The movies tend to conceive of despair, as they do of love, in terms of external obstacles that are overcome, end-of-story. So they gloss over our existential amnesia, and they confuse our actual despair (our wrong relation to God, self, and world) with felt despair. As Binx Bolling sees it, this apparent comedy is really the tragedy of man accustomed to despair. The man may have regained the world, but it turned out he never had a soul if his predicament is reducible to [re]obtaining the American Dream.