THE PAYOFF

by Rob Lopresti

I don’t know if you have been watching the TV series Lost, which is sailing to a conclusion this spring. It ain’t a mystery (although in one sense it is nothing but mysteries). But if you have been following it you might appreciate this recent comic:

Made me laugh, anyway. What Betty is referring to is the payoff. This is not necessarily the climax, although they can be the same.

I define the payoff as that part of the story that justifies what the reader or viewer has been put through. It could be an explanation. It could be a big explosive finale. It could be an emotional turnabout or a big surprise. But it has to make the reader feel that the journey was worth the trip.

Spoiler warning

I’m going to talk about some payoffs, and that means giving away some endings. But I will stick to some pretty old stories. (Surprise! Odysseus makes it back to Ithaca!)

Think back to The Bridge Over The River Kwai. Did the bridge get blown up at the end? If you say yes, you are remembering the movie. If you say no, you are remembering the novel. Both were perfectly logical payoffs in their media.

Pierre Boulle, the novelist, followed his character’s journey to its logical conclusion. He had gone off his moral path, lost track of what his goal should have been, and the result was that the bridge didn’t get destroyed. It was a psychologically satisfying payoff

But the makers of the movie felt they had to show us the bridge go boom and that made sense in the visual media. A visceral payoff.

(And by the way, Boulle also wrote the novel Planet of the Apes, another case where the ending of the book and the movie parted ways, although in that case the filmmakers simply chose a more cinematic way to draw the same grim conclusion. And I highly recommend Boulle’s book of short stories Because It Is Absurd.)

You can say that the boom of the bridge is an application of the law known as Chekov’s Gun: “If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don’t put it there.” Whatever you set up, you have to pay off.

Hitch’s hitch

Have you noticed that suspense novels often have a big climax (hero wrassles bad guy away from the nuclear parakeets), but don’t end there? Instead a chapter follows in which the hero embraces the parakeet-keeper and you know that everything is going to be okey-dokey.

(I can think of one dramatic exception. Dick Francis ends Flying Finish true to its title, at the moment the plane lands. Neither the hero nor the reader know whether the heroine is alive or not.)

But if the novelist gets lucky and her suspense novel is turned into a movie that last chapter is pretty much sure to vanish. As I said, the appropriate payoff for a movie and a book are often different.

And here’s an example that may explain why. What’s the payoff in the movie Psycho? The climax is the heroine’s encounter with Norman’s mother in the fruit cellar. But this is followed by an end-of-the-suspense-novel type chapter in which a psychologist tries to explain what we have just seen.

Most viewers love the fruit cellar, hate the shrink scene. Critics have been arguing for fifty years about Hitchcock’s decision to put that scene in, his uncharacteristic attempt to explain what we have just seen. Some have even argued that the scene is deliberately unsatisfactory, put there to suggest that psychological explanations are inadequate.

Me, I think Hitch simply felt the tricks he had put over on the audience needed their own payoff.

Brain bogglers

Philip José Farmer wrote a series of science fiction novels known as the Riverworld saga. In the first pages everyone who ever lived on Earth wakes up at the same moment on the banks of a long river on a giant planet. As you read through the four books – and they are fascinating – you can’t help thinking, boy, he better come up with a good explanation of what the hell is happening. And to his credit, he does. Whether it is a good enough explanation every reader has to decide individually.

But the more of a puzzle the story is, the more the reader demands a satisfactory explanation for what has gone before. Fireworks and razzle-dazzle are not enough.

In that regard, the creators of Lost have a big job left to do. To justify our six-year trip, they have to convince us that this adventure was not random, that the creators knew all along what was going to happen. They are trying to tie up their loose ends now. (Who would have guessed that C.J. Cregg was the cause of all the trouble?) But if the explanations aren’t satisfactory then, as Betty says, we may feel we have been wasting our time.

It may seem like the rule is: the more elaborate the set-up the more elaborate the payoff has to be, but that isn’t necessarily true. I have mentioned here before the weekly competition that Mary Ann Madden ran in New York magazine back in the seventies. One week the set-up consisted of a lengthy statement a psychologist’s wife supposedly made in divorce court. She had walked into her husband’s office and found a half-clothed woman lying unconscious, while the shrink, holding half a grapefruit in one hand, attempted to stamp out a small fire on the rug. I forget the other details but I believe there was also a stuffed owl in the room.

The contestant’s job was to speak in the husband’s voice and offer a simple, innocent explanation for these circumstances. Many of the entries were bizarre, complex and wildly improbable. But the winner was magnificent. I quote it in its entirety:

“She’s lying.”

Now, that’s a payoff.