Who's Driving My Train?

In life, we spend most of our time worrying about our decisions and the repercussions from them. We worry and worry and think back to what could have been and what should have been done. This is all done without asking the golden question: Did we have a choice in the first place? In the film Runaway Train, the film's protagonist, Manny, spends three years welded into a cell in maximum security prison for his crimes. Many believed that was his course in life, to sit there rotting away in his cell. After a chance of fate, Manny is freed from the hole and subsequently escapes prison, taking his fate into his own hands and paving the way to freedom. At the end of the film, Manny achieves what he believes to be true "freedom" by choosing to end both the prison warden's and his own life. Now if it is true that we have full control over our lives and the directions they go in, Manny is a hero. He took life by the reins and charted his own course through her troubled waters. The real problem lies in the fact that none of us know whether we have any control or not, which is a major point of the film. Some supernatural stroke of insight caused Manny to choose the train that was destined to become a runaway. He could have picked any train, he could have chosen any path, but some unseen force guided him towards that very engine. Moments after getting on the train the conductor has a heart attack and sends Manny and his companion, Buck, careening down the tracks. The unstoppable nature of the train is meant to parallel the indomitable force of God and nature. For all of man's knowledge and technology, he still can't stop one train that ran away. There are still things outside of his control.
Taking the message from this film, I can draw parallels to my own life. Every day I wake up to my blaring alarm clock, go through my morning routine, and end up in the social prison known as high school. I don't have any say in the matter and my only respite is weekends, holidays, and the occasional sick day. Hour after hour I sit in the same classes in the same seat learning the same things. My life is on a set of rails that society and government says I cannot deviate from. Any choice I make follows the strict pattern that the world has laid out for me. Truly the only way to be free is to commit suicide, right? The answer to that question is noone knows. Manny went on that train seeking freedom and believed he found it in death, but who is to say that wasn't his fate all along? His incarceration, his escape, his stumbling upon the train that would ultimately spell his doom, all of these are just stops on the railway that is his life. Runaway Train gives us the opportunity to look at the world in a different light and truly stop and think about whether or not our decisions hold any weight whatsoever.