Plot
Max Phillips is a bookie who finds out via telegram that his son Pip, a soldier, has been seriously wounded fighting in Vietnam and will likely die. He is regretful that he didn't spend more time with Pip when he was younger. With that in mind, he returns $300 to an unlucky customer and gets into a fight with his boss and the boss's hitman. Max is shot by the hitman. Wounded, he stumbles into an amusement park and is surprised to see Pip, who is now a child again. After having some fun, reliving and expanding on enjoyable outings in the past, Pip runs away into a house of mirrors. When Max finds him, Pip explains that he is dying and vanishes. Max prays to God and offers to trade his own life in exchange for Pip's, then collapses and dies on the freeway. The next day, the full-grown Pip - walking with a cane due to his war injuries - visits the amusement park's shooting gallery and recalls some of Max's advice as he begins to play.
Read more about this topic: In Praise Of Pip
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“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“There saw I how the secret felon wrought,
And treason labouring in the traitor’s thought,
And midwife Time the ripened plot to murder brought.”
—Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?–1400)