Great movie.

Here is my two cents...




*** SPOILERS ***






Sam Doonby was in something "in the middle" between being born or being aborted. We see the flashback where his mother is driving off to Florida in a night rain and she then tells her husband-to-be about having a son... they turn the car around and get hit by another car... we can assume she died, and Sam grew up in that local orphanage. This was what I assumed was "his story" and how he became a drifter.

Well, there was an alternate universe, where Sam's mother had an abortion. She was single and did not want to carry the burden. So, in that case, Sam was never born at all, and we can assume that his mother eventually married again, or did whatever. We don't know what happens with her after the abortion.

Simply put, there is one world where Sam is born and his mother dies; and another one where Sam is never born at all. And we had followed the story where he was in fact born, and went to Africa (Peace Corp) and learned the guitar, and all of that. He was a real person, a very good man, and he ended up drifting into Texas and working as a bartender. He falls in love quite quickly... and not long after that, the woman of his dreams, in one drunken evening, tells him that she wishes that he never was, he never existed at all. And this was enough, apparently, to make him vanish, make it so that he never existed at all. We are left with the alternate universe, where Sam was aborted.

Interesting how Sam, when he does exist, has a terrible reaction when he meets the gynecologist! This means that on some level, he is aware of the connection between the two possible life paths that he has. He could not deal with being in the same room with the man who almost aborted him.

I think the deeper message (if there is one?) might be that we all can make decisions here and there that bring huge consequences later on. Surely, when a woman aborts her baby, she must wonder how the child might have turned out. With the case of Sam, he seemed almost saintly! In real life, of course, we should expect to find good and bad people, as well as the majority of them falling somewhere in the middle.