Throwing different shapes ... Pulp Fiction's back-to-front structure has influenced a generation of film-makers
Once upon a time, most stories began with "once upon a time" and ended with happily ever after. Now you need a SatNav system to find your way through a large proportion of film and television narratives.
Whatever the reasons for this trend - our disillusionment with single-perspective stories and unambiguous moral judgments, maybe, or simply a craving for something novel - it can only be for the good, as anyone who moped through the infantilised 1980s will attest.
Back then, a series like the BBC's new Five Days, about the abduction of a young mother, wouldn't have lasted five minutes: it's not the subject matter that would have been frowned upon, but the structure, which collects together five separate 24-hour periods in the hunt for the missing woman. Last night's opening episode showed the woman pulling into a lay-by to buy flowers before vanishing, leaving her young children in the car. Future instalments will drop in on days three, 28, 33 and 79 in the search, leaving audiences to fill in the blanks and get up to speed themselves.
Such experiments in storytelling are hardly uncommon; the BBC has already been there in recent years with the underrated Murder, scripted by Abi Morgan and starring Julie Walters. And while I'm no fan of 24 or the Oscar-nominated, non-chronological Babel, it's exciting to find writers and directors taking risks with the structure of their stories.
The kind of jiggery-pokery peddled by Babel's writer Guillermo Arriaga has any number of antecedents. You could cite Kurosawa's 1950 Rashomon, which presents four conflicting accounts of the same crime, or Italo Calvino's mischievous 1979 novel If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, which starts again from scratch with the dawn of each alternate chapter, or Krzysztof Kieslowski's 1981 film Blind Chance, in which three parallel narratives are played out, each one beginning with the same man running for a train.
I would argue that experimental storytelling really broke into the mainstream in the early 1990s, thanks to two key films. Groundhog Day was instrumental in smuggling experimentation into popular entertainment, while Pulp Fiction reminded the world of Jean-Luc Godard's dictum that a story should have a beginning, a middle and an end "but not necessarily in that order".
Groundhog Day is a masterpiece, Pulp Fiction some considerable distance from greatness, but the influence of both can still be felt today. Whenever a fantastical premise is incorporated into a realistic setting - think anything from Liar, Liar to The Truman Show to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - you're witnessing the Groundhog Day effect.
And whenever the constituent parts of a story are radically rearranged, as in Go or Lawless Heart or Elephant, you can thank the success of Pulp Fiction for tutoring modern audiences in how to read stories that go from A to B via X. Without those films, there is always the possibility that Charlie Kaufman might have arrived in Hollywood with his Being John Malkovich script only to be hounded out of town by an unruly, pitchfork-wielding mob.
The unspoken truth is that no amount of formalist sophistication will compensate for, or disguise, shortcomings in other departments. You have to know the rules before you can bend them, break them or twist them into unrecognisable shapes. So Muriel Spark's 1957 debut novel The Comforters works not because of its bizarre premise - a woman hears her every thought being dictated and realizes that she is a character in someone else's novel - but because Spark was an electrifying writer who could bring an entire world to life in a few barbed lines. Whereas the recent comedy Stranger Than Fiction, which ripped off the plot of The Comforters, was underpinned by nothing but its smug, look-at-me eccentricity.
It comes down to one basic fact: regardless of tricks or twists, good work will out. Which is as near as dammit to a happy-ever-after, wouldn't you say?
