David Bordwell’s final major work is arguably his most important. Perplexing Plots: Popular Storytelling and the Poetics of Murder (2023), released a year before his passing, takes over four decades’ worth of experience studying a single medium (film), produced within a single field (film studies), and directs that experience outward, at other media, revealing the wide-ranging transdisciplinary implications of his research. 

Perplexing Plots tackles popular storytelling itself—not within a single industry, culture or movement, but as a mass tradition comprised of hundreds of artists spanning numerous cultures, markets, and media. Bordwell scales up. He considers artmaking from the highest vantage-point available to any historian of art: that of the sum total of strategies that characterizes a tradition. 

He calls his object of study the variorum—a “menu of favored or less-common options” within 20^th and 21^st century popular media (10). To reconstruct it, Bordwell builds a transmedia narratology. But don’t be misled. The purpose is not to study transmedia storytelling—how various media create a narrative continuity within franchises like The Matrix or the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Rather, like Jan-Noël Thon, Bordwell traces the transmediality of forms traded among popular storytellers working separately. The techniques they swap are portable, traversing the boundaries often thought to separate media and media properties.

Perplexing Plots shows us the future of historical poetics, the approach Bordwell proposed for studying film and its contexts in the 1980s. That future rests in a research program that is curious about how art gets made in any popular medium, at various levels or scales: an individual artist working within a culture or industry, an industry that defines a given historical period, a tradition reaching across cultures, industries, or periods, etc. 

This broad scope comes from the approach’s roots. Historical poetics is inherently transdisciplinary. Bordwell’s work consistently combined numerous methods, some transdisciplinary in themselves, refining them into a complex and sustained research program. These methods include Russian formalism, Czech structuralism, ecological psychology and, crucially for Perplexing Plots, a strain of art history critical of collectivist and deterministic notions of historical development.

Perplexing Plots doesn’t cite art historians all that often, but their ideas help structure the book’s transmedia ambitions. It was from the work of art historians that Bordwell drew his concept of creative problem-solving. “Problem solving” is a common enough expression in engineering and design circles. It refers to how makers address a need in a situation where that need has yet to be met. Find a solution! engineers and designers are often told. But in the hands of E. H. Gombrich, an art historian who influenced Bordwell, the idea has deeper historiographic ambitions. The problem-solution model, as Bordwell calls it, can help us write the entire history of art by focusing our attention on practical craft choices. 

In Perplexing Plots, Bordwell reconstitutes the variorum through “an approach that treats storytellers as posing problems shaped by immediate circumstances, weighing means against ends, and finding pragmatic solutions that can be points of departure for other artisans. Thus does a drive to novelty fuel a broader tradition” (10). The idea comes from Gombrich and his notion that artists—painters, sculptors, architects, carpenters, ceramicists, and lace-makers—are situated thinkers. Problems are the sorts of thoughts that artists in different media can share. In The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art (1979), Gombrich, citing fellow art historian George Kubler, writes that artists consciously calculate how to “modify, enrich or reduce” the results of their predecessors, even those working in other media, creating a history of “linked solutions” (210). Through calculated thinking of this sort, the arts come together in a common drive to problem-solve. 

As Bordwell proposed in “Seeing and Seeking: A Beholder’s Guide to Gombrich,” a lecture he gave at my university in 2018, artists from distinct media may confront common problems as a result of four types of situation: the social contexts of art-making and art reception, the functions assigned to art, the craft community artists work in, and the “sitting” of art (in churches, museums, movie theaters, on smart phones, etc.). All four factors, to cite Bordwell, “set problems to be solve for particular tasks.” Change to “any of these conditions” leads to change in the history of creative forms. 

Perplexing Plots is a Gombrichian history, tracking the multidisciplinary problems that structure numerous arts simultaneously or seriatim. With plots designed to perplex us, it is to literary modernism and its popular counterparts that Bordwell turns to establish the social contexts and artistic functions that pressured storytellers. In literature, drama, and movies, storytellers moved in unison to pose and solve three related problems, with the aim of generating novel experiences in their own competitive markets: “the temporal structuring of plot, the use of point of view, and the segmentation of the narrative into more or less explicit parts” (10). By becoming transmedial, these areas of problem-solving established a broad tradition that captivated artists and audiences alike.

Where to next for this transmedia historical poetics? I can imagine at least two paths—but there are surely more. First, in his 1995 essay “Historical Poetics” (published here), Henry Jenkins argues that poetics need not focus on what’s broadly referred to as “aesthetics” but might develop a “poetic politics” (110). Against the common trend in cultural studies of examining how structures work unconsciously on historical actors, a politically oriented historical poetics might restore freedom of choice to media producers in how they confront structures of power—as problems to solve. Today, makers across creative industries are discovering common ways to address the relatively recent push for greater diversity and inclusion in Hollywood product and production. They are navigating a new variorum—a fresh set of options available both onscreen and behind the camera in a moment when the Right seems poised to mobilize backlashes against such solutions. A poetic politics might describe this new variorum and weigh the comparative advantages of each solution against the reconstructed ethical, market, and political standards currently driving this change. 

Second, poeticians might continue to explore a major driver of popular storytelling worldwide, namely media franchises. As I have written elsewhere, the study of storytelling in series remains a powerful trend in film and media studies. Like Bordwell, perhaps it’s time for this trend to scale up. Franchises are a relatively recent invention, made possible by copyright laws first passed in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. But the storytelling techniques they employ at times come from earlier eras—from other situations (in Gombrich’s sense).

Take the problem of establishing aperture as opposed to closure at the end of an installment in a multi-part story. Some franchises, like Beverly Hills Cop and Beetlejuice, bring the plots of each film to closure. Others, like Mission: Impossible and Fast & Furious, have recently left their endings open. Openness can take numerous forms, as I write in my upcoming book, Serial Bonds: The Shape of 007 Stories. These include the cliffhanger, of course, as well as other solutions that long predate the cliffhanger, suggesting that the open installment problem has a deep transmedia history. 

To cite one case: Dante’s Commedia, written as a three-part poem between ca. 1308 and 1321, relies not on cliffhangers to end each part but on hopeful hints about the protagonist’s future. The character Dante and his guide Virgil emerge at the end of Inferno, part one of the Commedia, from a “round opening,” “to see—once more—the stars,” as the final lines read. This cue suggests that Dante, at later stages in the poem, may ascend from his current position into the Heavens, an event which transpires in the poem’s third part, Paradiso.

In the franchise era, properties like James Bond eschew cliffhangers for this more hopeful form of aperture, which I call a leaper, cueing story-followers to anticipate—to figuratively leap toward—the hero’s future. In Casino Royale (2006), Bond’s capture of the elusive villain Mr. White suggests that the character may soon find the answers he’s looking for about the death of his lover, Vesper Lynd.

What encouraged Dante to adopt this solution? How did it catch on with later storytellers? Did his solution launch a distinct artistic tradition, or has it been employed in numerous (sub-)traditions, each with its own causal history? A scaled-up study of solutions like this will demand that we conduct a survey, at once massive and granular, of large numbers of series spread out across media, cultures, and time. It would require digital tools, too, culling a wealth of scholarly knowledge from a range of disciplines. Once completed, the survey would allow historical poeticians to propose theories about the trans-historical situations that shape the problem-solving of series storytellers across the ages.

David Bordwell’s contributions to the humanities are many. Among them, he revealed that historians of popular media have pressing questions to answer, and that their search will lead in transdisciplinary directions. Let’s roll up our sleeves.