The Thematic and the Plot

 A few months - maybe a year - ago, I watched a super-long video essay on YouTube about Twin Peaks. The essay broke down the show as an elaborate metaphor for David Lynch's (and Mark Frost's) views on the problems with the way television depicts violence, particularly about murder mysteries and police procedurals. Essentially, the argument was that Lynch wanted to focus on Laura Palmer as the complex, nuanced, and beautiful character who, in most such shows, would be a kind of non-character - a human McGuffin whose purpose was simply to drive the plot forward. The essay goes into extensive, elaborate detail to make every element of the series a direct metaphor for television both in its tropes and in its literal mechanics.

It's a frustrating essay, in part because of the profound smugness of the tone, but also in that the argument is fairly compelling. But I didn't want it to be compelling, in part because it created a detachment from the story - turning it into something purely metaphorical and not something to relate to with any sense of immersion.

Tonight, I watched Maggie Mae Fish's (part one) essay on Twin Peaks, which was in part a response to that same essay. While her essay was a response to the first one, largely arguing against the fully-mapped-out logic of the metaphor, she did also arrive at the idea that David Lynch wanted to focus on Laura Palmer as a fully-realized person - someone who wasn't just a glorified prop. She makes an interesting comparison between Fire Walk With Me, the prequel film made shortly after the show ended, and another massively influential film from the early 90s, Silence of the Lambs, suggesting that just as Twin Peaks was a reaction to soap operas like Dynasty, the follow-up film was one to movies like Silence of the Lambs.

So, what does this have to do with Christopher Nolan?

I had a discussion with my best friend a few weeks ago about Dunkirk, and how we've both become disillusioned with Christopher Nolan over time. If you asked college-aged me what some of his favorite movies were, Memento and The Prestige would probably be high up there (actually, the Prestige still ranks high, I think the better point was that I'd have listed Nolan as one of my favorite filmmakers). Nolan made a name for himself by making this elaborate puzzle-box movies with massive twists. Also, he washed the neon kool-aid taste of the Joel Schumacher Batman movies out of the public's mouth with the shot of straight whiskey that was his Dark Knight trilogy.

I remember listening to an interview with some scientist who had consulted I believe on Inception (or maybe it was Kipp Thorne on Interstellar), and hearing that Nolan had dismissed some scientific principle because the "audience wouldn't care," which, as someone who was a big Nolan fan at the time, I found kind of disappointing.

Watching Inception, I remember thinking that the visuals of the story were cool, and it was an exciting movie, but the thing that felt odd to me is that the whole thing was supposed to be about going into different layers of dreams, but the dream-world never actually looked the way that dreams feel. It presented a premise and scenario with rules that were more or less consistent (at least enough to function as a sci-fi setting) but the notion that it was tied to actual dreams didn't really ring true.

The common read on Inception is that it's actually a metaphor for filmmaking - but while I can see how the different members of the crew are like different members of a film crew, there are other parts about it that don't really feel tied into that. Why the layers of dreams?

See, I think that at the end of the day, Nolan is a filmmaker who just wants to make things that are "cool."

Dunkirk I think is a great example. The film tells some exciting stories, and it has this odd nested timeframe where we follow three plots - one takes course over what I believe is several days, another takes place over several hours, and the other takes place more or less in realtime. The plots all converge at the end of the movie as they all lead to the same moment.

But why?

This was the thing that my friend and I were talking about. All of this effort was put into writing, shooting, and editing the film so that it could pull off these cinematic acrobatics, even using a score that invoked the Shepherd's Tone to give that sense of constant building tension stretched out over time, but I cannot for the life of me figure out why. What did this have to do with the story? Why was the movie made this way?

So, the title of this blog is based on a story I pitched when I was six years old. Two of my favorite movies when I was very little were Back to the Future and Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. Both are comedies about time travel, so six-year-old Dan wanted to make a story about time-travel (also, the protagonist, who was, coincidentally, also a six-year-old named Dan, would be from the near future and thus, naturally, have a jetpack that he'd use to get around, because I was also obsessed with being able to fly).

Time travel stories are infamously difficult to write - or at least, they are if you want to follow any sort of logic. Indeed, I think one of the reasons why Back to the Future and Bill & Ted are sort of unquestioned (at least in terms of science fiction concepts) is that, being comedies, the easy response to any complaints about its logic is "eh, it's a comedy, don't think about it too much." Getting hung up on logical inconsistencies in these movies would make you look like Neil deGrasse Tyson, who seemed like he was going to be the next Carl Sagan and then wound up being the pedantic nerd who just says "um, actually" complaining about the science of superhero movies that involve literal magic.

But I think the broader question regarding time travel movies (and sci-fi in particular, but especially time-travel,) is whether you have intellectual room to tell both a compelling clockwork logic puzzle of a story and also, you know, have something profound to say.

I've always resisted the idea that some, say, cinema is "art" and some isn't. To me, "art" does not denote quality or sophistication. I think art is basically any work that intends to evoke an emotional response in someone. Now, a dumb action blockbuster does evoke emotions, but those emotions are maybe less complex. You get excitement, maybe satisfaction at seeing the good guys prevail over the bad guys. It's the same way that McDonald's french fries are still food, even if you're getting a very basic "salt and fat" taste to them.

Generally, I think most "high art" is the sort that engages in a more nuanced and subtle way than "low art" (though these terms are also profoundly classist).

One of the big criticisms of Christopher Nolan's Interstellar was the sentimentality of it - Anne Hathaway's line about love being a constant in the universe ringing schmaltzy (for the record, I think most antipathy toward Anne Hathaway is not really based on her acting skill, but more the sort of snowball effect of internet opinions).

Ironically, the sentimentality of Interstellar is actually supported by the plot itself - when (um, spoilers for Interstellar) we discover that the "aliens" who have provided humanity with a path to salvation are actually future humans who have evolved beyond our comprehension and have sent a message back in time, there's no longer any need to explain why the aliens would understand human emotions. Thus, the humanist and the cosmic perspectives in that movie can actually coexist with internal consistency (I still didn't love the movie, but I did not find this to be one of its flaws).

I think this post has gotten very rambly, and I should probably get to a point.

Essentially, I think there's a balance that you need to strike when telling a story - a balance between the Thematic and the Plot (I actually wrote the title to the post before I wrote the post, which means I guess I kind of stuck to a thesis? I count that as a win). If you make something all theme - all metaphor and meaning and deeper meaning without allowing your audience to connect with the story on an immersive, emotional, empathetic level, the story will feel hollow and kind of hard to connect to (yeah, Brecht, I know you prefer it that way). But, at the same time, if you ignore theme and deeper meaning in service of just crafting a meticulous puzzle-box of a plot, it can start to feel a bit like you're just smashing action figures together.