In this post, I'm going to talk about two 2012 releases & how I've interacted with them. That discussion is going to require a bunch of spoilers, so be warned that after this paragraph, Vader is Luke's father. I want to take a moment, though, to say two things.
One: if you haven't seen Looper yet, I want to be the latest to tell you (because you've no doubt heard several times already) that no matter how silly it sounds, go see it. Tonight. It's a fantastic psychological thriller that dabbles in sci-fi enough for fans of the genre, but not so much that it will disgust folks indifferent to it.
Two: if you have the chance to check out Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, read it. I've just finished, and I'm still coming to terms with the ending myself, so I make no assurances about a satisfied ending for you (TWSS). I have to say though, I don't know that I've ever had a book that pained me this much to put down. Again, it's a psychological thriller, except with a whodunnit flair that's so pop-culture littered & postmodern that it'd hurt me if I didn't love those things.
So, on to more spoiler-y business.
Search your heart, Luke; you know it to be true.
I called Looper about twenty minutes into the movie. It was competent and well-told (that's always my disclaimer when I'm about to call something predictable), but I knew how the closing scenes would go from a mile away. I knew from the scene with Seth, the non-Levitt looper who's trying to escape the mob. His future self is fleeing in the present, but the mob catches his past self, and by amputating and disfiguring the past Seth, the future Seth changed live onscreen. It's a confusing paradox that's best explained by Bruce Willis' insistence to Levitt (&, more importantly, the audience) to just not think about the time travel mechanics too much.
So I didn't.
I instead thought about how this plot mechanic relates to the protagonist: Willis' Old Joe is a badass with a heart of mostly obsidian whose life was barely brought home from the realm of murder and drugs by his wife. Needless to say, he's a little attached to her, so much that he'll make a bloodbath of his past to save her. Knowing from the Seth scenes that Old Joe can be affected to what happens to Levitt's younger Joe, and having been introduced to Joe as a young man portrayed with a generally good heart who's just starting on the path that would stain it, I found it immediately apparent that once the movie was coming to a close, Joe would kill himself. I didn't see The Rainmaker's plot-twisty little attribute, nor did I predict the real life & online discussions I'd get into about whether The Rainmaker was actually another version of Joe or his brother or something (eventual conclusion: he's probably not), but I knew that the finale would hinge around Joe's self-eradication for whatever reason.
My immediate reaction after being right? I do sci-fi too much. I've read and watched dozens of time travel stories, each with their own variations on the mechanics, and this future-self-being-affected-by-past-self mechanic, with its persistence to it affecting the future self even when the future self was in the past... it just reeked of what was to come. By no means did this realization completely ruin an excellent movie for me. There was still the suspense of seeing if I was right, and I've been singing the movie's praises ever since regardless.
But still, by thinking hard on where it could go from the Seth scene, I'd robbed myself of the shock. Of the gravity. Of the oomph of a good, blindsiding plot twist. An oomph that, had I not correctly overthought, would've made an excellent movie even better. Mindblowing, even.
That'd be a great pun if Joe shot himself in the head instead of the chest.
Contrast all that with my interaction with my latest read, Gone Girl. In a very postmodern way, it's fragmented into two storytellers at different times: Nick Dunne and his wife, Amy. The narrator alternates with every chapter. Nick begins narrating live, on the day of their fifth anniversary. From then on, you hear about everything relevant to Nick except where Nick is and what he's doing during the four hours she goes missing. Then Amy begins her story, told through diary entries: beginning just as they met, and, chapter by chapter, converging with the present in a way that's intricately crafted to tell their history while telling the present story.
They start in pretty stark contrast: Amy writes lively and spirited, and Nick narrates like a psycho killer.
(Fa fa fa fa fa, fa fa fa fa far better.)
It really paints him as guilty. He details how he's come to hate his wife and that he's lying to the cops, while her diary is nothing short of adorable enough that I caught myself falling in love with a fictional character.
(No worries, though, I do that a few times a year.)
Anyway, the person who told me about the book told me that there's a few massive plot twists, so my brain is spinning as much as I can while reading the page turner. I'm thinking Fight Club, I'm thinking Memento; there are some surprises in store, and I'm going to do my best to out-think the author.
Imagine my surprise when I find out that Nick has a mistress.
No, I'm not being sarcastic. In fact, my surprise that Nick has a mistress was only outdone by my surprise at my surprise: 140 pages into a thriller, and it'd legitimately never dawned on me that a guy with a failing marriage who really, really, really appears to have killed his wife might have a mistress.
Tony, can we talk?
Have you ever read good fiction?
You know, the kind both inspired by and rife with the juiciest drama imaginable?
Aren't you the same guy who claimed a couple weeks ago that you correctly predicted a season's main plot twist in Dexter after three episodes?
...But you can't figure out that a wife-killer might be fucking someone else.
Next on the reading list: Goodnight Moon. I wonder if the protagonist falls asleep?!
I won't go into much more Gone Girl detail than that, but I'm not really sure how the author pulled off the surprise... or if I've pulled it off myself. Honestly, I was blind to one of the oldest tropes. While trying to grasp at the tiniest and most distant straws, the bale of hay fell on my head.
Speaking of terrible cliches, that's one way I feel like she pulled it off: her plot twists were there, they were often huge, but they weren't cliche. There were minor twists before the mistress and huge ones after, and I was always delighted by them to the point that I actually managed to shut my brain off as much as possible and just enjoy the ride. If I can give credit to the author rather than my interaction with fiction, this is why.
Hell, the greatest impact the book had on me wasn't even a plot twist, nor anywhere near the end. It came a little while after one of the big plot twists, and for anyone who's read, it was the passage that started with "I hope you liked Amy. She was meant to be likeable. Likeable by someone like you."
Until I read that line, I'd never understood that, when folks described something in fiction as spine-tingling, it was an actual thing that could actually happen, and not just a cliche thing we say.
My point: I love how I felt while experiencing Gone Girl. Though my surprise varied, I was never like "Oh. I guess.", even when it had been done before. It was done tastefully, and revealed in just the right way. But then, most agree that Looper has these same traits... except that I hadn't stolen the book's shock from my later self, despite my attempts.
The worst part about this blog is that I'm not coming to some grandiose conclusion about how to better experience plot twists in fiction. Though I've got some clues, I can't piece together what kept the gravity in Gone Girl but took it out of Looper. There are too many factors: one's a book, one's a movie. One's a futuristic sci-fi universe, the other is set three months ago in almost exactly our world. One has Bruce Willis, one has OJ Simpson (sort of).
If nothing else, I guess I can thank Gone Girl for forcing me to question if I can better interact with my fiction, or whether it's just the most subtly clever psychological thriller that I've come across in years.
Also, if anyone's seen the movie & read the book, I'd love to hear how you felt about both.
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