Perplexing Plots: Popular Storytelling and the Poetics of Murder

by David Bordwell

Narrative innovation is typically seen as the domain of the avant-garde. However, techniques such as nonlinear timelines, multiple points of view, and unreliable narration have long been part of American popular culture. How did forms and styles once regarded as “difficult” become familiar to audiences?

In Perplexing Plots, David Bordwell reveals how crime fiction, plays, and films made unconventional narrative mainstream. He shows that since the nineteenth century, detective stories and suspense thrillers have allowed ambitious storytellers to experiment with narrative. Tales of crime and mystery became a training ground where audiences learned to appreciate artifice. These genres demand a sophisticated awareness of storytelling they play games with narrative form and toy with audience expectations. Bordwell examines how writers and directors have pushed, pulled, and collaborated with their audiences to change popular storytelling. He explores the plot engineering of figures such as Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, Patricia Highsmith, Alfred Hitchcock, Dorothy Sayers, and Quentin Tarantino, and traces how mainstream storytellers and modernist experimenters influenced one another’s work. A sweeping, kaleidoscopic account written in a lively, conversational style, Perplexing Plots offers an ambitious new understanding of how movies, literature, theater, and popular culture have evolved over the past century.

Genres: Film, Nonfiction, Crime, History, Writing

862 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2023

About the author

David Bordwell, Jacques Ledoux Professor at the University of Wisconsin, is arguably the most influential scholar of film in the United States. The author, with his wife Kristin Thompson, of the standard textbook Film Art and a series of influential studies of directors (Eisenstein, Ozu, Dreyer) as well as periods and styles (Hong Kong cinema, Classical Hollywood cinema, among others), he has also trained a generation of professors of cinema studies, extending his influence throughout the world. His books have been translated into fifteen languages.

Reviews

[Andy Weston · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent kaleidoscopic account of crime fiction on screen, stage and in literature.
There is an incredible amount of research done by the author, but that needs careful summarising which Bordwell pulls off in a lively and conversational style.
Keep a pad and paper close by, as recommendations come fast and furiously.

[David Sterritt]

The film scholar David Bordwell is a skillful writer, a scrupulous critic, and a brilliant analyst of cinematic style. The literary scholar David Bordwell is just as gifted, as his new book, “Perplexing Plots: Popular Storytelling and the Poetics of Murder,” amply demonstrates. This volume deals with movies at the beginning, the end, and sometimes in between, but mainly it explores a wide range of mystery novels, thrillers, suspense stories, and the like, tracing the genre’s roots, its intersections with high-modernist literature, and many related matters, including the ways in which complex narratives are assimilated into an ever-changing mainstream and thrive in different forms as the variorum becomes more diversified and multifaceted. Bordwell’s research and erudition are equally amazing to behold. Highest recommendation!

[Martin Riexinger · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the last book of the "Aristotle of film" who has passed away earlier this year. In this publication, however, film plays only a supporting role.

Bordwell starts his book with an account of the first time he saw Pulp Fiction, a film that starts with the end of the plot. He has given the book a similar structure, although the final chapter discusses examples released after Tarantino's classic. What Bordwell finds remarkable about the reception of this film, that its complex temporal structure is not a challenge for contemporary audiences. Going back in the history of film, that such complex structures appear already quite early in the silent era. But even then audiences were able to analyze the plots. Why? Bordwell argues convincingly because they had for decades been trained to do so by crime stories and crime drama, which in in spite of being judged trivial were in terms of narrative structure more complex than highbrow 19th century literature.

From then one he goes through the history of English language crime and mystery literature, with references to how they influenced narrative structure in films. According to him authors and directors in cooperation with the audience continuously expanded the complexity of narrative structures. Furthermore he argues that this development overlaps with the experiments of the literary avantgarde ("ultraists" in the book) regarding temporal structures and point of view. In this respect Bordwell continues the rehabilitation of the "trivial" as far more complex than often assumed, which already played a role in some of his earlier books.

Bordwell makes a convincing argument, and in addition alerted to many books and films worth reading/ watching. To critical points, however, prevented me to give the highest grade. In the middle section Bordwell loses focus a bit. Here the books tends to turn into a general history of crime literature, with many summaries of novels and stories but without a thorough demonstration of their relevance for the topic of the book. And while Bordwell convincingly highlights structural similarities between the crime and mystery genres on the one hand and the literary avantgarde on the other, he downplays in my opinion one important difference. Crime and mystery plots finally "work out." Avantgarde works leave the reader/ spectator confused.

[Roy Kenagy]

NYRB Feb 8, 2024. GEOFFREY O’BRIEN, Craving for Crime

NARRATIVE. GENRE

[Michael Pronko · Rating 5 out of 5]

The subtitle gives away the gist of this excellent, somewhat academic study. He points out how popular storytelling was always steeped in mystery, thriller, murder, crime, and detective plots. He points out how popular storytelling gradually carried over into our "respected literary" storytelling on screen and in books. This is the last work by this film critic and analyst. All of his books on film are great, but this final work, the last before he died, was perhaps what he was trying to say all along. He explains how narrative flows through society and why that matters.

[Lisa Kucharski · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great reference book of the structure of mysteries from the early days to more modern. If you write, it would be a great book to get just to jam on the ideas presented. Also a great deal of important mysteries are referenced as well- and movies so it’s a great way to delve into the world of mystery.

Highly recommend.

[Melissa Scheffey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Exhaustive compendium on the evolution of modern plots! Must-have for the fiction writer.

[Glenn Hopp · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perplexing Plots is about the influence that mystery/crime novels have had on mystery/crime films over time. It is as useful as a reference book as it is enjoyable as a critical study. The author, David Bordwell, who was 76, died on February 29, about a year after his book was published in early 2023. I’m still sad that I won’t be able to read more books by this insightful writer who has taught me so much about the movies. A book like this can be written only by someone who has spent his entire life seemingly watching every suspense movie and reading every mystery novel. Bordwell puts all that knowledge to amazing use. He spots trends, identifies patterns, and shows their importance in the growth of popular culture. He gleans rich information even from cheapie paperback originals. His enthusiasm for the subject is thrilling. It makes you think that even a Harlequin romance might contain, under all the banality, some kind of latent truth, if only our reading can discern it.