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The Power of the Unfinished Story
I want to talk about the ending of Twin Peaks. Well, let me clarify. I don’t want to talk about what happened, and I don’t want to talk about my or your interpretation of it. At least not yet. It’s still too near to me; I’m still processing it on some deeper level. And for anybody who hasn’t watched the series, I especially don’t want to talk about it. If you’ve never watched the series and would like to at some point, I recommend you steer clear of any and all talk of it until you watch the whole thing, start to finish. With all those disclaimers, you might be wondering just what it is that I do want to talk about?
I want to talk about stories that end in the middle instead of at the end. I want to talk about the beauty of the cliffhanger. I want to talk about stories where you’re pissed off or crushed or confused that it ended where and when it did. What’s the point of stories like this? If you’re going to tell a story, shouldn’t you finish what you started? Isn’t that part of the unwritten “contract” that goes on between a story-teller and their audience? Why on earth would anybody leave you hanging like that?
If you aren’t familiar with Twin Peaks, we could apply this to other stories as well. Two of the more popular examples of it are the whole Second Coming of Christ thing, and the story of King Arthur, also known as the Once and Future King. Just like Twin Peaks, these epic sagas end at what seems like a low point - a point which promises much more action to come. Both of these tales have endured for centuries, and both of them have in turned inspired enormous speculation and creative energy.
The way I see it is that if done correctly, an unfinished story ends up dropping a sort of “dirty bomb” into your subconscious mind. This unresolved event contaminates everything around it, setting up a sort of black hole with all kinds of sticky edges. Maybe a magnet would be a good image here as well. Anyway, along comes the linear/rational part of your mind whose job it is to sort things into a particular order or framework. The things themselves may or may not actually have such a framework, but that part of your mind doesn’t concern itself with such philosophical questions. Instead, it sets about taking the raw materials at hand - psychic energy, bits of the unresolved storyline - and sets about immediately trying to build a system to explain or at least contain what happened. I think it’s the whole “nature abhors a vaccuum” thing at work. Some part of your mind sets about trying to plug the leak. But the trick is that when it does this, it shifts around how things were previously organized, in order to contain the break. Since there’s only so much raw material and psychic energy to go around, it has to pull resources away from non-essential elements and set them to a new use. This inevitably forces some kind of deeper overall change in your mind - and might even be a bigger change than could have been effected if the story that set this all in motion just had a normal neat ending.
I think this only works though when you’ve become really emotionally invested in a story, and when it has already started activating archetypes and symbols in your mind. Otherwise, if you’re watching some shitty movie and then the ending is unresolved, you sort of just say “Fuck that!” and then move on with your life. It doesn’t have that same kind of last impact where your mind gets re-organized and re-patterned.
Anyway, as I said, I came to these conclusions after watching Twin Peaks with it’s cliffhanger ending. And rather than spend a lot of time speculating on what happens to Cooper and everybody else, I sort of set that part of my mind to work on understanding the underlying mechanism at work. More than likely it’s as much of a rationalization as anything else, but it’s my rationalization. It’s me taking the creative power unleashed by an extremely effective story and harnessing it in a way that’s reusable and communicable, without diminishing the original vehicle which delivered it or hopefully damaging it for anybody else.
November 21st, 2005 at 8:23 pm
Personally, I think the reason for such story structures, especially the Arthur and Christ stories, go back to a gnostic Hero Myth.
Like I’ve said many times, the Hero Myth is much like Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, in which the protagonist starts out in the cave-world (begins as an ordinary person), and slowly ascends into his role as the hero. Usually the hero leaves the cave (with the help of a mentor or oracle, Plato’s philosopher), learns about the outside world (the realm of the extraordinary), and brings something back from the outside world to help humanity (the Grail Quest, for example). Other times, instead of bringing something back to the cave, the hero actually defeats the Demiurge and leads humanity out of the cave (Star Wars, for example, with Luke/Anakin defeating the Emperor).
Coming back to the unfinished story, I believe that the purpose for leaving such stories unfinished is because it forces the viewer/reader to step into the story, in order to finish it. Thus, it acts as a motivating factor to induce the observer into walking the path of the hero himself (or herself). This is what I think Hero Myths are truly about (regardless of whether they are based on real people or not). They motivate people to transcend ordinary reality, and either bring something back (from extraordinary reality) for the good of humanity or lead humanity out of the cave. This is what I meant by “gnostic Hero Myth”, the gnostic path embedded into the Hero Myth, where the focus shouldn’t be on studying/obsessing over the hero or being like the hero (WWJD and Christ as a Savior), but instead, the focus should be on becoming one’s own hero, using the hero within the story as a guide or mentor.
I could continue on until my hands go numb, but I’ll leave it at that.
November 21st, 2005 at 8:27 pm
Yeah exactly. That’s more or less what I was driving at, but in a different way. Dig!
November 21st, 2005 at 10:53 pm
Agree on the ‘forcing the reader/watcher’ to enter the story bit. Sometimes it’s done intentionally so… best example that springs to mind is Doug Rushkoff’s Club Zero G graphic novel. Worth a read.
November 22nd, 2005 at 11:55 am
Funny you should mention cliffhangers– I hate them. It’s the main reason why I stopped watching Twin Peaks after the first six episodes, and it’s the same reason that I tuned out from X-Files as well. And don’t get me started about Lost… I don’t like TV shows where I have to catch up on watching an entire epsiode just so I can feel up-to-speed with everyone else. It bears noting that I had many geeky friends back then who would talk about last week’s episode REGARDLESS of whether they were spoiling it for me or not.
I mostly hate cliffhangers because nowadays they are done to ensure big ratings. An old TV show like Batman used cliffhangers in a creative way– to give the viewers something to look forward to next week. In that regard, cliffhangers function the way you described. But in today’s TV age, there’s an overwhelming cynicism about those kinds of gimmicks. And more often thahn not, they are just used to make sure money is being made. Of course, money always needs to get made, even in the case of an old show like Batman, but back then they were less cheap about it.
November 22nd, 2005 at 1:11 pm
Yeah that’s a fine point. My watching of Twin Peaks was very colored by the fact that I had all the episodes on my computer that I could watch as soon as the last one ended. In a way, I can’t imagine having to watch it on TV with commercials and waiting a week in between episodes, which I then might have missed anyway. That shit would have drove me nuts. I don’t like feeling chained to my television.
November 22nd, 2005 at 1:37 pm
Whenever anyone asks me if I ever saw this episode of “Friends” or this episode of “Seinfield”, I always tell them I don’t watch sitcoms. The last one I followed was “twin peaks”. Hard to believe it’s been ten years since that show aired. I will have to go back and watch them again(I own all the videos) and will hold my comments. I will say though it is without a doubt, my 2nd favorite all-time favorite tv show, next to Julie Newmar Catwoman episodes.
November 22nd, 2005 at 9:25 pm
the untold story is the next moments of our lives. like everything else that we do, we imprint our internal self onto the world “outside” our head. maybe they are the same thing. it would explain valis and all the people in our dreams and those who are attracted to us and we attracted to them. an ongoing re-integration of the self.
November 22nd, 2005 at 10:25 pm
I can’t stand being chained to my TV either, which is why I no longer watch series television. I’m not willing any more to make the commitment to a weekly program.
November 23rd, 2005 at 10:14 am
Yeah, another on that hits the nail on my head. I’ve been writing a story/novel/whatever on-and-off for the past two years and I’ve become so invested in it (and its unfinishedness) that I apply the characters and the concepts to pretty much everything now. It’s really weird how a story can take on a life of its own. And those characters are so mad at me for not working on it…
I’m not sure what’s worse, being in control of the fate of the unfinished story or being the observer…
December 30th, 2005 at 2:53 pm
[…] nger. This is an approach to story-telling that I’m sympathetic with (as I’ve written about elsewhere), especially after being exposed to a lot […]