In Stout Rex’s “What to Do About a Watson,” he comes to the conclusion that the inclusion of a Watson character can be a beneficial tool for the creation of a good detective story. He claims that Watson provides a graceful and natural way to allow readers a way to see the thought processes of the detective without completely spoiling essential information that you don’t want readers to have access to. This is a problem that other writers have also faced and come to different conclusions about. In order for a detective story to play fair, the readers must be able to follow along with the detective’s lines of deduction. In forms of media other than written stories, such as films, this problem continues to be something that authors need to solve for their story. While many have continued to keep a Watson figure that gives opportunity to include dialogue between the detective and the Watson, some movies have adopted different strategies. The 2018 movie Searching is one example that uses computer actions as a way to get across the main character’s, David Kim’s, thought processes without relying on spoken language at all.
As opposed to traditional movies, Searching exclusively shows the displays of computer, smartphones, television, or other digital screens in its storytelling. Everything that is shown to the audience is contextualized within this view of a screen. For example, scenes that include dialogue between David and other characters are often phone or video calls that he is making from his computer. Throughout the movie, David serves as our detective character as he tries to uncover what happened to his daughter, Margot, and find her. There are only a few scenes where we are explicitly told David’s theories or his thought processes, with most of those being scenes in which he calls his brother or Detective Vick. Instead, the movie shows us David’s computer screen as he uses it which reveals many hints as to what he is thinking throughout. A very obvious example of this is when we see David type out a text message, linger for a moment, and then erase the message before typing out something different. These moments give us insight into things that David wants to say but feels unable to. While this example is not one in which David is really working as a detective, similar computer actions are later used in the same way to show how he reacts to new clues and piece things together.
A great example of this occurs towards the end of the movie, when David begins sending pictures and videos of Margot to a funeral livestreaming service and sees a stock photo which causes him to pause. He slowly moves his mouse away from the button to close the browser page as the camera zooms in on the figure in the stock image. He then goes on to pull up Margot’s photos, quickly skimming through some of them before changing gears and opening up her Facebook account instead. At this point, it is clear to audiences that David recognizes this face but is unsure where he saw it. He seems to believe that it has some relevance to Margot’s disappearance, so he continues to look for where he recognizes it from until he finds the face being used as a profile picture for one of the chat members in Margot’s livestreams. Having found this, he opens both pictures at once so that he can confirm that they are indeed, the same person. Later in the movie, we see him undergo a similar detective process as he realizes that Detective Vick has been lying to him and sees the photo of her with the ex-convict who she has claimed was responsible for Margot’s disappearance.
In all of these examples, the movie takes advantage of the audience’s familiarity with using computers in order to make these moments work as revealing David’s thought processes. Viewers understand the feeling of searching through webpages or saved files to find something that you know you can find, so when David does so, no words are needed to make audiences understand it. And if audiences did not make the connection themselves, David putting both pictures on screen at once will make it clear why he reacted this way while confirming part of his theory. There is no need for a Watson character in Searching, because the actions required to perform this kind of investigation on a computer are familiar enough to provide a window into the detective’s mind.
By Alex Duarte
Intermittent Mechanism 