Buckland-Warren-Puzzle-Films-Complex-Storytelling-Contemporary-Cinema

The Screenplays of Charlie Kaufman 115from this “problem.” Kaufman, notably, over-uses both temporal titles aswell as voiceover narration in his script. Screenwriting guru Robert McKeepointedly chastises his character at one point to avoid voiceover narrationin screenplays, calling it “flaccid, sloppy writing” (p. 68). Is this an attemptto force the ambiguity of the iterative, from one form to another – and towhere it might not belong?Furthermore, the interpretation of the list of title-cards above satisfiesone temporal logic; the notion that in life events take time to fully develop.Thus the beginning of the story is 1993, and the end of the story is “now.”We might assume that the middle of the story, or its “core,” will be theintervening years, with perhaps a few flashbacks or flashforwards out ofand back into this territory. This recalls the “durative” tense – in whichpast events unfold somewhat slowly and continuously, matching roughlyto the imperfect verb tense in the Romance languages (Bal 1997, p. 93).Why, then, would title-cards be required? Indeed, the titles and theirseemingly random deployment work against and compete with such anintuitive reading. Now, instead, we fear we have missed something. Ourinternal chronometers are jarred whenever we see one of the five inter-titleswith the words “three years earlier/later” or “two years earlier” in them,in that we instantly want to assign specific years in order to have everythinglink together coherently. Furthermore, we reasonably assume, owingto the repeated invocation of such a specific quantity of time (two or threeyears), that the titles refer back to the same three years so that “three yearsearlier” cues us to 1995, “two years earlier” cues us to 1993, and “threeyears later” cues us back to 1998. Through this reading, we hypothesizethat all the titles – except for the “two years earlier” title – are global, andrefer to the “now” of 1998. If we use this logic, the temporal unfolding ofthe script reads as follows:1998 TITLE: ON THE SET OF “BEING JOHN MALKOVICH” SUMMER1998 (p. 1)TITLE: FOUR BILLION AND FORTY YEARS EARLIER (p. 3)1995 TITLE: NEW YORKER MAGAZINE, THREE YEARS EARLIER (p. 6)1993 TITLE: STATE ROAD 29, FLORIDA, TWO YEARS EARLIER (p. 6)1895 TITLE: ORINCO RIVER, ONE HUNDRED YEARS EARLIER (p. 14)1995 TITLE: FLORIDA, THREE YEARS EARLIER (p. 19)1859 TITLE: ENGLAND, ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY NINE YEARSEARLIER (p. 40)1986 TITLE: NORTH MIAMI NINE YEARS EARLIER (p. 44)1998 TITLE: THREE YEARS LATER (p. 63)1995 TITLE: FAKAHATCHEE THREE YEARS EARLIER (p. 79)]