Monthly Archives: October 2008

Adaptation Act 3 Sarcastic?

I’m not convinced. On the level of comprehension, act three is exactly what Donald and McKee stand for. While a swamp ape would have been the deuxs ex machina abhorred by the character and real McKee, the alligator is not so bad. They are in a swamp, and the alligators have been seen there before. I see the third act as only sarcastic in retrospect (see my last blog post for more on this argument). Imagine if Transformers began with the main character telling his little brother how he hates movies about aliens from space. The rest of the movie would then seem to be a sarcastic reflection on this statement. Nothing in the form or content of the third act of Adaptation is disingenuous. Only by reflecting on the bulk of the film do we find it so. 

On another note, I didn’t realize it until our conversation about Susan as implied author, but the sequence in which Susan reveals her last trip to Florida in detail and admits to her book being an unreliable source makes a great argument for her inclusion as an implied author. The three just might be real, god help us all.  

Many-Leveled Narratives in all their gloriousness

Like many in our class, my first academic exposure to Adaptation was in Don’s screenwriting class. We examined the unconventional structure, and how it still broke into McKee’s blessed three acts complete with arcs and climaxes. Each act, sequence and scene had its turn, and we went through the process of figuring out exactly how it was accomplished. 

Watching it for the second time in a narrative context was, surprisingly (and unsurprisingly), a completely different experience. I know what we’re talking about this week is authorship, and I really should be blogging about the imbedded author, but I must digress. What really struck me this time around was the multiple levels of narrative structure in the film. Beyond listing all the things he doesn’t want in a screenplay, and then doing exactly those things to arrive at closure, Kaufman creates narrative connections that only work retrospectively over the whole body of the film. He shows us the evolution of the world far before he explains why we had to suffer through those elementary graphics. We don’t understand the whole film to be the real Kaufman’s musings on writing the screenplay about writing the screenplay about flowers until near the end. I may have been slow in this regard, but it wasn’t until these sorts of meta-connections spanning the film began to fall into place that the narrative made any structural sense. 

Jump with me now to television. Adaptation‘s structure reminds me, in a way, of Boston Legal. Within single episodes of the series, characters will refer to themselves as such. They will comment on the show as a show designed for television. Last week Alan Shore complained about being the star but not getting any credit when a walk-in client didn’t request him for the case. During their usual closing chat on the balcony, Alan and Denny have complained that they didn’t get to see each other much during that episode. Earlier this season, Alan and Denny brainstormed what crazy things they should do, because it is Boston Legal‘s last season on the air. Moments like these form a sort of meta-narrative of real actors, writers and directors joking with real viewers about the status of the show. The creators clearly designed these moments break the fourth wall and poke fun at how seriously TV narratives tend to take themselves, but more than that, these moments form another level of story. 

So back to Adaptation, and full circle, as such things must be. For me, during this second viewing with different priorities, there were two levels of narrative. One was Kaufman, the character, and his trials and tribulations writing a script about the glory of the orchid. And one was Kaufman, the screenwriter, making fun of McKee and screenwriting for Hollywood in general by planting seeds in the script that we only recognized retrospectively. It may be simple point, but I didn’t realize it the first time around. Which begs the question, how great an effect do viewing priorities have on a “reading” of a film? Could it be said that I “missed” some of the meaning of the film my first time around? 

Wherefore Art Thou, oh Narrator?

Chatman argues persuasively (at least, once it got translated into human-speak in class–hats off to Professor Mittell for that one) that the viewer constructs a cinematic narrator and implied author while watching a film text. At the time, it made sense. Anyone “reading” a film will create a prime mover behind every choice in the text and infer their thematic/ideological message based upon the sum of those choices, when in real life, a cadre of professionals and artisans with innumerable outlooks contribute to the narrative processes of the film. During our blargument, Aaron wrote that he looked to his construct of the Coen brothers for answers to the perplexing subjectivity of Barton Fink. Clearly, here is concrete evidence for Chatman’s argument. 

But Bordwell is not satisfied. I can’t tell if Chatman and Bordwell are locked in mortal combat for all eternity (a text is forever after all) just so they each have an excuse to keep publishing the same theories over and over, or if they really do feel this strongly about a narrator. Seems like a silly fuss over the signification of eight letters, but that’s just me. Anyway, Bordwell counters,

A filmmaker or group of filmmakers created the system of cues we are to follow, and as real agents ourselves we engage with those cues. End of story. 

It seems to me that Bordwell’s primary argument against Chatman’s concepts of the cinematic narrator and implied author is Occam’s Razor. If we don’t need Chatman’s concepts to bundle Bordwell’s stand-alone concepts, then we shouldn’t use them.

Other than naming a cinematic narrator or implied author, it doesn’t seem like Chatman and Bordwell have much of a feud. Bordwell doesn’t deny the existence of unreliability, overarching principles and a governing design in films. He just doesn’t want to add another belle to the terminology ball. And, really, who can blame him? My head is spinning as it is.

In other Bordwell news, I found his explanation of character narrators and flashbacks very helpful to articulate my feelings about Leland’s bit of Citizen Kane and the alternating narrators of The Prestige. 

Bordwell argues,

One way to justify and clarify the breakup of chronology is to assign a character to tell another about what led up to the current state of affairs. A scene showing the character launching on the tale prompts your understanding that what follows is a flashback. It doesn’t matter that nobody could tell an event with the sort of detail we find in the images shown in the flashback. Nor is there any scandal in the fact hat the narrating character didn’t witness the events that we’re going to see. All that matters is that a scene calls forth in us a mental schema, people tell one another about an event that has occurred, and that triggers only one relevant inference: A time shift is coming up.

In my film history discussion of Citizen Kane last Friday, my peers were incredibly attached to the idea that the characters frame narrating the flashbacks were affecting that flashback’s representation in terms of their subjectivity. Basically, that was a wordy way of saying that they thought Leland’s subjective view of Kane was directly represented in the breakfast sequence. I disagreed at the time, and now I have a Bordwell in my pocket to explain why. Leland never saw the breakfasts. Even if he had, he couldn’t have related it in depth, perspective and surround sound, as we experience it. As I read Bordwell, I found myself agreeing that, in the case of Citizen Kane, the six narrators primarily serve as triggers for the flashbacks and nothing more. I am not saying that there are no moments of subjectivity, because there are (for example, the doubled opera opening). Only that if a character book-ends the flashback, if doesn’t necessarily follow that the character is relating events from their perspective. It is the film that relates information to build our perception of Kane in a specific fashion. 

In the case of The Prestige, I think this concept also holds true. Many of the embedded flashbacks were not motivated by the journals or the court case. We can attempt to slot them into one of these character narrator’s stories, or we can posit the film as relating these incidents (be it cinematic narrator or formal devices). I can envision an argument where the omissions of the journals are actually omissions of the film to create a more powerful reveal of twin brothers and clones. Am I reading this wrong? What do you all think?

Science, The Prestige and Intertextual References

As part-time physicist (who would have thunk it … a second post combining my disciplines) I feel I must set the record straight. I know nobody wants to hear it, but poor Tesla was not a wizard. He was just a physicist who basically invented radio, failed the electricity race and had a unit of magnetic flux named after him. The scene at the fair demonstrating wireless electricity transmission is pretty accurate. Edison went with wires, while Tesla was convinced that electricity could be transmitted to homes through the air by several hubs like the one shown. The only issue is, the voltage required to transmit electricity through the air is roughly that of lightning. In order for the scene with Tesla creating a “human” conduit supplying the bulb with power, he’d have to be dead. Like most things, electricity will travel the path of least resistance, so it would take to the air before going through a human or solid ground.

But don’t lose hope. The magical field of light bulbs is not so impossible these days. HP has patented a method of wireless charging that is not fatal to those humans nearby. Within five or ten years, we should be able to set all our enabled appliances on a special countertop and they will be supplied with power. No wires required. See this article if you’re interested.

On the film front, the magic transporting act sure looks a lot like the preview for the film adaptation of Watchmen, particularly the bit where Jon Osterman is disintegrated and becomes Dr. Manhattan. On a side note, if you’re into graphic novels, or even if you just like morally ambiguous narratives like The Prestige, I highly recommend taking a look at the book. But to the point: the nearly identical blue-electric disappearance of Osterman in the first frame of the trailer got me to thinking. Like the Cahier’s filmmakers, Hollywood has too much readily available film history to be able to make films blind. Such intertextual moments as this one must be purposeful, but to what end, really?

The Illusionist, a similarly themed film, was released concurrently with The Prestige. Same time period, same rivalry over women, opened in theaters a month apart. We can all name several times where this has happened (Antz and A Bug’s Life come to mind) and on a certain level I understand Hollywood’s desire to preemptively imitate a prospective hit. But I’ll be blunt. I don’t like it. Anyway, I’ve realized I can rail against the apparent lack of creativity, or I can try to understand the effects of such narrative strategies. 

Intertextual moments seem to me to work on two levels. On the first, they piggy-back on the distinctive positive qualities of the referenced moment by evoking it in the mind of the viewer. On another level, they “wink” at the informed watcher for being smart enough to make that connection in the first place. We all feel good and everybody goes home happy.

But I watched The Prestige after The Illusionist, which turned out the most unfortunate intertextual references. In The Illusionist, the reveal is that it’s been real all along. So in The Prestige, I felt myself applying the generalized narrative schmata of The Illusionist while I watched, waiting to see if the fabula matched up. Let me be the first to say that this somewhat lessened the impact of my first experience of a fabulous film. Accepting the reveal that it has been magic was a difficult for me as it was for the characters, when I kept expecting the ‘secret’ to be one bound by the laws of physics.

One last side note, and I’m done for the night. Magic is an interesting topic for a film. In a sense, the cinema is magic. The reason we see magicians on stage is that on film, nearly anything can be done to alter the image, which, of course, negates the impact of the trick. Most ‘magic’ films have to make the magic incredible to justify the use of a medium where stage magic is pedestrian. We expect to have the incredible baffle us, and to have the stage magic explained. Both The Illusionist and The Prestige seem to fit into this category.

Not sure what conclusions I can draw out of all this, but there you have it. First thoughts on a first viewing. 

Hydrating with Martinis

Aaron persuasively argues in his blog that Barton Fink uses the impersonal subjective, as explained by George Wilson in “Transparency and Twist in the Narrative Fiction Film,” primarily in the hotel scenes to visually show us Barton’s subjective view of the world. The film’s taglines, “There’s only one thing stranger than what’s going on inside his head. What’s going on outside,” and “Between Heaven and Hell There’s Always Hollywood!” seem to support his case. Aaron ultimately decides that it is difficult to discern ‘what happened’ in the film, and that “The pleasure of this film … is indeed hypothesizing (on subsequent viewings) which scenes, events, or characters are real or not real.” 

Frankly, I’m not sure I agree. At a certain point during the film (mine was around 20 minutes) the spectator has to make a choice about the narrative world: surrender or be hopelessly lost/bored/annoyed. Like with Delicatessen or The Sixth Sense, the viewer has to accept the logic of the narrative world whole cloth or end up disoriented and unsatisfied. In a certain sense, trying to suss out the meaning of Barton Fink is a lost cause. Even if we could tie the Coen brothers to chairs and pepper them with all our questions, and even if they gave us answers, I’m not sure we would be satisfied. The world of Barton Fink is so, well, weird, that trying to orient yourself inside it, trying to categorize the rules of its universe, is like trying to hydrate with martinis. The more you drink, the less you’re sated. Returning to a sender-message-receiver model of communication allows for the distinct possibility of misinterpretation. The viewer isn’t passively receiving a programmed message, but constructing the message they perceive within the text. Can we say that there is a message in Barton Fink? There is no easy way to get inside the Coen’s heads or to understand Gregory Currie’s all-important intention in this film. But there is easy access into the brain of Barton Fink. 

The pleasure of the film, for me, is in the ride, the bizarre, wonderful ride where meaning doesn’t enter into the equation in the powerful way it does with most films. I agree that the film relies on impersonal subjective shots quite a bit, but in a certain sense it is a film entirely mediated by Fink’s gaze. We not only see the world the way he sees it, Fink appears to concretely effect the storyworld. Los Angeles is hot, but not so hot that the wallpaper would be peeling off the walls. Fink sees flames, and Charlie starts sweating profusely. Fink sees a picture with a woman and a beach, then walks down the beach and sees the woman. Which happened first? What is ‘real?’ In this storyworld, does that distinction earn us anything? Would knowing that Barton met with Lipnick, but imagined Audrey’s death really change how we read the film? And, actually, come to think of it, do we even read the film the way we read The Singing Detective? It could be argued that both texts utilize the impersonal subjective for the same reason. But there seems to a true fabula that we can construct by sifting through the subjective bits of The Singing Detective. I’m not convinced the same holds for Barton Fink. 

That’s about all the ramblings I’ve got for now. My roommates like to joke that I’m the exception to every rule, so feel free to set me straight if you disagree. Am I the only one who felt this way while viewing the film?

Barton Fink and Weimar Cinema

First things first. I must comment on the oh-so Jewish hair exemplified in tonight’s screening. And now that that’s out of my system …

Taking a survey of film history course has afforded me a sort of Langlois approach to cinema in comparing my screenings. While my 102 film exposure has been largely (if not entirely) sequential, mix these in with my other screenings and you get a wonderful sort of jumble–the kind that leads to the Cahiers revolution. Not that I am actually comparing myself with the French New Wave … and there goes the snappy introduction to my free-form connection between Barton Fink and Weimar Cinema. 

There seems to me to be quite a few parallels between Barton Fink and early German cinema, especially Expressionism and Kammerspiel. For the first, the setting is as, if not more, important than the character’s actions, and is the only concrete place where these events could possibly have “logical” causality and cohesion. For the second, there is attention to urban circumstance, interior character life, unity of place and time with relatively few characters and locations.  Barton Fink seems to use sound in many of the same ways that Fritz Lang did in M. In other words, not just as a montage element, but to visualize the interior lives of it’s tortured characters. Here’s a taste, for those of you who haven’t seen it … 

Similarly to the treatment of ordinary sounds as signifiers (the extra long ringing of the bell), ordinary objects become sinister portents. The peeling wallpaper, dripping glue and the dribbling sweat–each seem more than just odd. They physicalize the interior lives of the characters in a disturbing way. My ultimate question is, whose interior life? The obvious choice seems to be the namesake of the film: Barton Fink. He is unquestionably our protagonist. However, I can see how an argument could be made for the hallway fire externalizing Charlie Meadow’s psyche instead. That is, of course, if he is really a murdering madman. The sum of my ramblings seems to be: Is the character Barton Fink entirely determining of the point of view of Barton Fink?

Another Final Paper Topic

This one really isn’t really for me, because I’m pretty excited (or, as excited as one can be about writing 15 pages …) about my first idea. But I was watching some television, as one does on break, and realized that beyond the narrative of a television episode itself, credit sequences are endowed with a surprising amount of fabula/syuzhet information. A show relies on its credit sequence to tell the story of its whole narrative, to embody, in a certain way, the mood and content of the entire series. What, and how, do we learn of television serials from their credit sequences?

In TV and American Culture I remember examining the credit sequence of Miami Vice with this in mind. But some shows go beyond a simple montage of images and sound relating to mood and content. Middlebury graduate Cara McKenney just won an Emmy for her team’s work on the title sequence of Mad Men (for more information, see this Globe Article). Credit sequences rely on images, but also on the star system in naming creators and actors that further inform our hypotheses about the show as viewers. 

I know it’s a bit thin on the traditional narrative front, but I’ve always found credit sequences fascinating in their choice of style and content. Anybody interested?

Seriality in Narrative

We’ve talked a lot about how the viewer is considered active in Bordwell’s model. They use schemata to evaluate the information provided by syuzhet and style to construct fabula. The viewer makes assumption, inferences and hyptheses, which are then proved or disproved when the narrative provides more depth, range and communicativeness. And now that I’ve gone through all the buzz words …

Watching one episode of The Singing Detective per week has meant that we’ve roughly followed the mode by which it would have shown on television. The narrative seems to be deliberately designed to make use of the time between viewings, in fact, in some ways it requires this time of reflection and hypothesis testing. It is only when I thought back on the deluge of fabula moments that I could make the connections necessary to realize the same actor was playing different characters, or the slight changes made in a scene during it’s second enactment (or recounted enactment). My comprehension of the show largely depended on these rest periods. 

In this sense, watching two episodes back to back this past week felt slightly disruptive. I didn’t have enough time to properly process the information in the previous episode, and ended up being slightly confused on Thursday. On some level it might be considered easier to keep the details of a show straight if it is watched on DVD, instead of it’s intended medium. It seems few television shows these days are really designed for the television format, and, in fact, are better when consumed like a very long film. 24 and Lost come to mind in this regard. But, for me anyway, The Singing Detective is best viewed as it was intended to be viewed: with the week long break between screenings.

Constructing Narrative in Political Campaigns

Right now, like many, I have politics on the brain. A lot. And what better way to vent my obsession than to examine the deliberate construction of personas (characters) for our favorite political figures of the day in my blog? I’m going to try to leave my beliefs out of it as much as possible so this doesn’t disintegrate into an argument over war accessorizing (everyone has a bracelet, what are we, five?). Anyways …

Getting into campaign commercials and smear articles would be really complicated, so instead I’ll apply Bordwell’s narrational principles to the single unit of last Thursday’s vice-presidential debate. 

The temporal construction of the narrative of the debate is actually quite complicated when I seriously thought about categorizing it according to Bordwell’s terms. Where does the fabula or syuzhet begin and end? For Biden, the beginning appears to be when he first took public office, but Palin’s fabula (even including her career as a mother) doesn’t extend that far into the past. Add that both are constructing character personas for themselves and the character of their running-mates, and we’ve got a mess. Some simplification is certainly in order.

During the screen duration of the debate, there was a lot of recounting of past fabula events, and none of the recounting can really be attributed to an objective narrator. Both Palin and Biden deliberately obscured their own fabula past in favor of recounting their opponent’s or the candidates’. On other occasions Palin and Biden argued over the truth of the recounting. Frequency came into play as numerous fabula events (particularly voting records and tax plans) were recounted multiple times. The screen time and syuzhet time were the same, but the fabula duration was radically condensed. Frequency of recounting accorded some fabula events more importance than others, the war in Iraq being one of the most prominent. 

I think I’m using these terms right for this situation. The fabula includes entire political careers, the syuzhet the two characters in a debate. The characters of McCain and Obama are created and challenged by both sides, but never physically manifest in the narrative. By selectively recounting a vote statistic, Palin could omit the fabula information that McCain voted the same way as Biden. The only point about which I am confused is where to place the fabula beginning. Are there two fabulas, one for Palin and one for Biden, beginning separately? And how does their interaction narratively with their running-mates personas affect their narrative?

Final Paper Topic Thoughts

Once upon a time …

I say this only because there is a bit of a story behind my current paper topic thought. The day before I was due to come back to Middlebury, I went out and finally made the switch. I got a mac. Bad timing … I got to spend the whole night transferring all my documents and programs onto it from my old pc, instead of packing for the move … but you can’t have it all, right? Anyway, the short of it is that we (me and my computer) never really got a chance to get aquatinted in all that shuffling. So I finally got a chance to explore all the fun stuff on my new computer this past weekend. And in my applications, lo and behold, a program called Front Row.

And this is how I discovered that apple so kindly provides free uploads of current film trailers right to my computer. 

Twenty-some-odd previews and much lost homework-time Iater I was convinced. While trailers are technically a para-text, they do tell a story. But interestingly, they often don’t cause us to construct a fabula that matches with the film’s actual fabula. Many a time I have watched a film searching for the moment from the preview that got left on the cutting-room floor. I’m sure we all constructed a version ofWanted and Hancock (just to pick two summer blockbusters) from the trailers that was vastly different than the actual films.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZQQgvhn4jg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7ftozVc3lI

Trailers seem to operate by introducing character(s), the major situation of the film, a few genre-relevant moments and some sort of theme music before leaving the viewer in suspense. The prominent goal is, obviously, peaking interest to properly fill in the gaps introduced by the trailer … so we’ll all pay our $10.50 to see the picture. For the final paper, I’d like to look at the way a couple trailers go about constructing an incomplete (and, the general idea is, fascinating) storyworld. 

And now the hitch. I’m not quite sure how to narrow it down from here. I realize choosing a genre would do so, but even then there are several interestingly constructed trailers in each. Or should I look at a succession of trailers for a single film, several judged to fail, requiring that they re-cut until the studio found the one that was acceptable? So I appeal to the group: what do you think? How can I make my topic smaller and more manageable? Thanks in advance …