The ending sequence, despite the difficulties it presents, does suggest that human beings, despite their individual insignificance in such a vast postmodern society, can still retain the ability to chart their own path. in order to become the upper class, but by doing so he only makes the breach between himself and that which he seeks more evident. Paul does well to serve this end in the film: he memorizes behavior patterns, speech, cooking recipes, names, places, dates, etc. Paul is an outsider, and the point of view of the outsider has been used in both modern and postmodern art to represent the growing disconnectedness between humans in such a fragmented and materialistic society that seems to place focus on the surface over the interior at every opportunity.
The film reinforces this by presenting several aspects of the culture and society in the movie from Paul’s point of view.
Paul, as a character, is the manifestation of the postmodern ideal embodied in the painting that is so central to the film. While Ouisa could not grasp about the Kandinsky painting and its insight into her life, she could not help but recognize when another symbol of the balance between chaos and control, good and evil, sane and insane, entered her life: Paul. John Guare not only wrote the play Six Degrees of Separation, but also adapted it to film. Furthermore, until Ouisa’s revelation at the end of the film, neither of them seems to care. The artificiality of the social circles Ouisa and Flan run in are underlined by the fact that half the time neither of them have a clue whose wedding or baptism it is they are even attending. Ouisa’s life is spent catering to rich investors and social events, like baptisms and weddings. In contrast to Flan, Ouisa’s revelation at the end of the film shows she is able to rediscover her true self that has laid dormant and unused from years of living in a materialistic upper-class that only cares about surface, despite its claim to deeper meaning. This fact is made clear when, at the end of the film, Ouisa questions everything about Flan when she asks, “How much of your life is accounted for?” On the surface, several of Flan’s comments about the beauty of art would seem to indicate his awareness of the deeper value of art that cannot be measured in dollars however, his behavior at the end and his revelation that he is a gambler shows who he is on the inside: nothing more than a slightly higher-brow con-artist than the enigmatic Paul who started this process of self-examination for Ouisa and Flan.
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