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

20 Thomas Elsaessersituations, and improbable events. Audiences, for instance, felt cheatedby a film like The Usual Suspects (1995), because it involved not only anunreliable narrator, Keyser, but also a mendacious point-of-view shot,implying the presence of a witness in a crucial scene, when there was none.Bona fide mind-game films by contrast maintain a basic consistency andself-consistency or they enact the very condition their hero suffers from, inthe structure of the film itself, as in Memento, where the film, as it were, wipesout its own memory, by being told in short segments that precede eachother, rather than follow each other. Films such as The Matrix, Donnie Darko,and Fight Club present their parallel worlds without marking them off asdifferent by superimposition, soft focus, or any of the other conventionalmeans by which films indicate switches of register or reference. The questionthen becomes: do the films “lie,” or is it the very opposition oftruth and lie, between the actual and the virtual, the subjective and theobjective, that is at stake? The disorientation of the spectator extendsto the reality-status of what was being shown, and unlike other forms ofdeception, illusionism, and make-believe, the mind-game film does notinvolve a matter of ocular (mis-)perception, nor does it have to do withperspectivism; it is neither a matter of the human eye missing something(such as the body in Antonioni’s Blow Up [1966], which is then revealedvia the mechanical camera), nor are we presented with several versions ofthe same event, as in Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950).Film scholars who have turned to narratology to explain these filmscan point to precursors of the complex storytelling mode and of multiplepoint-of-view narration, such as Bergman’s Persona (1966), the unreliablenarration from Hitchcock’s Stage Fright (1950), with its “lying” flashback,Fritz Lang’s Woman in the Window (1944) and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt(1956), or Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima mon amour (1959) and Last Year inMarienbad (1961), not to mention Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941) andF for Fake (1974) or almost the entire oeuvre of Luis Buñuel, mind-gameplayer par excellence, who needed to invoke neither external agents noraberrant psychology to persuade the audience of multiple universes,held together by chance and contingency, between which characters mayswitch on a mere whim or when perceiving a seemingly banal object.In literature, too, there is no shortage of precursors: Boccaccio, Cervantes,Lawrence Sterne, tracing a line to Chesterton, Borges, Gide, Nabokov, andCalvino (each one a master of the shaggy dog story of mutual/multipleembeddedness), as well as the classic modernists from Flaubert to Proust,Virgina Woolf, and Joyce, or Conrad, Mann, and Faulkner.