Cliffhangers
Yesterday we began a discussion of the techniques used by writers of serial fictions to inspire and harness the desires of their audiences. Notable among these is of course the cliffhanger, such as we find at the end of the penultimate chapter of Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop, where Nell is left ill and at death’s door. Perhaps somewhat crude, but by the same token one of the most effective ways of ensuring that people will tune in for the next installment: Get them invested in the protagonist’s well-being, and then leave that character in jeopardy, with the outcome uncertain until the next chapter or episode arrives.
The word ‘cliffhanger’ (although by no means the overall concept) seems to have been originally applied to Thomas Hardy’s early novel A Pair of Blue Eyes, which was released serially in 1872-3. The novel, not at all a critical or a commercial success, has a protagonist who is left literally hanging from the edge of a cliff at the end of a volume.
Later, the term came into much more widespread use to describe the 1914 silent film serial The Perils of Pauline, in which the main character, the classic “damsel in distress” figure, ended every segment in a situation that seemed sure to end her life (including one in which she is, again, hanging from the edge of a cliff) only to be saved at the beginning of the next installment.
It is worth noting, however, that readers of A Pair of Blue Eyes or viewers of The Perils of Pauline were never really in doubt that their heroes were going to be rescued—their rescue was in effect guaranteed by the genre conventions of those works. People ran to the next installment primarily to find out how the rescue was to be carried out, not whether it would be. This is not, of course, how we use the word cliffhanger today; the word has come to mean a situation like that of Dickens’ Nell, in which the audience is unsure as to the outcome. In fact, it appears likely that this is what facilitated the widespread acceptance and use of the term to describe this kind of ending: A metaphorical description of the situation of the protagonist within the story, it also provides an apt description of the emotional state of the audience while waiting for the next installment. The hero in whom we are emotionally invested is left in peril for the week or month until the story can continue, and so we feel as if we are ourselves suspended in midair as we wait. It is this evocative connection to the subjective experience of being an audience of such a fiction that has allowed the term to become applied quite generally: not simply to the protagonist or his situation, but to the technique itself and this moment in the story (we do not say that “the hero is left in a cliffhanger” but that “the chapter’s ending is a cliffhanger”). Also, it is not used merely to describe situations in which a main character’s life/health/safety is in danger, but more liberally to any ending in which the outcome of a situation is in doubt: whether a lover will accept a marriage proposal, for example, or whether a hand of cards will win in a crucial poker game.
The key, of course, is that the narrative stops at the moment when a situation could go either one way or another. Some use the term erroneously to refer to any situation of change or uncertainty at the end of a segment. These are not true cliffhangers, however, but other techniques for building suspense between acts, and it is these (often more subtle) techniques, used very often in television shows today, that I really want to talk about. But that will have to wait until my next post.
(I also wanted to point out that the 1993 Sly Stallone film Cliffhanger, while it contains more than one scene in which a character is hanging off the edge of a cliff, does not contain any actual cliffhangers. It does, however, have what is in my opinion one of the best post-climactic-fight lines in the history of action films. After Stallone jumps off of a disabled helicopter, leaving the bad guy to plummet with it to his death, he gets to the top of the mountain where the FBI is waiting, and says: “If you’re looking for Qualen, try about 4,000 feet south of here. He’ll be the one wearing the helicopter.”)
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