Lucky Number Slevin v. Wild Things

2006.10.12 — Entertainment | Movies | Movie Analysis | by Andrew Cole

I watched Lucky Number Slevin this weekend on DVD and felt disappointed that I hadn't seen it while it was in theaters. I liked it so much that, before it was even over, I was surfing to its IMDB entry to vote it an 8 out of 10, and hey, I don't give away 8s, baby. But the next morning as my eyes lolled open, something struck me: Slevin was basically structured a lot like the movie I despise most in all filmdom: Wild Things.

If you haven't seen Slevin (2006), you won't want to read the comparison below. It's a good movie, certainly worth your time. If you haven't seen Wild Things (1998), it doesn't matter. The shocking twist ending is the crappy part.

The two films are most similar in the way they cheat the viewer with a skewed narrative point of view. You may remember from your high school literature class the various possible narrative POVs:

First person and second person

First and second person POV are almost never used in film because of the way the medium is structured. First person ("I went downtown to buy a pack of Lucky Strikes") is used fairly frequently in novels, but there are only a handful of examples on film. One is The Lady in the Lake (1947).

Second person ("You went to Memphis, and you met Memphis Johnny in a dive bar called The Jake.") is used only in Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-type books and some online interactive fiction; virtually impossible on film.

Third person, objective

"He tried to kick the door in. Muffled cries came from the other side."

This POV merely shows us what's happening around the hero but never lets us in on the private thoughts of any of the characters. Third person, objective is used occasionally in novels and occasionally in film, especially where the hero is all-important or alienated and the villain is distant or unknown.

A good example is The Maltese Falcon (1941): we see only what Bogie sees, know only what he knows, and we don't even know what he's thinking. And the James Bond films stick pretty closely to the objective POV. We only see and hear what 007 experiences—that's why Bond has to meet the villain a couple of times before the climax: to give the audience a chance to see him.

Third person, limited

"He tried to kick the door in. He thought he could hear Zelda calling for help on the other side."

This POV shows us only what the hero knows, but often lets us in on his—but only his—thoughts or other special insights. Third person, limited is used extensively in novels and frequently on film. It may be represented by voiceover narration, usually the hero himself, but sometimes a knowledgeable third party like an independent narrator or a dispassionate observer. The character of Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby (1974) plays this role, as does the character of Red in The Shawshank Redemption (1994).

Third person, omniscient

"He tried to kick the door in, thinking Zelda was on the other side. In the room, Croft and Knuckles tried to keep Zelda from calling to him."

This POV shows us the good guys, the bad guys, and sometimes what any and all of them are thinking. Third person, omniscient is used occasionally in novels and extensively in film to show the reader or viewer nearly everything everywhere. It may hold a little of the villain's schemes back to surprise us, but never keeps anything about the hero from us except when he needs to whisper a plan to a friend so we get surprised with how they pull it off.

Some people think there is such a thing as "third person, limited omniscient." They define it either as an omniscient form of third person, limited or as a limited form of third person, omniscient. Both of these are stupid. In nearly all stories, the POV shifts slightly from time to time or may even jump from one character to another. This is more a case of poor writing (or especially clever writing) than a special kind of narrative POV.

Comparison

Both Slevin and Wild Things use the third person, omniscient POV that most Hollywood movies use. We experience what the hero sees and hears; we experience what the villain sees and hears; we even experience what some minor characters see and hear. This POV is simply the most convenient for movie storytelling, where it's hard to know what characters are thinking unless they say it out loud, and it's generally more exciting to know more than the hero knows, so that we see he's getting himself into deep trouble but he doesn't. It also helps get the movie made: you can get a bigger star to be the villain if he has a nice, juicy role with plenty of scenes of his own.

But both films completely cheat this point of view by selectively showing the viewer scenes that tell a certain story when in fact something completely different is going on. As a result, the heroes know more than the viewer does, and a twist ending is manufactured by revealing the extra information that the hero had (never mind the fact that Wild Things is basically a "thriller" about... a date rape lawsuit).

But from a storytelling standpoint, there is no legitimate reason for withholding the information—Slevin's relationship with Mr. Goodkat; Mr. Lombardo's relationship with Detective Duquette. It's virtually the same as simply showing scenes that didn't happen and later admitting, "Oh, remember when the kid pulled a gun and fired a couple of shots? He didn't have a gun. It was a cell phone."

Caper flicks often withhold certain information that the hero has so the audience gets to be surprised by the way the caper comes off. That's expected. What isn't expected, and isn't fair—and isn't fun—is if the hero is in league with the "villain" and shares the loot. The audience would say, "So all the posturing and demanding that the hero be caught and killed was just for pretend? But they had that one scene where they were alone, and the villain still wanted to kill the hero! That doesn't make sense!"

In Wild Things, we see almost every possible combination of characters together, but we're never shown what's really going on. The POV is completely artificial: no character actually sees all those scenes. Imagine seeing a movie where one characters insults another and the scene cuts; you start to hate the first character; then at the end, you see "rest" of the scene, where the character immediately admits he was just kidding. It's artificial conflict—dishonest story-telling.

Slevin carefully avoids this dishonesty by never putting Slevin and Goodkat together alone on-camera until the scheme is revealed. In Wild Things, the whole movie is about the characters being alone together and still not revealing the scheme.

The unreliable narrator

An unreliable narrator is not unknown in storytelling. In Memento (2000), the hero has a brain disorder, and his recollection of events in his past turns out to be unreliable. In The Usual Suspects (1995), the story is told in flashback by a minor character who turns out to have ulterior motives. In fact, all stories told in flashback are not to be trusted. And knowing that, we're not cheated (generally).

But Slevin and Wild Things have no narrator to be unreliable. It is the screenwriter himself who is lying to us about the events, lying by omission to be exact—simply not telling us all the pertinent facts that the heroes (anti-heroes, actually, in both cases) have access to. And since he's the all-powerful creator of the story, he might as well just change the villain to a chicken in the third act. A narrator can be unreliable, but the storyteller can't just change his story after he's set it up.

In Slevin, somehow, it works for me. In that case, it was mainly because the writer's ruse simply didn't work. I recognized pretty much from the very beginning the gist of what was going on. Even if I wasn't sure who was on the other end of the phone at first, I pretty well understood who was on our end and the why the person at the other end mattered. During Wild Things, however, I had no clue about the true relationships of the characters, which was cheated even more by actually putting characters alone together who held a secret between them that they kept from us the audience.

In short, Wild Things cheats at every turn, showing us scenes between characters who share a secret but only those that don't reveal that secret.

But Slevin plays fair with its audience by not confabulating scenes in which characters who share a secret pretend not to share a secret even when they are alone. And it gives the audience some clues about the relationship and the secret that make the final revelation not a complete shock. And correctly anticipating a logical twist is far more satisfying than being blind-sided by one that lacks logic.

Nevertheless, I went back and changed my vote for Lucky Number Slevin from an 8 to a 7. Hey, you lie down with Wild Things, you wake up with fleas.

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