Possibly the most interesting part of the reading from Bordwell’s book was where he laid out many of the assumptions that go into viewing. Most of them were the sort of learned passive things we use to make sense of stories, but he also went more in depth, bringing up post-sensory things like processing a flickering series of frames as continuous motion. These sorts of assumptions generally go unquestioned, and generally that’s completely fine, because so few works really play with these assumptions that they can usually be taken as a given and move on. However, from an analytic stand-point, it’s useful to ennumerate these sorts of things, if only to make the readers aware of things that they passively, even subconsciously, do as viewers.

One of the things I found strange about our discussion last week about The Singing Detective was how explicit we were about the assumptions we were making while watching it. Personally, when I was watching the film, I didn’t find it particularly ambiguous about what was happening. Aside from the initial period where the various elements of the series were being introduced, there was no real need to spend much time pondering the relationship between the scenes. It was perfectly obvious that Philip Marlow was a writer in a hospital, writing a book in his head; all the WW2-era footage was clearly from his book, although Marlow’s circumstances did occasionally encroach on his fictive world, such as when the character became hot at the same time as Marlow. When we were discussing the episode in class afterwards, though, Professor Mittell seemed to be carefully phrasing how we summed up what we had saw, making explicit that the relationships we had made between scenes were at best guesses.

This, I feel, is prime evidence for just how deeply engrained that these sorts of assumptions are in our viewing process. By most standards, the episode we saw was extremely ambiguous about what was happening. Compared to the first episode of pretty much every other television series I’ve ever seen, this episode contained very little in the way of information to orient the viewer. Even with this paucity of information, it was completely natural to cobble together what little we had into a narrative that conformed to certain expectations.

Although I would be surprised if many of the assumptions I had made during the first episode turn out to be incorrect, it’s still probably important to be able to parse out just how much we’re interpretting what we’re seeing through some sort of set assumptions. Most of the time, questioning those assumptions probably won’t yield much, but it certainly can be useful for certain works. My first thought is to Mulholland Drive, which is probably the most abusive film I’ve ever seen, in terms of Lynch’s toying with the audience’s natural urge to assume they understand what is happening, only to pull the rug out from under them when they least suspect it.