To Twist or Not To Twist: Some Musings on the Twist Ending and Other Literary Tricks
Lately I’ve been watching Showtime’s “Masters of Horror” on Amazon. It came out in the early 2000s, but I was pretty busy back then with other things. I recall seeing the boxes for some individual episodes at the video store: one for John Carpenter’s “Cigarette Burns,” with a de-winged angel on the cover; another for Joe Dante’s “Homecoming” that showed zombie servicemen in the new ACU digitized camo uniforms, vacant-eyed and slobbering, out for blood.
I’m watching the episodes for two reasons: one is for fun, to pass the time, to give myself over to a good yarn and maybe even a few scares while pigging out on popcorn. The other reason is more practical, maybe even mercenary. And that’s that I know my own storytelling skills could use some honing, that I feel like I can still learn from the masters. Heck, I can still probably learn a great deal from those whose skillset falls well short of mastery.
We all have our weaknesses as writers, and some of us are lucky enough to actually be aware of where the glaring holes in our game are. This helps us to shore up our soft spots, hopefully, although the truth is that we not only have our weaknesses, but our limits. This means that we can be aware of a weakness and still be powerless to really correct it, even in editing. Maddening, isn’t it, that our style—like an artistic thumbprint—is not just a matter of our strengths, but our weaknesses, some of them pretty glaring?
Some of the MOH episodes are fairly straightforward, while others employ unconventional or at least unexpected storytelling techniques. These include things like:
1. The unreliable narrator: we discover that the person telling the story cannot be trusted, that they might even be insane.
2. In Media Res: rather than the story beginning at the beginning, we’re thrown into the thick of things, into the middle of the action, without any initial explanation. In horror, many times this involves a character we don’t know (usually a woman) being stalked by a man or malevolent force we not only don’t know, but can’t see.
3. Anagnorisis: this is a fancy Greek term for the protagonist’s sudden recognition that someone is not quite who they thought they were. In the most dramatic stories, this someone ends up being the narrator themselves. In classical terms, think Oedipus discovering he murdered his father and married his mom. In modern fiction, think the unnamed narrator in Fight Club discovering he’s Tyler Durden.
Another one of these techniques is the plot twist, a specific and famous version of which is known as the O. Henry ending. One very good episode of “Masters of Horror” that features this is called “Family.”
For those who haven’t seen the episode and are worried about me spoiling it, go ahead and stop reading. For the rest of you, here’s a basic rundown:
A seemingly normal portly suburbanite named Harold, played by George Wendt (yes, Norm of “Cheers” fame), has a dark secret. He likes to kidnap people, kill them, take them to his basement, and strip the skin from their bodies with acid. He then dresses these skeletons in conservative garb and arranges them around his television set in an upstairs room of his McMansion.
He doesn’t kill indiscriminately or profligately. He just wants enough bodies to play house with a loving family. But sometimes he gets sick of one “family member” and decides to swap out one skeleton for another. And I guess he prefers not to get his skeletons from a medical supply center, but would rather make them himself. He appears to have some taxidermy skill and probably considers the hunt for trophies part of the fun.
The director (John Landis) does a very good job of giving us the subjective experience of the killer, showing us his psychosis without overexplaining what made him a monster. The episode also does a good job of getting inside the killer’s head, showing how no one—or hardly anyone—is the villain in the movie of their own lives. To paraphrase Rick James by way of Dave Chappelle, rationalization is a hell of a drug; so’s delusion.
While we merely see skeletons in cardigans and dress shoes arranged around the boob tube in chairs, on sofas, and, in the case of the girl, perched way too close to the screen, the narrator sees his “family” as flesh and blood creatures. They’re all loving and appreciative of the pater familias, except the wife, who likes to snipe and henpeck him a bit from behind the open paper she’s reading.
Soon a new couple moves in to the house next door. Harold spies them through a crack in the venetians and immediately takes a shine to the wife. His own current wife is none-too-happy with this, and is given new grist for the mill. Without giving a blow-by-blow, Harold dispatches of his old wife, smashing the skeleton’s face to chips with a hammer, freeing him up for a new wife.
Once the neighbor husband is out of the picture—the neighbors appear to have a big fight, and he takes off—Harold invites the man’s wife, Celia, over to his house for dinner. Celia senses something is off, and is made uncomfortable by the candlelit, romantic setting. The meal ends and Harold begins giving Celia a tour of the house. Inevitably, the tour takes them to the room where the family of skeletons—sans the hammer-shattered wife—are standing, waiting for the new addition to the family to join them.
Celia understandably freaks out and Harold begins trying to strangle her with a noose. Why he didn’t simply slip a soporific in her food is one of the many implausibilities that only become apparent in hindsight.
Harold is about to kill Celia when a hand holding a rag covers his mouth. The rag, obviously soaked in chloroform, sends the bulky Harold to his knees.
When he wakes up, both Celia and her husband are looking down on him, where he is strapped to a leather chair. They reveal that this was all a setup, that Harold kidnapped and killed their daughter some years before—that was her skeleton upstairs in the little girl’s bright dress—and they’re back for revenge.
It was a clever turn of events, but I felt a little twinge of disappointment at the revelation. It reminded me of the forced and ham-handed irony of many old “Twilight Episodes,” followed by a fade to black and then one of Rod Serling’s sermonizing monologues. Or the last few seconds of an “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” in which a wife reveals some implausibly rich detail in the last few seconds. Cue the few playful notes of the xylophone or the flatulent sound of an oboe, followed by Hitch himself telling us not to worry. The malefactoress got her just desserts (ha-ha) when all was said and done.
I don’t mean to beat up on Serling or Hitch, who admittedly were not only masters in their own respective rights, but trailblazers in the still-relatively new form of the teleplay. Still, sometimes the masters can be a little too slick, schematic. Sometimes one twist is one too many, at least for my taste. Sometimes the rawness and organic searchings of the non-master yield their own wonderful and more original fruits. To mangle another quote, this one, I think, by Mark Twain: the master swordsman need not fear the second greatest swordsman in the world, but rather the man who has never wielded a sword before.
I recall something once said by action screenwriter William Martell in one of his excellent books on the craft of the screenplay. How many coincidences, he asked, can one story support? His answer: one, and that is the fact that a linear and somewhat logical series of events—that is to say a story—is occurring in the first place. Real life is filled with too many non sequiturs, absurdities, and frankly boring moments to make for such cogent and entertaining fare.
Martell made some exceptions for certain genres—in romantic comedies, for instance, it’s normal for a man and woman who hate each other to keep stumbling into each other. Sometimes they even end up getting tasked to cover the same news story or give a speech at some convention and they are forced to share seats on an airplane.
But while Martell’s theory is only one, it’s one I tend to like much more than many others that allow for everything from deux ex machina to great and sudden reversals of fortune, usually near the tale’s end, known in the classical formula as peripetia.
I read in some book on the craft of the short story—I can’t remember which—that a story cannot simply be a series of things that happen. It can seem that way, hide its meaning, even from the creator. But it must have some direction, some structure, if only subconsciously; otherwise it is just a vignette, or a sequence of vignettes. The author mentioned the stories of Chekhov, which many times seem to feature brief and underwhelming interludes in the lives of quiet people, but hide incredible depths of meaning and feeling in seemingly banal descriptions of train rides and moments playing the piano.
Maybe so. And maybe it’s just the willful and defiant snot-nosed student in me who refuses to accept the wisdom of the absolute rule, even when it’s laid down by a master. Say “Never do x” and a part of me will simply look for the exception to the rule, or more than one exception if I can find it.
In other words, I like it sometimes when things just happen. Not only when there’s not much deployment of literary device, but there’s no subtext or symbolism, or hell, even much of a point.
Thinking back on “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” for instance, my absolute favorite episode was “Breakdown,” featuring Joseph Cotten. In it, Cotten plays a man who gets in a car accident and becomes paralyzed. He’s not dead, though he appears to be—not just to the naked eye, either, but even to doctors when his vital signs are taken.
The whole episode basically consists of the suspense generated by what we know about this man, with this man—vital info to which everyone else is oblivious. If this accident victim cannot somehow communicate his being alive from within the shell of his paralyzed body, he’s going to be subjected to all manner of horrors. He’ll be autopsied (technically vivisected, since he’ll be alive), embalmed and buried.
That’s it, as far as what “Breakdown” is about, and what goes on in the episode. There are no great twists, no real major shifts of focus or fancy narrative techniques. It’s strikingly straightforward, sold mostly by the conviction Cotten brings to the role, the agony of his powerlessness he succeeds in communicating to us while (almost) failing to communicate it to others around him.
Stranger still, it was one of the few episodes to be directed by the master himself, as Hitch usually liked to farm the task out to a rotating cast of young upstart talents. The closest thing to a hackneyed device employed during the whole thing is the voiceover that accompanies Cotten’s roaming, squirming gaze. “God, let them hear me, please,” a la the paralyzed, decerebrated dreamer in Dalton Trumbo’s antiwar novel “Johnny Got His Gun.”
And again, Cotten’s unwavering conviction makes the old, tired device fresh, and new. There’s no sense of lazy exposition in the voiceover, only an agony that’s inchoate to everyone but the audience and Cotten.
How do you like that? Hitch, a man known for having a bottomless trick bag—MacGuffins, innuendos, etc.—played it straighter than usual, and the results were superlative.
Go figure.
Ultimately, I’ll have to close this out by falling back on a couple of chestnuts imparted by men who, if not masters of their forms, had plucked more than a morsel of wisdom from the jaws of the great monster we all face when we create. Hemingway called the blank page “the white bull,” but I imagine it as an all-devouring and faceless void that can eat you or feed you based on how it’s feeling that day and, of course, the spirit in which you approach it.
The first quote comes from Theodore Cheney (hopefully no relation to Dick). He liked to say that the only rule in the creative act was the rule of thumb. The other comes from my buddy the screenwriter, who, whenever I get off on this narratology kick, does the right thing by shutting me down. “It’s not math, man, or even science! It’s an art, not a formula.”
I suppose it is if you do it right, and let the story and (dare I say it) the muse take you to that special place where even masters are powerless—ready to learn something new when they thought they already knew it all.
I’m watching the episodes for two reasons: one is for fun, to pass the time, to give myself over to a good yarn and maybe even a few scares while pigging out on popcorn. The other reason is more practical, maybe even mercenary. And that’s that I know my own storytelling skills could use some honing, that I feel like I can still learn from the masters. Heck, I can still probably learn a great deal from those whose skillset falls well short of mastery.
We all have our weaknesses as writers, and some of us are lucky enough to actually be aware of where the glaring holes in our game are. This helps us to shore up our soft spots, hopefully, although the truth is that we not only have our weaknesses, but our limits. This means that we can be aware of a weakness and still be powerless to really correct it, even in editing. Maddening, isn’t it, that our style—like an artistic thumbprint—is not just a matter of our strengths, but our weaknesses, some of them pretty glaring?
Some of the MOH episodes are fairly straightforward, while others employ unconventional or at least unexpected storytelling techniques. These include things like:
1. The unreliable narrator: we discover that the person telling the story cannot be trusted, that they might even be insane.
2. In Media Res: rather than the story beginning at the beginning, we’re thrown into the thick of things, into the middle of the action, without any initial explanation. In horror, many times this involves a character we don’t know (usually a woman) being stalked by a man or malevolent force we not only don’t know, but can’t see.
3. Anagnorisis: this is a fancy Greek term for the protagonist’s sudden recognition that someone is not quite who they thought they were. In the most dramatic stories, this someone ends up being the narrator themselves. In classical terms, think Oedipus discovering he murdered his father and married his mom. In modern fiction, think the unnamed narrator in Fight Club discovering he’s Tyler Durden.
Another one of these techniques is the plot twist, a specific and famous version of which is known as the O. Henry ending. One very good episode of “Masters of Horror” that features this is called “Family.”
For those who haven’t seen the episode and are worried about me spoiling it, go ahead and stop reading. For the rest of you, here’s a basic rundown:
A seemingly normal portly suburbanite named Harold, played by George Wendt (yes, Norm of “Cheers” fame), has a dark secret. He likes to kidnap people, kill them, take them to his basement, and strip the skin from their bodies with acid. He then dresses these skeletons in conservative garb and arranges them around his television set in an upstairs room of his McMansion.
He doesn’t kill indiscriminately or profligately. He just wants enough bodies to play house with a loving family. But sometimes he gets sick of one “family member” and decides to swap out one skeleton for another. And I guess he prefers not to get his skeletons from a medical supply center, but would rather make them himself. He appears to have some taxidermy skill and probably considers the hunt for trophies part of the fun.
The director (John Landis) does a very good job of giving us the subjective experience of the killer, showing us his psychosis without overexplaining what made him a monster. The episode also does a good job of getting inside the killer’s head, showing how no one—or hardly anyone—is the villain in the movie of their own lives. To paraphrase Rick James by way of Dave Chappelle, rationalization is a hell of a drug; so’s delusion.
While we merely see skeletons in cardigans and dress shoes arranged around the boob tube in chairs, on sofas, and, in the case of the girl, perched way too close to the screen, the narrator sees his “family” as flesh and blood creatures. They’re all loving and appreciative of the pater familias, except the wife, who likes to snipe and henpeck him a bit from behind the open paper she’s reading.
Soon a new couple moves in to the house next door. Harold spies them through a crack in the venetians and immediately takes a shine to the wife. His own current wife is none-too-happy with this, and is given new grist for the mill. Without giving a blow-by-blow, Harold dispatches of his old wife, smashing the skeleton’s face to chips with a hammer, freeing him up for a new wife.
Once the neighbor husband is out of the picture—the neighbors appear to have a big fight, and he takes off—Harold invites the man’s wife, Celia, over to his house for dinner. Celia senses something is off, and is made uncomfortable by the candlelit, romantic setting. The meal ends and Harold begins giving Celia a tour of the house. Inevitably, the tour takes them to the room where the family of skeletons—sans the hammer-shattered wife—are standing, waiting for the new addition to the family to join them.
Celia understandably freaks out and Harold begins trying to strangle her with a noose. Why he didn’t simply slip a soporific in her food is one of the many implausibilities that only become apparent in hindsight.
Harold is about to kill Celia when a hand holding a rag covers his mouth. The rag, obviously soaked in chloroform, sends the bulky Harold to his knees.
When he wakes up, both Celia and her husband are looking down on him, where he is strapped to a leather chair. They reveal that this was all a setup, that Harold kidnapped and killed their daughter some years before—that was her skeleton upstairs in the little girl’s bright dress—and they’re back for revenge.
It was a clever turn of events, but I felt a little twinge of disappointment at the revelation. It reminded me of the forced and ham-handed irony of many old “Twilight Episodes,” followed by a fade to black and then one of Rod Serling’s sermonizing monologues. Or the last few seconds of an “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” in which a wife reveals some implausibly rich detail in the last few seconds. Cue the few playful notes of the xylophone or the flatulent sound of an oboe, followed by Hitch himself telling us not to worry. The malefactoress got her just desserts (ha-ha) when all was said and done.
I don’t mean to beat up on Serling or Hitch, who admittedly were not only masters in their own respective rights, but trailblazers in the still-relatively new form of the teleplay. Still, sometimes the masters can be a little too slick, schematic. Sometimes one twist is one too many, at least for my taste. Sometimes the rawness and organic searchings of the non-master yield their own wonderful and more original fruits. To mangle another quote, this one, I think, by Mark Twain: the master swordsman need not fear the second greatest swordsman in the world, but rather the man who has never wielded a sword before.
I recall something once said by action screenwriter William Martell in one of his excellent books on the craft of the screenplay. How many coincidences, he asked, can one story support? His answer: one, and that is the fact that a linear and somewhat logical series of events—that is to say a story—is occurring in the first place. Real life is filled with too many non sequiturs, absurdities, and frankly boring moments to make for such cogent and entertaining fare.
Martell made some exceptions for certain genres—in romantic comedies, for instance, it’s normal for a man and woman who hate each other to keep stumbling into each other. Sometimes they even end up getting tasked to cover the same news story or give a speech at some convention and they are forced to share seats on an airplane.
But while Martell’s theory is only one, it’s one I tend to like much more than many others that allow for everything from deux ex machina to great and sudden reversals of fortune, usually near the tale’s end, known in the classical formula as peripetia.
I read in some book on the craft of the short story—I can’t remember which—that a story cannot simply be a series of things that happen. It can seem that way, hide its meaning, even from the creator. But it must have some direction, some structure, if only subconsciously; otherwise it is just a vignette, or a sequence of vignettes. The author mentioned the stories of Chekhov, which many times seem to feature brief and underwhelming interludes in the lives of quiet people, but hide incredible depths of meaning and feeling in seemingly banal descriptions of train rides and moments playing the piano.
Maybe so. And maybe it’s just the willful and defiant snot-nosed student in me who refuses to accept the wisdom of the absolute rule, even when it’s laid down by a master. Say “Never do x” and a part of me will simply look for the exception to the rule, or more than one exception if I can find it.
In other words, I like it sometimes when things just happen. Not only when there’s not much deployment of literary device, but there’s no subtext or symbolism, or hell, even much of a point.
Thinking back on “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” for instance, my absolute favorite episode was “Breakdown,” featuring Joseph Cotten. In it, Cotten plays a man who gets in a car accident and becomes paralyzed. He’s not dead, though he appears to be—not just to the naked eye, either, but even to doctors when his vital signs are taken.
The whole episode basically consists of the suspense generated by what we know about this man, with this man—vital info to which everyone else is oblivious. If this accident victim cannot somehow communicate his being alive from within the shell of his paralyzed body, he’s going to be subjected to all manner of horrors. He’ll be autopsied (technically vivisected, since he’ll be alive), embalmed and buried.
That’s it, as far as what “Breakdown” is about, and what goes on in the episode. There are no great twists, no real major shifts of focus or fancy narrative techniques. It’s strikingly straightforward, sold mostly by the conviction Cotten brings to the role, the agony of his powerlessness he succeeds in communicating to us while (almost) failing to communicate it to others around him.
Stranger still, it was one of the few episodes to be directed by the master himself, as Hitch usually liked to farm the task out to a rotating cast of young upstart talents. The closest thing to a hackneyed device employed during the whole thing is the voiceover that accompanies Cotten’s roaming, squirming gaze. “God, let them hear me, please,” a la the paralyzed, decerebrated dreamer in Dalton Trumbo’s antiwar novel “Johnny Got His Gun.”
And again, Cotten’s unwavering conviction makes the old, tired device fresh, and new. There’s no sense of lazy exposition in the voiceover, only an agony that’s inchoate to everyone but the audience and Cotten.
How do you like that? Hitch, a man known for having a bottomless trick bag—MacGuffins, innuendos, etc.—played it straighter than usual, and the results were superlative.
Go figure.
Ultimately, I’ll have to close this out by falling back on a couple of chestnuts imparted by men who, if not masters of their forms, had plucked more than a morsel of wisdom from the jaws of the great monster we all face when we create. Hemingway called the blank page “the white bull,” but I imagine it as an all-devouring and faceless void that can eat you or feed you based on how it’s feeling that day and, of course, the spirit in which you approach it.
The first quote comes from Theodore Cheney (hopefully no relation to Dick). He liked to say that the only rule in the creative act was the rule of thumb. The other comes from my buddy the screenwriter, who, whenever I get off on this narratology kick, does the right thing by shutting me down. “It’s not math, man, or even science! It’s an art, not a formula.”
I suppose it is if you do it right, and let the story and (dare I say it) the muse take you to that special place where even masters are powerless—ready to learn something new when they thought they already knew it all.
No comments have been added yet.
