Defective Tales

Some broken tales are works of weird genius

When a Tale is Broken

A tale tells of an action, or of a man’s character and career. These both rely upon a series of events, scenes, or anecdotes, that add up to a whole effect: in the former case, the success or failure of the attempted action, and in the latter case, the sum measure of the man.

There is a logic to both the action and the character. The logic builds to the whole effect of the tale. What contradicts or undermines that effect has no business in the tale; at the same time the logic uses steps to build the effect, and some of these steps can be dropped, while others are needed.

If we think of the logic as covering a sequence of A to Z, with each of the letters standing in for one scene or anecdote along the way, then we can also think of each of these scenes and anecdotes as covering their own sequence of A to Z, and each of these subordinate parts will then have its own A to Z, and so on.

This is kin to Zeno’s Dichotomy Paradox: there Zeno of Elea, an ancient Greek philosopher, argued that you could never go anywhere. Before you reached where you were going, you had to go half way there. But before you could reach the half-way mark, you had to go half way to it, and before you could reach this quarter-way mark, you had to go to the eighth-way mark, and so on, forever down to the smallest imaginable distance. But even the smallest imaginable could be divided in two just as the whole distance was.

Of course, as a practical matter, you can go places, and we all do. But each stage of the journey may be described in ever-smaller details, until the description of the journey fills thousands of pages and years of recital.

Therefore the tale must leave out some of the details of its sequence. At the same time, if some details are left out, there is a breakdown in the ‘sense’ or logical progression of the sequence.

This is what I mean when I say a tale is ‘broken’ or defective (in grammar, when a verb lacks some of the forms of some tenses, it is called ‘defective’ and I borrowed that term when I saw how some tales could work and yet have such gaping holes that they don’t, when you come to think of them, make any sense).

The Failed Defective Tales

In almost all the defective tales you read, the talesman has simply done a bad job, and the tale is weak, nonsense, and generally bad. The talesman has tried to tell a tale that is too complicated for him, or he has forgotten some parts of it, or he simply hasn’t thought it all through. Maybe he was under deadline and rushed, or maybe he had other limitations of time or space (word count) that forced him to leave out parts he hoped he could get away with — at any rate he couldn’t find any better way to tell the tale in that time or space — or maybe he just wasn’t up to the task. And when you watch a movie like this, or read a story like this, you just think, ‘What a bad story! They certainly botched that one!’

But sometimes a tale, even though it is defective in this way, has an odd and strong effect on you, a sort of weird charm or influence.

Defective Tales that Work

When I say a tale is defective, but it ‘works,’ I don’t mean a broken, incomplete tale that has some very strong scene or character or style that’s strong. I don’t mean a movie that makes no sense, but has beautiful photography, or a great performance by one of the actors; or a written story that has great style and powerful expressions, or concepts that you can never forget.

I do mean a tale that adds up to something that goes beyond the logical sequence that the tale seems to be about, into something else altogether; or a tale that relies upon its audience to supply the missing scenes in the sequence — and gets away with doing so.

I will give two examples from movies.

Alfred Hitchcock made a film Vertigo based on the French crime thriller Sueurs froides: d’entre les morts (Cold Sweat: From Among the Dead) written in 1954 by the team of ‘Boileau-Narcejac.’ One of the difficulties in telling a suspense-mystery tale, is that the explanation of the mystery’s solution is so boring. It’s mainly in the explanation that Vertigo seems defective; the ending leaves us literally on the brink with nowhere to go. The movie was deemed a critical failure when it was released, and was a financial flop as well. And yet it has since been called one of the master’s greatest films!

What Vertigo is ‘really about’ is not the superficial level of the detective thriller, of ‘who did what, when, to whom, and why.’ It is more interested in other things that lurk below the surface — how men see women, how directors relate to actresses, how actors relate to their roles, how women fall into the trap of conforming to what they think men want to see in them, and other things. The movie has such power over us because we are dimly aware of these deeper issues.

So we find in Vertigo one of the things that can make a defective tale ‘work’ and somehow satisfy its audience. The ‘deeper levels’ that the tale reaches usually fall into one of a few kinds:

• They are more abstract than a tale can properly handle without resorting to the weak, didactic device of having characters debate the issues
• They deal with subject matter that the audience would find uncomfortable to face head-on, or would even be censorable
• They are beyond the talesman’s grasp, though wholly out of his reach; he can suggest them but not firmly deal with them
• They are so intangible that no-one can deal with them concretely; direct handling would destroy them and leave them without power
• They are the stuff of dreams — dregs and vestiges of our unconscious hopes, desires, or fears

The Woman in Green is a minor, 1945 entry in Universal Pictures’ series of B-films about Sherlock Holmes starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce; it was directed by Roy William Neill from a script by Bertram Millhauser. The subject matter involves hypnotism, which in 1940s Hollywood usually means psychoanalysis and the unconscious urges or ‘baser instincts’ that control us all despite our ‘better impulses.’ Again we have a mystery, one that in the end makes very little sense. The chief reason seems to be one of cutting the film down to the 68-minute running time, as can be guessed by some elided scenes shot with dialogue but presented without sound, and covered by a voice-over. This voice-over comes not from Dr Watson as in Conan Doyle’s tales, but from the Scotland Yard detective who consults with Holmes about the case. The chief power of the movie comes from some special-effects or trick-photography shots of the bowl of dark liquid in which a flower floats, and the images of hypnotist and victim appear. The hypnotist is a beautiful woman who attracts Holmes’s interest when he first sees her (without any awareness of her connection to the case he is being offered), and she seems to hypnotize the great detective himself, which is ‘proved’ when the thugs stick a needle into the ‘hypnotized’ Holmes without any reaction to the pain. Professor Moriarty turns out to be behind the scheme, which involves the hypnotist as femme fatale, who seduces a string of wealthy men, then hypnotizes them into believing they have gone mad and committed random murders of women in the street; she and Moriarty then blackmail the men. Truly a loopy scheme.

The compression of the tale is at odds with the development at length of the scenes of hypnosis; clearly what the filmmakers are most interested in is the beautiful seductress/hypnotist, and what might lie deep in the fears and subconscious of even the most upstanding of men. The fact that the murder victims are women evokes sexual repression in these respectable men: it is as though, thoroughly aroused by the hypnotist, the men must, like Mr Hyde, wreak their desires upon common women they find in the street — and even then it is not sex but violence that drives them. (The murder of women in the street, especially young fair women with no other motive such as robbery, probably stands in for rape and murder, because rape was forbidden by Joe Breen at the censorship office.)

Because of all this, the film has an odd power, and hints at underlying fear in the way many films noir do from the period. Thus it comes off (or it did to me at any rate) as a defective tale that worked. And we can add to the above list one more reason why:

• They belong to an established genre and expect their audience to be familiar with the genre and fill in the gaps on their own

In the case of The Woman in Green we have a specific sub-genre of the detective tale, that of Holmes & Watson. By now the famous detective’s powers of deduction approach the magical, and his encounters with criminals must somehow test his superhuman powers of self-control. Holmes here adopts no disguises (though he does, in a swipe from one of the Conan Doyle tales, disguise a bust as himself, for a hypnotized sniper to fire at). But he does come up against a beautiful woman, and somehow resists her fatal charms, which are themselves literally compounded into the almost-magical realm of hypnosis. (We could even go so far as to say that in this tale, hypnosis stands in for sex appeal. Indeed it is a hallmark of these defective tales that work that, since they do not deal directly with whatever it is that gives them their odd power and genius, and we must supply the explanations ourselves, we the audience tell these tales as much as their credited talesmen, and so almost any interpretation that speaks to us, is valid — at least to us.)

DIY

Now the question arises whether a defective tale can be made to work ‘on purpose’ by design. I don’t give Roy William Neill full credit for doing so in The Woman in Green but I do give Hitchcock full marks in Vertigo.

Maybe it’s something only masters can do.

Those of us who are not masters can still produce such tales, even the least-masterly talesmen among us. But it will be by accident, and come because the ‘thing underneath’ takes over the talesman himself while he busies himself writing the tale. He himself believes he is dealing with what lies on the surface; but what lies beneath is too strong within him, and manifests itself in the tale, to the detriment of the superficial subject matter at hand.

(Composed on keyboard Monday, April 7, 2008)