I suspect this is because the “murder mystery” format as developed in Victorian fiction is an attempt to impose rational order on chaos, and so creates the illusion that someone is in control, that someone will fix this mess, even if everything except the murder mystery is batshit. It’s reassurance. - ThreadSky

gralefrit.bsky.social • 34 days ago

I suspect this is because the “murder mystery” format as developed in Victorian fiction is an attempt to impose rational order on chaos, and so creates the illusion that someone is in control, that someone will fix this mess, even if everything except the murder mystery is batshit. It’s reassurance.

Reposted from Mike Royce

David Lynch knew the essential secret of storytelling: you can do whatever the fuck you want as long as you’re also trying to solve a murder

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rupertstubbs.bsky.social•34 days ago

As you said earlier, writers like Agatha Christie embraced (and subverted) that format, but with a lot of reverse-engineering to make sure it’s satisfying.

sammypotatoes.bsky.social•34 days ago

One of the reasons the endings of Twin Peaks (both original and Return) are so earth-shatteringly unsettling is that they shatter that illusion. The person we assume will fix the mess cant and ends up making things even more chaotic

sammypotatoes.bsky.social•34 days ago

(Spoiler alert)

hannahstohelit.bsky.social•33 days ago

As Dorothy L Sayers put in the mouth of Lord Peter Wimsey- "in detective stories virtue is always triumphant. They're the purest literature we have."

joshsteich.bsky.social•34 days ago

Paul Auster would like a word

snakerattleroll.bsky.social•33 days ago

Can I also add that it is fun.

mortival.bsky.social•34 days ago

This is fascinating to me. I’d argue that there is reassurance in TP, even in S3, because they are good people and they will keep trying to be good in the face of the unfixable; but this is still, as you say, the detective form being applied. The struggle, not the solution, is the point.

0tralala.bsky.social•34 days ago

I’ve written a bit on this re Sherlock Holmes. The appeal of those stories is, as you say, that sense can be made from the chaos - and that YOU can learn this method. Watson also adds empathy and compassion. This v obvious when you read Doyle’s non-Holmes crime stories, which go v dark.

0tralala.bsky.social•34 days ago

For example, see the stories in Round the Red Lamp. But also Twin Peaks s1 is about than just whodunnit. It explores the effect of tragedy and trauma on the whole community: what it triggers, what it reveals, how much chaos is there all along.

0tralala.bsky.social•34 days ago

That should have been “about *more* than…”

juv3nal.neocities.org•34 days ago

it's sort of a recapitulation of the implicit promise of plot-centric fiction. If we read/watch "to find out what happens next," the whodunnit promises that "what happens next" in some way follows from what has already happened.

gralefrit.bsky.social•34 days ago

There’s no murder in Eraserhead. So it’s a “cult movie”. There’s a murder in Twin Peaks. That’s a “classic TV series”. It’s like the difference between The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer and Shooting Stars. The illusion of form and control is a comforting handrail for the anxious.

tompleasant.bsky.social•34 days ago

Oh, genius! Mindblown

markbradley.bsky.social•34 days ago

Agree with the point, but there is an apparent murder in Eraserhead? Granted that greatly depends on the viewer’s interpretation of it.

gralefrit.bsky.social•34 days ago

Yeah. But try pitching a cosy crime series with that offer. “There might or might not have been a murder.”

gralefrit.bsky.social•34 days ago

I was thinking about Watchmen recently and how a comic book could attempt to be about almost everything in Alan Moore’s head as long as we only see a murderer in shadow from behind in the first couple of pages. That’s the formal offering.

drpaddysmith.bsky.social•34 days ago

They formally are in a whodunnit, but in-story it's only the obsessive lunatic who insists and cares that they are, and everyone else keeps telling him to knock it off

gralefrit.bsky.social•34 days ago

It’s like Superhero Big Lebowski. The gumshoe stuff is of tangential interest.

gralefrit.bsky.social•34 days ago

As long as one element is missing from the data given - in this case someone’s name and identity, whodunnit - the “briefing period” for readers / viewers at the start of a story is complete bar one tantalising thing. And we’ll wait for that last piece of the jigsaw forever.

drpaddysmith.bsky.social•34 days ago

That's the trick Wagner pulls in Tristan and Isolde

He can stick as much opera as he likes in between setting up a phrase at the start and resolving it 5 hours later

gralefrit.bsky.social•34 days ago

If the briefing period lacks lots of data, that’s frustrating. “Who are these guys? What’s going on?” The more missing data, the weirder the story seems. But leave out just one thing, and be clear about everything else, and that’s the classic game. You feel the pull of that one missing piece.

diervilla.bsky.social•34 days ago

Severance works because although there isn’t a murder, there is a great moral harm.

gralefrit.bsky.social•34 days ago

Always thought that was more of a “what is this place?” set up, like The Prisoner. You yearn to know all the rules.

cooraysmith.bsky.social•34 days ago

It’s very noticeable that the often extreme weirdness of Twin Peaks S3, which at times makes Inland Empire look straight, is leavened in Part One with the discovery of a body and the arrest of a seemingly innocent man for it. The body then turns out to be a character from S2 as an extra hook.

cooraysmith.bsky.social•34 days ago

(I am assuming the original poster was referring to S1. But maybe I am inadvertently making the same point.)

rirelien.bsky.social•34 days ago

My fave crime writer of the early 20th c, Dorothy Sayers, did this well. See _Strong Poison_ or all of them really.

angusmain.bsky.social•34 days ago

I think it’s the Life of Brian “what were their names” thing too. Story is such a familiar pattern we need all the bits in place. If one of the bits is missing you wait for it to be given, or have to make it up yourself.

gralefrit.bsky.social•34 days ago

I did a GoonPod on this and ended up concluding that Brian is an essay on the imposition of narrative form on chaos.

comptonscatter.bsky.social•34 days ago

what I like about (some) weird fiction is the recognisable absolute ordinarity of everything outside whatever's weird.

herne-thehunter.bsky.social•34 days ago

It’s also why the first season of True Blood is better than all the others. Yes, they all have boobs and blood and vampires. But the first season is also a fairly traditional murder mystery, at heart.

boscobel1975.bsky.social•34 days ago

Great example.

jonathancresswell.co.uk•34 days ago

For a split second while half asleep I thought the main point being made here was specifically "Mortimer and Reeves should have a murder take place in their next show", which very much amused me, then I actually read the point which makes more sense

gralefrit.bsky.social•34 days ago

It’s what was delicately hinted at in Catterick, and then not quite imposed on it enough. In many ways (pushed glasses up nose) it may be Britain’s Twin Peaks.

wendelschwab.bsky.social•34 days ago

I think Umberto Eco does this too in The Name of the Rose.

It's a book about the examination of the duality and contradictions of rationality and theology, but he gets away with it because it's a murder mystery.

scootermcgee.bsky.social•34 days ago

📌

maximummary.bsky.social•34 days ago

Eraserhead is a “cult movie” because it never had a regular release. It screened as a midnight movie on weekends at art house cinemas. You literally had to go to one theater in the city, at midnight, if you wanted to see it. Twin Peaks is a “classic TV series” because it was incredibly popular.

maximummary.bsky.social•34 days ago

It felt like everyone was watching it. The ratings were huge. People had get togethers. Bars advertised they were showing it. This was pre-internet. If you wanted to watch Twin Peaks, you had to be home in front of your TV at 9pm on Thursday nights. Or set up your VCR to record it.

maximummary.bsky.social•34 days ago

These words have meanings that may seem quaint in the era of streaming, but they have nothing to do with plot content.

“Cult movies” were literally films that you could only see if you performed cultish behavior like tracking down 16mm screenings at community centers, schools, or churches.

simplerdave.bsky.social•34 days ago

The genius of Conan Doyle is that Holmes and Watson contain a double reassurance: Holmes is the rational one, attempting to impose order on an increasingly irrational world; and Watson is the genial everyman who keeps even *him* grounded...

casmilus.bsky.social•34 days ago

The same dynamic is at work in Terry & June. Terry wants the comfort of the patriarchal structure of his corporate job, while June provides the emotional materiality of the home.

casmilus.bsky.social•34 days ago

The ending of TP3 is really quite simple if you picked up on a few clues...
1 / 432

wendelschwab.bsky.social•34 days ago

The ending of TP3 is spelled out in the song "Shadow" that the Chromatics play at the roadhouse earlier in the season.

It's pretty awesome actually.

kfizzsimon.bsky.social•34 days ago

Hi Joel, dyou think this would have any contemporaneous historical parallels like say with the scientific revolution and the imperative to seek causation and the often misplaced Victorian(am I right?) empirical notion of singular causal agents? Did the enlightment swap single causal agents for God?

gralefrit.bsky.social•34 days ago

A good book on the invention of the murder mystery is The Suspicions Of Mr Whicher. Some of this stuff is in there.

kfizzsimon.bsky.social•34 days ago

thanks- much catchier than

Single Causal Agent

🤣

kfizzsimon.bsky.social•34 days ago

-and assuming Nick did use a department and decade to prove it feels like that is our default expectation and if unchecked can lead to some of the more astonishing conspiracy theories abroad which tend to assume an omniscient/omnipotent agent which fits with the definition of a single causal agent

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