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

84 Daniel Barrattplausible that this skepticism is due to the fact that we have a tendency tooverestimate the number of scenes in which Malcolm appears in the sameframe as either Lynn or Anna – thereby overestimating the opportunitiesfor narrative contradiction – and that we falsely recall, say, (two-way) conversationsbetween Malcolm and either Lynn or Anna which do not actuallytake place. It is partly this skepticism which prompts a second viewing.In conclusion, Cole states that the dead people who haunt him“only see what they want to see.” I would suggest that when we watch TheSixth Sense for the first time, we only see what we have been “primed”to see. Conversely, by the time we watch the film a second time round,the proposition that “Malcolm might be dead” has been solidified into afact: we have had a chance to commit this fact to long-term memory andto incorporate it into our narrative (re)construction. In short, we have been“primed” to see the film in a new light.The original version of this chapter was presented at the third conferencefor the Center for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image, University ofPécs, Hungary, May 2001. An abridged version was presented at theannual Screen conference, University of Glasgow, June 2002. Thanks toMurray Smith and Edward Branigan for their comments.Notes1 Interviewed in the DVD Bonus Feature “Rules and Clues.”2 According to Eitzen’s “parallel processing model of selective attention,”automatic processing is analogous to peripheral vision on the grounds that itis unlimited, parallel, and largely beyond conscious control.3 The use of the term “twist blindness” is partly inspired by an astonishing defectof our attention system known as change blindness – an inability to detect visualchanges to filmic and real-world scenes that are obvious to viewers who knowthat they are going to happen (Levin and Simons 1997; Simons and Levin 1998).One of the main implications of change blindness is that we do not store detailedrepresentations of our visual world in memory from one moment to the next:rather, the filmic or real-world scene serves as an “external memory store” forthe specific details; we only tend to pick up and retain abstract, schematic information(Simons 2000).4 In the field of film studies, Bordwell (1992, p. 194) discusses comprehensionand memory in relation to a first-time viewing of Michael Curtiz’s Mildred Pierce(1945), arguing that the film’s flashback of the murder scene exploits the