Film Intuition
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| "Where Is My Mind?" Chaucer's "Unreliable Narrator" Goes Neo-Noir (The Usual Suspects, Fight Club and Memento) By Jen Johans |
*Note: Contains Plot Spoilers*
The idea of an unreliable narrator is fascinating literary device that seems to play best in
the noir realm as film manages to trick viewers like no other medium and having an old-
style narration that ends up misleading audiences is quite a unique piece of
craftsmanship. When I researched the unreliable narrator online, I found that it
originated in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales— and since that book, writers have been using
false tricksters to guide readers and viewers with tales of increasing complexity and
danger.
Probably the most famous work of unreliable narration of the 90’s was Bryan Singer’s
masterful film, The Usual Suspects. I remember first reading about the film when I was
just fourteen, discovering the movies being debuted at the Sundance Film Festival. I’d
always been a fan of Kevin Spacey, who up until that point had had bit parts in a number of
films, most prominently in Glengarry Glen Ross. After seeing a few trailers on television
and building up great anticipation, I had to wait months for it to be released in Minnesota
and finally it opened at a movie theatre far from my home. I conned my big brother into
attending (telling him it was simply a crime film instead of an “independent” one) and my
parents grudgingly drove us the 45 minutes out to see it.
The movie was a whirlwind of wit, intellect and dazzling performances—I became the
biggest advocate for Spacey and thrilled when he took home the Oscar (screenwriter
Christopher McQuarrie had written the film solely for him) and as an advocate of
disability rights, loved the way Spacey’s character Verbal Kint played on the stereotypes
people have in pulling the wool over police officer David Kujan’s eyes (Chaz Palminteri).
Palminteri was the third choice for the role of Kujan—actors Robert De Niro, Christopher
Walken and Al Pacino all turned down the part (since then, IMDb reports that it is the role
Pacino regrets most not having played). Initially, the idea for the film came from
imagining a film poster of five men in a lineup—taking the name from a line from
Casablanca, McQuarrie wrote most of the screenplay at work, dreaming up the plot the
same way Verbal Kint does in front of a Quartet note board at the solicitor’s office where he
worked. The film’s ending is a genuine puzzle and the last three minutes alone should be
shown to editing students in their first class—it is using cinema simply to amaze and there’
s a near-rush felt by the audience as we learn what really has transpired. Actor Gabriel
Byrne told IMDb that he originally thought he was the criminal mastermind, Keyser Soze
until he saw the work at a film festival. Soze, inspired by the murderer John List who
killed his family and disappeared for seventeen years was originally named Sume after a
former boss of McQuarrie but after reading the screenplay, Sume told the writer that he
didn’t want his name associated with an “inherently evil villain” so it was changed
(IMDb). All in all, the film warrants a second viewing and in doing so, some critics found
that the mystery doesn’t hold up (since essentially it’s a magician like work, pulling the
wool over your eyes and concocting a monster plot where there never was one). However,
movie buffs and fans of great acting and writing have turned this into one of the 90’s most
referenced crime films and it’s still a personal favorite of mine—most notably for Spacey
who’s so good, I imagine I’d pay the price of admission just to see him read a cookbook.
Spacey followed up Soze with another neo-noir for director David Fincher with Seven, an
intelligent but downright disgusting thriller that I felt sickened trying to view as the
morally bankrupt plot left nothing to the imagination and had no purpose other than to
horrify. Ironically, most fans called Fincher’s follow-up Fight Club even more disturbing
and while it definitely was a chore to sit through, the film was also brilliant, darkly comic
and impossible to forget. More an assault on our commercial society and late 90’s
generation than a film about a bunch of guys just wailing on each other, (as some critics
simply dismissed it)—audiences seemed to misunderstand the purpose, completely
missing that that the film is an allegory in the way that Peter Greenaway’s intensely sexual
and over-the-top The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover was a response film to
England’s monarchy in the 80’s. Based by the novel by Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club also
calls up allusions to The Graduate and the works of Nietzche.
Fight Club follows our narrator (Edward Norton in a role never given a name other than
“Jack” in an ironic joke) as his homeostasis is altered when his condo full of Ikea
purchased possessions blows up, forcing him to face his life and realize that he’s missing
something vital. Insomniac and dispassionate in his job as an insurance calculator for an
automotive company, he takes to attending support groups for diseases he doesn’t have—
anxious to simply feel and connect with strangers for a brief period. It helps him
temporarily until he meets Tyler Durden (over-the-top and perfect, Brad Pitt who’s worked
before with Fincher in Seven)—a loose cannon with whom he co-creates a “fight club”
where men can work out their aggression on one another until this leads to acts of
homegrown terrorism. It's quite homoerotic as most women noticed, much to some male
viewers’s chagrin… and yes, a few years ago the author finally outed himself. I’ve never
read the book by Chuck Palahniuk and know that, from research, the ending varies greatly
from his original plot. However, the author is quoted on Wikipedia Online Encyclopedia
saying that he prefers the film’s ending to his own. Jim Uhl’s script echoed the tone of the
book as Uhls himself put it, “a seminal statement of the times, a statement about this
particular generation, much in the same way the 60’s were captured in the better films of
that decade,” (Fight Club production notes). The film perfectly captured Palahniuk’s
beliefs on the power of culture:
- The first way in which a new generation takes control of society is through
the culture; the arts, films, books, music. Through all entertainment.
People who feel safe and secure in the existing society are frightened by
ideas that threaten their power. People who hold the power in society want
nice complacent forms of entertainment, films that comfort people and
support the status quo. (DVD Booklet)
visuals and juxtaposition of shots are quite novel—producer Laura Ziskin (yes, only a
female producer would touch it) really helped keep this labor of love on track by giving
unprecedented power to Fincher. In doing so, former music video director Fincher (he
helmed some of Madonna’s better videos) shot more than three times the normal amount
of film reels (IMDb). The film’s huge narrative shock and switch revealing our unreliable
narrator was quite surprising in the first viewing but after one goes through the film again,
one notices what a clever craftsman Fincher and his editor were as there are so many clues
littered throughout the movie (on several levels of intellect to hit each part of the brain
visually, in a literary fashion etc.). For example, one I just learned during my research was
regarding the term “paper street” which is the street the two men live on in Fight Club.
According to IMDb, a paper street refers to a “street that has been planned by city
engineers but has yet to be constructed.” A source of invention by someone who invents… I
kick myself for not knowing my architectural terms. Actually, there’s a list of clues
available for the film online at Wikipedia Online Encyclopedia. Although it’s filmed in
L.A., the setting of the work was always Wilmington, Delaware but predictably and with
justification, the city officials were worried about duplicate attacks witnessed onscreen so
the setting is anonymous, giving viewers a more terrifying experience as we see that it
could occur anywhere. Harry Knowles from Ain’t-It-Cool-News online described it best:
- It forces you to have dangerous thoughts, confront them as you would any
problem before you and expects you as a reasonable human being to come
out with the right answers… If you leave this movie afraid that this could
happen here, GOOD. YOU SHOULD BE AFRAID. That is the whole point. To
scare you. To make you not want to be a space monkey. Another mindless,
thoughtless follower. Another brick in the wall. A goosestepper. A fool.
Suddenly a film about a generation without direction, without “great wars” or purpose who
resort to terrorism from consumer slavery became a bit too hard to handle as in a scene
where Norton’s character prays for a plane crash and at the end when buildings come
tumbling down. It only had two years there (released in ’99) when the film fit in with its
time but following 9/11, everything changed and suddenly the film feels like a period
piece. I hadn’t seen the film since before the attacks and admittedly watching it now felt
pretty eerie but again, I was able to view it simply as a film, a work meant to inspire
thought and take it on that level (the way I’ll now have to watch Seinfeld and Kramer in
general as a show and character and remove Michael Richard’s bigoted opinions from the
work of art itself). While some critics—and with reason—call the work simply dangerous
and some young men did indeed go out and start up their own fight clubs (missing the
point of the work), I definitely encourage viewers to approach it with their “thinking caps
on” (as we said in grade school)—it’s easy to merely want to switch it off without giving it a
second thought but fight against the instinct. The film is like Spike Lee’s Do The Right
Thing, which many people felt would incite riots (and was blamed for the misfortune of
being released before Rodney King)—a brilliant work that should incite thought, not
violence and it’s sad that critics don’t give American audiences more respect and let the
few who may let media do their thinking for them, give the millions of other intelligent
viewers a bad name. As the production notes for the film read (and admirably, they show
all sides to the work), there is “more violence in the first 10 minutes of Saving Private Ryan
than if you watched Fight Club for an entire year.” Author Bret Easton Ellis wrote this
analysis for “Gear Magazine:”
- Fight Club rages against the hypocrisy of a society that continually promises
us the impossible: fame, beauty, wealth, immortality, life without pain. Now
it all comes together with Fight Club, a relentless, dizzying take on the male
fear of losing power that’s a wild, orgiastic pop masterpiece.
More than either of the previous films, Christopher Nolan’s brilliant feature Memento
demands audiences to view it a second time to clarify the mystery rather than simply
entertain. Andy Klein wrote the following in his analysis of the mysteries entwined within
the film:
- [Memento’s] puzzles are so intriguing and so impenetrable at first viewing
that filmgoers are almost forced to go back for a second look if they want to
figure out just what the hell was going on. Memento is like The Sixth Sense
and The Usual Suspects in that nearly every scene takes on a different
meaning once you know where the film is going. Or should that be "where
the film has been"? Unlike The Sixth Sense and The Usual Suspects --
indeed, unlike almost every other celebrated "puzzle film" in cinematic
history -- Memento's puzzle can't be undone with a simple declarative
explanatory sentence. Its riddles are tangled up in a dizzying series of ways:
by an elegant but brain-knotting structure; by an exceedingly unreliable
narrator through part of the film; by a postmodern self-referentiality that,
unlike most empty examples of the form, thoroughly underscores the film's
sobering thematic meditations on memory, knowledge and grief; and by a
number of red herrings and misleading clues that seem designed either to
distract the audience or to hint at a deeper, second layer of puzzle at work --
or that may, on the other the other hand, simply suggest that, in some
respects, the director bit off more than he could chew. (Salon)
Christopher’s film was inspired by his brother Jonathan’s story “Memento Mori,” which
was plotted just prior to the film as the two brothers drove cross-country chatting and then
began simultaneous work on their Memento puzzles.
The film version of Memento stars Guy Pearce (no stranger to noir, having previously
starred in L.A. Confidential) as a former insurance investigator, who following an injury
received while interrupting the rape and murder of his wife, has suffered severe brain
trauma and anterograde amnesia. Leonard is unable to process new memories following
the horrible murder and finds he “resets” like a VCR counter every ten to fifteen minutes as
he goes on the hunt to get revenge and track down the perpetrator. While his brother
Jonathan’s story makes a stellar companion piece to the film, it’s also vague, confusing,
highly literary and melancholy but nonetheless remains as one of the best portrayals of
disability ever produced in short fiction. While the style of Christopher’s film is most
definitely noir, Jonathan is psychological, introspective and helps give a more intimate
study of the man’s condition. However, when the two collaborated on the final thoughts
for the film’s structure, they realized that third-person would be the best bet (The Onion).
Christopher Nolan took the clever idea of a fractured narrative and nonlinear
structure/chronology first flirted with in Following (a brilliant find for film buffs) and
crafted one of the very best films of the neo-noir genre with his follow-up Memento. In
Adaptations, Stephanie Harrison quotes Nolan as saying that he wanted to “create an
experience that doesn’t feed into your head, that bleeds around the edges,” (420). He
definitely achieved his goal, as the structure of the film is one of the bravest and most
unique pieces of editing and storytelling to be seen on the silver screen in years. The film
follows two trains of thought—the first in color is shown in reverse chronological order and
the second interrupts each “reset” with a black-and-white telephone conversation that
goes along chronologically. At the end (or the beginning), the two merge-- it sounds
wonderfully complicated and it is for the first twenty minutes or so but if you just go with
it, you’ll find it begins to flow nicely. In fact, it even passed the litmus test of the fussy,
snobbish but brilliant A.O. Scott of The New York Times when he called the film an
"existential crossword puzzle that folds "straightforward events and simple motives into
Möbius strips of paradox and indeterminacy.” Christopher Nolan shared the genesis of this
idea in his interview online with The Onion:
- …the structure of the film was from the process of sitting and thinking about
how you put the audience into the position of somebody who doesn't know
what's just happened. I finally came up with the answer: "Well, you don't
tell them what's just happened, you tell them what's going to happen, and
tell the story backwards, and that way you remove the information from the
audience that's not available to the character, and that helps you get into
his condition.”
Like David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, there are several websites dedicated to solving the
mystery and possible plot holes (including wondering how Leonard could remember he
has short term memory loss if he has short term memory loss) in Memento and Salon.com
has one of the best, as referenced earlier. As Nolan told The Onion regarding his love of
noir storytelling, “the genre is really all about not knowing what's going on around you,
and that fear of the unknown. The only way to do that effectively is to really get into the
maze, rather than look at the maze from above, so that's where I sort of come at it.” This
being said, Memento is a maze in which it’s definitely worth getting lost.
(c) Jen Johans. filmintuition.com
