(Untitled)

[helianthus16]

One way of looking at Lost: an exposition of every possible cliffhanger (including the original, with Jack's stunt) at every possible moment, from commercials, to ends of episodes, to the interludes between seasons

Comments

[helianthus16]

I disagree with the notion that good story lines are a matter of making and breaking assumptions; and I really disagree with the ones where assumptions never end up being accurate. If you're just screwing with your audience you're not doing anything useful, or fun. You end up trying to spend all your time misleading your audience instead of telling a story.

Good story lines are made when the storyteller believes in the story; when it matters to the author, then the author has a chance to make it matter to the audience. Surprises are just one element of story.

In fact, the more I think about it, the more I abhor the notion of defining stories in terms of challenged assumptions. Because, really, the easiest way to challenge assumptions is to devolve into arbitrary happenings.

It's one of those circumstances where, if you're telling a good story, you don't need to be thinking about which assumptions are being challenged where, you can remain focused on the story. Do you think (I'm going to assume you've seen The Sixth Sense) Shyamalan was like, "I'm going to write a story to completely surprise people at the end?" No! He had the idea for the story, and that idea had, as a central component, the surprise at the end.

Besides, controlling assumptions like that means that, in order to get the effect it produced on you, the writers of Lost would have had to say, "Some people would have this idea of A team and B team members, and won't be unhappy if they die, but they'll think that the paralysis will be discovered, and when it isn't, they'll be happy! It's perfect!" It's just too much work!

The individual technique was much more cool and much less pointlessly analytic; in the last minutes of the episode they show that they're not dead, and then they delay telling us what happens until the very last possible second. Create suspense, prolong it, and then resolve it horribly.

But that's merely an individual technique in their storytelling. The part that makes it fun, that makes it a story, is the new perspectives on previous events, the relentless power of the diamonds that spirals out of control and leads them to death--none of which has anything to do with changing assumptions.

Lastly, one thing I liked and forgot to mention was the Monster sound effect when all the spiders were coming, the idea that the monster was behind the spiders and therefore behind their deaths...

[into_seafoam]

Well, one could argue that those new perspectives on previous events is also a way of changing our assumptions if we assumed before that Locke and Boone were the first ones to discover the drug plane and that Paulo had never met Ben and Juliette before.

But I agree with a lot of what you said. I think that the things you're talking about make a powerful script but I'm not sure that's how a lot of scriptwriting goes these days. My playwriting teacher making challenged assumptions an important point of focus is just sortof an example of that.

Maybe that's more theatre than film, but I know that theatre writing has a lot to do with audience expectation. I don't think the point of it is to screw with the audience as much as it is trying something new and maybe trying to teach your audience something about themselves based on their thought process through the progression of the play. Being a theatre major just makes me always look at every form of entertainment through that lens.