“A man makes his destiny, right? Nothing makes the gods laugh harder.”

Is it true that our destiny is fixed?    Maybe we don’t think it’s destiny per se, but maybe God’s decision about what will happen to us.  Whether we live or die, whether we hit the lottery, even perhaps whether we will believe in God. It is, of course a question that can never be answered with authority.

But such fatalism lies at the heart of First Snow.  Jimmy, a slick and sleazy salesman, is killing an afternoon in the middle of nowhere while his car’s being repaired.  For entertainment he goes to a fortune teller who has his trailer parked nearby.  Things are pretty general, when suddenly the psychic goes ballistic and ends the session without telling Jimmy what he’s seen.  Jimmy thinks nothing of it until the general things he’s been told early in the reading become reality.  Then he wants to know what else there was.  When he eventually hears his future, he tries to stave it off.  He tries to get away from his destiny.  Can he?

The film is styled as a psychological thriller.  It would be a stretch to call it Hitchcockian, but it does at times come very close.  It builds suspense as Jimmy starts seeing clues that the fortune teller may have been right.  He also discovers that there are many possible ways his fate could play out—which one will it be?

From the time Jimmy hears his destiny he goes through the stages of grief just as a dying patient might: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.  As he tries to find some way to avoid the predicted future, he becomes more and more hostile and unlikable.  We get to the point of hoping the fortune teller’s prediction is true because Jimmy is so awful.  When he finally embraces his destiny, it becomes a chance for redemption for this character who has been so unlikable.  He then is able to find the gift of life that can be shared with others, because he no longer is busy trying to change what is coming.

Which brings us back to the question of destiny.  Is fatalism true?  Many people seem to accept the idea that “when your time is up, it’s up.”  They may even live their lives without bothering with a healthy diet or exercise, because it’s all irrelevant if your days are numbered.  If I wanted to, I could find some scriptures (both Christian and non-Christian) to back up that philosophy.  But since it really can’t be answered, what is the point?  Whether fixed or not, we do not know the number of our days.

One of the things the fortune teller tells Jimmy when pressed about the future is, “Even if I could see things, what would it matter?  Go live your life.”  That is the voice of wisdom that overcomes the concept of fatalism.  Whether we are bound to destiny or not doesn’t matter if we live the life that unfolds before us.