The End of the Detective Story

In the past fortnight I have picked the killer about 45 minutes before I was supposed to. I just watched 'Horsemen' with Dennis Quaid, not that Dennis Quaid and I went to the movies, but that he was in the movie.

Anyway, I doubt anyone is particularly hanging out to see that film, even though I'm sure heaps of people read nothing but 'Crime Fiction' and watch all the CSI shows.

So it occurred to me shortly after the opening scene that they made a superfluous effort to call in the detective character as an expert, when they could have just left this out and had him show up at the sight and no member of the viewing public would have gone 'hang on a minute, how come he got the case?'

And because it's a movie, this is information. Which you can couple up to the information you have going in, that it's a religion themed serial killer film. Which basically means its going to be like se7en, which was actually a really good film. You know it's going to be worse than se7en though because of the actors in it.

So I drew the parralal, you know because the director gives you the superflous expert information that the Detective is going to ultimately end up being the target a la se7en. Then they cast a creepy emo-kid as his son and crucially you see him in the second to opening scene of the movie.

Now here's the thing with the traditional detective story, to be clever you can't have people running around to solve a case and then at the end the killer turns out to be 'Henry Peterson' some serial killer dude you've never heard of before. To be an interesting and 'clever' story you can't pull out the 'Deus Ex Machina' that is the resolution of any story has to come from within the internal logic of the narrative. Thus typically the way to avoid 'Deus Ex Machina' is to introduce the killer as early as possible and hide them in plain site.

Now it may not be the stuff of good police work, but in movies you can make such safe assumptions as to conclude when they give you superflous information that it won't be so superfluous in the end. Hence you can go, 'aha it wasn't necessary to establish why Dennis Quaid was on the case, but they did therefore he is the target being played with therefore his son is actually the killer!' and it was right.

Mystic River was the other film I saw recently, and it was infinitely better. Albeit the films are almost two different genres of detective movies. Horsemen is you know all about shocking horrific murders, whereas Mystic River was more about the community and the characters than the singular unremarkable murder that takes place.

But anyway, it was one of those movies I'd thought must be good on account of the Oscars it won, being Sean Penn beating out Bill Murray and Johnny Depp, and Tim Robbins beating out Ken Watanabe and Benicio Del Toro.

Furthermore Clint Eastwood directed it, ergo it must be brilliant. Alas for me it wasn't but that's probably a product of films like 'The Departed' and 'Gone Baby Gone' that have come since but I saw before it. Alas though, people may actually want to see Mystic River and enjoy the realism of the actually detective story involved, and preserv a bit of mystery. So I won't go too far with the spoilers:

Here's all the information you need.

1. Girl is scene with Tim Robbins character in the same bar the night of her death.
2. Tim Robbins shows up home covered in blood later that night, tells his wife a man tried to mug him and that they can't call the cops and they can't go to hospital.
3. Director does not show the murder.

Here because it's a movie it's safe to conclude that Tim Robbins didn't do it. Real life, different story. Why? Because the director is pushing you hard in that direction, but crucially won't admit it. It's like listening to politicians once you know the tricks of avoiding responsibility eg. passive tense 'The report was poorly written' as opposed to 'I wrote a poor report'.

4. Early in the film you are introduced to a completely superfluous character, sadly decked out in very symbolic attire.

Which lead me to call it very early. And don't get me wrong, you don't go see Mystic River because it's a mystery like say 6th sense. The film still offers heaps in terms of the characters and drama within the story, albeit it is a bit of a mess of a film.

Thus though, I find there are certain intractable plot limitations to writing a 'crime fiction' screenplay, made worse when put into motion pictures because in a book it doesn't cost much to add heaps of superfluous information, an extra page is like 2c per. Shooting an extra 15 minutes of movie comes at the expense of something else and probably costs in the neighbourhood of $2 million dollars. Hence hencely detective movies are inherently predictable.

Yet they endure. Will anything kill off this staid and boring genre? Well Horsemen may ironically be ringing in the end times for the detective story. In it there's a scene where a kid says 'Come and See? Come and see what?' and Dennis gets up and dusts off his old book 'Dickensons Quotations' or something and finds out 'Come and See' is from Revelations 6. Then he rummages around in the bottom of a closet and discovers the passage in the bible.

As it turns out the '4 horsemen' in the film end up having met on some thing called the 'internet'. Something book reading on gut instinct Dennis Quaid is presumably baffled by. And it is in this mystical 'internet' that one could see the end of the Detective story.

You see, forgive me if my expectations are too high, but I had assumed that in modern detective work, if people were to write 'come and see' 4 times at a murder scene, then one might actually plug that into google. As it turns out, it appears several times, most popularly according to google in John 1:46, which would have been problematic. But hopefully that there were 4, and that it appears to be a bible reference, the cops would have made this connection on day one.

Mystic River was different because the turning point in their case was actually the forensics coming in to Id the murder weapon, ruling out the obvious suspect and ruling in the actual killer.

But at the very least, serial killers be warned, your undoing has come, and it is the internet, a vast mystical land where you can leave your digital fingerprints all over, even in cached websites, and no longer will you be able to rely on obscure religious texts and rest safe in the knowledge that only some kind of super expert profiler detective will have that obscure text in their bookshelf.

The end is nigh for biblical killers because now, anyone can look up your favorite passage in a matter of minutes, seconds even. Dropping pennies just don't get up the velocity to kill people anymore (and its a myth that they ever have).

Curiously, se7en stands out because the killer was nobody you'd ever heard of before, the director won out because it became a film that wasn't about the killer and the mystery but about the plan and machinations itself. Unfortunately if you just make a whole bunch of movies like se7en then you end up with a bunch of depressing films being watched by depressed and desensitised audiences.