The investigation process

The investigative approach fascinates and structures many narratives. Beyond police officers, convenient characters because they are legitimate to investigate, what if we explored other approaches inspired by the humanities to renew our storytelling?

The Investigation, a Passion for Audiences

The police, and particularly police officers who investigate, are extremely present in film scripts and novels, whether in commercial or art-house films. Very often, in films, we follow an investigator or encounter investigators at certain points in the story, and this happens infinitely more often than in our daily lives! The investigative process fascinates everyone. Many films and series are built around it, with the backbone of an investigation. Even the experimental series Twin Peaks by David Lynch is an investigation, which from the very beginning poses a question that will never be answered: who killed Laura Palmer? Agatha Christie’s novel And Then There Were None is very significant in this regard, as it features a small group of characters, trapped in a microcosm, investigating each other to try to find out who among them is the murderer of those already killed and potentially the next victims.

The investigation is therefore not exclusive to police officers, but police officers are convenient characters for cinema because they are legitimate in investigating. There is no need to justify in the script why they spend time on their investigative process; it’s their job. And very often, the police officer will investigate even beyond their working hours. They will continue to investigate to uncover the truth, even if they are dismissed from the police force, because they seek the truth, and the truth disturbs those in power—a very common argument.

The investigative method is thus the backbone of a great many films. It poses a mystery that the characters need to solve. And the investigating police officer has an intrinsic need to solve all mysteries. This is why they are such convenient characters. We can present any situation without explanation: a person found dead, a theft, a burglary, a suicide (but is it really a suicide?), a color in the sky, a loud noise in the forest—anything. We present an event that has no explanation, any event, and then we introduce a police officer who is legitimate to investigate. They must find either the culprit, the motive, or the reason for this state of affairs. The script requires that the answer to the question never be given, or only at the end of the story.

The investigative process, for films that use it (though it is not mandatory, even if many films do), completely structures the film. The answer comes only at the end, and the successive twists and turns provide partial answers, false leads, beliefs that it’s over, only to reveal that it was more complicated... And very often, we discover the involvement of the investigators themselves or their loved ones in the subject of the investigation. This may shed light on mysteries in their lives or reveal their dark side, for example. This dimension of the investigator being implicated as part of the investigated and potential culprits is a very good scriptwriting trick, as it emotionally involves the investigator in the stakes of the investigation. This is not necessary at the beginning; it’s a card we hold back for later to avoid a sense of repetition for the audience. That is, in the first phase, the investigator simply does their job as an investigator, and in the second phase, we discover that they are implicated themselves, and they themselves may even discover that they are more involved than they thought. This allows for a second phase and reignites the emotion.

The Discourse on Method

With this starting point that the film begins with a big question and that what underlies it is the quest for the answer to that question, there is also another dimension that greatly interests the audience: discovering the unique investigative approach of the character. One police officer will obtain information through violence, another through cunning and manipulation, a third will be an undercover agent and discover it through their co-optation with the enemy, etc. I believe that the space for invention in investigative approaches is still very vast. Indeed, we often fall back on the same clichés.

I propose that we open ourselves to the approaches of sociologists and expand this notion of investigation far beyond police investigations and even beyond journalistic investigations. Indeed, both police officers and journalists seek specific, rational answers in their investigations, as the goal is to identify a culprit. We are therefore dealing with a very closed vision of the investigation and its outcome. Whereas in the investigative approach developed by sociologist Bruno Latour, for example, we investigate the world itself and its agents, its obstacles, its human and non-human agents, conceptual ones, we map our understanding of the world to discover complex, profound, accurate, fascinating, and constructive explanations, particularly for ecology.

Moreover, in films, police officers often map things out: there is this recurring image of a wall full of photos, diagrams, and strings to connect and find the missing links between elements that, at first glance, seem disparate. This is a particular investigative method, but there are many other methods, many other ways of investigating that the humanities explore: sociology, ethnology, anthropology, ethnomethodology, among others. And of course, psychology, and even more so, psychoanalysis. In fact, in the field of psychoanalysis as in others, there are many schools that clash over the question of investigative methods.

I believe that drawing a little from the humanities and adopting their particular investigative methods can be very enriching for scripts. This could open our narratives to entirely new dimensions.