A quick history on the DVD Blend. Years ago, before we had a separate DVD section, I wrote a column called The DVD Blend. The regular feature served two purposes: it gave me the chance to editorialize about movie trends, and it offered a venue to talk about upcoming releases. Since then we broke off DVDs into their own section and the column became a way of picking out the best of the week’s releases.
I was never really happy with that incarnation of The DVD Blend, which is probably why it wasn’t anywhere near as regular as it should have been. This year, I’m reviving the original idea of the column - a place to editorialize and comment on movies, DVDs, Blu-rays, and digital distribution (among other things). Hopefully I’ll write something each week that you’ll find interesting enough to come back and read more, or even comment on below. Either that or I’ll just talk to myself week after week. I get paid the same either way.
Start From the End and Work Your Way Backwards
Watching Battlestar Galactica: Razor this week got me to thinking about stories that start from the end and then back up to tell a story we’ve already seen the ending to. While Razor doesn’t exactly use that plot device, it does feature a storyline that fits neatly into a part of the series that had already been explored. Regular viewers of the series already knew the fate of the Battlestar Pegasus, the featured vessel of the story, and had never seen Major Shaw before - a good indication the character wasn’t long for this world beyond Razor’s specific tale. There was even a part of Razor that featured a flashback to Adama’s youth. Knowing the man eventually becomes mankind’s saving grace following the Cylon attack means the scenes with young Adama didn’t have much suspense - the character was obviously going to make it out.
So why do we have stories who start by revealing the end of the story and rely on flashbacks for the primary narrative? I guess you could say it’s a kind of storytelling challenge. Some movies can do it well. They can put it right in your face in the story’s first few minutes that the protagonist you’re going to follow is going to die, or is going to kill the about-to-be-hated antagonist, but if they tell the story well, you won’t care that you know how things turn out. Even better is the movie that can keep you guessing how things wind up like they did until the very end.
Good movies wind up being widely recognized. It’s not much of a surprise to list Memento in this category - a film that is so disjointed by design, you hardly even know where you’ve started, let alone where you’re going to wind up. Of course, in Christopher Nolan’s hands, would you expect anything less? Amadeus starts with the film’s major antagonist looking back at things from a mental institution, which means he’s not fully going to win by the movie’s end. Titantic is told by an aged Rose, so you know there’s at least one survivor from the doomed ship. One of my personal favorites, however, is The Hudsucker Proxy, which opens much like It’s a Wonderful Life - with the main character, Norville Barnes, ready to commit suicide. Why? We don’t know, and finding out is part of the journey. But at least there’s still the suspense of whether he’ll go through with it to keep the audience driven to watch more as the story catches up with where it started. The story has room to build in both directions.
Unfortunately, more frequently than not, movies don’t pull it off successfully. Key characters who we know will be dead by the end are hard to get invested in - a major problem in last year’s The Strangers. That’s not the worst problem a flashback story can suffer from though. That happens when a story catches back up with where we started, and then cheats its way out of the fate we thought was waiting for a character. Oddly, The Strangers also carries that issue, although it’s not as annoying there as it is in movies like Babylon A.D. or Michael Clayton - films that remind me of Annie’s tirade about cheating the story in Misery and make me want to hobble the people behind the story (directors and writers watch out!).
One of the more recent offenders for bad flashback storytelling happens to be one of last year’s worst movies - Star Wars: Clone Wars. Technically the entire movie is a flashback, since we’ve seen far, far into the future for these characters. Yet they introduce a new Jedi who is deeply involved with the more familiar characters - a padawan learner for Anakin who we’ve never seen before or heard of in the stories that chronologically follow. Obviously her fate can’t be good, but instead of resolving that within the movie (which might have given the film some sort of fulfilling side for the audience), she’s been left around to annoy people for the series. Who knows if they’ll ever address her fate. Even worse, George might just CG a live-action version of her into the existing movies at some point - the ultimate cheat in his storytelling.
By now some people are wondering what this has to do with home entertainment. When you get down to it, buying a DVD or Blu-ray is about replay value; how much a movie holds up upon subsequent viewings. Movies that use this kind of flashback storytelling poorly or cheat things out at the end quickly lose all replay value. After all, what’s the point in watching if the story is going to change the rules at the last minute. Occasionally you get a movie like Donnie Darko that manages to change the rules in such a way that you can’t help but watch over, and over, and over, but that’s more the rarity than the rule.
The bottom line is storytellers who want to use a full flashback device like these stories needs to know how to do it well. Otherwise, find a different way to have things unfold - a way that won’t have the audience feeling cheated by the time the credits roll.
Oh - and that Battlestar Galactica movie? It managed to build a compelling enough story that I didn’t care that I was fully aware where the characters were going, or that many instances didn’t hold the tension they should. To me, that’s the ultimate accomplishment with flashback storytelling - draw the viewer so fully into the story, they no longer care that they know where things are going. Kudos to Ronald Moore and the folks behind BSG for that.
Have our own nitpick about flashback storytelling? or leave a comment below.
