Issue 4: Film Reviews
Memento
Dir: Christopher Nolan, USA, 2001
Switching
Dir: Morten Schøjdt, Denmark, 2003
A Review by Siobhan O'Flynn, University of Toronto at Mississauga, Canada
Christopher Nolan's neo-noir thriller, Memento, has generated polarized responses: fans who love the challenge of grappling with the puzzle of the film's fragmented structure and those who are turned off by either the frustration of the effort required to piece the story together, or a dissatisfaction with the story that is or is not eventually recovered. Within new media studies, Memento's non-linear structure has received a flutter of comments because, in Jon Dovey's words, the film is an example of what he has suggested is "a narrative structure that might respond to a spatial analysis….[as] a film that is of the cultural moment of hypertext". Dovey's comment, offered in "Notes Towards a Hypertextual Theory of Narrative" (2002), is predicated on the opposition of film as a passive medium set against the active, immersive, involvement of the interactive piece. What he does not pursue in depth is an exploration of the spatial, interactive experience of this "passive" film that occurs in the viewer's active decipherment of the film. Paradoxically, the lessons gained from a "spatial analysis" of the film occur despite Memento's supposedly "passive" medium. Watching Memento can be highly interactive, and the more adept the viewer is at maintaining multiple story lines, the more involved in the story recreation, the more satisfying the experience can be. As such, the film can in fact model an alternative focus to the current, reductive approach to narrative in new media studies and a key insight into the authoring challenges of writing narratives for new media works.
For the filmmaker working in new media, interactive movies are the Holy Grail, where interactivity is at once the gimmick with the potential to lure curious users, and the potential cause of the alienation of those users. Easy to imagine, interactive cinema suggests the combination of the gut-wrenching, emotion twisting, edge-of-your-seat power of cinema with the addictive thrill of action/reaction found within games. What could be better? We get a story and we get to play with it: "You choose what will happen next!" Or, as the recent X-Box game, Fable, announces: "For every choice, a consequence." The idea of combining the attractions of film and game is clearly heard in Interactive Storytelling: Techniques for the Twenty-First Century (2004), the new how-to work by interactive screenwriter and theorizer, Andrew Glassner, in his call to new medium creators: "In our quest to develop a new medium, I believe we should aspire to something that is capable of deep human expression….I am excited by the idea that we can develop a new form of expression that is capable of not just entertainment but depth". Why then, haven't interactive movies become as ubiquitous as cell-phones? The challenge for creators of interactive movies is how to overcome the inherently disruptive act of interactivity, of shifting from one story line to another. In giving up control of the plot, the interactive filmmaker must relax the control of the disclosure of information necessary for traditional plots. The absence of a tightly controlled structure presents the creator with the problem of how to construct a narrative that can generate the same (or similar) effects of the traditional plot (drama, suspense, conflict, climax, and character arc, to name a few) when the sequence of the telling is constantly disrupted. If we follow a story that no longer adheres to a linear, author-driven sequence, we risk losing the impact or suspense of the masterfully plotted thriller or melodrama or comedy.
The emphasis on an Aristotelian notion of the function of story and plot established what has been a long-standing opposition of narrative and database within new media criticism and practice. Lev Manovich declared, in an oft-quoted statement from The Language of New Media (2001), that:
As a cultural form, database represents the world as a list of items and it refuses to order this list. In contrast, a narrative creates a cause-and-effect trajectory of seemingly unordered items (events). Therefore, database and narrative are natural enemies. Competing for the same territory of human culture, each claims an exclusive right to make meaning out of the world.
Manovich's distinction between database and narrative defines narrative as a sequence of events held together by a discernable sense of causal relationships thereby generating an understanding of consequence and meaning. This definition has remained consistent in most critical examinations of the problem of narrative in new media, wherein "narrative" and "story" are used interchangeably. Yet the Aristotelian distinction between story as the chronological sequence that can be reconstructed from the plot and plot as the often non-chronological sequence of events found in the telling, does nothing to resolve the problem of interactivity, and in fact places the focus of attention on the wrong element. Creators are faced with a vista of either random, user-generated, causally unconnected plotting or the nightmare of endless branching vistas of obsessively plotted multi-stream stories.
The major stumbling block for creators of interactive works has been working with the two central elements of story and plot, and story has been the focus of much recent critical writing on narrative and new media. The paradox of this new medium is, however, that while the technology is constantly improving, amazing graphics, mobility within a virtual space, interaction with beautiful graphics and a fully realized virtual world are potentially meaningless without a good story. However, the contemporary critical focus on story, or as it is often phrased, narrative in new media, will never adequately overcome the problem of interactivity disrupting the "story" because of the reductive approach to story adapted consistently via the same ur-texts of literary theory. When new media theorists or creators turn to literature as an old media modeling a "passive" textual experience, almost universally, discussions focus on the Aristotelian opposition of story and plot. What has been left out are discussions of the non-traditional novel, of the function of language, style, and the poetics of metaphor, symbolism, etc.
Memento's noir story and cast of characters are entirely conventional. A man, Leonard Shelby (Guy Pierce) seeks revenge for the rape/murder of his wife (Jorja Fox), only to find himself duped by the corrupt cop (Joe Pantoliano) and the femme fatale (Carrie Ann Moss). Even the dual function of the protagonist as the detective/criminal, which the audience is confronted with in the opening sequence, is as old as Oedipus Rex. Nolan's innovations within the genre are the "condition" of his protagonist who is unable to create short-term memories and the disruptive structure of the film that replicates Leonard's fragmented experience of time and the world for the viewer. Even Leonard's condition is arguably a new twist on Oedipus' fatal flaw of ignorance. The structure, however, has received critical praise, and Nolan received an Oscar nomination for best original screenplay. The film disrupts chronological time by intercutting multiple time lines and possible-alternate story lines. The first, "Z" to "M" backward time-line is established in the opening sequence and Nolan makes this story line instantly recognizable by shooting it in colour. This sequence starts chronologically after the key violent encounter that opens the film and Leonard's significant change into a tailored suit. The colour sequence further functions as Leonard's "external" journeying through a benighted urban landscape of diners, bars, abandoned buildings, and various motel rooms. The second, b/w sequence, moves from "A" to "M" in a forward moving time-line that is intercut with the colour sequence. In this claustrophobic, increasingly paranoid sequence, Leonard, in his original "grunge" clothes, sits in a motel room, surrounded by the maps, polaroids, notes, and tattooing equipment, he "scripts" his world from. The reconstructed "A" to "Z" story which the viewer reassembles from the disruptive shifting between seemingly distinct yet connected stories, is complicated by suggestions of contradictory details that destabilize the "truth" of Leonard's limited perspective. One such instance is the story of Sammy Jenkis, a man with a mirror condition to Leonard's. This story is embedded in the b/w sequence as a story that Leonard tells repeatedly in order to explain his own "condition." Yet as cinephiles will know, Nolan destabilizes the "truth" value of this story with a subliminal superimposition of Leonard's face on that of the bug-housed Sammy, suggesting that Sammy's story is Leonard's own. This fleeting vision, more readily accessible on the DVD, leads to the unhinging conclusion that Leonard's "story" and the action of the film may exist only within his mind.
Despite its traditional format, Memento has earned a level of cachet in discussions on how to theorize interactive cinema because of its fragmented, dislocating structure. By rights, the film's constant disruptions of the story line(s) should alienate viewers, and in fact, it often does. For some viewers, however, the experience is arguably more immersive because the engagement with solving the puzzle demands that the viewer maintain three or more separate and interconnected story lines simultaneously. What the viewer assembles is a spatial mobile of suspended story fragments that intersect and alter each other through the course of the viewing. Dovey's emphasis is on the viewer's "contemplation [of] the static reality of a number of events that have already occurred and then to try and make sense of them". The focus here is on the reconstruction of the static "story" from the fragmented plot. This Aristotelian approach to "story" is pervasive in writings on narrative in new media.
Memento's structural challenge is also no innovation. Literary works such as Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines, Annie Dilliard's For the Time Being, and V.S. Naipaul's A Way in the World all present fragmented narratives constructed of intersecting story lines and/or thematic threads that challenge the reader to create a sense of a unified whole, in answer to the question, how do all these discrete and seemingly different fragments relate? In the viewing experience of the film, however, a viewer is forced to consider not just the story or narrative but the question of how meaning is generated on various levels that can exist independent of the linear story, more usefully thought of as narrativity. When the access to or comprehension of an horizontal, chronological story line is complicated or blocked by the fragmented work (traditional or interactive), the reader/user is forced back to a consideration of what Dovey and many others have termed the vertical axis of narrative that is concerned with the generation of meaning at the level of theme, symbol and metaphor. From the standpoint of the creator, all of these devices are again as old as storytelling itself, as much a part of Beowulf's "word hoard" as the epithets, similes, metaphors, and ritual set pieces that formed the "database" of the epic poet.
Within the disrupted text, the reader/user engages with the text/world hunting for patterns, echoes, repetitions and inversions, much like Leonard Shelby, all of which function to create associative links between otherwise distinct fragments or episodes. Contrary to Dovey's assertion that Memento "invites us to contemplate the static reality of a number of events that have already occurred," Nolan's film offers not a contemplation of static elements but of narrative fragments that are dynamic, mutually affecting and unstable in terms of the meaning attached to each. This understanding of the interrelation of story and narrativity also counters a long-standing opposition within new media theorizing.
Morten Schjødt's interactive feature film, Switching, winner of The Cyberloup-IPL New Media Award 2003, also challenges the user to reconstruct a story from a fragmented narrative. In this made-for-DVD work, the viewer/user can "switch" from moment to moment by hitting the "enter" button. The film is designed to suggest an intuitive "switch" window in moments where characters become introspective. Schjødt's decision to use the cinematic moment in which a character turns from external interaction to internal contemplation as the "natural" moment to switch nicely integrates the content with the interface technology, while also suggesting an implicit belief in moments of narrative closure in which we will naturally be ready to move on. However, the DVD allows the user to "switch" at any moment; the user decides when to "end" the experience. The switching experience itself allows the user to move chronologically through short temporal sequences that move forward, then loop back and then move forward again with variations. Some sequences are highly realistic, others hallucinatory, and reactions to the piece read it variously as one story with variations, or multiple parallel story lines with minor differences. Either way, because the sense of temporal relation and causality is unhinged, particularly by the combination of realistic scenes with hallucinatory ones, the question of narrativity resurfaces in terms of what other elements can generate meaning within but especially across fragments.
The story, however, is again entirely traditional. We follow a Danish couple, Frida (Laura Drasbæk) and Simon (Rasmus Botoft) in encounters before and after their break-up. The cast of characters include Frida's sister, Anna (Kaya Brüel), who has designs on Simon, and an oddly knowing waitress (Lærke Winther Andersen) who works in the café all the characters habituate, and who is also interested in the rejected and downcast Simon. The wolfish Patrick (Johan Widerberg), a Swedish DJ in the café, introduces further sexual tension, as he too becomes involved with Anna. Nationalist tensions are also raised in a scene at the urinals in which Patrick derides the size of Simon's "little cock". Clearly, Patrick's self-satisfaction has as much to do with a sense of Swedish superiority over the Danish Patrick as with the relative size of their organs.
The film "begins" in the conventional sense of having a clearly articulated beginning, with a fade-in to the POV of Frida, driving through an underground, fluorescent lit tunnel in the title sequence. The film then alternately cuts to a close-up of Frida washing her face in the café washroom or Frida waking up in the daylight looking for Simon who then brings a cup of undrinkable coffee, or Frida waking up at night with Simon beside her. Other scenes are also presumably possible "beginnings," but these seem to be the common "start" scenes. The website for the film describes the relationship of these two waking scenes as a "vicious circle in which they [Frida and Simon] are trapped." In an optimal user experience, the user "switches" in an anti-linear way through various moments of the chronological "story," building a reasonably coherent sense of the spatial story outside of the iteration itself. As with Memento, the user then builds a spatial cognitive mobile of suspended story fragments that interact and reconnect with each additional story fragment. In extended viewings, the film's disrupted chronology plays with our sense of relationships as functioning simultaneously within and without time. Memories return and invade the present, the future is disrupted by the past. As Simon tells Frida, "Time is relative. It's always related to before and after." Further, the notion of time as a constrictive force, as the cycle of suffering, death and rebirth or samsara is introduced in Frida's gift of The Buddhist Bible to Simon after their break-up. The idea of samsara emphasizes the interactive experience as a "vicious circle" without an ending.
The interactivity can be intriguing, particularly with certain scenes that seem to remain unexplained within the overall trajectory of the film: a hallucinatory bug experience of Frida's in the woods; and a waitress who serves coffees then begins to strip. The film seems, however, to not use fully its potential for narrativity in the way that recurrent details, like bugs, washing, and showering echo across fragments but don't seem to resolve into any more meaningful, or insightful relationship to the story. This gap may simply be an obfuscating directorial choice in the same territory as David Lynch's hallucinatory, meaning-resistant films. "Switching" can also trap the film in increasingly constricted loops so that one is forced to watch sequences over and over in decreasing units of time until through some seeming haphazard stroke of luck, the film releases the viewer and switches into a new sequence. Another dissatisfaction arises from the DVD's scene selection function. Here, as on a standard DVD, the user can choose to watch the story scene by scene. Unfortunately, this option can also reveal scenes which the user missed in the creation of his or her narrative. This "reveal" can leave the user in the ticked-off position of being made aware that she or he has missed potentially crucial scenes and/or sequences.
These structural "bugs" can seriously disrupt the user's immersion in the film and unfortunately, whatever spatial model of the narrative the user has created up until that point can get metaphorically jettisoned with the shift to frustrated compulsive pressing on the "enter" key. This is a serious flaw that presumably interactive filmmakers want to avoid. When Switching works, the experience can be as immersive as viewing Memento. At its worst, I'd stick with the more "passive," traditional, director-controlled form of Memento any day of the week.