Woody Allen, genre fiction and how a story turns on coincidence.
Regardless of his Lolita obsession -
see Manhattan with a young Mariel Hemingway -
and his early tendency to clone the acting of his leading ladies - i.e., first wife Louise Lasser, Diane Keaton, and Mia Farrow - Woody Allen deals in Jewish neurosis and existential dilemmas - Love and Death, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Hannah and her Sisters, and one of my favorite movies, Match Point, starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers and new leading lady, Scarlet Johansson.
I will never forget the bank robbery scene from Take the Money and Run, and the discussion about the robbery note…paraphrasing here…It’s says gun. No, it clearly says gub, that’s a ‘b’. No, that’s an ‘n’. I still laugh about the orgasmatron in Sleeper.
Anyway, on to the theme of this post - one coincidence. Allen tackled the ultimate moral dilemma in Crimes and Misdemeanors - can an otherwise righteous man get away with murder? What does it do to him? How does it change him? Or doesn’t it change him at all? He addressed the same subject in Match Point, except this time Rhys Meyers plays a bit of a sociopath who gets involved, and in over his head, with a not-too-bright, but beautiful woman who is also a user. When Johansson’s character turns shrewish and she threatens the perfect life Rhys Meyers has so carefully crafted, he plans the perfect murder. The question is, will he get away with it? He does, but only because of one thing, and it’s the same sort of one thing those of us who write genre fiction use all the time…the coincidence - the hand of fate, the intercession of the gods. Why am I thinking of this? Because the exact same coincidence occurred in the second game of the World Series - which as you all know, I AM WATCHING!
Game two turned upon Texas Ranger Ian Kinsler’s almost home run. Did you see it? He smashed a ball to the wall and it looked as if it would go over. He’d have a home run and turn the tide for the Rangers. Instead the ball bounced up in the air and fell back into the field, and Kinsler ended up with a double and the Giants won game two. It was one of those paradoxical either/or moments - a game changer either way.
So it is in Match Point. The outcome hinges upon one thing - a ring that Rhys Meyers tosses into the Thames, except the ring hits the top of a fence railing and bounces up in the air. It doesn’t fall into the Thames, it falls onto the sidewalk, where it is picked up by…and the rest is history. It’s a game changer - Match Point. Rhys Meyers gets away with murder because of that singular accident of fate.
I love game changers. It’s the coincidence that propels the story. A dropped scarf, a note passed into the wrong hands, a horse slipping on an icy road and tossing its rider just as Jane Eyre happens to be returning from town late in the evening.
Even Jonathan Franzen, NYT-appointed god of literary fiction, uses the game changer in his book, The Corrections. A man is about to live out his dream - leave his cold, withholding bitch of a wife, his miserable job, his troubled children, and move to an island off the coast of Africa. What happens? The ring falls onto the sidewalk. The ball bounces back into the field. He arrives home to tell his wife he’s leaving her, but before he can open his mouth, she announces that she has cancer…match point.
