Spoiler Alert!: Mind-Tricking Narratives in Contemporary Hollywood Film 3825364739, 9783825364731

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction
2 Mind-Tricking Narratives: Between Classical and Art-Cinema Narration
3 Manifestations of Mind-Tricking Narratives: Some Case Studies
4 The Sophistication of the Viewer: How We Have ‘Learned’ to Understand Complex Narrative
5 Don’t Spoil the Ending! A Cognitive Approach
6 Conclusion
7 Bibliography
8 Appendix: Sample List of Mind-Tricking Narratives in Film

Citation preview

cornelia klecker

isbn 978-3-8253-6473-1

Spoiler Alert !

ind-tricking narratives almost redefine the concept of spoilers.” Films with a surprise ending have become rather frequent in recent years. They are particularly interesting when they offer one plot that contains two storylines, though the second story becomes apparent only in retrospect after this twist ending. The author calls these mind-tricking narratives. This volume contributes to recent discussions of complex storytelling in film by naming, classifying, and deftly analyzing the “mind-tricking narrative” that is a more precise filmic category than the “twist” or “puzzle” film that other film scholars have identified. The list of films belonging to this category include M. Night Shyamalan’s ‘The Sixth Sense’ (1999), David Fincher’s ‘Fight Club’ (1999), and Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Prestige’ (2006). It also successfully challenges the widespread belief that popular culture equals dumb entertainment and draws upon traditional narratology and cognitive film theory to serve this end.

cornelia klecker

cornelia klecker Spoiler Alert!

Spoiler Alert! Mind-Tricking Narratives in Contemporary Hollywood Film

f i lm an d television st udies Volume 2 Edited by

erwin f eyersinger m ario k larer co rnelia kleck er j o ha nnes m ahlknecht

c o rnelia klecker

Spoiler Alert! Mind-Tricking Narratives in Contemporary Hollywood Film

Universitätsverlag

w i nter Heidelberg

Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar.

© Cover image by Cornelia Klecker. Photo of film frame courtesy of Paul Sherman. A similar version of chapter 2 was originally published as “Mind-Tricking Narratives: Between Classical and Art-Cinema Narration” in Poetics Today, Volume 34, no. 1–2, pp. 119–146. © 2013, the Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics, Tel Aviv University. All rights reserved. Republished by permission of the copyrightholder, and the present publisher, Duke University Press. www.dukeupress.edu. Parts of chapter 4 were originally published in “Chronology, Causality, … Confusion: When Avant-Garde Goes Classic” in Journal of Film and Video, Vol. 63, no. 2. © 2011 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.

is b n 978-3-8253-6473-1

Dieses Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Das gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen. © 2o15 Universitätsverlag Winter GmbH Heidelberg Imprimé en Allemagne · Printed in Germany Druck: Memminger MedienCentrum, 87700 Memmingen Gedruckt auf umweltfreundlichem, chlorfrei gebleichtem und alterungsbeständigem Papier Den Verlag erreichen Sie im Internet unter: www.winter-verlag.de

Table of Contents Acknowledgements ................................................................................................ 7 1 Introduction ...................................................................................................... 9 2 Mind-Tricking Narratives: Between Classical and Art-Cinema Narration .... 17 2.1 A Matter of Complex Narrative 17 2.2 Hollywood and Complex Storytelling 17 2.3 Approaching Mind-Tricking Narratives 26 2.3.1 The ‘Deceiver’ 30 2.3.2 Devices of Deception 31 2.3.3 Awareness of Deception 32 2.4 Classical Narration versus Art-Cinema Narration 35 2.5 Concluding Remarks 37 3 Manifestations of Mind-Tricking Narratives: Some Case Studies ............... 39 3.1 Eternal Moonshine of The Simpsons’ Version of a Mind-Tricking Narrative 39 3.2 “Are You Watching Closely?” The Prestige versus The Illusionist 46 3.3 Authentication Authority and Narrative Self-Erasure in Fight Club 56 3.4 Reversing Cause and Effect: Memento 78 4 The Sophistication of the Viewer: How We Have ‘Learned’ to Understand Complex Narrative ......................................................................................... 89 4.1 The Concept of Time in Narrative 90 4.2 Montage in Avant-Garde Film 99 4.3 21 Grams – A Case Study 104 4.4 The Postmodern Concept of Time 110 4.5 Why Postmodernism Is NOT the ‘End of Everything’ 115 4.6 Pulp Fiction – A Case Study 120 4.7 The Television and MTV Generation 127 5 Don’t Spoil the Ending! A Cognitive Approach .......................................... 131 5.1 Cognitive Film Theory 133 5.1.1 David Bordwell’s Model 133 5.1.2 Edward Branigan’s Model 142 5.2 “The Kansas City Shuffle” – Lucky Number Slevin 146 6 Conclusion.................................................................................................... 155 7 Bibliography ................................................................................................. 159 8 Appendix: Sample List of Mind-Tricking Narratives in Film ..................... 171

Acknowledgements This work has gone through quite a journey and, especially since this is my first book, I would like to take the opportunity here to thank quite a number of people who contributed to this publication in various ways. This project started as my dissertation, so I am naturally greatly indebted to my two thesis advisors Mario Klarer and Bradley Chisholm, whose valuable feedback and re-assuring words I would not want to miss. I would also like to thank Gudrun Grabher for her continuous and priceless encouragement throughout my studies and well beyond them to this day. Furthermore, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Sonja Bahn, not only for proofreading every single word I have ever written but also, and even more importantly, for being a true inspiration and role model – not to mention that she was also the one who first drew my attention to film studies. Therefore this book in so many ways would literally not have happened without her. Finally, I would like to thank my colleagues and friends at the Department of American Studies at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, for pointing out relevant films and articles to me as well as for believing in me and helping me through times of frustration.

This is dedicated to my brother Gerald and my late sister Eva.

1

Introduction

I hope for many of you the argument here will resonate with a feeling you’ve had in the past, even if you may have suppressed it at the time – a feeling that the popular culture isn’t locked in a spiral dive of deteriorating standards. […] The sky is not falling. In many ways the weather has never been better. It just takes a new kind of barometer to tell the difference. --- Steven Johnson, Everything Bad Is Good for You (xii) When we look at the landscape of mainstream film in recent years, meticulously designed narratives that force the audience to actively participate and that lead up to the final mind-boggling plot twist have been extremely popular. M. Night Shyamalan is probably the most famous director of this spate of films, and his The Sixth Sense, released in 1999, most definitely the most well-known and, with about $ 300 million box office gross in the United States alone, the most successful representative1. In 2010, the weekly American society magazine People conducted a survey of their readers’ favorite surprise endings. With 61%, The Sixth Sense won in a landslide and took “the title of best twist ever” (“Surprise Endings” 39). Furthermore, the film’s line uttered by the young protagonist played by Haley Joel Osment, “I see dead people,” as well as the viewers’ shocked gasp of “Bruce Willis has been dead all along” have become part of mainstream culture and is not just specialized knowledge within the circle of film buffs2. The very same year another cult film with a stunning twist ending was released, namely David Fincher’s Fight Club. The final revelation that Tyler Durden, played by Brad Pitt, was a mere figment of the imagination of the character played by Edward Norton had a similar effect on the viewers as The Sixth Sense’s and led the audience to re-interpret the entire film. Interestingly enough, Edward Norton had already played a character suffering from a dissociative identity disorder, also popularly known as multiple personality, before. However, in the film Primal Fear, which was directed by Gregory Hoblit and released 1

Cf. analyses of the film found in Barratt, Branigan (110-1), Friedman (17-22), Harty, Lavik, Orth, Wilson (82), to name only a few. 2 “I see dead people” came in 44th in “AFI’s 100 Years … 100 Movie Quotes,” a threehour special television event on CBS created by the American Film Institute (“AFI’s 100 Years”). Furthermore, it has its own entry in the online Urban Dictionary: “A famous quote now used by many for mocking others. [...] The popularity of this line has grown, and now many people say things similar to this, like how people always change the phrase ‘got milk?.’ Some examples of how it has changed are, ‘I see white people,’ ‘I see black people,’ or ‘I see naked people’ (“I see dead people”).

10

Introduction

in 1996, the twist at the end is not that the character played by Norton is mentally ill but that, in fact, he is not. He merely pretended to be so that he would be acquitted of murder by reason of insanity. A character’s mental illness is a common motivation for films to employ this kind of narrative structure. Mary Harron’s American Psycho (2002), John Polson’s Hide and Seek (2005), and Joel Schumacher’s Number 23 (2007), and Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island (2010) use similar techniques, to name only a few. Con films, too, often build up to a more than surprising outcome. Perhaps, the most prominent example is Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects, released in 1995. The fact that Verbal Kint (played by Kevin Spacey), who serves as the narrator of the story being interrogated by the police, turns out to be the legendary mastermind criminal Keyser Söze, caused a tremendous amount of debate among film critics and moviegoers alike. One or even a team of con men who fool their opponents, whether it is the police or other criminals, and the audience along with them, has been a frequent scenario ever since. James Foley’s Confidence and Ridley Scott’s Matchstick Men, both released in 2003, as well as, at least to some extent, the Ocean’s Trilogy, directed by Steven Soderbergh and released in 2001, 2004, and 2007 respectively, and Glenn Ficarra and John Requa’s Focus (2015) starring Will Smith as the leading con man are further examples. In Paul McGuigan’s Lucky Number Slevin (2006) we are led to believe that Slevin, Josh Hartnett’s character, is accidentally mistaken as an assassin only to discover in the end that he himself was the puppet master of the whole plot right from the beginning. Conversely, in Tony Gilroy’s Duplicity (2009) we are convinced that Julia Roberts’s and Clive Owen’s characters are in full control of their scheme; yet, we realize in the end that they were conned themselves. Of course, one or more characters fooling others is a narrative framework that also works outside the con man milieu. In Alan Parker’s The Life of David Gale (2003) it is once again Kevin Spacey’s character that, together with a friend, played by Laura Linney, thought up and carried out the entire conspiracy. In this case, as an ardent opponent of the death penalty, he tries to prove that innocent people can be wrongly convicted and sentenced to death. David Fincher’s The Game (1997), Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige (2006), and Louis Leterrier’s Now You See Me (2013) play with reality and illusion within the diegetic world, and Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys (1995) as well as Michael and Peter Spierig’s Predestination (2014) tackles the mind-boggling concept of time travel. Some films employ a non-linear narrative in order to withhold information, which leads to the desired surprise ending. Greg Marck’s 11:14 (2003) and Peter Tavis’s Vantage Point (2007) both show the same story several times yet always from a different point of view. With every presented vantage point, the film provides more details and forces the viewers to constantly reevaluate and adjust their hypotheses about what actually happened. In Memento (2001), director Christopher Nolan decided to relate parts of the story back-

Introduction

11

wards, partly, in order to mimic the protagonist’s inability to form new memories. In other words, the audience experiences to some extent the condition of not knowing what happened before. However, this ignorance of previous actions is also what makes the twist ending possible, since we find out that the man whose sole quest in life it was to find his wife’s murderer had, in fact, already killed him. The list of these kinds of films could, of course, be prolonged considerably – and will be later on. For now, suffice it to say that there is clearly a trend detectable. These films almost make up a small genre of their own – one that I will be calling mind-tricking narratives. I use the term to classify this rather new phenomenon in contemporary mainstream film. As the expression already suggests and was sketchily illustrated above, these are narrative techniques that deliberately play with the viewers’ experience, response, and expectations during the viewing of a film and feature an utterly surprising outcome in the end. While the quality of the mind-tricking narratives employed in film varies greatly – some are extremely convincing and on-point whereas others fail miserably – it is undeniable that the structure itself has enjoyed great popularity in the past twenty years (which is not to suggest that mind-tricking narratives in film have not appeared before; they clearly have, yet not remotely in the kind of quantity we have seen in the past two decades). A great number of the most famous and critically acclaimed directors, such as Christopher Nolan, Martin Scorsese, David Fincher, and Steven Soderbergh, as well as actors, such as Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio, Morgan Freeman, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Julia Roberts, and Cate Blanchett, feature one or even several mind-tricking narratives on their résumés. And this trend is not restricted to film but even some television serials have adopted this narrative structure. The end of the last episode of the third season of J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof’s highly successful drama series Lost (2004-2010), for instance, entirely changed the previous understanding of the timeline of the events presented in this season. In other words, what initially seemed to be flashbacks turned out to be flashforward sequences, which obviously completely changes the story and many of the viewers’ hypotheses. The sixth season of the premium cable show Dexter (2006-2013) featured a character with dissociative identity disorder, who hallucinates a religious serial killer but – similar to Fight Club – neither he, nor the other characters, nor the audience are aware of the fact that he is only a hallucination. The first season of American Horror Story (2011-) features a character who, in the manner of The Sixth Sense, does not realize that she died and has become a ghost; and even the political thriller Homeland (2011-) employed a mind-tricking narrative during the first few episodes of its third season, where the audience is kept in the dark about the two protagonists’ intricate triple agent mission. Given these abundant occurrences, the aim of this comprehensive analysis is to establish mind-tricking narratives as a distinct and clearly defined category. Films with a mere twist ending are frequent and even trademarks of certain pop-

12

Introduction

ular genres, such as the detective story, however, mind-tricking narratives achieve much more than simply surprising the audience at the end. One core aspect of mind-tricking narratives is that they do not simply ‘make people think’ but deliberately deceive them. They hold back some vital information until the very end of the film. The instant this piece of information is finally revealed, the audience will experience the ultimate epiphany. This moment of recognition is, of course, a standard element of classical narration, yet, in mind-tricking narratives, it has no cathartic value (at least, not in an Aristotelian sense). On the contrary, the film’s resolution will more often than not be the most unsettling scene or sequence as it changes the entire reading of the film. In The Sixth Sense, for instance, the final and vital input that Dr. Malcolm Crowe, the character played by Bruce Willis, has been dead all along forces the audience to re-interpret the story and completely disregard previously established hypotheses. For example, during a dinner scene for Dr. Crowe and his wife’s wedding anniversary, she seems to be upset with her husband. She does not react to his apology for being late. At the end of the film, the audience realizes that the husband had died earlier and in fact has been a ghost throughout the film. At this point they know that her cold reaction was due to the simple fact that she could never see or hear him in any of those scenes, and that she was mourning her loss. Having this new knowledge, and replaying the movie in their mind’s eye, the viewers now interpret things very differently and thus establish a second and corrected storyline that only became apparent through this twist ending. This study contributes to the recent discussion of complex storytelling within the area of film narratology and film theory in general, concentrating on one specific trend in contemporary mainstream film that has largely been neglected. Unlike recent analyses of complex narrative that attempt to cover a wide variety of unconventional storytelling, the following narratological approach analyzes one specific isolated phenomenon that has gained considerable popularity since the mid-nineties. Given this clear focus it will be able to scrutinize in more detail two interrelated aspects: for one thing, the narrative tools and techniques frequently used in order to create a mind-tricking narrative will be identified. The other objective is to explore the scope and limitations of certain cognitive faculties in film viewing by following a cognitive approach. The cognitive perspective has become an accepted notion in many fields of study, such as anthropology, psychology, philosophy, aesthetics and theory of the arts, linguistics, and also film studies. In order to explore the audience’s activity during the viewing of mind-tricking narratives, I will draw heavily on David Bordwell’s as well as Edward Branigan’s cognitive film theories. Bordwell applies a constructivist theory of psychological activity, which positions the viewer as an active participant in the process of story comprehension. He argues that film is a complex system that follows certain norms and supplies the spectators with several cues. These cues trigger off the process of making inferences and hypotheses. Viewers combine these cues with other relevant in-

Introduction

13

formation, most importantly schema-based knowledge. Schemata are organized clusters of knowledge that allow us to go beyond the information given and guide our hypothesis-making. Cognitive film theory in general and this concept of schemata in particular are central in the analysis of mind-tricking narratives. The interplay of information provided by the film and preconceived notions that shape the interpretation of the former are the key to understanding why the average spectator does not anticipate the outcome of the film despite the many clues that the films often provides in order to ‘taunt’ the audience to a second viewing. Since narratology and cognitive theory provide highly effective methodologies for explicating media and cultural premises, this volume will contribute to contextualizing existing research in film and media contact studies to examine narrative feedback mechanisms in recent mainstream film. Thus it will alternately enquire how filmic storytelling has shaped the communicative frame of viewers’ expectations and anticipations and how the viewers’ capability of comprehension affect and guide film narratives. This work is structured into five big parts. The chapter following this introduction, “Mind-Tricking Narratives: Between Classical and Art-Cinema Narration,” will provide a general introduction to the kind of narrative discussed here. It will give an exact definition of what mind-tricking narratives are and also attempt to subdivide them according to three major criteria: the ‘deceiver’ (i.e., ‘who deceives?’), deceiving devices (i.e., ‘how is the deception created?’), and deceptive awareness (i.e., ‘when does the audience find out about a deception?’). Finally, drawing upon Bordwell’s definitions in his Narration in the Fiction Film, it will discuss whether mind-tricking narratives still belong to the realms of classical Hollywood narration or whether a move towards art-cinema narration is detectable. The third chapter, “Manifestations of Mind-Tricking Narratives: Some Case Studies” compiles four close readings that will individually analyze how different mind-tricking narratives can work. The first analysis will actually briefly leave the area of film and examine an episode of the popular American television series The Simpsons. Already in 2007, the Emmy-winning episode “Eternal Moonshine of the Simpson Mind” was aired, which blatantly satirizes mindtricking narratives. The discussion of what aspects they make fun of and how they do so will help deepen the understanding of how mind-tricking narratives work. The second case study will be a comparison of two films. By contrasting an exceedingly convincing execution with an utterly unsuccessful attempt, namely, The Prestige and The Illusionist (2006) respectively, I will illustrate the fine line filmmakers have to walk in order to create a proper mind-tricking narrative. The third case study on Fight Club will focus on the narratological issues of authentication authority as well as the postmodern device of narrative selferasure. Finally, in a fourth case study, the reverse-chronological plot structure of Memento will be scrutinized.

14

Introduction

The fourth chapter, “The Sophistication of the Viewer: How We Have ‘Learned’ to Understand Complex Narrative,” will tackle the question of why mindtricking narratives have experienced an increasing popularity ever since the midnineties. For this purpose, we have to leave the area of mind-tricking narratives and turn to complex film narrative as a whole. With the aid of a discussion of non-linear narratives, I will explore how and why mainstream audiences have reached a level of sophistication that, today, enables them to understand and enjoy complex narratives in general and mind-tricking narratives in particular. The long history of non-linear editing in avant-garde film as well as the postmodern concept of time will help approach this matter. The two close readings about Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu’s 21 Grams (2003) and Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994) will demonstrate these theoretical concepts and also make evident that the dismal yet still very wide-spread notion of postmodernism and popular culture as the end of smart and fascinating art has few if any grounds. As a last step, I, once again, have to leave the realm of film in order to discuss the implications that our constant exposure to television and other technological advances have had on this sophistication of the viewer. The final chapter will approach mind-tricking narratives from a cognitive point of view. For many ‘purists,’ using classical narratology as well as cognitive film theory within one and the same work will be a massive contradiction. However, I follow Edward Branigan’s argumentation in his Narrative Comprehension and Film, one of the most important monographs on cognitive film theory. Both Bordwell as well as Branigan disavow the existence of an implied author or narrator in film but Branigan still believes in the practicability of terms such as ‘narrator’ and ‘focalizer.’ He calls them “convenient labels” that readers/viewers can use in order to aid their process of comprehension and draws on them himself in the description of his eight levels of narration: When the narrative object is narrowed to the acts of comprehension by which it is known, then I believe it is possible to conceive of an “author” as merely another reader with no a priori message to deliver. […] “Narrator,” “actor,” and “focalizer” are then merely convenient labels which allow the reader to fashion his or her own redescription, or transformation, of one perception of the “here-and-now” context into a new perception of it. (Branigan, Narrative Comprehension 111)

For this reason, I, too, feel comfortable applying concepts and the terminology of classical narratology in some of the case studies while at the same time employing the cognitive theory in the last chapter. The focus of this chapter will be Bordwell’s and Branigan’s models. The main concepts will be explained and applied to mind-tricking narratives. The final close reading of Lucky Number Slevin will lead the reader step by step through the process of hypothesis-making in a highly complex and deliberately misleading narrative structure. The more general aim of this volume is in the spirit of the motto of this introduction. Popular culture by no means equals dumb entertainment. Many finan-

Introduction

15

cially successful films these days are decidedly intricate and demanding, and a large number of viewers seems to rise to the challenge. As a consequence, mainstream phenomena are well worthwhile an in-depth academic discussion, which this study of mind-tricking narratives should illustrate. And as a final introductory remark, I would like to issue a warning about the many plot spoilers included in this work – hence, the title of this volume Spoiler Alert! In order to properly analyze mind-tricking narratives, it is unavoidable that some of the twists of the films discussed are revealed. So please proceed with caution.

2

Mind-Tricking Narratives: Between Classical and Art-Cinema Narration

2.1

A Matter of Complex Narrative

In3 her 2009 article “Cheap Plot Tricks, Plot Holes, and Narrative Design,” Marie-Laure Ryan identified and analyzed two narratival problems, namely, as mentioned in the title, plot holes and cheap plot tricks. In this article she also mentions “brilliant plot twists” and describes them as follows: BPTs [brilliant plot twists] are deliberately created effects that do not follow a fixed formula, cannot be repeated without losing their punch, and require a much more specialized environment. […] they aim at the standard narrative effects of suspense, curiosity and surprise, and rely on proven principles of efficient narrative design, such as sudden turn, anagnorisis, or directing the reader’s suspicion toward the wrong character, their brilliance resides in a unique contextualization of these features which can only be studied individually. Eventually, a theory of plot design will have to […] investigate the principles that produce these effects […]. (Ryan 57-8)

The aim of this chapter is not only to accept this challenge but take it a step further. The main question raised is what distinguishes brilliant plot twists from non-brilliant plot twists or even a ‘twistless’ plot if, so Ryan, they all produce the “standard narrative effects” as so influentially described by Meir Sternberg (Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative 259 and “Telling in Time” 529). Ryan’s suggestion that they depend on a distinctive context seems vague at most. Furthermore, her claim that they cannot be studied collectively, i.e. that these effects cannot be theorized, is highly debatable. In fact, in the following I will seek to identify common narrative features of filmic narratives that employ “brilliant plot twists,” among other criteria, and these shall be referred to as mindtricking narratives. 2.2

Hollywood and Complex Storytelling

Mind-tricking narratives are instances of what is now often simply referred to as complex storytelling, an area of film studies, which has been much discussed in 3

A similar version of this chapter was published as “Mind-Tricking Narratives: Between Classical and Art Cinema Narration” in Poetics Today 34.1-2 (Spring/Summer 2013): 119-46. Print.

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Mind-Tricking Narratives: Between Classical and Art-Cinema Narration

recent years. Unfortunately, complex storytelling as used here is still a rather vague term. What is most important is that it has to be distinguished from Aristotle’s conception of the “complex plot.” Aristotle defined two types of plot in his Poetics (cf. 39-41). On the one hand, there is the simple plot, which stresses the importance of the unity of action. On the other hand, there is the complex plot, which is based on the simple plot but offers the additional features of reversal and recognition. However, “complex,” as the term shall be understood here and henceforth (unless indicated otherwise), is mostly defined by what it is not: it does not adhere to a classical narrative structure. In film this means that it describes all kinds of deviations from classical Hollywood cinema (cf., for instance, Bordwell’s The Way Hollywood Tells It 80 and 89 as well as Buckland 1). When it comes to narrative structures in Hollywood film, David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, in their seminal work The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960, lay the foundation for any kind of further narratological discussion on mainstream film. In Bordwell’s insightful description, Classical Hollywood narrative is mainly characterized by its following a clear and comprehensible narrative flow and a complete disguise of the film’s artifice. Causality and goal-directedness are central traits of Classical Hollywood narrative. In Bordwell’s words: Here in brief is the premise of Hollywood story construction: causality, consequence, psychological motivations, the drive toward overcoming obstacles and achieving goals. Character-centered – i.e., personal or psychological – causality is the armature of the classical story. (Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson 13).

When we analyze contemporary mainstream films4, we will soon detect that this depiction of classical style is, too a large extent, still valid today. Yet not entirely. Bordwell himself concedes that Classical Hollywood only lasted until about 1960 (cf. Classical Hollywood 3). The question remains what came afterwards. Two decades later, he tried to tackle exactly this issue in his The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies (2006). Bordwell describes postsixties Hollywood film in order to disprove two prevalent schools of thought. On the one hand, many theorists proclaimed the recent “collapse of narrative.” Bordwell mentions Wheeler Winston Dixon’s “Twenty-Five Reasons Why It’s All over,” in which Dixon laments that: 4

With ‘mainstream’ I mostly refer to Hollywood film, even if I have a rather broad definition of ‘Hollywood,’ similar to that of David Bordwell’s (cf. The Way Hollywood Tells It 17-8 and my own “Fascination for Confusion” 113). Some of the key features, which can be freely combined, are that these films are produced and/or distributed by the major film companies or their subsidiaries, have economic success, star famous actors or directors, or are nominated by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science.

Hollywood and Complex Storytelling

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We now witness the collapse of narrative and the demise of audience consciousness5. Plots are reduced to the simplest possible linear graphs: here’s the good guy, here’s the bad guy, here’s the conflict, the good guy wins. The audience is confronted with one violent spectacle after another, devoid of any context or explanation. The human has been reduced to the level of mere agency in these mechanistic spectacles, which have been created to cater to the ever-diminishing attention spans of image-saturated viewers. Contemporary audiences don’t want complexity, they want hand-holding simplicity, in which every step of the narrative construction is heavily foreshadowed and plays out in a nondisruptive manner. Because of the wide variety of new and competing media, more has become less. We no longer have the time to become intensely engrossed in a complex narrative structure, or the desire to be surprised or challenged. (Dixon 363-4; also qtd. in Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It 5)

Simplistic plots and visual spectacle are main aspects of both blockbuster and high concept films. Blockbusters, Bordwell also calls them “megapictures” (cf. Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It 2-3), are big-budget films that are heavily advertised, released simultaneously on thousands of theater screens, and usually accompanied with a variety of related commercial products, such as, T-shirts, action figures, soundtracks, and novelizations6. Blockbusters are designed to make a lot of money and, thus, create these additional sources of revenue. This ramification of one film might be mirrored in a more fragmented narrative of the film itself. Bordwell cites Richard Maltby, who explains that blockbusters privilege “the pursuit of synergy” over “narrative coherence” (Maltby 26; also Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It 5). Recent examples of blockbusters are Michael Bay’s Transformers (2007) and James Cameron’s Avatar (2009). High concept films, as Justin Wyatt argues, were a result of the abovementioned blockbuster practices – as a matter of fact, many blockbusters also are high concept (cf. films, such as, Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park [1993] and James Cameron’s Titanic [1997]). Stripped to their essentials, high concept films combine an idea that can be effortlessly pitched (to producers and audiences alike) with the promise of becoming a financial success. In Wyatt’s words, they feature “a striking, easily reducible narrative which also offers a high degree of marketability” (13). A prime example is David R. Ellis’s Snakes on a Plane (2006), whose mere title suffices in order to describe the main premise of the film. Bordwell disagrees with the notion that Hollywood has succumbed to producing mindless and unvarying films and analyzes an abundance of post-sixties productions to lay bare their novelty traits. For instance, in his close reading of Cameron Crowe’s Jerry Maguire (1996) he illustrates how this film diverges 5 6

I.e. the viewers’ ability and willingness to follow and comprehend complex storytelling. For a discussion of novelizations as promotional material see Mahlknecht (2012).

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from the Hollywood premises by featuring “an intricate plot and a rare density of implication and motif” (Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It 63). However, the other current view of contemporary film that Bordwell attempts to challenge is that Hollywood’s output has become too diverse to even be able to talk about a distinctive and uniform style7, the kind of coherent style that he described in his Classical Hollywood Cinema as well as Narration in the Fiction Film. He does acknowledge the fact that there have been some changes and novelties, as mentioned above, but he considers them still firmly rooted in the classical Hollywood style (Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It 9-10). I generally agree with Bordwell’s observations. To this day, mainstream film largely follow classic Hollywood style. However, he might pay too little attention to the high frequency of deviations from classical narrative and dismisses these novelty aspects by squeezing them into conventional frameworks. The best example is his analysis of Christopher Nolan’s Memento, an epitome of nonclassical narrative as numerous analyses illustrate8, as an essentially classically structured film. As I will argue in depth in a later chapter of this volume, Memento is a heavily fragmented movie that essentially features two narrative strands: one is in black and white and shows Leonard Shelby, the protagonist played by Guy Pearce, alone in a hotel room, where he is mostly talking on the phone. The other one is in color and shows how Leonard is trying to find his wife’s murderer. These two strands are intercut in alternating segments. The first appears in chronological and the latter in reverse-chronological order. Thus, the film frequently reverses cause and effect on the level of narration. However, as already mentioned above, Bordwell specified causality as one of the central characteristics of classical narrative and, related to that, pointed out the importance of chronology: If temporality and causality did not cooperate […], the spectator could not construct a coherent story out of the narration. […] Hollywood cinema’s reliance upon chronology triggers the fundamental query: What will happen next in the story? […] The relatively close correspondence between story order and narrational order in the classical film helps the spectator create an organized succession of hypotheses and a secure rhythm of question and answer. (Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson 44) 7

Cf. descriptions of post-classical Hollywood in Langford’s Post-Classical Hollywood, Booker’s Postmodern Hollywood, and Cowie “Storytelling.” The latter is also cited by Bordwell: “[Contemporary Hollywood films] cannot be seen as unified as was possible under the old oligopoly. Stylistic norms have changed, and perhaps no longer exist as a consistent group of norms” (Cowie 188 and Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It 5). 8 Cf., for example, Branigan’s “Nearly True” (2002, 108), Elsaesser’s Hollywood heute (2009, 219), Ghislotty (2009), Lavik (2006, 63), Little (2005), Mittell (2006, 31), and Sibielski (2004).

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In Memento the correlation between story order and narrational order is everything but close. Therefore, in this film the audience’s process of establishing hypotheses works backwards. The viewers witness effects before they learn about the cause and have no knowledge about what happened before. This is clearly a violation of classical narrative, as Bordwell quotes Lewis Herman: “Care must be taken that […] there is no conflict between what has gone on before, what is going on currently, and what will happen in the future; that there is complete consistency between present dialogue and past action […]” (Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson 18). I definitely agree with Bordwell’s observation that Memento provides several aiding devices (or storytelling redundancies, as he refers to them) that make it easier for the viewer to follow the plot. For instance, the clear color distinction of the two main narrative strands (one in color, the other one in black and white) helps us place the different segments instantly. Furthermore, the reverse-order scenes partly overlap in that the beginning of the preceding sub-sequence and the end of the following sub-sequence are identical. Seeing a few seconds once again refreshes our memory and helps us connect the segments. Nonetheless, Bordwell takes it too far when he claims that “Nolan’s real achievement […] is it to make his reverse-order plot conform to classical plot structure […]” (The Way Hollywood Tells It 79). By this postulation, Bordwell overlooks the intricacy of its narrative structure and does not do the film justice at all. Again, I would like to emphasize that I entirely agree with Bordwell that Classical Hollywood narrative is, to this day, very dominant (cf. The Way Hollywood Tells It 1). Nonetheless, he understates the complexity of certain recent films as well as their frequent occurrence. The only true acknowledgement to complex narratives Bordwell makes are his so-called “forking-path plots,” which he describes in his article “Film Futures,” published in 2002 (88). Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths” (Borges, 1964), which discusses the concept of parallel universes, inspired him to this name. In this essay, Bordwell analyses films, such as Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run and Peter Howitt’s Sliding Doors (both released in 1998), whose complexity stems from their offering more than one narrative path that describe alternative futures. Sometimes these different paths are shown consecutively (as in Run Lola Run) and sometimes they are alternately intercut (as in Sliding Doors). Still, Bordwell considers these narratives to be comparatively simplistic since the parallel worlds presented differ only slightly. For instance, characters remain basically the same instead of changing radically (e.g. a girlfriend ‘turning into’ a sister; the protagonist not being there). “Narratives are built not upon philosophy or physics [which would allow for much more radical alternatives] but folk psychology, the ordinary processes we use to make sense of the world,” Bordwell reasons (“Film Futures” 90). Acquired knowledge about filmmaking conventions enable viewers to follow and understand narratives but these conventions, so Bordwell suggests, are firmly rooted in ordinary life.

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Bordwell gives the example of flashbacks and flashforwards. Similar to our relative knowledge of the past and ignorance of the future, we perceive flashbacks as fairly reliable and flashforwards as mere speculations. In Bordwell’s words: “Film flashbacks, for example, are seldom questioned, while flashforwards are always under a cloud, apparently because we assume the past to be knowable in a way that the future is not“ (“Film Futures” 90). Likewise, when we think about chance and coincidence in our lives and wonder what would have happened had x not occurred, we imagine variants that differ only slightly from each other. Therefore, films present forking narratives that are comparably similar to each other (Bordwell, “Film Futures” 90-1). Bordwell considers these forking-path narratives a prime example of how contemporary films bend Classical Hollywood narrative with some novelties that only work due to the fact that they rely heavily on traditional cinematic storytelling conventions. He sketches out seven of these conventions: “1. Forking paths are linear [chronological],” “2. The fork is signposted,” “3. Forking paths intersect sooner or later,” “4. Forking-path tales are unified by traditional cohesion devices,” “5. Forking paths will often run parallel,” “6. All paths are not equal; the last one taken presupposes the others,” and “7. All paths are not equal; the last one taken, or completed, is the least hypothetical one” (Bordwell, “Film Futures” 92-100). In the following, I will briefly summarize the ones that seem most vital in his argument that even forking-path narratives bear little complexity, namely numbers 1, 2, 6, and 7. “1. Forking paths are linear” (Bordwell, “Film Futures” 92). Despite their initial appearance of highly fragmented plots, forking-path plots are told in a strictly chronological fashion and rely on stern causality – once, the parallel universes have been established. The narrative is divided once into two or more paths but these paths do not branch out again afterwards. Too many alternatives would render these narratives too difficult to comprehend. Speaking of intelligibility, Bordwell’s second convention is that the narrative clearly indicates the fork (“Film Futures” 93). Inserts or dialogue lines pointing out an alternative future or repeating the same opening sequence for each forking path – or, of course, any combination of those and other techniques – all clearly signpost the chosen narrative structure. Furthermore, despite the fact that forking-path plots have multiple outcomes, these films do reach a traditional resolution and unity in the sense that the last path taken is considered (by the viewers) the most probable or even truest one: If something like a primacy effect established the first future as a benchmark, the “recency effect” privileges the final future we see. Because endings are weightier than most other points in the narrative, and because forking-path tales tend to make the early stories preconditions for the last one, these plots suggest that the last future is the final draft, the one that “really” happened […]. (Bordwell, “Film Futures” 100)

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So, similar to his discussion of Memento, Bordwell partly reduces the complexity of forking-path plots to their using all the essential traits of classical narrative: chronology and closure. His main conclusion is that films with a mainstream appeal cannot be too complicated. Or in his words, “the more radically the film evokes multiple times, the more constrained it must be on the other fronts” (Bordwell, “Film Futures” 103). In Edward Branigan’s response to Bordwell’s article, he largely agrees with Bordwell’s analysis of forking-path plots but feels the need to qualify it particularly in terms of convention 6 and 7, that “all paths are not equal.” He argues that there are complex films that do not display this proposed closure through the recency effect but end far more ambiguously than Bordwell concedes. He suggests that there exist other types of plotting […], where the relationship among parallels and alternatives is neither flaunted [as in forking-path plots] nor buried [as in classical narrative], but is ambiguous or indeterminate, as if parallels were seen in parallax. (Branigan 107)

I, for one, am not even convinced that in ‘regular’ forking-path narratives the final version is taken as the truest one. In Run Lola Run, for instance, to take up Bordwell’s example, I have my reservations whether the majority of viewers will simply accept the final path (which features a favorable outcome) as a happy ending of the entire film and discard the other proposed alternatives – I certainly did not. But let us, for the moment, say that this is, in fact, the case. Then, the challenge presented to the viewers is all the more demanding. The fact that we favor the last finish, according to Bordwell, “conforms to our propensity to weight the ending [of the entire film], to treat it as the culmination of what went before…even if all of what went before couldn’t really have come before” (“Film Futures” 102). What Bordwell describes as a tendency to privilege the final option, however, requires the audience’s heightened cognitive skills of picking out relevant story elements that were presented in parallel worlds and piecing them together into a coherent storyline. As Branigan so eloquently put it, “Bordwell finds a ‘causal’ logic among forking-path plots despite the absence of any chrono-logical support” (110). To stress my point, not just Bordwell found these causal relations in the midst of fragmentation but also the audience does, even has to. Consequently, these forking-path narratives prove to be much more complex and different from classical Hollywood than Bordwell acknowledges. Allan Cameron, too, believes that Bordwell does not recognize the complexity of many contemporary films, such as the ones mentioned above, to its full extent. He coined the concept of “modular narratives,” which present a narrational order that is radically different from the story’s chronological order and, consequently, deviate from classical narrative, which features a fairly close correspondence between the two (cf. Cameron 4-5), as already mentioned above (Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson 44). Forking-path narratives are one of four

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types of cinematic modular narratives that he outlines in his analysis (cf. Cameron 6-16). The other three are: (2) “Anachronic narratives:” They are mostly defined by their use of flashbacks and flashforwards, such as we find in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994) (Cameron 6). (3) “Split-screen narratives:” Two or more parallel narratives are shown literally simultaneously by use of split screen, such as Mike Figgis’s Timecode (2000) (Cameron 6). (4) “Episodic narratives:” These narratives destabilize causality and can be subdivided into “abstract series” and “anthology.” The first is shaped according to a “non-narrative system.” Cameron gives the example of Peter Greenaway’s A Zed and Two Noughts (1985), which is structured according to an alphabetical list of animals. The latter provides several short stories that are unconnected except for the fact that they share the same diegetic space, such as Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth (1991) (Cameron 13-4). Cameron does not only recognize the complexity of these particular films but detects an ongoing and increasing tendency in this direction in mainstream film. Warren Buckland, too, has become aware of exactly this trend. In his anthology Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema, he takes up the cudgels for contemporary film by acknowledging the increasing narrative complexity that can be witnessed. Against Bordwell, with his folk psychology, he claims that there has been an abundance of movies – he mentions films, such as Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich 1999, David Lynch’s Mullholland Dr. (2001), and Stephen Daldry’s The Hours (2002) - that employ complex storytelling, particularly since the 1990s. Buckland explains that in today’s culture dominated by new media, experiences are becoming increasingly ambiguous and fragmented; correspondingly, the stories that attempt to represent those experiences have become opaque and complex. These complex stories overturn folk-psychological ways of understanding and instead represent radically new experiences and identities. (“Introduction” 1)

What is very important here is that Buckland, too, defines ‘complex’ differently than Aristotle. As Buckland recapitulates (cf. “Introduction” 2-3) and as already mentioned earlier, Aristotle explained that there are two kinds of plots, namely the simple and the complex plot (cf. Aristotle, chapter X, 39-41). However, for Buckland puzzle films constitute a third kind of plot, which goes beyond Aristotle’s complex plot. How so? Unfortunately, it appears that the term puzzle film does little more than simply replacing the already vague concept of complex storytelling. As Buckland himself explains: How do puzzle plots go beyond Aristotle’s definition of the complex plot? […] puzzle films embrace non-linearity, time loops, and fragmented spatio-temporal reality. These films blur the boundaries between different levels of reality, are

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riddled with gaps, deception, labyrinthine structures, ambiguity, and overt coincidences. They are populated with characters who are schizophrenic, lose their memory, are unreliable narrators, or are dead (but without us – or them – realizing). In the end, the complexity of puzzle films operates on two levels: narrative and narration. It emphasizes the complex telling (plot, narration) of a simple or complex story (narrative). (Buckland 6; original emphasis)

In other words, Buckland’s puzzle films cover a wide range of films. Examples of films listed by Buckland (without further elaboration) are rather experimental split-screen editing as in Timecode, disordered narratives as in Stephen Daldry’s The Hours (2002) and Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu’s 21 Grams (2003), films that have an unusual time conception on a story level, such as Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber’s The Butterfly Effect (2004) and Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko (2001), and films whose story (rather than plot structure) is confusing, such as Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich (1999) and David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. (2001) (cf. Buckland 11). The question remains what all these films have in common. It seems that puzzle films comprise more or less everything that is in some way(s) ‘out of the ordinary.’ Clearly, a more operational specification is needed. Thomas Elsaesser’s concept of “mind-game films,” as elaborated in his Hollywood heute: Geschichte, Gender und Nation im postklassischen Kino as well as in his contribution to Buckland’s Puzzle Films, attempts to specify complex storytelling or, rather, a specific kind of complex storytelling. He broadly defines mind-game films as “movies that are ‘playing games,’ and this at two levels […]” (Elsaesser, “Mind-Game Film” 14). The first level occurs when a character is played games with by one or more other characters. Elsaesser gives the example of Peter Weir’s The Truman Show (1998). The title character, played by Jim Carey, is, though completely unaware, the central character of a reality show. His entire life is broadcast on television and the show’s director, played by Ed Harris, often interferes, in other words plays games, with Truman’s life in order to make the show more interesting and to keep him from finding out about this. The second level occurs when the audience is played games with by the filmmakers. A film achieves this by withholding or misrepresenting information, such as in Fight Club, where the fact that Brad Pitt’s character is merely imagined is kept from the audience until the end. Sometimes, of course, these two levels run parallel, namely, when the same crucial information is withheld from both the character(s) and the audience (Elsaesser, “Mind-Game Film” 14). Elsaesser’s category of mind-game films, too, extends widely, yet, identifies “one overriding common feature,” namely, the film’s “delight in disorienting or misleading spectators […]” (Elsaesser, “Mind-Game Film” 15). However, Elsaesser lists several movies that do not really do that. He mentions films such as the Wachowski brothers’ The Matrix (1999). But this film keeps the viewers, along with the main character Neo, played by Keanu Reeves, in the dark for only, perhaps, twenty to thirty minutes and then plainly reveals the existence of a

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computer-generated world. Moreover, movies that only play with their characters, such as The Truman Show mentioned above, do not play with or disorient the spectators at all. While the overriding feature of misleading spectators is a good starting point to identify a certain kind of complex storytelling, the list of movies Elsaesser puts under the heading of mind-game films but that does not actually confuse and mislead the audience is rather long. Therefore, in the following, I would like to define and identify one specific type of complex storytelling, namely, as mentioned above, mind-tricking narratives. 2.3

Approaching Mind-Tricking Narratives

The narrative structure of mind-tricking narratives is definitely complex and this is despite the fact that a great number of them are narrated in a seemingly classical way – as defined by Bordwell (Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson 13). In other words, many of them have one storyline that is traditionally structured into beginning, middle, and end; all segments are neatly put together and causally linked; the overall look of the film is designed to disguise its artificiality. Compare films, such as The Sixth Sense, which is – initially – as straightforwardly Hollywood as they come. So, how can one argue that mind-tricking narratives are instances of complex storytelling? If we define ‘complex’ the way we have previously, as a deviation from classical Hollywood narrative, then mind-tricking narratives need to do just that, even when they appear to follow the classical schema. Their core deviation lies in the resolution; in other words, mind-tricking narratives feature an ending that completely takes us by surprise. Any narrative’s underlying principle is the tension between withholding and releasing information. However, mind-tricking narratives hold back some vital information until the very end of the film. They open a focused and temporary gap, keeping it open to the last possible moment. In his chapter “Tactics of Syuzhet Construction,” Bordwell elaborates a great deal about the distribution of information along the narrative sequence and, drawing heavily on Meir Sternberg’s analyses, particularly about different kinds of gaps (cf. Bordwell, Narration 54-55). As Bordwell explains, no syuzhet explicitly presents all fabula events but leaves some things out. This disparity creates gaps that can either be temporal, causal, or spatial. Accordingly, Bordwell distinguishes three binary pairs that gaps can be characterized with: temporary/permanent, diffuse/focused, and flaunted/suppressed. Even though these terms seem almost self-explanatory, let me briefly clarify their meaning to ensure better understanding. A temporary gap is filled again – this can happen almost immediately or at a much later stage, but it is filled eventually. On the contrary, a permanent gap is left open for good; i.e. the missing information is never provided (cf. Bordwell, Narration 55 and also Sternberg, Expositional

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Modes 50-51). A diffuse gap holds back information that is rather vague and indeterminate and the viewers, as a consequence, can fill it in with common knowledge. Bordwell gives the example of a time ellipsis of a character’s childhood, where we can establish a rough picture about what happened between the birth and the eighteenth birthday on our own. On the other hand, a focused gap withholds a very particular piece of information, such as the identity of a murderer in a detective story. Finally, a flaunted gap draws attention to itself explicitly (again, withholding the identity of the murderer would be a great example) while a suppressed gap is covered up and so escapes notice (cf. Bordwell, Narration 55). Sternberg calls these suppressed and imperceptible gaps “surprise gaps,” which he defines as follows: What characterizes the pure “surprise gap,” […] is that the different hypotheses emerge not simultaneously but successively, often in a widely spaced sequence. More precisely, one of them is made to arise immediately upon the hidden opening of the gap – as automatic, self-explanatory, or at least overwhelmingly probable explanation; so that it may be effectively demolished and replaced by a subsequently sprung explanation, with a superior intrinsic authority or contextual power of accounting for the facts. This is, then, the most extreme case of shifts in probability during the reading-process. For the position of the successive hypotheses within the text’s structure and hierarchy of probabilities is not simply changed, but turned upside down: what at first seemed the only possibility, to the extent that the reader may have unconsciously filled in the gap in passing, is later eliminated or at least drastically demoted, and what first may not have occurred to him at all is later decisively established. (Sternberg, Expositional Modes 245)

When we use Sternberg’s (and Bordwell’s) terminology and apply them to mindtricking narratives, we can say the following: all mind-tricking narratives provide a temporary and focused gap. A very specific piece of information, such as that the character played by Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense is a ghost or that Tyler Durden in Fight Club is only a hallucination, is kept from the viewers but revealed eventually, or to be more precise, only at the end of the film. Most (but not all) mind-tricking narratives suppress this gap, i.e. they create a surprise gap. The viewers do not even know that there is something they do not know. In The Sixth Sense and Fight Club, for instance, viewers will probably “have unconsciously filled this gap in passing,” so that they come to believe that the character played by Bruce Willis is alive (and not, as it turns out, dead) and that the character played by Brad Pitt is real (and not imagined), respectively. What is important is that mind-tricking narratives depend on an extreme case of a surprise gap that causes a radical correction of hypotheses that occurs once the gap is disclosed in the end of a film. And this correction affects a hypothesis that is relevant for the entire narrative, which is why the surprise gap was opened early on in the film. As a matter of fact, the filling in of the surprise gap is likely to

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cause an intense shock and even disbelief in the possibility of the final outcome. And this may prompt a viewer to re-watch the film. During such a second viewing, the narrative pay-off is greatly heightened if the mind-tricking narrative features hidden redundancies. Redundancy as well as retardation are “two general principles” that Bordwell describes that guide the construction of a narrative (Narration 55). For any narrative to work, information needs to be delayed to a varying extent, i.e. a varying duration of time, but a narrative can also repeat information. One could argue that mind-tricking narratives are a curious case of extreme retardation and the truly effective ones combine it with hidden or retrospective redundancy. In other words, the essential all-changing input is withheld until the very end of the film, hence excessive retardation. Yet, they provide many clues that already hint at the final disclosure. However, the average viewers will make them out only upon a second viewing, once they already know about the surprise ending. Then these clues can, depending on the number and visibility of such clues, even be perceived as redundant. A truly attentive viewer might be able to pick up those hints on a first viewing and fill in the surprise gap ‘prematurely.’ However, this is rather unlikely since surprise gaps are hidden gaps, which are unlikely to encourage rather improbable hypotheses. The average audience will experience surprise and the ultimate moment of recognition the instant the surprise gap is finally disclosed. Both surprise and recognition are, of course, standard elements of classical narration, yet, in mind-tricking narratives, they work somewhat differently mostly because they need not lead to a cathartic effect. But let us start with the element of surprise. For Aristotle, surprise is an important part of a narrative since it reinforces the cathartic effect, as he noted himself in his Poetics: “Tragedy is an imitation not only of complete action, but of events inspiring fear or pity. Such an effect is best produced when the events come on us by surprise […]” (Aristotle 39). According to him, the two ways of creating surprise are “Reversal of the Situation” and/or “Recognition” (Aristotle 43), both of which occur somewhere between the beginning and the end of the plot. This, of course, is a rather limited view of the element of surprise, which, as Sternberg pointed out, is and therefore should be analyzed as an important narrative device on its own: Aristotle would keep surprise in a role that is localized (for pinpointed impact), mimeticized (into fortune-reversing act), contributory (to pity-and-fear), and otherwise dependent (on well-formedness), instead of casting it as a universal narrative force in its own right. […] the higher communicative power […] of plot shrinks at its “complex” best into two midpoint junctures in glorious isolation, namely, the surprise turns of peripety and/or discovery. As officially defined, both form sudden, hence local, intensifying twists, at the expense of plot scope; both also relate to the middle […]. (Sternberg, “Telling in Time” 510-1)

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Given these characteristics of the Aristotelian surprise, it becomes apparent that the surprise twists in mind-tricking narratives work rather differently. For one thing, these twists have always to do with the recognition of past events and never constitute a reversal of future events, i.e. it is always a discovery and not necessarily a peripety. And this discovery is of such magnitude that it changes the understanding of the entire story and forces the viewer to reinterpret the entire film. As Sternberg explains, “surprise effects vary between sheer disruption and new resolution, according to whether they only unsettle or also resettle the earlier course of events” (Sternberg, “Telling in Time” 521). The twists in mind-tricking narratives always resettle previous events and since they occur at the end of the film, as opposed to in the middle, they create a completely unexpected resolution that shocks the audience. But instead of creating pity and fear, this surprise effect, that resettles the events of the whole film, keeps us occupied with the process of reconsidering and reshaping our understanding of the entire narrative, thus shifting our focus of attention from the narrated to the narration (this aspect will be further elaborated upon later on). Therefore, surprise effects in mind-tricking narratives do not have any cathartic value. Buckland remarked the same about The Sixth Sense: “[The film] seems at first to conform to a standard moment of recognition in Aristotle’s sense. However, this recognition does not lead the audience to feel catharsis, but to a sense that the film’s director, Shyamalan, has pulled a ‘fast one’ on the audience” (“Introduction” 5). In order to create this sense of having been misled, or deceived, one aspect is very important, namely, that mind-tricking narratives have a definite resolution. Final disambiguation or, to use Sternberg’s terminology once again, “retrospective untwisting” is vital (“Telling in Time” 537). By the end of the film, the puzzle has to be solved; every piece should fall into place. Old hypotheses are crushed and a final definite version of the narrative is established. So, we have established that the core features of mind-tricking narratives provide a temporary and focused surprise gap, which is plugged in the end. Since surprise gaps are imperceptible, the abrupt opening of the gap, where none was observed before, causes shock and surprise about past actions and events. But this surprise does not cause pity and/or fear and, thus, catharsis but leads the viewers to reinterpret the entire film. These central principles provide the basis for a great variety of films, some of which were mentioned in the introduction. These are, of course, only some examples of mind-tricking films released in recent years (for a list of mind-tricking narratives in contemporary Hollywood film, see the appendix provided at the end of this volume). I do not proceed to offer a taxonomy of the different kinds of mind-tricking narratives. It would be difficult to draw clear lines between the various categories as they would mostly overlap. However, I would like to identify three main aspects in which these films differ from one another and, thus, can be distinguished. Who deceives the audience that will eventually be undeceived by surprise? How is it done? And when does the audience discover the deception and the truth it concealed?

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2.3.1 The ‘Deceiver’ The most obvious question when discussing deception is ‘who deceives?’ In mind-tricking narratives, we encounter at least two possibilities. Either the film itself deceives the audience or one or more characters do so. Of course, at the end of the day, it is always the film that deludes, but the trickery can be mimetically motivated if done by a character. Interestingly enough, most mind-tricking narratives do, in fact, take advantage of exactly this possibility. If the deception is motivated on a story level by use of a character creating the deception, then it branches out into essentially two possibilities. The first one is that a character simply lies, i.e., deliberately tricks other characters. These more often than not tend to be con films that involve criminals outsmarting other criminals. Consider Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects (1995), where Verbal Kint (played by Kevin Spacey), who serves as the narrator of the story and is interrogated by the police, turns out to be the legendary mastermind criminal Keyser Söze in the very end. Confidence, Lucky Number Slevin, Matchstick Men, and Focus are other examples of this kind of mind-tricking narrative. The other possibility is that characters lie to themselves; in other words, they are not aware of the fact that they misrepresent reality and since the film only shows their point of view neither is the audience. This seems to be the most common type of mind-tricking narrative. Again, the already mentioned The Sixth Sense would be a prime example, where the viewers do not know that the character played by Bruce Willis is dead since he does not know himself. Fight Club also belongs to this category. There Norton’s character is not aware of the fact that Tyler Durden is merely a figment of his imagination and since he serves as the narrator neither is the audience. In his discussion of mind-game films, Elsaesser outlines a “list of common motifs” that are the roots of the unreliability of characters (“Mind-Game Films” 17). All of these motifs have one thing in common, namely, that the decisive factor is the mental condition of (usually) the protagonist. Characters might not have access to all the facts due to memory loss (as in Memento). identity disorder is frequently drawn upon in mind-tricking narrative. This mental illness manifests itself by characters who imagine nonexistent characters and whole scenarios that they, and thus the audience, perceive as real (as in Fight Club and American Psycho). So, while there are some examples, where it is the film that deceives, in most mind-tricking narratives the deceiver is one character, usually the protagonist, who misrepresents the filmic reality either deliberately or unknowingly.

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2.3.2 Devices of Deception The question of who deceives, of course, strongly ties in with the issue of how it is done. If it is the film itself that tricks us – as opposed to a character in the film’s world – then the key to the process is discontinuous editing through which decisive story information, such as that a character is not real, is withheld. For instance, in Greg Marck’s 11:14 (2003) the same period of time is shown repeatedly but each time from a different character’s point of view. Each perspective adds some information but it goes almost without saying that the decisive allexplaining and/or changing input is left until the very last time this period is repeated. Another deceiving devise, and perhaps, one of the easiest ways of creating a mind-tricking narrative, is having characters deceive each other – and this is particularly easy if it is the protagonists who are being fooled. If the film focuses on its main characters, i.e. on their actions and point of view, then it follows that any information kept from them is, consequently, also kept from the audience. Examples of this kind of narrative would be M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable (2000), where the protagonist, played by Bruce Willis, finds out only in the end that his close advisor is in fact also the villain he has been looking for. It becomes even more interesting when characters deceive themselves unknowingly. This kind of mind-tricking narratives is quite similar to the films discussed in Jonathan Eig’s “A Beautiful Mind(Fuck): Hollywood Structures of Identity” (2003). His definition of “mindfucks” covers films that feature a surprise revelation about the protagonist’s identity that even the character him- or herself is unaware about (Eig n.p.). This misrepresentation of the nature of a character’s identity is a radical deviation from, not to say, violation of a classical Hollywood convention, namely, that a delusional character’s perception of reality is to be marked as such (for instance, by using actual point-of-view shots). In other words, the main purpose of these mind-tricking narratives is presenting a highly subjective narrative as more or less objective and truthful. It is disguised as being the camera’s ‘omniscient’ view. Again, a prominent example would be Fight Club, where the fact that Tyler Durden is only a figment of the protagonist’s imagination is simply passed over. Many other films use this exact same premise, including Hide and Seek, Number 23, Secret Window, and Brad Anderson’s The Machinist (2004). This has become such a common practice that the screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (or, rather, his fictionalized self played by Nicholas Cage in the film Adaptation) proclaimed with frustration: “The only idea more overused than serial killers is multiple personality” (Adaptation 00:30:3034) – and this already in 2002. Elsaesser summarizes these various strategies as follows: [T]hey suspend the common contract between the film and its viewers, which is that films do not "lie’ to the spectator, but are truthful and self-consistent within

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Mind-Tricking Narratives: Between Classical and Art-Cinema Narration the premises of their diegetic worlds, that permit, of course, ‘virtual’ worlds, impossible situations, and improbable events. (Elsaesser, “MGF” 19-20)

If withholding information counts as lying, then I completely agree with his analysis. However, I would be hesitant about using the word ‘lie’ in this particular context as it might be a bit misleading. Few (if any) of those films will actually lie as ‘in deliberately giving information that is untrue.’ They leave strategically placed gaps that offer two possible interpretations – one during the first viewing and the second (and final one) retrospectively upon the disclosure of the surprise gap. During the first viewing, spectators will most likely fill them in according to their common everyday knowledge as well as previously acquired knowledge about Hollywood film and its conventions. The filmmakers, of course, rely heavily on the fact that most viewers’ minds will go into the most plausible direction only to reveal in the end that their interpretation was wrong. The already mentioned and often-cited9 restaurant scene in The Sixth Sense exemplifies this magnificently. To reiterate, Dr. Malcolm Crowe, played by Bruce Willis, enters a restaurant and sits down at the table where his wife, Anna Crowe, played by Olivia Williams, seems to have been waiting for a while. She does not talk to him; she does not look at him. The most obvious hypothesis for the viewers is that Anna is angry with him for being late and, therefore, gives him the ‘silent treatment’. We read her behavior and facial expression as frustration. At the end of the film, of course, we find out that the true cause of her silence was the fact that he is a ghost and she could simply not see him. She was not angry; she was sad. It is of vital importance to point out, however, that the film did not explicate that she was irritated – we merely assumed that. So, as mentioned above, mind-tricking narratives often disguise the ontological structure but do not lie. 2.3.3 Awareness of Deception Inquiring when the audience finds out that they have been deceived or at least denied some relevant information can make one distinction among mind-tricking narratives. Most mind-tricking narratives, as mentioned earlier, are the ones that disguise, as it were, this very fact until the end. In other words, the audience is not aware of the fact that crucial information is kept from them until the final sequence: the surprise gap operates along the lines as already described. However, much less often but worth mentioning nonetheless, there are films that keep the viewers in constant ‘puzzling-mode.’ More or less right from the beginning, we are aware of the fact that there is a mystery or riddle to be solved: 9

Cf., for instance, Barratt 75-6.

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the gap created in the beginning is flaunted. This means that in these mindtricking films the surprise gap is mixed with a curiosity gap. Consider Sternberg’s definition: “With ‘curiosity gaps,’ the reader is at once alerted to the deformation of antecedents […]” 10 (Sternberg, Expositional Modes 244). Sternberg also allows for “the possibility of mixed gaps (whose opening is highlighted, while the timing, manner, or substance of their filling is unexpected, as – often – in the detective story)” (Expositional Modes 244). A prime example of a mind-tricking narrative that features such a mixed gap is Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige (2006), where the main issue of how a particular magic trick is performed accompanies us throughout the greater part of the film. Other movies that raise the question of ‘what has happened’ and/or ‘what is going on’ early on are Number 23 (2007), Primal Fear (1996), The Game (1997), and John McNaughton’s Wild Things (1998), to name only a few. Of course, Sternberg’s quote from above suggests that this kind of mindtricking narratives offers the same plot structure as traditional detective films. Some sort of mystery (e.g., a murder) is presented at the beginning and the final solution (e.g., the identity of the murderer) is only revealed in the end. However, there are some characteristics that distinguish mind-tricking narratives from the average detective movie. Two of them are in Tzvetan Todorov’s “The Typology of Detective Fiction.” For one thing, conventional detective films – I am greatly generalizing their narrative structure for emphasis – plant clues so that the viewers may follow them and identify the murderer more or less simultaneously with the detective; or as Todorov explains, “we examine clue after clue, lead after lead” (45). Mind-tricking narratives, on the other hand, attempt to lead you astray. Lavik remarks much the same tendency in The Sixth Sense: [T]he film differs from traditional detective stories in one crucial sense: in the time-honored Sherlock Holmes/Hercule Poirot tradition it is commonly held that the reader or viewer have access to the same information as the detective hero and hence, in principle, the opportunity to solve the mystery before or at the same time as him or her. (Lavik 56)

Mind-tricking narratives plant clues that the viewers will only be able to pick up in retrospect after the disclosure scene in the end or even only on a second viewing. Plainly put, detective films want to enable you to find out by a certain point; mind-tricking films do not. The other distinguishing feature that can be found in Todorov’s typology of detective fiction is his proposed double-structure of classical detective fiction: “At the base of the whodunit [classic detective fiction] we find a duality […]. 10

The deformation of antecedents is Sternberg’s distinguishing feature between curiosity gaps and suspense gaps, which are directed towards the future and not the past (cf. Sternberg, Expositional Modes 244).

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This novel contains not one but two stories: the story of the crime and the story of the investigation” (Todorov 44). In classical detective fiction, the final revelation of the murderer, no matter how surprising, only has an impact on the story of the crime but does not change the story of the investigation. This means that the storyline that occupies the narrative present, i.e. the process of the investigation, is not altered retrospectively by the disclosure. On the other hand, the twist in mind-tricking narratives always affects the storyline that develops in the narrative present. They rarely even have this double structure, which is absent in The Prestige, for example. And when they do have it (as in The Usual Suspects), the twist in the end reshapes the story of investigation, as well. Two further distinguishing characteristics are in Eyal Segal’s “Closure in Detective Fiction.” Among other things, this article poses a question that is relevant to us: Why does this closure tend to be perceived as especially strong? This perception is undoubtedly related to the extremely “single-minded,” goal-oriented movement of the detective plot. This characteristic endows the developing narrative interest with a highly focused quality […]. (Segal 168)

Mind-tricking narratives are not that single-minded. The mixed gap (curiosity and surprise gap), whose disclosure creates the mind-boggling twist, is not the single most important aspect of the mind-tricking films. For instance, in The Prestige the gap is about how a particular magic trick, namely ‘The Transported Man,’ is performed. But the movie offers much more. It is almost a psychological study of two rivaling magicians who constantly try to outdo each other. It is about lost love and revenge. Compare Sternberg’s remarks in his discussion of Jamesian poetics and detective-like modern narrative: “Unlike the detective story, human and psychological problems are not sacrificed on the altar of narrative interest […] (Sternberg, Expositional Modes 298). The aspect of this single-mindedness, or the lack thereof, brings me to the last distinguishing feature: the effect the disclosure creates in mind-tricking narratives is very different from that created in detective fiction. As Segal explains about detective stories: “At any rate, since the reader’s interest is so exclusively focused on a single issue from beginning to end, his sense of ‘relief’ is especially powerful when this issue is at last resolved by the solution of the mystery” (Segal 169). The disclosure in mind-tricking narratives, however, causes everything but relief since it throws into doubt everything that we have seen before. The effect created by the filling in of the mixed gap, which completely resettles everything, goes with an intense emotional impact. Unlike classical detective stories, mind-tricking narratives are more than just sheer intellectual play. Nonetheless, mind-tricking narratives do require enhanced intellectual capabilities. As previously mentioned, the disclosure of usually the surprise (and in rare cases mixed with the curiosity) gap resettles everything. In other words, the final disclosure requires the audience to considerably readjust their previous

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reading of the entire film. This ‘double reading’ of one and the same film is, perhaps, one of the most attractive aspects of (at least, to some extent) all mindtricking narratives. Again, The Sixth Sense serves as a good example concerning the mental work required. At a first viewing, people believe that they are watching a movie about a psychiatrist that tries to help a little boy who sees dead people. Once, they learn that the protagonist, too, is one of the ghosts only the boy can see, they have to reconstruct – or, rather, ‘re-reconstruct’ – the whole film in retrospect. The viewers’ experience, reception, and, in particular, also their expectations differ greatly from the first to the second viewing. And this leads, once again, to the issue raised at the beginning – are mind-tricking narratives part of classic Hollywood narratives or not? In what follows I will argue that they are in fact a hybrid of classic Hollywood and art-cinema narration. 2.4

Classical Narration versus Art-Cinema Narration

In Narration in the Fiction Film, Bordwell distinguishes classical narration from art-cinema narration. One central dividing feature is that classical narration wants the audience to be oblivious about the artifice of the film while art-cinema tends to draw attention to it. In Bordwell’s words: Like classical narration, art-film narration poses questions that guide us in fitting material into an ongoing structure. But these questions do not simply involve causal links among fabula events […]. In the art film […] the very construction of the narration becomes the object of spectator hypotheses: how is the story being told? Why tell the story in this way? (Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film 210, my emphasis)

Mind-tricking narratives generally do both. If we reduce these two types of narration to this core distinguishing characteristic, then, at a first viewing, most mind-tricking films develop a classically narrated plot. The illusion of film as reality is kept intact; viewers are immersed in the story and are emotionally involved. Due to the twist ending, though, that calls into question everything that was believed to be true before, a re-viewing in the light of the unexpected disclosure, a second viewing will have a very different emphasis. The audience will now focus on two questions: how did I get fooled and does the story really hold up? When we learn in the end of The Sixth Sense11, for instance, that the character played by Bruce Willis is dead and only the little boy was able to see and communicate with him, we are likely to ask ourselves, whether he really was never seen and/or spoken to by any other character – by his wife in the restaurant 11

Cf. Barratt’s (2009) and Lavik’s (2010) analyses of The Sixth Sense.

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scene described earlier, for example. And if we believe this ending to make sense, we might wonder how it is possible that we were misled that way, that we did not see the disclosure coming. In other words, the viewer’s attention shifts or extends from the narrated to the narration itself. People then become acutely aware of the fact that they are watching a movie and that they have been manipulated into believing or, rather, assuming something that is not true while lacking a piece of crucial information. Instead of being disguised, the artifice of film is minutely laid bare in the process of re-viewing and not just by filmmakers or film scholars but also by mainstream audience members. In his very insightful analysis of The Sixth Sense, Lavik explains that this film’s successful twist ending is based on its ability to pack two fabulas into one syuzhet,12 or inversely, to create one syuzhet that can hold two fabulas (Lavik 56). The first one we construct when we watch the film for the first time but once the ending is revealed we are forced to replace it with the second. This conflict of the two different fabulas makes us question whether the syuzhet can really be consistent with the second version. And this questioning of the narration itself is what makes (the second and subsequent viewings of) the film highly self-conscious. As Lavik asserts: What is so unusual about the The Sixth Sense is that it seems to occupy both ends [Hollywood film and art cinema] though the first time we see it we are not in a position to discern its self-consciousness. It is only after the twist is introduced that we discover the correct but concealed fabula, and only then can we scrutinize the syuzhet to find out why and where we were led to make initially incorrect inferences. […] The Sixth Sense’s narration is highly self-conscious, but only retrospectively. (58)

This self-consciousness goes so far that viewers will judge the film according to how well it was ‘written’; the story itself suddenly comes second to the storytelling skills employed. It is evident that mind-tricking narratives shift the focus of mainstream film from classical Hollywood narration toward art-cinema narration,13 in which the

12

Lavik borrowed the two terms “fabula” and “syuzhet from Bordwell (Narration 49-53). Of course, I am not suggesting that this is the first time that Hollywood films employ art-cinema techniques. For example, in his in-depth analysis of the poetics in seventies cinema, Todd Berliner explains that, [l]ike art films, many seventies films flaunt their process of narration. A Clockwork Orange, Nashville, Taxi Driver (1976), and Annie Hall, because they contain the kinds of narrative and stylistic idiosyncrasies found in much foreign art cinema […], create curiosity about their modes of narration and stimulate an interest in their stylistic devices that diverts attention from the films’ stories” (Berliner 7; cf. also Bordwell Narration 213).

13

Classical Narration versus Art-Cinema Narration

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illusion of reality is not the foremost priority but had to give way to the notion of film as artful storytelling. Let me now come back to Bordwell’s description of the viewers’ response to art-cinema narration, in particular, the question “why tell the story in this way?” It is highly interesting that the majority of filmmakers seem to have the need to justify this decision and fall back on a more mimetically motivated approach. They try to ‘naturalize’ their choice of withholding information. In other words, it is commonly not the film itself that misleads us but a character in the story. With few exceptions (such as 11:14), mind-tricking narratives pretend that the deception is not ‘just’ for art’s sake but also is caused by story-related, especially perspectival, circumstances. In this sense, they meet Aristotelian demands for keeping the work’s artifice hidden below the mimesis of reality. As Sternberg put it (though not talking about mind-tricking narratives but criticizing Aristotle’s approach), these narratives resort to a “mimetic motivation for surprise” (“Telling in Time” 510). Someone suffers from memory loss or dissociative identity disorder, or characters want to trick someone else – either they do not want to provide more information or they simply cannot. Looking at the list of films employing mind-tricking narratives provided in the appendix, it is truly striking that the vast majority of them will have exactly this central strategy. 2.5

Concluding Remarks

In this chapter I have described and analyzed mind-tricking narratives – a specific manifestation of complex storytelling in recent mainstream film. These mindtricking narratives delicately balance the familiar Hollywood appeal that has proven to be utterly successful for decades and the rising awareness of film audiences. Let us look again at (part of) Dixon’s statement: “Contemporary audiences don’t want complexity, they want hand-holding simplicity, in which every step of the narrative construction is heavily foreshadowed and plays out in a nondisruptive manner” (363). Given the number of mind-tricking narratives released in recent years and their economic success, it is evident that there is a market for greater complexity and not every viewer requires or even wants ‘hand-holding;’ and in responding to film, as I have tried to explain, contemporary mainstream audiences do not automatically long for sheer and simple entertainment.

3

Manifestations of Mind-Tricking Narratives: Some Case Studies

3.1

Eternal Moonshine of The Simpsons’ Version of a Mind-Tricking Narrative

One of the best ways of illustrating how certain narratives work is by closely looking at a parody of the narrative in question. For one thing, insightfully making fun of something presupposes a deep understanding of the targeted person, object, or concept. A parodist has to know how a narrative functions and be perfectly aware of the devices and tools used. In her Parody//Meta-Fiction: An Analysis of Parody as a Critical Mirror to the Writing and Reception of Fiction, Margaret A. Rose explained it as follows, “[i]n the ‘meta-literary’ analysis of another text, the parodist is to be seen in the dual role of reader and writer, as both the ‘decoder’ of the parodied text and its new ’encoder’ […]” (69). In other words, a parodist has to dissect a work before it can be parodied. Another reason why a parody seems most fit to be used as an aid to demonstrate how a narrative works are the techniques used in parody, which Rose identifies as such: “Common types of techniques” are “partial caricature, substitution, addition, and subtraction; and to these may be added exaggeration, condensation, contrast, and discrepancy” (50). Exaggeration as well as condensation seem particularly important in this matter. A frequent comical device is hyperbole, in other words, isolating certain characteristics, drawing attention to them, magnifying them, and even bluntly commenting on them. The long-running highly successful American animated television series The Simpsons (1989 to date) has made a name for itself by doing just that in every conceivable way. They have ridiculed and commented on numerous cultural aspects, such as politics, religion, American suburbia, and homophobia, to name only a few. But they have also included popular film and television phenomena – sometimes only with brief references and other times an entire episode evolves around a particular film or television show. “The Springfield Files” (1997) ‘paid tribute’ to the American science fiction, mystery, and conspiracy show The XFiles (1993-2002), which generated a cult following in the nineties. This episode even includes The X-Files’ main characters Fox Mulder and Dana Scully voiced by their respective actors David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson. “Cape Feare” (1993) is a spoof of the original but even more so of Martin Scorsese’s remake of Cape Fear (1962 and 1991, respectively), which goes so far as to even featuring shot by shot imitations. Another example would be “The Debarted” (2008), whose inspiration is clearly Martin Scorsese’s Academy Award winning The Departed (2006) as well as “24 Minutes” (2007), whose plot structure and overall design is clearly taken from the American crime drama Series 24 (2001) and

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Manifestations of Mind-Tricking Narratives: Some Case Studies

also stars Kiefer Sutherland, the lead actor in 24, as a guest voice. Obviously, the list could be prolonged considerably. In 2007, The Simpsons’ home network Fox premiered the later Emmywinning “The Eternal Moonshine of the Simpson Mind.” The title, of course, suggests a parody of Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), which this episode is to a large extent. However, its plot structure can also be read as a spoof of the many mind-tricking narratives that were released in theaters up to this point. Briefly summarized, “The Eternal Moonshine of the Simpson Mind” is about Homer’s suffering from acute memory loss and his trying to trace back what happened. It starts out with a parody of the almost slapstick storyline of a film, though not a mind-tricking narrative at all, namely, Ice Age (2002). A squirrel (aka Ice Age’s Scrat) is trying to catch an acorn off a tree but the moment it succeeds in getting it, Groundskeeper Willie1 hits it over and away with a shovel2. Homer then wakes up under a pile of snow after a night of drinking. He goes home and discovers that his entire family is gone. Only Santa’s Little Helper, the family dog, is in the kitchen barking and attacks Homer on sight. Homer flees towards Moe’s bar and asks his friend and owner of the bar, Moe, what happened the night before. He briefly describes his dilemma: “Homer: Moe, my family is gone, my dog hates me, and I can’t remember what happened last night!” (“The Eternal Moonshine of the Simpson Mind” 00:03:38-00:03:43). This, of course, also summarizes all information the viewers have at this point, the basis of their speculations of what happened. Moe explains that Homer came into the bar and told him that he needed to forget something. Therefore, Moe made him drink the so-called “Forget-Me-Shot” that makes one forget everything that happened the previous day. Homer is horrified: Homer: Oh my god! Why would I wanna wipe out my memory? What horrible thing did I do? Chief Wiggum3: You don’t remember, huh? There was a domestic disturbance at your address yesterday. (“The Eternal Moonshine of the Simpson Mind” 00:05:13-00:05:23)

The words “horrible thing” and “domestic disturbance” immediately stir the viewers’ hypothesis about what might have happened the day before in a very specific direction. Meeting Chief Wiggum triggers off Homer’s first memory. One thing that is particularly interesting here is that, apart from making fun of 1

Groundskeeper Willie is one of the recurring minor characters in The Simpsons. He is the personification of the Scottish cliché, as it were. 2 In Ice Age, Scrat is the protagonist of a minor story strand in which he keeps chasing an acorn but never succeeds in catching it. 3 The utterly unqualified chief of police of Springfield, the town The Simpsons is set in.

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how mind-tricking narratives work, this episode also parodies a specific dogma of classical Hollywood narrative, namely, that flashbacks have to be properly and unmistakably marked. The short flashback scene that follows is indicated in an overly explicit manner. As if it were not enough that the flashback is introduced (as well as ended) with typical dreamy music and, for the lack of a better term, let us call it a ‘butterfly-dissolve’ (cf. figure 1), Homer even bluntly declares, “ I remember […]” (“The Eternal Moonshine of the Simpson Mind” 00:05:28-00:05:29). Very much according to classical Hollywood narration, no confusion about what is a memory and what is ‘real’ is allowed in this episode. The flashback shows Homer’s wife Marge with a black eye and Wiggum accusing Homer of domestic violence. Marge, however, maintains that she merely ran into a door but this claim sounds like a lame excuse. Homer figures out that it was Ned Flanders, his neighbor, who filed the complaint. He confronts him. Ned explains that he heard noises coming from the Simpsons’ house and, “as a Christian […] assume[d] the worst” (“The Eternal Moonshine of the Simpson Mind” 00:06:27-00:06:28). Homer has two more memories (marked the same way as the previous one – Homer saying that he is about to have a memory followed by the butterfly-dissolve). The first has Marge say, “stop Homer, please” and in the other one she holds her left eyes lamenting, “my eye” (00:06:4400:06:51). Again, these memories feed our suspicion that Homer hit Marge. Next, Homer visits a “Memory Recovery Institute,” which provides machines that can help people revisit lost memories.4 Homer is connected to one of those devices. From this moment on we see him floating in a “memory bubble” from which he can freely choose memories that he would like to observe (cf. figure 2).

Figure 1: ‘Butterfly dissolve’

4

Figure 2: ‘Memory bubble’

This is the most obvious reference to the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which features an institute that has devices to do the exact opposite, namely, erase memories.

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Manifestations of Mind-Tricking Narratives: Some Case Studies

Homer picks the moment when he came home the previous night and seemingly caught Marge cheating on him: [Squeaky noises can be heard]. Homer: Those squeaks sound like couch springs grooving to the beat of love. [He enters the house]. Marge: Homer, I wasn’t expecting you! [Marge sits on the couch in the living room; a man, whose head is hidden behind a bottle, sits next to her]. Homer: What’s going on here? Marge: Oh Homer, I didn’t want you do find out this way! (“The Eternal Moonshine of the Simpson Mind” 00:10:23-00:10:45)

Since the bottle obscures his view of the man, he picks up his children, Lisa and Bart, from a random memory so they can help him figure out who the man is. Together they manage to make the previous memory continue. The man turns out to be Duffman, the mascot and spokesperson for the fictional company Duff Beer: Homer: The mother of my children with the reason for my children! Marge: Stop Homer, please! Duffman: I’m just giving it to your wife. She is gonna be sore tomorrow. (“The Eternal Moonshine of the Simpson Mind” 00:13:45-00:13:56)

Shocked with this revelation, Homer gets out of the memory-recovering machine. Since he is convinced that Marge cheated on him and his reaction was to hit her, which caused his family left him, Homer decides to commit suicide. He climbs onto the railing of a bridge. As he is falling down, his life flashes before his eyes. His last flash is the memory described above: [Homer enters his home]. Homer: Hey, what’s going on in here? Marge: Oh Homer, I didn’t want you do find out this way. We were planning a surprise party for you. Homer [overjoyed]: A surprise party! Marge: This Magic Marker is running out of ink. [Marge writes on a poster, which creates a squeaky noise]. Marge: I’m sorry your surprise party was spoilt. Homer: Are you kidding?! The mother of my children with the reason for my children. This is gonna be the greatest party ever! Duffman: Oh yeah, Duff Beer is sponsoring the party featuring new Duff Beer Champagne – the beer of champagnes. […] [Homer tries to open the bottle with his teeth]. Marge: Stop Homer, please!

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[The bottle pops open and the top hits Marge’s eye]. Marge: My eye! Homer: Don’t worry, honey, I’ll get you an icepack. Where is the icepack!? Duffman: I’m just giving it to your wife. She’s gonna be sore tomorrow. (“The Eternal Moonshine of the Simpson Mind” 00:16:19-00:17:16)

With this, the memory ends. Homer, still falling, lands on a moon bounce on the deck of a passing boat, where the surprise party is taking place. At this moment, Homer as well as the audience know what really happened. The conflict is resolved. “The Eternal Moonshine of the Simpson Mind” can neatly fit into the category of mind-tricking narratives described in the previous chapter. It certainly provides the core principle, namely, consciously deceiving the audience in a major way and revealing the deception in the end. The trickery itself is diegetisized, in other words, the deceiver (‘who deceives?’) in this episode is essentially the protagonist, i.e. Homer Simpson, himself. He, of course, does not lie to the viewers but simply does not know himself (cf. films, such as Fight Club and Shutter Island). Interestingly enough, the writers of this episode also drew on the landmark of naturalizing devices in mind-tricking narratives, namely, the character’s unreliable mental condition. Homer suffers from memory loss or suppression of memory as Leonard Shelby does in Memento or Claire Spencer in What Lies Beneath. Therefore, the main devices used (‘how is it done’) are subjective narrative, in other words, the audience has the exact same level of knowledge as the main character does, as well as a rather non-linear and fragmented plot structure since we are jumping from memory to memory. Finally, this Simpsons episode clearly belongs to the spate of mind-tricking narratives that keep the viewers in constant ‘puzzling-mode’ (‘when does the viewer find out?’). The whole premise of the story is ‘what happened last night’ and this is the mystery Homer and the viewers are trying to solve (cf. films, such as Primal Fear and Wild Things). To reiterate, the way mind-tricking narratives function and are able to create a stunning twist ending is by providing one syuzhet that can hold two fabulas. The first version is the more likely version, the one the narrative wants you to believe. It purposefully guides you in this direction by withholding information and even misleading you. The second version is the one that actually happened, the one that is revealed at the end. Viewers have to piece together this story in retrospect by reevaluating and re-reading everything they saw before. “The Eternal Moonshine of the Simpson Mind” does just that but in a very exaggerated way. The answer to Homer’s question of ‘what happened last night’ is palpably stirred towards the suspicion that Marge cheated on Homer and he, in turn, physically abused her, which made Marge and the children leave the family home. The flashes of memory exclusively provide information that goes in accordance

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with this theory and even strongly suggests it. And if that was not enough to lead the viewers in this direction, Homer’s own initial assumption is that he did a “horrible thing.” This is clearly a parody of how mind-tricking narratives go about misleading the viewers. Of course, ‘regular’ mind-tricking narratives have to be much more subtle so as not to stir suspicion early on. The Simpsons episode makes the audience believe this first version of the story so openly that, arguably, most of them will smell a rat. Despite the fact that it is probably very hard to figure out what truly happened, many viewers will assume that actually something completely different occurred and expect some kind of twist. And this expectancy is a result of the viewers’ awareness of such trick narratives combined with The Simpsons’ utter exaggeration of it. One aspect that this episode pokes particular fun at is deception by careful selection of provided information, in other words, which information is withheld and which is shared. Most of Homer’s brief and misleading memory flashes are part of an incident that is only about one minute long (see the transcript above) and more than half of it would immediately reveal what actually happened. Almost ‘miraculously’, though, Homer only remembers the ambiguous bits. In other words, the only way this syuzhet can hold two fabulas is by a very specific and unlikely selection of retained (or regained) pieces of memory. The Simpsons writers did not even shy away from commenting on that. Having landed on the party boat, Lenny and Carl, two of Homer’s friends and coworkers, remind Homer that everything that happened was part of his master plan. He drank the “forget-me shot” on purpose in order to make the surprise party a surprise again. The last flashback is triggered off. Homer, Lenny, and Carl are sitting at Moe’s bar. Homer is about to down the drink when it occurs to him: Homer: The only problem is that I’m sure to retain some image of coming home and finding Duffman. No doubt, I’ll misconstrue that as him placing a cuckold’s horns upon my brow. And that will make me wanna jump off a … Huh, for the love of god make sure that the party boat has a moon bounce! Lenny: Ok. [Homer drinks the drink. The flashback ends. We are back on the boat]. Homer: Wow, I’m a genius! (“The Eternal Moonshine of the Simpson Mind” 00:18:55-00:19:17)

Homer’s last line could easily be read as a half-ironic statement about the screenwriters of mind-tricking narratives. Creating this kind of a well-made trickery is a very intricate process. The first step is to establish a syuzhet that is, on the one hand, straightforward enough to lead the audience in the desired direction and, on the other hand, ambiguous enough to be appropriately reinter-

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preted in retrospect. One of the most important aspects writers have to consider is whether the story holds true on a second viewing, in other words, every piece has to fall into place and everything has to fit in neatly and make sense. Much of the discussion surrounding The Sixth Sense, for instance, was about whether the filmmakers had made a ‘mistake’. Is Bruce Willis’s character really not communicating with or noticed by anyone but the little boy who can, in fact, see ghosts? The same goes for The Prestige, which is minutely analyzed and taken apart on a second viewing to make sure that the twist with the twin brothers actually holds true throughout the entire film (cf. the chapter on The Prestige and The Illusionist). This need to tie up all the loose ends is another feature that “Eternal Moonshine of the Simpson Mind” pokes fun at. Having declared that he was a genius, Homer remarks: Homer: But there are still a few things I don’t understand. Like, why did Marge lie to Chief Wiggum about how she got that black eye? Marge: Because I didn’t want him finding out about the party. I mean, he’s okay but, you know, he brings Sarah5 and I just don’t care for that woman. [,,,] Homer: The only thing that still doesn’t make sense is why the dog attacked me. Bart: Because you never feed him, walk him, or let him out to pee. (“The Eternal Moonshine of the Simpson Mind” 00:19:17-00:19:53)

Two scenes that strongly supported the hypothesis of Homer having hit Marge are the ones mentioned above. When Homer came home in the morning only to find an empty house, the dog barked at him for no apparent reason. Thus, viewers are likely to conclude that he was still defending his mistress, i.e. Marge. The other scene is when Wiggum came by the house to inquire about the domestic disturbance and Marge tells him that she merely ran into a door –a ‘cliché excuse’ for a physically abusive husband. Even though both of those scenes make perfect sense in the first version of the story, they do not fit into the surprise party version whatsoever. If not by memory, at the latest after a second viewing, the audience would notice that these sequences do not add up. The Simpsons’ way of explaining these sequences is clearly a parody of how it is usually done or, at least, how it should be done in genuine mind-tricking narratives. Viewers can be rather hard to please and are sophisticated these days. They do not just demand that every puzzle piece falls into place in the end but they also insist that it is done in a reasonable way. Variations of deus ex machi5

Chief Wiggum’s wife

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na, i.e. rather far-fetched explanations of story elements similar to those we find in The Simpsons episode as described above, are usually frowned upon – and, hence, made fun of by The Simpsons writers. “Eternal Moonshine of the Simpson Mind” is clearly a parody of films that employ twist endings. It toys with familiar story premises, the typical structure, and common devices used in mind-tricking narratives as I sought to outline above. Besides, the mere fact that the creators of The Simpsons would even bother to poke fun at these kinds of films, that they produce a parody of them, is rather telling. It definitely supports the notion that this spate of movies has become extremely popular. As Rose explained about literary parody: As the comic effect of specific parody is often derived from its evocation of the readers’ expectations for a certain text, and the disappointment of those expectations with the distortion of the text, the parodist must assume that the object of his satire will be known to a proportion of the reading public. (Rose 69, my emphasis)

The Simpsons is an extraordinarily successful television series, which is aired primetime on one of the major American networks and enjoys high ratings. Evidently, it is targeted at a large audience and aims at mass appeal. Consequently, the writers of The Simpsons must consider mind-tricking narratives established enough to be known by a sufficient number of people. There is no point in making fun of a narrative structure – particularly on such a large scale, i.e. designing an entire episode as a parody as opposed to merely dropping a brief reference, if only very few people pick up on it. Now, I am neither claiming that this episode cannot be enjoyed without the knowledge of said films nor that everybody will, in fact, be aware of the intended persiflage. However, it strongly suggests the rising popularity of mind-tricking narratives in recent years. 3.2

“Are You Watching Closely?” The Prestige versus The Illusionist

In1 2006 Hollywood released two films about magicians. At first glance, they seem to have a lot in common. Their protagonists are magicians played by wellestablished and famous Hollywood actors. They are set in a European capital around 1900. They both involve the death of a beautiful woman. Both are adaptations of literary works published in the 1990s. Both are essentially told in one long flashback. And, perhaps, most importantly both attempt to be mind-tricking 1

A similar version of this chapter was published as “’Are You Watching Closely?’ The Conflict of Mind-Tricking Narratives in Recent Hollywood Film” in Cultures in Conflict / Conflicting Cultures. SPELL 29. Eds. Mario Klarer and Christina Ljungberg. Tübingen: Narr, 2013. 65-78. Print.

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narratives. However, while Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige is the prime example of an extraordinarily well-crafted mind-tricking narrative, Neil Burger’s The Illusionist rather fails in the attempt. By comparing these two films, I will try to work out the ‘dos and don’ts’ of a mind-tricking narrative. The central question is: which information is revealed when? In other words, which clues are given, which questions raised, and which are finally answered – not to mention how all this is done. Let me start with the negative example and leave the epitome of a mindtricking narrative for later. Neil Burger wrote and directed the film The Illusionist, which is loosely based on Steven Millhauser’s short story “Eisenheim the Illusionist,” published in 1990. The cast includes Edward Norton playing the protagonist Eisenheim, Jessica Biel playing his love interest Sophie von Teschen, and Paul Giamatti playing Chief Inspector Uhl. The basic story is fairly simple. The childhood sweethearts Eisenheim and Duchess Sophie von Teschen are separated because of the inappropriateness of their relationship due to the difference in their social status. They are coincidentally reunited as adults in turn-of-the-century Vienna, even though Sophie is more or less engaged to the Crown Prince Leopold, played by Rufus Sewell, which proves to be quite an obstacle. When their affair comes out, the prince kills Sophie in an outburst of anger. Using ghostly apparitions of different people and, eventually, Sophie herself in his shows, Eisenheim manages to accuse the prince of her murder. The prince shoots himself when Inspector Uhl finally confronts him. However, what we find out only in the very last montage sequence is that Sophie, in fact, is still alive and that everything has been an elaborate set-up by Eisenheim to free Sophie from her oppressive relationship with the prince. This very condensed plot summary actually suggests the perfect make-up of a mind-tricking narrative. The final all-important twist that changes most of the story is certainly there. The problem, however, is that it is a twist that the audience will hardly care about. A closer look at the plot structure and the film’s distribution of information will explain why that is the case. As mentioned before, the film is told in one big flashback. It starts at, what will turn out to be, Eisenheim’s last performance. He is about to be arrested by Chief Inspector Uhl, who then talks to the Crown Prince. The prince asks about events in Eisenheim’s past that might be used as leverage. This triggers off the flashback that is narrated by Uhl, who, with the help of his men, has done a lot of research on Eisenheim. After a brief sequence that provides background information on Eisenheim’s childhood - how he became intrigued with magic and fell in love with Sophie, who was eventually taken away from him - we return to Vienna, where we see the adult Eisenheim perform tricks on stage. Chief Inspector Uhl is in the audience. Since it is through Uhl’s eyes that we see the entire film, let me provide a few insights into his character. He, like Eisenheim, comes from a lower social class as his father was a butcher. He is essentially a well-meaning human being but

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has been corrupted somewhat by being too close a friend of the Crown Prince’s in order to move up on the career ladder as well as in social status. One of his most important character traits, not only for his line of work but also for the film viewers as he serves as the movie’s narrator, is his inquisitiveness. He loves magic tricks, enjoys being stunned by them but also always tries to figure them out. Crown Prince Leopold shares this particular character trait even though he hates being fascinated by magic tricks. He is, in that respect, a purely rational being and is annoyed by the illusionist quality of tricks. He simply and only wants to find out how they work, which in Eisenheim’s case, he never really can. This means that, in this film, we have two dominant characters that constantly try to work out various magic tricks. Therefore, even if viewers by their own nature and inclination do not attempt to figure them out, they do so due to the fact that two characters constantly ‘make’ them do so. Generally, the film places much more importance on the workings of the magic tricks than on the actual murder. After Eisenheim provoked the prince during a private performance at the Hofburg (the court palace in Vienna) and his plan to elope with Sophie is revealed, the prince, as mentioned above, kills Sophie, or so the viewers assume without any suspicion. Though we never actually see the murder itself, it is essential to point out that not the tiniest seed is planted that Sophie is still alive. Not the slightest doubt is raised, neither at the time of the murder nor later on when her body is found. For the viewers – and I would like to argue, even the most attentive one – Sophie is, in fact, dead, stabbed by the prince. Another voiceover by Uhl introduces a jump in time. The police arrested someone for Sophie’s murder and Eisenheim is about to start a new magic show. In this show, he performs the most stunning trick of them all. He conjures up spirits live onstage. The audience sees apparitions standing next to Eisenheim, talking to the audience, responding to their questions, and on one occasion even walking down the aisle next to the seating area of the theater. Uhl as well as the prince are awestruck and deeply unsettled by this trick. They try – as usual – to figure it out and so several possible ways of performing such a trick are presented in the film. None of them, though, can really live up to the perfection of Eisenheim’s version. The viewers, too, are ‘forced’ to think along. They try to explain for themselves how this trick might be done and, perhaps, even wonder whether Eisenheim does, in fact, have supernatural powers that enable him to conjure up real ghosts. When he finally has Sophie’s ghost appear, Uhl tries to arrest him for implicitly accusing the Crown Prince of her murder. However, Eisenheim turns out to be an apparition himself. Eventually, Uhl has gathered enough circumstantial evidence against the prince so that he is truly convinced of his guilt. He visits the prince at his residence to confront him. At this point, the story has finally caught up with the beginning of the film – the flashback is over. As the prince realizes his defeat, he shoots himself. Uhl leaves the Hofburg and a little boy hands him an envelope

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containing the explanation of one of Eisenheim’s main tricks. He spots Eisenheim, disguised with a beard, on the street and follows him through the city all the way to the train station. He misses Eisenheim by seconds. And this is when Uhl experiences an epiphany visualized by a rather short montage sequence. The Chief Inspector realizes that Sophie is still alive. She drugged the prince and pretended to be dead while Eisenheim planted fake evidence against the prince. Explaining the exact details of the way they framed the prince would exceed the realms of this study. Suffice it to say that Sophie and Eisenheim are happily reunited at some undisclosed location. With this, the movie ends. The final reaction of the average film viewer is utter surprise. No one could ever have seen that coming. And, in this case, that is exactly the problem. As previously mentioned, at no point did the film hint at even the slightest possibility that Sophie might still be alive. No inconsistencies in terms of her death are ever shown. Even more importantly, however, the audience will simply not care about the fact that she is still alive. Emotionally, they will be happy for Eisenheim, who is the clear focus of empathy, but filmically, in terms of the narrative presented, they will experience the ultimate frustration. Instead of revealing how the magic tricks are done, particularly the ghostly apparitions, the viewers are presented with an almost inane twist ending that does not at all reward them for all the hard brain work they invested into watching and following the film. The Illusionist is a film about magic tricks and illusions, and yet the twist has nothing to do with them, which makes it superfluous. The problem of this film’s narrative might stem from Neil Burger’s assessment of what he believes the movie is about, as he explained in an interview: “The movie is less about how does he [Eisenheim] do these tricks - how is it done - than this sort of uncanny sense that nothing is what it seems. I want the movie to inhabit this realm of dream and mystery” (“The Making of The Illusionist” 00:14:20- 00:14:35). I see his point. The question whether Eisenheim has supernatural powers or not most definitely goes into that direction. However, he employs two characters, Uhl and the prince, who spend a lot of time investigating these tricks. Therefore, I find it extremely hard to argue that this is not what the movie is about. As mentioned above, the film does not merely invite but practically forces the viewers to think along - if not with the prince, as he is a more than unlikeable character, then most definitely with Uhl as he functions as the film’s narrator. Interestingly enough, Neil Burger’s own audio commentary on the DVD version of The Illusionist supports this point. While discussing his film, he spends a great amount of time explaining how the tricks work and not only in a filmic sense, i.e. which special effects they used. More importantly, he explains how similar versions of the tricks were actually performed by magicians who lived around 1900. This means that Burger must be greatly aware of the fascination people have for how magic tricks work. Consequently, I find it extremely surprising that he would ‘miss’ that aspect in his own film.

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To sum up this analysis of The Illusionist, in a convincing mind-tricking narrative the filmmakers must answer all big questions raised in the film. Conversely, it is fairly pointless to provide a twist that has little to do with what the film is about. The aha-effect of ‘Sophie is still alive’ is not even remotely as strong as the surprise caused by ‘Bruce Willis’s character is dead’ in The Sixth Sense. The latter film is about a boy who sees dead people and therefore talks to a psychiatrist. The fact that this psychiatrist turns out to be a dead person himself is an intricate part of the main storyline. Not so in The Illusionist, in which ultimately two big mistakes were made. For one, the potential narrative payoff of the final disclosure is completely drowned out by the frustration the audience goes through when the main question of ‘how are these tricks done’ is left unanswered. And two, which is perhaps even more important, the twist feels superfluous and artificial. Similar to the way that the narrative technique of deus ex machina is rather frowned upon because it offers contrived and lazy solutions and conclusions, a forced twist, shall we call it a twist ex machina, does not lend itself for a convincing mind-tricking narrative either. Keeping all this in mind, I would like to move on to the role model of mindtricking narrative. In the same year, namely 2006, Christopher Nolan wrote and directed The Prestige. Christopher Priest’s novel of the same name, which was published in 1995, served as the literary basis. In this film, not one but two magicians share an equally important role. Christian Bale plays Alfred Borden and Hugh Jackman incorporates the role of Robert Angier. Again, the basic story is easily summarized. Two rivaling magicians try to outdo each other with their magic tricks, in particular the so-called “Transported Man.” Angier is the less skilled magician but a much better showman. His competitiveness stems mostly from his blaming Borden for his wife’s death. Borden, on the other hand, is a brilliant mind and, thus, a much better magician. Unfortunately, he does not really know how to ‘sell’ his tricks properly. His rivalry comes from his utter dedication to magic as an art form and his conviction as well as desire that no one can or ever will outthink him. In the end, both of them die, and then again they do not really. But let us start from the beginning, plotwise. The film starts with a short montage sequence of Angier’s death in a water tank and John Cutter, Angier’s ingénieur2 played by Michael Caine, who performs the very common trick of a little bird disappearing from a cage. Cutter’s voiceover explains: Every magic trick consists of three parts or acts. The first part is called the Pledge. The magician shows you something ordinary, a deck of cards, a bird, or a man. He shows you this object; perhaps, he asks you to inspect it, to see that it is, indeed, real. Yeah, unaltered, normal. But of course, it probably isn’t. […] The second act 2

The magician’s technician. He is the one who really comes up with the magic tricks.

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is called the Turn. The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now, you’re looking for the secret, but you won’t find it […].But you wouldn’t clap yet because making something disappear isn’t enough. You have to bring it back. That’s why every magic trick has a third act. The hardest part. The part we call the Prestige. (The Prestige 00:01:02-00:03:08)

What I would like to argue in the following are mainly two things. First of all, I would like to illustrate that Christopher Nolan designed the plot of the film exactly according to this structure of a magic trick, namely, the Pledge, the Turn, and the Prestige. Secondly, I would like to point out that The Prestige, unlike The Illusionist, does not only raise and answer the ‘right’ questions but, additionally, plants clues for the audience to pick up on throughout the movie and, thus, greatly enhances the pleasure of repeated viewings. In an interview, Christian Bale explained how he shares this notion of The Prestige being structured like a magic trick: That’s what I think Chris [Nolan] did so well is, you know, doing a movie about rivalry, happens to be about magicians and explaining this whole notion of the Pledge, the Turn, the Prestige, of how a magic trick works. And then, without really realizing it, the viewers are also being shown an absolute magic trick throughout and they’re being told they’re being shown a magic trick but you don’t kind of realize it or you don’t believe it. (“Das Notizbuch des Regisseurs” 00:14:31-00:15:00)

In other words, a film as the ultimate sleight of hand. The devices that Nolan used in order to achieve this are manifold. Similar to The Illusionist, the entire story of The Prestige is also told in a flashback, or two to be more precise. One is folded into the other. The actual discourse Now is the time when most of the story has already happened. Being accused of Angier’s murder, we find Borden in jail. He is given Angier’s journal and starts to read in his cell. In typical Hollywood fashion, this is how the first flashback is introduced. Accompanied by Borden’s voiceover that slowly merges into Angier’s, we see Angier in Colorado Springs, where he tries to meet the scientist Nikola Tesla, played by David Bowie. Tesla refuses to see him, and so, back at the hotel, Angier starts reading Borden’s notebook. It starts in 1897, only days after Angier and Borden met for the first time. This triggers off another flashback – a flashback within a flashback. Angier’s voiceover, that now slowly changes back into Borden’s, takes us back in time to the Orpheum Theatre in London, where the water tank trick3 is per3

Angier’s wife is tied up by two volunteers from the audience who really are plants by the magician, namely Borden and Angier. She is dropped into a big tank filled with water. This tank is locked and then covered with a big red curtain. Within less than a minute she manages to free herself and stands next to the tank when the curtain is pulled back up.

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formed on stage. A brief montage sequence of Angier reading in Colorado and Borden reading in his cell reminds the viewer of the double flashback-character of these scenes. Soon afterwards, we again jump back in time and witness the decisive water tank accident. Angier’s wife does not manage to get out and drowns, perhaps, because Borden tied the wrong knot. Angier ends up blaming him for his wife’s death. This event, it could be argued, marks the end of The Pledge – if seen as analogous to the climax, the point of no return. Similar to Mercutio’s death in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, everything that happens afterwards is more or less a result of this specific incident. Since I do not draw on the classical dramatic structure, as defined by, among others, Gustav Freytag for drama and David Bordwell for Hollywood film, I would like to propose an alternative. As explained in Cutter’s voiceover quoted above, the Pledge describes something ordinary. So far, in terms of storytelling and film realities, everything has been quite normal. Until this moment, viewers have not had anything to puzzle on. Therefore, I would like to argue that the Pledge still continues. After the tank accident, both Angier and Borden start to set up their own magic shows. The rivalry begins. Angier, using the stage name “The Great Danton,” is supported by Cutter, who now works as his ingénieur, as well as a female assistant called Olivia Wenscombe, played by Scarlett Johansson. Borden gets ‘emotional’ support by marrying Sarah, played by Rebecca Hall, who soon bears a daughter. Angier and Borden start to spy on and even sabotage each other, so much so that Borden’s left hand gets partly mutilated. In the midst of this account of how these two magicians became highly successful, the film keeps cutting to Borden in jail and Angier in Colorado Springs. These scenes give more details about what happens (in Borden’s case) and happened (in Angier’s case) there. One always has to keep in mind that the time level of Borden being in jail constitutes the actual discourse Now while Angier’s time spent in Colorado Springs is already part of a flashback and therefore in the past. Finally, about fifty-two minutes into the film, we reach the Turn. With Angier spying in the audience, Borden performs his master trick “The Transported Man” for the first time. Explained in a very simplified manner, this trick constitutes two doors on either end of the stage. Borden goes through and ‘disappears’ in one and comes out of the other practically at the same second. The audience at the magic show is stunned and Angier is completely dumbfounded. But not only Angier, also the film viewers are utterly surprised. For the first time, they truly ask themselves, how this trick is done. Also for the first time, the film does not reveal the mechanics of a trick. Something ordinary, the story of two rivaling magicians, that is, has been turned into something quite extraordinary by the filmmaker. Not only Angier and Cutter but also the viewers try to get behind the secret of “The Transported Man” but, of course, they cannot. Therefore, this question will linger until the end of the film, the third act, the Prestige.

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Still in the second act, the Turn, a lot of story information is revealed. Angier and Cutter try to copy “The Transported Man” by using a double, a hired actor who looks stunningly like Angier (and is, in fact, played by Hugh Jackman himself). Knowing that his act is not even closely as good, he sends his assistant, Olivia, to spy on Borden. She cannot uncover the secret but steals Borden’s notebook and brings it to Angier. At this point, we find out how Angier got possession of this journal. Since this notebook is written in cipher, he blackmails Borden into revealing his secret. Borden tells him that it is Nikola Tesla. Angier travels to Colorado Springs, Tesla’s current residence, and asks him to build him a machine for the trick. Here, the film has come full circle in terms of the flashback within the flashback, the period of time when Angier starts deciphering and reading Borden’s notebook. On the last page, a huge shock awaits him. Borden directly addresses Angier, thus, revealing that this entire notebook was a fake. It is part of a meticulously designed diversion premeditated by Borden a long time before. The viewers are just as shocked as Angier. Most of what the film has presented them so far is now subject to complete reevaluation. Borden has revealed himself as a completely unreliable, not to say, untrustworthy, narrator. Angier also finds out that Tesla, in fact, never built a machine for Borden. All the more surprisingly, Tesla and Borden find out that it actually works. The machine that Tesla has built for Angier manages to duplicate top hats and cats. Reassured, Angier travels back to London, where he experiments with the machine. Angier’s voiceover explaining how he tried to duplicate himself leads us to Borden again sitting in his cell reading Angier’s journal. All of a sudden, Angier directly addresses Borden revealing that he knew that Borden would be in jail reading this notebook, awaiting his death for Angier’s murder. This time, the viewers feel Borden’s terror. This journal, too, was an elaborate set-up, except that this one was a frame to murder that will lead to Borden’s death sentence. The next sequences are rather difficult to place, not in terms of the storyline as it is a mere continuation of what happened upon Angier’s return to London, but regarding the narration itself. Since both flashbacks are most definitely over, it is not at all clear who the narrator of the following is. Is it Borden’s memory or Angier’s or that of both? If so, it is not indicated accordingly. This is either the only narrative inconsistency that Christopher Nolan lets pass, or it is the beginning of the actual discourse Now. In other words, these are all the story events that happen right before Borden is accused of murder and starts reading Angier’s journal. Be that as it may, these story events are significant. Angier reunites with Cutter and sets out to perform exactly one hundred shows featuring his improved version of the trick, now called “The Real Transported Man.” Upon seeing this, Borden starts agonizing about how this trick is done but simply cannot figure it out. He keeps coming to Angier’s shows in disguise until he finally, in his utter frustration, sneaks backstage where he witnesses Angier drown in the water tank. In other words, the story has finally caught up with the very beginning of the

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film. Borden is arrested, tried in court, and found guilty. However, shortly before Borden is hung, Angier turns up at jail disguised as a man called Lord Caldlow. Borden recognizes him and suffers his second shock – he will be killed for the murder of a person who is still alive. Cutter, who was appointed to deliver Angier’s belongings to ‘Lord Caldlow,’ finds out about Angier’s plot and is deeply appalled. The next sequence crosscuts between them, Angier and Cutter, hiding the machine in some kind of storage room and Borden being hung. With Borden’s last words before his death, quite fittingly “abracadabra,” the third act, the Prestige, finally starts. Someone sneaks up on Angier in the storage room – Cutter already left – and shoots him. The shooter turns out to be none other than Borden himself as if he were resurrected from the dead. In his final moments, Angier has an epiphany and, thus, figures out what really happened. The following voiceover by Angier and Borden alternatingly revealing the true story is visualized by a fast-cut montage sequence of partly already seen scenes as well as some new material. Borden had a double, his very own twin brother, and they shared one identity their entire life. Therefore, ‘one’ Borden was actually killed by hanging but the other one is reunited with his daughter at the very end of the film. The secret of “The Transported Man” is finally disclosed. With this close reading of The Prestige I hope to have illustrated why it is the perfect embodiment of a mind-tricking narrative. By not only explaining the basic structure of a magic trick but also employing it as the plot structure of the film, Nolan managed to turn a movie into a sleight of hand. It astounds and impresses the audience just as much as if they were to watch a person disappear and reappear on stage. One of the most important aspects is that it, unlike The Illusionist, answers the same question that it raises. The final moment of revelation that Nolan creates, the shock the audience experiences, ties in with the questions they have been puzzling about for the better part of the film. An artful and thoughtful distribution of story information is the key, as Nolan himself explains: The filmmaker almost more so than the novelist has a very close relationship with a magician in terms of the way in which we’re using the release of information, what we tell the audience when, the point of view that we’re drawing them into. We use those techniques to fool an audience, to engage an audience in all kinds of blind alleys and red herrings and so forth and then ultimately, hopefully, a successful narrative payoff. (“Das Notizbuch des Regisseurs” 00:14:03-00:14:28)

The technique of telling the story in two flashbacks is one essential aspect of achieving this narrative payoff. Apart from the fact that with these two narrators we get two subjective narrations that combined result in a rather omniscient view, Nolan also created a story-motivated selection of the information that is concealed. Since, as already mentioned, the notebooks were not authentic but written in order to manipulate and fool the other character, it makes perfect sense that decisive information, such as having a twin brother and duplicating oneself a

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hundred times with a machine, is withheld – and not just from the respective characters but, consequently, also from the audience. The truly fascinating thing about The Prestige, though, is not all the story information that is concealed but really all the information that is given. The narrative payoff is greatly heightened by all the clues that are planted. Some of them are quite subtle and can really only be detected after second and third viewings. Others are blatantly obvious – in retrospect, that is. During the big final revelation montage sequence, viewers will remember certain things that they have been told or they have seen and they will find it difficult to believe that they did not figure this out by themselves. One aspect that, in retrospect, seems almost comical is the fact that the film actually immediately gives away the twist ending by telling us quite upfront how Borden performs his trick. When Angier asks Cutter how Borden does “The Transported Man,” Cutter instantly replies, “he uses a double” (The Prestige 00:52:38–00:52:39). Of course, Cutter is merely referring to this particular trick and not Borden’s entire life, but still, he is exactly right. Furthermore, there are those little stories that represent Borden’s situation. The bird trick, for instance, can be seen as an analogy. When the birdcage is smashed and the bird inside ‘disappears,’ what really happens is that the bird is killed and the magician brings another one, a double, back. During a performance of this trick, a very smart little boy starts crying because he is convinced the magician killed the bird. When Borden shows the other bird to reassure him that it is fine, the boy simply remarks, “but where is his brother?” (The Prestige 00:18:34-00:18:35). A similar analogy can be found in the Chinese magician Chung Ling Soo. Cutter sends Angier and Borden to his magic show in order to figure out his ‘fishbowl trick.’ Without explaining the specifics, the key for this trick is that Chung Ling Soo is actually really strong. He only pretends to be a weak elderly man, a character he has to play not only on but also off stage. While watching Chung Ling Soo walking toward his carriage – slowly, bent over, and supported by a cane - Borden explains to Angier with great admiration, at the same time hinting at his own life: “This is the trick. This is a performance right here. This is why no one can detect his method. Total devotion to his art. Utter self-sacrifice” (The Prestige 00:15:58-00:16:11). Talking to his wife about this, Angier remarks, “I couldn’t fathom it. Living my whole life pretending to be someone else” (The Prestige 00:16:46-00:16:49). Of course, this is exactly what Borden has been doing all along. I could list a great number of further clues, some of which are revisited in the final montage sequence and some of which can really only be detected after a second viewing. The question remains, why viewers do not pick up on them. Why are they not able to predict this twist ending? One possible reason might be that part of us does not really want to figure it out. Similar to Chief Inspector Uhl from The Illusionist, we want to know how it works and yet again love to be fascinated and stunned by a magic trick. The final voiceover by Cutter suggests

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just that: “Now you’re looking for the secret. But you won’t find it because, of course, you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to work it out. You want to be fooled” (The Prestige 01:59:30-01:59:49). The viewer’s desire to be fooled is one of the main reasons why films with mind-tricking narratives have been so successful in recent years. The two movies discussed merely serve as representations of so many others that Hollywood has released lately. In many ways, they work according to the same formula that I have tried to work out in these analyses. The interplay of giving and withholding information is most vital. What I really wanted to point out, though, is that a good mind-tricking narrative does not just produce any kind of twist ending. The challenge goes far beyond that since they need to avoid a twist ex machina. While it is important not to leave any questions unanswered, it is just as vital that the ending fills gaps that have been previously created. Otherwise, the audience might not even care about the twist. The final revelation has to reward the viewers and not frustrate them. 3.3

Authentication Authority and Narrative Self-Erasure in Fight Club

One1 of the most popular mind-tricking narratives is David Fincher’s Fight Club, which was released in 1999. Based on Chuck Palahniuk’s equally highly esteemed yet controversial novel of the same name, this film managed to create one of the most well-known and frequently discussed surprise endings in the last two decades. As mentioned earlier, in a 2010 poll about “fave movie twists” carried out by People Magazine, Fight Club came in third only beaten by The Sixth Sense and The Usual Suspects (“Surprise Endings” 39). Though only a modest US box office success making little more than $ 11 million during its opening weekend and $ 37 million total US gross, the film has become a cult film and its character and lines have entered popular consciousness. Fight Club’s lasting popularity can be traced back at least partly to the fact that the ‘coolest’ character, namely, Tyler Durden, famously portrayed by Brad Pitt, is simply erased towards the end of the movie. This kind of “narrative self-erasure,” which is usually associated with experimental postmodernist writings (cf. McHale 1016), presupposes a highly self-conscious narration. Fight Club plays with classical story-telling conventions or, in other words, viewer assumptions, particularly when it comes to the authority of the different narrative instances. Who is telling the story, who delivers the images, and who is telling the truth are some of the questions raised in the film – for film scholars and audience alike. The following 1

A similar version of this chapter was published as “Authentication Authority and Narrative Self-Erasure in Fight Club” in Amerikastudien / American Studies 59.1 (2014): 8398. Print.

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chapter seeks to analyze how the film toys with the authentication of narrative authorities in order to perfect a narrative self-erasure. To do so, we nee to briefly recapture the most important plot elements in Fight Club. After an elaborate opening sequence, which features a fast-moving animation of the interior of Jack’s2 brain (Jack is played by Edward Norton) that eventually moves out of his head along a gun barrel that is stuck in his mouth, Jack’s voiceover narration starts. “People are always asking me whether I know Tyler Durden” (Fight Club 00:02:00-00:02:04). The film starts almost at the very end of the story. Tyler Durden is threatening Jack and asks him whether he has a speech to mark the occasion. The narrator voice explains that “Project Mayhem” has set up explosives in twelve buildings that are about to blow up. “I know this because Tyler knows this,” Jack explains (Fight Club 00:02:44-00:02:48). The voiceover leads us to the first flashback, to a time when Jack used to go to support groups for various serious illnesses. Realizing that this point in time is not really the beginning of the story, the voiceover lets us jump further back saying, “No wait. Back up. Let me start earlier” (Fight Club 00:03:41-00:03-44). We finally back up to the beginning of the story. Jack, who works as a recall coordinator for a major auto company, suffers from a severe case of insomnia and – upon his doctor’s recommendation to see what ‘real’ problems look like – attends a meeting of a support group for testicular cancer. Feeling strangely liberated by the utter hopelessness that pervades these meetings and his sudden ability to cry his heart out cured his insomnia. He becomes addicted to support groups but then is disturbed by Marla Singer, played by Helena Bonham Carter. She, too, goes to several meetings despite being perfectly healthy. Jack, again, ceases to sleep. He confronts Marla and she agrees to divvy up the support groups. A little bit later, he meets Tyler Durden on a plane. After Jack’s condo blows up, Jack calls Tyler and they meet up in a bar. As they leave, Jack’s voiceover abruptly stops the narrative flow in order to properly introduce Tyler. “Let me tell you a little bit about Tyler Durden” (Fight Club 00:31:00:00:31:06). For the first time, Jack as well as Tyler talk directly into the camera. We move location with every of Tyler’s different jobs explained – from a movie theater to a restaurant – and then, without any transition, jump back to the outside of the bar. Jack moves in with Tyler into an abandoned and completely run-down house. They found the Fight Club and Jack stops going to support groups. To Jack’s great annoyance, Tyler starts a sexual relationship with Marla. Once again, we see a brief flashback with Jack imagining and at the same time narrating how those two met. Eventually, Tyler starts recruiting people and giving them assignments for various vandalizing acts. “Project Mayhem” has started 2

As has been custom in the scholarly discussion of Fight Club, the narrator, who is actually nameless in the film, will be referred to as Jack as he was in the original screenplay by Jim Uhls.

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despite Jack’s initial ignorance of it. After a car accident caused by Tyler, Jack wakes up and discovers that Tyler is gone. He finds several plane ticket stubs and tries to retrace Tyler’s steps. Jack finds out that Tyler set up fight clubs in several cities across the country. He meets a bartender who tells him that he, Jack, is Tyler. On the phone with Marla in a hotel room, she, too, thinks the same. Suddenly, Tyler appears in the hotel room. The disclosure sequence begins: Jack and Tyler are in fact the same person. While they are talking in the hotel room, we see several flashbacks of already seen scenes, except now in a ‘corrected’ manner. Completely in shock, Jack passes out. When he wakes up, he flies back home but everybody is gone. All that is left are the plans and notes for Project Mayhem. He then goes to one of the skyscrapers that is scheduled to be blown up and Tyler reappears. Jack tries to stop the destruction by fighting Tyler loses his consciousness again. After a brief fade-to-black, the flashback has caught up with the beginning of the film. Once again, we see Jack, gun in his mouth. The voiceover explains, “I think this is about where we came in” (Fight Club 02:04:37-02:04:39). And this is the last time we hear the voiceover narration. Jack finally realizes that he can only stop Tyler by stopping himself and shoots himself in the head. Tyler vanishes but some of his/Tyler’s recruits arrive dragging Marla with them. With an iconic and pseudo-romantic final sequence – Jack and Marla holding hands watching the explosions while the music kicks in – the film ends. Jack’s moment of recognition that is visualized by the aforementioned montage scene, which is so typical for mind-tricking narratives, is most vital. The audience corrects their story hypotheses and finds out what really happened. The truth is finally disclosed. However, the term ‘truth’ within the area of fiction, where per definition everything is made up and invented, requires some discussion. In his seminal article “Truth and Authenticity in Narrative,” Lubomír Doležel tries to counter-argue the dominant skepticism of many theorists about the mere concept of truth and fictionality in literature. He briefly summarizes the two main positions, namely, the Fregean, which postulates that literary utterances are neither false nor true, and the structuralist, which considers the question of truth in literature irrelevant (Doležel 9). Jan Mukařovský represented the latter position quite clearly when he states, “the question of truthfulness does not make sense at all in poetry […]” (6). Doležel explains that both attitudes are essentially in accordance with J. I. Austin’s philosophy. Austin maintains that there are classes of sentences that are not, in fact, subject to verification: [M]any utterances which have been taken to be statements […] are not in fact descriptive nor susceptible of being true or false. When is a statement not a statement? When it is a formula in a calculus: when it is a performatory utterance: when it is a value-judgment: when it is a definition: when it is part of a work of fiction […]. It is simply not the business of such utterances to ‘correspond to the facts.’ (Austin 131, my emphasis; cf. also Doležel 9)

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However, there is also a different school of thought, one that concedes that we do make truth-value assignments in literature. Doležel recaptures the area of “possible-worlds semantics” as carried out by theorists, such as Thomas G. Pavel, Dominique Chateaux, and John Heintz, among others. Pavel points out that only so-called ersatz-sentences can be characterized as true or false. Ersatzsentences are essentially paraphrases of the source text, which can either be true, i.e. truthful to the original, or not (Doležel 9). Consequently, Doležel defines truth in fiction as follows: “A fictional ersatz-sentence is true if it expresses (describes) a state of affairs existing in the fictional world of the text; it is false, if such a state of affairs does not exist in the fictional world of the text” (Doležel 9). Of course, this is a definition of truthful statements about fiction so still missing is a discussion of what the truth in fiction is, i.e. how can we determine, which sentences of the source text itself are true or false. To tackle this problem, Doležel again draws on possible-worlds semantics. Fictional worlds are constructed by “world-construction procedures,” which, in turn, decide whether something exists in said world or not. These procedures include the introduction of semantic units of narrative via different speech acts – different being the operative word. Doležel is quick to point out that there is no unifying source of a narrative text but, in the simplest form, there are at least two (Doležel 10-1). “[T]he two kinds of narrative speech act appear in a binary opposition […]: The speech act of the anonymous Er-form narrator carries the authentication authority, while the speech acts of the narrative agents lack this authority” (Doležel 11, original emphasis). Consequently, truth in fiction is determined by whether narrative units came from an authenticated source or not. What is vital to keep in mind is that in narratives authentication authority is given by mere convention. Sticking with Doležel’s binary model but using terminology that is more apt to discuss film, we can distinguish the extradiegetic narrative instance (Doležel’s anonymous Er-narrator) and the character-narrator (Doležel’s personalized narrative agents). As already mentioned, the extradiegetic narrative instance has an automatic authentication authority. By convention, we assume that this instance knows all and does not lie. In other words, we do not question its truthfulness. A reason for this convention might be found in Marie-Laure Ryan’s theory of the impersonal narration, which she introduced to literary narratology and was adapted for film by Robert Stam. The main notion of this model is that the impersonal narration has two functions. On the one hand, it creates the fictional universe but, on the other hand, it can also refer to, select, and comment on it. However, it is the world-creating function combined with the impersonal narration’s lack of human characteristics that makes the viewer believe in its factuality. The real world of the fictional universe, which Felix Martinez-Bonati calls “mimetic stratum,” is presented as if the audience had direct access to it, completely without narrational mediation (cf. Stam 114-7). In Ryan’s words,

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Manifestations of Mind-Tricking Narratives: Some Case Studies the “mimetic stratum” of the work is not experienced as language but directly as word: the reader does not simply conclude “the narrator says P” from the narrator’s mimetic statements, he also derives “P is the case” and regards P as an unmediated fact of the real world of the fictional universe. (Ryan, “Fiction as a Logical Issue” 131)

As Stam points out, this aspect is even more obvious in film where so much of the fictional world is conveyed with visuals and sounds rather than language (cf. 179). This means that usually the extradiegetic narrative instance (which can be seen analogous to Ryan’s impersonal narration) delivers the film’s pictures and sounds, whose truthfulness is taken for granted by the viewers. If other narrative agents, i.e. character-narrators, contradict the fictional world created, viewers will automatically consider them false and unreliable. This attitude can be accounted for by the fact that, as briefly mentioned above, the character-narrator does not possess the automatic authentication authority but needs to be authenticated first: In Doležel’s words, they need to “earn [their] authentication authority” (18). As Stam explains, the extradiegetic narrative instance can ‘pass on’ some of its authority to the character-narrator. In his discussion of narrational roles/authority, Stam draws heavily on Francesco Casetti’s concept of the function of the enunciator3 (cf. Stam 110). In his analyses of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Cronaca di un amore and Alfred Hitchcock’s Stage Fright (both 1950), Casetti illustrates how the enunciator’s role is divided into four manifestations of authority, namely, competence, performance, mandate, and sanction – in other words, the knowledge, the ability, the assignment, and finally, the authentication to tell the story, respectively (cf. Casetti passim; also cf. Stam 110). The enunciator can delegate these functions to a character-narrator as a way of transferring authority. The moment the enunciator sanctions the internal character-narrator’s narrative, the audience will believe in its truthfulness. In other words, since, by convention, we trust the enunciator, we will also rely on its choice of appointing someone to relate the story on its behalf. How conventions work is often best illustrated by analyzing an exception. Therefore, Casetti discusses the famous ‘lying flashback’ at the beginning of Stage Fright. Briefly put, at the beginning of the film the character-narrator Jonathan tells a story. The enunciator helps legitimize his story by transferring the four functions to him. In Casetti’s words: A solidarity exists between the agent in control of the whole game and the one required to execute just a few moves. The result is that the latter is attributed a legit-

3

Stam defines the enunciator as “a kind of hybrid of the extradiegetic narrator and the implied author” (110).

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imacy on a par with the former and, therefore, an equal credibility. If he is his equal and his peer, then he must be equally worthy of trust. (Casetti 80)

The viewers have no reason to question the accuracy of this flashback as the enunciator clearly sanctioned it. Of course, we eventually find out that Jonathan was, in fact, lying. The enunciator ultimately transfers the functions of authority to Eve, another character, actually more the narratee, who finds out the truth, which is ultimately sanctioned.4 The fact remains, though, that – at least, according to film convention – the enunciator initially sanctioned a story and authenticated a narrator that clearly was not supposed to be sanctioned. As Casetti sums up, “the root of this lie is in the contrast that is created between letting someone speak as if he is someone who manages the whole discourse […] and the sudden revelation that he speaks only for himself” (79). Viewers assume, unless it is explicitly indicated otherwise, that what they see and hear is authentic and honest. The same holds true, of course, for what we read in literature, as Ryan explains: [The narrative] concerns what is, from the point of view of author and reader, an alternate possible world, but on the level of the embedded contract, speaker and hearer communicate about what is for them the real world. Every narrative text whose narrator is not hallucinating presupposes a level where a speaker tells a story as true fact and not as invention. (Ryan, “Pragmatics” 524; also cf. Stam 110)

Hallucination is the key word that leads me back to Fight Club. Similar to Stage Fright, the enunciator in Fight Club delegates the four functions of authority to the very dominant character-narrator Jack. As previously mentioned, right after the opening titles, Jack’s voiceover narration starts. Thus, it is indicated that the enunciator has given him the mandate to relate a story. Jack also possesses the knowledge and ability (i.e. the competence and performance) in order to be the narrator as he is telling his own story. He can remember what happened since he is talking about his own past experiences. Generally, the enunciator does not give any reason to doubt the narrator, does not indicate that he is in any way untrustworthy. And this is an implicit sanction. Of course, as we know now, the story does not hold true in the end. This means that several conventions have been broken – on both sides, on the level of the enunciator as well as the level of the character-narrator. The enunciator’s biggest deviation from norms is that it verifies and appropriates Jack’s narrative. Hallucinations, similar to dream sequences and the like, are normally to be marked as part of the character’s belief-world and as not belonging to the real world of the fictional universe. Comparably, if a character is a liar, he or she has to be identified as such, and this has to be done in advance and 4

For a more in-depth discussion of Hitchcock’s Stage Fright see Casetti 78-85.

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not in retrospect. In her analysis of Fight Club’s postmodernist characteristics, Anthrin Steinke summarizes this violation of rules as follows: [The extradiegetic narrative instance] neglects some of its tasks. It does not authenticate and correct but is characterized by unreliability. The intradiegetic narrative instance5 portrays false occurrences; the extradiegetic one is misled to a certain extent and delivers the compatible, the “false” images. (Steinke, Aspekte des postmodernen Erzählens 201-2, my translation6)

Since the extradiegetic narrative instance delivers the pictures of an untrue story without marking them as false, the viewers immediately trust them implicitly – no questions asked. Jakob Lothe remarked the same about any narrative text, i.e. also literature: This demonstrates how strongly our attitude to narrative texts is influenced by conventions, i.e. customary notions and expectations that are so ingrained that we do not (or only to a partial extent) think about them. A fundamental convention in narrative fiction is that we believe the narrator, unless the text at some point gives us a signal not to do so. (Lothe 25, original emphasis)

This “fundamental convention” can also account for why it is extremely problematic to argue that the pictures are a ‘mere’ visualization of Jack’s very subjective point of view and, thus, actually quite accurate. Despite the fact that the viewers are perfectly aware that the story is rendered from a very specific and personal perspective of one particular character, viewers will unmistakably distinguish this kind of subjectivity from plain misinformation. Therefore, I concede that the subjectivity of the narrative is, in fact, visibly marked – Jack is present in every scene, only relates story elements he can know about or otherwise points out that he merely makes hypotheses; he is very verbal about his thoughts and emotions, and Jack’s voiceover narration itself, which is audible throughout almost the entire film, clearly indicates that he is essentially in control of the storytelling. Nonetheless, viewers will not equate subjectivity with unreliability and untrustworthiness. The latter would have to be marked distinctly and additionally. In his essay “Transparency and Twist in Narrative Fiction Film,” George Wilson explains that some movie twists are created by the films’ disguise of the epistemic structure of a segment and its very delayed revelation only towards the 5

Cf. character-narrator “[die extradiegetische narrative Instanz] einige ihrer Aufgaben vernachlässigt. Sie authentifiziert und berichtigt nicht, sondern zeichnet sich durch Unzuverlässigkeit aus. Die intradiegetische narrative Instanz schildert unwahre Begebenheiten, die extradiegetische lässt sich gewissermaßen verleiten und liefert die passenden, die ‘unwahren’ Bilder.”

6

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end of the film. He calls them epistemological twist films, which are defined by “the fact that global aspects of the epistemic structure of their narration are clarified, in a surprising way, only toward the end of the movie” (cf. Wilson 89). Examples are The Sixth Sense and The Others, where the fact that the protagonists are ghosts is withheld, but also Stage Fright’s opening flashback, where a lie is presented as truth, as well as Fight Club, where a hallucination is portrayed as reality. Even though Wilson is partial to the notion that these films feature a mere visual illustration of a very subjective point of view, he, too, concedes that suppressing such vital information breaks a very common convention, namely, that of transparency (cf. 89-90). Flashbacks are, in fact, a particularly good example how subjectivity does not or, at least, should not overrule transparency. Arguably, the most commonly used device to introduce a flashback are character-narrations. These are, per definition, always subjectively inflected but still assumed to be truthful – save two rather specific scenarios. Both have to do with criminal investigations. The visualization of crime suspects defending themselves and witnesses giving testimony during a police interrogation as well as detectives speculating about how a crime was committed has a lot of leeway in terms of accuracy of the images presented. The American television series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (as well as the various spin-offs) is a prime example of these practices. Good parts of each episode are made up of flashbacks concerning the circumstances of the murder. Witnesses as well as suspects tell their own versions of the story, which are frequently changed and adjusted when new evidence turns up. Each version is illustrated with often contradicting flashbacks. The same holds true for whenever the investigators conjecture what the found evidence means. We often see their speculations visualized and corrected later on. In either scenario, however, the context clearly marks the supposed character of these flashbacks. The suspects and witnesses are discernibly denoted as potentially unreliable (the premise of their accounts is ‘this is what we want you to believe happened’) and the detectives’ flashbacks are indicated as hypothetical (‘this is what we believe might have happened’). Fight Club, too, is essentially narrated in one big flashback. Yet, the premise of Jack’s narration is presented as ‘this is what happened.’ The convention that is broken here is that, despite the fact that Jack is relating the story in retrospect, he tells it from the perspective of his ‘experiencing I.’ In a discussion of the novel Fight Club, Lars Bernaerts makes similar observations: [T]he narrating self suppresses his current knowledge and identifies with the epistemic position of the experiencing self. Consequently, the reader is not confronted with the alleged full truth until the protagonist himself is, whereas the narrator realizes all along that one of his characters is a delusional figure. (Bernaerts n.p.)

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In correlation, Steinke pointed out the largely temporal paradox in Fight Club’s narration. Jack’s comprehension of what happened at the moment he is narrating does not, in fact, allow him to depict Tyler Durden as a real character. The point in time when Jack introduces the flashback occurs long after he realized his mental condition. The ‘narrating I’ is fully aware of Tyler being a figment of his imagination, yet, assumes the level of knowledge of the ‘experiencing I’ and pretends he actually exists. This results in a simultaneous type of narration. The intradiegetic narrative instance renders the story as if the act of narration was happening concurrently with the incidents narrated. The combination of these two opposing narrative positions – in retrospect and simultaneously – causes a logical paradox and accounts for the big twist in the end (cf. Steinke, Aspekte des postmodernen Erzählens 2047 and 208). In many ways, what we see in Fight Club is a breakdown in the pecking order of narrative instances. The usually all-powerful extradiegetic instance gives way to an extremely authoritative intradiegetic narrator. There are many instances in which Jack really comes to the fore. For example, he talks straight to the camera, thus, breaking the fourth wall, and directly addresses an implied audience several times. Oftentimes, he takes over narrative responsibilities that he should not be in control of, for example, when he orders: “No wait, back up. Let me start earlier” (Fight Club 00:03:41-00:03-44). He simply tells the extradiegetic instance to ‘rewind’ the story a bit and it readily obliges by delivering the appropriate pictures. About thirty minutes into the film, Jack halts the narrative flow as well as the actual picture when it occurs to him that the implied audience might need some background information: “Let me tell you a little bit about Tyler Durden” (Fight Club 00:31:06-00:31-07). This line introduces a brief almost documentary-style sequence in which Jack, talking straight into the camera, elaborates on Tyler’s various jobs jumping in time and place at his convenience. It almost appears to be a ‘filmic footnote.’ Steinke, too, observes the “collapse of the hierarchy of narrative levels” in Fight Club, which results in identical contents of the two narrations and not just some common elements (Aspekte des postmodernen Erzählens 201,8 my translation). The extradiegetic narrative instance assists Jack in rendering his story from his perspective and with his subjective and emotional inflections, instead of vice versa, where the extradiegetic instance installs a character-narrator, who will aid 7

Cf. “Bei der Zeitposition der Narration im Verhältnis zur erzählten Geschichte des analeptischen Teils handelt es sich in semantischer Hinsicht deshalb um den gleichzeitigen Narrationstypus; schließlich schildert die intradiegetische narrative Instanz die Dinge so, als würden sie sich zeitgleich mit dem Akt des Erzählens zutragen […]” (Steinke, Aspekte des postmodernen Erzählens 204). 8 Cf. “Kollaps der Hierarchie der narrativen Ebenen” (Steinke, Aspekte des postmodernen Erzählens 201).

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it in the storytelling. The dominance of Fight Club’s character-narrator is also demonstrated by, as mentioned before, the failure of the extradiegetic instance to correct and contradict Jack’s version of the story. Instead, it accommodates his every move. We can conclude, then, that the twist in the end of the film is the result of the breaking of conventions, or more specifically, the unreliability of both narrative instances. The character-narrator often deliberately chooses to tell the story assuming the position of the experiencing I, who was yet unaware of Tyler’s fictitiousness. The extradiegetic narrative instance concurs by delivering the matching, though, false images. In other words, both instances lie – up to a certain point, that is. After not quite two hours into the film, Jack comes to the moment in the story where his experiencing I discovers his mental condition and how it affected his past life. In a brief montage sequence, the narrator corrects his own rendering of the story. And this is rather remarkable. Once again, it is the characternarrator that is in control of the narration. It is he who uncovers his own unreliability and rectifies his account. The extradiegetic instance supports this with revised images (also cf. Steinke, Aspekte des postmodernen Erzählens 216 and Steinke, “It’s Called the Change-Over” 153-4). As mentioned earlier, this moment of revelation occurs when Tyler suddenly reappears in the hotel room Jack was staying at: Jack: Why do people think that I’m you? Answer me! Tyler: Sit. Jack: Answer me. Why do people think that I’m you? Tyler: I think you know. Jack: No, I don’t. Tyler: Yes, you do. Why would anyone possibly confuse you with me? Jack: I don’t know. (Fight Club 01:47:50-01:48-16)

This dialogue triggers off Jack’s realization of the true nature of past events and the following lines are interspersed with now corrected flashbacks. We see already seen scenes but this time Tyler is either replaced by Jack (cf. figures 3 and 4) or Jack is now alone (cf. figures 5 and 6), or as Tyler himself explains: “Sometimes you are still you. Other times you imagine yourself watching me. Little by little you are just letting yourself become Tyler Durden” (Fight Club 01: 49:16-01:49:31). One 'before-and-after shot’ is particularly interesting as it does not seem to stem from Jack’s immediate realization. Even though Tyler Durden is present during the entire hotel scene, there is one brief moment where he is not there, where we see Jack talking to himself (cf. figures 7 and 8).

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Figure 3: Tyler Durden

Figure 4: Jack

Figure 5: Jack with Tyler Durden

Figure 6: Jack alone

It appears that the extradiegetic narrative instance is timidly gaining back some control over the storytelling. As I have just mentioned, this shot of Jack talking to himself is strikingly different from the other revelation shots as it is not introduced with a close-up of Jack’s face. The extradiegetic instance is finally taking over the authentication authority by contradicting and correcting the characternarrator’s perception – in other words, what it ‘should’ have done during the entire film. And it does so increasingly until the end of the film. When Jack tries to stop Tyler from blowing up a building by fighting him in its underground garage, it provides footage from surveillance cameras to once again remind the audience that Jack is really fighting himself (cf. figures 9 and 10). When the flashback finally ends and we find ourselves back at the starting point of the film, namely, with Tyler sticking a gun in Jack’s mouth, Jack’s voiceover-narration stops with the words, “I think this is about where we came in” (Fight Club 02:04:27-02:04:29). At this point, the extradiegetic narrative instance has to take over completely. Since we have reached the narrative present, the character Jack is not able to tell us the story anymore as he simply does not know what is going to happen. Character-narrators, per definition, can only narrate in retrospect. So while the hierarchy of the narrative levels is somewhat restored in the end, the blunt undermining of it throughout most parts of the film has, of course, a lasting impact on the audience. Even though the film leaves little to no ambiguity about what happened and, thus, provides closure to some extent, its ending remains highly unsettling. Fight Club ‘fakes’ a classical happy ending by bringing

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Figure 7: Jack talking to Tyler Durden

Figure 8: Jack talking to himself

the players of the plotline of the heterosexual romance together – Marla and Jack watch the explosions while holding hands – but, actually, the ending is everything but classical. As Bordwell defines the classical Hollywood ending, “[w]e can see it as the crowning of the structure, the logical conclusion of the string of events, the final effect of the initial cause, the revelation of the truth” (Narration in the Fiction Film, 159). Fight Club does reveal the truth but simply erasing one of the main characters that the audience has most likely grown attached to and that makes them reevaluate the entire narration in a flash hardly applies to the characteristics mentioned above. In his book on David Fincher, Frank Schnelle describes Fight Club’s ending as follows: It was not about dénouement and closure […], but about retroactive deconstruction: With the ending a film could and was permitted to appear in a completely

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Manifestations of Mind-Tricking Narratives: Some Case Studies new light; the projected had to be interpreted anew and seen differently than it had seemed before. (Schnelle 30, my translation,9 cf. also Steinke, Aspekte des postmodernen Erzählens 209)

The film lied to us, played a trick on us. It created a character only to make him disappear right in front of our eyes and by doing so drew our attention to the constructedness of fiction in general. As Doležel remarked about modern fiction:

Figure 9: Tyler fights Jack

Figure 10: Footage from a surveillance camera

9

Cf. “Nicht mehr um Auflösung und Abschluss ging es […], sondern um nachträgliche Dekonstruktion: Vom Ende her konnte und durfte ein Film nunmehr in einem völlig anderen Licht erscheinen, musste das Gezeigte neu interpretiert und anders gesehen werden, als es zuvor den Anschein gehabt hatte” (Schnelle 30).

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[T]he narrator constructs a narrative world by introducing a set of narrative motifs, but he fails to authenticate it since his authentication authority is undermined. We are presented with fictional worlds whose existence is ambiguous, problematic, indefinite. These worlds are neither authentic, nor non-authentic, but create an indeterminate space between fictional existence and fictional non-existence. (Doležel 23)

This vague position between fictional existence and non-existence is exactly what applies to the character Tyler Durden. Fight Club has often been called an epitome of postmodernist film and this kind of narrative self-erasure is definitely a landmark in postmodernist fiction. Brian McHale gives an excellent account of this narrative device. Narrative self-erasure is a highly self-conscious practice. By deconstructing projections of a fictional world, it lays bare how readers (or alternatively viewers) are ‘accomplices in crime’ with the text when it comes to constructing fictional objects and worlds. It is a collaborative effort. McHale defines narrative self-erasure as follows, “a ‘world of fixed and discrete objects’ is given and then taken away, with the dual effect of destabilizing the ontology of this projected world and simultaneously laying bare the process of world-construction” (101). He finds parallels between this kind of narrative self-erasure and Jacques Derrida’s concept of sous rature. In Of Grammatology, Derrida deletes verbal signs; in other words, he places them ‘under erasure.’ He literally writes words, crosses them out, and so we have both the word as well as the deletion - as the following example shows: “[T]he sign is that ill-named thing […] which escapes the instituting question of philosophy” (Derrida, Of Grammatology 1910). What is important here is that despite the visual or physical cancellation, these signs remain visible, even legible. Even though they have been eliminated, they keep functioning in the discourse. Of course, what Derrida tries to illustrate with this typographical gimmick is how certain paradoxes are produced in the discourse of Western metaphysics. Some key concepts are criticized and, thus, sought to be eradicated. Yet, the very same discourse demands just these concepts. The crossed-out word is inaccurate but as it is needed, it remains legible. Or as McHale puts it, “[these concepts] both cannot be admitted, yet cannot be excluded; so he places them sous rature” (100). Fiction can use a similar practice in order to point out the above-mentioned constructedness of fiction. In Fight Club, Tyler Durden is placed sous rature. He is projected and then erased. Yet, his existence clearly lingers on. As Steinke puts it pointedly, “Fight Club initially projects, thereafter reconstructs, and sub-

10

Cf. “[L]e signe est cette chose mal nommée […] qui échappe à la question institutrice de la philosophie” (Derrida, De la grammatologie 31).

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sequently revises” (Aspekte des postmodernen Erzählens 209, my translation11). This revision creates a new version of the story. The account without Tyler is supposed to delete the previous version with him since it is the truthful rendering, yet, it does not do so in its entirety. If a character is the ‘victim’ of narrative erasure (as opposed to objects or single events, for instance), the impact on the reader or viewer is, of course, particularly grave (cf. McHale 103). The emotional investment in projected people tends to be very high. Through them, we relate to fictional worlds, events, and objects. Consequently, we will be especially reluctant to let go of them once they have been erased. This, in turn, will greatly reinforce the duality and ambiguity of the character’s existence – the space between fictional existence and fictional non-existence. We met Tyler Durden; we are devoted to him; we do not want him to be a mere figment of Jack’s imagination. But, on the other hand, of course, we know he is. This deletion of a character has a number of predecessors in postmodernist fiction. McHale mentions, for instance, Samuel Beckett’s short prose “Texts for Nothing (#3)” (1950-52), whose narrator makes up other characters as companions only to obliterate them all in the end (cf. 104). This certainly recalls Fight Club. Jack, the character-narrator, who is dissatisfied with his lonely and meaningless life, longs for companionship and invents Tyler Durden. To Jack, Tyler is not just a projection (pun intended) of everything he would like to be but does not dare to be himself – as manifested, for instance, in the sequences where Tyler overpowers Jack, who then blacks out and is completely ignorant of Tyler’s whereabouts and actions. Tyler is also a projection of a friend, somebody to talk to, someone who understands Jack – as the many scenes featuring their everyday conversations illustrate. The decisive difference is, of course, that Jack created his companion subconsciously. Throughout almost the entire length of the movie, Jack’s experiencing I is neither aware of Tyler’s constructedness nor does he know that he is his creator. Another paradigmatic example of the postmodern technique of narrative selferasure McHale provides is a short story by Jorge Luis Borges. In “Averroës’ Search” (1968), Borges erases his protagonist’s, the philosopher Averroës’s, imaginary world and Averroës himself along with it: He felt sleepy, he felt a bit cold. He unwound his turban and looked at himself in a metal mirror. I do not know what his eyes saw, for no historian has ever described the forms of his face. I do know that he suddenly disappeared, as if fulminated by a bolt of flameless fire […]. (Borges 109)

11

Cf. “In Fight Club wird zunächst projiziert, sodann dekonstruiert und anschließend revidiert” (Steinke Aspekte des postmodernen Erzählens, 209).

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What happens in this text is that the narrator, who is an author in the story, stops believing in the character that he himself created. As a result, the character as well as the world around him vanishes (cf. McHale 104). As Borges concludes very pointedly: “(The instant I stop believing in him, Averroës disappears.)” (110). This bears great resemblance to Jack’s situation. The moment he ceases to believe in Tyler, i.e. the second he does not just know but truly understands that Tyler is not real, that he is a mere hallucination, Tyler disappears. For quite some time towards the end of the film, Jack keeps talking, even fighting with Tyler despite the fact that he already knows about his non-existence, as it were. However, during the last sequence on the upper floor of a skyscraper, it finally occurs to him: Jack: You’re a voice in my head! Tyler: You’re a voice in my head! Jack: Why can’t I get rid of you? […] Jack: This can’t be happening! Tyler: It’s already done, so shut up! 60 seconds ‘till CRI. Jack: No. I can figure this out. This isn’t even real. You’re not real; that gun is … that gun isn’t even in your hand. The gun’s in my hand. [Jack – instead of Tyler - is suddenly holding the gun in his hands]. Tyler: Hey, good for you. It doesn’t change a thing. [Jack points the gun to his head]. Tyler: Why do you wanna put a gun to your head? Jack: Not my head, Tyler. Our head. Tyler: Interesting. Where are you going with this, Ikea boy? Hey, it’s you and me. Friends? Jack: Tyler, I want you to really listen to me. Tyler: Okay. Jack: My eyes are open. [Jack shoots himself in the head. Traces of smoke come out of Tyler’s mouth]. Tyler: What is that smell? (Fight Club 02:05:36-02:08:24)

Jack finally understands that there is no point in bargaining with Tyler since he is his very own creation. Jack constructed him and, therefore, he has the power to destroy him, erase him. To appropriate Borges’s words quoted above, the moment he stops believing in him, Tyler disappears. And along with Tyler, everything he stands for vanishes, as well. A lot of the criticism surrounding Fight Club deals with its depiction of masculinity as a “narrative of the white male decline,” which Sally Robinson, in her book Marked Men: White Masculinity and Crisis, describes like this:

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Manifestations of Mind-Tricking Narratives: Some Case Studies In the late 1960s, in the wake of the civil rights movement, and with the rise of women’s liberation, gay liberation, and the increasing visibility of ethnic and racial diversity on the American scene, white men begin to be decentered. […] an enduring image of the disenfranchised white man has become a symbol for the decline of the American way. […] the degree to which the crisis afflicting the white middle class is also, and most forcefully, a crisis in masculinity, has become clear in recent years, with the vociferous cries of men who are contesting the claim that they are the villains in American culture. (Robinson 2-3; original emphasis)

Jack is portrayed as a victim of this decline of the white male, who tries to regain a sense of identity by reclaiming man’s once dominant and central position. He suffers from a severe crisis of identity that seems to be triggered by the lack of a clear gender distinction caused by the feminization of consumer culture. As Susan Faludi explains in her Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man: […] culture reshapes [men’s] sense of manhood by telling him […] that masculinity is something to drape over the body, not draw from inner resources; that it is personal, not societal; that manhood is displayed, not demonstrated. The internal qualities once said to embody manhood – surefootedness, inner strength, confidence of purpose – are merchandised to men to enhance their manliness. (Faludi 35)

In order to solve his identity crisis, Jack creates Tyler Durden – an embodiment of hyper-masculinity, of the ‘pre-60s’ notion of masculinity defined as active, strong, rational, and dominant. In two pivotal scenes, Tyler summarizes both these aspects – the contemporary white male crisis as well as Jack’s longing to be just like him, respectively: We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. (Fight Club 01:07:46-01:08:02) All the ways you wish you could be, that’s me. I look like you wanna look. I fuck like you wanna fuck. I am capable, and most importantly, I am free in all the ways you are not. (Fight Club 01:48:45-01:48-55)

This issue of the white male decline sparked quite a controversy particularly in terms of what solution(s) the film might present. In her more than favorable film review, Faludi calls Fight Club an “incisive gender drama” (89). Henry A. Giroux, on the other hand, believes that this could not be further from the truth. In his well-known condemnation of Fight Club, “Private Satisfactions and Public Disorders: Fight Club, Patriarchy, and the Politics of Masculine Violence,“ Giroux maintains that the film is highly misogynist as it calls for a war on women. He grounds this accusation with the film’s portrayal of consumer culture not

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only as the enemy of masculinity but also as feminization of society. It is consumer culture, and consequently, all things feminine, that men need to fight in order to recover power, authenticity, and identity. In Giroux’s words, “Fight Club functions less as a critique of capitalism than as a defense of authoritarian masculinity wedded to the immediacy of pleasure sustained through violence and abuse. […] masculinity gains its force through a celebration of both brutality and the denigration of the feminine” (Giroux 15-6). In her response to Giroux’s article, Suzanne Clark largely agrees with this line of argumentation. She, too, believes that the film offers violence and the return to hyper-masculinity as solution for the crisis of white male identity. In a recent article (2011), Robinson joins in with the denunciation of Fight Club. However, she does not only claim that the film considers women “eradicable” since they embody consumerism, which lies at the heart of the threat of real masculinity, but she takes it even a step further (Robinson, “Feminized Men” 2). She argues that the founding of the Fight Club, which establishes violence and brutality as sources for male identity, suggests that masculinity is a natural state of being and, unlike femininity, not a social construct. Or in her own words, “Fight Club does not simply argue that an authentic masculinity needs to be rescued from the wastes of an inauthentic and feminizing consumer culture; it argues that we need to think about masculinity as outside of culture itself” (Robinson, “Feminized Men” 7). However, all these critics seem to ignore one decisive factor, which by no means can be overlooked without completely altering the film’s meaning. And this is the narrative self-erasure of Tyler Durden discussed above. What all critics agree on is that Jack and Tyler present an opposition: Jack is passive and feminized whereas Tyler is active and masculine (cf., for instance, Robinson, “Feminized Men” 3, Ruddell 493-4, and Ta 266). Or as Giroux puts it: “If Jack represents the crisis of capitalism repackaged as the crisis of a domesticated masculinity, Tyler represents the redemption of masculinity repackaged as the promise of violence in the interest of social and political anarchy” (Giroux 13). In other words, it is Tyler who presents violence and the fight against feminizing influences as remedy for the white male crisis. What many critics seem to completely discard, though, is that it is Tyler, and not women, who is eradicated in the end. Tyler, the embodiment of hyper-masculinity, though charming and attractive, turns out to be the villain of the story, who Jack wants to stop at all cost. And this is an oversight that I find more than troublesome. Giroux shrugs it away as “meaningless gesture of resistance” (18) and laments that the film does not treat violence as “pathology” (16). Robinson questions whether “it really matter[s] if Tyler Durden is just a figment of the narrator’s imagination” (23). I find both these opinions peculiar. The film clearly treats violence as a pathology since it is initiated and promoted by Tyler who himself is a mere product of a pathology. Corollary, it is of great relevance that he is only a hallucination as it totally undermines Robinson’s postulation that the film portrays masculinity as natural. Fight Club literally depicts the notion of a ‘real’ male identity as a com-

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plete construct since Tyler is a mere construct conjured up by the narrator. Tyler Durden is put sous rature; consequently, this conservative notion of a ‘real’ masculinity is put sous rature, as well. Masculinity flickers. The concepts are still there, linger, but are inaccurate and so they cannot be used as a remedy anymore. Instead, Jack and Marla hold hands in the very last scene, which might signify a potential future without gender-related identity struggles that are buried so deep in our subconscious. This aspect of subconsciousness leads me to another aspect, namely, the ‘diegetic motivation’ for character creation and erasure. In Fight Club, the reason for using this narrative gimmick is embedded in the story and given a material cause. Jack is not an author within a text who created a fictional world along with characters and objects only to delete them in the end. He is a mentally ill person who hallucinates. Irrespective of the fact how unrealistic Fight Club’s depiction of multiple personality, or more accurately dissociative identity disorder, is, it is a much less self-conscious reason for using narrative self-erasure than exceedingly metafictional narratives. By naturalizing an extremely artificial practice, Fight Club manages to tone down its otherwise highly self-conscious narration. After all, it is a film that was produced within a Hollywood context. This movie walks a line between art-cinema narration and classical narration. One of the main premises of the latter is transparency, which, as previously mentioned, Fight Club completely undermines by withholding a vital piece of information. This transparency is strongly connected with another premise, namely, that of strict causality, i.e. a logical and unambiguous flow of narrative. In Bordwell’s own words: The priority of causality within an integral fabula world commits classical narration to unambiguous presentation. Whereas art-cinema narration can blur the lines separating objective diegetic reality, character’s mental states, and inserted narrational commentary, the classical film asks us to assume clear distinctions among these states. (Bordwell, Narration 162)

Obviously, Fight Club goes to great lengths to blur these lines, at least, up to the point of the final revelation. A much more obvious way in which Fight Club stretches, or rather, oversteps the limits of Hollywood film style is the already mentioned self-consciousness that strongly pulls the film towards art-cinema narration. Once again, briefly summarized, Bordwell defines the latter by its focusing on the form and manner of storytelling, i.e. its contructedness, while classical narration tries to veil the act of narrating (cf. Bordwell, Narration 210). Hollywood film, of course, is geared toward classical narration and, thus, tries to keep up the deceit, i.e. the illusion of ‘reality’ in film. As Bordwell explains, “the Hollywood film strives to conceal its artifice through techniques of continuity and ‘invisible’ storytelling […]” (The Way Hollywood Tells It 3). So while Fight Club, perhaps, tries to disguise the artificiality of narrative self-erasure by back-

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ing it up with a story-inherent reason, there are many other instances where the film practically flaunts its constructedness. One of them strongly ties in with narrative self-erasure. It is striking that McHale, when he talks about the indeterminacy of constructed and deconstructed fictional worlds, uses the word “flickering” rather frequently. “The worlds projected by means of these strategies of self-erasure are precisely such flickering worlds” (McHale 101). Analogously, Tyler Durden is such a flickering character. In Fight Club, however, he does not only flicker in and out of existence metaphorically speaking but also quite literally. Compare the figures 11 – 14.12

Figure 11: No Tyler Durden

Figure 12: Brief insertion (flicker) of Tyler Durden

12

Many thanks to my friend Bert Walser for making these screen-shots.

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Manifestations of Mind-Tricking Narratives: Some Case Studies

Figure 13: No Tyler Durden

Figure 14: Brief insertion (flicker) of Tyler Durden

Most of the often-discussed subliminal images that are inserted repeatedly in the film are shots that include Tyler Durden – before Jack actually meets him and he is introduced to the implied audience. These very short shots are difficult to spot, hardly noticeable at a first viewing. Figure 11 is a still taken from Jack’s first support group meeting; figure 13 occurs right after he leaves a support group considering confronting Marla. Figures 12 and 14 are stills of the brief insertion of Tyler, his flicker, within the respective sequences. As already mentioned, these subliminal images are barely perceptible, but once we do catch a glimpse of them, they again remind us of the constructedness of film. After all, Jack and Tyler themselves illustrate how single frames can be inserted into a film reel.

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When Jack mentions that Tyler works part-time as a projectionist, together they explain: Tyler: Why would anyone want this shit job? Jack: Because it affords him interesting opportunities. Tyler: Like splicing a frame of pornography into family films. Jack: So when the snooty cat and the courageous dog with the celebrity voices first meet, that's when you'll catch a flash of Tyler's contribution to the film. Nobody knows that they saw it but they did. Tyler: Nice, big cock. (Fight Club 00:31:39-00:32:08)

In other words, Tyler creates flickering images while he himself is a flickering character. Fight Club is an extraordinary film in many ways but particularly in how it undermines Hollywood style despite being a Hollywood production. It completely ignores the convention of the automatic authentication authority of the extradiegetic narrative instance, which ‘fails’ to undertake some of its most vital tasks. It neither corrects Jack’s version of the story nor does it indicate that he is untrustworthy. The intradiegetic narrative instance, i.e. the character-narrator Jack, clearly controls the storytelling and, additionally, chooses to assume the level of knowledge of his experiencing I. He renders the story as if he did not yet know that Tyler Durden was merely a figment of his imagination. This breakdown of the hierarchy of narrative instances combined with the unreliability on both sides creates the stunning twist towards the end of the film. An entire character is suddenly erased and Jack along with the audience have to revise the complete story of the film. This kind of narrative self-erasure, so often used in postmodernist fiction, reinforces the film’s emphasis on uncovering the constructedness of fiction. Fight Club delicately balances elements from classical Hollywood narrative and art-cinema narration and, thus, demonstrates how sophisticated Hollywood productions with a popular appeal can be.

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Manifestations of Mind-Tricking Narratives: Some Case Studies

Reversing Cause and Effect: Memento "Life must be lived forward but can only be understood backwards." --- Søren Kierkegaard "And the present is trivia which I scribble down as fucking notes." --- Leonard Shelby, Memento

In1 2010, Christopher Nolan celebrated a big success with his highly anticipated film Inception starring Leonardo DiCaprio in the lead role. With this film, which grossed almost $ 300 million at the US box office alone and close to $ 800 million worldwide, he, once again, proved that an extremely elaborate plot structure can generate a mass appeal. The diegetic world of Inception is comparable to our – the ‘real’ – world with one decisive addition: the existence of a device that enables people to build, invade, and interfere in other people’s dreams. Such a dream invasion is usually performed in order to extract secret information from someone. However, Cobb, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, is hired to carry out a so-called inception, in other words, planting an idea inside a person’s subconsciousness, an undertaking, which is believed to be nearly impossible. Exactly explaining how this is done would go way beyond the scope of this chapter. Suffice it to say that in order for an inception to work, one has to plant a dream within a dream within a dream. Therefore, in Inception, we have the diegesis consists of the ‘real’ world plus four levels of dream worlds, which are embedded in each other. As of the moment when some of the characters reach the deepest dream level, the viewers have to keep track of five different levels. And as if this were not enough, due to the fact that our mind works much faster in a dream than in real life, in other words, a dream that only lasts a couple of minutes can cover hours even days, all of these four levels adhere to different time spheres. Time in dreams lapses at different speeds. A few minutes in the fictional ‘real’ world are a few of hours in the first dream world, which are, in turn, a few of days in the second, weeks in the third, and even years in the fourth dream level (the so-called limbo). All these levels are frequently intercut until the inception is accomplished and the characters wake up again - or not. The very end of the film throws this resolution into doubt. Perhaps, Cobb is still dreaming; perhaps, the entire film was a dream and the diegetic real world was never shown whatsoever. It is impossible to decidedly resolve that issue. Even though this final suggestion that the characters are still in a dream state provides 1

Part of this chapter was published as “Skip and Rewind: When Time Gets Out of Line in Mainstream Film” in Moderne Sprachen 53.1 (June 2009): 7-35. Print.

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exactly the kind of shocking twist that is so important for mind-tricking narratives, the fact that it is never resolved and that the film offers an open ending instead disqualifies Inception as such. However, nine years earlier in 2001, Christopher Nolan wrote and directed a film, then only his second production, that, literally and metaphorically, 'reversed' Classical Hollywood narrative. It also provides the viewers with a final twist that explains, though, not to the very last detail but still rather unambiguously, what really happened. Inspired by the idea of the short story "Memento Mori" by his brother, Jonathan, Christopher Nolan decided to visually tell the story of Leonard Shelby, played by Guy Pearce, who suffers from Arterial-Grade Memory Loss, or short-term memory loss, caused by a severe head injury he sustained in the same night he had to witness the rape and murder of his wife. The police never captured or even identified the murderer and so Leonard has set his mind to finding him himself. He can remember everything until the "incident," as he often refers to it but, due to his mental disorder, he is incapable of making any new memories, i.e. he cannot keep a memory or hold a thought for more than a couple of minutes. Afterwards he completely forgets what has just happened. This is, obviously, an extremely difficult basis for solving a puzzle, in other words, for identifying and finding a murderer or even 'surviving' without help in everyday life. But with the need to avenge his wife as a strong motivation not to give up, Leonard has developed two strategies to cope with his situation. For one thing, he relies heavily on conditioning, that is, the process by which people are trained to behave in a particular way when particular things happen. To give an example, Leonard starts every morning after waking up by checking the content of the bedside drawers and keeps feeling his jacket pockets for notes and Polaroids all day long, not because he consciously remembers doing so but because it is more an unconscious reflex that he has trained himself to respond to. His other strategy is making records of all memories he considers important. These records contain handwritten notes, Polaroids (and usually notes on the bottom or the back of them) of people he has met, the hotel he is staying at, and the car he is driving, and – potentially the most extreme form of keeping records – tattoos on his own body reading the most essential information of his life, such as "John G. Raped and Murdered My Wife" right across his chest in mirrored letters and the "key facts" he has collected in terms of his wife's murderer on both of his arms and his left thigh. These records serve as his substitute memory that Leonard heavily relies on and he never doubts the authenticity and truthfulness of his documentations. Going through life without knowing or remembering why you are doing what you are doing and what caused the way you are feeling must be utterly confusing. It is an extreme condition that is hard to imagine and, as a consequence, almost impossible to identify with or relate to as an audience even to a certain degree. In order to convey Leonard's confusion and give the viewers a sense of

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how it feels to suffer from this rare type of amnesia, Christopher Nolan opted for an extremely unusual and elaborate narrative structure. The film is made up of two narrative strands and two different time levels. This sounds common enough if it were not for the two narrative strands, though markedly visually distinguished, operating on essentially the same coherent and present time level. Of course, this is only revealed at the very end of the film. The second time level is some point in the past, the exact time being unidentified except that it happened before the incident and is presented by the use of rather conventional flashbacks. These are part of both narrative strands but much more prevalent in one of the two. But for an adequate analysis of the film and its use of time, the structure of the plot as well as the story have to be examined in further detail. As already stated above, there are two main narrative strands. The first one takes place almost entirely inside a hotel room, where Leonard Shelby, on the phone with an undisclosed person, relates the story of Sammy Jankins, a man he knew at the time he was still working as an insurance claims investigator and who suffered from the same mental disorder. This part of the film was shot in black and white using, not exclusively but extensively, a camera angle similar to that of a surveillance camera and edited together chronologically, i.e. from the beginning to the end. While Leonard speaks about Jankins's case, the camera repeatedly cuts to Sammy Jankins back in time to visually show the story being told. These intercuts, i.e. flashbacks, tend to be rather long and are supported by Leonard's voiceover. The second narrative strand deals with Leonard's desperate search for his wife's murderer, his gathering of facts, and collecting of tattoos. For this part, the narrative proper, Nolan used color film and edited it backwards, i.e. he started at the end. Occasionally, the technique of flashbacks is employed here, too, but these are relatively short and seem like literal flashes of Leonard's memory dealing with his wife and her murder but never with Sammy Jankins. These two narrative strands were divided into fragments and cut together alternately connected by fades to black. It is noticeable that the segments of the colored story overlap for a couple of moments. In other words, a few seconds of the beginning of the preceding sequence and the last few seconds of the following sequence are identical. Memento clearly defies any kind of conventional film grammar not only in terms of disrupting a linear time structure but also by alternating a specifically subjective with a comparatively objective view. The sequences in the hotel room are shot in documentary style and, consequently, serve as the more reliable source of information. The camera angles seem more distant and detached; at times they remind one of security cameras, and also the voice-over narration is more factual and structured. These features combined with the use of black and white create the feel of authenticity. However, these sequences become more subjective and frenzied as the story moves towards the narrative proper. The

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frequency of the crosscutting increases and the camera angles change from the impersonal high and straight-on angle to much more intimate close-ups and point-of-view shots. On the other hand, the colored segments already start out even more subjective than the last few black and white sequences towards the end of the film. Nolan made use of a lot of close-ups and point-of-view shots and never, but in one single instance, does the audience see anything that Leonard does not know about or cannot see himself. The occasional voice-over, too, is narrated in the first person and is thus very personal. Like an inner monologue it is confusing, frenzied, and hardly structured. The audience sees everything from Leonard's point of view and thus gets the chance to fully identify with him. This identification is further supported by the fact that, during dialogue scenes, the shots of Leonard always tend to be just a little bit closer than the person to whom he is talking. It seems apparent that this kind of editing represents everything but linear storytelling. On the other hand, the director himself does not validate the argument of having used a discontinuous narrative structure in Memento, as he stated in an interview: People often refer to Memento as having a non-linear structure. But it isn't. It is very linear. More so than in a conventional film. You actually can't remove a scene from the film 'cause each scene depends on its relationship with the preceding scene and the one that follows. It's totally linear. It's just reversed essentially. (Mitchell 00:06:56-00:07:17)

Thus stated, Nolan's argument that his film, apart from being told backwards, is markedly continuous seems to make a lot of sense. He is referring to the overlapping elements of the colored sequences that connect the segments very strongly and, due to a marked time relation, would make it impossible to simply skip one. However, he fails to consider the utter discontinuity created by the intercuts with the black and white sequences. This very intricate editing makes the chronology of the plot stand in striking contrast to the chronology of the story, as the following tables shall illustrate: Chronology of the plot (44 sequences all together): Sequence 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

color 1 (backwards)

b/w 1

color 2

b/w 2

color 3

b/w 3

color 4

b/w 4

9

10

11

12

13

...

...

44

color

b/w fading into color

color 5

b/w 5

color 6

b/w 6

color 7

b/w

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As already mentioned before, the film starts with the first colored segment that is, literally, played backwards. Next, the twenty-one black and white and the twenty-two colored sequences are edited alternately. The beginning of every preceding colored segment overlaps with the end of each following one; the black and white segments become gradually shorter as the film comes to an end. The forty-fourth and last segment starts in black and white but fades to color before the film ends. Basically, Christopher Nolan created a puzzle with fortyfour pieces which, to reconstruct a linear timeline, have to be put together as illustrated in the following table: Chronology of the story: Sequence 2

4

6

8

10

12

b/w 1

b/w 2

b/w 3

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43

... color 7 - 21

11

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color 6

color 5

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44 b/w fading into color 1 color 1 (forwards)

In order to recreate the proper timeline of the story, the audience, as a first step, has to put together all the black and white sequences in the order presented in the film and, then, add all the colored sequences in reversed order. To disprove Nolan's argument, even though the beginning of the film is, in fact, the end of the story, the beginning of the story is not the end of the film but already the second sequence. The last segment of the film, that is, the one that changes from black and white to color, is somewhere in the middle and not at the beginning of the story. Therefore, the story is not 'simply' told backwards, as Nolan claimed, and, in turn, requires the active participation of the viewers, who have to put the bits and pieces together by themselves. For this reason, Nolan had to lead the audience in and give them some clue as to how to 'read' the film, which he did right at the beginning of the movie. To an observant viewer, the first three sequences give away the basic structure of the plot. The initial sequence is, literally, shown backwards, very subtly though, as it takes the viewer some time, and probably the most conspicuous action, i.e. a gun 'jumping' from the floor back into Leonard's hand, to actually notice it. Next follows the first black and white sequence that introduces the viewer to Leonard's "condition", as Leonard himself tends to call his short-term memory loss in the film. Finally, the end of the next colored sequence, this time shown forward, overlaps with the first sequence, probably reinforcing the viewer's suspicion already aroused in the first sequence that this part of the story is, in fact, told in reverse. Hence, the first three segments give the viewers the basic knowledge of how the film works. However, the question of how the black and white scenes are related to the colored ones, whether they precede or follow, is answered only at

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the very end of the film. Sequence number forty-four starts out in black and white showing Leonard finally leaving the hotel room. A couple of minutes later the scene changes into color but so subtly – over a close-up of a Polaroid developing – that it is barely noticeable while it happens and only later on does it occur to the viewers. The film ends in color in the middle of the story but not without keeping to the rigid structure of the rest of the film, namely the overlapping of the end of this scene with the beginning of the preceding scene. Then fade to black and the credits roll. It is also then, at the end of the film but in the middle of the story, when the twist is unveiled and the protagonist’s entire motivation for every action is practically annihilated. In the last sequence, we find out that many of Leonard’s ‘preincident’ memories are, in fact, false. He has distorted them over time, morphed them into a more pleasant story. Teddy also explains that Leonard already killed his wife’s murderer a long time ago and that he simply does not remember that. Even worse, Leonard systematically destroyed evidence so that he would forget his success, so that his one reason to live would not simply vanish into thin air. At the end of the sequence, we even witness ourselves how Leonard ‘forges’ evidence to, later, make himself believe that Teddy is his wife’s murderer. As Leonard explains towards the end: Can I just let myself forget what you [Teddy] just told me? [He writes ‘Don’t believe his lies’ on Teddy’s Polaroid] Can I just let myself forget what you made me do? [He burns the two Polaroids showing the corpse of his wife’s killer and himself being happy] You say I just want another puzzle to solve, another John G. to look for. You’re a John G. [He notes down the license plate number of Teddy’s car] So you can be my John G. Do I lie to myself to be happy? In your case, Teddy, yes I will. (Memento 01:41:44-01:42:42)

The viewers find out in the end that Leonard’s entire quest was phony. His wife’s killer is already dead and all the clues, the Polaroids, tattoos, and reports, are potentially fraud – contrary to what the rest of the film made them believe. These various records were supposed to be and presented as the only reliable source of information. In other words, the film made us think along, trying to trace back the ultimate cause for the result (Leonard killing Teddy) only to reveal in the end that this cause along with the clues were merely manufactured – and not just in a filmic sense but on the diegetic level. Besides being an excellent manifestation of a mind-tricking narrative, Memento's very overtly confusing narrative structure also reflects the postmodern struggle with rationality. In her essay "Postmodern Narrative or Narrative of the Postmodern? History, Identity, and the Failure of Rationality as an Ordering

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Principle in Memento" Rosalind Sibielski argues that Leonard Shelby's actions undermine rationality and, thus, mirror the postmodern moment (84). She refers to Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's criticism of the Enlightenment, whose focus on the mind and progress merely resulted in the "disenchantment of the world" (3). In Dialectic of the Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno's main argument against Enlightenment modernity and especially rationality is that it was used historically to smooth the progress of authoritarian or totalitarian systems with the rule of the Nazi Party in Germany in the 1930s as the horrific epitome. Another reason why they challenge rationalism is that they strongly believe that "society [...] remains irrational, however we may try to rationalize it" (124). There are many aspects of the human psyche, such as the unconscious or the irrational of desire, that cannot be explained by rational reasoning and, thus, rationality can only give the illusion of order and safety, i.e. it can merely "give an artificial impression of being in command" (125). Consequently, postmodernism seeks to counter the notion of pure causality, of the necessary and absolute link between cause and effect. By crosscutting two strands of narrative, one being told forward, one backward, and thus, bringing about a massive sense of disorder, the film manages to question rational reasoning and casts doubt upon the belief that the true causal relations between events can be figured out if one is only capable of putting them into a linear, i.e. conventional or logical, structure. Furthermore, it seems a telling coincidence that Leonard Shelby usually refers to his mental disorder as his "condition" considering that he seems to be the ultimate representation of a person caught in The Postmodern Condition, which happens to be the title of the famous work by Jean-Francois Lyotard. He follows Horkheimer and Adorno's challenge to totalizing systems of knowledge, also questioned in the film. However, Rosalind Sibielski (85-87) draws several parallels between the postmodern condition described in Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism and Leonard's condition. According to Jameson, the postmodern perception of time is defined by a loss of a sense of history. Due to the disappearance of the historical referent, all one is left with is "pop history", i.e. art no longer represents and, in a sense, reconstructs the actual past that once was a real present but merely portrays collective ideas and clichés of that past. In contemporary times, people are swamped and overwhelmed by innumerable artificially reproduced records, such as photographs and film footage, so that they find themselves "condemned to seek History by way of [their] own pop images and simulacra of that history, which itself remains out of reach" (Jameson, Postmodernism 25). Jameson speaks of a "crisis in historicity" that will eventually lead or has already led anew to the question of the general organization of time and temporality within a culture that is profoundly dominated by space and spatial logic. The problem nowadays is that

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[if], indeed, the subject has lost its capacity actively to extend its pro-tensions and re-tensions across the temporal manifold and to organize its past and future into coherent experience, it becomes difficult enough to see how the cultural productions of such a subject could result in anything but 'heaps of fragments' and in a practice of the randomly heterogeneous and fragmentary and of the aleatory. These are, however, precisely some of the privileged terms in which postmodernist cultural production has been analyzed. (Jameson, Postmodernism 25)

The narrative structure of Memento is made up of exactly these "heaps of fragments" that inevitably have become the only means of expressing the sense of time in a postmodern world. Due to the very subjective narrative through the eyes of the protagonist, the audience tries, along with Leonard Shelby, to organize his experiences into a coherent storyline; a task that is made extremely difficult, not to say almost impossible, by the fragmentation of the film. In her essay, Sibielski also makes the case that Leonard's short-term memory loss and the way it effects his life can be compared to the way Jameson describes the postmodern condition by using Jacques Lacan's concept of the schizophrenic (cf. Sibielski 86). Broken down to the very basics, Jameson argues that Lacan defines schizophrenia as "a breakdown in the signifying chain," which is a string of elements that comprise a meaning (Postmodernism 26). The linguist and structuralist Ferdinand de Saussure discovered that the meaning of an utterance is generated by the relationship between the various signifiers. When this relationship, and in turn the signifying chain as such, breaks down, what is left are only several unrelated signifiers, which results in schizophrenia. The connection between this mental disorder and a linguistic malfunction is time. The comprehension of language requires a temporal unification of past, present, and future since the relationship of the several signifiers that constitute, for example, a sentence have to be remembered in order to be understood. Similarly, so Jameson, "personal identity [is] itself the effect of a certain temporal unification of past and future with one's present" (Postmodernism 26). The significant problem of the parallel between the inability to make sense of language and to make sense of oneself is that [if] we are unable to unify the past, present, and future of the sentence, then we are similarly unable to unify the past, present, and future of our own biographical experience of psychic life. With the breakdown of the signifying chain, therefore, the schizophrenic is reduced to an experience of pure material signifiers, or, in other words, a series of pure and unrelated presents in time. (Jameson, Postmodernism 27)

So, if history in general or someone's individual past in particular is out of reach, either due to the postmodern condition or memory loss as in the case of Leonard Shelby, the necessary unification is impossible and the signifying chain breaks down.

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As mentioned before, the film's narrative structure resembles Leonard's fragmented knowledge and enables the viewer to experience all the events through his eyes. Recounting the narrative proper backwards is an extremely creative and efficient way of withholding information from the viewers. The audience, just like Leonard himself, does not know about his past and has to, at least temporarily, trust his records. Furthermore, more often than not they are entirely ignorant of the motivation for his actions, where he is and for what reason, why the people act the way they do, and the like, since the essential signifier, i.e. the immediately preceding sequence, will follow only afterwards. It is very much as Burt, the hotel receptionist, puts it when talking to Leonard: "It's all backwards. I mean, like, maybe you had an idea about what you wanna do next, but you don't remember what you just did" (Memento 00:09:01-00:09:06). Unlike Leonard, of course, the audience has the significant advantage of eventually finding out about the missing links. At the end of the film, they are in the position to realign and string together the signifying chain. One could argue that Leonard Shelby himself experiences postmodernism to an extreme. Similar to the way people have to rely on records of history in order to gather information about it, Leonard depends on his self-made simulacra, i.e. his notes, Polaroids, and tattoos of his own past. He, too, lives in a series of unrelated presents in time since his memory cannot hold a thought for more than a few minutes. This life in an 'eternal' present results in a major crisis of identity. Not only does he not know who the people he meets are, whether they are friends or enemies, but Leonard also has no clue as to who he himself has become. He merely remembers who he was (before the incident). While he appears to be completely oblivious of this dilemma, his friend Teddy, played by Joe Pantoliano, realizes this problem. He points it out to him twice in the film, the first time (according to the structure of the plot) shortly before he gets killed: Teddy: You don't even know who you are! Lenny: I'm Leonard Shelby. I'm from San Francisco. Teddy: That's who you were. That's not what you've become. You don't know what's going on. You don't even know my name. Lenny: Teddy. Teddy: That's because you read it off a fucking picture. (Memento 00:05:52-00:06:01)

To Leonard, Teddy resembles in many ways a 'historical' figure. He has read about him and seen pictures of him, but does not know him from his own experience. A very similar dialogue occurs towards the end of the film. The repetition of the almost exactly identical lines illustrates just how significant the theme of losing one's identity by losing one's sense of time is.

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Teddy: You don't even know who you are. Lenny: Yes, I do. I don't have amnesia. I remember everything right up until the incident. I'm Leonard Shelby. I'm from San Francisco. Teddy: That's who you were. You do not know who you are. What you've become since ... the incident. You wander around playing detective. You don't even know how long ago it was. (Memento 01:05:18-01:41)

The fact that Leonard does not know how long it has been since his wife died seems rather peculiar. One might think that someone who suffers from shortterm memory loss would desperately keep to calendars and clocks – not so in the film, though. Unlike in Pulp Fiction where time and the passing of time are emphasized repeatedly by several time markers (see the discussion of Pulp Fiction in a later chapter), Memento has very few actual references to time, either visual or verbal. In fact, there is only one single instance where a clock, a watch that is, can be spotted within the frame. This happens during one of Leonard's flashbacks when Sammy Jankins 'kills' his wife by repeatedly giving her insulin injections. However, the close-ups of the watch saying three o' clock is not used to give the viewer some temporal orientation but merely to illustrate how Jankins's wife manipulated him. Christopher Nolan went to great length to convey the sense of timelessness and 'eternal' present in the film. Neither Leonard nor the audience knows how long he has been looking for his wife's murderer, not even whether it has been a couple of weeks or several years. Judging from the number of times Leonard wakes up and nights pass, the plot seems to cover three days all in all but there is no knowing whether, and if so, how much time has elapsed within the individual segments. Even though the link between the sequences, that is, the repeating of the beginning of the preceding sequence at the end of the following, does not allow a jump in time between the segments, the editing within each segment does not follow this rule and can thus skip as much time as it pleases. Other than that, and excluding the watch mentioned above, there are only four time references in the movie. The hotel receptionist is responsible for three of them. He tells Leonard that he has stayed at the hotel for "a few days" (Memento 00:09:1400:09:15) and explains that he had another room "last week" (Memento 00:24:50-00:24:51). When Leonard asks him what time it is (and this is the only time he does so), the receptionist answers that it is "a quarter to one" (Memento 00:25:25-00:25:29). The fourth and only visual reference of time is a note written by Natalie, played by Carrie-Ann Moss, and it is very telling in what it says: "Today, 1 pm, meet Natalie for info" (Memento 00:16:41-00:16:45). Due to Leonard's condition that will not let him remember when he received this note, the exact date or at least weekday would be much more sensible than the deictic expression 'today' that, only depending on when it is read, can refer to absolutely any day. This note, though not very efficient for practical life, is sym-

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bolic for the postmodern concept of time. History is out of reach, every day is today, every moment is now. Memento's partly reversed, partly chronological, in any case, heavily fragmented plot structure is a prime example of how time can be used as an interesting tool in narrative. Through the utter non-linearity and division of the film into several segments, Christopher Nolan managed to create a sense of timelessness and eternal present that epitomizes the postmodern experience of time while combining this with the features of a mind-tricking narrative.

4

The Sophistication of the Viewer: How We Have ‘Learned’ to Understand Complex Narrative

[P]opular culture has, on average, grown more complex and intellectually challenging over the past thirty years. Where most commentators assume a race to the bottom and a dumbing down – “an increasingly infantilized society,” in George Will’s words - I see a progressive story: mass culture growing more sophisticated, demanding cognitive engagement with each passing year. Think of it as a kind of positive brainwashing: the popular media steadily, but almost imperceptibly, making our minds sharper, as we soak in entertainment usually dismissed as so much lowbrow fluff. --- Steven Johnson, Everything Bad Is Good for You (xi-xii) Mind-tricking narratives are very self-conscious in how they demand rather attentive viewers. They require the audience’s active participation in simply trying to follow the plot and/or, later on during a second viewing, retracing what happened or how one got fooled. In order to fully appreciate mind-tricking narratives, viewers need to be rather competent in ‘reading’ film; they need to have acquired a rather specific set of skills. In this chapter, non-linear narratives will be discussed in more detail. For one thing, their self-conscious way of editing helped provide the viewers with skills needed to comprehend mind-tricking narratives. For another thing, their rise in popularity in recent years can partly seen in correlation to various puzzle films.1 Still today, the dominant view of contemporary mainstream film is that they adhere to the conventions of Classical Hollywood style, which is mainly characterized (as mentioned above) by its following a clear and comprehensible narrative flow and a complete disguise of the film’s artifice. Linearity and causality are two of the main traits of Classical Hollywood narrative2. However, when we 1

Parts of this chapter were published as “Skip and Rewind: When Time Gets Out of Line in Mainstream Film” in Moderne Sprachen 53.1 (June 2009): 7-35. Print; as “Chronology, Causality, … Confusion: When Avant-Garde Goes Classic” in Journal of Film & Video 63.2 (Summer 2011): 11-27. Print; and as “Fascination for Confusion: Discontinuous Narrative in Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction” in Landscapes of Postmodernity: Concepts and Paradigms of Critical Theory. Eds. Petra Eckhard, Michael Fuchs, and Walter W. Hölbling. Wien: Lit Verlag, 2010. 113-28. Print. 2 “Here in brief is the premise of Hollywood story construction: causality, consequence, psychological motivations, the drive toward overcoming obstacles and achieving goals. Character-centered – i.e., personal or psychological – causality is the armature of the classical story” (Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson 13).

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look at today's landscape of popular film, the large number of non-linear plots employed is just as, if not even more, astonishing than the number of mindtricking narratives that can be found. It seems that in 1994, Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction marked the beginning of this kind of discontinuous and fragmented narrative as a new appeal in mainstream film. Once the way was paved, many other films followed. Guy Ritchie’s Snatch (2000), for instance, though mostly linear, features some scenes with an unusual use of time (such as time sped up and cause and effect presented in reverse). Syriana (2005), which was directed by Stephen Gaghan, has so many subplots that it is extremely difficult for the audience to put it all together at the end of the film. Steven Soderbergh seems particularly fond of time shifts as well, as we can see in The Limey (1999) and his mainstream breakthrough Out of Sight, which was released in 1998 and starred the two major Hollywood actors George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez. Spike Lee’s Inside Man (2006) deliberately plays with conventional narrative, even makes fun of it and, thus, misleads the audience right from the beginning. Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) epitomizes heavy fragmentation and discontinuity caused by parts of or even the whole story taking place inside a character’s head. In The Fountain (2006) director Darren Aronofsky crosscuts three interlocking time periods where the two main actors inhabit all three different times and embody three different parts of the same person. Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There (2007) illustrates that discontinuity on a plot level can work perfectly even in a biographical movie. Perhaps the most extreme form of an untraditional structuring of narrative, namely, relating the story backwards, was done in Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2001) and Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible (2002). Of course, many more films with a discontinuous plot could be listed. The central question posed in this chapter is why discontinuous narrative has emerged in mainstream film as late as it did even though these narrative techniques as such are not a novelty. Modern novels as well as avant-garde films throughout the 20th century have employed unconventional plot structures rather successfully, yet in mainstream film Hollywood narrative has remained quite dominant – until recently. The following discussion of narratology in literature and in film, the concept of montage as the governing principle of film, as well as the long tradition of unconventional editing in avant-garde film, will help us approach this matter. 4.1

The Concept of Time in Narrative

First of all, we must consider how narratology deals with the aspect of time and how these aspects are translated onto the screen in film theory. The crucial binary opposition in the discussion of the concept of time in narrative is temporality versus logic, i.e. a chronological order versus a causative chain. In “Introduction

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of the Structural Analysis of Narratives,” Roland Barthes points out that exactly this confusion between consecution, that which comes after, and consequence, that which is caused by, is the "mainspring of narrative" (94). This potential atemporal logic behind the temporality of narrative forms the core problem of narrative syntax, which divided theorists until recently. Vladimir Propp is convinced of the notion of the irreducibility of the chronological order since he considers time reality and, as a consequence, finds it necessary to root a story in temporality. However, he stands rather alone with this opinion. Dating as far back as Aristotle, who was the first theorist to establish rules about how to write a proper literary work in his Poetics, critics favored logic over chronology. Most contemporary researchers, such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, A. J. Greimas, Claude Bremon, and Tzvetan Todorov, share Aristotle’s opinion and, according to Barthes, would agree with Lévi-Strauss’s proposition that “the order of chronological succession is absorbed in an atemporal matrix structure” (qtd. in Barthes, “Structural Analysis” 98). In other words, by means of narrative logic an author creates a chronological illusion. Temporality as such is actually nonexistent in narrative, as Roland Barthes explains: from the point of view of narrative, what we call time does not exist, or at least only exists functionally, as an element of a semiotic system. Time belongs not to discourse strictly speaking but to the referent; both narrative and language know only a semiotic time, ‘true’ time being a ‘realist’, referential illusion [...]. (“Structural Analysis” 99)

It is important to bear in mind that when we speak of a linear plot, it can but does not necessarily have to be chronological but it must have an unbroken chain of causal relations. In his Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film, Seymour Chatman agrees with Barthes’s statement that ever since Aristotle it has been argued that the order of events in narrative is governed not by a simply linear but a causative principle: “In classical narratives, events occur in distributions: they are linked to each other as cause to effect, effects in turn causing other effects, until the final effect” (Chatman, Story and Discourse 46). A salient property of narrative, that I have taken for granted so far but would like to draw attention to now, is its double time structuring. As Chatman points out, all narratives coalesce the actual “story-time” with the “discourse-time” while still keeping these two time orders independent from each other; in other words story-time can but does not have to parallel discourse-time (“What Novels Can Do” 404). In terms of time relations between story- and discourse-time, Seymour Chatman relies completely on Gérard Genette’s elaboration. Genette distinguishes three different categories, namely order (ordre), duration (durée), and frequency (fréquence) (cf. Chatman, Story and Discourse 94). The most important aspect of analysis for this essay is the order in which events are presented in narrative. According to Genette and in Chatman’s words the “discourse can rearrange the events of the story as much as it pleases, provided the story-

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sequence remains discernible. If not, the classical plot fails in ‘unity’” (Chatman, Story and Discourse 63). The chronological order can be disturbed and the succession of cause and effect can be delayed as long the reader or viewer can, at all times, follow the plot. Genette further distinguishes between a normal sequence, where the order of the story parallels that of the plot, and anachronous sequences. Anachronous sequences can be manifested in two different ways: as flashbacks (analepse), which leaps back in time in order to recount some event(s) that happened earlier on in the story, and flashforwards (prolepse), which temporarily leave the narrative Now to relate an event that is only going to happen in the future. Genette’s third possibility is achrony (syllepsis), which has no visible relation between story and plot (Genette, Narrative Discourse 33-85). The connection is either completely at random or is based on another kind of motivation, such as spatial proximity, discursive logic, themes, and the like. This categorization presupposes one single story-strand, which defines the narrative Now. Anachronies as well as achronies can only be detected in opposition to the main strand. Arguably the majority of narratives, however, include more than just one single story-strand and often none of them can be given priority over the others. If that is the case, each of the strands has its own individual set of time relations between story and plot. With or without a hierarchical relation between the diverse story strands, events can be arranged in two different ways: either the events temporally overlap, i.e. the story-strand is continued as if it had never been interrupted, or the two strands are co-temporal, i.e. the passing of time in one strand means the passing of just as much time in the other strand. The events happening in the strand that is not explicitly narrated simply remain unknown, a literary convention that has been labeled “unchronicled growth” (Chatman, Story and Discourse 66-7). The problem with Genette’s and Chatman’s analysis of time relations in narrative is that they assume conventions of the classical narrative tradition and are, thus, less useful for modern literature. Especially during modernism authors sought to defy all kinds of rules and conventions and wrote in any manner they thought fit to express their creativity. They rejected the notion of strict causality and replaced it with contingency instead. Chatman explains that unlike the traditional narrative that tries to solve problems and inevitably aims at a resolution, modern narratives try to reveal a certain state of affairs. For that reason, a temporal order is more significant in the first than in the latter. Furthermore, modern narratives tend to place more importance on characters than on events, which once again makes a causally related order less vital. Chatman exemplifies this point magnificently by juxtaposing Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925): whether Elizabeth Bennet marries is a crucial matter, but not whether Clarissa Dalloway spends her time shopping or writing letters or daydreaming, since any

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one of these or other actions would correctly reveal her character and plight. (Chatman, Story and Discourse 47)

Besides narratives of revelation, there are also “antinarratives,” as Chatman calls them, to be found during modernism (Story and Discourse 57). These texts question narrative logic, the rational belief in cause and effect that leads to a resolution in the end. One event does not just lead to the next event but opens up a variety of possibilities that are all treated as equally valid. Another type of antistory is created by the “intentional ‘failure’ to mention crucial events” (Chatman, Story and Discourse 57). Chatman names Alain Robbe-Grillet as the inventor of this kind of story. In his La Jalousie, for example, Robbe-Grillet ‘fails’ to mention the presence of the narrator-character. Besides novels, the French author, screenplay writer – one of his films will be discussed later on – and influential theorist published a series of essays on how novels should and are going to look in the future and published them in the volume Pour un nouveau roman in 1963. This work does not establish a coherent theory but mainly promotes the rejection of literary conventions, in particular their focus on plot, narrative, characters, and action. Reinventing oneself with every novel is one of the main objectives of the nouveau roman since the traditional plot development towards a meaningful ending has lost its value in the modern world. “To tell a story has become impossible” since “the world is neither meaningful nor absurd, it simply is” (RobbeGrillet qtd. in Kline 211). Literature has changed dramatically throughout the 20th century and the rules and conventions of classical narratology are unable to cover the vast variety of narrative styles today. One central esthetic principle that modernism undermined is the continuity of literary discourse. Marianne DeKoven, for instance, describes modernist literature with a number of attributes that all have to do with time: “decentered subjectivity, rupture of linearity in plot and temporal structure, foregrounding of pre-Oedipal, presymbolic language, stylistic indeterminacy, multiplicity, fragmentation” (20). In the 1960s and 1970s, poststructuralist thought, too, contributed largely to a newfound concept of time that rejects continuity as something entirely outdated. In Of Grammatology, Jacques Derrida explains: We have seen that the traditional concept of time, an entire organization of the world and of language, was bound up with it [the linearity of the symbol]. Writing […] is rooted in a past of nonlinear writing. It had to be defeated […]. A war was declared, and a suppression of all that resisted linearization was installed. And first of what Leroi-Gourhan calls the ‘mythogram,’ a writing that spells its symbols pluri-dimensionally; there the meaning is not subjected to successivity, to the order of logical time, or to the irreversible temporality of sound. This pluridimensionality does not paralyze history within simultaneity, it corresponds to another level of historical experience, and one may just as well consider, conversely, linear thought as a reduction of history. It is true that another word ought perhaps to be used; the word history has no doubt always been associated with a

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What is interesting here is that, though often equated, for Derrida pluridimensionality stands in stark contrast to simultaneity. Derrida believes that simultaneity merely synchronizes two absolute presents and, consequently, “remains a linearist concept” (85). Perhaps, Tralfamadorian literature as described in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5 (1969) would most closely realize Derrida’s idea of pluridimensional writing: Tralfamadorian […] books were laid out – in brief clumps of symbols separated by stars. […] each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message – describing a situation, a scene. […] Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other. There isn’t any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. (71)

By explaining how this kind of alien literature works, Vonnegut reflects on his own writing style. The structure of his novel is fragmentary and several time levels overlap. Consequently, various story as well as time levels seem to be present at all times (Klarer, Einführung 46). Another remarkable aspect that Derrida draws attention to is the relentless rejection of those who resist linearity; he even speaks of a “war” and “suppression.” His astonishment about this firm defiance of discontinuity by critics despite the, in the meantime, long tradition of non-linear literature is a sentiment that Derrida shares with Roland Barthes. The French (post)structuralist wrote his essay “Literature and Discontinuity” in defense of the generally critically disapproved Mobile: Study for a Representation of the United States by Michel Butor, another member of the nouveau roman movement. Barthes ironically explains how, despite all modernist movements, “our criticism wants literature to be” (173): The (traditional) Book is an object which connects, develops, runs, and flows [...] to write is to secrete words within that great category of the continuous which is narrative; all literature [...] should be a narrative, a flow of words in the service of an event or an idea which ‘makes its way’ toward its denouement or its conclusion: not to ‘narrate’ its object is, for the Book, to commit suicide. (Barthes, “Literature and Discontinuity” 173-4)

1

Also quoted in Klarer: “In this passage from Of Grammatology, Derrida alludes to the utopian possibility of non-linear narrative spaces in which simultaneous écriture offers an alternative to traditional discourse” (“Simultaneity and Gender” 166).

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According to Barthes, traditional writing is based on the notion of development. Ideas develop in the course of the literary work and find their conclusion at the end. He sees, however, an alternative way of dealing with ideas; they do not necessarily have to be developed but can be “distributed,” as it was done in Butor’s Mobile. For that reason, fragmentary, non-linear narrative should not be condemned as inferior. “[E]very order has a meaning, even that of the absence of order, which has a name, which is disorder” (Barthes, “Literature and Discontinuity” 175). Meaning can be created in various ways and is not tied to a linear step-by-step unfolding of events. Consequently, Genette’s category of achrony, as described above, seems very useful. The fact that events are not related temporally or causally does not mean that they are completely unrelated. Spatial or thematic relation is just as valid a governing principle for the arrangement of events. I agree with Chatman, however, when he says that antinarratives “depend for their effect on the presupposition of the traditional narrative [...]” (Story and Discourse 57). Only by contrasting it with a traditional plot can the audience detect an unusual structure and thus be made aware of different, more important correlative links than time and/or effect. Coming back to flashbacks and flashforwards but moving on to film and leaving aside literature for now (Chatman even argues that these two terms should be used exclusively in film theory), David Bordwell gives a good account of what effects these two cinematic tools can create. When a filmmaker decides to follow the fabula2 order, he usually wants to focus the viewers’ attention on upcoming events. Bordwell calls this the suspense effect that is very common in most narrative films. Furthermore, it can reinforce the primacy effect3 since each following event can be evaluated as a change from the first one we see. On the other hand, when the fabula order is not followed, the primacy effect can be broken as the viewers are forced to re-evaluate earlier material in consideration of new insight into prior actions. In any case, the reshuffling of the fabula order creates narrational gaps. According to Bordwell, these gaps can either be “temporal” (when the representation of the event is postponed) or “permanent” (when the event is never shown); “focused” (when we want to know exactly what happened at a specific point in time) or “diffuse" (a general sense that events are out of order); ”flaunted” (when a change in time is explicitly marked, such as inserts or the various signals that introduce a flashback) or “suppressed” (when there are 2

Bordwell took this term from the Russian Formalists. It is sometimes translated as ‘story.’ Bordwell defines it as such: “The fabula embodies the action as a chronological, cause-and-effect chain of events occurring within a given duration and a spatial field” (Narration 49). Bordwell’s fabula order is thus the same as a chain of causally related events – the order of traditional narrative. 3 Meir Sternberg borrowed this term from psychology. It describes how initial information establishes “a frame of reference to which subsequent information [is] subordinated as far as possible” (qtd. in Bordwell, Narration 38).

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no such signals) (Narration 78). Defying fabula order can also happen for the sake of greater subjectivity as is often the case with flashbacks. Arguably the majority of flashback sequences serve as a representation of a character’s memory of a past event (cf. Bordwell, Narration 78). Conversely, the flashforward is very difficult to motivate realistically (unless a character is capable of looking into the future). It is a means of communication with the audience that lets them have a glance at future effects without knowing the causes that lead up to them. It is a highly self-conscious cinematic tool, which is no doubt the reason why it has frequently been used in art cinema and mostly been avoided in Classical Hollywood narrative (cf. Bordwell, Narration 79). The importance that Chatman as well as Bordwell (but also many other film theorists) place on flashbacks when they analyze narrative that is ‘out of order’ shows how common these techniques are in traditional narrative. However, the films this chapter seeks to draw attention to cannot be analyzed in those terms. No matter where an event can be located in terms of chronological order, it is always presented in the narrative present and never as an event of the past (as in a flashback) or of the future (as in a flashforward). The narrational gaps created are diffuse and suppressed. In a way, these films epitomize the one time characteristic that, as many critics, such as Chatman, Bordwell, McFarlane, Barthes, et al., have stated, distinguishes film from literature: film cannot present action in the past. Everything is present as the story literally unfolds in front of our eyes. In Space, Time and Structure in the Modern Novel, Sharon Spencer, too, explains that while many critics argue that the novel is mostly a temporal medium since it can change the tense of verbs, cinema is usually considered to be an eminently spatial medium. Since film is made up of images, it has the freedom to move in space but is, at the same time, confined to the impression of 'presentness' (Spencer 101-102). "[P]ictures have no tenses,” says Béla Balázs. “They show only the present - they cannot express either a past or a future tense" (Balázs 120). Georges-Albert Astre, a French critic, shares the same line of thought: "Film necessarily exists in a continual present […] it confers on the past (indeed, on the future) the authenticity of the actual moment in the present"4 (143). This ‘presentness’ of film suggests that the decisive difference between temporality in the novel and in film is that while in the novel time is narrated, film narrative time is presented. In his discussion of the mode of descriptions (of visual details) in literature and film, Chatman came to the conclusion that film never describes but always presents, or, the term he found most suitable, “depicts” (“What Novels Can Do” 408, original emphasis). Film’s unique presentation of time, Jakob Lothe rightfully points out in his Narrative in Fiction and Film, is mainly caused 4

“Le film est nécessairement un continuel présent […] il confère au passé (voire au futur) la même authenticité qu’à l’instant actuel” (trans. by Sharon Spencer).

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by two competing aspect: Film presupposes a spatial dimension (since each single image is, in fact, a spatial print) while at the same time it also instantly inflicts temporality on this space by setting these prints in motion (62). Lothe compares this discussion of filmic time and space to the so-called ‘Eisenstein-Bazin debate’ (62). For the Russian director and film theoretician Sergei Eisenstein film communication is not established by the mere display of images but by their specific combination: “[T]wo film pieces of any kind, placed together, inevitably combine into a new concept, a new quality, arising out of that juxtaposition” (Eisenstein, Film Sense 14, original emphasis). This assertion is closely related to Eisenstein’s montage theory. Since film is made up of single images, the most basic filmic device is that of montage, or, as Eisenstein put it, "Cinematography is, first and foremost, montage" (“Cinematographic Principle” 127). In plain terms, montage can essentially be described as the process of editing, i.e. the assembling of the various shots into a certain order. Yet, Eisenstein argued that montage is more than merely linking shots together. The shot is by no means an element of montage. The shot is a montage cell. [...] By what, then, is montage characterized and, consequently, its cell – the shot? By collision. By the conflict of two pieces in opposition to each other. By conflict. By collision. (“Cinematographic Principle” 133)

Eisenstein does not believe that montage is just a simple accumulation of shots (even though linkage may occur as a special case), but he argues that if two given factors are juxtaposed, a third entity arises. In other words, the final result is more than just the sum of its parts. To him, montage is the driving force that makes a film work: If montage is to be compared with something, then a phalanx of montage pieces, of shots, should be compared to the series of explosions of an internal combustion engine, driving forward its automobile or tractor: for, similarly, the dynamics of montage serve as impulses driving forward the total film. (“Cinematographic Principle” 134)

Unlike a combustion engine, however, montage has the power to alter and transcend conventional time and space barriers. For André Bazin, on the other hand, montage is “simply the ordering of images in time” (156). He favors filmmakers who seek to recreate a sense of realism with their films, whose storytelling is “analytic” and “dramatic” instead of “expressionist” and “symbolistic” (Bazin 161). Thus, he does not share Eisenstein’s fondness of “montage by attraction,” whom he accuses of fragmenting the world and chopping up its natural unity of both time and space (Bazin 156). Bazin’s interest lies mostly in the reality of dramatic space. He considers the shot

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in depth a useful cinematic tool to restore the unity of image in time and space that is otherwise destroyed by montage. A composition in depth, that is a shot with little to no camera movement in which several planes are equally in focus, can partly replace montage and thus add to the continuity of dramatic space. To Bazin, the most skillful directors try to do away with montage as much as possible in order to “transfer to the screen the continuum of reality” (166). Very much unlike Eisenstein, whose view of film is heavily influenced by expressionism, Bazin seeks to regenerate realism in storytelling. As Lothe points out, their different attitude towards the ‘proper’ way of editing is grounded in their opposing conception of film as an art form in which, as Eisenstein thinks, time and, as Bazin believes, space dominates. Both valid arguments, however, Gerald Mast claims that the fact that time and space play an equally important role is what makes film a unique kind of art. In his words, the special attraction of film is the cumulative kinetic hypnosis of the uninterrupted flow of film and time. Because the art of cinema most closely parallels the operation of time, it imprisons the attention within a hypnotic grip that becomes steadily tighter and stronger (if the work is properly built) as the film progresses and it refuses to let go until it has had its way. (Mast Film/Cinema/Movie 112)

This hypnosis of the uninterrupted flow, however, once again assumes a kind of storytelling that, as Michael Wood called it in his essay “Modernism and Film,” embraces “ancient conventions of realism and narrative coherence” (217). This almost unquestioned embrace of realism in film, however, seems to be somewhat of a paradox. Already Walter Benjamin, in his famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” expressed his bewilderment at the strong illusionary quality of film when he describes its strange blending of obvious artifice, on the one hand, and a realistic sensation, on the other: In the theater one is well aware of the place from which the play cannot immediately be detected as illusionary. There is no such place for the movie scene that is being shot. Its illusionary nature is that of the second degree, the result of cutting. […] The equipment-free aspect of reality here has become the height of artifice; the sight of immediate reality has become an orchid in the land of technology. (Benjamin, “Mechanical Reproduction” 675)1

1

Cf. “Das Theater kennt prinzipiell die Stelle, von der aus das Geschehen nicht ohne weiteres als illusionär zu durchschauen ist. Der Aufnahmeszene im Film gegenüber gibt es diese Stelle nicht. Dessen illusionäre Natur ist eine Natur zweiten Grades; sie ist ein Ergebnis des Schnitts. […] Der apparatfreie Aspekt der Realität ist hier zu ihrem künstlichsten geworden und der Anblick der unmittelbaren Wirklichkeit zur blauen Blume im Land der Technik.“ (Benjamin, “Kunstwerk” 157)

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While Benjamin seems to believe that realism is an inherent quality of film, Noël Burch argues in Life to Those Shadows that commercial films have always had a strong tendency to consciously ‘naturalize’ their storytelling in order to create an illusion of life. Burch calls this practice the “Institutional Mode of Representation” which is completely stripped of the many expressive – and thus interfering – possibilities of film (2). He explains that this mode of realism has been so dominant for such a long time that today we perceive it not as one of the many ways the development of film narrative could have taken but as an entirely natural evolution of filmic storytelling. Michael Wood shares the same line of thought. He singles out montage and the formation of imaginary space through the focus of the gaze as the two main film principles. However, these two principles are “so quintessentially modernist that their burial in Victorian narrative illusion makes for an all but unmanageable paradox” (Wood 222-3). 4.2

Montage in Avant-Garde Film

Luis Buñuel, the highly influential Spanish-born filmmaker, was one who openly displayed exactly this paradox. His first films Un chien andalou and L’âge d’or, released in 1929 and 1930 respectively, came at a time when the prime of French avant-garde was already over. Both are collaborations with the Surrealist painter, Salvador Dalí; both caused quite an uproar at the time they came out – mostly due to their content but also thanks to their form. As Ted Perry put it in his introduction to Masterpieces of Modernist Cinema, these films are “time transgressive in [their] disorganization and in [their] treatment of space, time, and subject matter” (4). In the short film Un chien andalou the search for astounding effects is clearly in the foreground. There is no plot to speak of; time and space are completely dislocated. Objects are taken out of their usual environment and placed in new and provoking surroundings. Any kind of narrative logic is annihilated – the montage is subject to free association. Buñuel himself described the project in his autobiography as follows: "Our [his and Dalí’s] only rule was very simple: No idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation of any kind would be accepted. We had to open all doors to the irrational and keep only those images that surprised us, without trying to explain why" (103). One aspect, for instance, that they fail to explain is how a street and a beach can occupy the very same space – they are both featured as the exterior of the room which itself builds the main location of the film. Un chien andalou makes fun of cinematic space. As Burch has pointed out, the rule that the space in a movie is continuous, is an acquired not a natural one. Montage can give the illusion of substantial space but also just as easily break it. Buñuel skillfully illustrates that we are actually dealing with a sequence of film frames and not real space. Therefore, if a person leaves a frame, he or she can

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enter any other kind of frame. In other words, if someone leaves a room – purely technically speaking – it makes as much sense for him or her to immediately enter the very same room through the same door, as it happens in Un chien andalou. Pierre Sorlin, too, in his essay on Buñuel, draws attention to the film’s formal discontinuity, which is created by “frames [succeeding] each other in a seemingly random order” (217). Many commentators have seen an attempt to stress the “arbitrariness of filmic construction” in Buñuel’s work (Sorlin 218). In film, not only the order of frames is essentially arbitrary but also what the frame includes. Buñuel plays with the viewer’s tendency to mentally complete the space beyond the frame. Even though we know that there is really nothing outside the frame except for the camera, light, cables, etc., what the film frames exclude intrigues us. We want to see the characters’ universe. So when the protagonist of Un chien andalou picks up the ends of two ropes and starts pulling them, we want to know what is tied around the other ends. Buñuel, then, almost ridicules the viewers’ assumptions by having the character drag in cork mats, melons, two priests, pianos, and a dead donkey. As Wood pointed out, besides the metaphorical significance of the ‘items’ dragged in, this scene functions like a flashing arrow indicating to the audience that “[t]his is a film. What is beyond the frame, what can be dragged into sight at any moment, may literally be anything” (Wood 227). ‘Anything goes’ is also the motto of the concept of time, which is reduced to absurdity. Since there is little to no causal relation between the various shots, the passing of time is relatively meaningless, as well. Nonetheless, or, perhaps, exactly because of that, there are several inserts whose rather futile time indications emphasize their utter irrelevance: “Il était une fois … “ (“Once upon a time …”), “Huit ans après” (“Eight years later”), “Vers trios heures du matin” (“About three o’clock in the morning”), “Seize ans avant” (“Sixteen years ago”), and “Au printemps …” (“In spring …”). These inserts, too, are obvious indicators of the arbitrariness of time in general and the relativity of the progression of time in film. While Luis Buñuel occupies the surrealist end of the spectrum of avant-garde filmmakers, the French director Alain Resnais covers the other end. Ted Perry describes one of his films, namely L'année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad), as being “close to the mimetic, realistic end of the continuum” (2). Despite the realistic touch to the film, its use of time and space is everything but conventional. This film, whose screenplay was written by none other than Alain Robbe-Grillet, was released in 1961. The highly repetitive plot is about the recurring interactions of the three principle characters who remain unnamed in the film and are only referred to as X, A, and M in the original screenplay. It is set in a noble social gathering at a baroque chateau. A man (X) approaches a woman (A) and enquires, "Didn't we meet at Marienbad last year?" The woman reacts hesitantly and denies ever having met him. X, then, tries to convince her by recounting several conversations that they supposedly had. He explains that they

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had an affair. She told him she would run away with him but suddenly changed her mind. Instead, she promised to meet him again the following year and she would elope with him then. Despite all his efforts to make her remember, the woman remains adamant about not knowing him. Nonetheless, she engages in a conversation with him until a second man (M), who may or may not be her husband, approaches and, thus, ends the conversation. As the film progresses, the same interaction is repeated several times in different locations inside and around the chateau. X becomes increasingly persistent and his voice-over narration of the past events seems more and more as if his conviction of what happened alone will make them come true. For the viewer, there is no knowing the truth, no telling fact from argument. Not even at the end of the film is the certainty and sequence of events clear. The movie ends with X and A running off together. However, X recounts this event in the past tense, which means, he might again be relating what happened last year at Marienbad. Consequently, the entire story could start all over again and be repeated infinitely. As T. Jefferson Kline points out in his essay on Marienbad, despite contradicting analyses of Resnais’s film, all critics seem to agree on one aspect, namely “the recognition that the film cannot be sorted out into a recognizable story” (215). Robbe-Grillet himself explained that a brief synopsis alone would suffice to realize that the film could never be told in a conventional manner, i.e. in a linear narrative with logical developments. The whole film, as a matter of fact, is the story of a persuasion: it deals with a reality which the hero creates out of his own vision, out of his own words. And if his persistence, his secret conviction, finally prevail, they do so among a perfect labyrinth of false trails, variants, failures and repetitions! (Robbe-Grillet, Marienbad 10)

Since the film depicts a reality that was created in a character’s mind, the concept of time has to be adjusted accordingly. Robbe-Grillet elaborates at length on the aspect of time in cinema. He, too, agrees with the many other film theorists on the fact that the actual tense of film is the present. He believes that the images that make up the film are really “imaginings” which, if lively enough, are always in the present. The memory of past experiences and the contemplation of future events are very similar to a mentally projected film, whose segments we can arrange and rearrange at our convenience. “Hence the total cinema of our mind admits both in alternation and to the same degree the present fragments of reality proposed by sight and hearing, and past fragments, or future fragments, or fragments that are completely phantasmagoric” (Robbe-Grillet, Marienbad 13). Therefore, so Robbe-Grillet believes, viewers are perfectly capable of comprehending a distorted narrative. He even takes it a step further. The linear plots of the conventional cinema are not apt to represent our own experience:

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Robbe-Grillet was convinced that the meanwhile conventionalized filmic devices of the flashback and the “objectivized hypothesis” (i.e., a visualization of, for instance, the testimony of a witness which might or might not be true) had prepared the audience for the narrative experiment in Last Year at Marienbad. According to Robbe-Grillet, viewers basically have two options: they can cling to traditional narrative structures and try to put the film into a chronological order, thus, making the movie close to incomprehensible. Or they can just let themselves be “carried along” and enjoy the images right in front of them. The story told will seem the most realistic, the truest, the one that best corresponds to [their] daily emotional life, as soon as [they] agree to abandon readymade ideas, psychological analysis, more or less clumsy systems of interpretation which machine-made fiction or films grind out for [them] ad nauseam, and which are the worst kinds of abstractions. (Robbe-Grillet, Marienbad 14)

Robbe-Grillet believes that the preconceived ideas of the necessity of linearity in narrative would only interfere and consequently destroy his own vision. Once the viewers manage to rid themselves from these conventions, the audience would be perfectly capable of comprehending Last Year at Marienbad. Getting rid of traditional Hollywood film ‘grammar’ was also the main objective of an avant-garde movement that came roughly at about the same time as the release of Resnais’s most outstanding films, namely the Nouvelle Vague or French New Wave. A group of former critics for the famous film magazine Cahiers du cinéma decided to put their theories into practice and started making their own films at the end of the 1950s. François Truffaut with movies such as Les quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows), Tirez sur le pianiste (Shoot the Piano Player), and Jules et Jim (Jules and Jim), and Jean-Luc Godard with film such as À bout de souffle (Breathless), Une femme est une femme (A Woman Is a Woman), and Le weekend (Weekend) have strongly influenced filmic techniques to this day. Despite their striving for realism, for blurring fact and fiction by using natural light, actual locations, and often hand-held camera, they never tried to disguise the fact that the audience is watching a movie. And even though they preferred narrative cinema (as opposed to, for instance, Buñuel’s surrealist works), they rejected the clear rules and restrictions of the Hollywood narrative as too dogmatic. Some typical trademark features of French New Wave cinema are extended voice-over narrations, out-of-sequence shots, sudden jump cuts, newsreel footage, photographic stills, freeze frames, panning shots, wipes, and dolly shots (cf. Forbes 464).

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À bout de souffle (1960), perhaps Godard’s most famous work, serves as a prime example. The story is relatively simple. Michel Piccard (played by Jean-Paul Belmondo) steals a car in Marseilles and shoots a policeman, who stopped him for speeding, on his way to Paris. In Paris he meets his American ex-girlfriend, Patricia Franchini (played by Jean Seberg), and tries to convince her of two things: to sleep with him and come with him to Italy. She only lets herself be persuaded to do the first and then turns him in to the police. When they arrive, a friend of Michel’s tosses him a gun in a last attempt to save him. But instead, the policeman panics and shoots him. While the story is rather straightforward, the cinematic style is fairly striking. Jill Forbes summarizes Godard’s innovations in À bout de souffle as follows: [I]nstead of the shot-reverse shot and continuity editing in which bodies are carefully positioned in space, eyelines are matched, and the sources of sound are identified, a more elliptical, faster-moving, and apparently inconsequential narrative based on jump cuts and a montage of sound and images profoundly changed film techniques. (Forbes 464)

Indeed, the most important editing feature that Godard introduced is the jump cut. This is a device in film editing where, usually, the middle part of a continuous shot is left out and the beginning and the end of this shot are joined together. In other words, Godard cut out a few feet of film at seemingly random places. In traditional filmmaking jump cuts are considered a flaw, a mistake, since they completely destroy the illusion of the continuity in time and are, thus, extremely self-conscious. Godard also created jump cuts by editing together different takes of the same shot. During the scene, for instance, where Patricia talks to a journalist in a coffee shop, within roughly twenty seconds, we see eight cuts from the journalist to the journalist while delivering one continuous speech. Normally, cuts are used in order to either change space (i.e. the point of view or the entire location) or time. In this sequence Godard does neither. He uses the exact same camera angle and the lines the journalist says are nonstop. Godard’s body of work consists of constant violations of orthodox continuity of this manner. In Reflexivity in Film and Literature, Robert Stam lists several of these instances and explains that the effect that Godard creates by using these disruptive devices is a strong emphasis on the inherent discontinuity of film itself: A filmic text is a discontinuous discourse, analyzable into discrete shots and individual frames. The process of film production, furthermore, is essentially discontinuous. Shots are selected from diverse takes made at different times. Editing involves physically collating separate pieces of film. The continuity of film, in sum, consists of a perpetual discontinuity. Montage normally imposes an apparent continuity on discontinuous materials. Godard merely underscores this discontinuity by emphasizing the individual frame (“22,337 frames tell you about Patricia and

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The techniques employed in the avant-garde movies discussed above, which should only serve as sample analyses of the many more avant-garde movements in film that have emerged and disappeared throughout the 20th century, bear great resemblance to quite a number of fairly mainstream films released in the late nineties and especially after 2000. Or, rather, the argument should go vice versa. In recent years, more and more popular films use rather unconventional narrative structures – unconventional in opposition to Classical Hollywood narrative. The list of movies with discontinuous plots, which I mentioned in the introduction and which could be considerably prolonged, all reject dominant narrative and question linearity in similar ways to Buñuel’s, Resnais’s, Godard’s, and Truffaut’s. In order to illustrate just how akin these great masterpieces of the avant-garde are to a number of contemporary mainstream films, the following case study of 21 Grams will serve as a representative example. 4.3

21 Grams – A Case Study "The past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past." --- T.S. Eliot "I don't know when anything began anymore or when it's gonna end." --- Paul Rivers, 21 Grams

In the year 2000, Alejandro González Iñárritu managed to make the world notice Mexican film with his directorial debut. Amores Perros is a triptych about the brutal life in Mexico City, where people are barely better off than dogs. During a horrible car crash the fate of three diverse couples collide. The young Octavio wants to finance his future with his brother’s wife Susana by organizing cruel and illegal dog fights; the successful model Valerie, who is disabled after the crash, wants to try her luck with her beloved Daniel, and one witness of the accident, the bum and professional killer El Chivo, wants to get into contact with his daughter, Maru, who believes that he is dead. It took Iñárritu three years to complete the film and the result is a drama in three parts about love, suffering, betrayal, and death in a major city. In terms of its narrative techniques it reminds one of Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. The stories about the three couples are told in chapters that are introduced by black inserts reading “Octavio y Susana,” “Valerie y Daniel,” and “El Chivo y Maru.” Right at the

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beginning of the film, before the first chapter insert, the audience sees the climax of all these stories, that is, a car accident. They witness the high-speed car chase of Octavio and his friend until he jumps a red light and crashes into another car. This sequence is repeated three times, each time from the perspective of the main character of the three stories. So, once again in the first chapter, the viewers experience the accident through Octavio’s eyes even though this time the sequence is sped up and shortened. Next, the audience gets Valerie’s point of view. She is the driver of the car Octavio hits and suffers major injuries. Finally, the viewers, literally and metaphorically, witness the crash for the fourth and last time through El Chivo’s eyes, who is not involved in it himself. Besides this obvious connection between the three stories, all the characters are also present during each of the others' chapters. Most of the time, it is only a brief appearance. The characters walk by or somehow enter the frame, which hints at the simultaneity of all three stories. Three years later, in 2003, Iñárritu’s second work was released. After his success with Amores Perros, Hollywood knocked on his door and 21 Grams was produced in the United States, was shot in English, and starred popular actors and actresses, such as Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro, and Naomi Watts. With this film, too, Iñárritu and his screenplay writer Guillermo Arriaga tell three stories that are connected by a, this time fatal, car accident. However, while Amores Perros was narrated chronologically, at least, within the chapters, 21 Grams completely abandons the notion of continuity and jumps around in time as well as between the stories. The plot structure of 21 Grams is made up of 106 segments (excluding the end titles). Since the film runs only about 118 minutes (again, excluding the end credits), the average length of a sequence is little more than sixty seconds. This leaves the viewers with a 'time puzzle' that is extremely difficult to put together. Especially Sean Penn's character, Paul Rivers, is very confusing since the viewers see him in three different states of health and with two different women within only fourteen minutes. While the overall storyline will eventually be composed in the audience's mind, it is very challenging to rearrange every segment of the film into chronological order. One problem is that there is no knowing how much time the story covers altogether. The only actual point of reference is the accident. Consequently, even though many of the segments are, in fact, connected rather closely and can thus be placed quite accurately, others can only be approximately allocated, such as before and after the day of the accident. Besides, it is often not really certain, which segments of the three different stories happen simultaneously, and which consecutively. In a way, the narrative could also be called circular as the composition of the first few sequences parallels that of the last few. Right at the beginning, the main themes of the film are introduced in a 'prologue'. Michael and his two daughters at the diner and Cristine at the support group stand for the importance of the family and mutual support. Jack lecturing the teenager establishes the themes of

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providence, fate, and guilt. Also, the fatal truck that causes the whole tragedy appears on the screen for the first time. The flock of birds flying sets the mood for one thing and, since they are flying at dawn, it might also symbolize the narrow line between life and death, an issue that Paul's voice-over elaborates on in the subsequent sequence. The end of the film is composed in a similar manner. The shot of the flying birds closes the circle and marks the end. It is, again, followed by Paul's voice-over contemplating, "How many lives do we live? How many times do we die?" (21 Grams 01:55:45-01:55:52). The next and last nine sequences are a collage of events right before the tragic accident and the outcome at the very end and, juxtaposed like that, it indeed seems as if the characters have lived more than just one life. All these 'different' lives of the characters, however, are shown simultaneously rather than consecutively. Therefore, the concept of the present is rather exceptional in this film. Everything is presented as the present, whether it is past, present, or future, which leaves the viewer in an unstable and unsettling situation. Should the film contain the concept of the consecution of past, present, and future at all, then past, present, and future are displayed simultaneously. However, it could be argued that the film itself consists only of unrelated presents and any kind of chronological structuring takes place only in the viewers' heads. By doing so, Iñárritu questions causality and takes up Roland Barthes's opposition between temporality and logic. As already stated before, in his essay "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives," Barthes exposes that the mainspring of narrative is precisely the confusion of consecution and consequence, what comes after being read in narrative as what is caused by; in which case narrative would be a systematic application of the logical fallacy denounced by Scholasticism in the formula post hoc, ergo propter hoc – a good motto for Destiny. (94)

This quote brings up two principal points. Conventional films are often edited in a manner that consecution and consequence can, in fact, be confused. In order to guide the audience, cause and effect will be shown in sequential order, sometimes even irrespective of a linear timeline. 21 Grams overtly defies this kind of film grammar. Cause and effect are never edited in consecution. The audience frequently sees the result before they find out what action triggered it off; they witness the emotional damage done to the characters before they learn what happened. To give an example, Paul has a new heart transplanted before Michael dies and Cristine agrees to organ donation; and Cristine listens to Michael's messages on the phone before he leaves them. The other significant term Barthes mentions is destiny. The role of fate in people's lives is, arguably, the main theme of the film and Iñárritu's stance on this topic is reflected in the plot structure. The three individual stories gradually merge into one as the plot moves along and the characters become aware of their connection. However, since the structure of the plot features no continuity to

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speak of, the audience knows about their relation right from the beginning of the film, even if they cannot yet specify what sort of relation it is. Furthermore, almost all the different states of the characters are established very soon. The audience sees Paul healthy, then sick being hooked up to an oxygen tank, and then heavily bleeding. They experience Cristine as a loving mother, a drug addict, and, finally, short of a nervous breakdown; they learn about Jack as a religious fanatic, a prisoner, and guilt-ridden worker. 21 Grams is an utterly bleak tragedy, filled with the worst kind of grief characters can possibly go through. Nonetheless, due to the non-linear structure the audience never really loses itself in the story but is constantly and abruptly confronted with various events. So, while the viewers feel tense at all times and barely get a moment of relief, they are not as fully affected by all the emotions as they would otherwise be. Why, then, did Iñárritu opt for such a highly discontinuous narrative? The answer has to do with the main theme of the film, namely fate and destiny, as already mentioned above. The term destiny can be defined as "the things that will happen to someone in the future, especially those that cannot be changed or controlled" (“destiny”). If events in one's life cannot be controlled or changed, things fall into place 'by accident' – pun intended. They are not governed by the rational principle of cause and effect but occur at random. This notion is reflected by the plot structure of the film that seems to be edited at random, as well. Iñárritu questions the notion of causality by putting the sequences in an order of neither causal nor temporal relation and, consequently, suggests that this non-linear arrangement is as logical and gives as much explanation for the reasons of events as a chronological order would do. In his review of 21 Grams in Film Quarterly, Robert Hahn argues that the film regards "fate not as chance but as something inevitable and inescapable (although perhaps unknowable)" and "time as the enveloping, permeable element where identities evolve and our fate plays out" (53-4). This is a valid point, especially considering that the film displays the turning point for all the characters, namely the accident, as absolutely unavoidable. As Hahn explains, the film repeatedly relapses to the moments right before the fatal crash. The audience learns more about it as they see it several times through the eyes of the various characters. The question that is thus conjured up quite naturally is: What caused the accident? Reckless driving by Jack or careless parenting on the part of Michael? (cf. Hahn 57) The answer is never revealed as the accident itself is never shown (very much unlike Amores Perros that features the accident four times). About twenty-five minutes into the film, the accident scene shortly enters and leaves the frame when Marianne and the Reverend ride by in their car. Approximately half an hour later, the audience finally witness the car crash but they can only hear it and never see it, as the camera remains static and does not pan to the action (21 Grams 01:09:33-01:10:40). The film does not provide reasons for the accident except that it had to happen; it was inescapable.

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Nonetheless, arbitrariness is the key word; the arbitrariness of fate that wins over the notion of Providence. The concept of a divine plan that is laid out in front of people is heavily questioned by means of the character of Jack. He has found Jesus and become a religious fanatic who sees divine interventions everywhere. He strongly believes that Jesus provided him with the truck, which he won at a friend's raffle. As this heavenly gift later causes the fatal accident, Jack's beliefs are momentarily shattered. During their conversation in Jack's prison cell, even the Reverend starts to contradict himself – no more talk of Providence but of accidents (21 Grams 00:54:51-00:56:58). Coming to terms with one's fate, whether it is losing one's own life, grieving for the loss of your family's life, or causing the end of someone else's life, is extremely difficult and cannot be rationalized. According to Hahn, 21 Grams "implicitly argues against serial coherence as the key to comprehension" and suggests that revelation does not necessarily lie in the final chapter or the denouement, but may spring upon us suddenly and when we least expect it; that reality is all that is the case, and the characters all that they seem to be. (56)

Past, present, and future are equally important at all times and affect the identity of a character simultaneously. The popular notions of seizing the present, of abandoning and forgetting the past, and of concentrating on the future are completely undermined in the film. The past as well as the future are permanently 'present'. When Mary asks Paul to "look ahead together, not behind!" Paul knows that this is simply not possible (21 Grams 00:51:34-00:51:36). The past cannot be left behind since it is a part of anyone's identity and the narrative structure of the film illustrates this point beautifully. The viewers never experience the events in the life of a character as past, as being over and done with. Through the use of discontinuous editing, sick Paul is always part of healthy Paul, drugaddicted Cristine always part of the caring mother, and religious Jack of the hitand-run killer. Before the accident is after the accident is all eternally present. The way Iñárritu defies traditional film grammar in 21 Grams as well as the motivation to do so bear great resemblance to the manner and reason why, for instance, Resnais opted for simultaneous timelines in Marienbad. Iñárritu feels that he cannot express his view of life within the boundaries and restrictions of classical narrative. Similarly, Resnais thought that linearity and causality could not properly communicate his stance on reality. Both filmmakers, of course, work under the premise that montage is the principle tool of film, which – within the constraints of filmic logic (not traditional narrative logic) – enables them to tell their stories in ways they think best. The question remains, as posed at the beginning, why these alogical and nonlinear narrative techniques have entered the realm of mainstream film only in the 1990s – and then still rather sporadically – and are starting to become more and more popular in the 21st century? As this chapter has been trying to outline by

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discussing some well-known avant-garde works, there has been a long tradition of discontinuous narrative in literature as well as in film. Modernist novels, such as works by Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, were exceedingly avant-garde at the time they were published, yet became established classics in the second half of the 20th century. This evolution of literature was observed by the more social and historical branch of Russian formalists already in the 1920s – most notably by Roman Jakobson and Jurij Tynjanov. In his essay “On Literary Evolution,” Tynjanov explains that the change in the form and function of literature is a normal development and that, therefore, novelty features of one period become literary conventions in the next: If we agree that evolution is the change in interrelationships between the elements of a system - between functions and formal elements - then evolution may be seen as the “substitutions” of systems. These substitutions vary from epoch to epoch, occurring sometimes slowly, sometimes rapidly. They do not entail the sudden and complete renovation or the replacement of formal elements, but rather the new function of these formal elements. (Tynjanov 58-9, my translation).

When formalists talk about history, they mean the evolution of literature, i.e. a succession of systems. In other words, once one gets used to a literary technique, it becomes part of everyday language – “avant-garde becomes classical” (Sexl 164-5, my translation). Walter Benjamin had a similar line of thought in the 1930s. He believed that mere habit plays a big role in the reception of art, which, in certain circumstances, acquires canonical value. “For the tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at the turning points of history cannot be solved by optical means, that is, by contemplation, alone. They are mastered gradually by habit, under the guidance of tactile appropriation” (cf. Benjamin, Mechanical Reproduction 679). Habituation and familiarization seem to be key elements in the development of art from avant-garde to mainstream. The evolution of film editing – still within the restrictions of linear montage – have also helped prime the audience for more elaborate narratives today. The editing of film has become more and more radical as the sophistication of the viewers has grown. Seymour Chatman gives the simple example of locomotion. He claims that earlier films seem to be very much engaged with showing how characters travel from one location to another. By modern standards a montage of two shots, one cut, that is, are usually enough to indicate a change of location (e.g. ‘a girl leaving a bar’ and ‘the girl entering her apartment’). Years ago, however, Chatman specifically brings up the 1956 movie Patterns, several transitional steps (such as ‘girl driving a car,’ ‘girl entering a building,’ ‘girl going upstairs,’ etc.) were included. Nowadays, filmmakers assume that audiences can easily reconstruct this kind of information, which makes these shots redundant. Even more so, as Chatman puts it quite accurately, “they slow the action down unnecessarily and ‘insult our intelligence’ by showing what we could easily figure out for ourselves” (Story and Discourse 53).

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Perhaps, the most important realization within the area of mainstream films using avant-garde techniques is Noël Burch’s analysis of film montage, as discussed earlier. Linearity and causality are by no means inherent qualities of film. The long-lasting dominance of Classical Hollywood narrative has nothing to do with the characteristics of the very medium film. On the contrary, considering the possibilities of film montage and the firm tradition of avant-garde movies ever since the invention of the medium, it is actually only natural that these techniques gained popular appeal and entered into mainstream cinema. This movement of art, techniques, and issues from the fringes to the center is, of course, a characteristic typically ascribed to postmodernity, which also accounts for the rise in non-linear narrative within the area of mainstream film. 4.4

The Postmodern Concept of Time “Luckily, it’s been well-established that time is not a fixed construct.” --- Dr. Gregory House (Hugh Laurie) in House M.D.

In recent decades, ‘postmodernity’ has become an extremely dubious term which theorists have used extensively and defined in countless, often contradictory ways. One typical aspect that most scholars will, in fact, agree with is its fusion of highbrow and lowbrow art. Long gone seems the clear-cut distinction between ‘proper’ bourgeois art and popular culture. Some theorists, such as Theodor Adorno and Fredric Jameson, lament this development as a devaluation of art in its very essence; others, such as Walter Benjamin and Jürgen Habermas, appreciate it as democratization. Positive attitude or not, the fact remains that in the postmodern era many formerly avant-garde techniques have become mainstream and previously highly intellectual discourses have been included in popular art. The question raised now is how non-linear narrative in popular film can be ascribed to postmodernism. Approaching the matter from a slightly different angle, these films address a previously highly intellectual and ‘elitist’ issue on a popular and wide-ranging basis. Non-linear narrative magnificently reflects the postmodern concept of time. In order to make that argument clear, I have to elaborate on the postmodern perception of time. In 1979, the French philosopher and literary theorist Jean-François Lyotard published The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge in which he postulates the end of the great metanarratives that dominated modernity. The downfall of these meta-narratives that used to be the source of all modern knowledge provided the basis for postmodern plurality. Many other theorists, even though they never labeled themselves postmodernists, such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze, used Lyotard’s account of postmodernism as a platform for their own work. Polemically put, this downfall of the great narratives gave way to alternative

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ways of telling a story, to narrative structures that, as I would like to argue in this chapter, are heavily influenced by this and other postmodern concepts. Henri Bergson (with his concept of durée) and Martin Heidegger (most notably with his elaborations in Being and Time), among others, provided the philosophical foundations for non-linear time models within which time cannot simply be divided into the three dimensions of past, present, and future. Rather, nonlinearity, fragmentation, and the perpetual present have become the dominant markers of postmodern thought. In The End of Modernity, Gianni Vattimo establishes a time model that is heavily influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of the eternal return of the Same (ewige Wiederkehr des Gleichen), elaborated in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Vattimo uses the terms modernity and postmodernity to describe two epochs whose core-distinguishing feature is the way society perceives progress. One of the main characteristics of modernity is the metaphysical paradigm of progress, i.e., being new is equated with being valid. In Vattimo’s words, “modernity is that era in which being modern becomes a value, or rather, it becomes the fundamental value to which all other values refer” (End of Modernity 99). Secularization is the key word to describe modernity, since it explains the nature of the value that dominates this era. Religious belief is replaced by “faith in progress – which is both a secularized faith and a faith in secularization” (Vattimo, End of Modernity 100). The very notion of progress has been secularized and, thus, Vattimo concludes that [f]or Christianity, history appears as the history of salvation; it then becomes the search for a worldly condition of perfection, before turning, little by little, into the history of progress. But the ideal of progress is finally revealed to be a hollow one, since its ultimate value is to create conditions in which further progress is possible in a guise that is always new. By depriving progress of a final destination, secularization dissolves the very notion of progress itself, as happens in nineteenth- and twentieth-century culture. (End of Modernity 7-8)

In other words, in the age of modernity the ‘new’ becomes the central value because any kind of progressive movement lacks a final goal. Instead, progress is a development that merely leads anew to a state from which further progress is possible. In postmodernity then, the idea of progress has finally become completely obsolete; it is the period of postmetaphysics. In his essay “Die Säkularisierung des Fortschritts” (“The Secularization of Progress”), the German philosopher and sociologist Arnold Gehlen describes the experience of postmodernity as post histoire (or post-history). The long-standing succession of the new leads to habituation, and as a result, progress is perceived as routine. Nowadays, we need to be swamped with novelties in order to have the feeling that everything stays the same. Postmodernity is the era of the dissolution of the notion of progress. Gehlen detects a correlation in terms of ahistoricity between this dissolution and many utopian ideologies:

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The Sophistication of the Viewer Where we effectively try to make the new man, our relationship with history also changes. This happens usually by the victorious party of the advanced, which digs off the roots of the old-established powers in order to declare their own lack of history as principle for the entire society. The French revolutionaries called 1793 the year One of a new era […]. (Gehlen 408)1

Gehlen (408-9) finds a prime example in Sebastien Mercier’s 1770 novel L’an 2240, a Rousseauian utopia in which everything is paid immediately in cash and no extinct languages are studied. As Gianni Vattimo explains, “[t]he suppression of all credit and classical languages emblematically embodies a reduction of existence to the naked present, that is, the elimination of any historical dimension” (End of Modernity 104). Krzystztof Pomian argues along similar lines. As Vattimo points out, Pomian characterizes modernity as a futuristic era and, parallel to Mercier’s novel, explains that “the future is, literally, injected into the very texture of the present in the form of paper money […] The history of more than two thousand years of monetarization of the economy is also the history of a growing dependence of the present on the future” (qtd. in Vattimo, End of Modernity 1052). According to Vattimo, postmodernity is characterized by a crisis of the new and a crisis of the value of the future, two notions that are also manifested in any kind of art, from architecture to literature. Postmodern art’s main aim is to rid itself of rationality, the notions of innovation and overcoming the past, and the need for progress and development (Vattimo, End of Modernity 105). Such a crisis of the future unavoidably alters our perception of time and history. Thus, Vattimo seems hardly surprised that many landmark works of the twentieth century, such as the already mentioned Ulysses, but also Finnegans Wake by James Joyce (1939), Robert Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man Without Qualities; 1930-1943), and Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time; 1913-1927), focus on the aspect of time on a contextual as well as on a structural level and defy seemingly naturalized temporal linearity. In Vattimo’s words, “[s]uch a crisis [of the future and the new], obviously, implies a radical change in our way of experiencing history and time, as is somewhat obscurely anticipated by Nietzsche in his ‘doctrine’ of the eternal return of the Same” (End of Modernity, 106-7).

1

My translation from the German: “Wo man nun wirklich versucht, den neuen Menschen zu schaffen, dort ändert sich das Verhältnis zur Geschichte. Dies geschieht meist so, daß die siegreiche Fort-schrittsgruppe die Wurzeln der altetablierten Herrschaftsmächte abgräbt und ihre eigene Geschichts-losigkeit zum Prinzip der Gesellschaft ausruft. Die französische Revolutionäre ernannten das Jahr 1793 zum Jahr 1 eines neuen Weltalters […]“ (Gehlen 408). 2 Translated from K. Pomina, “The Crisis of the Future,” published in Italian (“La crisi dell’avvenire’) in Le frontier del tempo, ed. R. Romano. Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1981. 102.

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According to Gianni Vattimo, the appreciation of ‘the new’ is the basis for the linear and rather future-oriented perception of time during modernity. In the metaphysical concept of time, every present moment points beyond itself towards a telos from which this moment can be considered meaningful. In this sense, we can see modernity as the epoch during which the valuation of the new manifests the general metaphysical time structure. Postmodernity, on the other hand, is the epoch during which the new has lost its value. As a consequence, the metaphysical concept of time loses its future point of reference that used to guarantee the meaningfulness of the present. With the end of the appreciation of the new, i.e., the future, the meaning of the term time changes as well. The idea that time is a movement from the past over the present towards the future, that time is always directed towards the future, was based on the implicit equation of the new, i.e., the future, with value. Due to the suspension of the metaphysical or modern valuation of the new, the whole idea of the future disappears, which, in turn, causes the metaphysical concept of time to collapse (Weiß 49-51). Since the metaphysical conception of time ceased to be valid, the question remains what the postmetaphysical time structure, i.e., the one dominant in the postmodern epoch, looks like. As Gianni Vattimo sees postmodernity emerge with Nietzsche’s work, he finds an alternative concept of time in Nietzsche’s eternal return of the same events in which the three distinct segments of time, namely past, present, and future, lose their traditional connotation. Vattimo dedicates a whole chapter of his book Il Soggetto e la Maschera to this particular issue. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, to be more precise in the chapter “On the Vision and Riddle,” Nietzsche recounts how Zarathustra arrives at the gateway “This moment” ("Augenblick"), where the two never-ending paths past and future meet. Facing the gateway, the dwarf, who has been accompanying Zarathustra, asks him whether those two roads contradict each other or whether they would form a circle. Zarathustra’s assumption that the latter is true finds the dwarf’s agreement. He explains, “All that is straight lies […]. All truth is crooked; time itself is a circle” (Nietzsche 136). Vattimo comments on this matter as follows: Not only must everything that will be have already walked along the path of the past, since its path lasts an eternity and, thus, it must have seen all that can be; but also the gateway itself that signifies the present moment has to have been there always. And if the paths of past and future are, indeed, crooked, does not the present moment drag all things behind itself? Thus – also itself? Past and future unite in a circle whose dizzying characteristic is that it also contains the present moment itself, which, previously, seemed to be a privileged moment in this circle. The present moment itself has always been and in this ‘having-been’ it brings about all future things, even its own future happening. (Vattimo, Il Soggetto e la Maschera, 200)

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The metaphysical time model becomes invalid with this belief in the eternal return of the same events. If every moment has always been there and is always going to be there, a concept of time structured into past, present, and future is not applicable any longer. Every present moment is, at the same time, its own past, i.e., its source and its own future, i.e. its own telos (cf. Weiß 52). Since modernity is the era defined by the appreciation of the new and a constant overcoming of the past, this critical overcoming cannot be a way out of modernity. Nietzsche’s concept of the eternal return marks the end of this era as it makes linear progress impossible. Being ceases to be reduced to novelty, as it was, for instance, in avant-garde movements of the first half of the twentieth century (cf. Vattimo, The End of Modernity 166-8). This abandonment of a linear time model results in an altered sense of history. In Vattimo’s words: “It is very likely that the idea of thought’s progress and emancipation through ‘critical overcoming’ is closely related to a linear conception of history; when critical overcoming is ‘distorted’ […], history itself can no longer appear in a linear light” (The End of Modernity 180). The way Nietzsche suggests and Vattimo interprets it, time is not a straight line that signifies a movement from the past over the present to the future but is a circle. This abandonment of linearity results in a breakdown of the distinct notions of past and future. Consequently, the focus inevitably lies on the present. As Joan Stambaugh explains: “Nietzsche’s thought of eternal recurrence […] transcends ordinary, everyday conceptions of space and time. […] past and future meet in the general gateway of the present moment; all time and space come to presence in the eternal present moment” (Stambaugh 125, my emphasis). This notion parallels the idea of the perpetual present that other theorists, among them Fredric Jameson, associate with postmodernity. He believes that one of the main features of postmodernism is the "fragmentation of time into a series of perpetual presents" (Jameson, “Consumer Society” 28). According to Jameson, the chief reason for this altered perception of time during postmodernity is the "disappearance of a sense of history" (Jameson, “Consumer Society” 28) triggered by the emergence of a late consumer or multinational capitalism. Similar to Vattimo, who declares “the end of history” during post-modernity (The End of Modernity 4), Jameson believes that our contemporary society has lost its capacity to perceive its own past. Due to modern technologies, most significantly various types of media, we are exposed to a perpetual change that makes it virtually impossible for us to keep traditions of the sort that help us retain our history. Especially the media exploitation of the news seems to function as a means to wipe out immediacy, to transfer recent historical experiences as quickly as possible into the past, and thus to make us forget. In Jameson's words, the "informational function of the media would be [...] to serve as the very agents and mechanisms for our historical amnesia" (“Consumer Society“ 28). Vattimo agrees when he says that contemporary history is “the history of that era in which, thanks to the use of new means of communication (especially television), every-

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thing tends to flatten out at the level of contemporaneity and simultaneity, thus producing a de-historization of experience” (End of Modernity 10). The postmodern perception of time is defined by a loss of a sense of history. As previously mentioned in the case study on Memento, due to the disappearance of the historical referent, all one is left with is ‘pop history’ that, in turn, leads to Jameson’s so-called "crisis in historicity" (Postmodernism 25). Once again, I would like to draw attention to Jameson’s line of argumentation: [if], indeed, the subject has lost its capacity actively to extend its pro-tensions and re-tensions across the temporal manifold and to organize its past and future into coherent experience, it becomes difficult enough to see how the cultural productions of such a subject could result in anything but 'heaps of fragments' and in a practice of the randomly heterogeneous and fragmentary and of the aleatory. These are, however, precisely some of the privileged terms in which postmodernist cultural production has been analyzed. (Jameson, Postmodernism 25)

The narrative structure of the movies mentioned in the introduction is made up of exactly these "heaps of fragments" that have inevitably become the only means of expressing the sense of time in a postmodern world. 4.5

Why Postmodernism Is NOT the ‘End of Everything’

In line of the Marxist tradition, Fredric Jameson has rather a bleak outlook on postmodernism and, consequently, also on art produced in this kind of environment. In his essay “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” he attributes two most notable characteristics to postmodern art: its “specific reactions against the established forms of high modernism” and the effacement of “key boundaries or separations, most notably the erosion of the older distinction between high culture and so-called mass or popular culture” (13-4). He considers the 1960s as an important transitional period that marks the beginning of postmodernism. In this essay Jameson elaborates on two key features of this period, “pastiche” and “schizophrenia” as he calls them, that reflect the conditions of the new social order of late capitalism and give a sense of the postmodernist experience of space and time (Jameson, “Consumer Society” 15). Pastiche is one of the most common practices of postmodernist art. Unlike parody, that consciously copies a unique style in order to mock the original, pastiche has no such satirical motive, no humorous tone. It is an imitation that does not quote the original text but incorporates it. The reasons for this development lie in seventy or eighty years of classical modernism itself. Jameson claims that contemporary artists have to face the unsolvable problem of coming up with new styles when everything has already been invented during the preceding periods. The only way out of this predicament is, once again, pastiche. For Jameson, however, this is not a way out but a dead end, as he concludes

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This “failure of the new” and “imprisonment in the past” are epitomized in, as the French call it, la mode rétro, otherwise known as the nostalgia film. Jameson’s definition of this genre is much broader than usual. To him this category does not only consist of films that deal in various ways with the past (often also referred to as period or historical films). He lists popular films such as Lucas’s American Graffiti that tried to capture the atmosphere of the United States in the 1950s, Polanski’s Chinatown, and Bertolucci’s The Conformist that represent the 1930s in the US and Italy respectively. These movies seem quite straightforward historical films; however, Jameson goes on to include Star Wars and Body Heat in the nostalgia film category. Even though Star Wars, obviously, does not deal with our actual past, it is a pastiche in the sense that it copies the Saturday afternoon serial about alien villains and American heroes, which was extremely popular from the 1930s to the 1950s. It is a film that recaptures the feel and shape of a dominant art object of the past that can once again be nostalgically lived through. Thus, it is “metonymically” a historical or nostalgia film that conveys a period in the past through certain characteristics (cf. Jameson, “Consumer Society” 19). Jameson shares this notion of an increasing longing for ‘the good old times’ that seems evident in postmodern culture with Baudrillard, who explains in his Simulations that “when the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality; of second-hand truth, objectivity, and authenticity” (Jameson, “Consumer Society” 12). According to Jameson, this proclaimed nostalgia assumes its full meaning in Body Heat, which technically cannot be defined as a nostalgia film since it takes place in a contemporary setting. It is, however, most definitely a pastiche for the fact alone that it is an unofficial remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity. Jameson has further reasons for calling it a nostalgia film. Its contemporary setting seems rather indeterminate and superficial. The credits remind one of the style of those of the 1930s and the hero resembles old stars like Clark Gable rather than more recent stars. All in all, so Jameson, there is an archaic feel to it. The film is located in a small town somewhere in Florida and thus, though in a contemporary setting, has only few references to its contemporary world, to consumer society. Consequently, it loses the sense of immediacy and rather creates a feeling of timelessness. The fact that the style of nostalgia films is taken over even by contemporary films with contemporary settings leads Jameson to the conclusion that we are “unable today to focus our own present, as though we have become incapable of achieving aesthetic representations of our

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own current experience” which is a “pathological symptom of a society that has become incapable of dealing with time and history” (“Consumer Society” 20). In line with Jameson’s definition of the nostalgia film, movies with a discontinuous plot structure can also be counted into that category. Since non-linear narrative is not a novelty in art (cf. the next chapter), these films are most definitely a kind of pastiche. Classic modern novelists, such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, ‘abandoned’ linearity in order to give way to a more abstract and complicated timeline. Events are presented out of sequence or simultaneously; time is expanded or even halted (especially during interior monologues or in stream of consciousness) or sped up. Thomas Mann, Gustave Flaubert, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Gertrude Stein express a postmodern temporality in their writings. Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot confronts us with a strong sense of timelessness and eternal present since its two protagonists, Vladimir and Estragon, are constantly confused about what time it is, about how much time has elapsed since they were told to wait for Godot. Harold Pinter’s play The Betrayal, which starts with the horrible ending and finishes with the happy beginning, seems to have laid the foundation for films that are told backwards, such as Memento and Irreversible. Thornton Wilder jumps back and forth in time in Our Town and the way Arthur Miller created a distorted sense of time in Death of a Salesman mostly by displaying on the ‘outside’ what is going on inside Willy Lohman’s head might have helped shape films like The Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind. The list could go on almost endlessly with the possible conclusion that Fredric Jameson is right. In postmodernist times it is not possible to invent new styles anymore; everything has already been around. I agree with many of Jameson’s arguments about postmodernist art. Seemingly new styles are not unique but unconscious copies of earlier productions. As a matter of fact, Jameson considers this a main distinction between modernism and postmodernism, as he states in his essay that radical breaks between periods do not generally involve complete changes of content but rather the restructuring of a certain number of elements already given: features that in an earlier period or system were subordinate now become dominant [...]. In this sense, everything we have described here can be found in earlier periods and most notably within modernism proper [...]. (“Consumer Society” 27)

Artistic features that were once, during modernism, new, innovative, and, very importantly, oppositional to the dominant cultural sphere, are now well established, accepted, mainstream. The same holds true for the one artistic characteristic that this chapter is concerned with, non-linear narrative. The point where I would like to leave Jameson’s argumentation is his generally negative perception of postmodern art and his bleak outlook for future productions, as well as his conjecture that postmodern art is incapable of reflecting reality. In his article for The New Left Review, he wrote that

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With this very derogative description of postmodern art and with a number of unfavorable characteristics that he attributes to it, he may not stand alone among other postmodernist theorists (especially those who tend to have a Marxist inclination), but he most definitely does not do justice to Pierre Macherey, whom he mentions in the quote. In “The Problem of Reflection,” Macherey explains quite the opposite: It is not a question of positing [...] the indefinably open character of works, their radical disorder, etc. Disorder, non-order – that is to say, the totality of real contradictions through which we must explain literary products – is not an absence of order, a primitive and indeterminate power of the negative within it, which would dissolve works by restoring them to a sort of primal violence, that of their transgression. The incomplete, unfinished character of the works, their internal decomposition must be treated as the form of their material determination. (18)

Radical disorder, contradictions, and internal decomposition are not negative. They are not only valid but also essential characteristics of contemporary art. So much so, and this leads me to my second disagreement with Jameson, that I would go as far as to claim that films that have a discontinuous plot structure are, in fact, in some sense ‘mimetic’ – not, perhaps, as defined by Aristotle and definitely not as determined by realism but close to the way structuralists and especially Roland Barthes characterize this term. In his essay “The Structuralist Activity,” Barthes explains that the aim of structuralist activity is to reconstruct the natural object in question in order to make the inherent rules and functions visible. As a consequence, structure as such is an interested and directed simulacrum. In this essay Barthes refers to structuralist analysis and not to film but he reasons that structuralism is to be equated with art and defines mimesis as follows: [C]reation or reflection are not, here, an original ‘impression’ of the world, but a veritable fabrication of a world which resembles the primary one, not in order to copy it but to render it intelligible. Hence one might say that structuralism is essentially an activity of imitation, which is also why there is, strictly speaking, no technical difference between structuralism as an intellectual activity, on the one hand, and literature in particular, art in general, on the other: both derive from a mimesis, based not on the analogy of substances (as in so-called realist art), but on the analogy of functions (what Lévi-Strauss calls homology). (Barthes, “Structuralist Activity” 215)

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Films with a discontinuous plot structure also resemble, for lack of a better word, reality or life, analogous with its functions and units since reality as such is, arguably, not fragmented or non-linear but merely our perception of it. However, not only Roland Barthes but also Fredric Jameson himself agrees, even though unawares, that art can still be mimetic. Jameson is deeply concerned about two main features of postmodernist culture. He laments, as already quoted above, that “we have become incapable of achieving aesthetic representations of our own current experience” and bewails “the disappearance of a sense of history, the way in which our entire contemporary social system has little by little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past, has begun to live in a perpetual present [...] (Jameson, “Consumer Society” 20 and 28, respectively). Reading those statements back to back, the contradiction becomes apparent. Since we live in an age that consists of a series of perpetual presents and that is dominated by fragmentation and discontinuity, films that use a non-linear plot structure, that are heavily fragmented, that convey a sense of timelessness, and that create confusion reflect today’s perception of time rather accurately, much more so than Classical Hollywood narrative does. Consequently, they are, to put it provocatively, in a way mimetic. Movies, such as Pulp Fiction, Memento, and 21 Grams (compare the respective case studies), achieve exactly what Jameson maintains has become impossible: an “aesthetic representation of our own current experience.” In any case, they counter the apocalyptic prophecy of “the failure of art and the aesthetic” (Jameson, “Consumer Society” 18). Postmodernism as the end of everything is a belief adopted by many contemporary theorists. That this is taking ‘it’ a bit too far is captured magnificently in Jacques Derrida’s sarcastic “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Adopted in Recent Philosophy”: It is not only the end of this here but also and first of that there, the end of history, the end of the class struggle, the end of philosophy, the death of God, the end of religions, the end of Christianity and morals [...] the end of the subject, the end of man, the end of the West, the end of Oedipus, the end of the earth, Apocalypse Now, I tell you, [...] and also the end of literature, the end of painting, art as a thing of the past, the end of the past, the end of psychoanalysis, the end of the university, the end of phallocentrism and phallogocentrism and I don’t know what else. (Derrida, “Of an Apocalyptic Tone” 20-1)

Postmodernism might be the end of various things but it most definitely is not the end of fascinating art, art that is new and innovative on a mainstream level. Using an unconventional, once avant-garde, technique in order to create a popular appeal is in itself a remarkable achievement of postmodernist productions. Furthermore, I firmly believe in Roland Barthes’s argument that “discontinuity is the fundamental status of all communication: signs never exist unless they are discreet. The esthetic problem is simply how to mobilize this inevitable discontinuity, how to give it a rhythm, a tempo, a history” (Barthes, “Literature and

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Discontinuity” 181). A close reading of the film Pulp Fiction will help support this notion. 4.6

Pulp Fiction – A Case Study “Action is discontinuous, like every pulsation of life." --- Henri Bergson "I'm curt with you because time is a factor." --- Winston Woolf (Harvey Keitel) in Pulp Fiction

In 1992, independent film director Quentin Tarantino released his first film, Reservoir Dogs. The film’s plot, which rather attracted famous actors than it appealed to the audience at the time, was Tarantino's first step in completely turning around the Hollywood blockbuster scene. Already in Reservoir Dogs he employed an elaborate narrative structure that toys with time and consciously avoids continuity. The film is about the preparations as well as the aftermath of an attempted robbery, but the heist itself is never shown. Unlike the traditional gangster film, Reservoir Dogs is extremely character-driven and focuses only very little on the action. The importance that is placed on the individual characters also, at least partly, explains the plot structure. The film starts shortly before a robbery. A group of gangsters is sitting in a diner talking over some food. Next, the audience sees two of the criminals, one of them severely injured, riding in a car towards their secret meeting place, an empty warehouse, where most of the story takes place. The rest of the film is divided into several episodes, each of which is 'dedicated' to one character and marked by a black insert in which the character’s name is inscribed in white letters. After these inserts, the film jumps back in time to the 'job interviews' of the respective characters. After these segments, Tarantino cuts back to the warehouse where the criminals try to figure out what went wrong and, most importantly, who had betrayed them. These conversations trigger off some flashbacks through which the viewers learn more about the robbery and the fate of some of the minor characters. Eventually, the rat is identified, and most people get killed as the film comes to an end. Structuring the plot according to characters rather than along a linear storyline was Tarantino's first and very successful attempt at consciously avoiding chronology and thus defying traditional film grammar. Only two years later, in 1994, Tarantino's second production, Pulp Fiction, hit not only theaters worldwide but also the hearts of an extraordinary number of moviegoers and film critics alike. With over one hundred million dollars at the American box office and over two hundred million worldwide, as well as seven Academy Award nominations (Best Movie, Best Director, Best Actor in a Leading Role, and Best

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Actor in a Supporting Role among them), the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, and the Palme D’Or at the Film Festival in Cannes, it was the surprise hit of the year. At the time, nobody would have thought that a film that overtly defied traditional Hollywood film grammar (and only cost about eight million dollars) could turn into a crowd-and-critics pleaser and a financial success. But Pulp Fiction was more than just a moneymaker. The hype around the film has completely changed the Hollywood scene; the film and its director have turned into cults of their own. What made Pulp Fiction such an unusual film was its discontinuous narrative structure. Never before had a film with mainstream appeal employed a narrative technique usually only drawn on in the European avant-garde. At a first glance, Pulp Fiction appears to be a rather traditional episodic film. Different stories about various characters are told simultaneously and only eventually does one find out how all these people and events are interrelated. However, this movie differs from conventional films in that the timeline is cut up and rearranged seemingly arbitrarily, i.e., irrespective of a proper chronological order. Basically, the plot is divided into a prologue, an introduction, and three 'chapters' which are visually marked with black inserts and white letters saying "Vincent Vega & Marsellus Wallace’s Wife," "The Gold Watch," and "The Bonny Situation" respectively. Within these episodes, the stories are told chronologically; it is only the arrangement of the chapters themselves that really toys with time. The most obvious deviation from traditional narrative is that in Pulp Fiction the plot is circular. The film starts in the same location and roughly at the same time as it ends and does so without using an extended flashback. Pulp Fiction starts ‘cold’, i.e., without main titles. In the prologue, two minor characters, Honey Bunny and Pumpkin (played by Amanda Plummer and Tim Roth), are introduced, but they will not appear on the screen again until the last sequence of the film. After the main titles, featuring the widely recognized Pulp Fiction theme, the two main characters Vincent Vega (played by John Travolta), who is the only one appearing in all chapters, and Jules Winnfield (played by Samuel L. Jackson), who appears in all but one chapter of the film, are introduced, and the audience is immediately familiarized with their very distinct personalities. The sequence in the car in which Vincent and Jules keep waffling about rather irrelevant things and the next sequence in Brett's apartment that shows the first very bloody murder literally serve as introductory segments of the whole film. It foreshadows the thematic focus of the movie – senseless dialogues and violence. Next, the first proper episode of the film, "Vincent Vega and Marsellus's Wife," begins. Interestingly enough, Butch Coolidge (played by Bruce Willis), the third main character and protagonist of the following episode, is introduced already at the beginning of this part, even though he does not play an important role yet. The story of Vincent and Mia Wallace, Marsellus's wife played by Uma Thurman, who will not be seen again during the rest of the film, starts out as an innocent dinner at a restaurant but is then overshadowed by heavy drug abuse. After

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that, the film cuts back to Butch, or rather a dream about his childhood. He wakes up, and only then the next episode, "The Gold Watch," starts. As mentioned above, Butch is the protagonist, and Marsellus (played by Ving Rhames) could be considered his antagonist, even though the real villains are the pawnshop owner and his friend Zed. In this section, Butch is established as a hero saving his enemy from sexual abuse and torture but, most importantly, he also kills the 'hero,’ or antihero, of the whole film, namely Vincent Vega. This fact is easily forgotten, since he disappears until the last section, "The Bonny Situation," where he suddenly reappears. The audience witnesses the murder in Brett's apartment for the second time, but this time they also find out what happened afterwards. Jules believes he has witnessed a miracle, and Vincent accidentally shoots a boy in their car. Another character, the Wolf (played by Harvey Keitel), helps them out of this mess, and Vincent and Jules decide to have breakfast at a diner. The viewers soon learn that it is the very same diner that Honey Bunny and Pumpkin are about to rob. Newly converted and thus peaceful, Jules manages to talk them out of it and the film ends with him and Vincent leaving the diner. The end credits roll. As mentioned before, the plot of Pulp Fiction is structured according to characters rather than chronology, which accounts for the fact that there are radical shifts in time, on the one hand, and, potentially more importantly, repetition and simultaneity, on the other. If one wanted to sum up the story, that is, the events in chronological order, of Pulp Fiction, here is what happened: Vincent and Jules set out to retrieve a briefcase for their boss Marsellus in the morning. They kill three boys and take another hostage, whom Vincent accidentally shoots in a car. Another professional criminal, the Wolf, helps them out of this predicament. Afterwards Jules and Vincent have breakfast at a diner and Jules decides to quit his criminal career. Suddenly, Honey Bunny and Pumpkin draw their weapons and want to rob the place. However, Jules talks them out of it. In the evening of the following day, Vincent takes out Mia, who almost overdoses. On a Wednesday night, Butch wins a boxing fight, which he was bribed to lose, and returns to his girlfriend Fabienne (played by Maria de Medeiros). The next morning, Butch goes back to his apartment to get his father's gold watch. He shoots Vincent and, on his way back, he is spotted by Marsellus. A pawnshop owner captures butch and Marsellus; Butch manages to break free and save Marsellus, returns to Fabienne, and Butch and Fabienne take off. Quentin Tarantino goes to great lengths to emphasize time and location. One gimmick he uses is simply repeating a scene, or parts of it, as is the case with Jules’s Bible speech in Brett’s apartment, or Pumpkin’s line “Garçon, coffee!” at the diner. However, he also uses much more subtle devices, which will most likely only be registered during repeated viewing. In the prologue, while Pumpkin is talking about quitting robbing liquor stores, an attentively listening audience can hear Jules talking about quitting his criminal life, too. Only seconds

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later, during a close-up of Honey Bunny, Vincent is in the frame walking towards the restroom. The question remains why Quentin Tarantino, apart from mere playfulness, decided to opt for this elaborate kind of discontinuity. In an interview with Charlie Rose, he explained: A good majority of movies that come out you pretty much know everything you’re gonna see in the movie by the first ten or twenty minutes. Now, that’s not a story. A story is something that constantly unfolds. [...] My story line jumps all over the place. Back and forward. (C. Rose)

According to Tarantino, if a film is too predictable, the story is not properly told. Therefore, having a non-linear plot is one way of letting a story unfold in front of the viewers’ eyes without sudden twists and surprises within the story. However, Tarantino does not hold back with his surprise at the intense and ongoing discussion of the narrative structure of Pulp Fiction. As he sees it, he simply followed modernist literary techniques: The truth of the matter is if I had written Pulp Fiction as a novel [...] you [Charlie Rose] would never even remotely bring up the structure. ‘Coz it’s, like, a novel can do that, no problem. Novelists have always had just a complete freedom to pretty much tell the story any way they thought it fit. That’s kinda what I’m trying to do. The thing is, for both novels and film, seventy-five percent of the stories you’re gonna tell will work better on a dramatic basis, on a dramatically engaging basis, to be told from a linear way. But there is this twenty-five percent out there that, you know, can be more resonant by telling it this way. And I think in the case of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction it gains a lot more resonance being told in this kind of wild way. (C. Rose)

Tarantino does not at all oppose linear storytelling; he is merely of the opinion that one should use the kind of techniques most suitable for one’s purpose. It is vital, though, that the audience can still follow the story. Tarantino stated that he would lose interest if he got confused, mostly because, usually, this confusion is not created on purpose but mistakenly. However, he thinks that “there is no problem being momentarily confused if you feel you’re in good hands.” Momentarily confusing the audience by jumping around in time makes a film very self-conscious. But this is not the only time Tarantino calls attention to cinematic conventions. Heavily influenced by French New Wave directors, such as François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, he also employs phony process shots twice (during the car rides of Butch and Vincent) and a drawing effect, when Mia non-verbally calls Vincent a ‘square’ (cf. figure 15). Rather unusual is also Tarantino’s love for long Steadicam shots during dialogue scenes. The longest, Jules and Vincent’s discussion of foot massages right before they enter Brett’s apartment, takes more than two and a half minutes. By

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Figure 15: ‘Square’

refraining from any editing as in this scene and often very little editing in other scenes, Tarantino gives the audience the illusion of ‘real’ time; in other words, the dialogue unfolds right in front of them. In both Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, contrasting movie time with real time is one of Tarantino’s major concerns, especially when it comes to acts of violence. In another interview he explained: "[W]hat I'm interested in is the use of violence, in stopping the 'movie' time and playing the violence out in real time. Letting nothing get in the way of it and letting it happen the way real violence does" (qtd. in McAlevey 80). In Reservoir Dogs, for example, the audience never actually sees the heist itself. The immediate aftermath is shown in several flashbacks, therefore in movie time, while Mr. Orange, one of the characters, seemingly bleeds to death inside a warehouse in real time, i.e., in the course of the whole movie that covers roughly two hours. In Pulp Fiction, this confrontation between movie time and real time is much more complicated. In their article "A Moment of Clarity: Retrieval, Redemption, and Narrative Time in Pulp Fiction," Cynthia Baughman and Richard Moran argue that the manipulation of narrative time generates additional enjoyment for the viewer, especially when a missing puzzle piece finally falls into place and reveals the picture (cf. 108-9). This pleasure occurs, for instance, when the viewers, at the end of the film, see Vincent and Jules changing from their bloody clothes into dorky shorts and T-shirts and thus discover why those two normally stylishly dressed characters wore them in Marsellus's bar at the beginning of the film. Another example can be found towards the end of the film, when the audience learns that Jules and Vincent happen to be in the same diner at the same

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time Honey Bunny and Pumpkin are about to rob it. Probably the most important structural aspect of the film is that Vincent, arguably the main character and the audience's favorite, seems to come back to life. Baughman and Moran argue that Vincent's 'resurrection' is part of the film's opposition to genre demands and real life as well as narrative time and life time. The movie fulfills the generic demands; that is, it provides a happy ending with the two heroes walking off having successfully finished their latest adventure, ready to face their next. Nevertheless, this happy end is undermined by the audience's awareness of Vincent's death, and therefore the false and temporary nature of the film's happy end is emphasized (cf. Baughman and Moran 109). I would contend, however, that by the time Vincent reappears onscreen, the viewers have already forgotten that he had, indeed, been shot. This is partly accounted for by the fact that quite some time elapses between the killing and the re-emergence (about twenty minutes elapse between the killing and the reappearance) and the fact that the shooting is rather sudden, abrupt, and short. Thus, by using a discontinuous narrative Tarantino manages to kill a character without actually having him die. Besides these aspects, however, the non-linear narrative has deeper motivations. According to Baughman and Moran, the characters in Pulp Fiction struggle with time. They try to control it by stopping time, going back and forth, expanding and shortening time; they try to predict the future, seize the present, and escape the past. In the prologue, the conversation between Honey Bunny and Pumpkin introduces the themes of remembering and repeating: Pumpkin: Forget it, it's too risky. I'm through doin' that shit. Honey Bunny: You always say that, the same thing every time. I'm through. Never again. Too dangerous. Pumpkin: I know that's what I always say. I'm always right too. Honey Bunny: But you forget about it in a day or two. Pumpkin: Yeah, but the days of me forgittin' are over. The days of me rememberin' have just begun. (qtd. in Baughman and Moran)

That Pumpkin once again forgets, and thus is still incapable of controlling his life and seizing the present, is shown by their robbery of the diner only minutes after this conversation. Noteworthy here is that, as the audience finds out at the end, Pumpkin's declaration happens at the same time and place as Jules's much more adamant decision of quitting the life of a criminal. The audience is invited to draw parallels between these two declarations and, much more importantly, to see the difference between an intervention in 'real' life and on the level of narrative. The robbery is interrupted twice. Once temporarily by the 'narrator', that is, the director/editor, and a second time by Jules, who tries to take control over his as well as Pumpkin's and Honey Bunny's lives. These interventions on two different levels also resemble the difference in power and control between character and narrator. Jules and Vincent symbolize this difference as well. While Jules

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writes himself out of the story and thus survives in 'real' life, Vincent refuses to change and thus gets killed. He only survives on the level of narration (cf. Baughman and Moran 110). In Pulp Fiction the focus on temporality is highlighted by the fact that it does not only play a role in the narrative structure but is also repeatedly emphasized within the story. There are a number of overt references to time, as exemplified in Jules and Vincent's dialogue right before their murder: Jules: What time you got? Vincent: It's 7:22 in the a.m. Jules: No, ain't quite time yet.

Other examples are the drug dealer's wife shouting, "It's 1:30" when Vincent shows up with the almost dying Mia. "It ain't Tuesday, is it? - No, it's Thursday," Zed, one of the torturers, says to the pawnshop owner, and "every time of day is good time for pie," Fabienne explains to Butch while they are hurrying to catch the eleven o'clock train. "The clock is ticking," the Wolf points out, and it is literally since he, Vincent, and Jules have to clean the car and get rid of the body within only one-and-a-half hours. But besides these, there are also more implicit references to time. Jackrabbit Slim's, the diner Vincent takes Mia to, is a fifties Hollywood theme restaurant. It features outdated interior decoration, fifties music, and waiters dressed up as former icons, such as James Dean and Marilyn Monroe. This diner gives one the possibility of ‘freezing’ time and returning to the past. The reason for going back in time here, however, is not to alter anything or change one's course of life, but to voyeuristically indulge in a time that, in fact, never changes, that one can come home to. It is unchangeable and unthreatening, or as Vincent puts it, "a wax museum with a pulse rate". Butch is the character most occupied with time; and, most notably, with the passing of time. His chapter is called "The Gold Watch" for a good reason. As he is introduced, Marsellus is lecturing him about the uselessness of attempting to stop the flow of time, that he is getting too old to be a boxer, and that he should better face it. In a flashback to Butch’s childhood, Captain Koons narrates the story of the gold watch and how it is connected to the family history. Not only does this watch measure in minutes and hours, but also in years, decades, and wars, symbolizing the history of the entire twentieth century (Baughman and Moran 111). Jules and Vincent's story also provides two opposing stances toward lived time. By the end of the film, Jules reaches "what alcoholics call a moment of clarity," i.e., the recognition that sometimes one has to take a chance in order to redirect one's future. Vincent, on the other hand, supposes that he can leave and re-enter the flow of time at his personal will. He believes that the world will stop turning, whenever he decides to take a timeout. In the film, these timeouts, three in number, are marked by his retreats to the bathroom. Unfortunately for Vince,

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however, time does not stop but goes on relentlessly. Therefore, whenever he returns from the bathroom, something terrible has happened. Mia has overdosed; Honey Bunny and Pumpkin have started their robbery, and Butch has returned to his apartment, finds a gun and then shoots Vincent. Vincent continually and misguidedly behaves as if he could simply freeze time while he is gone and then continue exactly where he left off. In the last sequence of the film, Vincent interrupts his argument with Jules by saying, "I've gotta take a shit. [...] To be continued." But when he returns, the situation has changed considerably. Once again, Vincent is totally unprepared for what has happened since; what he does not realize is that life goes on without him (cf. Baughman and Moran 110-1). Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction has served as a prime example for postmodern narrative. It was the first American mainstream film to transpose the postmodern concept of time to the screen. Thus, Pulp Fiction opened the doors for many other unconventional films to come and has, not undeservedly, reached cult status. Its circular narrative structure and the use of repetition parallels Nietzsche’s notion of the eternal return of the same events. By calling into question the notion of cause and effect, Tarantino’s masterpiece succeeds in bringing postmodern esthetics closer to the masses. Discontinuous film plots can be considered manifestations of the postmodern concept of time. The theories of Friedrich Nietzsche, Gianni Vattimo, and Fredric Jameson elaborated on the fact that non-linearity, fragmentation, and the perpetual present are the three foremost characteristics of the conception of time in the postmodern tradition. Along with the crisis of the value of the new and the future, our sense of history and, consequently, our experience of linear time have broken down. Besides the familiarization of the viewers with avant-garde techniques due to their gradual canonization, there is another aspect that factors into the equation of viewer sophistication: the advent of television. 4.7

The Television and MTV Generation

We can find a much more satisfying explanation when leaving the area of film for a moment and turning to its closest relative, television. Granted, the invention of television dates back decades ago but the way we are almost overwhelmed with information and input by twenty-four-hour programming on a incredibly high number of channels, with a wide range of different formats and commercials has definitely changed our perception of the world. Many theorists have acknowledged the dominant influence the media in general and television in particular have in our times. Fredric Jameson speaks of “the penetration of advertising, television and the media generally to a hitherto unparalleled degree throughout society” (“Consumer Society” 28). Arthur Kroker and David Cook, for instance, go as far as to argue that television is

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The Sophistication of the Viewer the real world of postmodern culture which has entertainment as its ideology, the spectacle as the emblematic sign of the commodity form, lifestyle advertising as its popular psychology, pure, empty seriality as the bond which unites the simulacrum of the audience, electronic images as its most dynamic, and only form of social cohesion [...], the diffusion of a network of relational power as its real product. (279)

Jean Baudrillard, too, was quite explicit about the impact of the television apparatus on society in contemporary times: “With the television image – television being the ultimate and perfect object for this era – our own body and the whole surrounding universe become a control screen” (Baudrillard, “Ecstasy” 127). Recognizing the dominance of television, a brief second look at the formatting of this media will help us take a large step forward to understanding why non-linear narrative has emerged in popular film. Daring an admittedly radical generalization, one can say that a main characteristic of television is fragmentation – fragmentation on several levels, intrinsic and extrinsic. The program of any given channel contains a variety of different ‘texts’ that are endlessly strung together even though they are more or less unrelated to each other; a soap opera followed by newsreel, followed by a feature film, followed by a talk show, and so on. This basic level of fragmentation is further fragmented by commercials, trailers, and previews, which repeatedly interrupt the ongoing program. Furthermore, certain formats themselves are built up in fragments. News programs, for example, cut the major events of the day into easily digestible pieces, jump around in time, space, and topic – from war over weather to sports and fashion – in a matter of minutes. A common television format, the series, be it soap opera or situational comedy, is also fragmented in the sense that, even though every episode usually reaches some sort of conclusion, it is always ‘to be continued’ the next day, week, or month. Consequently, it is fair to say that television shows no linearity to speak of. It is merely a chain of individual segments strung together. This rather superficial description of the average television programming alone illustrates the high amount of fragmentation the viewer is confronted with. So far, however, we have not considered the diverse viewing habits. Not all people watch one channel continuously and attentively for a longer time (as a matter of fact, it is my belief that most people do not). A small technical device, namely the remote control, adds a whole further factor to the equation. The already mentioned high number of channels offered today lead most viewers to switch programs more or less often. The viewers create their own program and paste together their own small segments by ‘zapping’, ‘channel hopping’, or ‘channel surfing’, which appears to be a new pastime today. Besides, television is watched in different locations very often while performing some other action: in the kitchen while cooking, in the dining room while having lunch, in the elevator while going up some floors, through a shopping window while going to work, at the train station, the airport, New York Times Square – the possibilities

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are infinite. As a result, the viewers themselves cut up the already fragmented program into even smaller segments by only watching bits and pieces of it. Within this fragmented world of television, there is one channel, launched in the early eighties, that has had a lasting impact on the aesthetics of moving images and driven segmentation to an extreme. I am referring to MTV. Music Television has influenced popular culture tremendously; not without reason do we even talk about an ‘MTV generation.’ In her essay “Feminism/Oedipus/Postmodernism: The Case of MTV,” E. Ann Kaplan uses MTV to debate competing claims of postmodernism. She argues that MTV’s twenty-four-hour rapid flow of short segments [...] renders all of its texts ‘postmodern’ because of the manner of their exhibition (i.e. a stream of jumbled, hectic signifiers for which no signified was intended or has time to be communicated; the reduction of all to surfaces/textures/sounds/the visceral and kinaesthetic: the hypnotizing of the spectator into an exitless, schizophrenic stance by the unceasing image series). (36)

Narrative or non-narrative, linear or non-linear are no longer categories applied on this new kind of visual expression, the music video. This apparatus with its rapid, mostly incoherent flow of segments that last only four minutes or even less constructs a “decentered, fragmented spectator” (Kaplan 36), today’s audience of mainstream film. Besides, music videos tend to undermine traditional binary oppositions, for instance “between high and low culture; between masculine and feminine; between established literary and filmic genres;” and most importantly for the topic of my analysis “between past, present and future” (Kaplan 35-6). Consequently, even though a great part of the audience who will, for example, go see a Quentin Tarantino film may not be familiar with James Joyce or have ever seen a Godard film, they grew up being exposed to television and MTV. Thus, they are not merely accustomed to fragmentation and nonlinear narrative but even demand and enjoy it. Finally, to complete the list of technical influences that ‘primed’ spectators for discontinuous film plots, I should briefly mention videocassettes and even more importantly DVDs and video games. The ways films can be and are watched these days has changed dramatically in the last couple of years. People do not have to go to the theater anymore, where movies are projected onto a big screen and shown in one, usually uninterrupted, flow. With a DVD player and merely four buttons on the remote control (play, pause, forward, and rewind, that is) any viewer can ‘reedit’ a film, turn Classical Hollywood narrative into a discontinuous plot. Segments can be skipped, repeated, or watched in slow motion. Even watching it backwards is possible if one is inclined to do so. Give or take, the same holds true for video games. Innovations in the visual sector of these games in recent years have made them appear more and more ‘realistic,’ i.e. they look almost as real as films. Besides, every major Hollywood blockbuster nowadays is turned into a game. Of course, these games are even more interactive

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than plain DVDs. The player decides where to go, what to do, and when to do it. Characters die and resurrect. All these games are non-linear and fragmented in the sense that the ‘plot’ unfolds depending on what buttons the player pushes. Now that we have entered the twenty-first century, the old traditional conception of a linear movement of time has, if not yet completely disappeared, at least lost its formerly unshakable foundation. In literature, or media in general, the change of attitude towards the aspect of temporality and causality initiated a significant modification in style. Chronology and the consecution of cause and effect as well as the thus created unity used to be the basis of all art, the most common convention. During modernism, artists started to break all kinds of rules to defy literary conventions. The avant-garde fought and rebelled against the restrictions of the conservative bourgeoisie. The long tradition of avant-garde literature as well as film have provided today’s audiences with plenty of opportunity for the familiarization of their techniques, and various external, and mostly technological, influences have trained film audiences for a new kind of cinema. Now that we have a much better idea about what has prepared a mainstream audience for appreciating complex narrative, we can and should delve deeper into the complex concept of film comprehension in general. How do we make sense of narratives and how do filmmakers take advantage of how human faculties function in order to create mind-tricking narratives? Cognitive film theory will help us explore these two questions in the following chapter.

5

Don’t Spoil the Ending! A Cognitive Approach JACK: Will! You're not gonna believe what just happened! Are you watching this? WILL: Yeah. I've never seen The Usual Suspects. They're just about to reveal who Keyser Söze is. JACK: It's Kevin Spacey. --- From the Television Show Will and Grace

Only five years after the release of The Usual Suspects in 1995, the film’s twist that Kevin Spacey played not only the narrator, Verbal Kint, but also the criminal mastermind, Keyser Söze, had entered popular knowledge and could, thus, be made fun of in the then popular NBC television series Will and Grace. By now, it should probably go without saying, but it probably goes better with saying that the element of surprise is the most important aspect of mind-tricking narratives. The success of these films stands and falls with the perfect timing of the twist; i.e., it must not be revealed prematurely. Filmmakers have to go to great lengths to cover up the surprise ending – and not just purely narratologically speaking. Absolute secrecy is most vital. Already in 1955, the French film Les Diaboliques1, directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot and starring Simone Signoret and Véra Clouzot, featured a rare insert at the very end: “Don’t be DIABOLICAL! Don’t destroy the interest in this film that your friends could have. Don’t tell them what you have seen. They will thank you.”2 Les Diaboliques could be called an early mind-tricking narrative (and was also remade in 1996, starring Sharon Stone and Chazz Palminteri). In this film, the two female leads kill the male protagonist, Michel Delassalle, played by Paul Meurisse, in an elaborate plot. However, throughout the course of the film, suspicion arises that he might not be dead after all. Finally, we find out … well, for once, let me not give away the ending. Instead, let us just say, we find out what really happened. With this insert, the filmmakers obviously tried to encourage audiences not to tell others about this final twist and, thus, greatly lessen the enjoyment of the movie. The Sixth Sense was an incredible phenomenon in this respect, as well. Part of its success relied on the fact that no-one who had seen the film revealed what 1

I would like to thank my colleague, Johannes Mahlknecht, for drawing my attention to this particular film and its final insert. 2 From the original French: “Ne soyez pas DIABOLIQUES! Ne détruisez pas l’intérêt que pourraient prendre vos amis à ce film. Ne leur racontez pas ce que vous avez vu. Merci pour eux.” (Translated by Hilde Wolfmeyer).

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happens in the end – from crew members, over test audiences, to ‘regular’ moviegoers. In Inside the Actors Studio3, Bruce Willis expressed his astonishment: Normally in films, when there is a secret at the end of the film, most people give it away. But for some reason people didn’t give it away. They kept the secret. There was a big sign over the door going into the set every day: “Can we keep this secret? Are we gonna be able to keep this a secret?” And we never thought we would able to get away with it. But for some reason people did [keep the secret]. (Willis 00:32:36-00:32:55)

Mind-tricking narratives almost redefine the concept of spoilers, i.e., giving away important story information, and, consequently, spoiler alerts, i.e. indicating when one is about to reveal critical details. Interestingly enough, the mere knowledge that there will be a twist – without actually knowing what exactly it is – greatly tampers with the enjoyment of a film since it completely changes the viewer’s expectations. For that reason, ideally a filmmaker should not be famous for producing this kind of film. The prime example is M. Night Shyamalan. One year after his massive success of The Sixth Sense, he released Unbreakable in 2000. The latter, too, featured Bruce Willis in the lead role as well as a more than surprising outcome when the viewer learns that Elijah Price, played by Samuel L. Jackson, is, in fact, the villain. In 2002, Signs, starring Mel Gibson and Joaquin Phoenix, followed. Even though Signs does not qualify as a mindtricking narrative, this film, once again, included a surprise in the end. At the latest by the time Shyamalan released The Village in 2004, he was known as ‘the twist movie maker.’ People, who went to see a Shyamalan movie, expected a twist ending. In anticipation of this expectation, Shyamalan included not just one but two twists in The Village in order to throw people off. Already The Village received poor reviews from critics and low ratings from viewers4 – not to mention his next two films, The Lady in the Water and The Happening5 (2006 and 2008 respectively), both of which tried to be somewhat surprising in the end. The frame of reference is extremely important when it comes to film viewing. The moment we expect a twist, we are likely to interpret scenes and process story information differently. As a consequence, we will establish different hypotheses and draw different conclusions. The same thing happens, of course, on 3

The highly successful television show Inside the Actors Studio is a series of interviews with actors, filmmakers, and comedians and is famously hosted by James Lipton, Professor Emeritus at the Actors Studio Drama Program in New York. It is currently in its seventeenth season (it started in 1994) and has already well over 200 episodes. 4 Only 43 % on Rotten Tomatoes and a 6.5 rating on Imdb.com (as of April 08, 2015). 5 Lady in the Water: 24 % on Rotten Tomatoes and 5.7 on Imdb.com (as of April 08, 2015); The Happening: 17 % on Rotten Tomatoes and 5.1 on Imdb.com (as of April 08, 2015).

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a second viewing (of any film but particularly of mind-tricking narratives). Once, we know about the twist, this additional information is greatly influential and constantly part of our hypothesis-making. The challenge filmmakers encounter when they set out to create a mind-tricking narrative is, on the one hand, to plant enough seeds that the twist in the end makes sense and, ideally speaking, feels almost unavoidable once it has been revealed but, on the other hand, to divert the audience from these potential clues so that the surprise is not spoilt. 5.1

Cognitive Film Theory

The way spectators try to make sense of a film is of great importance in an analysis of how mind-tricking narratives work. How do we get fooled, why do we not pick up on the clues, and why are we often so skeptical whether the story really holds true? In order to tackle these questions, I will draw on cognitive film theory. My two main sources will be David Bordwell’s and Edward Branigan’s models. I will extract and explain the, for this analysis, most relevant concepts so that I can, then, in a final step, apply it to actual mind-tricking narratives. 5.1.1 David Bordwell’s Model In 1989, David Bordwell published his seminal article “A Case for Cognitivism” with which he practically founded cognitive film theory6. He explains how a cognitive perspective can fruitfully inform film analysis. For too long, hermeneutics have dominated film studies and film analysis, which concentrate too much on the content of film, on semantic fields, psychoanalytic approaches, and the like. Cognitivism, on the other hand, can offer true explanations: It [cognitivism] does not tell stories. It is not a hermeneutic grid; it cannot be allegorized. Like all theorizing, it asks the Kantian question: Given certain properties of a phenomenon, what must be the conditions producing them? It then searches for causal, functional, or teleological explanations of those conditions. (Bordwell, “A Case for Cognitivism” 17, original emphasis)

While Bordwell seems somewhat frustrated with film studies that are rooted in hermeneutics, he does not seek to invalidate other existing film theories in general. He ‘merely’ wants to illustrate the applicability of a cognitive framework and relieve doubt in the practicability of its tools. In Bordwell’s words:

6

Cf. also Bordwell’s “A Case for Cognitivism: Further Reflections.”

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Don’t Spoil the Ending! A Cognitive Approach My concern is to show that the cognitivist approach, apart from its propensity for naturalistic explanation, shares with contemporary film theory a commitment to constructivist explanations in terms of mental representations functioning in a context of social action. (Bordwell, “A Case for Cognitivism” 17, original emphasis)

In the very same year, Bordwell elaborated on these views in his monograph Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema. The main premise of cognitive film theory is that the spectator plays an active role in the meaning-making process. The film provides cues that the viewer uses to make sense of the data given. Spectators interpret constantly. However, here, interpretation does not only refer to identifying symbols, metaphors, or elaborate meta-levels but also more basic (even subconscious) concepts such as film’s most fundamental principle – persistence of vision, i.e., perceiving motion when confronted with fast moving and slightly changing images. As this notion is so central, let me provide Bordwell’s exact words: Comprehension and interpretation thus involve the construction of meaning out of textual cues. In this respect, meaning-making is a psychological and social activity fundamentally akin to other cognitive processes. The perceiver is not a passive receiver of data but an active mobilizer of structures and processes (either “hardwired” or learned) which enable her to search for information relevant to the task and data at hand. In watching a film, the perceiver identifies certain cues which prompt her to execute many inferential activities – ranging from the mandatory and very fast activity of perceiving apparent motion, through the more “cognitively penetrable” process of constructing, say, links between scenes, to the still more open process of ascribing abstract meanings to the film. In most cases, the spectator applies knowledge structures to cues which she identifies within the film. (Bordwell, Making Meaning 3, original emphasis)

Bordwell distinguishes four different types of meaning that viewers construct out of these textual cues in potentially any given film. We use “comprehension” in order to create “literal meaning,” which can either be “referential” (i.e. the pure construction of the film’s fabula and diegesis) or “explicit” (i.e. what we think the film ‘tells’ us rather openly). The activity of “interpretation” is employed for the construction of “implicit” meaning (i.e. what we think the film ‘tells’ us indirectly or rather covertly) and “repressed” or “symptomatic” meaning (i.e. what we think the film ‘tells’ us unintentionally) (Bordwell, Making Meaning 89). Similar to the way Bordwell uses Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho to exemplify these types of meanings, let me bring into play Fight Club to illustrate this distinction. The referential meaning is more or less a plain summary of the story events we witness: the narrator meets Tyler Durden; they set up first one then several fight clubs all over the country, plan and carry out various violent attacks, and so on. As an explicit meaning, we might establish that the film depicts

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the problems of contemporary manhood and man’s inability to properly define let alone fulfill his role in present-day society, which, in a worst-case scenario, can result in schizophrenia. These meanings are still fairly obvious, or “literal,” as Bordwell labeled it, and require the spectator’s ‘mere’ comprehension. Fight Club’s implicit meaning may be that the viewers themselves are strategically manipulated by the film similar to the way it is shown in the film, i.e. the film’s self-referentiality. As symptomatic meaning we might hypothesize that the overly violent fight scenes are a manifestation of Fincher’s suppressed anger issues7. The latter two meanings are, for the lack of a better word, a little more ‘farfetched’ and, therefore, involve the viewer’s interpretation. Bordwell is mostly concerned with implicit and repressed meanings. He explains that interpretation consists mainly of two aspects: “perceived cues,” on the one hand, and “conceptual schemes,” on the other (Bordwell, Making Meaning 129). Condensed to its very basics, the way interpretation works is that the film provides textual cues, which the spectators pick up and then assign to preexisting schemata and procedures that often refer to concepts outside the film itself. In Bordwell’s words, “the ascription of meaning consists in mapping semantic fields onto textual items and patterns” (Making Meaning 129, original emphasis). These semantic fields can be mapped “one-to-many” onto the film. This means that one semantic unit, e.g. the genre Western, is manifested in numerous textual cues, such as, general setting, cowboys, guns, etc. Semantic fields can also be mapped in the exact opposite way, namely, “many-to-one” (Bordwell Making Meaning 129-30). In this case, one specific textual cue represents several semantic units, for example, Fight Club’s ‘Ikea-shot’8 (see figure 16 below) may represent capitalism, consumerism, abundance, and superficiality. It is important to point out that all mapping of semantic fields involves a process of selection since it is simply impossible to interpret all cues a film provides. This, of course, also suggests that mapping is always somewhat subjective. Different viewers may assign different units to different cues because they establish other hypotheses, consider other textual cues more relevant, or find certain assumptions simply more probable (cf. Bordwell Making Meaning 1301). The basis of establishing these assumptions and hypotheses is interpretive inference. As Bordwell explains, “[h]uman induction achieves its goals by using organized, selective, and simplified bodies of knowledge” (Making Meaning 7

I would like to stress that by no means do I suggest this interpretation to have any grounds. I do not believe that Fight Club is an expression of David Fincher’s violent fantasies. It merely serves as a strident example of the repressed meaning a viewer might assign. 8 In this shot the narrator explains how he, too, has “become a slave to the Ikea-nestinginstinct” while we see a pan of his apartment with catalogue-like inserts (Fight Club 00:04:36-00:04:41).

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Figure 16: Fight Club’s ‘Ikea-shot’

136). Fairly similar versions of these simplified structures have been called frames (cf. for example Fillmore, Fauconnier, and Goffman), scripts (cf. for example Schank and Abelson), models (cf. for example Johnson-Laird and Lakoff), and schema – Bordwell and Branigan prefer the latter as will I in this chapter. As Bordwell points out (cf. Making Meaning 137), already Immanuel Kant, in his Critique of Pure Reason, uses the term “schema” and “schematism” in a similar, yet, perhaps, much more abstract way than that of a cognitive psychologist and, in turn, Bordwell’s (271-7). In his chapter “On the Schematism of the Pure Concepts of Understanding,” Kant basically distinguishes two types of schema, namely, the “schema of sensible concepts” and the “schema of a pure concept of the understanding” (Critique of Pure Reason9 273-4). The first seem similar to platonic ideals, abstractions or, perhaps better, generalizations of physical figures in space that can be perceived via the human senses. Kant gives the example of the concept of a (generic) dog that can relate back to the sensory perception of dogs. On the other hand, schemata of the pure concept of understanding do not stem from sense perception but originate in the human mind itself10. Bordwell, however, does not distinguish between these two but simply defines schemata as “data structures” that are used in interpretative processes and uses the terms “procedures” or “routines” for “interpretative activities” them9

Cf. the original German: “Schema der reinen Verstandesbegriffe” and “Schema sinnlicher Begriffe” (Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft 239-47). 10 I would like to thank my colleague Christian Quendler for helping me with Kant’s elaborations on schematism.

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selves (Making Meaning 137). He draws mostly on George Lakoff’s taxonomy on “kinesthetic image schemas” as described in Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things (271-5; also cf. Bordwell, Making Meaning 137), who, in turn, falls back on Mark Johnson’s elaborations in his The Body in the Mind. These schemata are subdivided into the “container schema,” the “part-whole schema,” the “link schema,” the “center-periphery schema,” and the source-path-goal schema” (Lakoff, Women 271-5). I do not wish to explain all of these schemata here but will merely pick out one of them, namely, the link schema, which is basically defined by two units being connected by something. In Lakoff’s words: Structural elements: Two entities, A and B, and LINK connecting them. Basic logic: If A is linked to B, then A is constrained by, and dependent upon, B. Symmetry: If A is linked to B, then B is linked to A. (Lakoff, Women 274, original emphasis)11.

A prototypical link schema would be the buy-sell schema, where A and B are represented by buyer and seller and the connection is the exchange of goods for money. This basic schema can then be applied in altered and more abstract forms – from someone buying a loaf of bread in a bakery all the way to an online auction on eBay. Which schemata we employ is typically based on simple heuristics – what seems most appropriate and plausible, or “probabilistic,” as Stillings et al. refer to it (88, original emphasis) – also because, even though one can essentially choose whichever interpretation imaginable, if it becomes too far-fetched, one will gain little acceptance for it. As Bordwell puts it: “Critics rank cues hierarchically, and at the top of the list are human agents performing actions” (Making Meaning 153). Accordingly, in narrative cinema, the mainspring of interpretation lies in what characters say and do. Heuristics are, of course, per definition a technique or approach of solving problems. Interestingly, film interpretation, to a large extent, is just that – problem-solving: previously established hypotheses are thrown into doubt due to new information and we have to decide whether to adjust the old hypothesis or discard the new input. Generally, we tend to pay attention to textual cues that play into our hypotheses rather than the ones that undermine them. The result of this semantic mapping is a “model film,” i.e. the viewer’s interpretation of the film in

11

Cf. also Johnson: “In its simplest manifestation the internal structure of the LINK schema consists of two entities (A and B) connected by a bonding structure. Typically, those entities are spatially contiguous within our perceptual field. Extended cases might involve many related entities (rather than merely two) and might include spatially and temporally discontinuous or noncontiguous entities (as in ‘action-at-distance’). The simple LINK schema makes possible our perception of similarity (Body in the Mind 118).

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its totality, which is essentially an individual reconstruction of the entire film (cf. Bordwell, Making Meaning 138-45). While Bordwell’s Making Meaning seems to be a ‘manifesto’ of the virtues of cognitive film theory and a comment on the film theoretical practices historically as well as at the time, his earlier and, probably, even more influential work, Narration in the Fiction Film, published in 1985, deals with actual film analysis. Already back then he stressed the viewer’s active participation in film comprehension, which is triggered off by cues the film provides. The basis of his elaborations is a Constructivist theory of psychological activity, which has its roots in the work of German psychologist Hermann von Helmholtz. The principle assumption of Constructivist psychology is that we make two kinds of inferences in order to make sense of the world. As Bordwell explains: In some cases, the inference proceeds principally “from the bottom up,” in which conclusions are drawn on the basis of the perceptual input. Color perception is a good example. Other processes, such as the recognition of a familiar face, operate “from the top down.” Here the organization of sensory data is primarily determined by expectation, background knowledge, problem-solving processes, and other cognitive operations. Both bottom-up and top-down processing are inferential in that perceptual “conclusions” about the stimulus are drawn, often inductively, on the basis of “premises” furnished by the data, by internalized rules, or by prior knowledge. (Bordwell, Narration 31)

Story comprehension as already outlined above is based on and, thus, works exactly the same as our everyday meaning-making. The ‘world’ provides us with cues that lead us to hypotheses, which are piloted by schemata. Additional cues either confirm or undercut previously established hypotheses – it is an ongoing process of testing and probing. It is important to point out here that perception is, to a large part, an acquired skill: the bigger our collection of schemata that we have at our disposal, the more varied and nuanced our interpretations can be (cf. Bordwell, Narration 31). This, of course, also – in part – accounts for the surge in complex narratives in recent mainstream film since it helps explain the concept of the ‘sophistication of the viewer’ as mentioned in an earlier chapter. Simply put, with every film we watch, we have the possibility to assemble additional schemata that we can then draw upon during future viewings. We become more apt at assigning textual cues to the appropriate semantic fields and, consequently, might long for more challenges, in other words, more complex films. Speaking within the realms of constructivist psychology, the way storytelling works is that a given artifact supplies us with textual cues that, on the one hand, generate and, on the other hand, constrict our hypotheses. When it comes to mind-tricking narratives, this balance is particularly delicate as their textual cues have to be consistent with two plausible model films. Bordwell, too, acknowledges this form of viewer sophistication when he says that, “we have seen in recent decades that films with complex time patterns can supply audiences with

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new schemata or encourage them to see the film more than once. The history of film form can thus alter the perceiver’s prior experience” (Narration 33). As previously mentioned, many schemata we employ during film comprehension do not stem from the area of film but from the everyday world and, therefore, also from other media that require story comprehension (cf. also Bordwell, Narration 32). This, once again, plays into the argument stated in an earlier chapter that changes in technology greatly influence the way we view and understand film. Most notably television, videogames, and the Internet have provided us with new schemata that we can now draw on when watching a film. Following Reid Hastie’s model of “procedural schemata,” Bordwell distinguishes basically two types. Viewers call upon “central-tendency” or “prototype schemata” in order to make out the most basic narrative elements, such as characters, actions, settings, and goals. More effective for narrative comprehension, however, are “template schemata” or “filing systems” (Bordwell, Narration 346) since they are more flexible. Spectators can supplement and modify these schemata depending on the textual cues they receive. Which schema is applied to which input depends on different kinds of motivation (cf. Bordwell, Narration 36). Relevance and plausibility may be judged according to: • Realistic motivation (‘how things would be in the real world’) • Compositional motivation (‘how things work in stories’) • Artistic motivation (‘this is so because it is art’) • Transtextual motivation (e.g. ‘this is so because it is typical for this genre’) Aided by these schemata, viewers establish assumptions, inferences, and hypotheses. In discussing how withheld story information steers our hypothesismaking, Bordwell falls back on Meir Sternberg’s elaborations. “Curiosity hypotheses” make us wonder about past and “suspense hypotheses” about future events. Furthermore, we evaluate our hypotheses according to how probable they are (from very likely to almost impossible). Hypotheses may also be mutually exclusive while others can exist parallel to each other. Speaking in a temporal sense, the first can then only happen in succession while the latter may occur simultaneously (cf. Bordwell, Narration 37; Sternberg 43-6). Bordwell stresses that viewers tend to favor narrative over stylistic schemata and, consequently, often fail in recalling purely visual details. As he quotes van Dijk: “Our memory and processing resources are able only in a very restricted way to store and retrieve these kinds of surface structural information, even if the communicative conventions require specific attention to such structures” (qtd. in Bordwell, Narration 36; cf. also van Dijk 153). This aspect is of particular relevance for mind-tricking narratives. One reason why we often doubt that the story holds up after the twist has been revealed is because we remember the inferences and hypotheses that we established at the time rather than what we actually saw. As mentioned before, we add and ignore information according to the schemata we employ and find most plausible. Consequently, at the end of the film we are

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likely to remember what we added and have forgotten what we ignored. And this can lead to an actually false memory of what we have seen, which is a key ingredient of mind-tricking narratives. One main appeal of these films is the ultimate shock and surprise caused by the twist ending. However, going back, rewatching the film, and figuring out whether the story actually holds its own is just as much part of the fascination. And this fascination is fuelled by the skepticism we experience due to our false memory. Daniel Barratt illustrated that magnificently in his analysis of The Sixth Sense. One reason why many viewers doubted the validity of the film’s ending (that Dr. Malcolm Crowe was merely a ghost) was that they seemed to remember his communicating with characters other than just the little boy. A second viewing will then surprise them once again as it proves them wrong. The memory of Malcolm interacting with others stems from the gaps we filled in order to fit the schemata and not from what we really saw12. As Barratt puts it: Schematic distortion can affect the accuracy of eyewitness testimony. Similarly, the schematic distortion of our eyewitness testimony of the restaurant scene and other parts of the film may account for our initial skepticism towards the flashback sequence and the film’s conclusion. (Barratt 78)

Another aspect that helps fool the audience is the so-called “primacy effect,” which stands in opposition to the “recency effect,” yet two more terms that Bordwell took from Sternberg, who, in turn, borrowed them from cognitive psychology13. As much as our hypotheses change and are adjusted during the viewing of a film, they are liable to a certain hierarchy – and mostly a temporal one. In other words, hypotheses established early on are more deep-seated than later ones. This means that in order for us to completely discard an early hypothesis, the textual cues have to undermine them very strongly. Otherwise, we are more likely to simply ignore those cues (cf. Bordwell, Narration 38). Simply put, the primacy effect is much stronger than the recency effect. In Sternberg’s words:

12

When it comes to the concept of memory both Barratt and Bordwell draw heavily on F.C. Bartlett’s theories: “Suppose an individual to be confronted by a complex situation. […] We saw that in this case an individual does not normally take such a situation detail by detail and meticulously build up the whole. In all ordinary instances he has an overmastering tendency simply to get a general impression of the whole; and, on the basis of this, he constructs the probable detail. Very little of this construction is literally observed and often […] a lot of it is distorted or wrong so far as the actual facts are concerned” (206). 13 Cf. Hovland’s anthology The Order of Presentation in Persuasion and particularly the chapter “Primacy-Recency in Impression Formation” by Abraham S. Luchins.

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Due to the successive order of presentation, the first block [the beginning of a given text] was read with an open mind, while the interpretation of the second – in itself as weighty – was decisively conditioned and colored by the anterior, homogeneous primacy effect; the leading block established a perceptual set, serving as a frame of reference to which subsequent information was subordinated as far as possible. (Sternberg 94, my emphasis)

This means that at the beginning of a film, we are still open to all kinds of interpretations. However, once, these hypotheses seem to hold true for some time, they become seemingly verified facts and, thus, serve as a basis for further hypotheses. Again, this aspect is extremely important for mind-tricking narratives. Once a character is, on the face of it, established as ‘real’ (as in ‘not dead’ or ‘not imagined’), viewers will highly unlikely ever doubt this fact even if there are textual cues that might indicate it. However, these cues will then be picked up on a second viewing when we already know what really happened and, thus, we know what to look for. Mind-tricking narratives deliberately provide cues that mislead the audience until the very end of the film. Bordwell has observed this phenomenon, as well (though not specifically commenting on the kind of films discussed here): “[A] film may contain cues and structures that encourage the viewer to make errors of comprehension; in such cases, the film ‘wants’ a shortor long-term ‘misunderstanding’” (Bordwell, Narration 39). Bordwell goes on briefly musing about the effect story comprehension might have. He believes that this ‘game’ of hypothesis-making also has an impact on our emotions in so far as a confirmed hypothesis creates a feeling of fulfillment and satisfaction whereas a contradicted hypothesis generates additional interest and encourages the viewer to pay even more attention (cf. also Bordwell, Narration 39). And this suggests that mind-tricking narratives encourage the viewers to re-watch the entire film since one of the main hypotheses is disconfirmed at the very end. Interestingly enough, Steven Johnson, in his popular science investigation of how our mind works, goes so far as to postulate that “we like twists in our stories because our brains have a biologically grounded interest in surprise” (Mind Wide Open 152). In many ways, mind-tricking narratives are an extreme case of Sternberg’s “rise and fall of first impressions” (99). The distribution of information at the beginning of a literary text or film greatly influences our story comprehension14. Sternberg explains that the “natural” way of constructing an exposition is to provide all the basic information the readers need in order to form adequate hypotheses. However, there are three further narrative strategies where the primacy and recency effects clash to an increasing degree. One mode employs the 14

For the following elaboration on “strategies of rhetorical control” compare Sternberg’s Expositional Modes, particularly, chapters 4 to 7 and for a brief summary pages 98-99. Compare also Bordwell, Narration 56.

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“retardatory structure” and “expositional suspension,” where some of the information is delayed so that future hypotheses alter preliminary assumptions but do not completely contradict them. Then there is the “rhetoric of anticipatory caution,” which misleads the viewers somewhat in the beginning but at the same time hints at its own unreliability so that future contradictions appear little surprising. Finally, there is the case where the exposition presents a lot of information and seems trustworthy but the preliminary hypotheses that are based on this are eventually completely contradicted. In Sternberg’s words, “it involves a homogeneous primacy effect which is sooner or later demolished by subsequent revelations surprisingly establishing the contrary, or is at least reduced by this recency effect to the position of a qualifying factor” (99). Mind-tricking narratives clearly belong to the latter case and the primacy effect is – obviously – demolished later rather than sooner. Once our hypotheses are destroyed, we have to access our memory in order to retrace the narrative’s steps and figure out what actually happened. The problem – or, in the case of mind-tricking narratives, the big advantage for filmmakers – is that at this moment our memory often tends to play tricks on us. 5.1.2 Edward Branigan’s Model As mentioned earlier, viewers have great difficulties retrieving what they really saw as opposed to what they think they saw. Edward Branigan, in his seminal monograph Narrative Comprehension and Film published in 1992, elaborates a great deal on how memory shapes our story comprehension. He explains that our capability of memory is significantly limited. Our process of forgetting and remembering is by no means arbitrary but mostly determined by our on-the-spot interpretations, which are governed by narrative schemata. Branigan’s definition of ‘schema’ is similar to that of Bordwell’s: “A schema is an arrangement of knowledge already possessed by a perceiver that is used to predict and classify new sensory data” (Branigan, Narrative Comprehension 13, original emphasis). Viewers remember according to the narrative schemata employed during a film viewing and have trouble recalling actual visual data. Besides, the more ordinary some textual cues appear to be, the less likely they will be stored for later access since the guiding schema already ‘takes care’ of the usual information. As Branigan puts it, only the “gist” is remembered (Narrative Comprehension 16). Barthes, too, expressed a similar notion in his S/Z, where he explains that reading always involves restructuring as well as forgetting: To read is to find meanings, and to find meanings is to name them; but these named meanings are swept toward other names; names call to each other, reassemble, and their grouping calls for further naming: I name, I unnamed, I rename: so the text passes: it is a nomination in the course of becoming, a tireless approximation, a metonymic labor. […] Forgetting meanings is not a matter for excuses,

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an unfortunate defect in performance […] it is precisely because I forget that I read. (Barthes, S/Z 11)

The way Barthes describes this process of renaming and grouping seems very similar to the cognitivist’ schema-theory. What we consider relevant and which schemata we make use of as a result depends, according to Branigan, mostly on probabilities. In our quest for a unified story, we seek causal links that might not necessarily be inherent in the film and also do not always function the same way. Branigan distinguishes seven different types of possible causal relations. We might, for example, consider two elements connected because they are presented consecutively, or chronologically, or they are paired up by convention, to name only the simplest and most obvious types (Branigan, Narrative Comprehension 26-7). However, these relations on a small scale – element by element – do not alone seem to account for narrative comprehension. Branigan believes that we also constantly draw on a larger framework that makes us assess various probabilities, a framework that lies outside the textual cues given in the film: It is evident that in many cases our assessment of the ‘probabilities’ draws upon broad cultural knowledge in judging which actions and transactions are acceptable as belonging together (and hence likely to occur together). Thus our comprehension of narrative causality – of what may follow what – may depend upon our general knowledge of social interactions; that is, the connections we are predisposed to call ‘causal.’ (Branigan, Narrative Comprehension 27, original emphasis)

Branigan traces this back to Roland Barthes’s essay “The Sequence of Actions,” in which he, Barthes, distinguishes six simple causal relations of a classical narrative: “consecutive” (‘which comes after’), “consequential” (‘caused by which came before’), “volitional” (‘preceded by an expression of intent’), “reactive” (similar to consequential; ‘something is immediately triggered off, in other words, a re-action to something’), “durative” (‘marks the beginning or the end of an interruption’), and “equipollent” (oppositional pairs, such as, ‘to question and answer’) (Barthes, “The Sequence of Actions” 142-4). What Barthes stresses, as does Branigan, is that the mainspring of these relations are often not innate but simply ‘necessary’: [I]f the logical link seems less pertinent than its expression, this is because the logic to which the narrative refers is nothing other than a logic of the alreadyread: the stereotype (proceeding from a culture many centuries old) is the veritable ground of the narrative world, built altogether on the traces which experience […] has left in the reader’s memory and which constitutes it. […] Narrative logic, it must be admitted, is nothing other than the development of the Aristotelian probable (common opinion and not scientific truth […]. (Barthes, “The Sequence of Actions” 144, original emphasis; cf. also Branigan, Narrative Comprehension 27-8)

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In narrative comprehension we draw upon schemata that we know from everyday life as well as previously read and watched artifacts and employ them according to plausibility. The concept of ‘Occam’s razor’ comes to mind. Named after the scholastic philosopher William of Ockham, it is usually, even if inadequately, condensed to ‘the simplest explanation is generally the right one.’ Despite the fact that this does not ‘sound’ very scientific, it is a general notion that has frequently occurred in philosophy. Barthes mentioned the Aristotelian probable but also Kant, for instance, described the “law of parsimony” (in Latin lex parsimoniae), which is used synonymously with Occam’s razor, in his Critique of Judgment (14)15. Isaac Newton, too, endorsed a similar view in his Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. He states the rule number one in his chapter on “Rules of Reasoning in Philosophy” as follows: “We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearance” (398). Even though we do not consciously follow this rule, this is exactly how we operate in narrative comprehension. We receive textual cues and are likely to draw the most obvious, probable, that is, conclusions – such as, a character is alive as opposed to dead or a character is real as opposed to a figment of another character’s imagination. The fact that we are guided by probability that we judge according to real-life experiences also suggests that we tend to favor top-down over bottom-up processes. A prime example, for Branigan, is the fact that we are able to perceive narrative continuity despite the lack of actual physical continuity (cf. Narrative Comprehension 45). Typical Hollywood continuity editing is everything but continuous. Pure physical continuity would have to be one uncut shot and, apart from Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope16 (1948), this is practically never the case. Continuity editing involves cuts, changes in camera angles, and ellipses. Nonetheless, we perceive it as one whole since we can easily supplement what is missing or ignore what is being repeated. Branigan even speaks of our “persistence to topdown processing” (Narrative Comprehension 46, original emphasis), which means that our guiding framework often takes precedence over contradicting textual cues. Which textual cues are provided, in other words, which information is revealed and which withheld, is of singular importance to narrative comprehension. Branigan draws on Colin MacCabe’s “hierarchy of discourses” in order to explain how the distribution of knowledge works (cf. Branigan, Narrative Comprehension 74; also MacCabe 7-27). Classical narratives are structured in a graded hierarchy that permits a delay in information. Generally, vision is equated 15

Cf. the original German: “’Die Natur nimmt den kürzesten Weg (lex parsimoniae) […]’” (Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft 23). 16 And even Rope is not completely unedited since one single film role does not allow an 80-minute-sequence but several film roles have to be used.

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with truth but a narrative can take advantage of the point of view of a character that does not possess the highest level of knowledge, which, in turn, has to be concealed in order for the narrative to work. Only by the end of the film should the transition from relative knowledge to absolute knowledge be completed. Limiting the viewers to relative knowledge by use of the point of view of an ‘ignorant’ character is a technique frequently used in mind-tricking narratives. As mentioned in the first chapter, it is conspicuous how many mind-tricking narratives attempt to diegetisize their withholding of crucial information by offering a subjective point of view. We do not know that Tyler Durden is not real because the narrator does not know. We are unaware of the fact that Leonard Shelby already killed his wife’s murderer because he does not remember having done that. We do not realize that Verbal Kint is Keyser Söze because Verbal lies to the police and, in turn, also to us. Ben Brewster, too, explains that “changes of viewpoint […] make possible hierarchies of relative knowledge for characters and spectators” (9; also qtd. in Branigan, Narrative Comprehension 74). Branigan points out that the relative knowledge between the spectator and a given character can also indicate which emotional effect is expected and will be prompted: If the spectator knows more than the character, suspense is created; mystery is caused when spectator and character share an equal amount of knowledge; and surprise is generated if a character knows more than the spectator (cf. Branigan, Narrative Comprehension 75). Even though this model seems quite straightforward and logical at first, I am not convinced that it applies to all mind-tricking narratives. All of them want to bring about utter surprise in the end, however, not all of them achieve that in the same way. Most con films, such as The Usual Suspects or Confidence and Lucky Number Slevin (see the case study below), do, in fact, attain their goal of a shocking end because a character knows more than the viewers. On the other hand, as just mentioned, other mindtricking narratives, such as Fight Club and Memento, work even though or, rather, exactly because viewers and character are equally knowledgeable (or ignorant, in that case). It seems that, in mind-tricking narratives, only the knowledge disparity between spectator and ‘absolute’ knowledge is of relevance. The characters’ level of knowledge appears to be an extraneous variable. But let us come back to memory and story comprehension. In his sub-chapter on “Forgetting and Revising,” Branigan falls back on Alan Williams’s theoretical elaborations in his Max Ophuls and the Cinema of Desire (cf. Branigan, Narrative Comprehension 84-5). Published already in 1980, Williams anticipated many of Bordwell’s and Branigan’s notions though without specifically referring to cognitive psychology. He expresses his frustration with contemporary film theory that completely disregards the conventions and culturally shared experiences that help us understand film (cf. Williams 37). He proposes that whenever we watch a film, we really experience four different versions:

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Don’t Spoil the Ending! A Cognitive Approach One could say that just as there are two films in question at the level of the shot – the one projected and perceived as continuity, the other discontinuous, examined by the naked eye – there are two films in any single work of cinematic fiction: the film that the spectator assembles (unconsciously, or at least non-consciously) from the images and sounds presented, and the images and sounds themselves, structured so as to leave gaps which the spectator has been trained to fill. (Williams 21)

In other words, there is the film that consists of single frames printed on a film role, the film that we perceive as motion including sound, the film whose diegesis we establish while watching the film, and the film that we remember later on. The latter two are of particular importance here. Williams accounts for these two different versions since viewing does not equal remembering. As a matter of fact, “misremembering,” i.e. having a strong but false memory of a shot or dialogue line, is a central element of his concept of film comprehension. Viewers desire unity as well as continuity and try to make sense and construct meaning out of what they see because they expect the film to make sense and have meaning – at least, that is the case in narrative cinema. And even in experimental film, Williams gives the example of Un chien andalou, many critics have tried to find ways of justifying the obvious absurdity of the film17 (cf. 22-7). Since Williams calls the fourth film “the film we think we have seen” (22), mind-tricking narratives can add at least one more, namely, ‘the film it turns out to be.’ In other words, there is the film we think we have seen until right before the twist and the film we then reconstruct after the all-changing new input. And should we then re-watch the film and suddenly, due to our position of superior knowledge, pick up on cues (and clues) we completely missed before, we could even speak of six films altogether. The following case study will help illustrate how human faculties work during the viewing of a mind-tricking narrative and how filmmakers can take advantage of how we typically process story information. 5.2

“The Kansas City Shuffle” – Lucky Number Slevin

In 2006, the film Lucky Number Slevin, directed by Paul McGuigan, was released. The cast includes some of the biggest names Hollywood can offer: Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, Ben Kingsley, Josh Hartnett, Lucy Liu, and Stanley Tucci. It is a mind-tricking narrative par excellence since it does not, as we will see, just include one or two but even three twists – and, unlike The Village’s two twists, these work really well together. 17

Cf., for instance, Raymond Durgnat’s chapter on Un chien andalou in his book on Luis Buñuel.

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During the title sequence we see a brief shot of a telephone on a bedside table in between two beds (it appears to be an outdated hotel room), a murder in a parking garage and an unidentified person (the face is outside the frame) retrieving a black notebook, which lies on the floor right next to the body. Seconds later, we witness yet another killing – this time in an office – and this time a green and red notebook is taken away. Next, we find ourselves in the waiting area of an empty, apart from a sleeping homeless person, airport. A young man enters, sits down, and the film fades to black as he falls asleep. As he opens his eyes, we all of a sudden see a guy in a wheelchair, played by Bruce Willis and called Mr. Goodkat as we will find out much later in the film, right next to him starting to talk. He explains that he is in town for the “Kansas City Shuffle”: A Kansas City Shuffle is when everybody looks right, you go left. […] This particular one’s been over twenty years in the making. […] Requires a lot of planning. Involves a lot of people. People connected only by the slightest of events. […] It starts with a horse. (Lucky Number Slevin 00:05:34-00:06:15).

And with this a flashback sequence starts, which tells the story about a fixed horse race and is accompanied by Willis’s voiceover narration. A father goes to the track to bet on a horse while his son remains in the car on the parking lot right outside. However, the horse falls and now he owes 20,000 dollars to some dangerous people you should not owe money to. Back at the parking lot, his car and son have disappeared. We see him being asphyxiated in some sort of storage hall; someone points a gun at his wife in the kitchen, and someone else points a gun at the boy’s head somewhere outside in the middle of nowhere. This is followed by a shot showing blood being sprayed on children’s drawings on the wall (cf. figure 40). With a fade to white the flashback ends and we are back at the airport. When the young man asks whether this was a Kansas City Shuffle, Mr. Goodkat replies: No, this is just the inciting incident. The catalyst. This is a Kansas City Shuffle, they look right [he points to the far corner of the hall, the young man looks to the left, away from Gabriel, and notices that the homeless woman is gone] and you, go left." (Lucky Number Slevin 00:14:56-00:15:13)

When the young man turns back, Mr. Goodkat is all of a sudden standing above him, snaps his neck in a quick motion, and, in the wheelchair, transports him into the back of a truck, which we then see driving into Manhattan where we witness a street shooting. Fade to black, and then we once again see the telephone in the hotel room; this time it is ringing. Fade to white, and we finally meet the film’s protagonist, Slevin, played by Josh Hartnett. This roughly fifteen-minute opening sequence is already very telling – particularly on second viewing. Very similar to Memento’s and The Prestige’s beginnings that describe how we are supposed to read the film, Mr. Goodkat’s

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initial explanation of the Kansas City Shuffle already gives away how the film works or, at least, that it intends to fool the audience. In other words, we look left as they go right. What is also very curious is Mr. Goodkat’s use of the word ‘catalyst.’ In Barthes’s essay “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives,” he distinguishes two types of narrative functions, namely, “cardinal functions” (or “nuclei”) and “catalysers” (93). The first are of great importance for the causal progression of the story. They influence the course of the narrative in that they open up possibilities and have a notable effect on what happens next. The latter are merely fillers, as it were. They can be left out without really changing the story. Nonetheless, it would be completely wrong to call them superfluous. Catalyzers, too, are functional in the sense that they fulfill the important “phatic” function1 (Barthes, “Structural Analysis” 95). They cannot alter the narrative path but instead help keep the viewer (or, of course, reader in Barthes’s text) interested. In Barthes’s words, a catalyzer “has a discursive function: it accelerates, delays, gives fresh impetus to the discourse, it summarizes, anticipates and sometimes even leads astray” (“Structural Analysis” 95)2. However, in Lucky Number Slevin, the proposed catalyst really is the ultimate nucleus, the mainspring and reason for the entire story, the characters’ motivation. Of course, this will only be revealed much later in the film. One particular montage of shots in this opening sequence is extremely important in order to create surprise in the end, namely, when the boy apparently gets shot. As mentioned previously, we see the mother being threatened, the boy being threatened, and finally sprayed blood on the wall as we hear a gun shot. However, we do not actually see him getting killed or die. This is merely the conclusion we draw. The immediate consecution of the boy at gunpoint and the blood as well as the associative connection of ‘boy’ and ‘children’s drawings’ will most likely lead us to the hypothesis that the boy was shot. Cutting away before someone gets killed – particularly, if it is a child – is a not unusual Hollywood convention since it circumvents rating problems. So, we are probably familiar with this technique and it is fairly unlikely that the fact that we do not get to see the boy’s passing away would make us question his death. What is probably obvious from my drawing particular attention to this scene is that, at the end of the film, we will learn that the boy was indeed not shot, which is of great significance for the story. Important to point out is also that the film does not lie in this scene. Even though it strongly suggests it, it does not actually show the boy getting shot, which is why the story can hold up even on second viewing.

1

Here, Barthes draws on the terminology of Roman Jakobson’s communicative model. Branigan, too, draws on Barthes’s terminology in his analysis of Nick Fury (cf. Narrative Comprehension 81-2). 2

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With the appearance of Slevin, the film’s tone changes completely. We find him in an apartment dressed only in a towel when we hear a knock at the door. Lindsey, played by Lucy Liu, enters and exclaims in surprise, “You are not Nick!” (Lucky Number Slevin 00:17:36-00:17:37). What follows is a witty back and forth between the two of them that almost reminds one of screwball comedy. To the question how he hurt his nose, Slevin answers that he was hit, which he had kind of expected since “they say bad things happen in threes” (Lucky Number Slevin 00:18:16:00:18:17). With this line, a flashback sequence starts. He explains how he lost his job; his apartment had termites, and he caught his girlfriend cheating, which led him to take a trip to New York, where he was mugged shortly after – hence, the broken nose. This flashback is distinctly visually marked with a grayish spectrum of almost completely unsaturated colors. Lindsey points out some inconsistencies but Slevin has plausible explanations for everything. She starts getting worried about Nick Fisher, the guy who actually lives in the apartment and whom Slevin was supposed to meet. Evidently he disappeared. She sets her mind to starting an investigation on her own. However, she has to leave for work and only seconds after she is gone, two guys enter the apartment looking for Nick. Slevin tries to explain to those two stereotypically violent yet amusingly dumb criminals that he is not who they are looking for but they pick him up anyway and take him to The Boss, played by Morgan Freeman. It turns out that Nick owes someone 96,000 dollars who, in turn, owes The Boss. We find out that this ‘someone’ was the guy we saw being shot in the parking garage. Evidently, The Boss had him killed. So now Nick owes The Boss 96,000 dollars and since he is convinced that Slevin is Nick, Slevin has to come up with the money. The Boss offers him a deal: instead of paying back the money he can kill The Rabbi’s son. The Rabbi, played by Ben Kingsley, had The Boss’s son shot, which was the killing we saw that took place in Manhattan. And all of this is presented in a fairly light-hearted mood since we find out these things in a witty conversation, such as the following: The Boss: My son was murdered, so The Rabbi's son must share the same fate. Slevin: Whose son? The Boss: The Rabbi's. Slevin: Why do they call him The Rabbi? The Boss: Because ... because he's a rabbi. Slevin: Who's his son? The Boss: Yitzchok. Slevin: Yitzchok. Yitzchok and The Rabbi. The Boss: Yitzchok The Fairy. Slevin: Why do they call him The Fairy? The Boss: Because he's a fairy. Slevin: What, he has wings, he can fly, he sprinkles magic dust all over the place? The Boss: He's homosexual. Slevin: Right. (Lucky Number Slevin 00:31:30-00:32:06)

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The funny tone of the film is extremely important since it helps distract us and leads us astray. As mentioned earlier, the genre schema is very influential and at this point in the film we are more likely to consider this film a clever comedy than a thriller or mystery. Humorous lines as well as mistaken identity are landmarks in screwball comedies. Besides, Slevin is still dressed in nothing but a towel, which adds to the comical absurdity of the film. As a consequence, we might let our guard down quite a bit. In other words, we might be a little less attentive to potential clues, concentrate less on trying to figure out what is happening, and focus on the funny dialogue instead. As Bordwell mentioned in his analysis of Mildred Pierce, many viewers are aware of genre conventions and, consequently, are not as easily manipulated (cf. 188 and 190). Therefore, if Lucky Number Slevin had been a straightforward mystery, we might have expected the film to plant red herrings and deceive us. We might have picked up cues and opted for a less obvious and less probable hypothesis merely because it actually is more probable within the genre, i.e. the trans-textual motivation would have trumped the realistic one. The comedy schema, however, shifts our focus and makes us less suspicious. But let us continue with the film’s narrative. After Slevin left, we see Mr. Goodkat in The Boss’s apartment. The Boss had hired him to kill The Rabbi’s son but Mr. Goodkat decided to ‘use’ Nick. Slevin, back in Nick’s apartment, barely had time to get dressed when two other guys want to pick up Nick – this time in order to take him to The Rabbi. Slevin finds out that Nick owes The Rabbi money, too. The moment Slevin leaves The Rabbi’s home, Mr. Goodkat comes out of the shadows. In a brief exchange between him and The Rabbi, we find out that Mr. Goodkat knows that Slevin is not Nick and that he has unfinished business with him. Back at Nick’s apartment, Lindsey has returned and she briefs Slevin about what she found out. She went to the hotel that Nick had called last and ran into Mr. Smith, the guest in the hotel that Nick had contacted. In two brief flashback sequences, visually marked with a grey-greenish tinting, we see her secretly taking a picture of Mr. Smith in an elevator. Mr. Smith is really Mr. Goodkat but Slevin denies knowing him. Lindsey followed Mr. Goodkat in a cab all the way to a building that Slevin then came out of. Now it is Slevin’s turn to brief her about what happened. When she asks why he is not as worried as he should be considering the circumstances, Slevin explains that he suffers from ataraxia, which is characterized by a complete freedom of worry. This seems like a farfetched explanation but given the comedic nature of the film, which has led us to employ a comedy schema, we are quite willing to accept this as a good enough reason. More importantly, this will prevent us from wondering about Slevin’s behavior in the future. The reason he is so confident and relaxed is not that he is a trained professional but because he simply does not get scared. Slevin decides that it is best to play along and tells The Boss he will kill The Rabbi’s son in order to clear his (Nick’s, that is) debt. The Boss feeds him with

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information about security systems, bodyguards, and the like – information he received from Mr. Goodkat. As Slevin leaves The Boss’s home, he is, once again, spotted by the police, who set up a surveillance center in a van outside on the street. Detective Brikowski, played by Stanley Tucci, wants to know who Slevin is and why he keeps meeting The Boss and The Rabbi. It is also at this moment when we first learn that Bruce Willis’s character is called Mr. Goodkat and that he is a professional killer who, however, has not worked in New York City for about two decades. Back again at Nick’s apartment, Lindsey tells Slevin that she has managed to figure everything out. She works as a coroner and thus found out that one of The Rabbi’s bookies and two of his ‘assistants’ were killed – and these are the murders in the office that we saw at the beginning of the film. Detective Brikowski pointed this out to her at the morgue and also casually mentioned that this bookie used to be his a long time ago. Lindsey’s conclusion is that Nick is not missing but hiding and that he set Slevin up. In a short sequence that intercuts Lindsey talking to Slevin with already seen footage, Lindsey plausibly accounts for everything that has happened. In other words, she either does the work for us, i.e. establishing a probable hypothesis that explains everything, or she strongly confirms what we already thought had happened. The fact that Lindsey has been characterized as a smart and quick-minded person and the film’s presentation of her theory with intercut shots of already seen footage that we have no reason to distrust, we assume that she is right. The only thing that she cannot explain is how Mr. Goodkat figures into all of this. But before we can think too much about that, the film distracts us with the obligatory romantic storyline. Lindsey asks Slevin out for dinner and he accepts. Slevin picks the restaurant where The Fairy is having dinner as well. He talks to him in the restroom but we do not actually get to see that. On their way home, Slevin tells Lindsey that a cop approached him while he was in the restroom. In another flashback sequence we see him talking to Detective Brikowski, who wants to know who Slevin is since he knows that he is not Nick. We find out that Nick spent eight years in jail for raping a fourteen-year-old girl. The fact that Slevin would be friends with someone like that might strike us at odd but, again, the film distracts us with the romantic storyline as we see Lindsey and Slevin walking home chatting and having fun. This sequence is presented with almost Godard-like jump-cuts, a fact that will be important later on. He spends the night at her place and leaves in the morning to get some coffee. He gets dragged into a van by the police, who question him, but he refuses to say anything but his name and so they toss him back out onto the street. Slevin arrives back at the apartment and then we see a montage of him lost in thought alternately in the hallway and next to the bed which Lindsey is still sleeping in as well as different shots of them kissing before she leaves for work. The self-conscious editing of this sequence might strike us as rather odd but due to the jump-cuts earlier we probably

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will not spend too much thought on that – the artistic motivation seems to be the most probable here. After this the big showdown starts. Slevin is being picked up and brought to The Fairy’s apartment. We see a brief shot of two of The Rabbi’s guys in a car outside on the street – assassinated. The Fairy opens the door and lets Slevin in. Slevin shoots him in cold blood. All of a sudden, Mr. Goodkat appears in the frame pointing his gun towards Slevin. However, he shoots The Fairy, who was not dead yet, instead of Slevin. The big twist has begun. Slevin and Mr. Goodkat are quite evidently friendly with each other. Mr. Goodkat kills The Fairy’s bodyguards and Slevin plants a dead body, who is none other than the young man Mr. Goodkat killed at the airport. Slevin puts his watch on the guy’s wrist in order to make people believe that it is him. As Slevin and Mr. Goodkat walk down the street, we see a big explosion behind them – they blew up the apartment. Mr. Goodkat visits The Boss while Slevin manages to overpower The Rabbi. Next, we see the two of them tied back to back to each other in The Boss’s apartment. Slevin enters and starts to explain what has really happened: How do you get to two men that can't be gotten to? You get them to come to you. But to do that, I needed a name. And where do you find names? In books. And who has books? Well, your bookies have books. Crooked bookies, who work with big time crooks. I was looking for a gambler. One who was in both books with a lot of red in the minus column. That's when I found Nick Fisher. A lowlife that no one was gonna miss. All that was left to do was make the phone ring. All I had to do was pull the trigger and wait for you to call the man who does the jobs that no one else wants. (Lucky Number Slevin 01:20:04-01:22:25)

During this diegetic voiceover narration we see a montage of already seen scenes supplemented with new material that reveals what truly took place. All the seemingly random and unconnected scenes from the beginning of the film are finally being accounted for. Once again, we see quick shots of the two killings we witnessed in the beginning of the film but now find out that Mr. Goodkat killed the bookie in the garage and that Slevin killed the bookie in the office. We also learn that the young man at the airport was, in fact, Nick Fisher and that Slevin was the one who shot The Boss’s son (and not one of The Rabbi’s people). The shot of the hotel room was Mr. Goodkat’s and the telephone rang because The Boss called to hire him. We also see Slevin there in the hotel room and Mr. Goodkat hits him in the face, which explains how Slevin broke his nose. At this point the movie could actually end. We know what really happened and the fact that Slevin was not the innocent guy who accidentally stumbled into the midst of a war of two opposing families but was the puppet master all along is quite sufficient a twist. Nonetheless, the film continues and offers a second (even if related) twist. When The Rabbi asks Slevin, who is paying him, Slevin explains that he is working for himself and this raises the question of who Slevin

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actually is. So, whereas the first twist dealt with the question of how the plot was done, the second twist sorts out why it was done. This second revelation sequence starts with Detective Brikowski back at the morgue, where a completely burnt body has arrived. A close-up of a wristwatch lets us know that this must be Nick Fisher. Lindsey overhears Brikowski talking to another policeman and thus finds out that this body was found at The Fairy’s apartment and Lindsey looks extremely worried. So we assume that she is upset about what she thinks is Slevin’s death, since she cannot know that this is really Nick. Brikowski leaves and gets in his car while on the phone with another policeman who has important information about Slevin. While we hear them talking, we see Lindsey at the morgue, a close-up of the burnt wrist and watch, a close-up of Slevin’s wrist wearing the same watch and then showing it to her, and a medium close-up of Lindsey tearing up. We are now convinced that Lindsey is mourning Slevin’s death. All of a sudden, Mr. Goodkat enters and shoots Lindsey, who drops dead in an instant. Through two conversations that are alternately intercut – the policeman talking to Brikowski and Slevin talking to The Boss and The Rabbi, we find out that Slevin was the little boy whose father lost a bet at a horserace that we saw in the beginning. The Boss and The Rabbi ordered the killing of the entire family. Mr. Goodkat was hired to kill the boy, Slevin, but simply could not bring himself to doing so. Visually, this is presented similarly to the earlier revelation sequence. Shots of Slevin talking to The Boss and the Rabbi as well as Brikowski talking on the phone with the other policeman are intercut with scenes from the opening sequence of the film that are now enhanced with additional material. Slevin kills The Boss and The Rabbi and then suddenly appears in the Brikowski’s car and shoots him. We see a flashback of how he shot Slevin’s mother. An auditory flashback reminds us of how Brikowski told Lindsey that one of the bookies used to be his, too. It seems that everything has been wrapped up in a neat little bow. The film could, once again, come to an end. Due to the massive overflow of information we have just been confronted with, chances are that we have completely forgotten about Lindsey. Why did Mr. Goodkat shoot her? Before an attentive viewer has even time to remember and wonder about that, the film offers yet another twist. We find Slevin at the now crowded airport waiting area, when Lindsey – alive and kicking - suddenly enters the frame. The third and final revelation sequence begins. Once again, we see Slevin coming home to the apartment with two coffee cups in his hands but now we also find out that Mr. Goodkat was waiting there for him. He explains that he has to kill Lindsey because she took his picture, which would endanger his secret identity. Slevin agrees. We see him lost in thought in the hallway and inside the apartment – now, the odd montage sequence that we had ascribed to mere artistic motivation earlier makes perfect sense. Slevin was trying to figure out what to do. He tells Lindsey everything

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and with the help of a bulletproof vest and fake blood packs hidden under her shirt, they simulated her. This also means that the more probable reason for Lindsey’s crying earlier was fear of Mr. Goodkat and definitely not sadness about Slevin’s death. Their plan was to fool Mr. Goodkat into believing that he killed her but they did not succeed. He, too, suddenly appears at the airport but luckily lets Lindsey live. In a final sequence, we see how Mr. Goodkat not only let young Slevin live but even decided to take him in. As this in-depth analysis has illustrated, the plot of Lucky Number Slevin is very intricate and complex and builds up to utterly stun the audience in the end – and not once, or twice, but even three times. And in this case, the big surprise is created because a character - Slevin, that is, but also Mr. Goodkat - knows more than the audience at all times. However, what is particularly interesting in this film is that its twist seems to rely a great deal on the viewer’s awareness of film conventions. We fill gaps in montage sequences according to the way we are used to doing it in so many films and finding justifications of extraordinary editing techniques in the artistic motivation. Besides, our familiarity with the comedy genre, which has a tendency to be less realistic and often includes rather absurd elements, makes us more accepting of and less cautious about many cues we might have interpreted otherwise. Lucky Number Slevin (as well as most other mind-tricking narratives) do exactly what Bordwell remarks about Mildred Pierce: It is not just that the film encourages us to deceive ourselves; it deceives us blatantly, but helps us forget its own operations. And it accomplishes this by its tacit knowledge of how narrative comprehension involves going beyond the data, jumping to conclusions – in short, of making inferences and hypotheses. (Bordwell, “Cognition and Comprehension” 196)

Forgetting the film’s operations is also a key element in film comprehension. While I, in my analysis of Lucky Number Slevin, specifically pointed out some of the hypotheses viewers are likely to establish and also attempted to explain why they would do so, I did not mean to argue that they are always aware of all these mechanisms at work. Quite the contrary, most of these operations work sub- or pre-consciously. If that were not the case, we would never be able to even remotely follow a complicated narrative such as a mind-tricking narrative. And even though Lucky Number Slevin takes advantage of our knowledge of film in order to manipulate us, it also shows that we are quite apt to comprehend complex narrative these days and that mainstream film does not automatically entail dumb entertainment. As Ben Kingsley said in an interview: “It must be so great for an audience seeing, ‘oh, the director doesn’t think I’m the dumbest person in the world’” (Making of Lucky Number Slevin 00:13:02-00:13:06).

6

Conclusion

Hollywood has often been used almost synonymously with light entertainment. ‘Tinseltown’ is a business that wants to make as much money as possible. Therefore, their movies have to draw large crowds into theaters. In order to have a mass appeal these films need to be ‘easily accessible’ – in other words, they have to be effortlessly understandable, structured in a straightforward fashion, and provide relevant story information rather repetitively so that everyone can follow. As Bordwell put it so poignantly: “The Hollywood slogan is to state every fact three times, once for the smart viewer, once for the average viewer, and once for the slow Joe in the back row” (Classical Hollywood 31). Furthermore, mainstream film has a reputation of being escapist. Average viewers go to see a film in order to forget life for a while, to lose themselves in the story. And therefore, Hollywood film can never draw attention to its actual act of storytelling and has to disguise its artifice. After all, we want to forget that we are even watching a film and do not need to know how we have been manipulated into believing so. Hollywood produces popular film and popular culture is dumb. And not only that but popular culture has constantly been spiraling even further down towards inanity. However, this is where ‘popular opinion’ is wrong – at least to quite some extent. As Steven Johnson argued in his manifesto for popular culture: For decades, we’ve worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a steadily declining path toward lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the “masses” want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies want to give the masses what they want. But in fact, the exact opposite is happening: the culture is getting more intellectually demanding, not less. (Johnson, Everything Bad Is Good for You 9, my emphasis)

Of course, neither Johnson nor I would ever claim that everything out there is good. The Hollywood paradigms described above are not completely invalid today. For every Inception there is a Transformers, for every Fight Club a Twilight series. Generally, however, Hollywood has released more demanding films than it is given credit for. The mind-tricking narratives discussed in this work are a prime example for this trend. What these narratives show is that the line between highbrow and lowbrow, between art-cinema and Hollywood narration, has become completely blurred. Approaching film from a meta-level has grown to be a pastime for the masses. Just think of the narrative self-erasure as well as breaking the fourth wall, which both blatantly point at the artificiality of a text, analyzed in Fight Club. Nowadays, the fascination of storytelling often trumps the interest in the story itself. Mind-tricking narratives entice viewers to watch the film again and minutely scrutinize, for one thing, how one was fooled and, for another, whether the filmmakers did not, perhaps, make a mistake. We are com-

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pletely aware that we were led astray and want to find out exactly how this was done. Interestingly enough, many of the methods used in order to deceive us and create a stunning twist are typically associated with postmodernism. Subjective point of view is one of the most common techniques used in the area of mindtricking narratives. The all-changing piece of information is withheld from us because the character that leads us through the story is unaware of this essential factoid him- or herself. That in itself would be nothing out of the ordinary except that the subjective point of view goes along with the unreliability of the extradiegetic narrative instance. Even though this narrative authority is supposed to indicate the untrustworthiness of the character, instead it even supports his or her claims with appropriate (yet false) images. This disappearance of the Archimedean point, which had to give way to paradoxes, plurality, fragmentation, lack of unity as well as hierarchy and authority, is emblematic for postmodernism and also mind-tricking narratives. The question of ‘what is real’ is constantly raised. Mind-tricking narratives play with imagined worlds and identities, use different – yet unmarked – epistemological levels. Besides, some form of mental illness – usually dissociative identity disorder, which is more commonly (even though wrongly) called schizophrenia – is the key ingredient of almost half of all mindtricking narratives. And this threat of schizophrenia, though as a more abstract concept and not actual mental illness, is, of course, one of Jameson’s deepest concerns as well as complaints about postmodernism. However, what distinguishes mind-tricking narratives from ‘true’ postmodernist film is that they do offer a final solution and resolution in the end (cf. also Eig 12). The fact that a film is not just surprising and/or confusing but that viewers do eventually find out what really happened is an important part of my definition of this kind of film. And particularly this feature might also play into the popularity of mind-tricking narratives. They are a puzzle but a puzzle that can be solved. The question why mind-tricking narratives have experienced such a boom in the past roughly fifteen years but particularly since post-2000 has been discussed at length in this dissertation, as well. The sophistication of the viewer is, perhaps, the most important contributing factor. Throughout the history of narrative film, movies have become more complex, the pacing increased, the average shot length reduced, and temporal ellipses have been more extensively used. The demarginalizing of avant-gardist narrative and montage techniques, too, aided this process and paved the way for more fragmented, discontinuous, and less straightforward editing. Various technical advancements fostered this development, too. Television, above all MTV, and home-video possibilities, in particular the rise of the DVD, but also, of course, videogames and the Internet have significantly enhanced our viewing capabilities. As discussed in the chapter on cognitive film theory, viewers today can draw on a great number of schemata from a variety of media that we are constantly exposed to. And these make us much

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more apt to pick up cues, draw conclusions, and establish hypotheses even in convoluted storytelling. In correlation, the fact that we have acquired these ‘superior’ narrative comprehension skills, in comparison to past audiences, suggests that we also want to put them to use. In other words, we crave more demanding films in order to not get bored. Mind-tricking narratives manage to provide exactly this challenge – films that one does not watch and immediately forgets but has to go back to and re-watch them. And these repeated viewings are, of course, good news for Hollywood as it boosts DVD-sales and basic cable syndication – not to mention the ‘free advertising’ many of these films get due to ongoing and vivid discussion on various film Webpages and fan forums on the Internet. So, Hollywood is till trying to make profit – their increasing production of challenging films is not motivated by sheer altruism (alone). They merely found out that there is, in fact, money to be made with complicated and thought-provoking films.

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8

Appendix: Sample List of Mind-Tricking Narratives in Film

11:14 (Greg Marcks, 2003) American Psycho (Mary Harron, 2002) Atonement (Joe Wright, 2007) Bandits (Barry Levinson, 2001) Basic (John McTiernan, 2003) A Beautiful Mind (Ron Howard, 2001) Before I Go to Sleep (Rowan Joffe, 2014) Color of Night (Richard Rush, 1994) Confidence (James Foley, 2003) Cypher (Vincenzo Natali, 2002) The Devil’s Advocate (Taylor Hackford, 1997) Diabolique (Jeremiah S. Chechik, 1996) Dream House (Jim Sheridan, 2011) Duplicity (Tony Gilroy, 2009) eXistenZ (David Cronenberg, 1999) Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999) Focus (Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, 2015) The Forgotten (Joseph Ruben, 2004) --- first half hour Frailty (Bill Paxton, 2001) The Game (David Fincher, 1997) Gone Baby Gone (Ben Affleck, 2007) Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014) Hide and Seek (John Polson, 2005) House of Games (David Mamet, 1987) Identity (James Mangold, 2003) The Illusionist (Neil Burger, 2006) Inside Man (Spike Lee, 2006) Jacob’s Ladder (Adrian Lyne, 1990) The Life before Her Eyes (Vadim Perelman, 2007) The Life of David Gale (Alan Parker, 2003) Lucky Number Slevin (Paul McGuigan, 2006) The Machinist (Brad Anderson, 2004) Matchstick Men (Ridley Scott, 2003) Maverick (Richard Donner, 1994) Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2001) Next (Lee Tamahori, 2007) Now You See Me (Louis Leterrier, 2013) Number 23 (Joel Schumacher, 2007) Ocean’s Eleven (Steven Soderbergh, 2001)

172

Appendix

Ocean’s Twelve (Steven Soderbergh, 2004) Ocean’s Thirteen (Steven Soderbergh, 2007) Oldboy (Spike Lee, 2013) The Others (Alejandro Amenábar, 2001) Perfect Stranger (James Foley, 2007) Predestination (Michael and Peter Spierig, 2014) The Prestige (Christopher Nolan, 2006) Primal Fear (Gregory Hoblit, 1996) Righteous Kill (Jon Avnet, 2008) Salt (Phillip Noyce, 2010) Saw (James Wan, 2004) Saw II (Darren Lynn Bousman, 2005) Saw III (Darren Lynn Bousman, 2006) Saw IV (Darren Lynn Bousman, 2007) Saw V (David Hackl, 2008 Saw VI (Kevin Kreutert, 2009) Saw 3D (Kevin Kreutert, 2010) Secret Window (David Koepp, 2004) Shawshank Redemption (Frank Darabont, 1994) Shutter Island (Martin Scorsese, 2010) Side Effects (Steven Soderbergh, 2013) The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan, 1999) Stay (Marc Foster, 2006) Taking Lives (D.J. Caruso, 2004) The Tourist (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2010) Trance (Danny Boyle, 2013) The Usual Suspects (Bryan Singer, 1995) The Village (M. Night Shyamalan, 2004) Twelve Monkeys (Terry Gilliam, 1995) Unbreakable (M. Night Shyamalan, 2000) Vanilla Sky (Cameron Crowe, 2001) Vantage Point (Peter Tavis, 2007) What Lies Beneath (Robert Zemeckis, 2000) Wild Things (John McNaughton, 1998)