‘Bred Crumbs

No Country for Old Men, which may win the Best Picture OscarTM tonight, for what little that’s worth, is three-quarters of an outstanding movie, until it drops off preciously into the land of WTF.

(Spoiler caution: I’m going to talk about the movie a little further in only very broad strokes, but still, if you plan to see the movie and haven’t, you might want to not continue reading.)

No Country has a couple of big problems. One is that the Coen Brothers decide suddenly that this film needs to Be Important. The second is that to do this, they decide to make the last part of the movie dull and to turn the first part — the fascinating, intense, entertaining part — pointless. Subverting expectations can be a great thing, but not when it invalidates the rest of the work.

Between the two parts, the Coens use a technique that is becoming increasingly popular in "quality" movies and TV. They keep a key part of the story utterly hidden. It’s not delayed slightly for suspense, it’s not revealed late in the game because it is a secret held by a non-viewpoint character. It’s just not there, because the writer/director is being artsy.

Sound familiar, Sopranos fans? I mean, if you’ve followed a character for seven years, why should his fate actually be shown at the end? Isn’t it cooler to just cut away, just to piss people off?

No, it isn’t.

Disclosure: I’ve never seen The Sopranos. I only know of the ending what I’ve read about it. Maybe, somehow, it was effective storytelling. Though I can’t imagine how. It’s not storytelling at all. It’s storyhiding.

This is not to say that stories should never ever hide or delay key information. But it has to be done carefully, and only to serve the story, not to avoid a story or to give it an illusion of depth. One masterful way to pull this off is by rigidly applying point of view. At first glance, The Sixth Sense might seem to be a prime example of storyhiding, but it isn’t at all, because the thing that is hidden from the audience until the shocking (at the time, anyway) end is also unknown to the character whose point of view we have shared throughout the movie.

Storyhiding, in contrast, is withholding something important or interesting from the audience even though the point-of-view character or characters know it. In small doses, storyhiding can be used effectively as a short-term sleight of hand. In Jurassic Park, for example, Speilberg engages in minor storyhiding, first spending a little time pushing the camera into awestruck faces before showing us, the viewers, the mighty CGI dinosaurs they’re gobsmacked by. (From all the Spielberg oeuvre, JP comes to mind because of the new RiffTrax of it by Mike Nelson and Al Yankovic. Yes, him.) The slight delay adds drama, which makes the brief storyhiding effective. Or would, if the technique hadn’t over time been pounded into cliché.

Another adept wielder of limited manufactured teasing is screenwriter John August’s directorial debut, The Nines. In this three-part movie, there’s a bit of dialogue from the Part 1 story that’s withheld from the audience until later, because to leave it in its place would be too much too soon, and would have stolen a lot of the thunder from Part 2. The Nines is a puzzle, but it’s a fun puzzle, partly because it’s a small puzzle, but mainly because before the movie’s done, the pieces are revealed and the puzzle actually comes together, creating a picture that is whole yet still tantalizing, leaving you with plenty to think about afterward but in no way leaving you feeling suckered or ripped off. (The Nines, which reached only a few theaters, is out on DVD. See it. I’m not saying anything more about what it’s about, because like Donnie Darko before it, it wonderfully defies explanation, and the less you know, the more likely you are to enjoy it.)

As opposed to, oh, Lost, the current reigning tyrant of storyhiding. At the very beginning of the series, the plane-crash survivors were stalked by a monster. (They were terrified at first, but after several episodes they got over it and quit even talking about it, probably because of how lame it turned out to be.) Even though most or all of the main characters ran into or ran from this thing, the audience wasn’t shown it until well into the second season, long past the point a reasonable viewer should care.

Nowadays, Lost is engaging in flash-forward, showing stingily chosen clips from a future after some of the survivors get off the island, while still spending the bulk of its time back in the "present" dawdling in dull love triangles and walking through jungles. The flash-forwards seem like a refreshing little device, until you think about them for even a moment. The characters in the forward clips knows what has happened, why and how they got there. So why can’t we? (Last season’s short-lived TV series The Nine, no relation to the plural-titled movie, pushed this flimsy envelope even harder, focusing on nine people who endured a hostage situation but rationing out the events of that situation only a few minutes at a time over the course of the series. Viewers didn’t take the tiny bait.)

For all its acclaim, Lost has so little faith in its story’s mysteries (maybe because they’re a mystery to the writers, too) that it creates false mysteries by manipulating the camera and the cutting to relentlessly avoid showing the audience things that are well known to most of the characters. For some reason, a still large, but thankfully dwindling, number of viewers (and critics) are eating this up.

Well, stop it. Don’t encourage them. You’re only hurting yourself. Think about this: if storyhiding is such a cool little trick, then why did David Chase hide in France when his Sopranos finale aired, to avoid the reaction to it?

Different is not necessarily better. Don’t fall for it. Make these pretentious writers and directors actually tell their story instead of, like the bullies they are, holding it just out of your reach, forever.

For god’s sake, especially don’t give them Oscars for it.