Why is this happening?

Unanswered questions as artistic flaws

Near the beginning of the live-action remake of Mulan, Rouran warriors led by Böri Khan, and aided by the witch Xianniang, attack and defeat an imperial outpost. Xianniang, posing as a surviving soldier, reports the attack to the emperor, and then returns to Böri Khan’s camp. In the next scene they talk:

Khan: So, you have news?

Xianniang: The emperor sends his army, to defend the silk road.

Khan: Good. We will crush every garrison until the imperial army is on its knees. And then the imperial city will be laid bare. The emperor will be mine to kill. You have proved useful, witch.

Xianniang: Not witch! Warrior. [She grabs his neck.] I could tear you to pieces before you blink.

Khan: But you won't. Remember what you want. A place where your powers will not be vilified. A place where you are accepted for who you are. You won't get what you want without me. [He removes her hand.] When I found you on the desert stepp wandering alone, you were exiled, a scorned dog. When I sit on the throne, that dog will have a home.

Xianniang: We will finish what we started.

Khan: Then you will see to it that nothing and no one stands in my way.

Why, in this bizarre exchange, does Xianniang threaten Böri Khan, and why does he explain their history and their deal? Surely her power and his promises are old news and neither needs the reminder.

Of course the answer is obvious. The audience has seen these two in battle but knows nothing about who they are and why they are fighting, and needs to, in order to understand the action. So the screenwriters contrived a scene where the characters explain it all.

“Q and A”s like this come up often. Another noted example is in Chapter 31 of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Huck and Jim are in Louisiana, and Jim has been captured and sold to the Phelps family. When Huck walks to the Phelps plantation to free Jim, he learns that the Phelps’s are aunt and uncle to Tom Sawyer, and that they are expecting Tom to arrive any minute. Now it was up in Missouri, one thousand river miles and two dozen chapters ago, that Huck last saw Tom. So why is it that, so far from home, he runs into Tom’s kin, and they are the ones holding Jim, and Huck arrives just as Tom is supposed to? There is a good reason for this crazy coincidence. George Saunders explains, in a preface he wrote for the novel:

Twain has written himself into a tough and very serious spot...Jim cannot escape, not for long, and Huck cannot remain unpunished for having helped Jim escape: the country Twain has made is too cruel and sure of itself and methodical in its slavery for either of these things to happen. And Twain understood the book—as we do—to be a comic novel, and the prospect of Jim being sold down the river or lynched, and Huck being bullwhipped and/or sent to a reformatory, say, does not gibe with our expectations of a comic novel.

Tom Sawyer returns to the plot so that the fate Saunders describes can be averted, by having Tom (eventually) deliver the news that Jim is already free, and has been free since Miss Watson died two months earlier and freed him in her will.

These answers to these questions, about a dialogue in Mulan and a plot twist in Huck Finn, miss the point. But the answers are true, so what could be wrong with them? What is wrong is that the answers, while correct, answer the wrong questions. They answer “external” questions, when it was “internal” questions that were asked.