Repetition and variation grabs us in 'The Gone'
Kōtare Productions, Keeper Pictures and Kingfisher Films for TVNZ and RTE, 2023
Two young, rebellious Irish people disappear in New Zealand, an echo of a similar incident years earlier. The girl is the daughter of a prominent Irish judge. The lad is fun-loving, a little too fun-loving, and that leads them into trouble, so far ill-defined.
An Irish detective, maybe forty years old, a seasoned but far from elderly man, has just resigned from his position, refusing to give reasons for such an early retirement. Hearing about the case, he goes to New Zealand to help the police in the remote town of Mount Affinity. The investigation there is led by a young detective – a Māori native of Mount Affinity who has made her career in the “big city.” She knows the history and the people but doesn’t provide a glimpse of what led her to leave home and even break off contact with her relatives there. Mount Affinity has also become home to a business promising a breakthrough, environmentally important technology. It has built a large and futuristic headquarters in this remote spot and now wants to expand it onto land the local Māori population consider sacred. The protests, led by the detective’s relations and backed by young white residents, threaten economic development. Investors are nervous.
This thumbnail of the context provides clues about the raw materials the writers can work with to construct an elaborate plot for six hours of programming. There are layers upon layers of potential conflicts of interest, reasons – some gradually revealed, other hidden even at the end – why none of the characters is willing to speak the truth, the whole truth and nothing but. All these devices might have led to a clash of the mechanics of storytelling or to the descent into the cliché that makes a story complicated – but not complex.
Complication occurs when there’s a lot of stuff all tangled up. Complexity happens when all that tangled stuff also interoperates, creating feedback loops with unintended, even unknowable outcomes. All the untangling the human mind can manage still leaves doubt. Complexity points to paradoxes and ambiguity, multiple answers to the same mathematical equation, all valid. It suggests our theory isn’t complete, our brains lack sufficient computational power, and even that any computation possible might still not find any answer (Cf. Manson, 2001; Simon, 1962). Quantum mechanics is complex. So are Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, string theory, and fractals. Even trying to understand leads you to think the unthinkable, abandon conventional reason, drawing instead on imagination, failing and, maybe – just – jumping to magic for an explanation.
By these definitions, most crime dramas are complicated, but not complex. Our brains assemble facts – clues strewn through the narrative – and then apply some sort of logic or theory to reach a conclusion that we call knowledge: whodunnit? The more complicated, the more brainpower we exert, but we get there in the end. All the clues line up. Some throw ringers into the mix, clues that offer up a mystical alternative to reason, only to remind us that we were silly. That’s why so many of us find this form of fiction so satisfying. We get there, in the end.
A novelist and screenwriter I know says that our satisfaction in reading and viewing comes from repetition and variation. Repetition is comforting; it gives quiet assurances. Variation stimulates; it discomfits initially, but then satisfies by leading us to expand our perception. It’s not an original theory of his. Scholars use it to understand phenomena in a wide range of fields: art, neuroscience, advertising, education.
But in fiction what we do is search for the logic and the emotional glue that help us make sense of what we’re seeing. It’s what the philosopher Stephen Toulmin (2003) called the “warrant” that connects the “grounds” (e.g., facts, evidence) to the “claim of truth” (e.g., arrest and conviction). As we discover the logic and glue – the warrant, the “why” – we feel content that we’ve understood, made sense of it. Tensions resolved.
In complex stories, however, there may not be any such logic available, and thus no resolution of the tension. Poor fictions resort to divine interventions: the deus ex machina. They wipe away the complexity; it’s beyond human understanding. The god (or ghost) in the machine will restore order.
There is, however, an alternative. My novelist and screenwriter acquaintance says that what makes fiction work in dealing with complexity is when there’s a variation to the repetition of searching for logic – when variation in logic turns into magic. Here he’s wrong – or perhaps offers only a partial answer, and one that’s likely to mislead. Complexity challenges our imagination. It’s a word that embeds something magical. A new image promises understanding through metaphor, not a complete explanation but something that helps us cope with the incompleteness of understanding.
Imagination creates a new image that represents the feelings we cannot quite define. It demands that we continue the quest for understanding, stretching our minds, while also accepting, with humility, that we may not be able to understand.
Is “The Gone” a complex story? The Māori incantations, the wisdom of their deeply flawed elders, the symbols found with the dead bodies all point to a mystical, unknowable force at work. But the show never relies on that. The Māori elders don’t behave like mystics. They are grounded in the everyday. They are old people, not ancients. They are flawed and trying to cope with that once they become willing to let down their guard. In this story, invoking the magical offers a holding explanation, giving us time to reflect, to identify a better solution, when we know more or see more clearly.
The end of Season 1 offers a resolution of most of the tension – but with a reminder that this sufficiently satisfying conclusion has not yet yielded understanding. A Season 2 is under production. It could yet turn this story into one merely of complication. But for now, it feels complex. it Let’s hope the writers don’t resort to settling the issues with a deus ex machina.
Manson, S. M. (2001). Simplifying complexity: a review of complexity theory. Geoforum, 32(3), 405-414. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/S0016-7185(00)00035-X
Simon, H. A. (1962). The Architecture of Complexity. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 106(6), 467-482.
Toulmin, S. (2003). The Uses of Argument (Updated ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.