Things Not What They Seem

I've been thinking lately about books or movies that harbor "deep, dark secrets," and by that I mean fundamental information about a character or situation that is not revealed until the very end. Once we learn the secret, we come to look at the entire story in a different way.

Common varieties of these secrets include the following:

-- I am your father. (Variations: I am your mother; I am your sister or brother; you were sleeping with your mother without knowing it; you were adopted.)

-- I have a terminal illness. (Variation: I am out of money.)

-- I am an angel on a mission from God. (Variations: I am God; I am Jesus; I am a witch; I am a wizard; I am a ghost; I am a secret agent.)

-- I am a robot. (Variations: You are a robot; I am an alien life form, or you are.)

-- It was all a dream. (Variations: We are characters in a play or a book; I imagined events that did not really happen or people who do not really exist.)

-- We are the subjects of a psychological experiment. (Variations: We are living inside of a machine; we are trapped in a prison; we are animals in a zoo.)

Is that all? There must be others, but this is all I can think of so far. It does appear there are a limited number of deep, dark secrets to choose from, and they come up in our stories again and again. If we begin with the knowledge that a story will end with a revelation, we should be able to figure it out by choosing the most likely option from those listed above. So this means we are only really surprised when we don't know there is going to be a surprise.

In part two of this installment, I shall test my theory by viewing multiple episodes of The Twilight Zone.

Comments

[Sven]

It seems a little brutal to equalize certain death with being broke. Maybe it is from a dramaturgical point of view, but maybe you could split this into two points just for us oversensitive readers?

Isn't the most common dark secret some horrible thing that happened in the past and influences the characters actions in the movie? One of these storylines where you don't understand why the hell the character is so stupid, until you learn that as a child he always had to finish his spinach. Once that information is revealed, you understand the characters actions in hindsight (hopefully).

[Avery Palmer]

I don't mean to say that both are equally bad. Simply that in both cases, someone who appears strong/heroic/powerful turns out in the end to be on his or her last legs.

Yes, we certainly find a lot of unlikeable characters who were forced to eat their spinach. (In Harry Potter, for instance.) Here I'm specifically talking about dark secrets that we learn at the very end of a story. Often, we learn about the motivations of unsympathetic characters well before the story is finished -- which is a somewhat arbitrary distinction, but then the revelation helps develop the plot rather than forcing us to rethink the entire story at the end. This is also usually the case with romantic secrets: someone is gay, or someone is having an affair.