Breaking the Law

I want to be a writer; therefore I write. Because I want to be a good writer, I read books (though not as many as I should), seek advice from other writers, and study writing techniques. These two pursuits often overlap, resulting in blog posts about guidelines for writing fiction.

Writing about the rules of fiction helps me to learn them. Hopefully my readers learn something too, or at least suffer no harm from my amateurish pontificating. In any event, my aim is not to dictate a set of immutable laws governing all literature. After all, I'm still learning. Like jazz musicians, the real fun only starts when you know the rules well enough to start breaking them.

If that's the case, why not ignore the rules from the beginning? Why bother learning them at all? The answer is that there's a significant difference between writing with hamfisted ignorance or lazy disregard for literary conventions and purposefully tweaking the rules in entertaining ways.

Let me illustrate my point by returning to that tried and true well of storytelling excellence: Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight. The film breaks a major rule of characterization and begins doing so immediately by never explaining the Joker's back story (a few self-professed origins are given but cannot be trusted for obvious reasons). Antagonists 101 states that the main villain must be fully fleshed out. The audience must understand the character and his motivations in order to identify with him and thus find meaning in his villainy.

Nolan directly transgresses this rule. Instead of a complex three-dimensional antagonist, he gives us a demonic agent of chaos with no personality beyond the scope of his crimes. It shouldn't work, yet it does--and brilliantly--because the director (and writers and actor) know how to break the rules.

Lesser artists would've wound up with a mustache-twirling cardboard cutout who ties women to train tracks. Ledger's Joker can get away with doing evil for evil's sake because his character is a walking commentary on breaking rules. He straddles the line between a human villain with intelligible motives and a destructive force of nature (as made explicit by Alfred's "Some men just want to watch the world burn" speech). That shift puts the conflict on a whole other level.

When the movie version of an "unfilmable" book earns critical praise, it's often because the filmmakers took advantage of the project's stigma to subvert movie and literary storytelling conventions. In fiction, one of the best ways to entertain an audience is to do the unexpected. Learning the rules your art relies on and then creatively breaking them usually catches people off guard.

What are some other books, films, etc. that defied conventions with entertaining results?