IT CANNOT BE TOLD

The principle of mystery

”The cause is hidden. The result obvious to all.” – Ovid

The famous Danish author Karen Blixen (pen name Isak Dinesen) said the human being is like a plant that needs roots deeply buried in the dark soil, away from the light, hidden safely. And that if you tried bare the roots, dig them up, examine them under the glaring light of the sun, the human being would wither away. She said so, amongst other things, because she was in opposition to the psychoanalysis and the academic literary analysis, which seeks to uncover all hidden motives.

That opposition is understandable, but perhaps it is more difficult than that to go about and uncover the secrets of the human existence. It might be possible to explore the realms beneath without digging up the whole tree, roots and all. At least it seems that in Karen Blixen’s own works, she was constantly referring indirectly to those forces beneath that motivate and orchestrate so much of our lives. She tried to tell stories about those forces without ever exposing them to direct light.

The root of drama, our ancestor, is the mystery play, the ritual - the enactment of the hidden. It is exactly being enacted because it cannot be told, explained or communicated in any other way than through experience. You just had to be there. The deepest kind of secrets, knowledge and insights are the founding base of drama. It is the force that keeps making us re-visit the greatest works of art, because their mystery runs deep and is really beyond the consciousness of our rational mind. We have to experience them by immersing ourselves in the drama.

This might come off as either very ambitious or pretentious, but for me it is simply a design principle. Even if you are ‘just’ trying to write a good, solid mainstream script, you should apply the principle of the mystery to some degree. Take a good mainstream movie like “The 6th Sense” which translates this principle beautifully into a story that brings us face to face with the great mystery of our mortality. It even does so almost literally on the plot-level by withholding the fact that our protagonist is already dead, and we realize this ‘secret’ simultaneous with him.

The presence of the secret should permeate the script from beginning to end, sending out constant signals just below the threshold of our ordinary level of consciousness. The tragedy deals with the basic mysteries of death, mortality and fear. The comedy deals with the mysteries of life, the birth, the marriage of opposites and joy. There are many ways to approach the great mysteries and sometimes we might find them in the most unexpected places, both as creators and as audiences.

When you work, creating a script, you have to know what your secret is. When I say 'know' it can mean a lot of things. You might know it quite clearly, like “This is a comedy about a guy with an extreme fear of dying, it controls his whole life, and the script lingers constantly on the side of tragedy, but towards the end, when it seems our guy for sure is going to die, the miracle of love let him live on”. Or you might just have a feeling guiding you to send out those signals as you write, and leading you to the eventual revelation of your mystery.