he basically says: “I don’t want to kill this guy. But if I don’t do it, then all the other murders will be for nothing. I’ve already done all these terrible things. I have no choice but to do this last one.”

So here’s this guy who lost his job fighting to do the right thing, who’s now doing the wrong thing — the most wrong thing — to justify the other wrong things he’s done. Trying to build something beautiful out of something ugly, because he feels, like all the characters, that he has no other choice.

Meanwhile, in order to pull off this final murder, he ends up in a situation where he has to drink. He’s been secretly pouring out his shots while the man he’s trying to kill gets drunker and drunker. But then the man gets a brilliant idea to do a shot bombed into a beer, and there’s no way for him to hide it. And this man who has held onto this one thing — his sobriety — loses even that.

This man who feels like he has no other choice, who feels like he has to provide, who feels like he’s in it on his own — when in fact his wife is actually there for him throughout. There’s this wonderful moment where she says to him, in the subtext, “If you’re doing something terrible, I’m in it with you.” But he can’t see that. And he doesn’t really want to kill this guy, but he kind of does it anyway — because otherwise all the other terrible things he has done will mean nothing.

And it’s with that that we send him back to his wife. And we see that although she’s still there for him, something has been lost between these two forever.

Even the Practical Wife Stops Dealing With Reality

While all this is going on, we’ve also seen his relationship with his wife devolve. He starts to suspect her of cheating. She’s got this job with a dentist who clearly likes her, but he is the one messing up his relationship — because he’s off “interviewing,” but really killing people, while she’s getting closer and closer with this dentist.

We find out at the very beginning that the first thing he does is buy her a pair of dancing shoes. She loves dancing, and there’s this big dance everything’s supposed to be culminating toward. But while she’s out at the dance, he’s off killing somebody, and he shows up late. And it looks like she’s with this dentist. She’s not — but having seen the infidelity of Bummo’s wife, he thinks maybe this is happening to him too. He starts to suspect.

And his wife is no dummy. She can see bad things happening. There’s this incredible moment where mom basically goes — again, I’m paraphrasing — why are both of the men in my house hiding something from me? She confronts her son, because she knows he’s hiding something. And he tells her about the dead body.

And Miri, who’s a practical woman — she knows her husband, she’s smart, she deals with reality — knows what he’s likely to have done and how he’s likely to have disposed of this body. She goes and finds that tree, and she digs it up. And she sees.

This is what’s so incredible: we are waiting for her to leave her husband. We are waiting for her to put her foot down. But she doesn’t. This woman we’ve seen as practical moves to this place of not dealing with reality, because she feels like she has no other choice.

She lies to her son. The woman moves from practicality and dealing with the truth to reinforcing the lie. She tells her son that her husband buried a pig. She protects her son from the truth of who his father has become.

And of course, the pig she’s making up is symbolic — because his father was a pig farmer who had to kill all of his pigs because they were sick, because he had no other choice. Who lost his farm. Who started all of this psychology rolling that’s built up to this point, in this man who wants to be good, who’s driven by love.

The Real Theme: Plot vs Structure in an Age of AI

As this movie culminates all of these different elements — and now I’m really going to spoil it, because I’m going to give away this beautiful, powerful ending — Park Chan-wook is holding in his back pocket the real theme. You don’t even know where this piece is going, because you feel like you’ve been watching a comedy thriller.

But it’s so grounded, because it’s driven by these characters who have real love underneath them — who, for all their flaws and the terrible things they’re doing, are driven by love. This man who wants his daughter to have her fricking cello and her independence, who wants to protect his family, who feels like there’s no other choice — in a world of people living compromised lives because they believe there is no other choice, because they don’t want to deal with the fact that their reality is shifting, and that their choices and their lifestyles may need to shift with it.

All of this culminates with mom hearing, for the first time, her daughter play the cello. And it’s so fricking beautiful. It’s so beautiful that even for all our moral outrage at what’s happened, a part of us goes: was it all worth it? Because this little girl has a gift that her father’s horrific actions have given her, and their home is saved.

But the little girl notes that the tree is infested. It’s being eaten by ladybugs. So we have this thing of trying to make something beautiful out of something ugly — the beauty of what she’s playing underscoring the ugliness of how it’s been built.

And finally, Man-su gets his job. And this is where that final card gets laid down on the table. Man-su gets his job, but it will not be the job he’s always had. He will not be supervising people. Because this movie is not about a man looking for a job. This movie is about AI. This movie is about what’s happening for all of us, and what’s going to happen — or potentially going to happen — in our world.

What’s actually happened is the company is now going one hundred percent AI. They’re going to run “lights out,” meaning the AI robots don’t even need the lights turned on. They just need one guy: our main character. In fact, they tell him, you’re not going to be beating the paper rolls with your stick anymore — one of the things we see him doing early on, one of the things he takes pride in, a way, I believe, of testing them.

So we’re watching this man who starts the movie doing the old thing around which he has such pride, fighting for the lives and careers of the people around him. And he’s won. He’s gotten the thing he fought for the whole movie. But he’s basically the one guy who survives. And even there, his job is not his job. His job is simply to be the one guy in a world of automation.

Throughout this piece, there’s been a running gag — a promo piece that the man he’ll eventually kill has made, basically talking about how paper doesn’t destroy the environment, paper renews the environment. We’re not killing trees; we’re replanting trees.

And juxtaposed with all of this, we end on these incredibly disturbing images of automated machines chopping up the trees. And we realize that the trees are the people. The trees are us. And that we’re moving towards this place because everybody, just like our main character, wants to protect their family, their livelihood, their identity — wants to believe there is no other choice, or truly does believe there is no other choice. And in this way, we are all complicit.

Because the problem, as Bummo’s wife points out — whose name I wish I knew — is not that you lost your job. The problem is how you deal with it. The problem is not that plot is happening in our world. The problem, or the question, is how we deal with it. That’s why I said at the beginning that this film, in a lot of ways, is the first film to seriously deal with the question of AI.

It deals with it in a shocking and disturbing way. It deals with it through theme. But it’s also asking us a profound question, which is: like the main character, there are forces happening in our world that are terrifying, that are beyond our control. And maybe, maybe that also is just plot. Maybe the real problem — or the real answer — is how you deal with it.