Craft of Screenwriting: The Tightrope before the Twist Ending
(This article contains spoilers for Chinatown, The Sixth Sense, The Prestige, The Usual Suspects, and Fight Club)
It’s hard to not love a good mystery or thriller. Maintaining suspense requires great mastery of the screenwriting craft, but giving a satisfactory ending in the way of a twist or grand reveal requires even more skill and understanding of how a viewer’s mind processes a film. It is no surprise that films that do this well — like Chinatown and The Sixth Sense — are regarded as some of the best screenplays ever written.
Viewers often praise films in this genre by saying “you’ll never see the twist coming.” But what makes a twist or reveal truly satisfying is if it is foreshadowed or set up in a manner that it does not become obvious.
To understand this, one must know about setups, payoffs, and foreshadowing. A setup is generally something minor — a casual line of dialogue or shot that you register but don’t think about much. It stays with you somewhere in the back of your mind until the payoff, which reveals it to be something far more significant. For example, in Fight Club, the narrator (Edward Norton) meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) on a flight and notices that they have the exact same briefcase. He even says things like “sometimes Tyler spoke for me” and that Marla (Helena Bonham Carter) and Tyler would never be in the same room together and communicate through him. When he’s beating himself up in his boss’s office, he says “for some reason, I thought of my first fight with Tyler.”
Foreshadowing as a concept is much bigger, as it need not only be needed in thrillers or mysteries, but even applies to character-driven dramas. In The Sixth Sense, we learn that Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment) can see dead people. Throughout the film, no one except him is ever shown to interact with Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis), who also seems to find it impossible to get his wife to talk to him or open doors. At one point, he even says to her “I can’t seem to keep track of time.” These things accumulate and stay with the viewer till the end.
To have a truly satisfying twist, a screenwriter walks a tightrope with great precision. On one side is the danger of tipping your hand with very conspicuous setups and foreshadowing and making the twist too obvious. On the other is failing to set up or foreshadow the end which results in it coming out of nowhere and making the viewer feel cheated. But if the writer manages to walk this tightrope, at the end there is a great twist which takes the viewer by surprise but also immediately leads to them connecting all the dots in what Robert McKee calls a “rush of insight”. All of the setups mentioned above in Fight Club and The Sixth Sense (and there are even more) ensure that a bunch of seemingly unrelated things are subtly conveyed to the viewer which all lead to this rush of insight when it is revealed that the narrator is Tyler Durden and Malcolm Crowe has been dead all along, respectively.
In Chinatown, the grand twist is foreshadowed brilliantly. The character of Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) shows extremely unusual discomfort at the few mentions of her father during the film and tells the protagonist, Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson), that her father is dangerous. Her father wants Gittes to find the mistress of Evelyn’s dead husband. When Gittes discovers that Evelyn is the one hiding this girl, she claims that it is her sister in a manner that doesn’t appear truthful. It stays with the viewer on the backburner while the primary mystery that Gittes is investigating remains the focus. When Gittes finally confronts Evelyn about her “sister’s” identity, she reveals that the girl is her sister and her daughter because her father raped her when she was 15. Immediately, Evelyn’s discomfort at the mention of her father is made perfectly clear as the viewer has that rush of insight.
It’s quite easy to fall on one side of the tightrope and tip one’s hand completely. In The Prestige, Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) sees rival magician Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) perform a trick called the Transported Man and wants to know how Borden does it. His stage engineer John Cutter (Michael Caine) insists that it has to be using a double, but Angier does not agree. On top of this, a shadowy character named Fallon becomes conspicuous in the film simply because his name is mentioned repeatedly. Director Christopher Nolan also makes a grave mistake by showing Fallon’s face multiple times, each time cutting away so quickly that it evokes suspicion. But even those few seconds make it obvious that Fallon is played by Christian Bale with some makeup and prosthetics. All of this combined makes it pretty obvious that Borden does, in fact, use a double and the big twist is ruined well before the reveal.
On the other end of the spectrum is The Usual Suspects. The basic plot of the film is Roger “Verbal” Kint (Kevin Spacey) choosing to narrate the story behind a dockyard explosion to U.S Customs agent Kujan even though he’s under no obligation or compulsion to do so. He fabricates everything from the beginning to the end — making most of the film a lie — before it is revealed to Kujan and the audience that Kint is actually Keyser Söze, the mastermind behind the explosion. At no point during the entire run of the film is there even a hint of foreshadowing or a setup that can justify this twist. It’s sprung on the viewer out of nowhere.
The Usual Suspects, perhaps, can be credited with starting a trend of “mind-fuck” films where a twist ending comes out of the blue. When one has too many such films, it dilutes the importance of foreshadowing and setups and gives the writer the license to take the audience for granted. Over time, audiences lose the appreciation of a well-executed tightrope walk because they’re used to shock rather than a rush of insight, which is what seems to have happened off late. The tightrope walk seems to be endangered, much like the craft of screenwriting.
