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TRICKS OF THE TRADE

March 22, 1991

Writers are manipulators. We create our own reality, stock it with whatever we need, and try to hornswoggle the audience into buying into these fantasies. There's a phrase for it: "Willing suspension of disbelief" (not "suspension of belief," as it's occasionally incorrectly called.)

If you blow the suspension of disbelief-- if any of the seams of stitching together that fabric of unreality begin to show-- then you lose your audience. There are, however, certain tried-and-true stunts you can pull, devices you can utilize, so that your audience will willingly go along for the ride.

1) Audiences will forgive practically anything in order to have a happy ending: So there we were at the end of Back to the Future III and it looked like Doc Brown was going to be stuck back in the Old West. Although Doc would have been happy, would the audience have felt good about it? Especially after having invested a collective six hours of movie-going time?

Heck no! So the movie makers pulled a rabbit out of their hat, produced an ending that was-- to put it politely-- unlikely, and got away with it. Why? Because the audience was with them. The audience wanted it that way and left the theater happy.

I pulled a similar stunt at the end of Hulk #372. At the climax of that issue, Bruce Banner is pursuing (on foot) a train which his wife, Betty, has just boarded. He's running down the track after it, trying to get its attention, but the train is picking up speed, turns a corner and is gone. Bruce sinks to his knees, sobbing and berating the fate that is his. The "camera" even starts to pull back on him.

The reader is now completely set up for a depressing Bruce-just-missed-her ending, extending a separation that's already gone on for two years.

And on the very next page, Bruce suddenly looks up in shock. Betty has come back around the track, on foot, carrying her luggage, shouts Bruce's name and leaps into his arms. Fade out.

I was asking a lot of the readers here. I was asking the reader to accept that Betty somehow sensed that something was wrong and, on the basis of a feeling, either leaped off a moving train (albeit still moving slowly) or forced it to come to a halt by pulling an emergency brake, then ran back to where her intuition was guiding her so that she could liplock the husband she thought was dead.

That's a stretch, even for me. Yet the response to that ending was uniformly positive. Every letter was pretty much the same-- "I was so afraid that it was going to be another clichéd separation, and was thrilled to find out I was wrong!"

I had every confidence that the readers would be so pleased that I hadn't pulled a cop-out ending, that they would forgive the extremely suspicious means by which I did it. Which leads us to:

2) Clichés can be your friend: There are certain aspects of storytelling that are so standard, so overused, that audiences accept them. So when you make use of one of those clichés and abruptly stand it on its ear, you can catch the audience completely flatfooted.

The first two Indiana Jones films followed a basic formula-- Boy Meets Girl, Boy Loses Girl, Boy Gets Girl. So audiences were properly shocked when Last Crusade turned into Boy Meets Girl, Boy Loses Girl, Boy Meets Grail, and on to An Unexpected Conclusion.

Use your audiences' expectations against them. In Hulk #345, The Leader announced that he was going to set off a gamma bomb in the center of an unknowing town precisely at 10 p.m. The Hulk got to the bomb an hour early, so The Leader obligingly set the bomb off prematurely, taking readers off-guard. Remember that villains do not have to play by the rules, and I don't understand why they so frequently do.

An immediate corollary to the above:

3) Make fun of clichés whenever possible: I had The Hulk, Sub-Mariner, and Doctor Strange running into each other, with dialogue to the effect of, "I thought you were dead." "Me? I was at your funeral," etc. Fans loved it.

Having a free-wheeling attitude towards clichés can also save your butt. Example: My running attitude with Rick Jones is that this guy has seen it all. He's encountered every single cliché from pseudo-deaths to space invaders. To a certain extent Rick is the jaded seen-it-all comics fan, except he's in the comic book. This saved me when I wrote myself into a corner in Hulk #375.

I had just had The Hulk and Betty leap clear of an exploding Skrull saucer and suddenly ground to a halt as I realized, to my horror, that I had forgotten to get Rick off the ship. I'd just blown Rick Jones to Kingdom Come.

What did I do? The next page, Rick floats safely to Earth, dangling from a parachute that he claims he always carries with him, just in the event that he has to jump from an exploding Skrull saucer. It's a gag I could only have pulled with Rick. And, when Bruce expresses total disbelief, Rick sanguinely eplies, "Why? I had to, didn't I?", a defense to which Bruce can muster no response.

Which brings us to:

4) When in doubt, have the character be in doubt: One of the oldest writing tricks around.

What are the odds on a New York police officer visiting his estranged wife in L.A. on Christmas and arriving just in time to thwart a carefully conceived theft by a band of ruthless criminals? Slim-- but acceptable. You have to have something on which to hinge a story. (Alfred Hitchcock called it "The MacGuffin.")

Now-- what are the odds on that very same police officer, exactly one year later, crossing swords with more terrorists while his wife's life once again hangs in the balance? Ridiculous. Long beyond belief. Unacceptable.

Yet that is the premise upon which Die Hard II hangs. Joel Silver Productions knew it was absurd and knew that the audience would know.

So what did they do? They had Police Detective John McClane (Bruce Willis) comment on this extraordinary coincidence, expressing his own disbelief, at least four times throughout the film. And, for good measure, even wife Holly (Bonnie Bedelia) asks wearily, "Why does this keep happening to us?"

When a character states that he thinks something is absurd or unbelievable, it's the writer's way of signaling to the audience, "Hey, I know this is a weak point. I confess. And I respect you enough to know that you know, so now that we've all acknowledged it, let's move on."

Most times, the audience will subliminally think, "It's not just me. The character knows this is stupid, too," and will be satisfied with that.

That's what I had Bruce do when Rick Jones didn't die on the Skrull ship. I also feel-- and this is purely my opinion, since I haven't spoken to him about it-- that it's what Alan Moore pulled in the last two issues of Watchmen.

After 10 issues of a noteworthy series that was assiduously rooted in reality Alan took flight with a plot twist that was a variation on a hoary science-fiction cliché-- alien invader comes to Earth and all the countries automatically, within seconds, unite against it. It was a rather jolting, mad-scientist direction in which to go. But before I, as a reader, could express my disbelief, there was Nite Owl. Over and over and over again, he stated how outlandish the entire concept was, and how it would never work.

He was right, of course. The first thing that would happen, with the appearance of an "alien monster" landing in New York and killing millions, is that a dozen terrorist groups would all claim responsibility. Then the United States would accuse the Soviet Union of being behind it, accusations would fly, and so would missiles. The whole thing is absurd, but Nite Owl tells us over and over again that it's preposterous so that Ozymandias can make at least some attempt to convince us that it's not.

If you're eager enough to buy into it, then Nite Owl's protests and Veidt's rationalizations will be enough to ease you along. (Although, frankly, it kind of ruined it for me, and what happened to Rorschach really finished it. Why not let him go and try to convince people of Veidt's complicity? Who are people going to believe: the golden-haired, admired millionaire, or the escaped psycho with body odor? A case of tying off a loose end that didn't need to be tied.)

There are variations on the "expressing disbelief" stunt, by the way, such as:

5) Have a character acknowledge that he's acting out of character: In other words, when a character is doing something he should not, by rights, be doing, have the character say, "I can't believe I'm doing this." It's a tidy little dodge.

6) Pretend you're not in the medium you're in: The cop looks disdainfully at a plainclothes cop who is making a reputation for theatrical heroics and, in order to make clear that this is "real life," says sarcastically, "The guy thinks he's Rambo." The plainclothes cop makes a snide comment about Rambo in return.

The gag is that the plainclothesman is played by Sylvester Stallone, and the movie is Tango & Cash. It's really one of the most common writing stunts when you're trying to simulate reality-- You have a character say, "That stuff only happens in comic books or movies or on TV shows," etc; this is real life."

The one time I've ever heard the line used appropriately was in Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors, in which Woody Allen lays out for Martin Landau how, given a specific set of circumstances (which, unbeknownst to him, constitute the plot of the film), he would like to see things turn out. And Landau looks at him scornfully and says, "You've seen too many movies. This is real life." And, in fact, none of the things Allen anticipates happen. And you leave the theater thinking that you have indeed seen a slice of real life.

Now that's a genuine crime, if not a misdemeanor: Fabrication in the first degree. Guilty Guilty Guilty.

(Peter David, writer of stuff, still watches CNN and hopes that someday, at the beginning of a press conference, when General Schwarzkopf walks in, all the reporters shout, a la Cheers, "NOORRMM!")

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