No, I don’t know why all the paragraph returns have suddenly vanished from this blog.

But I’m going to get to the bottom of this.

(By asking people smarter than me to please get to the bottom of this.)

Today in my playwriting workshop we again discussed unreliable narration, and twist-ending plotting — and then later I took my daughter to see a movie that turned out to exemplify the perils therein.

Unreliable narrators (or protagonists) have made for some of the best debates drawn from literature. Is the knight in the Canterbury Tales the most accomplished hero in medieval history, or is he a boaster with few actual accomplishments? It’s difficult to read Chaucer’s tone on this, and the evidence seems fifty-fifty. In “Turn of the Screw,” is the governess haunted by those ghost children, or is she insane? In Richard Nixon’s autobiography, does he actually believe his lies and justifications, or is he brain-damaged?

But a truly unreliable narration demands that the argument be split both ways so that we doubt. If we can decide early on one way or the other, the game’s over. The narration — or protagonist — can be unreliable, but our conclusion has become definitive. Once that happens, everything afterward starts to look like transparent writing tricks.

The same goes with twist endings. If you can sniff out the twist early on, everything else becomes drudgery. Today in my workshop one writer asked for advice — to pursue writing an unreliable character and a twist, or to expose the device early on and approach the material from a different angle.  Do these twists well and you wind up with “The Sixth Sense.” Do it badly and you wind up with “The Village.” (Or, someone else chimed in, any other M. Night Shyamalan movie.)

So there I was at 2:15 for the beginning of this week’s big new movie, and by the first scene I was sure I knew what was up. By the third scene, I had confirmation. The obvious problem with relying on gimmicks is that if they fail, you have nothing else to entertain people with. The leading man still looks like a rat-faced little boy to me, and his acting in this movie is stapled together from 50’s B-movies and James Cagney, circa the grapefruit-in-your-face era. Even the first scene looks utterly fake, and for reasons that mystify me:  It’s merely of people talking on a boat, and yet the background rolls past like a canvas in a stage melodrama. Is it so difficult to film people on a boat that you need to Photoshop every frame? If you know your lead character can’t be trusted, and that leads you to an immediate conclusion about the unsurprising twist awaiting you an endless two hours and ten minutes in the future, and your popcorn has already run out, what’s left to be enjoyed?

Whenever this happens to me in the movies (and it happens all too often), I wonder if others see things this way. The woman two seats to my left gasped and murmured throughout the movie like a lady with a hand up her skirt. At one point I actually looked over to see if she had been signed out for the day from a nearby facility. But no; she was just slack-jawed in absorption with a truly dumb  and patently phony bit of hooey made by supposedly the greatest living American director. Which left me remembering this exchange from “Annie Hall”:

Alvy Singer (the Woody Allen character):  Here, you look like a very happy couple, um, are you?
Female street stranger:  Yeah.
Alvy Singer:  Yeah? So, so, how do you account for it?
Female street stranger: Uh, I’m very shallow and empty and I have no ideas and nothing interesting to say.
Male street stranger: And I’m exactly the same way.

The folks who coined the term “global warming” have realized their mistake (too late), and now say they should have said “global climate change.” I can attest to that. My birthplace in New Jersey has been buried under an avalanche of snow for weeks now, I have a friend in Washington DC wondering what all this white stuff is that has shut down the government, and another friend sent me an email last night with the repeated refrain “Have I said how sick I am of cold and snow?”

And then there’s me.

I’m writing this from the restaurant of a 5-star hotel in Boca Raton, FL, where, I assure you, I am freezing my ass off. It’s plenty cold outside, but it’s frigid inside. This hotel, which optimistic realtors might call “Miami Beach adjacent,” was not built for sub-60 weather. The glass corridors admit a regular breeze that would freeze the flippers off a penguin. My room is beautiful (actually, too beautiful — when I walked in and saw a two-story suite I tried to offer it to someone else in the party whom I thought more deserving). It’s also positively polar. As we took a break to regroup, I told my business partner I was heading to my igloo to order some blubber.

This is Florida.  But it doesn’t seem like the Florida of our collective recollection.

Wonder why the federal deficit is so high? Perhaps it’s because the last administration in its twilight had to commit billions to bailing out the banks who underwrote the near-collapse of the global economic system, and because the present administration has had to commit billions to bailing out the general economy in the form of stimulus programs.

But perhaps it’s also because that first group did things like build a big three-and-a-half mile fence — at a cost of $57.7 million.

Which directs me to my true wonderment:  From 2001-2009, where were all the deficit hawks of the party of Glenn Beck? Why were they so willing to drink the tea back then?

How much time do writers actually spend writing? This writer estimates his output at between 2 and 5% of his time. If that holds true for most writers, then most writers would be better off holding a job and writing on the side — which is precisely counter to the conventional wisdom.

According to this piece in the LA Times, the affliction of Hollywood aspiration now has a clinical term:  “Hollywood NOS,” where “patients suffer from the mistaken assumption that…  showbiz glory will somehow insulate them from emptiness or the mundane hardships of day-to-day life.”

Favorite excerpt:

One psychiatrist, who would only speak anonymously because of his high-profile patients, described a session with a moderately well-known actress whose career was fading as she hit her 40s. The doctor told her that the “magic” part of her work life probably was over and that she would need to adjust. His patient looked out the window onto the flat white stucco building outside and said dully, “You see the way the sun is shining on the building? When I hear what you’re saying and see the flatness there, I want to kill myself. The mundane life, I don’t want any part of it. The work of it. The adversity of it, the lack of fame and specialness. I’d rather be dead.”

Sadly, this piece of reporting isn’t from The Onion. Everyone who lives around here has seen it in person all too many times.

Albert Brooks on mainstream media response to Barack Obama, one year later. (And “mainstream” means Fox.)

This amuses me greatly.

Evidently it was played during some game over the weekend.

My seven-year-old boy Dietrich amuses me to no end. He’s fond of spontaneously hitting people with odd quizzes and math problems of his own invention. (Although it’s not always amusing when it’s, say, 7 at night and all you want to do is drink your wine and mind your business and you’re suddenly expected to calculate eleventy billion divided by infinity.)

Here’s the latest quiz he just told me he used on another boy today on the school yard:

Dietrich: Dude, would you rather  have a good family, or a bag of Flaming Hot Cheetos?

Other Boy:  The Flaming Hot Cheetos.

I realize this isn’t a scientific survey, but still, the result should give us all pause.

On Wall Street, nothing quite equals success like enormous, obvious failure.

Par example, witness the resurrection of detested Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain, a man who held Bank of America hostage in its forced acquisition of his company — so that he could pay out $5.8 billion (that’s with a “b”) in bonuses to the people who’d led it to failure. His latest coup? He’s going to lead CIT Group, which has the distinction of being “the first company in which the government realized a loss under its $700 billion federal bailout program.” My kids ran their lemonade stand better than anything Thain has done lately, and for less money, although his new pay package is a mere $500,000 a year, plus $5.5 million in stock. But then, my kids’ business actually made money.

Read more here and feel your blood boil all over again. And remember:  One way or another, you and I are paying for all of it.