Just in case I gave you the mistaken impression I was all highbrow and stuff because I sit around watching opera in my free time, I capped off my week watching Angels and Demons, the latest Dan Brown movie adaptation. (I’ll say this for Dan Brown. His stories are kind of like crack to me. I just can’t resist a treasure hunt. Especially when I figure out the clues ahead of the characters in the book, because it makes me feel smart. And you know, I never turn down an opportunity to feel smart.)
So anyway, there’s this old writing adage: If you put a gun on the mantle in the first act, it had better go off in the third.
Agatha Christie? Anton Chekov? It sounds like it should be Christie, just from a literal standpoint.
Anyway. Angels and Demons, Ewan McGregor plays this priest in the Vatican, and as he’s introduced to the protagonist, has this clunky piece of dialogue/exposition/infodump about his stint in the army when he was a helicopter pilot. So of course I knew by the end of the movie that he was going to be flying a helicopter.
So, there’s putting a gun on the mantle, and there’s putting a spotlight on it.
Contrast this with the other movie I watched (re-watched, actually) this weekend: UP. Here, Carl has several Conveniently Useful character traits. Most notably, he’s sold balloons at the zoon for his job. The whole conceit of the movie hangs on this seemingly random quirk that gets about two seconds of establishment in the middle of the backstory montage.
Likewise, the dogs’ obsessions with squirrels–set up as a joke early on, but a Useful Character Quirk later on. Ditto the Wilderness Scout call.
Characters can (in fact, should) have random quirks, because humans have random quirks, and ideally they’ll play into the plot–whether it’s the A plot or the B plot. But I think that the more conveniently useful the trait is, the less random it can be.
Now, from my super secret confession, you may have gathered, the lampshade the screenwriter hung on Father McHottie… er, I mean, McGregor, didn’t really diminish my enjoyment of the movie. It was delicious cheese, and unlike The DaVinci Code, the camera work didn’t make me nauseated. But for a great example of an adventure story that hinges on some of the best character development I’ve seen, check out Up.
But bring Kleenex.
How about some suggestions in the comments, of places where the Convenient Weapon/Clue/Character Trait was planted so skillfully that it became a pleasant surprise when it played out later in the book?
