Tag Archives: syuzhet

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?

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 …