movies, Books
Out of Order
Last Friday, I figured I should celebrate Valentine’s Day with something somewhat romantic, but I wasn’t in a very romantic mood, so I ended up watching 500 Days of Summer, a somewhat anti-romantic romantic comedy. I’m not super-strict about my definition of “romantic,” so I’m okay with a hopeful ending, even if it doesn’t involve the main couple in the movie.
This is a rather unconventional romcom that questions a lot of the premises common to the genre. It’s told in a non-linear way, starting with a breakup and bouncing back to a first meeting, then ahead to an established relationship, then back to starting to get together, etc. Tom is a hopeless romantic who’s looking for “The One” who’ll complete him. Summer is a free spirit who doesn’t believe in love and doesn’t want to be tied down. Tom meets Summer and is sure she’s The One when he learns she likes his favorite band. They argue over the issue of love, and his hopes are dashed when she tells him she doesn’t believe in it, but then she kisses him, they start dating, and everything is perfect, until it isn’t and he doesn’t know what to do.
I recently saw some online discourse about the movie (which is probably why it caught my eye). Apparently there’s some debate over which of them is in the wrong and the bad guy. Is she bad for telling him she didn’t believe in love, then dating him anyway, or is he bad for expecting her to fall in love with him when she told him she wouldn’t? Is she a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, or is he trying to cast her in that role? I would say they’re both at fault. She sent seriously mixed signals, saying one thing and then acting another way, but he was in love with an idea, and she happened to be the person he cast in that role.
But the main thing I like is the nonlinear structure that makes the audience have to piece things together, where we don’t see how it all fits together until toward the end. I love stories that do that sort of thing or that play with narrative structure in fun ways.
In the romantic comedy space, there’s Sliding Doors, which has parallel timelines — we see the heroine miss a train after losing her job, leading to her getting mugged, then because of that she gets home late enough that she doesn’t catch her boyfriend cheating on her, and her life becomes a struggle. But then we also see the heroine barely catch the train, so she gets home in time to catch her boyfriend, which leads to her starting her life over, starting a business, and starting a new romance. We cut back and forth between the timelines. Which one is the “good” one and which is the “bad” one, and how will it work out?
Or there’s The Very Thought of You, which plays with perspective. We see the same events multiple times through the perspectives of three friends who all meet the same woman on the same day, and we only realize what’s really happening when we put them all together and know what’s happening in the background of each of the scenes.
I’m With Lucy starts with the ending — the heroine is on her way to her wedding. She got there after a time when she said yes to every blind date. We go back to these dates and the relationships that came from them, jumping around a bit in time. Which of these guys is she marrying?
Getting away from romcoms, there are movies like Memento, which is told in reverse order, and Inception, with the lines between dream and reality blurred. The first season of Once Upon a Time had dual timelines, with flashbacks going mostly in reverse chronological order gradually showing how the present-day situation came to be, while the characters worked to resolve the situation in the present (the flashback format continued through the series, but it mostly became thematic, showing an incident in a character’s past that reflected the character’s present).
I haven’t seen it done so often in books, but there’s a time travel book by Connie Willis that plays with this, Blackout/All Clear. It’s a story in which time traveling historians from the future go to the time of World War II to study it, but something goes wrong, and they’re stuck there as the Blitz begins. But there were other previous missions involving some of the same people to different times in the war, and since they took on cover identities and the story is told using the cover name, we don’t know which characters are the same people at different times until later. There’s also the mix of what’s happening chronologically within the war era and what the timeline is in the “present,” which can mean that a person from earlier in the present might be later in the war than they are in the current mission that started later in the present. This is a kind of storytelling that would be less effective in a movie because it would be more obvious that they’re the same person. In the book, there are a lot of “ohhhh” moments of realization.
I have ambitions of writing something like this, either out of order or otherwise nonlinear. The closest I’ve come was my Christmas novella, which was similar to Sliding Doors, except the heroine was living both timelines and aware of both of them, so she had to figure out which life she wanted and how to stick with that one instead of living both of them. I have an idea that might fit into the nonlinear category, with flashbacks where you don’t know which present character is the person in the flashback, but the whole idea hasn’t really come together yet, and the concept is more ambitious than I feel up to tackling right now.