Clue (Lynn, 1985) is a classic comedy-mystery film based on the classic whodunnit board game. The movie is absolutely hilarious, but it’s also very unique as far as mystery films go. Clue has three endings. Not narrative jumps, not fake-outs, but three actual solutions to the whodunnit mystery. On theatrical release, each theater was sent a different ending, and on streaming, they are all presented as possible realities. At first, it would seem like this absolutely throws away any sense of a consistent plot or narrative (any proper diegesis)––how can a murder have three different killers, three different distinct sequences of effect?
Clue is a genius film because it doesn’t have one narrative, one sequence. It cleverly builds up a giant front of nothing, then builds it’s entire narrative in less than five minutes. How? Diegetic narration.
Clue is a restricted film, in that we never know more than one character. Specifically, we never know more than the murderer knows–-we see the killings as they happen, but we never know who does them. At least one characters always knows more than us. And that character is usually the man above, Wadsworth (Tim Curry). He is the butler of the house, and the story’s effective narrator.
Throughout most of the film, the characters make absolutely no progress towards finding out who the murderer is. They search the house repeatedly, deal with guests, and discover murder after murder (eventually totaling six), but never get any closer to finding the truth. In this sense, Clue completely disregards the notion that characters are causes of events––the murderer in Clue might as well be a force of nature (faceless, unknown, unfeeling, and unseen), and the plot is otherwise driven by seemingly random occurrences (the motorist’s arrival, the singing telegram, Mr. Boddy not being dead). Clue‘s plot, when pared down, is nearly non-existent: the characters move around the house discovering nothing for an hour as random things happen, until Wadsworth explains the entire thing to them.
This is not a plot. It’s a sitcom set-up. Which is why Clue‘s comedy takes center-stage. Comedies don’t necessarily need plots, and Clue can sometimes feel more like a Who’s-on-First-esque stand-up bit rather than a film.
I don’t want to claim that Clue has no elements of narrative story; like all mysteries, it hides it’s causes without hiding it’s effects, while it has no actual flashbacks it does have an extended scene where Wadsworth acts out the beginning of the movie, functioning as a flashback, and it does have a climax (or, more accurately, three––each of the three moments when Wadsworth unmasks the murderer(s)). But it barely has a rising action, if at all. It mostly shuns exposition, giving one detail each per character and nothing else until the very end, and while it theoretically has a goal-oriented plot, nothing happens. The narrative of Clue moves at a speed of zero until the very end, when it suddenly launches through every stage of a plot in five minutes.
Clue, to me, is a fascinating example of a refusal of narrative. The story of the movie is so completely not-the-point, instead being there only to provide moments of shock and comedic set-ups. I’m curious what others think––is Clue a seminal masterpiece in non-narrative writing? Or just a mystery that leans a little too heavily on humor? Either way, this whodunnit mystery film is a classic for a reason––and that reason isn’t the mystery itself.
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