I wrote a post not long ago about spoilers. Plot spoilers have always been a big deal - there's a story that someone walked out of the premiere of The Empire Strikes Back and said (and by the way, this one's past the statute of limitations) "I can't believe Darth Vader is Luke's father!" thus drawing the ire of the fans looking forward to their own viewing.
This post is going to have some spoilers, but generally not for anything that hasn't been around for over ten years. (And if I do get into other things, I'll put it behind a cut.)
But spoilers are, I think, a broader conversation than twists. Twists, naturally, can be spoiled, but so can other things. If you're, say, making a climactic film in an 11-year, 22 (or whatever the count was) film franchise, certain characters dying would be the grounds for spoilers, but it's not exactly a twist - when the stakes are raised and the threat is made out to be enormous, it's not surprising that some of the good guys might pay the ultimate cost. You might not want to know who does, but it's not exactly a twist.
Given that it's the subject of the post, let's talk about what it is, exactly, that we mean when we talk about a twist.
Often, it's sort of the opposite of dramatic irony. This term is used to describe situations where the characters are operating on limited information while the audience knows better. When Hamlet considers killing Claudius but decides against it given that his murderous uncle has just been praying and, he assumes, atoning spiritually for killing Hamlet's father, Hamlet decides he can't kill him now as it would result in Claudius going to heaven with a clean soul. Yet the audience knows that Claudius has found himself unable to ask forgiveness for his deeds, meaning he's still damned. Hamlet's failure to do the deed then is what leads to all the other deaths in the play.
A twist tends to involve some character - sometimes even the protagonist - having some vital piece of information that the audience knows nothing about, only for this information to be revealed later on.
But that's not really the complete picture.
I suppose such a thing could be a mild twist. But if we use that definition, it would mean that every Agatha Christie-style murder mystery has a twist ending, only because we know that someone's the murderer, but we don't know who that is until it's revealed in the end.
So we also have to take into account genre expectations.
Murder on the Orient Express is maybe the most famous of the Poirot mysteries by Christie. But the thing about it is that even within the mystery genre, it has a twist ending. Like most Poirot stories, a person is murdered (and as is often the case, someone who rightfully deserves a number of enemies.) Seemingly by coincidence, there are several different people who all have some connection to the victim - a mob boss - who are on the Orient Express with him when he is stabbed to death. Each has a motive to kill him, which is actually rather standard Agatha Christie fare. So, knowing the genre that she more or less invented, we expect to have Poirot's suspicions jump from suspect to suspect until he arrives at the final proof that tells us which of these people it is. But then there's the twist: they all did it. In this case, it's not exactly the character who has information that the audience doesn't, but instead it's that the author knows that the rules of locked-room mystery stories can be changed, while the audience is expecting them to remain consistent.
One of the best-executed twists, to my mind, is that of Fight Club. Fight Club, adapted from the Chuck Palahniuk novel, is thematically dense with ideas about capitalism, sexuality, misogyny, violence, and toxic masculinity. But it also contains a mind-blowing twist that has become something of a cliche by now (a TV show, which I won't name here because it's from more recent than 10 years ago, paid homage to Fight Club by playing a cover of Where is My Mind? which is the song that ends the film, while doing essentially the same big twist.) All throughout, the film has centered around the nameless narrator (and it's a tribute to the film that when you first watch it, you might not even realize you never got his name) and Tyler Durden, the charismatic ubermensch with whom he forms first the eponymous Fight Club and then the anarchist terrorist organization called Project Mayhem. When the narrator tries to stop the insanity that has gotten way out of hand, he comes to realize that Tyler Durden is not a real person - that Tyler is just a persona that has allowed him to act out his every unfettered, id-based impulse.
Now, here's the thing about Fight Club: I predicted the twist.
There is a scene somewhere in the middle of the movie when Marla, the woman who inadvertently helped to spawn the Tyler Durden persona, comes to see the narrator and speaks with him while Tyler is in the basement. When Marla asks who the narrator is speaking with, the movie just moves on, but I thought "hold on, wouldn't it be obvious that it was Tyler? Unless Tyler doesn't exist?"
So yes, I did predict the ending.
But it was not predictable. It was inevitable.
See, here's the thing: upon a second viewing, Fight Club seems to beat you over the head with the truth of the twist. From early on, you get lines like "Sometimes Tyler would speak for me." Or you'd see him popping up in single-frame flashes (spliced in, like the porn he inserts into children's movies) well before the Narrator actually meets him. In such a stylized movie, we're expected to simply dismiss these the first time around as anarchic stylistic touches. But the movie is actually screaming the truth at us, and yet the truth is so outlandish that we work hard to explain it away.
And that, to me, is the essence of a good twist.
The same friend who first recommended Fight Club also encouraged me to see Memento, which has its own twist. But the Christopher Nolan movie I like the most (sorry, Dark Knight) is the Prestige, which manages to use one massive twist to misdirect - not unlike a magician - from the even bigger one.
I previously wrote an extensive summary of the plot, but realized that would be about the length of the preceding post, so to boil it down: there is one twist in this movie that would normally seem to be the big one that leaves audiences talking about it. The film centers around the bitter rivalry between two stage magicians in the 1890s, Borden and Angier. But we eventually discover that Borden is, in fact, two different people.
This twist works similarly to Fight Club, in that on a second viewing, knowing what we know, the signs are obvious. Christian Bale gives subtly but distinctly different performances depending on which Borden twin he's portraying, to the extent that you can develop a sense of one brother who is ambitious and vengeful and the other who is humble and cares more for his wife and child.
But what's remarkable is that this twist is, itself, kind of a misdirection from the larger twist. And that twist is that The Prestige is a science fiction movie.
The lengths that the Bordens go to hide the fact that they are two people is remarkable. But then we discover that Angier bought what amounts to a cloning machine from Nikola Tesla. And we find that Angier has, essentially, been killing himself over and over in front of an audience in the hopes of luring Borden to be implicated in the death.
The horror of what Angier has done, and the shocking genre shift showing us how he accomplished it, pulls the rug out from under us. Perhaps we felt we were clever, maybe figuring out the truth about the Bordens because that's the kind of twist this sort of movie is expected to have.
And much like an expert magic trick, it uses our own cleverness against us.
And again, the twist is telegraphed - the title shot at the beginning of the movie is a field of top hats that have been duplicated by this device. Yet, perhaps like the single-frame splices of Tyler Durden, we might dismiss this as a metaphorical or stylistic image. We don't yet have the context to understand the profound significance of the image.
I don't know if it's just the movies I watched around that era or if there were a lot of those sorts of movies then. 1999, the year of Fight Club, also saw the release of the Sixth Sense, another movie famous for its massive twist.
The examples I've mentioned so far are, I think, examples of well-executed twists.
What's interesting is the way that films have shown themselves to be, actually, sort of short-form versions of storytelling. Television has become more novelistic, and a few prominent TV adaptations of novels have shown that you can tell much broader, more sweeping stories. I just watched Good Omens (which probably deserves its own post,) which was done as a 6-part miniseries (roughly 6 hours total.) Previously, I could imagine such a story being more likely to get a 2-hour big-screen adaptation, but TV is becoming a more popular medium for adaptation, maybe thanks to Game of Thrones.
But when it comes to twist-focused stories, film has the advantage of forcing you into a certain degree of narrative economy. If you watch something like, say, Lucky Number Slevin, you know that there's going to be some big reveal, and it's a joy to watch and wait for the truth to be unpacked.
Films are also generally seen in one sitting, which means that the twist ending is part and parcel with the entirety of the narrative. I think this part is particularly important when you talk about stories that really pull the rug out from under you regarding characters and their true natures.
Um, spoilers for Game of Thrones.
The end to Game of Thrones, which one presumes mirrors at least in some ways the intended ending for the books, is something of a twist. Like Murder on the Orient Express, the Song of Ice and Fire story is built around playing with genre expectations.
The first book and first season of the show, the ostensible protagonist of the entire story is killed at its climax. Is this a twist?
I think it's debatable. On one hand, if you are really assuming that the good guy would prevail, or that the protagonist of the series would continue to be that for the entire run, it might come off as a twist. But I don't know if it totally counts.
Dune, for example, which is Science Fiction but so far removed from familiar society so as to feel more similar to fantasy, switches protagonists in the middle of the series. In some ways, Paul Atreides learns the dark lessons Ned refused to hear, by embracing the use of brutality in order to secure his power.
I don't want to downplay how shocking Ned's death was, but to a large extent, George R. R. Martin was still establishing the rules of his series at that point. Ned's death was the true announcement that this was a series in which being a good guy and a protagonist did not lend you plot armor. While the Red Wedding was perhaps more shocking to some due to the sudden way it cut off a different plotline along with several characters, in my opinion it was far less of a twist because it was more of a reminder of these rules than laying them out in the first place.
It wouldn't be until the second-to-last episode of the TV series that we'd get a twist as devastating. Upon securing victory at King's Landing, with the war basically won, Daenerys, whom we've been following as she's risen from political and sexual bargaining chip to powerful queen, goes on a murderous rampage, destroying seemingly the entire city.
We're then forced to ask ourselves if we've really been watching Daenerys travel along a hero's journey or a villain's.
Now, I'll go on record saying that the moment she snapped, and indeed a lot of the final season, was rushed and thus didn't land all that well. But does Daenery's villainous turn pass the Fight Club test? In other words, does it feel inevitable?
I think that's open for debate. We'd never seen her act so brutally toward people who were actively surrendering to her before - her violence was generally a response to some particular act of defiance or offense.
What worked about it, and what passed the Fight Club test to my mind, was that viewing Daenerys this whole time required forgiving or overlooking a lot of things that made her a problematic hero. From burning Mirri Maz Duur alive (for the offense of taking rather understandable revenge upon the Dothraki) to the fact that she happily accepted the loyalty of an army of slave soldiers to whom she had granted "freedom" without giving them a chance to explore what, exactly, that meant. And there was her use of Mereen as a kind of "practice kingdom" before sailing west. Many of these seemed like unfortunate footnotes to a largely heroic arc, and yet in retrospect, it paints the image of a self-obsessed conqueror more interested in her destiny and power than actually making the better world she claimed she wanted.
So I think it does work as a twist on paper. But there are a couple problems.
One is that we were given far too much time to invest in the idea of Daenerys as a hero. Thus, the feeling from her turn is one of personal betrayal. Again, with a movie, you've only spent 2 hours with these people, and thus, the movie exists as its own, discrete entity. You don't expect to break it down into different pieces that you'll like or dislike separately. Meanwhile, Game of Thrones had been going on for so long that there are actual children named Daenerys whose parents wanted a name that evoked a powerful woman fighting against the patriarchy. We've been given so much time to sit with these characters that this sort of twist feels less like a clever piece of plot-engineering than an actual betrayal by a friend.
That reason's kind of philosophical, and an attempt to explain the emotional response to the twist.
The show also could have better motivated her snap - it was as if the desire to have it feel unpredictable robbed us of a good motivation. Yes, we'd seen her be violent before, but there seemed to be no purpose behind her destroying the city beyond proving to us that she was, in the end, a villain.
And that, perhaps, is at the core of what I'm talking about here.
A twist's quality is not in how hard it is to predict. Once again, I'll point out that maybe my favorite twist ending to a movie is Fight Club, which I did manage to predict. Shocking the audience can feel pretty fun, but the subversion of the audience's assumptions is not, actually, what makes a twist like these work. It's far more important for the re-contextualization of what came before to feel revelatory. It's the thrill not just of finding out that you, as the audience, were wrong about something, but that the truth was staring you in the face all along. That the author earned the twist, and played entirely fair with you.
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