Movie Mysteries and Film Puzzles

Mahmood has given us a great framework with which to evaluate films on both style and substance, and the intersection of the two.

As for the question, Is David Denby right when he claims that Iñárritu/Arriaga are masking a political message with a deceptively complicated structure that seems to suggest that the world is a complex place in which randomness, unpredictability and fate all intersect in order to create sometimes devastating and always unforeseeable consequences?

For Babel, and definitely for 21 Grams, I think this is a plausible argument. I didn't pick up on any subversive messages in Babel, nor do I necessarily think there's an ulterior motive. A. O. Scott of the Times seems to think it is in part a cautionary tale about the perils of globalization -- but that seems silly to me. As much as I respect his opinion, none of the conflicts in the film wouldn't have been possible 50 or 100 years ago. The story about the Mexican nanny could be seen as more of a parable about immigration policy than anything else. (And are the characters heartlessly bounced around in the pinball machine of global capitalism, or is that just the writer's pen -- or fate?)

So the "unfair distribution of power" argument makes much more sense. The most vivid support for this theory is the scene in which Brad Pitt (an entirely unlikable character, which made casting him such a brilliant choice) manages to helicopter out of Afghanistan with his ailing wife, Cate Blanchett. Iñárritu makes sure we understand that in this particular time and place, the two rich Americans are worth far more than the dirty peasants -- the helicopter swoops in to rescue them, dwarfing everyone else as if the king had just arrived. And Brad knows it. The guilt tears him apart, leading to an entirely unbelievable scene in which the actor attempts to fake crying.

I maintain that Iñárritu's first and still superior film, Amores Perros, is among the finest of the new millennium so far. It features three intersecting stories, each with characters from a different socioeconomic class. But all of them have flaws, and all of them have virtues. The world depicted in Amores Perros truly is complex. Far from glorifying the downtrodden, championing the ex-Marxist guerrilla, and vilifying the rich, duplicitous magazine editor, no one comes out especially well in the end. Denby entirely misreads the last scene in the film, in which, he writes, El Chivo "lights out for fresh territory, like the hero of an old Western." On the contrary, he's limping away from the realization that he lacks the courage to confront the daughter he abandoned and the past that doomed him to a life of crime and poverty.

So we're back to the distinction between puzzles and mysteries. Is Babel a mystery? Surely by the end, the filmmakers have tied up the loose ends and made something of a statement about their characters. We're left to hypothesize what it all means -- but does it mean anything beyond what's in the film itself? Can we apply it to life in general? These questions are another way of asking, Is it transcendent? Is it art?

Certainly, the filmmakers are consciously trying to transcend. But I don't know if they do; there's just one caricature too many (pick one: the rich Americans with a sense of entitlement; the hapless Mexican maid with a heart of gold; etc.). The only truly original character is the girl in Tokyo. Amores Perros's characters didn't necessarily stand for anything, and as a result they were fluid, multifaceted and real. So in the end, we can believe that these real people have something to say about life, and about us. Maybe Babel is only relevant within itself, and once it ends, the puzzle is solved. Nothing more about the mystery of life is illuminated.

This puzzle/mystery distinction got me thinking about other films I like. The example of L'Avventura is classic; I'd add Blow-Up, because that Antonioni picture also begins like a puzzle and turns into something of a mystery. But it keeps elements of both. The photographer's investigation into a crime his picture may have captured becomes a bona-fide investigation into perception, reality, and truth. In one scene, someone literally disappears into a crowd. Did the photographer see her at all? In the celebrated final scene, a group of mimes plays pretend-tennis. But isn't that the sound of the ball? And aren't his eyes following something going back and forth? So, throughout, we get clues that not everything is as it seems -- the main character becomes untrustworthy, and depending on what we think of him (and the film's reality), we can attempt to solve the original puzzle. But the mystery remains.

Other films succeed as both puzzles and mysteries. The classic film puzzle is Memento, which requires conscious effort to follow and finally piece together in the end. But the mental work of understanding the story by piecing together the narrative (which is disjointed and backward, like the main character's memory) leads to an understanding of how the character perceives the world. In other words, the film is subjective. And this aligning of protagonist and audience allows the mystery to remain, because, again, the Big Questions haunt us long after we've solved the riddle.

On the other end of the spectrum are films by M. Night Shyamalan. He's the consummate film puzzler. Surely, in his mind, he's making profound statements about God and our place in the world -- but let's get real. I liked Signs and I even liked The Village, but they are what they are. The Sixth Sense will remain one of the best twist endings of all time, but it will not be remembered as a great mystery that continues to reward viewing after viewing. The end does, after all, give everything away. (Incidentally, he's been consistently championed by David Bordwell, a distinguished film scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This is not surprising, because Bordwell tends to focus on relatively superficial scholarship on film structure and film style. This is not to denigrate his sometimes fascinating work, but it's worth noting that in the end, puzzles are superficial and mysteries are not.)

That's because Shyamalan uses film structure to fool the audience, and in the process, his characters and plot points become tools with which he can impose his idealized vision of the world onto us. Stephen Hunter made this point extremely well in a 2002 essay, which unfortunately is not available online in full. His basic point was that Shyamalan's films always have the same subtext, that things will work out in the end, and even bad things serve a purpose in the grander scheme of things because they enable preferable outcomes in the future. In Signs, this became clear with the flashback structure: the dying wife subplot wasn't just there; it existed to serve the purpose of showing that, despite the tragedy of her death, it served a purpose by later driving Joaquin Phoenix's character to "swing away" and knock a home run with an evil alien's green head.

So, Shyamalan: puzzles and nothing more. Once the movie is done, you know how he feels about life, and there's no real mystery about it. Memento, however, continues to intrigue, and for that incredible feat, the Nolans deserve all the praise they've gotten.