Not-So-Great Expectations

(See? See what I did there?)

I’m blogging today about three works that made me think a bit more about how expectations and knowledge can affect the way I experience stories.  Yeah, you’ve been warned.

One of these works has appeared in my blog before: BBC’s Sherlock, which has happily been renewed for another season (miniseries? Whatever, as long as it comes back). Another has appeared through its series-siblings, but not in and of itself: Jeffrey Deaver’s The Vanished Man, an installment of the Lincoln Rhyme series of thriller-mysteries. And, finally, I don’t think I’ve mentioned this last one, at least, not by name: the play Theater of Blood, based on the 1973 movie starring Vincent Price.

Before, when I blogged about expectations*, it was mainly about how sometimes a reader or viewer needs pre-existing knowledge to understand or appreciate a particular story. The example I used was Jesus Christ Superstar: if you don’t know a lot about the founding stories of Christianity, as I do not, the musical is a whole different experience. But the stories I mentioned above made me see that the opposite can be true, too. Sometimes, pre-existing knowledge can spoil a story instead of making it better.

The most obvious and trivial case is when the reader or viewer knows something about the plot by reading spoilers or watching promos. But I’m talking about something different, something that admittedly applies only to a very specific genre of story. Well, maybe “genre” isn’t the right word, since that implies a wide-ranging category like “science fiction” or “mystery”; the kind of stories I’m interested in right now is more precisely defined but less likely to have its own section in the bookstore. These are stories that deliberately reference real-world facts and drop trivia as clues to what happens next.

Some of these stories, like Sherlock, do so because they’re re-imaginings** of older, famous stories. For instance, if you know things about A Study in Scarlet or the original Bruce-Partington plans, you’ll know whodunnit in “A Study in Pink” and “The Great Game” before 21st-century Holmes and Watson do, because the plots of the new stories follow the plots of the old ones.

Other stories  reference older stories without deliberately re-creating them; in Theater of Blood, for example, a crazed has-been actor traps the critics who tanked his career in an abandoned theatre and kills them one by one in ways resembling famous (and infamous) death scenes from Shakespeare’s plays. Finally, there are stories that base important plot points on specialized real-world knowledge.

The Vanished Man is one of these, and it’s the reason why I felt like writing this blog entry. I picked it up expecting another great Lincoln Rhyme procedural — and it was another great Lincoln Rhyme procedural — but for the first time with this series, I knew what would happen next. Not because I suddenly got a million times cleverer and saw all the twists ahead, but because, the same way previous books in the series involved a lot of information about things like human smuggling or aircraft flight, this one involved a lot of information about the history of conjuring. Which is part of my field of study for my PhD thesis.

Deaver is great at building tension by putting the reader into the mind of the antagonist for a page or two between scenes told from the perspective of his dynamic duo. In The Vanished Man, this involved getting into the head of a crazy-talented (and also just crazy) homicidal magician. This magician would occasionally think about what he was going to do next (hint: murderous versions of famous illusions), but instead of saying what exactly he intended, he’d think about it like an expert in the field. For instance, if the crazy magician were about to kill someone by mauling them with tigers, instead of thinking, “I am going to maul someone with tigers”, he might think, “I am going to use an illusion made famous by two German-American Vegas stars… an illusion so dangerous that even one of the experts who performed it had to be rushed to the hospital…” etc.

Now, the illusionists Deaver has his murderer mention are somewhat less well known today than are Siegfried and Roy. Few people recognize the great names of the nineteenth century (with the exception of that of Houdini), unless they study magic or are magicians themselves. Deaver includes suggestive details, like saying the illusionist in question had an ambulance standing by during the performance of his act, or teasingly suggesting that this illusion is so famous that the readers would surely recognize it, if only they had just one more clue…

In a way, being able to identify the referenced illusionist and illusion before I was “supposed” to increased my enjoyment of the book — who doesn’t like to feel one step ahead of where the author wants the reader to be? Even knowing the reference, I didn’t know other important things, like who the victim would be, when the murder would take place, and whether the heroes would get there in time to stop it. But other times, having advance information like this can make a story much less enjoyable. For an example, let me get back to Theater of Blood.

I’m decently familiar with Shakespeare; some plays I know really, really thoroughly from having spent a summer performing them. Others, I know tolerably well, from having read them and liked them, or from having learned them at school. At one of the key points of Theater of Blood, early in the play, the (surviving) characters stumble across a list of the plays their mysterious killer was in. The protagonist takes care to read the whole thing aloud in order, strongly implying that each of the critics will meet his or her fate in a manner similar to that play’s most famous death scene in the order the plays were produced. Well and good.

But for me, this*** made the show an exercise in patience and frustration. There was no suspense as to whether the critics would survive: they were obvious horror-movie jerks, cruel enough to make the audience thrill to see them bumped off. Instead, the tension came from trying to figure out how each character would meet his or her demise and who was next — but I already knew those things. Given each character’s defining trait (one gourmand critic had a pair of toy poodles; another was a drunk; etc.), and given what I knew about the plays that had been mentioned, it was pretty easy to figure out what was coming.

I’m 100% sure I would’ve enjoyed that show more if I’d known absolutely nothing about Shakespeare; although feeling like you’re smarter than the author hoped you’d be is gratifying, it’s only fun when you feel like the author’s still ahead of you. If you feel like you’re somewhere down the road from the author, waiting for him or her to catch up, well, what kind of a race is that?

All storytellers in all media occasionally depend on being able to hide something of interest from their audiences, whether it’s what happens next or just how this particular artist will make this particular character come alive in this particular upcoming scene. No one can escape telegraphing unwanted information to a few of their readers or viewers ahead of time. But if they do, I think it’s wiser to do it like Jeffrey Deaver than like Theater of Blood.

* Sidenote: and, yup, in belated response to me of three weeks ago, I totally did use that title before. Whatevah! I regret nothing!

** I like re-imaginings. Re-imaginings are great. Re-makes are the ones you have to watch out for.

*** Well, among other problems, mostly to do with theme and other kinds of expectations, like expecting a prominent character to have a listing in the programme, which led to me not even realizing a major upcoming revelation was supposed to be a surprise to both audience and characters until it became clear to me during intermission that the rest of my class had no idea what I was talking about when I joked about the “plot twist”.