You Mean He Was Dead All Along???

(Yes, I know this is long. But I’m out of the country come Monday, so this makes up for no blog next week.)

I love surprise endings. I enjoy reading them — nothing makes me feel more satisfied with the ending of a book or movie than a well executed twist — and because I enjoy reading them, I also enjoy writing them.

Thing is, twist endings are difficult to pull off. And they’re also difficult to write about, because you can’t discuss any examples without potentially ruining awesome stories for anyone who reads your essay. (Or maybe not — more on this later.) Even identifying the stories you’re going to talk about might ruin them whether or not you give anything away. Sometimes, knowing that the story you’re watching or reading has a twist ending is enough to help you guess that twist ending, sort of like the way that knowing how the author of a murder mystery is trying to provide you with enough clues to guess the identity of the murderer but enough diversions to make the real villain invisible to you until the end can help you figure out which of the characters dunnit, even when you don’t know how or why they did.

So, here is the spoiler warning for the spoiler warning: although the stories I’m about to talk about are fairly well known for their twist endings, I’m about to list them after the cut, in the next paragraph.

And here’s the real spoiler warning: I will reveal the ending of the movie Fight Club. I will make reference to the endings of the movies The Sixth Sense and the original Star Wars trilogy, and I will avoid referring to books, since, due to widespread viewership and not-as-widespread readership, I suspect it’s easier to spoil them than films. There will also be references to the finale of House season 6 and to that of Dexter season 4,  and to season 1 of Dexter in its entirety, although I will not explain what actually took place in any of those shows.

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SPOILERS

Right. So what makes an effective twist ending? Well, first and perhaps most obviously, the ending has to be a surprise. But it has to surprise us in the right way. It’s not a twist ending when Sherlock Holmes reveals the killer in the final few pages, even if the killer was someone we weren’t suspecting, because that’s the way we expect a murder mystery to end. The simple fact of not knowing the ending isn’t enough to make it a twist — otherwise most stories would qualify. Instead, a twist ending has to take the audience’s expectations and take them in a completely new direction.

For instance, it’s a twist in Fight Club when Edward Norton and Brad Pitt (the Narrator/”Jack” and Tyler Durden) turn out to have been different personalities of the same individual not just because it’s unexpected, but because the story could–and seemed like it would–legitimately end with Tyler and “Jack” just being regular guys who have to confront one another, and it still would have been exciting and satisfying. Similarly, The Sixth Sense could have ending with Bruce Willis resolving his character arc by helping Haley Joel Osment deal with his gift and working out his own feelings toward his distant wife; Darth Vader could have turned out to have killed Luke’s father; and season 4 Dexter could have murdered Trinity and gone off to start the difficult struggle of being a family man and a serial killer at the same time. All these stories were set up so these endings would have felt good, if predictable in spirit (though maybe not in detail).

But instead, the actual endings of these stories not only changed what kind of stories they were but retroactively changed what came before them — you can’t view the Star Wars trilogy or the Trinity-murder scene in the same light once you know what their respective endings reveal. To count as a twist and not just a surprise, an ending must force us to go back to the scenes we’ve already watched or read and view them in a new light. Words that seemed to mean one thing turn out to mean another; actions that seemed to be for one purpose actually worked out another way; a context that seemed obvious turned out to be wrong.

So it’s going to seem strange when I say that the second part of making an effective twist ending is making it follow naturally from what happens in the story. This is actually the only reason that I wanted to mention the House season 6 finale, “Help Me”, because I think it committed a darn tempting mistake to which I often succumb in my own writing.

The “twist” ending of “Help Me” involves a character having a 180-degree change of heart in the last two minutes of the episode; whereas before, this character was coo-coo for Cocoa Puffs, now the character’s decided he or she can’t stand them. Before they thought Archie should get with Betty, now they’re cheering for Veronica. Before boxers, now briefs. You get the idea.

Anyway, because the writers and director and producers (rightly) felt that this was one of the most important developments of the episode, they decided to do their best to keep it a surprise for the viewers, going so far as to issue script pages only to the performers in the scene, cutting the last two minutes from previews for the press, and doing something that turned out to shoot them in the foot: they wrote the rest of the episode (and, indeed, the rest of the season) with the character in question loudly and convincingly proclaiming their absolute undying love for Cocoa Puffs, every two seconds, in both word and deed.

So, essentially, the character showed up in the last two minutes and said, “Hey, remember when I really liked Cocoa Puffs? Well, SURPRISE!!! A TWIST!!! All that time, I was actually having a harrowing personal crisis in which I was trying to like Cocoa Puffs but really couldn’t help hating them. But that all happened off-screen. I hope you believe what I’m saying now and not what I said and did before.”

And the cast of the show really did their best to make that reversal ring true, but it still felt contrived. The writers had done such a good job of hiding any signs of their “surprise” ending that they seemed to have laid no groundwork at all. It was a surprise, all right, but a surprise in the world of the narration and not in the world of the story. I, for one, wasn’t like, “Aha! This character has been hiding this secret for THE WHOLE SEASON! I can’t believe I didn’t see it coming!” — instead, I thought, “So the writers have been trying to hide that they planned this all along. Great. Are we done yet?”

(To be fair, this might also be the result of trying to make a surprise ending out of something that ordinarily wouldn’t be a surprise: before this season, this character obviously didn’t like Cocoa Puffs, and the whole Cocoa-Puffs storyline felt inserted solely for the purpose of creating tension where there was none before. But that’s neither here nor there.)

Putting all one’s eggs into the basket of “I’ll surprise my audience so good they durn won’t know what hit ’em” is missing the point of twist endings. Good twist endings don’t work because they surprise the audience. They work because they are first and foremost good, satisfying endings. Yeah, OK, you might not get the same thrill from watching out of Fight Club if you already  know Tyler and Jack are the same person. But it’s still an intriguing and well crafted story. I knew the ending of The Sixth Sense before I popped it in the VCR, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.

To look at it another way, a counter-example: sometimes it’s wiser for writers to trade the payoff of a big twist at the end for a little twist in the middle that heightens the tension, and the first season of Dexter shows this perfectly. The season is about the Ice-Truck Killer, whose identity is a mystery for at least half the episodes. But instead of saving it for the final reveal, the audience learns which character it is pretty early on, even though the other characters don’t. Sure, the writers could’ve horded it for the finale, but it just worked better this way. There was still the thrill of the twist, but Dexter got to up to stakes by having the viewers know something the characters didn’t, letting them watch Deb and Dex and the rest of the cast stumble unwittingly into danger.

Not to mention that this was the wise choice because it would have become obvious which character was the bad guy pretty quickly. Guest star? Check. The same guy who it is in the already published and widely available books? Sort of, but check.  By shifting the moment of the twist, the writers played down the “Who is the Ice Truck Killer?” killer story question in favour of “Will our heroes catch him/her? What’s going to happen if they do?” — a much more interesting problem, with many possible resolutions.

So, yeah, t’s better to have a non-twist ending that wraps up the story in a good way than a twist ending that feels cheap. Nobody likes the moments in a horror movie when the spooky music and scary camera angles build up to a crescendo only for the filmmakers to cheat by having a cat jumping out of the garbage can. Ending a story with an ending whose only virtue is its unpredictability is like ending with one of those moments. But, contrariwise, having a twist ending so predictable that it doesn’t change the reader or viewer’s perception of the story isn’t a twist at all. In the end, like pretty much everything worth doing ever, writing twist endings is a balancing act, and (at least I hope) practice makes perfect.

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