The JimH Blog

Holy Grail, Batman

The Da Vinci Code film opens this weekend and as a homage I offer this somewhat different and decidedly funnier complimentary story. It's from NPR's Selected Shorts: Chivalry by Neil Gaiman.

Unwinding the stack and Jonathan Strange

Several people have commented on this post about the pleasure of building up concepts, finding new information that forces you to rethink them, unwinding the stack a few sentences, and then reparsing. Some of my favorite kind of humor is based on that.

This principal can operate on a much larger scale too. There was a film back in the 20th century called The Sixth Sense which extended it out to a full-length movie. The production is mostly pedestrian schlock. It relies entirely on a single gimmick, but the gimmick is a good one. I won't spoil it, but if it works the way it's supposed to (it did for me) near the very end of the film, a ring drops and rolls along the floor. At that instant, you realize your assumptions about every scene in the movie were wrong. Your brain starts backtracking and you mentally reconstruct a new storyline with this new information. It's fun.

There's a related device you see more often in novels than in films where the subtext is obvious to you but the characters are oblivious to it. You, the reader, get to follow the two realities.

A subtle variation of that is the false historical novel. I don't mean, for example, Dan Brown's insidiously bogus history in The DaVinci Code which he presumably intends you to believe, or Robert Graves's wonderful I, Claudius which at least reads like a scholarly attempt at real history. Rather, consider Philip Roth's The Plot Against America or Susanna Clarke's engaging Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. You're not supposed to believe Lindbergh became president, or that England once had a proud but now forgotten history of great magicians. You follow two story lines at once: the novel and whatever real history you remember.

I hope Bloomsbury won't mind that I let you listen to the beginning of the latter novel by clicking here if I also plug their book here and CDs here.