Once upon a time, a very long time ago now (at least as measured by anyone born in the last 20 years or so), a nice lady by the name of Aggie published a stage play. It was a murder mystery, complete with an ending with a twist (not a twisted ending, which is something quite different), and it was an astonishing success. Aggie never thought it would be the hit it turned out to be, and neither did the early newspaper reviewers who first watched it.
But The Mousetrap, as the play was titled, endured. To this day, in fact. Just about the only thing which could close it down was the Covid pandemic, and after that, it sprang back to life, rather like the zombies in numerous film franchises.
I’m going to make a ‘hot take’ about The Mousetrap. (A term I only started to run across relatively recently in the last year or two; Wikipedia says that, in journalism, a hot take is a "piece of deliberately provocative commentary that is based almost entirely on shallow moralizing," but also admits the term has broadened through social media use to “an unpopular or controversial opinion.”) So here it is: I don’t particularly care for The Mousetrap. I find it simplistic and predictable. (Yes, Virginia, I have seen it. At least twice over the years, maybe more.) And I agree with the early critics, who, again according to Wikipedia, said the play was ‘built entirely of clichés,’ with a number of the characters ‘too obvious by half.’
Now, in Aggie’s defense --- not that she really needs a thoroughly unknown writer to come to her defense, though I will anyway --- she wrote this story more than 85 years ago. I’ve said many times that writers write for, and of, their times, and she certainly did. Was it a kinder, gentler time? Not really, on one level --- the Second World War, with all its attendant horrors, had just wrapped a few years earlier --- but on another, literary level, I’d say it was. It was certainly a less frenetic time.
The same case can be made for the early James Bond films, by the way. Simplistic, trite, beyond dreadfully sexist… they were crimes against cinema. (And yes, I’ve watched them, too. The entire collection, he said with a sigh. My wife wanted all the Bond films for Christmas one year, so, dutiful husband that I am, I got them for her AND watched them with her. Of such sacrifices are successful marriages made. Oy.) I know many will find it sacrilegious that I’d mention Agatha Christie mysteries and Ian Fleming potboilers in the same sentence, but I’ll offend people all over again by saying that there’s probably more similarities between the two writers than a lot of people care to admit.
At any rate, I’d like to advance the idea that literary audiences weren’t quite so… so jaded. And that’s what led me to my central question for today: have we lost our capacity for surprise? How many times do we read/watch the climax where the protagonist prevails against all odds, and we relax… but only for a moment, because we know, even if the clueless protagonist doesn’t, that something else is coming along before the end of the story? Something even nastier and scarier.
(Think of the climactic sequence of the film Aliens: the protagonist, Ellen Ripley, has rescued her de facto daughter and the injured soldier Hicks, and together with the android Bishop, they’ve escaped the nuclear destruction of the alien-infested colony and are safely back on their spaceship and ready to go home. Or are they? Turns out they aren’t, because a big, badass momma alien hitched a ride on their little shuttle and is just a little pissed off with the way things have played out.) Whenever a character heaves a sigh of relief after defeating the enemy and says something to the effect of, “Well, glad that’s over, guess we’re done here,” as the audience, we’ve been trained over the last few decades just to know they’ve overstrained the universe’s tolerance for that kind of foolish naivete, and something really ugly is about to happen. Haha! Biff! Kapow! Take that, ridiculous puny characters!
Have we lost our capacity for literary/filmic surprise? Well, no, I don’t think so… but authors and filmmakers have to be a whole helluva lot more creative about it now than they needed to be lo, those (more innocent) several decades ago. Characters we used to routinely assume were invulnerable to lethal harm because they were primary characters (something I called the Immunity Syndrome several posts back) … people like George R.R. Martin sure killed that idea (and the characters themselves) off right smartly. In fact, more often than not, if you stumbled across a likable, fairly heroic character of his, it was a pretty good bet said character would likely soon be pushing up the daisies after a grisly demise.
It’s fairly rare nowadays that I can read or watch something unfold and think or say, “Man, I sure didn’t see that coming.” Part of that is because of the aforementioned process as writers have to endlessly ramp up the extraordinary twists and turns of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune to keep readers/viewers increasingly aware of various plot machinations on their toes and guessing as to what will happen. Part of it is also because in that quest, too many writers become lazy about making sure those machinations are logical and make sense within the confines of the world and narrative they’ve created. Overwhelming and confusing your audience with explosions, metaphorical or literal, isn’t brilliance, folks.
You know, I rather wonder what Agatha --- and Ian, too, for that matter --- would make of it all now.
But The Mousetrap, as the play was titled, endured. To this day, in fact. Just about the only thing which could close it down was the Covid pandemic, and after that, it sprang back to life, rather like the zombies in numerous film franchises.
I’m going to make a ‘hot take’ about The Mousetrap. (A term I only started to run across relatively recently in the last year or two; Wikipedia says that, in journalism, a hot take is a "piece of deliberately provocative commentary that is based almost entirely on shallow moralizing," but also admits the term has broadened through social media use to “an unpopular or controversial opinion.”) So here it is: I don’t particularly care for The Mousetrap. I find it simplistic and predictable. (Yes, Virginia, I have seen it. At least twice over the years, maybe more.) And I agree with the early critics, who, again according to Wikipedia, said the play was ‘built entirely of clichés,’ with a number of the characters ‘too obvious by half.’
Now, in Aggie’s defense --- not that she really needs a thoroughly unknown writer to come to her defense, though I will anyway --- she wrote this story more than 85 years ago. I’ve said many times that writers write for, and of, their times, and she certainly did. Was it a kinder, gentler time? Not really, on one level --- the Second World War, with all its attendant horrors, had just wrapped a few years earlier --- but on another, literary level, I’d say it was. It was certainly a less frenetic time.
The same case can be made for the early James Bond films, by the way. Simplistic, trite, beyond dreadfully sexist… they were crimes against cinema. (And yes, I’ve watched them, too. The entire collection, he said with a sigh. My wife wanted all the Bond films for Christmas one year, so, dutiful husband that I am, I got them for her AND watched them with her. Of such sacrifices are successful marriages made. Oy.) I know many will find it sacrilegious that I’d mention Agatha Christie mysteries and Ian Fleming potboilers in the same sentence, but I’ll offend people all over again by saying that there’s probably more similarities between the two writers than a lot of people care to admit.
At any rate, I’d like to advance the idea that literary audiences weren’t quite so… so jaded. And that’s what led me to my central question for today: have we lost our capacity for surprise? How many times do we read/watch the climax where the protagonist prevails against all odds, and we relax… but only for a moment, because we know, even if the clueless protagonist doesn’t, that something else is coming along before the end of the story? Something even nastier and scarier.
(Think of the climactic sequence of the film Aliens: the protagonist, Ellen Ripley, has rescued her de facto daughter and the injured soldier Hicks, and together with the android Bishop, they’ve escaped the nuclear destruction of the alien-infested colony and are safely back on their spaceship and ready to go home. Or are they? Turns out they aren’t, because a big, badass momma alien hitched a ride on their little shuttle and is just a little pissed off with the way things have played out.) Whenever a character heaves a sigh of relief after defeating the enemy and says something to the effect of, “Well, glad that’s over, guess we’re done here,” as the audience, we’ve been trained over the last few decades just to know they’ve overstrained the universe’s tolerance for that kind of foolish naivete, and something really ugly is about to happen. Haha! Biff! Kapow! Take that, ridiculous puny characters!
Have we lost our capacity for literary/filmic surprise? Well, no, I don’t think so… but authors and filmmakers have to be a whole helluva lot more creative about it now than they needed to be lo, those (more innocent) several decades ago. Characters we used to routinely assume were invulnerable to lethal harm because they were primary characters (something I called the Immunity Syndrome several posts back) … people like George R.R. Martin sure killed that idea (and the characters themselves) off right smartly. In fact, more often than not, if you stumbled across a likable, fairly heroic character of his, it was a pretty good bet said character would likely soon be pushing up the daisies after a grisly demise.
It’s fairly rare nowadays that I can read or watch something unfold and think or say, “Man, I sure didn’t see that coming.” Part of that is because of the aforementioned process as writers have to endlessly ramp up the extraordinary twists and turns of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune to keep readers/viewers increasingly aware of various plot machinations on their toes and guessing as to what will happen. Part of it is also because in that quest, too many writers become lazy about making sure those machinations are logical and make sense within the confines of the world and narrative they’ve created. Overwhelming and confusing your audience with explosions, metaphorical or literal, isn’t brilliance, folks.
You know, I rather wonder what Agatha --- and Ian, too, for that matter --- would make of it all now.
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