A Mystery Box Full of Red Matter

Here is a fantastic TED talk by JJ Abrams, the guy behind many of the most interesting genre movies and TV shows in recent years (Alias, Lost, Star Trek, Cloverfield, Fringe). It’s about the fundamental role played by mystery and the unknown in storytelling.

I’m posting it here because, as wonderful as the talk is, I disagree with it at a deep level. Yes, indeed, the concept of “mystery” is absolutely crucial to what makes a story compelling. But I think Abrams takes the idea too far, valorizing mystery for its own sake, rather than as motivation for the characters and the audience to try to solve the mystery. The reason why mysteries are interesting is because we want to figure them out! If they are simply irreducibly mysterious — if there is no sensible explanation that ultimately makes sense of all the clues — then it’s simply frustrating, not magical.

This isn’t just jousting with words — it has consequences for how stories are told. That’s why I chose Star Trek as my one movie to complain about in our Comic-Con panel last summer (as much as I enjoyed the movie overall). The dangerous planet-killing substance in that case was “red matter.” Shiny, red, and ominous-looking, red matter is not anything known to modern science. Which is fine; modern science doesn’t know about warp drive or Vulcans, either, but they work well in this particular fictional context. The problem is that red matter wasn’t associated with any sensible properties even within this fictional world. We never knew where it came from, why it did what it did, how it would react to different circumstances, etc. (Why did it have to be deposited in the exact middle of a planet, rather than just splashed on the surface?) It was simply “mysterious.” But this particular bit of mystery didn’t make it more compelling — it prevented the audience from engaging with the menace that the red matter presented. If we knew something about it, we wouldn’t just be going “okay, that’s the bad stuff, gotcha”; we’d be following along as Kirk and Spock tried to defuse the danger, understanding what might and might not do the trick. Not all mystery is good storytelling — sometimes a bit of understanding helps grab the attention.

Just to draw the distinctions even more carefully, let me come out in favor of ambiguity as opposed to mystery. The end of Inception is quite famously amenable to more than one interpretation. (To go back further, ask whether Deckard was a replicant.) This drives people crazy, trying to figure out which one is “right,” an impulse I think is misguided. It’s okay to accept that we don’t know all the answers! But in theses cases we understand quite well the space of all possible answers. There is no black box whose operation is simply mysterious. We don’t need to know all the final answers once and for all; but it’s better storytelling if we understand what the answers could be, and that they make sense to us.

Hopefully it’s not too hard to read between the lines here, and see the consequences for science as well as for movies. There are those who argue that science destroys the magic of the world by figuring things out. That’s exactly backwards — the scientific quest to solve the world’s puzzles is one of the things that makes the story of our lives so interesting.

49 Comments

49 thoughts on “A Mystery Box Full of Red Matter”

  1. Analyzer (comment 7): “How do Star Trek’s infamous “inertial dampers” work, or the “Heisenberg compensator” that allows the transporter to function?”

    The latter serves to let me know more precisely how fast I am moving through the doorway into another room a second after the former causes me to accelerate violently away from the television showing the particle-of-the-week-show.

    Alternatively:

    http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Heisenberg_compensator
    http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Inertial_dampener

    Searching that wiki for “equivalence principle” gets no hits, but on the other hand

    http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Theory_of_General_Relativity

    “How red matter might work is an interesting topic of discussion for a handful of physicists after the movie’s over”

    You mean like some of the people here, on this blog? 🙂

  2. Sci-Fi writers almost always commit a writing error (which for a show is worse than a scientific error) when they invent BS to explain previously accepted BS. Did we really need “midichlorians” to explain “The Force”? How many Star Trek episodes got bogged down in technobabble? or were resolved in a “techno deus ex machina”? As a Sci-Fi fan, I want novelty. But for the sake of the story, I need internal consistency, characters I care about, and a worthwhile challenge.

  3. J.J. Abrams is a remarkably successful (Hollywood) story teller. If he rubs science fiction fans and scientists the wrong way, I would argue that the question is what should we be learning from him about what grabs people’s attention rather than arguing with him about details of MacGuffins or the successes and failures of particular plot devices.

    I would argue that Abrams demonstrates that most people see the world as somewhat mysterious and they don’t always want those mysteries dispelled. This of course isn’t news, but Abrams is very successful at manipulating this instinct. A classic example of this instinct is that many would complain when a rainbow is “explained.” How do we as scientists, skeptics, or fans, then go about convincing people that we aren’t dispelling the magic of rainbows by describing how they work but rather deepening the mystery and magic around them?

    Penn and Teller – and other magicians – address this by, for example performing the cups and balls – which I just watched on youtube recently – with clear glass cups so you can see the “magic” happening. It is still magical! Can we convince people that this is what we’re trying to do, too? I don’t know if it’s possible but that’s what we have to try, rather than bemoaning the magical box.

  4. Just checking in as another LOST fan who was severely disappointed for the very reason you’re describing.

    What I find interesting is that a lot of people were NOT disappointed by the Lost mysteries in their black boxes. I find this hard to contemplate — wanting to know more was what kept everyone hooked, wasn’t it?

    I think there’s a big personality type distinction going on here. Perhaps the same one that gets a physicist funny looks when they get excited about how many quarks there are (for lack of a better example).

  5. No 30, Wabasso said

    “I think there’s a big personality type distinction going on here”.

    Yes, I think you have hit the mark here. Clearly some are quite happy to practice the willful suspension of disbelief.
    Is that a good thing? Should scientists bring a critical, analytical attitude to everything in life? Or are we better, happier people for being able to embrace mystery in some aspects of our life?

  6. I suppose in the next Star Trek movie they’ll fix the timeline with Blue Matter. Of course, they’ll probably look at the gross profits from the first movie and decide to just call it Doesn’t Matter.

  7. Awesome post Sean! I’m yet another disillusioned Lost fan, who thought that when he pulls all the unknown things together, I’d be left breathless. Unfortunately, he screwed up big time and left it all hanging in the air. And I think the clarification you make between ambiguity and mystery is extremely important. Even if Lost had left a lot of ambiguous loose ends, I would have been more than happy. The problem is that with this guy’s love of mystery, he weaves the puzzle much to arbitrarily and with too much insurmountable complexity, that you pretty much realize that he really is not going to be able to get out of it. I think there is a point to be made here: if you keep the solvability of the mystery in mind, then because of the constraints, you are much more creative. As an analogy, a composer who just uses diverse and outlandish instruments is none the better for it unless he is able to tie them together musically(and the difficulty of this task atleast scales quadratically with the number of instruments) and in contrast to this, you can have a composer who just uses one or two instruments but can still make very beautiful music.

  8. “But I think Abrams takes the idea too far, valorizing mystery for its own sake, rather than as motivation for the characters and the audience to try to solve the mystery. The reason why mysteries are interesting is because we want to figure them out! If they are simply irreducibly mysterious — if there is no sensible explanation that ultimately makes sense of all the clues — then it’s simply frustrating, not magical.”

    I would phrase it as implausibly mysterious. Event Horizon was mentioned above, and I think this is a perfect example. An experimental starship, missing for some time, turns up in the solar system and is unresponsive. When investigators enter the ship, we are shown its Maguffin: a device that opens a space warp inside the ship. That, for me, rendered the movie ludicrous as SF (though it works well as horror.)

    I don’t mind having something be ultimately mysterious. In Star Wars, The Force works precisely because it is explained as little as possible. I agree with the comment above that Lucas ruined it when he tried to ascribe it to “midichlorians” — obviously analogous to mitochondria. That leads the view to contradictions as distracting as wondering how a ship can travel through a gate that’s inside it.

    “There are those who argue that science destroys the magic of the world by figuring things out. That’s exactly backwards — the scientific quest to solve the world’s puzzles is one of the things that makes the story of our lives so interesting.”

    I fully agree with this. Arthur C. Clarke understood it very well, and explained it eloquently. There’s a quotation from another person that also expresses it well. Unfortunately I’ve lost the attribution, but it goes much like this: “The bigger the ocean of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.”

  9. JJ Abrams is the prime example of what is wrong with so much SF on tv and the movies: no respect, whatsoever, for a) his audience and b) the art of storytelling. He has nothing but DISDAIN for both. Thank god I never got drawn into Lost (which they made up as they went along), Cloverfield violated Bradbury’s 1st law of what NOT to do in a story. Alias was good for a season or a bit more, then went to hell because they had no plan. Star Trek? commit GENOCIDE (and stupidly, violating all kinds of KNOWN physics (the number one thing NOT to do in SF) to “reboot”?) Please, he’ll never get a euro of my money again.

  10. While JJ Abrams may be successful with fantastic realms, he isn’t exactly noteworthy in dealing with reality. His newest TV series, UNDERCOVERS, has officially tanked, and will not finish the season.

  11. I think ultimately it boils down to a question of ‘Entertainment for the masses’ and ‘Entertainment for the geeks’. You’re spending millions of dollars on a movie, you’re going to want mass appeal to ensure that you get a return on your investment.

    An unexplained plot device will work for the majority of the people: they don’t have the curiosity to want to know what it is and how it works, it’s sufficient to just be there.

    2001 has been mentioned a couple of times. In and of itself, it was a brilliant piece of art, and IMO, Trumbull’s FX have yet to be bettered (of a similar style – matting and CGI is getting close, but from a pure modelling basis, none have come close). But taken in the context of the novel, it becomes a disappointment.

    According to IMDB, Duncan Jones’ Moon broke even. A brilliant film, little ‘unobtainium’, but technically very detailed – didn’t have the mass market appeal. Authors have a similar problem: if you put formulae in a book, the public aren’t interested. They don’t want facts, they want entertainment.

    Coming back to ‘unobtainium’ – logic dictates that as soon as you’ve got hold of some, it becomes ‘obtainedium’… but the masses aren’t pedants and they don’t care what it’s called, or what it does (which Cameron didn’t sufficiently explain – why was it needed anyway?). But as long as there’s drama and thrilling adventures, and they get a return on their movie ticket, everything is as it should be. But as soon as they get bored with the technical explanations… they tell their friends ‘it’s boring, don’t bother going to see it, wait for the DVD’, and the movie companies start to lose money.

  12. @38. Al Feersum

    “Coming back to ‘unobtainium’ – logic dictates that as soon as you’ve got hold of some, it becomes ‘obtainedium’… but the masses aren’t pedants and they don’t care what it’s called, or what it does (which Cameron didn’t sufficiently explain – why was it needed anyway?).”

    The movie hints strongly at it being a room temperature superconductor, of which we would have many many uses. The extra features and literature confirm this.

    At first the name “Unobtanium” really bugged me. But then I started to think of how it would actually play out in real life. I think it’s totally realistic for the media and mainstream to give a new important discovery a totally misleading name, i.e. “The God Particle”.

  13. @7. Analyzer,

    Agreed. Stories can ask for a suspension of belief. There are limits and some commonly accepted guidelines (although these are regularly tested). However the impulse to explain everything is particular to to the mechanistic/scientific mind. Millions like or even prefer mystery.

    One of the things that I really liked about Awakenings was that it never completely explained how the drug worked. In the end it stopped working and no one knew why. The problem was, they had never figured out how it worked in the first place. That left the main characters ill equipped to correct the situation when things started to go wrong.

    The story ended with a mystery and may even have been stronger for doing so.

    Not Sci-Fi of course. Just goes to the point that not everything has to be explained. You can even have a mystery that the whole plot turns on and is never completely resolved.

  14. Alan in Upstate NY

    I enjoyed Star Trek, but thought that the “red matter” was given no credibility and simply not believable. I too thought it was a major plot flaw in an otherwise very good movie.

    Clear skies, Alan

  15. I don’t understand any of this post at all apart from the last paragraph. Thta was what I was supposed to have put before. I thought it was about science. I don’t understand science fiction but am prepared to give it a try, a bit like Coronation Street, which have never liked.

  16. bittergradstudent

    @Brain Too:

    I”m pretty sure Awakenings was based on actual events.

    And I’m with everyone who thinks that the Red Matter wasn’t at all the point of the movie. A 5000 HellaWatt laser from the year 2500 that needs 48 hours to charge before the death pulse would have served the same plot purpose. Or would we be complaining because the lasing medium wasn’t sufficiently explained in that case?

  17. Although I am very much into Star Wars. The whole idea of it is magical. When young, I watched it for the space/sciency effects, the lighting, the mood, but had no idea what the hell was going on with the characters and plot. Even now, can’t much remember any plot. Favourite character, R2D2.

  18. olderwithmoreinsurance

    @44 No, we would hate it because no imaginable energy source can overcome the binding energy of a terrestrial size planet. Though a 5000 Hellawatt laser might do a great job liquifying the surface (assuming you could, you know, PROTECT it for 48 hrs.). And has EVERYONE forgotten that a black hole was left in a decaying orbit around the earth in the god-awful movie mentioned? I’m sure that thought never crossed Abrams mind, along with the dozens of other impossible or just plain stupid reasons to have fights, blow things up, have characters violate any imaginable UCMJ, this side of the Taliban (go on, fuck any student you want in your chain of command, we just want to see Spock GET SOME! woohoo)

  19. No, I maintain that elements of mystery can work just fine in all sorts of movies and stories.

    Look, what is perhaps the most common thematic element in every kind of story you can think about? Love. What do we commonly say about love? It’s a mystery.

    We describe love, we explain the situation of love, we can be abstract or particular. We can justify love in evolutionary and reproductive terms. We can be crass or lyrical. Yet we always come back to the idea that love is a mystery.

    Mystery. It’s a great part of story telling. You can solve the mystery or not, that’s a choice of the story teller. Both are fine as long as you engage your audience.

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