So, last night I watched a movie by accident. It was
"Basic" which starred Travolta and a few others.
Synopsis:
A sadistic drill sergeant (Samuel L. Jackson) takes a group of Army Rangers into a Panamanian jungle for a live fire exercise during a hurricane. Only two come back alive and the mystery is just what, exactly, happened out there. Travolta is a former Ranger and current DEA agent who is tasked with interrogating both survivors to solve the mystery. As you might expect the stories from each survivor do not exactly come off the same. Who is lying and who is telling the truth? Is anyone telling the truth? Travolta has to figure it out and now we are off to the races. And, for atmosphere, the entire movie (with the exception of one or two flashback sequences) takes place at night in a hurricane so it's dark and wet and noisy.
This is, without a doubt, the most confusing plot, script and movie I have probably ever seen. And it is
on purpose, apparently. This is the ultimate cinematic example of a literary gimmick called the "
shaggy dog story." Honestly, I had never heard of this. I mean, I've heard shaggy dog stories before but I didn't know that there was an actual name for it in literature. Here is how wikipedia sums it up:
In its original sense, a shaggy dog story is an extremely long-winded anecdote characterized by extensive narration of typically irrelevant incidents and terminated by an anticlimax or a pointless punchline.
Shaggy dog stories play upon the audience's preconceptions of joke-telling. The audience listens to the story with certain expectations, which are either simply not met or met in some entirely unexpected manner. A lengthy shaggy dog story derives its humour from the fact that the joke-teller held the attention of the listeners for a long time (such jokes can take five minutes or more to tell) for no reason at all, as the end resolution is essentially meaningless.
Example (brief example...there is one in a Mark Twain book that goes on for four or five pages):
A boy owned a dog that was uncommonly shaggy. Many people remarked upon its considerable shagginess. When the boy learned that there are contests for shaggy dogs, he entered his dog. The dog won first prize for shagginess in both the local and the regional competitions. The boy entered the dog in ever-larger contests, until finally he entered it in the world championship for shaggy dogs. When the judges had inspected all of the competing dogs, they remarked about the boy's dog: "He's not that shaggy."
In this case, nearly the entire movie is one big huge shaggy dog story and when the "big reveal" comes at the end the viewer is left holding the bag with nothing to show for the time invested in watching it. One professional movie reviewer said that perhaps it would be possible to mentally put everything together so that it eventually makes sense but it would take a minimum of half a dozen viewings and that's pretty hard to do with a movie that you really probably wish you hadn't seen the first time after the lights come up. So, the joke is on the viewer..."ha, ha, made you buy a ticket and this is what you get for your time and money."
And it's too bad because Travolta, Jackson and the others do a passable job of performing. The script is mostly engaging and the action is convincing. It's just that about half way through, after you have been exposed to the third of fourth plot twist (there are seemingly
endless plot twists) you begin to realize that 1) you aren't sure at all what is going on and 2) that you may
never know what's going on. Then at the very end you think that finally it all begins to make sense (sort of) and the final plot twist rears its ugly head and only then do you figure out that you have been had.
Now don't get me wrong...I personally like plot twists. mrs. trapeze will annoyingly attempt to figure out how every single movie we watch is going to end up (and usually does) so it's always nice to find one which has a truly surprise ending. Probably one of the best examples of that type of movie is
"The Usual Suspects" which posed the question: Who is Keyser Soze? When you find out at the end of the movie it is both surprising and satisfying. Not so with "Basic" because the surprise ending gives you thoughts of tracking down everyone responsible for this movie and violently killing them.
How to describe the end of "Basic" without just coming out and telling you the "surprise" ending? Well, it would be like watching the entire ninth season of "Dallas" and then being told that none of it was real, that Pam Ewing just dreamed that Bobby had died at the end of season eight. Or watching the entire series of "Lost" and finding out on the final episode that the writers had no idea at all how to tie up all the loose ends and just decided to fake out the audience with some kind of an afterlife ending.
