Monthly Archives: September 2008

The “Twist” Genre and the Crying Game

Bordwell’s definitions of fabula and syuzhet help illuminate exactly how the “twist” genre, as explored by Erlend Lavik, operates. Typically in these films (and if memory serves, The Sixth Sense is no exception), the syuzhet is deliberately constructed so as to encourage the viewer to ask the wrong questions and thus arrive at the wrong fabula. Then, near the end, the “twist” occurs, which exposes the mis-construction of the fabula. 

This strategy is what is at work in “Walkabout.” The syuzhet and style both conspire to mislead the viewer into believing that Locke can walk, and his illness lies elsewhere. Then the “twist” occurs, at which point the syuzhet reveals key fabula information: Locke was in a wheelchair before the plane accident. This causes a re-ordering of the fabula by the viewer to accommodate this new information. Using other Bordwell terminology, the viewer made assumptions about Locke’s mobility, inferred something was wrong with him and hypothesized he was sick before the trip. But each of these operations is rendered wrong by the twist (in other Bordwell terms, the new prototype schemata).

Lavik cites the example of The Crying Game in his article. I find this an interesting comparison to the rest of the twist cycle. When The Sixth Sense came out, critics went nuts over the twist. While I don’t remember any explicit articles “ruining” the movie, there was plenty of talk about the syuzhet and how deliberately constructed it was. In contrast, when my mom gave me The Crying Game for some holiday or other a while back, she explained that at the time of it’s release, nobody would talk about the film at all. Granted, the content of the twist is a lot more controversial. Not only is torture, murder and revolution commonplace in the fabula, the girlfriend turns out to be a transvestite. Bit of a nasty surprise for the protagonist, and it does require a fabulous rethinking of the entire film.

There seems to be a common theme in all these films. Like “Walkabout” the twist in The Crying Game works only because the viewer pre-consciously, or perhaps even unconsciously, makes an assumption that unless explicitly visually stated, all characters are what they look like, that is, functioning, gendered, human beings. Thus we assume that the girlfriend is, in fact, a girl, and that Locke can walk. This same assumption seems to be at work in The Sixth Sense. 

I hope some of this made some sense … I apologize if it didn’t. I am currently suffering the Middlebury mega-virus of the month …

 

Why do We Believe Alvy Singer?

As discussed in class today, Annie Hall is very much a subjective narrative mostly from Alvy Singer’s point of view. Putting aside to what extent this point of view reflects or does not reflect that of Woody Allen, the filmmaker, why do we as viewers put so much faith in the visuals of the film?

From the first cut to a childhood flashback, we are cued that Alvy is not a trustworthy narrational source. He thinks his childhood is happy, we see that he was depressed about the universe expanding. Paraphrasing Waylon’s comments in class today, Alvy “seeps” into the “real world” of Annie Hall when he consults the people walking on the street as to why they think he and Annie broke up. The so called ‘real world’ is not even entirely real. Alvy shows us a home directly underneath the roller coaster, and then admits to exaggerating on a regular basis. Quite clearly the whole film’s narration is signaled to be a fiction entirely influenced by Alvy’s neurotic consciousness. 

And yet, we believe what we see on screen. While watching the film, I never found myself questioning the “truthfulness” of the visuals. This is disconcerting. I see the apartment under the roller coaster, and I understand that Alvy really didn’t grow up there. And yet, I am just as sure that, in the storyworld, Alvy and Annie really did chase lobsters around the beach house kitchen.

Why? Why should I privilege some visuals and not others as the ‘real’ storyworld? Woody Allen has constructed a film where anything can be an exaggeration, a spin, or even an outright lie, and yet I trust that he relates the dialogue and action I watch correctly. Couldn’t the plot in Annie Hall have been a complete misrepresentation of a relationship to suit Alvy’s argument?

I don’t have an answer to these musings. And I don’t really think that the larger gag is that we’ve all been had by a clever subjective narrative trick. But it seems to point to a larger narrative issue. How (and why) do we, as viewers, decide which characters to trust? 

Is Margolin’s View of Character Applicable to Film?

Uri Margolin writes in her essay “Character” in The Cambridge Companion to Narrative that character can be most succinctly defined as “storyworld participant” (66). Seems simple enough. But it gets complicated for literature, the medium she’s writing about, when one considers what, exactly, constitutes a participant. Objects and places can be awarded a personality and significance, and even interact with other storyworld participants, but does this make them a character? And I’m sure we can all think of ‘people’ who do not actively participate in their storyworld at all. Confusion of terms can also get in the way: character refers both to the being and the qualities that define that being. 

One way Margolin describes to handle this conundrum is to view character as a created literary figure. She writes, “By writing their narratives, authors determine rather than describe the properties of their characters” (68). Margolin seems to be positing a prime mover behind the text that the interpreter can look to for intention and logical reasons. This makes sense; the author owns their work entirely, and few works suffer a particularly heavy hand from the publisher. But in film, it is much more difficult to identify an author. Even if the auteur theory is correct, when applied to character things get mighty muddled. Is it the screenwriter, director or actor who determines character? Surely a character depends on the specific confluence of the three. 

Margolin continues to identify necessary traits for a character. It must have an identity that is individual, singular and unique from all other storyworld participants. Readers should be able to categorize the character in the storyworld, for example, by class, ethnicity or whatever category is most pertinent. These concepts are also problematic when applied to film. Oz in The Whole Ten Yards is not just a character, but an actor named Matthew Perry, who also played Chandler in long running television series Friends. As we watch Perry performing as Oz, we bring our entire experience with Perry as all the other characters we have seen him play to bear in the particular storyworld of The Whole Ten Yards. We will identify ‘Chandler moments’ where the character of Oz looks and sounds a whole lot like the character of Chandler. Margolin’s definition breaks down when Chandler and Oz and Perry are no longer unique individuals. But does that make Oz less than a character? I can probably name five actors off the top of my head that play the same ‘character’ over and over again, but aren’t the same character (a la Margolin’s first definition).

I guess, for me, the definition that she supplies that most tracks with film studies is her last one. Character is directly related to what she terms the textual database, which is “just a set of data, which needs to be critically evaluated” (77). In this definition, the reader is as important as the author in defining character. So for film, character relies on the viewer to interpret the signals of the actor, director and screenwriter. Like last week’s discussion and my previous post, any examination of a storyworld would be remiss if it didn’t acknowledge that a message is only as good as it’s receiver.

In the end, Margolin writes, “in reality it [character construction] is a process or continuous mental activity …” (78). This seems to be a definition worth examining further (despite its vagueness and simplicity) as it applies to texts in any medium.

On the Viewer’s Role in Constructing Story

In class today we seemed to come to a consensus concerning how the viewer actively interacts with the plot and narration to construct story. Professor Mittell stated it the most simply: the viewer will assume the simplest answer and only ask the questions posed by the narration. This is how we can be fooled by our assumptions about Locke in “Walkabout.”

I tend to agree with this analysis in the case of certain film and television genres. In (romantic) comedies, we believe what we see, and what we see tends to be true. Whenever someone is deceived, it is usually for comic effect, and the viewer is “in” on the joke. Similarly, in dramas, characters deceive one other, but not the audience.  Only in specific cases, like Closer, does the process of narration intentionally withhold information from the viewer. Science fiction and fantasy also tend to be straightforward in this way, allowing the viewer complete access to the mythology of the storyworld. 

But Lost doesn’t fit so easily into any of these categories. While I acknowledge that early in the series intrinsic norms might not have been firmly established, from episode one, Lost set itself up as a mystery/thriller show with fantastical elements. The viewer in this genre is suspicious and informed. I suspect that the conspiracy claims collectively constructed on the internet by fans do not follow Occam’s Razor. Perhaps while in the act of viewing the text, these fans subconsciously assume the simplest answer to cinematically posed questions. However, in digesting the material and examining the mystery post-exposure, I believe that the viewer actively looks for the trick.

What I am trying to say is best illustrated through the example of M. Night Shyamalan’s films. We were all fooled by The Sixth Sense, but once we understood the rules of his genre, we as viewers began watching with the intent to know the twist before it happened. In this way, the informed audience circumvented usual viewing practices so as not to be fooled. And many weren’t. 

I guess my whole point, which is rather small compared to the length of this blog, is that we might do well to consider the suspicious viewer to be the norm in today’s audience, conditioned to critically examine any filmic “truth,” which makes obscuring the true storyworld more difficult. 

Cinematic Narrators and Galilean Relativity

Physics and film. Together, in one post. I’ll be the first to admit that I never saw my two academic pursuits coinciding. Ever. But here I am, about to draw tenuous connections between the two that will probably make all my professors cringe.

Robert Stam explains in the second half of our reading from New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics that one of the central debates in narrative theory as applied to film is whether “film posses the equivalent of the narrator of literature …”  (104). Stam writes an extensive laundry list of the different historical approaches to this question (structural linguistics, enunciation theory, cognitive theory and literary narratology), but seems to have it all ways at once. He points out the strengths of each theory and then proceeds to explain how each ultimately fails as a universal approach. Stam seems to come to little conclusion concerning how best we humble film students can fundamentally approach the issue of the cinematic narrator. 

And now for the physics. Those of you who scrupulously avoid BiHall, bear with me. There is a point to all of this. I promise.

Galilean relativity is one of the first attempts to reconcile the issue of the varying speeds of light. Lots of physics and calculus later (and ignoring the fact that well intentioned Galileo was dead wrong because the speed of light is a universal constant), the basic concept is this:

A guy on a moving train is holding a card that expresses his undying love to his fiance. His girl stands alone at the station as the train pulls away. She observes her guy and the card both moving at the speed of the train as he tosses the card towards her. The guy, however, observes the card in his hand, not moving at all, until he releases it and watches it waft towards his love. Obviously this ends tragically, as the card is whipped away by a passing wind. But no matter. The real issue is, does the card begin at rest, or is it moving at the speed of the train? The answer, according to Galilean relativity, is both. It depends on which reference frame you choose. Which is to say, do you identify with the guy or the girl?

It seems to me that this is the same issue being wrestled with by Stam and his cinematic narrator buddies. As interpreters of the filmic text, whose reference frame do we privilege? It is easy to identify a point of view shot, or a voice-over narrator and be done with it. But is this narrator to be privileged over Gaudreault’s narrator, who operates through editing to tell a specific story?

I have to ask, do we really have to choose? Isn’t it as useful to examine all narrators and their function in the text equally? It’s about choosing a frame of reference, but realizing that infinite reference frames still exist. In this way of looking at things, the personal narrator in Stam’s final theory tells a distorted report only when compared with the impersonal narrator’s reference frame. Each is valid. Perhaps the personal narrator’s frame can tell us more about that narrator’s motives in the storytelling process. But it is only in comparing all reference frames that these insights can be gleaned. 

Then again, I could be wrong. I am, after all, only a humble film student.