Authors: David Bordwell,Kristin Thompson
B0041VYHGW EBOK (33 page)
Most commonly, a story event is presented only once in the plot. Occasionally, however, a single story event may appear twice or even more in the plot treatment. If we see an event early in a film and then there is a flashback to that event later on, we see that same event twice. Some films use multiple narrators, each of whom describes the same event; again, we see it occur several times. This increased
frequency
may allow us to see the same action in several ways. When a plot repeats a story event, the aim is often to provide new information. This occurs in
Pulp Fiction,
when the robbery of the diner, triggered at the start of the film, takes on its full significance only when it is repeated at the climax. In
Run Lola Run,
a single event is repeated many times after it first occurs: Lola’s boyfriend reports by phone that he has lost a bag (
Tasche
) full of drug money, and we hear him and Lola shouting “Tasche” several times, even though we realize that they really say it only once or twice each. The repetition of their shouts underlines their terror in a way characteristic of this hyperkinetic movie. In our examination of
Citizen Kane,
we shall see another example of how repetition can recontextualize old information.
The various ways that a film’s plot may manipulate story order, duration, and frequency illustrate how we actively participate in making sense of the narrative film. The plot supplies cues about chronological sequence, the time span of the actions, and the number of times an event occurs, and it’s up to the viewer to make assumptions and inferences and to form expectations. In some cases, our understanding of temporal relations can get quite complicated. In
The Usual Suspects,
a seemingly petty criminal spins an elaborate tale of his gang’s activities to an FBI agent. His recounting unfolds in many flashbacks, some of which repeat events we witnessed in the opening scene. Yet a surprise final twist reveals that some of the flashbacks must have contained lies, and we must piece together both the chronology of events and the story’s real cause–effect chain. Such time scrambling has become more common in recent decades. (See
“A Closer Look,”
p. 87
.)
Often we must motivate manipulations of time by the all-important principle of cause and effect. For instance, a flashback will often be caused by some incident that triggers a character’s recalling some event in the past. The plot may skip over years of story duration if they contain nothing important to the chains of cause and effect. The repetition of actions may also be motivated by the plot’s need to communicate certain key causes very clearly to the spectator.
In some media, a narrative might emphasize only causality and time. Many of the anecdotes we tell each other don’t specify where the action takes place. In film narrative, however,
space
is usually an important factor. Events occur in well-defined locales, such as Kansas or Oz; the Flint, Michigan, of
Roger and Me;
or the Manhattan of
North by Northwest.
We shall consider setting in more detail when we examine mise-en-scene in
Chapter 4
, but we ought briefly to note how plot and story can manipulate space.
A CLOSER LOOK
PLAYING GAMES WITH STORY TIME
For a spectator, reconstructing story order from the plot might be seen as a sort of game. Most Hollywood films make this game fairly simple. Still, just as we enjoy learning the rules of new games rather than playing the same one over and over, in unusual films, we can enjoy the challenge of unpredictable presentations of story events.
Since the 1980s, occasional films have exploited that enjoyment by using techniques other than straightforward flashbacks to tell their stories. For instance, the story events might be reordered in novel ways.
Pulp Fiction
(1994) begins and ends with stages of a restaurant holdup—seemingly a conventional frame story. Yet in fact the final event to occur in the story—the Bruce Willis character and his girlfriend fleeing Los Angeles—happens well
after
the final scene we see. The reordering of events is startling and confusing at first, but it is dramatically effective in the way the conclusion forces us to rethink events we have seen earlier.
The success of
Pulp Fiction
made such a play with story order more acceptable in American filmmaking.
GO
(Doug Liman, 1999) presents the events of a single night three times, each time from a different character’s point of view. We cannot fully figure out what happened until the end, since various events are withheld from the first version and shown in the second or third.
Pulp Fiction
and
GO
were independent films, but more mainstream Hollywood movies have also played with the temporal relations of story and plot. Steven Soderbergh’s
Out of Sight
(1998) begins with the story of an inept bank robber who falls in love with the FBI agent who pursues him. As their oddball romance proceeds, there is a string of flashbacks not motivated by any character’s memory. These seem to involve a quite separate story line, and their purpose is puzzling until the film’s second half, when the last flashback, perhaps a character’s recollection, loops back to the action that had begun the film and thus helps explain the main plot events.
Mainstream films may also use science fiction or fantasy premises to present alternative futures, often called “what if?” narratives. (The film industry website Box Office Mojo even lists “What If” as a separate genre and defines it as “Comedies About Metaphysical Questions That Come to Pass by Fantastical Means but in Realistic Settings.”) Such films typically present a situation at the beginning, then show how the story might proceed along different cause–effect chains if one factor were to be changed.
Sliding Doors
(Peter Howitt, 1998), for example, shows the heroine, Helen, fired from her job and heading home to her apartment, where her boyfriend is in bed with another woman. We see Helen entering the subway and catching her train, but then the action runs backward and she arrives on the platform again, this time bumping into a child on the stairs and missing the train. The rest of the film’s plot moves between two alternative futures for Helen. By catching the train, Helen arrives in time to discover her boyfriend’s affair and moves out. By missing the train, she arrives after the other woman has left and hence she stays with her faithless lover. The plot moves back and forth between these alternative cause–effect chains before neatly dovetailing them at the end.
Groundhog Day
(Harold Ramis, 1993) helped to popularize “what if?” plots. On February 1, an obnoxious weatherman, Phil Connor, travels to Punxsutawney to cover the famous Groundhog Day ceremonies. He then finds himself trapped in February 2, which repeats over and over, with variants depending on how Phil acts each day, sometimes behaving frivolously, sometimes breaking laws
(
3.9
,
3.10
),
and later trying to improve himself. Only after many such days does he become an admirable character, and the repetitions mysteriously stop.
3.9 During one repetition of February 2 in
Groundhog Day,
Phil tests whether he can get away with crimes, getting himself tossed in jail in the evening …
3.10 … only to find himself waking up, as on other Groundhog Days, back in bed at the bed-and-breakfast inn.
Neither
Sliding Doors
nor
Groundhog Day
provides any explanation for the forking of its protagonist’s life into various paths. We simply must assume that some higher power has intervened in order to improve his or her situation. Other films may provide some motivation for the changes, such as a time machine. The three
Back to the Future
films (Robert Zemekis, 1985, 1989, 1990) posit that Marty’s friend Doc has invented such a machine, and in the first film, it accidentally transports Marty back to 1955, a time just before his parents fell in love. By accidentally changing the circumstances that caused their romance, Marty endangers his own existence in 1985. Despite being comedies aimed primarily at teenagers and despite providing the time machine motivation for the changes, the three films, and particularly
Parts I
and
II
, created complex crisscrossings of cause and effect. Marty induces his parents to fall in love and returns safely to 1985 (where his life has been improved as a result of his first time trip). But events that take place in his life in 2015 have effects in 1955, as the villain Biff uses the time machine to travel back and change what happened then in yet another way—one that ends with terrible consequences for Doc and for Marty’s whole family. Marty must again travel back to 1955 to stop Biff from changing events. By the end of
Part II
, he becomes trapped there, while Doc is accidentally sent back to 1885. Marty joins him there in
Part III
for another set of threatened changes to the future. If all this sounds complicated, it is. Although the narrative maintains a remarkably unified series of cause–effect chains, it becomes so convoluted that at one point Doc diagrams events for Marty (and us) on a blackboard!
Such narrative games were influenced by a similar trend in European films. In 1981, Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski made
Blind Chance,
which showed three sets of consequences depending on whether the protagonist caught a train at the beginning or not. Unlike
Sliding Doors,
however,
Blind Chance
presents these alternative futures as self-contained stories, one after the other. The same approach appears in
Run Lola Run
(Tom Tykwer, 1998, Germany). Here the heroine’s desperate attempts to replace a large sum that her inept boyfriend owes to drug dealers are shown as three stories. Each one ends very differently after small changes of action on Lola’s part.
CONNECT TO THE BLOG
Do modern audiences even care about closure and coherence anymore? We argue that they do in “The end of cinema as we know it—yet again.”
Although temporal scrambling and “what if?” premises make it more difficult for us to piece story events together, filmmakers usually give us enough clues along the way to keep us from frustration. Usually, the film does not provide a huge number of alternative futures—perhaps only two or three. Within these futures, the cause–effect chain remains linear, so that we can piece it together. The characters and settings tend to remain quite consistent for all the alternative story lines—though often small differences of appearance are introduced to help us keep track of events
(
3.11
,
3.12
).
The individual story lines tend to parallel one another. In all three presentations of events in
Run Lola Run,
the goal is the same, even though the progression and outcomes are different. The final presentation of events tends to give us the impression of being the real, final one, and so “what if?” films usually achieve a sense of closure. Characters sometimes even talk about the events that have changed their lives, as with Doc’s blackboard explanation in
Back to the Future II.
In
Sliding Doors,
Helen remarks, “If only I had just caught that bloody train, it’d never have happened.”
3.11 In one story line of
Sliding Doors,
Helen helpfully gets her hair cut short so that we can distinguish her from …
3.12 … the Helen of the other story line, who keeps her hair long. (A bandage on her forehead was a crucial clue before the haircut.)
These films appeal to the way we think in ordinary life. We sometimes speculate about how our lives would change if a single event had been different. We easily understand the sort of game that these films present, and we’re willing to play it.
More and more, however,
puzzle films
have denied us this degree of unity and clarity. Here filmmakers create perplexing patterns of story time or causality, trusting that viewers will search for clues by rewatching the movie. An early example is Christopher Nolan’s
Memento
(1998), which presents the hero’s investigation along two time tracks. Brief black-and-white scenes show an ongoing present, with story action moving forward chronologically. The more expanded scenes, which are in color, move
backward
through time, so the first plot event we see is the final story event, the second plot event is the next-to-last story event, and so on. This tactic reflects the hero’s loss of short-term memory, but it also challenges viewers to piece everything together. At the same time, there are enough uncertainties about the hero’s memories to lead viewers to speculate that some mysteries remain unresolved at the close.
The DVD format, which allows random access to scenes, encouraged filmmakers along this path, as did the Internet. Websites and chatrooms buzzed with speculations about what really happened in
Donnie Darko
(2001),
Identity
(2003),
Primer
(2004), and
The Butterfly Effect
(2004). Like other films that twist or break up story time, puzzle movies try to engross us in the dynamics of narrative form.