A Plotting Triad

[steepholm]

Love's Labour's Lost. Five acts of fun, games and silliness in the court of Navarre. Then, just when everyone's winding up for a jig, news comes from France that the Princess's father is dead. Curtain.

Cheers Friends. Monica is annoyed with Ross, Rachel, Phoebe and Joey for not getting to her carefully prepared Thanksgiving supper on time. She locks them out of the apartment, but eventually they burst in, only for Joey (iirc) to go flying into the middle of Monica's wonderful meal. Disaster! But the phone rings, and she no longer cares, because she and Chandler have been offered a baby for adoption. End of show.

Dennis Hamley's The War and Freddy. It's WWII, and young Freddy, who is staying with a neighbouring boy, has to endure nightly games after lights out in which he is forced to play the Germans against the neighbour's British, and inevitably to lose (because to win would be unpatriotic). Eventually he gets his own back. Triumph! But then his mother (who's been visiting his sick grandmother) arrives to report that she is dead and that Freddy will be needed at the funeral. End of story.

They all have in common: a) the abrupt and dramatic change of mood, occasioned by an unsignalled piece of news; b) the placing of what has gone up to that point into the perspective of the Really Big Things (birth and death), and c) the Finis before we've really had time to recover. The effect is that even the shaping and sense of proportion we associate with art buckles under the arbitrary impact of fortune's blows: et in Arcadia ego.

Is there a term for this sort of thing? Are there any other examples? Examples from other forms - music, perhaps?

Comments

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

Doesn't answer question (peripeteia?) but you seem to be living in an alternate universe character wise

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

you seem to be living in an alternate universe character wise

How so? Did I misremember anything? I wouldn't be surprised, as Hamley's is the only one of which I've had very recent experience.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Aha - you mean Cheers versus Friends? Just spotted that - and fixed.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I think it's because I was thinking of Cheers earlier, and reflecting that I could never work out whether the theme song went:

"You need to go where people know, people are all the same"

or

"You need to go where people know, people aren't all the same"

... but that it didn't seem to matter and that both sentiments, although nominally contradictory, were equally acceptable as lyrical pabulum.

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

Maybe the first and third could be described as mors ex machina? Or does that suggest the King and the grandmother died in a car crash?

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

:) As they rushed Monica's donor to the maternity hospital... Irony of fate!

[calimac.livejournal.com]

I recall once reading about a TV show, probably British, taking place in a school, perhaps, which suddenly, unexpectedly, and totally out of the relatively light character of the series, blew up in an explosion, killing most of the characters, and the next episode started over with new characters.

If you want a composer who's prone to shifting emotional gears in a startling manner, and to drop in sudden endings where you didn't see them coming, try Havergal Brian, whose epic Gothic Symphony is on the BBC Proms broadcasts this week.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I wonder if you're referring to the soap opera Family Affairs?

I've not come across Havergal Brian, but I rather like the idea of a Gothic Symphony, so I may listen out.

[calimac.livejournal.com]

I don't think that was it: the explosion was something much larger than a riverboat, and the interruption of the plotline much more jarring and abrupt.

The Gothic may not be the best place to start with Brian, as it's so very large, but it is a monumental composition, and this may be your only chance to hear a good performance, as the available recordings are pretty deficient.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

Emmerdale plane crash?

[calimac.livejournal.com]

Doesn't fit what I recall of the description I read. According to the general Wikipedia article, disasters of this kind, albeit usually smaller, had been features of Emmerdale for years. The one I read about was, as I recall, unprecedented on its show and, in context, ludicrously enormous and unexplained.

I find it interesting, however, that we've found these other near-match examples. I don't believe that plot devices of this kind are common on American soaps, which go more for the Revelation of Hidden Secrets surprises.

[sheenaghpugh]

I'm not being funny here, but my mind went at once to the end of the Winnie the Pooh stories where Christopher Robin goes off to boarding school. Not that, as a child, I had any idea what had happened, but it was clear that something major and very sad had happened and totally changed the mood.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I agree. It's not quite as abrupt as my other examples, as we have a chapter to get used to the idea, but it's definitely in the same general category. There's nothing elsewhere in that book or the first to prepare you for the emotional hammerblow that is the last chapter of The House at Pooh Corner. (One of the contributors to The Pooh Perplex makes this point in even more lurid terms, but I can't find my copy.)

[calimac.livejournal.com]

Woodbine Meadowlark, "A la recherche du Pooh perdu."

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

That's the fellow. An independent scholar, if I recall. Thank you!

[gair.livejournal.com]

gerald is reading me The House at Pooh Corner atm but keeps warning me that she's not going to have anything to do with the last chapter.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I see that Disney actually made a sequel to the Pooh stories, in which Christopher Robin (in school uniform!) is once again at large in the 100 Acre Wood. To my mind, this is tantamount to necrophilia.

[ashkitty.livejournal.com]

The end of that book is one of the saddest things in the world.

[gillo]

Because I am shallow, the example that comes to mind is the end of "Angel", last episode of Season Two - they return from Plzgrrb full of excitement and fun, to find Willow waiting to tell them Buffy is dead. Whedon does this sort of thing a lot.

There has to be a correct term for this, but I got nuffink.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen it - the whole Buffyverse is a closed grimoire to me, something I must put right - but that sounds like an excellent candidate.

[sheenaghpugh]

There's one of these sudden pieces of news midway through Catherine Fisher's Corbenic when the hero's mother dies. Big surprise.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Yes - although he does have time to bring his relationship with her to some kind of resolution by the end, doesn't he, when he has a second go at being Parzifal?

Fisher does some excellent twists altogether, now I think about it.

[joyeuce]

What came to my mind, because it's what I've been rehearsing all week (Radio 3, Sunday, 7.30 pm, should you be interested), is Verdi's Requiem. The last movement is all set for a big dramatic ending - and then, about 20 bars from the end (two pages in the vocal score), it all collapses into broken pleading - which I suppose isn't a complete shock, as we've had a certain amount of that earlier in the work, but placed there, it's unexpected. I think. I know this piece too well!

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Yes, that would seem to fit the bill - thank you!

They keep trailing Verdi's Requiem on Radio 4, and it's hard to avoid the impression (as with Carmina Burana and the Enigma Variations) that there's only one memorable passage in it, but I'm sure that's not the case.

[joyeuce]

I bet I know which bit they're trailing - the big crashing opening to the Dies Irae, by any chance? That's fun, but it does have other wonderful moments; the Tuba Mirum is just as exciting (but only comes once). It's not my favourite requiem - Brahms and Mozart both beat it hollow - but the last movement gives me the shivers (in a good way!).

[ashkitty.livejournal.com]

This is completely off topic, but I shall be in your neck of the woods this week (is that an annoying Americanism? I am not sure), if you fancy meeting for a coffee or something. Conferencing, but I expect there will be moments to sneak off here and there!

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Evelyn Waugh's "Work Suspended" in which some typical Waugh characters are hilariously trying to buy a house while falling in love with the wrong people when suddenly WWII falls on their heads.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I've not read that one, but it sounds as if it fits the bill perfectly.

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

Coming to this a bit late, but Manoel de Oliveira's Um filme falado (A Talking Picture) seems to fit the bill. There are three completely unsignaled switches of genre in the movie, and the ending really comes out of nowhere.

Spoiler:

Fifty minutes of travelogue/infodump, thirty minutes of refined tabletalk, and ten minutes of "There's a bomb on board!" followed by the mother and daughter getting blown up. Huh?

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

That sounds a strange film in all kinds of ways! Thanks for the tip.