Crossdressing, dystopias, and the power of the fait accompli

Last week, my wife and I watched the classic comedy Some Like It Hot, after she confessed to me that she’d never seen it, or any other movie with Marilyn Monroe. We’d just reached the movie’s first big turning point, crowned by a classic smash cut: Tony Curtis, talking to the manager of an all-girl band on the phone, asks if they still needs a couple of musicians for Florida—and then, without preamble, we cut to our two protagonists in drag, rushing across the platform to catch the train. Turning to me, my wife pointed out that in a modern comedy, we’d inevitably be treated to a montage of the two men changing into women’s clothes, but here, the movie just gets on with it. Which is a good point. And I was even more struck by this when I remembered that the same approach occurs in that other great comedy of sexual panic, Tootsie, which cuts to Dustin Hoffman in drag only a few seconds after the idea first occurs to him. But why?

One obvious answer is that both movies know that we’re well aware of their underlying premise, so there’s no reason to put it off any longer than necessary. But I think something slightly more sophisticated is at play. The fact is, when a farce—or any kind of contrived storyline—depends on the audience accepting a ridiculous premise, it’s best to present it to them as something that has already happened. A scene of Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon changing into skirts would only underline how absurd their entire scheme is, derailing the movie’s momentum just as it was getting started. Instead, the film wisely presents it to us as a fait accompli: here they are, already in heels. As a result, we have no choice to suspend our disbelief and come along for the ride. The same thing applies to many other comedies: they leave a convenient gap in the structure wherever tricky questions might be raised.

This is also true of a genre that seemingly has nothing to do with sexual farce, which is science fiction, especially the dystopian kind. It’s hard to imagine how a future like the one depicted in In Time, to take just one recent example, could have arisen through any kind of reasonable historical process, so a shrewd writer skips the intermediate steps and simply shows us the consequences. Part of this is just good storytelling, but in particular, if your future scenario is especially farfetched, as in Equilibrium, you’re better off giving us as little explanation as possible. This is also why most superhero “origin stories” are so unsatisfying: whatever psychological reality the story possesses is destroyed by showing the main character deciding to put on that costume for the first time. (A well-timed gap can also be used to skate past sticky plot points. My favorite example is that convenient caption from The X-Files: Fight The Future: “Wilkes Land, Antarctica: 48 Hours Later.”)

Presenting the audience with a fait accompli, then, is one of the most effective ways of avoiding problems of fridge logic. Once they’re caught up in the story, viewers or readers are much less likely to question what they didn’t see than what they did: given a blank space in the narrative, they’ll intuitively fill in the gap with an explanation of their own, when they might have objected to whatever you tried to show them, no matter how reasonably presented. I’ve learned this lesson repeatedly in my own fiction, in which I’ve addressed plot points that refused to work simply by pushing them into the background. (There’s actually a great example of this in The Icon Thief, which I’d discuss in greater detail if more than ten people in the world currently had copies.) In the end, if the story works, we don’t need explanations. If you want us to believe the impossible, just cut to it directly.