Start to Finish

Exit Lines opens with the promise of a new beginning for this last chapter in the Idyll Inn, a retirement home being built for profit as part of a chain of investment properties - a "numbered company run by a management group on behalf of a collective of professionals, mostly dentists and doctors, interested in untroublesome, steady investment in what is bound to be a growth industry." In a reversal of the comic formula, the elders resist the rules of their juniors to infuse a stagnating social contract, with its expectations to conform to numbing passive routines, with new Ufe and vitality of an emotional, if not a corporeal, kind.