Apparently some people complained that last week’s reading was rather dense and jargon-heavy. I wasn’t particularly put off by it then, but I certainly did this week. David Borwell’s book and the first essay we read in The Cambridge Companion to Narration were both extremely dense text, full of, in my opinion, language that seemed to be mainly there to make what the authors were saying seem important. Being one of the few minors in this seminar, I probably have slightly less experience trudging through this sort of thing, but it just seemed extremely pointless to me. It reminded me of when I took History of Film I back in freshman year, when we read lots of early film theorists, like Eisenstein and, later, Bazin, who were in a lot of ways trying to justify the medium as worthy of consideration, and who, again in my opinion, fell back on fancy and frankly confusing technical terminology. A lot of the groundwork that those early theorists was obviously hugely important, but I sometimes feel like certain lines of thinking in film theory don’t need to preserved, that they merely obfuscate meaning with insider jargon, where a plainer style would make the points the authors are trying to make much more accessible.

Personally, I felt the best essay we read this week — and there is absolutely no way to say this without it sounding like brazen brown-nosing, but oh well — was Professor Mittell’s essay in The Cambridge Companion to Narration. Instead of getting bogged down in sometimes spurious-seeming allusions to Plato and Aristotle or relying on lots of pretentious-sounding lingo (incidentally, could someone tell me how to pronounce sjuzhet? I have absolutely no idea. Also, I’m amazed that this spell-checker knows the word “sjuzhet.”), the analysis of The Wizard of Oz and Lost was presented in a clear and easy to understand way, offering interesting insights while remaining quite accessible.

That being said, I was a little perturbed by the essay, as it seemed to not entirely deliver on the promises it made in its thesis. As it seemed to me, the essay was supposed to analyze the ways that film and television differ narrationally, which I was extremely interested in, as I had never particularly considered it. However, it seemed to me that not that many ways that television was different were presented. The main point seemed to be that the way a television show is made, particularly an arc-based one like Lost or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, led to different production concerns than one would encounter in making a film. And this is certainly true, and is well illustrated in the examples Mittell cites of actors suddenly dying or becoming pregnant. However, it seems to me that these same concerns can affect a film production as well. Take for instance the recent death of Heath Ledger. Although this did not affect The Dark Knight, his death came during the middle of the filming of Terry Gilliam’s next film, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, which neccessitated changes to the film in order to continue on without one of its central actors.

Aside from the limitations to script writing and filming made by the neccessity of commerical breaks, there did not seem to be much in the way of examples as to how television employs unique narrational strategies. The example of the reveal that John Locke was formerly handicapped seemed to not really offer any insight into how this was a uniquely televisual approach to narration, except that the viewers had had more time to assume that Locke had always been able to walk than if they had been watching a film. Looking at the examples Mittell offered as to how narration is constructed differently in television, it seemed that most of them were ways in which television was limited, mainly by the constraints of commercial broadcast and the increased chances of casting and production problems due to the extended schedule of filming. I’d be interested to explore further the ways in which television is capable of different narration, as opposed to how they adapt filmic narrational modes to the considerations and limiting factors of the medium.