What In The World Is This Thing We Call Plot?: "Night Moves"

A private detective in Los Angeles is asked to find a girl who’s gone missing.

At the same time, he discovers his wife is cheating on him. He confronts his wife, but nothing is resolved. He follows the girl's trail to the Florida Keys. He finds her staying with her step-father and his on-again off-again girlfriend. On a day trip out in a boat, this odd group comes across the underwater wreckage of a small airplane. The girl agrees to go back to L.A. with the detective, who sleeps with step-father's paramour on the night before they leave.

The girl is returned home. The detective accepts his payment. The case is closed. He even reconciles with his wife. We, the audience, wonder how things can have wrapped up so soon – is there something wrong?

Indeed there is. The girl is killed under suspicious circumstances. The detective realizes he didn't understand what was really happening at all. He retraces his steps, and finds that everyone he encountered when he was first tracking down the girl was involved in a crime. The girl was killed because she found out. The downed plane was a part of it. The woman in Florida slept with him to distract him from discovering what was happening.

The detective forces that woman to take him back out to the plane wreck but they find a man there – a man the detective thought was his friend – who kills the woman and tries to kill the detective. The detective survives, but is wounded, perhaps dying, stuck in a boat motoring in circles on the open ocean as the film ends.

This is the plot in brief of Night Moves, made by Arthur Penn and released in 1975. But "plot" here, as with many of the best American hardboiled mysteries, is a tricky concept. Far from being simply a chain of events in a story, the plots in these films (and novels) function as something far larger and more enveloping, something closer to an atmosphere through which we and the characters move, or a device in which we and the characters find ourselves trapped.

Which is to say that plots in movies like this one raise complicated questions about plot itself. What it is, how it functions, and why it’s important to film, from both the critic and the filmmaker's perspective.

What follows are some preliminary attempts to dig into all of this.

Start with a basic (and certainly non-comprehensive) idea. We could think of an "open" or "discovery" plot as one that’s structured so that our protagonist, along with the audience, is confronted with a mystery which they have to solve, following clues and navigating obstacles in all the usual ways. The are "open" because at the beginning the parameters, players, situations and resolution are not clear; what pulls us through them is a curiosity about what will be discovered: an open field of possibilities lie before us. Many classical mysteries – think Agatha Christie or Sherlock Holmes – work in this way.

A "closed" or "fenced" plot, on the other hand, involves a character caught in a terrible situation they must try to escape. The difficulty is that every move they make throws up a new wall in front of them, constricting their possibilities, until their options have narrowed been down to a single moment like a keyhole through which they either escape or don't escape.

This kind of plotting was a favorite of midcentury novelists, and frequently occurs when the protagonist of the story also happens to be the bad guy, or when the story is about someone trying to get away with a crime. James Cain's work, like Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice, provides good examples, as do things as varied as Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me, Patricia Highsmith's Ripley books, and movies like Fargo and Heat. (A similar kind of plotting is often used in those kind of horror films, like The Wicker Man or Hereditary, where a character slowly realizes that a supernatural doom has reached out to put its finger on them.)

There are, of course, as many kinds of plots as there are plants in a garden, but thinking in terms of open and closed provides a good place to start working through the complexities at play here. Categories of this sort are always imprecise, but can be helpful if viewed as tools rather than strictures.

So, in Night Moves, the first half of the movie functions like a typically open-plotted mystery. Our detective is Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman), a retired pro football player. The initial mystery is simple: a retired actress named Arlene Iverson (Janet Ward) hires Moseby to find her 16 year-old daughter Delly (Melanie Griffith). It’s clear almost immediately that Delly has run away because she’s been mistreated by her mother Arlene, in the kind of emotional abuse through well-funded neglect that is so common among the rich.

From her boyfriend, a mechanic named Quentin (James Woods) who works in Hollywood, Moseby finds out that Delly has been in New Mexico, hanging out with a stuntman and pilot named Marv who’s working on a movie. Moseby goes to New Mexico, meets Marv and finds out that his stunt coordinator is a guy named Joey (Edward Binns) whom Moseby knows from L.A. He discovers that Marv slept with Arlene when he was working on one of her films, and realizes that Delly may be sleeping with men her mom slept with as her method of causing the older woman pain. This leads him to Florida, and Arlene's ex-husband Tom (John Crawford), who’s Delly's step-father.

In Florida, Moseby finds Delly living with Tom. He also meets Paula (Jennifer Warren) the free-spirited if emotionally damaged woman Moseby sleeps with as a way of getting back at his own wife, whom he caught cheating on him at the movie's opening. They happen across the downed plane, which has a dead pilot in it, and then Moseby brings Delly home.

So far, so good. The open mysteries – where Delly has gone, and why her life is so damaged – have all been solved. Moseby even moves toward reconciliation with his wife.

But, as I mentioned above, all of this leaves a worm of unease in the mind of the viewer. Everything has been solved too easily. This takes us into the second part of the film (the third act, really), which is also structured like an open-plotted mystery.

Delly dies in an accident on a movie set. She was riding in a stunt car driven by Joey (the stunt coordinator) which crashed, killing her and breaking Joey's arm. Moseby sees some outtakes from the movie they were filming and realizes that Quentin (the mechanic boyfriend) was doing work on the car before the scene. Moseby also knows that Arlene stands to inherit money from her daughter's trust. Finally, he learns that the stuntman Marv has disappeared. It's clear that someone killed Delly on purpose, and that something more nefarious is going on, but Moseby doesn't know what it is.

He goes back to Florida, where he puts the final pieces together. Marv and Joey and Tom (the step-father) were involved in smuggling artifacts into the country from Mexico. Marv was flying a small plane with one of these artifacts on it and crashed on his way into the Keys. Tom and Paula have been trying to recover the artifact from the downed plane, which is why Paula slept with Moseby that night: to distract him while Tom went out to the plane, Delly found out about all of this, and so when she got back to L.A., Joey (with Quentin's help) killed her to prevent her from talking.

Moseby forces Paula to take him out in a boat, and he waits while she dives down to retrieve the artifact. But Joey shows up in another small plane, intent on taking the artifact. He shoots Moseby in the leg and then crashes the plane, killing Paula and himself, leaving the wounded Moseby alone, stranded in the boat.

In a certain sense, then, the second mystery – who killed Delly, and why? – of the film has been solved, and the entire plot is complete. But this is exactly where things get complicated.

The definition of plot that we're usually presented with is something like "a sequence of causally-connected events in a story." This, as with most simplifications, is more misleading than useful, primarily because of its reduction of the two main terms it uses: events, and causality.

In Night Moves, the first thing to note is that the second open plot is in some sense a replaying of the first. Moseby interacts with the same set of people when he's trying to figure out who killed Delly as he does when he was trying to figure out where she ran away to. But his realizations the second time through are not limited to uncovering the mystery of who killed her; they also include the fact that he misunderstood what he was learning the first time he interacted with all these people.

When he was looking for Delly the first time, that is, the pieces in the smuggling conspiracy were laid out in front of him, but could not understand them. This means that what he discovers in his second investigation is not just the answer to the second mystery (who killed Delly?) but also that he had fundamentally misunderstood, or had been unable to understand, the first mystery he thought he had solved (where is Delly?). Solving the second mystery, in other words, allows him to also understand his failings in regards to the first.

Seeing this plot, then, as a linear sequence of events, a chain of causality, isn't quite right. His later interactions with the characters don't just relate to the events that come immediately before or after them; they also relate to his earlier interactions with those characters. Rather than a chain of causality, these two parts of the plot function like a pair of similar transparencies, or maps, laid on top of each other. The second retraces the first, illuminating it in a new way.

Which is to say that when we talk about plot as a "chain of events" or something like that, we're dealing in a metaphor, a mental image, and it's often a bad metaphor. This is because of the narrowing force of the concepts at play, such as "chains" and "causality."

The narrowing effect of the idea of an "event" in traditional definitions of plot is similarly troublesome. This is for the simple reason that the events in a film like Night Moves are not restricted to things that happen externally to the characters. They also include things that happen inside Moseby – alterations in his understanding – and inside the audience as well.

Part of the "plot" of the film, that is, involves Moseby realizing his own lack of efficacy. Not only has he not understood until too late that he was involved with a group of smugglers – rather than simply a random collection of people that Delly interacted with – he is responsible for bringing her back to L.A., where she would be killed. In some sense, he is responsible for her death.

This means that at least one of the mysteries he solves at the end (or perhaps doesn't solve) relates to the question of what use it is going around and trying to solve mysteries. Perhaps there has been some use in this, as Moseby now knows the truth; perhaps there is no use in it at all, as he hasn't been able to save Delly. In either case, to restrict the "events" of the film to the usual kind of external events we think about when we think about "plot" is to miss perhaps the most significant mystery which confronts Moseby, and us.

Moseby is, in the end, trapped in something like one of Jorge Luis Borges' metaphysical labyrinths. He has solved one mystery only to find that it was the wrong one, and solved the second mystery only to find that all of this solving – which he and we have understood to be the whole point of mysteries – leads not to something better, like understanding, but to disillusionment, destruction, a kind of incomprehension about why things must happen the way they do. And we the audience are similarly trapped.

And this sensation of being trapped is directly a function of that thing we call – whether or not we have a great definition of it – plot.

This is what I meant at the beginning by the plots of these films operating in some sense like atmospheres in which we find ourselves. Far from being simple chains of events, they become structures which explore their own terms: causality, belief in solving mysteries, the comprehensibility of events both internal and external.

Which brings me back to the notion of open and closed plotting.

Night Moves, like a great deal of American hardboiled narrative, shows the way in which these two kinds (approaches? structures? strategies? forms?) of plot overlap, without ever quite losing their definitional force. Harry Moseby, along with us, is presented by a pair of open mysteries: where has Delly gone, and who killed her? Both of these, as in a Sherlock Holmes tale, involve situations and people that must be discovered; we're not sure as they begin where they will end.

The feeling this creates is one of a movement into the unknown, an opening of possible horizons in front of us.

But Moseby's internal journey, and ours – the internal part of the question of "what happens" in the story – is one of increasing closure. The nearer the film draws to its conclusion, the more Moseby and we discover walls being thrown up, like a maze that has been constructed to guide him into a place of despair and possible destruction. As in something like Double Indemnity, as we move through the film we begin to feel these walls closing in, begin to feel that the story is more about a character trying to escape an approaching doom than it is about a character putting together the pieces to triumphantly solve a crime.

The feeling this creates is one of a movement toward a predetermined end, a continual closing of possibilities.

This combination of feelings – the future being at once open and closed, a mystery as somehow both an unbounded riddle and a foreclosing doom – is one of the hallmarks of a great deal of American hardboiled stories like Night Moves. And the creation and understanding of these kinds of stories rely on plots so complicated and wonderful that to reduce them to causally connected series of events is to injure them past recognition.

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