Many Endings Syndrome

I love a murder mystery, no matter how cheesy the plot, how stock the characters, or how many times strangers with guilty pasts naively accept a mysterious invitation to an isolated manor house and then decide to split up and search the place when it becomes clear that one of them is a murderer.

Actually, I must admit to preferring murder mysteries of that last variety, if only because series detectives rarely end up at Hill House or Soldier Island*: the rules of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes and Ellery Queen dictate that the Detective Cannot Die (well, except when the author is sick of them), but everyone’s fair game to U. N. Owen.

One of the more interesting varieties of murder mystery to have sprung up in recent years is the Murder Mystery With Multiple Endings. Sometimes, the audience gets to vote on the murderer, as in Dead Men Don’t Dance, the drama club play in which my oldest cousin starred during her final year of high school. Sometimes, the ending is random, as in the 1985 movie Clue, which had three endings that got distributed randomly to various cinemas across the country. (The DVDs and home videos cram all three together with annoying title cards that read “It could have happened that way, or…”)

To me, this type of murder mystery never seemed quite “right”. Maybe it’s because it doesn’t play by the rules of the genre: the reader/viewer should feel that all the clues were in place from the beginning of the mystery, and that a quick-witted person could deduce the criminal’s identity on his or her own as the story progresses. If we know that the movie is deliberately set up so that three or four different people could plausibly have done it, then we know there’s no possible way to deduce which of those three or four did do it**. It would be kind of like a crossword puzzle or a sudoku turning out to have several different solutions. The choice of murderer depends not on logic, but on a whim – that of the producers, the writer, or the majority of the audience.

(The last, I think, is the weirdest. Isn’t the point of a good murder mystery that most of the audience doesn’t guess the identity of the murderer until it’s revealed at the end? Where’s the fun if the most obvious suspect really does turn out to be the killer? I guess maybe some people vote for the suspect they think is least likely or that they think would make the best story, but we were asked to “guess” at the killer’s “real” identity.)

Many have drawn up rules of “fair play” for writing mysteries; although they vary from person to person, the main idea seems to be that the reader/viewer should be able to think he or she could have worked out the solution had he or she been as clever as the detective. Also, writers shouldn’t steal from other, more famous stories, and a writer who wants to make a puzzle shouldn’t bother with silly things like character development and emotional plot. (Clearly, I’m at odds with that last, although I do admit to hating those two character in Agatha Christie books whom you know are innocent because they’re clearly going to hook up after the story’s over.)

Interesting that these rules have been created specifically for mysteries, and especially interesting given that we expect most stories, regardless of genre, to be “fair”. I don’t know for sure, never having read or watched one, but I think I’d have a problem with a fantasy where the big, revelatory ending came in several contradictory versions, too. But maybe I wouldn’t have the same expectations for genre romance (where the reader’s idea of the “correct” ending has a lot to do with his or her own idea of what’s attractive or what makes a healthy relationship). Or literary fiction. But don’t we always expect the ending of a good story to be “guessable” by a particularly insightful reader? Or at least expect to be able to trace the end back through to the beginning and see how the first steps of the path were laid out so that the last ones became inevitable?

Perhaps you can divide stories with choose-your-own endings into two camps: the camp where the main events throughout the story have been the same, and the camp where each ending retroactively changes the whole plot.

Choose Your Own Adventures are usually examples of the first kind. No matter what path you pick, you’ll always find the same bad guy’s machinations behind the dangers you face. Sometimes, you’ll get there with all your friends at your side and a Swiss Army Plot Device in your pocket; other times, you’ll die just as you discover the truth; and still other times, you’ll never make it that far because you made the mistake of offering to cook stew instead of pasta for the evil dwarfs who’ve captured you***. But the same villain is still up to the same plot in the background – the only differences are how you choose to deal with him/her and with the minor antagonists you stumble across.

In the other kind, like Clue and Dead Men Don’t Dance, the narrative stays the same up until a certain point in the story – no matter which ending you get, the characters all say and do the same things up until the branching point.

Somehow, in the first Choose-Your-Own-Adventure type, it seems like the story isn’t changing, just what you get to learn about it. It’s like wandering around inside an environmental theatre piece: you only get to see the events along the path you take, because there’s no way you can follow all the performers at once, but you can come back later, follow different characters, and rest assured that the other parts of the story will still be going on the same way they did when you first saw them.

Maybe a better example is an RPG video game – though you can only play one distinct path per play-through, you can rest assured that the main plot of the game won’t change: you’ll still be fighting Giygas or Lavos or Ganondorf at the end. And, if there’s any item you need to go find or mini-boss you need to defeat, the game will find a way to force you to do it.

Contrariwise, the second kind of multiple ending really seems to be a multiple whole-plot. Depending on which way the story goes, the characters will turn out to have retroactively been doing different things. If Professor Plum is the killer, then he’s the masked figure who stole the revolver out of the cupboard while Miss Scarlet was the one who knocked over the vase in the hall… etc. If Miss Scarlet is the killer, then, in the same scene, she’s the masked figure who stole the revolver out of the cupboard while Professor Plum was the one who knocked over the vase in the… etc. The scenes as filmed or as written are the same, but, given the different endings, they mean very different things. (Kind of like saying, “Roosevelt was the best US president ever” and purposely leaving it open to mean either Teddy or Franklin.) So, by themselves, their meanings are open, multiple – in other words, they don’t really mean anything important. And that makes this kind of story entertaining as comedy, but deeply unsatisfying as a story.

I guess there’s a third sort of story with multiple endings, the Rashomon-and-Copenhagen variety: where the same story is retold several times from different perspectives to highlight the subjectivity of memory and experience. In Rashomon, although the main plot event itself was objectively the same, each of the characters “saw” different things happen and experienced a different narrative. In Copenhagen, the characters try three times to reconstruct the central event and only wind up agreeing that, though each try is plausible, memory is such that there can be no definitive version of past events, not even when they happened to you.

Maybe multiple endings interest me because, to the writer or director or storyteller, every story had multiple endings. When you’re making it up, it can go any way. And even once you’ve settled on a “definitive” plot, you still have to pick which character’s (or characters’) viewpoint(s) to include, which scenes to show and which to just imply, and, if you’re writing anything with an element of mystery, how to make the reader think you wrote ending A when the real ending is ending Z, and that also has to be plausible. Because, paradoxically, readers also seem to get annoyed when it’s clear that only ending Z could have happened from the beginning. There has to be at least a chance of endings A through Y to make us believe that the protagonist’s actions really did make a difference.

Perhaps we get the best of both worlds with fanfiction? The author’s intentions regarding the ending of the original work are clear, so we don’t feel cheated, but we still get the joy of exploring all the various permutations and ways-it-could-have-been.

If I were clever, I’d figure out some way to end this blog entry with multiple endings. (Which should be easier on the Internet, because, hey, links! Scripts allowing personalized content!) However, not only do I not feel particularly clever at the moment, I also feel somewhat lazy. So, instead, I’ll leave you with the footnotes and a picture of me dressed as a recycle bin. Yay non sequiturs!

* The work referenced is Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, which has gone through many retitlings due to the extremely offensive nature of the original nursery rhyme that drives the plot.

** Underdetermination! Sorry, philosophy of science interlude. As you were.

*** Actual example. Seriously, you think I could make this stuff up?