Transparency and Twist in Narrative Fiction Film

One of the characteristic marks of classical narrative films is that their audio/visual narration is, in a certain sense, transparent.1 Very roughly, this means that (1) most of the shots in these movies are understood as providing the audience with "objective" or intersubjectively accessible views of the fictional characters, actions, and situations depicted in the film and that (2) where the shots or sequences are not to be construed as objective, there is a reasonably clear marking of the fact that they are, in one of several different ways, "subjective." Of course, "subjective shots and sequences" come in various modes. For instance, some shots and sequences depict the perceptual field of a particular character. Others depict a character's visual imaginings, memories, dreams, or hallucinations. Still others render in visual terms the content of something that some character is verbally reporting or describing. This short list of possibilities is obviously not exhaustive, and the individual "subjective" modes deserve lengthier discussion. Nevertheless, let us say that (1) and (2) give us, as a crude first approximation, a specification of the norm of "the transparency of narration" in classical narrative film. Although the conception that these conditions jointly express has a recognizable intuitive import, it is not easy to elaborate the conception more sharply. The concept of an objective shot or sequence in fiction films is problematic and, correlatively, so are the various concepts of subjective depiction. Moreover, the nature and functioning of the factors that contextually mark the epistemic status of a movie segment (that is, a shot or edited sequence) can be surprisingly elusive. These are among the issues I will address in this essay. However, my investigation is not simply motivated by an untrammeled analytic impulse. I have been struck by the fact that there are a number of fairly recent mainstream, commercial films-films that present an elaborate, detailed, and more or less coherent narrativethat depend on surprising, systematic violations of narrational transparency. The narration in the films I have in mind is significantly unreliable in particular ways, and its unreliability depends precisely on the audience's confounded expectation that the norm of narrational transparency will have been in place. These movies have come to be known as "twist movies," where the "twist" in question is predominately epistemological. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1919) is a celebrated early example of the strategy, and there have been scattered instances throughout the history of film. But lately we have enjoyed (or deplored) a positive explosion of epistemically twisted movies. The films I am thinking of come in at least two broad kinds. First, there are movies in which the cinematic narration, as the audience eventually comes to realize, represents the narrative action through the subjective perspective of a particular character, although, in general, that action has not been represented from the perceptual point of view of the character in question. That is, the narration stands outside the "focalizing" character, regularly presenting him or her within the frame. Still, at the same time, the narration reflects the problematic way in which the character imagines the relevant fictional history to have transpired. Jacob's Ladder (Adriane Lyne, 1990) is one example of this strategy, appearing early in the recent cycle. David Fincher' s Fight Club (1999) and the framed core story of Secret Window (David Koepp, 2004) are