It's a Mystery

[heslopian]

I've been thinking recently about the murder mystery genre of fiction. Can it, in its purest form, ever produce intellectually and emotionally challenging art? I loved them as a child but now whenever I read or watch a whodunit - victim(s), killer, closed circle of suspects - I can't help but feel underwhelmed. Watching the horror film Scream, about a masked murderer who stalks teenagers in a small town, again, I kept wanting to learn more about the families and friends of the various knife fodder, to get inside their heads and truly understand the feelings such violence creates, so that in the end the simple fact of who was behind the mask didn't matter anymore (I already knew, but still, they didn't interest me).
And if such a story does establish characters of some psychological complexity the plot becomes an afterthought, as I'm more interested in their thoughts and feelings than solving the puzzle.
What are your thoughts?

[srijantje]

any story or genre can be good if it's well written

[heslopian]

I'm not asking whether it can be good but rather deep and challenging. I still think Scream is a well written film; it just doesn't sate my hunger for human insight.

[addy]

It can, most certainly... someone just has to challenge the genre and write it in a fresh way. All stories are human stories at the end of the day, you just have to dig deeper to get more meat out of some of the others.

[billy]

the insight is in the plot, good films have good plots.
flowers for algernon aka charlie, though it's only a metaphorical murder of the psyche.
every now and again a good plot reveals itself in all genre. as for it producing challenging art, thats up to the beholder more than the artist i think.

[heslopian]

thats up to the beholder more than the artist i think.

Yeah, I get the feeling my question and argument are very subjective. One very deep mystery novel I read was A Game for the Living by Patricia Highsmith, about a wealthy German atheist and a poor Mexican Catholic who come to suspect each other of the rape, murder and mutiliation of a woman they were both having affairs with, but again I felt as though the mystery element was incidental.
By "mystery" I mean your traditional objective problem with a crime and an unkown culprit, as opposed to something metaphysical like Flowers for Algenon (didn't that star Matthew Modine?).

[Touchstone]

I don't see any particular reason a murder mystery couldn't be "intellectually and emotionally challenging art".

Think about it this way--I can't imagine enjoying torturing someone to death but I know that there are people who do enjoy that. A lesser artist could write a story about such a person, painting a black and white picture of a person who was bad doing bad things--the story of whose eventual capture/death might be entertaining. But a greater artist could perhaps make one understand why the person behaved that way, and what it was they got out of it. Not merely at an intellectual level but at an emotional level.

I'm not going to attempt to judge the quality of the art, but it's the sort of thing the guy who wrote The Silence of the Lambs tried to do with one of the prequels--where he explores Lecter's childhood. [Actually, I will judge, since I think anyone who writes more than one book about any given character is a hack rather than an artist, but that doesn't really change the point I'm trying to make.]

[billy]

i agree with the above.
i think every now and again in all genre someone pops up and does an amazing film which is a great piece of art.
mario puso's the godfather, once upon a time in america, then you also have the art of the cinematography. one of the most famous being psycho, i don't think there's a communal art (there may be at times) but we all think some films are special enough to be artful and usually we have films in each genre.