Plot Does Not Matter

Indulge me in a little demonstration: think about the Mission: Impossible movies. Maybe you’re a fan of the series and have strong feelings about them. If so, there are probably a handful of scenes and images that immediately come to mind. But even if you’ve never seen any of the films, you probably still have a strong idea of what the series is. Okay, now here’s the challenge: can you describe the plot of any of the Mission: Impossible films? Don’t look it up, just see if right now, off the top of your head, you can remember what the actual sequence of events in any of these movies was. I’m guessing that even if you’re a regular watcher of the series, you can’t do it. But even if you have a good memory like me and could recall details like the NOC list, the Rabbit’s Foot, or the two halves of the key to the source code of the evil AI that’s in a sunken nuclear submarine, I am positive that you had to do some mental digging to remember them. None of those things were what first came to mind when I brought up Mission: Impossible. But here’s the thing: it doesn’t matter. Mission: Impossible is one of the most successful and acclaimed action movie franchises ever, even though nobody remembers what any of the movies are about. This is actually by design. When Christopher McQuarrie, who has written and directed the last three Mission: Impossible films along with the next (and final?) installment coming in May, sets out to write one of these films, he starts by discussing with Tom Cruise the various stunts and locations they want to be in the film. Cruise says, “I want to hang off the side of an airplane.” McQuarrie says, “I want to crash a train.” Then McQuarrie reverse-engineers the plot of the film around the predetermined set of action scenes. That’s part of why these movies work: they’re designed around the stunts and spectacle because the stunts and spectacle are the core of the movies. The plots are forgettable, but that’s fine, because the plot does not matter.

In our current media age, plot is king, at least as far as popular consciousness is concerned. Among the masses, plot tends to be the most scrutinized part of any piece of media, and also what people mostly beat up on when they don’t like something. The most frequent criticisms I hear for movies and shows people don’t like: too many plot holes, the plot made no sense, the plot was too far-fetched, etc. I had a friend who would react to any unexpected or unwelcome occurrence in her life by telling herself that it was “good for the plot.” There’s a well-worn joke across the internet than whenever a movie or show has a lot of nudity or other sexually arousing material, people say they “watch it for the plot,” the latent implication being that watching something “for the plot” is the standard, correct way to watch it in opposition to watching for reasons of horniness. But the truth is that nobody really watches anything for the plot. Among all the narrative and formal aspects that make up a film or TV show – characters, setting, pacing, themes, tone, mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing, sound – plot is almost always the least important. Plot is not a film’s marquee feature; it is a scaffold there to support the things that are actually important, and its undue prevalence in contemporary discourse is part of a worrying trend of reducing art to the purely intellectual.

What Plot Is

To answer this question in a trivial sense, we need a working definition of plot. The one I am using is this: plot is the sequence of events that occurs in any film (or book, play, game, etc.) from beginning to end. If you watch a film and take down a transcript of everything that happens on screen, that is its plot. So for example (spoilers for the films about to be mentioned, by the way), the plot of Star Wars is that a farmboy gets his hands on the blueprints for the evil empire’s big weapon, goes on an adventure to get those blueprints to the rebellion, then joins the rebellion and blows up the big weapon. The plot of 12 Angry Men is that the sole juror to initially vote not guilty in a murder case where a guilty verdict guarantees a death sentence gradually convinces all the other jurors to change their vote by calling into question each piece of the prosecution’s evidence. The plot of Vertigo is that a detective falls in love with a woman he was hired to protect but can’t save her from suicide, then meets another woman who he tries to make just like her to somehow redeem himself, then finds out she is actually the woman he fell in love with and that her supposed death was actually an elaborate scheme by his client to murder his wife, but then he ends up accidentally killing her for real.

The more substantive question of what plot is, though, concerns its function, its role within the broader operations of a work. Plot is logistics. It is the tedious brunt work of storytelling, the potato-peeling phase of making a film’s goulash. It is crude and unglamorous. Plot is there because most films aim to tell stories, and in order to tell a story you generally need to have things happen. Stories tend to work best when they have conflict, and so you need something for there to be conflict over. Characters need to react to events and make decisions, and so you need to have events to react to and decisions they can make. Plot is what provides these raw materials for the characters and story to work with, it is what gets everything situated where it needs to be. You have a scene where Tom Cruise drives a motorcycle off a cliff and you need to make it fit in the film? You use your plot to cook up a scenario where he has to get onto a moving train and this is the only way to do it. What the actual plot material is doesn’t matter, all that matters is that it works to make the thing you need fit.

Plot also serves as a scaffold for a film, a way to create a basic structure to fall back on. Inevitably, your film is going to begin and end somewhere, so it helps to have a framework that gives you a place to start from and a place to arrive. It also helps ensure that you don’t get too carried away exploring one particular thing or meander so far away from where you began that you forget what you were doing in the first place. Plot is there to give you a clear direction to travel and to make sure that everything keeps moving along smoothly. It is like a set of bumpers at a bowling alley. Plot’s fundamental function is as a support system. It is there to suggest a sense of direction and manipulate all of your elements into the configuration you need them to be in at a particular point in time. It can be a useful tool, but it is always an instrumental tool, there not as a main attraction, but to help the elements that actually matter shine through.

What Plot Isn’t (aka What Actually Matters)

Look again at those plot descriptions for Star Wars, 12 Angry Men, and Vertigo. If you’ve seen those films, you’ll know that those plots are pretty flat descriptions of their respective movies. They’re technically correct, but none of them really get to the core of what those movies are. The Death Star plans are hardly a central aspect of Star Wars, the heart of the film is really its being a modern myth, a Campbellian journey of an ordinary person venturing out from their ordinary world to become a hero, a part of something larger than themselves. 12 Angry Men is about bias and prejudice, about how people bring their own emotional baggage into situations where they are supposed to be impartial, and about the viability of a justice system that relies on a fallible individuals. Vertigo is about obsession, and how it can completely skew a person’s practical and moral judgment, and how we so often create our own images of who those close to us are supposed to be rather than accepting them as they are. None of these aspects of the films are covered by a mere plot description.

These better accounts of these three films are not descriptions of their plots but of their stories. The story-plot distinction ought to be familiar to those who have made it through high school English, but to reiterate it: plot is just what happens, story is the broader narrative that encompasses what it means. Story is what we come for, not plot. Story is the level at which films and other media can move us, can provoke us, can lead us to some genuine discovery. Story is what a work is about at its deepest level, what it hopes to communicate. Plot is just a mechanism to help deliver a story, but on its own it is quite empty.

Another thing plot is not is style. It is amazing the frequency with which people forget that film is an audiovisual medium, that there is a reason we watch movies instead of just reading the scripts. Films do not directly deal in statements in ideas, they deal in sounds and images. Those are the very fabric of every single film, and the experience would be fundamentally different without them. Writing about Scottie’s obsession in Vertigo can point to an aspect of the film, but it is certainly no substitute for experiencing the way the film depicts it stylistically, for the overwhelming dreamy haziness of the scene where Judy emerges fully transformed into Madeleine, with its harsh green light, spinning camera, and blaring music. Films are communications of the human experience through images and sound, not equations meant to be balanced out. A film’s artistic value lies in its story and in its aesthetics. Plot cannot take their place, it can only act in their service.

Moving Beyond Plot

One might object to my argument to this point on the grounds that plot not being the end goal of a work of art does not mean that it does not matter. If it serves as the skeleton of a film, the foundation on which its most important aspects rest, then clearly it matters a great deal. Remove the foundation from the building and the whole thing collapses. Remove the skeleton from the body and you’re only left with a mush of organs that can’t do much of anything. Plot might not be sexy and it might not be the ultimate fruit we want our artworks to bear, but it still has an indispensable role in getting us there.

In some cases, this is true. Many films, especially popular ones, rely on their plots to do a lot of the leg work in building their characters and developing themes, and in these cases plot takes a more integral role in holding the film together. But just because many films do lean heavily on plot does not mean that they have to. Plot is a support system available as an option to a filmmaker, and it is an option many take because it provides a ready-made structure that can hold a film together. But it is an option that one can reject. Plenty of films get along just fine without leaning on plot.

This comes in degrees. On one level, there are those films that partake in a sparse plot but have little interest in it, being much more keen to explore the aesthetic possibilities their scenarios suggest. These are films like 2001: A Space Odyssey or Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, which use sci-fi concepts as springboards for abstract visual poetry and philosophical rumination. There are films like Stranger Than Paradise and Perfect Days where nothing really happens and the act of watching the film is more about acclimating yourself to a particular environment and way of life than following a story. Going further away from plot, there are dreamlike, surrealist films like Meshes of the Afternoon and Un Chien Andalou where nothing on screen is meant to be taken literally in the first place. We can even get rid of narrative altogether, and then we end up with films like Man with a Movie Camera, Koyaanisqatsi, and Baraka, where we have no characters, no scenario, and we instead observe the machinations of the world and human society in feature-length montage. And we can even get rid of any notion of a film trying to make a statement through its images, and arrive at avant-garde works like Leviathan by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel and 13 Lakes by James Benning which are not telling a story at all and are solely aiming to give us an aesthetic, sensory experience through the images and sounds. There is an expansive universe of cinema well beyond the bounds of plot-driven films.

The common mistake made by those who cling to the value of plot is assuming that because the most popular films tend to lean heavily on plot, that any successful film must necessarily do the same. This is false. Plot can be an important element in a film if the film makes it so, but it does not need to be. There is nothing inherently important about the consistency or twistiness of a plot in creating a great film. The prevalence of plot in popular films is not a result of some deep principle about what makes good art, it is an aesthetic trend born from commercial instincts to play it safe when it comes to creative choices. The films that reject the safety net of a structured plot and find their own paths to artistic value are frequently the most interesting.

Intellectual Reduction of Art

The current obsession with plot is symptomatic of a much deeper problem in the way we consume art. It is the problem of reducing art to the merely intellectual, of taking a work’s value to be equivalent to whatever the work has to say. This is a practice that views every work of art as a puzzle to be solved, as though every artist begins their process with some well-defined essential core than they then encode in their work, and it is the audience’s job to crack the code and discover the pearl that lays within. Under this view, every film is a tabulation of figures placed in an exact arrangement which is meant to be analyzed, picked apart, reduced to simplest form so that we can solve for x and proclaim that we have understood the film. The basis of this method is the belief that if we think hard enough, everything can be known, and so it places its primary emphasis on the aspect of the film that is most easily stated in intellectual terms, that can most easily be extracted from its aesthetic context and placed under logical analysis: the plot. Style? Aesthetic expression? Emotion? These are fickle, wispy phenomena that can hardly be isolated, let alone explained. So don’t worry about them. But plot? Plot makes sense. Plot we can analyze. Plot is easy. Focus on the plot and ignore all the rest and you can reduce art into a definable commodity.

I hope it’s clear how damaging such a view is to the treatment of art. Art is not an intellectual discipline, it has never aimed to be, and treating it as such both devalues it and encourages the wrong kind of behavior in its creation. The last thing I would ever hope for is that an artist turns away from some interesting and exciting idea because they’re worried about a plot hole or not having it make enough sense. To deny oneself beauty in the name of logical consistency is a sad ordeal, yet it is what we encourage when we prioritize the intellectual over the emotional and aesthetic in our treatment of art.

What can we do about it? Certainly shutting down all the yapping about plot holes would be nice, but that would only solve the problem as much as bringing back Subway’s $5 footlong would solve world hunger. The issue goes reaches far deeper into general aesthetic values. People say things like, “A movie can look as beautiful as you want, but that doesn’t mean anything if there isn’t a good story behind it,” and it’s a non-trivial task to convince them that there is no reason that has to be true, and that the purpose of a film doesn’t have to be telling a story. The key value that seems to fuel this need to intellectualize art is a fear of not knowing. We are unable to grapple with uncertainty, unable to deal with not knowing what something is telling us immediately, or at least of not in principle being able to find out what it’s telling us if we think about it enough. In order to let go of plot, we need to make ourselves open to uncertainty, open to not having all the answers. We need to be willing to let a work of art wash over us and see what we find instead of trying to force it into an intelligible box.

To close, a litany to remind us what really matters:

I must not fixate on plot.
Plot is the art-killer.
Plot is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face the artwork.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the plot has gone there will be nothing. Only art will remain.

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