What does Chekhov’s Gun have to do with phasmids, dehydraters and cannonballs?
Well, a couple of months ago I went through a movie binge – two dozen movies in two weeks – that helped answer that question.
Firstly, though, what is Chekhov’s Gun?
Basically, Chekhov’s Gun is a literary technique formulated by Russian playwright Anton Chekhov which states that story elements must be paid off.
“One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.” Chekhov, letter to Aleksandr Semenovich Lazarev (pseudonym of A. S. Gruzinsky), November 1, 1889
This can be taken in at least two ways.
- Do not introduce superfluous elements into your story. Trip the fat. Make sure everything serves the narrative and keeps the story moving forward.
- Foreshadow. Introduce elements early on that allude to future events. Plant things in the audience’s mind that will be paid off later.
Now, point one does not mean that an audience has to see how a story element serves the narrative at the time. For instance, early in Master and Commander we are introduced to a marvellous creature called a phasmid – a stick insect.
The phasmid helps reveal the interests of one of the characters, but it seems somewhat irrelevant to the plot. It is only at the very end that we see the centrality of the little insect to the captain’s audacious plan.
We see that the final confrontation had been foreshadowed from the very start. This pays off both the character’s interactions related to the phasmid and brings a sense of satisfaction with the plot elements.
Two other movies in my binge that handled this well were Megamind and Kung Fu Panda 2.
In Megamind we are first introduced to our hero as he plummets to the earth. It seems like a hopeless situation. He seems doomed.
Through the course of the movie, Megamind plots and invents and carries out his nefarious plans. One of his inventions, a dehydration ray, serves to provide humour and carry the plot forward. What was done brilliantly (in my opinion, at least – feel free to disagree) was to repurpose Megamind’s invention to be central in the final act.
Again, because we had seen it in action early in the movie, it did not feel like a Deus Ex Machina type solution to a plot problem. Rather than feeling contrived, it felt organic to the story, because it had already been a part of the story.
Kung Fu Panda 2 offered a similar elegant motif repurposed for the final act.
For much of the movie, Po the Panda is frustrated by his inability to find inner peace. Po tries to replicate Master Shifu’s fluid movements in channelling a single drop of water through a complex, dance-like motion.
It is Po’s ability to find inner peace and master the movements that leads to the solution at the final battle.
Again, Po’s repurposing of Master Shifu’s movements feels right in the story because it has been threaded through the narrative.
All of these final acts feel right because they have been foreshadowed throughout the narrative. Had the ideas and solutions not been foreshadowed, they would have felt contrived.
To earn their acceptance and thrill an audience with a thematically and emotionally satisfying climax, it is important to plant the seed of the solution in their minds the seeds early in the movie.
The challenge is to do it in a way that keeps them surprised, yet is obvious only in hindsight.
If you can master that, you will go a long way to creating a truly memorable story.