Carl MuckenhouptThere's this thing I like to do sometiems that I call the Owl Creek Bridge Game. I thought for sure I had mentioned this before here on Mastodon but it doesn't show up in a search of my posts. The idea is that you take a work of fiction and add the unexaminable assumption that the viewpoint character dies at some point in the story without realizing it, after which the rest of the story is either a dying dream or the afterlife. And you try to figure out where in the story this happens.
The canonical introductory example is John Wick. For the first 20 minutes or so of the film, there's no suggestion that he's anything other than an ordinary sad man. Then he's attacked in his home and beaten to within an inch of his life, after which he suddenly turns out to be an elite hitman capable of enacting that ordinary man's desperate fantasies of survival and revenge. No, the more plausible explanation is that everything after the attack is imaginary.
Anyway, I mention it now because I just had a brainwave about it. You know how every single James Bond film starts with a brief scene of looking down the barrel of a gun as Bond walks into view, then whirls and shoots at the camera? (https://www.youtube.com/shorts/q8-BMk-ADmY)
What if that's the only part that actually happens, and the entire rest of the film is the unseen dying gunman imagining that the guy who shot him was James Bond? It explains so much!
Every James Bond gun-barrel turn-n-shoot
ranjit@CarlMuckenhoupt the grinch died when his heart grew three sizes.
⁂ L. Rhodes@CarlMuckenhoupt Pretty easy for hard boiled detective stories. Their protagonists almost always get knocked unconsious at some point.
@lrhodes In some cases, they get knocked out more than once over the course of the story, and the tricky part is figuring out which was the fatal one.
Victor Gijsbers@CarlMuckenhoupt Heart attack when seeing Mr Darcy swim in the lake.
The old female pawnbroker kills *him* with an axe to prove she transcends the moral law.
@victorgijsbers Please understand that coming up with audacious reinterpretations is just the first step in the Owl Creek Bridge Game. The real fun is in finding supporting evidence in the text.
@CarlMuckenhoupt Ah, yes, you have to reread and prove!