Torso Torques

[steepholm]

I was kind of annoyed by a Film Programme discussion the other week with Stephen Woolley, the producer of The Crying Game. The thing that annoyed me was this discussion of the film's famous twist:

We started the campaign [not to reveal the ‘twist’] in the UK. I wrote a personal note to all the film critics when the film was released, and I think 99.9% of them kept it quiet. … That twist became part of the reason the Americans flocked to see the film. At the height of its popularity in New York I used to slip into the back of cinemas, just for the moment, just for the revealing moment, because the audience would go crazy. … Obviously, it did work as a sort of hook for the film.

Well, of course I've talked about that film here before, since (because I like it in other respects) it got me thinking a bit about twists in general, what they do and when and why they work, or not - and when they're plain objectifying. That discussion is here.

But Woolley said something else that was rather interesting, and tangential to the other discussion. They were talking about the positioning of the twist and its relation to genre. Many twists come at the end of the story - but in The Crying Game it comes somewhere round the halfway point. And the effect is to change the genre of the of film - in this case from a fairly hard-bitten thriller about the IRA into something quite different (what would you say the genre of The Crying Game is by the end?)

Woolley's comparison was with Pyscho - where the midway murder of the apparent main character signals the change from its being a crime thriller to a psycho-drama. Another example that springs to mind is, of course, Madoka Magica...

I feel there must be at least a few others - stories that that reveal that the audience (and possibly the characters) have been wrong-genre-savvy, and make them reevaluate everything that's happened through the prism of a different genre template, but that also give them the time to do so, rather than using the revelation as a final-scene pay-off. A twist in the tail is fine, but a twist in the torso is better. It's a model that appeals to me, anyway - but how common is it?

Examples, please!

Comments

[legionseagle]

Sleuth becomes a psycho-thriller about a third of the way in, when it becomes apparent that the murder mystery tropes are set dressing for a power-game between the two main characters. It's a shift between two closely related genres, admittedly, but it's a definite tonal shift.

[steepholm]

Oh yes, that's a good example!

[legionseagle]

There was a FFA thread about films with twists and it occurred to me some days later that the film with the perfect twist ending was The Hour of the Pig but that there are a number of tonal shifts within the film before the final twist where viewer expectations are consistently subverted.

[jadelennox]

I admit I got sidetracked from your point of this post to reading the old LJ post you link to, and the one that that post links to, and the old blog posts I linked to, and remembering when people got in these fabulous rich discussions on LJs and blogs before everything deteriorated to Facebook/twitter microblogging.

This of course makes me really sad that I don't have anything in particular to offer as an example for you.

Hmm. Buffy, both the movie and the television series, were actually set up to do exactly what you are talking about, but you are supposed to figure it out in the first episode of the television show. This is not a horror movie in which the blonde girl named Buffy gets murdered.

Then there's the problem where it happens because of societal expectations about the creator and the medium, which changes the interpretation of the book. I can't even count how many people critiqued Bitterblue because it was a terrible romance. But it wasn't a romance. It was a girl-centered young adult fantasy in an era when most girl-centered young adult fantasies are romances, and where the previous two books by the author had had central romantic elements. And that was enough to make people read it as romance, and then get angry because--despite the presence of a romantic pairing--it was in no way a romance. I remember having a similar reaction when I read Georgette Heyer's A Civil Contract. It is a non-romance novel that has a marriage pairing and love story at the center of it, but it is not a genre romance. But it's by Georgette Heyer, and most printings package it exactly like her Regencies. In these two cases the work itself is not doing what you are talking about, but the larger social construct changes the reading of the work.

[steepholm]

Ah, yes, when shall we see the like of those LJ discussions again? At least they're still accessible online - and occasionally there's a refluorescence of the old LJ, if one hits on the right topic. (On the other hand, it's kind of depressing how often I get told by an excited LJ-bot that my workaday entry is one of the top 25...)

You're absolutely right that context and expectation have a lot to do with the way that these things are read. I need to think about that more, actually.

I wonder whether Buffy didn't show its hand somewhat with the the Vampire Slayer part of the title? That seeming oxymoron has cute appeal, but must surely have undermined the twistworthiness of the moment when Buffy started slaying vampires?