Extract

Bertrand Russell, an avid reader of detective novels, claimed never to notice the name of authors and to forget the stories he read “within a week of reading them.” (See his Letter to Julie Medlock, 1951, https://dearbertie.mcmaster.ca/letter/wodehouse, accessed on January 14, 2024.) The implication is that while it may be fine to consume popular fiction, it would not do to take it too seriously. Among philosophers of art, at least, such attitudes are no longer assumed. Consideration of popular art in its various forms—including comics, street art, mass market films, and the many genres of popular music—currently inform some of the richest work in philosophical aesthetics.

David Bordwell’s Perplexing Plots is a superb exemplar of how to collapse the high/low art distinction (or, as he refers to it in a neat metaphor, the distinction between the arthouse and the multiplex) and treat it all with equal seriousness and appreciation. Bordwell’s subject is the mystery plot in popular storytelling. Mysteries are a particularly interesting and appropriate way to approach popular storytelling, as the act of storytelling is at the center of their concerns. Structurally, mysteries contain a “hidden story” that must be brought to light (p. 20). Bordwell charts how over the course of the 20th century (roughly), the mystery-based plot and its variants (murder mystery, domestic thriller, police procedural, psychological thriller, heist, and others) enlarged both the techniques available to authors and the skills cultivated by audiences.

You do not currently have access to this article.