I recently started watching Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood because I felt like I need something with Plot to watch (most of the stuff I’ve started on streaming services right now is whacky comedy). And so far, so good! I’m having fun.
This Note was written a bit earlier than they usually are, as I don’t think I’ll have the time on Friday to type it out.
On Mystery Boxes & Pseudo-Mystery Boxes
I recently saw someone describe the approach to storytelling in Rings of Power as “mystery box”, and it’s a topic I have been thinking about of late (as my parents can tell you from when I randomly rant about it to them), so I figured, why not make a Saturday Note about it? I have touched on it before (I think), but I don’t know that I’ve done an entire Note on it.
To define: the term “Mystery Box”as a storytelling tool was created by director J.J. Abrams, as he explains in his own TED Talk. The gist of it is this: he once bought a “Mystery Box” from a magic shop that promised fifty bucks worth of magic for fifteen dollars. He’s never opened the box for fear of ruining the surprise–for him, the mystery is enough.
This then explains his favorite approach to storytelling: creating a mystery that people have something to talk and theorize about. You may realize the problem with this is that it means he doesn’t have an answer for the box. The mystery is just as much a mystery to him as it is to the audience. So naturally, when these things are finally answered, audiences find them disappointing and hate it.
This sounds like a ‘duh’, but one way to measure the success of a show or movie is how many people are talking about it and how much they care about it. And people love a good mystery to talk about. So this approach, or something similar to it (we'll get to that in a bit), is popular because you can point to audience engagement to say it’s successful–never mind that audiences hate it once you actually pull the rug out from under them. All their thinking, their theorizing, their conversations–it didn’t matter, because no one knew what was going on either.
J.J. Abrams didn’t go create The Force Awakens with ideas in mind for where these characters are going. All theorizing about what this or that moment meant are completely pointless, because they don’t mean anything. It’s a good way to surprise audiences, but it’s also a terrible way to write a story because you’re rarely ever going to be able to match up to expectations or create answers that make sense.
[What the Mystery Box is not is any form of mystery or confusion in storytelling. When thinking about the ideas for this note I came across a blog post talking about why the blogger thought the Mystery Box doesn’t work, and he defined things like the ending to Inception and the way Christopher Nolan played with time in his films as examples of the Mystery Box. Basically, anything that was a twist or uncommon seemed to be a Mystery Box for this guy–and that’s not really a good definition. I don’t know of any example of Nolan using the Mystery Box.]
We are getting, more and more, what I call the Pseudo-Mystery Box. This is not quite the same thing, in that the makers of the show or movie HAVE a plan, but they go to great lengths to try to hide it even when it’s not meant to be that mysterious in order to drum up speculation. There’s that story that goes around that part way through filming the first season of Westworld, the makers rewrote the season because they saw that someone on Reddit figured out the Plot.
And then you have the entire first season of Rings of Power, which has the looming question of, “Which one of these characters is secretly Sauron?” Which is what you’d expect from shows these days, but not what you might if you know what they’re adapting. The whole schtick now is that compelling shows MUST have a central mystery and a twist, when that’s not really what’s going on here. Who Sauron is should not be the driving Plot for the audience–the fracturing and falling of these kingdoms should be.
As I saw one blogger put it, “Stop trying to outsmart Reddit, and make me care about the characters.” Not every single fan is going to be doing hardcore research to try to figure things out. By trying to appeal to the super-fan, and only the super-fan, in a way that won’t last to begin with, we’re getting subpar stories meant to shock rather than entertain or uplift.
That’s what this boils down to a lot of the time: through using the Mystery Box, or the Pseudo-Mystery Box, the writers are trying to put all their efforts into the Plot of the stories rather than the characters. And Plot-driven stories can work really well, but they’re becoming standardized in a way that prioritizes making unexpected twists that the audience will never see coming at the expense of interesting character arcs satisfying conclusions. Many times, the reason audiences never see them coming is because the writers don’t either until they’re forced to make these endings.
We can accept less fulfilling Plots if we care about the characters enough. But we don’t care about the characters enough, because that’s an aspect of the story that’s being ignored or downplayed to make for twists. Look, I guarantee that if you make the story good enough, it’s not going to matter if we see the Plot twists coming–we’ll enjoy it anyway if it’s done well. Surprise is not the only way to make a memorable story.
And deliberately deciding to not have an answer to the question you’re asking in the story? That’s bad writing. That’s being bad at your job.
Sit down and write out what you want the story to be. Figure out where you’re going. And then once you have worked out how to get there, make sure you write interesting and likable characters to take the audience through that. If it ends up having a twist, trust that your readers are invested enough that whether surprised or not, they’ll still love the story.
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