Plot twists aren’t the only measure of a life well lived but they might be the best one, Tyler concludes after many idle hours pondering the wild but moderately disappointing world around him, so his life, he decides, should be a more compelling story, and one with better action scenes than roadside fist fights with cornfed locals, but like many young American white men his age Tyler lacks a clear inciting incident prompting him to answer a call to adventure on his hero’s journey so he gifts himself motivation by burning down his childhood home because that sets up or at least suggests an epic revenge narrative stuffed with twists because for example maybe he’s actually the villain like in that TV show where the enormous quiet guy realizes he’s the villain after reading a bible and/or becoming a ruthless crime boss with a sad backstory, so Tyler figures being haunted by the mysterious deaths of loved ones is the way to go, but
––plot twist––
nobody’s in the house when he burns it down because his family has ditched him for sunnier climes and more sedate and strategic offspring (or maybe they were already dead) so nobody cared about the uninhabited farm house, so Tyler, newly cut adrift from his former life’s future as the area guy who comes into town once a month and keeps to himself and seems nice and smells okay but still might be a serial killer, Tyler requires from his life some surplus or complicating adventure and contacts the military recruiting office, explaining his interest in being secretly badass and lethal but in a sanctioned way but the military recruiters look at the eager but eccentric young arsonist they’d found in Tyler and say “nah” but
––plot twist––
Tyler catches America during a “low standards” era of corporate patriotism and international intrigue so the unnamed organizing force of “the military” doesn’t care about Tyler’s youthful-hero inadequacies and despite Tyler establishing himself as an underdog, outsider, and maybe an anti-hero he’s swiftly granted permission to join an excitingly secretive experimental branch of the American armed forces that might be important to the story later as a plot twist or backstory or even as backstory twist, and after proving himself a true warrior during the montage portion of his young adulthood by doing a lot of pushups and crunches and learning how to load and aim a semiautomatic rifle and letting military doctors do experimental science stuff to him for foreshadowing reasons and finally drinking no fewer than two shot glasses of cum-spiked urine provided to him by commanding officers because only manly men can brave the test of pointless disgust or whatever, at this point a demoralized Tyler washes out and ends up living in a houseboat in Panama City, Florida and becomes addicted to meth and works as an extreme-adventure tour guide for rich white guys flying in from corporate offices in places like Jacksonville and Dallas, one of whom “accidentally” shoots him in the back of his head when they visit an unpopulated atoll, but
––plot twist––
it turns out Tyler is actually the best secretly badass soldier ever and he thrives doing highly-skilled war stuff and the next stage of Tyler’s hero’s journey unfolds when he’s deployed overseas in a lightly fictionalized war effort and gets shot at by a bunch of people, many of whom have good reason to do so and most of whom Newly Badass Tyler kills via firearms or explosives, pausing now and then at sunrise or sunset to quietly smoke one rancid cigarette and feel maybe wistful about the sacrifices he has made on the way to embrace his fate, and like a lot of heroes Tyler developed ambivalence as his main personality trait besides spite and arson but
––plot twist––
Tyler chooses, like a proper American and not like his well-meaning but emotionally distant parents or his smarmy brother, golden child and secret villain Grayson, to shove introspection’s cold undertow aside in favor of expensive and maladaptive habits and pastimes more in line with his on-the-go/hired killer lifestyle and are risky enough to be helpful reminders Tyler is, no matter what, basically alive and probably on his way toward at least a medium-sized happy ending or at least a feature role in a true crime saga but after Tyler fucks up both his knees on a secret mission to neutralize bad guys it isn’t quite a plot twist but while his hero’s journey should end here with Tyler arriving back to his old hometown and working at a liquor store and launching an unsuccessful campaign for county sheriff and eventually hanging himself in his garrulous and frequently sundowning uncle’s barn with some colorful rock-climbing rope from someone else’s forgotten adventure that gave shape to an equally forgotten life, actually mundane tragedy is averted thanks to plot twists, well-maintained joints, determination, enthusiasm toward suffering in silence, morphine/ketamine cocktails, and the inevitability that someone somewhere in the world at some point probably is or was a hero, or more or less a hero, and Tyler, while still overseas and waiting around in a montage of quietly cinematic sin emporium K holes meets the mysterious and beautiful love of his life, who
––plot twist––
isn’t a native of the country whose job it was for Tyler et al. to destabilize and/or destroy but a seductively mercurial international rando who swiftly falls in love with Tyler in front of some majestic explosions, compelling Tyler to abandon his life as a government-sponsored antihero with bad knees and a drug habit and follow his strong but vulnerable love interest back to Norway or some other scenic locale that contrasts nicely with the yellow-filter grit of his secret former life but
––plot twist––
the hero’s journey slows to a trickle for a while because even though Tyler has deserted his secretly badass squadron in order to elope with whomever, the price of which is death, his squadron assumed he was dead in a ditch somewhere and couldn’t be bothered to look for him, but because Tyler left behind a life of left turns and quiet waiting for a life of plot twists, the woman who has lured Tyler back to her hometown in order to frame him as culpable for miscellaneous villain stuff done by her dashing but irreputable Norwegian crime boss bother whose name is some Norwegian equivalent to Tyler but
––plot twist––
Tyler’s life is an action-adventure, not a sad adventure, and he already has plenty of people to exact his revenge upon so instead the woman with whom American Tyler eloped doesn’t have an Evil Tyler brother but a nice but bland ex-husband with whom Tyler’s under-explained wife is on good terms and who teaches jazz at a Norwegian secondary school and has a lovable pet goat named Gunnar and was a fun side character but
––plot twist––
American Tyler’s new wife, who only hasn’t gotten a name yet because her job is to die in order to motivate the hero on his hero’s journey, dies in a sad and permanent way to motivate American Tyler to team with Scandinavian Jazz Tyler (who was a Special Ops guy and remorseless mercenary before he fell in love with his love interest and his attentions turned to jazz and secondary education) and Jazz Tyler’s lovably irascible pet goat Gunnar to maybe find some kind of bullshit magic treasure thing so they can resurrect their mutual fridged love interest but
––plot twist––
she didn’t die in a sad and permanent accident but from a sad and permanent and for some reason extremely detailed murder because she knew the secret of where the magic whatever thing was so off the two Tylers and the goat go, discussing along the way whether this was maybe a trap or just a dumb stretch of side quest character development as well as what kind of horrible things they’d each done to strangers in their respective pasts they felt super bad about but couldn’t permit themselves to dwell on and it turns out (in what’s not really a twist because Tyler saw it coming) the magic treasure thing really was a trap and just a way to lure American Tyler and Jazz Tyler to whatever large picturesque Mediterranean city fits in Tyler’s life’s budget in order to kidnap American Tyler and extract from him some highly specific and heretofore unmentioned military secrets (because in heroism as in life, everybody has really interesting secrets) so that whoever the bad guys are in this story and/or Tyler’s life can either rule the world or destroy it or both, and Jazz Tyler, who
––plot twist––
turns out to be a supervillain, the one who orchestrated everything, explains that this elaborate scheme wasn’t really justified by any real motive but whatever because––and they stop mid-explanation for some big professional-level punching and so American Tyler can end up sweaty and shirtless and tied to a chair in an abandoned warehouse like heroes tend to do, his chest glistening in sinister foreign sunlight through carefully-poked holes in the hideout’s roof to remind American Tyler et al. that some parts of the world are a lot older than America and that this is sometimes meaningful, or if not meaningful at least evocative––so the bad guys finish explaining to a captive and glistening Tyler they just like being bad guys and it pays pretty well and the hours are good even if the retirement options after a career in low-level villainy are grim, but this is Tyler’s adventure, not theirs, and they threaten him in a friendly way that once they extract the world-ruining secrets possessed by this one random shirtless guy named Tyler they’re gonna maybe sell him off as a gladiator for an excitingly shady underground fight ring in case Tyler’s hero’s journey gets a sequel and to raise the stakes or else sentence him to by death by goat, which is an actual and traditional and very scary thing wherever American Tyler’s being held captive by Evil Jazz Tyler and his clock-punching henchmen, and in fact the lovable pet goat is not a goat at all but an advanced weapons system in lovable goat form but
––plot twist––
American Tyler already knows this and some of his secrets concern how to defuse or reprogram the magical goatweapon so that it might be used as a force for good, but because life is short and everybody has rent to pay and sorrows to drown and joint pain to ignore the bad guys leave Tyler tied up alone and unguarded while they head out to an excitingly seedy discotheque because there’s a 2-for-1 drink special so then in the dark and temporarily hopeless because this is the low point in the hero’s journey Tyler almost gives up and, alone and immobile, briefly dreams of having stayed in his hometown and marrying the first girl he met who was lonely enough to ignore his flaws and settling down into a futureless job in a slaughterhouse and dying in his sleep of heart failure, all of which sounded, if boring, at least pretty efficient, but
––plot twist––
Tyler does not in fact give up and instead escapes by dint of big muscles and secret badass military training and as Tyler escapes he grabs the goat to use as both weapon and negotiation tool so he and the cranky goat and whomever’s available go on a wild chase down the narrow moonlit cobblestone streets of the city that leads to a dead end and it turns out it was a misunderstanding because his pursuers just want to rob him because he is a rich shirtless American and not because of secrets or history or whatever but Tyler, unable to trust in a kind of Ockham’s Razor of motivations for armed robbery, chooses instead to detonate the goat, killing himself in the process because the equivalent of US $100 in local currency in his wallet means a lot to him, and Tyler’s journey and life end abruptly without any denouement, or they would but
––plot twist––
Tyler throws his wallet with lethal precision at the attackers, who aren’t even chasing him out of direct short-term personal gain so they get confused and distracted by this and by Tyler yelling “no habla Español” even though they, like Tyler, don’t speak Spanish, he manages to evade them using a combination of wits, parkour skills, and a hypodermic needle full of an unexplained fluorescent serum he carries with him for emergencies, but just as Tyler amps himself up and finds a conveniently unlocked truck to steal in order to flee the city and packs the goat in the truck’s goat compartment and gets in and turns the ignition (in which the keys have been left for story reasons and because Tyler is lucky) and checks the rearview mirror he notices
––plot twist––
the woman who was both very dead and his former wife is aiming a gun at Tyler and slides into the truck’s passenger seat and tells him this is the part of the hero’s journey where Tyler succeeds but only at a cost so he has a decision to make, which is that he can turn over the goat to her and her international cadre of secret scientists and walk away unharmed, or she can speed dial the bad guys and they can do grim villain stuff to him, or he can help her destroy the goat and together they can flee to Quebec and live quiet lives working in the farm-to-table pumpkin industry for 10-15 years until it turns out that both of their kids have supernatural powers due to inherited experiments and shadowy forces from Manitoba want to harness the kids’ power or whatever because part of a hero’s journey is being able to hitch a ride on your kids’ hero’s journeys once yours is starting to lose steam and you spend more time early in the morning sitting in the pre-dawn kitchen wondering if it’s too late to fix any of the mistakes you made, much less all of them, and before she lets him choose she does a big monologue about how she’s a secret scientist and her name is Anne and she likes long walks and sad movies and making memories with her loved ones and she has a tragic backstory that endowed her with vague telekinetic powers and that she is not actually dead and never has been, and as he listens, because Tyler is the hero he knows he can detonate the goat in the back of the trunk and kill the excitingly mysterious Anne and the goat and still escape unscathed because, while he neglected to mention it, he’s effectively immortal for secret military science reasons and after kissing his wife for the first time since she died, Tyler grits his teeth and prepares to detonate the goat but
––plot twist––
his knee twinges and he actually decides “nah” and quips about not being able to sneak into Canada without a shirt, then agrees to help Anne escape to Canada from whatever malevolent forces are pursuing her or them or anyone, so that’s what they do but once they’re at the pumpkin farm in Quebec the newly chill and contemplative Tyler, who has a lot more free time now, sits around a lot and thinks about how the hero’s journey he went on didn’t culminate how it was supposed to and how as a story his life was vaguely unsatisfying even if it were eventful, and these and similar thoughts and his inability to start a family with Anne because he’s infertile coupled with his unwillingness to adopt start to eat away at Tyler as he listlessly tends to the pumpkins because he’s American so not only does he need to know how the story ends but he also needs it to be a satisfying surprise, which it is not, so he starts drinking to pass the time and numb the pain and dabbles in some pills here and there when Anne’s in the city busy with her side hustle in bitcoin science awareness but
––plot twist––
while the military did do weird stuff to his young body and force him to drink weird stuff to prove both his masculinity and his team player bonafides the experiments did not render Tyler effectively immortal, so after Tyler burns a few years farting around the farm and launches an unsuccessful bid for local councilperson under an assumed name more out of boredom than anything else and Anne tells him she has gotten her own place in Montreal because she needs some space to work on herself, Tyler swallows a pretty big handful of fentanyl and, because every hero’s journey is also sometimes a cautionary tale, he dies alone facedown in a pumpkin patch but, because American Tyler is an fully-journeyed hero; his death is regarded as sad by anyone who notices and lasts a very, very long time.