Inlanders - Stephen Reese

I posted earlier that I’m enjoying the fourth season of Lost. I admire the show as an example of “pure storytelling”: this happens, then this happens…but then! And then! And guess what? Then this! And who’s that? And what’s that mean?

When you keep posing new questions and withholding the answers, you get a fine steam of forward momentum going. Alas, Lost has been accused of withholding too much and revealing too little. Worse, it can resort to gimmickry. As in last week’s episode.

In it, the writers intercut a “flash-forward” showing the hospital birth of one character’s baby, with a flashback tracking her husband’s frantic efforts to secure a panda doll for emergency room gifting. In the show’s final moments, the dupe is revealed, confirming that husband is nowhere near his wife in the future. He’s securing the panda for an employer in the past.

Let me start this rant by saying I’m not fond of twists.

For me, the nobler goal of storytelling is to engage an audience’s emotions. To aim first for their heart, and their head second, if at all. An immediate emotional response, in my opinion, is more instinctive and true than a considered, reasoned reaction. It’s a more powerful means to bind the reader (or viewer) to the fiction, and a finer achievement for the writer. 

Consider: a story that’s found its way into someone’s heart has greater lasting impact and meaning than one that simply teases their brain. If a viewer’s head gains critical and objective distance from the material, that magic of immersion, the suspension of disbelief, empathy for the characters living the story…they’re lost.

Sometimes a head “gaining distance” happens so abruptly and inelegantly, the heart never comes back for more. 

I argue a twist does this. It jolts the audience right out of the fiction. Our heads are so busy trying to make sense of the cognitive disconnect - as the rug is pulled out from under us - we forget we were feeling anything in the first place.

That’s what happened for me when Lost showed its hand last week. Suddenly discovering the two threads were not connected, except to deceive, violated my intimacy with the story. It was a snide nudge and wink without emotional weight, a purely intellectual device. Hey look, viewer, we got you to believe the husband was on his way to meet his wife, but nope, his scene’s actually from an earlier, unrelated time.

That’s not storytelling. It’s a cheap parlor trick.

If the little game you’ve played with your audience adds nothing to our understanding of the characters and doesn’t carry the story forward in a meaningful way, the only one who’ll be satisfied is you, Mr Clever. You don’t win any points for not playing fair with the people you’ve worked so hard to seduce into your fiction. Betrayal is betrayal, regardless the arena.

I’m not saying a twist can’t work. I imagine it’s well and regularly employed in mystery yarns, which I have no affinity for and won’t presume to pontificate about here.

In a standard, straight-ahead drama, though - which I’ll claim to understand - you want readers (or viewers) to invest in characters for real emotional reasons and follow their plight with true, building concern. A conclusion, when it comes, should feel inevitable, built on and arising naturally from all events preceding it. This way, the audience is not caught off-guard. Those events we’ve witnessed along the way combine their narrative and emotional weight, and the critical mass they gather can ONLY tip the scales this one particular way we may not have foreseen, but will readily admit was coming - once we glimpse it actualized.

That’s not a cheap trick at all.

It’s damn hard to pull off.

And to be fair, Lost did pull it off, only a few weeks earlier this fourth season. The episode in question saw a hero traveling back in time to give his beloved a message that if acted upon, would reunite them in the future after years of estrangement.

If the beloved can look past the absurd means her lover uses to deliver the message (time travel), and honor the request, no matter how insane, they win. The outcome hinges on her finding faith that this man she once loved and trusted - but over the years has come to doubt - is telling the truth now.

So we’ve got a cool time travel setup to get our head working.

And the payoff of true faith to hook our heart.

Now that’s storytelling.

- Stephen Reese