Chekhov’s Gun: flattering the viewer versus subverting expectations
Russian playwright Anton Chekhov was quoted as saying “If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don’t put it there.” Though it was originally meant to be as a warning against superfluous detail, its use has become twisted in contemporary media, where an extraordinarily low bar is set for a third act reference to a first act plot device. There is a fine line that must be walked; very often these twists are unwelcome and serve no purpose but for the screenwriter to work something in, but at others they are worth analyzing.
That Chekhov’s gun needs to be fired is an illiterate understanding of a quote from someone who works with metaphor and themes. The gun hanging on the wall could mean any number of things in any number of contexts. Perhaps it indicates in that Democrat to whom it belongs believes in gun rights. Perhaps because it’s on the wall of a gangster indicates that they don’t personally deal with death and guns anymore. In either of these contexts, the gun doesn’t need to be fired to serve a narrative purpose. Of course, this is too subtle for the “how do you know that’s what the author meant” crowd when they took high school English. So we get Q giving Bond a veritable armoury of gadgets, every one of which coming in handy when he’s in a near-death situation. Quite literally, the eye-glasses-dart-gun must be fired.
Of course, some credit is due. Screenwriters have realized that it doesn’t necessarily have to be a gun. It could be a boot-knife, a machine that prints hyper-realistic rubber replicas of people’s faces, a spare super strong generator that powers a weaponized suit of armour, or even a character who mysteriously goes missing. It’s a nifty piece of writing when done right, a reminder to the audience that they should have known all along, and the miraculous recovery wasn’t a deus ex machina, but set up from the beginning. Obviously, this deviates widely from Chekhov’s original intention, taking a life of its own. I’ve decided to call it the Chekhov’s gun callback.
A good usage is usually when the audience doesn’t see it coming, it serves a purpose in the plot as well as advancing the characters, and it doesn’t feel forced. An example is Ethan Hawke’s character in Training Day saving a little girl earlier in the movie, which the audience presumes is just to show his values. Later on in the movie however, it turns out that the girl is a relative of a gang leader who was about to kill him. This isn’t excessive, and contributes to the plot without becoming the plot. But increasingly often it errs on the side of excessive, and the payoff isn’t worth the setup: usually when the audience sees the payout coming, or it’s a bit too far-fetched plot-wise. In addition to the plot-twist, a key element of any vaguely suspenseful piece of audiovisual media these days, the Chekhov’s gun callback is probably the second-most anticipated, and they frequently go hand in hand.
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I finally got around to watching Luca Guadlino’s The Challengers a few weeks ago, and I can’t get its Chekhov’s gun callback out of my head. For those of you who haven’t seen the movie, early on in the movie, the two male protagonists decide on a simple code to communicate something in a tennis match. At climax of the movie, a key piece of plot is revealed to one of the protagonists using that code. It was one of the most obvious Chekhov’s gun callback I’ve seen in any sort of media, and I’ve seen plenty of bad movies. Though the movie surpassed my admittedly low expectations, this threw me off and disappointed me. Frankly, the movie didn’t require a callback like that to shock everyone, though I could imagine the collective gasp from the theatre. Sheeple.
Upon further reflection however, I realized that this was entirely the writer’s intent. It was, if you will, a soft lob for the viewers to smash. The audience is supposed to get it, with adequate periods of time being spent on explaining the mechanics, and then the rest of the movie creating the perfect circumstances for the code to be used again. It’s a serious match between the two men, the first since they’ve become estranged as boys, the start of which was the usage of the code. It’s a coda, a full circle, and narratively perfect. But here, it’s meant to make the audience feel smart. Because it’s a smart movie. And when the audience sees what a smart movie is driving at before it happens, they like the smart movie.
As the Chekhov’s callback has become a staple in most commercial movies, then further subversion is possible. For example, in mystery movies, red herrings are so much more impactful now since the audience holds onto every little clue that could be of potential use. Genre-aware movies such as Knives Out take full advantage of that. Any thriller or mystery now doesn’t have to work too hard to establish red herrings, but requires more effort to hide the real clues where they won’t be as closely scrutinized.
As I’m writing this on a flight without internet, I skimmed Fall Guy and Vengeance as case studies. Fall Guy has an enormous number of callbacks, up to the point of basically being gags: setup and punchline in succession. Stuntman, gets hit by car. Dog’s party trick is that it bites people in the balls, and then it bites someone in the balls. Stuntman’s greatest stunt is jumping a boat through an explosion, it happens in real life, and he survives. Standard action fare. Vengeance is a black comedy mystery film which is somewhat self-aware like Knives Out: constant references to past events, almost as satire. I had a bit of a gut-laugh when the protagonist from New York tries to use Chekhov’s gun as an explanation on why having guns is a bad thing, and the Texan teenager he’s speaking with says that there are no literal guns in any of the Chekhov plays she’s read.
Both are important in good story-telling: no surprise should be without breadcrumbs, however big or small, in the plot or in society. Yet not everything needs to be obvious, to be spoon-fed to the audience. As the separation between setup and payoff shrinks, it becomes a gag; not a bad thing, but not necessary at every turn. And though one thing should progress from another, if everything is a joke, then so becomes the whole movie.
