Thursday, 04 June 2009
Some writers do prolepse too much, Jamie thinks.
~
[Spoiler warning: This article contains mild spoilers for the films Crash and Michael Clayton and season one of the television drama Damages, and severe spoilers for the books in the Twilight series and the second season of Damages.]
[Length warning: This article is really quite long.]
We all know that over the last few decades it has become increasingly common in works of fiction to play tricks with chronology. The more radically non-chronological approaches, like the backward narratives of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal and Jonathan and Christopher Nolan’s Memento or the jigsaw-puzzle presentation of Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary’s Pulp Fiction, remain fairly rare; but at least one of the less mind-boggling departures from A-B-C story-telling is now becoming a common narrative device. This is the flash-forward.
Definitions and prospectus
There’s a little inconsistency out there in the use of the term ‘flash-forward’. It is sometimes used to mean nothing more than a point at which the narrative moves forward in time by skipping over a longer-than-usual chronological interval between the events of one scene and those of the next (it’s in this sense that the cut, in 2001: A Space Odyssey, between the leg-bone being thrown into the air by a prehistoric primate and the space-station spinning through the stars three million years later has been called “the longest flash-forward in the history of cinema”). The wikipedia entry declares that the flash-forward is “also called prolepsis”, although prolepsis is really a much wider concept covering any form of reference forward in time, and then gives a broad definition that includes the depiction of predicted or imagined future events even if these events do not ultimately occur. Perhaps the term is not sufficiently well established to quibble about its ‘correct’ usage, but what I want to discuss, and what I’m going to call a flash-forward in this article, is simply the direct opposite of that well-known device the flash-back.
A flash-back is the depiction (in the same medium as the primary narrative, for example shown in moving pictures if the work is a film, narrated in prose if the work is a novel, but not, for example, as a mere ‘messenger speech’ in a play) of a scene or series of scenes that took place chronologically before the point in the narrative at which it is depicted. A flash-forward, in the sense I mean, is the depiction (again in the same medium as the primary narrative) of a scene or series of scenes that will take place chronologically after the point in the narrative at which it is depicted. It does not include hypothetical future scenarios imagined by the characters: in order to be a flash-forward it must be something that will in fact happen, whether within the primary narrative (which is the more common kind) or after its end (as, for example, with the prologue of Alan Moore’s From Hell).
In fact what I want to talk about is even more specific than the flash-forward as I’ve just defined it: it’s the use of a flash-forward to begin a work of fiction (or a part of such a work). I’m going to call this the ‘flash-forward opener’.
How it works: Michael Clayton and Crash
Two recent cinematic examples are found in Michael Clayton (2007, written and directed by Tony Gilroy) and Crash (2004, written and directed by Paul Haggis). Michael Clayton begins with a full 15 minutes of flash-forward, in which we see the office of some kind of company bustling with people at an improbably late hour, and we hear one of these people taking a call from a journalist from which we gather that the company is hurrying to settle a law-suit secretly; we see the title character, who we learn is a ‘fixer’ for a law-firm, playing poker and then being called out to do some ‘fixing’ for a wealthy man who has just accidentally run down a pedestrian with his car; and we then see Clayton driving, getting out of his car to look at some horses standing by the roadside in the dawn light, and reacting with surprise as his car explodes behind him. Only as he runs down the bank towards it do we discover we have been in a flash-forward, as the screen fades to white and we see the caption ‘Four days earlier’ that takes us into the beginning of the primary narrative. In Crash the opening flash-forward is shorter, and we know it is a flash-forward from the outset because we see the caption ‘Tomorrow’. We see a man and a woman in a car, and after a while it becomes clear that their car is part of a pile-up. The woman, who is Hispanic and, it soon turns out, a police officer, gets out of the car and becomes involved in an argument with a Korean woman; meanwhile the man approaches a taped-off crime-scene by the roadside, talks to a detective in terms that make us think he too may be a police officer, and starts to examine the crime-scene, at which point we fade to black with a caption ‘Today’.
These two flash-forwards serve similar purposes. Some are purposes that would have to be served one way or another anyway, such as establishing characters. The Michael Clayton flash-forward tells us that Clayton is a ‘fixer’; he can be called on at times and in situations that would be outside the realm of a normal lawyer and that suggests things may not be entirely above board; at least one person describes him as a ‘miracle-worker’, though he calls himself a ‘janitor’; he is calm, quiet, and authoritative, and despite other indications appears to be basically one of the good guys (he says that he knows local people who can help the hit-and-run driver deal with the police and fight his case in court but refuses to countenance the implied request that he help the driver cover the whole thing up). In Crash we get an irascible Ria and a reserved and philosophical Graham who seem to be a couple, to know each other fairly well, and to be cops. The flash-forwards also begin to set up themes. In Crash it’s race and racism: he’s African-American, she’s Hispanic, and the argument with the Korean woman involves racist unpleasantness on both sides; in Michael Clayton, it’s the efforts of the wealthy to evade justice, and the moral strain those efforts place on the lawyers whom they pay to assist them: the hit-and-run mini-drama in the flash-forward contains many of the moral issues of the main plot in a simplified form that both flags them up and also contrasts with the greater murkiness of the main narrative.
The flash-forwards also do something that specifically exploits the fact that they are showing us snippets of the future, namely to tease us and hook our interest: to create tension. Of course creating tension is not the sole preserve of the flash-forward. Any opening scene, like any scene except the conclusion, must create a desire to know what is going to happen next. But an opening scene that’s a flash-forward creates three different types of tension.
First, it is a scene in the plot like any other except the conclusion [1] and therefore, like any other scene, leaves you wanting to know what happens next (i.e. chronologically after the scene ends). In our two examples, we want to know what Clayton will find when he reaches his burning car and what he will do about it and whether, if this was a deliberate attempt to kill him, the assassins will try again and whether they will succeed; we want to know what Graham has noticed in the long grass, and (if we think this will be a crime-solving sort of film) whether it will help him solve the crime that seems to have been committed.
Secondly, because the flash-forward scene, although placed at the beginning of the narrative, is not itself the beginning of the plot (i.e. it does not show the event that sets the story in motion), it leaves you wanting to know what happened before and thus how things got to this point: why has Clayton’s car blown up? who committed the crime whose evidence Graham is inspecting? what, in general, is going on, and what is this story all about anyway? In this respect the flash-forward has the same sort of effect as any event during the course of a story that is, at the time it occurs, unexpected and / or unexplained.
Both these tensions are created by and within the flash-forward itself and are immediate; the third is slower and longer-lasting because it occurs not during the flash-forward but continuously throughout the rest of the story, and it is the constant desire to know how we are going to get from the point we are now at to the point we know is inevitably coming. Once we discover that the company we saw in the flash-forward is a chemical company paying Clayton’s law-firm to fight a law-suit brought by people claiming to have been poisoned by its products, we want to know how it will come to be working through the small hours to settle the suit; when we see Graham called to investigate a police shooting, we wonder whether this will turn out to be related to the road-side crime that will occur, or be discovered, later, and whether it will be the reason he’ll look so weary.
In short, a story that opens with a flash-forward has us looking expectantly three different ways: forward from the end of the flash-forward trying to see the next turn of events and ultimately the end of the plot; back from the beginning of the flash-forward trying to see the ‘real-time’ plot approaching; and forward from whatever point we are at in the ‘real-time’ plot trying to see the flash-forward looming up in front of us. It’s a very effective and economical tension-maker, and it’s easy to see why a writer would use it.
But...
How it fails: Twilight
Another well-known recent outing for the flash-forward opener is Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight book-series (specifically the first three - Twilight, New Moon, and Eclipse - because they’re the ones I’ve read). These are really an example of the sloppy use of the flash-forward opener, making the device pointless at best and confusing at worst. Each book begins with a preface that flashes forward to the climactic scene of the book. Perhaps the first thing to mention is that, this being printed prose, Meyer is able to exert significantly more control over the information we do and don’t get from these flash-forwards than in the two cinematic examples I’ve already discussed. One thing she can conceal is the identity of all the characters except the narrator (whom we correctly assume to be the same as the narrator of the rest of the book, Bella). In Twilight there is only one other character referred to, described as “the hunter”; in New Moon, by contrast, Alice is named; but in Eclipse we go back to vagueness with “my protector” and another character who has “black eyes”. This means that as we read the rest of the book we don’t know whether any new character who is introduced is someone we have already met in the preface. The same is true of other features we might expect to recognize from the preface, especially location: the climactic scene in Twilight takes place in a mirrored dance studio, but nothing in the preface suggests this, even though it would be a much more obvious feature to mention than the adjective Meyer does use to describe the room, “long”. New Moon is again more explicit, giving us sufficient features (the crowd, the bright sunlight, and the clock-tower) to identify when the main narrative arrives at the location where the preface took place; but Eclipse has no description of the surroundings at all, except that we are “far, far away” from “the cold forest”.
Meyer is clearly deliberately suppressing clues to the identities of people and places in order to stop us working out anything important about the climax before we get to it: this means that in Twilight we must not know when we first meet James that he is “the hunter” from the preface, nor when we first hear of Alice’s vision of the mirrored room must we work out that it’s the location for the climactic scene. In Eclipse the suppression is even more thorough: for the location because Bella and Edward spend quite some time hanging around on the mountain where the confrontation with Victoria will occur and Meyer wants it to be a surprise when Victoria turns up (since the battle is meant to be taking place elsewhere); for the characters because, I strongly suspect, we are supposed to entertain throughout the book the possibility that the “protector” will be Jacob rather than Edward (in keeping with the general ‘choice between Jacob and Edward’ strand of the plot). The preface of New Moon is able to be much less strained and more natural in the level of detail it gives because we don’t encounter the location until very near the scene forecast by the preface, and the only other character present is Alice, who is around throughout the book and whose presence therefore gives nothing away. The reference to “our extraordinarily dangerous enemies”, though, is still kept deliberately woolly because to name the Volturi at this stage would give away a significant plot development.
The preface of Twilight in fact goes to such lengths to disguise itself that it is even rather difficult to identify precisely when we reach the moment that it foretells. This is another contrast with Crash and Michael Clayton, which both repeat the relevant shots from the flash-forward (or at least some of them) at the relevant points in the main narrative; in Meyer’s books, the words of the preface are never repeated. In the preface of Twilight, “the hunter” smiles “in a friendly way” and then “saunter[s] forward to kill me”, but the moment of attack in chapter 22 is quite different: James circles Bella and then crouches down, his smile “widen[s]... till it [is]n’t a smile at all but a contortion of teeth, exposed and glittering”, then Bella tries to flee (not mentioned at all in the preface) and James attacks her with superhuman speed. On Meyer’s website she says that the preface isn’t in fact describing this moment at all but is to be inserted some paragraphs earlier, when Bella first enters the room; this is either retrospective rationalizing of sloppy writing or else proof that the preface is in fact deliberately misleading, since according to Meyer the end of the preface, “he sauntered forward to kill me”, is followed by James not in fact making the slightest attempt to kill her but merely walking past her and putting down the remote control next to the video player. This is a chiz [2] on a par with the notorious [3] cliff-hanger between Uncanny X-Men issues 133 and 134.
One can, of course, argue that all this suppression of information and manipulation of perception is necessary if you’re going to flash forward to the climactic scene of a story. But if that’s the case, shouldn’t the writer be asking herself whether it’s really a good idea to flash forward to the climax at all? The flash-forward openers of Crash and Michael Clayton flash to scenes that are not climactic but can in fact be forecast quite safely: in Crash this is because nothing really happens in the scene until just after the end of the flash-forward, and there is only the very slightest hint in the flash-forward itself that anything important is going to happen after that point; in Michael Clayton it’s because the scene with the hit-and-run driver is almost irrelevant to the main plot (more on this later), and the explosion of the car, though significant, is so totally mysterious when taken out of context that it gives nothing away except that this will be a film in which dangerous things may occur.
In fact the preface of each of the Twilight books is so profoundly uninformative that I found I had completely forgotten its content by the time I got to about page 100 anyway. I was therefore one of the lucky readers whose experience of the rest of the book was largely unimpaired by the preface. Others, it seems, are not so lucky: one of the Frequently Asked Questions on Meyer’s website is, “I'm confused by the preface; who is the Hunter?”. Now I have to say that the people who are Frequently Asking this Question must be a bit dense if they’ve read the whole book, re-read the preface, and are still puzzled. Nonetheless, if one of your 21 most frequent questions is “I’m confused by the preface” that is a sign not only of a particularly obtuse readership but also of bad writing. And I suspect that if I had bothered to retain the content of the preface in my head right up to chapter 22 I would also have been sufficiently confused that I’d have needed at least to go back and re-read it, which is not really what you want your readers doing during the climactic scene. Similarly, the preface of Eclipse gave me the fairly strong impression that there was only a single aggressor, and it was only the third time I read it (my second re-reading in preparation for this article) that I noticed that “he was outnumbered”. Clearly if I hadn’t forgotten the thing entirely by the time I got to chapter 24 I would have been puzzled, or felt tricked into expecting only one attacker, or failed to realize that this was the scene from the preface.
So, in terms of the functions of the flash-forward opener I mentioned when discussing Michael Clayton and Crash, the Twilight prefaces fall down on attempting to create tension (because they are so unhelpful that the reader is likely either to forget them or be confused or misled), but what about the other functions? They don’t establish character because they suppress most character’s identities and say very little even about Bella except that she tends to put herself in harm’s way. Do they foreshadow themes and plot-points? Sort of. In all three cases they tell us what is likely to be at stake in the books: the death of Bella and / or someone she loves. We may perhaps doubt how valuable this information really is since we already know (if we have any idea what kind of book we have in our hands) that vampires are going to be involved. The preface of Twilight also suggests that love will be a feature, but we can’t tell whether it will be the love of friends, family, or lovers, so really this tells us almost nothing except that it is not a book filled with unmitigated hatred and indifference. Moreover, the theme most strongly implied by the preface is in fact not one that the book really addresses at all: apart from the plot-oriented lines like “I stared without breathing across the long room, into the dark eyes of the hunter, and he looked pleasantly back at me”, the entire preface seems to be concerned with reflections on death and the proper attitude towards it: questions like ‘how will death come?’ (“I'd never given much thought to dying... I would not have imagined it like this.”); ‘what constitutes a good death?’ (“Surely it was a good way to die, in the place of someone else, someone I loved. Noble, even. That ought to count for something.”); ‘when does death become inevitable?’ (“I knew that if I'd never gone to Forks, I wouldn't be facing death now.”); ‘how should we feel about the prospect of dying?’ (“I couldn't bring myself to regret the decision. When life offers you a dream so far beyond any of your expectations, it's not reasonable to grieve when it comes to an end.”). The rest of the novel does not concern itself with these questions to any significant extent and is far more concerned with questions of ill-advised romantic love and what sacrifices are worth making for it. The preface of New Moon seems to concern itself with self-sacrifice, despair, and living (or dying) without love, which are closer to the actual concerns of the book; but Eclipse’s preface is entirely about fighting against the odds for survival and to protect others, which is indeed what is at stake in the scene in question but is much less significant for the book as a whole than questions like rivalry in love and choice between two incompatible goods.
In sum, the Twilight flash-forward prefaces are likely to have either no effect or only an unhelpful effect on the reader. They are, I suspect, there principally to assure the reader that something exciting and dangerous will happen at some point, lest we give up during the early chapters of day-to-day teenage angst and woe in the absence of any threat to life and limb. They are a combination of lazy writing and strained manipulation of the reader, but they do little serious harm and do not get in the way of the plot itself.
How it not only fails but brings the whole plot crashing down around its ears: Damages
Far more culpable is my last example, the television legal drama Damages, written by Todd and Glenn Kessler and Daniel Zelman. In the first season flash-forward openers were used fairly extensively: the whole series, and many individual episodes, began with a flash-forward, though some episodes began in the present or even with flash-backs. Flash-forwards were often also used to end episodes. The flash-forwards were distinguished from ‘real time’ by being shot in harshly over-exposed colour. Flash-forwards were usually only a minute or two long, and by and large they built up coherently and comprehensively over the course of the thirteen episodes to form a picture of events in the ‘future’ as the main plot approached the beginning of the flash-forward plot. Although, like the Twilight flash-forwards, these relied to some extent on keeping the audience slightly confused and off-balance, they were sufficiently comprehensible that they worked as a narrative device and kept up the tension as the main narrative unfolded. More importantly, the events they forecast (principally the murder of the heroine Ellen’s fiancé, and an attempt to kill Ellen herself) are natural and important developments of the main plot, so the tension created was meaningful and was ultimately rewarded when the main plot arrived at those points. But then came season two.
According to Todd Kessler, the producers “figured that this was very much kind of a signature to the first season of having these two timeframes... So what started as a way of just telling stories in the first season in a significant way has emerged as a signature to our storytelling for Damages.”[4] In other words, where in the first season flash-forwards had served a real narrative purpose, in the second season they were to be used as a gimmick whether necessary or not. Most episodes begin and end with a flash-forward, or at least feature one at some point, shot in the same visual style as in season one but dramatically much more fragmentary. From one flash-forward to the next, it is not clear whether they are in any kind of chronological order within the future time-line, or how they relate to one another causally. Sometimes we see one we have seen before, but slightly extended; at other times we see two we have seen before placed next to one another to suggest a new chronological relationship. These flash-forwards, in short, serve simply to confuse and mislead the viewer. To unpack that assertion I’m afraid I need to slightly tediously take you through them one by one.
1 (beginning of episode 1): Ellen [5] is in a room drinking whiskey and apparently talking to someone we don’t see or hear. In the background we hear Just For A Thrill by Ray Charles. Ellen is vaguely threatening and is asking for the unseen person to tell the truth. She shows that she has a gun.
2 (end of episode 1): Apparently a continuation of 1. Ellen decides the other person is not going to tell her what she wants and fires two shots in the direction in which she has been talking.
3 (beginning of episode 2): Same as 2.
4 (about 15 minutes into episode 2): Same room as 1-3. Ellen and Wes are rolling around in bed. Ellen’s phone rings. She gets up and dresses, refusing to tell Wes what the call was or where she’s going. She leaves.
5 (about 30 minutes into episode 2): Tom enters an apparently empty building, goes downstairs, removes something that was taped to the underside of a desk. He leaves. Then we see him sitting in a car. Ellen gets in; Tom hands her a towel in which is wrapped a handgun. He says, “I hope you know what you’re doing.” She says she does and gets out. Then we see Ellen firing two shots as in 2.
6 (end of episode 2): Purcell digs a hole at night, throws something into it, sets fire to whatever it was.
7 (about 3 minutes into episode 4): Ellen’s room, Just For A Thrill playing in the background. Ellen picks up a gun from the bed, puts it into her handbag. Knock at the door. She invites someone in - we don’t see who it is. She asks, “Is that the money?” (we see a briefcase at the feet of whoever has just sat down, but not the feet themselves) and then, “Are you sure you’re okay? You seem a little worried.” Cut to the outside of the door as if through the eyes of someone approaching. Cut back to Ellen firing the two shots as in 2. View from outside the door again: Ellen opens it, looks around, then leaves carrying the briefcase.
8 (about 15 minutes into episode 5): Camera approaches Ellen’s door from outside. A knock. She looks through the spy-hole and opens it. It’s Wes. She says, “I told you you can’t be here today”, but they kiss and he comes in and closes the door behind him.
9 (end of episode 5): Wes is packing a bag. He packs three hand-guns. Now we see him waiting in the foyer of Ellen’s hotel, talking on his mobile: he’s cancelling a flight reservation. Ellen comes into the foyer; Wes tells her there’s work being done at his building and asks to stay for a few nights. Cut to an outdoor car-park in daylight; a parked car. The windscreen is suddenly punctured by what looks like a bullet-hole, and we seem to see blood on the glass. The back door opens and Wes gets out.
10 (about 30 minutes into episode 6): Messer is in a car outside Ellen’s hotel. He sees Ellen entering the building. He goes up in the lift and furtively enters her room using a key-card.
11 (end of episode 6): Possibly a continuation of 10. Messer enters Ellen’s room. Ellen is in the shower, singing Just For A Thrill. She calls out, “Wes, is that you?” Messer takes out a gun and attaches a silencer. He approaches the bathroom.
12 (end of episode 8): Uncle Pete’s wife Stefania opens a closet and finds a box of files. In one file, marked ‘Katie Connor’, she sees surveillance-style photographs of Ellen and Katie and of Katie’s dog. She also finds a red file labelled ‘Ellen Parsons’. Cut to Ellen approaching Stefania, who is sitting down. Stefania tells Ellen she found the file, and gives it to her. Cut to part of the way through 1: now we see that the person Ellen is threatening is Patty, who is looking scared. Patty asks her not to shoot, and Ellen puts away the gun, saying it isn’t loaded; then she gets the red file out of her bag. She hands it to Patty, who opens it and looks surprised. Cut to black, and we hear two gun-shots.
13 (about 2 minutes into episode 9): We see Tom getting out of the lift at the law firm. The security guard stops him going into the office. He insists that he wants to see Patty urgently and she’ll want to hear what he has to say, but the guard repeats that on Patty’s orders Tom isn’t allowed in the building any more. Tom gets back into the lift, saying, “Tell Patty that I tried to warn her, and... I’m filing suit against her for wrongful termination”. Cut to Tom peering through the grille of a door: this is the beginning of 5. We see flash-back 5 again, with the addition of the shot of Patty pleading for her life from flash-back 12, and without the shots fired.
14 (about 3 minutes into episode 10): Ellen talking to Patty as in 12 and 13, but now we see that Agent Werner has an audio-visual bug in the room and is watching and listening in a surveillance van. As Ellen fires the two shots, Werner jumps, takes off the headphones and hurries out of the van.
15 (end of episode 10): Pretty much the same as 14. After Werner gets out of the van we cut to a shot approaching Ellen’s door along the corridor, then cut to Werner running along the street. Ellen’s door opens and Patty comes out looking shocked. She puts her hand up to her face: there’s blood on it. She gets into the lift and slumps to the floor as the doors close.
16 (about 2 minutes into episode 11): An abbreviated version of 15. Werner runs into the hotel foyer and summons the lift. When it arrives he sees Patty lying inside. He gets out his phone and says, “My informant just shot Patty Hewes.”
17 (end of episode 11): An abbreviated version of 16, then we cut to a different location where Werner and other officers arrest and handcuff Ellen.
18 (beginning of episode 13): Same as 2, then rewinds back past the beginning of the flash-forward through various shots we’ve seen involving Ellen’s threatening conversation with Patty to Patty’s arrival at Ellen’s door. Stops rewinding and plays normally. Ellen opens the door and invites Patty in.
The problem with these flash-forwards is revealed by the way they are ultimately resolved, which is as follows:
Ellen does not shoot Patty: she shoots past her to destroy the surveillance camera by which Werner is watching from his van. The folder she hands Patty contains not what it had in it when Stefania gave it to her but a note saying, “The feds are watching”. Patty’s injury has nothing to do with the gun-shots but is caused a minute or two earlier by another character who stabs her in the lift on her way up to Ellen’s room. Wes stays at Ellen’s place with a bag full of firearms not to kill her but to protect her from Messer. When Messer enters the room while Ellen is in the shower, Wes intercepts him and sends him packing; later Wes shoots him in his car, which is the final bit of flash-forward 9. The remaining flash-forwards turn out to be pretty much what they looked like, except that 6 turns out not to have been a flash-forward at all but possibly a flash-back or even a scene placed in its correct chronological position.
It’s all very well for flash-forwards to be resolved in a totally unexpected way, but these resolutions are totally unexpected because, first, the flash-forwards are mostly contrived to make us expect something else and, second, what actually happens is often so implausible that we would never have expected it anyway. To begin with the contrivance, the clearest example is the way the first few flash-forwards quite artificially conceal from the viewer even the identity of the person Ellen is talking to, which is the televisual equivalent of the suppression of information in the Twilight prefaces except possibly even more blatant because in television it is impossible not to perceive immediately the unnaturalness of not seeing the faces of both people involved in a conversation. (The suppression is also necessitated by the same problem as with Twilight, namely that the flash-forward shows the climactic scene and therefore can’t afford to show it straight-forwardly for fear of giving away the ending.) There is also the case of flash-forwards 10 and 11, which in episode 13, after a suspenseful wait of six whole episodes, are resolved so quickly as to make them profoundly anti-climactic: oh no, Messer’s creeping up on Ellen with his gun, she has no idea he’s there, how will she survive? Oh look, Wes is pointing a gun at the back of Messer’s head and kicking him out. Oh. Okay.
This artificial creation of false expectation is in contrast to the flash-forwards in season one, and indeed those in Michael Clayton and Crash, which show us future events in a fairly straight-forward and honest way. We see that Ellen’s boyfriend will be murdered, and indeed he is; we don’t see who will do it, and that is part of the mystery of the series. In Michael Clayton we see that Clayton’s car will be blown up, and it is; in Crash we see a pile-up on the highway, and that’s what happens. The uncertainty and suspense is created by our inability to see the context and thus to understand why those events will happen or what their significance will be. We ask ourselves, “Who will kill the boyfriend, and why?” “Who will blow up the car, and why?” “What will the crime-scene be about, and what will catch Graham’s eye there?” And those questions are answered, and the tension thus resolved, when the plot naturally reaches the events that have already been glimpsed: when we see them the second time, we understand them, and if they amount to plot-twists it is not because they were themselves misleading but simply because we did not understand them the first time without their context. In season two of Damages, in contrast, we are manipulated into expecting events that do not happen at all. We ask, “Why will Ellen shoot Patty?” and the answer is, “Aha! She won’t! Fooled you, fooled you, nyah-nyah-nya-nyah-nyaaah!”
As for implausibility, it’s hard to know where to start. The prime is example is Tom going to pick up an illegally-bought gun for Ellen, which is totally incredible given that she has just mercilessly ruined his life. This is apparently meant to be explained away by her promise that if he does it she will “get the feds off [his] back for good”, but this is a meaningless promise because he has already got them off his back by doing exactly what she manipulated him into doing in the first place. And that’s not to mention the fact that there is no reason why she can’t collect it herself: she has nothing to do all day except meet Messer briefly at a time of her choosing (which in the end she doesn’t bother to do anyway, for no discernible reason except that she somehow psychically knows that the writers have already killed Messer off before the time of the meeting), and at the time Tom collects it she is busy doing nothing more important than having unexpected sex with Wes.
Artificial contrivance and ridiculous implausibility are deftly combined in the principal flash-forward tease: the shooting of Patty Hewes. By the end of flash-forward 18 an overwhelming number of things convince us that Ellen is going to shoot Patty. We see her let Patty into her room. We see her threaten Patty with the gun. We see her fire two shots in Patty’s direction. We see Patty coming out of the room with blood on her hands and collapsing in the lift. We see Werner finding her there and phoning someone to say that Ellen has shot her. We see Ellen being arrested. How does it come about that all these things happen and yet Ellen doesn’t shoot Patty? I’ve mentioned that the shots are fired to destroy the camera. There is no reason for Ellen to do this. The only reason the conversation is being watched in the first place is that Ellen set up the meeting as part of a plan to entrap Patty and have her arrested for bribing a judge, but by the time of the conversation she must already have decided not to go through with that plan and she could simply have called off the surveillance; alternatively she could allow the surveillance to continue and just ignored it, since nothing in the conversation would cause her any problems if it were recorded; nor has she anything at all to gain from making Werner or anyone else think she has shot Patty. I’ve also mentioned that the blood comes from a totally unrelated stab-wound (which is presumably bleeding steadily all over Ellen’s carpet during her conversation with Patty but which Ellen doesn’t notice and Patty doesn’t mention). This is the result of the stabber, Garrity, attacking Patty for no good reason except that she refuses to give accept his offer to testify against the company she is suing. There is, in turn, no reason for her to refuse this offer since it can only benefit her; nor is there any reason for Garrity to make this offer except that the boss of the company in question has recently beaten up his girlfriend, which in turn the boss has no reason to do except that Garrity threatened to testify against him: a threat that had already been neutralized without the need for anyone’s girlfriend to be beaten up at all. As for the arrest, this too is nothing to do with the shooting but is Ellen being arrested for trying to bribe the judge, which she has no reason to do once she’s abandoned the entrapment plan except that Patty urges her to do it anyway, which we think Patty is doing because she has discovered the entrapment plan and has in turn set up Ellen to be arrested in her place, whereas in fact we later discover that she has set up Werner to arrest Ellen only to be arrested himself, for which there was no need for Patty to have Ellen make the bribe because she already had quite enough evidence to have Werner arrested without it. Implausibility upon unnecessary complication upon under-motivated irrational act, all contrived for the sole purpose of getting a bleeding Patty into a room with a gun-firing soon-to-be-arrested Ellen in a way that doesn’t involving the Ellen-shooting-Patty that we have been led to regard as inevitable.
Now, it may be unfair to the writers to use words like “contrived” and “misleading” (which suggest that the flash-forwards were written deliberately to point the viewer away from the true outcome) because in fact the series was mostly written as it was being filmed and the writers themselves often did not know what the true outcome was going to be. This, I suspect, is the explanation for the spectacular failure of flash-forward 6: this was probably intended to be a flash-forward but in the end could not be made into anything exciting and therefore eventually got resolved in episode 12 with the revelation that Purcell killed his wife in anger after she threw a remote control at his head, this remote being the thing he burns and buries. (Which, incidentally, makes absolutely no sense: the remote control would in no way constitute evidence implicating him in the murder (which has already been comprehensively covered up by Purcell’s employer in any case) so he had no earthly reason to take it all the way to his country house and burn and bury it in the garden, and moreover if it had been of any interest to the police he would have had no opportunity to remove it because the police were all over his town-house within minutes of the murder.) It probably also explains why flash-forwards like 4 and 8 are included even though they really lead to nothing very much and neither create any significant tension nor lay the foundation for any major surprises. And most of all it may well explain why, saddled with a number of plot events that had already been predicted in the flash-forwards and still needing to end the story in a moderately unexpected way, the writers had to turn the entire final episode into a labyrinth of unlikelihood. But it is no excuse. It’s one thing to sow seeds for future plot-developments if you’re doing NaNoWriMo and the worst that will happen is that you’ll end up not using them all and having readers get to the end and possibly wonder whatever happened with that unexplained flower-pot in the bedroom, but if you’re making a major big-budget television series you don’t box yourself in by writing and broadcasting major elements of the plot in advance without the slightest idea how you’re going to fit them together.
Coda
The flash-forwards in season two of Damages are an extreme example of what can go wrong with this device: they not only fall into the trap of artificially manipulating the audience in the same way that the Twilight books do, rather than working constructively with the audience’s perception to create trifarious suspense like Crash and Michael Clayton, but they actually become such a burden that the story itself gets distorted in order to accommodate them. The abuse of the flash-forward opener is rarely so egregious, but it shows what can happen when a narrative device becomes an end in itself. The flash-forward openers of the two films I began with are short, subtle, and restrained: they enhance the narrative but are not essential. In fact what Robert McKee says about voice-over narration may well be true of flash-forwards: they should be used only if the story would be satisfactorily told without them.
It’s very much to be hoped that works like Michael Clayton and Crash are taken up by writers as examples of the flash-forward opener and that malfunctional examples like Twilight and Damages neither invite emulation nor so thoroughly discredit the flash-forward opener that it disappears from self-respecting fiction. When used well and judiciously it is a unique and subtle charm in the story-teller’s spell-book.
Notes
[1] Unless, of course, the flash-forward shows the climax of the plot, which would mean either losing the traditional narrative tension of not knowing what’s going to happen in the end (I don’t know whether this has ever been done) or suppressing information in the flash-forward so as not to give away the real climax (see my remarks on Twilight and Damages in this article).
[2] A chiz is a swiz or swindle as any fule kno.
[3] I don’t know whether this cliff-hanger is actually notorious, but it deserves to be. I wish I could find you links to images of the last page of 133 and the first page of 134: it’s simply hilarious.
[4] Speaking to Jim Halterman
[5] I’m not going to trouble you with explanations of who these characters are. You can look them up on teh interweb, but for the purposes of this article you don’t need to know.
[Length warning: This article is really quite long.]
We all know that over the last few decades it has become increasingly common in works of fiction to play tricks with chronology. The more radically non-chronological approaches, like the backward narratives of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal and Jonathan and Christopher Nolan’s Memento or the jigsaw-puzzle presentation of Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary’s Pulp Fiction, remain fairly rare; but at least one of the less mind-boggling departures from A-B-C story-telling is now becoming a common narrative device. This is the flash-forward.
Definitions and prospectus
There’s a little inconsistency out there in the use of the term ‘flash-forward’. It is sometimes used to mean nothing more than a point at which the narrative moves forward in time by skipping over a longer-than-usual chronological interval between the events of one scene and those of the next (it’s in this sense that the cut, in 2001: A Space Odyssey, between the leg-bone being thrown into the air by a prehistoric primate and the space-station spinning through the stars three million years later has been called “the longest flash-forward in the history of cinema”). The wikipedia entry declares that the flash-forward is “also called prolepsis”, although prolepsis is really a much wider concept covering any form of reference forward in time, and then gives a broad definition that includes the depiction of predicted or imagined future events even if these events do not ultimately occur. Perhaps the term is not sufficiently well established to quibble about its ‘correct’ usage, but what I want to discuss, and what I’m going to call a flash-forward in this article, is simply the direct opposite of that well-known device the flash-back.
A flash-back is the depiction (in the same medium as the primary narrative, for example shown in moving pictures if the work is a film, narrated in prose if the work is a novel, but not, for example, as a mere ‘messenger speech’ in a play) of a scene or series of scenes that took place chronologically before the point in the narrative at which it is depicted. A flash-forward, in the sense I mean, is the depiction (again in the same medium as the primary narrative) of a scene or series of scenes that will take place chronologically after the point in the narrative at which it is depicted. It does not include hypothetical future scenarios imagined by the characters: in order to be a flash-forward it must be something that will in fact happen, whether within the primary narrative (which is the more common kind) or after its end (as, for example, with the prologue of Alan Moore’s From Hell).
In fact what I want to talk about is even more specific than the flash-forward as I’ve just defined it: it’s the use of a flash-forward to begin a work of fiction (or a part of such a work). I’m going to call this the ‘flash-forward opener’.
How it works: Michael Clayton and Crash
Two recent cinematic examples are found in Michael Clayton (2007, written and directed by Tony Gilroy) and Crash (2004, written and directed by Paul Haggis). Michael Clayton begins with a full 15 minutes of flash-forward, in which we see the office of some kind of company bustling with people at an improbably late hour, and we hear one of these people taking a call from a journalist from which we gather that the company is hurrying to settle a law-suit secretly; we see the title character, who we learn is a ‘fixer’ for a law-firm, playing poker and then being called out to do some ‘fixing’ for a wealthy man who has just accidentally run down a pedestrian with his car; and we then see Clayton driving, getting out of his car to look at some horses standing by the roadside in the dawn light, and reacting with surprise as his car explodes behind him. Only as he runs down the bank towards it do we discover we have been in a flash-forward, as the screen fades to white and we see the caption ‘Four days earlier’ that takes us into the beginning of the primary narrative. In Crash the opening flash-forward is shorter, and we know it is a flash-forward from the outset because we see the caption ‘Tomorrow’. We see a man and a woman in a car, and after a while it becomes clear that their car is part of a pile-up. The woman, who is Hispanic and, it soon turns out, a police officer, gets out of the car and becomes involved in an argument with a Korean woman; meanwhile the man approaches a taped-off crime-scene by the roadside, talks to a detective in terms that make us think he too may be a police officer, and starts to examine the crime-scene, at which point we fade to black with a caption ‘Today’.
These two flash-forwards serve similar purposes. Some are purposes that would have to be served one way or another anyway, such as establishing characters. The Michael Clayton flash-forward tells us that Clayton is a ‘fixer’; he can be called on at times and in situations that would be outside the realm of a normal lawyer and that suggests things may not be entirely above board; at least one person describes him as a ‘miracle-worker’, though he calls himself a ‘janitor’; he is calm, quiet, and authoritative, and despite other indications appears to be basically one of the good guys (he says that he knows local people who can help the hit-and-run driver deal with the police and fight his case in court but refuses to countenance the implied request that he help the driver cover the whole thing up). In Crash we get an irascible Ria and a reserved and philosophical Graham who seem to be a couple, to know each other fairly well, and to be cops. The flash-forwards also begin to set up themes. In Crash it’s race and racism: he’s African-American, she’s Hispanic, and the argument with the Korean woman involves racist unpleasantness on both sides; in Michael Clayton, it’s the efforts of the wealthy to evade justice, and the moral strain those efforts place on the lawyers whom they pay to assist them: the hit-and-run mini-drama in the flash-forward contains many of the moral issues of the main plot in a simplified form that both flags them up and also contrasts with the greater murkiness of the main narrative.
The flash-forwards also do something that specifically exploits the fact that they are showing us snippets of the future, namely to tease us and hook our interest: to create tension. Of course creating tension is not the sole preserve of the flash-forward. Any opening scene, like any scene except the conclusion, must create a desire to know what is going to happen next. But an opening scene that’s a flash-forward creates three different types of tension.
First, it is a scene in the plot like any other except the conclusion [1] and therefore, like any other scene, leaves you wanting to know what happens next (i.e. chronologically after the scene ends). In our two examples, we want to know what Clayton will find when he reaches his burning car and what he will do about it and whether, if this was a deliberate attempt to kill him, the assassins will try again and whether they will succeed; we want to know what Graham has noticed in the long grass, and (if we think this will be a crime-solving sort of film) whether it will help him solve the crime that seems to have been committed.
Secondly, because the flash-forward scene, although placed at the beginning of the narrative, is not itself the beginning of the plot (i.e. it does not show the event that sets the story in motion), it leaves you wanting to know what happened before and thus how things got to this point: why has Clayton’s car blown up? who committed the crime whose evidence Graham is inspecting? what, in general, is going on, and what is this story all about anyway? In this respect the flash-forward has the same sort of effect as any event during the course of a story that is, at the time it occurs, unexpected and / or unexplained.
Both these tensions are created by and within the flash-forward itself and are immediate; the third is slower and longer-lasting because it occurs not during the flash-forward but continuously throughout the rest of the story, and it is the constant desire to know how we are going to get from the point we are now at to the point we know is inevitably coming. Once we discover that the company we saw in the flash-forward is a chemical company paying Clayton’s law-firm to fight a law-suit brought by people claiming to have been poisoned by its products, we want to know how it will come to be working through the small hours to settle the suit; when we see Graham called to investigate a police shooting, we wonder whether this will turn out to be related to the road-side crime that will occur, or be discovered, later, and whether it will be the reason he’ll look so weary.
In short, a story that opens with a flash-forward has us looking expectantly three different ways: forward from the end of the flash-forward trying to see the next turn of events and ultimately the end of the plot; back from the beginning of the flash-forward trying to see the ‘real-time’ plot approaching; and forward from whatever point we are at in the ‘real-time’ plot trying to see the flash-forward looming up in front of us. It’s a very effective and economical tension-maker, and it’s easy to see why a writer would use it.
But...
How it fails: Twilight
Another well-known recent outing for the flash-forward opener is Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight book-series (specifically the first three - Twilight, New Moon, and Eclipse - because they’re the ones I’ve read). These are really an example of the sloppy use of the flash-forward opener, making the device pointless at best and confusing at worst. Each book begins with a preface that flashes forward to the climactic scene of the book. Perhaps the first thing to mention is that, this being printed prose, Meyer is able to exert significantly more control over the information we do and don’t get from these flash-forwards than in the two cinematic examples I’ve already discussed. One thing she can conceal is the identity of all the characters except the narrator (whom we correctly assume to be the same as the narrator of the rest of the book, Bella). In Twilight there is only one other character referred to, described as “the hunter”; in New Moon, by contrast, Alice is named; but in Eclipse we go back to vagueness with “my protector” and another character who has “black eyes”. This means that as we read the rest of the book we don’t know whether any new character who is introduced is someone we have already met in the preface. The same is true of other features we might expect to recognize from the preface, especially location: the climactic scene in Twilight takes place in a mirrored dance studio, but nothing in the preface suggests this, even though it would be a much more obvious feature to mention than the adjective Meyer does use to describe the room, “long”. New Moon is again more explicit, giving us sufficient features (the crowd, the bright sunlight, and the clock-tower) to identify when the main narrative arrives at the location where the preface took place; but Eclipse has no description of the surroundings at all, except that we are “far, far away” from “the cold forest”.
Meyer is clearly deliberately suppressing clues to the identities of people and places in order to stop us working out anything important about the climax before we get to it: this means that in Twilight we must not know when we first meet James that he is “the hunter” from the preface, nor when we first hear of Alice’s vision of the mirrored room must we work out that it’s the location for the climactic scene. In Eclipse the suppression is even more thorough: for the location because Bella and Edward spend quite some time hanging around on the mountain where the confrontation with Victoria will occur and Meyer wants it to be a surprise when Victoria turns up (since the battle is meant to be taking place elsewhere); for the characters because, I strongly suspect, we are supposed to entertain throughout the book the possibility that the “protector” will be Jacob rather than Edward (in keeping with the general ‘choice between Jacob and Edward’ strand of the plot). The preface of New Moon is able to be much less strained and more natural in the level of detail it gives because we don’t encounter the location until very near the scene forecast by the preface, and the only other character present is Alice, who is around throughout the book and whose presence therefore gives nothing away. The reference to “our extraordinarily dangerous enemies”, though, is still kept deliberately woolly because to name the Volturi at this stage would give away a significant plot development.
The preface of Twilight in fact goes to such lengths to disguise itself that it is even rather difficult to identify precisely when we reach the moment that it foretells. This is another contrast with Crash and Michael Clayton, which both repeat the relevant shots from the flash-forward (or at least some of them) at the relevant points in the main narrative; in Meyer’s books, the words of the preface are never repeated. In the preface of Twilight, “the hunter” smiles “in a friendly way” and then “saunter[s] forward to kill me”, but the moment of attack in chapter 22 is quite different: James circles Bella and then crouches down, his smile “widen[s]... till it [is]n’t a smile at all but a contortion of teeth, exposed and glittering”, then Bella tries to flee (not mentioned at all in the preface) and James attacks her with superhuman speed. On Meyer’s website she says that the preface isn’t in fact describing this moment at all but is to be inserted some paragraphs earlier, when Bella first enters the room; this is either retrospective rationalizing of sloppy writing or else proof that the preface is in fact deliberately misleading, since according to Meyer the end of the preface, “he sauntered forward to kill me”, is followed by James not in fact making the slightest attempt to kill her but merely walking past her and putting down the remote control next to the video player. This is a chiz [2] on a par with the notorious [3] cliff-hanger between Uncanny X-Men issues 133 and 134.
One can, of course, argue that all this suppression of information and manipulation of perception is necessary if you’re going to flash forward to the climactic scene of a story. But if that’s the case, shouldn’t the writer be asking herself whether it’s really a good idea to flash forward to the climax at all? The flash-forward openers of Crash and Michael Clayton flash to scenes that are not climactic but can in fact be forecast quite safely: in Crash this is because nothing really happens in the scene until just after the end of the flash-forward, and there is only the very slightest hint in the flash-forward itself that anything important is going to happen after that point; in Michael Clayton it’s because the scene with the hit-and-run driver is almost irrelevant to the main plot (more on this later), and the explosion of the car, though significant, is so totally mysterious when taken out of context that it gives nothing away except that this will be a film in which dangerous things may occur.
In fact the preface of each of the Twilight books is so profoundly uninformative that I found I had completely forgotten its content by the time I got to about page 100 anyway. I was therefore one of the lucky readers whose experience of the rest of the book was largely unimpaired by the preface. Others, it seems, are not so lucky: one of the Frequently Asked Questions on Meyer’s website is, “I'm confused by the preface; who is the Hunter?”. Now I have to say that the people who are Frequently Asking this Question must be a bit dense if they’ve read the whole book, re-read the preface, and are still puzzled. Nonetheless, if one of your 21 most frequent questions is “I’m confused by the preface” that is a sign not only of a particularly obtuse readership but also of bad writing. And I suspect that if I had bothered to retain the content of the preface in my head right up to chapter 22 I would also have been sufficiently confused that I’d have needed at least to go back and re-read it, which is not really what you want your readers doing during the climactic scene. Similarly, the preface of Eclipse gave me the fairly strong impression that there was only a single aggressor, and it was only the third time I read it (my second re-reading in preparation for this article) that I noticed that “he was outnumbered”. Clearly if I hadn’t forgotten the thing entirely by the time I got to chapter 24 I would have been puzzled, or felt tricked into expecting only one attacker, or failed to realize that this was the scene from the preface.
So, in terms of the functions of the flash-forward opener I mentioned when discussing Michael Clayton and Crash, the Twilight prefaces fall down on attempting to create tension (because they are so unhelpful that the reader is likely either to forget them or be confused or misled), but what about the other functions? They don’t establish character because they suppress most character’s identities and say very little even about Bella except that she tends to put herself in harm’s way. Do they foreshadow themes and plot-points? Sort of. In all three cases they tell us what is likely to be at stake in the books: the death of Bella and / or someone she loves. We may perhaps doubt how valuable this information really is since we already know (if we have any idea what kind of book we have in our hands) that vampires are going to be involved. The preface of Twilight also suggests that love will be a feature, but we can’t tell whether it will be the love of friends, family, or lovers, so really this tells us almost nothing except that it is not a book filled with unmitigated hatred and indifference. Moreover, the theme most strongly implied by the preface is in fact not one that the book really addresses at all: apart from the plot-oriented lines like “I stared without breathing across the long room, into the dark eyes of the hunter, and he looked pleasantly back at me”, the entire preface seems to be concerned with reflections on death and the proper attitude towards it: questions like ‘how will death come?’ (“I'd never given much thought to dying... I would not have imagined it like this.”); ‘what constitutes a good death?’ (“Surely it was a good way to die, in the place of someone else, someone I loved. Noble, even. That ought to count for something.”); ‘when does death become inevitable?’ (“I knew that if I'd never gone to Forks, I wouldn't be facing death now.”); ‘how should we feel about the prospect of dying?’ (“I couldn't bring myself to regret the decision. When life offers you a dream so far beyond any of your expectations, it's not reasonable to grieve when it comes to an end.”). The rest of the novel does not concern itself with these questions to any significant extent and is far more concerned with questions of ill-advised romantic love and what sacrifices are worth making for it. The preface of New Moon seems to concern itself with self-sacrifice, despair, and living (or dying) without love, which are closer to the actual concerns of the book; but Eclipse’s preface is entirely about fighting against the odds for survival and to protect others, which is indeed what is at stake in the scene in question but is much less significant for the book as a whole than questions like rivalry in love and choice between two incompatible goods.
In sum, the Twilight flash-forward prefaces are likely to have either no effect or only an unhelpful effect on the reader. They are, I suspect, there principally to assure the reader that something exciting and dangerous will happen at some point, lest we give up during the early chapters of day-to-day teenage angst and woe in the absence of any threat to life and limb. They are a combination of lazy writing and strained manipulation of the reader, but they do little serious harm and do not get in the way of the plot itself.
How it not only fails but brings the whole plot crashing down around its ears: Damages
Far more culpable is my last example, the television legal drama Damages, written by Todd and Glenn Kessler and Daniel Zelman. In the first season flash-forward openers were used fairly extensively: the whole series, and many individual episodes, began with a flash-forward, though some episodes began in the present or even with flash-backs. Flash-forwards were often also used to end episodes. The flash-forwards were distinguished from ‘real time’ by being shot in harshly over-exposed colour. Flash-forwards were usually only a minute or two long, and by and large they built up coherently and comprehensively over the course of the thirteen episodes to form a picture of events in the ‘future’ as the main plot approached the beginning of the flash-forward plot. Although, like the Twilight flash-forwards, these relied to some extent on keeping the audience slightly confused and off-balance, they were sufficiently comprehensible that they worked as a narrative device and kept up the tension as the main narrative unfolded. More importantly, the events they forecast (principally the murder of the heroine Ellen’s fiancé, and an attempt to kill Ellen herself) are natural and important developments of the main plot, so the tension created was meaningful and was ultimately rewarded when the main plot arrived at those points. But then came season two.
According to Todd Kessler, the producers “figured that this was very much kind of a signature to the first season of having these two timeframes... So what started as a way of just telling stories in the first season in a significant way has emerged as a signature to our storytelling for Damages.”[4] In other words, where in the first season flash-forwards had served a real narrative purpose, in the second season they were to be used as a gimmick whether necessary or not. Most episodes begin and end with a flash-forward, or at least feature one at some point, shot in the same visual style as in season one but dramatically much more fragmentary. From one flash-forward to the next, it is not clear whether they are in any kind of chronological order within the future time-line, or how they relate to one another causally. Sometimes we see one we have seen before, but slightly extended; at other times we see two we have seen before placed next to one another to suggest a new chronological relationship. These flash-forwards, in short, serve simply to confuse and mislead the viewer. To unpack that assertion I’m afraid I need to slightly tediously take you through them one by one.
1 (beginning of episode 1): Ellen [5] is in a room drinking whiskey and apparently talking to someone we don’t see or hear. In the background we hear Just For A Thrill by Ray Charles. Ellen is vaguely threatening and is asking for the unseen person to tell the truth. She shows that she has a gun.
2 (end of episode 1): Apparently a continuation of 1. Ellen decides the other person is not going to tell her what she wants and fires two shots in the direction in which she has been talking.
3 (beginning of episode 2): Same as 2.
4 (about 15 minutes into episode 2): Same room as 1-3. Ellen and Wes are rolling around in bed. Ellen’s phone rings. She gets up and dresses, refusing to tell Wes what the call was or where she’s going. She leaves.
5 (about 30 minutes into episode 2): Tom enters an apparently empty building, goes downstairs, removes something that was taped to the underside of a desk. He leaves. Then we see him sitting in a car. Ellen gets in; Tom hands her a towel in which is wrapped a handgun. He says, “I hope you know what you’re doing.” She says she does and gets out. Then we see Ellen firing two shots as in 2.
6 (end of episode 2): Purcell digs a hole at night, throws something into it, sets fire to whatever it was.
7 (about 3 minutes into episode 4): Ellen’s room, Just For A Thrill playing in the background. Ellen picks up a gun from the bed, puts it into her handbag. Knock at the door. She invites someone in - we don’t see who it is. She asks, “Is that the money?” (we see a briefcase at the feet of whoever has just sat down, but not the feet themselves) and then, “Are you sure you’re okay? You seem a little worried.” Cut to the outside of the door as if through the eyes of someone approaching. Cut back to Ellen firing the two shots as in 2. View from outside the door again: Ellen opens it, looks around, then leaves carrying the briefcase.
8 (about 15 minutes into episode 5): Camera approaches Ellen’s door from outside. A knock. She looks through the spy-hole and opens it. It’s Wes. She says, “I told you you can’t be here today”, but they kiss and he comes in and closes the door behind him.
9 (end of episode 5): Wes is packing a bag. He packs three hand-guns. Now we see him waiting in the foyer of Ellen’s hotel, talking on his mobile: he’s cancelling a flight reservation. Ellen comes into the foyer; Wes tells her there’s work being done at his building and asks to stay for a few nights. Cut to an outdoor car-park in daylight; a parked car. The windscreen is suddenly punctured by what looks like a bullet-hole, and we seem to see blood on the glass. The back door opens and Wes gets out.
10 (about 30 minutes into episode 6): Messer is in a car outside Ellen’s hotel. He sees Ellen entering the building. He goes up in the lift and furtively enters her room using a key-card.
11 (end of episode 6): Possibly a continuation of 10. Messer enters Ellen’s room. Ellen is in the shower, singing Just For A Thrill. She calls out, “Wes, is that you?” Messer takes out a gun and attaches a silencer. He approaches the bathroom.
12 (end of episode 8): Uncle Pete’s wife Stefania opens a closet and finds a box of files. In one file, marked ‘Katie Connor’, she sees surveillance-style photographs of Ellen and Katie and of Katie’s dog. She also finds a red file labelled ‘Ellen Parsons’. Cut to Ellen approaching Stefania, who is sitting down. Stefania tells Ellen she found the file, and gives it to her. Cut to part of the way through 1: now we see that the person Ellen is threatening is Patty, who is looking scared. Patty asks her not to shoot, and Ellen puts away the gun, saying it isn’t loaded; then she gets the red file out of her bag. She hands it to Patty, who opens it and looks surprised. Cut to black, and we hear two gun-shots.
13 (about 2 minutes into episode 9): We see Tom getting out of the lift at the law firm. The security guard stops him going into the office. He insists that he wants to see Patty urgently and she’ll want to hear what he has to say, but the guard repeats that on Patty’s orders Tom isn’t allowed in the building any more. Tom gets back into the lift, saying, “Tell Patty that I tried to warn her, and... I’m filing suit against her for wrongful termination”. Cut to Tom peering through the grille of a door: this is the beginning of 5. We see flash-back 5 again, with the addition of the shot of Patty pleading for her life from flash-back 12, and without the shots fired.
14 (about 3 minutes into episode 10): Ellen talking to Patty as in 12 and 13, but now we see that Agent Werner has an audio-visual bug in the room and is watching and listening in a surveillance van. As Ellen fires the two shots, Werner jumps, takes off the headphones and hurries out of the van.
15 (end of episode 10): Pretty much the same as 14. After Werner gets out of the van we cut to a shot approaching Ellen’s door along the corridor, then cut to Werner running along the street. Ellen’s door opens and Patty comes out looking shocked. She puts her hand up to her face: there’s blood on it. She gets into the lift and slumps to the floor as the doors close.
16 (about 2 minutes into episode 11): An abbreviated version of 15. Werner runs into the hotel foyer and summons the lift. When it arrives he sees Patty lying inside. He gets out his phone and says, “My informant just shot Patty Hewes.”
17 (end of episode 11): An abbreviated version of 16, then we cut to a different location where Werner and other officers arrest and handcuff Ellen.
18 (beginning of episode 13): Same as 2, then rewinds back past the beginning of the flash-forward through various shots we’ve seen involving Ellen’s threatening conversation with Patty to Patty’s arrival at Ellen’s door. Stops rewinding and plays normally. Ellen opens the door and invites Patty in.
The problem with these flash-forwards is revealed by the way they are ultimately resolved, which is as follows:
Ellen does not shoot Patty: she shoots past her to destroy the surveillance camera by which Werner is watching from his van. The folder she hands Patty contains not what it had in it when Stefania gave it to her but a note saying, “The feds are watching”. Patty’s injury has nothing to do with the gun-shots but is caused a minute or two earlier by another character who stabs her in the lift on her way up to Ellen’s room. Wes stays at Ellen’s place with a bag full of firearms not to kill her but to protect her from Messer. When Messer enters the room while Ellen is in the shower, Wes intercepts him and sends him packing; later Wes shoots him in his car, which is the final bit of flash-forward 9. The remaining flash-forwards turn out to be pretty much what they looked like, except that 6 turns out not to have been a flash-forward at all but possibly a flash-back or even a scene placed in its correct chronological position.
It’s all very well for flash-forwards to be resolved in a totally unexpected way, but these resolutions are totally unexpected because, first, the flash-forwards are mostly contrived to make us expect something else and, second, what actually happens is often so implausible that we would never have expected it anyway. To begin with the contrivance, the clearest example is the way the first few flash-forwards quite artificially conceal from the viewer even the identity of the person Ellen is talking to, which is the televisual equivalent of the suppression of information in the Twilight prefaces except possibly even more blatant because in television it is impossible not to perceive immediately the unnaturalness of not seeing the faces of both people involved in a conversation. (The suppression is also necessitated by the same problem as with Twilight, namely that the flash-forward shows the climactic scene and therefore can’t afford to show it straight-forwardly for fear of giving away the ending.) There is also the case of flash-forwards 10 and 11, which in episode 13, after a suspenseful wait of six whole episodes, are resolved so quickly as to make them profoundly anti-climactic: oh no, Messer’s creeping up on Ellen with his gun, she has no idea he’s there, how will she survive? Oh look, Wes is pointing a gun at the back of Messer’s head and kicking him out. Oh. Okay.
This artificial creation of false expectation is in contrast to the flash-forwards in season one, and indeed those in Michael Clayton and Crash, which show us future events in a fairly straight-forward and honest way. We see that Ellen’s boyfriend will be murdered, and indeed he is; we don’t see who will do it, and that is part of the mystery of the series. In Michael Clayton we see that Clayton’s car will be blown up, and it is; in Crash we see a pile-up on the highway, and that’s what happens. The uncertainty and suspense is created by our inability to see the context and thus to understand why those events will happen or what their significance will be. We ask ourselves, “Who will kill the boyfriend, and why?” “Who will blow up the car, and why?” “What will the crime-scene be about, and what will catch Graham’s eye there?” And those questions are answered, and the tension thus resolved, when the plot naturally reaches the events that have already been glimpsed: when we see them the second time, we understand them, and if they amount to plot-twists it is not because they were themselves misleading but simply because we did not understand them the first time without their context. In season two of Damages, in contrast, we are manipulated into expecting events that do not happen at all. We ask, “Why will Ellen shoot Patty?” and the answer is, “Aha! She won’t! Fooled you, fooled you, nyah-nyah-nya-nyah-nyaaah!”
As for implausibility, it’s hard to know where to start. The prime is example is Tom going to pick up an illegally-bought gun for Ellen, which is totally incredible given that she has just mercilessly ruined his life. This is apparently meant to be explained away by her promise that if he does it she will “get the feds off [his] back for good”, but this is a meaningless promise because he has already got them off his back by doing exactly what she manipulated him into doing in the first place. And that’s not to mention the fact that there is no reason why she can’t collect it herself: she has nothing to do all day except meet Messer briefly at a time of her choosing (which in the end she doesn’t bother to do anyway, for no discernible reason except that she somehow psychically knows that the writers have already killed Messer off before the time of the meeting), and at the time Tom collects it she is busy doing nothing more important than having unexpected sex with Wes.
Artificial contrivance and ridiculous implausibility are deftly combined in the principal flash-forward tease: the shooting of Patty Hewes. By the end of flash-forward 18 an overwhelming number of things convince us that Ellen is going to shoot Patty. We see her let Patty into her room. We see her threaten Patty with the gun. We see her fire two shots in Patty’s direction. We see Patty coming out of the room with blood on her hands and collapsing in the lift. We see Werner finding her there and phoning someone to say that Ellen has shot her. We see Ellen being arrested. How does it come about that all these things happen and yet Ellen doesn’t shoot Patty? I’ve mentioned that the shots are fired to destroy the camera. There is no reason for Ellen to do this. The only reason the conversation is being watched in the first place is that Ellen set up the meeting as part of a plan to entrap Patty and have her arrested for bribing a judge, but by the time of the conversation she must already have decided not to go through with that plan and she could simply have called off the surveillance; alternatively she could allow the surveillance to continue and just ignored it, since nothing in the conversation would cause her any problems if it were recorded; nor has she anything at all to gain from making Werner or anyone else think she has shot Patty. I’ve also mentioned that the blood comes from a totally unrelated stab-wound (which is presumably bleeding steadily all over Ellen’s carpet during her conversation with Patty but which Ellen doesn’t notice and Patty doesn’t mention). This is the result of the stabber, Garrity, attacking Patty for no good reason except that she refuses to give accept his offer to testify against the company she is suing. There is, in turn, no reason for her to refuse this offer since it can only benefit her; nor is there any reason for Garrity to make this offer except that the boss of the company in question has recently beaten up his girlfriend, which in turn the boss has no reason to do except that Garrity threatened to testify against him: a threat that had already been neutralized without the need for anyone’s girlfriend to be beaten up at all. As for the arrest, this too is nothing to do with the shooting but is Ellen being arrested for trying to bribe the judge, which she has no reason to do once she’s abandoned the entrapment plan except that Patty urges her to do it anyway, which we think Patty is doing because she has discovered the entrapment plan and has in turn set up Ellen to be arrested in her place, whereas in fact we later discover that she has set up Werner to arrest Ellen only to be arrested himself, for which there was no need for Patty to have Ellen make the bribe because she already had quite enough evidence to have Werner arrested without it. Implausibility upon unnecessary complication upon under-motivated irrational act, all contrived for the sole purpose of getting a bleeding Patty into a room with a gun-firing soon-to-be-arrested Ellen in a way that doesn’t involving the Ellen-shooting-Patty that we have been led to regard as inevitable.
Now, it may be unfair to the writers to use words like “contrived” and “misleading” (which suggest that the flash-forwards were written deliberately to point the viewer away from the true outcome) because in fact the series was mostly written as it was being filmed and the writers themselves often did not know what the true outcome was going to be. This, I suspect, is the explanation for the spectacular failure of flash-forward 6: this was probably intended to be a flash-forward but in the end could not be made into anything exciting and therefore eventually got resolved in episode 12 with the revelation that Purcell killed his wife in anger after she threw a remote control at his head, this remote being the thing he burns and buries. (Which, incidentally, makes absolutely no sense: the remote control would in no way constitute evidence implicating him in the murder (which has already been comprehensively covered up by Purcell’s employer in any case) so he had no earthly reason to take it all the way to his country house and burn and bury it in the garden, and moreover if it had been of any interest to the police he would have had no opportunity to remove it because the police were all over his town-house within minutes of the murder.) It probably also explains why flash-forwards like 4 and 8 are included even though they really lead to nothing very much and neither create any significant tension nor lay the foundation for any major surprises. And most of all it may well explain why, saddled with a number of plot events that had already been predicted in the flash-forwards and still needing to end the story in a moderately unexpected way, the writers had to turn the entire final episode into a labyrinth of unlikelihood. But it is no excuse. It’s one thing to sow seeds for future plot-developments if you’re doing NaNoWriMo and the worst that will happen is that you’ll end up not using them all and having readers get to the end and possibly wonder whatever happened with that unexplained flower-pot in the bedroom, but if you’re making a major big-budget television series you don’t box yourself in by writing and broadcasting major elements of the plot in advance without the slightest idea how you’re going to fit them together.
Coda
The flash-forwards in season two of Damages are an extreme example of what can go wrong with this device: they not only fall into the trap of artificially manipulating the audience in the same way that the Twilight books do, rather than working constructively with the audience’s perception to create trifarious suspense like Crash and Michael Clayton, but they actually become such a burden that the story itself gets distorted in order to accommodate them. The abuse of the flash-forward opener is rarely so egregious, but it shows what can happen when a narrative device becomes an end in itself. The flash-forward openers of the two films I began with are short, subtle, and restrained: they enhance the narrative but are not essential. In fact what Robert McKee says about voice-over narration may well be true of flash-forwards: they should be used only if the story would be satisfactorily told without them.
It’s very much to be hoped that works like Michael Clayton and Crash are taken up by writers as examples of the flash-forward opener and that malfunctional examples like Twilight and Damages neither invite emulation nor so thoroughly discredit the flash-forward opener that it disappears from self-respecting fiction. When used well and judiciously it is a unique and subtle charm in the story-teller’s spell-book.
Notes
[1] Unless, of course, the flash-forward shows the climax of the plot, which would mean either losing the traditional narrative tension of not knowing what’s going to happen in the end (I don’t know whether this has ever been done) or suppressing information in the flash-forward so as not to give away the real climax (see my remarks on Twilight and Damages in this article).
[2] A chiz is a swiz or swindle as any fule kno.
[3] I don’t know whether this cliff-hanger is actually notorious, but it deserves to be. I wish I could find you links to images of the last page of 133 and the first page of 134: it’s simply hilarious.
[4] Speaking to Jim Halterman
[5] I’m not going to trouble you with explanations of who these characters are. You can look them up on teh interweb, but for the purposes of this article you don’t need to know.
Themes: Books, TV & Movies
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As far as bad cliffhangers go, the old Republic movie serials (from whence we get the likes of Flash Gordon) were notorious for their dodgy cliffhangers: an episode would include with an almost certainly fatal incident for the protagonist, and then rather than coming up with a smart way for the protagonist to get out of the situation the writers would edit in an extra bit when the cliffhanger was replayed at the beginning of the next episode, revealing that the hero was never in any danger in the first place. (For example, they'd show the hero's vehicle falling off a cliff, and then in the next episode they'd edit back in the bit where the hero gets out of the vehicle...)
MacBeth and LotR and Harry Potter show prophets saying stuff and the Light-siders manipulate the form of words of the Prophecy to win; e.g Merry and Eowen are NOT men.
F!F explicitly shows the Prophecy ON screen, which has a bigger emotional impact; e.g. Blake's 7 shows the Liberator exploding; Xena season 4 is predicated on Xena having an ON screen vision of Gabrielle with a shaven head being tortured to Death.
Blake's 7 gets round it by having a similiar sized ship explode so the Prophecy is fulfilled.
Xena season 4 wallows in the F!F. Gabrielle obediently shaves her head to achieve the torture.
I quite like a well done flash-forward. The Emperor's New Groove does it rather well (and with tongue in cheek, which helps), skipping forwards to half-way through the plot. I liked the way Heroes used to do it, back in the day when visions and glimpses of the future were more certain. The lead up to Isaac's death, for example, I thought was particularly good. Later on you stopped being able to trust anything and the impact of prophetic paintings was massively diminished.
But I too hate flash-forwards which pretend to show people dying only for it to be a trick/for them to miraculously pull through. The Matrix Reloaded pulled that one particularly stupidly, I seem to remember.
I'm not sure -- everywhere I've seen them, flash forwards imply more inevitability than prophecies. I think a LoTR flash forward would have been more like Tolkien writing in a prologue "The Witch-King was afraid, for he knew of the ancient prophecy which decreed he would meet his end at the hand of a woman dressed in men's armor, and a hobbit with an enchanted blade" and then going on to say "some months earlier, Bilbo Baggins had a party..." when starting the main plot.
I like a flash-forward when it's done well, and especially when the concept is played with somewhat -- the film Next did something reasonably novel, with an entire chunk of the film being essentially a flash-forward, and resolved it fairly nicely in my view. But then, I am sheeple and easily satisfied :-)
Dafydd, I'd draw two main distinctions between flash-forwards (as I defined them) and prophecies. First, as Rami says, a flash-forward shows something that will certainly happen in precisely the way it's shown, whereas a prophecy describes something that is predicted to happen but may conceivably not happen, or may happen in an unexpected way. Secondly (and less easily to explain clearly), although both a flash-forward and a prophecy are descriptions of the future, the flash-forward is a description that exists in the telling of the story but not within the story, whereas a prophecy is a description that exists within the story. To put that another way, the characters in the story know that the prophecy exists (or at least are capable of knowing it if they were told), whereas it's logically impossible for the characters in the story to have any knowledge of the flash-forward because it doesn't exist within the story: it's simply a way of telling the story, specifically by taking a slice of the story that chronologically occurs later and showing it to the audience (but not the characters) prematurely.
You'll see from that, if I've explained it intelligibly, that I would regard all four of your examples as prophecies (or at least visions of the future - 'prophecy' implies someone doing the foretelling, whereas some of these are just characters perceiving the future) and not flash-forwards (by my definition), regardless of whether they occur 'on-screen' or not. In each case, one or more characters perceives or is told about the future, which means the description of the future exists within the story. Likewise Rami's hypothetical Lord Of The Rings example I would also say is still a prophecy and not a flash-forward, because it's a character being aware of a description of the future. A true flash-forward would be more like, "As the Witch-King girded his mighty knees and magically secured his crown above his non-existent head, little did he know that he he would meet his end at the hand of a woman dressed in men's armor, and a hobbit with an enchanted blade".
This actually links back to the point about inevitability because there's a curious sort of inverse relationship between inevitability and in-story-ness. Allow me to refer for a moment to a debate between those two well-known sci-fi / fantasy geeks Marcus Tullius Ciceró and St Augustine of Hippo. Cicero said that if foreknowledge of the future were possible then that would mean that the future was predetermined and unalterable and therefore free will was an illusion. Augustine said that free will was compatible with God's foreknowledge of the future because God is outside time and is therefore not really knowing the future at all: from his point of view the whole of time is already fixed, like a home video of your tenth birthday party that he can fast-forward and rewind and pause. No matter how many times he watches it, the video will always end the same way, but that doesn't mean that the people who were there at your tenth birthday party had no free will at the time the video was made. For reasons I shan't go into here, Augustine's argument fails to establish what he was actually trying to prove, but his idea of God being outside time is a useful one here if for 'God' we read 'the audience' and for 'time' we read 'the story'. From the point of view of the audience, the story has already happened and is completely fixed. You can skip to the end of the book, film, comic, whatever, and you can see the end, and that will always be how it ends: the choices made by the characters are all fixed before you sit down to start reading or watching, and they will always be the same. But within the story, the characters experience time just like we experience time in real life. In real life we may or may not believe that the future is predetermined; I may hear the weather forecast or read the book of Revelations and have an opinion about whether either of those represents a truthful description of an inevitable future, but other people may disagree with me and there is no way to tell who is right except to wait for the future to become the past; and this is true even if I personally go into a trance and have a vision of myself as an old man. Now, when we read or watch a story we see things from the point of view of the characters, so when they experience a description or vision of the future we evaluate it just as we would evaluate a weather forecast, prophecy, or prescient vision in our own lives: we entertain the possibility that it may or may not turn out to be correct. But when we read or watch a story and are told directly what is, unbeknownst to any of the characters, going to happen later in that story, we experience that from our own point of view as a reader or viewer who knows that the end of the story is already fixed, and therefore we accept the prediction as a factual description of what is going to happen. So even if, in the world of the story, all the characters regard the future as entirely predetermined and everything that is prophesied as entirely inevitable, we, the audience, still unconsciously entertain the possibility that things will turn out differently (or else we would probably stop reading or watching); on the other hand, no matter how contingent the in-story future may seem to the characters and how free their will appears to be, we automatically accept a flash-forward as a totally true description of what will happen later in the story, to the extent of feeling rather cheated and disgruntled if the flash-forward turns out to have been misleading. That's why I say the relationship between inevitability and in-story-ness is curious and inverse.
Of course everything I've said above is rather circular, in that it all depends on my definition of 'flash-forward' being correct and therefore all it is, in the end, is a lengthy unpacking of that definition. One could quite legitimately defined 'flash-forward' as a sort of umbrella term encompassing descriptions of the future both experienced by the characters and communicated over the characters' heads directly to the audience. My only comment about that would be that, if we use the term 'flash-forward' in that way, we find ourselves without a term to refer specifically to the thing-that-I've-here-distinguished-from-prophecy.
Finally, as to the difference in emotional impact between prophecies and flash-forwards (reverting to my definitions), I'd say that the impact isn't necessarily greater either way, just different. A prophecy creates a tension, namely, "Will it come true?", that a flash-forward doesn't create because it will by definition come true and the only questions are when and how and with what significance &c. A prophecy also raises questions like, "How will the characters respond to the fact that they have information about what may or may not turn out to be the future?", which again a flash-forward by definition can't raise. On the other hand, a flash-forward creates a tension that is in a way more intense because we know it's inevitable in a way that a prophecy is not. So they serve very different narrative purposes, really, and prophecies no doubt have their own particular strengths and abuses. Sounds like material for another article... but not by me (at least for now).
1) Messenger goes on pilgrimage to the holy Shrine and comes back to tell the Prophecy has SMALL emotional impact. The Prophecy is a form of words. Light-siders will solve the riddle and finagle the form of words and win.
2) Audience sees ON screen the Prophet going into a mad trance and speaking the Form of Words. This has bigger emotional impact, but it is still a riddle-game of Light-siders solving the form of words.
3) Fast!Forward: audience sees the prophecy hsppen ON screen has bigger emotional impact than Form of Words.
4) Blake's 7 - Liberator explodes ON screen was neatly done. In Story, a similiar space ship explodes.
5) Xena (season 4) has an ON screen vision of shaven headed Gabrielle being tortured, Gabby deliberately shaves her head to fulfill the prophecy. That is retarded.
6) Xena (season 5) has an ON screen vision of her friends dying in a particular town, so she takes them there. Equally retarded.
I found it really hit-and-miss: sometimes it meant the book was less enjoyable, because I'd already read the climactic scene and the whole book was building up to it, but sometimes it just created a different tension and it was worth seeing how the characters got there. From what I've seen of them, and from what you say, cinematic uses are just as hit-and-miss.
I wonder if there might be some kind of easy heuristic one could use upon seeing the first minute or two of a flash-forward to decide if the rest of an episode / movie / book will be worth it, or if the flash-forward and its impact on the story is going to ruin everything.
As an aside, I'm careful to say 'sequence of events' rather than 'narrative' or 'work' because I don't want to imply that the events depicted in the flash-forward have to be depicted in exactly the same way when the story gets to their chronologically 'correct' point: the ones in Crash and Michael Clayton are, and so (more or less) are the ones in Damages, but those in the Twilight books aren't, and I wouldn't disqualify them from the definition for that reason. In fact I wouldn't even say that the events shown in the flash-forward have to be from within the chronology of the story being told - they could, like the prologue of From Hell, be events that will take place long after the end of the story proper.
The From Hell example, now that I think of it, is an interesting one because it works a little differently from the two 'good' examples I mentioned in the article. To some extent it does the same things as they do - forecasts some characters, themes, atmosphere - but because it clearly happens many years after what we presume (correctly) will be the events of the main plot, it doesn't create the three tensions in the same way. It doesn't appear to leave anything much to be resolved after the end of the flash-forward, so there's no real 'what will happen next?' tension; nothing much appears to have happened immediately before it starts, so there's little 'what's going on?' tension; and we never expect to see the scene again, so we don't spend the rest of the book unconsciously wondering how each new turn of the plot will lead us to it, although we do get a sense of gradual recognition as we see the characters from the prologue become more like themselves (as it were).
What I suspect it's there for is to actually shut down some unwanted avenues of tension and speculation that might otherwise arise while we read the book, and to tell us what kind of book it isn't going to be. It says, "There's going to be a psychic. He's a fraud. I don't want you to waste your time wondering whether he's really psychic: it isn't that kind of story. Also, there's going to be a policeman. He isn't going to be very heroic, and he isn't going to bring the villain to justice: it isn't that kind of story. He will solve the mystery, but he'll accept a bribe and become a reluctant party to a massive cover-up: it's that kind of story."
As for whether there's a way of telling from a flash-forward whether the rest of the thing will be worth the trouble, that's an interesting question. I'll have to ponder it. Based on the thinkings already done in the article I'd say that principal sign of a likely dud flash-forward is if it seems to be deliberately vague, unspecific, or confusing. Given that all the bad flash-forwards I can think of are flashes of the climactic scene of the plot and all the good ones I can think of are flashes of events from before or after the climax, that should also be a good indicator, although it may not always be easy to guess whether what one's being shown in a flash-forward will turn out to be the climax or not. I can imagine that one could actually get some quite good effects from flashing forward to a scene that appears to be climactic but in fact turns out to be a false climax followed by a twist and then the real, unforecast climax. (Someone must have done that already - if not, hey, free idea for any writers reading this!)
I think this is very likely, especially since From Hell isn't really in a position to create much tension in the first place, at least as far as the central plotline is concerned: we know that Jack the Ripper is going to kill a bunch of women, and we know that he'll never be unmasked, and it would be a waste of time trying to convince us that those hookers have a hope of getting away, or that the policeman will bring the villain to justice. "What happens next?" is a completely irrelevant question in From Hell; it's all about "What do people think about all this?"