Shapes of stories

3 movies that follow Kurt Vonnegut’s shapes of stories:

(THESE CONTAIN SPOILERS) 

1. American Beauty- From bad to worse
1. The movie starts with an estranged family… the father just goes through his boring job and life, the mother is unsuccessful at her job, the two have fallen out of love, and their only daughter hates them both. This is the below average start. The father then has a mid-life crisis fueled by an extramarital crush on his daughter’s classmate, quits his job, and blackmails his boss. The wife has an affair with her business rival, and gets really into guns. The daughter becomes detached from her best friend and the world in favor of the boy next door. In the end, the father, after working to become a better version of himself, gets shot, and the wife has to live with the fallout as the daughter and the boy run off. The movie ends with the family becoming even more estranged, and having to cope with the father's death. This is the infinite downward spiral. Things never get better throughout the movie, although the characters tell themselves that it is.
2. Crazy Rich Asians- Boy meets girl
1. The movie starts with a young couple, Rachel and Nick, in New York. They both are happy with each other, successful at work, and have a comfortable home life. This is the above average start. They travel to the boyfriend’s hometown of Singapore to attend his friend’s wedding. He forgot to mention to her that his family is one of the richest in Southeast Asia, and that he is a very sought after bachelor. He is happy to see his extended family, but they are very hostile towards Rachel because she’s a commoner among the elite. She attends a bachelorette getaway but is shunned and insulted… the fact that she’s dating the heir to the very rich family puts a target on her back. Even worse, his mother really wants to shoo her away, because she thinks she isn’t fit to become part of their family, just a dumb American whose Chinese roots have been done away with. A the wedding reception, his mom reveals that Rachel was conceived from an affair, and that it would cause a scandal if they were to marry. This upsets Rachel and she flees from the reception. She doesn’t speak to Nick for a few days due to the trauma she had been put through, but in the end, he catches her on a flight back to America, proposes to her, and they party in Singapore. Happily ever after! This is the infinite happiness curve.
3.  The Sixth Sense- Man in hole
1. The movie starts out above average, with a happy young couple who had just been gifted with a prestigious award. Their relationship is great, their jobs are great, their house is great… and then one of the husband’s past patients returns with a gun and shoots him. This is where the downward spiral begins. He is presumed to have recovered afterwards, but his wife is distant, and he has a new troubled boy to work with. Upon spending time with him, the child psychologist realizes his symptoms and personality resemble that of a patient who shot him because he didn’t help the patient enough. Then, the boy tells the psychologist that he sees dead people, and upon looking further into the patient, the psychologist finds this to be true. Throughout the movie, the boy is haunted and bullied by ghosts and other kids who find him to be an outcast (respectively) and he has a strained relationship with his mother (as seen with the bumblebee pin, and the fact that he hides his abuse from her), but the psychologist advises the boy to listen to the ghosts instead of running away from them. He does this once, and it brings justice to a little girl (Who initially haunted him) whose mother killed her to gather attention, and it foiled her mother’s plot to kill her sister. This is where the upward curve begins. The boy is now at peace with his condition, and the kids finally stopped bullying him. His mother and him have a normal relationship again, all thanks to the psychologist. While it is revealed that the psychologist died in the beginning and was a ghost all along, it’s still positive because it shows that his wife wasn’t just ignoring him, he literally died and she was mourning his death. When he learns about this, he lets go of her, which is sad, but it is happy in that he is content with accepting reality and letting life run its’ course.