Identity
A Pattern Language
As of this writing, I am currently in the process — the slow and laborious process — of writing my first novel. I mention this not because I think that there are a lot of literary agents reading these reviews, but because one of the characters in this novel has a problem that you may have experienced yourself. He is constantly being confronted by people who assume that he has seen some movie that he has not, in fact, seen. You could say to him, for example, “Show me the money” or “You had me at hello”, and he would, not having seen Jerry Maguire, literally not understand what you were talking about, or why.
(Movie people tend have the same problem in reverse. I’ve seen probably 200 movies in the last four years, but never once seen an episode of, say, Survivor or The Sopranos. I couldn’t tell you the difference between Dr. Melfi and an immunity challenge to save my life, other than one is Lorraine Bracco and the other is probably not.)
The point I am trying to make here, probably not successfully, is that the movies are a language all their own. The movies are not a foreign language for most of us — the way that, say, Portuguese is — they’re too universal for that. (There is a movie jargon, an insider’s lingo that’s essentially the same as Legalese or techno-speak, but that’s not what I’m talking about, either.) The movies are a pattern language, standing apart from what we commonly think of as language. The movies have their own syntax and grammar and shades of meaning.
A small example, but an important one. One movie that always gets treated badly in a real-world analysis is Independence Day, the 1996 thriller about a hyper-unrealistic alien invasion. In one scene, the main romantic interest, her son, and their dog are trapped in a tunnel, trying to evacuate Los Angeles. Miraculously, the woman and her son escape a giant wave of fire, but then go back for the dog, who is then even more miraculously saved. Nitpickers point out here, and rightly so, that the fire would suck all the oxygen out of the tunnel, killing all three. True enough, but this is a movie, which operates on movie syntax; killing these characters at this point in the story would break all sorts of unwritten rules. The movie, as illogical as it is, operates in a reality that is largely created by the expectations of the audience and their experiences with other, similar movies. Killing these characters at this point in the story would break faith with the audience. You can’t violate the rules of that reality, even while you break the rules of boring old regular reality. The pattern language takes precedence.
This brings us to where we should have started, at Identity, and its use of the pattern language in telling its story. Identity starts on a dark and stormy night, and not by accident. Dark, of course, because darkness inspires more fear than daylight, and stormy, because rain looks really good in the movies, and you need prophetic claps of thunder, and, well, all sorts of reasons. We have an initial incident, a car accident that leaves a young mother bloodied, a family in emotional shock, and brings in a snooty actress and an honorable limo driver. This brings in violence, blood, and emotional conflict, and these all mean different things in the language. That they are all introduced in the first few minutes tells us something else. This is going to be a thriller, a suspense flick, maybe even a horror movie.
Our setting is important, too. It’s a remote motel, on a desert highway, in the middle of nowhere, chosen for its isolation, and for its resonance in terms of other movies — The Postman Always Rings Twice, say, and definitely Psycho. For a more modern sensibility, there is the little twist that radios and cell phones don’t work, and that the hospital is too far away, and that all the roads are blocked by swollen rivers. This tells us something else; we’re in for a long night.
More and more people arrive at the motel, and it’s interesting to see who they are and where they come from, and how they all seem to fit into little slots. We get sweet Amanda Peet as the Hooker With A Heart of Gold, which works, mostly because she has the same edge she had in Changing Lanes. We get Ray Liotta as a cop, but we’re less likely to trust him because we’ve seen him, maybe, in Unlawful Entry and know he’s got a dark side. We see Jake Busey as a murderer, wearing a prison jumpsuit, and that means something too, and he’s played a bad guy, and so has his old man, for that matter.
And then people start getting separated from the group, and then people start getting killed, one by one, in traditional horror-movie style, each in part of what seems to be a greater pattern, which we assume that the movie will, in due course, reveal.
What makes Identity so much fun for most of this process is that, somehow, the movie seems to be perfectly aware that it is utilizing these patterns, and brings the audience in for the joke. When we hear a loud banging sound, and it’s revealed that the sound has nothing to do with the killer — the “it’s only a cat” moment from ten thousand horror movies — it’s as though the movie is winking at us, and we’re winking back. Identity is just transparent enough that we see the patterns, but it’s also just intriguing enough that we want to follow along, see where the movie leads us.
The problem at this point for the reviewer (and the aspiring novelist, for that matter, especially those who would like very much to hear from a literary agent, and you know who you are) is that the process of movie reviewing has its own patterns. One of those is that you don’t reveal surprises, you don’t let the audience know exactly where the movie is taking them. What’s important — and what actually happens in Identity, thank goodness — is that the movie stay consistent with the patterns it has established. The plot twist, when it comes, has to keep congruent with all that is gone before. It can continue the overall fabric; it cannot rend it. Identity succeeds spectacularly in keeping faith with its audience while at the same time confounding its expectations. More than this, of course, I cannot say.
Or at any rate, not much more than this, because the movie reviewer patterns dictate that I talk about the acting (first-rate all around, including a road-weary John Cusack) and the set design (a triumph in the sleazy arts) and the cinematography (echoing the rainier scenes in Se7en and Road to Perdition). Although none of what you see here can be called original, everything you see fits into the larger scheme of things, designed to surprise and to startle and to, eventually, delight you. Identity is thoughtful and smart and aware, and it is everything you should look for in a scary movie, even if — or especially if — you’ve seen a thousand of them before. But more than that, it’s a careful exploration of the language of movies as well, and how that language can be skillfully and carefully used to communicate even the most unlikely of things.