This month, I'm concentrating on my favorite stories, trying to figure out why they mean so much to me and what I can learn from them about storytelling and about myself as a storyteller.
In the first part of this series, I focused on stories that work primarily to build up other worlds take us through them while the story lasts.
In this second part, I'm starting on a second kind of story that particularly draws my imagination while they're going on and my memory: stories that have a point to make, and choose to make their point through messing with their audience's minds.
The Game (1997)
The Game is a film from director David Fincher, produced between the woundingly speculative Seven and the new testament for male adolescents Fight Club.
It opens easily enough. Nicholas Van Orton (Michael Douglas) believes himself to be a successful businessman. His mansion is immaculate, his luxury car is fast, he does business and has lunch how and with whom he prefers. As it happens to be his birthday, he is paid a visit by his little brother Conrad (Sean Penn), who says he's given his brother an unorthodox gift: participation in something called The Game.
In the first part of this series, I focused on stories that work primarily to build up other worlds take us through them while the story lasts.
In this second part, I'm starting on a second kind of story that particularly draws my imagination while they're going on and my memory: stories that have a point to make, and choose to make their point through messing with their audience's minds.
The Game (1997)
"I don't care about the money. I'm pulling back the curtain. I want to meet the wizard."
It opens easily enough. Nicholas Van Orton (Michael Douglas) believes himself to be a successful businessman. His mansion is immaculate, his luxury car is fast, he does business and has lunch how and with whom he prefers. As it happens to be his birthday, he is paid a visit by his little brother Conrad (Sean Penn), who says he's given his brother an unorthodox gift: participation in something called The Game.
It's put on by a company called Consumer Recreation Services, or CRS for short. It's played out by real people, a sort of live-action adventure with no set parameters or known end result. Nicholas is told when it starts, but not what will happen or what the rules will be. He finds a clown in his driveway with a key in his mouth. There's a minor spill in the restaurant Nicholas goes to for dinner. He isn't often told outright that something happening to him is part of the game, but he's never told anything isn't part of it, either.
And every time something odd happens to him, there's a moment where he, Nicholas, or we, the audience, or both, say to ourselves, "Alright, is this real? Is this really happening, or is it the game? This can't be fake, can it?" And even though it's done it a hundred times already, every time this happens, the story still manages to surprise us.
Gradually, then surprisingly, then violently, the game seems to go wrong.
Soon things are completely insane. His fortune is stolen, his credibility as a human being is destroyed, the CRS offices are abandoned, his brother is running scared of what he's got them both into. Guns are going off. Things go from bad to worse, and the apparent dangers and disasters Nicholas is put through are nowhere near as harrowing to us as never knowing what is really happening, or why and how the game went wrong, or who to trust.
The brilliant thing about The Game is how it tells you, outright, that it is a story about a story, and then deftly tricks you into forgetting that it is a story at all.
It carries this off by constantly, expertly, and ruthlessly betraying the confidence we place in everyday occurrences and certainties, and replacing the world of the character brick by tricky brick with illusion.
It carries this off by constantly, expertly, and ruthlessly betraying the confidence we place in everyday occurrences and certainties, and replacing the world of the character brick by tricky brick with illusion.
The strength of the movie is that it knows it is an illusion, and uses to the absolute hilt its ability to fool us into believing things that we know aren't real.
I still remember the first time I watched the film, and struggled constantly to understand whether or not the danger to the character was "really happening," seeing the stakes rise higher and higher, and higher. Again and again I said to myself, "there, that's conclusive, they couldn't risk doing that in faking that sort of thing," and again and again I would remember that it was a movie, and that they must have faked the scene in some way or another in order to get it on film. Therefore, how could I be sure that it wasn't still part of the game?
As a story to learn from, it could be considered the keep-them-guessing tale par excellence. As mentioned above, the story is sort of a magic trick, it states blandly that this is a story, this is not a reality, then spends its length trying to test which things we as the audience refuse to believe could be real or not, and what we reasonably believe could be scripted, staged, manipulated, or planned out ahead of time.
It's also a master's course unto itself in terms of audience expectation; how to play to it, when to ignore it, how to confound it utterly and then somehow also pay it off in full. It would be difficult to go into details without spoiling the good parts, but watch it with a notebook and pay attention to whom Nicholas trusts, whom he distrusts, when he seems to be at ease and for what reason, and why we aren't expecting what happens next to happen. All of this, cleaned of its particulars and understood on principle, is valuable information on how to make this kind of story come alive.
Perhaps my favorite part is that, whenever we get the fleeting feeling that "this must be real, they cannot have faked this," whether it flies away a moment later or not, for that moment we manage to convince ourselves, at the impetus of the story, that what we are experiencing is real and not fake, even though we're still caught up in the larger story itself, something which is itself intrinsically fake, all the time.
As a story to learn from, it could be considered the keep-them-guessing tale par excellence. As mentioned above, the story is sort of a magic trick, it states blandly that this is a story, this is not a reality, then spends its length trying to test which things we as the audience refuse to believe could be real or not, and what we reasonably believe could be scripted, staged, manipulated, or planned out ahead of time.
It's also a master's course unto itself in terms of audience expectation; how to play to it, when to ignore it, how to confound it utterly and then somehow also pay it off in full. It would be difficult to go into details without spoiling the good parts, but watch it with a notebook and pay attention to whom Nicholas trusts, whom he distrusts, when he seems to be at ease and for what reason, and why we aren't expecting what happens next to happen. All of this, cleaned of its particulars and understood on principle, is valuable information on how to make this kind of story come alive.
Perhaps my favorite part is that, whenever we get the fleeting feeling that "this must be real, they cannot have faked this," whether it flies away a moment later or not, for that moment we manage to convince ourselves, at the impetus of the story, that what we are experiencing is real and not fake, even though we're still caught up in the larger story itself, something which is itself intrinsically fake, all the time.
It's an odd movie, at times seeming to be a thriller just for thriller's sake, objectless except for its one endlessly restated and relentless object. Yet it is an utterly absorbing character study, and an unforgettable exploration of the small details and assumptions we make to get by in the world, and how these can be used by the skillful storyteller against us to bewilder and estrange our expectations, and also in our favor, to engage our sympathy and drive us towards sharing with the characters in emotional release.
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