Hegel, Socrates, Jung: The Phenomenology Of The Psyche
Hegel (Alvin studying German, planning trip to Germany, while writing letter to Lance's sister, refers to Love as a Ghost, the German for "Ghost" is Geist, Geist is a Key Hegel Koncept, Geist = Ghost, Mein, Mind, Spirit, Soul, Breath, Psyche, etc):
Alvin Lanced = Avalanche = Spiritual Shake-Up
Lance = Alvin = a split/double consciousness struggling to unify, the struggle between master and slave within one and the same consciousness struggling to experience unity
One road, divided = Alvin, divided against himself
Road makers, guiding and illuminating the way = various markers in the inner (mental/spiritual) and outer (natural environment, Lance, Old Man, Woman) worlds guiding and illuminating Alvin's breakdown and reunification/healing
What Alvin the Unhappy Consciousness wants is to see himself as part of the Unchangeable, to realize that there is something Unchangeable-Solid-Certain-Concrete for himself (and in itself). But the only Unchangeable is the perpetually changing way of change itself, the perpetually changing way of people and of life and beliefs etc. Life and everything in it is perpetually changing, and that perpetual change is the Unchangeable. Alvin, the Unhappy Consciousness, in an attempt to force stoicism and rationality and Unchangeablity on his girlfriend and Lance and the Road he's on, ends up turning against himself and changing; he becomes for and against himself, changing from becoming the master of Lance to the servant of Lance, experiencing a re-awakening, etc, thus actualizing the Unchangeable and becoming one with it.
Socrates:
For the Alvin to be what it is for himself to be, he must first become what it is what he does not want to be (Know Thyself......), he must lose himself in himself to become dismembered and thus undergo the spiritual journey to put all his pieces back together again
Hegel divided philosophy into three categories - logic, nature, spirit, and the film unfolds in that order, beginning with logical Alvin (thesis: morality, rationality, stoicism), venturing into the nature of Lance (antithesis: primitivism, lower consciousness, skepticism), culminating in a reformative transformative battle that results in a Jungian reunification of psyche mind+conscious+unconscious) (synthesis: unification of consciousness)
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Lance = Young Alvin, Alvin confronted with himself as a carefree lusty impulsive young man
Old Man = Alvin of the Future
Old Woman = Ashes of a relationship, ashes of a life, she's the girlfriend who took flight, she' the pilot of man because man decides life and fate based on woman, woman piloted mankind, woman a pilot because she steers relationship and steers men and carries men and children also takes flight from men
Alvin and Lance two contradictions unified/held together by old man, forming triad, and sustained by memory of Woman
Ah Geist
Alvin - Father
Lance - Son
Old Man - Holy Geist
Woman - Pilot of them all, birthing them and steering them, licence lost in geistly fire