Almost everyone in The Last Picture Show fucks, but the ennui and disappointment that pervades their small-town, plain-in-the-plains lives affect their libido and their passion that charges it as well. Implicit in the sex is aspiration: escape from Thalia, Texas; more attention from the citizens of Thalia, Texas; the manhood and womanhood so seemingly essential and exclusive to the act, which helps determine status in Thalia, Texas. Besides, what else is there? You can go the picture show, hardly pay attention to the movies while you neck in the back. You can go shoot pool and get smoked by the same players, or watch the same players smoke the same victims. You can eat sausages and drink coffee served by the same waitress you fancy each time. You can work, in oil, or roughnecking, or managing couple businesses that attract the same customers in the same hours of day and night. You can watch the high school's football and basketball games, see the team get beat down brutally each time. Everything's respectable and of routine in Thalia—so damn dull that sex is the only source of excitement and life, that is until it becomes a routine of its own, or it's taken away and it breaks your heart.

So, yeah, it's not much of a life, and the citizens who live it—characters of rich attributes, sometimes repugnant, but extremely human—make a tense peace with it or try to escape it, and themselves, however much they can. The adolescents of Thalia, the ones on the cusps, are the main stars of the novels, but the disaffected adults have their neuroses too, whether it's their bigotries or their baggage, born of their lifelong desolation, both physical and emotional. Since there's little in their immediate environs to shape them, they shape each other, taking out their frustration and desperation and affecting each other far more than they realize. And though their immediate world seems staid, the world at large is not, and neither are their ages or lives. So some folks will pass on or pass through, and the picture show will play its last flick, and you might as well go to catch it.