Of Mystery and Monologues
Earlier this week, I posted a recent tweet from writer-director Christopher McQuarrie (Edge of Tomorrow, Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation):
That elicited this comment from Jeff Guenther:
Mysteries are an odd genre.
The conclusion (or “summation”) of a mystery raises hob with the Hero’s Journey and most other structures. Poirot’s summations, for example, sometimes take a half hour.
This “talking head” sequence is mitigated by flashbacks, seeing what really happened from the tec’s POV, sometimes accompanied by VO narration. The flashbacks are sometimes just repeated scenes/shots rerun with the narration, and a few close-ups to emphasize certain details.
The detective’s arc is often shallower than typical protagonists, too. A touch of vanity (in the case of Poirot) will do. Sherlock’s “flaw,” a cocaine habit, was eventually dropped, with little effect on the quality of the stories.
Scott, do you have any comments on the demographics for mysteries?
Which led to my response:
Jeff, not on the demographics. I can say that mystery seems to have more of a home in Hollywood as part of another genre, not a genre unto itself. So Gone Girl is a Drama-Thriller with a mystery dynamic. Unfriended is a Thriller-Mystery. Ex Machina is Science Fiction with a mystery element. But if you look at the top 50 B.O. movies from 2015, there’s not one of them which you can call a straight-out Mystery.
I think what McQuarrie is talking about is any sort of mystery, either big “M” (main genre) or small “m” (story dynamic). The resolution to the mystery almost always happens in Act Three. Normally a story’s momentum builds and builds, so Act Three chugs along toward a Final Struggle / Resolution. To stop the action with a monologue… that is specifically what I take away from McQuarrie’s tweet: If you do that, the actual narrative content of the monologue had better be damned compelling and provide a satisfying sense of conclusion.
Of course, as you mention, we can use various cinematic devices to make the ‘talking head’ monologue more visual: flashbacks, recreations of events, voice-over narration. But if we find ourselves doing that to mask some weak dialogue, we probably haven’t yet hit the right note re the story’s mystery.
Of course, McQuarrie won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for the movie The Usual Suspects which features a terrific mystery: Who is Keyser Söze? And he resolves the mystery not through a monologue at the end, but rather a combination of recollected dialogue and visuals:
And as I’m sitting here thinking about it, what if we looked at everything Verbal Kint related to the cop Dave Kujan as a kind of extended monologue?
How about you? Ever had trouble writing a monologue as a mystery revelation?