Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements

NOTE: This little essay discusses the 2009 film Exam, and contains spoilers pretty much from the first sentence. If you imagine you might someday watch this film and fear spoilers, read no further.

Exam is a small little movie I’d describe as Sci Fi, though it’s main thrust is mindfuck/thriller territory. It’s one of a few recent SF films (another that pops to mind being Cube) which combines low budgets made to look slick by the simple expedient of setting the entire movie in one room, more or less, and the plot engine of several disparate people who must work together despite mistrust and paranoia to surmount the plot obstacle. They’re also usually extremely high-concept, with tight little premises that appeal to me. I love a story that turns on one simple but potentially brilliant device.

When I was a kid in grammar school, we were once given a test (this might have been 3rd or 4th grade, I forget). We were told to read all of the instructions before beginning the test. There were about 50 instructions/questions on the page, starting with “Write your name on top of this sheet” or something similar. If you read all the way to the bottom, the last instruction said “Do not perform any of the instructions before this one”. In other words, the whole point of the test was to teach us that good drones in society always pay very close attention to instructions — the kids who started working immediately and didn’t read all the way through failed, where those of us who read everything and smugly put our pencils down passed.

To this day, I’m not sure if passing was a good thing. Am I smart, or just exceptionally well-trained by my societal masters?

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So, I’ve been watching Persons Unknown. There, I said it, and I feel better for having admitted it. It’s not a good show – between the sketchy character development and the ridiculous 1970s camera work (wherein everything is FLASHED BACK with groovy EFFECTS so you know you’re watching a MIND SCREW) it’s slightly less than compelling drama. Of course with these sorts of serialized dramas, where the main point is the mystery behind it, you expect a little wonkery and wankery; the producers, after all, expect to string you along long enough to get a syndication deal, and then roll in your money for the rest of their lives.

Still, I started watching it. I watched it a) because I am a sucker for  shows with mysterious premises like “x number of strangers are kidnapped for no obvious reason”, and b) because it sort of came out of nowhere for me – just suddenly on the screen. And after two episodes I was pretty much done with it: It was stiff, kind of poorly written in a everything-weird-but-the-kitchen-sink way where all sorts of bizarre details are thrown into the mix for no apparent reason, and I had not come to care about any of the characters at all. So after two episodes I was ready to fold up the tent and abandon ship.

And then I saw the preview for episode three, and it was bananas.

The power of the Bananas Plot Twist (BPT)  should never be underestimated. You take an ordinary, possibly not very interesting story, and give it a sudden and irreversible twist to the left, and you can transform something boring and generic into something, if not good, at least interesting. It’s like the Truck Driver’s Gear Change in music (that moment when the song suddenly and unexpectedly lurches into a whole new key for dramatic effect, e.g. Man in the Mirror): Just when your audience is writing your story off, you throw something bizarre and wonderful at them and they stick around.

All I saw in the preview was gas masks being dropped from a plane, but only three masks for six people, and then gas everywhere. And I thought, well, damn, I guess I want to know what’s going on here after all.

The trick, of course, is to introduce your BPT early enough in the story to hook folks before they do actually give up on you. In the case of Persons Unknown, the third episode was perfect: The first episode is all about premise so I was willing to accept some slow storytelling and lame character development. Episode two wore me down a bit as the characters glumly sleepwalked through their predicament, and I was just getting ready to give up when the BPT came up and reeled me back in.

The other trick is to make the BPT bananas enough. We’re a long time in on the modern story form, and a lot of twists have been done plenty of times before – if you’re going to try to pull off a BPT, don’t go weak sister on it: commit and take one more step across the line than seems absolutely necessary. When you’ve got a show like Persons Unknown to begin with – a show about strangers kidnapped and psychologically tortured, for god’s sakes – you can’t just reveal that someone’s not who they say they are. That’s ho-hum. Think John Locke revealed as paralyzed or Agent Cooper dreaming about the Man from Another World – go for it.

Persons Unknown remains in the meh category for me; I’m interested enough now to see where it’s going, but if there isn’t something amazing by, say, episode 8, I may wait for the spoilers to show up on the Internet. Still, the gas masks got me this far, and there will probably be other BPTs that might suck me in further, who knows? There had damn well better be. I’m a sucker for a good BPT.

I have terrible time perception; my memory is often suspect, frequently hallucinogenic, and sometimes outright fantasy, and I find it impossible to place events in a clear timeline in my own damn life. I can’t explain it. Something that happened 20 years ago will seem like it happened last month, something that happened last month will feel like a lifetime ago. And let’s not even get into my day-to-day memory – it’s a disaster. Yesterday I had agreed to meet my wife The Duchess at her office to help a friend of hers with some computer troubles, and I forgot no less than four times during the day, having the following conversation:

THE DUCHESS: I’m just calling to remind you about coming by here later.

ME: The what now?

So, whenever I’m tempted to write about past experiences or my perception of things over time, I hesitate. When writing fiction this is no problem – is probably a boon – but when I’m trying to write about the real world and make actual points, I get nervous, because it’s entirely possible that Ronald Reagan did not tap dance on national television in 1983 like I remember, and using the Reagan Tap Dance as an example of cultural revival in the 1980s might invite criticism from the peanut gallery. The cruel, unfeeling peanut gallery.

Still, to be an author is to be heroic, right? So I will tender this observation: When I was a kid reading fantasy and sci-fi paperbacks like they were oxygen keeping me alive, there were a lot of stories involving people (usually youngsters) crossing over into magical lands where they were no longer simply schoolchildren or loafabouts, but heroic warriors or skilled wizards. Today, however, this trope seems to have shifted: No longer do characters cross over into magical worlds separate from our own reality; rather characters come to realize that the world they live in is actually but obfuscatingly magical to begin with.

It’s a subtle shift, in a way. The books I’m thinking of from my youth – starting with the granddaddy of all crossover stories, The Chronicles of Narnia and running through a lot of the books I read as a kid (The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, The Guardians of the Flame, The Darwath Trilogy, to name three off the top of my head) all involved mundane, ordinary people from my world being swept into a magical realm where they either had the opportunity to simply reinvent themselves, or where they actually had amazing new abilities they lacked here. Today, look at the obvious examples: Harry Potter and the Twilight series: These stories posit that the mundane, crushingly dull world we live in coexists, or actually is the magical realm where we can reinvent ourselves or discover we have amazing abilities. The characters in these books don’t need to cross over, they just need to open their eyes.

Part of this shift might be just simple innovation: After years of stories where ordinary shlubs travel to magical worlds, a little change to the formula was needed to spice things up, and when those changes proved popular they spread. Part of it is changing sensibilities, though, I think. I think there’s more of a sense these days that the world we live in is kind of amazing, and that magic and adventure might lurk around every corner, and not exist solely in a magical world we have to be very, very lucky to stumble upon. You can speculate endlessly on cultural shifts like this: Is it the way kids are raised today versus how they were raised in earlier decades? Is it the explosion of the Internet, which makes so much more of the world visible to us all, whereas in the past it was a dull murky shadow at best? Who the hell knows. Quite possibly it’s just that this subtle shift in the mechanics of stories makes timeworn ideas seem fresh again, which is a nasty trick all us authors use.

Now here is where my memory makes me uneasy: You see, it’s entirely possible that these plot tropes existed simultaneously back in The Day, and I simply don’t remember it. Sort of the way entire cousins of mine existed back in 1980, yet seem to have appeared fully-formed in 2008 out of thin air, demanding I appear at family functions. It could be that my childhood self simply preferred the sorts of stories where people had to find hidden magical doorways rather than waking up and realizing that they actually have magical powers in the real world. Who knows? I can’t even remember my own name some days, and have had a series of Memento-esque tattoos applied to my body in order to get me through the day.

In the end, of course, none of this has anything to do with quality: Either approach can yield fantastic stories, and everything old gets new again someday, when a cranky, forgetful drunk will write about it. It’s in The Prophecies. trust me.

So, aside from my exciting life of international adventure, cybercrime, ballroom dancing exhibitions, and writing novels, I sometimes find myself on a couch with The Duchess and 2-3 cats at night, watching terrible, terrible movies. We like movies and have a very low bar for them, meaning we’ll watch almost anything. I am a man who paid for a ticket to view the classic John Candy film “Who’s Harry Crumb?” back when I was a teenager. Which dates me terribly, but if anyone has actually seen that horrible film it will give you an idea of how low my movie bar is.

The other night the movie Daybreakers leaped that bar with aplomb, did a few tumbles, and landed on our TV screen. To be honest I was intrigued by the concept even though I knew the movie had been made in 2007 and shelved for a few years, even though I knew it starred Ethan Hawke, who always looks unwashed and makes me want to Windex my screen whenever he’s on it. (To be fair, I usually enjoy Hawke as an actor. I just wish he’d stop writing). I thought the idea behind the movie was a good one: While it takes the tired old “vampire virus sweeps the world” idea, it has an interesting capitalist take: Once the world is mostly vampires, people just monetize human blood, start farming the remaining humans as livestock, and invert society so everyone can get on with their (immortal) lives at night.

I really like this. It makes sense to me: Once the horror of the whole world turning into vampires has past and everyone’s sitting around at night kind of bored, why wouldn’t society just retool for the new rules? The movie imagines a world that sleeps by day and works by night, cars that are modified to have “day driving” modes with tinted windows and cameras for steering, coffee kiosks offering 20% human blood in each cup, and an evil pharmaceutical company simultaneously farming humans for blood and researching synthetic blood. I like the setup.

Sadly, the movie itself is not so great. It establishes the universes pretty well and has some very nicely done design and effects, but ultimately degenerates into magical science solutions and characters with motivations so vague they might as well not exist. Sigh. But I’m not here to indict another failed narrative, I’m here to talk about special effects, and how often they are completely, utterly wasted in movies.

So, you have vampires. These are more like traditional vampires, not Twilight vampires: They need human blood to survive. They do not have reflections in mirrors. Sunlight kills them kind of gruesomely. A wooden stake through the heart makes them burst into bloody confetti. They don’t turn into bats at will, but blood deprivation makes them devolve into a bat-humanoid monstrosity with no higher brain functions. In a movie filled with vampires there are very few actual F/X shots; I don’t think the budget for the film was huge, and the directors probably had to be pretty picky about where they spent their paltry millions on effects shots. Sadly, they chose poorly.

For example, early in the film when Ethan Hawke’s character is introduced, we see his car first. A shot zooms in on the side mirror, and we see a pretty traditional WOW shot of things floating in the air, disembodied (because he has no reflection) and then the camera spins around to show us Hawke, looking normal aside from slightly glowing eyes and fangs etc. The shot itself is nicely done, and achieves what I suppose was the goal: Establishing that these are vampires. It’s pointless, though. The vampiric lack of reflection never comes up again as a plot point, and there are plenty of other ways the characters are established as vampires (glowing eyes, fangs, a tendency to drink blood and burn horribly in the sun). So what was the point? They blew millions of dollars to underscore something that didn’t need to be underscored. It’s a nifty shot, yes, but there might have been better ways to spend the money. If you removed that 30 seconds of film the movie would not be appreciably changed in any way.

This is often the trouble with F/X shots. You have some movies, like Transformers, where the entire damn movie is one long F/X shot, but then you have the lower-end SF films where the budget is not infinite, and the decision to include some F/X is a momentous one. They’re usually bad choices because no one seems to know how to use them to further the story – or to know that if you don’t need the F/X to further the story, it’s possibly best to just leave it out. Daybreakers could have spent that money on another writer to come up with a better ending than the mumbo-jumbo they put out there. If the lack of reflection had come up again later, been important in some way, that would have improved things considerably, but aside from an aversion to the sun and a deterioration due to blood deprivation the fact that most of the characters are vampires doesn’t really come up much in the plot mechanics.

Of course, you could argue that the concept of the film precluded a lot of vampiric F/X – the whole point is that humans roll with the vampire thing, recreate their materialistic world (except now literally feeding off of people!) and get back to drinking and smoking and wearing stylish suits while living in fabulous homes. It’s not about horror or action, it’s about society running out of resources and turning in on itself like a starving dog. Or it should have been, except for the mumbo jumbo ending, which makes no sense in that context.

Oh well. A better ending, of course, would have improved this movie a lot more than one unnecessary F/X shot, but better endings are a little more amorphous and difficult to quantify, whereas $5 million for 30 seconds of useless film is easy to tally up. Lord knows if they ever make an Avery Cates film, I hope they spend $20 million to build complex Monk robots with animatronic faces instead of just hiring guys to wear latex masks, and then someone will remind me of this essay when they spend $20 million on a single shot of a hover floating in the air and then the rest of the movie is stick figures and stock footage because they blew the budget, and i will despair.