By 1968, stag films were completely dead, replaced by feature length porn with increasingly involved storylines and pornographic conventions, like cohesive sexual encounters as opposed to stag's jumble of quasi-random sex clips shoved between opening and closing narratives.
By the time she closes her narrative – Jess and Anna's story told, with all the digression, happenstance and indeterminacy that characterises real lives – their children have grown, and either begun to make their way or gone spectacularly off the rails.
A note of disappointment seems to close each narrative phrase.
So it is perhaps not a banal diminuendo when this novel closes its narrative with scenes, seven years after the epic disasters of 1812, from the domestic lives of Pierre and Natasha and Nikolai and Marya.
Mazzetti closes his narrative with an interview with Richard Blee, a retired C.I.A. operations officer who worked aggressively against Al Qaeda at the Counterterrorist Center before and after September 11th, and who, like the Shin Bet directors in "The Gatekeepers," has since developed doubts about tactics he once embraced.
For various reasons, of both taste and technique, I decided to close the narrative in the late summer of 1983; but any reader in the late 80s and onwards would see that the young narrator's heedless present day had become historical in ways that he, and I, could never have predicted.
In a way, the book's final scene, in which Moby drives around his hometown of Darien, Connecticut, listening to a pre-release tape of Play and filling in childhood memories to close the narrative's circle, is a cheat.
The therapist tries, gently, to lead the man back into the narrative, gradually closing the distance.
2020 still have three untitled Marvel films, but it seems improbable any of these will put Black Widow front and centre after The Avengers narrative closes with Infinity War - Part 2. Indeed, Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige has already come under fire for this apparent lack of female-fronted movies.
There was a hint of narrative, with the closing moments suggesting that this was one woman's meditative journey.
