Keith Davis

Great advice here in Medium from playwright and filmmaker David Mamet about how narrative works...

We, the audience, are shown the Hero’s progress, through wide-eyed gullibility, through hope, into betrayal, despair, and courage, but the thing (the play, the situation, the Hero) is made whole only by a deus ex machina, a force from Outside, and so, finally, we, the audience, though gratified, cannot be, as Aristotle would say, Cleansed. For we are unable to say of this final reversal, “Yes, and that might happen to me.”

No, none of us will find his implacable tormenter, his Inspector Javert, reduced, in the struggle’s final moments, to contrition. So the film itself is very enjoyable, but the ending is forgettable. Nothing wrong in that.

Here is the writer’s problem: The audience will foresee anything the Dramatist has foreseen — they will beat you to the punch every time, and figure out that The Butler Did It, unless the writer is prepared to undergo the same process as the Hero, that is, to follow promising clues to the point where they, and thus one’s conscious mind, are proved risible, and carry one’s humiliation down the next avenue, and the next, until one is stunned by the uselessness of one’s own mind.

This revelation is always accompanied by denial and then shame. “What?” one thinks, “The answer cannot be this obvious. How can I have been such a fool as not to have seen it, in front of me all the time?”

The ending of a film may be so authentically shocking that we viewers realize we could not have foreseen the answer, as we (and the hero) DIDN’T EVEN UNDERSTAND THE QUESTION.