Chekhov Gun discussions always remind me of this Vonnegut passage:
"I had no respect whatsoever for the creative works of either the painter or the novelist. I thought Karabekian with his meaningless pictures had entered into a conspiracy with millionaires to make poor people feel stupid. I thought Beatrice Keedsler had joined hands with other old-fashioned storytellers to make people believe that life had leading characters, minor characters, significant details, insignificant details, that it had lessons to be learned, tests to be passed, and a beginning, a middle, and an end.
"As I approached my fiftieth birthday, I had become more and more enraged and mystified by the idiot decisions made by my countrymen. And then I had come suddenly to pity them, for I understood how innocent and natural it was for them to behave so abominably, and with such abominable results: They were doing their best to live like people invented in story books. This was the reason Americans shot each other so often: It was a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books."
(from Breakfast of Champions, by an author who often tells you the end in the beginning and puts the journey in the details)
"The Room", by Tommy Wiseau, is a movie where Chekhov's gun isn't applied. It contains lots of small happenings with no further relevance. It has lots of other issues, technically speaken.
But together they make this film not only amateurish, but it also gives it a certain kind of realism. In real life stuff happens and still may have no further relevance to the "story" after all. In real life there is nobody enforcing Chekhov's gun.
Together with the other charming mistakes and bad acting the film feels quite authentic. It gives this impression that someone just wanted to tell his story, despite not being as professional as we are used to.
Like a little child coming home from playing in the woods that excitetly blabbers out the story of what he just experienced.
Same with the Big Lebowski, but in a much more deliberate (and professional) way. The Dude, imagining himself in a film noir story, thinks that every detail is some clue relevant to Bunny's disappearance, but turns out to be completely irrelevant: the guy following the Dude in the VW, the essay in the Dude's car, Jackie Treehorn's note, etc. Instead, basically every single event in the movie after exposition is a red herring when it turns out that the Dude's initial hunch that Bunny kidnapped herself was true all along.
The one that always gets me is Luke's lightsaber in the original Star Wars. It's introduced as a connection to the father he never knew, making it hugely significant. There's a whole scene on the Falcon of Ben training him to use it. And then he never takes it out again for the remainder of the movie.
You see this in lots of long-play shows/properties. Adventure Time comes to mind. A number of seemingly irrelevant details become central to the main plot in much later episodes (years/seasons later).
I am wondering, however, whether there is some sort of plot bible that lives with the “keepers” of the storyline, or whether some details are just randomly sprinkled here and there as hooks with the hope that writers will weave them into the future plot.
Either way, this type of writing is extremely rewarding to long-time fans of a show.
That is a surprising thing to note. Though it does help set up two of the most important scenes in the movie: Lightsabers are used in the dramatic battle between Vader and Obi-Wan; It's good to have them in a few scenes if the first time they're in a battle, the mentor is killed. Furthermore, at the end when Luke is doing the trench run, he's relying on his targeting computer until force ghost Obi-Wan tells him to use the force. This relaxing and trusting in the force was directly set up in the Falcon training scene.
I think overall this is the best way to use Chekhov's Gun: Introduce several things, but don't make it obvious how they're going to fit together.
Wow I never realized that. Did they already intend to film a sequel and call back to his lightsaber, or was that just a random detail they worked in later?
He has blinders on and is learning to use the force, which he does use again. his lightsaber isn't used again, but they are used again in a master's fight.
One character being played by three different actors (either that, or three characters being so similar I confused them as the same character despite being three different actors) is hardly charming IMO.
Longer form stories, such as Game of Thrones (where Azor Ahai, and other such plotlines are literally killed off) are probably more entertaining. It sucks to see a fan theory turn out to not matter at all, but not everything ends up being relevant to the conclusion.
I don't think a 2 or 3 hour movie has any room to dwell on unimportant details. Anime and miniseries do have that time. We can watch Goku mess around with Princess Snake or Krillen get his Namekian power up (which doesn't matter for any fight, but is good development for the character in isolation).
That's probably the charm of Cowboy Bebop. There's so much detail and none of it really matters. The interesting story happened like 10 years ago (in universe time). That's be my pick for a show / story with very little Chekhov gun going on.
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Chekhov gun is probably contrasted with Red Herring, which is explicitly a detail that not only doesn't matter, but purely exists to mislead the audience. Any Chekhov gun heavy plot needs red herrings to balance things out, otherwise it's too predictable.
“ Red Herring, which is explicitly a detail that not only doesn't matter, but purely exists to mislead the audience.”
There is also the McGuffin which appears to matter, but exists entirely to elicit character action. For instance, in “Psycho” the plot line about the stolen money is dropped almost as soon as it is established, but it did its job by getting Marion on the run and into the motel.
> In real life there is nobody enforcing Chekhov's gun.
Of course not. Which is sort of the point. We already have real life. Stories are something different. Checkov's gun isn't a statement of some kind of platonic ideal of fiction construction, it's a convention. We like stories with "tight" framing because it's easier to watch and keeps our attention on the things that matter. And that's all it means.
You can tell other kinds of stories. Art is art. But if you want people to like your stories (or whatever other artwork you're producing) you'll probably be better served y adhering to convention and violating it in small, targetted ways than you will be throwing out long-held standard assumptions.
(Note that the fact that these conventions exist is itself ammunition for creativity, btw. A "realist" story where nothing necessarily matters is going to have a very hard time delivering a creative twist at the end. A conventional plot, though, can leverage the fact that the audience is conditioned to expect things based on rules like Chekhov's, and subvert those in interesting ways.)
Chekhov's gun treatment can remove an element of surprise, or worse, reveal whole plot-line. It's a convention that is an art in itself, too much and too little can ruin the experience.
I don't think that rule expresses universal truth. These rules come and go. You have great writers who wrote famous books which don't follow these Storytelling that follows then becomes boring and predictable when they are widely used.
The junk adventure/vampire what not literature tend to follow all the structural rules and is as forgettable as it gets.
The argument with real life matter. Because when your storytelling rules make it impossible to tell real stories, then there is something wrong with them.
according to some theories, there is enforcement of Chekov's gun. Reality is combinitorial explosive, ie. there are vastly too many inputs for us to synthesize. So our perception and memory both function to "chunk" events and objects. These "chunks" are what you perceive and remember. So you don't just bump into random objects, but in fact you only see and remember things that are in some way relevant. In other words, everything is a Chekhov gun in some ways.
The movie that comes to mind for me is Napoleon Dynamite. My first impression was that it was just aimless slapstick, but really it's about a group of misfits becoming friends. The events that lead there sometimes pay off and are sometimes are seemingly random. This really makes it feel charming and realistic.
Speaking of that movie, I can recommend anyone who is familiar with The Room, but who hasn’t seen The Room, to watch the movie The Disaster Artist (2017) instead. I’ve only watched the latter and not The Room itself but watching the latter instead was a nice experience.
The Disaster Artist is based on the book "The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made" by Greg Sestero, and it’s got James Franco portraying Tommy.
In good writing, details serve multiple purposes. Just showing a gun because it will be used later will seem ham-fisted to an audience. A good writer will introduce the gun as a character moment and as setup.
Maybe the rifle/gun is just a bad example today? I watch movies all the time where there are guns or rifles which does not gow off. And I sure don't feel like some promise was broken.
Gun isn’t literal here. Gun is a metaphor for details; if the details don’t serve the plot (if the gun doesn’t go off) then the details should be removed (don’t show the gun)
One of the things that made Quentin Tarantino's early films, particularly Pulp Fiction, such a breath of fresh air is that they did this with abandon. John Travolta and Samuel L Jackson would chat away about McDonald's in France or whether or not they were prepared to eat pork and it was of no consequence whatsoever to subsequent events, other than to give characters a bit more depth. Too many films and novels have things happen for no other reason than that the plot is going to require it in the next act and it's great when a writer takes a different approach.
The great thing about the Room is that it is so poorly acted that it is impossible to replicate. So it is a kind of a side-channel into the minds of the people playing here. It might be lame and unwatchable at places, but it's also more genuine than any performance a trained person could put forth.
But some of those things that are dropped don't make any sense to have no impact on the characters, like someone having cancer. It's just mentioned and never brought up again.
I think I see the argument for why that's 'charming', but I've seen far more enjoyable media that does it better.
Details that build characters is good. X has cancer is fine, albeit heavyhanded. Certainly enough of a characterization to work in low-plot action movies for example.
Not everything needs to be relevant to the plot. But I'm not convinced that a 2 hour movie has the room for this kind of storytelling.
I've never seen The Room so my opinion may change if I ever do, but there is another movie that I have seen (though only by proxy of MST3K) called Manos: The Hands of Fate that also has been referred to as the worst movie ever made, and I wholeheartedly agree.
In most of the best-known classic Chinese novels, like "Journey to the West", "Water Margin" and "Dream of the Red Chamber", there is usually a character that feels very important in the first few chapters, then nowhere to be found in the rest of the book.
When people reading these novels, most of them wouldn't think of those runaway characters because there are many new characters and exciting plots. But it just strikes when people start to recall the plots sometimes after reading: one of the most important characters already foresee all of the conflicts, and they just run away and live their life rather than participating in the following conflicts.
It turns out, most of the novels are written by frustrated scholar-officials. They got burnt out in reality so they wrote those novels. Many of them would become hermits and enjoyed their life happily after. It sounds escapist but there's some Zen in it in the context of Chinese literature.
It feels like "The Shawshank Redemption" when it strikes me that the hammer was in the bible, and the most intensive scene was presented in a very calm way when people didn't know it.
This is a really good insight - the trope of the "frustrated scholar-official" is extremely prominent in the Chinese literary tradition. That being said, the ideal of "becom[ing] hermits and enjoy[ing] their life happily after" was something of a literary conceit; in most of the actual literature written by people who tried to do this, there's an extremely strong tension between the idealized/romanticized apolitical world of the hermit, and the reality that farming was very hard labor and not something most literati particularly enjoyed. Probably the most famous example of this is the poetry of Tao Yuanming. (Note: I wrote my Master's thesis on depictions of eremitism in ancient/early medieval China.)
I just got done reading the Three-Body problem which is translated from Chinese and there was a very strong escapist narrative which felt very strange for a westerner reading it.
This actually adds a lot of context as I felt the book didn’t live up to the reviews but I felt all along that it was down to cultural differences and the translation to English.
The image in the first link points out that there is a literal rifle on the wall in Shaun of the Dead. That's a pretty cool reference to the origin of Chekhov's gun.
I never really liked Chekhov's Gun, as it tends to make the world feel artificial and barren. Details unrelated to the story at hand make the world feel much more vibrant and interesting. It gets worse as a story's length increases - for instance TV shows that go on for years where the main characters only seem to have relationships with 5-6 other people in the entire world.
Of course there's a separate issue where a fictional work will artificially emphasize the importance of something and then ignore it. For example, people say something's impossible, then there's a close up shot of someone's face, he slowly says "It's not...I know a guy" and loud dramatic music starts playing. There, the creators are telling the audience that this is something important, and it will be odd if it's not followed through (though even then, I've seen some creators not follow through in interesting ways).
Surprise is overrated. Suspense is superior. The best explanation of the difference is given by Hitchcock in an interview with Truffaut.
We see two characters talking for 45 seconds. Then a bomb goes off, that was under the table. The audience didn't know there was a bomb: big surprise; but the dialogue between the characters is completely irrelevant and eclipsed by the explosion.
Now imagine the same scene, but before, we see a terrorist placing the bomb under the table. Now the scene is totally different, and every word that comes out of one of the characters' mouth is fascinating. Does either one of them know about the bomb? Will they find out in time? Will they survive? Etc.
You see a man putting a bag under a table. Two man arrive, sitting at the table, you wait for the bomb to explode because the bag must have a meaning. The meeting ends, the men stand up, one is killed by headshot.
And your scene depends on the characters. Is one the main character? Highly unlikely he get killed.
It's even worse if it's a TV series. Main character is strapped to a bomb? No problem. Guest star is strapped to a bomb? Might get killed.
Unknown supporting role strapped to a bomb? Sure death.
I think that was part of GoT's success. Surprise deaths. And nudity of course.
If everything has a meaning even the chosen actor is important. Known actor in a minor role? Surely gets important.
That is interesting, I hadn’t thought of that before.
I think a recent series which bucked this trend was For All Mankind. Rather than building suspense, bad stuff just happened with no warning. And it wasn’t a jump scare, it just happened. The entertainment for me then came from the characters reactions and how the plot then unfolded.
I actually class it as one of the best shows I’ve seen. I feel it managed to be very wholesome while also having some major emotional highs and lows. In particular, it didn’t build drama just for the sake of keeping the audience engaged.
A great example of this is a scene in the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy. Before the scene starts the narrator explains, in detail, what exactly will happen in the scene, and what the end result will be. None of this makes the scene itself any less thrilling.
I attended a talk from Digger webcomic author and artist Ursula Vernon, and she seemed to have a different approach. If I remember right, she said that instead of planning the whole thing in advance and placing specific Chekhov’s Guns as needed, she put in a lot of small detailed world building everywhere, allowing her to choose from whatever seemed appropriate at the time.
Chekhov‘s Guns are important for short stories (which is what Chekhov was famous for), but short stories are not the only type of fiction and they don’t fit everywhere.
Chekhov wrote short stories and plays. It is harder to apply the same principle to serialized narratives like tv-shows and comics, since you don't know how everything pans out and you cant go back and edit.
On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on. He'd dreamed he was going through a grove of timber trees where a gentle drizzle was falling, and for an instant he was happy in his dream, but when he awoke he felt completely spattered with bird shit
'knowing what will happen' is not in itself a limit on good literature. You know what's going to happen in every Shakespeare play long before you've seen or read it.
Salman Rushdie is an example of a master writer who will eat this cake and still have it. He often states preety early in the book something like "this was Y, X's wife, who will later kill him in his sleep, in his room, with a bread knife", and when the time of killing comes he will still manage to surprise you.
This reminded me of a particularly grisly character introduction in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. It's played to the opposite effect where it's not going to be a surprise at all. It's hardly even suspenseful, but hangs another helping of dread over the story.
> Toadvine glanced at the man's forehead but the man's hat was pushed down almost to his eyes. The man smiled and forked the hat back slightly with his thumb. The print of the hatband lay on his forehead like a scar but there was no mark other. Only on the inside of his lower arm was there tattooed a number which Toadvine would see in a Chihuahua bathhouse and again when he would cut down the man's torso where it hung skewered by its heels from a treelimb in the wastes of Pimeria Alta in the fall of that year.
It's not really the gun on the wall, the bread knife, or the tattoo. It's the narrator revealing a kind of untrustworthy omniscience by spoiling future details of the story.
This is thoroughly ridiculed in A Series of Unfortunate Events (the Netflix TV series and presumably also the books that they're based on). (Mild spoiler alert) The bank manager has a noticeable cough the whole way through. If anything it gets worse and other characters comment on it, and it seems for sure that it will be a plot point. Of course, it ultimately comes to nothing.
No, it just tells you that somebody will fire the rifle at some point. This increases tension but does not really tell you much about what is going to happen except it is going to get dangerous and violent.
I'd argue that if the gun is shown to lead the audience on, but it not beeing fired is a twist to the plot or a relevant conclusion, then in the sense of the metaphor it still "has gone off"
Yeah, yesterday I watched Star Trek Beyond and I hated all those foreshadowing events and almost everything else. Spoilers: There's a supposedly useless artifact, which gets a big camera zoom when getting archived and oh surprise, it turns out to be a weapon of mass destruction. There's a huge space station, which gets introduced with long camera shots full of happy people and oh surprise, it's about to get attacked later. There's some relationship drama and discussion about a stupid gift, which later gets used as a tracking device to save everyone. The captain notices a motorcycle on a spaceship, which later gets used to make a stupid stunt show to save everyone. The captain, for no apparent reason, plays a video log showing the crew of an old space ship and oh surprise, later this video is used to reveal the identity of the villain. Some alien found some old music tapes from our time and we get to hear them loudly, and of course this music is later used as a super weapon to save the day. ...
You could say that it's the little things that help to really tie the film together (even though they don't really have a significant impact on the main plot). In most cases they aid in defining the characters.
Jesus being a pederast doesn't have much of an effect on the storyline, but it provides context into the background of the character, so he's not just merely a competing bowler.
Another example of an even more seemingly irrelevant detail is when Jackie Treehorn starts sketching something on a pad upon receiving a phone call. When it's revealed to the audience what it is, not only is it surprisingly funny, but it hints at who Jackie Treehorn is. Maybe he's in his line of business because it means more to him than just a lucrative enterprise.
These kinds of "irrelevant details" are fairly common in films by the Coen brothers. When I think of their film Raising Arizona, I'm pleasantly reminded of how it's revealed that the evil nemesis just happens to have that same tattoo as HI.
They play a role in a different sense: if you see a rifle it may be there because it's going to be fired or maybe because the character likes rifles. Could you imagine The Big Lebowski without bowling? And yet bowling has nothing to do with the story.
Its a polemic really. The terseness and immediacy of Chekhov's stories and plays made them 'modern' and set them in contrast to older art. It was a very powerful shtick at the time.
Of course today's times are very different. Our lives have so much content and immediacy now that is beyond Chekov's experience that people seek out exactly the opposite.
Still I think the way he carefully and deliberately constructed things has a lot to teach us. In the software world he'd be a builder of lean core libraries and a hater of the bloatware apps that use them.
Wikipedia cites it as a "dramatic principle", not merely a style. I've seen it advocated as "the way things should be done". That's why I think the contrast is important to note: it's not a principal of good writing, it's merely one style of telling a story.
In art there are no absolutes like in management you can always find good examples proving the principles wrong.
The principle is more a guideline for new writers not to ramble and maintain focus especially if there are word limit restrictions typical to published short stories of the era, you cannot afford to waste words on things that don't matter to the story.
Established authors like Hemmingway or Asimov can get published with shaggy dog stories most regular authors cannot.
Even those authors can get a way once in a while, however most of the time they too have to follow the principle like everyone else too.
Readit News
"I had no respect whatsoever for the creative works of either the painter or the novelist. I thought Karabekian with his meaningless pictures had entered into a conspiracy with millionaires to make poor people feel stupid. I thought Beatrice Keedsler had joined hands with other old-fashioned storytellers to make people believe that life had leading characters, minor characters, significant details, insignificant details, that it had lessons to be learned, tests to be passed, and a beginning, a middle, and an end.
"As I approached my fiftieth birthday, I had become more and more enraged and mystified by the idiot decisions made by my countrymen. And then I had come suddenly to pity them, for I understood how innocent and natural it was for them to behave so abominably, and with such abominable results: They were doing their best to live like people invented in story books. This was the reason Americans shot each other so often: It was a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books."
(from Breakfast of Champions, by an author who often tells you the end in the beginning and puts the journey in the details)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP3c1h8v2ZQ
I saw him do this bit in person in the early 90s and never forgot it.
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But together they make this film not only amateurish, but it also gives it a certain kind of realism. In real life stuff happens and still may have no further relevance to the "story" after all. In real life there is nobody enforcing Chekhov's gun.
Together with the other charming mistakes and bad acting the film feels quite authentic. It gives this impression that someone just wanted to tell his story, despite not being as professional as we are used to. Like a little child coming home from playing in the woods that excitetly blabbers out the story of what he just experienced.
I am wondering, however, whether there is some sort of plot bible that lives with the “keepers” of the storyline, or whether some details are just randomly sprinkled here and there as hooks with the hope that writers will weave them into the future plot.
Either way, this type of writing is extremely rewarding to long-time fans of a show.
I think overall this is the best way to use Chekhov's Gun: Introduce several things, but don't make it obvious how they're going to fit together.
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One character being played by three different actors (either that, or three characters being so similar I confused them as the same character despite being three different actors) is hardly charming IMO.
Longer form stories, such as Game of Thrones (where Azor Ahai, and other such plotlines are literally killed off) are probably more entertaining. It sucks to see a fan theory turn out to not matter at all, but not everything ends up being relevant to the conclusion.
I don't think a 2 or 3 hour movie has any room to dwell on unimportant details. Anime and miniseries do have that time. We can watch Goku mess around with Princess Snake or Krillen get his Namekian power up (which doesn't matter for any fight, but is good development for the character in isolation).
That's probably the charm of Cowboy Bebop. There's so much detail and none of it really matters. The interesting story happened like 10 years ago (in universe time). That's be my pick for a show / story with very little Chekhov gun going on.
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Chekhov gun is probably contrasted with Red Herring, which is explicitly a detail that not only doesn't matter, but purely exists to mislead the audience. Any Chekhov gun heavy plot needs red herrings to balance things out, otherwise it's too predictable.
There is also the McGuffin which appears to matter, but exists entirely to elicit character action. For instance, in “Psycho” the plot line about the stolen money is dropped almost as soon as it is established, but it did its job by getting Marion on the run and into the motel.
Of course not. Which is sort of the point. We already have real life. Stories are something different. Checkov's gun isn't a statement of some kind of platonic ideal of fiction construction, it's a convention. We like stories with "tight" framing because it's easier to watch and keeps our attention on the things that matter. And that's all it means.
You can tell other kinds of stories. Art is art. But if you want people to like your stories (or whatever other artwork you're producing) you'll probably be better served y adhering to convention and violating it in small, targetted ways than you will be throwing out long-held standard assumptions.
(Note that the fact that these conventions exist is itself ammunition for creativity, btw. A "realist" story where nothing necessarily matters is going to have a very hard time delivering a creative twist at the end. A conventional plot, though, can leverage the fact that the audience is conditioned to expect things based on rules like Chekhov's, and subvert those in interesting ways.)
The junk adventure/vampire what not literature tend to follow all the structural rules and is as forgettable as it gets.
The argument with real life matter. Because when your storytelling rules make it impossible to tell real stories, then there is something wrong with them.
I think there are lots of different thinkers with this perspective, here is one concise formulation:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPByuAeFxwE
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3521126/
The Disaster Artist is based on the book "The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made" by Greg Sestero, and it’s got James Franco portraying Tommy.
E.g. that the character is the kind of person who owns guns.
It does not go off or get used, but the viewer will use that as input to make a judgement about the character.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_(2015_film)
Details that build characters is good. X has cancer is fine, albeit heavyhanded. Certainly enough of a characterization to work in low-plot action movies for example.
Not everything needs to be relevant to the plot. But I'm not convinced that a 2 hour movie has the room for this kind of storytelling.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manos:_The_Hands_of_Fate
If you're masochistic, download it from somewhere. If you're sadistic, have people watch it with you.
I'm not engaging in hyperbole when I call it ridiculously bad.
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When people reading these novels, most of them wouldn't think of those runaway characters because there are many new characters and exciting plots. But it just strikes when people start to recall the plots sometimes after reading: one of the most important characters already foresee all of the conflicts, and they just run away and live their life rather than participating in the following conflicts.
It turns out, most of the novels are written by frustrated scholar-officials. They got burnt out in reality so they wrote those novels. Many of them would become hermits and enjoyed their life happily after. It sounds escapist but there's some Zen in it in the context of Chinese literature.
It feels like "The Shawshank Redemption" when it strikes me that the hammer was in the bible, and the most intensive scene was presented in a very calm way when people didn't know it.
I just got done reading the Three-Body problem which is translated from Chinese and there was a very strong escapist narrative which felt very strange for a westerner reading it.
This actually adds a lot of context as I felt the book didn’t live up to the reviews but I felt all along that it was down to cultural differences and the translation to English.
There are articles about the other linked concepts as well:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Foreshadowing
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MacGuffin
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RedHerring
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ShaggyDogStory
Dead Comment
Of course there's a separate issue where a fictional work will artificially emphasize the importance of something and then ignore it. For example, people say something's impossible, then there's a close up shot of someone's face, he slowly says "It's not...I know a guy" and loud dramatic music starts playing. There, the creators are telling the audience that this is something important, and it will be odd if it's not followed through (though even then, I've seen some creators not follow through in interesting ways).
We see two characters talking for 45 seconds. Then a bomb goes off, that was under the table. The audience didn't know there was a bomb: big surprise; but the dialogue between the characters is completely irrelevant and eclipsed by the explosion.
Now imagine the same scene, but before, we see a terrorist placing the bomb under the table. Now the scene is totally different, and every word that comes out of one of the characters' mouth is fascinating. Does either one of them know about the bomb? Will they find out in time? Will they survive? Etc.
Suspense > surprise.
And your scene depends on the characters. Is one the main character? Highly unlikely he get killed.
It's even worse if it's a TV series. Main character is strapped to a bomb? No problem. Guest star is strapped to a bomb? Might get killed. Unknown supporting role strapped to a bomb? Sure death. I think that was part of GoT's success. Surprise deaths. And nudity of course.
If everything has a meaning even the chosen actor is important. Known actor in a minor role? Surely gets important.
I think a recent series which bucked this trend was For All Mankind. Rather than building suspense, bad stuff just happened with no warning. And it wasn’t a jump scare, it just happened. The entertainment for me then came from the characters reactions and how the plot then unfolded.
I actually class it as one of the best shows I’ve seen. I feel it managed to be very wholesome while also having some major emotional highs and lows. In particular, it didn’t build drama just for the sake of keeping the audience engaged.
I could talk about that show for ages.
Nobody is surprised, then subsequently asks no questions. The questions simply come after.
And so I imagine the sequence of when you want the viewer to ask their questions can be used as a literary device (famously, in media res).
Chekhov‘s Guns are important for short stories (which is what Chekhov was famous for), but short stories are not the only type of fiction and they don’t fit everywhere.
'knowing what will happen' is not in itself a limit on good literature. You know what's going to happen in every Shakespeare play long before you've seen or read it.
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> Toadvine glanced at the man's forehead but the man's hat was pushed down almost to his eyes. The man smiled and forked the hat back slightly with his thumb. The print of the hatband lay on his forehead like a scar but there was no mark other. Only on the inside of his lower arm was there tattooed a number which Toadvine would see in a Chihuahua bathhouse and again when he would cut down the man's torso where it hung skewered by its heels from a treelimb in the wastes of Pimeria Alta in the fall of that year.
It's not really the gun on the wall, the bread knife, or the tattoo. It's the narrator revealing a kind of untrustworthy omniscience by spoiling future details of the story.
Jesus being a pederast doesn't have much of an effect on the storyline, but it provides context into the background of the character, so he's not just merely a competing bowler.
Another example of an even more seemingly irrelevant detail is when Jackie Treehorn starts sketching something on a pad upon receiving a phone call. When it's revealed to the audience what it is, not only is it surprisingly funny, but it hints at who Jackie Treehorn is. Maybe he's in his line of business because it means more to him than just a lucrative enterprise.
These kinds of "irrelevant details" are fairly common in films by the Coen brothers. When I think of their film Raising Arizona, I'm pleasantly reminded of how it's revealed that the evil nemesis just happens to have that same tattoo as HI.
IRL is probably more like the shaggy dog.
Of course today's times are very different. Our lives have so much content and immediacy now that is beyond Chekov's experience that people seek out exactly the opposite.
Still I think the way he carefully and deliberately constructed things has a lot to teach us. In the software world he'd be a builder of lean core libraries and a hater of the bloatware apps that use them.
Wikipedia cites it as a "dramatic principle", not merely a style. I've seen it advocated as "the way things should be done". That's why I think the contrast is important to note: it's not a principal of good writing, it's merely one style of telling a story.
The principle is more a guideline for new writers not to ramble and maintain focus especially if there are word limit restrictions typical to published short stories of the era, you cannot afford to waste words on things that don't matter to the story.
Established authors like Hemmingway or Asimov can get published with shaggy dog stories most regular authors cannot.
Even those authors can get a way once in a while, however most of the time they too have to follow the principle like everyone else too.
If you've not read it, don't read the plot summary, the [spoiler] is enormous.
Get the text, enjoy the story, love the wit.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shah_Guido_G.