20 Master Plots: And How to Build Them by Ronald B Tobias

Author:Ronald B Tobias [Tobias, Ronald B]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
ISBN: 9781599635392
Publisher: F+W Media, Inc.
Published: 2011-12-15T08:00:00+00:00

PSEUDO-NEO-CRYPTO SYMBOLISM

A story like D.O.A. has its story line and its clues, and in the end it isn’t that hard to figure out. You’re given all the major clues, and they aren’t all that subtle. Sometimes the story is more devious, such as the film Chinatown, in which there are two riddles, one within another, each relating to the other.

But there is another class of riddle that is impossible to solve. Perhaps they’re not meant to be solved, only pondered. Anyone who reads Kafka knows not to ask the question “Why?” because the reader won’t get a satisfactory answer. That’s Kafka’s point: Real life doesn’t give whys. Things happen, period. No explanation. One day Gregor Samsa wakes up and he’s a bug. Why? Kafka predated the beer commercial, but the slogan could just have easily been his: “Why ask Why?” We’re spoiled as readers—we expect answers. Good answers. Answers that make sense. And if we don’t get them, we feel cheated. We get angry. We want an orderly world that answers our questions. Kafka didn’t think that was necessary. In his world, you can wake up a bug and it wouldn’t occur to you to ask why.

So it is with Kafka’s The Trial. Joseph Κ (he doesn’t even get a real name) is accused of a crime he doesn’t understand by a court he can’t communicate with. There are no clues because there are no particulars, only generalities. There’s a riddle, but it doesn’t seem to have a solution. Lots of events seem to mean something, and we must struggle to make sense out of them. In a sense it’s like the princess or the tiger, except at a more abstract level. Kafka seems to say, “Life’s that way, there are no clear answers … just what you can come up with.” Only in fiction is there a godlike figure that can come forward to give the “correct” answer. A philosopher might reply that there are no correct answers, only fabricated ones.

So that’s what we must do with riddles like The Trial: Construct a meaning. No one will tell us how all this fits together; it’s up to us to make it work.

When Stanley Kubrick released 2001: A Space Odyssey (based on Arthur C. Clarke’s story “The Sentinel of Eternity”), audiences were bewildered. The film was filled with objects and events that seemed to have meaning, and we struggled to put it all together. Many dismissed it as psychedelic babble, a sign of an unhinged mind. Critics were unimpressed. And yet the film was clearly a riddle begging solution. What is the rectangular monolith that keeps appearing from the prehistoric past to the future? What happens to David Bowman at the end of the film, when he’s suddenly drawn into a Louis XIV drawing room somewhere near the moons of Jupiter? Why does Bowman transform from a decrepit old man in a Howard Hughes bedroom to a celestial embryo? What does it all mean? Figuring it out was like trying on new clothes at a department store.

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