Suggesting that “Audiences always think they know how a story will go”, Roz Morris of Nail Your Novel dissects Kathryn Bigelow‘s award-winning The Hurt Locker (spoilers galore) to see why a film that “[sets] up several conventional situations – and uses our expectations to pull us up short” made such an impact with audiences.
Readers always try to second-guess where a story is going. They can’t help it. Subverting the audience’s expectations is not new. The Hurt Locker twists them overtly and violently to tell us the world of war is nothing like the one we know. Neither are the people anything like the people we know. It is storytelling that is fully in control of its audience.
via The Browser