On Puzzle Stories (Favorites 02-08)

Returning once again to my exploration of favorite stories: what and how they're put together, why they mean so much to me, and what I can learn from them about storytelling in general and myself as a storyteller in particular.

How does one remember they cannot remember?
image copyright Columbia TriStar home video

This second phase of the project, which has stretched on far, far longer than I'd originally intended, deals with the story as a puzzle.  The three subjects were the film The Game directed by David Fincher, the famous play Hamlet written by William Shakespeare, and the film Memento directed by Christopher Nolan.

What can we say about these three works (particularly what hasn't already been said in the lengthy preceding analysis?).  They are three examples of a kind of story I feel to be important, one of a list of categories of stories I'm building which will hopefully prove to be logically exhaustive, if capable of endless expansion by degrees and variations.

That is to say, I'm trying to sort all the stories I know and care about into a set of piles; some stories, like Hamlet for instance, will belong to more than one pile for certain, but my hope is that when I'm done, all the stories I've read (and maybe all that I will read, though that would be boring) will fit into one of these categories I'm setting out.

First let me make a clarification that might have been useful earlier.  What do I mean when I say a "Puzzle Story."  I don't mean a mystery story, where there's a body or a robbery and the characters are mostly concerned with figuring out what happened and who the perpetrators were.

I have read and enjoyed many, many, many mystery stories.  They seem to be mostly designed to snare the reader by curiosity, and of course the intrepid characters in pursuit of the truth.  For this second reason I think most of the genre mystery books in existence fit into another category I'm planning on describing at a later time; for now if I were pressed I would say that this kind of mystery is a kind of puzzle-story, just a very over-specialized sub-order, like many science fiction novels fit into the "on other worlds" category more than any other.

But the kind of puzzle story I'm after a definition for takes the curiosity of the reader further than just the normal murder or crime mystery (or any other kind of "who did it" scenario).  They take the uncertainty of the narrative beyond a blank spot in the sequence of events, where we don't know who did the deed or how.

They make us wonder "what is the truth" and "how will they figure it out" not just about one event, but about the story itself, either in part or in its entirety.

" I don't care about the money. I'm pulling back the curtain. I want to meet the wizard."
image copyright Universal Studios Home Entertainment

For example, in the Game, Nick is trying to find out not just how CRS and its workers are able to stay ahead of him, what they want, and how to get his life back, but in fact spends most of the running length of the film trying to decide what is real and what is an illusion orchestrated by the game.  It's not just a mystery that makes us ask what's happened earlier, and why, but what is happening now, what

Hamlet probably helps make this point clearer: it's not a mystery by any stretch of the imagination.  If we tried to shove it into one of the contemporary genres of dramatic work (that is, if it were a kind of movie), it would probably fit into "psychological thriller" or just a plain-old drama, NOT a mystery.  We know what's happened so far, what we want to know is what's going to happen next.  But the questions the characters raise are not about what's going to happen next, but why the things are happening at all, why they are important, and whether the reasons the characters give for doing things are good reasons or not.  It asks these questions and provides a plethora of answers to them, and we get to sort out which ones we think make sense or not.

Memento is I guess both the most and the least mystery-like of the three stories under discussion.  It's the most mystery-like because we spend the whole thing trying to figure out where things went wrong, and why Leonard killed the person we see him kill in the first few minutes.  We go on a journey both backwards and forwards in time, as things first seem to make more sense in some ways but then less in others, until we arrive at the middle of the overall timeline, the answer to the initial question, and are made to understand that none of the questions the story has raised will have satisfactory answers.  The mystery is developed through the presentation of the scenes, rather than the intrinsic nature of the story; it's in the storytelling itself, and it's main drive is to make is wonder at the power memory has over the continuity of our lives.

In all three stories, danger is everywhere; people are stabbed, shot at, driven in cars into deep water.  The characters are left to themselves to get themselves out of the trouble, like in any good work.  Sometimes it drives the dramatic tension, and in two out of the three cases serves as the Call to Adventure for the heroes (Nick in The Game gets an invitation from his brother as a birthday present).  But it's all secondary to the real nature of the stories: the questions of what causes people to become violent are less important than the questions of what is real.

In all three stories, the heroes are locked in a struggle with illusions. 

In the Game, it's the artfully real scenarios and problems brought into being by the CRS company; their job is to make him believe what he's seeing is real, to get him to behave in a certain way, and then change what he's seeing to keep one step ahead of his rapidly unraveling sense of reality; at first presumably to mess with Nick's mind, but later to do... what exactly?  

"Now might I do it, pat.  Now he is a praying."
image copyright BBC

In Hamlet, it's the lies the protagonist is literally swimming in from every other speaking character except Horatio and maybe Gertrude; he has no way of knowing who's against him until they try and get him killed.  He knows his world has gone nuts, and that no one would believe him if he told them what's going on, so he responds by acting crazy himself until he can make up his mind what to do.  Which almost never happens.

In Memento, the source of the illusions is a mixture of the first two; his sense of reality is constantly fraying apart, not because CRS is messing with his head, but because his brain doesn't work right anymore.  At the same time, everyone he talks to and relies on for information feeds him only disinformation, hoping to misdirect his well-intentioned violent streak towards their own goals.  He senses that things aren't going right, but he is fundamentally incapable of stringing together the facts the way the audience is.  And all we can do is watch and shake our heads, or nod, if we agree with what we see.

I could go on for days arranging these three particular examples as a puzzle of a collection, how they are alike and unlike.  But what we're after is a usable definition of what kind of story they are, and what their mechanism is, and how that can be applied to better understanding storytelling in general?

In short, where is all this going?

I suppose in the end what these stories are about is meaning, and searching for it in the too-often indecipherable mess of events that life throws at us.

I would say 3 things about puzzle stories, that are worth looking for in other works by way of comparison of theme and technique.


1.     Using the conventions of storytelling to which we're accustomed, they show that the appearance of the character's world is no more than an appearance, not reality.

"You've received the first key and others will follow. You never know where you'll find them, or when or how you'll need to use them, so keep your eyes open."
image copyright Universal Studios Home Entertainment

There are unspoken rules to telling stories that we all agree to, often without realizing what those rules are or how effectively they influence what we see and how we see it.

A good puzzle story is one that knows the craft of storytelling so well that it's able to play against our expectations of the reality of the story; that is, it knows what we normally see or hear and how we see (or hear, or read) it so well that it's able to trick us into revealing the illusions the characters are experiencing to ourselves.

The actual narrative plot and, to a certain extent, the characters in these stories will often take a back seat to the emphasis on the presentation, or to the ideas, or to that aspect of the work that the writer wishes us to see most clearly, which usually has to do with testing the meaning of the little things we all take for granted.  Some things turn out to mean what we think, others don't, the crucible is the story.

2.     They illustrate, and in some cases re-draw, the line between coherent storytelling and utter chaos and confusion.

"This guy told me his name was Teddy."

image copyright Columbia TriStar home video

This goes along with the first point somewhat; you can only betray the rules of how stories work and how we understand them so far, before the story itself starts to break down and become incomprehensible to the audience.  After all, the depiction of life, or the world or some part of it, needs to resemble life itself to a certain degree to be recognized.

I've seen a fair amount of experimental film, though not as much as I should if I wanted to set myself up as a real judge or critic on the matter by any stretch of the imagination, and I would be willing to say that the amount of footage that baffled me by far outweighed the amount of footage I thought I grasped and understood, but there's usually a sense in puzzle-stories, the ones that hold together, that if we're not trespassing over the boundary of "beyond this point it makes no sense," the effort of the writers is in part trying to find out where that boundary is.

And after all, if they're able to trespass over it, or seem to, and we can still understand their meaning, doesn't that mean the capacity for human understanding has been expanded somewhat?  At least in theory.

3.     They challenge the connections their characters have formed, with the people they know, with the world around them, with their own beliefs and understanding.

"Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know
not how oft. Where be your gibes now?"
image courtesy of independent.co.uk

What things are important to you?  What's the thing that's most important?  So important for instance that you'd sacrifice everything else in your life before you sacrificed it?  So important that you'd die for it, or kill for it?  Why is it important to you?

Stories can be a chance for us to think through things we couldn't survive being forced to think through ourselves.  They help us take apart and think through the reasons why we're attached to the things, people, and ideas we're attached to.  Sometimes we might find that the connections aren't as well-founded as we felt; this can be distressing or empowering, depending on how you look at it.

Sometimes they can have the power to show us the foundation of meaning in our lives is less solid than we'd thought (if we're able to read the story as applying to ourselves, I often cannot), or they can sometimes help us see that the things that are holding us back have no real power over us at all.

The great thing about puzzle stories is that they require thought, and analysis, and speculation and guesswork from us in order to be fully lived-through.  We are compelled to reason our way through the story with the characters, and in doing so to take our day-to-day world apart.

Then they make us, if only briefly, put it back together in a way we've never seen before.