One great river of narrative is something that started with the detective story.
It is a rich engagement, one in which the reader and writer engage in a battle of wits. Its power comes from the way it involves the reader in the story. The engagement is tight. The more the reader invests, the more they are *in* the narrative, with the traditional form being that the reader discovers things at the same time a detective does.
There are very clearly understood rules of this game. The book or movie must "play fair." Clues need not be obvious, but they need to be there. Also, at the end there needs to be a solution, and everything needs to add up.
It can be hard, very hard. "Irreversible" was very hard. "Memento" was moderately hard. "Eyes, Wide Shut" was hard. All these had their mysteries in discovering what the story was, instead of the simpler case of solving a mystery within the story.
Now here, we have something similar. Simpler in a way all the difficulties come from time travel overlaps. In mathematics, it is common to denote a second instance of something as that thing primed, then double primed and so on. (The notation is an apostrophe.) So we know that the problem will be one of multiple instances of characters.
But this doesn't play fair.
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Okay. I went back to the beginning and did the thing again. The second time in viewing it all makes more sense because you know what to look for. Some of the things that don't seem like clues can be turned into clues given what you know from the future. It works. I am happy.
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No wait! If you go back a third time, it is all ruined because all the things you could discover have been ruined by the second rerun. Now you just encounter the amateurish production values and weak storytelling. I hate the second viewer for ruining this for me. I should have just skipped the second viewing and gone to the third.
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Ignore the paragraph above. What matters is the second viewing. All subsequent viewings (and there could be dozens already that are unknown) don't count because the second one goes all the way back to the first detective story and changed the rules. Now we don't have to play fair.
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Okay. Final judgment. After 21 viewings I can say for sure that there is no mystery at all. This is what the original script for "Cube 2," was intended to be, but it got swapped in an argon- filled cube, by a guy named Granger.
... In true revisiting fashion, this comment was deleted after nine months because of some complaint. So it itself now makes a reappearance, changed by the experience of returning to the outside before re-entering.
Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.
It is a rich engagement, one in which the reader and writer engage in a battle of wits. Its power comes from the way it involves the reader in the story. The engagement is tight. The more the reader invests, the more they are *in* the narrative, with the traditional form being that the reader discovers things at the same time a detective does.
There are very clearly understood rules of this game. The book or movie must "play fair." Clues need not be obvious, but they need to be there. Also, at the end there needs to be a solution, and everything needs to add up.
It can be hard, very hard. "Irreversible" was very hard. "Memento" was moderately hard. "Eyes, Wide Shut" was hard. All these had their mysteries in discovering what the story was, instead of the simpler case of solving a mystery within the story.
Now here, we have something similar. Simpler in a way all the difficulties come from time travel overlaps. In mathematics, it is common to denote a second instance of something as that thing primed, then double primed and so on. (The notation is an apostrophe.) So we know that the problem will be one of multiple instances of characters.
But this doesn't play fair.
+
Okay. I went back to the beginning and did the thing again. The second time in viewing it all makes more sense because you know what to look for. Some of the things that don't seem like clues can be turned into clues given what you know from the future. It works. I am happy.
+
No wait! If you go back a third time, it is all ruined because all the things you could discover have been ruined by the second rerun. Now you just encounter the amateurish production values and weak storytelling. I hate the second viewer for ruining this for me. I should have just skipped the second viewing and gone to the third.
+
Ignore the paragraph above. What matters is the second viewing. All subsequent viewings (and there could be dozens already that are unknown) don't count because the second one goes all the way back to the first detective story and changed the rules. Now we don't have to play fair.
+
Okay. Final judgment. After 21 viewings I can say for sure that there is no mystery at all. This is what the original script for "Cube 2," was intended to be, but it got swapped in an argon- filled cube, by a guy named Granger.
... In true revisiting fashion, this comment was deleted after nine months because of some complaint. So it itself now makes a reappearance, changed by the experience of returning to the outside before re-entering.
Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.