Make It Clear

How important it is that the audience understands what and where and who

The most thrilling aspect of the way a tale can be told, to an audience, is when the tale does not explain enough, and the audience must make guesses and assumptions about what is going on … and they prove to be correct. The talesman does this by leaving out vital bits of information. But if he leaves out just a few more bits of information, the audience won’t be able to guess and assume correctly. They will feel lost, and this is one of the least thrilling, most annoying aspects of the way a tale can be told.

By way of explanation, I’ll be using examples from movies. But the principles should hold for all forms of talesmanship.

Lost in Time and Space

This notion arose when I watched Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain recently. It is a tale of passion — obsession, really. A doctor’s beloved wife is dying from an inoperable brain tumor. He is desperate to save her and heads a research study using other primates to refine techniques to wipe out the cancer. These methods use surgery in the main, but also examine chemical methods of dissolving or killing the tumors.

The man’s wife is full of life and seems not particularly afraid of or worried about dying. She is one of those girl-characters created in an ideal mold by male talesmen who see the man as too with work to see and enjoy what life in the present moment has to offer; in total contrast, this type of girl has no ambitions or obsession with work, and is wholly in love with the sensuous moment. In this sense we can look at such tales as being not really about man and woman, but about inner traits of the human soul. The ‘work’ soul is here shown as male, the ‘play’ soul is female.

The man’s wife happens also to be a writer, or at least she is writing a historical novel set in the time of Spain’s great Empire and conquest of Central America. In this tale-within-a-tale, the Queen of Spain has heard tales of the Biblical Tree of Life hidden in Central America. The Mayans know where this Tree is, and have extracted from its bark a substance that grants immortality. The Mayans have also connected this tree with a constellation, a nebulous cloud surrounding a dying star, where the Mayans believe dead souls go to be reborn. The Spanish Queen is attacked for these views by the Chief Inquisitor, but she sends a brave conquistador and franciscan monk to New Spain to find the tree. When the conquistador has found the tree, the Queen promises that he and she will drink of its nectar and become united for all time.

The doctor’s wife dies, leaving this novel unfinished. But it just so happens that, as part of his experiments, the doctor has used a chemical derived from the bark of a mysterious Central American tree upon one of his baboon subjects; the baboon shows no sign of losing the tumor right away, but it does regain health in all other ways, and seems to have become young and strong again. But since the tumor has not changed, the doctor disregards the stunning results and goes on with other surgical tests. Too late, the word reaches him that after all the baboon’s tumor has begun to wither away.

It is left to the doctor to finish his wife’s novel. He does so much later. In fact it seems that he imbibes the bark essence himself, becomes immortal, and plants one of these mystic trees over his wife’s grave, where it flourishes and seems to him to repeat another of the Mayan beliefs, of the ‘First Father’ who sacrificed himself to the roots of this tree, and whose soul went through the fruit of the tree into a bird and thence into the sky.

An indeterminate time later, the doctor travels through space with the tree, speaking to it as if it were his wife, haunted by visions of her, seeing himself as the conquistador and his wife as the Queen. He goes to the nebula about the dying star, where he hopes to find his wife reborn.

There is an ending which tells … something more about the conquistador and blends the doctor of the far future into the conquistador’s tale, and conflates the conquistador with the Mayan First Father; this may be truth or it may be only how the doctor chose to complete his dead wife’s novel.

All three of these tales (conquistador, doctor, and cosmic voyager) are presented on film, and Hugh Jackman plays all three men, as Rachel Weisz plays Queen and doctor’s wife. The articulation of the tale mixes all three tales together, and jumps confusingly among them.

The opening (before we know where we are or what is going on) jumps between cosmic traveler and conquistador. We then have bits of the doctor’s tale. The opening seems designed to plunge us into a dream, where bits of imagination and memory drift in and out of one another. This is by intent but it leaves the audience adrift and lost for a good half hour, until we get to catch on and seem to make sense of the three tales.

This is a case where there was not enough explanation. (I’m sure Aronofsky would have hated to make a film that explained things as I suggest here.)

The opening of the tale is where explanation is the one crucial thing. ‘Make it Clear’ is the first commandment of the opening. The job of the opening is to make things clear (what must it make clear? The predicament).

Illusions of Knowledge

I must add this paraphrase of something Alfred Hitchcock is said to have once said:

The audience always has to know where they are at any moment in a movie … even when they’re wrong.

What must be Made Clear is the illusion, not the truth. So long as we the audience can feel confident that we know where who and what is going on, we will enjoy the tale. Later we can learn that what we believed was not, in fact, the truth — this is often a ploy of mystery tales, but it is also a prime motif of the French dramas of the 1900s ‘well-made play’ in which there was almost always a mystery, a family secret, which did not appear as a mystery at all; rather a prosperous family appears on stage in Act I and only in Act II do we learn that the façade of prosperity is false, and the family is in desperate need of cash (a new business enterprise to succeed, a marriage to come off) in order to stave off ruin.

Genre and Explanation

When dealing with mature genre tales, a good deal of explanation can be left out from the opening, and the audience will feel confident they know who what and where they are regardless. This is because they (think they) know the genre in its characters and setting as well as narrative forms. Experienced genre audiences will grow bored with explanations such as what is a detective and what his job is, or any other mundane basic information about the genre. As a genre matures so do its audience, with the result that tales told in it will become increasing rococo and dense, and get by on less and less explanations. The only exceptions here come when the tale tries to reverse or undermine the expected who what and where of the genre in an effort to refresh it.

Masters Get By With Less

Master talesmen know just what bits of information they must tell, and what bits they may leave out. Beginners are wise to make no such assumptions, and to include everything. Make it clear! We beginners will be tempted to follow the lead of the masters, for the reason that we as audience have found that great thrill in following tales that are incomplete, that we as audience must guess at, assume, and complete for ourselves. But until we know what we are doing — really know what we are doing — we will almost always fall short, and give our audience too little information, leaving them confused and lost at sea.

Three examples of master filmmakers who produced movies that were incomplete, even ‘defective,’ were Hitchcock, Leo McCarey, and Howard Hawks. In the last half of the 1950s they made three movies that are now thought of as masterpieces, and all are defective. Hitchcock made Vertigo McCarey made An Affair to Remember and Hawks made Rio Bravo. These are all defective, leave out tons of ‘needful’ information not just from the opening but throughout the tale, and almost make no sense if examined logically upon the evidence they provide.

But these three men were at the height of their considerable powers, they knew exactly what they were doing. And we must note that the three movies were genre movies as well. (Indeed, in the case of An Affair to Remember McCarey was remaking his 20-years earlier Love Affair.)

(Composed on keyboard Saturday, April 5, 2008)