As Richie points out, Joey has bought into the American dream. It is not the American dream of wealth; Richie has that. It is not the American dream of power; Richie has that, too. Rather, it is some kind of post-modern version of "Little House on the Prairie."7 In other words, for Joey, the American dream is the wife and kids he left behind in Indiana. It is the consistent and, perhaps, mundane world of the daily grind. It is, as Nietzsche might observe, a "long obedience in the same direction." Mostly, however, it is love.
But it is a love that may no longer be there when he returns. Nonetheless, he goes back to Indiana and to his estranged family. He finds them sitting down to dinner. Although no place has been set for him, his daughter retrieves a table-setting left for him on the sideboard. His son then passes him the meatloaf. He (Tom? Joey?) and his wife (Tom’s wife? Joey’s wife?) stare at each other. There are no words spoken; only gazes are exchanged, and it seems to me that one is a gaze of acceptance, on the part of the wife, and the other a gaze of amazement on the part of the husband.
End of film: th-th-that’s all folks!
I think my philosopher friends were distressed because there was no discursive (i.e., spoken and reasoned) conclusion to the film. But there are moments in human interaction that are not amenable to words. This is one of them. For only in silence can acceptance be unconditional. To have begun to speak would have been to attempt to explain that which cannot be explained except as being an action that runs completely counter to what we commonly call reason. It is not reasonable for Edie Stall to take a murdering mobster back into her home. But she had already made the decision to do so. She had not changed the locks, and there was a place-setting awaiting (hoping?) for her husband’s return. It was not reasonable for Joey Cusack to believe his wife would take him back. But he drove all the way to Indiana anyway. He, too, hoped. And to hope is to believe in a possibility despite all the evidence.
To put it another way, Edie and Tom/Joey have each now made the decision to love each other. It is easy for people to say that love is blind, and the kind of love we associate with "falling in love" often is. It happens to us like an accident; thus, we say, we fall. We couldn’t help it. There was some irresistible force involved, as if love were a form of gravity. But committed love is not accidental. Rather, it is a love that one walks into deliberately and just as deliberately remains standing in. This love is not blind. It is, above all things, bound. It is a love that sees who and what you are and despite this, or even because of it, stays and abides and accepts and loves. It is a love that does violence to reason inasmuch as violence also means to violate. Such a love violates the "laws" of reason and the reasonable. I think that this, too, perturbed my philosophical friends. For reason makes a wonderful servant, but it makes a lousy master.
Strangely enough, it is the intent of philosophy (the love of wisdom or the wisdom of love, depending on your perspective) to master reason in order to know best when to use it as a tool and when not to. As mentioned above, Plato’s Socrates consistently makes this point by leading his poor listeners into aporia—situations that reason gets you into that it cannot get you out of. But action, particularly loving action, breaks the impasse created by the aporia of reason. And, no, there is no certainty or knowledge about the outcome of such action. For all the Stalls know, tomorrow the FBI will be at their door. But tonight, for one brief moment, they have stepped beyond their ideas and expectations of each other. And perhaps this is the most we can expect of anyone.
7 This notion is reinforced when Richie asks Joey how life is on the farm. He had assumed that Joey lived on a farm.