Puzzles and Mysteries in Modern Cinema

In the New Yorker this week, film critic David Denby provides a powerful critique of what he calls the new "non-narrative" cinema, and in particular the Innaritu-Arriaga trilogy ("Amores Perros," "21 Grams," and most recently Academy Award-nominated "Babel"). Denby argues that for all of their narrative discontinuity which is meant to imply that the world is more complicated than it appears, the movies are really just simple, overdetermined parables about the distribution of power and capital in the world. That thesis is quite interesting, and perhaps we contributors should talk about it at greater length. But I found the following paragraph interesting for a slightly different purpose:

Arriaga and Iñárritu may be too obsessed with the unfair distribution of power and capital in the world to operate freely as radical experimenters in form. In 1960, in the great “L’Avventura,” Michelangelo Antonioni set up a mystery—a young woman disappears on an island—and then refused to solve it. The woman’s friends, after initially pledging a search, begin a guilty affair. The movie’s mournful despair suggests how often we pay homage to appropriate moral sentiments while our real feelings drift elsewhere. The plot divagation put a crack in the moral universe, and the audience, at first baffled, then wounded by self-recognition, fell into it. “L’Avventura” was an open form; it didn’t play around with time sequences, but it altered our sense of how life works. The Arriaga-Iñárritu films, for all their structural innovations, are closed, even overdetermined, forms—puzzle boxes. All the pieces are there to be put together in our heads, but the rich ambivalence of art somehow slips away as we reconstruct the way one thing connects to another.

Now consider the following excerpt from a Malcolm Gladwell piece, also in New Yorker Magazine (1/7/7), entitled "Open Secrets."

The national-security expert Gregory Treverton has famously made a distinction between puzzles and mysteries. Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts are a puzzle. We can’t find him because we don’t have enough information. The key to the puzzle will probably come from someone close to bin Laden, and until we can find that source bin Laden will remain at large. The problem of what would happen in Iraq after the toppling of Saddam Hussein was, by contrast, a mystery. It wasn’t a question that had a simple, factual answer. Mysteries require judgments and the assessment of uncertainty, and the hard part is not that we have too little information but that we have too much. The C.I.A. had a position on what a post-invasion Iraq would look like, and so did the Pentagon and the State Department and Colin Powell and Dick Cheney and any number of political scientists and journalists and think-tank fellows. For that matter, so did every cabdriver in Baghdad. The distinction is not trivial. If you consider the motivation and methods behind the attacks of September 11th to be mainly a puzzle, for instance, then the logical response is to increase the collection of intelligence, recruit more spies, add to the volume of information we have about Al Qaeda. If you consider September 11th a mystery, though, you’d have to wonder whether adding to the volume of information will only make things worse. You’d want to improve the analysis within the intelligence community; you’d want more thoughtful and skeptical people with the skills to look more closely at what we already know about Al Qaeda. You’d want to send the counterterrorism team from the C.I.A. on a golfing trip twice a month with the counterterrorism teams from the F.B.I. and the N.S.A. and the Defense Department, so they could get to know one another and compare notes. If things go wrong with a puzzle, identifying the culprit is easy: it’s the person who withheld information. Mysteries, though, are a lot murkier: sometimes the information we’ve been given is inadequate, and sometimes we aren’t very smart about making sense of what we’ve been given, and sometimes the question itself cannot be answered. Puzzles come to satisfying conclusions. Mysteries often don’t.

Now, let's consider Denby's piece again. In L'Avventura Michelangelo Antonioni set up "a mystery," with the disappearance of a woman on an island, which never gets solved, whereas the Arriaga-Innaritu films are puzzles, the solutions to which are overdetermined. I think that Denby has hit upon something interesting, but also failed to understand quite what it is. The disappearance of Anna is interesting because it appears at first to be a puzzle, but turns into a mystery. Her disappearance causes the characters in the movie to go off into explorations of their own selves, etc. Not having watched L'Avventura in a long time, I am not in a position to dissect it any further (although I am inspired to watch it again soon), but I think it is important to realize that Antonioni has essentially turned a puzzle, with a clear although unknown solution, into a mystery, which cannot be resolved. On the other hand, Denby is charging Innaritu and Arriaga with doing the very opposite: pretending that they are describing a mystery, a complicated world where time, and by extension truth, has been compromised and disrupted, when in fact they are simply setting up a puzzle which as a clear solution, namely that the world's problems are rooted in the inequitable distribution of power and capital.

Is Denby right? I am not sure, but it may be worth watching all these movies over again to figure that out.