#NOCTURNAL ANIMALS ENDING EXPLAINED SERIES#
I remember realizing how much I would come to love this series when I realized that its writer, Charlie Brooker, not only succeeded in undercutting the potential for a ridiculous (and impossible to sustain) farcical comedic approach, but laid out an agonizing series of genuinely moving events that seemed like they could actually happen given the “promise of the premise.” Even a devastating epilogue is added to allow us to think about the human toll of this on-the-surface “absurd” premise. But one could handpick practically any episode of Black Mirror and find that this adherence to premise fuels the narrative in extremely effective and interesting ways.Īs a brief aside, consider the program’s first-season opener, “The National Anthem.” Since the idea behind the episode arises only moments into it, it will not be too much a spoiler to divulge it: When a fictional member of the Royal Family is kidnapped, the ransom demand is that the Prime Minister have sex with a pig live on television. Plot and character both serve the premise in an inextricable, symbiotic way.įor the purposes of focusing our analysis, the subject here will be the final episode of season three, “Hated in the Nation”. Once again, this could be a recipe for disaster, but the level of finesse is admirable. Honoring it, if you will, in a way that seems to place the premise itself at top priority over any other aspect of the script. In lesser hands, this kind of cautionary tale could easily become a preach-fest, but Black Mirror delivers episode after episode of cogent commentary, mixed with riveting storytelling.Īnd the reason this show pulls it off is that its writers always give the premise its due, making sure to play out all the logical ramifications of the concept. The genius (a much-overused word that certainly seems to apply in this case) of Black Mirror is that it uses traditional storytelling to paint a landscape of the supposed future so clearly resembling where we are now that the parallels are impossible to ignore. But it is a story driven by symbolic meaning and an approach rooted more in avant-garde theater than in conventional storytelling. The Lobster, for example, does a fine job of exploring all the ramifications of its premise.
#NOCTURNAL ANIMALS ENDING EXPLAINED FULL#
Science fiction, perhaps more than any genre, demands the full throughline promised by its premise.
When our hero’s day finally ends, we share his catharsis.īill Murray as Phil in Groundhog Day. But it followed such a clear path, of a man who is the living definition of insanity (making the same mistake over and over and expecting different results), that when it ended, it had played out the premise exactly as was appropriate. It left out certain specifics, most notably why its protagonist was cursed or how many actual days he spent in his purgatory. In my previous analysis of the streamlining of the Groundhog Day story from early draft script to its final screen version, it came to light that Groundhog Day was a premise (man relives the same day over and over) so demanding of follow-through that its early drafts included far more permutations of the premise than were even needed.Īs a film, it got it just right. This ending sells out the rich texture of the premise, and leaves us with a distinct feeling of “wait…that’s it?” We were prepared for so much more by a script that was firing on a lot of cylinders, but because the premise didn’t deliver on its promise, we were left with less. However, at film’s end, rather than playing out these threads in a way that leaves the themes resonating, the filmmakers choose to close on a kind of “gotcha”, wherein the book’s author leaves the heroine hanging in a “screw-you” response to her lack of appreciation of him and of herself.
The premise contains big issues of ambition, the submerging of one’s creativity, and most conspicuously, notions of masculinity in an increasingly violent world. The ex-wife of a struggling writer finds herself drawn into the seamy world of his novel, as she sets its terrifying fictional events off against her perhaps unfair treatment of him in the past. In the overall very good Nocturnal Animals, the premise has layers of thematic integrity. Photograph by Merrick Morton/ Courtesy of Focus Features Amy Adams as Susan Morrow in Nocturnal Animals.
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