Complex Narratives in Cinema

BA (Hons) Film and Television, Year 2 Media Cultures Element 1: 2,000 Word Essay Term 1 Peter Matthews Cadhla Kennedy KEN13398837 QUESTION 8 With close reference to Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York and ONE film of your own choice or TWO films of your own choice, investigate the contemporary phenomenon of complex narrative in cinema. How and why do filmmakers seek to disorient the viewer? When asked about the initial idea behind Synecdoche, New York, Charlie Kaufman responded:  Spike Jonze and I were approached by Sony to do a horror movie. We talked about things that we thought were really scary in the world, as opposed to horror movie conventions. We talked about things like mortality and illness and time passing and loneliness and regret. (Ryan, 2008). It is in the desperate attempts of humanity to constantly classify that we view the world segregated by genres. The home to complex narratives lies in Postmodernism, a movement in the arts that gained popularity in the 90s and had as a principle premise to subvert the classical conventions of narrative. Film critic argues that “it was a moment when reality felt unstable, truth was easier to question than to merely accept and cinema was a useful pry bar against the limits of mundane perception.” (Douramacos, 2015). Films with complex narratives bear in common the intention of playing with the nature of human perception and its limitations. Filmmakers find ways to create remote universes that implicitly or explicitly push the perception boundaries of time and space. Some characteristic traits of complex narratives will be discussed in further detail in relation to Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York (2008) and Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich (1999), where perception itself is included as an element of the story, creating metanarratives and levels of awareness like the geological layers of the earth. In postmodern complex narrative films, audiences are brought to suspension of disbelief and require being comfortable with the paradoxes or contradictions of how ideas unfold. In other words, the viewer is required to embrace surrealism and the absurd in order to enjoy the experience, and by doing so, to become a simple observer of these worlds rather than attempting to identify with them. There is something deeply rewarding about figuring out the mind games that films such as David Lynch’s Mullholand Drive or Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia cast upon their audiences. The viewer is led to pick up complex elements other than the characters and the storyline, these themselves being most of the time fragmented as well. This is opposed to offering a safe experience where no choices have to be made. By not watching a sealed and consistent creation, the viewer feels free of constraints. Spectators can get passionately involved in the worlds that the films create – they study the characters’ inner lives and back-stories and become experts in the minutiae of a scene, or adept at explaining the improbability of an event. (Elsaesser 2009:13) By the end of watching movies as such, one might feel terribly confused and frustrated, but mesmerised and blown away nonetheless. Charlie Kaufman talks in one of his interviews about how films should be a conversation, not a lecture. (Sciretta, 2008). Successful filmmakers in this ambit seek to give food for thought whilst still taking into consideration the necessity of intriguing their viewers and keeping their attention by creating mystery and finding a good balance in the information that is being delivered. If one places attention to detail in the mise-en-scène and cinematography, movies such as Holy Motors, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or Mr. Nobody are highly pleasurable in the simple grounds of contemplation. The innovative and engaging editing in Memento, master performances like Philip Seymour Hoffman’s in Synecdoche, New York or the lines of dialogue in Pulp Fiction can make the experience of the audience engaging however misleading the plots might be. This is not to say that the postmodernist era is the creator of movies as such; complex non-linear stories have been told throughout the history of cinema in the early surrealism of Luis Buñuel, Kurasawa’s forking path narrative in Rashomon (1950) or Fellini’s filmmaker fantasy in 8 ½ (1963). In Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, we are told right from the beginning that time is not to be taken linearly as it is told from the viewpoint of an unreliable narrator, Caden Cotard. In the opening scene of the film we are introduced to Caden’s family and routine. He wakes up to a radio narration that tells us it is the first day of fall. By the time he sits down to have breakfast, a rapid close up of a newspaper shows it is October 14th 2005, and then Caden has a line of dialogue where he realises the milk has expired on October 20th. The last close up of the newspaper reveals November 2nd as the radio narrator wishes audiences a Happy Halloween. In these 3:30 minutes of a morning scene, over a month has gone by. The fast close ups and blurry background references to dates and the passage of time are persistent throughout the whole film. Various interactions with characters show how his time perspective is discordant with the reality that surrounds him, and we also see him gradually growing old through the use of make up. This elastic compression of time and space can be observed in many other films such as Memento or Fight Club, where a protagonist suffering from a mental condition is the focal justification for the alteration in the perception of reality. In Being John Malkovich (1999), an absurdist Kafkaesque film written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Spike Jonze, the use of dialogue can be intentionally misleading. The central character Craig Schwartz, a confused man who, in the same way as Caden, dwells with existentialist doubts in relation to his life and identity, goes to a job interview in an office on the 7 ½ floor of a building, where the ceilings are half as tall and people are forced to bend over in order to walk. He has an absurd conversation with the secretary in the office, where she is illogically incapable of understanding any of the words that Craig says. “-Mr Juarez? -Yes? -Chess? -I said yes! -What do you suggest?” This mirrors the post-structuralist critical outlook of deconstruction that examines the nature of language and the conflict between text and meaning. Miscommunication in Synecdoche, New York is also a persistent theme. When his daughter Olive asks Caden what the marks on his face are, he explains the difference between sycosis and psychosis. When he talks about a boy’s suicide with his psychologist, there is a misunderstanding when she asks him “Why did you kill yourself?” and corrects herself, “I said, why would you?” An anonymous blogger makes a beautiful observation; she says we can’t bear the thought of words being meaningless screams into the wilderness in a desperate attempt to connect with another human being. The constant miscommunication in the film represents this lack of meaning. All we are really doing is trying to communicate with words that are not up to the task but we must believe that they are, as they are all we have. (Anon., 2013). Again in Synecdoche, New York, the perception of space gets completely distorted as the movie evolves. When Caden starts building a theatre set in a warehouse that replicates his neighbourhood in New York and actors who mimic his life, reality bleeds into fiction. When actress and lover Claire gives up on Caden and his play, she demands that he collects his stuff from the apartment, and he does so, but from the apartment of the theatre set. However, Kaufman plays with the fact that their reality in itself is a fiction as well, as they belong to the storyworld of the movie. The plot thickens further with the complications of Caden’s assistant and lover Hazel having a romance with his doppleganger Sammy and Caden sleeping with Hazel’s doppleganger Tammy. The fine line that separates performance from reality makes us doubt if emotions or relationships can be genuine. [Cinematic images] represent actors, sets, natural scenes, or whatever it was that projected or deflected light into the lens of the camera. By intention they represent fictional things and events. (…) The claim of presentness is part of a more general view about the nature of cinematic experience: that the viewer images himself within the space of the fictional events presented on screen, watching them as they occur. (Currie 1992:346). These metanarrative layers can also be observed in Being John Malkovich, where Craig as a puppeteer embodies himself in other selves, in first instances with his puppet and later leaping into John Malkovich’s mind through a mysterious portal he finds in his office. Right at the beginning of Synecdoche, New York, it might strike us as strange that Olive’s poop is green, but it is not until Hazel goes to the viewing of a house in flames and decides to buy it that we clearly grasp the surrealism of the film. From that point on, one can decide to embrace this fact or wrap up and leave. Surrealism is about presenting images that evoke irrational responses, often through metaphor or unlikely juxtaposition. (Podhoretz, 2008). These dreamlike scenarios, the overwhelming scale of the warehouse theatre set and the warehouses within it, his appearance in television adverts and cartoons and bizarre encounters with minor characters add surrealism to the film. Caden, terribly obsessed with his own death, only interprets what he wants to hear in his consultations with the doctors concerning his unjustified illnesses. His relationship with his psychologist and their encounter in the plane where she controls what Caden reads in the book written by her; Olive’s left behind diary where he reads her writings after she’s gone or his slow transformation into Adele’s cleaning lady, Ellen, are other elements that are introduced to complicate the plot and disorient the viewer. This gives a sense of drugged perception where the protagonist takes the viewer on a journey to the subconscious mind. This is more explicitly exposed in Being John Malkovich, where the journey is as literal as crossing a muddy tunnel into another person’s mind. The film, though more structured and straightforward, is also loaded with elements of surrealism that make the narrative uncanny and rather complex. When John Malkovich decides to enter the portal into his own mind, he encounters a dreamlike scenario where every person around him has his face and the only spoken or written word is ‘Malkovich’. The chase of Craig’s wife Lotte and Craig’s other love Maxine through Malkovich’s subconscious also gives insight into Freudian interpretations of dreams, the nature of relationships and the bizarre love triangle (perhaps square if one includes John Malkovich’s body) that represents the confrontation of the psyche where Craig plays the Id, Maxine the Ego and Lotte the Superego. In this territory, Kaufman and Jonze explore profound philosophical ideas mainly revolving around existentialism and the nature of the self. If we look closely into Craig’s puppet play ‘Dance of Despair and Dissolution’, we see the vicious circle of lack of acceptance and self-denial he leads himself to (Paulsberg, 2002). It exposes the truth of human experience and how this truth is strictly limited to the singular experience of every individual self. Now, if we take into consideration the meaning of the word ‘synecdoche’ (a figure of speech in which a part is made to represent the whole), one could argue that Caden’s fear of death and his brutal existentialist crisis speak for humanity as a whole. Movies with complex narratives take more than one viewing to grasp key concepts or get a sense of what they are about. However, the conclusion one arrives with them will be always be an absolute subjective truth. As Walter Chaw once phrased it, “I don’t understand Kaufman’s films, they seem to understand me.” (Chaw, 2012). Behind the apparent ‘mindfuck’, complex narratives refuse to guide and manipulate their audiences through conventions that fit genres, but rather choose to give food for thought by exposing universal truths of oneself. We watch movies to understand complex worlds that are not our own, and it is by watching other people’s dramas that we gain understanding of our own problems. When we contemplate universal fears such as loneliness or death, we find a big sense of relief by seeing that we are all in it together. In a deeper reflection, an anonymous blogger tells us we are all separate and alone and yet the same. Our identities bleed into one another – we are similar, we are different, we change. We are all leads in our own play but cannot accept others as leads too. We want to control a chaotic and bewildering universe with our own system of meaning. We all feel scared, alone, confused, and we are all searching for meaning and love and truth. Postmodernism is the method for communicating this existential terror. It gives us the theoretical framework to explore the universal human experience. (Anon., 2013). Bibliography Anon., 2013. The Value of Postmodernism. No, really. Available at: https://watchyourfingers.wordpress.com/2013/08/18/the-value-of-postmodernism-no-really/comment-page-1/#comment-1 Access date: 3 January 2016. Buckland, W., 2009. Introduction: Puzzle Plots. In: W. Buckland, ed. 2009. Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema. Singapore: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Chaw, W. Being John Malkovich (1999) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc. Available at: http://www.filmfreakcentral.net/ffc/2012/06/being-john-malkovich.html#more Access date: 9 January 2016. Currie, G. 1992. ‘McTaggart at the Movies’ in Philosophy, p.343-355. Cambridge University Press. Dancyger, K. & Rush, J. 2013. 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Quentin Tarantino. Miramax Films. 1994. Rashomon. Dir. Akira Kurosawa. Daiei Film Co., Ltd. 1950. Synecdoche, New York. Dir. Charlie Kaufman. Sony Pictures Classics. 2008. Un Chien Andalou. Dir. Luis Buñuel. Les Grands Films Classiques. 1929.