The Doing of The Undoing: How a Straightforward Plot Kept Us On The Edge of Our Seats (and How You Can Harness This Magic in Your Nonfiction Book)
“If Hugh Grant’s character did it, I don’t know how they can make a whole miniseries about this,” I said.
“Well, I think she did it,” Jack said.
“What makes you think Nicole Kidman is the murderer?”
“Because she’s a psychiatrist, so she’s probably the crazy one.”
Lol.
After the first episode of HBO’s The Undoing (2020), my husband, Jack, and I had plenty to discuss. In case you haven’t seen it, go watch it and then return to this article because there are big spoilers.
**SPOILER ALERT**
Consider yourself warned.
Now, then. In a nutshell, the story is told from the perspective of Grace [Nicole Kidman]. She’s a reluctant socialite and psychiatrist on NYC’s upper east side. Her husband, Johnathan [Hugh Grant] is a pediatric oncologist with a vaguely British accent, and they have a 13-yr old son, Henry [Noah Jupe], enrolled in a private school.
The first hint of conflict comes with the insertion of an outsider, Elena Alves [Mathilde de Angelis] into Grace’s life. Elena joins the silent auction committee for Reardon, the elite private school Henry attends, to the chagrin of the other committee members. However, Grace speaks kindly to Elena and tries to welcome her, even standing up for the newcomer for breastfeeding her baby at the table.
Grace’s body-positive acceptance of Elena is pushed further when the latter approaches the former in the locker room of her Pilates club naked. Full frontal nude. Grace is gracious. When she’s discussing these strange incidents with Johnathan on the car ride to the silent auction, and he asks Grace if she finds Elena attractive, I thought we were heading into the territory of a show I would expect from Starz.
However, when Elena’s body turns up dead the next morning, and Grace can’t account for her husband’s whereabouts, the drama takes off.
To better understand this show’s strengths and how it captivated us and so many other viewers, I have a few angles to examine:
The difference between a plot and a story
Whose “undoing” is it, really?
Use The Undoing’s twists to write better nonfiction
Through these inquiries, I want to figure out how it was that a predictable and logical ending caught us by surprise — and how you can do that in your nonfiction writing.
DISCLAIMER: You will notice that I keep a strict plot and story analysis instead of getting into psychology and possible psychosis of the characters, and that’s because those elements are well-examined in a lot of other reviews of the miniseries.
The difference between a plot and a story
What I find most interesting about this six-episode miniseries is this: they took a very straightforward and utterly predictable plot, and instead of trying to imagine a plot twist you never saw coming, they serve up the most obvious and likely truth. But, with a revelatory story-telling style that kept us on the edge of our seats week after week waiting on the turn of events that came in the most unlikely way.
In this conversation, I’m referring to Russian Formalist, Mikhail Bakhtin, and his understanding of the sujet (story) and fabula (plot). His theory is that there isn’t much room for variation within given plots in our culture, but there’s a lot of room for creative variation with story or narrative. That is to say, we can present what happened in different ways to create different meanings, but what happens itself is fairly static.
In fact, this theory is an explanation of how Shakespeare’s plays were so successful, although they largely rip off other plots from other plays and poems well-known at the time. Now, we mostly only know Shakespeare, and it’s thought that’s because his narratives or stories — how the plots are revealed — were enduring, not because his plots were particularly earth-shattering.
And we have the same with The Undoing. As charted below, this plot is so boring no self-respecting CSI would ever air it:
1. Surgeon husband has an affair with patient’s mother
2. Affair escalates, husband loses job
3. Husband pays bribe money to mistress, lies to wife
4. Mistress stalks wife
5. Husband kills mistress
6. Husband is arrested as prime suspect
And so forth. But the show keeps us on the edge of our seats because we don’t know for sure about #5 until the final episode. That’s a function of narrative, or the way the events are told.
A more expected narrative would give us a likely suspect in the first episode, and by the third or fourth, we’d start to think someone else must’ve done it. We’d go through a few more suspects, and then in the final episode there’d be a huge reveal that the killer is someone we never expected — in that case, mostly Jack would’ve been right, and it would’ve been Grace. Or even young Henry.
The Undoing chose to give us something else. Maybe something even more unsettling. And that was captured in the name of the series, itself. We watch a narrative arc constructed by Johnathan unravel as more of the plot, or what actually occurred, is revealed.
Whose “undoing” is it, really?
I love the title because it makes me think. If the title were “Undoing,” we’d be free to think of all the possible ways that characters are undone. The Undoing implies that there’s a single undoing. To me, that undoing rests on a line Hayley Fitzgerald [Noma Dumezweni] says to Johnathan in the sixth and final episode after Grace testifies against him:
“You didn’t get rid of the hammer.”
This hammer, the murder weapon, is found by Henry off-screen during Episode 2 while at the family’s beach house. He hides the hammer in his violin case to protect his dad. And even runs it through the dishwasher-twice. Grace finds the weapon in the case at the end of Episode 5.
Johnathan’s not properly disposing of the murder weapon, whether out of hubris or lack of time, is his undoing. And, in the end, the weapon’s presence is the undoing of Grace’s very thin trust in him. Compiled with her learning more details from Johnathan’s mother about the nature of his estrangement from his British family — that he bore some responsibility for his sister’s death and never grieved. In his mom’s words, he “wasn’t capable of feeling grief.”
Consider that this event happened off-screen way before the series starts, yet in the narrative, we don’t learn about it until Episode 5. That’s how the information is strategically placed within the series of events for maximum effect. If we knew this history in Episode 1, it would’ve been “game over,” right?
Perhaps the most heartbreaking undoing from the hammer is Henry’s, who trusts his father to the point of getting into the car with him the day of the verdict. More than anyone, Henry has known that his dad was guilty for weeks, and seeing Johnathan deny it even when it was just the two of them was a breaking point. And the disavowal of guilt even as he kind of admits guilt, “the person who did that is not your dad,” seems to disappoint his son more than honesty would have. Then, Henry becomes the adult, encouraging his dad to pull over as cop cars and helicopters where on the pursuit.
Use The Undoing’s twists to write better nonfiction
When you want to tell a story and you’re concerned whether people will be interested or care about it, look at both the plot and the story. In most cases, you might have a boring or predictable plot like The Undoing when you strip it down. Philandering husband kills mistress. Well, that’s a tale as old as time. So, how can you use the narrative structure to make the revealing of the plot points unfold in a fresh and innovative way? You use a tool from creative writing called, “making strange the familiar.”
Here’s what I mean. I have a student in Crank Out Your Book in 8 Weeks who starts her book with a fairly cliché viewpoint on her subject. Yawn. But that’s where The Undoing also starts, featuring a boring, wealthy couple and their adorable child. Then, the author quickly turns that viewpoint on its head by looking at it from a different angle, as if to call attention to how strange it is how quickly we accept the stereotype. That happens at the end of Episode 1 when there’s been the death and then Johnathan is missing. Suddenly, everything you thought you knew about this couple and their marriage is called into suspect.
In fact, the miniseries in particular introduces us to Johnathan and offers a version of who he is, and then that version is distorted over and over as the narrative arc unfolds. Let’s take for instance the scene in Episode 1 when he comes home, presumedly from a patient emergency, in tears, and he sleeps with Grace. This beautiful moment’s meaning changes when you see it from a perspective of knowing that he’d actually come home from a hook up with Elena, since his semen was found inside her. Then, that scene is put into a reframe again when we know he’d gone back and seen her bludgeoned corpse. And finally, in Episode 6 we know proof-positive that Johnathan came home to have sex after brutally murdering his mistress. What first looks like a sweet love scene becomes grotesque.
How can you use what the reader already knows or thinks they know about your given subject and then turn it back on itself in a compelling manner? Bullet out your plot points, and then decide the best order in which to deliver to the to the reader.
You do it bit by bit, starting by serving up a comfortable stereotype the reader can relate to. Then, you start calling elements of it into question with carefully executed revelations of new information. As you erode the first version, new versions emerge. You invite the reader to wonder, “if what I thought was true about A is in question, what else might be in question?”
For my client, she accomplishes this by setting forward an undiagnosed health problem that disrupts her life almost completely with fainting, foggy memory, lethargy, etc. You might expect a quick answer along the lines of autoimmune disorder. And, if I told you where she arrives by the end of the book, you might not even believe me. But, when you go chapter by chapter and see her address different symptoms with different treatments and outcomes and follow the trail of information, everything makes sense.
Just like if I told you after Episode 1 we’re going sit through six more episodes, and the #1 suspect is going to be guilty one, you might say, “Why on earth do I want to watch that?” You’d want to watch it for the sujet, not the fabula.
CONCLUSION
We want to consume interesting narratives that make us think differently about things that are familiar to us.
“Come, darling. Give me a hug,” Johnathan says, arms outstretched.
“No!” Grace screams, ushering Henry from the bridge where Johnathan had either almost killed himself or staged a final attempt to garner sympathy.
As Grace had refused to believe his guilt in the early episodes, in the last scene she refuses to believe his pleas of innocence.
The credits rolled on the screen.
“Okay, it wasn’t Grace,” Jack said.
“Still, I can’t believe the first and only real suspect was the guilty one,” I said. “Maybe I should write an article about how they kept us on the edge of our seats, and then we wound up here.”
