Plausibility & The Planet of the Apes
Write yourself into a corner to make possible the implausible.
Do you know the scenes below from the Planet of the Apes? These are the final scenes of the movie. Taylor, an American astronaut, and Nova, a woman who is part of the modern human population, are on horseback riding away from Dr. Zaius, an ape.
Dr. Zaius had allowed them to escape down the coastline into the unknown. An average writer would have just allowed Taylor and Nova to proverbially ride off into the sunset onto some new adventure. They would be Adam and Eve-type characters rebuilding human society, like at the end of Anthem by Ayn Rand. Or not. That’s the thing with the unknown. You just don’t know. Well, if you don’t count the four sequels.
The writer, however, chooses to give it a serious twist.
421 THE STRANGE FORMATION - AS SEEN BY TAYLOR
An immense column juts from the beach at a thirty-degree angle. We can now see that it is not rock, but metal. Green metallic tints show through its gray salt-stained surface. As we draw closer, the object takes on the appearance of a massive arm, its top shaped like a hand holding a torch.
If you’ve seen the movie, there’s no surprise in what they’re seeing. For the audience, however, it was an unexpected visual. That audience could only understand things frame-by-frame, in step with Taylor and Nova.
In fact, Nova had no idea what the Statue of Liberty was all about. Taylor knew it by sight and by name, as well as its significance. It wasn’t part of her history. Those days were long forgotten generations long ago.
422 REVERSE ANGLE - FAVORING TAYLOR
Frowning with consternation. His horse proceeds at a slow walk.
423 TRACKING WITH TAYLOR - WHAT HE SEES:
Near the base of the column, where the shore and water meet, are a row
of metal spikes. From this angle they look like tank traps.
Taylor is trying to process what he’s seeing. He’s not predicting what will be implausible yet possible. He’s trying to predict the plausible.
What is plausible?
The entire movie was about him adjusting to being thrown into a time two millennia after the one he was born in. Everything that wasn’t plausible was true: apes ran society, humans were caged, and all of human history was essentially forgotten.
A-423 CLOSER - TAYLOR
Dumbfounded, he slides from his saddle, approaches the spikes. Nova dismounts and follows him.
TAYLOR
(a cry of agony)
My God!
He falls to his knees, buries his head in his hands. CAMERA SLOWLY DRAWS BACK AND UP to a HIGH ANGLE SHOT disclosing what Taylor has found. Half-buried in the sand and washed by the waves is the Statue of Liberty.
The big reveal. Who expected the Statue of Liberty? Nobody in the theaters thought that in 1968, that’s for sure. I certainly didn’t when I was 7 years old watching it on Channel 2 in Chicago. As a second grader, I didn’t fully understand the magnitude of the scene. The Statue of Liberty represents so many things that it was the perfect choice for the writer. Taylor and Nova could have gone with some other iconic landmark that is close or en route to the ocean, like the Empire State Building or the Golden Gate Bridge. None of them carries the symbolic weight, however, that the Statue of Liberty does.
For Taylor, there were some added components to the symbolism. It represented freedom from the apes, but he was still trapped in this time. Freedom is complicated.
Visually, it’s a fairly simple scene. In the greater context of the movie, the audience is surprised.
Spaceships were relatively new to us then. Comic books talked about them, but we wouldn’t actually walk on the moon until 1969. We didn’t know what really happens when someone goes into space and we certainly didn’t know what going into space under the context that the 4 astronauts did at the beginning of the movie.
It’s more than deus ex machina. Literally translated as “god from the machine,” the phrase refers to a plot device where a seemingly unsolvable problem is suddenly and abruptly resolved by an unexpected and unlikely occurrence. That’s not what happened in Planet of the Apes.
The world the astronauts left in 1972 was the same one you know (more or less, as this is a fictionalized version). When they landed, humans were subjugated and dominated in 3978. A lot had happened in 2,006 years.
When we think about the plausibility of the scene, we know that the astronauts landed in the water somewhere. The specifics are left a mystery by the writer in order to set up for the big ending. However, whatever happened that led to the current circumstances must have been catastrophic. Moreover, whatever was left of the human civilization had fallen into archeological ruin. We already know Cornelius had archeological remains of a non-ape civilization.
That Taylor and Nova would find this was implausible but not impossible.
My favorite books and movies are the ones in which I cannot predict what is happening. I want to be surprised. I want the writer to feel challenged not to have taken the predictable route, riding off into the sunset, but to show me something that fits better.
I don’t mean stories that rely on red herrings or those where the writer intentionally fools me. I mean where the writer creates an impossible situation that seems to have no resolution, but then the writer creates the perfect resolution where all things come together not in a ridiculous way, but a satisfying one.
Books
And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie — Christie’s masterpiece. She expertly navigates many whodunnits, but this one takes it to another level. It remains satisfying because it adheres strictly to the "fair play" rule of detective fiction—all the clues are present, yet the identity of the killer remains elusive until the epilogue.
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier — While it begins as a traditional Gothic romance, the narrative shifts when the truth about the title character, the deceased Rebecca, is revealed. It upends the “haunted by a saint” trope in favor of a much darker reality.
Movies
Psycho — Alfred Hitchcock famously mandated that no one be let into the theater after the movie started. Why? To take them somewhere other than expected. It kills off its “main” character (the decoy protagonist) only 47 minutes into the film, forcing the audience to restart the story with a new lead.
The Sixth Sense — Bruce Willis and Haley Joel Osment in prime form. Once the truth about Malcolm Crowe (Willis) is revealed, the satisfaction comes from realizing that every previous scene was carefully constructed to hide the truth in plain sight. M. Night Shyamalan brilliantly wrote himself into a situation that seemed to have no resolution.
What Now?
Take the risk. Create a story in which the characters don’t seem to have a fix to their problem… then, fix it in a way no one expects.
It has to be unexpected, but not impossible.
Four Sentence Story Prompt
Here’s a quick prompt to push you forward into writing yourself out of a corner.
A research expedition discovers a perfectly preserved, 18th-century clockwork automaton buried in a layer of Antarctic ice that has been sealed for 30 million years. Upon being thawed, the machine begins ticking and uses its internal brass cylinders to accurately transcribe the private thoughts of the lead scientist in real-time. The protagonist realizes the machine is not recording his mind, but is actually a physical manifestation of the script the scientist is currently trapped within. To stop the machine from revealing a fatal secret in the next sentence, he must find a way to break the internal gears without using any action that a writer could describe in text.
A Not Funny Joke
Two chimpanzees were sitting in a clearing, hunched over a well-worn copy of War and Peace.
One chimpanzee turned to the other and asked, “Is it a comedy or a tragedy?”
The second chimpanzee looked up from the page and replied, “It’s a tragedy. He hasn’t mentioned a single banana in 1,200 pages.”