Narrative Instability : Destabilizing Identities, Realities, and Textualities in Contemporary American Popular Culture 9783825346843

Citation preview

stefan schubert

Narrative Instability

schubert · Narrative Instability

T

schubert

Destabilizing Identities, Realities, and Textualities in Contemporary American Popular Culture

American Studies  ★  A Monograph Series  Narrative Instability

  his book introduces the concept of ‘narrative   instability’ in order to make visible a new trend in contemporary US popular culture, to analyze this trend’s poetics, and to scrutinize its textual politics. It identifies those texts as narratively unstable that consciously frustrate and obfuscate the process of narrative understanding and comprehension, challenging their audiences to reconstruct what happened in a text’s plot, who its characters are, which of its diegetic worlds are real, or how narrative information is communicated in the first place. Despite—or rather, exactly because of—their confusing and destabilizing tendencies, such texts have attained mainstream commercial popularity in recent years across a variety of media, most prominently in films, video games, and television series. Focusing on three clusters of instability that form around identities, realities, and textualities, the book argues that narratively unstable texts encourage their audiences to engage with the narrative constructedness of their universes, that narrative instability embodies a new facet of popular culture, that it takes place and can only be understood transmedially, and that its textual politics particularly speak to white male middle-class Americans.

Volume 305

Universitätsverlag

isbn 978-3-8253-4684-3

win t e r

Heidelberg

american studies – a monograph series Volume 305 Edited on behalf of the German Association for American Studies by

alfred hornung anke ortlepp heike paul

stefan schubert

Narrative Instability Destabilizing Identities, Realities, and Textualities in Contemporary American Popular Culture

Universitätsverlag

winter

Heidelberg

Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar.

isbn 978-3-8253-4684-3 Dieses Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Das gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen. © 2019 Universitätsverlag Winter GmbH Heidelberg Imprimé en Allemagne · Printed in Germany Druck: Memminger MedienCentrum, 87700 Memmingen Gedruckt auf umweltfreundlichem, chlorfrei gebleichtem und alterungsbeständigem Papier. Den Verlag erreichen Sie im Internet unter: www.winter-verlag.de

Contents

Acknowledgments 1 Introduction: Popularizing Instability 1.1 Methodology and Interdisciplinary Impulses 1.2 The Structure of This Book 2 Introducing Narrative Instability 2.1 Conceptualizing and Theorizing Narrative Instability 2.1.1 Previous Research 2.1.2 Narrative Instability as a Concept 2.1.3 Play and Transmediality: Instability Across Media 2.2 Contextualizing and Historicizing Narrative Instability: Why Instability Now? 2.2.1 Approaching the Contemporary Moment 2.2.2 Popularity and Popular Culture 2.2.3 American Culture and Society in the Contemporary Moment 2.2.4 Clusters of Instability: Identities, Realities, and Textualities 3 Unstable Identities 3.1 Introduction 3.2 Narrating Unstable Identities 3.2.1 General Characteristics: Fight Club 3.2.2 Identity, Twists, and Pleasure 3.3 BioShock 3.3.1 Twisting the Storyworld: Narrative Instability 3.3.2 Identity: Rapture, Objectivism, and Class 3.3.3 Self-Awareness, Reception, and Pleasure 3.4 Black Swan 3.4.1 Nina’s Swan Dive: Narrative Instability 3.4.2 Constructions of Femininity 3.4.3 Intertextuality, Metatextuality, and Performances 3.5 Conclusion

vii 9 13 17 19 19 19 26 31 39 40 43 46 52 55 55 57 59 61 68 71 80 91 101 103 110 119 125

Table of Contents

4 Unstable Realities

vi

127

4.1 Introduction 127 4.2 Narrating Unstable Realities 129 4.2.1 General Characteristics: Interstellar 130 4.2.2 Reality, Space/Time, and Popularization 134 4.3 Inception 143 4.3.1 “It’s Never Just a Dream”: Narrative Instability 146 4.3.2 “The Dream Has Become Their Reality”: Reality and Realities 152 4.3.3 Popularization and Metatextuality 160 4.4 BioShock Infinite 170 4.4.1 “A World of Difference between What We See and What Is”: Narrative Instability 172 4.4.2 Reality and Realities—History and Histories 180 4.4.3 Breaking the Circle: Unstable Realities, Popularization, and Metatextuality 190 4.5 Conclusion 199 5 Unstable Textualities 5.1 Introduction 5.2 Narrating Unstable Textualities 5.2.1 General Characteristics: The Stanley Parable 5.2.2 (Meta)Textuality, Self-Reflexivity, and Genre 5.3 Alan Wake 5.3.1 A Multiplicity of Voices: Narrative Instability 5.3.2 Omnipresent Textualities 5.3.3 “There Can Be No Explanation”: Genre and Media Reflexivity 5.4 Westworld 5.4.1 “This Whole World Is a Story”: Narrative Instability 5.4.2 Textual Politics: Narratives of Race and Gender 5.4.3 “The Stories Are Best Left to the Guests”: Genre, Play, and Metatextuality 5.5 Conclusion

201 201 203 204 206 211 213 221 230 238 240 249 258 268

6 Conclusion: Future Instabilities?

269

Works Cited

275

Acknowledgments After years of researching, looking for, and writing about instabilities of all kinds and forms, I am deeply thankful to those that have ensured my own personal and intellectual stability throughout all this time. This book project, which is based on my dissertation completed in 2018, would not have been possible without a number of people supporting it, and I can only hope that these brief lines of appreciation can begin to acknowledge how grateful I am to them. First and foremost, I want to thank my dissertation advisers. It is only thanks to Anne Koenen that I considered pursuing a PhD in the first place —more than a decade ago, listening to her lectures made me realize that there is a place in academia for the proper study of popular culture. Later, I was grateful that she took me in as a PhD student, and for the wonderful experiences of working for her—which always felt like working together. Throughout the past years, I could not have asked for a better Doktormutter (in all senses of the word). She has been unwavering in her support of my academic endeavors, and this study has immensely profited from her vast depth and breadth of knowledge. I want to thank her for her honest opinions and advice about all matters related to this project and beyond, for the many helpful suggestions for improvement, for the insightful (and very entertaining) talks and discussions, and for her friendship over the years. I also want to thank Katja Kanzler for her invaluable advice throughout this process, particularly in the last few years. She has been an enormously attentive and accurate reader, whose suggestions have helped to sharpen the contours of this project. To problems that at times seemed colossal and insurmountable to me, she always offered specific, helpful, and programmatic solutions, with a keen eye for larger contexts and questions. Her teachings (both in the seminar room and outside) have accompanied me for more than a decade now. My sincere thanks go to both of them, for their support and for believing in the merit of this project—it would not have been possible without them advising me so well. I am equally certain that I could not have finished this study without the support of the larger scholarly community at American Studies Leipzig. I particularly want to thank Sebastian Herrmann for his guidance and friendship throughout the years, for his critical eye, his sharp advice, the rigor and the precision with which he tackles problems, and for the many thoughtful and thought-provoking discussions. He has been indispensable for the growth of this project, and of myself as an academic, on a myriad of levels (likely more than I am aware of). I also want to thank Florian Bast for his friendship and advice, particularly in the earlier years of this project. I learned a lot from him about being a scholar and working at a university, and about the importance of critically reflecting on and productively questioning one’s own procedures. I specifically want to thank the two of them together for their mentorship throughout the years.

Acknowledgments

viii

I have also been proud to call the Institute for American Studies at Leipzig University my academic home for such a long time, and I want to thank my colleagues for making it so enjoyable—and easy—to work with them. As representatives of all the people who have shaped the institute into what it is today, I especially want to thank, in addition to the people already mentioned, Crister S. Garrett, Gabriele Pisarz-Ramirez, Katja Schmieder, and Tobias Schlobach for the congenial atmosphere they have established. Even more specifically, the doctoral colloquium at ASL has been imperative in providing this project with regular advice, with directions for further thinking, with critical questions and suggestions, and with the motivation needed to continue writing, both in many hour-long colloquium sessions and in more concerted meetings, closer to the beach. I am truly grateful for all the time and energy that others have invested in thinking about my project. Many people have been involved in the colloquium over the years, but as representatives, I want to thank particularly Sebastian Herrmann, Florian Bast, Frank Usbeck, Claudia Müller, and Eleonora Ravizza for their critical minds and their attention to detail. I have also profited considerably from two more scholarly environments, the projects and the publication surrounding The Poetics of Politics and the DFG research network Narrative Liminality, the work on both of which—and, especially, the exchange of ideas as part of them—has informed my thinking in very productive ways. In addition, my thanks go to the series editors of American Studies – A Monograph Series, Alfred Hornung, Anke Ortlepp, and Heike Paul, for their careful review, as well as to Andreas Barth at Universitätsverlag Winter. Lastly, I want to thank my family and friends for their support throughout the years, emotional and otherwise. My biggest thanks are due to my parents, who have always believed in the things I pursued and have enabled and supported me in countless ways, far too many to mention here. I also want to thank my brother, not least for the early appreciation of all kinds of popular culture that he instilled in me. Finally, none of this would have been possible without the love and support from Ele—I want to thank her for her kindness, her patience about the project, the fun and joy she brings to my life, and for, quite miraculously, simply making everything better. Leipzig, July 2019

1 Introduction: Popularizing Instability From the beginning, [literary postmodernism’s] primary home was the university, a status that explains [...] why metafiction in particular was often said to be fiction “of the academy, by the academy, and for the academy.” (Rebein 6) [T]hrough the Reagan years and to the present, [postmodern fiction’s experiments with form] have been greeted with an increasingly testy impatience: Why can’t these authors put aside their postmodern games, their annoying stylistic tricks [...]? (McLaughlin, “Post-Postmodernism” 212) *** [O]ne overriding common feature of mind-game films is a delight in disorienting or misleading spectators [...]. Another feature is that spectators on the whole do not mind being ‘played with’: on the contrary, they rise to the challenge. (Elsaesser 15) Some of the directors may be just playing with us [...] [b]ut others may be trying to jolt us into a new understanding of art, or even a new understanding of life. [...] Are moviegoers bringing some new sensibility to these riddling movies? What are we getting out of the overloading, the dislocations and disruptions? (Denby 80)

The above sets of accounts peddle two divergent narratives about the contemporary moment, about fiction and its audiences: One portrays the contemporary as marked by a break with postmodernism and an end of formal experimentation, the other rather highlights a kind of ‘hyper-postmodernism’ (cf. Nealon x) of the contemporary, where the self-reflexive experiments typically associated with postmodern novels have spread to a variety of other media, most prominently film. While, of course, these accounts discuss different media—novels and films—they lay claim to similar audiences, the contemporary reading and viewing public.1 On the one hand, Robert Rebein and Robert L. McLaughlin, writing about American fiction ‘after postmodernism,’ dismiss postmodern novels of the 1960s and 1970s as having never reached mainstream popularity because of their formal experiments, “their annoying stylistic tricks,” and they argue that contemporary novels are characterized less by experimentation and more by a return to realism. On the other hand, Thomas Elsaesser, in an essay on ‘mindgame films,’ and David Denby, writing about the ‘new disorder’ in US films, notice a growing tendency of contemporary films to “[disorient]” and “[mis1

As I will outline below, contemporary audiences of fiction can hardly be neatly differentiated anymore according to the different media they consume (if they ever could); instead, these media converge with each other and are ‘consumed’ by audiences transmedially (cf. Jenkins, Convergence).

10

Narrative Instability

lead]” their viewers, and they emphasize how popular such films are with audiences—precisely because of the formal experiments that lead to such “dislocations and disruptions.” Taken together, these accounts present an argument that the experimental techniques used in ‘high,’ ‘avant-garde’ postmodernism by authors like John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, or Donald Barthelme led to their novels largely being ignored by nonacademic readers, failing to reach any mainstream popularity—yet that it is exactly the same techniques that, when used in films since the 1990s, such as Fight Club (1999), The Sixth Sense (1999), or Memento (2000), turned these texts into popular blockbuster successes.2 Intervening into such debates, this study introduces the concept of narrative instability to analyze these developments in contemporary US popular culture, a concept that better grasps what the discussions about the contemporary moment throw into relief and that reconciles this apparent contradiction. With narrative instability, as I will outline in more detail in chapter 2, I propose to analyze texts that consciously frustrate and obfuscate the process of narrative understanding and comprehension, challenging their audiences to piece together what exactly happened in a text’s plot, who the characters really are, which of the diegetic worlds is real, or how narrative information is received in the first place. The diversity of narrative instability ranges from so-called ‘twist films,’ like The Sixth Sense, in which the ending reveals that the protagonist has actually been dead for the majority of the film, to texts such as Twelve Monkeys (1995) or Looper (2012), which trap their characters in linear time loops, and to video games like The Stanley Parable (2013) or films like Stranger Than Fiction (2006), featuring characters who hear voices in their heads that narrate their every move. Throughout this book, developing this new concept of narrative instability allows me to argue that these texts encourage their audiences to engage with the narrative constructedness of their universes, that narrative instability embodies a new facet of popular culture, that it takes place and can only be understood transmedially, and that its textual politics particularly speak to white male middle-class Americans—lines of argumentation that I will outline in more detail below. Other concepts and terms have been suggested to focus on similar aspects of contemporary popular culture—Elsaesser’s ‘mindgame films’ and Denby’s ‘new disorder’ are just two of many—yet I argue that introducing 2

This seeming contradiction arises in the fusion of contemporary scholarly debates that, often, do not speak to each other, instead adhering to their own distinct media. Yet it is also a discussion held beyond academia, as Denby’s piece, appearing in a 2007 issue of the New Yorker, exemplifies, one that nowadays spills over to fan discussions on social media and Internet forums, where many of these films are popularly discussed—a far cry from positing such fictional texts as “of the academy, by the academy, and for the academy” (Rebein 6). In turn, contemporary US popular culture inserts itself into these public and academic discussions about the cultural value and the social functions of literature and popular culture.

1 Introduction: Popularizing Instability

11

narrative instability is necessary to be able to properly delineate and analyze the textual and cultural phenomenon I identify in this book. While I will examine the shortcomings of existing scholarship below (cf. 2.1.1), one of the most important distinctions concerns my conception of narrative instability as an inherently transmedial trend, occurring simultaneously in different media and, significantly, through connections and influences between them. Many of the discursive techniques to implement instability hail from postmodern novels of the 1960s and ’70s, but they attained mainstream popularity when they began to be more frequently featured in films starting in the late 1990s. Furthermore, as I will demonstrate, during the 2000s, their popularity in film has in turn led to a number of other media engaging in narrative instability as well, most prominently video games (and increasingly also television). Throughout this book, I will explore this transmedial link between unstable texts and investigate how media traditionally known for their narrative prowess (such as film) tap into forms of play(ing) more commonly associated with (video) games. The often metaphorical use of ‘play’ appears frequently throughout the debates surrounding these questions: While McLaughlin complains about “postmodern games,” both Elsaesser and Denby attempt to understand the peculiarities of the films they analyze by (more positively) suggesting that they are “playing with” their audiences. The readiness with which references to games are used in these contexts points to the centrality of elements of play in contemporary culture, and consequently, part of this book’s project will also be to more thoroughly chart how narrative instability is ‘playing’ with us. I conceive of narrative instability as a trend within contemporary US popular culture, one that has not been identified as such—partly since it occurs across different media, making it more difficult to be recognized in monomedial studies.3 Significantly, it is a trend characterized by immense mainstream popularity and commercial success, with films like The Sixth Sense or Interstellar (2014) grossing over 600 million dollars, establishing their status as pop-cultural artifacts instead of as “fiction[s] of the academy” (Rebein 6), and with many unstable texts having entered the pop-cultural repertoire. As such, a central concern of this study will be to probe into the popular pleasures narratively unstable texts exude, also implied by Elsaesser’s reference to “delight” and Denby’s focus on how these texts “jolt” their audiences. Essentially, these different vocabularies are 3

In contrast to many of the previously mentioned debates’ implicit assumptions, I do not intend to insinuate a monocausal or homogenizing progression within the contemporary moment. Many of the scholarly contexts describing the current moment as ‘post-postmodern’—positions from which Rebein and McLaughlin also write— seem to imply a monolithic understanding of postmodernism, displaying a “desire to be done with postmodernism” (J. Green 24) and proposing a new, equally homogeneous paradigm to replace it. I investigate this tendency among post-postmodern scholarship in more detail in section 2.2.1.

12

Narrative Instability

used for similar questions and phenomena—issues that I will bring together under the common rubric of instability, ultimately suggesting avenues for answering Denby’s question of what audiences “are [...] getting out of the overloading, the dislocations and disruptions” (80) engendered by narrative instability. Throughout this book, my central argument is that narrative instability functions as a site for contemporary audiences to interrogate the narrative constructedness of fictional texts and, in turn, of their own lived reality. That is to say, narrative instability leads to a confusion of the storyworld that does not, ultimately, frustrate audiences but that activates them. The instability in these texts does not necessarily culminate in a crisis; instead, the texts recognize that crises engendered by instability can be used to resolve matters—an embrace of complexity and ambivalence rather than of simplicity and binarisms. As such, narratively unstable texts allow audiences to see (and investigate themselves) how narratives work and how they use their formal elements to create meaning, particularly relating to questions of identity, reality, and textuality. As a second line of argumentation, I contend that the commercial and critical success of narrative instability speaks to a new facet of popularity, casting contemporary audiences as craving this complexity and the questioning of straightforward, linear narratives—pleasures that are traditionally associated only with high-culture texts. Such a shift can be read as part of a larger ‘postmodernization’ of society (beyond academia), where developments encapsulated in W. B. Yeats’s famous line that “[t]hings fall apart; the centre cannot hold” (158) do not lead, as in modernist imaginations, to panic or crisis but where the center being questioned and not able to “hold” is a welcome development, deconstructing (both formal and political) master narratives. Third, I argue that one needs to understand this cultural trend as being driven by (trans)medial change, by a public that consumes a variety of media and by media that are aware of and influence each other. It is mainly the effects of notions of play, centrally occurring in video games, that propel such changes in other media, with play distinctly embracing nonlinearity and the potential for agency, for active engagements with texts. In this way, instability serves as an intermedial bridge, fostering a new kind of ‘ludic’ textuality. Finally, next to this interest in the poetics of instability, its ‘politics’ speak particularly to white male middle-class Americans. The textual politics of my corpus become complicated as many narratively unstable texts pursue ostensibly progressive projects but, beneath their textual surface, often end up reaffirming the normative power of white masculinity and sidelining minority voices. This potential ambivalence and polysemy of meanings, in fact, might also explain part of instability’s popularity, outwardly speaking to a large implied audience—but, as my analysis will show, actually frequently upholding the dominant ideology rather than questioning it. Together, these different lines of inquiry conceptualize narrative instability as a trend illuminating an especially popular and dynamic part of contemporary American culture, pro-

1 Introduction: Popularizing Instability

13

viding audiences with the means to conceive and (de)construct the narrativity of their own reality as well.

1.1 Methodology and Interdisciplinary Impulses My project locates itself firmly in American studies, and within this field of study, more specifically in American literary and cultural studies. 4 It is mainly from cultural studies that I extract a broad conception of texts as encompassing a variety of different genres and media, defining a text more generally as “any organized set of discourses (and meanings)” (J. Lewis 403) and as “a signifying construct of potential meanings operating on a number of levels” (Fiske, Reading 34). My central focus on the symbolic form of narrative is equally informed by more recent scholarly work on the concept of narrativity, which emphasizes the narrative qualities or properties that a text can have rather than a formal definition, a distinction between “possessing narrativity” and “being a narrative” (Ryan, “On the Theoretical” 6). This emphasis on narratives from a broad array of cultural areas aligns with American studies’ (transmedial) interest in popular culture as well.5 Most significantly, however, my disciplinary approach in this project is informed by an interest in the cultural work that the texts I dis4

5

Narrative instability also closely relates conceptually to American studies as a field: Arguably, a certain degree of ‘instability’ has always been part of conceptions of American studies as well as of reflections on what ‘America’ means. Such uncertainties, fractures, or insecurities, however, do not lead to despair or crisis but are instead recognized as productive, functioning as motors of introspection and reflection, “a means [for society to think] about itself” (Tompkins 200). The questioning of clarity, of easily understood narratives, of binarisms, and of singular truths typical of narratively unstable texts fits into the constant (re)imagining of what ‘America’ means, which, in turn, is typical of American studies, having led to continuous reinventions of its scope, doubts about its methodologies, and worries over its (non)existence as a discipline or a field (cf. Smith, “Can”; Wise), all alongside interrogations of master narratives and previously established paradigms (cf. Paul 1825). While the narrative turn has already been well established in American studies, throughout this study, I also implicitly argue for a more focused and theorized engagement with notions of play, the ludification of contemporary culture, and video games as a popular medium within American studies. Particularly in terms of the last point, American studies is uniquely suited to study video games as part of popular culture, with its focus on the cultural work such texts can do, the pleasures they create, and the way the interaction between player and game relates to questions of power. American studies as a field also established itself in close connection with the study of popular culture (e.g., in Cawelti’s analyses of popular genres), yet it has been lagging behind disciplines like history and media studies in including this medium as part of its regular corpus. Consequently, I deem it especially insightful to study video games not in isolation but alongside other media and pop-cultural artifacts.

14

Narrative Instability

cuss do, an understanding unique to American studies. In her influential study of nineteenth-century texts largely ignored by the literary canon, Jane Tompkins approaches a text’s cultural work as a way of “providing society with a means of thinking about itself, defining certain aspects of a social reality which the authors and their readers shared, dramatizing its conflicts, and recommending solutions” (200). Instead of valuing texts only for their formal or aesthetic aspects, Tompkins suggests a “notion of literary texts as doing work, expressing and shaping the social context that produced them” (200). Paul Lauter similarly looks at cultural work as “the ways in which a book or other kind of ‘text’ [...] helps construct the frameworks, fashion the metaphors, create the very language by which people comprehend their experiences and think about their world” (“Reconfiguring” 23). Phrased in the most general way, this book’s central goal is to examine the cultural work of narratively unstable texts, probing into both how they help audiences understand and express something about themselves and how they, in turn, shape those very processes.6 In line with how American studies operates as a field, this book draws on theoretical and methodological impulses from different disciplines. On the one hand, my study fuses approaches from literary and cultural studies, as just mentioned. On the other hand, there are a number of other fields and disciplines from which I use insights throughout this book. Most prominently, I utilize concepts and theories from (postclassical) narratology and narrative studies as an analytic toolkit in order to grasp how the texts that I analyze work narratively, even though my overall research interest is not (classically) narratological. More specifically, my approach is anchored in the still emerging field of ‘cultural narratology’ (cf. A. Nünning, “Surveying” 59), investigating the cultural processes and negotiations enabled through narrative. Furthermore, my focus on texts’ cultural work also takes wider understandings of ‘America’ into consideration, notably from the study of history, politics, and society, even though I do not methodologically engage with political science or sociology. Finally, media studies, film studies, television studies, and game studies form important fields organized around different media, whose insights and research interests often overlap with my foci and from where I will use relevant scholarship throughout the next chapters as well. Since I conceptualize narrative instability as making use of the symbolic forms of both narrative and play, it is especially the relatively new field of game studies with which a number of my findings resonate. Although the study of narrative elements of video 6

From a disciplinary perspective, in turn, my study recognizes the significant shift entailed in American studies’ suggestion to focus on the cultural work of a text rather than only on its aesthetic merits, as it opens up the study of texts previously not deemed ‘worthy’ of academic attention (and, often, in the process discovers aesthetic value in these texts as well). My focus on video games in this study, which, partly due to their enormous popularity, are at times still not considered ‘serious’ enough to be academically studied, fits into this shift as well.

1 Introduction: Popularizing Instability

15

games within game studies has a complicated history,7 my approach towards video games, understanding them as a liminal medium that includes elements of both play and narrative, promises to invigorate debates about narrativity in games as well, as does my general conception of studying elements of play in texts that are not games per se, potentially widening the scope of game studies.8 Altogether, these interdisciplinary impulses add to my overall project of analyzing and understanding a significant part of contemporary American popular culture. In a way, the concerns and aspects I will outline about narrative instability in the next chapter also form part of methodological considerations. That is, to summarize, I use the narratological concept of the storyworld to discuss the discursive and narrative properties of a variety of texts from different media in order to investigate the cultural work they do. My analyses and interpretations specifically contextualize the primary texts within discussions of the contemporary moment and scholarship on post-postmod7

8

The debate over whether video games are narratives, games, or fit into other kinds of categories, which is called the ‘ludology vs. narratology debate’ in game studies, has too complicated of a history to render here in detail (for summaries, cf., e.g., Egenfeldt-Nielsen et al. 189-204; Wolf and Perron 2-13; or Mäyrä 5-11). More importantly, I deem it a relatively unproductive question for the study of video games to begin with, both because it pitted positions against each other that did not actually exist in this way—seeing video games as only narrative or as only consisting of rules akin to play (cf. Murray, “Last Word”; Jenkins, “Henry”)—and because both paradigms fundamentally engaged a formalist interest in finding out what video games (in a very general sense) are (Bogost). Instead, my interest lies in analyzing what games do and how they do that, focusing on specific texts rather than trying to ascertain homogeneous traits of this entire (and in itself very diverse) medium. For other recent scholarship within game studies that takes a similar approach, cf., e.g., Kapell; Ruberg and Shaw; Malkowski and Russworm. This conception of video games as a liminal medium has been informed by discussions as part of the network “Narrative Liminality and/in the Formation of American Modernities,” funded by the German Research Foundation; and I have previously outlined this perspective in more detail (cf. Schubert, “Videospiele”). To summarize, I locate video games in the borders of the symbolic forms of narrative and play; all games, in this sense, include both narrative and ludic elements, the degrees of which differ between individual games. For details on these elements, see the discussion of remediated narrative elements in video games and the central aspects of interactivity, agency, nonlinearity, and iteration in conceptions of play in chapter 2 (cf. 2.1.3). There are, of course, additional aspects commonly associated with playing—e.g., while I include rules as part of interactivity, performative and simulational elements would be other components of playing; and elements such as a certain competitiveness could also be considered fundamental for play. Additionally, just like with narrative, the use of a number of these terms in game studies is not unproblematic; Espen Aarseth, for instance, argues against the use of the term ‘interactive’ and suggests his perception on so-called ergodic texts as an alternative (49, 1-2). However, I see most of these appeals as mainly terminological and disciplinary distinctions with little impact on the actual analysis of games, and hence, I will discuss them only in specific instances where they are relevant for the analysis.

16

Narrative Instability

ernism, convergence culture and transmediality, popular culture, and discussions of race, class, and gender. Accordingly, my methodology draws from both literary studies and cultural studies: At the core, I pursue an interest in how texts work as texts, which significatory strategies they use, and how they can be meaningfully interpreted. This literary-studies methodology is combined with a cultural-studies interest in connecting these texts’ properties with their cultural resonances, understanding this textual trend not as self-contained but as part of a larger cultural moment. On a more metastructural level, my analyses consist of close readings, a method adapted from New Criticism, with a distinct transmedial focus on the medial specifics of the studied texts. That is, I will analyze films and television shows for their visual and auditory as well as for their narrative elements, and likewise, my analysis of video games focuses on their audiovisual, narrative, and ludic aspects. My main argument thus works through analysis and close reading, and similarly, I argue for the conceptual validity of narrative instability both on a theoretical level in chapter 2 and, especially, via the analytic readings in the following three chapters. The connection of this focus on the poetics of narrative instability with their historicization and politics, in turn, is inspired by New Historicism’s interweaving of texts and their historical context, associating texts “with politics, with ideas, and with social life, all these things being fluidly interconnected” (Mikics 206; cf. Gallagher and Greenblatt). While my study does not share New Historicism’s usual interest in the past, it still probes into the cultural functions and reverberations of fictional texts in “a particular historical moment” (Tompkins xi), which I explicitly historicize as the contemporary. Lastly, reading narratively unstable texts for their constructions of race, class, and gender corresponds to the methodological repertoire of cultural studies, influenced by theories from masculinity studies and critical whiteness studies, among others. The corpus of this study serves both to present a somewhat representative sample of narratively unstable texts and to focus on texts that allow for particularly insightful and productive readings. In this sense, the analyses in the following chapters all work towards my overall goal of examining narrative instability, but the six detailed readings also stand for themselves and contribute to the study of these individual texts. Acknowledging the importance of play and the influence of video games in contemporary media culture, I focus on three video games, two films, and one TV show, balancing the ‘audiovisual media’ (film and TV) with the ‘interactive’ one. In addition to this mixture of media, I have selected texts that are differently ‘canonized’ within their respective fields of study—while, for instance, the film Inception and the games of the BioShock series have been frequently studied in film and game studies, the video game Alan Wake and the (still very new) TV show Westworld have received comparatively little attention. Some of my readings will thus break new ground for these texts, whereas others benefit from being contextualized within a wide range of scholar-

1 Introduction: Popularizing Instability

17

ship, where my analysis adds to existing debates. Finally, I have chosen texts with different emphases on how they engage questions of race, class, and gender. Whereas almost all of them focus on white male middle-class protagonists, the analysis of Black Swan in the third chapter highlights one of the few unstable texts about a female protagonist. Similarly, while whiteness, class, and gender intersect in all of these primary texts, my analyses carve out different dimensions and facets of their representations, focusing, for instance, on issues of class in BioShock, on questions of masculinity and fatherhood in Inception, and on race, whiteness, and blackness in BioShock Infinite.

1.2 The Structure of This Book This book’s main theoretical and analytical work is divided into four sections: Chapter 2 provides the theoretical basis for narrative instability, whereas chapters 3, 4, and 5 examine and analyze narrative instability more closely, focusing on unstable identities, unstable realities, and unstable textualities. Chapter 2 will lay the groundwork for this project by theorizing and conceptualizing narrative instability in contrast to existing scholarship on related terms and concerns. Additionally, it will contextualize this study ‘historically’ by discussing my understanding of the contemporary period during which the texts analyzed in this book were released. The first of the three analytic chapters, chapter 3, focuses on unstable identities texts, which feature protagonists dealing with uncertainties about who they are and thus closely connect their instability on the discursive level with a crisis of identity on the story level. The first section generally explores unstable identities texts with the help of the film Fight Club; points to related scholarship relevant for the study of these texts to carve out a productive understanding of identity; and briefly discusses the nexus between pleasure, reception, and audience expectations. Then, the second section analyzes the video game BioShock as a ‘classic’ twist text, with the significant deviation that it is not a film but a game, and works out how it connects its unstable elements with its setting, depicting a society inspired by Ayn Rand’s philosophy of objectivism, which it especially relates to class. The third section reads the film Black Swan for how it negotiates instability through its female protagonist, discussing questions of femininity and motherhood, and how it connects these aspects with an instability that builds on the audience’s expectations of narrative instability. Chapter 4 investigates unstable realities texts, in which the overall nature of (the diegetic) reality is in doubt, as these texts envision reality as something that is narratively constructed through the representation of space and time. The first section of this chapter demonstrates general characteristics of unstable realities texts with the example of the film Interstellar, establishes a productive understanding of constructions of reality, and

18

Narrative Instability

illuminates popularity and popularization as crucial cultural contexts. The second subsection analyzes the film Inception in regard to its construction of narrative space—as it allows its characters to enter the dreams of other people—and demonstrates how the film connects this narrative instability with concerns about fatherhood and masculinity. Finally, the third subsection is devoted to the video game BioShock Infinite, with a slightly stronger focus on constructions of time, as the protagonists in the game have the ability to travel to alternate timelines (and, consequently, spaces) of their reality, a fantastic possibility that I relate to questions of race and class throughout American (alternate) history. As the last analytic chapter, chapter 5 examines unstable textualities, that is, texts with storyworlds that become unstable through these texts’ signals to representation itself, self-reflexively and metatextually pointing to the process of narration and then obscuring crucial details about their discursive setups. The first section uses the video game The Stanley Parable as a remarkably self-aware text to illustrate this group in general terms, focuses on related scholarship on metafiction and self-reflexivity to arrive at a productive understanding of textuality, and specifically highlights questions of genre as constituting how narratively unstable texts signal their own textuality. The second subsection reads the game Alan Wake as unstable in this sense, pointing to its ubiquitous self-awareness about matters of text(uality) and especially to its references to other media, notably the novel and television, to discuss its own storytelling effort. The third subsection, in turn, investigates the growing importance of instability in contemporary television by looking at the first season of the HBO show Westworld, which renders its awareness of textuality less through allusions to engaging with and producing texts (as Alan Wake does) and more consistently through references to narrative and play, which I, in turn, connect to questions of gender and whiteness in particular. Finally, chapter 6 briefly summarizes my findings, brings a few of the larger contexts from the individual chapters together, and points to potentials for future research. Overall, this structure in itself does analytic work as well: As a survey of contemporary narratively unstable texts, it detects identity, reality, and textuality as the three most central cultural concerns among the entire corpus and argues for them as productive clusters. On the one hand, the texts within a specific group speak to each other, together forming a rounder picture of how contemporary popular culture engages identity, reality, and textuality, which is also why I at times point to other primary texts in order to accentuate this investigation of instability. On the other hand, while primary texts, e.g., in the third chapter do indeed center on questions of identity, they still also relate, only to a lesser degree, to issues of reality and textuality. These three clusters are thus not strict categories but relatively loose groups, where the individual larger chapters, in turn, also engage in a dialogue with each other, constituting cross-fertilizations between these chapters that I will at times point to in footnotes.

2 Introducing Narrative Instability This chapter will lay the groundwork for this book in two larger sections: First, I will interrogate existing scholarship on similar concerns in order to identify drawbacks in these previous conceptions and to contextualize narrative instability within them, which will allow me to introduce the concept of narrative instability in more detail, on which all the subsequent chapters will build. Second, I will contextualize this study ‘historically,’ that is, I will elaborate on what is meant by ‘contemporary,’ what popular culture implies in the context of this project, and which US American cultural contexts an investigation of narrative instability relates to. Together, this will carve our narrative instability as a heuristic concept that allows me to make a popular and transmedial textual trend visible in the first place.

2.1 Conceptualizing and Theorizing Narrative Instability In the following, I will outline narrative instability as the central concept of this book. First, in order to establish why narrative instability is needed as a concept, to accentuate its analytic benefits, and to contextualize my approach within existing scholarship, I will point to previous studies on related concerns and terms, particularly from narratology. Subsequently, I will chart my conception of narrative instability in more detail, which includes placing it in a transmedia(l) context, highlighting how it is to be understood as an inherently transmedial concept, and pointing out the significance of ‘play’ for this conception. Overall, this section will thus bring a number of at times isolated and medially specific studies into dialogue with each other, establishing narrative instability as a trend that points to a new understanding of contemporary narratives and that allows for these different contexts to productively speak to each other. 2.1.1 PREVIOUS RESEARCH As I will outline in more detail later, I introduce narrative instability as a concept to grasp how contemporary US popular culture complicates audiences’ mental efforts of reconstructing a text’s storyworld.9 Such an interest 9

David Herman defines storyworlds as “mental models of who did what to and with whom, when, where, why, and in what fashion in the world to which interpreters relocate [...] as they work to comprehend a narrative” (Story Logic 9). In comparison to the concepts of story, discourse, or narrative, a storyworld highlights both spatial and temporal aspects (Story Logic 14), and it especially points to the process

20

Narrative Instability

in how a text can impede narrative understanding touches on a number of existing terms and fields of research, begging the question why I am introducing yet another concept to the scholarly landscape. However, I argue that a new conceptualization is necessary since none of the existing terms and concepts sufficiently map the narrative and cultural phenomenon identified in this study or allow for its detailed analysis. I will recount these shortcomings in the following by discussing where previous studies point to related concerns yet where they do not capture the analytic interest that I propose. Accordingly, I will examine the most prominent and influential of these studies, first via related concepts from and (sub)fields of narratology, then in regard to other (mostly cultural-studies) contexts, and finally in terms of other singular uses of the term instability, in order to both delineate my approach from these related studies but also to point to productive resonances. Overall, I argue that my conception has three distinct advantages over existing ones: First, it brings together a diverse set of primary texts that have not been grouped like this before but that actually feature narrative and textual commonalities. Narrative instability elucidates and makes visible what they share, making these connections available for further analysis. Second, while the majority of existing studies focuses on single specific media (most prominently either the novel or film), my conception is inherently transmedial, opening up the possibility to identify patterns across texts from different media and in turn sharpening the understanding of what they have in common. Third, many previous studies work within typological and structuralist impulses, proposing categorizations or delineations from other concepts, whereas my conception highlights the potential to scrutinize the meanings and cultural resonances of these texts—my investigation of narrative instability’s cultural work puts these resonances front and center, examining them as part of a specific cultural moment. Among the narratological concepts related to my understanding of instability, unreliability appears as the most pertinent one, particularly in more recent studies written in the wake of narratology’s ‘cultural turn,’ which has led to the emergence of a ‘postclassical narratology.’10 Unreliability has

10

of narrative comprehension, which Herman calls the “ecology of narrative interpretation”: When interpreters “[try] to make sense of a narrative, [they] attempt to reconstruct not just what happened [...] but also the surrounding context or environment embedding existents, their attributes, and the actions and events in which they are more or less centrally involved” (Story Logic 13-14). In other words, this shift towards the storyworld emphasizes the role of audiences in making sense of a text, and it casts this process of understanding as going beyond the plot and encompassing other constituent elements as well, all of which together form a spatial understanding of that narrative text. In this book, I will extend the concept of the storyworld beyond the study of novels and instead investigate how a variety of popcultural media and artifacts can be narratively analyzed with its help. For influential work both proclaiming and performing the shift entailed in postclassical narratology, cf. D. Herman, Narratologies; Alber and Fludernik, Postclassical Narratology; Heinen and Sommer; G. Olson, Current Trends; for more of an over-

2 Introducing Narrative Instability

21

been studied in narratology since Wayne C. Booth’s influential definition as describing a narrator who does not “[speak] for or [act] in accordance with the norms of the work (which is to say, the implied author’s norms)” (158). This focus on the implied author is ill-suited for my project, yet more recent reimaginings in the vein of cognitive narratology have “relocate[d] unreliability [...] in the interaction of reader and text” (A. Nünning, “Reconceptualizing” 99).11 In this sense, how a narrator’s unreliability affects the audience’s process of reconstructing a storyworld often plays an important part in creating instability, and the recent surge in studies of unreliability, particularly in different media and disciplines, aligns productively with the study of narrative instability.12 Yet unreliability describes just one possible discursive implementation13 that can lead to instability, appearing as a much narrower concept that does not take discursive traits such as metalepsis, polyfocalization, or an unmarked internal focalization into account, all of which can engender instability as well. Additionally, more structuralist concerns such as the binarity between ‘factual’ or ‘normative unreliability’14 add relatively little insight to a cultural-studies framing of unreliability, which instead asks for the effects it has on readers. Finally, as an over-

11

12 13

14

view of the development towards postclassical narratology (or narratologies), cf. A. Nünning, “Narratology”; Sommer. Two constitutive developments of the shift from ‘classical,’ more structuralist narratology to its ‘postclassical’ variation include a focus on media other than the novel as well as a “move toward a grand contextual [...] and reader-oriented effort” as part of cognitive approaches to narrative (Alber and Fludernik, Introduction 6, 8). Both developments complement my conception of narrative instability as well, and accordingly, the narratological areas partly overlapping with instability have also been informed by them. Especially Vera Nünning’s recent edited collection on Unreliable Narration and Trustworthiness significantly expands the scope of more ‘traditional’ research on unreliability, pointing out how scholarship has been lacking for unreliability in nonhomodiegetic narration, in media other than the novel, and in disciplines beyond literary studies (“Conceptualising” 2-4). For other relevant studies on unreliability in the vein of this cognitive reimagining, cf. Zipfel; Köppe and Kindt; Koch; Ensslin, “‘I Want.’” This is similarly true for other narratological concepts that form part of generating instability, especially metalepsis (cf. Kukkonen and Klimek; Thoss; Hanebeck). Here, as in most instances, I use the terms ‘discourse’ and ‘discursive’ to refer to a text’s level of narration (as opposed to the level of the story), to how it narrates (instead of what it narrates). At times, I will also discuss certain concepts, such as truth or identity, as being discursively constructed, which implies discourse in the Foucauldian sense—I trust that these two very different meanings of the same term are usually understood, but I will distinguish them more explicitly in potential moments of ambiguity. As Ansgar Nünning explains in reference to Greta Olson, “factual unreliability” implies a “fallible narrator [...] whose rendering of the story the reader has reasons to suspect,” whereas “normative unreliability [is] displayed by an untrustworthy narrator whose commentary and interpretations do not accord with conventional notions of sound judgment” (“Reconceptualizing” 93, 93, 93-94; cf. G. Olson, “Reconsidering Unreliability”).

22

Narrative Instability

all concept, unreliability mainly emphasizes the trustworthiness of an individual subject, commonly a homodiegetic narrator. In this sense, it individualizes matters of trust, truth, or reality, often containing that uncertainty by, eventually, exposing a narrator as fallible. In contrast, narrative instability points to a larger cultural uncertainty and is interested not only in a specific narrator’s unreliability but also in what the popularity of texts featuring these elements signals about the culture and society in which these texts circulate, understanding instability not as a ‘universal’ trait of texts but as belonging to a specific historical moment. Next to particular concepts, two larger narratological theories (or fields of study) tangentially relate to my interest in instability: possible-worlds theory and unnatural narratology. Possible-worlds theory maintains that “reality—conceived as the sum of the imaginable rather than as the sum of what exists physically—is a universe composed of a plurality of distinct worlds” (Ryan, “Possible Worlds,” par. 2). Applied to the study of narrative, it suggests that “when interpreting fictional narratives, recipients relocate to an alternative possible world” (D. Herman, Story Logic 15). As such, it is an important impulse in the study of storyworlds—and for the spatial dimension of narrative—as well, yet it functions as a more general approach to understanding narratives, similar to storyworlds. 15 ‘Unnatural narratology,’ in turn, was developed in response to Monika Fludernik’s conception of ‘natural narratology’ (cf. Towards) and focuses on “various kinds of narrative strangeness and in particular [...] texts that deviate from the mimetic norms of most narratological models,” encompassing, among others, texts that are “experimental, extreme, transgressive, unconventional, non-conformist, or out of the ordinary” (Alber and Heinze 2). Such a focus on ‘strange’ texts partly overlaps with the primary texts I consider narratively unstable and thus is certainly one of the most relevant recent trends that links my conception to narratological studies, yet it is less interested in a cultural historicization of these phenomena than in a narratological typologization.16 Additionally, the scope of what is deemed ‘unnatural,’ as the above quotation demonstrates, is also very wide, yet at the same time, much of what unnatural narratology encompasses, e.g., “‘physically impossible scenarios and events, that is impossible by the known laws governing 15

16

Among studies of possible-worlds theory and narrative, Marie-Laure Ryan’s work is the most relevant—cf. in particular her monograph Possible Worlds. Other influential takes include those by Ronen; Doležel; and Bruner; for a study of possible worlds in video games, cf. Maza. Unnatural narratology also has to relate to a complicated and potentially problematic notion of what is considered ‘natural,’ whereas what instability relates to (whatever we may call ‘stable’) is a less ‘loaded’ concept. For some of the concerns about the role of the ‘natural’ in unnatural narratology, especially also in relation to Fludernik’s natural narratology,’ cf. Fludernik, “How Natural”; Alber et al. Another slightly related concept concerns notions of the ‘disnarrated’ or the ‘unnarratable’ (cf. Warhol).

2 Introducing Narrative Instability

23

the physical world, as well as logically impossible ones, that is, impossible by accepted principles of logic’” (Alber qtd. in Alber and Heinze 4-5), seems quite congruent with a focus on the fantastic as a mode. In turn, while the elements that make fantasy and science-fiction texts fantastic or speculative often can initially induce confusion (and other reactions similar to encountering instability), they do not, in themselves, draw attention to the level of narration, which is a central element of the texts I consider unstable. Instead, fantastic texts entail a shift from the realist to the fantastic mode that is in line with how the fantastic functions as a mode, always encompassing both of these to different extents (cf. Rosemary Jackson 13-60; Koenen, Visions 42-43).17 Hence, although some overlap between fantastic and unstable texts exists, the texts considered in this study all self-consciously relate instability to their own narration, speaking to an interest in matters of textual representation among them. The recent surge in (what I call) unstable texts has also prompted studies from a broader cultural-studies angle, whose scope at times overlaps with narrative instability. This scholarship typically makes use of certain tropes to denote the peculiarity they detect in their corpus, describing these texts by how they feature or engage in, among others, twists (cf. Wilson; Berliner, Hollywood Aesthetic 66-69), puzzles (cf. Buckland, “Puzzle Plots”; Buckland, Hollywood; Kiss and Willemsen; Panek), mindgames (cf. Elsaesser; Hesselberth and Schuster), mindfucks (cf. Eig), mind-tricks (cf. Klecker), or mazes (cf. Eckel et al.).18 Many of these studies focus only on single media—most prominently film—and a number of them imply a typology in their categorization of these texts as specific genres. In contrast, my conception will highlight how these texts operate transmedially (cf. 2.1.3), uncovering an audience interest in these texts across media and fo17

18

Nevertheless, there are, of course, many fantastic and science-fiction texts that are also unstable, such as Inception or Interstellar, both of which I discuss in chapter 4, and elements of confusion and uncertainty play an important role in fantastic texts —as Tzvetan Todorov influentially notes when he identifies the fantastic in “the duration of [...] uncertainty,” through the “hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event” (136). Likewise, magical realism (cf. Zamora and Faris) forms another kind of ‘predecessor’ for narrative instability, as, for instance, the works by Jorge Luis Borges evoke topics and concepts taken up in unstable texts as well—yet they usually only occupy the plane of the story, not of narration. For example, Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths” (1941) describes the existence of an infinity of ‘forking paths’ that lead to a labyrinthine novel, yet it does not itself perform that infinity through its narration, unlike similar attempts in narratively unstable texts like House of Leaves (2000) or BioShock Infinite (2013). Still, particularly Borges’s fiction serves as an important intertextual reference point and inspiration for many unstable texts. A number of these different approaches to contemporary texts simultaneously highlight that they are part of a larger trend towards ‘narrative complexity,’ an aspect I discuss in more detail in 2.2.1.

24

Narrative Instability

cusing on the cultural work of these transmedial engagements. Even more importantly, the studies using these different terms all suggest their specific terminology to describe a unique phenomenon, implying categories such as puzzle or twist films. However, the primary texts they consider both show significant overlap between the different studies and include a number of omissions, with texts mentioned under one rubric but equally qualifying for another, without being discussed there.19 Instead, I propose narrative instability as a more systematic account to cover these texts, maintaining a careful balance between too restrictive definitions and too wide or generalizing conceptualizations, which some of these studies engage in. For instance, Jonathan Eig understands mindfuck films as involving only “surprises about the identity of major characters,” which neglects a large number of texts that feature narrative ‘surprises’ in similar ways and through the same discursive techniques but focus on aspects other than identity. On the other hand, Warren Buckland describes puzzle films as “intricate in the sense that the arrangement of events is not just complex, but complicated and perplexing” (“Puzzle Plots” 3), which appears to be a very loose conception, exchanging the difficulty of determining ‘complexity’ with a similar difficulty of discerning what is meant by ‘complicated’ or ‘perplexing,’ and accordingly, his scope of puzzle films is very wide and heterogeneous. 20 In turn, Julia Eckel and Bernd Leiendecker sidestep this problem by using ‘narrative mazes’ as an “umbrella term” for all of the existing scholarship, “a metaphor that encompasses all of the aforementioned terms and highlights their disorienting potential” (16). While this move might make sense when confronted with the sheer quantity of the proposed terms and definitions, it does not contribute to efforts of identifying commonalities and unifying tendencies among these texts or of distinguishing them from others. Instead, I propose narrative instability as a more theorized concept, one that argues that the commonalities between these seemingly diverse primary texts lie in how they affect the process of reconstructing a storyworld.

19

20

Since many of the texts that these scholars posit as ‘puzzle,’ ‘twist,’ or ‘mindgame’ films particularly overlap with those that I group as engaging with unstable identities, I will discuss this scholarship and how it engages my conception of unstable identities in more detail in the next chapter (cf. 3.2.2). In trying to distinguish his notion of complexity from Aristotle’s, Buckland mentions that puzzle films become complex as they “embrace nonlinearity, time loops, and fragmented spatio-temporal reality. These films blur the boundaries between different levels of reality, are riddled with gaps, deception, labyrinthine structures, ambiguity, and overt coincidences. They are populated with characters who are schizophrenic, lose their memory, are unreliable narrators, or are dead (but without us – or them – realizing)” (“Puzzle Plots” 6). While all of these are relevant aspects, the fact that they are listed as an enumeration points to the lack of a unifying feature that would combine all of these characteristics, which I propose with instability.

2 Introducing Narrative Instability

25

Finally, while narrative ‘instability’ itself has not been used as a theorized term in scholarship,21 it appears occasionally to denote various different but related meanings. To give just some examples of this variety, in a discussion of Fitzgerald’s novel Tender Is the Night, Michael North connects “the narrative instability of the novel and the mental instability of the characters” (133); while Shelly Jarenski briefly analyzes “moments of narrative instability” in Melville’s fiction, e.g., when “the point of view shifts in Moby-Dick from the first person perspective of Ishmael to the virtual disappearance of that character in the omniscient third-person explorations of Ahab’s monomaniacal pursuit of the white whale” (23); and Richard Misek, analyzing the film The Thin Red Line, mentions “a moment of diegetic instability in which the dividing lines between viewer, actor, and character break down” (121).22 Similarly, terms closely related to instability that are evoked in comparable contexts include narrative incoherence or incongruity (cf. Berliner, Hollywood Incoherent; Murphy 80; Vest 155), inconsistency (cf. Cusset; Fludernik, Towards 203), or uncertainty (cf. Parrish 27; Calvin; Harris and Crawford), yet none of them has been thoroughly theorized as a concept.23 All these instances of using the term instability 21

22

23

The only exception is Claudia Pinkas’s German-language monograph Der phantastische Film: Instabile Narrationen und die Narration der Instabilität. Her study, however, is a narratological theorization of films told in the fantastic mode, using instability as a metaphor to describe narrative effects that fantastic films evoke—in contrast, I delineated my conception of instability from the fantastic above. Furthermore, her goal to “design a narratology of fantastic films” (“Ziel ist der Entwurf einer Narratologie des phantastischen Films,” 2) puts her study in a very different disciplinary context than my focus on arguing for the cultural work of narratively unstable texts. Other examples of uses of instability in very different contexts include Catherine Cusset’s discussion of narrative instability and inconsistency in paintings by Antoine Watteau (126); Thomas Flynn’s claim that “[t]he generic and narrative instability of the modern novel reflects its double origins” (xx); Alistair Fox arguing for a “narrative instability [...] between history and historylessness” (109); and studies linking instability to the body and “physical history” (Küppers 32), to the fantastic (Lilleleht 25), to dreams and the “juxtaposition of reality and imagination” (D. E. James 189), or to the fragmentation of identities (Calvin 32). The primary characteristic of these uses of instability and related terms is their sheer variety and heterogeneity, yet another striking aspect is that many of these are employed in contexts of discussions of postmodernism. Gary K. Wolfe, for instance, calls narrative instability one of many “postmodern techniques” (153), and Timothy Parrish refers to it as one of the “tendencies [...] that are said to mark the so-called postmodern era” (27)—even though, again, neither of them theorize what exactly they mean by the term. I similarly see the success of narrative instability as very much a postmodern phenomenon, yet I historicize narratively unstable texts more specifically as part of the contemporary era in section 2.2 rather than only referring to a vaguer notion of postmodernism. As concerns my specific choice among these many different terms, I consider instability particularly suited for an analysis of these phenomena because it rings back to Yeats’s metaphor of ‘things falling apart’ and the ‘center not holding,’ epitomiz-

26

Narrative Instability

point to very different understandings, highlighting the status of instability as a metaphor rather than as a theorized concept, as this study proposes it. These numerous terms, concepts, and fields discuss aspects and tendencies related to my conception, yet none of them allow me to focus on the narrative techniques and the cultural contexts that I deem significant in identifying a contemporary popular-culture trend, which I term narrative instability. Accordingly, introducing narrative instability as a new concept will allow me to highlight and accentuate what I see as drawbacks in the existing approaches. For one, the plethora of differently termed studies on puzzle films and the like provide evidence of a desire to point to something new, “a ‘certain tendency’” (Elsaesser 14) in contemporary popular culture, yet I argue that the overarching characteristic that these seemingly diverse texts actually have in common is a tendency to destabilize the process of constructing a storyworld. Significantly, however, unlike many of these other studies, I do not want to propose a new ‘paradigm’ or chart a narratological typology of these texts’ features through a structuralist model. In contrast, I propose to use instability as an analytical tool for the investigation of texts’ narrative properties and their cultural work, scrutinizing why they have become popular and have attained this cultural currency, why contemporary audiences find pleasure in these narratives and how they engage with them, and what this can tell us about American culture and society in a specific historical moment. For these questions, it will be crucial to analyze the effects narratively unstable texts have on audiences, and to trace these effects in the narrative discourse—which the focus on storyworlds as the audience’s mental reconstructions also facilitates. Finally, I propose that this phenomenon takes place across different media, calling for a larger scope in a transmedia investigation, for which the concept of the storyworld with its privileging of both narrative and space—a spatial understanding of narrative that fits video games and audiovisual media especially well—is particularly suited. Having thus identified a number of shortcomings and theoretical gaps in existing scholarship and having demarcated my general approach to narrative instability from it, I will use the next section to conceptualize and explain instability in more detail. 2.1.2 NARRATIVE INSTABILITY AS A CONCEPT As mentioned before, I introduce narrative instability to identify texts that obfuscate or impede the audience’s effort of reconstructing a text’s storyworld. Narratively unstable texts thus impair and disrupt the process of narrative comprehension, the mental recreation of a text’s events, characters, and settings as an (imagined) world. In my conception, narrative instability makes visible a characteristic of a text, something that a text does—by using a central move of postmodernism. It also connects with a certain (productive) instability that I see as constitutive of American studies as a field (cf. 1.1).

2 Introducing Narrative Instability

27

ing a number of diverse discursive techniques, texts can destabilize the storyworld and, simultaneously, draw attention to that very process. In this sense, instability relates directly to a text’s storyworld: It is the storyworld that can be stable or unstable, and as a shorthand, texts with unstable storyworlds can be called narratively unstable. On another level, I argue that texts with these unstable characteristics form a trend or a tendency in contemporary US popular culture, that they are experiencing a ‘boom’ and have attained a particular cultural currency.24 How unstable a storyworld can be fundamentally concerns the knowledge the audience has about its elements—how much, in general, is known about its characters and events; how certain it is that these are really the ‘correct’ elements; how much competing information about characters and events there is; how reliable the sources of this information are; etc. This question of the knowledge about a text’s narrative situation, about its discursive elements, is also important in the context of a number of narratological studies, particularly in examinations of classical Hollywood cinema, which is characterized by “transparency” (Wilson 81) and “redundancy” in order to ensure that it is “comprehensible” (Bordwell 73).25 David Bordwell traces how such principles recur in contemporary films as well, where “well-entrenched strategies for presenting time, space, goal achievement, causal connection, and the like” (75) are intended to ensure that viewers are provided with enough information and knowledge to follow the narrative progression. In narratively unstable texts, a storyworld becomes more unstable the more in doubt these elements are, for instance when there simply is no information on a specific aspect. On another level, however, any text engenders not only the storyworld itself but also the process of reconstructing it, and by affecting this process, instability is generated as well. Any text’s storyworld, after all, is “subject to being updated, revised, or even 24

25

Throughout this book, I am centrally interested in both of these aspects of narrative instability—one stimulated by a (literary-studies) interest in analyzing specific narrative characteristics of a text, the other more geared towards a (cultural-studies) exploration of the popularity of these texts and their cultural context, as they experience an upsurge in contemporary popular culture. For simplicity’s sake, I refer to these two different research interests as ‘narrative instability’ at times interchangeably throughout this study, often implying both perspectives. The audience’s level of knowledge is also of importance in reader-oriented approaches to narrative, notably in cognitive narratology, yet ‘narrative knowledge’ itself as a term has rarely been theorized in such studies. Mieke Bal, for instance, mentions this aspect rather in passing, noting how a detective story often “takes care to keep the knowledge from the reader” in order for its climactic revelation to be more effective (95). Implicitly, narrative knowledge as I suggest to think about it also plays a role in narratological investigations of coherence in texts, which tend to regard coherence “as a textlinguistic [...] notion” that forms a “strong norm” for comprehending narratives (Toolan par. 1, par. 21). While investigations of coherence and stability share a number of concerns, incoherence has not been systematically studied so far.

28

Narrative Instability

abandoned in favour of another” (D. Herman, “Storyworld” 570) as the text reveals increasingly more information; storyworlds are thus inherently dynamic. However, this more ‘usual’ process of updating the storyworld can be impacted, for instance when a narrator is exposed as being unreliable, which renders an immense (and, initially, often uncertain) amount of narrative information gained from that narrative instance untrustworthy, necessitating a much more significant revision of the storyworld than if, for instance, a character is revealed to be a murderer in a classic detective story. Likewise, a text might suddenly offer another version of the same event, establishing two competing renderings of the storyworld that are ultimately irreconcilable with each other and thus refusing to privilege one stable storyworld. In more abstract terms, then, sudden, very significant updates to the storyworld, irreconcilable information, or incoherence within the storyworld that works against the narrative logics set up so far can lead to instability, because these narrative strategies all, fundamentally, draw attention to the very process of constructing that storyworld. When, for instance, the ending of The Usual Suspects (1995) reveals that Verbal is actually the mysterious Keyser Söze, audiences will not only have to update the storyworld according to this character revelation, they are also prompted to think about why they did not notice this ‘twist’ coming—because Verbal has actually been narrating most parts of the film to special agent Dave Kujan, constructing an elaborate narrative that made it impossible for his identity to be correctly identified. Beyond the revelation of a character’s identity on the level of the story, this moment renders the storyworld unstable because it draws attention to the level of the narrative discourse, to its narration, prompting viewers to reconsider how they received information throughout the film and acquired knowledge about the narrative setup in the light of Verbal’s unreliability as a narrator. Hence, such a moment, like narrative instability in general, emphasizes how storyworlds are reconstructed, pointing to the narrative discourse and to representation itself. This aspect is also significant for specifying what is commonly called a ‘twist.’ Plot twists are prominent in many texts and are, arguably, constitutive for genres such as crime fiction.26 This common usage of the term ‘twist’ partly differs from what some call a genre of ‘twist films’ such as The Sixth Sense, The Usual Suspects, or Fight Club. Thinking of these texts not as constituting a genre but as narratively unstable texts can help differentiate the terms: If a revelation about a character concerns only the story level and does not prompt a reflection on the narrative discourse, it is not an unstable moment as I un26

The short stories by O. Henry (William Sydney Porter) are equally well known for typically featuring ‘surprise endings’ (cf. Monteiro). Throughout American literature, plot twists often also relate to instances of racial passing, revealing a character thought to be white as black in the ideology of the one-drop rule, for instance in Kate Chopin’s “Désirée’s Baby” (1893).

2 Introducing Narrative Instability

29

derstand it. This is an important difference that also delimits narrative instability from many of the approaches discussed in the previous subsection, as it draws a line between plot twists, which have always been part of literature and film, and those unstable moments that characterize texts which have experienced an upsurge in contemporary popular culture—the distinction thus helps to pinpoint the novelty of these texts.27 An interest in instability invariably also raises the question of what narrative stability entails. Constant (minor) additions, revisions, and corrections to a storyworld do not constitute instability in themselves, but rather, they can be understood as a text’s effort to preserve stability while progressing the plot or certain character developments. Most (‘mainstream’ and popular) narratives, to some degree, crave stability, wishing for what they present to their audience to make sense and to be coherently decipherable for its meanings, so that, in Michael Toolan’s phrasing about coherence, “the identified textual parts all contribute to a whole, which is communicationally effective” (par. 1). Core aspects of narrative, such as causality, closure, and a certain coherence of the depicted events (Nünning and Nünning 66), can all be understood as stabilizing principles. 28 Only because narratives usually strive for one stable storyworld that is consistent in itself, and because audiences have been attuned to such stability, can narrative texts impede that process to create instability in the first place. However, I do not understand this as a binary conceptualization that would characterize storyworlds as being either stable or unstable. Instead, I conceive of instability as a gradable concept, with a text potentially being more or less unstable. This distinction of instability as gradable allows me to incorporate a wider variety of primary texts that resolve their instability to varying extents (or refuse to do so), allowing for a comparison of seemingly very different texts—for instance as I analyze the game BioShock (2007), 27

28

However, for some texts, it is more difficult to make such an absolute distinction, as instability is a gradual characteristic of texts. For instance, a film like The Matrix (1999) is partly unstable in this way: The unstable moment revealing Neo to be living in a virtual reality draws attention to the internal focalization of Neo through which the events had been presented thus far, yet it happens so early on that the rest of the film does not engage in instability anymore—whereas a more typically unstable text like Fight Club very much builds up towards its final climactic revelation of instability. Similarly, The Truman Show (1998) is not an unstable text in the sense I propose, since it early on makes the audience aware of the constructed reality of its protagonist, which he slowly uncovers throughout the events of the film. Hence, in this book, I am primarily interested in texts that are more thoroughly unstable on the level of discourse instead of featuring smaller moments of instability or those only located on the story level. From here on, when I use the term ‘twist’ in this study without referring to a specific scholarly text, I mean it in this sense, as a synonym for a ‘moment of instability.’ Specifically, it is especially narrative as a symbolic form that drives towards such stability, closure, and reconciliation. As I will discuss in 2.1.3, forms of play are often more open-ended.

30

Narrative Instability

which offers a restabilized version at the end of its story, and the film Black Swan (2010), which more ambiguously wallows in its instability, side by side in the next chapter. While, conceptually, looking at a text’s storyworld shifts attention from the text itself to its audience recreating a storyworld, analytically, I suggest to study narrative instability via the text, by examining its discursive techniques for how they can engender instability. My literary-studies analysis of the primary texts considered here will thus closely focus on the characteristics of the texts at hand, with an implied audience in mind (but no empirical interest). Discursively, turning a text’s storyworld unstable can be achieved in a variety of ways, which I will analyze in more depth in the three chapters to follow. In general, these discursive implementations include internal focalizations without denoting them as such; unreliable or otherwise compromised narrators (both homo- and heterodiegetic); multiple different accounts of the same event, possibly through polyfocalization or multiple perspectives; instances of metalepsis (intrusions between levels of narration); or, often in combination with some of these, a distinct lack of information, a refusal to provide details about crucial aspects of the text’s narration (such as its narrator). As my readings will show, many unstable texts use internal focalization to create instability, by focalizing the representation of their world through a character whose perception is flawed in certain ways, an aspect the audience is usually not aware of. They thus utilize an aspect of narration that has become naturalized in ‘filmic’ language as well—when a scene is shown with the camera positioned over somebody’s shoulder or from the eyes of that character, audiences know that this is supposed to denote that character’s perception and realm of experience (cf. Thomas 55; Verstraten 96-124). In this sense, narratively unstable texts build on the audience’s understanding and knowledge of certain narrative or filmic techniques, of what one could call the ‘literary repertoire’ in Wolfgang Iser’s terminology (69). To culminate in instability, these texts then ‘exploit’ the audience’s knowledge and expectations by breaking with them, consciously working against their assumptions.29 29

A similar tendency is true for genre as well, with some popular texts innovating themselves by building on, and then working against, genre expectations. Many unstable films belong to and play into such genres, an aspect I examine in more detail in 5.2.2. Additionally, as I discuss in the next chapter, there is a rising sense of unstable texts as a kind of genre or trend as well, with audiences’ knowledge (and expectations) of instability growing throughout the years. The popular reception of M. Night Shyamalan’s films can be read in this way—while The Sixth Sense was a box office hit and generally received favorable reviews, all of his subsequent five films grossed less money (while still, overall, being successful) and were reviewed increasingly unfavorably. Each of them also includes different variations of some kind of twist towards its ending, something that worked to great effect in The Sixth Sense but quickly seemed to lose its potency when it could be expected as a director’s trademark. I will discuss this growing awareness of instability throughout this book as well—often implicitly, but explicitly for instance when I talk about the ex-

2 Introducing Narrative Instability

31

To summarize, I introduce narrative instability as a concept that denotes the characteristic of a text’s storyworld being unstable because the information provided about it is in doubt, incomplete, or contradictory or because the process of receiving that information has been obstructed. It is a gradual characteristic rather than an absolute one, and one that can be engendered by a variety of discursive implementations. To some extent, narrative instability always metatextually draws attention to the text’s own effort of representing and narratively constructing a fictional world. In turn, such unstable texts have attained widespread cultural currency and popularity in the contemporary media landscape. 2.1.3 PLAY AND TRANSMEDIALITY: INSTABILITY ACROSS MEDIA A core element of my conceptualization of narrative instability, and a striking difference from a number of other approaches, is to conceive of it as inherently transmedial, as a trend taking place across different media and in which individual media texts are characterized by influences from other media’s textual strategies. In this sense, narrative instability is characterized by a “convergence” of media, defined by Henry Jenkins as “the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences who will go almost everywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they want” (Convergence 2).30 In turn, and coming back to the observations from the beginning of the introduction, the proliferation of narratively unstable texts around the end of the 1990s can be partly explained through the logics of ‘remediation’ (cf. Bolter and Grusin), which I consider part of a larger convergence culture: Newer media ‘remediate’ or “refashion” (Grusin 497) older, more established forms in order to assume part of their cultural currency, and conversely, the more traditional media “are seeking 30

pectations of a twist in Black Swan (cf. 3.4.1) and Inception (cf. 4.3.1). As Jenkins stresses, this convergence culture is equally characterized by a participatory culture, “as consumers are encouraged to seek out new information and make connections among dispersed media content.” This active role of the audience, “contrast[ing] with older notions of passive media spectatorship” (Convergence 3), is also crucial for how audiences engage with narratively unstable texts, an aspect I come back to below. Another development Jenkins considers a part of convergence culture is transmedia storytelling, the dispersion of textuality across different media platforms. In stories told transmedially, “consumers must assume the role of hunters and gatherers, chasing down bits of the story across media channels, comparing notes with each other via online discussion groups, and collaborating to ensure that everyone who invests time and effort will come away with a richer entertainment experience” (Convergence 21). I will discuss these aspects of transmedia storytelling in slightly more detail in chapter 5 in my readings of Alan Wake and Westworld, which particularly foster such a transmedial audience engagement. For an investigation of transmedia storytelling between ‘industry buzzword’ and ‘new narrative experience,’ cf. Ryan, “Transmedia Storytelling.”

32

Narrative Instability

to reaffirm their status within our culture” (Bolter and Grusin 5) by appropriating some of the characteristics of new media.31 These characterizations of a (media) culture increasingly interested in convergence and remediation provide the context for the proliferation of narratively unstable texts since the 1990s. As the literature on puzzle, twist, mindgame, etc. films mentioned above demonstrates, narratively unstable texts have first been noted in scholarly studies on film in particular. Around the turn of the millennium, it is films that first popularize instability as a larger cultural trend by acquiring significant commercial and critical success, among them The Usual Suspects (1995), The Game (1997), The Sixth Sense (1999), Fight Club (1999), eXistenZ (1999), American Psycho (2000), Memento (2000), A Beautiful Mind (2001), The Others (2001), and Identity (2003), to name just a few. Many of the narrative traits that engender their instability, as I discussed before, are inspired by ‘avant-garde’ postmodern novels of the 1960s and 1970s.32 These traits thus fit narrative characteristics of postmodern novels that have been variously described as “contradiction, [...], discontinuity, randomness” (Bertens, “Debate” 9; cf. Lodge 270-300), “logical impossibility” (Fokkema 54), “the self-reflexive, the incoherent, the discontinuous, and the immanent” (Hoffmann 37), and as characterized by metafictional tendencies (Nicol 30-31) and unreliable narration (Taniyan 53).33 The unstable films emerging in the late 1990s take 31

32

33

For further studies on the nexus of convergence culture, remediation, and transmediality, cf. Jenkins, Ford, et al.; Ryan and Thon; Newman and Levine; Glaser and Georgi; Gernalzick and Pisarz-Ramirez. Experimental cinema of the 1970s also forms part of this influence, a perspective that Brian McHale highlights when, in a discussion of typical traits of postmodernism, he points to Peter Wollen’s comparison of “Godard’s counter-cinema (paradigmatically postmodernist [...]) and the poetics of ‘classic’ Hollywood movies” (7). The cinema of Jean-Luc Godard, however, can be considered as belonging to the same ‘avant-garde’ postmodernism as the novels by Barth or Pynchon, and in turn, such experimental cinema was heavily influenced by narrative techniques from the novel as well, engaging in a similar remediation. In turn, many of these elements are not exclusively postmodern either; rather, they have literary predecessors as well, many of them in modernism—as McHale, for instance, notes for unreliable narration (18-19). Similarly, a prominent early example of a text using a moment of instability as I understand it is Agatha Christie’s 1926 The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, whose ending reveals that Dr. James Sheppard, Hercule Poirot’s assistant in the murder investigation, is actually the murderer. By itself, this would amount to a typical plot twist contained on the level of the story (and thus not constitute instability); however, Sheppard is also the narrator of the novel, and Poirot’s identification of Sheppard as the murderer thus points readers to the many unreliable moments in Sheppard’s rendering of the story, drawing attention to the narrative discourse. Likewise, Elsaesser lists a number of “precursors of the complex storytelling mode” in his take on mindgame films (20)— still, these and other earlier unstable texts are rather isolated or singular examples, whereas postmodern novels in the 1960s and ’70s established a trend, just as narrative instability does now in popular culture.

2 Introducing Narrative Instability

33

these narrative concerns and discursive implementations as their basis and transfer them to the cinema screen—at the core, their formal experiments are thus very similar, yet they are adapted to another medium, and while postmodern novels of the 1960s and ’70s have at times been decried as ‘elitist’ and allegedly intended only for academic audiences, the films around the turn of the millennium have attracted large audiences. I see part of this success inherent in the (audio)visuality of film (and related media): In line with John Berger’s dictum that “[s]eeing comes before words” (7), the visual carries a particularly strong appeal to reality—having seen something might entail a more forceful claim to truth than having read something. This ‘trust’ placed on visuality is also what provides the film camera with its “ostensible objectivity” (Quendler 7), and this is exactly what unreliable narration and many of the first very prominent narratively unstable films build on, breaking the ‘trust’ audiences might have placed on the camera.34 The strong effect that visually ‘misleading’ audiences can have is especially apparent in the narratively unstable films from the late 1990s and early 2000s, which centrally work with one significant moment of instability (an aspect I discuss further in the next chapter). In Fight Club, for instance, the revelation that Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) is not actually a diegetically real character but a manifestation of the ‘split’ personality of the protagonist Jack (Edward Norton) has a stronger effect because we have been seeing Tyler Durden throughout the entire film, believing him to be a fully fledged character, whereas the moment of instability reveals that this was due to the film being internally focalized through Jack’s unreliable perspective.35 Additionally, while seeing something ‘with your own eyes’ entails a stronger claim to reality than ‘only’ reading about it, experiencing something yourself in turn supersedes the mere witnessing of it—this experientiality is what many video games tap into, allowing their players to ac34

35

This apparent objectivity, credibility, or reliability of the camera comes to fictional films and TV shows through the appeals to the documentary mode, which is also visible, for instance, in the narratological term ‘camera eye’ for a third-person ‘objective’ narrator. Even there, of course, as with all visual depictions, what might seem objective actually is highly subjective (Quendler 7), and visual depictions can be just as misleading as narrative ones as well (cf. also Roskill and Carrier; Newton). For an account of the intermingling of fictional and documentary realism in this sense, cf. Nichols 165-98. Interestingly, the use of an unreliable narrator is also something cinema audiences had to become accustomed to—Maurice Lahde notes how the original reception of Alfred Hitchcock’s Stage Fright (1950) was relatively negative, since audiences felt ‘cheated’ by the revelation of an unreliable flashback (296). In this sense, instability can be effective partly because, originally, film might be a medium where audiences did not expect to be ‘misled’ by unreliability. Unstable texts that feature such moments but, eventually, lead to stability again thus seem to propose a kind of pleasure similar to what Michael Balint terms ‘Angstlust,’ a thrill experienced, for instance, during and because of the anxiety-inducing moment of instability and particularly after that moment has passed, seemingly restoring normalcy (cf. Balint).

34

Narrative Instability

tively experience and shape video-game narratives, where an unreliable rendering of these events can have an even greater destabilizing effect on the storyworld. Overall, then, within this nexus of convergence and remediation, (postmodern) novels form a crucial anchor point for my discussion of narrative instability, albeit one situated in the background as the (at times implicit) remediated source of many of the audiovisual texts I focus on.36 Destabilizing a narrative often works particularly well through the visual aspect of reconstructing a storyworld, and as such, my focus in this book will be on films, TV series, and video games. Film is the most prominent medium to feature narrative instability, whereas TV shows—which have gained much cultural traction in the last two decades in the discourses surrounding ‘complex television’ and ‘quality TV’ (cf. Mittell, Complex TV; Ernst and Paul; Hassler-Forest)—do not seem to engage in instability often. At least partly, this might be attributable to their seriality: Featuring a central moment of instability to work towards implies some kind of finality; for TV, it is usually the end of a season that ushers in the majority of narrative revelations that can engender instability. Sustaining such a setup over multiple seasons can be difficult, however—either the revelations are postponed to future seasons, which might frustrate audiences, or an unstable season finale builds a similar expectation for the subsequent season, leading to increasingly more unstable elements having to be introduced in a dynamic of “[intra-]serial one-upmanship or outbidding” (Kelleter, Serial Agencies 81) and thus potentially compromising the coherence and believability of the storyworld. Perhaps due to these reasons, compared with the dozens of popular and successful narratively unstable films that have been released in the last two decades, only few television shows are unstable in this sense.37 Yet as television is experiencing further shifts in close connec36

37

Significantly, a number of popular unstable films have direct literary antecedents, such as the 1996 novel Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk, Bret Easton Ellis’s 1991 American Psycho, and Dennis Lehane’s 2003 Shutter Island, all of which were adapted into films. Additionally, a number of contemporary novels also are narratively unstable, for instance Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper (2006), Doug Dorst’s S. (2013), and much of Mark Z. Danielewski’s fiction, especially House of Leaves and Only Revolutions (2006). Notably, many of these novels are unstable through experiments with their own form, acknowledging their physicality and using that to highlight their textuality, for instance through the ubiquitous use of footnotes(-within-footnotes) or by having to turn the book upside down in Danielewski’s fiction. A number of these elements, in turn, are remediated from newer media, especially from forms of play (for instance in so-called choose-yourown-adventure stories), but also from film or television (cf., e.g., Edwards; Hayles). While these developments form an important backdrop to my study, the main focus in this book is on investigating how ‘newer’ media and popular culture have used the legacy of the postmodern novel. David Lynch’s Twin Peaks (1990-1991) was an early example of a TV show engaging in narrative instability; perhaps because it aired too early, before the surge in narratively unstable films at the end of the decade, it failed to acquire sufficient rat-

2 Introducing Narrative Instability

35

tion (and competition) with streaming services—such as Netflix’s practice to make the entire season of a show available immediately, allowing for binge-watching practices (cf. Barker and Wiatrowski)—more narratively unstable TV shows seem to be produced as well, and consequently, in order to investigate this development, I will look in detail at one such text in chapter 5 by analyzing the HBO show Westworld. The trend towards narrative instability is more visible in another, even newer medium: the video game. I would argue that some video games have begun to ‘turn inwards’ more frequently in the last few years, metafictionally exploring the inner workings of their capabilities to tell stories, in line with some scholars’ calls for games to develop “their own deconstructions” in order to ‘mature’ as a medium (Domsch 179; cf. also Ensslin, Language 151).38 While this trend to metafictionally discuss video games’ own narrative capabilities is particularly prominent among so-called ‘indie games’— released without major publishers on platforms such as Steam and often developed by very small teams—bigger, so-called ‘triple A’ titles with large budgets, teams, and often considerable commercial success are beginning to show similar tendencies.39 There are, however, no major studies of this

38

39

ings for a third season (fittingly, however, it was revived with a reboot in 2017). The 2012 TV show Awake about a character existing in two separate realities met a similar fate, being canceled after its first season. Of course, many other shows include smaller unstable elements, for instance the occasional twist that works according to my concept of instability (e.g., on shows like The Outer Limits [19952002]) or single discursive devices like unreliable narration in a sitcom such as How I Met Your Mother (2005-2014). Yet while they formally make use of narrative instability, few of these texts engage as thoroughly in instability as the films I mentioned so far, particularly not in terms of their cultural resonances. The most prominent example of a popular TV show with elements of instability is Lost (2004-2010), which arguably engaged in both practices just mentioned, deferring more and more revelations to future seasons while simultaneously constantly introducing new mysteries. Eventually, as Jason Mittell notes, by “privileging the genre of fantasy adventure over science fiction, Lost was willing to let many dangling mysteries go unexplained within the context of the television series, offering instead a spiritual celebration of Jack’s (and, by extension, our) ‘letting go’ of the need for rational understanding in the program’s closing moments” (Complex TV 310), leading to a very polarized reception of its finale. In turn, a more recent example of a narratively unstable TV series is the 2019 Netflix show Russian Doll. Other popular media might be engaging in a similar trend towards metafictionality, arguably, for instance, comic books and graphic novels (cf. Hescher 81-83; Round; Stein et al.). Still, especially because of the prominence of notions of play in contemporary culture, I deem video games as the most salient of these. Examples of such indie games include Dear Esther (2012), The Stanley Parable (2013), or Pony Island (2016), whereas some of the big-budget games interested in their own narrative and ludic workings are the titles of the BioShock series, Heavy Rain (2010), Alan Wake (2012), or Spec Ops: The Line (2012). Throughout this book, I will mainly focus on the latter kinds of games, the particularly popular and commercially successful ones.

36

Narrative Instability

trend among video games yet, which this book partly tries to assuage as well: Narrative instability is one way for video games to engage in these formal experiments, to draw attention to their own efforts of narration and how these can be interwoven with their ludic elements, i.e., their gameplay and the potential for interactivity. In their storytelling efforts, video games remediate narrative techniques from novels and, specifically, film as well.40 Finally, taking video games serious as a cornerstone of this investigation of contemporary popular culture is also significant because video games’ aesthetic dimensions are, in turn, remediated by the ‘older,’ more established media, leading to a fusion of narrative and play. In the contemporary environment of transmedia and convergence culture, media influence each other dialectically—as Bolter and Grusin also note (5), remediation is not a one-way street, but rather, just as newer media look towards more traditional ones to establish themselves, older ones try to reinvigorate themselves through inspiration from new media’s innovative capabilities. I centrally read this reciprocity as one between the symbolic forms of play and narrative, and I understand video games as liminal media that make use of both narrative and ludic elements (cf. 1.1). In order to tell stories, they remediate aspects known from (audiovisual) media and add elements from what I call ludic textuality (or narrativity), partly inherent in their gameplay (i.e., the way the game has to be engaged with in order to function) and partly as additions to their narrative capabilities. As these elements of play, I propose interactivity, agency, nonlinearity, and iteration as the most relevant ones: Games have to be actively (and physically) engaged with in order to work (interactivity);41 they provide options and decisions to players 40

41

Among the most prominent remediated elements is the use of so-called ‘cutscenes,’ which interrupt the gameplay and portray an important story event similar to a scene in a film. Since cutscenes are difficult to employ seamlessly within the gameplay, they are often criticized as “cinematic sequences a[d]dressing the reader, putting the player on hold” (Klevjer 193). Other remediated elements include the occasional use of voice-over narration and unreliable narration, codified camera shots, angles, and movement, and an established first-person and third-person camera perspective on the protagonist, both of which convey internal focalization. Crucially, this interactivity also implies a familiarity with the rules of a game, an aspect that particularly ludologists highlight in their understanding of games (cf. Aarseth; Juul; Frasca). In turn, such a focus on the ‘rules’ of a text reoccurs in contemporary unstable texts that, like these games, highlight the importance of their poetics, their formal and narrative ‘rules,’ by drawing attention to their discourse. Additionally, next to an engagement with the text, interactivity also entails a social component, in online or cooperative games that depend on other players as well (whereas most single-player games work with an artificial intelligence, i.e., characters controlled by the computer). Applying this notion of interactivity beyond video games highlights the social and communal aspect entailed in a number of unstable texts, whose instability prompts engagements with other viewers or players on social media or online forums, together trying to piece together the plot and to uncover the meanings of the text.

2 Introducing Narrative Instability

37

between which they can choose (agency);42 these choices can lead to different narrative experiences (nonlinearity);43 and because of that, many games encourage repeated playthroughs or repetitions of individual sequences (iteration). These aspects of playing inspire a number of narratively unstable texts and influence their textuality accordingly: Unstable texts encourage an active engagement with formal and textual properties, often by rewatching a film/series or going back to specific scenes with updated knowledge; they foster communal audience engagements, discussing possible interpretations or ‘hidden’ plot elements and connections on online forums; and they highlight narrative and interpretive openness (instead of closure) by mimicking games’ nonlinearity, advocating multiple possible outcomes and embracing ambivalence.44 Narratively unstable texts ‘play’ with their own textuality in these ways, and while this is certainly something found in the unstable video games I 42

43

44

As I will come back to notions of agency throughout this study, it is important to point to a use of agency in the field of game studies that is often limiting or misleading. In fact, the rather complicated issue of agency and choice in video games has been discussed numerous times in game scholarship (cf., e.g., Domsch; Murray, Hamlet 126-53; Mukherjee 146-73; Eichner; Grodal), with one particularly influential idea being the ‘illusion’ of choice, agency, or free will in video games (Atkins 44; Domsch 42, 90; Haimberg 3). Atkins, for instance, speaks of the “limited illusion of freedom of choice offered that works against the expectations of linearity” (44), implying that agency is limited (and that complete freedom of choice is an illusion) only in video games. Instead, I propose to understand (most, but not all) video games as trying to achieve a certain textual effect in terms of choice and agency—they want their players to feel like they are in control of what happens. Video games will always feature some choices—starting from the mundane physical choice of which button to press and going over to narrativized choices, such as where to go, whom to attack, or how to develop one’s character—but cannot, of course, offer complete ‘freedom,’ the possibility to do whatever one pleases to do. Yet it is actually this idea of ‘complete’ freedom or agency that is an illusion; just like in real life, choices and agency in video games always happen “within a dialectic of enablement and constraint,” as Florian Bast phrases it (28), understanding agency not as “an inherent attribute” (27) but as “an ability realized in a specific cultural and historical context” (28). This kind of nonlinearity does not describe an achronological narration, as the term is used in literary studies. Instead, in the context of play, nonlinearity denotes that there “is not simply one fixed sequence of letters, words, and sentences but [that] the words or sequence of words may differ from reading to reading because of the shape, conventions, or mechanisms of the text” (Aarseth 41). A nonlinear text thus has the “ability to vary, to produce different courses” (Aarseth 41-42), for instance when, in a game, a specific choice leads to different endings. The 1985 film Clue is an early example of what nowadays could be considered a remediation of video games’ penchant to feature multiple endings, as it was shown with three alternative endings in different cinemas. In turn, such a practice also encourages audience engagement afterwards, comparing narrative outcomes and possible interpretations with viewers who have seen different endings (or, in the logics of iteration, watching the film again oneself in the hope to witness another ending).

38

Narrative Instability

discuss, it also extends, in remediated form, to the more traditional media of films, television series, and novels. Placing this much importance on play connects with recent discussions of the interplay between these symbolic forms and of what some term the ‘ludification’ of contemporary culture and society: As Valerie Frissen et al. argue, while ludification centrally includes the “immense popularity of computer games, which, as far as global sales are concerned, have already outstripped Hollywood movies,” elements of play have also entered realms such as “leisure time,” “work,” “education,” “politics,” and “even warfare” (“Homo Ludens” 9).45 Significantly, ‘high’ postmodernism has also often been described as being ‘playful,’ yet frequently with very different implications: When McLaughlin complains about contemporary fiction’s “postmodern games,” he equates these with “annoying stylistic tricks” and a lack of “characters we can care about and a plot in which we can lose ourselves” (“Post-Postmodernism” 212), not only casting postmodernism but also games as a foil against which he supposedly places fiction with ‘meaning.’ In other contexts, describing postmodernism as playful equally serves to associate it with not being serious (cf. Edwards 69), with a certain looseness and an interest only in formal experimentation instead of a focus on characters or plot, constructing a binary between the seriousness of realism and ‘playful’ postmodernism as its opposite, unconcerned with ‘real’ themes or emotions. 46 45

46

This ludification (to which discourses around ‘gamification’ also belong) is mirrored in contemporary media discussions as well, evident, for instance, in Elsaesser’s previously discussed notion of the ‘mindgame film’; Mittell equally notes that contemporary films have “embraced a game aesthetic, inviting audiences to play along with the creators to crack the interpretive codes to make sense of their complex narrative strategies” (“Narrative Complexity” 38). In many regards, Johan Huizinga’s 1938 Homo Ludens still is the most influential work in highlighting the importance of play in everyday culture and spheres of life. In the following decades, a variety of scholarship has addressed the continued and renewed significance of play in contemporary society—for further research on this ludification and gamification and the influence of play and games on other media, cf. Frissen et al., Playful Identities; Warmelink 181-205; Savignac; Fuchs et al. Ryan notes that the metaphor of play or game is particularly prominent in postmodernism because “it exemplifies the elusive character of the signified and the slippery nature of language” (Narrative as Virtual Reality 177), and Julian Kücklich similarly observes: “Play liquefies the meaning of signs; it breaks up the fixed relation between signifier and signified, thus allowing signs to take on new meanings. This is probably also the reason why the metaphor of play has gained such prevalence in the post-modern discourse” (7-8). As a case in point, Kücklich cites Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man as examples of influential uses of ‘play’ metaphors in discussions of postmodernism. The association of play with nonseriousness, in turn—even Jenkins implicitly evokes this binarism when he contrasts the “work—and play—spectators perform in the new media system” (Convergence 3)—also fits discourses that associate video games with a lack of seriousness, seeing them as a waste of time or even a danger (particularly to children) (cf. Happ and Melzer; Markey and Ferguson).

2 Introducing Narrative Instability

39

While, as I will discuss in the next section, I doubt that such a generalizing assessment is productive for investigations of postmodernism, I still identify a significant difference between how postmodern texts of the 1960s and ’70s were considered ‘playful’ and how I understand narrative instability as engaging in play. As narratively unstable texts are characterized by this kind of ludic textuality, I argue that they have a different relationship to play than what has been ascribed to postmodernism in scholarship so far— specifically in the ways I outlined above (recurring to interactivity, agency, nonlinearity, and iteration). Overall, next to the more general narrative aspects making up instability, its inherently transmedial dimension is equally significant in identifying narrative instability as a trend across popular culture. In addition to remediations of storytelling techniques from older to newer media and vice versa, it is particularly unstable texts’ relation to the symbolic form of play that establishes this transmedial dimension.

2.2 Contextualizing and Historicizing Narrative Instability: Why Instability Now? In addition to the more ‘literary’ interest in outlining instability as a narrative trend, this book centrally pursues a cultural-studies project of examining narrative instability’s cultural work. In that vein, and keeping Fredric Jameson’s imperative to “[a]lways historicize!” in mind (Political Unconscious ix), I want to contextualize this study ‘historically’ by providing answers to the question of ‘why instability now?’—why is it that narratively unstable texts have become popular now, in their particular media, instead of the high-postmodernist novels of the 1960s and ’70s, and what can be learned about contemporary US culture and society from analyzing this popular trend. To approach these questions, I will take a closer look at my suggestion to position narrative instability as part of contemporary American popular culture: First, I will outline my conception of the ‘contemporary’ moment into which narrative instability injects itself, contextualizing the contemporary era within discussions of (post-)postmodernism. Second, I will detail what I understand as popular culture and the ‘popular’ in more general terms, linking this project to canonical scholarship in American studies and popular culture studies. Third, I will examine in how far this is a specifically (US) American trend, pointing to the cultural contexts that narrative instability evokes, centering on whiteness, masculinity, and the middle class. Finally, a fourth section will carve out a few of the recurring cultural framings engaged by narrative instability, specifically highlighting how the texts considered here consistently return to issues of identity, reality, and textuality. Together, the following pages accentuate the contemporary moment as characterized by a high degree of self-reflexivity and complexity, by pleasures gained in the negotiation of popular narratives and

40

Narrative Instability

notions of play, and by complicated, ambivalent textual politics lying between progressive projects and reactionary backlash. 2.2.1 APPROACHING THE CONTEMPORARY MOMENT By focusing on the contemporary moment in this study, I refer to roughly the middle of the 1990s to the 2010s, as this is when narrative instability begins to become popular. Notably, narratively unstable texts negotiate questions and frictions that are reflected in academic discussions about the contemporary as a possibly ‘post-postmodern’ era: With a variety of different terms and concepts, such as ‘post-postmodernism’ (cf. McLaughlin, “Post-Postmodern”; Timmer; Nealon), ‘late postmodernism’ (cf. J. Green), ‘after postmodernism’ (cf. López and Potter; Rebein; Hoberek, “After Postmodernism”), ‘metamodernism’ (cf. Vermeulen and van den Akker), ‘digimodernism’ (cf. Kirby), or ‘cosmodernism’ (cf. Moraru), a number of scholars have suggested the ‘end’ of postmodernism, arguing at least that “it is in a state of decline” (López and Potter 4) but often, more forcefully, suggesting that “postmodernism became terminally ill sometime in the lateeighties and early-nineties [and] was buried once and for [all] in the rubble of the World Trade Center” (Brooks and Toth 3). While my historicization of narrative instability also engages such discussions, I see four significant differences between them, which will help sharpen my own contextualization:47 First, the variously labeled post-postmodern accounts all imply a strict periodization, identifying significant differences between postmodernism and whatever they propose comes thereafter. Such a penchant to periodize seems flawed for a number of reasons (cf. Herrmann, Kanzler, and Schubert 10-17), among them the arbitrariness with which they propose various points in history, such as the end of the Cold War or 9/11 (Brooks and Toth 2-3), as the liminal break between the two periods. Second, almost all of these accounts refer to a particular understanding of postmodernism that omits many of its heterogeneous aspects, instead using postmodernism as a foil against which they project a new paradigm, in the process “forg[ing] postmodernism into a period characterized by literature’s disavowal of politics and social referentiality” (Herrmann, Kanzler, and Schubert 12). Specifically, this narrative about postmodernism focuses only on its proclivity for formal, metafictional experimentation, largely disregarding another crucial dimension of postmodernism: the opening-up of (access to) discourses and the increased recogni-

47

This historicization of the contemporary moment strongly builds on previous work done in the context of a research project on the ‘poetics of politics’—for a more thorough and detailed engagement with these various narratives of post-postmodernism, and particularly their tendency to periodize, cf. Herrmann, Kanzler, and Schubert.

2 Introducing Narrative Instability

41

tion of female and ‘minority’ authors.48 Third, many of these studies discuss only one specific medium, most frequently the novel, often disregarding popular culture and failing to see the transmedial influences and relations between these media, which relate very differently to developments typically associated with postmodernism. Finally, this strong impetus to employ the logic of periodization implies a monolithic quality to culture in general, which is then understood to largely and coherently move from one period to another. For these post-postmodern studies, this is usually a shift towards ‘neo-realism’ or a similarly termed concept, variously characterized by “clarity and simplicity” (López and Potter 5), “probing, superconscious narrations” (Rebein 43), the examination of “social issues through the prism of personal experience” (Rebein 19), “more grounded (or ‘responsible’) works” (Brooks and Toth 5), and other elements that supposedly stand in opposition to postmodernism.49 In many respects, this seems like a vast oversimplification—just as modernism did not simply ‘lead into’ postmodernism and, instead, the two constructions significantly relate dialectically to each other and share similarities (cf. Hoffmann; Brooker; Eagleton), many of these supposedly neo-realist aspects characterize parts of (different understandings of) contemporary postmodernism as well. In contrast to these four larger points, my conception understands the contemporary period as a continuation of postmodern tendencies, not a sharp break from it; it sees postmodernism as always having had both an interest in self-referential formal experimentation and in ‘political’ aspects; it recognizes individual media as relating differently to postmodern tendencies and looks at the contemporary cultural landscape transmedially; and it envisions narrative instability as only one tendency within the heterogeneous contemporary moment, instead of casting it as a sharp break or shift from what came before. Narratively unstable texts highlight issues that reverberate with questions asked about the contemporary moment in discussions of post-postmodernism, yet narrative instability rather aligns with studies that argue for an intensification of postmodernism in the contemporary era (cf. Nealon), seeing that many of the traits characterizing instabil48

49

This construction leads, for instance, to Rebein’s unusual claim that, among others, Toni Morrison is one of the “writers we would not normally associate with literary postmodernism” (7), in the process reducing postmodernism to a predominantly white male project. On the different facets and dimensions of postmodernism, cf. particularly Linda Hutcheon’s Poetics of Postmodernism, which understands minority voices as the ‘ex-centric’ in an effort to ‘decenter’ the postmodern (57-73). This kind of new realism has been labeled ‘neo-realism’ (cf. Brooks and Toth), ‘dirty realism’ (cf. Rebein), ‘critical’ or ‘transcendental realism’ (cf. López and Potter), or ‘speculative realism’ (cf. Saldivar). While, of course, there are numerous works in the contemporary moment that can be considered to engage in such a neorealist mode of writing, all of these studies use postmodernism in a way to misleadingly imply that works in the realist mode were not part of postmodernism, again reducing it to a foil against which to project proclamations of post-postmodernism.

42

Narrative Instability

ity align with ‘classical’ postmodernism as well. As some studies frame it (cf. Timmer; Brooks and Toth), in this sense, postmodernism is present as a ‘specter’ in these texts. Yet narrative instability also entails differences from these earlier postmodern conceptions, particularly in regard to unstable texts’ (transmedial) relationship to play, as discussed above, and in terms of how readily audiences have engaged with them, leading to immense mainstream popularity and commercial success (which I outline in more detail in the next subsection). Most importantly, though, with an interest in the ‘poetics of politics’ (cf. Herrmann, Kanzler, and Schubert), this study is not invested in periodizing the contemporary but in historicizing it —instead of proclaiming this as the ‘era of instability’ or engaging in a similarly grandiose gesture, my interest lies in analyzing what the proliferation of narratively unstable texts illuminates about contemporary American culture. In turn, in addition to the shift towards convergence culture discussed before, another major cultural trend that relates to narrative instability concerns a move towards ‘narrative complexity.’ In Jason Mittell’s seminal study of the subject, he defines narrative complexity as a “distinct narrational mode” in an “era of narrative experimentation and innovation” (“Narrative Complexity” 29; cf. also Mittell, Complex TV). Although Mittell specifically discusses television, the idea of popular narratives becoming more complex has taken hold for other media as well (cf. Staiger; Buckland, Puzzle Films; Kiss and Willemsen; Hven). While I see a general drawback in the normativity implied in the term ‘complex’—which Mittell also problematizes, stating that ‘conventional’ and ‘complex’ “are not value-free descriptions” (“Narrative Complexity” 30)—it encompasses a larger media development that more productively captures the variety of textual transformations of the last decades than a more singular study on, for instance, puzzle or twist films. Narratively unstable texts generally fit into this trend as well, at least in terms of two strands that I consider constitutive of the shift towards complexity. On the one hand, audiences enjoy narrative complexity and draw pleasure from it because of what Mittell, via Neil Harris, calls ‘operational aesthetics’:50 As Harris explains, this is a “pleasure in experiencing deception after knowledge of it had been gained” (68), an idea that Mittell prominently adapts to describe the pleasure of “watch[ing] the gears at work, marveling at the craft required to pull off such narrative pyrotechnics” (“Narrative Complexity” 35). It is thus a pleasure that derives not primarily from the content of the text but from its form, its narrative discourse, signaling a heightened audience interest in

50

More correctly, Mittell uses the term in the singular, yet, in line with Felix Brinker’s analysis of complex television (50), I suggest to use it in the plural, since ‘operational aesthetics’ denote the multitude of practices and pleasures that can be involved in this engagement with complex narratives.

2 Introducing Narrative Instability

43

matters of textuality.51 On the other hand, narrative complexity implies a trend towards a level of audience engagement akin to the previously mentioned participatory culture, where texts encourage audiences to reengage with the text multiple times, closely watch for ‘hidden’ details, and collect their findings to discuss them with other viewers (or readers or players). Mittell more specifically refers to such practices as “forensic fandom,” a mode “that invites viewers to dig deeper, probing beneath the surface to understand the complexity of a story and its telling” (“Forensic Fandom”). Similar to how rewatching a film for such details mirrors the iterative nature of many video-game narratives, this social engagement with the text is an element I also understand as being influenced by play as a communal effort, which goes hand in hand with more widespread discussions of popular culture in online contexts.52 Overall, narrative instability as a popular trend in the contemporary moment thus is characterized by a continuation of many postmodern strategies, a difference in how it relates narrative and play to each other, a focus on operational aesthetics as a source of pleasure, and the encouragement of an active audience engagement with the texts’ narrative, discursive, and thematic elements. 2.2.2 POPULARITY AND POPULAR CULTURE The texts and media I consider in this book are all part of popular culture, and hence, their study aligns itself with the historical emergence of the field of popular culture studies as well as with the significance of the study of popular culture within American studies. Theories of popular culture and of the ‘popular’ in general thus form an important context in which narrative instability inserts itself as well.53 In this sense, investigating popular culture 51

52

53

Mittell adds that these traits of narrative complexity “convert many viewers to amateur narratologists” (“Narrative Complexity” 38), which, while again somewhat of a normative term, is a useful shorthand to describe the way in which contemporary audiences engage with many narratively unstable texts for pleasurable effects; accordingly, I will at times refer to this notion of ‘amateur narratologists’ as well. Of course, talking to others about the meanings of a text is also something encouraged by the symbolic form of narrative (not least in the context of oral storytelling), and it is not a form of participation dependent on the Internet, instead having characterized negotiations of texts and their narratives for centuries. However, the Internet facilitates and encourages such discussions more easily, and it also makes it easier to study such discussions academically. Significantly, this trend towards ‘forensic fandom’ takes place across media as well; for instance, the official forum for Danielewski’s House of Leaves includes thousands of threads and ten thousands of posts that collect hints hidden in the book, compare clues from different pages with each other, and collaboratively work to interpret parts of the novel (cf. “House of Leaves”). As with a few other significant contexts for this book, the history of the study of popular culture is too broad and multifaceted to render here in detail. Additionally, since such retracings already exist, I will only summarize the most critical points

44

Narrative Instability

in American studies implies an inquiry into the functions and uses of popularly consumed texts and into an understanding of the interplay between texts and their audiences—and, notably, it also always entails an inquiry into the ‘Americanness’ of such popular-culture artifacts, as it is specifically American culture that is cast as something to be consumed (cf. A. A. Berger, Ads 35). Throughout the past several decades, popular culture has been studied from a variety of often contradictory approaches—in fact, part of the productivity of analyzing popular culture might be that “there can be no single unified outlook or critical perspective” on it (Haselstein et al. 335). Taking a step back, however, the struggles over the meanings of popular culture are visible along three larger impulses: “ideological, commercial and populist concepts” of popular culture, among which “debate has ensued about exactly where to locate the authority over popular culture’s meanings on the spectrum from ideological manipulation to audiences’ semiotic freedom” (Kanzler, Infinite Diversity 49, 45). Ideological conceptions of popular culture debate its implications in the dominant ideology—ranging from condemnations as part of the ‘culture industry’ in the thinking of the Frankfurt School (Horkheimer and Adorno; cf. Witkin) to more nuanced takes on popular culture and its audiences as allowing for the potential of oppositional readings (Fiske, Television 65; cf. Hall, “Encoding/Decoding”). In turn, commercial points of view highlight popular culture’s status as commercial products, implicated in a capitalist logic, yet since producers of popular culture “face the objective that their products must be popular,” they potentially “[need] to adopt positions that may collide with their own ideological interests” (Kanzler, Infinite Diversity 47). Populist conceptions, lastly, focus specifically on the role audiences play as well as on the agency they have in ‘consuming’ popular culture and, in the process, activating its potentially ambivalent meanings. While recognizing the importance of all three of these perspectives on popular culture, I am particularly interested in the last aspect throughout the course of this book: Influenced by John Fiske’s take on popular culture, I read the texts in this study for the pleasures they elicit for their audiences (Understanding 49-68) as well as for their polysemy, their potentials for complex, ambivalent meanings (Television 85-93), and for what could be called the ‘politics’ of these texts.54

54

that are relevant for my study at hand. For a deeper engagement with the emergence of popular culture as an important paradigm within American studies and influential work on popular culture in general, cf. specifically Fiske, Understanding; Cawelti, Mystery; Jenkins, McPherson, et al.; Storey, Cultural Theory; Storey, Cultural Studies; Strinati. As the nexus of pleasure and reception practices forms an important context for this study, I will look at it in more detail in the next chapter (cf. 3.2.2), since it is especially relevant for unstable identities texts, which often feature single significant moments of instability about their protagonist’s identity that expect and encourage a certain reception in order to be pleasurable.

2 Introducing Narrative Instability

45

Against the backdrop of these theoretical discussions, popular culture has been variedly defined. In Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, John Storey lists six different approaches of thinking about popular culture: quantitatively, that is, “culture that is widely favoured or well liked by many people” (5); relationally, as “the culture that is left over after we have decided what is high culture” (6); as ‘mass culture,’ “a hopelessly commercial culture [...] mass-produced for mass consumption” (8); from a populist perspective, as “the culture that originates from ‘the people,’” a kind of ‘folk culture’ (9); in a more ‘political’ understanding, via the Gramscian concept of hegemony, as “a site of struggle between the ‘resistance’ of subordinate groups and the forces of ‘incorporation’ operating in the interests of dominant groups” (10); and as part of postmodern culture, which “no longer recognizes the distinction between high and popular culture” (12). Many of these dimensions can be set up against each other to more comprehensively study popular culture. For this investigation, I follow Storey’s quantitative impulse to understand popular culture as those cultural artifacts that have been both commercially and critically successful. 55 Moreover, in fusing some of the approaches that Storey lists, I consider those texts popular that make use of specific media and genres. For the former, this concerns those media that have attained a particularly popular standing in recent decades, engendering highly profitable consumer markets, and thus encompasses, in this study, video games, film, and TV. In regard to genres, texts can become popular by making use of formulaic narratives that have proven to be successful or well-liked by audiences—a crime novel or a science-fiction film, for instance, can easily be marketed as such, immediately speaking to a potential audience of genre fans. Texts can then use this allegiance to a certain genre and capitalize on the audience’s knowledge of formulas, fostering innovation by not neatly belonging to one single genre but by mixing different established ones or consciously working against the expectations of a specific genre.56 Adding to Storey’s list, I also consider the texts in my corpus popular because they engage in the popularization of certain scientific issues, an aspect I discuss in detail in chapter 4 (cf. 4.2.2). 55

56

Both commercial and critical success, along with other parameters that could be considered to denote being “widely favoured or well liked by many people” (Storey, Cultural Theory 5), can be measured in different ways, of course. Accordingly, I will point out how I understand the primary texts of the subsequent chapters’ central analyses as belonging to this understanding of popular culture at the beginning of each reading. John G. Cawelti’s work has been most influential in pointing out that the study of such popular genres, which work according to ‘formulas’ that he analyzes, has scholarly value even when taking them just as seriously as ‘high-culture’ texts, i.e., when reading them not as ‘simply’ formulaic fiction but considering their aesthetics (cf. Adventure). I discuss genre in more detail in chapter 5 (cf. 5.2.2), as it forms a particularly significant context for how unstable texts understand their own textuality.

46

Narrative Instability

Finally, the relation between popular and high culture, similar to conceptions of popular culture as hailing from ‘the people’ vs. being implicated in the culture industry, is more complicated than can be explored here. I certainly see postmodernism’s claim that it “no longer recognizes the distinction between high and popular culture” (12) with suspicion, as divisions between high and popular culture themselves seem to continue their hold in American society, just, perhaps, with shifted positions, where, for instance, a medium like the video game nowadays takes on the ‘low’ cultural position previously held by television. Claiming to strip away these demarcations between low and high culture thus appears as a mostly performative act. Importantly, however, I consider narrative instability as potentially providing such an impulse, mainly through its transmedial dimension, breaking the barriers between formal conventions traditionally associated only with either high or popular culture, and thus offering popular pleasures in operational aesthetics.57 In studying the texts in this book as popular, I thus understand popular culture not as an entity as such but as a process that is negotiated and discursively constructed. 2.2.3 AMERICAN CULTURE AND SOCIETY IN THE CONTEMPORARY MOMENT A third significant contextualization of this project is its focus on the United States. As an American studies project, the corpus considered logically consists of US texts. However, narrative instability is also a transnational trend encompassing texts with international appeal: For one, unstable texts are commercially successful internationally as well; moreover, there are also a number of unstable texts from other countries that, even if they 57

Similarly, the previously mentioned shift towards ‘quality TV’ performs such a breakdown of clear binaries between pop and high culture as well, as do discourses surrounding a ‘middlebrow’ culture (cf. Rubin), both of which come close to a ‘crossing of the border’ and ‘closing of the gap’ famously proclaimed by Leslie Fiedler. Still, popular culture, as mentioned above, also remains a commercial enterprise, and as such, it is implicated in the dominant ideology, which is why I would caution to understand it simply as culture from ‘the people’ (whoever that homogeneous entity might be). Previous signs of fusions between popular and high culture have, after all, often been met with alarm, for instance in David Foster Wallace’s influential essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” in which he laments the fact that television has adapted techniques from the postmodern avant-garde, rendering it incapable of criticizing dominant ideology. As McLaughlin summarizes Wallace’s argument, “techniques that were for the early postmodernists the means of rebellion have become, through their co-optation by television, ‘agents of a great despair and stasis’” (“Post-Postmodern” 64-65). In contrast, however, I see this “co-optation” as potentially positive and productive, allowing, after all, for narrative innovation and experimentation. In turn, I do not consider the ‘political’ and ideological implications of such a fusion in terms of the traditions of a larger cultural critique (which Wallace seems to engage in) but by reading these texts for the cultural work they do (cf. 1.1).

2 Introducing Narrative Instability

47

are not as numerous as their US counterparts, still constitute a transnational trend.58 Yet in line with a general minimization of authorial presences in literary studies following the ‘death of the author’ (Barthes, “Death”), I do not want to define the question of a text being American as who has written or produced it (something that is particularly difficult for films, TV shows, or video games, seeing that hundreds of people are involved in their production). Rather, I understand my corpus as American through a focus on the texts’ content, their subjects, and their themes, as even unstable texts from other countries are ‘Americanized’ in this sense.59 These elements include specific American genres like the Western or the hard-boiled detective story, (founding) myths associated with the United States (cf. Paul), and, more specifically, a particularly self-conscious engagement with questions and categories of difference such as ‘race,’ class, and gender. I specifically want to focus on the latter in slightly more detail, as these categories form a cultural realm that all narratively unstable texts relate to. Part of my overall argument is that one of the most recurring cultural dynamics among narratively unstable texts is their propensity to predominantly focus on white, male, middle-class protagonists.60 Hence, while un58

59

60

To name just two concrete examples of unstable texts’ international success: While The Sixth Sense grossed over 290 million dollars in the US, it made almost 380 million dollars in other countries (“Sixth Sense”); Inception, similarly, has a domestic gross of over 290 million dollars but was an even bigger international success, bringing in over 530 million dollars from other markets (“Inception”). The audiences reached by narratively unstable video games and television shows, which are more difficult to track, similarly extend across the globe. On the other hand, narrative instability is also found in non-American texts—there are earlier texts with single unstable elements, such as Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972) or Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Welt am Draht (1973), and more recent examples that fully form part of contemporary narrative instability, like Tom Tykwer’s Lola rennt (1998), Nacho Vigalondo’s Los Cronocrímenes (2007), Jaco Van Dormael’s Mr. Nobody (2009), the Wachowskis and Tykwer’s Cloud Atlas (2012) based on the 2004 novel by David Mitchell, or the TV series Dark (2017-), the first German-language series created by Netflix. These and many others give evidence of narrative instability’s transnational popularity, but particularly texts such as Dark also illustrate how strongly they are influenced by their US ‘counterparts,’ since the show is closely modeled in its plot, unstable moments, and discursive presentation according to a by then existing tradition of American narrative instability. However, the six texts forming the central primary readings in the following analytical chapters all fit a more narrow, author-focused definition of US texts as well, with the exception of the video game Alan Wake, which was developed by the Finnish studio Remedy Entertainment (and published by Microsoft). As I will demonstrate in chapter 5, however, Alan Wake firmly locates itself in an American setting, with numerous references to and inspirations drawn from US popular culture and literature (such as film noir, the horror film, and the American Gothic). In terms of class, while some characters in unstable texts could be considered as belonging to the upper class in regard to factors such as income, occupation, lifestyle, or the power they have over others (Zweig 19), I subsume these under the moniker of the middle class as well. This is because what is most striking about the

48

Narrative Instability

stable texts tackle a variety of different subjects and settings, what the child psychologist Malcolm Crowe in The Sixth Sense, the unnamed car recall specialist in Fight Club, the investment banker Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, the best-selling eponymous writer in Alan Wake, the corporate espionage expert Dominick Cobb in Inception, the former NASA pilot Joseph Cooper in Interstellar, or the rival stage magicians Robert Angier and Alfred Borden in The Prestige (2006) all have in common is that they are white middle-class men.61 As I will demonstrate throughout this study, the texts considered here mainly construct instability as an issue of and for white middle-class men, the presumed unmarked ‘norm’ in US society. Arguing against this assumed unmarkedness, I see this constellation not as a coincidence but as a conscious intersection of categories, where the dominant majority positions along lines of race (whiteness), gender (masculinity), and class (middle class) reinforce each other to establish an even more powerful position.62 While the unstable texts discussed in this book differ in

61

62

treatment of class in many narratively unstable texts is their tendency to ignore it, to portray their protagonists as belonging to some universally assumed class— which is in line with an overemphasis on the middle class in American imagination as well. As Michael Zweig posits, “[a]s the working class has disappeared from polite conversation, the middle class has come to be accepted as the social position most Americans are in” (29), casting middle-class Americans as the “common man, everywoman” (30). This representation of the universality of the middle class also affects self-perceptions, as Americans from very different economic positions often tend to consider themselves to belong to the middle class along with a general tendency to “disbelieve in class” (Lauter and Fitzgerald 1; cf. 2-4), turning the middle class into “the source of normative representations of Americanness” (Robinson 2). Accordingly, when unstable texts, whether they consciously mark class or try to homogenize it, relate particularly significantly to constructions of class, I will analyze these moments in detail, for instance in the games of the BioShock series (cf. 3.3, 4.4). There are, of course, a few notable exceptions, as a number of narratively unstable texts feature (white) female protagonists, such as the films Lola rennt, The Others, Black Swan, or Arrival (2016) and the video games Beyond: Two Souls (2013) or Life Is Strange (2015). Accordingly, I will focus on Black Swan in a detailed reading in the next chapter in order to examine the differences in instability that such a choice of protagonist can entail. This idea of thinking of whiteness, masculinity, and the middle class as intersecting is informed by Cynthia Levine-Rasky’s study of the intersection of whiteness and middle-classness. Like Levine-Rasky’s approach, this is intended as a theoretical move to help “advance an understanding of power” by “explor[ing] the intersections of race and class but [...] with the lens on whiteness, middle-classness” (239). Originally, intersectionality theory is a concept from black feminist theory intended to study oppression in particular (cf. Crenshaw), arguing that “identity is experienced not as composed of discrete attributes but as a subjective, even fragmented, set of dynamics” (Levine-Rasky 242). Levine-Rasky also problematizes the ‘appropriation’ of this concept for the hegemonic norm (240); yet I contend that part of a rounder understanding of power relations in society entails looking not just at how multiple categories of oppression increase the subjugation of minorities (cf. also

2 Introducing Narrative Instability

49

their awareness of these issues, as visual media, they all at least implicitly mark their characters, so even if they generally keep whiteness invisible as a discourse, they cannot avoid implicating themselves in the history of power relations surrounding whiteness in a US historical context. Accordingly, in order to problematize and probe into this particular construction, I will carve out in my analyses how the primary texts relate to issues of race, class, and gender, how they explicitly mark their characters as such in certain moments but in others try to keep their dominant positions invisible, and how all of these constructions significantly relate to questions of oppression, discrimination, and domination. In this sense, and in line with much recent scholarship in fields like masculinity studies (cf. Connell; Kimmel, Manhood; Robinson) and critical whiteness studies (cf. Morrison, Playing; Dyer; Roediger; Frankenberg; Hill), I will argue against the assumed universality of these dominant poles by making them visible and contextualizing them within power relations. Conspicuously, this focus on the white male middle class in narratively unstable texts comes at a time of concerted attempts and struggles by women and (racial) minorities to increase their sociocultural visibility and to reach into the domains of public (cultural) discussions. 63 While, as I will show in the detailed readings of the following chapters, many unstable texts ostensibly pursue progressive projects, they become entangled in a reactionary political landscape that has formed as a backlash against these developments. Part of the pleasures that these texts offer is thus a seeming criticism of dominant ideologies that, on closer inspection, entails fissures, tensions, and contradictions that end up reaffirming hegemonic structures. Across the variety of unstable texts, this dynamic works in three related ways: For one, many texts suggest that the instability of one’s identity or one’s world is something only the unmarked ‘norm’ of white men cares (and worries) about, epistemically privileging them over minorities by invariably tying these representations to whiteness. While this plays into ideas that people of color and women have more ‘pressing’ and ‘real’ needs to consider, seeing how they do not enjoy white male privilege, it is a patronizing tendency similar to the previously mentioned constructions of postmodernism that exclude minority writers from their definition of postmodernism as (only) self-reflexive formal experimentation. Secondly, these texts argue for the constructedness, the arbitrariness, and the unknowability of categories such as one’s reality precisely at a time when women and people of color in the US have, after decades and centuries of struggle, slowly attained more of a position to insert themselves

63

Beal) but also at how multiple categories of domination increase one’s power of oppression. For a brief history of intersectionality theory, cf. Levine-Rasky 240-43; for contemporary research adding to the field, cf., e.g., Lutz et al.; Hancock; O’Donovan et al. Beyond matters of fictional representation, such struggles are also visible in recent social movements like ‘Black Lives Matter’ and ‘#MeToo.’

50

Narrative Instability

into discussions of and in the public sphere.64 Notably, this is a development preceded by and closely tied to earlier popularizations of postmodernism as well, for instance when feminists “(suspiciously) wonder[ed] at the coincidence of postmodernism’s deconstruction of the subject with a historical moment when marginalized and previously silenced groups like women have just begun to ‘engage in the historical and political and theoretical process of constituting ourselves as subjects’” (Koenen, Visions 304; cf. also JanMohamed and Lloyd; Koenen, “(Black) Lady”). Unstable texts that have become popular since the mid-1990s, in turn, reflect discussions about current and future societal and demographic shifts in the US, with projections about white Americans losing their majority status by 2050 instilling “fear of change” and “fear of losing privileged status” among “some Americans” (Frey 1). Consequently, just as white male America’s monopolistic grasp on certain cultural negotiations seems to be slipping, 65 some narratively unstable texts argue that reality or identity are concepts that cannot really, definitively be grasped or discussed anyway, constituting a form of (epistemic) backlash against the increased visibility and perceived power of women and minorities. Finally, and again in close connection with the previous point about an alleged crisis of white middle-class masculinity, a number of narratively unstable texts function as a reassertion of (especially) masculine identity, where the narrative resolution of instability into an eventual stability goes hand in hand with reconstituting the white male self. 66 Often, this renewed 64

65

66

This tendency also works closely together with the first one, as these narratively unstable texts suggest that the predominant ‘mode’ of discussing and negotiating one’s reality in contemporary popular culture is exactly through doubts and anxieties about the existence of reality, discussions from which they exclude nonwhite and nonmale voices. This development is also one of many that feeds into a perceived ‘crisis’ of masculinity and whiteness, appearing in a variety of different incarnations (cf. Robinson; Kimmel, “Contemporary”; Clare): Particularly around the turn of the millennium, “white, middle-class men, especially, perceived a threat to the meaning of hegemonic masculinity and to their positions of power” (Messner 9). Besides the theoretical level of thinking about “masculinity as crisis” (Traister 287), in line with Sally Robinson’s take that “[a]nnouncements of crisis, both direct and indirect, are performative” (10), proclaiming a dominant position to be in crisis can also be seen as one way of portraying that position as threatened and victimized, in turn legitimizing a patriarchal backlash in an attempt to preserve power. In this regard, unstable texts also highlight a dimension of contemporary American culture, society, and politics that, since the 2016 presidential election, has routinely been ascribed to a ‘Trump era,’ characterized by a backlash—or, in the words of political commentator Van Jones, a “whitelash” (qtd. in Carissimo)—against the progress made by women and people of color. This construction casts especially white working-class men as the ‘forgotten men’ of America, who, as Donald Trump put it in his electoral victory speech, “will be forgotten no longer” during his presidency (qtd. in “Transcript”; cf. particularly Kimmel, Angry White Men). Although, of course, the texts I consider in this book were produced before Trump’s election,

2 Introducing Narrative Instability

51

self-affirmation and -determination works specifically through the exclusion of an Other—in Inception, for instance, the white male protagonist’s crisis as a father is ultimately resolved by silencing the voice and eliminating the presence of his former wife. In this way, although narratively unstable films are not generally ‘conservative’ texts (which would be too generalizing a label either way), their predominant focus on the white male middle class aligns with a complicated political moment that they do not seem to recognize as such—for all their narrative and formal awareness, they often do not acknowledge whiteness and masculinity as the normative, patriarchal powers that they are. Consequently, while many unstable texts are mostly perceived as progressively contributing to discussions about an increasingly heterogeneous society, beneath their textual surface, a number of them actually end up pandering to narratives of a white male victimization in similar ways to more obviously political and reactionary texts. This nexus of race, class, and gender, then, will form an important background throughout this book, as investigating the meanings of these texts will often focus on notions of power as well, where these dimensions become crucial. I deem it significant to study these texts along the lines of these categories of difference exactly because they tend to only represent characters from the ostensibly unmarked norm, in order to analyze both how these portrayals always work relationally (along whiteness and blackness, middle class and working class, masculinity and femininity, etc.) and how they individually intersect with each other. Overall, next to the previously discussed dimension of the formal experimentation that narratively unstable texts engage in—which the existing scholarly contexts of puzzle films and narrative complexity so firmly center on—this ‘political’ dimension of narratively unstable texts will form a second larger context for my readings, further distinguishing narrative instability as a concept from these more formally oriented inquiries.

thinking less in terms of periods or liminal events but instead of larger, slower, and often contradictory cultural tendencies, the election of Trump can be understood as having made something visible that has been present in US society all along, something that, perhaps, during the presidency of Barack Obama, at least the political mainstream was more reluctant to see. The complicated politics of a number of narratively unstable texts play into this dimension of contemporary American society as well, functioning as a prism into the country’s complex negotiations of matters of race, class, and gender. Specifically, the (at times contradictory) reassertion of white men through the exclusion of women and minorities from participatory spheres found in some narratively unstable texts connects with a fear of women’s and minorities’ ‘overreach’ and the perceived loss of white male dominance that has served to explain Trump’s election in many subsequent analyses (cf., e.g., Coates; Gillon; Filipovic).

52

Narrative Instability

2.2.4 CLUSTERS OF INSTABILITY: IDENTITIES, REALITIES, AND TEXTUALITIES Narratively unstable texts position and insert themselves self-consciously in the diverse cultural contexts that I evoked in the previous pages, echoing (scholarly) discussions about contemporary popular US texts. Through their instability, they cast doubt on the certainty of concepts such as truth or reality, they emphasize the complexities and ambiguities of issues like identity, and they render these questions as epistemological ones, highlighting the difficulties surrounding knowledge.67 Many unstable texts, however, do offer or encourage one particular interpretation that ultimately leads to resolving much of their instability, privileging a stable version of the storyworld in the end—or, at least, offering multiple possible stable reconstructions, instead of more thoroughly wallowing in instability. They thus use instability to arrive at stability, rather than a more ‘straightforward’ consistently stable storyworld. Hence, a significant effect of instability is the complication of such more straightforward narratives as well as the questioning of narratives presenting ‘simple’ solutions or stable binaries. By refusing a more straightforward (and often binary) access to knowledge and truth, unstable narratives contrast with a focus on polarizing, simplistically presented narratives and a lack of nuance and ambivalence prevalent in other parts of contemporary culture.68 The video games of the BioShock series, for example, narratively portray isolated cities envisioned as utopias but exhibiting many elements of dystopias, making it difficult to decide whether the societies they depict are either. The presentation of a clear con67

68

In this sense, unstable texts are aware of what Fredric Jameson calls a “crisis of representation” (Foreword viii), casting questions about truth or reality not just as an ontological matter but as an epistemological one and thus highlighting how we can know about them, how they can be represented. This is also in line with Linda Hutcheon’s perspective on postmodernism as advocating that “notions of truth, reference, and the non-cultural real have not ceased to exist [...] but that they are no longer unproblematic issues [...]. The postmodern [...] is [...] a questioning of what reality can mean and how we can come to know it” (Politics 32). In contrast, this perspective argues against McHale’s, who considers postmodernism to primarily operate ontologically whereas modernism, for him, is characterized by epistemology (9-10), again evidencing the diversity of conceptions about postmodernism (cf. 2.2.1). Again taking up the context of the US’s contemporary political landscape, unstable texts thus go against a trend of simplified narratives particularly prevalent in the news media—where the election of Barack Obama was immediately hailed as American society turning ‘postracial’ (cf. Tesler); where Hillary Clinton’s potential and widely assumed electoral victory in 2016 would have universally shattered the ‘glass ceiling’ (cf. Karni; Ruiz), presumably embarking on a ‘postfeminist’ era of similar hyperbole; and where, since 2016, the election of Trump is portrayed equivalent either to the “apocalypse” having come true (Eskow; Bilton) or a “messiah” having arrived (J. Brown; cf. also Heer), depending on whether one asks detractors or supporters of Trump. Such narratives lack the complexity and nuance found in some segments of contemporary popular culture.

53

2 Introducing Narrative Instability

flict that leads to an eventual resolution can also be seen as a hallmark of the symbolic form of narrative, which strives towards closure, finality, and linearity, whereas narratively unstable texts are more influenced by the playfulness of nonlinearity and open-endedness, refusing to provide clear solutions (or even clear conflicts) and centrally highlighting ambivalence. Within these more general concerns across narratively unstable texts, and while covering a variety of subjects, topics, and issues, there are still larger, overarching tendencies that frequently recur in narratively unstable texts. In fact, I argue that there are three central cultural realms that the texts considered here engage in, and around which their interest in instability convenes: identity, reality, and textuality. Accordingly, the questioning of straightforward, linear narratives and truths also primarily works along these issues in unstable texts. Significantly, these three areas are not intended to be a typology of narrative instability but rather a kind of ‘clustering’ or grouping of a number of texts according to the cultural issues they resonate most with.69 I will discuss these realms in detail in the following three analytic chapters, each of which is centrally dedicated to how texts narrate unstable identities, unstable realities, and unstable textualities, respectively—used in the plural to indicate how the primary texts examined here complicate notions of the stability of these concepts. *** Having introduced narrative instability as a concept in these more general, theoretical, and contextual terms, I will demonstrate how it can be used for productive readings of contemporary American popular culture in the following chapters. While the individual analyses of primary texts will work as readings in themselves, and while the overall chapters also function in a somewhat self-contained manner as investigations of groups of unstable texts, together, they will form a concerted inquiry into the cultural work of narrative instability. In this sense, the next three chapters and analyses will work to uncover the apparent contradiction mentioned at the beginning of the introduction, answering how contemporary films, TV series, and video games have received such enormous popularity through the use of narrative techniques influenced by avant-garde postmodern texts from decades before, and what, in turn, this tells us about contemporary American culture and society. While I pointed to potential ways of addressing this conun69

As such, these three issues also often overlap, which I see not as a drawback of this clustering but as a methodological advantage, allowing for a productive dialogue between different kinds of unstable texts. Pointing out how unstable texts primarily engage one of these issues is meant to denote a matter of degree and intensity rather than an absolute category—films like Interstellar, Donnie Darko (2001), or Twelve Monkeys, which I read as unstable realities texts, also include many elements that relate to matters of identity (and some of textuality), yet it is reality that I see as the most significant one.

54

Narrative Instability

drum throughout this chapter, the following readings will inform these potential avenues with detailed arguments about specific primary texts, in the end promising to answer Denby’s central question: “What are we getting out of the overloading, the dislocations and disruptions?” (80).

3 Unstable Identities 3.1 Introduction ‘Schizophrenia,’ multiple and ‘split’ personalities, amnesia, paranoia, hallucinations, or delusions—protagonists in narratively unstable texts are often afflicted by a variety of mental diseases or deficiencies, many of which relate directly to these characters’ self-understandings. Indeed, the most prevalent issue that narratively unstable texts deal with concerns questions of identity: These texts’ protagonists are plagued by (perceived or ‘real’) problems with their selves, suffer from mental conditions, or are unsure of who they really are. In turn, through this focus on mental issues and the protagonists’ inner thoughts, these texts use the combination of narrative and ‘mental’ instability to discuss cultural issues related to identity and social belonging—accordingly, this cluster of texts features what I call unstable identities. To make productive use of the concept of identity in the context of studying narrative instability, I will frame issues of identity as referring to thoughts, concerns, anxieties, or worries about one’s position within a smaller or larger social, cultural, or political group. That is, identity in this sense refers not just to who one thinks one is but also, and especially, to who one is in position to (or within) a group of people, and to how such constructions are negotiated in culture and society. Particularly in an American context, this kind of cultural identity is understood in close connection with categories of difference, turning more general questions about identity into a meaningful category of inquiry. Narratively unstable texts featuring unstable identities add a contemporary, self-reflexive, and transmedial voice to the cultural expression of issues of identity in American popular culture by problematizing questions about the knowledge of (narratives of) identity, warranting a detailed analysis of how these concerns are narratively expressed and what cultural work they do. Building on the contextualization of narrative instability in the previous chapter, here, I will examine texts whose instability specifically relates to their protagonists’ identity concerns. The discursive setups of these texts take a number of forms, as do the concrete cultural issues concerning identity that they discuss. For instance, the ‘trigger’ of instability on the level of plot in these texts can be the revelation that the protagonist has been dead for the majority of the story (as in the films The Sixth Sense or The Others), that another character or multiple characters are actually a literalized part of the protagonist’s ‘split personality’ (Fight Club or Identity) or that they are somebody’s doppelgänger or twin (The Prestige), that a character has repressed his or her actual identity and replaced it with another personality,

56

Narrative Instability

often following a traumatic event (Shutter Island [2010] or, arguably, Mulholland Drive [2001]), that a character who, knowingly or not, suffers from amnesia or has other memory deficiencies is actually somebody else than he or she (and audiences) assumed they were (Memento, BioShock, or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind [2004]), or a variety of related revelations (as well as a combination of different ones) about the protagonist’s identity. To discuss the notion of unstable identities in detail, this chapter is divided into three larger sections. First, to lay the groundwork for analyzing narrative instability in texts with unstable identities, I will discuss their general characteristics, referring to Fight Club as one such exemplary, foundational text. In order to establish the contexts that the texts considered in this chapter relate to, I will also point to scholarship on similar issues and to relevant cultural concerns, connecting scholarly inquiries on identity, puzzle films, reception practices, and pleasure under the rubric of narrative instability. In the following two sections, I will look at two texts featuring unstable identities to substantiate this investigation through detailed close readings. The first of these readings (and the significantly longer one) represents the main analytic work of this chapter, discussing unstable identities in the video game BioShock. By understanding BioShock as somewhat of a classical ‘twist’ text but with the significant deviation that it is not a film but a game, I will stress the transmedial dimension of narrative instability as I trace how BioShock self-consciously remediates a narrative pattern known from film to the discursive peculiarities of a video game. Carving out how BioShock can be read as a game about unstable identities will thus more generally establish how this group of texts works in its instability and specifically detail how the game features instability in the context of its own awareness as a game as well as in relation to concerns about class prevalent in its storyworld. Finally, the last section will discuss Black Swan as a film that, unlike most texts about unstable identities, does not build towards one fundamental moment of instability, that is, it could not easily be classified as a so-called twist film. Instead, Black Swan ‘plays’ with this notion of a twist, which forms only one part of its narrative instability. This focus will thus complicate the more typical discursive setup of unstable identities texts that the reading of BioShock established, and it will relate the film’s identity concerns specifically to questions of gender and femininity, as Black Swan is one of the few unstable texts that feature a female protagonist. Taken together, both texts, while exhibiting characteristics of this overall group of unstable texts, represent a particular problematization in terms of their instability that an analysis of pleasure and narrative expectations in the context of their discursive setups as well as a focus on class and gender will uncover. Overall, this chapter will argue that unstable identities texts connect their protagonists’ mental issues directly to the disruption and fragmentation caused on the discursive level, using this interweaving of the textual

3 Unstable Identities

57

and the thematic to problematize what exactly constitutes one’s identity. That is, while the texts considered in this chapter also focus on individual identity issues of their protagonists, they frame these as larger questions about identity as such through their unstable storyworlds, asking what characteristics or actions make up one’s identity, how we can gain knowledge about identities, and what such knowledge entails. In addition, this chapter will carve out these texts’ cultural work in framing contemporary American cultural discourses of (unstable) identity as closely linked to discussions of difference: The texts I analyze connect the general questions of identity to notions of social belonging and social difference, relating to categories like race, class, and gender. Yet whereas many texts are aware of these categories, their protagonists are still usually part of the unmarked ‘norm’ (white, male, middle-class), which speaks to a general tendency of narratively unstable texts to focus their concerns with instability on this ‘unmarked’ majority of American society (cf. 2.2.3). By questioning such constructions particularly in terms of class (in BioShock) and gender (in Black Swan), narratively unstable texts point out how power still primarily resides with the white male middle class. Furthermore, along with a general problematization of questions of knowledge and identity, these texts frame their protagonists’ doubts about identity as both ontological and epistemological dilemmas, that is, the question of ‘who they are’ is supplanted by the even more fundamental question of ‘how can they know who they are,’ connecting this epistemological anxiety to a postmodern ‘crisis of representation.’ Finally, these unstable texts self-consciously link their moments of narrative instability engendered by their protagonists’ identity troubles to their own fictionality, displaying an awareness of their status as fictional representations and of their textual and medial boundedness in these moments (and surrounding them), speaking to a general interest in matters of textuality in the contemporary American public. As part of my overall project, this chapter will investigate the narrative peculiarities and the cultural work of what I deem the most significant (and largest) group of narratively unstable texts, in the process establishing unstable identities as an intertextual trend in the first place.

3.2 Narrating Unstable Identities In the pivotal scene of the film Fight Club, the unnamed (voice-over) narrator commonly referred to as Jack (played by Edward Norton) sits in a hotel room with the man who recently prompted a number of changes in his life, Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt). After just having gone through a string of dramatic events, Jack wonders why people would confuse him for Tyler— eventually culminating in his own realization that it is “[b]ecause we’re the same person.” This scene constitutes the major moment of narrative instability in the film, since it leads to one of the most significant revisions pos-

58

Narrative Instability

sible in the film’s storyworld: The main characters Jack and Tyler are not actually two separate individuals, but, instead, Jack suffers from some kind of mental condition (presumably dissociative identity disorder), with Tyler being his ‘split’ personality, a figment of his imagination. As viewers try to come to terms with this revelation, they need to update almost all of the previous scenes of the film and the information with which they had constructed the storyworld so far—assisted by the film’s narration itself, which shows numerous previous scenes again with this new knowledge. For a moment, viewers cannot be sure what exactly has happened in the film until this point, and particularly, who Jack/Tyler really is. This instability of the process of narrative understanding, of creating a sense of what happened in the text (where and to whom) in the form of the storyworld, is discursively achieved through the constant association of the film’s narration with Jack, who in this scene is revealed to suffer from a mental disorder that impacts his ability to narrate reliably. The instability thus is directly connected to the film’s protagonist’s mental issues relating to his own identity. At the same time, I understand the cultural concerns that Fight Club resonates with and the themes that it raises as largely relating to questions of identity, of social belonging and status, and of one’s sense of self, 70 all of which are traits that Fight Club shares with narratively unstable texts dealing with unstable identities in general. In this section, I will first discuss some general (narrative) characteristics of these unstable texts in more detail (using Fight Club to illustrate specific dynamics), so that they can serve as a basis for the in-depth examinations of primary texts in the remaining two sections. Subsequently, I will point to previous scholarship on questions of identity (especially within American studies), to related secondary writings on texts dealing with unstable identities, and to discussions of pleasure and reception practices, since all of these form an important cultural nexus for my later analyses. Accordingly, I will bring scholarly inquiries from different contexts together to uncover some of the topics that scholarship so far has deemed important to discuss in relation to these texts. Overall, this section will thus both provide a general overview of this group of narratively unstable texts and lay the groundwork for the more detailed discussions in the following two sections. In the process, it will point towards understanding the representation of unstable identities as an intertextual trend that connects a large number of disparate texts with each other, engaging in a dialogue on discussions of identity in contemporary US culture.

70

In scholarly contexts, Fight Club, generally a well-studied film, has been discussed along these lines in particular. For relevant scholarship on the film that focuses particularly on identity and questions of masculinity (and, frequently, violence, patriarchy, and capitalism), cf., e.g., Giroux; Ta; Friday; King; Clark.

3 Unstable Identities

59

3.2.1 GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS: FIGHT CLUB From a discursive point of view, Fight Club is typical of how narratively unstable texts with a focus on unstable identities work. For the majority of the film, viewers construct the text’s storyworld as one in which its protagonist Jack slowly changes his life from being trapped in a dull corporate job to an anticapitalist and anticonsumerist lifestyle as he follows the guidance of a man he met by chance, Tyler Durden. Yet in the crucial scene mentioned above, the revelation that Tyler is actually an expression of Jack’s mental condition prompts viewers to reevaluate the entire storyworld of the film. As the characterization of Tyler has to be changed and revised completely within the text’s storyworld, so do all of the plot elements that directly related to or mentioned him. Part of this realization involves the fact that every scene shown previously that featured Jack or Tyler was presented from Jack’s perspective—discursively, the film is internally focalized through him. There are numerous previous hints towards this internal focalization in the film, and especially the beginning establishes that the film consists of Jack’s narration. However, despite some explicit references early on, Jack’s voice-over narration then gradually becomes ‘naturalized’ and goes unnoticed throughout the film. The moment revealing Tyler’s actual identity, however, makes Jack’s internal focalization explicit once again, as viewers are shown flashbacks to previous events of the film, this time, however, with the updated knowledge of Tyler and Jack being the same person, which again reinforces the idea that the audience has access to Jack’s inner thoughts. This constant internal focalization and Jack’s unreliable narration are discursive features of the text that viewers were not previously aware of—features that, although they were actually hinted at throughout the film, usually stay ‘hidden’ when first viewing it. In the majority of texts featuring unstable identities, instability is discursively achieved through such an unreliable internal focalization that viewers are largely unaware of throughout most of the text, only being revealed as part of one major moment of instability usually occurring towards the end of the story. Concealing the protagonist’s ‘true’ identity from viewers throughout most of the plot and revealing it during a pivotal scene is a staple of many of these kinds of unstable texts, as is the number of sudden and significant revisions to the text’s storyworld that such a revelation prompts, which are so severe that they render the storyworld unstable for a while—viewers cannot be entirely certain what exactly has happened (and to whom) so far. However, it is equally typical of these texts that briefly after such a scene, the narration will try to guide viewers towards a stable storyworld once again: In Fight Club, Tyler explains to Jack (and the viewers) in some detail how exactly it is possible that he is just a part of Jack’s personality. In addition, flashback scenes depicting previous events with this updated knowledge further support that this revelation is indeed how the plot is sup-

60

Narrative Instability

posed to be understood. After first severely confusing viewers as to what happened in the film, Fight Club then relatively quickly foregrounds an understanding of the film’s plot that Tyler is indeed an expression of Jack’s mental condition as its dominant interpretation (instead of, for instance, reinforcing the idea that Jack is completely unreliable and that this new revelation is not to be believed either).71 The progression from a stable storyworld (Jack and Tyler are two separate characters) to a fundamental disruption of stability in a specific moment to, again, a stable, updated storyworld (Tyler is Jack’s ‘split personality’) is common for many, even if not all, texts featuring unstable identities. This fundamental moment of revelation is also one of the reasons why the film encourages and rewards watching it again, paying close attention to previous hints and instances of foreshadowing in subsequent viewings. For instance, in the opening scene of Fight Club, Jack mentions regarding a specific fact that he “know[s] this because Tyler knows this,” which seems like an innocent statement when first viewing the film but could be recognized as a clear giveaway of the film’s ‘twist’ after having watched it once.72 Additionally, Fight Club is also a particularly sophisticated example of exhibiting a certain self-awareness that most unstable texts share, which includes a meta-referential awareness of the film’s status as a fictional text. This general self-reflexivity becomes apparent early on, as Jack provides comments and explanations of his current situation via voice-over. The film begins with Jack’s and Tyler’s final confrontation, but then Jack’s narration goes back several days and weeks to start with an extended flashback of how he arrived at this point, forming the major part of the film. From the beginning, it is thus foregrounded that the film consists of Jack’s narration and that he has narrative authority over it, for instance in an early remark breaking the fourth wall, stating: “No, wait, back up. Let me start over again,” after which he flashbacks to an even earlier point. This general selfreflexivity also explicitly extends to the film’s instability; that is, like most unstable texts, Fight Club connects the themes it discusses via its instability intimately to its own textuality and mediality. This is most apparent directly 71

72

This becomes most apparent in scenes in which Jack is physically fighting Tyler one final time. In these sequences, the point of view changes from Jack’s, showing him and Tyler fighting, to that of security cameras in the building, showing only Jack, fighting with himself. This is one of the rare perspectives that is externally focalized and thus explicitly marks itself as not being Jack’s point of view. The choice of a security camera (a ‘camera eye’), conventionally known for showing what objectively and reliably happens and thus underscoring the belief in one definite ‘truth,’ also strengthens the reading that Jack is the only actual person there, with Tyler being a literalization of his personality disorder. The pleasure gained from multiple viewings of these films is a general aspect of ‘hunting’ for narrative clues—similar to Jason Mittell’s notion of ‘amateur narratologists’—in narratively unstable films that I will come back to in section 3.2.2 as well as in the two readings of BioShock and Black Swan.

3 Unstable Identities

61

after the pivotal scene revealing Tyler’s identity: As Jack seemingly becomes unconscious after processing all of this new information, his voiceover says: “It’s called a changeover. The movie goes on and nobody in the audience has any idea,” referencing an earlier scene in the film in which Tyler’s side job as a projectionist in a cinema is mentioned. 73 Thus, this (nondigital) film metaphor of changing reels is evoked during this scene to indicate the major revision of the storyworld, and Jack’s remark that “[t]he movie goes on and nobody in the audience has any idea” also comments on the initial confusion—or unwillingness to believe—that audiences might experience during this sequence. Like unstable texts in general, Fight Club thus links the instability of Jack’s identity74 to questions of textuality and mediality, which speaks to the popularization of such meta-referential concerns in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. These and other aspects of texts dealing with unstable identities will be further expanded on in the in-depth readings of this chapter. 3.2.2 IDENTITY, TWISTS, AND PLEASURE Questions of identity have been discussed in various scholarly contexts, a vast body of work that, however, I am not interested in tracing or surveying here. Instead, I want to introduce an understanding of identity that specifically suits the analysis of narratively unstable texts, which I will contextualize within relevant scholarship in order to refine and sharpen this perspective. In addition, I will further relate this to some of the most important studies on texts that I consider as dealing with unstable identities, some of which have raised issues relevant to a discussion of identity in narratively unstable texts. Generally, identity as discussed in this chapter encompasses notions of both self-identity and cultural identity, i.e., the question of what defines and makes a person is one that also has to be asked within the context of that person’s relationships with(in) social, political, or cultural groups of people —this relational aspect becomes crucial for any understanding of identity. 73

74

Tyler explains that when the reel for a film has to be changed to the next one (the so-called changeover), he likes to insert single frames of pornographic images in that transition; and throughout the actual film of Fight Club, such single frames are also included, demonstrating the film’s own awareness as a film. Notably, as in many unstable texts, these identity concerns also implicitly and explicitly relate to white middle-class masculinity only. The inherent whiteness of the film is mostly established through the absence of nonwhite characters, yet there are also a few explicit nods towards the ontological and epistemic issues that the film raises concerning white middle-class men in particular. For instance, when Tyler mentions during one of his anti-consumerist speeches that he sees “in fight club the strongest and smartest men who’ve ever lived [...] an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables—slaves with white collars,” he makes this point about class by equivocating these men with (black) slaves and through the explicit mention of the color white.

62

Narrative Instability

In this way, I see identity as “‘a sense of self that encompasses who people think they are, and how other people regard them’” (Blunt et al. qtd. in Longhurst et al. 117). This ‘sense’ entails that self-identity “is what we as persons think it is,” it is “not something we have”; rather, it “is a mode of thinking about ourselves” (Barker 222). In addition, one’s cultural identity has to be understood as “wholly social and cultural with no transcendental or ahistorical elements,” and hence, “what it means to be a woman, a child, Asian or elderly is formed differently in different cultural contexts” (Barker 222). As such, issues of identity are also intimately linked to similar concepts like subjectivity and selfhood, and they are central to “the question of agency and politics,” as Stuart Hall notes (“Who” 2). This nonessentialist understanding of identity originates from the notion that “identities are constructed within, not outside, discourse” and that “we need to understand them as produced in specific historical and institutional sites within specific discursive formations and practices” (“Who” 4).75 This conception of identity is notably influenced by postmodern and poststructuralist theories, constituting what has been called the ‘postmodern subject.’ Accordingly, Hall notes that “identities are never unified and, in late modern times, increasingly fragmented and fractured; never singular but multiply constructed across different, often intersecting and antagonistic, discourses, practices and positions” (“Who” 4).76 As postmodern theorists like Jameson or Baudrillard have noted, “the subject has disintegrated,” is “fragmented and disconnected,” and the “postmodern self [...] no longer possesses the depth, substantiality, and coherency that was the ideal and sometimes achievement of the modern self” (Kellner 233). In this sense, “[i]ndividuals don’t have a single identity, they have identities” (During 146), and the move towards a postmodern subject equally entails a “shift from describing persons as unified wholes who ground themselves, to regarding the subject as socially formed” (Barker 224). Identity in the contemporary moment is thus understood as multiple, fragile, and fragmented, casting doubt on the idea of an autonomous self. Throughout this chapter, I will understand identity as relational, not a ‘thing’ or an ‘entity’ but something that is discursively constructed. Narratively unstable texts appear as one part of contemporary American popular culture where exactly such notions of “fragmented,” “fractured” (Hall, “Who” 4), and, in short, unstable identities are represented and discussed. Additionally, as Hall maintains, “identities are constructed through, not outside, difference. This entails the radically disturbing recognition that it is only through the relation to the Other [...] that the ‘positive’ meaning of any 75 76

For other influential studies that conceive of cultural identity along similar lines, cf. Hall and Gay; d’Haen and Vermeulen. Similarly, Douglas Kellner states that “[f]rom the postmodern perspective, [...] identity becomes more and more unstable, more and more fragile. Within this situation, the discourses of postmodernity problematize the very notion of identity, claiming that it is a myth and an illusion” (233).

3 Unstable Identities

63

term – and thus its ‘identity’ – can be constructed” (“Who” 4-5). This recognition is particularly significant in American studies, where investigations of identity have long focused on categories of difference like race, class, gender, sexuality, age, ability, nationality, or religion, with especially “considerations of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation [being] categories of obvious importance in American Studies,” as John Carlos Rowe notes (75; cf. also Lauter, “Is Class”; Singh and Schmidt). Simon During adds that “[c]ultural studies has often been regarded (and especially in the USA) as the academicisation of identity politics” (149), which understands categories like “[g]ender, race or ethnicity, and class [as] the identities, most of all, by which we are placed socially” (146). This realization entails recognizing the importance of these categories of difference in constituting one’s identity as well as emphasizing investigations of the “power relations within a community” (During 146) that are negotiated through such difference, notably via processes of Othering and defining the self against such a (racialized, gendered, etc.) Other.77 Investigating constructions of identity in contemporary US culture thus involves analyzing differences along the lines of race, class, and gender in particular, a focus that I maintain in the next two sections, emphasizing the importance of constructions of class in BioShock and of gender in Black Swan. Generally, discussions of identity are one of the prime sites with which unstable texts negotiate the contemporary moment in terms of a perceived threat to white, male, middle-class hegemony (cf. 2.2.3), which is why most unstable texts feature protagonists from this unmarked hegemonic ‘norm.’ While these previous studies are important to mention in order to carve out the understanding of identity relevant in the subsequent readings, unstable identities texts relate even more directly to another body of scholarship, to studies that focus on similar groups of primary texts under different names and analytic foci. In addition to my previous remarks on scholarship that discusses phenomena similar to my understanding of narrative instability (cf. 2.1.1), I deem three such approaches as especially relevant to investigating unstable identities: scholarship on ‘puzzle films,’ on ‘twist films,’ and on ‘mindgame films.’78 While all three claim to discuss distinct phenomena and, in fact, types of genres, there is considerable overlap between their findings and their thematic emphases. Beyond providing relevant con77

78

Othering—as a practice tightly connected to questions of identity and power—is particularly important in postcolonial studies, where Edward Said influentially introduced the concept of Orientalism as “a political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, ‘us’) and the strange (the Orient, the East, ‘them’)” (Orientalism 43). On the significance of racial Othering throughout US history, literature, and culture, cf. also Toni Morrison’s recent The Origin of Others. Of course, there is also scholarship that discusses similar phenomena outside of these three paradigms, for instance in Bordwell’s analysis of ‘subjective stories’ and ‘network narratives’ (72-103).

64

Narrative Instability

texts for the subsequent discussion of unstable identities, pointing to these types of scholarship is also meant to demonstrate how a focus on instability can bring disparate scholarly strands together, emphasizing that it is the larger concern of unstable identities that all of them discuss. I will examine these strands in more detail in the following in order to point out how this scholarly background also forms part of the overall intertextual web to which unstable identities texts relate in their discussion of ontological and epistemological identity concerns, but also to highlight how approaching these texts through unstable identities instead allows a shift from more structuralist concerns of categorization towards an analysis of their cultural work, while also recognizing these interests as appearing across a number of different media, not just in film. As examples of these different strands and where they actually overlap in their (implicit) discussion of unstable identities, I refer to Warren Buckland as well as Elliot Panek in their treatment of puzzle films, George Wilson’s investigation of twist films, and Thomas Elsaesser’s examination of the mindgame film. Buckland stresses that contemporary puzzle films reject “classical storytelling techniques” and instead feature “complex storytelling” (“Puzzle Plots” 1). He engages this idea of complexity via Aristotle and notes that “the complexity of puzzle films operates on two levels: narrative and narration. It emphasizes the complex telling (plot, narration) of a simple or complex story (narrative)” (“Puzzle Plots” 6), yet the exact notion of this ‘complexity’ still remains notably vague, and Buckland’s ‘puzzle films’ thus take a variety of forms. Panek somewhat more precisely focuses on the significance of the discourse of these texts, an aspect that I also highlight in instability, as he defines puzzle films as “narratives in which the orientation of events in the plot to diegetic reality is not immediately clear, thus creating doubt in the viewer’s mind as to how reliable, knowledgeable, self-conscious, and communicative the narration is” (65).79 Yet he also includes a distinction between puzzle texts and certain “episodic narratives” and “[s]ome art films” by explaining that the latter texts “may have events that contradict events in other scenes, but unless the characters within the diegesis acknowledge this contradiction, then the deception remains at the level of the author, at the surface of the text” (85), a distinction that fails to outline why the level beyond the diegetic characters of the film would be considered its “surface” (rather than constituting the deeper layers of its diegetic mechanisms). While both Buckland’s and Panek’s approaches to puzzle films thus share considerable overlap with 79

Panek’s typology of such films (he suggests five distinct categories) also includes a group of films featuring “narratives that contain a single significant moment in the diegesis in which narration reveals itself to have been deceptive” (68), which fits the discursive setup of many unstable identities texts. One of these categories, however, consists of “the unique narration in Memento” (68), which appears as a somewhat unusual categorization—in my clustering according to cultural concerns, Memento equally forms a part of texts dealing with unstable identities.

3 Unstable Identities

65

films featuring unstable identities, the specificities of where narrative puzzles or instability occur and in which contexts to understand them (where I propose a distinct focus on identity) stand out as differences. Wilson frames twist films in terms of “transparency,” seeing ‘classical’ narration as transparent, whereas twist films lack this quality (81). Generally, he distinguishes two broader categories, one “in which the cinematic narration, as the audience eventually comes to realize, represents the narrative action through the subjective perspective of a particular character” (81), which aligns slightly (but from a different contextual background) with Panek’s category of films with a single revelatory moment, and another “in which it emerges that the fictional world contains special (typically, supernatural) beings that can be perceived only by conscious agents with nonstandard perceptual powers and not by means of normal human vision” (82), which appears as an unusually specific criterion that overall does not seem to cover the whole breadth of twist films. In general, in distinguishing ‘plot twists’ from unstable texts, this book’s specific understanding of what a ‘twist’ is—framing it beyond a plot twist and instead as having significant impact on the whole storyworld and hailing not just from the narrative, from the storyworld itself but from the way it is related to the audience, via the narration—remains most crucial (cf. 2.1.2). Finally, Elsaesser’s take on the mindgame film—also related to the term ‘mindfuck’ (cf. Eig)—instead stresses, as do I, that such texts do not form a (sub)genre but rather are “a phenomenon” or “a ‘certain tendency’ in contemporary cinema” (14). He particularly highlights the ‘game’ aspect of this term, stating that it includes films in which either “a character is being played games with” or “where it is the audience that is played games with, because certain crucial information is withheld or ambiguously presented” (14), an aspect that in some ways relates to the distinction between ‘plot twists’ and narratively unstable moments. However, the examples he cites for these two groups contradict Elsaesser’s clear distinctions; for instance, many of the films he names for the first group, such as The Game or The Truman Show, also partly ‘play’ with their audience, at least until the one significant moment of instability that ‘reveals’ their narrative setup. In turn, some of the films Elsaesser mentions for the second category, like Fight Club or The Usual Suspects, include such a revelation as well, so at some point, they stop ‘playing games’ with the audience. While many of his individual points are highly productive in the context of discussing unstable identities, this focus on the ‘mindgame’ as a conceptual anchor for his discussions remains somewhat unconvincing. For using ‘play’ and ‘game’ as metaphors for such films, I instead propose a more symbiotic relationship between media such as the novel, film, and game, understanding them as oscillating between the symbolic forms of narrative and play (cf. 2.1.3).80 80

Additionally, while Elsaesser focuses on the mental issues that these films’ protagonists suffer from as the ‘reason’ for their status as mindgame films, looking at the

66

Narrative Instability

Overall, these strands of scholarship thus relate to a discussion of texts featuring unstable identities and offer important individual insights, yet I see instability as the more suited lens through which to analyze them. It is instability that brings the different kinds of texts this scholarship discusses together, and at the same time, an analysis of these texts’ instability does not imply any attempt to categorize or even typologize them, something a number of scholarly studies engage in, often without going beyond structuralist and narratological insights. Instead, the focus in this chapter allows me to discuss these texts specifically in terms of how they relate to notions of identity, contextualizing them within their cultural resonance and relevance. Still, the significant attention that such texts have received in previous scholarship adds to the textual sphere to which unstable texts relate as well, often self-consciously discussing these issues, and it points out how later texts like BioShock or Black Swan so effectively relate to this intertextual tradition, given its strong presence in both public and scholarly perception. Lastly, in addition to the cultural contexts I outlined in the previous chapter, there is one cluster of contexts that, while significant for all unstable texts, becomes especially relevant in texts featuring unstable identities: the nexus between pleasure, reception, and audience expectations. Pleasure has been conceptualized from a multitude of perspectives, but in my notion of the term, I will particularly focus on the context of popular culture and understandings that derive from the writings of Roland Barthes and John Fiske. Barthes, in his distinction between pleasure and bliss (‘jouissance’), notes that the text of pleasure is a “text that contents, fills, grants euphoria; the text that comes from culture and does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable practice of reading,” whereas the text of bliss is a “text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts [...], unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions” (Pleasure 14). Bliss thus aligns with high-culture understandings of how fiction, and art, are supposed to function, a notion that sees popular culture as granting pleasure in the form of ‘mere’ entertainment as deplorable.81 Similar to Barthes’ take, I understand pleasure as something negotiated between the text and the reader (or audience) and thus also as something that has its origin in the text itself and that can be analyzed accordingly; yet I do not see a strict di-

81

discursive level for the ‘trigger’ of instabilities and understanding them as expressions of cultural concerns seems like a more fruitful analytic approach. Barthes later softens this dichotomy, though, when he mentions that pleasure “sometimes extends to bliss, sometimes is opposed to it” (Pleasure 19) and that one cannot be absolutely certain whether “between pleasure and bliss there is only a difference of degree” or if “pleasure and bliss are parallel forces, that they cannot meet” (Pleasure 20). Still, he retains a distinct mistrust of popular culture, stating that “[n]o significance (no bliss) can occur, I am convinced, in a mass culture (to be distinguished, like fire from water, from the culture of the masses), for the model of this culture is petit bourgeois” (38), a point of view I would not agree with.

3 Unstable Identities

67

chotomy between pleasure and bliss, pop and high culture. To such an understanding of textual pleasure, the work of Fiske adds the notion of ‘popular pleasure,’ which he sees as “opposed to hegemonic ones,” as “aris[ing] from the social allegiances formed by subordinated people” and “exist[ing] in some relationship of opposition to power (social, moral, textual, aesthetic, and so on) that attempts to discipline and control” (Understanding 40). This notion of pleasurable readings in opposition to the ‘dominant’ reading of the text goes back to Hall’s analysis of ‘dominant’ or ‘preferred’ readings and meanings (cf. “Encoding/Decoding”). Such understandings posit that the dominant reading inherent in the text aligns with the dominant ideology, against which one has to read ‘in opposition.’82 While I do not see pleasure and the ‘preferred’ reading of a text as inescapably mandated by hegemony and ideology, I do take up the notion of a text generally exhibiting a preferred reading through its own textual properties. This constitutes the way the text wants to be read, wants to be received, a notion that aligns with the German narratological concept of ‘Rezeptionslenkung,’ literally the ‘guiding/directing of the reception.’ 83 This term denotes that a text can include certain narrative properties that influence and direct the way it is received and consumed, including a specific way in which it wants to be interpreted, which resonates with the concept of the preferred reading. It is easily apparent how this is relevant in the context of unstable texts in particular: In a twist film, for instance, the text wants its audience to believe an often unreliable narrative instance in order to be successfully ‘misled’ and surprised by the twist, a way of engaging with the film that is not possible—or at least very different—if they notice the twist beforehand.84 These texts thus propose to take pleasure in the surprise of the twist, in having been ‘duped’ by the text.85 In the context of nar82

83

84

85

Hall suggests that television and other texts “allow a variety of negotiated or oppositional meanings,” yet “their structure always prefers a meaning that generally promotes the dominant ideology,” which Fiske expands by arguing that it is “more productive to think not so much of a singular preferred meaning, but of structures of preference in the text that seek to prefer some meaning and close others off” (Television 65). The term has not taken hold outside of German narratological circles (cf., e.g., Fieguth; Lusin), yet it actually describes an important property of texts that is often only discussed implicitly. If audiences realize that the film they watch is a twist film, however, general speculation—and interpretation—of what the twist might be is often equally encouraged by these texts. The reading of Black Swan in section 3.4 will demonstrate how some texts even ‘play’ with this very notion of expecting (and reading/viewing for) a twist. Significantly, in contrast, if the audience simply knew the twist beforehand, their experience of the text would be very different. In the logics of iteration, many texts suggest to rewatch/reread/replay them after the twist has been revealed in order to notice previous hints and instances of foreshadowing, which is an additional layer of potential pleasure as well, yet when this knowledge has already been obtained

68

Narrative Instability

rative instability, this pleasure comes from at least two distinct sources. One is the promise of (renewed) stability after the twist: Having enjoyed the stability of the text throughout and then having that taken away in a moment of instability might frustrate the audience at first, but many texts featuring unstable identities propose (and emphasize) a new and updated stable version of the storyworld after the twist, which audiences might crave—a longing that they were only made aware of through this unstable moment.86 Secondly, however, the audience can also take pleasure in the instability itself and the ‘operational aesthetics’ that are involved in it: As I noted before, this is a “pleasure in experiencing deception after knowledge of it had been gained” (Harris 68), an enjoyment deriving primarily from the form of the text, not only its content, and from an awareness of how the discursive setup has worked to conceal a particular element that eventually led to instability. Opening up this venue for pleasure, in turn, speaks to the sophistication of contemporary audiences of popular culture. How these different concepts and contexts figure in instability more specifically shall become clear through the readings in the following sections.

3.3 BioShock The video game BioShock, released in 2007,87 displays a particularly sophisticated interweaving of narrative instability and notions of identity, featuring what I call unstable identities. In BioShock, players assume the role of the protagonist, Jack, and explore an enormous underwater city called Rapture in the year 1960. They shoot their way through the ruins and debris of what seems like a once prosperous city, fighting off many of the city’s

86

87

before the first experience of the text, how the text can then still generate pleasure for its audience works very differently (cf. Gray; Gray and Mittell; Fish). This is also why the topic of ‘spoilers’ is particularly relevant for many unstable texts. This understanding of pleasure can be framed within the psychoanalytic concept of ‘Angstlust’ or ‘thrill’ (Balint), combining the seemingly contradictory experiences of anxiety and pleasure. Wondering why some people enjoy amusement park rides and others do not, Balint notes for those that gain pleasure from such rides that they have “an awareness that a real external danger does exist,” that they “voluntar[ily] expos[e]” themselves “to this danger and to the fear aroused by it,” and that they are characterized by “a confident hope that the fear will be tolerated or mastered, the danger will end, and a return to safety will follow” (Derry 22). Adapting this to narratively unstable texts, the twist moment can be understood as such a metaphorical “danger” as well, threatening to disrupt the storyworld and leading to a destabilized identity—yet the imminent “hope” of renewed stability then works similarly to the “return to safety” Balint describes. BioShock was released for the PC and Xbox 360 in 2007 and for the PlayStation 3 in 2008. In this chapter, I refer to the PC version of the game. In terms of ‘game(play) genre,’ BioShock is a first-person shooter. As regards its ‘narrative genre,’ BioShock mixes elements of science fiction, biopunk, and alternate history.

3 Unstable Identities

69

apparently deranged inhabitants. As they soon learn, Rapture was built by the megalomaniac businessman and visionary Andrew Ryan,88 who conceived his city as a resort from the looming threats of Soviet communism and US-style capitalism, instead modeling Rapture on an idea of self-interest, individualism, and anti-collectivism.89 Throughout its story and the player’s exploration of the game’s world, BioShock evokes and discusses themes such as humanity, individualism, family, genetic manipulation, and the responsibility of scientists, but it especially focuses on questions of identity, of what makes a human, and how choices and agency figure in that question. Since a major part of its story is told through a significant moment of instability and since the game also displays other unstable elements that particularly relate to its protagonist’s identity, I read it as an example of a text dealing with unstable identities. At the same time, BioShock displays a clear awareness of previous unstable texts and of the ‘genre’ of the twist film, borrowing these films’ narrative patterns and discursive setups and thus becoming part of an intertextual and transmedial narrative trend. In some sense, BioShock can actually be seen as a ‘classic’ example of a twist film, with the significant difference that it is a video game, remediating the workings of instability in films to the (narrative) properties of its medium. BioShock was a commercial and critical success, with the game selling more than four million units (Remo) and garnering numerous awards and both critical and scholarly praise, such as being called “the masterpiece of recent gaming” (Tavinor 91), praised as exhibiting a “complex, sophisticated and intertextual narrative world” (Kraus 90), heralded as “the definitive step of mainstream games toward the artistic and expressive capacities of media like cinema” and as “a game that pushes the boundaries of game design expression” (Sicart 152), and generally considered “among the best games ever made” (Schiesel). BioShock was particularly praised for its ambitious story and its interest in narrative in video games in general as well as for its intricate concern with a world influenced by Ayn Rand’s objectivist ideas. Scholars thus note that BioShock’s “immense popularity has [...] been attributed to the environment of Rapture itself” (Aldred and 88

89

Ryan’s ambition and megalomania becomes apparent through many details of the game, but it is perhaps most visible early on through the sheer enormity of Rapture as a project, a fully functioning city built completely underwater. This is especially the case because this fantastic site is presented to players as a visual spectacle, most notably right from the beginning when they see large parts of the city from within a bathysphere, with towering skyscrapers side by side giant whales swimming in the water. Such a spectacle is repeated in the game’s successor, BioShock Infinite. Ryan’s hubris, in turn, is already alluded to early on through the many grandiose names borrowed from religion and mythology for places in the city, most notably ‘Rapture’ itself, but also including areas named Arcadia, Olympus Heights, and Apollo Square. In these respects, Ryan’s philosophy and the way he conceived of Rapture are strongly influenced by Ayn Rand’s ideas of objectivism, a point I will come back to throughout this section.

70

Narrative Instability

Greenspan 483) and call the game “an unprecedented move in best-selling video games [as it] weighs in strongly in an ongoing philosophical debate” (Packer 221) and generally features a “complex exploration of free-will, individualist ideologies and the dangers of unfettered science” (Tulloch 28). In game studies, BioShock has been frequently discussed, and one might say that it has become part of the scholarly ‘canon’ of games. 90 To the varied scholarship that exists on the game, I will add an understanding of BioShock as a narratively unstable text, a dimension that has not yet been studied (while most articles point out the significance of the twist in the game, none contextualize the game as part of a larger narrative trend). Additionally, by focusing on unstable identities in the game and generally looking at it from the perspective of American studies, I will carve out the importance that constructions and negotiations of identity play in the game and for its cultural work, particularly regarding issues of class and in connection with a focus on narrative pleasure in the game. In this section, I will analyze BioShock from three different angles: First, I will examine how the game is narratively unstable. BioShock is heavily influenced by the ways in which films of the ‘twist’ genre (as discussed before) feature narrative instability, as the game similarly builds on one significant moment of instability that destabilizes and rearranges the storyworld, a moment that prominently concerns the protagonist’s identity. Second, I will focus on issues of identity in BioShock. The game’s world— the fictional underwater city of Rapture—as well as its characters and the way the story is presented all significantly relate to questions of identity. Partly, this is due to the pervasive engagement of the game with ideas of objectivism and similar ideologies that focus on individual autonomy, agency, and choice, and partly, this relates to matters of identification, especially to the economic situation in which the game’s characters find themselves—their class. Third, the final subsection will more intimately link identity and instability by discussing the unstable identities featured in the game in the context of BioShock’s awareness as a video game and how this relates to matters of pleasure and certain reception practices. Furthermore, this contextualization will allow me to focus more intently on highlighting the cultural work of unstable identities in the game. In doing so, I will argue that BioShock features unstable identities to self-reflexively discuss matters of choice and agency, questioning an under90

I will more specifically position my reading of the game within existing scholarship by referring to relevant studies in the next three subsections. In general, BioShock has been studied in the contexts of, among many others, dystopia (cf. Aldred and Greenspan; Gibbons; Schmeink), choice and agency (cf. Tulloch; Wysocki and Schandler; Robert Jackson; Pointon), objectivism (cf. Packer; Rose; Richardson and Elrod), alternate history (cf. Lizardi), art (cf. Tavinor), neoliberalism (cf. van den Berg), queerness (cf. Chang), the figure of the gamer (cf. Ante-Contreras), questions of a canon of video games (cf. Parker), and a variety of philosophical concerns (cf. Cuddy).

3 Unstable Identities

71

standing of identity as (only) constituted by the choices one makes in life since the game, conversely, points to how one’s identity affects and restricts the choices one can make in the first place. BioShock thus uses its unstable elements to probe into the link between choice and identity and to point to the complexity, fluidity, ambivalence, and the (partial) constructedness of these concepts. The instability surrounding Jack’s identity significantly connects to the overall game on multiple levels: First, identity and instability are closely linked on a metatextual level, as the game self-consciously displays its awareness of the mediality of games. Like all games do to some extent, it relates to questions of choice and agency, and its significant twist moment weaves into this notion of player choice in video games—part of the revelation is not only about Jack’s (and other people’s) identity but also about his lack of choice in the actions he has performed so far, which directly translates to the (lack of) agency players had in (not) controlling him during them. Second, through this first connection that links instability to notions of choice, unstable identities also figure in the game’s overall cultural concerns about agency, autonomy, and free will that it discusses through its engagement with objectivism, mainly via the character of Andrew Ryan and the setting of Rapture. In addition, these matters of identity in the game are frequently and pervasively linked to notions of class, and how the game thinks about class is equally influenced by its instability. Overall, BioShock thus complicates understandings of identity that are closely linked to choice through its own self-reflexive engagement with agency, suggesting to its audience to take pleasure in this complex discursive setup. 3.3.1 TWISTING THE STORYWORLD: NARRATIVE INSTABILITY Narrative instability in BioShock works similarly to many unstable twist films, adapting the ways that films can feature significant moments of instability to the medium of the video game. The game thus taps into a filmic tradition and intertextually weaves it into a ludic narrative, giving further evidence of instability as a transmedial narrative trend. In the following, I will outline how BioShock features a twist towards the end of its story that significantly recasts the previously constructed storyworld. Subsequently, I will highlight its allusions to such a larger revelation. Finally, I will point to similarities and differences between the game’s twist and those known from many unstable films, a focus meant to point out the high level of intertextual awareness that the game exhibits. Overall, this first subsection will thus analyze and characterize BioShock as a ‘twist game,’ a text standing in line with an emerging tradition of cultural artifacts that feature instabilities in their storyworld. In BioShock, players take control of the protagonist Jack, and the game starts with him surviving an airplane crash over the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and being stranded near a lighthouse. He enters a bathysphere (a

72

Narrative Instability

deep-sea diving sphere) to discover the enormous underwater city of Rapture, which was built by Andrew Ryan as a utopian escape from what he considered the widespread collectivism in the United States and the Soviet Union. When players enter the city in 1960, however, they find Rapture ruined and torn apart by a civil war waged between factions either following Ryan or Frank Fontaine, a ruthless businessman. Jack is contacted over radio by a man called Atlas, asking for Jack’s help in freeing Atlas’s family from the city’s crazed inhabitants, so-called splicers, who roam Rapture and suffer from an addiction to the gene-altering substance ADAM. Jack fights his way through various sections of Rapture, being confronted over radio by Andrew Ryan and chased by splicers and security robots working for him; he also encounters several so-called Little Sisters, young girls who have been genetically modified to collect ADAM and who are protected by so-called Big Daddies. Eventually, Jack reaches Atlas’s family trapped inside a submarine, which Ryan explodes before they can be freed. This, in turn, enrages Atlas, tasking the player to kill Ryan. As Jack finally arrives at Ryan’s office, the two do not engage in combat; instead, in a monologue, Ryan discloses a number of revelations to Jack: Jack’s memories of growing up on a farm and his memories of his parents are lies, as they have been falsely implanted into him. Additionally, Jack is revealed to have been under the control of Atlas throughout his time in Rapture—Atlas had been casually using the phrase ‘would you kindly?’ when he gave instructions to Jack, which is a code phrase that triggers a mind-control mechanism compelling Jack to do as Atlas pleases. Ryan is disgusted at this lack of choice and autonomy shown by Jack, and as Ryan knows that he will die one way or another, he chooses to die voluntarily by ordering Jack to kill him using the phrase ‘would you kindly.’ After Jack slays Ryan in this way, Atlas, in turn, admits to the mind control and discloses that ‘Atlas’ is just an alias he has been using, revealing himself to be Frank Fontaine. As Atlas/Fontaine then tries to dispose of Jack, Jack is helped by the scientist Brigid Tenenbaum, who frees him from most of Fontaine’s mind-control effects. Jack continues to travel through Rapture in order to relieve himself further from this control, and he eventually confronts and kills Fontaine in revenge. What happens to Jack afterwards depends on choices players made during the game in regard to their treatment of the Little Sisters—he is either shown as the new, power-hungry leader of Rapture or as escaping Rapture and leading a supposedly happy life together with the Little Sisters. This brief plot summary already hints at the main point of instability in the game, the revelation by Andrew Ryan about Jack’s true identity and his lack of control throughout the preceding events, which constitutes a significant moment of instability similar to how twist films typically feature it. These pieces of information provided to the player by Ryan question the storyworld players had constructed so far in terms of who Jack, their player avatar, is, as well as in terms of his motivation for pursuing what Atlas asked of him. Like in many similar films, this is prompted by the realiza-

3 Unstable Identities

73

tion that players’ construction of the storyworld thus far was based on Jack’s partially unreliable perspective, as the game’s narration has been internally focalized through him. As a consequence, players have to restabilize the storyworld piece by piece, and this effort of puzzling the storyworld back together into an overall stable state is further encouraged by the game: There already were hints before Ryan’s revelatory scene that everything might not be as it seems, and players can accrue additional pieces of information after this scene that go beyond the aspects Ryan mentions, each of which needs to be individually connected to the larger picture. If players think back to some of the information they gained about the world before—or play the game again—and connect this to later details and Ryan’s speech, the following reconstruction of the (back)story is possible: Frank Fontaine faked his death so that Ryan would feel a false sense of security, and he reemerged using the alias Atlas and rallied the poor masses of Rapture against Ryan’s regime. Meanwhile, he had the scientists Yi Suchong and Brigid Tenenbaum work on a backup plan, in case this attempt at overthrowing Ryan should fail: Tenenbaum approached Jasmine Jolene, the mistress of Andrew Ryan, after she inadvertently became pregnant with his child. Tenenbaum purchased the embryo and Suchong genetically modified it to grow much faster; at the age of one, it already physically looked like a 19-year-old. This child is the player character Jack, and thus, one of the later realizations players will eventually make after this scene, after they put more and more individual pieces together, is that Jack is actually Ryan’s son.91 Fontaine also tasked Suchong with implementing a mind-control device in Jack, making him comply with the phrase ‘would you kindly.’ When Fontaine feared he might lose the struggle against Ryan, he activated his backup plan, putting Jack on a plane from the US to England, and as Ryan alludes to in the confrontation with him, the airplane did not crashland but was deliberately high-jacked by Jack exactly when they would be flying over Rapture. The readjustments to the storyworld thus focus both on revising and updating the plot that players thought had happened so far and on the characterization of the main character, although the latter and the implied changes to his identity constitute the more impactful aspect. Significantly, in how the game presents these plot and character revelations to its players, it operates similarly to many twist films but also adapts this presentation to the aesthetic peculiarities of a video game. Leading up to Ryan’s grand revelation, there are multiple situations in the game when players briefly see ‘flashback images’ appear on the screen. 92 For instance, at the beginning of the level “Smugglers’ Hideout,” shortly before reaching 91

This revelation about somebody’s parenthood—and paternity in particular—also forms a staple plot twist in American popular culture, similar to the aforementioned motif of twists about racial passing in American literature. Most prominently, perhaps, Darth Vader reveals this to Luke Skywalker in The Empire Strikes Back (1980), famously telling him: “I am your father.” It is also a trope that reappears in BioShock Infinite (cf. 4.4.1).

74

Narrative Instability

the submarine with Atlas’s family, as players walk down a corridor, they suddenly see a photo of three people on the screen. Accompanied by an ominous sound (and a slight screaming noise), the screen zooms in on each of the three people, who are posed like a family—a mother on the left, a father on the right, and a son in the middle. Directly afterwards, Atlas again mentions his family needing help, which is the objective of the level. For a first-time player, these images might be mostly puzzling and primarily serve to convey a feeling of horror,93 yet when replaying the game or thinking back to these scenes after the twist, it becomes clear that these images on the screen are meant to represent Jack’s faulty memory. Generally, the game is internally focalized through its protagonist, which becomes especially apparent in these scenes: Triggered by his environment or other characters—such as the imminent rescue of Atlas’s family in this level—Jack thinks back to his own memories, particularly his family. While the firstperson perspective of the game is usually meant to represent that players see what Jack sees, superimposing these images on the screen is a way to visually represent what Jack is thinking about at the time. The use of these images on the screen (rather than, e.g., letting players ‘replay’ such a memory) also again points to the filmic influences of the game, borrowing visual representations from twist films. At the same time, the very brief moment that such images flash on the screen represents Jack’s spotty memory, as he only briefly and seemingly involuntarily has such recollections. The thematic link that constitutes this trigger is upheld in almost all other occurrences of these flashback images,94 overall establishing these scenes as a hint towards Jack’s unstable past: The theme of Jack’s family is taken up again shortly before confronting Ryan, when he says that Jack is “far away from [his] family” and when the same photographs are shown again,95 and also when he enters the backstage area of Jasmine Jolene’s 92

93

94

95

Such split-second images occur, for instance, in Fight Club, whereas films like Shutter Island intersperse the current narration with (longer) flashbacks (which are often framed like possible dream sequences) to cast doubt on the veracity of what viewers are presented—or, first of all, on the mental state of their protagonists. In these and a number of other scenes, BioShock exhibits many elements belonging to the Gothic tradition. Particularly, the recurrence of these flashback images pointing to Jack’s repressed memory could be considered an instance of Gothic haunting (cf. Burkhardt). The only instance where such a link is not immediately apparent is the very first such occurrence: As Atlas mentions another “tunnel collapse” in Rapture, players see images of Jack on the plane flashing on the screen. The connection between the two instances might lie in the shaking, rumbling nature of both—a tunnel collapsing and a plane crashing. Either way, the image that is shown points to another of Jack’s memories that is incorrect, foreshadowing the discrepancy between the plane having to crash-land and Jack hijacking it to force it down, a fact Ryan reveals later in the game. Ryan’s full quote is even more significant: “So far away from your family, from your friends, from everything you ever loved. But for some reason, you like it

3 Unstable Identities

75

workplace, but this time the zooming-in happens exclusively on the mother figure. For players either thinking back to this moment or replaying it later, this is a clear hint to piece together that Jolene is, in fact, Jack’s mother, and the image being shown at this point suggests that deep within Jack’s memory, he still knows that. Another of these photographs appears shortly before players enter the level “Farmer’s Market,” this time of a farm, presumably the one Jack thinks that he grew up on, being thematically linked via this rural imagery. The last time we see these images is during the twist scene, and afterwards, they do not appear again, as Jack’s identity and memory have presumably been ‘realigned.’ Ultimately, these images thus constitute early hints at Jack’s memory issues, and they can serve as further confirmation of specific details about Jack’s actual identity upon replaying the game. Additionally, they also suggest that the player’s point of view is closely aligned with that of Jack, which means that players gain insights into Jack’s thoughts but which also alludes to the potential unreliability of this perspective and his memory in particular. The most impactful aspect of instability in the game, which also features these images and aesthetically follows twist films, is the single significant moment of instability during the confrontation with Ryan. Instead of fighting players in what would be considered a typical ‘boss fight’ in a first-person shooter,96 Ryan taunts the player about having had no choice in the events that happened so far. In an extended monologue, he muses about questions of choice and agency: In the end, what separates a man from a slave? Money, power? No. A man chooses. A slave obeys. You think you have memories. A farm. A family. An air-

96

here ... you feel something, you can’t quite put your finger on ... think about it for a second, and maybe the word will come to you: nostalgia.” With the knowledge of the game’s twist, Ryan’s words spell out Jack’s true identity quite clearly: The family he thought he had (the one we see in the flashback images) does not exist, but being in Rapture does remind Jack of his family, his origin, his place of birth because this is, indeed, where he was born, a feeling that Ryan describes as “nostalgia.” Ryan’s use of the term is thematically especially fitting since nostalgia is usually understood as a longing for something that never actually was, for a “clearly constructed past” (Ravizza 2). As Eleonora Ravizza argues, the 1950s have been especially prone to such nostalgic longings in US culture, and BioShock references that era in multiple ways: Haimberg, for instance, notes that “phonograms pervade the world and play music from the 1940s and 1950s, which is consistent with a world that departed from reality in the 1960s,” so that the “score excellently highlights the rhythm of Rapture as an underwater world set apart from the surface by contempt and hubris” (Haimberg 9; cf. also Gibbons on the use of popular music in BioShock). Tavinor, in turn, notes the “[p]ortrayals of decaying art deco facades, faded Hollywood socialites, and echoes of Hearst, Hughes, and Citizen Kane” (92). Matthew Wysocki and Matthew Schandler point out that players can find a lot of ammunition in the rooms before this confrontation, suggesting that they should get ready for exactly such a boss fight (202), which, in turn, might increase their level of surprise at what happens when they finally do meet Ryan.

76

Narrative Instability plane. A crash. And then this place. Was there really a family? Did that plane crash, or was it hijacked? Forced down. Forced down by something less than a man.

In this way, he exposes his crude ideology that puts choice and agency above all and claims it to be the main factor in constituting what we think of as being (hu)man.97 At the same time, he also talks about Jack specifically, and as he mentions the “farm,” “family,” and “airplane,” the photographs players had seen before throughout the game are again superimposed on the screen. Afterwards, however, as he asks if “there really [was] a family,” for the first time, players do not see the picture of a mother, son, and father, but an image of a little boy and two doctors, presumably Tenenbaum and Suchong. Likewise, when Ryan mentions that the plane was “hijacked,” we see an image of Jack having opened a letter on the plane that includes the phrase ‘would you kindly’ and, presumably, the instruction to crash-land the plane, along with a pistol. All of these images are shown only very briefly, but they still manage to convey an impression of doubt regarding Jack’s past.98 The eerie discursive setup of the scene also works to enhance this effect: It features a persistent quiet string and piano score to convey an impression of mystery and uses lighting in a way to cast many (unnatural) shadows, mostly only illuminating Ryan as a suggestion that this confrontation with him, which was built towards throughout the entire game, will indeed bring ‘light’ into things and that Ryan will be the source of this enlightenment.99 Together with these different images shown on the 97

98

99

Or, at least, this ideology appears crude in the context of the game’s setting. By itself, Ryan’s extreme focus on free will mirrors Immanuel Kant’s understanding of choice, differentiating between “animal choice” as “determined only by inclination (sensible impulse, stimulus)” and “[h]uman choice [...] [as] a choice that can indeed be affected but not determined by impulses” (qtd. in B. Herman 242). Despite being displayed only briefly, the images still cast doubt on Jack’s previous memories because players can clearly recognize that the pictures shown are different, even if they might not be shown long enough to discern exactly what they depict. In this way, the game also encourages a certain reception practice, asking players to replay the game or freeze it in these instances (or take a screenshot) to take a longer look at the pictures if they are truly interested in uncovering the game’s instability. I discuss such reception practices in more detail in section 3.3.3. Additionally, while some of the previous images shown might indeed have been actual photographs, it makes little sense for a photograph of Jack on the plane to exist —the continued use of these visual images to evoke Jack’s past thus rather speaks to a metatextual link between memory and visuality. Throughout the game, light is generally used to guide the player and thus connoted positively. Haimberg, for instance, notes the “use of lightning [sic] to lead the player,” “illustrated in the lighthouse introduction scene which playfully entices the player and leverages their curiosity. The areas just ahead are dark, and only after the player takes the first step into darkness do the lights illuminate where the player has actually entered” (10).

3 Unstable Identities

77

screen, the scene manages to transfer the doubt that Ryan’s words instill in Jack’s mind to the player as well. Exposing Jack’s lack of choice through Atlas’s use of the phrase ‘would you kindly’ works even more closely to such revelatory scenes in twist films. Ryan continues his speech mentioned above, speculating that the airplane was “[f]orced down by something less than a man. Something bred to sleepwalk through life until they are activated by a simple phrase, spoken by their kindly master. Was a man sent to kill? Or a slave? A man chooses, a slave obeys.” He then utters the phrase ‘would you kindly’ and uses it to give a number of commands to Jack, such as to run, stop, and sit. As he mentions the phrase ‘would you kindly,’ the game displays flashback images on the screen again, but this time from places that Jack, and players with him, had visited before, and simultaneously, they hear Atlas repeating the phrase ‘would you kindly’ again and again, as he had been using it for various requests throughout the game so far. This culminates in Atlas’s most recent ‘request’ to Jack whether he “would [...] kindly head to Ryan’s office and kill the son of a bitch” along with an image of a room in Ryan’s office (that players had seen before) with the phrase ‘would you kindly’ smeared over a pinboard connecting various pictures of people with each other. The rapidity of hearing Atlas’s different sound bites and seeing the various images that all slightly overlap tries to mirror the overwhelming rush of thoughts going through Jack’s, and likely the players’, mind at this time: the realization that what Ryan is saying is true, that things are not what they seemed to be—that Jack had been ‘mind-controlled’ by Atlas this whole time. While displaying the flashback images directly on the screen is a filmic gesture already—as it works against the usual perspective of the first-person shooter, which is meant to show the world ‘from the protagonist’s eyes’—the stylization of this overall scene follows the aesthetics of twist scenes in the movies mentioned before even more closely. 100 In BioShock, most players will not recognize the innocuous phrasing of Atlas’s ‘would you kindly’ requests as something noteworthy while they first play through the game, but Ryan’s revelations have a similar effect in prompting them to reconsider what exactly had happened in the game so far. The specific dramaturgy of this scene thus creates an especially strong effect on players, a moment of surprise and shock that prompts the reevaluation of the whole storyworld as mentioned before, and one that both taps into an intertextual tradition via unstable films and innovates and expands on this effect through its ludic elements. 100

The twist moment of Fight Club, for instance, features very similar images of the film’s protagonist Jack thinking back to previous events in the film and having an epiphany about them: Instead of Tyler (Brad Pitt) being in those scenes, viewers then see Jack (Edward Norton) in them. The Sixth Sense, in turn, revisits previous scenes by showing them without the presence of its protagonist Malcolm Crowe, whom the twist reveals to have been dead for the majority of the film.

78

Narrative Instability

A significant difference in how the game features narrative instability in comparison to a number of twist films lies in the way players reconstruct a stable storyworld after the twist, which is precipitated by the way storytelling generally works in BioShock, owing to its nature as a video game. For a first-time player, piecing together what exactly has happened in the history of Rapture and who Jack really is might take a while after the twist —or it might not happen much at all, depending on how exactly they choose to play the game. While twist films like Fight Club and The Sixth Sense straightforwardly and immediately try to ‘help’ and encourage viewers to reestablish a stable storyworld after the twist, and while the ‘material’ for such a clear restabilization certainly exists in BioShock, this reconstruction largely depends on the player’s willingness to explore the ‘narrative background’ or ‘gamescape’ of the game,101 i.e., to probe into sometimes optional areas in order to find additional details chronicling the history of the world of Rapture. This process, then, hinges on a choice by players to either explore the world or dash through it, and the game, at least in this aspect, encourages a certain ‘reading’ (or playing) practice much less than most unstable films do—instead, it encourages players to choose. In contrast to these films, restabilizing the storyworld is also a significantly longer, step-by-step, and more gradual process, not at all an immediate one. Most of these further details about the world will come from audio diaries that players can find (before and after the twist), which feature characters like Ryan, Fontaine, Tenenbaum, Suchong, and many others commenting on, explaining, or alluding to events in Rapture’s or their personal history, and some of these do include details that can help players piece together Jack’s and Fontaine’s/Atlas’s backstories.102 A number of these di101

102

Shoshana Magnet refers to a game’s ‘gamescape’ as “a way of thinking about the implications of the way in which landscape is actively constructed within video games” (143). To give just one example, that Jack is Ryan’s son is never explicitly stated in the game, but it becomes apparent by combining the information from different audio diaries and other parts of the game. When players explore Jasmine Jolene’s workplace, as mentioned before, they can find an audio diary by her, saying: “That creepy Dr. Tenenbaum promised me it wasn’t gonna be a real pregnancy, they’d just take the egg out once Mr. Ryan and I had ...” The connection between Tenenbaum and Fontaine is something players could have already learned about in earlier audio diaries, and a later one found in Ryan’s office by Yi Suchong mentions: “Advanced Deployment, Lot 111. Dr. Suchong/Client Fontaine Futuristics. Baby is now a year old, weighs 58 pounds, and possesses gross musculature of a fit, 19-yearold.” Players have to put these and other single elements of Rapture’s backstory together to reconstruct that Fontaine purchased the unborn baby from Jolene and later had it artificially grown, revealing Jack to be Ryan’s son. Once they establish this, previous hints towards this fact will become obvious and strengthen this point, such as the fact that the resurrection-granting Vita Chambers in the game, according to another diary by Suchong, are only “tuned to [work with Ryan’s] genetic frequencies,” yet Jack can use them as well. Likewise, Ryan calling Jack his “greatest dis-

3 Unstable Identities

79

aries can be picked up along the ‘main path’ of the game, but quite a few of them are also strewn about on the sides, hidden in specific places or located in levels/areas that are completely optional for somebody only wishing to advance towards the end of the game. Thus, depending on the way players wish to explore Rapture, their reconstructions of the storyworld might differ, as they could lack certain details or might not know about a particular connection between the characters. For players intent on exploring the world of the game, it does offer a number of both ‘narrative’ and gameplay rewards.103 In a way, it builds on having piqued the players’ interest in “narrative puzzle solving” (Tavinor 102), in wanting to know what exactly happened after they find out that they had been ‘misled’ during the game’s twist, as the backstory of Rapture and its principal players is very rich and can be considered one of the main attractions of the game and its narrative.104 By making the complete restabilization of the storyworld optional but giving players the choice to explore a relatively large and rich world, BioShock also fosters slightly different reading/viewing/playing practices than most films that feature unstable identities: It encourages players’ own agency and choice in reconstructing the world and thus points to the fact that the ‘truth’ about something that happened is not a simple, stable

103

104

appointment” and casually referring to him as “my child” in the final confrontation with Ryan receives new meaning once players know of this fact. Which is to say, for exploring optional areas, players often receive gameplay rewards in the form of additional ammunition, specific items that improve their character, etc. However, often, these areas also include audio diaries or other elements that add to the storyworld of the game, which can be considered narrative rewards. Most areas offer both elements, some offer only either of the two, but overall, gameplay and story rewards are closely interwoven, doubly encouraging additional exploration. In many respects, the plot of the game is relatively simple and straightforward, the main complexity being its twist. In addition to that, however, what has happened in the (hi)story of Rapture is a more intricate narrative as well, both in terms of the quantity of story details and in terms of how players learn about this history, how they can explore the narrative background of the gamescape in order to piece together information from different places and sources, most notably the large number of audio diaries (cf. also Aldred and Greenspan 489). Due to the “small devices which contain audio recordings illuminating how and why Rapture degenerated into chaos,” Matthew Jason Weise speaks of a “collective diegetic narrator” in the game (153). Accordingly, a large part of the focus of the storyworld, besides Jack’s identity, concerns not so much Jack’s own journey or the events related to him but rather the backstory of Rapture and its various citizens. BioShock thus emphasizes a narrative interest in the overall storyworld rather than just the plot, and it aligns with video games’ interest in narrative world-building and ‘architecture’ (cf. Jenkins, “Game Design”). Significantly, though, what the central moment of narrative instability in the game also achieves is to integrate Jack’s story into the overall backstory of Rapture, by revealing him to be connected to many of the major ‘players’ of the city.

80

Narrative Instability

‘given.’ This is claimed by a number of other unstable films (like Fight Club or The Sixth Sense) that, after taking one truth away (through an unstable moment), still insist on another one actually being true afterwards (by reestablishing a different stability).105 Rather, the way BioShock offers options in narrative exploration to its players highlights that concepts such as ‘truth’ are fluid, ambivalent, and fragile, and certainly dependent on human agency and individual knowledge. While adapting the way unstable identities work in most twist films and modifying it with the help of the gameplay potentials of a video game, the narrative instability featured in BioShock still clearly originates from and discusses questions of an unstable identity: the revelation of Jack’s true identity and origin and the question of his own agency and choices in life. With the instability closely linked to the protagonist’s identity, BioShock can thus be considered a prototypical unstable identities text. It is one of the most significant examples of (the as of yet much less prominent genre of) twist games, intertextually connecting the media of film and game. BioShock’s narrative instability facilitated by its protagonist’s identity concerns connects with a general interest of the game in questions and notions of identity, which I will now turn to. 3.3.2 IDENTITY: RAPTURE, OBJECTIVISM, AND CLASS Issues of identity occur in BioShock on a number of significant levels, which I will discuss in detail in the following: First, many aspects of the game’s story and Rapture’s history relate to notions of identity, such as the central role of body- and mind-altering substances and genetic modifications that are so omnipresent in the game’s world. Second, the worldview behind Rapture, Andrew Ryan’s founding ideals, which are noticeably influenced by Ayn Rand’s philosophy of objectivism, centrally relate to the question of identity and to the related notions of individual autonomy and agency; and the influence of these philosophies on Rapture and its inhabitants is visible all throughout the city. Third, the revelation about Jack’s identity, i.e., the general plot of the game, obviously concerns this set of issues as well, and by being the cause of the storyworld’s instability, it also links the aforementioned levels to matters of instability via the common node of identity. Fourth, throughout these general concerns of the game’s world, the philosophy behind it, and the main character(s) and plot, questions of class play a crucial role.106 Finally, how the game brings up and 105

106

Part of these reconstructions also concerns the discovery that Ryan is a more complex character than he might seem at first, with at times ambivalent motivations and goals, exhibiting more shades of grey than the typical ruthless and purely ‘evil’ antagonist he might at first seem to be. As Tavinor notes, the final confrontation with Ryan might even instill “sudden sympathy” for Ryan in players (103). In terms of categories of difference, class is the most prominent and most ‘visible’ in BioShock. Gender plays a role as well, which I will briefly discuss in subsequent

3 Unstable Identities

81

deals with questions of identity is also influenced by its gameplay, e.g., in terms of modifying the player character. By analyzing identity in BioShock through these five different aspects, I will point out how the game questions notions of identity and its ‘staticness,’ problematizing how aspects like one’s class or the choices one makes in life contribute to the formation of one’s identity. Taking it one step further, the game does not just tackle individual questions of identity but also raises the more general epistemological question of what identity ‘is,’ how we can define or know who somebody is, and what consequences that has in life. Regarding both what happened in Rapture’s history and what players witness of the world in 1960, issues of identity play a major role. This relates mostly to the substance called ADAM and to the plasmids and gene tonics based on it: ADAM was discovered by Brigid Tenenbaum in sea slugs and, if used with humans, has the potential to change a person’s tissue and cells, functioning “like a benign cancer, destroying native cells and replacing them with unstable stem versions,” as Tenenbaum explains in an audio diary. Rapture’s scientists were then able to use ADAM for bodily, mental, and genetic manipulation via plasmids, which gave people more strength, let them manipulate fire and lightning, provided them with telekinetic powers, etc. This focus on changing oneself—both in terms of one’s appearance, one’s mental capacities, and one’s general skills and abilities— is visible throughout all of Rapture as players explore it in 1960, evidencing the profound influence ADAM and plasmids had in the everyday lives of Rapture’s citizens and in the overall history of Rapture. It becomes visible both in the general world of the game and in more specific instances of the game’s events. For instance, numerous posters and advertisements in the game display the slogan “Pick Your Plasmid and Evolve!” which pinpoints the potential of plasmids to alter one’s identity in a positively connoted way. In terms of the reality of what happened in Rapture, various characters comment negatively on the plasmids’ influence, such as Atlas in an early radio message: “Plasmids changed everything. They destroyed our bodies, our minds. We couldn’t handle it. [...] The whole city went to hell.” Particularly noteworthy in this quote is the focus not just on affecting the body but also the mind, closely linking both mental and physical aspects in terms of one’s identity.107

107

passages too, even though the most striking aspect about gender in the game is its conspicuous absence, or, more precisely, the game’s efforts to conceal it. Something similar is true for questions of race, which are equally absented from most of the game’s plot and world. In this regard, it is important that, by the time Jack explores Rapture, most of its citizens have gone insane due to the influences of ADAM and plasmids. These socalled splicers often wear masks to conceal their faces, about which Atlas wonders: “Why do they wear those masks? Maybe there’s a part of them that remembers how they used to be, how they used to look. And they’re ashamed.” The use of masks—which figuratively stand for taking on another identity—here quite literally

82

Narrative Instability

Furthermore, as players explore the world and learn about the city’s history, they will also understand that much of Rapture’s downfall was caused by ADAM and plasmids. As Tenenbaum explains in the aforementioned audio diary on ADAM acting like a “benign cancer”: While this very instability is what gives it its amazing properties, it is also what causes the cosmetic and mental damage. You need more and more ADAM just to keep back the tide. From a medical standpoint, this is catastrophic. From a business standpoint, well ... Fontaine sees the possibilities.

This drug-like addiction led to people resorting to violence and crime in order to obtain ADAM, and it also gave rise to businessmen like Fontaine, who made large profits by manipulating the markets and trying to meet the public demand for ADAM. Bill McDonagh, Rapture’s general contractor, puts this interdependence succinctly in an audio diary: “[H]e’s got the ADAM, and that makes him the guv’nor. He’s sinking the profits back into bigger and better Plasmids, building them Fontaine Poorhouses ... more like Fontaine recruiting centers.” Additionally, one of the most prominent inhabitants of Rapture are the Little Sisters and Big Daddies, who equally relate to ADAM: The Little Sisters were girls who Tenenbaum originally turned into ADAM-producing machines and who now roam the ruins of Rapture, still hunting for more of the substance, and the Big Daddies are giant machine-like men who also originally were human beings, meant to protect the Little Sisters. As different people and other elements of Rapture’s world point out,108 both the Little Sisters and the Big Daddies are not seen as human anymore, so they, too, underwent a significant change in

108

implies a change in identity, with the splicers having lost their humanity and their previous selves due to the addictive effects of ADAM. A similar aspect of the consequences of ADAM is highlighted through the character of Dr. Steinman, a surgeon and head of the Medical Pavillon, who in an audio diary marvels at the possibilities afforded by this new substance: “[ADAM] gives us the means to do it. [...] Change your look, change your sex, change your race. It’s yours to change, nobody else’s.” His statement is one of the very few explicit references to sex/gender and race as part of this overall effort to alter one’s identity. When players later meet Steinman, he has apparently become mentally insane as well, driven by his obsession with creating the ‘perfect’ human but having failed in that task. Whereas the Little Sisters are designed in a way that makes it quite apparent that they used to be human girls at some point, it might come as more of a surprise to players that the Big Daddies also were human men once, instead of robots or other machines. This was kept secret from the majority of Rapture’s population as well, and accordingly, most people do not consider them human at all. Tenenbaum, for instance, refers to them as “those disgusting Big Daddies” and calls them “[r]epulsive creatures.” A similar tendency is true for the Little Sisters, pointed out quite distinctly through the character of Masha Lutz, whom players only hear about in audio diaries. A diary by her mother describes seeing her daughter for the first time after she was turned into a Little Sister: “That thing? That, that is our Masha?” (emphasis mine).

3 Unstable Identities

83

their (perceived) identity. All of these elements underscore the importance of ADAM and plasmids in Rapture’s world, and these, of course, pinpoint the inhabitants’ infatuation with the possibility to change their selves, their identities, and advancing physically or mentally. The game’s science-fiction element of being able to change one’s genes, one’s appearance and mental capabilities, thus underscores identity as a very fluid concept in BioShock’s world—and prompts players to reflect on this notion as well. What happened in Rapture’s history as a result of its citizens’ obsession with changing who they are aligns with Andrew Ryan’s vision for the city, his underlying philosophy, which thus can be seen as a reason for these developments. As becomes apparent by exploring BioShock’s gamescape— through Ryan’s opening speech when entering the city, through public announcements broadcast throughout Rapture, by looking at and listening to a variety of propaganda, overhearing conversations, and listening to many of the audio diaries109—the city of Rapture was built by Ryan according to a philosophy strongly influenced by Ayn Rand’s ideas of objectivism, many of them expressed in her novels The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957).110 At the core of Ryan’s beliefs lies a focus on individualism and ‘rational self-interest,’ with a strong dislike for any forms of ‘collectivism’ and with an emphasis of unregulated laissez-faire capitalism: People should only care about their own well-being, and the fruits of their labor and dedication should belong entirely to them, without giving any of it away to anybody else or the government. The most ‘productive’ members of society, according to this view, should also be rewarded the most; whereas ‘unproductive’ parts of society should receive no help.111 109

110

111

Among these different sources, the audio diaries are arguably the most prominent and important ones, and they further point to BioShock’s transmedia awareness. Aldred and Greenspan accordingly note the “mobilization of antiquated analog media to provide the back story of Rapture” (487) and read this as the game’s “procedural insistence upon the consumption of older media” (488). I have discussed the influence of objectivism on Ryan, and on the game’s world and the overall meaning of BioShock, in an earlier article (cf. Schubert, “Objectivism”). There are also numerous elements alluding to this influence, like the similarity of Andrew Ryan’s and Ayn Rand’s name or intertextual references such as posters in the game displaying the question “Who is Atlas?” and thus referencing the question “Who is John Galt?” from Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged. These allusions have been well observed and discussed in previous scholarship (cf., e.g., Packer 213-15), which is why I will not focus on working them out here in detail and, instead, will emphasize the significance of these connections in the context of unstable identities in the game. For other analyses of the game’s references to objectivism, cf., e.g., Tulloch, who reads the game “as a rebuke and rejection of Randian thought in a time where it is resurgent amongst American right wing, neo-liberalist and neo-conservative politicians, economists and media pundits” and as “a challenge to the basic tenets and assumptions that underpin Rand’s thinking” (30). This philosophy and ideology, like most aspects of the game’s backstory, is rarely explicitly presented to players, but instead, it becomes apparent through smaller details of the gamescape, such as the aforementioned speeches and propaganda. Ex-

84

Narrative Instability

Chief among both Ayn Rand’s and Andrew Ryan’s philosophies is a focus on individual choice, agency, and autonomy, which equally relate to questions of who we are and what distinguishes us from other people—as Ryan is quoted in a public announcement: “We all make choices, but in the end ... our choices make us.” In this way, Ryan—and the whole philosophy upon which Rapture is built—makes explicit the question whether who we are is determined only by what we did in life, by the choices we are able to make (and for Ryan, this is clearly answered in the positive). The game’s at times subtle, at times more explicit recurrence to objectivism-inspired ideas thus links its concerns with identity to notions of choice and agency, which generally play a large role in BioShock as well (something I will focus on in more detail in the next subsection). Significantly, in the end, Ryan’s vision for the city only remains a utopian fantasy, whereas the reality of Rapture as players explore it has turned out to be a dystopia for large parts of the city’s society,112 with the ruined buildings and debris all around the city symbolizing this failure, just as much as the “pervasive presence of seawater [...] seeping into Rapture’s submerged buildings” reminds “the player of the fact that Rapture’s structure is failing” (van den Berg, par. 11; also cf. Watts 254). As Ryan’s grandiose speeches and propaganda praising a focus on individualism are juxtaposed with the reality of Rapture lying in ruins and its citizens having turned insane, the game ironically comments on the feasibility of a society based on objectivist ideals.113 Accordingly, Tavinor claims that “[m]uch of the immense fun of Bioshock derives from the irony

112 113

amples include Ryan’s discussions of the “Great Chain” of industry that guides their life; propaganda displays like “No Gods or Kings. Only Man” or “A man creates. A parasite asks, ‘Where is my share?’”; public announcements heard throughout Rapture proclaiming that “[t]he Parasite hates three things: free market, free will, and free men”; or audio diaries that include Ryan saying things like: “To build a city at the bottom of the sea! Insanity. But where else could we be free from the clutching hand of the Parasites? Where else could we build an economy that they would not try to control, a society that they would not try to destroy? It was not impossible to build Rapture at the bottom of the sea. It was impossible to build it anywhere else.” As Aldred and Greenspan point out, “[t]o play the game is to learn the story of the city’s demise” (482). I will implicitly mention some of the problems inherent in Ryan’s objectivist vision for Rapture when I discuss issues of class below. Part of the ‘failure’ of Ryan’s ideals is also revealed in audio diaries that point to Ryan’s inconsistency and hypocrisy, to him sometimes breaking with his own philosophy when he consciously manipulates the market, which he otherwise believes to be the force that, in turn, should activate and guide people. The way Rapture’s society actually works thus reveals Ryan’s founding ideals to be an ideology, which always comes with certain underlying fissures and contradictions that the ideology tries to mask, as Marxist theorists like Althusser and Macherey have pointed out (cf. J. Lewis 97; Bertens, Literary Theory 85).

3 Unstable Identities

85

of an objectivist utopia running amok,” turning the game into a “parody of Ayn Rand’s objectivist novel Atlas Shrugged” (92, 91).114 Besides the world and philosophy behind it being centered around issues of identity, the game’s main plot and the characterization of its protagonist also very clearly concern identity.115 Importantly, even after the twist scene revealing Jack’s ‘true’ identity, the game’s main narrative remains focused on issues related to it: At first, Jack tries to escape from the remaining influences of Fontaine over his mind and body, embarking on a journey towards individual autonomy and agency. While Tenenbaum frames Jack’s pursuit of Fontaine and his intention to kill him as revenge, Jack going after Fontaine can equally be seen as a quest for identity: As Ryan exposed Jack’s true origin and Atlas then revealed himself to be Fontaine, in order to come to terms with what happened—and on the extradiegetic level of players playing the game, in order to reconstruct a stable storyworld—it is necessary for Jack to find out how exactly he was born, why he was sent to Rapture, who he, ultimately, really is. Unlike before, when players followed Atlas’s instructions, this is more of a quest for identity for Jack since he is pursuing these goals for himself. Most importantly, as the memories of his family and his childhood on a farm, which had been evoked numerous times throughout the game, are exposed to be untrue, the game highlights Jack’s need to find out who his family is as a significant aspect of clarifying his identity. As he will uncover throughout the main plot of the game and especially through further hints from optional areas, Tenenbaum and Suchong as well as Fontaine himself might come closest to such an idea of family, together with the realization of Jack’s unorthodox birth in a laboratory. Eventually, in order to be able to confront Fontaine at the end of the game, Jack has to change into one of the Big Daddies himself, which constitutes a literal, physical transformation of his identity. In order to turn into a Big Daddy, players will have to pick up a body suit, a voice box, and certain pheromones, through which the game emphasizes one’s body (i.e., one’s physical appearance) and one’s voice as important aspects constitut114

115

Similarly, van den Berg notes that the game “presents a most spectacular failure of free-market capitalism, questioning the ethical underpinnings of ‘rational self-interest’” (par. 11), and Packer sees the game as “reveal[ing] a thorough critique of Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism brought to the masses via the video game medium” (210). In connection with the plot’s focus on issues of identity, the game alludes to the idea of the American Dream a number of times, which, similarly to objectivist ideals, also puts enormous importance on the strength, willpower, and autonomy of individuals. In the opening scene of the game, for instance, Jack’s voice-over mentions that his parents told him: “‘Son, you’re special, you were born to do great things.’ You know what? They were right.” As the first lines we hear in the game, they immediately evoke the issue of Jack’s past, his (false) memory, and questions of identity, of being destined to “do great things”—in line with the American Dream.

86

Narrative Instability

ing identity.116 The most important narrative aspect about this transformation is a change in empathy: Going through this process reveals (perhaps for the first time, if previous hints were not acquired) to players that the Big Daddies protecting the Little Sisters were once human too, and as they have to take care of a Little Sister in one of the levels afterwards, they actively engage in a process they have witnessed passively numerous times throughout the game: the protection of the Little Sisters. As this is a difficult task (splicers and other enemies easily kill the Little Sister), it can help to create an emotional attachment to them and to thus see both the Little Sisters but also the brutish Big Daddies, which Tenenbaum keeps describing as “disgusting,” in a more empathetic light, giving an actual identity to entities that players previously only saw as ‘soulless’ enemies, as obstacles in their way. Overall, besides thematically linking its overarching interest in identity with its narrative instability through the twist scene, BioShock also uses its plot and main characters to discuss matters of identity in general, of the importance of finding out who one is but also of the ambivalence inherent in such an effort, and of the significance of one’s perspective for how we perceive somebody, thus also highlighting identity as a relational concept. Throughout the game’s world and history, the philosophy underpinning it, and the main plot and the protagonist’s characterization, BioShock relates significantly to questions and categories of difference, most notably class and tangentially also gender.117 Particularly with issues of class, the game again exhibits a significant interweaving of instability and identity: While its overall narrative, the world it presents, and its underlying philosophy display a rather static understanding of class that does not offer means 116

117

This transformation is also represented via the gameplay—after players pick up the Big Daddy boots (as part of the body suit), they produce different sounds when they walk; when they pick up the helmet, what players see on screen looks different, which represents these changes aurally and visually; and when they pick up the suit itself, they take 25% less damage, which is a direct gameplay effect. As mentioned before, in terms of race and ethnicity, however, the game remains conspicuously silent, as most of its characters seem to be white, and their ethnicity is hardly ever referred to. Exceptions include Tenenbaum, whose German origin is repeatedly pointed out, and Suchong, who refers to his birthplace Korea at one point. Atlas, in turn, speaks with a strong Irish accent, but Fontaine does not— hence, it can be assumed that he fakes the accent to overall increase the working-class persona of Atlas. Fittingly, when players later explore Fontaine’s apartment, the song “Danny Boy” can be heard, again evoking an association with Ireland. Gender, on the other hand, is somewhat more present, but it is also most noticeable in the attempts to suppress it. This is perhaps particularly apparent in Ryan’s dictum of either being “a man” or “a slave,” where “man” seems to stand for “human” but thus excludes women, which are equally absent from most of Rapture’s power structures (almost the only important female character whose gender is highlighted in the game is Tenenbaum). Cf. Watts for a reading of BioShock partly discussing gender.

3 Unstable Identities

87

of social mobility, the revelations during the game’s moment of instability instead expose class as something (at least partly) discursively constructed, i.e., as “a discursive, historically specific construction” (Skeggs 5).118 In the world of Rapture, class plays a central role, as Ryan’s objectivism-inspired ideology assumes that only the higher classes are the productive ones, who, in Rapture’s ideal scenario, do not have to share their wealth with the ‘lower,’ allegedly less productive classes, whom Ryan calls ‘parasites.’ This lack of social redistribution is what made Rapture so attractive to many people, but it also implicitly assumes a lack of social mobility—Ryan’s ideal is built on the naive and elitist belief that all people who come to the city are relatively affluent in the first place, 119 and that people from weaker economic backgrounds are simply not ‘needed’ in Rapture. As players learn in the course of the game, this false assumption also majorly contributed to Rapture’s downfall, as it was members of the lower class living in Rapture who started the civil war out of discontent—after all, as Fontaine mentions in an audio diary, “somebody had to scrub the toilets.” When players first enter Rapture, they also already see protest signs with statements like “We’re not your property” and “Ryan doesn’t own us,” displaying the class dissatisfaction that led to unrest in Rapture. Significantly, however, these poorer masses were encouraged by and rallied behind their leader—Fontaine posing as Atlas. After staging his own death, Fontaine reemerged as his alias Atlas, for whom he constructed a discernible, populist working-class background and amassed an “army,” as he calls it in a diary, of disgruntled lower-class citizens. Fontaine’s move to pose and pass120 as a working-class member (while he actually, as a suc118

119

120

At the same time, of course, there are also ‘actual,’ material conditions attached to understandings and identifications of class. For scholarship discussing this issue, cf., for instance, Greene et al. 3-4; Dirks et al. 28-32. Also cf. Müller, who accordingly distinguishes between the terms ‘poverty’ as based in “economic conditions and closely related aspects” and ‘poorness’ as “describ[ing] characteristics, behaviors, and attitudes which are frequently attached to poverty but which are not necessarily or exclusively connected to poverty as an economic condition” (4). Ryan’s disdain for the ‘nouveaux riches,’ for people who actually had to work for their wealth, also becomes evident in an audio diary commenting on Fontaine: “This Fontaine fellow is somebody to watch. Once, he was just a menace, to be convicted and hung. But he always manages to be where the evidence isn’t. He’s the most dangerous type of hoodlum ... the kind with vision.” For Ryan, Fontaine thus remains a lower-class citizen, a “hoodlum,” regardless of how affluent or successful he is. For one of the most prominent studies on this particular concept of ‘class passing,’ cf. Foster, who especially analyzes passing for another class in the context of whiteness and the American Dream. In BioShock, the most apparent ‘marker’ of Atlas’s working-class persona is his Irish accent, but the background that players can piece together throughout the game works to reinforce this idea as well, as he allegedly came from very modest means and sought success in Rapture. The appeal this working-class background has, particularly against the ideological constraints of Ryan’s vision for the city, becomes apparent in an audio diary by Peach Wilkins,

88

Narrative Instability

cessful businessman, belongs to the wealthy upper class) in order to appeal to the poorer masses exposes class as something constructed, something that has clear markers that do not necessarily correspond to one’s ‘reality,’ and something that one thus can pose as—at least down the social ladder. While these concerns about class are relatively explicit for the corpus of narratively unstable texts, they refer mostly to the setting and background history of the game and do not primarily concern the protagonist Jack, who, however, still significantly relates to class to further expose its partial constructedness. The memories we see of Jack’s childhood clearly place him in a working-class background, apparently having grown up on a farm, a fact that is drawn attention to via the multiple times we see these images and through the way we are shown the image of the farm for the first time, when players enter the location called “Farmer’s Market.”121 It is through the central, climactic moment of instability in the game that this idea of Jack’s origin is exposed as a fabrication, again alluding to one’s social background as something constructed. Through the revelation, Jack instead appears as a kind of artificial human, practically classless for the concerns of the game. This constructedness, in turn, aligns with the game’s (and Rapture’s) general identity concerns, demonstrating a sophisticated interweaving of instability and identity through class in particular. While Rapture puts much emphasis on the possibility to change one’s appearance, one’s skills, etc. through plasmids, one’s class, in turn, apparently cannot be changed with the help of them—most poorer people in Rapture seem to be unable to climb the social ladder and instead suffer from addictions to ADAM and plasmids, only worsening their situation.122 In a final interpretive step, this relates to Ryan’s belief that one’s identity is constituted by the choices one makes in life, that “our choices make us.” Significantly, seeing class as a choice in one’s life would be a reductive point of view and generally is a complicated question (going back to the

121

122

a lower-class worker who later is part of Fontaine’s crew: “We all come down here, figured we’d all be part of Ryan’s Great Chain. Turns out Ryan’s chain is made of gold, and ours are the sort with the big iron ball around your ankle. [...] Fontaine’s promising something better. He’s like one-a us, you know, like he’s worked a day in his life.” Both Jack and Atlas thus seemingly come from the working class and, as such, do not belong in Ryan’s vision of Rapture, which is significant since both of them can be seen as the most important figures in the eventual destruction of that very vision. Before the twist, one might thus understand their working-class background as the reason for this incompatibility, but with the knowledge of the game’s identity revelations, it is rather the fact that they posed as a different class, displaying class as mobile and constructed, that makes them so toxic for Ryan’s strict ideology. As mentioned before, Dr. Steinman fantasizes in an audio diary that with ADAM, people might “change [their] sex, change [their] race”; and likewise, Tenenbaum mentions that “[b]lack can be reborn into white.” These characters are aware of the partial constructedness of some social categories, then, but not of class—a notion that only exists in the game through its instability.

3 Unstable Identities

89

aforementioned nature of class as partly based in material reality, partly constructed), and in Rapture, too, it seems that the poorer citizens cannot simply choose to rise in their class. While class would thus not be a part of Ryan’s understanding of identity,123 it does actually play an enormously important role in constituting one’s identity both for Rapture’s (poorer) citizens and outside of BioShock’s fictional realms. Ryan, however, cannot see or understand how one’s class would be such an important factor constituting one’s identity precisely because he is extremely privileged in regard to these matters: Being white, male, heterosexual, and upper-class, all kinds of choices are open to him, whereas a woman, a person of color, and/or somebody from the working class is restrained and limited in their choices by their social ‘difference,’ a point of view for which Ryan lacks the necessary empathy and self-reflection. Whereas for the unmarked ‘norm,’ the choices one makes might indeed be one of the most important aspects constituting one’s identity, for many marked ‘minorities,’ it is precisely the lack of one’s possible choices that affects one’s identity. This flaw in Ryan’s and Rapture’s philosophy concerning identity, Ryan’s belief in unhindered and ‘unlimited’ human agency, is thus exposed through the notion of class as something partly constructed, which the game establishes through its instability, demonstrating a complex interweaving of identity, class, and narrative instability. Lastly, issues of identity are not only brought up and discussed through the various elements of the game’s narrative, but they also feature significantly in the gameplay of BioShock, i.e., in how exactly the game is played and what options it features for the way it can be played. Narrative and gameplay are closely intertwined in terms of identity. In regard to (game) genre, the game is a first-person shooter, that is, the camera is positioned in a way as to suggest that what we see is what Jack also sees. 124 This perspec123

124

Or, rather, Ryan might in fact see class as a clear choice and blame the misfortune poorer people suffer from on themselves, on having made the wrong choices in their lives, or on not choosing/wanting enough to become wealthier (a crude belief disregarding the importance of the social situation one is born into that Ryan seems unable to see, as I discuss below as well). For a comprehensive study of the genre of first-person shooter games, cf. the collection Guns, Grenades, and Grunts (Voorhees et al.), which also includes an essay on BioShock as a first-person shooter in particular (cf. Peaty, “‘Hatched’”), or also cf. Kurtz. As with quite a number of such games, BioShock also features a silent protagonist, which is supposed to heighten the level of immersion, by being able to more easily identify with this character. This feature of a silent protagonist has often been discussed in the context of the games Half-Life and Half-Life 2 (cf., e.g., Flanagan and Nissenbaum 37; Collins 73; Tringham 270), and it is debatable whether such a “tabula rasa” (Flanagan and Nissenbaum 37) really helps increase immersion and identification or whether an actually fleshed-out character might achieve that more effectively. In BioShock, in line with the genre trope, it is not completely clear whether Jack never says anything or whether he says something but we do not hear it. A hint at the latter possibility is the fact that we do hear Jack

90

Narrative Instability

tive heightens the identification with the character, and it also, at least specifically in BioShock’s case, signals the internal focalization through which players witness the game: Every scene is seen and heard from Jack’s point of view.125 This constant ‘close’ perspective via the gameplay thus signals the significance of Jack’s identity throughout the game’s plot. Additionally, the genre of the first-person shooter, by way of its focus on one significant individual (or ‘hero’), often features stories that emphasize individualism and the idea of individual heroism, which strongly aligns with the American Dream and American literature and culture in general (and with objectivism, of course). Going beyond genre, BioShock’s gameplay also features elements that highlight the game’s overall focus on issues of identity and that specifically connect with its story.126 Most importantly, this concerns the elements BioShock borrows from the role-playing game genre, in that there are a number of ways in which players can modify their player character. This does not concern cosmetic aspects like one’s appearance but, instead, elements that all directly influence the gameplay: Players can choose between a variety of weapons and plasmids to use (such as a lightning bolt, telekinesis, or a freeze effect), they can choose to upgrade specific weapons, and they can select from various perks via gene tonics, such as additional damage done in melee combat, the ability to move more stealthily, or becoming invisible when standing still. These role-playing elements let players individualize their character, and they also make the game’s narrative and Rapture’s history about its citizens becoming addicted to ADAM more believable, since players can experience the powerful effects of plasmids and gene tonics first-hand. Some of the gameplay ele-

125

126

once, in the voice-over narration at the game’s beginning, and that one of the parts to turn him into a Big Daddy is a voice box. Likewise, when players swim in the ocean after the plane crash, they can see water drops appear on the screen, which is another indication that what we see is not literally what Jack sees (he would not actually have the water drops on his eyes, his ‘screen’ of vision) but that it is a representation of it, an ‘imitation’ of how he perceives that situation. This element can thus be read as a further detail trying to increase the feeling of immersion in the game. The concept of immersion, referring to the “player’s perception of entering the virtual game world through their own imagination” (Hausar 181), has been widely discussed in game studies as well; somewhat similar to discussions of choice or agency, part of these debates have been led by the questionable assumption that there is such a thing as ‘complete’ immersion. For different points of view on this subject, cf., e.g., Murray 97-125; Salen and Zimmerman 450-52. Packer makes a similar point, focusing on objectivism instead of identity, when he notes that BioShock “also encodes anti-Objectivist messages into the very mechanics of the game” (209). Generally, Packer notes a lack of focus on gameplay mechanics in previous scholarly studies of BioShock and accordingly emphasizes these elements in particular—especially cf. Packer 215-21 as well as van den Berg, par. 19-22 for a more detailed reading of the meanings inscribed in BioShock’s gameplay.

3 Unstable Identities

91

ments thus specifically contribute to discussions of identity and agency, 127 intertwining narrative and gameplay and extending the trope of unstable identities intertextually borrowed from films onto the gameplay. Overall, BioShock deals with identity most prominently via its plot, the setting (and the underlying philosophy that influences it), its protagonist, its gameplay, and by how it relates to notions of class. These individual concerns about identity are interwoven with and given additional meaning through the game’s instability: It is the revelation about Jack’s identity that thematically brings Rapture’s citizens’ obsession with changing who they are or how they look as well as Ryan’s ideology focusing on individualism and autonomy together. Furthermore, and by contextualizing this with the notion of class in the game, I pointed out how the game questions the ‘staticness,’ the rigidity—indeed, the stability—of one’s identity, partly by highlighting its constructedness and partly by uncovering that ideologies which believe in choice as the only factor influencing one’s identity are necessarily limited, hailing mostly from an unmarked and unchallenged white, male, upper-class position. By complicating the question of who a particular person is, the game also raises the hierarchically more abstract question of what identity is and what role individual choice and autonomy, which are so central for Andrew Ryan, play in that question. This latter point will become even more significant on a metatextual level. 3.3.3 SELF-AWARENESS, RECEPTION, AND PLEASURE After having examined how BioShock can be understood as narratively unstable and how it deals with issues of identity, I now want to take this analysis one step further by discussing the specific interweaving of identity and narrative instability in BioShock. Therefore, I will add to the previous considerations the level of the game’s self-awareness as a game, an awareness as a fictional text in general—one that has important intertextual ties with previous twist films—and as a video game in particular, a medium that needs to be played and interacted with in order to ‘work’ as a text. This metatextual dimension points to another layer in the game’s concerns with unstable identities, agency, and choice, as the issues of autonomy and of being able to choose, which are highlighted in the game’s plot, setting, and characters, also become central to how it can be engaged by players, in terms of the choices players do and do not have during a playthrough. In this sense, the game tries to encourage a certain way of being played, a certain kind of reception that is typical of most unstable films but of those featuring unstable identities in particular. With this focus on the game guiding the audience reception and encouraging a preferred way of reading/playing it (cf. 3.2.2), I will discuss how exactly narrative pleasure in the game 127

As Schmeink notes, “the game mechanics of Bioshock can be read as facilitating a strong feeling of player agency” (emphasis mine).

92

Narrative Instability

works and is generated, how the game ‘wants’ to be played, and what role an understanding of operational aesthetics plays in this context. Finally, this focus on the reception side of the game will allow me to more specifically point to the cultural work that BioShock does in the context of unstable identities, which relates to epistemological questions about choice and identity and specifically connects them to notions of class and myths like the American Dream. BioShock’s unstable narration is characterized by a distinct self-awareness of the game as a game, which becomes particularly apparent during its twist moment. Through this awareness, it connects Ryan’s and Rapture’s obsession with identity and the twist moment’s focus on Jack’s lack of choice with the plane of players playing the game, whose choices in the game so far actually have been equally lacking: Just as Jack thought that he traveled through Rapture and eventually confronted Ryan out of his own volition, players also, naturally, assumed that guiding Jack through these levels is something that they chose to do. The twist’s revelation that Jack was manipulated in his actions by Atlas/Fontaine, who forced him to do his bidding via the phrase ‘would you kindly,’ also metatextually translates to players of the game and their apparent lack of choices. As Tulloch phrases it, the “twist functions to reveal two parallel manipulations: Atlas’ manipulation of Jack, and the game’s manipulation of the player” (33).128 With this setup, BioShock positions itself in the realm of discussions about video games, what they are, and how they work. As I discussed previously (cf. 2.1.3), the questions of agency and choice have been prominently examined within game studies, often with a penchant to implicitly criticize the lack of ‘complete’ freedom in video games, which neglects to understand agency as always limited “within a dialectic of enablement and constraint” (Bast 28). This very conundrum of one’s choices and one’s agency as dialectically situated between “enablement and constraint,” both in reality and in video games, is what BioShock self-consciously draws attention to with its twist. This issue is further emphasized by how exactly the game presents the twist to players, making use of both audiovisual and ‘ludic’ storytelling. Most crucially, as Jack (and players with him) listen to Ryan’s revelation about Jack’s identity and his lack of choice through the use of the phrase ‘would you kindly,’ players have no control over their player character Jack 128

Tavinor likewise notes: “At the same moment that the character realizes that they are a pawn in a struggle between Ryan and Fontaine, the player is made to realize that they are a pawn in the game and narrative of Bioshock. [...] [T]he game has manipulated us through its use of environmental nudges, game-world obstacles, and objectives we have been kindly asked to achieve, so that for the most part, we have ‘sleepwalked’ through the game” (104). Wysocki and Schandler point out that “in that moment, much of the illusion of control that a player has over the game experience is laid bare” (200).

3 Unstable Identities

93

—this scene is presented to players as a cutscene. 129 Throughout most of the game, cutscenes are used only very rarely and in narratively significant moments,130 so for the most time, storytelling happens as players can ‘freely’ roam around Rapture: They look at objects and writings in the world, they listen to audio diaries or to people talking to them over the radio (in the background, while still being able to move), or they overhear conversations by other characters. Especially in the latter case, if they move away from such a conversation, they will not hear it anymore, thus generally increasing the feeling that players are in control of how much narrative information they want to receive. Likewise, in the level featuring the confrontation with Ryan, they make their way up to his office and, when they finally meet him, are able to move around as Ryan begins his speech—they cannot, however, directly approach Ryan, since a locked door separates them from him; they merely observe and hear him through a window into his office. When Ryan tells Jack to enter his office, however, as soon as players step over the door threshold, a cutscene starts. In line with the established conventions of ludic storytelling, black bars appear at the top and bottom of the screen to simulate a cinematic representation, and players from now on cannot move around anymore: They simply have to ‘sit back’ and watch their player avatar’s actions being automatically carried out on the screen. This includes the killing of Andrew Ryan as well, which Jack performs without any input from the player. Taking away player control in this crucial scene is highly significant in the context of the game’s concerns with choice and agency: On one level, it links the player and Jack even more closely, since precisely after they have been made aware of Atlas’s controlling of Jack through the phrase ‘would you kindly,’ their control of Jack (just as Jack’s control over his own actions) is taken away.131 Furthermore, on a metatextual level, the scene rep129

130

131

As mentioned previously, a cutscene presents players a piece of narration without any input needed from them; it is like a short film or video clip being shown to them. As a storytelling device, it has been very prominently used in games, even though it is often criticized for its lack of interactivity (cf. Klevjer). Tavinor, for instance, understands cutscenes as “temporarily steal[ing] away the player’s agency, a problem that has led to the increasing abandonment of cut-scenes in recent games” (103). For instance, the opening of the game (Jack in a plane) is presented as a cutscene, which then seamlessly blends into giving players control of Jack in the water after the crash. Many later instances of cutscenes coincide with a loss of control on Jack’s part. For example, when picking up the first plasmid, the impact this has on Jack is conveyed via a cutscene, which fits with Jack’s own momentary loss of control over his body—as Atlas tells him, “[his] genetic code is being rewritten.” Other such situations include Jack slowly waking up in Tenenbaum’s safehouse after having been unconscious for a while and Jack being completely frozen and unable to move due to the actions of a minor villainous character, Martin Finnegan. To reiterate, the fact that this scene is presented as a cutscene without any player control is crucial in the context of agency in video games: Players have no choice

94

Narrative Instability

resents how players, in a way, have been ‘tricked’ by BioShock as well: Throughout the course of the game, while aware of certain limitations of the gameplay and level design, players still felt that they were in control of their character and the choices they made—they controlled Jack’s movements and his actions in battle, they chose what weapon upgrades to buy, they chose to explore an optional area or not, to listen to a certain audio diary or not to pick it up, they were interrupted only rarely by cutscenes, etc., altogether heightening the textual effect of being ‘in control.’ Additionally, they might have been convinced to ‘do the right thing’ in confronting and trying to kill Ryan on Atlas’s behalf.132 The twist scene, however, suggests that they had no choice in any of this, that all of these actions were simply meant to culminate in this confrontation, which Atlas had planned all along: When, for instance, Atlas used the phrase very early in the game, saying “would you kindly pick up that crowbar,” players did, of course ‘choose’ to do that in a way, but in the game’s diegetic reality, Jack was compelled to do so by Atlas—which is represented in the game by the fact that if players do not pick up the crowbar, the game’s plot does not progress; players cannot go on.133 They either have to play the game by following Atlas’s instructions to Jack or they do not play it all; that, at least, seems to be the only choice they can make if they do no want to succumb to Atlas’s mind control over Jack. In the moment of the game’s central revelation, and by having it transmitted to players in a cutscene, then, the game points exactly to the conundrum of agency in many video games: that

132

133

in whether to kill Ryan or not, but they do not even play any part in it. Most parts of the game before were also already relatively linear, without a lot of potential for significant narrative choices, but players at least still had the freedom to explore or sometimes had to confirm a certain action by pushing a button, e.g., when pulling a lever in the submarine scene with Atlas’s alleged family. The narrative result is the same in each case, but how that is scripted in terms of the gameplay also signifies in itself: Having to watch Jack kill Ryan (instead of, for example, at least pressing a button to confirm to ‘kill Ryan’ on screen) is the least amount of control possible, and since cutscenes are used relatively rarely in the game, their general presence is also infused with more meaning in terms of a lack of control. Tulloch convincingly argues that this notion is strengthened by the game because players might think of Atlas’s function as a kind of tutorial, helping the player understand the game and its mechanics. In this sense, Atlas, early on, serves as “the primary pedagogic mechanism in Bioshock; he trains players’ practices, and their understanding of the gameworld,” and “like a tutorial or manual for most players he is unquestioningly followed” (29). In this context, the precise phrasing of ‘would you kindly’ is also noteworthy exactly because it is not a straightforward command but, instead, a polite request, phrased as a question, which implies options—one could, technically, answer ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ While the wording might suggest to players that there are choices involved in all these situations, in Jack’s reality, however, there are none. As concerns the significance of this phrase, Packer also notes that it “asks a favour and it is the call for favours that Ryan believes exists at the heart of ‘parasitical’ thinking that underlies state coercion” (220).

3 Unstable Identities

95

their choices are always limited by the game’s design and gameplay and that, regarding the main (linear) plot, they have to follow the game’s script (represented by Atlas), turning choice and agency in video games into a feeling, engendered by a textual effect, rather than an absolute. The way this is revealed to players, by highlighting this “tension between control and freedom” (Tavinor 102), comes close to a breaking of the fourth wall,134 as the game seems to mock players, for a while, for their lack of choices in the game so far,135 but especially for having been ‘duped’ and misled so easily. Ultimately, however, while Jack—and players with him—are mocked by Andrew Ryan for their lack of choice, for being ‘slaves,’ the actual game paints a more complex picture regarding choice and agency in the aftermath of this twist. For one, whereas players could not choose whether to kill Ryan or not and had to follow Atlas’s instructions before, they still had certain choices in terms of exploring the game’s world, and they continue to have them after the twist, as they engage in a kind of quest for self-identity. Since these decisions about engaging with the game’s world influence the storyworld that players construct of the game, they can be seen as fairly significant narrative choices as well. In addition, though, BioShock also features a much more overt gameplay and narrative decision: the question of what to do with the Little Sisters—who Tavinor calls “the moral center of Bioshock” (104). Whenever players defeat the Big Daddies protecting them, they can decide to rescue the Little Sisters or to harvest (i.e., kill) them for their ADAM, something that is presented by the game as a clear binary choice (players are offered both options on the screen and have to choose left or right), yet even though it “is binary, it creates a sense of choice” (Haimberg 3; emphasis mine). This decision influences the kind of gameplay rewards that players receive from the Little Sisters, but it also directly affects the ending of the game: There are two basic endings, “one utopian and one dystopian,” as Aldred and Greenspan note (486), the former occurring if players saved all of the Little Sisters and the latter if they 134

135

Such an awareness of BioShock as a game is most apparent in the twist scene, but there are other, smaller elements as well. For instance, later in the game, Fontaine tells Jack: “Has Mother Goose really got her hooks into you. You can knock Ryan all you want, but the old man was bingo on one point of fact: you won’t even walk till somebody says ‘go’!” While he directly comments on Tenenbaum’s influence over Jack at this point, Fontaine’s phrasing can equally be understood as a reference to the fact that Jack will not even walk without the input of the player. Tulloch equally argues that the game “demonstrates, indeed maliciously celebrates, the lack of authorial control players have over their ludic experience” by “question[ing] that applicability of any concept of interactivity to video gaming, by problematizing the fundamental notion of player freedom or what we can call complete individual agency” (32). Likewise, Aldred and Greenspan note that “the game ultimately mocks your helplessness at both a procedural and a narrative level” (490).

96

Narrative Instability

killed all of them.136 The first shows Jack refusing the Little Sisters’ offer to hand Rapture to him and instead returning topside and ultimately leading a happy life with the Little Sisters as his extended “family” (as Tenenbaum calls it in the voice-over), whereas the second ending features Jack becoming the new power-hungry and despotic leader of Rapture, consumed by ADAM. The question of who Jack is thus depends to a large extent—and in a very binary fashion, with “no middle ground between the two” (Schulzke)—on this choice, again linking it to notions of identity. Here, then, the game contradicts Ryan’s position that Jack (and players) had no choices and have been ‘slaves,’ but, on the other hand, it also confirms Ryan’s dictum of “our choices mak[ing] us” in a rather crude way, which, taken together, paints a more ambivalent and fluid picture in terms of choice and agency than Ryan or his underlying philosophy purport. It thus criticizes “ideologies that privilege the right of the individual above all, equate individual rights with freedom, and that understand truth as accessible when a person has individual freedom” and instead “suggests [that] truth, freedom and the individual are far from self-evident cohesive concepts” (Tulloch 34).137 On a metatextual level, the game reaffirms that the players’ actions include some meaningful choices, even if other aspects of the game’s storyworld cannot be changed or decided upon.138 136

137

138

A third ending is a variation of the latter one: If they saved some, but not all of the Little Sisters, they will still watch the ending that plays when they kill all of them, but the voice-over narration by Tenenbaum is slightly different (turning from anger into disappointment). For a reading that criticizes both endings as, ultimately, failing to “imagine [the] disappearance” of laissez-faire capitalism (par. 26), cf. van den Berg. Aldred and Greenspan equally criticize the ‘good’ ending for being “compulsorily heterosexual” and as a “perverse femtopia that misrecognizes itself as a bourgeois nuclear family” (486), whereas Wysocki and Schandler criticize the way the choice about the Little Sisters is presented by the game as “remain[ing] superficial” (203). By bringing these different elements together, BioShock thus actually manages to escape the simplistic and binary imaginations of ‘choice or no choice’ or ‘agency or no agency’ that its characters display. Accordingly, I disagree with readings such as Packer’s, who, in the context of the twist scene, claims that “[o]ne could argue that the game enacts the slavery that Ryan so opposes, teaching the player that freedom is the ultimate value” (220). While he correctly points out that “Ryan, like Rand, cannot see in shades of grey” (220), combining the aspects of the game’s narrative with that of its narration, as I have done above, points out how it uses Ryan as a foil against which it paints a more complex and ambivalent picture of agency and player ‘freedom,’ fully aware of the impossibility to achieve complete freedom or agency and, in fact, filled with shades of grey. That these choices thus lead to a kind of narrative reward is an aspect not fully engaged with by some scholars (cf. Packer 219; Sicart 160). Like Tavinor, however, in the context of the overall game, I deem it crucial that these choices can effect such a difference, potentially surprising players, especially after the twist pointed out their lack of choices. Hence, “[w]hat might have seemed to be merely a gameplay mechanic [...] turns out to be crucial to the game’s narrative resolution” (105).

3 Unstable Identities

97

The importance BioShock places on considerations of choice and agency also relates to pleasure in the game, to how players are supposed to enjoy the game, to how the game wants to be played and experienced—so, in short, to how it guides its reception. In this, the game works similarly to many twist films as well, mirroring video games’ iterative nature: BioShock also encourages multiple playthroughs so that players, with the knowledge of the twist, can look for further hints and clues in the beginning of the game that foreshadow the twist139 and that complete the picture of the game’s world and its characters’ histories. Yet it also enhances this effect through its general interactivity and the choice regarding the Little Sisters in particular, encouraging players to see what happens if they make different choices in another playthrough. Through the twist and the optional areas, documents, and audio diaries that the game features, BioShock encourages exploration in an effort to reconstruct what happened in Rapture (as well as to the different main characters of the game’s story). 140 This kind of narrative exploration is a main source of pleasure in playing the game, heightened by the choices BioShock offers in exploring its world. Some scholars, however, argue that the twist scene works against such kinds of pleasure, that the revelation that the game has been ‘tricking’ the player breaks the ‘ludic’ contract of motivating players to continue playing, a position I disagree with. Clint Hocking prominently argues for such a point of view: He claims that there is a “dissonance between what [BioShock] is about as a game, and what it is about as a story,” a dissonance that he calls ‘ludonarrative’ (Hocking). He equally notes that the “game seems to openly mock the player for having believed in the fiction of the game at all,” a point I discussed above, yet he considers the lack of choices in the game “a serious problem,” particularly the fact that players “do not have the freedom to choose between helping Atlas or not.” While the points he makes about different parts of the game being at odds are valid, he ne139

140

There are numerous examples of smaller hints alluding to the twist, and most of them will only be relatable to the revelation about Jack’s identity after having played through the game once, whereas they appear as either mysterious or innocuous before. These include random loading screen messages such as a quote by Dr. Suchong saying “Why children take so long to grow [...] must find way to accelerate process,” hinting at Jack’s artificial growth; an audio diary by Sullivan mentioning that the bathyspheres have been locked down through a genetic device and that only Ryan and his inner circles can use them but that the system is faulty and that “[s]isters, cousins—anybody in the ballpark, genetically, will be able to come and go as they see fit,” pointing to Jack’s and Ryan’s family relation; or hints that Fontaine might still be alive by characters like Peach Wilkins. On the gameplay level, such explorations are also facilitated by the in-game map showing players which parts of a particular level they have not explored yet, encouraging players to find ways to access them. Generally, exploration in these instances also goes beyond simply going to places, since sometimes certain puzzles have to be solved or levels have to be investigated very carefully in order to be able to enter hidden, optional areas.

98

Narrative Instability

glects that this is precisely the point of the game: That BioShock “openly mocks us for having willingly suspended our disbelief in order to enjoy it” is exactly the strength of its appeal, vastly heightening the effect of its instability on players. As Hocking himself notes, this feeling is much stronger “after a 20 hour commitment” than it would be in other media, but he misses the most significant aspect of the game when he claims that “[t]o mock us for accepting the weaknesses of the medium not only insults the player, but it’s really kind of ‘out of bounds’ (except as comedy or as a meta element – of which it appears to be neither).” As I pointed out above, the twist clearly works in a metatextually and self-aware context, prompting players to reflect on their choices so far and, as Hocking has done after having played it, on the nature of choice in video games in general.141 While Hocking and other scholars see this as a major flaw of the game, I argue instead that players are supposed to take pleasure in exactly this fact; that they did not have any ‘real’ choices so far is precisely the point BioShock wants to make (as Tavinor also notes [103]). That the game made this point not by ‘telling’ it to players but by—even more than ‘showing’ it, as a twist film would do—letting them play it out themselves is how it weaves this notion into metatextual concerns about choice and agency. As in other unstable texts, an understanding of operational aesthetics helps to comprehend this kind of “pleasure in experiencing deception after knowledge of it had been gained” and to see it as an “opportunity to debate the issue of falsity, to discover how deception had been practiced” (Harris 68, 77). As Mittell points out, it is the pleasure of “watch[ing] the gears at work, marveling at the craft required to pull off such narrative pyrotechnics” (“Narrative Complexity” 35). It is thus not just the ‘basic’ plot revelation about Jack’s identity and the phrase ‘would you kindly’ themselves that can excite and surprise players but, more importantly, the way the game succeeded in making players ‘fall’ for this twist, along with the realization that there were hints towards this revelation before, which the game managed to represent as innocuous. By showing images of previous scenes and repeating Atlas’s utterances of the phrase ‘would you kindly,’ BioShock further encourages such a thinking, suggesting to take pleasure in having been ‘misled’ and to potentially replay certain parts to notice this ‘deception’ even earlier. In addition, after the twist, then, there are still new things to discover about the storyworld, as mentioned before, and there are some choices left in the game both in terms of exploration and in regard to the Little Sisters. Since choices regarding the latter actually do lead to different narrative out141

Wysocki and Schandler similarly complain that “the gamer does not even have control over the moment of confrontation” and state that “[w]hat is problematic about this interpretation is that when Ryan encourages us to ‘Choose or obey’ we cannot. When it comes time to actually consider our options, agency and control have been taken away from us” (204). This is not a ‘problem’ of the game, though, but a selfconscious choice to point to the limits of agency.

3 Unstable Identities

99

comes, they are not meant to ‘mock’ players again, nor should players declare these choices to have been in vain—rather, the game suggests to come to terms with the fact that choices are always limited and part of a dialectic of “enablement and constraint” (Bast 28). As some scholars disregard this self-awareness and, at the same time, purport a notion of ‘absolute’ choice as a reality, they come to the conclusion that “we are ultimately slaves” (Aldred and Greenspan 490) or that “games make slaves of us all” and that “the only real choice, the only real level of control that a player truly has is the choice to play or not to play” (Wysocki and Schandler 206), a point also picked up by Hocking and Packer. In my reading, such notions fail to see beyond Ryan’s dichotomy of either being a ‘slave’ (without any agency) or a human with agency, and they neglect to understand agency as more than a binary concept, as actually being ambivalent and complex, which is precisely the issue BioShock emphasizes. This overall point about choice and agency in BioShock is also how I understand the game’s cultural work. As the previous paragraphs have argued, by letting players ‘play out’—that is, actively experience and themselves perform—an unstable narrative whose central twist revolves around the identity of its main character and around the lack of choices both he and players have had, BioShock discusses the question of agency in video games as well as in narratives in general. It relates these thoughts closely to matters of identity, to philosophical ideas about what identity is and to the epistemological dilemma of how we can know who we are—and, particularly, to what extent and in which contexts the choices we made in life influence who we are. The latter point is something the game especially reflects on via the character of Andrew Ryan and allusions to Ayn Rand’s philosophy of objectivism, which equally places large importance on individualism and autonomous choices.142 Additionally, these references are also used by the game to focus more intently on the issue of class in negotiations of one’s identity, an explicit focus on a category of difference that is relatively rare for an unstable text and that is still, comparatively, not discussed very often in American culture or even in scholarship (cf. Lauter and Fitzgerald; Michaels 200). At the same time, in the era of the game’s release, such questions of class and economic difference have found renewed significance in US society.143 Overall, the game’s high level of self142

143

In a way, part of BioShock’s cultural work also lies in a popularization of the ideas of objectivism. I will discuss the intricate connection between narratively unstable texts and the popularization of philosophical thoughts, scientific concepts, etc. in detail in the next chapter. Similarly, in the context of their discussions of BioShock, scholars also note how Rand’s ideas have become more popular again. Van den Berg, for instances, states that “Rand gained further notoriety through the Tea Party movement” (par. 15), Packer mentions that “[t]he economic recession of 2008 and subsequent government bailouts have brought a renewed popular interest in Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism” (209), and Tulloch notes that the game was released at “a time where

100

Narrative Instability

awareness and its intertextual references to an emerging tradition of narratively unstable films connect well with such epistemological concerns about knowing oneself, reflecting about the choices one can have, or about what identity means in contexts of class and social difference—and how we can know what our own identity or the concept of identity itself even entails, a question that will be even more central and more explicit in Black Swan. As a popular text released in the 2000s, BioShock marks contemporary American culture and society as self-reflexive about such issues, demonstrating how popular culture is being consumed by (inter)textually aware and sophisticated audiences that take pleasure in operational aesthetics, in working as “amateur narratologists,” as Mittell phrases it (“Narrative Complexity” 38). BioShock itself displays its intertextual awareness of narratively unstable texts and adapts concerns similar to those prevalent in films dealing with unstable identities to its ludic peculiarities, thus also demonstrating the widespread, transmedial appeal that instability has attained in US culture. *** In this section, I have analyzed BioShock from a variety of perspectives to discuss it as a text dealing with unstable identities. The examination of its narratively unstable elements traced the intertextual influences it takes from unstable films, highlighting the transmedial dimension of instability. In turn, the close look at different expressions of identity in BioShock pointed out the game’s critique of objectivism-inspired ideas about choice, agency, and class. Finally, examining BioShock’s self-awareness as a text and as a video game allowed me to bring instability and identity together in a discussion of choice and agency not just within the game’s storyworld but also on a metatextual level. Through all of these considerations and by looking at reception practices, pleasure, and operational aesthetics in the game, I pointed out how BioShock casts identity and choice as interdependent, questioning more simplistic understandings of identity as constituted solely by the choices one has made in life and instead highlighting that identity, in turn, influences the choices one can and cannot make in the first place. Overall, BioShock demonstrates many unstable texts’ awareness of other unstable texts and of their own instability, and it displays how this intertextual tradition is taken up transmedially as well. Its interest in identity points out how instability and identity are interwoven on a metatextual level— through choice and agency in the game—and how they are linked to larger concerns in the game, such as autonomy and the epistemological question of how we can determine what one’s identity means. Like many unstable texts, BioShock relates to categories of difference even though its main [Randian thought] is resurgent amongst American right wing, neo-liberalist and neo-conservative politicians, economists and media pundits” (30).

3 Unstable Identities

101

character comes from an ostensibly ‘unmarked’ position—still, the game elaborately discusses questions of class, its potential constructedness, and its role in negotiations of identity. As one part marking the contemporary moment in US cultural productions as characterized by instability, BioShock speaks to audiences’ self-reflection and introspection particularly in terms of questions of choice, agency, and class. By arguing against studies that understand the game’s instability as ‘ludonarrative dissonance,’ I emphasized how contemporary audiences can take pleasure in BioShock’s metatextual discussions of its own limitations of choice—rather than seeing this as a flaw of the game, it actually emerges as a source of its popularity. Simultaneously, the game also stands as proof of the wide textual and transmedial ‘reach’ of instability, being aware of previous unstable texts and how they work and, in a way, building on a certain genre knowledge, an aspect that will be even more pronounced in the following reading of Black Swan.

3.4 Black Swan When Darren Aronofsky’s film Black Swan was released in 2010, the ‘boom’ of unstable identities films that occurred around the turn of the millennium had already ebbed down quite a bit. Partly because audiences became more aware of the frequent narrative patterns of these films to include one significant moment of instability in their narration, later unstable films adapted and revised such patterns. Black Swan, which deals with the troubles of a young ballet dancer to perform the double leading role in the ballet Swan Lake, is an example of one such ‘adaptation’ that is found in a number of texts: It seems to tease audiences with the advent of an imminent twist, making viewers wonder about which aspect they might soon witness a large revelation, but it never fully delivers on this promise. Instead, it only ‘plays’ with the allure of a twist, of one significant moment of instability that will thoroughly upset the storyworld and, after this one moment of reshuffling, finally provide clarity again.144 In contrast, Black Swan is content with remaining ambivalent and unresolved to the very end—a narrative pattern of instability that could be called a ‘pseudo-twist’ film. The reading of Black Swan in this section will thus complement and add to the analysis of BioShock by demonstrating the variety and breadth of texts featuring unstable identities, as it displays a complication and thinking-further of the way narrative instability can be implemented in films like Fight Club and in games like BioShock. While the latter adapted previous patterns of narra144

This notion goes back to my previous discussion of playing (cf. 2.1.3), understanding it as part of play’s focus on nonlinearity as teasing different possible outcomes to the narrative conflict, similarly to how BioShock includes multiple different endings.

102

Narrative Instability

tively instability already through its different medium, in a way, this section is supposed to answer the question of what could come ‘after’ twist films in a narratively unstable film. Black Swan was both a commercial and a critical hit, grossing more than $300 million worldwide and garnering many awards and nominations, among them the Academy Award for Best Actress for Natalie Portman’s portrayal of the film’s protagonist Nina Sayers. It thus stands in a line with unstable films like The Sixth Sense, The Others, and Shutter Island as major box office successes, whereas films like Fight Club, while also moderately commercially successful, have rather acquired later popular appeal as ‘cult hits’ (cf. Batchelor). In academia, despite being a relatively new film, a number of scholarly inquiries of Black Swan have emerged in recent years, discussing it from a wide variety of angles. Many studies focus on issues related to gender and identity in general, but what is most remarkable about the body of scholarship is its variety.145 Among these, however, the relationship of Black Swan to previous texts from a tradition of narrative instability has not been explored, and my analysis in this section is thus also meant to bring some of the varied themes and topics in the film together under the rubric of unstable identities. In this section, as with BioShock, I will look at Black Swan from different angles to overall examine the film as a narratively unstable text. First, I will discuss the film’s instability by analyzing its narrative perspective and related discursive elements in order to discern the effects that the film’s instability has on the construction of its storyworld. Significantly, as the text is aware of previous unstable films, I will point out its differences from such texts and its allusions to them to highlight how it ‘plays’ with the notion of a twist. Second, I will examine the way the film discusses identity. Nina, the film’s protagonist, suffers from a number of identity issues, some of which relate to inner conflicts, while others are closely connected to her relations to other characters. While BioShock mainly focuses on issues of class in its concerns with identity, in Black Swan, questions of gender are of major importance, particularly constructions of femininity and female gender roles. Third, in the final subsection, I will bring the film’s concerns with identity and its unstable elements together to more closely investigate its cultural work as an unstable text, paying particular attention to its inter- and 145

To give an idea of this breadth of scholarly engagements, studies of Black Swan focus on such areas as fractured female identity (cf. O’Brien), queerness and the notion of the ‘monstrous-feminine’ (cf. Efthimiou), the uncanny sublime (cf. Laine 127-57), comedy, camp, and kitsch (cf. McLean), space (cf. Bordin), the body (cf. Pascual), rites of passage (cf. Soselisa and Djundjung), and melancholy (cf. Marston), and they read the film in the context of limit experience and artistic perfection (cf. Skorin-Kapov), in connection to Sylvia Plath’s work and in the context of anorexia (cf. Joritz-Nakagawa), via Nietzsche’s concepts of the Apollinian and the Dionysian (cf. Wansbrough), via Deleuzian theory (cf. Bignall), and with the concept of ‘terror management theory’ from social psychology (cf. Goldenberg).

3 Unstable Identities

103

metatextual self-awareness. As with BioShock and other texts featuring unstable identities, a focus on reception practices and pleasure will shed further light on this topic, as it will allow me to trace the way the film wants to be received, particularly by audiences that already come with certain genre knowledge and expectations about instability. With these different foci, I will argue that Black Swan intertextually relates to previous unstable texts to create viewing pleasures by consciously ‘playing’ with its audience’s expectations of a twist, and that it furthermore challenges the assumptions audiences might have about that twist’s resolution by pointing out and complicating the gendering of previous texts’ posttwist stability. I will show how the film departs from earlier texts dealing with unstable identities by ultimately leaving its storyworld much more ambivalent and uncertain. In turn, Black Swan links this ambivalence in terms of its instability with discussions of identity, as its protagonist equally suffers from an ambivalent and fragile identity. The film uses this connection between its discourse and its themes to point to epistemological dilemmas inherent in thinking about one’s identity, i.e., to the question of how we can know who we are, and what results insecurities about this question can produce. While it represents these concerns primarily as those of white middle-class Americans, it focuses, unlike most other unstable texts, on how women are affected by unstable identities and how, generally, constructions of femininity intersect with one’s identity. Specifically, the film points out how conflicting external expectations of what constitutes femininity complicate a stable female identity, which renders previous unstable identities texts’ resolutions for their characters inapplicable to a female protagonist. Through this focus and the film’s inter- and metatextual awareness, Black Swan replaces earlier unstable identities texts’ instability with blurrier, more ambivalent portrayals and thus further complicates and ambiguates both unstable narrations and stable, binary constructions of identity. 3.4.1 NINA’S SWAN DIVE: NARRATIVE INSTABILITY Black Swan, a mixture of psychological horror and thriller film, deals with the troubles of a young ballet dancer, Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman), to perform the dual role of White Swan and Black Swan 146 in Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake. While she has perfected the White Swan through precision and control, she is unable to perform the Black Swan with the spontaneity and passion required for it—as the French-born director of the ballet, Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel), tells her, she needs to “lose [her]self” and “live a little” to be able to perform that role. These problems to perform the role parallel Nina’s private life, as she struggles to grow up and 146

I will discuss the omnipresent color symbolism in the film, along with the significance of the characters’ names, in the next subsection (3.4.2).

104

Narrative Instability

emancipate herself from the controlling presence of her mother, Erica Sayers (Barbara Hershey), whom she still lives with. In the course of trying to master the role, she is involved in (increasingly violent) fights with her mother, with Thomas, and with the previous star performer at the company, Beth MacIntyre (Winona Ryder); she begins to notice strange marks and wounds appearing on her body; and she suffers from more and more severe hallucinations. In addition, a new performer at the company, Lily (Mila Kunis), seems to threaten to take over Nina’s role. At numerous times throughout the film, Nina mistakes Lily for herself, seeing her as a kind of doppelgänger, with Nina’s grasp on reality apparently fading. This culminates in a scene in which Nina stabs Lily to death, yet as Lily is later shown to be alive and well, Nina seems to have hurt herself instead. At the end of the film, Nina manages to perform the roles of both White Swan and Black Swan perfectly for the first time and finishes the ballet to thunderous applause from the audience, but appears to be bleeding to death as the credits roll. Narrative instability in Black Swan is engendered by uncertainties about what exactly is happening to Nina and who she, as well as Lily, is—uncertainties that result from the film being narrated entirely from Nina’s insecure and mostly unreliable point of view. All of the film is narrated and presented from her perspective, most scenes are directly focalized through her, and there are no scenes that do not feature her. While the latter detail does not make the film’s narration per se questionable, the fact that everything we see is, in some way, presented from her point of view does lead to large doubts about the reliability of what the film presents, as Nina’s own perception and her mental grasp on reality are shown to be problematic multiple times in the film. This is most directly expressed through the many visual and aural hallucinations that Nina seems to suffer from, seeing people that are not there, mistaking someone for somebody else (most of the time for herself), hearing sounds that nobody else can hear, or noticing and seeing things that, in the next shot, are revealed to apparently not have happened either. At numerous points in the story, the film thus highlights Nina’s unreliable nature, making this a plot detail that audiences will likely pick up on very early. That the story is also entirely narrated from her perspective and focalized through her most of the time, however, is slightly more difficult to notice, yet there are a number of scenes in which this discursive setup becomes quite clear. Narrative instability in Black Swan is created through this combination of the film being narrated from Nina’s perspective and this perspective being unreliable, which leads to a storyworld that remains continuously vague, that takes in information only for it to be revised moments later, and that, even after the ending, remains unresolved and, thus, unstable on a number of key elements, mainly regarding Nina’s (and Lily’s) identity. A number of scenes in the film draw explicit attention to the almost constant internal focalization through Nina, which both provides viewers

3 Unstable Identities

105

unique insights into her mind but also makes a more objective point of view on the events depicted on screen impossible. In fact, the very first shots of the film already establish this setup: The film begins with orchestra music, then shows the title screen, then a female and male dancer performing a ballet (Swan Lake, as it turns out), and then the next scene opens on a shot of Nina’s face as she lies in bed, smiling. The ballet dance we saw before was a dream she was having, as she later tells her mother that she had the “craziest dream last night, [...] dancing the White Swan.” The first scene the film shows to its audience thus is something only Nina could experience, a dream she had, and the focus on her face after she wakes up likewise emphasizes Nina’s mind, which viewers have access to visually and aurally. Most other shots in the film somehow highlight Nina’s presence, either by constantly showing her face or by framing scenes as filmed from behind her. Generally, there are only very few wider or establishing shots; instead, most are mid shots to close-ups. This repeated focus on faces, especially Nina’s, helps ‘tighten’ the frame and scope of the film, giving it a somewhat claustrophobic feeling but also expressing the focus on Nina and her perceptions of the world. This is similarly achieved via the pervasive presence of mirrors in the film, which, by partly reflecting Nina, only serve to decrease the scope of what we see.147 At the same time, mirrors are used to further highlight Nina’s internal focalization, for instance during a number of times when she dances at the company and is judged by Thomas—in the earliest such scene, the camera at first follows Nina’s movements but then closes up on Thomas’ face (whose eyes also follow her movements), who stands in front of a large set of mirrors, in which we can 147

Mirrors appear in Nina’s home and at the ballet company when she practices in front of one, when she looks at herself in the dressing room or a bathroom, but also through a number of reflections, e.g., when she looks at the windows in the subway. As a motif, they are omnipresent, and many shots either clearly include what is seen in a mirror or generally show the overall scene by looking at a mirrored reflection of it. Symbolically, they thus connect to questions of the reality of Nina’s identity in the film, asking whether the Nina we see or the Nina in the mirror is the ‘real’ one (or if there is a way to tell at all, or if, actually, there is a difference at all). Towards the end of the film, as Nina’s measures are taken in front of mirrors, the shot displays a mise-en-abyme, with Nina’s figure endlessly reflected from mirror to mirror, which equally signals a focus on multiple identities. As Tarja Laine notes, the film thus uses mirrors to express “the multiplication of Nina’s selfhood” (137). The use of mirrors as a motif in the film is widely discussed in scholarship, and some scholars also read their appearances in the context of Lacan’s psychoanalytic concept of the ‘mirror stage’ (cf., e.g., Laine 137; Efthimiou 20; Stephenson). In general, this omnipresence of mirrors aligns with traditional representations of femininity in literature, culture, and the visual arts, which use mirrors to portray women as (and through) the Other (cf. J. Berger 50-51). As Schanoes notes, “women are forced to understand themselves as objects, and to internalize exactly the division of self that the mirror, origin of the double, encourages: the division between self as subject and self as object” (116).

106

Narrative Instability

see the reflection of Nina dancing. The shot thus continues the intense focus on Nina even when it presents her from another character’s perspective, via the mirror suggesting that this could still be Nina’s focalization, as, while she dances, she is very much focused on Thomas’ judgment expressed through the reactions on his face, signaling her “desperate search for approval” from him (Efthimiou 5).148 This internal focalization of Nina becomes problematic since her perspective is clearly unreliable, as is pointed out variously in the film. It is the reason, after all, why the audience witnesses so many of her hallucinations, since the film presents them in a way that Nina also experiences them. One of the most frequently reoccurring hallucinations concerns the many times that Nina mistakes somebody else for herself, a trope hinted at in a very early scene, when Nina stares at another young woman looking like herself in the subway (later revealed to likely have been Lily). The first very clear instance occurs on her way back home from the ballet company. Again, the film highlights the internal focalization of Nina in this scene: The shots alternate between showing her upper body and what she looks at in that moment, a long, narrow underpass in front of her, where a woman is walking towards her. She stops for a while, then starts walking, and the camera keeps alternating between being placed in front of her, looking at her (and moving along with her), and showing the scene from behind her shoulder; the camera also moves slightly to the left and right, simulating Nina’s movement and closely aligning the perspective with her. When Nina and the woman cross paths, the camera shows Nina’s back and the woman’s face for a split-second, which looks exactly like Nina’s. Directly afterwards, the shot reverses, showing Nina’s face as she turns around to look at the woman again, who also turns, but now looks like a completely different woman. The scene is accompanied by slightly ominous music, which climaxes when the two women meet, signaling Nina’s agitated state and overall aligning viewers very closely with her perception. Similar confusions of identity on Nina’s part occur throughout the film, notably in an apparent sex scene between Nina and Lily (which I will discuss in the next subsection) and during their final confrontation (to be discussed below). Besides both scenes featuring Nina mistaking Lily for herself, they are also examples of plot events that other characters later deny to have happened, further establishing Nina’s perspective as unreliable. Other such elements include the wounds on Nina’s body (some of which her mother recognizes as well, others appear to exist in one shot but disappear in the next), when she imagines other people in a specific setting (such as 148

At the same time, the scene also manages to highlight Thomas’ general presence, as he is often the focus (besides Nina), the strongest voice, and most forceful physical presence in the scenes that he is in, which, I suggest, is not in spite but because of Nina’s focalization of most of these scenes, again highlighting her search for his approval.

3 Unstable Identities

107

in her bathtub or at the ballet company), or the literal, physical transformation of parts of her body into a swan. Many of these scenes are shown again in a subsequent shot and without the hallucination, suggesting that Nina herself alternates between seeing and not seeing them, while other scenes remain more ambivalent.149 Notably, these hallucinations also extend to the auditory level, to an internal focalization of sound (so-called ‘auricularization’ [cf. Schlickers 244]), as there seem to be numerous sounds that only Nina can hear—hissing and swirling similar to that of a swan, voices saying ‘sweet girl’ (which is how her mother repeatedly addresses her), a female voice gasping and sighing, etc.150 All in all, these different elements cast doubt on Nina’s perception of the world around her, marking her perspective as unreliable. For the storyworld that viewers try to construct of the film, many plot elements thus remain vague, since it is often uncertain whether a scene or a specific shot was only a hallucination or actually happened, leaving Nina’s characterization and her identity unresolved, full of doubts about who she is or what is happening to her. Throughout the film, this particular setup ‘teases’ a twist, a central moment of instability, at numerous times. This moment of revelation relates especially to Nina’s (and Lily’s) identity: As Nina repeatedly confuses other people—and Lily in particular—for herself, the audience might begin to wonder whether Lily really does exist, if she could just be a figment of Nina’s imagination, similar to Tyler Durden in Fight Club151 or John Nash’s hallucinations in A Beautiful Mind. Such interpretations are alluded to throughout the film, for instance when, in the beginning, none of the other characters interact with Lily, as most conversations only happen between 149

150

151

One such example is the word ‘whore’ being written across a mirror in red lipstick in the ladies’ bathroom of the ballet company. Nina notices this right after she learns that she was picked for the leading part of Swan Lake, which happens after she goes to see Thomas personally to ask for the part and ends up kissing (and biting) him in a botched attempt of persuasion. Nina is in the bathroom stall only very briefly to call her mother, and we do not hear anybody else being in the restroom, which makes it unlikely that somebody actually did write something on the mirror. The writing can thus also be read as a manifestation of Nina’s unconscious guilt, her own thoughts about only having gotten the part because she engaged with Thomas (and after having put on Beth’s red lipstick to try to seduce him). As mentioned, the film does not show the mirror again without the writing, which makes it more ambivalent than some other scenes, yet not notably so—other scenes that show a shot again, after all, also remain ambivalent regarding which of the two shots was the ‘true(er)’ one, since they all always come from Nina’s ultimately unreliable perspective. As Laine notes, “the use of sound forcefully contributes to the spectator’s experience of the uncanny in Black Swan. It consists of layered, intertwined mechanical, bestial and human noises, often mixed with the lurid and haunting score by Clint Mansell” (140). For a reading of Black Swan that focuses more closely on a comparison to Fight Club, cf. a previous article of mine (Schubert, “‘Lose Yourself’”).

108

Narrative Instability

Nina and her (similar to how Malcolm Crowe is portrayed in The Sixth Sense). Likewise, when Lily appears at Nina’s apartment, her mother answers the doorbell but sends her away, telling Nina that “[i]t was no one” at the door. While the most likely interpretation is that her mother simply did not want Nina to go out with Lily (who we then see to be there, talking to Nina), it also is a hint at the fact that Lily might not actually exist, that she might be literally “no one.” This uncertainty is upheld throughout the film; in one climactic sequence, Nina and Lily have sex after spending the night clubbing, and during this scene, there are again two moments when Lily looks like herself in one shot and exactly like Nina in another. The next morning, Nina wakes up alone, and at the ballet company, Lily denies having been at Nina’s home, instead claiming that she must have “fantasized” about her. Throughout the film, this is arguably the most direct refutation of something Nina said she experienced or witnessed by another character, and given Nina’s established unreliability at this point, it might gear the audience’s construction of the storyworld towards believing what Lily says (even though, if Lily were just a figment of Nina’s imagination, her statement would be without much reliability either). Similar smaller moments of such ‘pseudo-twists’ happen later, when something has been revealed to have happened a different way than first witnessed on screen, 152 yet they do not include a larger revelation clarifying Nina’s situation overall. The final confrontation between Nina and Lily likewise builds up to serve as a kind of twist but is then revealed to have been another attempt at ‘misleading’ the audience. Towards the end of the film, during the premiere of Swan Lake, Nina falls while dancing the White Swan. Afterwards, as she enters her dressing room, Lily is already sitting there, proposing that she should take over the part. A violent struggle ensues, during which Lily again suddenly (and for the longest period within a scene so far) looks like Nina, and Nina is only able to overcome Lily’s grasp thanks to her neck fantastically extending like a swan’s, as she then stabs Lily in the chest with a piece of a mirror that shattered during the fight. 153 As they struggle, the Lily-turned-Nina character repeatedly says, “It’s my turn,” and Nina 152

153

For instance, in one scene, Nina witnesses Beth, the previous star performer of Thomas’ company, in the hospital, as she had been in an accident. Nina gives back some of Beth’s items (like her lipstick), which she had stolen since she was “trying to be perfect, like you,” to which Beth replies: “I’m not perfect. I’m nothing.” Beth then proceeds to repeatedly stab herself in the face with a nail file, to which Nina flees in horror. As she runs to the elevator, however, she suddenly finds the bloodied file in her own hand, suggesting that it might have been her who stabbed Beth. That Nina stabs Lily with a piece of a mirror is, of course, highly significant given the pervasive presence of mirrors in the film. Steen Christiansen accordingly notes: “It is not an accident that Nina smashes the mirror and kills the phantasmatic Lily with a shard of the mirror. Not only is it symbolic of the way Nina rejects being bullied by her peers but it [...] also shows Nina’s desire to smash the mirror of representation and the mirror-boundary between screen and spectator” (313).

3 Unstable Identities

109

equally proclaims that it is her “turn” as she stabs Lily. The idea of different ‘personalities’ taking turns inside one body vaguely alludes to a dissociative identity disorder, which Nina might have been able to overcome by violently disposing of Lily—similarly to how Jack uses (self-)violence to dispose of Tyler at the end of Fight Club.154 As she has apparently been stabbed to death, Lily returns to look like Lily again, and Nina hides the body in the bathroom. At this point, viewers might be convinced that Nina either disposed of her hallucination, her ‘imagined’ second personality, as is the case in Fight Club, or that she actually murdered Lily because of her hallucinations, either of which would constitute a significant moment of instability with severe consequences for the storyworld. Later, however, Lily is revealed to be alive and well, and Nina cannot find the body anymore in the bathroom—instead, she notices a large amount of blood on her own dress, as she seems to have stabbed herself instead. Accordingly, after her final performance, she is apparently bleeding to death on a mattress. What happened in the dressing room before thus turns out to have been another hallucination, but one that led to Nina physically hurting herself. However, the issue of her identity and what exactly happened to her still remains relatively unclear; at no point does Black Swan offer another perspective on these events to clarify what might have happened.155 While it is suggested that Lily simply seems to be another, actual person in the diegetic world of the story and that Nina accidentally stabbed herself because she suffered from mental disorders, the film still remains ambivalent on these issues and offers no final clarification.156 Such a clarification could have come, in fact, from a significant moment of instability, a twist that would, for a moment, severely reshuffle important elements of the storyworld but, afterwards, again offer a stable storyworld, as films like Fight Club or games like BioShock do. Black Swan displays 154

155

156

Like with other unstable texts, part of the cultural work of Black Swan also lies in a popularization of certain scientific or psychological concepts, such as the idea behind a dissociative identity disorder. In scholarship on Black Swan, different ‘illnesses’ and concepts are equally discussed in this regard; Laine, for instance, mentions that “[s]uch a multiplication is symptomatic of the severe dissociative identity disorder from which Nina suffers” (137), whereas Ouweneel notes that “Nina’s double was caused by attacks of schizophrenia, a prolonged psychosis” (201). Instead, the film insists on continuing to present all events only from Nina’s perspective. It thus lacks a more objective ‘post-twist’ perspective like that of the security cameras in Fight Club. These two different core interpretations and reading practices—Nina’s identity troubles are hallucinations caused by her mental instability or they are diegetically ‘real’—work similarly to the differences in interpretation in texts like Henry James’s novella The Turn of the Screw (1898), whose central possibility of two divergent readings has generated a significant amount of scholarly discussion (cf., e.g., Jones; Williams; Amorós). Whereas the former interpretation would read the film as belonging to the realist mode, the latter frames it in the fantastic mode (cf. Koenen, Visions 42-43; Rosemary Jackson 13-60).

110

Narrative Instability

no twist in this sense, yet it ‘plays’ with the notion of delivering one in a few scenes. In a way, it expects its audience to watch the film with a specific knowledge of twist films, with certain genre expectations, as they will then connect with the film’s hints at being a twist film. Instead, it is exactly these assumptions of a twist that Black Swan can work with, successfully ‘misleading’ viewers to the extent that perhaps the largest twist in the film is the fact that, ultimately, there is none. Instead of an expression of Nina’s dissociative identity disorder, Lily turns out to just have been Lily, an actual character in the film’s diegetic reality (although Nina might, of course, still suffer from such a disorder). While Black Swan is thus not a ‘classical’ twist film and works quite differently than a number of previous unstable texts, it still clearly features narrative instability and is aware of such a filmic tradition, and it significantly interweaves its unstable narrative elements with discussions of Nina’s identity. 3.4.2 CONSTRUCTIONS OF FEMININITY Black Swan centrally deals with issues of identity, and throughout its narrative, it points to the vagueness, the fluidity, and the ambivalence of notions of (a stable) identity. Against the backdrop of Nina’s troubles to perform the dual roles in Swan Lake, the film depicts her struggle to grow up, to come of age, and to emancipate herself. It takes a rather bleak outlook on these attempts, ending, after all, with Nina’s presumed demise, with a failure to stabilize her identity—or, if death is understood as a kind of stasis, then this stability has come at a very high cost. While BioShock focuses mainly on questions of choice and agency in its deliberations of identity, Black Swan looks at the relationship between an individual and her direct community and at expectations brought onto somebody from outside. Even more so than BioShock, the film ultimately frames Nina’s struggles for identity not only as an ontological but also as an epistemological question, asking how she can know who she is, how anyone can be certain of one’s identity. In this section, I will trace this notion by discussing different directions Nina is pulled in regarding her identity, illustrated by the dual role in Swan Lake, her literal transformation into a swan, her imitation of Beth, and the confusions between her and Lily. Throughout these and other aspects, gender plays a particularly important role in Black Swan’s construction of unstable identities, relating to Nina’s identification as a girl, a daughter, and a woman, and focusing on questions such as infantility, purity, and sexuality. These questions of femininity and of the construction of gender roles are taken up in Nina’s oscillation between White Swan and Black Swan as well, but they become especially apparent in her relations with Thomas and with her mother. As is made quite apparent in the film, Nina’s struggles to perform the roles of both White Swan and Black Swan stand symbolically for problems in her own life, particularly in her quest to grow into an adult personality.

3 Unstable Identities

111

She excels at the White Swan, since that role requires control and precision, which are traits of Nina’s own personality, characterized by innocence, purity, and modesty. In contrast, she needs to perform the Black Swan with more passion, spontaneity, and lust, all of which she lacks in her life. 157 Prompted by Thomas’ explanations, Nina believes that the only way to perform with passion and sensuality is to be passionate and sensuous,158 something she tries to become throughout the film—Thomas himself speaks of the “metamorphosis into her evil twin.” That Nina, during this process, would become somebody else is highlighted by the fact that she goes about this transformation not directly through an intrinsic change but by emulating other people. From the beginning, she tries to be like Beth: In an early scene, she is seen stealing a few items from Beth’s dressing room, among them her lipstick, which she uses the next day to try to seduce Thomas. As Julie Sexeny notes, “Nina’s act of stealing the lipstick points to a desire to incorporate what is other to the self” (53). In the final scene between Beth and Nina, the latter admits that she was “just trying to be perfect, like you”—while this striving for perfection (which Nina understands as ultimate control, not passion or spontaneity) is significant, so is the element of emulation implied in the comparison “like you.” Beth’s violent rejection of Nina’s words and her forceful claim that she is “nothing” hint at Nina’s choice in emulating her having been misguided, and at one of the reasons why Nina’s quest for identity is ultimately unsuccessful.159 To perform the Black Swan specifically, Lily seems to serve as Nina’s example, since she represents elements needed to perfect that role. As Thomas says, when Lily practices dancing, she moves “imprecise, but effortless. She’s not faking it.” A general way to understand the many times that Nina mistakes Lily for herself is thus to read them as Nina’s confusions over her own identity, as seeing elements of both ‘Nina’ (control, precision) 157

158

159

This externalization of Nina’s identity struggles in the dual figures of the White and Black Swan and through a doppelgänger has a long tradition in fantastic texts as well, and particularly in supernatural and horror fiction—prominently, for instance, in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Double (1866), and Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson” (1839). Black Swan taps into this literary tradition, but also metatextually innovates it through its instability and ambivalence. On this note of the importance of performance, which I will discuss in section 3.4.3 again, cf. also Christiansen: “Nina is not satisfied with simply representing the Swan Queen, of appearing to be or pretending to be. Instead she must go beyond appearance and embrace being” (306-07). That Nina has become Beth, in a way, at the end of the film is also pointed out by Thomas telling Nina after her performance: “I always knew you had it in you, little princess.” ‘Little princess’ is a term he had used only for Beth before, as Nina and Lily discuss in a previous conversation, yet Lily already hinted at this progression when she said: “I bet he’ll be calling you ‘little princess’ any day now.” In this sense, Nina has indeed taken over parts of Beth, but she also inherited her ‘destructive’ nature.

112

Narrative Instability

and ‘Lily’ (sensuality, spontaneity) in herself—but also as wanting to be more like Lily. Most of these moments of confusion involve violence, which symbolizes Nina’s anxiety over such thoughts, over being insecure about who she is. Only after the apparent sex scene between Nina and Lily does she finally seem to be able to perform the Black Swan well—the next time she dances after that scene, Thomas mentions she had a “breakthrough”—which, with the knowledge of the sex scene likely having been a hallucination, suggests that Nina needed to come to terms with her ‘Lily’ persona, her more passionate, sensual, and, importantly, sexual side.160 Yet once that has happened, her grasp of the White Swan deteriorates: Significantly, it is during the performance of that role in the premiere that Nina falls, failing a routine that she had mastered numerous times before. Finally, only after ‘killing’ ‘Lily,’ which leads to Nina stabbing herself, does she perform both roles perfectly, yet this has come at the cost of her own life. Significantly, the scene of this violent struggle and the subsequent performance also includes the most visually explicit display of Nina’s literal transformation into a swan: During their fight, she extends her neck like a swan’s, and as she performs the Black Swan thereafter, we see her hands having turned into swan feet, her skin looking like an animal’s, and, as she assumes her final position as the Black Swan, instead of hands, she has two large black-feathered wings. The camera first shows her from the stage, looking towards the audience and thus depicting her black wings in front of a mostly white, light-filled background. Then, the camera switches to a point of view from the audience towards Nina, where she looks like her normal self, but significantly, behind her on the wall, the lights project two shadows of her, and both shadows show her as a swan, with the wings clearly visible. Even this perspective, then, is apparently not a more reliable, more objective one, but continues the common thread of ambiguity about Nina’s identity. Ultimately, by having transformed into a swan in order to perform the role perfectly, Nina has lost her humanity, and with that, her identity. As Thomas tells her to “live a little” and to “lose [her]self” repeatedly, in the end, Nina has literally lost her self.161 160

161

This progression towards the ‘Lily’/Black Swan side and Nina’s oscillation between these different aspects of herself is also expressed through the many uses of color symbolism in the film. One significant example occurs before the sex scene, as Nina and Lily go out for dinner: As usual, Lily is dressed in black, while Nina wears a white-grey shirt. In order to “spruce up,” Lily gives Nina one of her own shirts, a “spare” she always carries with her, which is black and more seductive than what Nina is wearing. In the next scene, we witness Nina putting on this black shirt over her grey top, and she then puts her grey shirt over that (later, she is seen kissing somebody without that shirt on). Symbolically, she thus tries to ‘put on’ the role of the Black Swan through Lily’s black clothes, layered in between her own, grey clothes. Somewhat similarly, in her psychoanalytic reading, Olivia Efthimiou understands Nina’s final transformation as her “now represent[ing] a duality in its full extent. The costume and make-up of the Black Swan is visibly transgendered and embod-

3 Unstable Identities

113

All of the above considerations regarding Nina’s identity significantly relate to questions of gender.162 The characteristics that Nina is torn between closely correspond to binary constructions of female identity in general, a binarity that runs throughout the film via “splits [such as] black/white, love/hate, fantasy/reality, mind/body, frigid/sexual, sanity/insanity” (Sexeny 51).163 Both roles closely evoke stereotypical portrayals of female characters throughout (American) fiction and culture, such as the ‘fair’ and ‘dark lady’ in the novels of James Fenimore Cooper or the Western’s “schoolmarm from the East” and the “dance-hall girl” (Cawelti, Adventure 11), both of which oscillate between pure, innocent, asexual and exotic, dangerous, sexual. Accordingly, Andrea Celenza also sees Nina as “struggling with a virgin/whore dichotomy within herself” (600). That

162

163

ies a distorted femininity, existing somewhere in between the world of the feminine and the masculine, the human and the inhuman; a place with no rules or borders. This existence cannot be sustained” (17). For Nina’s progression towards losing her identity, Thomas has been the most vocal voice; before the premiere, he tells Nina one last time: “The only person standing in your way is you. It’s time to let her go. Lose yourself!” This idea of Nina herself standing in her own way is particularly significant in terms of the insistence the film has placed on Nina’s different personality sides; in that sense, Thomas refers not only to Nina generally hindering herself but more specifically to her White Swan personality standing in the way of her Black Swan side. While class is the most prominent aspect of identity to discuss in BioShock, this role is clearly taken up by gender in Black Swan. Generally, the film still taps into the tradition of unstable films to concern themselves with the ‘unmarked’ norm, and in terms of class and ethnicity, Black Swan is equally interested only in white middle-class Americans. As in most unstable texts, issues of class are never taken up explicitly. Something similar is true for race, even though interpretations of the film could focus on the literalness of a white and a black swan and accordingly read Nina as white and Lily as a quasi-black Other. This difference is not just expressed in Nina’s and Lily’s clothes but also in the differently colored makeup that they use, making Lily’s skin appear darker. For a reading that partly discusses such considerations of race in the film, cf. Marston (who also notes that “Black Swan is perhaps far more likely to be analyzed for its gender commentary than for its race or class politics” [702]). However, as gender is the more pronounced category of difference, I will focus on it here, also to generally discuss notions of gender in unstable texts, which adds to discussions of class in the reading of BioShock. Still, by specifically discussing the gender and femininity of a white and middle-class woman, I also implicitly relate to these categories as well, of course, as discussions of femininity cannot just be generalized across ethnic and class identities. Many of these binary oppositions are not only expressed in the roles of the White and the Black Swan but also, correspondingly, in the characters of Nina and Lily. Another element that fits this pattern of dichotomies is geography: Lily is mentioned to just have come from San Francisco, whereas the whole film is set in New York City, posing East Coast and West Coast against each other. Notably, in American culture, the West Coast (and/or Hollywood) is also frequently associated with unreality or with, in fact, hyperreality (cf. Herrmann 107), a trope that adds to the concerns about Lily possibly not being diegetically real.

114

Narrative Instability

these portrayed characteristics are so diametrically opposed helps explain why Nina struggles to combine all these attributes within herself. Even more significantly, though, by demonstrating that even a female character who combines characteristics of both stereotypes—as Nina apparently does after killing ‘Lily,’ symbolized by her perfection of both the White Swan and the Black Swan—is doomed to fail, Black Swan points out that neither of these core sets of attributes entails a fulfilling female identity. 164 For a woman to impersonate both stereotypes, the film suggests, is not socially acceptable either, eventually leading to Nina’s demise. Instead, the film proposes to look beyond these suggested female gender roles, pointing to their stereotypical nature, and at the same time questions the dichotomy between control and passion, purity and sensuality, etc. Nina’s oscillation between the two roles also represents her process of growing up from a girl (and daughter) to a (young) woman. The film particularly focuses on the importance of sexuality as part of this maturing process, a move away from innocence and purity (associated with the White Swan) and towards sensuality and sexual lust (i.e., the Black Swan). In this context, Nina’s relationships to Thomas and (especially) her mother are particularly important. Thomas is the only male character of any significance in the film, which is another aspect in which the storyworld of the film intimately mirrors Nina’s own world: In her life, Thomas is likewise the central masculine figure, and as mentioned before, in scenes that feature Thomas, he is usually the most significant on-screen presence as well. 165 Nina’s father is never mentioned throughout the film, and Thomas can generally be said to assume a fatherly role for her, but at the same time, he also becomes a sexual interest.166 It is Thomas who connects Nina’s perfor164 165

166

In this context, Laine notes that the film “can be interpreted as a study of female breakdown” (128). Thomas’ last name is significant in this context, as names in fiction, of course, closely relate to (and/or constitute) a character’s identity. ‘Leroy’ is French for ‘the king’—in Swan Lake, there are only princes and princesses, and a queen, but no king, so Thomas carrying this name suggests that he, as a man, is placed above all other characters. On the significance of names in Black Swan, Jadranka Skorin-Kapov notes that the “name Nina means ‘little girl’ in Spanish, providing an additional character identifier” (95), and Celenza mentions that Lily is “ironically named” (599), after a flower that is often associated with purity. Seeing the figure of the father as sexualized in this sense aligns with psychoanalytic readings of the film, particularly in terms of Freud’s concept of the female Oedipus complex or Jung’s proposition of the Electra complex, which, “[a]t its most basic level, [...] refers to the phenomenon of the little girl’s attraction to her father and hostility toward her mother, whom she now sees as her rival” (Scott 8; cf. also Kulish and Holtzman). Psychoanalytic readings of Black Swan, of Nina’s identity troubles, and especially of her relationship with Thomas and her mother are generally highly productive. In a Freudian reading, one could understand Lily as a representation of Nina’s unconscious, of those sides of her that she represses. For readings along those lines, cf., e.g., Efthimiou; Christiansen 309-11.

3 Unstable Identities

115

mance of the Black Swan with her sexuality when, in preparation for the role, he asks her if she has a boyfriend and whether she “enjoy[s] making love,” as he sees this as an important trait to perform the Black Swan. 167 Accordingly, as a “homework assignment,” he tasks Nina to “go home and touch yourself. Live a little.” This repeated insistence to “lose [her]self” and “[l]ive a little,” for Thomas, is mainly tied to developing Nina’s sexuality, a trope he comes back to throughout the film, for instance when he calls her dancing “frigid” and when he tries to demonstrate what he means by practicing the dance with her, afterwards telling her that this “was [him] seducing [her], when it needs to be the other way round.” While two subsequent attempts of Nina to “touch [her]self” are shown to fail or be interrupted, when she apparently hallucinates to have had sex with Lily—and, in reality, likely masturbated—Nina afterwards experiences a “breakthrough,” according to Thomas, in her performance. At least for Nina’s wish to perform the role, coming to terms with her own sexuality has helped her, yet through the film’s later events and Nina’s tragic end, sexuality alone is also depicted as not sufficiently constituting an idea of female identity. In Nina’s quest to mature and establish an identity of her own, her mother is even more significant than Thomas. Nina and her mother, Erica, seem to have a complicated relationship, of which viewers are only shown the surface in the film, without being provided more context of what happened between them previously. Generally, her mother arguably is “the most pervasive presence that seeks to monitor and control” Nina (Efthimiou 8), trying to protect her from other influences by, for instance, attempting to prevent her from going out with Lily and initially canceling Nina’s participation in the premiere of Swan Lake, since she feels that Nina has exhausted herself too much for the role. In this sense, Nina’s mother can be seen as a force pulling her back, trying to prevent her from growing up, and wanting her to firmly stay within the White Swan side of her personality. Particularly with regard to Nina’s sexuality, her mother is depicted as an obstacle: When Nina tries to pleasure herself in accordance with Thomas’ “homework,” we see her lying in bed and slowly enjoying herself more. The camera is focused on Nina all this time and shows her body move more ecstatically, as the music also picks up and the bed begins to creak, but then Nina looks to the side and the camera shows a close-up of her mother sitting in the room as well, having fallen asleep on a chair the night before as she watched over Nina sleeping. As the camera zooms in on Erica and then quickly back out, a jarring sound of strings is heard, signaling Nina’s surprise and shock of seeing her mother there, and she immediately rushes to cover herself with her bed sheets again, turning around. In 167

Jill Dolan thus concludes that “Thomas doesn’t even pretend there’s any other way to ‘get’ the performance he wants from his star but to sexually humiliate her in public and to push her physical boundaries in private” (79).

116

Narrative Instability

this scene, it is her mother’s physical presence that prevents Nina from experiencing her own sexuality, literalizing the mother’s metaphorical role in the formation of morality and conscience in (particularly Melanie Klein’s) psychoanalytic theories (Zaretsky 37). The scene stands symbolically for her mother’s role throughout the whole film in trying to uphold Nina’s perceived innocence and purity. She is constantly infantilized by her mother (cf. also Joritz-Nakagawa 7; Celenza 598-99), something also signaled through the symbolic use of colors: Nina is always associated with the colors pink and white (e.g., in her clothes), standing for purity and innocence, and particularly her room is decorated completely in these two colors. 168 In a later scene, we witness Nina picking up a number of plush toys in her room and throwing them in the garbage, a symbolic act of rebelling and maturing, but also one directed against her mother. Likewise, the later confrontations with her mother are increasingly characterized by violence, as Nina attempts to block her mother’s access to her room with a wooden stick wedged in the door (apparently, the room cannot be locked) and ends up severely injuring her mother as she slams the door into her hand. As Nina says earlier when she mentions that “[i]t’s called privacy, I’m not twelve anymore,” she craves for a space (literally a room) of her own that is not controlled by her mother (she later announces her intent to move out). At the same time, we also witness glimpses of Nina seeking her mother’s approval (just as much as Thomas’), which cements their complicated relationship, trying to emancipate by distancing herself from her mother but also sometimes looking up to her.169 168

169

At a number of times in the film, we also catch a glimpse of Nina’s cell phone, which is equally pink on the outside and uses a bright pink background on the screen. Each time her mother tries to call her, the phone displays the word “MOM” as the on-screen name, the capital letters likewise symbolizing her mother’s significance in Nina’s life. Other aspects of their relationship also signal her mother infantilizing Nina, such as the ‘ritual’ of her mother helping Nina fall asleep by playing a music box or Nina calling her mother “mommy” in moments of happiness. As one significant example, the last time we see Nina’s mother is during Nina’s final performance in the premiere of Swan Lake. Directly before she jumps to her death, Nina looks across the audience, and the shot then shifts from showing Nina to depicting her mother in the audience, watching intently, then back to Nina and then back to her mother, zoomed in on her exasperated face. As Nina’s perspective has become wholly unreliable by the end of the film, it is unclear whether her mother is really sitting in the audience or whether Nina only imagines her to be there (their last encounter implied that her mother was not interested in attending the performance), as an expression of Nina’s need for approval from her. When Christiansen notes that “[w]e see how Nina’s mother sits crying in the audience at Nina’s perfect performance, achieving what the mother herself never managed and so symbolically we might argue that Nina becomes what the mother always wanted to be” (310), he neglects this aspect of Nina’s unreliability and the film’s general instability. Instead, these shots say more about Nina’s inner wishes and anxieties than about what actually happened during the performance.

3 Unstable Identities

117

This aspect of Nina possibly seeing her mother as a role model significantly relates both to her identity and to the narrative instability in the film. One way for Nina to grow up, after all, is to become a successful ballet dancer, which she sees as an important part constituting her identity. As is alluded to throughout the film, her mother also used to be a dancer and still has contacts to the ballet world. In one scene, the following exchange takes place: Erica: Has [Thomas] tried anything with you? He has a reputation. I have a right to be concerned, Nina. You’ve been staying late so many nights, rehearsing. I hope he isn’t taking advantage, that’s all. Nina: He’s not. Erica: Good. I just don’t want you to make the same mistake I did. Nina: Thanks. Erica: Not like that. I just mean as far as my career was concerned. Nina: What career? Erica: The one I gave up to have you.

The general topic of sexuality is something Nina clearly finds uncomfortable to discuss with her mother, and it also takes place at a time when their relationship has already become very cold. The conversation briefly continues by Nina alluding to the fact that she did not think her mother had a career ahead of her, and it ends with Nina’s forceful utterance of the word “No!” in response to her mother’s request to “[t]ake off [her] shirt” as she wants to see if Nina’s skin has gotten worse. 170 In the conversation, Nina feels insulted because she thinks her mother suggests that having had her was a “mistake.” Nina, in turn, believes that there was nothing else to accomplish for her mother anyway, which significantly relates to a stereotypical tendency of equating femininity with motherhood.171 In addition, it serves as a manifestation of a repressed topic in their relationship, with Nina’s mother both wanting her daughter to excel at the career she could not have and apparently trying to hold her back from achieving exactly that, as not to surpass her.172 Significantly, Nina seems to mainly recognize 170

171

172

The emphasis on the wounds on Nina’s skin is just one of many instances in which her body is highlighted. The body as a concept is, of course, highly important in constructions especially of femininity (but it also plays an important role, for instance, in Fight Club’s discussion of masculinity). For a partly ‘corporeal’ reading of Black Swan, cf. Laine 127-57. Two other prominent films featuring unstable identities with female protagonists, The Others and Arrival, cast their heroines primarily as mothers—The Others centrally identifies Grace Stewart as a mother throughout the film, whereas Arrival connects its final moment of instability directly to Louise Banks’s daughter Hannah. Nina later declares herself better than her mother in terms of their careers, proclaiming: “I’m the swan queen, you’re the one who never left the corps.” The complicated relationship between Nina and her mother in this regard is also reflected in scholarship on the film, which discusses their relation in different terms: Joritz-

118

Narrative Instability

the latter aspect, as becomes apparent when she comes home after the episode with Beth at the hospital and, seemingly in distress and suffering from more hallucinations, runs into her mother’s room, where a large number of portraits of Nina and Erica that her mother has been painting are suddenly and fantastically able to move and speak. We hear a cacophony of the phrases “sweet girl” and “my turn” as Nina yells “Shut up!” and rips the paintings off the walls—this scene, and Erica’s portrayal in general, aligns with representations (especially in horror films) that link the figure of the mother with the monstrous (cf. Creed). While generally serving as a demonstration of Nina’s anxieties and her mental issues, this instance is also the only other time in the film that the words “my turn” are uttered, which is the same phrase used by Nina and ‘Lily’ during their final violent confrontation. A large part of the instability surrounding both Nina’s identity and her narration in the film thus comes from the strenuous relationship with her mother: What she perceives as her mother’s jealousy over her daughter’s career and her attempts to hold her back, wanting it to be “[her] turn,” manifests in Nina’s different sides of her personality struggling to take “turn[s],” as this has made it impossible for her to stabilize her identity. When she stabs ‘Lily’ in the later climactic scene, then, her exclamation that “It’s my turn!” can also be read as a perceived triumph over her mother’s influence and control.173 Overall, Black Swan discusses identity as intimately connected with gender and femininity, since Nina’s identity struggles are presented as problems of a young woman in particular. Nina’s confusion over who she is stems from pressures on her to conform to certain roles, and to try to fit into patterns of either a controlled and innocent or a passionate and sexual woman, which are demands on women in US society perpetuated through exactly such stereotypes in literature and culture. By linking these gender assumptions to the fictional characters of the White and Black Swan in Swan Lake, though, Black Swan also alludes to these ideas as being constructed roles, constructions of femininity that do not necessarily fit reality. Neither of these two roles, nor an attempt of a combination of both, leads to

173

Nakagawa sees the mother as “a failed dancer who alternately praises or pretends to support but in fact repeatedly attempts to destroy or sabotage her daughter’s efforts whose talent she resents” (7), while Laine also understands Nina’s mother as “project[ing] all her frustrated ambition, jealousy and disappointment onto Nina” (127), and Dolan notes that “Erica both wants Nina to succeed and desperately needs her to fail, so that her daughter will cling to her, imprisoned in the child-like state Erica insists on preserving” (80). Nina’s mother and her identity troubles are also linked directly through other instances. In one example, as Nina demands more privacy, her mother deplores: “You’re not my Nina right now,” as if there really were different ‘kinds’ or personas of Nina. In turn, in their final violent confrontation, her mother asks: “What happened to my sweet girl?” to which Nina replies: “She’s gone,” again alluding to the possibility of a part of Nina literally having gone away, having been ‘lost.’

3 Unstable Identities

119

a positive outcome for Nina, to a stable identity. Instead, the fact that Nina herself is shown as unable to know who she is, that she mistakes other people for herself, speaks to the film’s attempts at pointing out the constructedness of identity and the epistemological dilemma of being unable to know who we ourselves are—when Nina attempts to kill her doppelgänger but instead hurts (and possibly kills) herself, this amounts to a literal confusion of referents. While this conundrum is taken up by a number of texts dealing with unstable identities, Black Swan frames these concerns specifically as related to constructions of femininity. In Fight Club, for instance, Jack tries to restabilize his identity in a very similar manner to Nina, using violence against his ‘split’ personality, which succeeds in getting rid of Tyler and reaffirms Jack’s sense of self. For Nina, however, the same strategy leads to her death. In this sense, Black Swan highlights that previous unstable identities texts’ solutions for their unstable protagonists are distinctly gendered, only working for men’s identity crises because, as BioShock discussed, their identity depends to a larger degree on making autonomous choices, whereas femininity is particularly constructed through outside expectations and projections. Black Swan, then, demonstrates that society’s demands on femininity make it particularly difficult to stabilize female identities.174 3.4.3 INTERTEXTUALITY, METATEXTUALITY, AND PERFORMANCES In a final perspective on Black Swan, I want to bring the film’s concerns with identity more closely together with its storyworld’s instability. This connection between instability and identity can be most productively approached by looking at how self-consciously Black Swan discusses these aspects, inter- and especially metatextually—the latter being an aspect of the film not often discussed in scholarship, as only Kendra Marston considers Black Swan “a deeply self-reflexive text” (696). Accordingly, in the next paragraphs, I will look at the film’s intertextual awareness of previous unstable films (and other texts as well) and how reception practices, pleasure, and (genre) expectations shape its unfolding of instability. At the same time, Black Swan is also aware of being yet another film in (or at least positioning itself towards) this cinematic tradition, and its metatextual awareness connects with other meta-referential elements. Finally, this metatextuality can also be related to Black Swan’s epistemological musings about 174

In a reading that understands the contrasts between the White Swan and the Black Swan as (also) about differences between white and black ethnicities, one could frame parts of Nina’s fears and identity troubles as stemming from anxieties about feeling threatened by the (sexualized) black femininity of the Black Swan, embodied in Lily. Kendra Marston partly points to such a reading when she understands the “film’s utilization of Swan Lake, a story about a supernatural threat to aristocratic white power, [as] provid[ing] the conceptual framework for a narrative that explores the ideological contradictions of white womanhood” (702; also cf. 70204).

120

Narrative Instability

identity, and bringing these aspects together will allow me to highlight the cultural work the film does as part of a dialogic relationship with other unstable texts. Black Swan’s intertextual awareness is evident very early on, as the film does not only use Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake as a subject but also features parallels in terms of the characters, some plot elements, and a number of themes of the ballet.175 While this is the most obvious text that Black Swan references, it alludes to a number of other cultural artifacts. 176 Additionally, unstable texts are an important group of artifacts that Black Swan refers to as well. In terms of reception practices, the film expects its viewers to come prepared with a certain genre knowledge and, actually, genre expectations, a particular ‘literary repertoire’ (Iser 69). As mentioned before, the film belongs primarily to the (supernatural) horror and thriller genre. This genre adds to the film’s instability, since one possible reading of the film—that Nina’s hallucinations are real after all, that she is slowly transforming into a swan and that there are doppelgängers of her—is strengthened by the choice of the horror genre, in which such supernatural elements are commonplace. For viewers to suspend their disbelief, they have to place the film correctly in these generic realms, and if they do so, this genre trope adds to the film’s overall instability, which ambiguates Nina’s identity and the supposed ‘truth’ of who she is and what happens to her. In this context, the film’s instability can also be framed as reading the text either as presented in the realist mode (where Nina’s identity troubles are hallucinations, manifestations of a troubled mind) or in the fantastic mode (where the hallucinations are diegetically ‘real’)—similar to texts like Henry James’s aforementioned The Turn of the Screw. As the film fluctuates be175

176

Thomas’ summary of the ballet near the beginning of the film, in which he mentions a “virginal girl, pure and sweet” and “her lustful twin, the Black Swan,” is one such example that directly applies to the characters in the film as well. Notably, Thomas characterizes the ending of the ballet as the White Swan finding “freedom” “in death,” a foreshadowing of Nina’s demise, but also an interpretation (seeing death as freedom) that seems limiting in terms of the character’s agency. In general, however, the film treats these themes in a less binary and more ambivalent manner than Tchaikovsky’s original ballet. These influences range from being inspired in its body transformations by the cinema of David Cronenberg, particularly The Fly (1986), to previous texts that discussed similar subjects, like the ballet film The Red Shoes (1948) or Dostoyevsky’s The Double (Christiansen 306), to other films by Aronofsky, such as The Wrestler (2008) (Laine 128; Joritz-Nakagawa 30) or Pi (1998) (A. Johnson 115-17), and even to the similarities to the work of female poets, particularly Sylvia Plath (Joritz-Nakagawa). The film has also been discussed in comparison to a number of other works, such as Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher (2001) (cf. Ritzenhoff) or Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience (2016) (cf. Fusco). Only one other scholarly text compares the film to, among others, Fight Club in more detail, but not in terms of seeing them as twist or unstable films but with a focus on fractured identity (cf. Dawson).

3 Unstable Identities

121

tween genres, it also constantly oscillates between these two poles, which adds to the frequent changes in updating its storyworld and the ultimate impossibility of stabilizing it. The uncertainty in resolving the film’s storyworld through genre affiliations and intertextual references is also heightened by the text’s allusions to previous unstable texts. As discussed in section 3.4.1, Black Swan plays with the notion of a twist, it teases viewers to deliver one fundamental moment of instability to thoroughly destabilize the storyworld—but, ultimately, to also newly offer a stable version of it with updated knowledge of its characters and the events that have transpired, which is the function the twist moment in many other unstable identities texts has. Even after the end of the film, no such moment has occurred, leaving the storyworld ambivalent and unresolved. Since there is no moment that would present previous scenes in a different light, viewers are not explicitly prompted to reflect on the operational aesthetics of the text through such a scene either. Instead, Black Swan interpellates an audience that notices the film’s penchant for instability early on, as unstable identities films had become a prominent group of texts that could trigger certain expectations by 2010 as well. If viewers were ‘on the hunt’ for a twist throughout the film, thinking of different possibilities for a large revelation within the storyworld, the ending of the film will have a much stronger effect on them, as the main surprise might be that no such single moment is featured in the film. The viewing pleasures Black Swan exerts thus relate to coming to terms with an even more unresolved and ambivalent kind of instability, one that does not follow the pattern of ‘stability into instability into (new) stability’ but that remains unstable throughout. As Black Swan discusses and features references to other texts, it is also aware of its own status as a text, metatextually reflecting on textuality and ‘art’ in general. Again, some of these elements are quite obvious, yet they are not made very explicit in the film, such as its references to Swan Lake and the general fact that Black Swan is one text about another textual practice, namely a film about ballet. Taking these interspersed elements together, however, reveals a layer of Black Swan that makes it possible to read the film as a film about films, about texts, about art in general. 177 The most important voice in this regard is Thomas as the director of the ballet company, who talks about ballet’s function as art at numerous times throughout the film. He explains—significantly, to an audience of guests— when announcing Nina as the new lead performer that they all “have had the [...] privilege to be enchanted, transported, and even sometimes devas177

In this context, Skorin-Kapov likewise notes that the film “can be also interpreted as a metaphor for achieving artistic perfection, with all the psychological and physical challenges we might encounter” (95), as a “poetic metaphor for the birth of an artist,” “a visual representation of Nina’s psychic odyssey toward achieving artistic perfection and of the price to be paid for it” (96).

122

Narrative Instability

tated” by Beth’s performances and then raises a glass “to all of us, to Beth, to Nina, to beauty.” With this nod to “beauty,” Thomas refers both to Nina/Beth and to the experience of ballet as art in general, which is supposed to ‘enchant,’ ‘transport,’ or ‘devastate,’ constituting a high-culture understanding of the role of Art that aligns with Barthes’ understanding of bliss as “the text that discomforts” (Pleasure 14). Earlier, when Thomas announced opening the season with Swan Lake, he admitted that it has been “done to death [...], but not like this: we strip it down, make it visceral and real,” and later, to help Nina perform better, he tells her of the need to “surprise yourself, so you can surprise the audience. Transcendence.” This function of Nina’s performance to surprise the audience, to enchant it, to shock it does not just relate to the ballet Swan Lake in the film, but instead, Thomas’ comments can also be understood as talking about Black Swan itself, and about film, art, and fiction in general. The appeal Thomas sees in art to offer transcendence, to provide the audience with something beyond ordinary experience, alludes to a notion of art and fiction that pits high culture as “antithetically opposed” to “everyday life” (Inglis 55), but it also relates to some of the elements of unstable texts, particularly those building towards one significant moment of instability, meant to surprise the audience and, indeed, to often ‘devastate’ the storyworld. These discussions of texts and fictionality in general, which are typical of unstable texts, appear throughout Black Swan in smaller instances as well, and overall, they significantly relate to the film’s concern with unstable identities.178 Thomas’ comments on art connect the notion of beauty closely to it as well, highlighting that art is something supposedly beautiful —but, as Thomas says about Beth’s “dark impulse,” it is what “makes her so thrilling to watch, so dangerous, even perfect at times, but also so damn destructive.” With art understood as something both beautiful and dangerous, it is fitting that Black Swan ends with a destructive element as well, the death of a woman, Nina—a trope in (American) literature and culture that goes back at least to Edgar Allan Poe’s assertion that “the death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world” (qtd. in Bronfen 59).179 The link between Nina’s struggle to perform both swan roles and her own identity issues also can be read metatextually, as it 178

179

The film’s metatextuality in general also aligns with its ambiguity about what is ‘real’ or not, for instance when Thomas comments that Lily is “not faking it” while performing the Black Swan passionately. Likewise, when Nina’s mother asks where Nina got her diamond earrings from, she tells her that “[t]hey’re fake,” to which her mother replies: “Fooled me,” which can be seen as a comment both on the question of what is real and what is fake, a hallucination, in the film and on the general confusion between reality and fiction. Nina seems to have internalized this view as well: When she tells a young man in a club that she is a ballet dancer and summarizes Swan Lake for him, she states that “her prince falls for the wrong girl, so she kills herself,” an ending that she calls “beautiful, actually.”

3 Unstable Identities

123

discusses the notion of performance and performativity in the context of an actual, literal ballet performance: As noted before, Nina seems to act according to the belief that for the performance of a passionate Black Swan, she has to be passionate herself, or at least ‘perform’ passion(ately) in her ordinary life as well. Her hallucinations about literally transforming into a swan point in a similar direction, and they significantly connect with Thomas’ comments about making the performance “visceral and real,” as the performances in fiction and in real life are blended seamlessly.180 This mixture of fiction and (the film’s diegetic) reality is also expressed through Black Swan’s use of music. Generally, the film uses a lot of orchestra music, and this score both comes from diegetic sources (such as during the rehearsals and the premiere, played by an orchestra or a pianist) and is used extradiegetically, to underscore certain themes and moods in specific scenes. Towards the end of the film, however, the music seamlessly switches from diegetic to extradiegetic for the first time. As Nina puts on makeup in the dressing room and notices more parts of her body looking like a swan’s, the music that is played picks up in intensity. Then, the shot cuts from inside Nina’s dressing room to her approaching the stage of the premiere, and the music continues seamlessly. It makes sense that the orchestra started playing, as the ballet has already begun, but still, Nina would not be able to hear the music so audibly in the dressing room—instead, it transitions smoothly from an extradiegetic use to a diegetic source (the orchestra). Likewise, after she falls during the performance of the White Swan, the music briefly quiets down, but in the next scene, as Nina finds Lily in her dressing room, it picks up again and continues throughout their struggle, and the music climaxes when Nina stabs ‘Lily’ in the chest. The music continues with trumpets playing as Nina drags the presumably dead body into the bathroom, and again the shot cuts from Nina’s face in the dressing room to her performance on stage as the Black Swan, with the music playing on—and it continues as Nina finishes her dance, returns to the dressing room to find out she stabbed herself, and goes back out for the final performance of the White Swan. The final twenty-five minutes of the film are thus constantly scored by this orchestra music, which is a way of aural storytelling that powerfully adds to the overall metatextual reading of the film: Nina’s performance in the ballet and her real life have fused seamlessly,181 and at the same time, 180

181

Somewhat similarly, Christiansen reads Nina’s transformation “as a matter of transgressing the boundary between representation and performance” (306) and the film as “question[ing] the notion of representation, framing it as a discussion between mirror and performance” (307). This aspect is also significant because of a previous point: Since many of the sounds in the film are transported to audiences as part of an internal auricularization—i.e., we hear what Nina hears—the music can also be understood as something that ‘plays inside Nina’s head,’ the suggestion being that she is unable to separate the fictional performance of Swan Lake from her own life.

124

Narrative Instability

the ballet performance of Swan Lake has blended in with the film Black Swan, as the music from the ballet is used for scenes of the ballet (inside the film) and for scenes of the film in general. The ending shot of Black Swan strengthens this reading, when we hear the music and the applause all throughout the final shots of Nina lying on the mattress. As the camera blends from Nina’s face to a white screen on top of which, eventually, the credits roll, we still hear the audience clapping and shouting “Nina!” 182 The film’s diegetic reality (the performance of the ballet and the audience’s reaction) thus metatextually ‘spills over’ into the extradiegetic level of the film as a film, as another performance. Overall, it is this blend, this confusion, that seems to spell Nina’s downfall, her inability to resolve her identity; yet this instability can thus be read not just as a failure of identity but also as the ‘price’ to pay, from Thomas’ point of view, for (‘perfect’) fiction, for art, which is “so damn destructive.” Ultimately, this aspect of the film metatextually portraying the destructive nature of art and fiction relates to its similar concerns about the destructiveness of searching for a stable identity, which is facilitated by the film’s narrative instability, bringing together all these different aspects as part of Black Swan’s cultural work. If art and fiction are indeed, at times, destructive, as the film metatextually points out, it makes sense that Nina’s successful performance in the end leads to the destruction of herself, to her apparent death. Yet it is not just the attempt to perform well in the ballet that is so dangerous but also Nina’s attempts to clarify her identity, to bring together different outside expectations in a stable identity and in the ‘performance’ of a specific construction of femininity.183 Again on a metatextual level, Nina’s wishes to stabilize her identity are mirrored by the film audience’s yearning for a final moment of instability that would resolve the storyworld of the film, a kind of genre knowledge that Black Swan expects from viewers to gain pleasure from the film’s instability. By ‘playing’ with such expectations of a twist but not delivering one, Black Swan prompts audiences to reflect on instability in texts in general. The film thus enters into 182

183

This use of music also frames the film, in a way: The film begins and ends with a ballet performance, first Nina’s dream about Swan Lake and finally the actual premiere, and both performances are accompanied by orchestra music. Notably, Nina appears to have come to terms with this in the end as well: She cries at first when she notices her stabbing wound, looking in the mirror, but then seems to accept her fate, determined to perform one last time, as if it suffices to perform the role once as long as it is ‘perfect.’ Her final words (and those of the film) are to Thomas, telling him that “[she] felt it,” that “[i]t was perfect.” That she thus accepts her death in order to achieve artistic perfection is also transported discursively through her final performance: As she turns to fall down onto the mattress, the epic orchestra music changes to a much friendlier, uplifting tone, and her fall is the only time in the film that slow motion is used, focusing intently on Nina’s content facial expression. As she lands on the mattress, a final aural hallucination can be heard, which this time sounds like a large sigh of relief. In their combination, all these elements express Nina’s happiness on the level of the narration as well.

125

3 Unstable Identities

a dialogic relationship with texts like Fight Club and BioShock, which crucially build on one unstable moment, complementing the picture of how American culture speaks about issues of identity and its seeming instability in the contemporary moment. Black Swan equally discusses the constructedness of identity, but it points out the epistemological dilemma of knowing who one really is even more, precisely by not ‘giving in’ to the craving of clarifying one’s identity that other unstable identities texts, through a twist moment, often feature, instead embracing an openness and ambivalence more in line with a ludic textuality (cf. 2.1.3). The film seems to suggest either trying to come to terms with this unknowability or not attempting to change one’s identity and find out who one ‘really is,’ demonstrating that craving stability, like Nina does, can be fatal due to society’s pressure to adhere to certain constructions of femininity. *** In this subsection, I discussed Black Swan as a narratively unstable text that is distinctly aware of a tradition of representing unstable identities in film and accordingly relates to these previous representations. By examining the film’s unstable elements, reading it as centrally concerned with the question of female identity, and bringing these aspects together in the film’s interand metatextual self-consciousness, this discussion of Black Swan crucially added to the analysis of texts dealing with unstable identities by, in a way, demonstrating what could ‘come after’ twist texts in an unstable text. The analysis of the film both helped complement the diverse picture of how texts narrate unstable identities and exemplified an important complication within such texts to more ‘radically’ embrace ambivalence in the ways it narrates instability and presents issues of an unstable identity. Especially in how the film denies a restabilized identity to its female protagonist, this analysis, in turn, pointed out how the narrative solutions for the protagonists of many other unstable identities texts do not work universally but are restricted to resolving (perceived) crises of masculinity only.

3.5 Conclusion In this chapter, I analyzed the cluster of narratively unstable texts that I understand as significantly relating their instability to notions of identity. I first discussed some general characteristics and embedded my understanding of unstable identities within previous scholarship and relevant cultural contexts. Subsequently, the reading of BioShock not only pointed out how many of these unstable identities texts typically work, it also exemplified the transmedial popularity of instability and how a video game can remediate discursive traits of instability. The game’s concerns with identity were examined in the context of individualism, freedom, and agency, and as re-

126

Narrative Instability

lated to constructions of class. In turn, the reading of Black Swan demonstrated how a text can deviate from the more common pattern of featuring twists in connection with unstable identities, instead ‘playing’ with the expectations of such a singular moment of instability. Like BioShock, the film focuses on questions of how identity can be understood as a social construction, but it even more deeply framed these as epistemological questions about the impossibility of knowing who one is. These concerns were particularly prominent in the context of Black Swan’s engagement with notions of gender and femininity, pointing out how society’s conflicting expectations of femininity complicate Nina’s quest of finding a stable female identity. The analysis of two major unstable texts in this chapter has thus demonstrated the cultural salience of unstable identities as a narrative trend by highlighting the intertextual relationship between such different texts. Their diverse subject matters, ranging from explorations of an objectivism-inspired underwater city to the struggles of a young ballet dancer, are united by their mutual concerns about identity leading to an instability of their storyworld. The texts’ specific cultural work, relating to matters of agency in the context of class or to emancipation and artistic perfection in connection with femininity, speaks to the wide range of issues contemporary audiences negotiate and discuss via unstable identities. By transferring these concerns to the level of the narration, both texts epistemologically engage identity as a category of social belonging itself, asking what it is that makes us determine somebody’s identity. Together, they problematize common understandings of identity, questioning how choice and identity influence each other and how gender constructions inherently affect how one can stabilize constructions of the self—the analysis of Black Swan thus also particularly pointed out how some previous narratively unstable texts have (often implicitly) worked to reestablish and reauthorize patriarchal narratives. BioShock and Black Swan present these complications of identity and narrativity not, ultimately, as a source of confusion but as one of pleasure in the forms of operational aesthetics and ‘Angstlust,’ speaking to contemporary audience’s interest in and enjoyment of complex narratives that question stable binaries. Finally, these analyses also highlighted the dialogic relationship between these texts, discussing notions of identity with different cultural impulses, via changing strategies of narrating instability, and with notably different levels of ambivalence. This relationship continues in the following chapter, as texts centering on identity implicitly relate to questions of unstable realities as well.

4 Unstable Realities 4.1 Introduction “This world is not real,” proclaims the protagonist in the film Inception, indicating that the space he currently finds himself in does not correspond to ‘actual’ reality but instead only amounts to a dream, somewhere in ‘limbo.’ Such uncertainties about what is or is not real are at the center of numerous narratively unstable texts, in which the reality of the texts’ worlds is in peril, ambivalent, or unknowable. In these texts featuring unstable realities, questions of ‘what is real?’ and ‘how can we know what is real?’ are foregrounded. As with identity, the concept of reality can be difficult to grasp and to approach productively—for the texts discussed in this book, I understand reality as narratively constructed through the representation of space and time, of the world these texts’ characters live in. Both space and time are crucial aspects in the construction of a text’s storyworld, and when either or both of them are difficult to reconcile into a stable storyworld, this destabilizes the process of creating a coherent narrative reality as well. 184 Despite the seemingly arcane or aloof subjects unstable realities texts discuss (questioning, after all, the reality of our world), they are among the most popular of unstable texts—the way in which they represent the uncertainty of reality by popularizing scientific and psychological concepts and theories speaks to contemporary audiences’ interest in exactly such questions. In this sense, texts featuring unstable realities form a particularly visible part of contemporary US popular culture, allowing the US public to discuss issues otherwise only considered in more ‘high culture’ or scientific discourses. Accordingly, in this chapter, I will explore that cluster of narratively unstable texts that significantly relates to questions of reality, space, and time. As with identity, this focus makes visible a diverse set of texts that, on closer inspection, all have an interest in realities in common. Their specific 184

In some sense, unstable realities texts thus exhibit a heightened degree of instability, since it is not only the characterization that remains incoherent and fragmented as the audience tries to recreate the storyworld but the overall world, the setting these characters (and the events that happen to them) find themselves in. In such fictional portrayals, the overall nature of the diegetic reality is in doubt, which has consequences for all other aspects of representation as well—if the world audiences perceive is not diegetically real, then the characters’ identities and what happened to them in the plot are all full of doubts as well. Yet in many of these texts, the ‘reality’ of the protagonists, i.e., their identity, is not foregrounded as much as the reality of their surroundings—they might not question who they are themselves, but they certainly question whether what they experience is truly happening.

128

Narrative Instability

discursive implementations and subject matters take a variety of forms: Some texts feature storyworlds that are stable in themselves but that, at some point, are questioned in their entirety as far as their diegetic reality status is concerned, for instance by pondering whether all or parts of what had transpired so far was a dream (as in, e.g., Inception or Vanilla Sky [2001]). Other texts make it more difficult to reconstruct the reality of a fictional text from the beginning, usually through distorted understandings of space, for instance if the texts feature multiple parallel universes (Donnie Darko, Edge of Tomorrow [2014], or BioShock Infinite). Films like Synecdoche, New York (2008) also extend this distortion of space to matters of time. Indeed, a rather large set of texts becomes narratively unstable by featuring time travel, often with linear understandings of time (instead of multiple universes), in which different realities overlap not in terms of space but time (Looper, Arrival, or Twelve Monkeys). Time and space, in many of these texts, are often interwoven and connected, but they each place different emphases on what the ‘deciding factor’ in influencing the world is, and there is actually no neat categorization between linear time travel and multiple universes either. Overall, all these different techniques cast doubt on the reality of the depicted world. In order to probe into the cultural work of texts featuring unstable realities, I will again take the time (and space) to discuss these matters in a more general way and then look at them specifically via two close readings. In the first of three subchapters, I will use the film Interstellar to point to some general characteristics of unstable realities texts. In addition, I will refer to relevant scholarship about matters of reality in order to discuss the cultural contexts that these texts refer to, specifically concerning questions of reality and hyperreality as well as the issues of popularity and popularization. Second, in the next subchapter, I will examine the film Inception as a text featuring unstable realities. By representing dreams alongside the diegetic reality but without a clear way of differentiating between these different spaces, the film ultimately, as I argue, embraces epistemic uncertainty. I trace the film’s interest in reality from three angles: its discursive setup featuring dreams-within-dreams and a pseudo-twist near its ending; the way it frames reality as an epistemological and a gendered issue; and how building dreams in the film’s storyworld works similarly to the creation of fiction, which allows me to read Inception as a film about films. Finally, in the third subchapter, I will turn to the video game BioShock Infinite as a very different take on representing unstable realities, since it features multiple alternate universes that vie for the status as diegetic reality. I argue that the game ultimately brushes the question of reality aside through a fatalistic attitude of seeing the future as predetermined. To arrive at this argument, I will first detail how the game’s twist and its representation of space narratively create unstable realities; then work out links between the game’s concerns with reality and the historical reality of the US of the time, especially in regard to racial and social discrimination; and finally investi-

4 Unstable Realities

129

gate how its concerns with reality function metatextually as relating to history, religion, and (ludic) fictionality more generally. The two readings, then, work quite differently, meant to demonstrate the variety of texts featuring unstable realities, yet they speak to each other dialogically in how they both understand reality as narratively constructed. Overall, I argue that the texts discussed in this chapter propose that one’s primary ‘access’ to reality, represented via time and space, is through narrative, and that this access depends on subjective experience, differing particularly due to one’s race, class, and gender. Yet while Inception and BioShock Infinite generally pursue progressive projects, they both end up making universal suggestions about reality while clearly only representing it from the perspective of normative masculinity and whiteness, complicating their textual projects by sidelining minority voices. Their way of reassuring a stable reality, I argue, is one that gives voice only to white middleclass men, patriarchally silencing women and people of color. These textual politics further connect to two interrelated aspects: Unstable realities texts exemplify one specific angle of popularity in the contemporary moment by having attracted significant critical attention and large fan followings through the popularization of seemingly ‘high-brow’ concepts, thus speaking to their formal narrative experiments as a source of popular pleasure. On another level, all of the texts discussed in this chapter also self-consciously work on a metatextual level—since they understand reality as narratively constructed and are narratives themselves, they link their specific concerns with reality to the creation of fiction, proposing that these fictional texts are a way of thinking about and conceptualizing reality in the first place.

4.2 Narrating Unstable Realities In the climactic scene of Christopher Nolan’s film Interstellar, pilot/astronaut Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) finds himself in a tesseract—a fourdimensional cube—inside a wormhole in outer space. This four-dimensional space is visually represented as an incoherent stream of bookshelves that looks into the bedroom of his daughter Murph(y) from different points in time (Murph is played by Mackenzie Foy, Jessica Chastain, and Ellen Burstyn at different ages). The tesseract and the wormhole, which were created by five-dimensional beings, depict a very different understanding of space than the one viewers will know, one that is also intimately linked to a conflation of time within such a space. The scene, which occurs briefly before the end of the film, explains that it was Cooper who, years before (or, actually, later), sent signals to his daughter through the bookshelf in her room, eventually allowing her to solve a mathematical equation enabling humanity to use gravity for propulsion and escape Earth, where life is threatened by severe crop blights. This kind of time travel serves as a twist

130

Narrative Instability

in the film, revealing the ‘ghost’ that Murph thought to haunt her room to have been her father, communicating with her from years in the future, a possibility afforded to by the film’s inclusion of four-dimensional spaces. This moment of instability is thus triggered by the film’s particular representation of time and space, but even beyond the twist, trying to understand elements of Interstellar’s depiction of (outer) space, time paradoxes, and scientific concepts like gravitational time dilation complicates the construction of a stable storyworld, since many of these elements depart so severely from how viewers usually think about time and space—and from how both are depicted in most works of fiction. The instability of the film is thus generated by uncertainties in the storyworld on the level of space and time, which culminate in a twist. As viewers recreate the film’s storyworld, doubts in that reconstruction center on the question of how ‘real’ what they see is, how the depiction of time/space travel in the diegetic reality of the film can actually work. In this section, I will use Interstellar to detail general characteristics of texts featuring unstable realities. Since this set of unstable texts displays an even greater variety than the ones examined previously, this discussion is meant as an illumination rather than an exemplification; i.e., the discursive properties the film uses in its instability work similarly for a few other texts but quite differently in yet other texts featuring unstable realities (two of which I will cover in the subsequent more detailed readings). In addition, I will provide a brief survey of relevant scholarship for the concerns in this chapter, namely texts that discuss issues of reality and hyperreality as well as concepts like time travel in fiction, in order to arrive at a productive understanding of ‘reality.’ This will also include a brief investigation of cultural contexts that will be relevant in later sections, notably popularity and popularization. Overall, these contexts will establish a host of issues to which texts featuring unstable realities self-consciously relate. 4.2.1 GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS: INTERSTELLAR In texts that centrally feature unstable realities, it is the emphasis on reality as narratively constructed through time and space 185 and the existence of uncertainties regarding these two aspects that generate fragmentations in the storyworld, for which there are different discursive implementations. In Interstellar, it is a combination of a singular moment of instability that centers on space and time travel and of a generally ‘fantastic’ depiction of space that engenders instability. The film, set in 2067 during its opening scenes, features a number of science-fiction elements and portrays a fantas185

In general, my interest in space here follows the spatial turn in the humanities, understanding space as “dynamic, constructed, and contested” (Beebe et al. 2). For studies further investigating such conceptualizations of space, cf. Warf and Arias; Tally.

4 Unstable Realities

131

tic futuristic scenario. Yet it is only towards the very end of it that viewers will understand that, in the film’s universe, time travel is possible—that it is Cooper who sends information to his daughter at numerous points in time, but all of it from the distant future, the year 2156. As a teenager, Murph believed a ghost or poltergeist haunted her room, sending her mysterious signals, but that ghost, as Cooper says himself, turns out to have been him. While this realization also concerns a character’s identity (the ‘ghost’ is Cooper), instability is instead generated from how the film makes this usually inconceivable setup possible, as Cooper sends this information back in time. When viewers are shown the scene in the tesseract, they also see an adult Murph, in the year 2092, collecting that information to ultimately allow humanity to leave Earth. Within the tesseract, Cooper explains to the robot TARS that this four-dimensional space and the wormhole were created by five-dimensional beings—as he realizes, “‘[t]hey’ aren’t ‘beings’ ... they’re us[,] [...] people who’ve evolved beyond the four dimensions we know.” Cooper’s co-pilot Amelia Brand (Anne Hathaway) mentions in a previous conversation that “they’re creatures of at least five dimensions—to them, time may be just another physical dimension. To them, the past might be a canyon they can climb into and the future a mountain they can climb up.”186 Of course, humans only could have evolved into such beings if Cooper did succeed in sending the information to Murph, saving humanity in the first place—the existence of the five-dimensional beings thus precipitates that Cooper was successful, but he could only be successful if the five-dimensional beings created the tesseract. That such a time paradox explains the inner logic of the film’s fictional world is presented as a twist, as something viewers could hardly have realized before, since the film did not exhibit traits of such a form of time travel earlier. In addition to this one significant moment, Interstellar also generally displays an understanding of space and time that viewers might be unfamiliar with, in turn making it more difficult to reconstruct a storyworld based on the laws of physics known from their own reality. 187 In terms of space, it is especially the tesseract that displaces viewers’ usual understanding of space. On the two-dimensional film screen, viewers witness this four-dimensional space from Cooper’s perspective as a kind of nonspace, a location that cannot actually be placed anywhere. It seems to be part of outer 186

187

Significantly, Brand uses spatial metaphors—a “canyon” and a “mountain”—to try to explain this understanding of time. Amelia Brand’s name, incidentally, might be a reference to the famous aviator Amelia Earhart, aligning with other significant choices of names in the film (e.g., the reference to Murphy’s Law through Cooper’s daughter Murph). As has been noted in cognitive narratology especially via possible-worlds theory, “when readers construct fictional worlds, they fill in the gaps [...] in the text by assuming the similarity of the fictional world to their own experiential reality,” unless the text itself contradicts this rule (Ryan, “Possible-Worlds Theory” 447).

132

Narrative Instability

space, surrounded by blackness, but the actual tesseract is a blurry line (or stream) of bookshelves that cross into each other in simulated three dimensions. On screen, the tesseract looks more like a graphical ‘glitch’ than an actual space, establishing its status as an incoherent place that, in a way, is unrepresentable in an ‘accurate’ fashion in two or three dimensions.188 Again, this space is closely linked to an unstable representation of time as well, as Cooper, inside the tesseract, can interact with Murph’s room from various points in time. Additionally, previous scenes in the film subtly displayed or already hinted at such forms of time distortion.189 In terms of the audience recreating the storyworld as they watch Interstellar, these peculiarities regarding space and time lead to slight instabilities in deciding on what happened in the film, and when and where. Through its futuristic setting and technology, the film early on establishes that it belongs to the genre of science fiction and makes use of the fantastic mode, yet even such genres ground themselves in extradiegetic reality, referring to the realist mode in order to establish a ‘basis’ from which they can fantastically deviate (Koenen, Visions 42-43). In reconstructing the sto188

189

Another prominent ‘unusual’ space is seen even later in the film, when Cooper awakes in a station orbiting Saturn and looks at the ground of the station bending itself upwards. Cooper’s fascination with this unusual setup is supposed to mirror the viewers’ as well, as the camera, in point of view, shows him looking out the window, where children are playing baseball, and then follows his gaze upwards to track the baseball that is shot in the air, only to reveal not the sky but fields and houses ‘bending’ themselves around the surface of this space habitat. For instance, the first planet Cooper’s crew travels to in order to find a new habitable environment for humanity is so close to the wormhole that the passing of time on this planet is characterized by gravitational time dilation: One hour spent on the planet translates into seven years on Earth. After Cooper returns from the planet, twenty-three years have passed on Earth and for the crew member who remained on their spaceship. At this point, the film depicts events on Earth twenty-three years later as well, but when Cooper is in the tesseract, more than sixty additional years have passed—yet the film, at this point, still continues to intersperse scenes from Cooper in the tesseract (in the year 2156) with those of Murph in the year 2092, trying to solve the equation. The unusual passing of time and the possibility to travel in time depicted in the film’s diegetic world thus also extend to how time is represented in the film itself, a point that is further strengthened by the beginning of the film, as it actually starts with Murph from the year 2156 (or close to it) talking about her father by showing her face as part of what seems to be a documentary. The film then continues to depict other elderly people talking about life back in roughly the year 2067 to explain the crop blight and dust storms they suffered from back then, alternated with scenes of Cooper and his family on their farm. As expository scenes, they suggest that the people shown in both setups are from the same or similar times, establishing the setting of the film—or at least they do not give viewers any reason to suspect anything else. At the space habitat towards the end of the film, we see these documentary snippets reappear on screens; only then will viewers realize that the elderly woman from the beginning of the film actually is Murph. In terms of the film’s depiction of time, this setup serves as further proof of the effortless interweaving of different points in time on the discursive level.

4 Unstable Realities

133

ryworld, the audience thus has to be wary of seemingly ‘fantastic’ and ‘unrealistic’ elements that, however, fit into the diegetic reality of the film— such fantastic elements do not, per se, constitute narrative instability, a thorough questioning or destabilizing of the storyworld.190 Only when these elements also lead to viewers questioning the reality status of what they witness do they amount to moments of instability, as is the case during the twist moment of Cooper in the tesseract, revealing the possibility of a progression of and ‘traveling’ in time within the film’s fictional world that was not previously assumed to be possible. This twist, in fact, implies a temporal paradox, specifically a causal loop: Cooper was only able to go through the wormhole and enter the tesseract because both were created by humans evolving into five-dimensional beings in the future, but these humans could only survive and eventually evolve into five-dimensional beings if Cooper entered the tesseract to help Murph solve the equation. Both events thus necessitate each other, and it is unclear which one came ‘first.’ While some unstable texts depict such time travel through the existence of multiple universes (as BioShock Infinite, in a way, does), in Interstellar, there is just one timeline, with time conceived as linear—past, present, and future all already happened. While this is what the film ultimately suggests, initially understanding this particular representation of time (travel) after the twist demands quite a lot from the audience, prompting them to question how this succession of events is possible. Overall, Interstellar is thus less focused on directly asking questions about what is real than time-travel texts featuring multiple timelines or universes, and it resolves its own instability relatively quickly again. While there is a great variety in how exactly these unstable realities texts work, the effect their kind of instability has on the storyworld is similar in all these instances: An understanding of time and/or space that deviates from our own experience renders parts or all of what audiences experience in a text questionable in terms of its reality status, complicating the overall comprehension of what has happened through competing, fragmentary, or inconsistent tellings of the narrative. While the specific narrative and discursive traits of these texts vary, Interstellar still illustrates some of their general features, and it also does so in regard to the cultural issues and themes that these texts often evoke. Most directly, many of them discuss questions of reality and the supposed or possible unreality of one’s world, of what reality is but especially of how it can be understood, how we can know what is real and what is not. Often, 190

In addition, the film goes towards certain lengths in making its science-fiction elements appear ‘realistic,’ mainly by grounding them in cutting-edge research done in astrophysics and related fields. Interstellar was advertised as having been advised in terms of its depiction of science by the theoretical physicist Kip Thorne, who also wrote a book on The Science of Interstellar. Many of its fantastic elements are thus supposed to appear likely or believable—a tendency I read as part of the film’s efforts in popularizing science that I discuss in slightly more detail below, in section 4.2.2.

134

Narrative Instability

such questions are tied to metatextual concerns, an aspect I will focus on more deeply in the subsequent readings in this chapter. By connecting questions of reality so closely to a text’s own narration, unstable realities texts concern themselves with epistemological questions about the knowledge of reality. Additionally, these texts tie relatively abstract and philosophical topics to more pressing concerns. Many texts ask specifically what such questions about reality mean for white (middle-class) men, the presumably ‘unmarked’ category and majority in American society, to which most protagonists from narratively unstable texts belong. Films like Interstellar and Inception, for instance, frame such questions in the context of what it means to be a father, how family generally figures into this, and how all these aspects contribute to negotiations of (white) masculinity— and when Interstellar discusses themes such as the ambition, hubris, and willpower of mankind, it actually only talks about white men as well (a tendency I will trace further in the readings of Inception and BioShock Infinite). Additionally, in all of these texts, instability is also closely related to matters of popularization, particularly of scientific and psychological concepts, which often are part of the diegetic explanations of these texts’ unstable elements. I see this popularization as intimately linked to the texts’ own success as pop-cultural artifacts, both of which are aspects I will briefly come back to in the following subsection. 4.2.2 REALITY, SPACE/TIME, AND POPULARIZATION Texts that deal with unstable realities tap into a host of cultural issues and concerns that they self-consciously relate to, which is why I briefly want to discuss these aspects in more general terms. Specifically, I will look at how questions of reality and unreality as well as related epistemic concerns have been previously discussed in scholarship in order to carve out a productive understanding of reality; at previous studies that examine texts I consider here; and at the notion of popularization and the related aspect of the popularity of these texts. Similar to the previous chapter, evoking these different contexts serves three main purposes: Most importantly, as all unstable texts display a certain kind of self-awareness towards their own narration, they also consciously refer to and evoke (scholarly) debates and concepts that are discussed alongside them, underscoring the need to highlight some of these debates here. Secondly, looking at scholarship discussing texts that I consider to feature unstable realities will allow me to reframe the issues brought up by these scholarly inquiries, which are sometimes prone to be interested in categorization, towards an American-studies interest in cultural work. Finally, many of these concerns tend to be discussed strictly along media lines (e.g., when mindgame films or the popularity of video games are discussed), whereas my focus on instability intends to highlight these concerns as occurring across media and, accordingly, to emphasize the analytical gain in considering them as such transmedia phenomena.

4 Unstable Realities

135

Discussions surrounding reality are at the center of many of these texts, tapping into a large body of cultural-studies scholarship that concerns itself with questions of reality. Of the numerous texts and theories that relate to what we consider reality or how we can grasp it, I see two strands as particularly relevant for the primary texts I consider here: While both ontological and epistemological question of what reality is have a long philosophical tradition, unstable texts relate more concretely to discussions of reality in postmodernism, which frame the ‘problem’ of reality as an epistemic concern, discussing the unknowability of reality and pointing it out as a discursively constructed concept. Additionally, theories that frame questions of reality as explicitly or implicitly about subjectivity are equally taken up in unstable realities text, so particularly theories that discuss reality in the context of categories of difference, pointing out how what we consider real can differ vastly for, for instance, white Americans and people of color. For postmodern discussions of reality, the work of Jean Baudrillard has been most influential, particularly his concept of ‘hyperreality.’ In Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard defines the hyperreal as “a real without origin or reality” (1), arguing that this kind of reality has taken over today’s culture and society, as he speaks of an “era of simulation” characterized by “a liquidation of all referentials” (2), with “simulation threaten[ing] the difference between the ‘true’ and the ‘false,’ the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary’” (3). Beyond introducing hyperreality as a general concept, Baudrillard, writing in 1981, thus also notes that this particular relationship to reality is characteristic of his times, that it marks how postmodern society tends to think about itself and engages with notions of reality. In his phrasing, “the whole system becomes weightless,” that is, “it is no longer itself anything but a gigantic simulacrum” (5, 6).191 For how unstable texts deal with reality, it is not so much Baudrillard’s specific conceptualizations that are relevant but the consequences and the reception of his writings, which were followed by many other studies that discuss the contemporary moment as characterized by doubts and uncertainties about reality and that point to the

191

Significantly, Baudrillard also relates hyperreality to the US in particular, specifically when he reads Disneyland as concealing the hyperreality of the US: “Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation” (12). While this understanding of the US is indeed distinctly postmodern, there are, of course, also precursors to such thoughts. Notably, Henry James’s 1892 short story “The Real Thing” can be read as dealing with a ‘hyperreal’ problem as well, featuring a painter with “an innate preference for the represented subject over the real one” (86). Similarly, Baudrillard was not the first to put forth such thoughts in the postWWII era; for instance, Daniel J. Boorstin’s 1961 The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America and Guy Debord’s 1967 The Society of the Spectacle can be read along similar lines and have been highly influential in their respective fields.

136

Narrative Instability

discursive constructedness of speaking and thinking (about) reality.192 Umberto Eco also links this idea to the US in particular, understanding US popular culture as speaking of “an America of furious hyperreality” (7), whereas Anne Norton reads America’s hyperreality more positively than Baudrillard, perceiving Americans’ relationship to Disneyland, for instance, not as “mistak[ing] it for reality” but as “recognizing it as a representation of desire” and “celebrat[ing] their collective capacity to produce a world more rational and more rewarding” (21).193 Finally, the way narratively unstable texts engage with reality also picks up ideas from scholarship that discusses a ‘crisis of representation,’ as Jameson phrased it. Understood as a move towards the epistemic question of how we can know about reality and how it can be rendered and represented, such thoughts are discursively linked to discussions of hyperreality, and they are equally often evoked to characterize the contemporary, prompting Sebastian M. Herrmann to speak of a “larger epistemic panic” in US society around the turn of the millennium (22). Furthermore, the inherent subjectivity of reality—a notion that also belongs to distinctly postmodern conceptions—is equally crucial for understanding how unstable texts deal with the question of reality. As Anne Koenen notes in a discussion of realism and the fantastic as modes, reality, or ‘consensus reality,’ is a contested concept: “[I]n a given society and culture there may be more than the one reality established by consensus, albeit differently privileged in hegemonic discourse; depending on social categories like gender, race, and class, shared systems of beliefs may differ” (Visions 43). Hence, “what is real is also a contested cultural category at a given moment, especially in an increasingly multicultural society” (Visions 4344; cf. also Olsen). Fundamentally, such discussions also arrive at the uncertainty and multiplicity of reality, but rather from a phenomenological angle, highlighting the importance of the subjective experience of reality, which may differ drastically based on one’s identity. In narratively unstable texts, this aspect also figures centrally: Most unstable texts represent reality from a normative point of view, that is, they mostly feature white, male, heterosexual, middle-class protagonists, and the degree to which they are consciously aware of this lack of difference 192

193

Beyond the scholarly realm, this popularity of Baudrillard’s thoughts extends to popular culture as well, for instance by being heavily featured in the 1999 film The Matrix, which discusses epistemic doubts about the reality status of one’s world as well and includes, for example, a nod to Baudrillard by showing a copy of Simulacra and Simulation in one shot. For studies on The Matrix and hyperreality in particular, cf. Constable; Merrin 115-32; Lutzka. Similar ideas abound in other disciplines and contexts as well, such as in discussions of globalization (cf. Belk) or journalism and politics (cf. Jamieson), as part of a larger cultural critique (cf. Mitroff and Bennis), or in more specific realms, such as contextualizations of reality TV (cf. Friedman) and virtual reality (cf. Woolley) —to name just a few.

4 Unstable Realities

137

varies. The issues concerning reality they depict are, thus, often framed as problems particularly of white male Americans, speaking to a flawed understanding of a unitary and shared experience of reality. In analyzing these representations, it is crucial to question the (at times unaware) normativity these texts espouse, particularly regarding matters of whiteness, masculinity, and class, as well as their intersections. As Richard Dyer notes for whiteness, scholarly studies have to “see whiteness, see its power, its particularity and limitedness” (4) in order to be able to critically question how “white people [...] function as a human norm” (1). These concerns—and similar ones for masculinity and class (cf. Robinson 1-21; Lauter and Fitzgerald)—relate to questions of reality as well, highlighting not only that the access to as well as the knowledge and representation of reality are doubtful but also that reality is far from a consensual or homogeneous construct in the first place. Both aspects form contexts that unstable realities texts consciously take up and relate to. A different host of scholarship that forms a relevant backdrop for an investigation of unstable realities concerns works that focus on similar primary texts but from different angles, mainly on so-called mindgame (or mindfuck) texts and time-travel texts. I already covered scholarship on mindgame texts in the previous chapter (cf. 3.2.2), as most conceptions of such texts focus on the role identity plays in them, yet a few also relate these issues to reality. As mentioned before, one of the major drawbacks of these clusterings is that they almost exclusively refer to film, instead of embracing a more transmedia approach. Additionally, some scholarship that tangentially relates to unstable realities texts, again mostly film, focuses on a number of directors (and writers). Of these, particularly the many studies on David Lynch (cf. Sheen and Davison; McGowan, Impossible; Nochimson), Charlie Kaufman (cf. LaRocca; Child), and Christopher Nolan (cf. Furby and Joy; Eberl and Dunn; and, again, McGowan, Fictional) are relevant, since they are all directors whose oeuvre covers many films that I consider narratively unstable in how they depict reality.194 Yet while the individual insights of such studies will be of help for my understanding of these texts as well, I deem an approach grouping texts according to their author as less fruitful than a more culturally, narratively, and thematically infused one, which looks for connections among texts from different authors—and different genres, subjects, and media. Studies on time travel in fiction constitute a second group of scholarship relevant for unstable realities texts. Often, these approaches focus on specific media as well, for instance television or film (cf. Ginn and Leitch; 194

As the large number of book-length scholarly engagements with these directors shows, there also seems to be a broad interest in what exactly it is that their individual films share, summarizing, for instance, Lynch’s work as “‘weird’” and as “challeng[ing] the spectator’s traditional experience of the cinema” (McGowan, Impossible 2).

138

Narrative Instability

Sherman), and even collections on time travel in different media, such as Matthew Jones and Joan Ormrod’s Time Travel in Popular Media, only feature few individual articles that look at time travel as a transmedia phenomenon.195 Still, the way these works discuss time travel and conceptualizations of time throughout fiction is relevant for my considerations here as well. Particularly, while fictions about time travel can take many diverse forms, a number of points reappear across these different studies: First, they link time and space closely together, similarly to how I conceptualize unstable texts in this chapter. Paul J. Nahin, for instance, notes that the history of time travel in fiction is closely connected to “traveling through space,” both being “‘imaginary voyages[s]’” (2); time travel, for him, is then defined as the manipulation of “matter and energy in a finite region of space,” linking the two concepts (18). As Paul Booth notes, in such understandings, “time travel [...] has been interpreted as a spatial phenomenon” (142). Second, besides other themes and concepts that time-travel fictions touch upon, such as causality, logic, and morality (Sherman 2-4), they also often specifically relate to science and history. As many time-travel stories belong to the genre of science fiction, they inevitably evoke science in some way. Yet Sherry Ginn and Gillian I. Leitch note that “as any good scientist will tell you, science fiction does not necessarily have anything to do with science” (xiv), alluding to the fact that such stories do not have to present science ‘accurately’ but, instead, often do so in a popularized form, which is also where some of their appeal might stem from (Nahin 2-3). However, I would contend, as I will detail below, that a popularization of science often entails a less detailed account but not necessarily a less ‘accurate’ one, since many science-fiction texts, as Interstellar has shown, do incorporate recent insights from science and technology. 196 Somewhat similarly, many, but not all, time-travel stories relate to history, featuring fantasies of how we can “rewrite history and begin anew” (Ginn and Leitch xiii)—while this observation mostly fits texts whose characters travel back in time, those that are set in the future invariably relate back to modern-day history as well. When engaging in forms of time travel, both science and history thus emerge as larger concepts that texts evoke in some way, often in a popularized form, a tendency that will reoccur in the readings of Inception and, especially, BioShock Infinite. Third, fictional texts that feature time travel also relate to narrative and narrativity, in that time itself has a close “relationship with storytelling” (Jones and Ormrod, “Contexts” 7), whose sequentiality and focus on events 195 196

A notable exception is David Wittenberg’s Time Travel: The Popular Philosophy of Narrative, which looks at time-travel fiction both diachronically and transmedially. As just one example, the idea that we live in a multiverse, that “our universe is just one among many,” as fantastically featured in BioShock Infinite, is the subject of much recent research in astrophysics and was studied prominently by Stephen Hawking (Wall).

4 Unstable Realities

139

implies the passage of time. David Wittenberg goes further than that, though: Since, for him, “all narratives do something like ‘travel’ through time or construct ‘alternate’ worlds,”197 he concludes that “literature itself might be viewed as a subtype of time travel, rather than the other way round” (1). For him, then, time-travel fiction is a “‘narratological laboratory’”; “these stories are themselves already exercises in narratology and the theorization of temporality” (2). This intimate interweaving between speculating about the nature of time and the nature of storytelling will become particularly evident in BioShock Infinite, but it also rings true for narratively unstable texts more generally, which tend to use concepts such as time as a vehicle to theorize about and experiment with narrative. Finally, however, a number of studies about time travel include a certain penchant for categorizing and typologizing. While a lot of newer scholarship seems aware of that tendency and consciously tries to avoid it, a certain fascination with typologies still prevails, for instance in Jones and Ormrod’s table of the various means of time travel in fiction (6-7) or in Nahin’s strict insistence on defining time travel: “In this book we are interested in physical time travel by machines” (18). Somewhat more openly, besides such a focus on the means and sources of time travel, these texts can also be grouped according to their understanding of time. Ginn and Leitch list four such possibilities: One theory proposes that time moves in a wave or arrow, always forward; [...] [time] cannot be changed because it has already happened. Another theory proposes time loops back onto itself: the past leads to the future, which, in turn creates its own past. A third theory proposes that time just is, that the past, present, and future occur simultaneously; it is we who are stuck in a particular time and who are moving in relation to where we are stuck [...]. A fourth theory, of a multiverse, proposes that time changes as we make decisions. For every decision we make, a new reality is born, a new reality with a new time line. Thus, there are an infinite number of worlds and times. (xiv)

These different understandings are highly relevant for how time—and space, as their nod to the “number of worlds” also establishes—is featured in unstable texts as well, yet the most interesting aspect of that is how such representations of time intermingle, how they often are not neatly categorizable into these different types but overlap. In order to notice such transgressions, the knowledge from scholarship concerned with time travel is certainly relevant, yet instead of grouping texts according to these or other categories, I will analyze narratively unstable texts for the cultural work that their treatment of time and space does. Lastly, discussing realities in narratively unstable texts also entails examining how they popularize scientific issues and concepts related to real197

This also links such science-fiction texts to those from the alternate-history genre, an aspect I will come back to in my reading of BioShock Infinite.

140

Narrative Instability

ity. As I already mentioned in chapter 2 (cf. 2.2.2), I see the “‘popularization’ of complex matters” (Harmon 70) as an integral part of most popular culture. In many scholarly discussions of popular culture, however, this is rarely a dominant aspect. Instead, it can be more broadly traced from specific approaches to the functions and roles of popular culture, particularly those in individual fields such as science and popular culture. To generally understand what exactly popularization (outside of popular culture) entails, early studies on ‘popular science’ already point to an important development: Writing in 1990, Stephen Hilgartner argues against the dominant view of the “popularization of science” as a “two-stage model,” wherein “first, scientists develop genuine scientific knowledge; subsequently, popularizers disseminate simplified accounts to the public,” which implies that the latter is a “‘distortion’ or ‘degradation’ of the original truths” (519).198 In contrast, Hilgartner argues, while popularization always entails some kind of simplification, this does not mean that “‘popularized’ knowledge” (520) is worth ‘less’ than the other—this binary opposition seems, in turn, too much of a “serious oversimplification” (533) to be productive. While Hilgartner ‘rehabilitates’ such popularizations mainly from the point of view of scientists, detailing how they profit from popularization as well, I also want to focus on the virtues of ‘popularized knowledge’ for audiences and consumers of such texts. Of course, popular-science texts are not the same as the pop-cultural artifacts I discuss here, but similar tendencies still apply: I also see the main function of popularization in popular culture as close to that of popular science—as Helena Calsamiglia notes, these popularized depictions attempt to narrow the “gap between science and society” since, in a way, the “currents of democratization and globalization have reached knowledge too” (139, 140). In this sense, elements of popularized science oscillate between “education [and] entertainment” (Cooter and Pumfrey 237), in that they both transport information from a specific discursive realm and elicit pleasures from the audiences.199 Overall, I thus understand popular culture as a kind of interdiscourse that serves as a mediator between science and the public through the popularization of knowledge. From a broader point of view, then, popular culture can feature popularized knowledge from a host of different fields and disciplines, and narratively unstable texts engage in such popularizations of, among others, science, philosophy, religion, and cultural studies and theory (e.g., psychoanalytic literary theory). While, compared to ‘original’ writings on, for instance, Ayn Rand’s objectivism or quantum mechanic’s multi198 199

For more on the field of popular-science writing, cf. in particular Cooter and Pumfrey; Broks; Perrault. While popular culture’s general role in this popularization of knowledge has rarely been thoroughly studied, similar thoughts have been put forward for fields other than science as well, such as (popular) philosophy (cf. Irwin), (popular) politics (cf. Zoonen), or, more specifically, (popular) criminology (cf. Rafter and Brown).

4 Unstable Realities

141

ple-worlds theory, a popularization always entails a kind of simplification, this produces not inauthentic or ‘wrong’ knowledge but, instead, a different form of knowledge. Specifically, this simplification is facilitated through a narrativization of certain theories or concepts, and telling a narrative always entails the omission of some details or the simplification of others. In the texts considered in this chapter, these concepts taken from science are narrativized, specifically, as instabilities, as leading to a questioning of the reality of one’s world. I see two main effects (or functions) of this popularization in unstable texts, which partly work in opposition: On a general level, popularization in popular culture facilitates an easier access to knowledge by making it available and ‘palatable’ to a wider public. Popular culture thus takes knowledge from a very specific and difficult-to-access discourse, such as science, and adapts it into a popularized form, a more open and publicly ‘accessible’ discourse. This can be seen as a ‘democratization’ of knowledge, which is part of the cultural work these texts do, since their consumption is one of the few ways that, on many issues, a wider audience might get into contact with scientific discourse, bridging the aforementioned gap between scientists and society, the larger public sphere. This, then, also links back to understandings of the functions of popular culture and its relation to society and politics, in line with Harmon’s take on the “consciousness-raising capacity” of popular culture (70)—a function that has a longer tradition particularly in the US and in the nation’s self-understanding as a democracy, where such popularized depictions are meant to elicit pleasure rather than to (more strictly) ‘educate.’ On the other hand, however, this popularized knowledge also leads to moments of recognition—as I detailed before, the implied audience of the texts considered here is the white middle-class, and the knowledge of, for instance, certain postmodern contexts or Freud’s psychoanalytic theories forms part of their cultural capital (cf. Burnham). For some of the audiences of these texts, there is, perhaps, not much to learn from these popularized depictions—instead, recognizing such allusions and references can lead to pleasurable moments, and they can, in turn, serve as opportunities of class distinction.200 Unstable texts thus speak to very broad and partly divergent segments of US society in a bid to further increase their appeal. Popular culture engages in this popularization in a pleasurable way, with entertainment and education/information not as opposite but concomitant functions, popularizing science but also becoming popular through scientific elements. This popularity is traceable both in the commercial success 200

Additionally, while such a kind of cultural ‘populism’ ostensibly touts democratization, it is also complicated by the tendency of unstable texts to reaffirm the dominant position of the white male middle class—not the broad public but rather the (cultural and political) elites. This kind of contradiction and oscillation is mirrored by the texts’ ostensibly progressive but ultimately often reactionary textual politics, which I will detail in the readings below.

142

Narrative Instability

of these texts and in the discussions they engender among fans, critics, and scholars, as I will detail more specifically for the two readings in this chapter. Interstellar, as previously discussed, also fits this pattern: The film grossed more than 675 million dollars (“Interstellar”) and won, among other prizes, the Academy Award and the BAFTA Award for best visual (special) effects, recognizing the way it visually depicts a fantastic world and space. At the same time, and like with most of Christopher Nolan’s films, Interstellar also engendered a lot of discussion, particularly focused on different popular ‘theories’ of what actually happened in its story and what that means—i.e., attempts at explaining its narrative instability. Such discussions did not only take place in forums or on social media, but also in (online) magazines and on websites, for instance on Entertainment Weekly (Franich), Empire (Nugent), or MTV, whose article’s headline reads: “Confused About the Ending of ‘Interstellar’? We Can Explain” (Sullivan). These, and many more, all speak to a fascination with the film’s plot but, by association, also with how its instability figures into the narrative, what kind(s) of reality the film depicts, and what that means as a cultural artifact. The initial confusion in the film’s story, which led to all these different articles offering one or more explanations, was caused by the film’s narrative instability, which, in turn, is related to a popularized depiction of the possibility of time travel, four-dimensional spaces, and five-dimensional beings. Another side of this reception—and again this is typical for Nolan’s films—are numerous articles and postings pointing out alleged ‘plot holes’ in the film, listing, for instance, “15 Maddening ‘Interstellar’ Plot Holes” (Hibberd), “The 7 Biggest Problems with ‘Interstellar’” (Lang), or “21 Things in Interstellar That Don’t Make Sense” (Sternbergh et al.). While these seem obviously less sympathetic to the film, I suggest to read them similarly to the ‘explanation’ posts, as they both speak to an interest in engaging with the film, and of having been confused by it—the one, generally, trying to explain that confusion within the film’s diegesis, by combining things from within the storyworld, the other rather arguing against the film’s diegesis, calling out what they consider inconsistencies that make the plot ‘unbelievable.’ While many of these specific criticisms often concern matters of realism, of a lack of suspension of disbelief on these writers’ and viewers’ part, they also predominantly are concerned with elements of the film’s instability, with its fantastic representation of space and its timetravel paradoxes, i.e., its popularized depiction of scientific elements. 201 For 201

Beyond having recruited Kip Thorne as a consultant for the film, as mentioned before, this concern with Interstellar’s depiction of science is also visible in how popular science ‘advocates’ reacted to it, and how their reactions were reported on. For instance, Neil deGrasse Tyson commented on Twitter on the film’s depiction of certain scientific elements (Bacle), and he discussed the film together with science enthusiast Bill Nye on his YouTube channel (Domanico). Interestingly, they praised most of the scientific depictions in the film and rather took issue with one of its plot points in that they “can’t imagine a future where escaping Earth via wormhole

4 Unstable Realities

143

instance, one of the ‘plot holes’ a commentator complains about concerns the film’s major twist: “Cooper is definitely revealed to be Space Ghost, supplying his daughter (and his younger self) with information. How is that not a cap-P Paradox?” (Hibberd).202 He seems to miss, however, that this paradox is part of the point of the film and addressed by it, which one of the articles trying to explain the film’s plot takes up: “The fifth dimensional beings are not aliens; the fifth dimensional beings are humans from the far, far, far future, who have evolved beyond the limits of the third dimension. These far future humans are now helping to create themselves by giving humanity the wormhole to a new galaxy” (Franich). Thus, both kinds of writings about Interstellar actually implicitly speak to each other, and both can be understood as engagements with the text that illustrate how the film has moved the writers and compelled them to pen these pieces. These episodes demonstrate how the film made these writers wrestle with its meaning, trying to reconcile Interstellar’s unstable elements (and particularly its representation of space and reality) into a stable storyworld in order to make sense of it—or declaring that this effort only went so far, before ‘giving up’ and presenting a lot of actually reconcilable elements as ‘plot holes.’ Overall, these different forms of writing and communication speak to a broader interest in cultural issues among US society that narratively unstable texts satiate, and accordingly, I will now turn to particularly prominent examples of such texts in two detailed readings.

4.3 Inception Christopher Nolan’s 2010 film Inception is centrally concerned with the question of reality, having its characters wonder at numerous points whether what they currently perceive is part of reality or, instead, a dream. In the fictional world of the film, people are able to infiltrate other persons’ dreams through the use of special technological devices. Such technology is used by the film’s protagonist, Dominic Cobb (played by Leonardo DiCaprio), to enter the minds of businessmen in order to extract vital information from their unconscious (consistently referred to as ‘subconscious’ in the film), which he sells to corporate competitors. One of the people whose

202

is a better plan than just fixing Earth” (qtd. in Domanico), which seems besides the point of the film’s science-fiction extrapolation and rather is a matter of suspending one’s disbelief. One of the other lists makes the same point more eloquently: “If Cooper saved humans from the fifth dimension, opened the wormhole, and engineered the whole sequence of events by which Cooper instructed his past self and his daughter on how to, basically, save humanity—well, how did those future humans get saved? Which is to say, you can’t travel back in time and engineer your own salvation. Don’t you first have to be saved, so that you will exist in the future to travel back in time?” (Sternbergh et al.).

144

Narrative Instability

dreams he initially tries to enter, Saito (Ken Watanabe), offers him an especially delicate job: He is asked to perform ‘inception’ on the son of Saito’s fiercest competitor, Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy). Inception entails planting an original idea in Fischer’s mind that he will then believe he came up with himself; this idea is meant to bring down the business of Fischer’s father and thus eliminate Saito’s strongest competition. Although inception is commonly believed impossible, Cobb takes on this task because Saito offers Cobb his help in clearing a murder charge against him—specifically, that he killed his wife—which currently prevents Cobb from returning to the United States and being reunited with his children. As the film takes on a narrative progression similar to a heist movie, 203 Cobb gathers a team of specialists in order to perform inception on Fischer. While on an airplane flight with him, the group enters Fischer’s original dream and then goes through several dreams-within-dreams to plant the idea in as deep a layer of the dream as possible; the film accordingly follows Cobb’s team through these different layers. Complications soon arise, since Fischer has been trained to protect his mind from such invasions and since Cobb’s deceased wife Mal(lorie) (Marion Cotillard) unexpectedly enters the dreams as a ‘projection’ of Cobb’s mind, threatening to disrupt the mission. Cobb eventually has to enter the deepest level of dreams, so-called limbo, “unconstructed dream space,” and is able to successfully put the idea in Fischer’s mind. He returns with all of the members of his team to the airplane flight, thus also seemingly coming back to reality. In the final moments of the film, Cobb is seen reunited with his children in the US. Inception has been a large commercial and critical success, having grossed more than 800 million dollars (“Inception”) and having received, among many other prizes, the Academy Awards for best cinematography, visual effects, and sound editing and mixing. Somewhat similar to the 1999 film The Matrix, Inception also quickly entered into a pop-cultural vocabulary. For instance, recurring questions whether what we currently perceive might just be somebody else’s dream (possibly within another dream), parts of the film’s music and sound effects, or terms like ‘getting inceptioned’ or neologisms ending in ‘-ception’ (such as ‘foodception’ or, more metareferentially, ‘filmception’) found their way into magazine articles, forum discussions, or Internet memes and were referenced and parodied in popular culture, such as in a 2010 episode of the TV show South Park, called “Insheeption.” In this sense, the film relatively quickly found a place among a contemporary popular-culture fan ‘canon.’ Similarly, Inception has also al203

In terms of genre, Inception combines elements from the heist film, science fiction, and film noir, and the assembling of the team to perform inception is particularly similar to how such crews are usually gathered in heist films, with each member having a clear designation and job. Such references to and reworkings of established genres are significant in many unstable texts, but particularly so in those connecting their instability to textuality itself, which I accordingly look at in the next chapter.

4 Unstable Realities

145

ready received a lot of scholarly attention—in addition to individual articles, book chapters, and scholarship covering Christopher Nolan’s oeuvre, there are also two edited volumes dedicated to ‘Inception and Philosophy.’ While this quantity of scholarly engagements covers a number of different topics in the film,204 many studies focus in particular on dreams, the meaning of the ending, and piecing together what has happened throughout the film, all evincing a focus on Inception’s plot (cf., e.g., Auxer; Floury; Tallmann; Terjesen). Instead, while the depiction of dreams and reality will be crucial for me as well, I will add to the existing scholarship on the film a perspective that contextualizes Inception’s interest in questions of reality as part of a larger narrative trend and that connects these concerns to questions of representation, textuality, and masculinity in particular. To approach Inception’s entanglements of instability and reality, I will look at the film from three angles. In a first subsection, I will analyze the film as a narratively unstable text that casts doubt on the spaces that it represents. This will be traced along the film’s aligning of the viewers’ knowledge with that of its characters, the inclusion of physical instabilities in the plot, and particularly the film’s ending. Secondly, against the backdrop of Inception’s narrative instability, I will look more specifically at how it renders its questions and doubts about reality. While focusing on its depiction of dreams alongside the diegetic reality, this analysis will particularly work out how the film imagines reality as an epistemological and distinctly gendered question. Finally, I will bring these aspects together and locate the film’s cultural work in how it popularizes psychological discourses and how it links its musings about realities to the nature of fiction and storytelling. The latter, in turn, will include the film’s use of architecture and dreams as tropes as well as elements that position Inception as a film about films, such as its awareness of other narratively unstable texts. In this subchapter, I will argue that Inception ultimately embraces epistemic uncertainty, and that the self-affirmation it proposes as a ‘way out’ of the obsession with having to know if one’s world is real works only for (white) men, rejecting a female presence. The film aligns viewers with its protagonist’s journey from craving knowledge about reality to acknowledging the unknowability of that very question, instead accepting ambivalence and his current world regardless of its ontological status. Such an obsession with reality, however, is framed primarily as masculine, one that causes a 204

Among others, scholarship has considered Inception for how Japan figures in it as a dream world (Blouin), how it can be considered a time-travel film and how it embraces a video-game aesthetic (Burnetts), for its narrative complexity (Oever), how it features metalepses (Kiss), in terms of trauma (Brasse), in specifically psychoanalytic terms (Fisher), for how it deals with ‘epistemic angst’ (Tullmann), in its relation to memory (Bergstorm), how it relates to epistemology (Engelen), as a heist film (Malloy), regarding free will (Fitzpatrick and Johnson), in relation to questions of faith (D. K. Johnson, “Taking”), and in regard to the role of music in the film (Engel and Wildfeuer).

146

Narrative Instability

crisis of (white) masculinity, a perceived loss of privilege—a crisis whose solution, the film suggests, is the patriarchal embrace of fatherhood and the rejection of femininity and motherhood. On another level, Inception sees its protagonist’s obsession with reality mirrored metatextually by drawing parallels between the events of the film and storytelling in films in general, linking the concept of catharsis in fiction with one in the film’s diegetic reality, and thus ultimately arguing for its own relevance as a fictional text. 4.3.1 “IT’S NEVER JUST A DREAM”: NARRATIVE INSTABILITY The narrative comprehension of what happens in Inception is compromised and becomes unstable because of how the film features dreams alongside its diegetic reality and due to the characters entering and sharing other people’s dreams, which together renders it difficult to ascertain which of these different worlds is diegetically real. Unlike a number of other narratively unstable films involving dreams, however, in Inception, this matter of the world’s reality status does not binarily boil down to a question like ‘Did this really happen, or was it all just a dream?’—with the latter possibility implying that the events that transpired were of no consequence. In contrast, in the world of Inception, what happens in dreams matters for the diegetic reality; it just matters, so to say, differently. Fittingly, Inception presents dream spaces not as discursively ‘unreal’ but, rather, draws no visual differences between diegetic reality and dreams. In the film, then, narrative instability relates directly to the reality of the world that it depicts, and reality is framed primarily as a matter of space and time. This question of the current world being real or being a dream abounds on the level of the film’s characters, but on a narratively higher level, the film does not always clearly communicate to viewers what is a dream and what is supposed reality either, encouraging doubts about the veracity of the worlds being displayed. This setup is further enhanced by the film’s dreams-within-dreams, complicating the unraveling of the various dream levels that its characters travel through.205 Specifically, as I will discuss in the following, Inception’s instability narratively works in three ways: The film, most importantly, aligns the viewers’ knowledge with that of a variety of different characters, instead of offering a hierarchically higher plane of knowledge; it connects literal physical instabilities in the film’s world to its unstable narration; and 205

The visual representation of these different dream ‘levels’ also links Inception’s narrative setup closer to forms of playing, as video games often work with levels that are progressively harder to beat—just as the dreams-within-dreams also offer increasingly more difficult challenges for Cobb’s team. The heist-like assembling of that team, picking characters for specific roles, also mirrors the importance of different character types especially in role-playing games. For an analysis of how Inception “is in part structured around a number of video game rules” (190), cf. Buckland, “Inception.”

4 Unstable Realities

147

it features a kind of pseudo-twist in its ending that points viewers to doubts about the world’s reality in the first place. While most of the film’s characters, and especially Cobb, are obsessed with knowing if their current world is real and usually claim to be in good command of that knowledge, discursively, Inception is less clear on providing viewers with pointers towards judging the ontological veracity of the world. This is especially true for the dreams-within-dreams that the film’s characters find themselves in. Discursively, while they work similar to hypodiegetic narration (i.e., stories-within-stories), they also differ from such more familiar setups in notable ways: Most pressingly, it is unclear who exactly the ‘narrator’ of such a dream is, an aspect that is usually explicitly known in stories-within-stories. As Cobb explains, in order to share a dream, an architect must first design it, “creat[ing] the world of the dream,” which the dream infiltrators then enter. To do so, they make their target fall asleep and then invade that person’s dream: “We bring the subject into that dream, and they fill it with their subconscious.” Hence, there are already two agents involved in how the audience perceives a particular dream: the architect who originally created the world, and the subject that fills that world with details. In addition, when Cobb’s team enters multiple dream layers, only the ‘outer’ dream is dreamed by the original subject, whereas the deeper layers each have other, individual dreamers from Cobb’s team— in these arrangements, there is an architect, a dreamer, and a subject involved in the creation of the dream’s world, rendering it unclear from whose perspective and narration audiences witness what they see in Inception. In most dream sequences in the film, the focalization switches between different characters, leaving the question of who narrates these dreams—and whether that narrator is reliable—unresolved.206 In addition, the higher levels of a dream can also affect the lower ones (just like a narrator of a story can influence his/her story-within-a-story). Yet in contrast to hypodiegetic narration, the lower levels equally influence the higher ones, a form of metalepsis—an intrusion into and between different narrative levels—that creates parts of the film’s instability by deviating so clearly from 206

While the film mostly follows Cobb, individual scenes are often focalized through other characters, which, as a natural part of filmic language, is not something necessarily noticeable. However, Inception also points to focalization itself in particular scenes, which is most apparent in the character of Eames (Tom Hardy) and his ability to ‘transform’ into other people—he is the ‘forger’ of Cobb’s heist team. When viewers see him preparing to take on the role of Fischer’s godfather Peter Browning (Tom Berenger), he first looks like himself, then sits down in front of a mirror, with some of the mirror’s reflections showing Eames, others showing Browning, and then, in the next shot, looks completely like Browning. For most of the crew members, he is usually recognizable as Eames, yet for Fischer, he is supposed to look like Browning—but Fischer is not in this scene, so it cannot be his focalization that the film shows. Instead, the transition through the mirror serves as a kind of narrative ‘gimmick’ for the audience, explaining the transformation and, through the motif of the mirror, displaying an awareness of focalization as such.

148

Narrative Instability

how hypodiegetic narration usually works.207 Additionally, even outside the dreams-within-dreams, the film does not provide viewers with much knowledge beyond the characters’ level: Certain members of Cobb’s crew might sometimes tell each other what is real and what is a dream, but viewers cannot always be sure that they are reliable, or that they even can know. The most prominent tool in the film to tell one’s reality apart from a dream, the use of so-called totems (which I will discuss further in the next section), also functions solely on the level of the story, providing very few markers to the audience beyond the level of the characters themselves. The beginning of the film—after the initial brief opening showing Cobb waking up at the shores of what seems to be limbo, meeting an old Saito in a Japanese castle—serves to exemplify this fantastic narrative setup, but it does not privilege viewers with narrative knowledge, instead aligning them with the characters. That very first scene between Cobb and old Saito switches seamlessly to Cobb and a younger Saito discussing a business proposition, as Cobb wants to offer his expertise in defending against dream ‘extraction,’ and it is still set in the same dining room of what looks like a Japanese castle—audiences receive no information on how any of the characters wound up there, however. As the world suddenly begins to shake slightly, Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), another member of Cobb’s team, wonders: “What’s going on up there?” (emphasis mine). The camera focuses on Cobb checking his watch, which suddenly begins to move faster, and the scene cuts to a very different place in a city where a riot seems about to erupt: In an apartment in this city, Saito, Cobb, and Arthur are sleeping as Nash (Lukas Haas), an architect who is also part of Cobb’s team, watches over them. For the audience, it is highlighted at this point that the world set in the Japanese castle is just a dream, and it is suggested that time passes differently in these worlds. Additionally, actions in the higher level can have effects on the lower one, as the rumblings in the castle are explained through the riot-like tumults outside the room that Cobb’s team is dreaming in—differences in how both time and space narratively work thus characterize these worlds. The shaking becomes worse as the riots increase, and similarly, when Cobb has to be forcefully woken up, Nash does so by kicking the chair he sits on backwards into a bathtub filled with water, which suddenly makes the castle become filled with water bursting through the windows, firmly establishing the exacerbated effect that such actions can have on the dream. At this point, everybody wakes up and continues negotiations in the room outside the riotous street, revealed to be Saito’s secret apartment. Saito explains that the events in the castle were an 207

For instance, as Mal explains during the opening scenes, pain in a deeper level can be felt in the hierarchically higher level, all the way up to the diegetically real person. Accordingly, Kiss notes that “[t]he diegetic rule of a bi-directional physical contamination among the embedded dream-levels makes Inception an exceptional case of ontological metalepsis” (40).

4 Unstable Realities

149

audition for Cobb but that he failed, since “[his] deception was obvious.” Only at this point does the film switch scenes again, showing a train on the move, on which Saito, Cobb, Arthur, and Nash are shown sleeping, watched over by a young man, Tadashi (Tai-Li Lee), whom Arthur hired. Back in the apartment, to extract further information from Saito, Cobb throws him on the floor and threatens him, where Saito notices that the carpet is not made of the right material and realizes: “I’m not lying on my carpet, in my apartment. [...] I’m still dreaming.” In fact, then, the whole opening scene is a dream-within-a-dream, with Saito and Cobb’s team actually being on a train, dreaming to be inside Saito’s apartment, in which they are again dreaming to be in a Japanese castle. While the first realization is already unusual and throws viewers in medias res as far as the film’s narrative setup is concerned, the early cut to the apartment helps the audience understand that arrangement. The second realization, that the scenes in the apartment are still just a dream, is only hinted at by the film to viewers right before Saito realizes this as well, in this sense keeping the audience on the same level as (some of) the film’s characters. Additionally, the different perspectives that the film assumes to narrate its events are confusing not only because of their multiplicity but also because some of them seem narratively compromised. Significantly, the most frequent perspective and focalization is that of Cobb, the film’s protagonist, but his point of view is also the most doubtful when it comes to judging whether one’s world is real or not.208 In fact, this consciously ambivalent setup is alluded to by the film itself, when Cobb later tells Ariadne (Ellen Page), an architect and the latest member of Cobb’s team, while they sit in a cafe: “You never really remember the beginning of a dream, do you? You always wind up right in the middle of what’s going on.” At this point, Ariadne realizes she is currently in a dream, which the film, again, did not highlight to viewers before, so this realization of Ariadne is one for the viewers as well. More significantly, what Cobb mentions here about dreams can equally be applied to the film: Inception starts in medias res, “right in the middle,” for viewers too, without 208

The internal focalization on Cobb, and its unreliability, is established early on, when, in the opening, viewers see his children playing on the shore of the beach he wakes up—as with many later instances of his children suddenly appearing, it is unclear whether this is only Cobb’s hallucination or memory or if, sometimes, other people can see the children too, as Cobb’s unconscious manifests them in a dream space. Another significant example of his potential unreliability concerns a shot of him and Mal holding hands in limbo, which is shown twice in the film: Once, as Cobb tells Ariadne about his time with Mal in limbo, their hands look like they always do, but the second time, when Cobb tells the projection of Mal in limbo that they did grow old together, the film shows the exact same shot, but their hands are now those of two very old people. In each case, it is unclear whether this is an actual memory of Cobb or whether he is consciously telling a story—to Ariadne and Mal’s projection, respectively—but he then either remembers or deliberately tells the story differently, pointing to his unreliability.

150

Narrative Instability

knowing how the characters ended up there—this is true for the individual dream scenes we see (which are only successively revealed to be dreams), but it is also true for the final layer of the opening, the scene on the train, which is the supposed diegetic reality. Audiences do not know or see how the characters boarded this train, and the constant movement of the train also symbolically stands for the film’s restlessness, the impossibility to spatially locate or identify this setup definitively. In fact, this aligns with a consistent lack of narrative communication about how the film’s characters reach certain places, as Cobb seamlessly travels between Japan, Paris, and Mombasa, “taking the viewer through a kaleidoscope of worldly ports” (Blouin 328). This transnational fluidity makes sense in the narrative, but it stands symbolically for the spatial obscurity of the film. Accordingly, while the film’s narrative perspective only provides viewers with just as much information as its characters, in terms of spatial identification, the audience’s knowledge is even below that of most characters, together complicating straightforward identifications of spaces as dreams or diegetic reality. A second larger aspect that plays into destabilizing notions of reality and space concerns instances of literal physical instability, which speak to the film’s awareness of space as something dynamic, as potentially questioning the validity of the current world. As pointed out before, whenever there is a certain physical movement or impact in a higher level of the dream, this will have similar, but more severe, physical consequences in the lower levels. The crumbling and shaking in the dreams in the opening scene establish this aspect of dream sharing, and they become a recurring motif from then on. Besides physical disturbances, such literal instabilities of the world’s physical space are also caused when the dreamer notices that he or she is dreaming, when they start to disbelieve the fiction of the dream. In the aforementioned scene with Ariadne and Cobb in a cafe, Ariadne’s realization that they are dreaming leads to the ground beginning to shake and all their surroundings, in slow motion, suddenly bursting apart—boxes, fruit stands, chairs, cars, and parts of the building and the street are all shown to shatter and explode, surrounding Cobb and Ariadne as they sit still, before she eventually wakes up. Later, as Ariadne is more aware of what she is able to do in a dream, she bends the world on top of itself, 209 as she stops in the middle of the street and curves it towards her, culminating in the roofs of buildings being attached to each other and Cobb and Ariadne ‘switching perspective’ as they approach a space in which the streets meet in a 90-degree angle. These instances of depicting ‘realistically’ impossible spaces equally recur throughout the film, particularly when Arthur explains “paradoxical architecture,” as he calls it, to Ariadne. The film’s characters, in turn, are aware of such an instability of their own created worlds, frequently speaking about a dream that is “collapsing” or warning, as the 209

The way this space is depicted as bending visually works similar to the aforementioned space station in Interstellar.

4 Unstable Realities

151

‘chemist’ Yusuf (Dileep Rao) does, that “[t]hat many dreams within dreams is too unstable.” In these instances, physical space and its instability— caused by fantastical intrusions upon the narrated space—serve to represent realizations about the constructedness of the (fictional) world, about the way the world is generally represented as a space, and how that representation is potentially malleable and manipulable. As a final element contributing to Inception’s instability, the characters’ lingering doubts about their own reality are also what the film’s ending taps into, by presenting viewers with a kind of pseudo-twist similar to unstable identities films like Black Swan (cf. 3.4.1). After finally, apparently, having completed all the steps of Saito’s mission, Cobb and his team wake up on the plane where their first dream started. Saito immediately makes a phone call, presumably to erase Cobb’s murder charges, and in the subsequent scene in the airport, Cobb clears immigration into the United States without any trouble. Stephen Miles (Michael Caine), Cobb’s father-in-law, picks him up, and the next scene has Cobb return to his home in the US, which looks eerily like the way viewers saw it previously in one of Cobb’s memories/dreams. The uncanny familiarity prompts Cobb to check the reality of his world with his totem, the spinning top, but when he spots his children playing in the garden, he is overcome with emotion and instead runs towards them. The film ends on a shot zooming in on the totem, cutting away before viewers could know whether it topples or not. 210 This final shot is laden with significance in the context of the overall film’s concerns with dreams and reality: While, particularly in the beginning, the characters often wonder about their current world being real or not, the ‘heist’ mission towards the middle and end of the film does not raise this issue anymore, instead focusing on the differences between the individual dream levels. The ending, however, highlights the question whether what Cobb is currently experiencing, and potentially many of the events before, is truly part of the diegetic reality. It is particularly the ending scene and shot that tease the possibility of a final twist, or of a clarification of the plot: If the top falls, it suggests that Cobb is in reality; if it is seen spinning for a long time, the strong suggestion is that this is just a dream, which would prompt severe revisions to the storyworld constructed so far. Instead, paradoxically, it is the absence of such a twist, which would ultimately offer some stability by providing clarity again, which leads to instability. In turn, what this unresolved scene achieves is to make viewers think back to what they wit210

Discursively, this last pan of the camera away from Cobb and towards the spinning top is significant in that it embodies the discursive split and move away from Cobb’s internal focalization. While there are also instances earlier in the film when viewers see scenes from a perspective that is not Cobb’s, his point of view is still the dominant one in the film. The slow and deliberate way the camera moves in these final scenes emphasizes that this last shot is part of a narration that is not dominated by Cobb’s perspective anymore—at the same time, the scene draws attention to this very domination in perspective that the film employed so far.

152

Narrative Instability

nessed so far, wondering which previous aspects of the film can help decide if Cobb is in reality or not, and thus overall highlighting the question of reality in the first place.211 Overall, the film’s narrative itself thus remains relatively stable—viewers usually know what is happening to whom—but the film casts doubt on where such events have transpired, and whether that setting in space and time is part of the diegetic reality or of a dream(-within-a-dream). Precisely because the characters are so aware of this aspect as well, since they openly and frequently mention questions of reality, viewers, too, are prompted to wonder about the possibility “[t]hat this world is not real,” as Cobb says to Saito when they are in limbo.212 In turn, this makes it more difficult to reconstruct a stable version of the storyworld, since viewers will not always be able to know whether to categorize certain scenes as part of reality or of a dream. This effect is achieved by keeping viewers’ level of knowledge at or below that of different, partly unreliable characters, by combining the narrative’s instability with literal physical instances of instability, and through the ending’s pseudo-twist. By playing with a twist in this way, Inception taps into the intertextual tradition of unstable films and viewers’ awareness of that tradition, in turn activating their interest in finding out whether previous hints in the film firmly answer the question alluded to at the end of it. Inception, however, ultimately embraces ambivalence—there are a variety of narrative clues throughout the film for different interpretations of the ending, suggesting that there is no one solution to this narrative puzzle. 4.3.2 “THE DREAM HAS BECOME THEIR REALITY”: REALITY AND REALITIES Questions of reality and unreality, deciding between what is real and what is ‘fake’ or just a dream, are ubiquitous in Inception. It is a concern often voiced by the film’s characters, and in turn transferred to the audience as well, partly through the ending scene just discussed. Beyond the film’s surface, which repeatedly mentions (questions of) reality, this figures into the text particularly along two avenues, which I will look at one after the other. On the one hand, Inception points out how thinking about reality is an epistemological matter, a question of acquiring knowledge, and this focus on how to ascertain and represent reality also links it to metatextual discus211 212

Since this ending scene is so significant, I will look at it again in the next subchapter to read it more specifically against the background of questions of reality. Furthermore, the unusual passing of time in deeper layers of the dream—as Cobb’s team realizes towards the end of their mission, ten seconds in the first layer translate to three minutes in the second and one hour in the third one—also complicates the understanding of time in the film’s storyworld. Still, it is space that serves as the main catalyst for Inception’s instability, where the question of what is real is inextricably linked to the ontological status of the current ‘world,’ the narrativized space in which the characters find themselves.

4 Unstable Realities

153

sions that I will outline in the next section. On the other hand, this quest for knowledge is distinctly gendered in the film. It is primarily presented as Cobb’s attempt to clarify his reality, an undertaking that is closely tied to a crisis of his masculinity, his self-understanding as a man, and to competing visions of himself as a father and as a husband. By associating the (in itself abstract) question of searching for reality so tightly with its male protagonist, Inception frames it as a concern primarily for (white) masculinity, ultimately resolving Cobb’s reality and masculinity crisis through an appeal to his role as a father and by eliminating the threat to epistemic certainty posed by femininity. While most characters make references to the question of what is real, it is Cobb whom the film associates most directly with it. Throughout the overall plot and in many individual scenes, Cobb displays an obsession with knowing what is and is not real, and a longing for the ‘true,’ the ‘authentic,’ the ‘real.’213 This becomes most apparent through the recurring motif of his totem, the spinning top, which he uses to determine whether he is in somebody else’s dream—if the top keeps spinning, he is; if it eventually topples, he is not. Ariadne calls the totem “an elegant solution for keeping track of reality,” and despite a few flaws this method has, 214 it stands as the foremost expression of Cobb’s desire to know what is real. For instance, when Cobb goes to Yusuf’s basement to test the sedative he proposes, Cobb starts dreaming and, after waking up again, seems shaken by the apparent realness of the dream he just had. The scene switches to him at a sink, pouring water on his face, and then shows a shot of Mal in front of a window, similar to an earlier shot shortly before she committed suicide. Discursively, it is not completely clear whether this is supposed to be a hallucination or a memory that Cobb just thought of, as the shot is simply presented as a sharp cut from one scene to the next, aligning view213

214

For instance, towards the end of the film, when Cobb talks to Mal in limbo, she tries to convince him that she is the only one Cobb can believe in, the only aspect that is real in his life, to which Cobb replies: “I wish more than anything, but ... I can’t imagine you with all your complexity, all your perfection, all your imperfection. [...] You’re just a shade of my real wife. And you’re the best that I can do, but I’m sorry, you’re just not good enough.” Cobb’s memory and (re)construction of Mal, while so close to the original, is thus just not ‘real enough’ for him. At the same time, his phrasing also hints at the inadequacy of fiction, of his imagination, a metatextual level I discuss in more detail in the next section. Additionally, in the context of the film’s interest in psychoanalysis, Cobb’s inability to fully imagine Mal’s femininity aligns with Freud’s contention that “the sexual life of adult women is a ‘dark continent’ for psychology” (qtd. in Morrow 18). For one, the totems are only supposed to be able to identify whether one is in one’s own dream or not. Additionally, as Arthur points out, the totem must be a personal item—yet the film suggests that the spinning top was actually Mal’s totem, not Cobb’s. A number of readings of the film thus point to other items as potentially being Cobb’s actual totem, such as his pistol (e.g., Auxer) or, more prominently, his wedding ring (e.g., Southworth 34; Tullmann 81).

154

Narrative Instability

ers closely with Cobb’s perspective without clarifying where to position that image and how reliable what was just shown is. Afterwards, Cobb frantically reaches for the top from his pocket and spins it on the sink, only to be interrupted by Saito. The scene stands exemplarily for Cobb’s general doubts about reality, for his need for certainty and knowledge of reality, symbolized in the totem, and for how the image of his wife causes him such doubts, which thus positions femininity as a threat to reality. Additionally, it highlights the viewers’ position regarding this overall question—the close-up of the top, which is seen falling down the sink and thus leaves the question of whether it would have stopped spinning unresolved and the matter of reality ambiguous, emphasizes the importance of the outcome and the totem, for Cobb just as much as for the film in general. Hence, it also upholds the consistent pattern of not providing viewers with further insights for deciphering reality from a dream. Instead, the audience has to rely on the totem as well, on a plot/character element rather than on one from the narration, aligning them further with Cobb. Reality for Cobb is positioned as an epistemological issue, as a matter not just of something being real or not but rather of knowing whether or not it is. Besides the totem, the film makes this explicit through Cobb’s dialogue and the background story of him and his wife Mal, which is only revealed gradually and in flashbacks, already linking this larger question to concerns about masculinity and femininity. When, during the ‘heist,’ Cobb mentions the danger of being trapped in limbo should they die in the dream, he also reveals that he has been in limbo before, together with Mal, when they explored dreams-within-dreams, “want[ing] to go deeper and deeper.” There, Cobb tells Ariadne, they “created. We built the world for ourselves,” but they also “lost sight of what was real.” Spending about fifty years in limbo, at first being fascinated by the ability to create spaces and manipulate worlds and “feeling like gods,” Cobb phrases the issue quite precisely to Ariadne: “The problem was knowing that none of it was real” (emphasis mine). While this issue of knowing that limbo was not real, that it did not ‘matter’ like the ‘real’ world, is what eventually made living there impossible for Cobb, for Mal, “limbo became [...] reality,” as she had repressed the idea of this being limbo—which is symbolized in a scene in which she locks away her totem in a safe, without it moving at all. 215 Hence, this is framed as an epistemological problem for Cobb. Presumably, had he been unable to tell whether limbo was real or not, it would not have mattered as much to him, but here, somewhat ironically, it is the epistemic certainty of limbo not being real that ruined this creative process for him. 215

This conundrum is also expressed in a recurring dialogue between Cobb and Mal, which goes: “You’re waiting for a train. A train that will take you far away. You know where you hope the train will take you, but you can’t know for sure. Yet it doesn’t matter. [...] Because we’ll be together.” While being together initially suffices for both of them to overcome this epistemological dilemma (“you can’t know for sure”), Cobb will eventually change his attitude.

4 Unstable Realities

155

As Cobb reveals to Ariadne near the end of their mission, his way of convincing Mal to leave limbo with him was to perform inception on her, to create the idea that the world was not real inside her mind. This is represented by Cobb finding the safe in which Mal locked the top, spinning it, and closing the safe again, in which the totem kept spinning—which, in Cobb’s words, established the “simple little idea that would change everything,” that “her world wasn’t real” in her mind. This idea, however, stayed with Mal even when they returned to their presumed reality, as Cobb explains that she continued to think that “she needed to wake up to come back to reality,” “that in order to get back home, [they] had to kill [them]selves.” Again, the question of reality is presented as an issue of knowledge, an “idea” that one knows or does not know, having repressed it. The practice of performing inception entails an epistemological change in what a person thinks they know, pointing to the malleability of the concept of knowledge. This central importance of knowledge for Cobb also becomes apparent in another exchange with Mal, when he talks to her in limbo for the last time. As in most of her appearances, this is not the ‘actual’ Mal but Cobb’s projection of her—these scenes should thus be understood as displaying Cobb’s inner conflicts and thoughts. Mal succeeds in unsettling Cobb by telling him: “So certain of your world. Of what’s real. [...] No creeping doubts? [...] Admit it. You don’t believe in one reality anymore.” Cobb’s response to her initial suggestion is simple: “I know what’s real, Mal.” She continues: “What if I’m what’s real? You keep telling yourself what you know. But what do you believe? What do you feel?” Cobb eventually dispels these doubts, clearly stating that Mal “doesn’t exist,” but how he, in a way, talks to himself here is notable for its clear evocation of epistemology, the postmodern idea of “[not] believ[ing] in one reality,” and the (failed) appeal to emotion and affect, to what one “feel[s]” and “believe[s]” rather than what one knows. Knowledge, in this exchange, trumps the appeal to emotion, yet Cobb’s attitude changes significantly during the ending of the film, which also suggests to viewers how to think about reality—and about the film and its meaning in general. As already mentioned above, the last shots work to establish that Cobb is not concerned with epistemic certainty anymore, as he turns away from his totem and towards his two children. At first, as he enters the apartment and looks at the furniture, he seems to doubt the veracity of this setting, this depicted space, as worry sets on his face and as he quickly reaches for and spins his top. When he hears his children, however, he turns away from the totem and towards them, and we see a familiar shot from before as well—his children, James and Philippa, playing on a meadow and beginning to turn towards him. Before, however, the shot ended there, as Cobb could not remember how their faces looked, whereas this time, their faces are shown and Cobb is seen going towards them, hugging and talking to them. At this point, a significant shift in Cobb’s attitude towards reality and his knowledge about it has occurred, one that has a

156

Narrative Instability

number of slightly different implications: For one, the question of whether something is real or not does not seem to matter as much to Cobb anymore, symbolized in his turning away from the totem. Similarly, one could understand being able to see his children’s faces and interacting with them as having taken over the function of the top for Cobb, as the more important indicator that this is reality, since he was previously unable to imagine his children’s faces. Related to this, and in the context of the overall film, the scene can be read as Cobb at least preferring this version of his life, where he does not know for certain whether it is real or not (as he does not care about the top anymore), to his life in limbo, where he knew the world was not real. He could, hence, be understood as embracing epistemic uncertainty in the ending of the film. Plus, on a more abstract level, he might also have realized that Mal(’s projection) was right in suggesting that he does not “believe in one reality anymore,” that he has abandoned the idea of definitively knowing what is real and what is not, that this is a futile or unimportant undertaking, as there is no one concept of truth or reality, just as there is not one objective indicator of reality. Instead, what has become the most important part of his life is his children, hierarchically placed above the question of whether they are real or not—“[t]he experience of being with his kids is what he cares about most, not reality,” as it is “our experiences that really matter, not whether we are living in reality” (Weijers 93). This ultimately aligns Cobb’s pursuit of reality very closely to questions of fatherhood and masculinity, which I will turn to later. While the final scene, however one reads Cobb’s shift in thinking, entails a fundamental evolution of his attitude towards reality and epistemic certainy, it also again mirrors this suggestion on the level of the audience. As Cobb walks towards his children, the camera slowly moves away from him, towards the left, zooming in closer onto the spinning top, with Cobb and his children hugging in the background, significantly decoupling the narrative perspective from Cobb’s focalization. The focus on the top, together with the music, whose climax coincides with the fade to black, first of all serves to highlight the importance of the top. Significantly, however, the shot ends without giving a clear answer towards whether the top can be used as a totem to determine the reality status of this world, ending too soon to be able to judge if it would have toppled or not. In this way, this scene functions as a pseudo-twist, since withholding a moment of instability in the end prevents a stable storyworld from being reconstructed— hence, the scene ends on ambivalence and thus propels further questions about what has happened to Cobb before, and about whether there are any clear signs for judging if this is reality or a dream. In fact, numerous readings of the film, both in academic and fan circles, particularly focus on the film’s ending and thus on the plot. Ruth Tallmann, for instance, recounts four popular interpretations, which she calls: “Most Real” (Cobb returns home to reality), “Mostly Real” (Cobb does not make it back and ends up in limbo), “Mostly Dream” (Cobb has been in a dream

4 Unstable Realities

157

since he went into Yusuf’s basement), and “Full Dream” (the entire movie is a dream) (19-20). The quantity and ubiquity of these and other ‘categories’ of interpretation speak to audiences’ interest in trying to ascertain what happened in the film, in a way mirroring Cobb’s obsession with definitively knowing about reality. Instead, Inception consciously embraces its ambivalence by including pieces of textual evidence for all of these different interpretations but never fully committing to any of them. 216 Rather, the film suggests to, like Cobb, ultimately abandon the quest for epistemic certainty and “accept ambiguity” (Kiss 40), particularly if that striving for reality can be replaced with something like caring for one’s children (real or not). In this sense, while the ending’s zoom on the spinning top first highlights its importance in potentially telling apart reality from dream, cutting to black before the top could assume that function ultimately suggests to come to terms with the unknowability of certain ‘truths,’ here, again, wanting to align the audience’s position with the journey and the realization that Cobb has gone through in the film’s plot. As a second larger point, Inception’s epistemological exploration of reality is particularly prominently filtered through questions of gender—especially masculinity and fatherhood—with reality itself becoming a gendered issue.217 In fact, Cobb’s pursuit of reality is consistently framed as part of a crisis of masculinity, by pitting his role as a husband against that as a father. His obsession with the ‘real’ and ‘authentic’ is thus also a quest to reclaim his masculinity after his wife has died and he has been separated from his children. Since Cobb is forbidden from returning to the US to see his children, and since he cannot imagine their faces in his dreams or memories, reality is not just an abstract concept for him but becomes deeply entangled with his children. In Paris, Cobb’s father-in-law Miles urges him to “[c]ome back to reality,” to which Cobb replies: “Those kids, your grandchildren, they’re waiting for their father to come back home. That’s their 216

217

As Jason Southworth also notes, “none of these points conclusively proves anything” (34). For instance, narrative clues that other interpretations highlight, such as the fact that Cobb’s children during the ending seem to have aged, could “simply [be] because Cobb believes that he has returned home after a long time and thus believes that his children should be dressed differently and appear older.” Likewise, him not wearing his wedding ring anymore might be “because Mal no longer appears [in that world], and he believes her to be dead in that world” (34). Additionally, as I mentioned previously as well, in a way, “the totems are simply red herrings” (34). Overall, then, “there is not enough information to prove one hypothesis over the other” (35). Tullmann likewise notes that “[t]he point is that no matter how we choose to interpret the film, we have no evidence that would definitively establish one conclusion over another. There really is no way for us to tell if he is dreaming at the end of the film” (82). Particularly female writers of the fantastic have pointed out how constructions of reality are not ‘neutral’ but often associated with masculinity, part of a “hegemonic strategy to establish one exclusive construction of reality” (Koenen, Visions 12).

158

Narrative Instability

reality.”218 Throughout the entire film, he intimately links his children with reality. However, in the ending, the sheer presence of Cobb’s children supersedes the question of whether he is in reality or not, with the affirmation of his role as a father apparently able to resolve his masculinity issues: “Cobb finds that his existential questions do not matter as much once he believes that he is reunited with his children” (Tullmann 88). On another level, Cobb’s masculinity is also plagued by his failure as a husband—guilt is another theme running through the film, as Cobb feels responsible for driving Mal into suicide by performing inception on her. 219 In turn, he thus sees success as a father as a possible way to redeem himself. These issues of fatherhood prevail throughout the film,220 and they render the initially abstract notion of caring about the reality status of one’s world in more relatable and ‘speakable’ terms. Yet by channeling its interest in masculinity so primarily through Cobb, Inception reduces them to white middle-class masculinity.221 At the same time, however, the film portrays Cobb as torn between being a husband and a father, as not being able to reconcile his masculinity with these two roles. When his children ask Cobb on the phone about their mother, he tells them that “Mommy’s not 218

219

220

221

Cobb’s response is also telling in that it links coming back to reality not only with his children but also with “home,” which is an equally persistent theme throughout the film. When Ariadne shares parts of Cobb’s memories, he tells her: “If I’m ever gonna see their faces again, I’ve gotta get back home. The real world.” Cobb’s longing for reality is thus also a longing for a home with his children, a theme that is further developed by the ‘homelessness’ throughout the film, with settings (both ‘real’ and in dreams) quickly switching from one nation to another and the consistent motifs of trains, planes, and other moving, restless objects taking the focus away from one stable space that could be considered home. In this regard, Inception has thematic similarities to Nolan’s earlier unstable film Memento, whose protagonist also has to deal with his wife’s death (which he, as the ending alludes to, likely caused). For a closer comparison of the two films, cf. Perdigao. In the exchange with Miles, it becomes clear that Cobb’s father-in-law has taken on a kind of fatherly role, and that of a mentor, for Cobb as well. Besides Cobb, this focus on fatherhood in the film is central for the character of Fischer and his fractured relationship with his father, which I discuss in the next section. As with most unstable films, the characters’ whiteness is narratively invisible and not addressed most of the time, but it is, of course, visually represented in the film, which invariably marks Cobb’s concerns as that of a white man. Additionally, his whiteness becomes more pronounced especially in contrast to the characters Yusuf and Saito, who are marked as nonwhite. It is most visible in a brief scene as Cobb is being chased through Mombasa and tries to hide in a place by sitting down and blending in among a lot of other people, yet he is immediately picked out from the crowd because he is, apparently, the only white person there. A similar dynamic is true for the issue of class—overall, Inception’s concerns with reality are primarily processed through gender and masculinity, and only implicitly via ethnicity and class. Ethnicity will become much more pronounced in the reading of BioShock Infinite.

4 Unstable Realities

159

here anymore,” establishing their family unit as one without a female— and, significantly, a motherly—presence. Accordingly, Cobb is shown as pursuing only the role of a father throughout the film while trying to minimize the presence of (sexualized) femininity in his life—his relationship to Ariadne, for instance, is also much closer to that of a father-daughter relationship than of a love interest. Connecting this concern with gender to questions of reality, Inception draws a clear distinction between masculinity and femininity based on Cobb and Mal’s interactions.222 Their most important difference in thinking about reality occurred when they resided in limbo, as Cobb could not live with the knowledge of limbo’s unreality anymore, while Mal was unfazed by it, having repressed that thought. Their general contrast in thinking is further strengthened as Inception stylizes Mal and femininity as a danger, as a threat to Cobb and his pursuit of reality: Positioned as a femme fatale, Mal—whose name is French for ‘bad’—takes on the position of the antagonist of the film, constantly haunting Cobb and threatening to ruin his attempts at dream infiltration. More directly, in terms of reality, Mal’s female presence stands for intrusions into Cobb’s supposedly real world and for unclarity whether a space is real or not. However, in the ending of the film, Cobb seems to have adopted Mal’s ‘feminine’ position, which he initially was so opposed to: At the sight of his children, it does not matter as much to him whether the world is real or not.223 The significant progression he makes throughout the film is thus also one from an attitude associated by the film with masculinity to one identified with femininity. This gendered point is made more directly in one of Cobb and Mal’s final dialogues,224 al222

223

224

Such a general gender difference is also visible in other characters’ relation, particularly in Cobb and Ariadne’s. Effectively, Ariadne’s role is similar to that of female stock characters in early science fiction, in which they served as an audience surrogate, asking how certain scientific inventions work (cf. Bould 18). In Inception, this sexist trope is repeated, as Cobb constantly explains aspects of dream sharing, inception, and the ‘heist’ to her, for instance when he (wrongly) convinces Fischer to enter Browning’s unconscious, to which Ariadne asks: “Wait, whose subconscious are we going into exactly?” Similarly, when Mal complains that Cobb claimed they would “grow old together,” Cobb replies that they did, when they were in limbo for fifty years—in that instance, the time spent in the unreal space of limbo thus does count for him as ‘really having happened,’ in line with Mal’s attitude at the time. Significantly, in all exchanges between Cobb and Mal that are not flashbacks, the Mal viewers see is not a diegetically real person but only a reflection of Mal in Cobb’s mind. As mentioned before, one should thus not directly consider Mal’s actions in such scenes as emblematic of her character but rather as revealing something about Cobb and his inner thoughts. Additionally, that the Mal viewers see is rather a suggestion of how Cobb thinks Mal behaves is also a hint at the film’s awareness of gender partly being a performance. Overall, then, Mal’s behavior and thoughts express less about femininity itself than about how a man like Cobb imagines femininity, an overemphasis, in turn, on masculinity that fits with the film’s general gender attitude.

160

Narrative Instability

ready mentioned above, when she asks him: “What if I’m what’s real? You keep telling yourself what you know. But what do you believe? What do you feel?” Inception here pits the importance of knowledge (and reality) against that of emotions and feelings, where Cobb embodies knowledge and Mal signifies emotion, in line with stereotypical pairings of these supposed binary oppositions with masculinity and femininity. Significantly, the scene, featuring Mal trying to convince Cobb that his world is not real, is a duplicate of an earlier one, briefly before Mal kills herself, when the two of them are in a hotel room and it is Cobb who tries to convince Mal that their world is, in fact, real. This reversal of roles equally speaks to a certain gender fluidity, just as Cobb takes on Mal’s earlier position at the end of the film. Accordingly, assuming this more feminine position is presented as a way out of Cobb’s masculinity crisis, partly framed by the film as a positive embrace of family life instead of an obsession with reality—ostensibly, rediscovering fatherhood as a valid social role seems like a progressive positioning for the film’s gender politics. However, in Inception’s overall context, this suggestion has distinctly misogynistic undertones: Cobb restabilizes his masculinity by taking on a trait previously connoted as feminine but also by eliminating an actual female presence from this family setting, imagining a family unit without a mother.225 Overall, reality is thus conceived by Inception as a matter primarily concerning masculinity, with an ambivalent attitude towards feminine influences on the construction of masculinity.226 In this sense, Inception uses its narrative instability focused on space and time to develop its epistemological understanding of reality, which it, however, distinctly frames as an issue of (white) masculinity, excluding women from a discussion of reality exactly at a moment in time when women try to assert their position in the public sphere (cf. 2.2.3). 4.3.3 POPULARIZATION AND METATEXTUALITY Taking a step back, Inception’s concerns with reality—primarily framed as an epistemological and a gendered issue—relate to two larger textual areas, its interest in matters of popularization and its metatextual elements. Both 225

226

Curiously, this setup is similar to another film starring Leonardo DiCaprio from around the same time, the 2008 Revolutionary Road. In that film’s ending, DiCaprio’s Frank is also eventually seen content with his role as a father after his wife has died from complications of an abortion. Together with the 2010 Shutter Island, another narratively unstable film that also has DiCaprio play a character who is haunted by his wife’s death, this set of movies all featuring DiCaprio has been morbidly dubbed his “Dead Wives Club” by a fan site (“Oscar Predix”). At least in the context of the film’s ending, I thus disagree with Bart Engelen’s assessment that “[f]rom Cobb’s and Mal’s repeated dialogue, which beautifully captures [an] emotional baseline, it becomes clear that they care more about each other than about epistemological certainty” (120).

4 Unstable Realities

161

aspects are also what the film’s combination of instability and reality makes most visible, evidencing its larger cultural work. Accordingly, I will first briefly highlight the popularization of psychoanalytic and philosophical concepts in the film and connect that to its focus on reality. Secondly, and in more detail, I will consider how the film works metatextually. Breaking that aspect down further, I will examine the film’s use of architecture, dreams, and elements through which Inception can be read as a film about films. Together, this section will point out how the film’s way of discussing reality through dreams relates to greater textual systems—popularized theories and fictional films—and will thus read the film as distinctly interested in connecting its concerns with the epistemic nature of reality to realism and fiction(ality). As discussed in section 4.2.2, many unstable texts have a penchant for featuring popularized incarnations of scientific, philosophical, or psychological concepts, but texts like Inception that deal with reality do so particularly as they try to imagine ways of depicting reality in unfamiliar ways. In Inception, the most frequently recurring concept that is presented in a popularized fashion concerns dreaming and the corresponding psychoanalytic theories about dreams, “present[ing] [...] the Freudian unconscious with all its twists and turns” (Floury 290).227 When Cobb or members of his team talk about dreams, they consistently refer to the “subconscious” as an important part of that, for instance when Cobb tells Ariadne that, when she builds a dream, a subject will then “fill it with their subconscious.” Significantly, how the film proposes that dreaming and the “subconscious” work together follows a popularized understanding of psychoanalytic and especially Freudian theories.228 This is already hinted at in the consistent use of the popular and colloquial term ‘subconscious,’ whereas Freud proposed the term ‘unconscious’ to denote what humans repress, seeing “the repressed [as] a part of the unconscious” (573) and “rejecting the term ‘subconscious’ as incorrect and misleading” (576).229 Moreover, this aspect be227

228

229

Beyond its depictions of psychoanalytic concepts, Inception also features popularized discourses of other scientific or philosophical areas. Tellingly, for instance, Cobb explains to Ariadne that “[t]hey say we only use a fraction of our brain’s true potential [...] when we’re awake. When we’re asleep, our mind can do almost anything.” The first part of Cobb’s explanation is a reference to the ‘ten percent of the brain myth,’ an urban legend that has been scientifically disproved. Cobb’s phrasing that “[t]hey say,” without specifying who that would be, also hints at an awareness of this idea’s status as a myth and urban legend. More generally, Inception also dabbles into philosophical and ‘postmodern’ concepts relating to reality, unreality, or hyperreality, for instance when Mal talks about the possibility of “[not] believ[ing] in [only] one reality.” The aforementioned focus on fatherhood, particularly relating to the heist of Fischer’s mind, implicitly references Freud as well, for instance when Eames says that you have to “start at the absolute basic[:] [...] the relationship with the father.” In Peter Gay’s collection of Freud’s texts The Freud Reader, he comments on this passage in a footnote, stating that “Freud virtually never uses ‘subconscious’ or

162

Narrative Instability

comes apparent in specific phrasings and individual depictions: When Cobb infiltrates a person’s mind to extract information, he does so by “literally talk[ing] to [somebody’s] subconscious,” which is represented by how the dream world is populated, establishing a belief in somebody’s unconscious thoughts being able to be represented as an orderly, coherent world. This entails a clear simplification of how the human mind works, a depiction somewhat similar to the simplified, literalized idea of dissociative identity disorder in Fight Club. At the same time, the idea of “literally talk[ing]” to a subject also evokes the talking cure often associated with Freud’s psychoanalytic work. In other instances, when Cobb discusses limbo, he talks about it as “unconstructed dream space,” “just raw, infinite subconscious. Nothing is down there.” The idea of “raw,” ‘pure,’ and endless ‘subconscious’ evokes a conception of the unconscious as a kind of material, as something one can fill a (dream) world with, which also points to a simplified belief in clear binaries between what is unconscious and what is not. This popularized notion of the unconscious is also evident beyond dialogues, for instance when Ariadne joins Cobb in his dreams and discovers that Cobb uses them to store memories of Mal and their children. In the dream world, these different memories are accessed through an elevator, and at the very bottom of it, reached by pressing the button for the basement, Cobb has stored the memory of a trauma, of Mal committing suicide.230 This references a popular understanding of both repression and the unconscious, with Cobb repressing and ‘hiding away’ the memory he most regrets in the deepest layer of his mind. The way in which Inception presents such aspects of the human psyche thus corresponds not so much to psychological understandings but rather to concepts from cultural studies, to popularized theories of psychoanalysis and psychology—for instance, the spatiality of the human mind that the film evokes is also a core element especially of Freud’s theories of consciousness, his ‘topography of the mind’ (cf. Dare et al. 57-71). Significantly, the film simplifies Freud’s psychoanalytic concepts, displaying a much more direct understanding of accessing somebody’s unconscious, whereas dreams for Freud were only the “‘royal road to the Unconscious’” (Dare et al. 76) but not a direct expression of it. These depictions reveal an interest of the film both in scientific

230

‘subconsciousness.’ But the term has retained its popularity. When it is employed to say something ‘Freudian,’ it is proof that the writer has not read his Freud” (qtd. in Freud 576). Mal’s suicide and the way she ‘haunts’ Cobb intertextually relates to Tarkovsky’s film Solaris, where Kris Kelvin’s deceased wife Hari returns as a kind of specter on the research station Solaris after having committed suicide many years before. Solaris also includes unstable elements centered around time and reality, and both films show a clear interest in psychological issues and can be productively read with psychoanalytic theory. For other similarities between Inception and Solaris, cf. also Botz-Bornstein, “Movie” 205-06.

4 Unstable Realities

163

matters of how the human mind works and in fostering a dialogue with the film’s audience by featuring these concerns in a popularized manner, representing them outside of the confines of scientific discourse and in a manner that the implied audience of the film might particularly relate to.231 A second larger avenue of the film’s cultural work concerns Inception’s negotiation of textuality and fiction(ality) through its metatextual elements. It pursues these ideas particularly via three angles: the trope of architecture, the focus on dreams, and a number of elements that can be interpreted as regarding Inception as a film about films, including moments of breaking the fourth wall and showing an awareness of twist films as a genre. All three angles work together, as the film presents the creation of dreams, where architecture plays a significant role, as similar to writing stories, and the traveling within dreams akin to stories-within-stories, closely aligning dreams and fiction. Similar to the centrality of architectural and spatial metaphors for Freud’s theories of human consciousness (Hendrix and Holm 3-4), architecture and (writing) fiction are closely interwoven throughout the film. The name for the person ‘building’ the dream Cobb’s team infiltrates is “the architect,” which hails from the fact that most of these builders are indeed architects. Cobb hires Ariadne when he visits his father-in-law Miles, an architecture professor, who recommends Ariadne as one of his brightest students.232 When Cobb tries to convince Miles that this is a great opportunity for one of his students, he describes the role of the architect as “the chance to build cathedrals, entire cities, things that never existed, things that couldn’t exist in the real world.” From this early point on, the film positions architecture as something fundamentally creative, propelled by imagi-

231

232

As discussed before, in thinking about unstable texts as interested in popularization, their own popularity as texts is also significant. Inception’s ‘project’ to depict popularized versions of particularly psychoanalytic and philosophical concepts in order to make them more ‘speakable’ resonates with its enormous popularity as a feature film. Regardless of the causality of this relationship—whether the film partly became popular because of its popularizing depictions or not—as an overall cultural artifact, Inception thus fosters a public dialogue about issues usually only discussed in scientific, academic, or professional discourse. Similar to Interstellar (cf. 4.2.2), this is traceable in a variety of different texts—just like for Nolan’s 2014 film, there are (magazine) articles and blog posts listing Inception’s alleged plot holes (e.g., “7 Plot Holes”) and others trying to explain its narrative (e.g., Outlaw), discussions in forums about these aspects, and two edited academic collections that each discuss ‘Inception and Philosophy’ (Botz-Bornstein, Inception; D. K. Johnson, Inception). I understand all of these different texts as evidence of the film’s cultural work, particularly as engendering an exchange about philosophical and scientific matters by representing them in a popularized manner. Fittingly, Ariadne, in Greek mythology, is connected to labyrinths and mazes, particularly that of the Minotaur, and one of Cobb’s first tasks for Ariadne in the film is also to draw up a sufficiently challenging maze.

164

Narrative Instability

nation, and in this sense a form of art 233 that is similar to creating fiction, stories, or narratives. Additionally, the quote immediately links this matter of creating architecture, worlds, and/or fiction to the question of reality, positing these dream architectures as superior since they “couldn’t exist in the real world.” This point is taken up again throughout the film via instances of “paradoxical architecture,” such as the Penrose stairs that form a continuous loop, which are possible in dreams by “cheat[ing] architecture into possible shapes,” as Arthur explains to Ariadne. Kiss points out that the steps “clearly and even literally [refer] to that bi-directional logic among the embedded narrative levels” (41). Later, during the heist, Arthur ‘creates’ such a staircase when he is chased by one of Fischer’s security projections while they are inside Arthur’s level of the dream; and Ariadne’s earlier attempts at literally unstable architecture equally focus on such ‘unrealistic’ features of the dream worlds. Architecture is thus used metaphorically in the film to link it to notions of creation and imagination, particularly as Cobb talks about “buil[ding] for years” when in limbo, yet it also establishes a connection between such creations, notions of reality, and, in a literary sense, realism.234 In turn, architecture is closely linked to the creation of dreams, which is another way for the film to metaphorically discuss textuality and fictionality. The way dreams are supposed to work in the film and are talked about by Cobb and his team posit them closely to the symbolic form of narrative. When they plan and design the dream world for Fischer’s inception, Cobb mentions that [t]he subconscious is motivated by emotion, right? Not reason. [...] We need to find a way to translate this [i.e., breaking up Fischer’s father’s empire] into an emotional concept. [...] I think positive emotion trumps negative emotion every time. We all yearn for reconciliation, for catharsis. 233

234

This high-culture notion of architecture (and, consequently, the building of dreams or creation of fiction) as art also shines through in Cobb and Ariadne’s exchange that this way of designing a building, which “feels like it’s almost creating itself,” is “genuine inspiration,” evidencing a belief in a divide between inspiration that is ‘genuine’ and one that is not. Cobb’s description that limbo’s endless opportunities of creation made Cobb and Mal feel “like gods” also elevates architecture to such high levels. The way the film makes use of architecture speaks to an understanding of architecture and the creation of fiction as two “interrelated systems of signification” (Kanzler, “Architecture” 583). Of the many parallels between the two systems, the visual representation of limbo also sticks out—when Cobb explains to Ariadne that they “built for years,” the camera shows old, partly crumbled buildings in the foreground and newer skyscrapers on the horizon. The process of building these structures is thus presented similarly to a revision-driven process of writing as well, with newer drafts replacing older ones. Furthermore, Charles Burnetts notes the similarities between the way architects are envisioned by the film and how ‘narrative architecture’ and the construction of space work in video games (243).

4 Unstable Realities

165

Their focus on dreams eliciting emotions and on the Aristotelian concept of catharsis evokes the conceptualization of fictional narratives, closely aligning the ‘success’ of the dream world meant to convince Fischer with the telling of a ‘good story’—even though, again, this understanding of catharsis as “reconciliation” constitutes a popularized usage of the term. Earlier, Eames already stressed the sophistication needed for this kind of craft: “It’s not just about depth. You need the simplest version of the idea in order for it to grow naturally in your subject’s mind. It’s a subtle art,” explicitly pointing to emotional catharsis being provided through the experience of art, such as a compelling story surrounding “the simplest [...] idea.” The film’s conception of dreams, then, consists of two core aspects: The surrounding architecture, which, in the comparison to a fictional text, would provide the setting and other ‘descriptive’ elements, and the ‘core’ elements that fill this architectural world with emotion, meaning, and the potential for catharsis—through a narrative. At the same time, as the film’s characters muse about these aspects and viewers later see scenes showcasing this kind of narrative manipulation of Fischer’s mind, the film highlights the metatextual dimension of audiences currently watching a fictional film that works in a smaller manner. In fact, this dimension is pronounced in the film as well, when Cobb tells Ariadne that dream infiltration allows them to “[take] over the creating part” of one’s mind perceiving and creating a world simultaneously when dreaming, similar to how one can conceptualize the experience of a fictional text and the (re)creation of a storyworld. Indeed, through its focus on architecture, dreams, and stories, Inception establishes a constant concern with matters of (meta)textuality and fiction, which allow for an interpretation of the film as a metatextual engagement with the nature of storytelling (in films) in general (cf. also J. R. Olson). Inception thus does not just use its narrative instability to point to questions of narration—prompting viewers to think about the narrative perspective of the film and Cobb’s reliability after the ending scene—but it also connects this effort to a certain self-awareness as a fictional text, displayed on a number of levels. First and foremost, the aforementioned concerns about dreams and architecture directly relate to Inception as a film, as telling a story as well, and when Cobb mentions that “[w]e all yearn for [...] catharsis,” this evokes the question of catharsis for the film itself as well. This interpretation is also strengthened by smaller instances of metatextual awareness throughout the story, such as the occurrence of mise-en-abymes, and by particular constellations of parts of the mise-en-scène.235 235

The first prominent example of a mise-en-abyme occurs as Ariadne places two large mirrors opposite each other when she is still discovering her dream-building powers as an architect. When she touches the mirror showing Cobb and herself infinitely duplicated, it shatters, in itself symbolizing the instability of this fantastic representation. Another mise-en-abyme is seen when Eames impersonates a blonde woman and talks to Saito in an elevator, again showing their infinite reflections in opposite mirrors. Most of them look like the woman, but one shows Eames’s actual

166

Narrative Instability

For instance, the music in the film works to subtly establish a connection between the diegetic world of the film’s characters and the extradiegetic frame of the film’s viewers, consciously linking these two textual levels. In the film’s plot, Cobb’s team uses Édith Piaf’s chanson “Non, je ne regrette rien” as a musical cue to synchronize the ‘kick’ needed across all levels to exit the dream world. When Yusuf, in his level, starts playing that music, the characters in the deeper levels of the dream hear it, albeit in a slowed-down and distorted version, since, as Cobb explains, time “seems to feel more slow” in a dream. In addition to Piaf’s piece, another musical constant in the film is Hans Zimmer’s iconic soundtrack, which particularly centers on a booming trombone sound, which has come to be known as the ‘Inception sound.’236 After a YouTube video revealed that this sound is an extremely slowed-down version of the beginning of “Non, je ne regrette rien,” Zimmer explained in an interview that “all the music in the score is subdivisions and multiplications of the tempo of the Édith Piaf track” (qtd. in Itzkoff). This can be understood as a mixing of diegetic and extradiegetic levels through music: While Cobb’s team already hears a slowed-down version of Piaf’s song, the extradiegetic music viewers hear as part of Inception’s soundtrack is slowed down even more, suggesting that the level the audience is on is even further down in a dream world. While only a small and barely noticeable element, this aspect highlights the film’s awareness of different textual levels, and combined with its interest in world-building and catharsis, it overall casts the film as highly self-conscious, asking its viewers to think about narration, representation, and textuality as such. A final aspect that plays into Inception’s self-awareness concerns its status as an unstable text itself, and in particular its awareness of a ‘genre’ of twist texts. While the film does not truly deliver such a twist in the end but rather achieves instability through the lack of it, its narrative shows an awareness of twists in storytelling, an explicitness that, in turn, heightens the likelihood of Inception belonging to such a ‘category’ of twist films as well. This is achieved by two kinds of plot twists in the film, which both, however, work on the level of the characters of the film rather than on the level of the film’s narration itself. The second of these plot twists is the more important one, since it displays a distinct awareness of how a twist moment functions in fiction.237 In order to convince Fischer of dissolving his father’s empire, Cobb and Eames make use of Fischer’s complicated relationship with his father, which connects this dimension of the film with 236 237

face, linking focalization and representation. For an analysis of the role of music in Inception, cf. Engel and Wildfeuer. The first concerns the revelation about Cobb’s first successful inception, when he planted the idea in Mal’s mind that her world was not real. In the moment when Cobb reveals this to Mal and Ariadne, this is actually a revelation for viewers as well, yet it is a twist restricted to the level of the plot and does not concern the narration, the way this information was previously presented, which is why it does not function as a moment of narrative instability.

4 Unstable Realities

167

Cobb’s crisis of masculinity and fatherhood as well. They know that Fischer believes his father to be disappointed in him since Fischer never achieved the greatness that his father did. Earlier, Eames, impersonating Fischer’s godfather Peter Browning, tells Fischer that, locked inside a safe to which only Fischer knows the combination, lies his father’s “most precious gift,” an alternate will that would destroy his empire. Speculating about the motivation behind that will, Fischer recounts that the last thing his father said, barely being able to speak, was the word “disappointed.” In the final level of the dream, Cobb’s team has Fischer approach the deathbed of his father inside a locked room, where his father is again barely able to speak and Fischer tries to help him: “I know you were disappointed I couldn’t be you.” To this, his father mutters quite decisively: “No, no, no. I was disappointed ... that you tried.” In that moment, the camera switches to a close-up of Fischer’s bewildered face, there is a loud gong noise, and the music immediately picks up, all to cement the notion of this as a surprise, a shock for Fischer, but presented similarly to viewers as well through the composition of the scene and the audio effects. His father then points Fischer to the safe, which he opens to find the will and a paper pinwheel, which viewers (and Eames) saw before in a photograph Fischer treasures, showing him and his father. After this scene and after awaking on Yusuf’s level of the dream, Fischer tells Eames (again impersonating Browning) that “the will means that dad wanted me to be my own man,” indicating that the inception of Fischer’s mind—and, as part of it, the twist for Fischer —has succeeded. Additionally, this moment connects to the previously discussed gendering of issues of reality in the film as well, since the twist for Fischer entails a realization about masculinity, and a stereotypically masculine belief in ‘being one’s own man.’238 All the preparation witnessed in the film before—the conception of how to reach “catharsis” for Fischer, the plan Eames comes up with to implicate Fischer’s godfather in trying to take over the company and, via the different dream levels, to eventually convince Fischer to ‘be his own man’—has come to fruition in this scene, which also clearly shows Fischer being overcome with emotion, possibly experiencing catharsis. Crucially, however, while this emotional appeal might work on a representational level for viewers as well (feeling sympathy for Fischer), the audience is aware of the constructed nature of this narrative—of the will, the pinwheel, and Fischer’s father’s feelings about his son all being artificial, created by Eames and Cobb. In the final scene with Fischer and his father, this is highlighted when the camera cuts to Eames watching them and saying “Come on, come on,” eager for his carefully planned narrative to succeed, a shot that uses 238

The overall setup of this twist figures into this as well, with ‘father issues’ serving as the central catalyst for Fischer’s emotional catharsis. When Eames notes that his “relationship with his father is even worse than we imagined,” Cobb adds that “the stronger the issues, the more powerful the catharsis.”

168

Narrative Instability

Eames as a surrogate for the audience and positions viewers in this perspective of watching the ‘twist at work’ as well. 239 Effectively, by following Cobb’s heist, audiences gain a look ‘behind the scenes’ of how such dream manipulation can work, and consequently, on a metatextual level, they look behind the scenes of a twist narrative as well. The self-aware creation of, in a way, an unstable storyworld for Fischer, through these dreams, thus points to Inception’s awareness not just of fiction and storytelling but of unstable narratives and their potential emotional impact in particular. This distinct metatextual awareness pervading the film ultimately works to set up a twist for the film itself, strengthening the expectation that Inception’s final scene will indulge in narrative instability, only to end on ambivalence instead, which, ultimately, leads to instability as well. The film’s awareness as a textual artifact transfers its concerns about reality and realism to its own narrative—if, as the film suggests for Cobb and for viewers, the difference between reality and dream should not matter as much, then this also suggests that the difference between Inception, as a piece of fiction, and reality is not that significant either. Besides its science-fiction setup, the film thus also appeals to its own relevance, with real-life phenomena like lucid dreaming (cf. Brogaard 32) carrying parts of its subject matter outside the realms of (science) fiction and, more generally, its themes and concerns being relevant to contemporary American audiences. As Cobb complains that his projection of Mal is “just not good enough” since he cannot “imagine [her] with all [her] complexity, all [her] perfection, all [her] imperfection,” he seems to lament the power of creating, of fiction, as well, as only ever being able to imitate reality but never to accurately reproduce it. In the end, however, at the sight of his children, this ‘flaw’ of fictionality does not seem to concern him as much anymore as it did with his wife. Ultimately, part of the cultural work of Inception, beyond popularizing and making-speakable psychological concepts and allowing its audience to reflect on filmic storytelling, also lies in reaffirming the power of narrative, the relevance of fictional stories for nonfictional lives. ***

239

On a metatextual level, the scene thus visualizes how Mittell describes the activity of viewers, as ‘amateur narratologists,’ taking pleasure in the discourse level of fiction by “watch[ing] the gears at work” (“Narrative Complexity” 35) and thus “trigger[ing] an interest in the mode of storytelling” (Kiss 42). Note, as well, that the film here decides to highlight the pleasure gained from seeing the twist succeed, focusing solely on the positive aspects of the in- and deception of Fischer. It chooses not, for instance, to highlight the moral quandaries of inception in the first place, or particularly that this entire plan only serves Saito’s corporate greed in convincing Fischer to end his father’s business empire—instead, the plan is only positively connoted by aligning it so closely with Cobb being able to see his children again.

4 Unstable Realities

169

In this subchapter, I have analyzed the film Inception as a text whose narrative instability concerns questions of reality and that ultimately embraces epistemic uncertainty. As I examined in the three subchapters, the film achieves this instability by rendering space and time unstable through the fluid interweaving of dreams and diegetic reality. In turn, its concerns about reality are framed as an epistemological issue, and as one that is distinctly gendered, linking epistemic concerns about reality with a crisis of white masculinity. Finally, the film consistently connects its narrative’s reality with larger textual questions, particularly with an understanding of how (film) narratives work, proposing to see similarities between the fantastic dream spaces in Inception and the nature of fiction. One of the film’s central suggestions is that the question what exactly happened in its ending, which parts of the narrative are real and which are a dream, does not actually matter as much; instead, it proposes to embrace its ending’s ambivalence and appeals to a more emotional or affective rather than rational ‘catharsis’ through, particularly, fatherhood. As such, Inception can be understood to speak to the contemporary cultural moment, combining more abstract and typically ‘postmodern’ concerns such as questions of reality and the formal experimentation of its narrative with what has been dubbed ‘post-postmodernist’ or ‘neo-realist’ elements like a “more grounded” (Brooks and Toth 5) focus on feelings and family (cf. also Timmer 18). In Inception, these aspects, often portrayed as binary opposites in scholarship, are combined, as the film’s (‘postmodern’) narrative instability allows it to express these (‘post-postmodern’) concerns in the first place. However, Cobb’s embrace of fatherhood comes at the expense of silencing Mal as the most important female character in the film, patriarchally excluding a female role from both Cobb’s family idyll and the discourses surrounding questions of reality. In this sense, Inception is also a narrative of masculine recuperation, claiming that the one reality (whether it is, indeed, diegetically real or not) that matters in the end happens to be the one of white patriarchy. On another level, the film’s embrace of ambivalence seems curiously at odds with parts of its (popular) reception, which has focused, in myriad ways, on deciphering what exactly its ending means, displaying an obsession with plot and certainty similar to Cobb’s throughout most of the film. This, too, is a way in which the study of Inception as a piece of popular culture helps uncover parts of the contemporary moment, suggesting that some segments of an audience can enjoy the formal narrative experimentation and ambivalence of the film but still crave for narrative stability in the end, not being quite ready, perhaps, for its unresolved instability.240 Others might take up the film’s ambivalence as a trigger to ‘play’ with the text’s 240

Weijers similarly notes: “It’s only natural that we wanted to know if Cobb’s spinning top was going to fall—we are curious creatures who compulsively seek the truth” (105).

170

Narrative Instability

different interpretative possibilities, deriving pleasure from puzzling over the most likely explanation.241 This points to different viewing practices among the film’s diverse audiences, with some, indeed, watching similarly to ‘amateur narratologists’ in trying to piece together what happened, while others focus ‘solely’ on taking pleasure in the film’s operational aesthetics.

4.4 BioShock Infinite In the 2013 video game BioShock Infinite, players assume the role of former Pinkerton agent Booker DeWitt in the year 1912 as they explore Columbia, a fantastically floating city that seceded from the mainland US. 242 Columbia’s citizens religiously worship the Founding Fathers, abhor Abraham Lincoln for having fought to abolish slavery, and overall form a society characterized by fanatic patriotism, nationalism, and xenophobia. This fantastic setup differs vastly from the world of Inception, and yet BioShock Infinite, too, features a storyworld that renders the reality of its world unstable and uses these doubts to muse about the nature of reality and its representation. Through a twist that reveals the existence of multiple alternate universes in its world, its narrative instability centers around the construction of reality through space and time as well, but unlike Inception, it connects these concerns more specifically to a concrete historical time. While, on the outset and in terms of subject matter, the film and the game seem vastly different and thus showcase the diversity of texts featuring unstable realities, they speak to each other implicitly in the way they position reality as narratively constructed, which this subchapter will further delve into. BioShock Infinite is a first-person shooter, that is, players explore the world from the perspective of Booker DeWitt, shooting their way through various areas (or levels) of Columbia. Booker has been sent to the city to free a woman, Elizabeth, who is held captive in a tower by Columbia’s tyrannical ruler, Zachary Hale Comstock.243 Booker manages to free Elizabeth, and together, they try to escape from the city while battling the security forces that Comstock sends after them. Meanwhile, a civil war between the city’s ruling party of the Founders and a populist lower-class uprising, 241

242 243

I will examine this way of engaging with unstable texts, as part of a larger participatory culture, in more detail in the next chapter, particularly in the reading of Westworld. In this sense, BioShock Infinite can be seen as a kind of alternate history, an aspect I will come back to below. This setup positions Elizabeth as a stereotypical damsel in distress who has to be saved by the male hero. Her characterization partly changes throughout the game, as Elizabeth assumes more and more (narrative, if not ludic) authority. While gender generally also plays an important role in BioShock Infinite, it stands in the shadow of considerations of race and class, which I will focus on here. For a reading of Elizabeth’s role in the game in particular, cf. Origitano.

4 Unstable Realities

171

the Vox Populi, breaks out, eventually leading to the Vox overthrowing the city’s elites. Booker and Elizabeth succeed in ending Comstock’s oppressive rule over the city, yet during the ending of the game, they realize that in addition to their own world, countless other parallel universes exist, in many of which Comstock lives on. Elizabeth has the power to travel between these different worlds through so-called tears.244 As part of the game’s final twist, they discover that Booker and Comstock are actually the same person, but from different universes, and that Booker/Comstock is Elizabeth’s father: Years earlier, after participating in the massacre at Wounded Knee, Booker decided to get baptized, started a new life, founded Columbia, and changed his name to Comstock in some universes, while in others, he decided against the baptism at the last minute and became the Booker that players have played as throughout the game. Elizabeth and Booker try to definitively end Comstock’s reign over Columbia across all universes by preventing him from ever being born, as Elizabeth drowns Booker in the baptismal water before he can make his decision. The screen then fades to black, while a post-credits scene shows Booker back in his detective office, years earlier—leaving open the question whether they succeeded or not. After the success of the original BioShock game in 2007, a direct sequel, BioShock 2, was released in 2010, whereas BioShock Infinite is not explicitly related to these two games’ narrative but rather serves as a spiritual successor—like all games of the series, though, it has been both commercially and critically highly successful, selling more than eleven million copies (Handrahan). Also like BioShock before, it has been debated in fans’ and critics’ circles for how it (at times controversially) represents and discusses a variety of issues, among them religion, politics, and history (cf., e.g., Ekeroth; E. Lewis; Serwer; Pinsof), all pointing to the cultural impact the game has had. In academic circles, BioShock Infinite has been analyzed along similar lines, although the game has not joined the ‘canon’ of academically examined video games quite as much as its 2007 predecessor. 245 To this existing scholarship, my analysis will particularly add a thorough investigation of how its narrative and discursive elements are interwoven with subjects such as history, religion, class, and race, and it will contextu244

245

To clarify, ‘tears’ here denote fissures, as in ‘tearing something apart,’ not the bodily fluids. Such kinds of fissures and transgressions are a staple of fantastic fiction in general, which often violates “coordinates of reality like time and space, cause and effect,” and specific “boundaries” (Koenen, Visions 58; cf. also 51-52). Scholarly investigations of the game range from religion (Bosman, “Accept”; Bosman, “Lamb”; Heidbrink et al.; Squires and McBain) to agency and control (Wysocki and Brey), from history (DeHaven and Hendrickson) to metafictionality (Kajtár), and to more specific topics, such as identity (Horn), race (Mafe), Gothic monstrosity (Peaty, “Beast”), the dominance of narrative rather than ‘ludological’ elements (A. M. Green), and nostalgia and dystopia (Buinicki; Pérez-Latorre and Oliva).

172

Narrative Instability

alize the game as part of a transmedia trend, whereas most studies focus on BioShock Infinite as part of a series of games only. Since BioShock Infinite’s gameplay and narrative elements cover quite a lot of material to potentially discuss, I will again divide my inquiry into three distinct subsections. First, I will look more generally at how the game engages in narrative instability, specifically through the presence of multiple alternate universes. The game reveals this existence in a twist, which leads to a larger reevaluation of the storyworld constructed so far, but it also adds to the understanding of multiple realities by how it represents them spatially. Secondly, I will investigate BioShock Infinite’s concerns with reality, tracing how it links the existence of multiple universes to questions of historical representation by alluding to US history in numerous ways. Additionally, the game approaches the question of reality specifically as a matter of racial and class differences, which impact one’s relationship to reality. Finally, I will bring these two larger aspects together in detailing how BioShock Infinite uses unstable realities to discuss history and religion in a popularized matter and how its concerns with reality in its storyworld work on a metatextual level as well. Throughout this subchapter, I argue that BioShock Infinite ultimately exhibits a fatalistic attitude to the question which of its worlds might be real, brushing this concern aside by seeing all future outcomes as predetermined and by diminishing the agency one has in changing one’s fate. Instead, it highlights how realities within just one of these worlds might differ drastically for people from different classes and ethnicities, linking Columbia’s racial and social injustices to similar tendencies throughout US history. Yet this textual project is also troubled by being centrally presented from the perspective of normative whiteness and masculinity, partly neglecting and silencing minority voices found in the game and failing to see how questions of agency might be drastically different for oppressed subjects in Columbia’s society. On another level, BioShock Infinite connects the nexus of reality, agency, and multiverses to the playing of the game itself and to textuality in video games in particular, exposing its own flaws of a lack of narrative agency and self-reflexively relating back to the first BioShock game. 4.4.1 “A WORLD OF DIFFERENCE NARRATIVE INSTABILITY

BETWEEN

WHAT WE SEE

AND

WHAT IS”:

In BioShock Infinite, while the twist moment at the end of the game also reveals information about its protagonist’s identity, it is the way time and space function as part of its storyworld that constitutes the game’s narrative instability. The most impactful aspect of the ending’s revelations concerns how such a fantastic setup is possible, as the game reveals the presence of multiple alternate universes of the same world and characters existing across time and space, which triggers a number of revisions of the storyworld constructed thus far. Throughout BioShock Infinite, this instability is

4 Unstable Realities

173

achieved by a significant twist moment near its ending, by having the game’s story told from Booker’s partly unreliable perspective and thus aligning players with his level of (narrative) knowledge, and through the way space and time are represented in the game’s world, particularly in terms of the tears used to travel to alternate universes and regarding the game’s circular understanding of time. The game’s central moment of instability concerns the revelation that the people, locations, and events players witnessed and encountered so far are only one possible reality existing among a myriad of other, alternate universes and worlds. This also explains why it is possible for Booker and Comstock to, in a way, be the same person, but from different universes, whose paths in time ‘split’ at the moment when they decided for or against the baptism. As the long ending scenes also reveal, the Booker who does not get baptized then has a daughter, Anna, with a woman who dies at childbirth, and he is plagued by gambling debts. Meanwhile, in the other (i.e., Comstock’s) world, the scientist Rosalind Lutece discovers a way to travel between different alternate worlds and shares that technology with Comstock. Comstock eventually becomes sterile from using this machine for his prophecies but is in need of a successor. Accordingly, he tasks Lutece with traveling to the other Booker’s world and to convince him to give up his daughter Anna in order for his debts to be forgotten; she tells him, accordingly: “Bring us the girl and wipe away the debt.” That world’s Booker eventually agrees, although in the final struggle, a part of Anna’s finger remains in Booker’s world, whereas the rest of her body travels to Comstock’s, which is how Anna—later called Elizabeth by Comstock—acquires her power to open tears between worlds. Booker then lives out a regretful life until, almost twenty years later, the Luteces 246 locate him again, since they now want Booker to stop his alter ego Comstock (without telling him of that plan). At the very beginning of the game, they have already brought Booker over to Comstock’s world via a tear between the two worlds. For players, the game starts exactly after that dimensional travel, on a boat headed to a lighthouse that will transport Booker up to Columbia, so players do not initially know any of these narrative events. From then on, the rest of the story, as summarized above, plays out. Significantly, many of the additional background details surrounding these discoveries, for instance about the Luteces, can be found out by players throughout the game by exploring optional areas and discovering a number of items, which then help to recreate this overall backstory. Narratologically, the game’s instability is thus created through Booker’s unreliable perspective and his internal focalization throughout the whole game—and the fact that BioShock Infinite withholds that information from 246

Rosalind Lutece is joined by her brother, Robert, who, as players can learn through optional voxophone recordings, is herself from another universe as well, with the two of them differing only in their biological sex.

174

Narrative Instability

players until the disclosure during the ending. As the game’s opening quote, attributed to “R. Lutece” in a work called “Barriers to Trans-Dimensional Travel,” states: “The mind of the subject will desperately struggle to create memories where none exist.” This assessment does not only fit thematically to the whole game but actually relates very directly to the first scenes of the story: Booker has just been transported from his original ‘home’ world to the one where he went through with the baptism and became Comstock. Accordingly, his mind struggles to adapt to this new world, in which he already exists as another person, and in which many aspects deviate from his own reality. The Luteces make use of his scattered memory by successfully covering up the trauma of having given away his daughter Anna to them many years ago—they use the phrase “bring us the girl and wipe away the debt,” which he faintly remembers, and connect it with the new task of rescuing Elizabeth from Columbia. This phrase is repeated numerous times throughout the game and serves as a reminder for Booker to continue pursuing his task. Booker’s mind connects the rest, since he assumes he still has gambling debts and accepts this ‘quest’ to pay for them by rescuing Elizabeth from Comstock’s hold. In this sense, his mind eagerly took on the opportunity to create new memories as soon as it was presented with a narrative that is coherent—which metatextually mirrors the process of creating a storyworld, piecing together a stable narrative in the constant drive to make sense of the world. Throughout the game, this narrative of Booker being in Columbia to rescue Elizabeth because he has to ‘wipe away his debts’ is suggested to players as well—like in Inception, the viewers’ knowledge and perception are thus closely aligned with that of the protagonist. A number of times throughout the game—usually when Booker is unconscious or otherwise incapacitated—players witness what is stylized as a flashback scene set in his old detective office, visually presented as bleak and similar to film-noir aesthetics, with a voice repeating the mission to “bring us the girl and wipe away the debt.” For instance, the second time this setting is seen occurs after Booker crash-lands on an island within Columbia and momentarily loses sight of Elizabeth. The flashback scene thus helps to refocus him— and players—on his mission to find present-day Elizabeth, since both him and the players assume that this is who “the girl” refers to. At other points in the game, when Elizabeth sometimes asks Booker about personal details and his answers remain vague, he usually attributes that to a reluctance of wanting to talk about his past or having forgotten or repressed certain events for his own good. Together, while these instances of Booker’s faulty memory work as hints at his potential unreliability, there are no larger aspects that foreshadow the overall twist; and although Booker has actively repressed his memory of having given Anna away, he is simply not aware of the other parts of the ending’s revelation, particularly the existence of multiple alternate worlds, so that they come as just as much of a surprise to

4 Unstable Realities

175

him as they will to players, who thus far had been aligned with the fiction that Booker’s mind had created. While Booker’s unreliable memory is thus not alluded to much, the game does feature a number of hints towards the possibility of alternate worlds within its universe, but it reveals the complete consequences of that only in the very end. The most obvious element is Elizabeth’s ability to open tears into these other worlds. The first time Booker witnesses this, Elizabeth opens a tear into what players can immediately identify as Paris, thanks to the Eiffel Tower visible in the background. Additionally, though, the scene shows a cinema that plays “Le revanche du Jedi,” the third film of the original Star Wars trilogy. Even though the tear is just visible for a few seconds, it serves as a first hint towards Elizabeth’s ability to open portals into different worlds—and, through the intertextual link to later pop culture, into different times as well. This moment of intertextuality even works one step further, since the French name of the Star Wars film—translated as ‘The Revenge of the Jedi’—is actually the working title of film, which was eventually released as The Return of the Jedi in 1983. Hence, Elizabeth’s tear is a portal into another space, Paris, another time, the 1980s, and actually an alternative world of that time and space when compared to players’ extradiegetic reality, one in which the working title of the film became the final one. Later, Elizabeth’s ability mostly recurs as a gameplay element, as players are given choices about which kinds of tears Elizabeth can open to help Booker in battle, for instance by conjuring additional ammunition, cover from enemy attacks, or machinery fighting on their side. As Elizabeth explains, “whenever [she] get[s] anxious, tears have a way of appearing,”247 as they function as “a form of wish fulfillment.” On a narrative level, this fulfillment is very limited—Elizabeth, for instance, wants to go to Paris but apparently cannot just open a tear for her to go through permanently—but it translates into more agency for players on the gameplay level, deciding how best to combat enemies in specific scenes where they can have Elizabeth open different tears. Accordingly, their effect on the narrative is minimal, but they do slightly affect the world of Columbia and the way in which Booker engages his enemies. While they constitute unstable spaces in that they present different versions of the same space and setting, narratively and in terms of storyworld implications, these 247

This peculiarity might be a reference to Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred (1979), in which the protagonist, Dana, also travels back and forth in time during moments of anxiety and danger. Another significant similarity between the two texts concerns the bodily mark this time travel leaves on their protagonists: When, as mentioned before, Elizabeth was dragged through the tear for the first time, one part of her finger was left behind in the original world, which is why she is now missing that piece. In the ending of Kindred, Dana loses part of her arm in a similar way. Cf. Bast 48-66 on the significance of the body in Kindred as well as for a longer reading of the novel in terms of agency, which, as I argue, is also a central issue in BioShock Infinite.

176

Narrative Instability

alterations are too insignificant to constitute a meaningfully different reality. Besides being a gameplay element, even before the twist, the tears are important twice in the game’s story, as Elizabeth and Booker travel through them and into alternative realities of Columbia. Both occur at narrative ‘dead-ends,’ when the two do not know how else to proceed: In the first instance, a person they tried to rescue, a blacksmith called Chen Lin who can provide weapons for the Vox Populi, has died before they could reach him. While Booker says “dead is dead” to Elizabeth, pointing to the irreversibility of the situation, the Luteces appear, providing a very different take on fate and chance: “The same coin, a different perspective. [...] Heads. Tails. Dead. Alive.” Along with them, a tear appears that opens a way into “another Columbia,” “another world,” as the Luteces and, later, Elizabeth say. Visually, this is displayed as a portal that, indeed, ‘tears’ into the current world, showing the same general space but with different contents and in blurred sepia colors, fringed on the outer rim. Instead of the dead Chen Lin, in this world, they see weapon crates to arm the Vox Populi. Only the Luteces are visible as part of both spaces, in exactly the same position, establishing them as a ‘constant’ between both worlds. Most significantly, this visual depiction highlights that in BioShock Infinite’s understanding of time and space, different spaces are equated with different realities. Whereas the previous ‘gameplay tears’ that Elizabeth could open were locally restricted, this tear affects the entire world of the protagonists, positioning space as reality-constituting. Furthermore, while there are actually countless different worlds, the Luteces’ exact words are also significant—their description of these as “heads” and “tails,” as two sides of the same coin, suggests a binary that stands against the idea of a multiverse, an endless possibility of alternates. This, in turn, connects with how players engage with this tear—there simply is no meaningful choice whether to go through or not (or, even, to go into different worlds). Instead, if players want to continue playing the game, they must travel through the tear. After Elizabeth and Booker are convinced that this is the way forward, the game displays on the screen that players should press the F key to “open tear.” Although this is thus presented like an option to players, something they have to actively do in order to increase the feeling of agency, no alternatives whatsoever are presented. However, once they go through the portal, they will gradually learn that a lot more has changed in this world than just the one detail of Chen Lin being alive, speaking against this strict binary understanding. Overall, these scenes involving narrative tears thus establish that while there might be, in theory, numerous alternate worlds and paths to take, these are all presented linearly to players in the game— an apparent contradiction I will discuss in section 4.4.3 as part of the game’s metatextual awareness. The effects of this fantastic element on the storyworld are potentially vast, yet by aligning the player’s experience with that of Booker, the game

4 Unstable Realities

177

tries to minimize these effects until the final twist. In fact, Booker does not seem to understand what exactly transpires when they go through the tear,248 and he does not appear interested in it either, which is why Elizabeth and Booker rarely talk about this fantastic transgression explicitly. The game thus attempts to keep the impact this has on players’ construction of the storyworld minimal, although the possibility of multiple other worlds existing simultaneously actually has the potential to cause significant revisions to the storyworld. However, BioShock Infinite focuses on a linear understanding of traveling through worlds and time, not asking, at this point, what this means for the reality status of the ‘previous’ world. At the same time, the game repeatedly emphasizes the aspect that space constitutes reality, most apparent in the numerous times that its characters themselves talk about the different “worlds” they are traveling between via the spatial vehicle of the tear. Additionally, one of the first peculiar sights they perceive after crossing into the other universe are people curiously stuck in place, visually blurred and distorted, talking incoherently. When Booker notes that these men “were dead” just before, Elizabeth simply replies: “Not in this world.” People that were dead in one world and are alive in the other—and are, apparently, somehow aware of this status or vaguely remember it— seem to experience a cognitive dissonance, an existence similar to the Schrödinger’s cat paradox of quantum mechanics as both dead and alive simultaneously. This unstable existence is depicted as people being spatially stuck, ‘in limbo’ (and bleeding from their noses, a motif repeated later), as existing between two different spaces (and thus realities). Taken together, these elements hint at the larger implications of Elizabeth’s ability to travel between worlds—only during the final twist moment does she talk about this more openly with Booker, triggering a number of storyworld revisions at once.249 248

249

In a reversal of the common science-fiction trope of a stock female character as a surrogate for the audience asking about fantastic explanations—such as Inception featured it—in BioShock Infinite, it is Booker who is confused by these developments and Elizabeth who grasps them more fully. Elizabeth notes, for instance, about a person they just fought: “In the other world, he was the one who was strung up on the wall.” To this, Booker reacts with confusion: “‘In the other world?’ This whole business makes my head hurt.” While Elizabeth often does not comment on Booker’s confusion, the ending is, in a way, an extended monologue by Elizabeth explaining to Booker how exactly multiple universes work within their world. Another rather subtle hint at the vast implications of being able to open tears into other worlds works on the level of the music found in the game. Throughout Booker’s travels in Columbia, players can hear a number of songs that are contemporary to them yet that are reimagined as versions fitting into the early 1900s. For instance, at the beginning of the fair, they overhear a barbershop quartet singing the Beach Boys’ 1966 song “God Only Knows,” and while they are in Battleship Bay, a version of Cyndi Lauper’s 1979 song “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” is played on a steam organ. Parts of the latter song’s lyrics even relate to Comstock keeping Elizabeth locked in a tower quite literally: “Some boys take a beautiful girl / And

178

Narrative Instability

Finally, these events together underscore—and reveal to players—the game’s understanding of time, how time and space are interwoven, and how they influence the reality of the world(s) that players experience. In the game’s universe, different alternate worlds exist parallel to each other and ‘take place’ simultaneously. Fantastically going further than the manyworlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, though, intrusions within these different worlds are possible thanks to the Luteces’ inventions and Elizabeth’s powers. The connectedness of these different worlds is visible, for instance, through the people stuck in ‘limbo’ just discussed, or in the many appearances of the Luteces, who also travel and, in a way, exist between worlds.250 The game stresses a circular understanding of time in and among these different worlds—the events that players witness in the game have played out countless times already in “a million million worlds,” as Elizabeth phrases it. However, within this inevitable, circular repetition, the game also suggests possibilities for agency, for trying to ‘break the circle.’ Specifically, also towards the end of the game but before the twist, a future Elizabeth (from another possibility of the timeline) brings the Booker we play to her world—a world in which, as in many other timelines, Booker was not able to save Elizabeth from Comstock, which eventually led to Elizabeth being successfully indoctrinated by Comstock, becoming her successor, and fulfilling his prophecy of “drown[ing] in flames the mountains of men” by attacking the mainland USA. At the end of this level, Booker encounters this Elizabeth, who has grown very old and who explains that what eventually succeeded in her indoctrination was not Comstock’s torture, it was time: “Time rots everything, Booker. Even hope,” since she waited for decades for Booker to come and rescue her (in the stereotypical damsel-in-distress fashion). When Booker insists he was on his way, Elizabeth replies: “Song-

250

hide her away from the rest of the world.” Much later, players can learn that these songs have traveled to Columbia since the brother of businessman Jeremiah Fink heard them through a tear into the future. Their anachronistic inclusion throughout the game thus also hints at the links between different worlds, and to one between Columbia’s diegetic reality and the players’ extradiegetic one. For an investigation of the role of music in the game in particular, cf. Ivănescu. Accordingly, the Luteces suddenly appear multiple times throughout Columbia, and they possess substantial knowledge of the events to come, since it is suggested that they have followed Booker on the journey that players are currently going through hundreds of times, each time with the same outcome. Their existence across time and space is alluded to, for instance, in a humorous exchange between the two on tenses, pointing to the fact that their traveling in time cannot be adequately expressed and rendered through language: “I told you they’d come.”—“No you didn’t.”—“Right. I was going to tell you they’d come.”—“But you didn’t.”—“But I don’t.”—“You sure that’s right?”—“I was going to have told you they’d come?”—“No.”—“The subjunctive?”—“That’s not the subjunctive.”—“I don’t think the syntax has been invented yet.”—“It would have had to have been.”—“Had to have had been? That can’t be right.”

4 Unstable Realities

179

bird. He would always stop you,” referencing a mechanical bird that Comstock built to protect—but actually to imprison—her. Her specific phrasing hints at the many other worlds in which Booker attempted to save her but was “always” stopped by Songbird. Here, in this one world, she explains that with her last strength, she transported this particular Booker into her world in order to provide him with something to save the Elizabeth of his world. On the one hand, this does suggest that there is the potential for agency in that this Elizabeth worked against her indoctrination at the end of her life and tries to save other worlds (and specifically other Elizabeths) from succumbing to the same fate, yet on the other hand, it is unclear whether this particular element is simply part of the larger circularity of time as well, without necessarily having an effect that would break this continuous loop. This idea of trying to break the circularity of time in BioShock Infinite’s universe is also taken up in the ending of the game, in which Elizabeth explains that the only way to stop this repetitive cycle is to prevent Comstock from ever existing in the first place, by drowning Booker at the time of his baptism. This attempt connects with a constant motif throughout the game, primarily evoked by the song “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” that is played in a number of places.251 Significantly, though, these depictions of time also create narrative instability in that they render it more difficult for players to differentiate between the different worlds, timelines, and the possibility of interacting between them. Fundamentally, this is a problem of the narrative discourse, since although the game stresses the circularity of time, the way it presents this to players is not through a multiverse but linearly: There are no choices about going through a tear or not, and no significant decisions can be made throughout the game that would alter the main storyline. Furthermore, it is unclear if the attempt to break this circle has worked out in the end, or whether Elizabeth drowning Booker before he can get baptized happens only in one possible world, without repercussions on the others—how exactly that circularity could be broken in the first place remains unexplained by the game, and the ending prefers to close on this ambivalent note. Additionally, Elizabeth drowning Booker before he and his future wife can have their daughter, Anna/Elizabeth, is a classic instance of the ‘grandfather paradox’ of time traveling, since Elizabeth is seen killing her biological father, which she obviously never could have done without having been born (Laas 64). Similarly, a post-credits scene only adds confusion to this, again depicting Booker in his office in 1883, on the day he originally gave away Anna, calling out for her, but with the game fading to 251

The Christian hymn’s lyrics relate significantly to BioShock Infinite: The chorus’s “There’s a better home awaiting / In the sky, Lord, in the sky” can be read as directly referring to Columbia and to Comstock’s utopian vision of the floating city as an Eden-like escape from the corrupted mainland US. The initially more innocuous phrase “Will the circle be unbroken / By and by, Lord, by and by,” in turn, connects to the ending and the game’s overall understanding of circular time.

180

Narrative Instability

black before revealing whether Anna is in the crib or not. This point thus remains unclear, similar to the question whether Booker being alive at this time at all means that drowning him has not worked out in the end. Instead, after this last scene, the screen switches to show the BioShock Infinite logo, highlighting the infinite possibilities of these worlds and hinting at the circularity of all of this possibly happening once more—particularly if players play through the game again, thus metatextually linking the concerns from its storyworld to the extradiegetic act of playing. Overall, then, the game embraces ambivalence, leaving its storyworld unresolved by having pitted multiple different spaces against each other as vying for the status of the ‘legitimate’ diegetic reality. 4.4.2 REALITY AND REALITIES—HISTORY AND HISTORIES BioShock Infinite uses narrative instability to raise questions about reality in a less abstract way than Inception, displaying multiple different worlds and realities side by side due to its belief in the existence of a multiverse. Narratively, these questions are represented and framed through a focus on history, both of the fictional Columbia and the actual United States—and via their interweaving. Furthermore, BioShock Infinite specifically renders its concerns about history and reality as differences and injustices based on race and class—similar to Inception, its musings about reality are mostly filtered through the rubric of whiteness, yet while the game also includes questions of gender and, particularly, fatherhood, it instead focuses on race and class as constituting different realities for the citizens of Columbia. Accordingly, after briefly recapping the consequences of the game’s unstable elements for its treatment of reality, I will look at how unstable spaces and realities are connected to questions of US history and how they particularly occur in relation to race and class. The coexistence of multiple alternate universes within the game renders all of their reality statuses less secure—in terms of players reconciling them with each other as part of the storyworld, the different realities players witness compete, in a way, for the status as sole ‘truth.’ Rather than actually pitting one of these realities against another, however, BioShock Infinite highlights the possibility of intrusions among them, of traveling from one world to another and possibly changing each of these worlds through Booker and Elizabeth’s actions, and in the end suggesting that events in one world can also have effects on the ‘previous’ one. The game’s overall narrative setup thus stresses ambivalence when it comes to questions of reality: Even though the characters do not talk as openly and self-reflexively about the reality status of their world as, for instance, the characters of Inception, it is still unclear how the worlds work with and relate to each other. Specifically, by stressing the circularity of time, highlighting how the events of BioShock Infinite have seemingly happened just like that hundreds of times before (as witnessed by the Luteces), and ultimately not confirming

4 Unstable Realities

181

whether Elizabeth and Booker’s final act of trying to prevent Comstock from being created succeeded or not, the game exhibits a fatalistic and deterministic attitude in thinking about reality. The choices Booker makes— and, by extension, that Booker can make—seem predetermined, and the events of all the different worlds always appear to intrude upon each other in a way that leads to the same outcome. The game’s overall narrative, and the world it presents, displays a keen interest in US history and particularly in commenting on political events and movements throughout US history ironically through exaggeration. It is these connections to the history of the US that the world of Columbia narratively relates to and that, by extension, the game’s instability connects to as well. Overall, and understanding BioShock Infinite as a kind of alternate history (cf. Lizardi), Columbia can thus be seen as a microcosm of the zeitgeist of 19th-century fin-de-siècle America, a “hyperbolic version of America” (Mafe 95), highlighting in particular the exaggerated patriotism and religious fanaticism and the resulting racism, jingoism, and xenophobia that characterized parts of US society. While Columbia as a floating city is, of course, a completely fictitious vehicle to allude to this history, many of its elements reference either a sociocultural image of the US in general or specific events and figures in particular. US flags litter the streets of Columbia, particularly in the first, wealthier areas that Booker explores, and likewise, the flag’s colors of red, white, and blue predominate the decors and environments of these parts of the city, signaling its inhabitants’ patriotism. In terms of specific US figures, one of the first sights players witness when Booker enters Columbia are three statues of “Father Washington,” “Father Jefferson,” and “Father Franklin,” who, as the Founding Fathers of the US, are worshiped in Columbia. The city’s ruling party, the Founders, is likewise named after them, thus literalizing the quasi-religious adulation of the Founding Fathers in parts of the actual US by turning them into religious figures. Other such references to US historical events and figures abound throughout the game, all working towards interweaving Columbia’s fictional history and setting with that of the historical US.252 252

I will discuss the massacre of Wounded Knee, which plays an important role in both Columbian and US history, in more detail below. Other historical events and figures include the Boxer Rebellion, the Chicago World’s Fair, the RMS Carpathia, as well as Abraham Lincoln and his assassin John Wilkes Booth. In another pointed exaggeration of Columbia’s racism, it is not Lincoln but Booth whom large parts of the city’s society adore, particularly the so-called Fraternity of the Raven, which is stylized similarly to the Ku Klux Klan. Comstock shares their unfavorable view of Lincoln, as he states in a voxophone: “What exactly was the ‘Great Emancipator’ emancipating the Negro from? From his daily bread. From the nobility of honest work. From wealthy patrons who sponsored them from cradle to grave. From clothing and shelter,” thus highlighting his racist beliefs through a distorted interpretation of the history of slavery. In addition to these direct references, other characters in the game also resemble historical figures, for instance through the similarities between Fink and business magnates like Henry Ford or Andrew Carnegie.

182

Narrative Instability

What players then witness as happening in Columbia’s history during Booker’s journey mainly serves two aspects in the game’s relation to unstable realities: It links Columbia’s history further to US history, particularly in terms of racism and discrimination, and it ambiguates previously held beliefs and dichotomies, together extending its uncertainty and instability to US history as well. The central narrative conflict that players witness in Columbia occurs between the ruling party of the Founders, led by Comstock, and the Vox Populi, a populist uprising planning a revolution that comprises many lower- and working-class citizens and is led by a black woman, Daisy Fitzroy. Throughout the game, with Booker’s help, the Vox Populi eventually succeed in overthrowing the Founders’ grip on the city, looting the wealthy districts of Columbia, and driving out (and murdering) many of its wealthiest citizens. Throughout all this, especially Elizabeth (and, reluctantly, at times also Booker) initially root for Daisy and her aims and help the Vox Populi in their struggles. This sympathy for their cause is also mirrored in how players learn about the injustices in Columbia, as the game gradually exposes that its society is deeply structured by racial and class discrimination, a revelation that particularly works through the ‘gamescape,’ the narrative background made up by intricate details found in the world of BioShock Infinite—similar to how this was designed in the first BioShock game. In fact, as a video game, BioShock Infinite lays particular emphasis on the gradual exploration (and the active choices in that exploration) of Columbia (Kajtár 131; Peaty, “Beast” 196), and this is also how players will primarily learn about the social struggles within the city. Initially, and on the surface, Columbia is indeed portrayed as a utopia, an impression that is reinforced explicitly through its visual aesthetics, such as signs and posters proclaiming the city to be “this new Eden, a last chance for redemption,” casting Columbia along the Puritan idea of the ‘City Upon a Hill’ (cf. Paul 150-60).253 More implicitly, this is also established by how exactly Columbia is depicted: The first areas players explore are all portrayed full of light, with bright colors, large heroic statues, and fantastically floating buildings forming a sublime spectacle similar to the initial impression of seeing the underwater city of Rapture in BioShock. Light and the color white predominate in these scenes, symbolizing the optimism and utopian ideals the city’s founders strove for, as does the peaceful music that accompanies these areas. To top off that positive first impression, in the early areas of the game, a large-scale parade celebrates the anniversary of Columbia’s secession from the mainland US, meant to demonstrate the city’s wealth and technological progress and evoking images from the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. 253

Buinicki argues that the many references to US history have a nostalgic effect as well, as “the lush world of Columbia marshal[ing] various aspects of American popular culture [...] present[s] a seductive view of American life, at first glance even a potentially utopian one” (725).

4 Unstable Realities

183

These early impressions of Columbia thus establish the city according to Comstock’s vision in a voxophone as “another Ark, for another time”—a utopian escape from the “Sodom Below,” as the Founders call the US, having abandoned, in their view, their founding ideals of Manifest Destiny, American Exceptionalism, and pursuing a City Upon a Hill, for which they see Columbia as a second chance.254 Gradually throughout the game, however, this vision is questioned and partly deconstructed, exposed as a fabrication, both through the game’s explicit narrative events about the struggle between the Founders and the Vox Populi and particularly via its gamescape.255 The way the narrative background chips away at Columbia’s pristine image primarily happens on two levels, the aural and the visual. For the former, as players walk through the streets of Columbia, they can overhear various conversations between its citizens. In accordance with the game’s general choices in exploring the city, they can simply walk past these people and only hear snippets, or they can choose to stay briefly and listen to the entire conversations. In the latter case, they will, for example, overhear a couple’s argument in New Eden Square, in which a man warns a woman to “keep an eye on that kind of talk,” to which the other replies: “Oh, don’t turn into some Finkton radical on me, John. I do not want to be some character out of I Married a Vox Populi, now do I?” The conversation thus serves as an early hint at dissent within Columbia’s society, foreshadowing the large-scale confrontation between the Founders and the Vox Populi over the ideals and injustices of Columbia’s society. Additionally, the intertextual reference to the 1949 film I Married a Communist (also the title of a 1998 novel by Philip Roth) weaves this clash of values into similar ideological battles in the US between communism and capitalism. Many other conversations more clearly allude to Columbia’s racial and class discrimination,256 which also becomes 254

255 256

Comstock’s particular phrasing of “another Ark, for another time” not only is one of the many references to the Bible, which I will discuss further in the next section, but also foreshadows the game’s central twist, whose revelation of multiple worlds and time travel indeed locates this particular Columbia in “another time.” I have previously explored this use of the gamescape in BioShock Infinite on a visual level in particular (cf. Schubert, “Dystopia”). For instance, in a conversation among a group of women on the Battleship Bay beach, one of them complains about an “Oriental” who “stopped [her] on the street and asked [her] for the time.” Another group engages in the following conversation: Francine went to lunch with that sky-line mechanic yesterday. A mechanic? He makes a good living. An Irishman can make a good living but that doesn’t mean I want to have lunch with one. The exchange combines some of Columbia’s citizens’ discrimination based on the intersection of class and race: A mechanic is looked down upon due to his class, which, for these citizens, is not something necessarily constituted by money, re-

184

Narrative Instability

clear if players take the time to listen to some of the voxophone, which are audio recordings by some of Columbia’s citizens, often found in optional areas. Visually, especially Columbia’s racism becomes even more apparent throughout the game, again mostly via the gamescape.257 There are myriad posters, statues, images, and other depictions that lay bare the Founders’ racist ideology in their vision of Columbia, exposing it as a “white supremacist society modeled on the segregationist past of the United States” (Elmore 100). A statue in front of the main building of the Fraternal Order of the Raven depicts Comstock fighting the “Serpent of Nations,” a creature with three heads that features stereotypical depictions of presumably a black, Asian, and Jewish man (featuring, e.g., an African nose-bone ornament, an Asian conical hat, and a Jewish kippah). Like many other such symbols in Columbia, the statue solidifies the Founders’ belief in ‘us vs. them’ binaries, casting Comstock as the white American fighting against a ‘globalized’ Other, a somehow homogenized union of nonwhite nationalities. The same principle applies to a mural showing George Washington in its center in an elevated position, with the Liberty Bell and the Ten Commandments in his hand, and below him a group of people again depicted in different racist national stereotypes. In a variation of this image circulated as promotional material for the game, beneath this depiction, the mural reminds Columbians that it is their “holy duty to guard against the foreign hordes.” While the image displays a variety of nationalities and ethnicities

257

gardless of how much of a “good living” he makes, and instead has to do with social power and lifestyle (cf. Zweig 19), which a mechanic seems to lack for them. Additionally, to make the point that she would never want to associate herself with somebody of such a lower class, this woman compares the mechanic to an “Irishman,” the negative associations with whom seem to be an established point of reference for this group of people, thus combining class with racial discrimination— being Irish automatically implies a lower-class status for these citizens. The game’s narrative ‘foreground,’ its main storyline, however, focuses more on Booker, Elizabeth, and Comstock than on the civil war raging in Columbia. Accordingly, most of the visual displays of racial and class injustice are found in the gamescape. A notable exception is the final scene of the first larger part of the game, when Booker is still exploring Columbia during the anniversary festivities. A raffle is played as the highlight of the fair, with the winner allowed to throw the first baseball at an interracial couple—in what amounts to Columbia’s version of a public stoning. The entire visual display recurs to racist stereotypes, linking African Americans with monkeys, and it is framed as an enjoyable spectacle for Columbia’s citizens. The end of this scene, as the stoning is stopped at the last second, also marks an important gameplay transition: Until then, players only explored the city, without any combat, but this then is the first time they have to fight off Columbia’s police, which becomes the main gameplay from then on. On the gameplay level, the shock of seeing Columbia’s racism exposed in this visually haunting manner can thus be read as compelling players to use force against the city’s inhabitants.

4 Unstable Realities

185

—among them, presumably, Chinese, Mexican, Jewish, Native American, Arab, and Irish—it depicts all of them huddled together and drawn in the same style and dark colors, suggesting that they collaborate together and stand in contrast to the bright figure of Washington in the middle, symbolizing white Columbia. Particularly the fact that a Native American is seen among the group of “foreign hordes” also establishes that for the Founders, it is white Americans who are the rightful owners of America. 258 Together, these images all serve as propaganda to legitimize the Founders’ racist ideology, striving to keep the poor masses oppressed and to cast clear divisions between white Americans and nonwhite Others.259 While some of these posters appear in central locations of the city, others will only be found by players more carefully taking in the gamescape of the world, speaking to the game’s choices in exploring and in filling the storyworld of the game. What some of these posters but especially the visual appearance of the overall city and its citizens ultimately highlight is the overwhelming whiteness of Columbia’s ruling elite (cf. also Mafe). In line with Richard Dyer’s observation that “it often seems that the only way to see [...] whiteness [...] is when nonwhite (and above all black) people are also represented” (13), Columbia’s whiteness becomes most apparent retrospectively when, for the first time, Booker encounters a number of nonwhite people in the level “Battleship Bay.” Tellingly, all of them are employed as workers and servants of white citizens, seen cleaning up and scrubbing the floors. 260 In these areas, players encounter posters that remind these servants to “always address patrons as ‘Sir’ and ‘Madam’” and that again construct a clear bi258

259

260

Another poster makes a slightly different point—found in one of Columbia’s police offices, it shows a white woman next to the words “Her eyes ... so blue! Her skin ... so white! ... or are they? We must all be vigilant to ensure the purity of our people!” Besides advocating racial purity, this particular visual display alludes to the phenomenon of racial passing, and to a certain white paranoia that somebody who looks white might, according to crude racial beliefs, not actually be white, in reference to the historical ‘one-drop rule’ (cf. Wald 11). While the poster thus also hints at a certain awareness of the constructedness of ‘race’ as a category, more immediately, and together with the other visual displays, it exudes the Founders’ crude racist ideology and showcases how this propaganda is meant to corral together Columbia’s white population against a common enemy: anybody who the Founders consider nonwhite. As DeHaven and Hendrickson argue, the posters, and “Columbia’s media” more generally, intend “to convert the disenfranchised lower class into cogs for the machine that is Columbia’s means of production, further empowering the Founders” (123), “us[ing] visual and audio indoctrination to design and instill a culture of servitude into the lower class” (124). A voxophone by Fink that players can find also alludes to the fact that the majority of black people in Columbia are slaves from the mainland US, with Fink saying to Comstock: “Well, I’ve a man in Georgia who’ll lease us as many Negro convicts as you can board! Why, you can say they’re simple souls, in penance for rising above their station. Whatever eases your conscience, I suppose.”

186

Narrative Instability

nary between white and nonwhite citizens.261 Additionally, in this level, players will walk by segregated bathrooms, with one of them labeled “Colored & Irish Washroom,” establishing the few white workers seen in this area as likely being of Irish heritage. When Elizabeth asks Booker why there is a separate bathroom just for certain people, he answers laconically: “There just is.” To that, Elizabeth adds that this seems like an “unnecessary complication” to her. More so than previous examples, this exchange points to BioShock Infinite’s awareness of race as a social construct, with both Booker’s and Elizabeth’s replies highlighting the arbitrariness with which these social divides are cast in Columbia (and were cast in the actual US). For a contemporary audience, particularly bundling “colored” and “Irish” together will have a similar effect, pointing to a time in the US when people of Irish descent were not considered white either (cf. Ignatiev). This scene, then, also serves to highlight the whiteness of all previously encountered characters and citizens—being a fantastic game of alternate history, after all, BioShock Infinite’s world might have consisted of only white people judging from the game’s very first locations, yet these areas highlight the normative whiteness of Columbia and make that whiteness visible in the first place. Specifically, this emphasis also extends to the game’s protagonist’s whiteness—as BioShock Infinite is visually presented directly from Booker’s perspective, players rarely get to see how Booker looks. Since all they witness in the beginning of the game are other white people, they might, however, assume Booker to be white as well, in line with the Founders’ ideology of establishing whiteness as a norm. As Booker’s reflection in a few mirrors will show, this assumption seems to have been correct, and in fact, players later learn that much of what Booker has repressed as a trauma concerns his past actions of racial violence against Native Americans.262 In turn, this casts the struggles with reality that he en261

262

The visual display of Columbia’s actual injustices becomes even more apparent when players arrive in the working-class district of Finkton and, especially, the lower-class area of Shantytown, which they enter by riding down a long elevator, symbolically ‘climbing down’ the social ladder. Here, Columbia’s previously bright colors and joyful music have given way to predominantly dark and brown colors symbolizing decay, as well as to dirty buildings, leaking water, parts of the world burning, and darker background tunes and noises. Significantly, for the first time in the game, the majority of people players encounter in Shantytown are black, adding to Columbia’s strict separation (and segregation) of white and black, rich and poor, bright and dark, and, particularly in these areas, showing how Comstock’s utopian vision for the city has become a dystopia for large parts of its population. During his participation in the massacre at Wounded Knee, Booker was given the nickname ‘the white injun,’ apparently because he was particularly brutal and savage in killing Native Americans. In a voxophone by Comstock called “The True Color of My Skin,” Comstock recounts that as a soldier, he was rumored by others to be partly Native American as well, with his “family tree shelter[ing] a teepee or two,” which Comstock calls a “lie” that “had followed [him] all [his] life.” Com-

4 Unstable Realities

187

counters throughout the game as specifically a matter of whiteness. Overall, then, through the aural and visual gamescape, BioShock Infinite gradually deconstructs the city’s original utopian idyll and instead reveals Columbia’s society to be structured by class and racial discrimination. Though exaggerated, these structural inequalities relate to the reality of racial and class discrimination in the actual US of the time as well. More specifically, the way in which Columbia’s dystopian character is only gradually revealed suggests to take a closer look at US history as well, upon which deep-seated oppression and injustice will become visible. In addition to linking Columbia’s history to the US and pointing to the oppression structuring both societies, the way BioShock Infinite depicts its world also works towards questioning binaries and ambiguating clear-cut dichotomies. Whereas the previously detailed events clearly align Elizabeth’s, Booker’s (even if somewhat reluctantly), and, by implication, the players’ sympathy with the Vox Populi and against the racist Founders, the game later complicates this (symbolically and literally) black-and-white narrative. This becomes apparent through the character of Daisy Fitzroy, the leader of the Vox Populi.263 As a black woman, many of the discriminatory conflicts of the city’s society are projected through her, visible already in an early voxophone, in which she states: “When I first seen Columbia, that sky was the brightest, bluest sky that ever was. Seemed like ... heaven. Then your eyes adjusted to the light, and you saw that sea a’ white faces lookin’ hard back at you ...” This first encounter with Columbia contrasts sharply with the players’ as Booker, establishing the differences Columbian society sees between white and nonwhite people, and in turn again marking

263

stock explains that because of this, he was especially brutal against Native Americans, seeing it as a way to prove his ‘white’ heritage—as he says, “[o]nly blood can redeem blood.” Via the game’s twist, these explanations apply to Booker too, complicating his own ethnicity and his history, although no other sources in the game further comment on the validity of these claims. While the voxophone also hints at a vague (and, of course, completely irrational) reason for Comstock’ racism, it especially frames Booker’s guilt about his past as an explicitly white male problem. I have further examined such interweavings of narrative, history, and nationalism in the game in a previous article (cf. Schubert, “Columbian Nightmare”). Even more centrally, though, this overall ambiguation works along the characters of Booker and Comstock. Through the game’s twist, the narrative suggests that whatever ‘good’ deeds Booker performed in the course of the game were committed by the same person that, as Comstock, did all the ‘evil’ things that players equally witness. The game’s protagonist and its antagonist, clearly positioned as classical opposites throughout most of the story, are thus revealed as different sides of the same coin. Even further, however, through its narrative instability, the game does not necessarily provide answers but asks and highlights exactly these kinds of questions—whether Booker and Comstock really are the same person, whether everything Booker did in the game’s story was really that good and what Comstock did that evil, whether a person is defined by who they are or by what they do and the choices they make, and how we could truly know who somebody is and how to judge them (calling back to similar concerns in the first BioShock).

188

Narrative Instability

Booker as white. While her fight against the Founders is framed as a battle for justice, once the Vox have won the civil war, the entire group, 264 and Fitzroy in particular, is portrayed less sympathetically. Significantly, the game draws parallels between her and oppressive leaders like Comstock and Jeremiah Fink, highlighted by the fact that after the Vox have overthrown Fink’s rule, the propaganda messages by Fink are then taken over by Fitzroy, whose announcements, while very different in subject, are cast in a similar tone as Fink’s (cf. also Peaty, “Beast” 204).265 Eventually, Fitzroy is killed by Elizabeth, since Fitzroy wanted to kill Fink’s young son as well, because, as she says, “[i]f you wanna get rid of the weed, you got to pull it up from the root.” The game thus goes to great lengths towards making the audience feel less sympathy for Fitzroy by showcasing her cruelty in almost killing a defenseless child. That Fitzroy is killed by Elizabeth is also troubling in that, symbolically, it is a brutal act of silencing the major voice and representative of minorities in the game, “the most vital other in this narrative” (Mafe 109), as a black woman is literally stabbed in the back by a white woman. Although BioShock Infinite’s point about the corrupting influence of power is well taken—as Elmore notes about the Vox, “political power always corrupts democratic and egalitarian ideals” (100)—the choice to have the only major black character in the game assume this role is problematic in that it casts the white protagonists as saviors against a nonwhite threat (cf. also Mafe 116-17). Still, in its overall narrative context, the game eludes a clearcut criticism as well: On the one hand, it falls short in thoroughly deconstructing and revealing the discrimination of Columbia’s society because throughout the whole game, players only witness these events from Booker’s perspective, so from that of the hegemonic white male norm, compromising a more thorough critique of imperialist discourse. On the other hand, the game’s ending proclaims that the only way to consequentially end Comstock’s—and thus whiteness’s—oppressive rule over Columbia is by killing off that white male hegemon, with Elizabeth drowning Booker before he can decide to become Comstock. In this sense, while far from a postcolonial ‘writing back,’ BioShock Infinite is not a white-savior narrative either, managing to elude straightforward textual politics. Finally, the game connects this aspect of ambiguation explicitly with history when Booker and Elizabeth visit the Hall of Heroes, a kind of museum that features a display of the “Battle at Wounded Knee” and the 264

265

Notably, the Founders’ violence against the poor that players have witnessed is replaced by the Vox Populi’s equally violent treatment of wealthier citizens. Accordingly, the Vox are presented as part of “a bloody revolution that loses sight of its ideals, turns anarchistic, and becomes the new oppressor” (DeHaven and Hendrickson 114), again drawing parallels between elements previously cast as binary opposites and, overall, complicating simple narratives of good triumphing over evil. Additionally, during one of these messages, Fitzroy’s face is superimposed on the side of a building, making her presence appear authoritarian.

4 Unstable Realities

189

Boxer Rebellion. Both exhibitions misrepresent actual history by casting the Native Americans and Chinese, respectively, as the sole aggressors, and the white Columbian soldiers participating in these events as heroes, with Comstock at their helm.266 The Wounded Knee Massacre, specifically, is stylized as a heroic “battle,” corresponding to a “propagandistic and racist rewriting” (A. M. Green 125). As other examples before, this links Columbian history with US history, and again, it does that through the node of racial discrimination, here resorting to stereotypical portrayals of Native Americans as aggressive, bloodthirsty warriors (cf. Usbeck 173-77).267 Cornelius Slate, who was with Booker at Wounded Knee, criticizes this version of history in general, but particularly the fact that Comstock uses it to stylize himself as a war hero when, according to Slate, he did not even participate in these battles. What players originally witness as a clear distortion of history, a racist revisionism showcasing the propaganda efforts by Comstock, also gains another dimension through the game’s twist, since it reveals that Comstock was, in fact, at Wounded Knee, even though he was still known as Booker DeWitt back then. While the way the Hall of Heroes depicts history is still clearly a distortion, Slate’s criticism becomes less valid through the twist, again arguing against clear-cut condemnations and evaluations. Instead, this episode points to the narrative construction of history and reality, and it connects its instability specifically to the writing of history as well. Overall, the way BioShock Infinite presents Columbia to players as tightly linked to a zeitgeist of the US around the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century distinctly relates to questions of reality, asking, in particular, which (utopian or dystopian) depiction of the US and US history can be considered ‘true’ and, even more pointedly, how history can be ‘ac266

267

Accordingly, Rick Elmore notes that “[b]oth of these events link political power and racial violence—Wounded Knee marking the end of large-scale resistance to the US government’s theft and appropriation of Native lands; and the Boxer Rebellion marking a nationalist, anti-imperialist movement in China and the first time a US president sent troops overseas without congressional approval” (101). The exhibit works with a number of Native American stereotypes, depicting all of them as warriors and some of them as hiding in bushes, symbolizing a constant hidden threat—“Wounded Knee is recreated as a spectacle of fire and smoke where glowing eyes lurk in the shadows” (Mafe 106). A number of scenes also depict the Native American warriors particularly as threats to white women, gendering their association with violence, and the color red dominates the visual display, connecting its common association with danger and the color stereotypically denoting Native Americans’ skin color. A statue dedicated to Comstock, who is proclaimed as the “hero” of Wounded Knee, spells out the exhibit’s obvious intentions: “With hue and cry, with hatchet red, they danced amongst our noble dead. But when our soldiers took the field, the savage horde could only yield.” The contrasting adjectives of “noble” and “savage” further cement the binary opposition that the exhibit’s visual display casts between the Native American Other and the glorified white Columbian soldiers.

190

Narrative Instability

curately’ represented in general. The existence of multiple realities within the game’s world casts doubt on the veracity of each one, rendering the question of how we can know about that ‘truth’ more unanswerable. Instead, in an embrace of playfulness, the game chooses to highlight ambivalence through the multiplicity of possible answers and narratives, showing players a number of aspects that seemed clear initially but that become more complicated as the story’s events unfold and its instability is revealed, and it thus highlights competing visions of and ideologies within the US. These ideological battles, for BioShock Infinite, center around questions of difference, discrimination, and justice, casting in particular race and class as social categories alongside which such questions are negotiated in a society, as “racism and classism are aligned throughout” (Elmore 101). Beyond the more abstract question of reality itself, BioShock Infinite thus exhibits an interest in the specific reality of the US, prompting players to wonder what ‘America’ was and is. 4.4.3 BREAKING THE CIRCLE: UNSTABLE REALITIES, POPULARIZATION, METATEXTUALITY

AND

Bringing together the insights from the two previous sections on BioShock Infinite’s narrative instability and its interest in questions of reality will allow me to delve more deeply into the game’s cultural work as a highly popular text. Like with Inception before, this will become most visible along two lines of inquiry, the game’s interest in the popularization of scientific and cultural concepts and its self-awareness as a text itself. For the former, I will discuss the way in which BioShock Infinite presents popularized understandings of, particularly, history, religion, and multiple-universe theory and will briefly link that to the game’s own popularity. In terms of metatextuality, I will look especially at the game’s focus on history as something narrative and constructed as well as at its own distinct awareness as a video game, reading elements of the game as a discussion of ludic narrativity and agency. Part of BioShock Infinite’s popularity consists of its popularized depiction of issues and concepts with seemingly broad appeal. The game’s popularization of history—taking up some specific events and figures as well as a more general zeitgeist from US history and ‘distilling’ them into exaggerated and ironic depictions—has already been thoroughly discussed in the previous sections. As mentioned in section 4.2.2, BioShock Infinite’s representations of history are partly simplifications and do not necessarily strive for historical ‘accuracy’; rather, they are used for entertaining purposes but activate the game’s audience along the way, causing them to reflect not only on the parallels of Columbia’s society to US history but to their own time as well. Two other (very different) popularized areas particularly stand out in addition to that, though: religion and multiple-universe theory. The game features a multitude of religious references, particularly to Christian-

4 Unstable Realities

191

ity, for instance visible in the repeated use of words like “Prophet” for Comstock, “Eden” for Columbia, “Sodom Below” for the US, and the “lamb” that is (falsely) “shepherded” for Elizabeth. Very early on, when Booker enters a device in the lighthouse to elevate himself to Columbia’s heights, a voice inside the machine tells Booker: “Make yourself ready, pilgrim,” then starts a countdown to “ascension,” and, when the sphere has landed in Columbia, says “hallelujah.” This language again associates Columbia with Heaven and Eden, and it also references US history and its beginnings by calling Booker a “pilgrim,” alluding to the European settlers of Plymouth Colony. Another recurring motif throughout the game is the centrality of baptisms and the sins that need to be ‘washed away’ through them —Booker has to be baptized before he can enter Columbia proper, and he dies at the end of the game by being drowned in the baptismal waters by Elizabeth. Booker’s original decision to be baptized after his participation at Wounded Knee is also the main trigger for the game’s later revelations, linking this religious trope to its narrative instability.268 Through Comstock’s use of religious references, the game criticizes the misuse of organized religion, and it sees religion and Comstock’s prophecies as essentially narrational as well, as they can be (mis)used to great effect, similarly to the propaganda posters found in the city—as Kajtár notes, “Comstock knows about the power of stories” and myths (130). Effectively, religion becomes a tool for the Founders to reinforce their ideology of (racial) oppression and discrimination. In a voxophone, Comstock states: To tax the black more than the white, is that not cruel? To forbid the mixing of the races, is that not cruel? To give the vote to the white man, and deny it to the yellow, the black, the red—is that not cruel? Hm. But is it not cruel to banish your children from a perfect garden? Or drown your flock under an ocean of water? Cruelty can be instructive, and what is Columbia, if not the schoolhouse of the Lord?

He draws a parallel between his racist practices and the way cruelty is featured in the Old Testament, arguing for a larger reason behind Columbia’s racial injustice, which, again, does not only relate to Columbia but also to actual US history, for instance through laws against ‘miscegenation’ or denying voting rights to black Americans. Religion is thus used to peddle Comstock’s idea of a unified, homogeneous Columbian family—in line with the many references to “Father” Comstock—that is unabashedly white. This link becomes even more apparent in a voxophone by Fink entitled “A Product Like Any Other”: 268

When Booker kills Comstock by repeatedly hitting him in the head, he also ends up drowned in a washing basin, evoking the baptismal motif. Comstock’s final words are “It ... is ... finished,” in reference to Christ’s last words on the Cross. While again linking Comstock to Christianity, this reference also establishes his hubris, likening himself to Jesus Christ.

192

Narrative Instability The truth is, I don’t have a lot of time for all that ‘prophecy’ nonsense. I tell you, belief is ... is just a commodity. Old Comstock, well, he does produce. But, like any tradesman, he’s obliged to barter his product for the earthly ores. You see, one does not raise a barn on song alone. No, sir! Why, that’s Fink timber, a Fink hammer, and Fink’s hand to swing it. He needs me—lest he soil his own.

Fink’s use of the words “commodity” and “product” links his speech to a capitalist register, understanding religion as a means to an end, to be used for profits as well as for racial and social oppression. Together, both voxophone entries illuminate how religion, capitalism, and nationalism work together in Columbia’s society.269 Although the game displays Fink’s and Comstock’s morally corrupt thoughts in order to openly reveal and criticize their ideology and to expose many of Comstock’s claims as lies, it also adds, again, a more ambivalent note regarding his use of religion. While most of his prophecies seem overthe-top and are phrased in ways that benefit himself, they are not simply fabrications. Instead, many of his prophecies are true, since he has fantastically witnessed future events thanks to the Luteces’ possibility of traveling to other worlds and times. His proclaimed prophecy to “[b]eware the False Shepherd, Booker DeWitt, for he shall be as a wall between [Elizabeth] and destiny,” for instance, is factually correct—in this world, Booker will eventually prevent Elizabeth from becoming Comstock’s heir and from “drown[ing] in flames the mountains of man,” which he foresaw in another reality. Yet casting Booker as a “False Shepherd” is Comstock’s own subjective addition, pointing to how prophecies are something narrative, a matter of interpretation, as well (cf. DeHaven and Hendrickson 121-22). Overall, the references to the Bible and to religion in general, while abridged and thus presented in a simplified, popularized form, serve to highlight the role of religion in and as ideology, and throughout US history in particular, and they also work metatextually by highlighting the prophecies’ narrative nature. On a different level, BioShock Infinite takes up the scientific theory of multiple universes (also called many-worlds interpretation) from quantum physics and, while not interested in a detailed rendering of it, extrapolates from it to wonder what consequences such an interpretation and understanding of reality, space, and time would have on a world (cf. also Laas). The curious existence people might lead as part of such an understanding of time is particularly embodied in the encounters with the Luteces throughout the game, as they move seamlessly across time and space. When they meet Booker and Elizabeth at Lady Comstock’s grave, whose ghost seems to haunt the area, they tell them:

269

As DeHaven and Hendrickson note, “Comstock uses religion to establish and maintain a system that he and others in the elite benefit from” (119-20).

4 Unstable Realities

193

Why do you ask what, when the delicious question is when? The only difference between past and present is semantics. ‘Lives, lived, will live.’ ‘Dies, died, will die.’ [...] Like us all, Lady Comstock exists across time. She is both alive and dead. She perceives being both. She finds this condition ... disagreeable. Perception without comprehension is a dangerous combination.

This exchange alludes to the many-worlds interpretation more directly, and specifically to the paradox of Schrödinger’s cat, the status of a being as alive in one world, dead in another. However, the game adds an additional fantastic element to these thoughts by allowing for the intrusion among these worlds through time and interspace travel, which then leads to characters like Lady Comstock existing across different worlds and, at the same time, being both dead and alive in one. BioShock Infinite then uses this popularized understanding of multiple-worlds theory not for a scientific investigation but to ask larger questions, in line with how most science fiction works. Its cultural work lies in using this fantastic setup to point to questions specifically about choice and agency, about when, for instance, a choice (like Booker’s baptism) leads to the ‘splitting’ of worlds, meaning that it is impactful, that the decision has severe consequences. It posits that everybody is responsible for one’s decisions and actions from other potential worlds, and it wonders about one’s agency in these decisions. In the game’s ending, it presents a rather fatalistic understanding of agency by showing the events of BioShock Infinite to be predetermined and doomed to repeat themselves infinitely. Whereas Inception embraced epistemic uncertainty since it argued that we cannot definitively know what is real and what is not, BioShock Infinite suggests that reality is insignificant insofar that our actions about or because of it fail to impact it significantly and cannot change its predetermined course—which seems to be at odds with the game’s initial emphasis on the many alternate worlds that form a multiverse. From another angle, BioShock Infinite’s cultural work and its success as a popular game are also traceable in its reception, particularly in regard to those issues that it chooses to present in a popularized way. While the game was generally praised by players and critics alike, it has, at times, also been received more controversially. This pertains particularly to its representation of religion and Christianity, with some reports detailing that a member of the game’s development team threatened to quit over its portrayal of religion (Makuch, “BioShock”), others reporting on a customer who requested a refund of the game on religious grounds (cf. Bosman, “Accept”), and venues like the blog Judeo Christian Church posting a “warning to parents with gaming children” that BioShock Infinite is a “[b]latantly [a]nti-Christian [g]ame,” specifically because it “[goes] so far as to end the story with the moral being that being ‘born again in the blood of the lamb’ leads to a life of evil and only by denying baptism can the main character escape his fate of turning to a destructive life as a cult leader” (Rucker). Such criti-

194

Narrative Instability

cisms fail to see the ending in the context of the overall game, which points to both negative and positive characteristics in both Booker’s and Comstock’s lives, complicating a simple dichotomy between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ and instead exactly asking the question how one can differentiate between such clear moral opposites. Additionally, what particularly the gamescape, together with Comstock’s many proclamations, highlights is the misuse of spirituality in organized religion, to further a discriminatory ideology, instead of arguing for any misgivings in Christian teachings, which would label it as an “anti-Christian” game. Still, such episodes point out how the game’s focus on popularizing religious issues succeeds, how it resonates with US society in starting conversations through the medium of the video game.270 Finally, in bringing BioShock Infinite’s interest in instability and reality together, the game significantly connects these issues by metatextually musing about the nature of narratives and, especially, video games as narrative media themselves. This interest in narrativity becomes evident in the previously discussed level of the Hall of Heroes, which—particularly with the knowledge of the twist—points to a number of different narratives that have been spun around the events at Wounded Knee, starting with Comstock calling them a “battle” when, both in US history and in the diegetic reality of the game, it was actually a massacre. 271 While this exhibit at the Hall of Heroes clearly evokes the distortion of the history of Wounded Knee, even more than that, the game overall uses this area to point to the difficulties of telling history in general, of history being a narrative, something constructed as well. Slate twice criticizes Comstock’s version of the events, saying that the soldier’s bravery that Slate witnessed in Wounded Knee is “the history that does not fit in their books” and complaining that although it was actually Slate who was actively involved in suppressing the 270

271

As another example speaking to its popularity, some of the propaganda that the game features has also been used unironically by contemporary proponents of those reactionary political views that the game satirically comments on. One such instance received particular attention in the press: A subchapter of the Tea Party posted an image of the mural calling on Columbians to “guard against the foreign hordes” discussed in section 4.4.2 on its Facebook page, apparently taken in by its nationalistic message (Tassi). Commentators noted the irony of the Tea Party using such an image, since many of the game’s references to nationalism can be understood as criticism of political movements such as the Tea Party. Similarly to the “anti-Christian” example above, having used this image in an apparent understanding that it is a sincere depiction, not an exaggerated critique—which a close reading of it clearly shows—can be traced back to lacking the context of the overall game. Regardless of the political intentions, this episode can thus be read as BioShock Infinite being actively involved in a societal dialogue, resonating with the public, and making certain tendencies in society speakable and visible. Again, however, this complicated history of the massacre in the game mirrors US history as well, as it has not always been known as a massacre in the US either (cf. Buinicki 729-30; Gitlin).

4 Unstable Realities

195

Boxer Rebellion, “that’s not how Comstock tells it.” Both quotes specifically evoke a historical event as not simply something that is but rather as something narrated—as “history” either written down in “books” or “[told]” to somebody, showing an awareness of both history as constructed and, in this case, the tendency of history to be written by the victors (cf. also A. M. Green 133-37).272 However, Slate’s criticism of Comstock’s history focuses particularly on the fact that Comstock was not at Wounded Knee, which, as the twist reveals, is not entirely true either. Overall, then, the game points to the difficulty of accurately portraying history, partly because it is facilitated through narrative, which, as a symbolic form, has particular tendencies towards closure and eventfulness that might bring about inaccuracies. In turn, this is also metatextually relevant since BioShock Infinite is a narrative too and since the events players witness throughout the game relate to the history of Columbia as well. Even more pointedly, BioShock Infinite shows its own awareness as a narrative when it extends its metatextuality to video games and ludic narrativity.273 This idea is most intricately developed throughout the extended twist scene, as Elizabeth explains different aspects of how time and space work in the game’s world to Booker and as the two of them visit the same locations repeatedly. She explains: “They’re a million million worlds. All different and all similar. Constants and variables.” For the similarities, she recounts specifically that “[t]here’s always a lighthouse. There’s always a man, there’s always a city,” which directly points to the basic setup of BioShock Infinite—but also to the one of the first BioShock game, discussed in the previous chapter. In fact, earlier, after the final battle, Elizabeth is only able to save herself and Booker from an attack by Songbird by transporting them through a tear to another world. That world is actually the city of Rapture from the previous game, from which players can then explore a small part rendered in the graphics of BioShock Infinite. When Booker asks Elizabeth what this place is, she answers that it is simply “a doorway. One of many.” As part of its twist, BioShock Infinite thus posi272

273

As Slate says when Booker and Elizabeth are about to look at the displays of Lady Comstock’s life: “You’ve seen what Comstock has done to my history. Now see how he’s rewritten his own.” In this sense, the game weaves concepts from the humanities, not just the natural sciences, into its overall popularization, in this case the centrality of narratives for historiography, as discussed by scholars like Hayden White. On another level, BioShock Infinite displays this self-awareness early on: During the fair’s festivities, Booker can participate in a number of typical carnival games, such as trying to hit a target. These games within the game thus point to BioShock Infinite itself as a game. Furthermore, they all serve propaganda purposes, since they are framed as participants having to fight off the Vox Populi, in games called “Bring Down the Skyline Vox” or “Hunt Down the Vox.” Just like the propaganda posters and statues, these games’ narrative elements are part of the Founders’ attempted indoctrination, and in this sense, BioShock Infinite also points to itself as a text with certain politics, carrying meaning.

196

Narrative Instability

tions all the events of the first BioShock, all of its characters, locations, and storylines, as actually belonging to the world of BioShock Infinite and taking place inside of it, as one of the many possible alternate worlds for Booker, with Columbia being replaced by Rapture. While there are many differences—variables—between the two games, there are, actually, also a lot of commonalities, or constants.274 As it suddenly transports players to a famous location of the first game and sees it as one possible world of its own, BioShock Infinite points not only intertextually to that game but also metatextually to its own status as a video game by positioning itself so clearly as a part of the BioShock series. In a more abstract sense, though, the “constants and variables” do not just refer to another game but can be read as a metaphor for video-game narrativity. Due to games’ interactivity and nonlinearity, when comparing two playthroughs of the same game with each other, there will always be aspects that are the same (constants) and others that differ (variables). Large story developments or the main protagonists, for instance, will be identical, but smaller side stories, minor characters, or choices made to develop the player avatar might be different, the extent of which varies vastly from game to game, of course. This, then, is similar to how BioShock Infinite presents its understanding of multiple worlds to players: When they go through a tear to another world for the first time, they arrive in a city that also is Columbia and that also features Booker, Elizabeth, Comstock, and so on, but where some minor details differed, in the end having led to Booker’s death and him becoming a martyr. The way time and space work in the game thus mirrors video games’ iterative nature and their potential nonlinearity, metatextually linking its fantastic time-travel elements to how stories are told in video games and thus exhibiting a more ‘playful’ kind of narrativity. This metaphorical equivalence, particularly in combination with 274

Among many other elements, and besides Rapture and Columbia in general, Jack from the first game and Booker from BioShock Infinite could be read as one such constant that is different in its specifics but sufficiently similar, as well as Andrew Ryan and Comstock, the Little Sisters and Elizabeth, Atlas and Fitzroy, Tenenbaum and Lutece, the Big Daddies and Columbia’s Songbird (and/or enemies called Handymen), Fontaine’s and Fink’s companies, a city beneath the sea and a city above the skies, plasmids and vigors, audio diaries and voxophones, Ryan’s Randian objectivism and Comstock’s American Exceptionalism, and the centrality of the phrases ‘would you kindly’ and ‘bring us the girl and wipe away the debt,’ to name just a few. Other links between the worlds are more explicit, even if easy to miss: For instance, while Booker and Elizabeth are briefly in Rapture, Booker is able to use that city’s bathyspheres, which in BioShock, only Ryan and Jack (as Ryan’s son) could operate. In a voxophone by Fink, in turn, players can hear him allude to having traveled into Rapture to observe the Big Daddies and the scientist Suchong, giving him the ideas to construct the Handymen and plasmids. Many of these elements are further explored in a two-part downloadable expansion for BioShock Infinite, called Burial at Sea (released in 2013 and 2014), which casts Booker and Elizabeth as part of a film noir-inspired plot taking place in Rapture.

4 Unstable Realities

197

the brief scene set in BioShock’s Rapture and another one showing other Bookers and Elizabeths from other universes being in the same world as the one players followed so far, can be considered as breaking the fourth wall, pointing out to players that they, too, are currently playing such a game that narratively works according to “constants and variables.” While the specific kind of twist in BioShock Infinite works differently than the one previously discussed in BioShock, the moment is similar in that it also breaks players’ immersion by emphasizing its own status as a video game, yet it tries to go one step further: Whereas the “would you kindly” revelation in BioShock pointed out to players that they actually lacked control and agency, BioShock Infinite highlights that the experience of its story and the narrative revelation of its multiple realities has worked exactly like the playing of a game, like any other game in fact, including the previous games of the series, thus metonymically subsuming BioShock into BioShock Infinite’s storyworld. Applying these specific revelations of the twist to the overall game divulges a more ambivalent picture—while BioShock Infinite centrally links video games’ potentially nonlinear narrativity to its understanding of reality, the game itself does not actually make much use of such nonlinearity and is, instead, overall very linear.275 At times, however, it ‘tempts’ players to engage in such nonlinearity, as it offers Booker a number of very overt choices throughout the game, for instance when deciding whether Elizabeth should pick a brooch with the image of a bird or of a cage, symbolically standing for freedom or captivity. These decisions are portrayed in a binary way, with the player having to choose between the left or the right option, as the game does not continue until this choice is made. 276 This presentation suggests that these decisions will indeed influence something later in the game, perhaps even affect the ending, as they did in the first BioShock— this, however, is never the case. The choices have a very minimal ‘cosmetic’ effect, and none at all regarding the overall storyline or the ending, 275

276

This linearity is metatextually highlighted during the extended twist scene as well: As Booker and Elizabeth travel through a space depicting many different lighthouses and multiple Bookers and Elizabeths from other worlds, the path of the bridges that connect these lighthouses only forms right in front of them as they step onto the first part of the bridge. The reality of the world, in this sense, forms spatially just in the moment when it is narratively necessitated. Significantly, though, there is only one strict, linear path that these bridges form in the end—although the paths sometimes seem to diverge, if players move into the diverging direction, the bridge ceases to build itself, as it only continues when players walk towards the ‘correct’ direction, symbolically standing for the linearity of the game’s main storyline. Of the allegedly “million million worlds” and branching paths, players thus only ever get to experience exactly one. In another nod to the previous game, this basic presentation also mirrors how players were confronted with the choice about the fate of the Little Sisters in BioShock, working against players’ knowledge and their expectations, since that choice actually had a narrative impact.

198

Narrative Instability

instead amounting to “false alternatives, having no concrete impact on the game” (Wysocki and Brey 152). In this respect, then, BioShock Infinite is full of constants, with little room for variables that would enable players’ agency, and, in fact, the game is well aware of this linearity.277 Elizabeth’s explanation of the multiple realities existing in their world also connects back to the earlier representation of tears that the two of them go through—within the game’s fictional world, diegetically, going from one world to another is one of the ‘variables’ that Elizabeth talks about, yet discursively, since players have no choice in going through the portal or not, this is actually one of the many ‘constants.’ Hence, this is not so much a flaw of the game than an attempt to show the limits of agency and (non)linearity. In the way in which narrative agency is restricted in BioShock Infinite’s main storyline, the game’s depiction of time and space, which builds on a circular understanding of time, becomes clearly apparent. At the same time, the gamescape does generally feature a high degree of choice in terms of exploring and thus learning more about Columbia’s history and society, which plays a significant part in the construction of its storyworld that goes beyond the main narrative events. In this sense, the game’s instability not just serves to point to its own narrative but metatextually positions it as part of ludic attempts at narrating a story more broadly. *** In this subchapter, BioShock Infinite has been analyzed as a text whose narrative instability relates to the existence of multiple parallel worlds that all have an equal claim to constituting ‘reality.’ In three sections, I looked at how the game discursively achieves this instability, particularly through a significant twist moment at the end; how it understands reality as an issue directly related to the representation of history and the unequal treatment of othered people; and how these concerns metatextually resonate with other 277

It comments, for instance, on Booker having to linearly continue on his set path at a number of points. Right at the beginning, when players have to climb a ladder from a boat to eventually reach the lighthouse, if they just stand there, the Luteces will comment: “He’s not moving.”—“He will ... eventually.” Their brief exchange points to the fact that in order for the game to continue, players will have to move at some point; simultaneously, since the Luteces have traveled through time and have been through all of these events so often, they also know that Booker will ultimately do that. Similarly, at the very end of the game, when Elizabeth shows Booker how a past/alternate version of himself gave his daughter away, as Booker refuses to do exactly that now, Elizabeth says: “Booker ... you don’t leave this room until you do.” Again this can be understood in a metatextual way, since the game will simply not continue if players do not choose to hand over Booker’s daughter. It is thus both a comment on their lack of agency and on the circularity of time that the game narratively constructs, with Elizabeth knowing that this is what must happen.

4 Unstable Realities

199

textual systems, particularly the popularized depiction of religion and the game’s self-awareness of telling a video-game story. Similarly to how Inception can be read as a film about films, BioShock Infinite is thus also, beneath its surface, a “video game about video games” (Kajtár 133). The circularity of time that BioShock Infinite narratively constructs in the end downplays the significance of trying to find out which world is ‘real’ in the game’s universe, instead fatalistically suggesting that the events of the world are predetermined and destined to happen, that they have already happened, and that there is thus no real potential for agency to change anything. The game is more pessimistic about this fact than Inception, focusing on the irredeemability of one’s past ‘sins’ and even suggesting that Booker bears moral responsibility for his transgressions from another world, for the actions he only might have committed in another universe. Yet the game also moves away from such more abstract thoughts and instead emphasizes the importance of thinking about reality in historically concrete terms, using its textual experiment to criticize social and ethnic discrimination throughout US history and thus asking more generally what ‘America’ and American national character signify, suggesting that it is mainly a history of injustice. Its popularity seems to suggests that BioShock Infinite spoke to the cultural moment of the time, with nationalistically minded political movements on the rise around the time of its release, making a comparative historical perspective all the more significant. Even with its ostensibly progressive project of highlighting racial and social injustice throughout US history, however, the game gets caught up in its own attempts at ambiguating clear-cut binaries, ultimately silencing its major representative of racial minorities in favor of upholding a focus on whiteness as Columbia’s racial dominant. Beyond such historical specificity, BioShock Infinite points to the power and potential of telling stories and representing history narratively, both in a more general sense and specifically in the medium of the video game. Although it also strives to point out the shortcomings of ludic textuality, it is, at the same time, held back itself by exactly these—while it is certainly a formal experiment on the level of narrative (as a video-game story), it is less of a formal innovation as a video game.

4.5 Conclusion In this chapter, I examined the way in which unstable texts feature inconsistencies and uncertainties in how they represent time and space, which leads to instability in the process of narratively reconstructing the reality that these texts depict. The first section discussed this set of texts more generally and carved out a productive understanding of reality from relevant scholarship. Subsequently, I expanded this investigation through two larger analyses, closely reading the film Inception and the game BioShock Infi-

200

Narrative Instability

nite. While both, ultimately, downplay the question of reality they first presented so centrally for very different reasons, they still meaningfully relate considerations of reality to other issues, particularly fatherhood and masculinity, history, and social and racial injustice, and both also use their narrative instability to link discussions of reality to fictionality. The very different subject matters of these two texts and the different ways in which their textual surfaces engage with reality point out the variety of texts featuring unstable realities. Yet beneath that surface, they share crucial traits in their construction of reality, their normative focus on whiteness, and their interest in metatextual matters, speaking to the way in which an investigation of narrative instability productively combines texts otherwise perhaps not considered comparatively. Both texts attempt progressive projects in certain ways, yet they are unable—or unwilling—to thoroughly criticize or deconstruct the normative discursive power of whiteness and masculinity and partly get caught in a backlash against the rising cultural visibility of women and people of color, speaking to a complicated political moment in time. In many ways, their specific narrative setups and their nods to ostensibly progressive causes allow these texts to forego a deeper discussion of some of these complications, in the end narratively preserving the supremacy of white masculinity. As two immensely popular texts, Inception and BioShock: Infinite also allow for glimpses into parts of the contemporary cultural moment in the US, suggesting that audiences find pleasure in both formal and thematic experimentation and in the popularization of matters usually rather discussed in scientific or ‘high-culture’ discourses. While unstable realities texts revel in uncovering their own status as fictions, they still relate these overall concerns back to questions of the narrative representation of reality, whereas the texts considered in the following chapter take this interest one metatextual step further by openly pointing to textuality itself as unstable.

5 Unstable Textualities 5.1 Introduction A writer trapped inside his own story, a man whose every move is being narrated and spoken out loud by a disembodied voice, a narrator who openly talks about his frustrations with wanting to tell a story inside a video game—already the setups in these and a number of other narratively unstable texts point to a kind of instability that, in a way, goes beyond the preceding chapters’ discussions of identity or reality, concerning instead the level of the textual representation itself. In the last group of texts to be discussed in this book, textuality itself becomes unstable. With this designation, I mean to analyze texts whose storyworlds are rendered unstable by these texts’ signals to representation, by pointing out and explicitly marking the process of narration and by obscuring crucial details about their narrative situation. While all unstable texts, to a certain degree, include metatextual musings about their own narration, those featuring unstable textualities centrally use uncertainties about how information is transported to the audience—how texts are narrated—to create doubt about their storyworlds. In turn, they connect their own narration to larger concerns surrounding textuality, most prominently matters of representation, narrativity, and mediality. Coming back to my discussion of instability in chapter 2, these texts might emerge as the ‘most unstable,’ since the doubts they sow about their storyworlds go to the core of how audiences understand texts and create replications of what happens in them, through the basic question of how events are narrated. Even with such complex interests in matters of textuality, many of these texts have found widespread popular appeal, demonstrating a rising transmedial interest in ostensibly ‘avant-garde’ questions of textuality among US audiences. There are, overall, comparatively few texts that fit into this group, and these ones engage in a variety of ways to discursively achieve unstable textualities. Their most commonly shared trait are elements that clearly point to the narrative voice structuring what the protagonist of the text and its audience experience, for instance in films like Stranger Than Fiction and The Fall (2006) or in games like The Stanley Parable and Alan Wake.278 Often, different levels of narration inside of one text go beyond transmedial barri278

While they all share this generally unstable setup, they also engage with their instability on different levels—Stranger Than Fiction, for instance, resolves its instability relatively quickly, unlike Alan Wake (which is part of the reason why I will look at the latter in more detail). Films like Ruby Sparks (2012) also work similarly to Stranger Than Fiction, yet they are not that unstable to begin with.

202

Narrative Instability

ers, referring, for instance, to a narrator of a novel in a film or a game. 279 In other texts, such as the TV series Westworld, the effort of narration is less obviously pointed to, without an explicit voice-over narration, and instead, such texts parallel their own status as a narrative text through another carefully curated and narrated experience inside of their storyworlds (in Westworld’s case, a kind of Western theme park). In films like Synecdoche, New York, this feature is combined with the representation of unstable spaces and time, as discussed in the previous chapter. Finally, texts that use what is commonly called a Rashomon effect (cf. Davis et al.) also fit into this group, that is, texts that, like the original Rashomon (1950), depict the same event repeatedly with different details and features, offering contradictory accounts of the same story. Since these different versions of one story work similarly to different discursive implementations of the same basic material, they draw explicit attention to storytelling as well—for instance in films such as Hero (2002) or Vantage Point (2008). In order to look more closely at the specifics of how and why unstable textualities are implemented in contemporary popular culture, I will consider relevant issues in more general terms before then engaging in two detailed readings of primary texts. First, with the help of the video game The Stanley Parable, I will examine how unstable textualities generally work and outline a few relevant contexts and previous scholarly studies that help narrow down my focus in this chapter. Specifically, as texts that point to their own fictionality have been previously discussed in scholarship through concepts such as self-reflexivity and metafiction, I will relate my understanding of unstable textualities to these existing studies in order to highlight commonalities and differences between existing conceptions and unstable textualities. Second, the first reading of this chapter will focus on the video game Alan Wake. I inspect the game from three different angles— investigating how it creates narrative instability by simultaneously highlighting the importance of a narrative instance but obfuscating its own; working out how it understands itself as a text in a fluid and broad sense, one that insists on its textuality as reaching beyond the confines of the video-game medium; and looking at these matters from a metatextual angle, by taking the game’s own awareness as a text and particularly its reflections on its genre(s) and mode(s) into consideration. Together, I read the game as using narrative instability to somewhat anxiously and hesitantly explore its own textuality as a video game between the parameters of ‘newer’ and more traditional media. Third, the final section will concern the television show Westworld. I first establish the series’s unstable textuality by analyzing its uses of different twist scenes against the background of its own self-aware creation of a textual universe, the Westworld park, 279

In turn, a novel like House of Leaves would be an example of transmedial awareness in the other direction, referring to its own narrative constructedness through references to film and games/play.

5 Unstable Textualities

203

whose narrative appeal is carefully crafted and presented to viewers. Second, I connect the show’s interest in narrativity to its textual politics by highlighting how it at once pursues progressive gender and race politics while being held back in its portrayal by a reluctance to acknowledge the discursive power of whiteness and masculinity. As a final step, I link Westworld’s awareness of the Western genre to its interest in another symbolic form besides narrative, that of play, overall arguing that it advocates for a fusion of a traditional, narrative textuality with a ludic one and promises pleasure to its audience if they engage with the show in a game-like manner. Conceptually, these two major readings thus work slightly differently and complement each other—the section on Alan Wake is geared towards pointing out how a text, on different levels, works with unstable textualities to discuss its own mediality, whereas the reading of Westworld probes more deeply into the textual politics that accompany such an undertaking. Overall, throughout this chapter, I will argue that texts featuring unstable textualities explore their own textuality, fictionality, and narrativity primarily through a recourse to other media, comparing the textual specificities of their own medium to others or trying to combine them into transmedial textualities through a fusion of narrative and play. They thus fundamentally understand textuality as a shared trait between different media’s efforts in telling stories, and their unstable moments probe into these transmedial connections. Among the contemporary popular-culture texts I investigate in this book but particularly for those in this chapter, there is a penchant to connect narrative as a symbolic form to notions of play and gaming, interweaving traditional understandings of narrative with a ludic textuality—either in video games that frame their ludic ways of storytelling as aligning with traditional narratives (as in Alan Wake) or in non-gaming media that, in turn, reach out to forms of playing to fuel their own narrative interests (as in Westworld). As part of these efforts, similar to the texts discussed in the previous chapters, they also connect these ostensibly more arcane interests in matters of textuality to issues that they regard as tightly connected to texts and narratives, particularly (narrative) power, agency, and representation. These texts’ ludic, unstable textualities seem especially suited for negotiations and expressions of meaning in contemporary US culture, connecting with post-postmodern, ‘amateur-narratologist’ audiences.

5.2 Narrating Unstable Textualities The 2013 video game The Stanley Parable brims with references to its own efforts of telling a story, featuring a voice-over narrator who, in one of many instances, directly addresses the protagonist and the player by wondering, “[W]hy am I asking you? I’m the one who wrote the story,” or, in a metatextual aside, narrates that the protagonist “praised the game for its in-

204

Narrative Instability

sightful and witty commentary into the nature of video game structure and its examination of structural narrative tropes.” The way in which the game self-consciously points to itself as both a narrative and a video game, and how it uses these elements to complicate players’ attempts at reconstructing the storyworld, stands exemplarily for how texts featuring unstable textualities work. Accordingly, in the following section, I will use it as an illustration of some of the discursive specifics of these texts. In a second subsection, I will highlight relevant cultural and scholarly contexts for the discussion of textuality and narrativity in this chapter, which will serve as a foundation for the readings in the two later sections. 5.2.1 GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS: THE STANLEY PARABLE The Stanley Parable works as a particularly illustrative example of featuring unstable textualities since it is even more metatextually aware than the texts I will discuss later. The game puts players in the role of an office worker called Stanley, whose coworkers have miraculously disappeared one day. Presented in the perspective of a first person-shooter, 280 players explore the office building in order to uncover what happened; there is, however, no combat or other overt gameplay. Instead, navigating Stanley through the building and the choices involved in that exploration constitute the main mode of interaction. Narratively, the game’s most interesting aspect is a recurring voice-over narration that refers to itself as a “narrator” and provides a constant commentary on Stanley’s actions and on the choices he has to make, for example whether he should go through a door on the left or a door on the right. As it soon turns out, this is not a voiceover in a ‘traditional’ or ‘passive’ sense, but rather, the so-called narrator is a character himself, one who wants to tell a story about Stanley and who becomes irritated if players choose to stray from the path he has set up for Stanley’s story. Specifically, by choosing where to go in the world of Stanley’s office building, they can reach a number of different endings for this narrative, none of which, however, conclusively end the game. Instead, The Stanley Parable then switches back to its title screen and suggests to play the game again, this time making different choices. 281 In a number of these endings, players discover a massive mind-control facility beneath the office complex, monitoring all of its inhabitants’ activities. Finding and disabling that facility is, in a way, the (linear) story that the narrator wants to tell to players. What the game presents as much more intriguing, however, are the 280

281

Originally, The Stanley Parable was released as a fan-made modification to the first-person shooter Half Life 2; in 2013, it was also published as a stand-alone version. Throughout this chapter, I refer to the latter. This embrace of open-endedness is a trait of ludic textuality, rather than a more traditionally narrative one, which would strive for closure (cf. 2.1.3). Instead, The Stanley Parable embraces the nonlinearity and iteration typical of play by highlighting that different choices can lead to varying narrative outcomes.

5 Unstable Textualities

205

multiple ways to stray from the path the narrator has set up, uncovering what else they can find in the building complex and teasing out the narrator’s often frustrated reactions about the player’s unwillingness to comply with his narrative authority. For players trying to reconstruct a storyworld from these story elements, instability is created because the game’s overall narrative setup is never clarified. The events happening to Stanley that players can witness during the different paths and endings all compete with each other for the status of diegetic reality, and it is unclear how the reliability of their telling is to be judged. While, inside the game, the narrator wants to tell the linear story of Stanley uncovering the mind-control facility, the actual story of the game is barely elucidated: Stanley seems to be fantastically able to hear the voice of a man narrating his life, a man who has seeming narrative control over the environments Stanley finds himself in but who is still being controlled by a higher, unmentioned narrative instance; this curious setup above the level of the story the narrator wants to tell is never explained in the game.282 In effect, then, it is not the question of who Stanley is or where exactly he finds himself—matters of identity and reality—that primarily causes doubt in the reconstruction of the game’s storyworld but the question of who is narrating the game, how what players witness in it is being mediated and represented to them. Hence, on the level of the storyworld, it is not individual storyworld elements that are in doubt but how players learn about them, the way they are supposed to be taken together to form a storyworld—the process of reconstructing a storyworld itself. Discursively, as in texts discussed in previous chapters, the game achieves this effect through (most of the time) an internal focalization of Stanley, who does not seem to know anything about his situation, and by displaying metaleptic intrusions between the different layers of narration in the game. Even more importantly, the game’s discourse repeatedly draws attention to itself, highlighting that what players witness is somehow being narrated, but it then refuses to provide details about this very narration. This simultaneous highlighting and obfuscating of the narrative situation renders the game’s textuality unstable, infringing on the players’ process of immersion and their suspension of disbelief, as it works via the game pointing to itself as both a game and a narrative. As with other texts featuring unstable textualities, The Stanley Parable frequently refers to itself (including its own playing and its own narration), to other narrative texts, 283 and to narration and storytelling as such. The game’s various ‘endings’ (which 282

Accordingly, it remains unclear who exactly the narrator is, why he wants to tell this story, why this linear story is part of the video game The Stanley Parable, how reliable the information players are provided with is, or who exactly the other narrative instances in the game are. Additionally, the game conceals the level of agency that players have, rendering it more difficult to ascertain which narrative outcomes they can change or affect and which ones are predetermined, thus again obscuring the general narrative situation of the game.

206

Narrative Instability

have been given names by fan communities) highlight these aspects with different emphases: The “Freedom” and “Explosion” endings, for instance, relate to the players’ lack of agency in deciding on Stanley’s fate; the “Broom Closet” semi-ending, along with many others, explicitly breaks the fourth wall numerous times by referring to the player controlling Stanley; the “Museum” ending recognizes The Stanley Parable’s own status as a video-game text, a product that was created by an author; the “Games” ending intertextually refers to other video games; the “Out of Map” and “Not Stanley” endings both point to the existence of The Stanley Parable as a game by having the player character leave the diegetic world of the office complex; while the “Insane” ending alludes to other narratively unstable texts.284 Together, these endings form varying engagements with textuality that all point to an awareness of The Stanley Parable as both a video game and a conscious effort to tell a story within video games, emphasizing the process of narration as such. Ultimately, what the game specifically has in common with the other two texts I discuss in this chapter is an interest not so much in telling just one story but rather in uncovering and reflecting on the nature of telling stories, particularly in transmedial contexts. 5.2.2 (META)TEXTUALITY, SELF-REFLEXIVITY, AND GENRE With textuality—traditionally defined “in semiotics to refer to how texts are constructed and how they generate meanings” (Danesi 57)—I point to the quality of being a text, and how a text, in turn, renders its own understanding of itself, for instance through an awareness of its own narrativity, of belonging to a certain medium, or of making use of generic conventions. Texts featuring unstable textualities create instability through references to their own textuality, that is, to their process of narrating, of representing events, and of creating meaning. This opens up a number of avenues for scholarly input, as these aspects have been prominently discussed throughout literary and cultural studies. Accordingly, I will cover scholarship on self-reflection and self-reflexivity, on metafiction, on textual aspects relating to transmediality, and on questions of genre. However, instead of providing a comprehensive history of this variegated scholarship, I will point 283

284

While most unstable texts intertextually refer to a variety of different media, The Stanley Parable is especially interested in exploring video games’ narrative capabilities and thus, for the most part, stays within its own medium for these narrative explorations. However, the narrator’s overarching effort to narrate a linear story— without intrusions from the player—generally references ‘traditional’ stories known mostly from literature, which form a constant implicit frame of reference for the game’s narrative experiments. I have previously analyzed some of the endings of this game with a different thematic focus (cf. Schubert, “Playing”). For other investigations of the game, most of them examining different aspects of narrativity, cf. de Wildt; Fest; Heron and Belford.

5 Unstable Textualities

207

to impulses from these different directions to carve out similarities in their treatment of textuality that will be significant for my later readings; in this sense, my brief summary of these contexts will serve to bring their various interests into dialogue. Additionally, the issues that these studies evoke also form an important context that texts featuring unstable textualities consciously relate to. Overall, in this overview, I will point out how existing studies are most useful for my contexts when connecting their findings across different media and towards textual politics, instead of pursuing a more typological approach. Texts that draw attention to their own textuality have been predominantly discussed in terms of self-reflection and self-reflexivity across literary, film, and media studies. As Winfried Nöth historicizes the term, selfreference has been a “much discussed characteristic of postmodernity” (3; cf. also Stam xv-xvi), as “literature, the visual and the audiovisual arts and media have become increasingly self-referential, self-reflexive, autotelic” (3). Similarly, contemporary popular culture is often claimed to be “manifestly self-reflexive” as well (Maltby 29). Fundamentally, this characteristic entails a turn to “[represent] representations. Instead of narrating, [these texts] narrate how and why they narrate, instead of filming, they film that they film the filming” (Nöth 3). This always implies some extent of an “[interrogation] of literary and filmic conventions,” with texts “point[ing] to their own factitiousness as textual constructs,” “interrupt[ing] the flow of narrative in order to foreground the specific means of literary and filmic production” (Stam xi). This idea of self-reflection and self-reflexivity, and related terms like self-representation, autoreferentiality (Nöth 8), or selfconsciousness (Stam 128), have traditionally been discussed in literary studies,285 where they also intimately relate to metafiction and metareferentiality. As Patricia Waugh influentially notes, metafiction “is a term given to fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact” (2), aligning very much with conceptions of selfreflexivity as well. In this sense, it describes “the capacity of fiction to reflect on its own framing and assumptions” (O’Donnell 301). Similar to Waugh, I see an engagement with textuality not as an absolute matter (a text being metafictional or not) but as a gradational quality (14).286 285 286

For other scholarship on self-reference and self-reflexivity in literature and literary studies in particular, cf. Huber et al.; Federman 17-34; Hardin; Kušnír. Mark Currie approaches metafiction slightly differently, defining it “as a borderline discourse, as a kind of writing which places itself on the border between fiction and criticism, and which takes that border as its subject” (Introduction 2). Despite the different emphasis, Currie describes the characteristics of metafiction similarly, highlighting “a self-consciousness of the artificiality of its constructions and a fixation with the relationship between language and the world” (2). For other influential work on metafiction, cf. Scholes; Hutcheon, “Historiographic”; and Currie’s edited collection Metafiction as a whole.

208

Narrative Instability

Notably, even though discussions of metafiction and self-reflexivity propose different terminologies and argue with varying methodologies, they both highlight similar effects for their respective texts. Waugh centrally asserts that metafiction “pose[s] questions about the relationship between fiction and reality,” in turn “also explor[ing] the possible fictionality of the world outside the literary fictional text” (2). In comparison, Robert Stam notes about self-reflexive texts that they “share a playful, parodic, and disruptive relation to established norms and conventions. They demystify fictions, and our naive faith in fictions, and make of this demystification a source for new fictions” (xi). Both thus accentuate effects that will become apparent in my later readings as well, in that texts featuring unstable textualities prompt their audiences to reflect on larger questions of representation and fiction(ality). Beyond the realm of literature, self-reflexivity has been studied in other media or as a transmedial phenomenon. Most prominently—and most relevant for me here—such approaches have focused on film (cf. Withalm; Limoges), television (cf. S. R. Olson, “Meta‐Television”; Russo) , and games individually (cf. Neitzel; Jannidis; Rapp; Carrasco and Tosca). In turn, Stam’s study of self-reflexivity is an example of understanding the concept in a transmedial context as such, since he focuses on both film and literature in his monograph. Werner Wolf, in proclaiming a “metareferential turn in contemporary arts and media,” equally stresses how this is a phenomenon taking place across media, arguing, for instance, for the effect that films’ prominent cultural role in recent decades has had on “experimental fiction of radical high-art postmodernism” (“Is There” 6, 33).287 Finally, other scholarship that touches on similar questions and issues sometimes uses different thematic foci to, in the end, analyze textuality as I understand it here. Among these lines of inquiry are works on ‘breaking the fourth wall’ in television and film (cf. Auter and Davis; T. Brown); in film studies, on the notion of ‘movies about movies’ in particular (cf. Ames; Behlmer and Thomas); and in some scholarly works on metalepsis across different media (cf. Kukkonen and Klimek; Klimek). These various studies point to similar effects of self-reflexivity as in literature, but they all attend to the medial specificities of the types of texts they discuss. From these different approaches, three points seem especially noteworthy for a discussion of unstable textualities: First, while many studies focus on self-reflexivity or metafictionality only in one medium, narratively unstable texts engage questions of textuality in a transmedial and ‘convergent’ manner. They refer to other media and text types to highlight their own textuality, sometimes trying to distance themselves from them, but often to look for similarities, or even to fuse different aspects of textuality usually 287

For other studies that focus on self-reflexivity or metafiction across different media, and often specifically in popular culture, cf. in particular the essays in Wolf et al. and in Wolf, Metareferential Turn, as well as Dunne.

5 Unstable Textualities

209

associated with a particular medium, engaging in storytelling efforts across media boundaries.288 Second, in looking at how self-reflexive texts expose their own textuality, narrativity often plays an equally important role: Next to thinking about their own semiotic representation in slightly more abstract terms, many unstable texts also highlight how their way of generating meanings fundamentally works through narrative. As such, their moments of metatextual awareness frequently entail a self-awareness of their narrativity, of how stories are generally constructed. Lastly, even though discussing a text’s textuality seems like an inherently abstract subject, my focus in this chapter will be on the meanings and effects that unstable texts create through this interest, and how discussions of textuality resonate with contemporary audiences. Rather than engaging in more typological or structuralist work, as some scholarship on self-reflexivity proposes (e.g., Nöth; Santaella), I will focus on carving out the cultural work that these self-conscious engagements with textuality do. As Bhattacharjee and Thomas note, there is an “intimate connection between society, representation and textuality,” in reference to what Edward Said describes as “the interface between the ‘text and the world’” (Bhattacharjee and Thomas xxiii, xxv; cf. Said, World). This penchant of texts to theorize their own ‘contact’ with society through self-reflexive means characterizes US postmodern society in particular: Via Linda Hutcheon, Matthew Flisfeder contends that “postmodernism is more self-reflexive [than modernism] of its own political and ideological contexts” and that self-reflexivity in this context can be understood as “a way of coming to terms with the manner in which narratives and images structure our conceptions of self and society” (Flisfeder 72, 74).289 In this sense, the later discussions of unstable textualities will, to some extent, always entail an analysis of their textual politics, forming an interrogation of the contemporary moment along the ‘poetics of politics’ that I outlined in chapter 2 (cf. 2.2.1). While this multifaceted scholarship on self-reflexivity and metafiction forms an important cultural context to which texts featuring unstable textualities consciously relate, these texts also render their textuality through questions of genre. In fact, similar to notions of narrativity or mediality, in how far texts ‘belong’ to certain genres or, rather, perform parts of certain generic conventions or consciously try to break with them constitutes a significant aspect of their self-reflexive engagement with textuality. Many narratively unstable texts seem to belong to a specific genre, 290 but the texts 288 289

290

In her account of metafiction, Waugh also notes the shared similarities between certain metafictional novels and play/games (34). He further notes that “[t]hrough its self-reflexivity, parodying all types of representation, and through the use of irony, postmodern representation shows that all forms of culture [...] are grounded in ideology, and, therefore, cannot avoid their political contexts” (72; cf. also Hutcheon, Politics). For instance, and keeping in mind how contested (and overlapping) genre labels can be, these frequently reoccurring genres of narratively unstable texts include the

210

Narrative Instability

discussed in this chapter highlight their generic allegiance particularly in order to probe how genre, ultimately, is something textually and culturally constructed. For the subsequent analyses in this chapter, it will be crucial to understand genre both as a textual feature and as formed by cultural practices. The former aspect primarily describes what is popularly called genres (such as fantasy, romance, horror, or crime story), pointing to a restrictive catalog of features within which certain fictional texts operate in a ‘formulaic’ manner. John G. Cawelti has been most influential in defining such popular genres—or formulas, as he calls them—as “a combination or synthesis of a number of specific cultural conventions with a more universal story form or archetype” (Adventure 6).291 Crucially, Cawelti’s work has highlighted how adhering to such formulas does not automatically ‘dismiss’ fiction and how apparently ‘formulaic’ popular culture can be analyzed for its textual meanings and ambiguities and for the ways in which it continuously innovates certain formulas as well, which constitutes an important understanding of the study of popular culture in American studies (cf. 2.2.2).292 Thinking of genres in relation to cultural practices, in turn, is influenced by Jason Mittell’s approach to see genres as “cultural processes [...] in specific historical instances” in order to “situate [them] within larger regimes of power and better understand their cultural operation” (“Cultural Approach” 177, 178; cf. also Mittell, Genre; Edgerton and Rose; Cornea).293 In this sense, Mittell’s conceptualization tries to think about ways of scholarly investigating genres, to explain their emergence and prominence in culture and society. Such a conception also entails understanding genres as potentially fluid, dynamic, and crossing over into each other, rather than as static and unchanging. Consequently, part of this ‘cultural’ understanding of genres includes investigating which popular narratives genres make use of and which ones they engender themselves. The specific (narrative) elements

291

292

293

(psychological) thriller (e.g., Identity, The Machinist [2004], Shutter Island), mystery (e.g., Mulholland Drive, The Usual Suspects, The Game), (psychological or supernatural) horror (e.g., Black Swan, The Others, The Sixth Sense), and science fiction (e.g., Inception, Looper, Source Code [2011]). While Cawelti thus clearly also highlights a cultural component to genre, the textual elements, the “structure of narrative or dramatic conventions” (Adventure 5), still emerge as more significant for him. For other influential studies in a similar vein, cf. also Cawelti, Mystery; A. A. Berger, Popular Culture; Silverblatt. Recently, this distinction between ‘genre fiction’ and ‘high literature’ has been questioned even more, as, for instance, Andrew Hoberek notes that “respected authors such as Cormac McCarthy, Michael Chabon, Jennifer Egan, and Colson Whitehead have all more or less permanently moved into territory that blurs the line between literary and genre fiction” (Considering 11), prompting him to speak of a “genre turn” in contemporary American literature (“Literary” 66). In Complex TV, Mittell additionally notes that “[t]elevision genres are cultural categories that discursively bundle texts together within particular contexts, not simply sets of textual conventions” (233).

5 Unstable Textualities

211

relevant for such approaches depend on the genres discussed—in the later readings, I will look at horror and American Gothic (for Alan Wake) and the Western (for Westworld), and I will comment on the cultural contexts of their generic specificities during the individual readings. Discussing unstable texts’ engagement with genres will point out how they make use of narrative and cultural references that are explicitly American, adding cultural specificity to ostensibly more universal engagements with textuality. In the following two larger readings, my analysis will make visible how these generic elements are combined with self-conscious reflections on textuality and narrativity, connecting them to cultural concerns specific to these texts’ contemporary audiences.

5.3 Alan Wake Featuring a writer as a character trapped inside his own novel, seeing his ‘true self’ locked in a cabin through a television set, and fighting against a supernatural presence that feeds on artists’ creative imagination, Alan Wake (2012) adopts many of the issues and themes I touched on in the previous two chapters but transports all of them to a higher narrative and textual level. In this action-adventure game, players are in control of Alan, a successful writer of popular fiction who has recently been suffering from writer’s block and, at the behest of his wife Alice, goes with her on a vacation to the small town of Bright Falls to clear his mind. There, however, Alice mysteriously disappears and Alan wakes up after having been in a car crash, unable to remember what happened during the past seven days. In the course of the game, he pieces together that Alice seems to have been taken by an ominous ‘Dark Presence’ that supernaturally has power over Bright Falls and that has inhabited some of its citizens, turning them into mindless, violent ‘Taken.’ Players navigate Alan through the surroundings of Bright Falls and fight against a variety of Taken, who first have to be flashed with light before they can be killed with weapons. 294 On his quest to rescue Alice, Alan witnesses numerous otherworldly occurrences. Most pressingly, he finds various pages scattered around the world, which are part of the manuscript of his next novel, “Departure,” which he, however, cannot remember writing. The events detailed in the manuscript and those happening to Alan as part of the game’s story have eerie similarities, as Alan realizes that he is apparently part of his own novel, that this novel, in his own words, “has come true.” Another writer, Thomas Zane, who stayed 294

Unlike most of the previously discussed video games, players control Alan from what in game studies is called the third-person perspective (Sharp 112). That is, they do not directly see what Alan sees, and instead, the camera is positioned slightly behind and above him. Nevertheless, this third-person perspective, similar to the first-person games of the BioShock series, is also meant to suggest Alan’s internal focalization (cf. Apperley and Clemens 114).

212

Narrative Instability

at the same lodge as Alan many decades ago, was apparently also influenced and touched295 by the Dark Presence, which then assumed the physical shape of Zane’s lover Barbara Jagger. Now, Zane is trying to help Alan escape the Dark Presence’s grasp by intervening into his world in the shape of a bright light. In the end, and partly with the help of his manager and best friend Barry, the local sheriff Sarah Breaker, and the town’s eccentric ‘lamp lady,’ Cynthia Weaver, Alan seemingly manages to fight off the Dark Presence and free Alice, yet now seems to be trapped in the realm of the Dark Presence just as Alice was before. The game ends on an ambiguous note as to many of its characters’ exact fate, instead alluding to the possibility of a sequel.296 Alan Wake, originally only released on Xbox 360 consoles but later also for the PC,297 was both a commercial and a popular success (Makuch, “Alan Wake”). While the game’s narrative ambitions along with its horror/mystery atmosphere were praised (cf., e.g., Crecente), a number of (professional and fan) critics also complained that its gameplay offered relatively little variety, becoming repetitive after a while (cf., e.g., McShea). I will analyze this penchant of the game to focus especially on its narrative aspects, and perhaps less on the uniquely ludic elements that characterize it as a video game, in a transmedial context in a later subsection. Somewhat surprisingly, despite its clear metatextual interest in storytelling and popularity, Alan Wake has only relatively rarely been discussed in scholarship. 298 To the more individualized studies of the game that do exist, my reading will add a comprehensive contextualization of the game within a tradition of narratively unstable texts by highlighting the multiple dimensions from which it tackles questions of textuality and narrativity. In the following, I will look at how Alan Wake features and uses unstable textualities from three different angles. First, I will discuss its general narrative setup in order to illuminate how its discursive features and its references to textuality create instability in the process of reconstructing its 295

296

297 298

In the game, being ‘touched’ by the Dark Presence is explained as different from being ‘taken’ by it—Zane seems to be dead but still retains his consciousness, and he continues to exist as a spectral presence, a kind of haunting typical of the Gothic (cf. Biesen; Moore; Burkhardt). While this summary depicts the most important aspects of the game’s story, players will initially be more confused by the events of the game, having to piece many of these details together through vague allusions and by evaluating contradictory narrative information against each other. I will point to more of these details in the following sections whenever they are pertinent to a related analysis. The Xbox version was released in 2010, the one for PC in 2012. All references in this chapter are to the PC version of the game. This scholarship on the game mainly centers on elements of the American Gothic and other genres (Fuchs, “Hauntings”; Fuchs, “Different Kind”; Krzywinska; Gonzales), on narratological, narrative, and transmedial aspects (Fuchs, “My Name”; Fuchs, “Horror Story”; Thon 113-16), and on more specific topics such as trauma (Brasse) and myth and folklore (Stobbart).

5 Unstable Textualities

213

storyworld. This analysis will particularly focus on the multiplicity of narrative voices featured in the game. Second, I will examine the game’s evocations of text(s), textuality, and other media in general to probe its awareness of textual matters, highlighting how it understands its own textuality as not bound by the medium of the game and not easily pinpointed in one single text. Finally, and in taking these first two perspectives together, I will more closely look at metatextual moments in Alan Wake, during which the game self-consciously refers to itself as a text. This will include its understanding as belonging to a specific genre and medium, pointing out how it combines influences from different spheres into an overall transmedial text. Throughout these three sections, I will argue that Alan Wake metatextually transfers its protagonist’s ontological and epistemological anxieties to the plane of the game itself, reflecting on the place of video game narratives as lying somewhere between ‘old(er)’ and ‘new(er)’ media. The game uses its various elements of instability to muse about the nature of fiction and storytelling, presenting Alan’s story as part novel, part television, and part video game. It especially places narrative and cultural prowess on the former two media and remediates narrative strategies from them, while, paradoxically, being much less self-reflexive about its status as a video game. In the context of contemporary discussions of textuality, transmediality, and convergence, Alan Wake thus implies for newer media like video games to look towards and model themselves according to more established ones, making relatively little use of the potential of its ludic textuality. At the same time, it firmly embraces self-reflexivity and metatextuality, also suggesting that part of the appeal of textuality for video games lies in them openly ‘playing’ with it, discussing their inner workings and storytelling ambitions with their audience. 5.3.1 A MULTIPLICITY OF VOICES: NARRATIVE INSTABILITY A variety of elements add to the narrative instability in Alan Wake, yet it is ultimately the game’s constant references to textuality and narratives as well as its multiplicity of narrative voices, without ever clearly establishing one as authoritative, that impede a stable reconstruction of the storyworld. Although issues of identity and reality also prevail throughout the game, doubts about who Alan is or whether his world is (diegetically) real 299 are 299

Among many other elements, who the ‘real’ or ‘true’ Alan might be is already complicated by the fact that players are presented with different instances of Alan on different narrative levels. Later in the game, there also seems to be a doppelgänger of Alan, Mr. Scratch, more explicitly pointing to a potential confusion of identities. In terms of questions of reality as I framed them in the previous chapter, the problems of differentiating between the game’s diegetic reality, dreams, and diegetically fictional stories highlights the difficulty of ascertaining what is real. Accordingly, at the beginning of episode 3, Alan on TV plainly states: “I can’t tell reality from dream anymore.” The cabin in which Alan writes is also an example of an unstable

214

Narrative Instability

superseded by the more fundamental question of what is narratively represented while playing the game, and by which narrative instance. In the following, I will analyze the game’s unstable textuality by looking at its general narrative perspective and at the multiple narrative voices that vie for attention—notably Alan’s own three ostensibly distinct voices, those of other characters, and especially Thomas Zane’s—and by pointing out how the game highlights the importance of narrating and of textuality throughout its story. I will thus establish how Alan Wake, through its multiple references to textuality and narrativity, at once highlights the importance of knowing who narrates a story and refuses to provide clear answers for its own narrative setup. A fundamental element of the game’s narrative instability concerns how it is constantly rendered through Alan’s perspective, presenting the story almost entirely from his internal focalization. This narrative setup becomes apparent early on in the game, mainly through Alan’s frequent voice-over narration, which often appears to be a representation of his current internal thoughts. Additionally, after the opening sequence, players take control of Alan for the first time during a nightmare he has, journeying through the world of his dream, which suggests a direct access to his mind and his thoughts as well. Numerous times throughout the game, as players still control Alan from a third-person perspective, they can see and hear short flashes of the Dark Presence, in the form of Barbara Jagger, talking to Alan. During these moments, her face briefly appears on the entire screen, looking into the camera, suggesting that what players see in these moments is what Alan himself also witnesses, or possibly hallucinates in his mind. 300 Together, these elements align the players’ perspective closely with that of Alan, providing access to his thoughts but also limiting the realm of experientiality to his consciousness: When Alan jumps into the lake to rescue Alice, the game shows a cutscene and flashes forward seven days later, after Alan has crashed his car and seems to have regained his senses. The seven days in between, when Alan was under the influence of the Dark Presence and writing the manuscript in the cabin, are skipped by the gameplay because Alan was not in control of himself during those days and cannot remember them. In turn, these circumstances already establish why this internal focalization throughout the game is problematic: Alan’s point of view—

300

space in unstable time, since it physically disappears along with Alice and seems to be stuck in Thomas Zane’s time. Alan notes that it “looked like a time capsule from the sixties,” and if players look closely at a calender in the cabin, they can see that it is indeed dated from 1970. At the same time, these instances of Jagger looking straight into the camera also serve as moments of breaking the fourth wall, acknowledging not only Alan’s but also the players’ presence in the story of the game. Additionally, this internal focalization extends to auricularization, since Jagger frequently tries to taunt or confuse Alan through words as well, claiming, for instance, that he will “never get [Alice] back.”

5 Unstable Textualities

215

and, even more troublingly, his narration—is not necessarily reliable, since he suffers from, alternatively, memory lapses, amnesia, insomnia, and generally perception-related delusions. What players witness of the events happening to Alan is thus potentially compromised both because Alan has forgotten about—or has not been conscious during—a number of events and because he is generally portrayed as not having the strongest grip on reality. Consequently, the events of the game attain an overall air of uncertainty, and Alan’s own lack of trustworthiness opens up the possibility of other narrative voices laying claim on an authoritative account of the events in the game. Accordingly, throughout Alan Wake, the narrative situation is never completely clarified, and it remains unresolved until the end where exactly in the storyworld players should narratively place what they have witnessed in the game. The players’ own agency in that question is relatively low, since although they control Alan, there is comparatively little choice in how to traverse the game’s areas—the game’s overall story is very linear and only offers few opportunities to stray from its path to add to the backstory.301 In addition, the Alan controlled by players seems to be part of his own novel, and it is this novel that actually dictates the events of Alan Wake, forming a first significant narrative voice in the game. More specifically, the game shows another Alan at multiple points, the one who is inside the cabin at Cauldron Lake, writing that very novel. Consequently, since players control Alan only while he is part of the novel but not while he is writing it, they lack agency over the events happening in the game. Throughout, players see glimpses of Alan writing, each time through a television set that depicts him in the cabin. As is suggested later in the game, Alan writing in the cabin for seven days under the spell of the Dark Presence is what happened right after he tried to save Alice by jumping after her into the lake—eventually, he was able to escape the grasp of the Dark Presence and fled from the cabin and crashed his car, which is when players regain control over him. From then on, since he has written himself into the story, the events depicted in his manuscript seem to be coming true and happening to him. In this sense, the Alan in the cabin and the one players control are seemingly the same person, yet they exist on different narrative levels (and during different times)—one having written the story that the other then is a part of. Additionally, the TV sets depicting Alan in the process of writing work metaleptically as well: In a traditional story-with301

Compared to games from the BioShock series, Alan Wake’s gamescape does not offer a lot of additional narrative information to add to the storyworld. In general, players can stray from the linear main path of the game less often, and frequently, when they do, they only gain gameplay rewards such as more ammunition. The most tangible narrative incentive (and instigator of slight nonlinearity) are additional manuscript pages that are at times hidden in more remote places, as well as TV and radio broadcasts, which, however, are usually found along the main path as well.

216

Narrative Instability

in-a-story, the embedded (hypodiegetic) narrative has no insight or awareness into the frame story. Here, however, players can witness what seems to be the narrator (or author) of their story, usually a narrative anomaly. The first time players gain access to Alan in this way, after they have worked their way through the woods into a gas station, they can see and hear Alan in the cabin talking about the fact that “outside the cabin, outside the story, there’s only darkness” and hoping that the “story will come true.” It is thus not only the setup of this scene—seeing Alan craft the story players are currently enacting—but also the content of what Alan talks about that directly draws attention to textuality, to the process of telling a story. In addition to the metaleptic insight into Alan writing in the cabin, the game’s voice-over also complicates rather than clarifies its narrative setup, adding another narrative voice to it. As a case in point, after seeing Alan on TV for the first time, his voice-over comments: “I don’t believe this. It’d been me on the TV, talking crazy. Was I losing my mind?” This quotation encapsulates the difficulty in narratively pinpointing Alan’s voice-over. Usually, it seems to be a representation of Alan’s current thoughts, here commenting on his disbelief and stating that he just witnessed himself “talking crazy.” Alternatively, the voice-over could also be part of the narrator’s passages in the novel Alan is writing in the cabin. Most importantly, as the game is divided into six individual episodes, at the beginning of each, a voice-over narrates “Previously on Alan Wake” segments, which do not fit into Alan’s current thoughts, since explanations of what happened so far, in a previous ‘episode’ of Alan Wake (the narrative), point to an awareness of the discourse level of the story, which a character inside that story cannot comment on.302 This blurring of possibilities also becomes particularly evident in the tense shift in the above quote, which begins with what could be considered Alan’s current thoughts in present tense (“I don’t believe this”) but then goes over to the past tense typical of narration (“Was I losing my mind?”).303 While voice-over narration in audiovisual media is usually an unmistakable hint at a narrative presence (cf. Kozloff), in Alan Wake, it rather adds to the confusion of clearly delineating who narrates the story.

302

303

The very first voice-over, as part of the game’s opening sequence, works similarly. During it, Alan also comments on his nightmare, saying that “this dream unsettled [him],” which, again, is not an observation a character inside a dream can usually make. Whether this points to an instance of lucid dreaming or to an authorial presence narrating the events happening to Alan, both possibilities would imply a particular textual awareness on the side of the narrating subject. It is equally unclear who the “I” in “Was I losing my mind?” refers to—the Alan we play, the Alan in the cabin, or both of them, if they are the same person after all, something that seems unclear to Alan at this very moment. This confusion of identities, in turn, is exactly the point the game wants to establish through its narrative setup, impeding a clear characterization of Alan in the game’s storyworld.

5 Unstable Textualities

217

Besides seeing and listening to Alan in the cabin and hearing his constant voice-over, Alan’s narration of the manuscript pages found throughout the game adds a third central voice to the game’s storytelling effort. Whenever players find a manuscript page, it is read out loud by Alan, in exactly the same tone as his voice-over narration. On an auditory level, the utterances from Alan’s in-game character, from the Alan in the cabin, from the voice-over narration, and from the pages thus all resemble each other and overlap, suggesting their similarity. However, the narration in the novel actually seems to change throughout the script. For instance, before players arrive at the gas station, they find a page detailing exactly what will happen there, stating: “Without any warning, I was blinded by a bright light. An old portable TV on the shelf had come alive by itself. Impossibly, I could see myself on the screen, talking like a madman.” Alan seems to be the firstperson narrator of these passages, presenting the scene from his perspective and foreshadowing what players will experience later.304 In other passages from the manuscript, however, events are presented from other characters’ perspectives, from different places than Alan’s current one, and even from different points in time, instead suggesting an omniscient narrator. For instance, one page details the arrival of Barry in Bright Falls: “Barry Wheeler was bouncing off the walls. He’d jumped on a plane after his calls were ignored by both Al and Alice for several days. [...] Barry had years of experience dealing with Alan Wake, and he couldn’t ignore it; something was wrong.” The passage includes details that Alan (as a character) could not know about, it is presented from Barry’s internal focalization (and uses free indirect speech, referring to his friend as “Al”), and it consistently refers to Alan in the third person, not using the first-person pronoun anymore. Throughout the manuscript of “Departure,” then, the narration shifts at least between the character Alan (writing in the first person) and an unnamed omniscient narrator (writing in the third person), who could be the writer Alan when he created the novel in the cabin, conflating the narrator with an actual authorial figure. Overall, these different voices of Alan (the 304

In addition, as I will discuss in more detail later, the page adds another narrative manifestation of Alan to the scene in the gas station—there is the Alan players play as when they arrive at the gas station, the Alan in the cabin through the TV, the Alan commenting on the scene in a voice-over, the Alan previously having written exactly that scene, the Alan reading the manuscript page out loud when they find it, and, technically, the Alan during the moment of finding that manuscript page in the first place. While the latter is the same character as the one later arriving at the gas station, the other (narrative) ‘instances’ of Alan are more difficult to position within the discursive setup of the game. Significantly, the foreshadowing of the manuscript pages, in general, has no impact on Alan—although players already read in the manuscript page what was about to happen, Alan’s reaction in the later scene does not change according to whether players found the page or not. This is also a small element that fits into the game’s reluctance to accept its ludic, interactive textuality, instead focusing on a linear main story as it would be found in a ‘traditional’ novel.

218

Narrative Instability

protagonist players play as, him writing in the cabin, his voice-over, and the narrator in the manuscript), which all appear centrally throughout the game, are impossible to reconcile with each other, impeding a clear understanding of the narrative instance(s) of (and in) the game. In addition to Alan’s own various efforts at narrating, other voices equally vie for players’ attention. Through the media of television and radio, players can gain additional insights into the community of Bright Falls via a local radio host’s program; on TV, they can watch a number of episodes of the fictional show Night Springs, which works as a homage to the actual TV show The Twilight Zone and whose themes resonate with the events of Alan Wake. More specifically inside the game, players can find yellow writing painted on houses and rocks throughout the world of Alan Wake, which only becomes visible when they shine their flashlight on it. With arrows, the yellow paint can lead players to areas off the main path and towards hidden caches of supplies. Additionally, in some areas, the yellow writing spells out what seems to be advice to Alan, for instance: “The Taken are filled with Darkness” or “The Darkness wears her face.” Such sentences take on the level of narration as well, providing possible explanations for the world’s supernatural events and further highlighting the power of the written word. Later, after players hear the local psychiatrist Dr. Emil Hartman’s explanation of what happened to Alan, they can find yellow writing saying “Don’t trust Emil,” offering a counter-narrative to Hartman’s take. Simultaneously, this message raises the question of the trustworthiness of either of these characters and, on the level of narration, of their reliability.305 The most important other narrative voice in the game is that of Thomas Zane, another writer who previously stayed at the same cabin as Alan and battled with the Dark Presence. While Zane is sometimes seen as a character in the game (dressed in a diving suit), most often, Alan encounters him as a disembodied presence, a large and bright spot of light that speaks to him in a godlike voice. In Alan’s first nightmare, Zane teaches him how to fight the Taken and advises him to “follow the light,” adding to the positive connotations that light and brightness assume in the game. He mentions that he “entered” Alan’s dream and that he “will give [him] back [his] dream” at the end of it, alluding to the similarity between these dream worlds and levels of stories, which he can enter as a narrative presence. As a case in point, only after Zane disappears does Alan’s voice-over narration resume—during the time of Zane’s presence, his voice, in a way, takes over the duty of narrating what is happening to Alan. Throughout the game, Zane is shown to have significant creative powers, for instance by changing

305

Later, players find out that these messages were written by Cynthia Weaver, who was in love with Thomas Zane and jealous of Barbara Jagger’s relationship with him.

5 Unstable Textualities

219

the landscape to his will, which is another quality aligning him with a narrator, evoking spaces through words in fiction.306 Zane’s authorial and creative powers in the game further complicate a reconstruction of the game’s story, since they are at times at odds with Alan’s. In later revelations, the game suggests that Zane did indeed exist and was a poet residing at the cabin; his then-girlfriend, Barbara Jagger, died in the lake, after which Zane tried to bring her back with the power of the Dark Presence, originally empowering the Darkness. Alan later realizes that during his time in the cabin, he wrote a fictionalized version of Zane into the story as a way out for himself, providing Zane with narrative powers that could battle the Dark Presence—it is with Zane’s help that Alan eventually manages to escape the cabin before finishing the novel. However, at the end of the fifth episode of the game, Alan finds a manuscript page, describing it in a cutscene: “The page was autobiographical, a memory from my childhood. But I didn’t write this. It was a page written by Thomas Zane. None of them were supposed to exist anymore.” Players then hear Zane’s voice read out the manuscript page, detailing how “Alan, seven years old, would fight sleep to the bitter end. [...] One evening, his mother, sitting by his bed, offered him an old light switch. She called it the ‘Clicker,’ and flicking the switch would turn on a magical light that would drive the beast away.” Many episodes earlier, players controlled Alan during a flashback in which they learn that Alan had given this ‘Clicker’ to Alice, since she suffers from a fear of the dark. Accordingly, after Zane’s narration, Alan’s voice-over adds: “My mind swirled. I had given the Clicker to Alice. Yet it was here. Zane had written it into existence ... in a story I had written.” This manuscript page points to a fundamental conundrum, namely the question of who wrote whom into existence: Upfront, this scene exhibiting Zane writing decades ago about Alan suggests that Alan and his entire story are actually a creation of Zane, raising the possibility that all of the events witnessed in Alan Wake are, in turn, part of something Zane has written. Alternatively, Alan, in the cabin, might have written about Zane 306

In the town of Bright Falls, in contrast, he is seen by some as a myth or legend— when Alan mentions him in a conversation with Sheriff Breaker, she replies: “Thomas Zane? Seriously? Might as well be Paul Bunyan or Bigfoot,” referencing two famous figures of American folklore, who equally mostly ‘exist’ through and in stories. Similarly, when Barry mentions Barbara Jagger in the presence of Randolph, the manager of a trailer park, he tells Barry and Alan: “Jagger’s a local spook story: ‘The Scratching Hag’! Comes for you in the dark. Childish stuff like that.” The way in which fantastic events in the past of the game’s world have become myths and “spook stor[ies]” decades later also speaks to interpretations in the realist mode that try to explain possibly fantastic elements in a narrative, similar to how Hartman later tries to convince Alan that the fantastic elements he witnesses are merely delusions and hallucinations. Barbara Jagger’s name also resembles Baba Yaga, a witch in Slavic folklore—cf. Stobbart for an investigation focusing specifically on myth and folklore in the game.

220

Narrative Instability

writing about Alan, so this fact of Zane knowing about Alan, and generally most of the elements surrounding Zane, might all be part of Alan’s fiction. Indeed, one of the overall questions of Alan Wake is exactly how much ‘fiction’ and how much ‘reality’ is taking place during the events of the game, or how the two could actually be differentiated. Next to all the other voices of Alan and others already obfuscating the game’s narrative situation, the question of which character is part of whose fictional novel, and who is part of whose story, looms unresolved past the end of the game. Ultimately, all of these different voices form part of the game’s narrative discourse, yet there is no overarching ‘game narrator’ or similar narrative instance with authority over them. Rather, the game consistently aligns players’ realm of experience with Alan’s compromised one, consciously creating ambivalence regarding Alan Wake’s narrative situation. Consequently, this renders the process of trying to reconstruct the game’s storyworld unstable, since it is impossible to unambiguously incorporate these different narrative levels, the metalepses between them, and their various (unreliable) narrators into just one stable storyworld. Finally, while thus refusing to present a clear narrative situation, Alan Wake, at the same time, exhibits a high degree of textual self-awareness, pointing to the importance of textuality and narrativity throughout the game. Writing is central to the basic premise of the game, at numerous points highlighting Alan’s profession—and identity—as a writer.307 Similarly, for the narrative drive of the game, writing becomes equally important: The reason Alan and Alice visit Bright Falls is that he has been suffering from writer’s block for two years. Accordingly, particularly Alice and Barry want to help Alan to continue writing, and a lot of the tension in Alice and Alan’s relationship, which players witness through flashbacks, revolves around Alan’s writing as well. The moment before Alice is taken by the Dark Presence, they have a fight about Alan’s reluctance to write, since Alice brought a typewriter to the cabin, outraging him. Moreover, inside the story Alan has been writing, it is not just the search for Alice that drives Alan but also the need to continue writing the story, since this will presumably lead to Alice’s survival. A number of figures—such as Hartman, the kidnapper Ben Mott hired by Hartman, and the Dark Presence in the form of Barbara Jagger—want him to continue writing as well, which can be read as Alan processing his writer’s block (from his diegetic reality) in the form of various pressures and deadlines compelling him to write (in the fictional world of the novel). In addition to this centrality of writing on the plot level, the story’s characters and various individual texts are themselves

307

The game centrally and explicitly points out this link right from the beginning, since Alan’s first words in the voice-over are: “My name is Alan Wake. I’m a writer.” Fittingly, this line is also repeated at the very end of the game, suggesting that Alan at least is still certain of his identity as an author.

5 Unstable Textualities

221

aware of narratives and storytelling.308 This points not only to the game’s own conscious fictionality but also to the level of awareness that its characters exhibit, highlighting the creative power of fiction, the narratively constructed nature of their own reality, and the blurriness of the line between fiction and reality. In turn, the ubiquitous references to textuality and narrativity in the game implicitly highlight the importance of a narrative presence in such texts, all while the game refuses to clarify the narrative situation of its own narration, exposing the vacuum of narrative authority in the game’s discourse. This overall uncertainty about which narrative instance provides players with information while the game, at various moments, points out that someone clearly is narrating (instead of leaving it at a more ‘invisible’ game narrator) creates instability on a textual level. Without using a singular moment of instability, as many of the previously discussed texts did, Alan Wake thus ultimately leaves its storyworld unresolved and ambiguous, with players unable to completely and beyond doubt reconstruct what has happened to Alan during the course of the game. 5.3.2 OMNIPRESENT TEXTUALITIES Matters relating to texts, stories, and narratives are omnipresent in Alan Wake, propelling forward the basic plot, motivating its characters, and appearing beneath the game’s textual surface in its discursive structure as well. These references to textuality form a larger cultural context that the game thematically relates to. In the following, I will thus first look at how texts and textuality are evoked by the game and its characters. Afterwards, I will consider intertextual and transmedia references in the game, establishing its own awareness as a text, which will also include a brief look at the various paratexts surrounding the game and extending its storyworld. Overall, I will argue that the game casts textuality as inherently interconnected, linking its own ‘multiplicity’ as a text (the multiple, partly irreconcilable stories about Alan that exist in the game) to other (media) texts and thus understanding its textuality as going beyond the physicality of its medium. References to textuality and narrativity pervade the entire game, yet Alan Wake places these references in the larger context of art and creation. Stories are positioned as an immensely powerful act of creation in the game: Early on, when players control Alan inside of his nightmare, a hitchhiker from one of his stories who has ‘come alive’ angrily asks him: “You think you’re God? You think you can just make up stuff?” Throughout the rest of the game, particularly Alan (and, to some extent, also Zane) is cast 308

For instance, in a manuscript page, Alan says that his book is “an act of creation that had rewritten the world”; in another, he insists that “[t]hings were never as simple in real life as in fiction”; while Alan on TV, in the cabin, twice claims that “[t]he story will come true”; and Cynthia Weaver explicitly tells Alan towards the end of the game: “We are characters trapped in a story you have written.”

222

Narrative Instability

as such a godlike creator, equating his ability to conjure stories with manipulating worlds and realities. In a manuscript page in which Alan notes that he “had written [him]self a way through this place in the manuscript,” he adds: “I willed the cabin to be real. And it was,” demonstrating his belief that creative willpower can engender reality. These references to stories as creation prevail throughout the game,309 and they become literalized towards its very end: In another dream before he approaches the Darkness at the end of the game, Alan finds himself back in his apartment in New York, where, in the middle of the room, the word “Clicker” floats in the air. When players point their flashlight at these words for a while—similar to how they usually neutralize the Taken possessed by the Darkness—the words vanish, and the actual light switch called ‘Clicker’ appears in the world. In the next level, this pattern is repeated for other words and objects, such as “phone,” “barrel,” the “Bird Leg Cabin,” and a “path.” These fantastic representations of words within the game’s world and their transformation into objects literalize the creative power of text, visually representing the semiotic difference between the signifier (the word “Clicker”) and the signified (the actual object, the referent). Simultaneously, these scenes also serve as a visual representation of Alan’s previous insistence that he “willed the cabin to be real,” implying that it is his creative imagination that grants him the power to turn concepts into actual objects, words into reality. Furthermore, the game also hierarchically puts narrative texts above other artistic expressions, centrally focusing on the importance of stories. 310 As Alan finds out later, the Darkness surrounding the lake seems to feed on people’s creativity—a manuscript page explains that “the poet’s [Thomas Zane’s] writing had called it from the depths and given it a brief, terrible taste of power and freedom,” while “[t]he rock stars [the Andersons] had stirred it from the deep sleep the poet had sunk it back to in the end.” The Andersons’ rock music thus also constitutes a form of creative expression for the Dark Presence, yet the manuscript page continues that “[w]hen it sensed the writer on the ferry, it opened its eyes,” implying, together with its manic pursuit of Alan throughout the game, that his creative potential is 309

310

Alan, for instance, explains that “[a] story is a beast with a life of its own. You can create it, shape it,” and that “[a] writer is a light that reveals the world of his story from darkness, shapes it from nothingness the way a sculptor carves a statue from a block of granite,” with the latter explicitly relating the crafting of a story to another form of art. Likewise, Hartman tells Alan that “[t]ogether we can create something absolutely wonderful” and, in a manuscript page, that he sees himself as a “‘producer’” for the “creators” he treats at his facility. The title of Hartman’s bestseller, The Creator’s Dilemma, equally highlights the focus on seeing (particularly) novelists as creators. Alan points to general differences among various artistic forms of expression in reference to the power of creation when, in a manuscript page, he describes the “dark place” as “unlike anything I could ever have imagined; it wasn’t solid, it flowed. It was conceptual and subjective. For someone else, an artist in another field, it would have been very different.”

5 Unstable Textualities

223

much stronger. Similarly, Emil Hartman treats a variety of artists suffering from creative problems in his clinic, but in a manuscript page, he also reveals that Alan “was easily the most promising subject he’d had ... well, since Tom, really.” In contrast, he dismisses one of his other patients because he “works on ... video games. It’s trash, of course. But it does involve some small creative effort.”311 About another, a painter, he notices that his ‘painter’s block’ was resolved once Alan arrived at the clinic, yet to Hartman he still appears “not so much [as] a creator as an ... illustrator, perhaps, a recorder of sorts.” Both Hartman and the Dark Presence thus privilege Alan’s creative powers over those of other artists, including musicians, painters, video game creators, and poets. Along this line of thinking, Alan is also positioned above Zane in terms of his creative potential, since the ability to imagine detailed worlds in prose fiction surpasses that of poetry, which rather works with figuration and symbolicity.312 Notably, these aspects of creativity and art are all discussed in the game through literal references to textuality. In unstable texts like the previously discussed Inception, which also features numerous metatextual elements, matters relating to the text itself and to the creation of worlds are metaphorized via dreams and architecture, whereas Alan Wake explicitly muses about textuality through direct references to stories and storytelling. On a discursively higher level, beyond its characters, Alan Wake highlights the interconnectedness of narratives and texts through a plethora of intertextual and intermedial allusions. These references are primarily to popular novels, films, and TV shows (and, curiously, only rarely to other video games). In terms of literature, Stephen King is explicitly evoked dur311

312

I will contextualize this brief humorous moment of the game’s metatextual awareness in the next section in more detail, arguing that Alan Wake’s own stance partly aligns with Hartman’s as well, since it places the artistic capabilities of media like the novel and television over those of video games. Coming back to the previous section’s conundrum of who between Alan and Zane created whom, this hierarchical positioning is also why, besides recognizing the game’s conscious ambiguity about this question, I would rather argue that it is Alan who (again) wrote Zane into existence, not vice versa. Throughout Alan Wake, Zane is primarily described as a poet, while for Alan, his profession as a novelist is highlighted. Since, for the game, the more narrativity a creative medium of expression has, the more powerful it can be for the Dark Presence, Alan is generally positioned above Zane in this struggle. Additionally, the confusion over who created the ‘Clicker’ was engendered through a manuscript page by Zane written as a prose text, not a poem, which is at odds with Zane’s usual mode of expression and rather hints at Alan having written that Zane wrote this page. In this regard, I would thus disagree with Michael Fuchs’s reading, which maintains that the possibility that Zane has written Alan Wake into being is the dominant interpretation of the story, stating that “Alan is a character in a piece of fiction by a writer named Thomas Zane, who died some thirty years earlier (and who, possibly, is Alan’s father – in more than one way)” (“Horror Story” 97). Besides the point just raised, I would generally counter that the game rather insists on its ambivalence regarding this issue, not providing enough textual evidence to know for certain who created whom.

224

Narrative Instability

ing Alan’s opening lines, and many of the supernatural and Gothic elements in the game appear similar to his writings. A wide array of other writers are mentioned particularly by Agent Nightingale, an (ex-)FBI agent trying to arrest Alan,313 who refers to him as, among many others, “Dan Brown,” “H. P. Lovecraft,” and “James Joyce” instead of using his actual name, also evoking similarities between Alan and these famous writers. These and many other references position both the world of Alan Wake and the game itself in an intertextual realm of fictional treatments of similar material, most prominently supernatural and horror writing and films.314 None of these references are particularly subtle or difficult to trace; instead, they are openly pointed out in the game’s textual surface, which links the game more directly to these other texts and, at the same time, highlights its own fictional status.315 Additionally, the game exhibits a constant attraction to the medium of television. Discursively, it mimics the narrative structure of television shows, since it is separated into individual episodes: Each ends with a cliffhanger, a song, and the game’s logo superimposed on the screen, after which the credits roll. When players click the credits away, the next episode starts immediately with a “Previously on Alan Wake” segment, narrated by Alan. This episodic structure tries to imitate a kind of seriality that, in contemporary media contexts, is still most often associated with television (Kelleter, “Populäre Serialität” 19). The game, however, was not actually released episodically, and the overall story works as one coherent narrative —in this sense, Alan Wake’s release format especially mirrors contemporary television in the so-called ‘post-television’ era (cf. Leverette et al.; 313

314

315

Nightingale functions as a secondary antagonist throughout the game; the exact reasons why he is pursuing Alan are never fully clarified, but he seems obsessed with Alan because the writer appears to him as a possible explanation for some of the supernatural events he has witnessed the Dark Presence engender. The game’s characters are equally aware of many popular films, referring, for instance, to Rambo and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, warning that “it’ll be Deliverance all over again” and that flocks of birds have “gone all Hitchcock on [Barry],” or commenting that “[a]ny second now and Stucky would be knocking on the door with his axe like Nicholson in The Shining.” Additionally, music forms another intertextual hub to which the game relates. Besides some forms of diegetic music heard in radio programs, the final sequence of every episode, when the credits roll, is also accompanied by songs. For instance, when Alan and Alice first arrive at the lodge (and again at the end of the first episode), Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” is playing on the radio, already raising the possibility that either all of what they experience or, at least, the supernatural existence of the lodge is a dream. Additionally, “In Dreams” was famously featured in David Lynch’s 1986 neo-noir film Blue Velvet, adding another intertextual dimension to this reference. Alan Wake thus also consciously understands itself as “a typical postmodernist text” (Fuchs, “Different Kind” 39), drawing from postmodern literature’s penchant for intertextuality and pastiche and from contemporary popular culture’s similar tendency to include a plethora of intertextual references to pop-cultural artifacts.

5 Unstable Textualities

225

Strangelove), in which many series are released season by season, rather than episode by episode.316 Still, while the immediately played “Previously” segments do not actually fit the way in which most players usually might engage with video games, they do encourage players to consume Alan Wake serially, reminding them of what happened previously if their last playing session was longer ago.317 This television-esque discursive structure fits with the game’s overall desire to function like a television show or a novel rather than a video game, which also explains why, for all the awareness of texts of different types in Alan Wake, there are only few references to other video games.318 Similarly, while different characters variously proclaim to witness the events they currently perceive as a story and draw parallels to horror movies or novels, none of them ever realize that they are characters in a video game (unlike, for instance, the narrator in The Stanley Parable). 316

317

318

As Alan Wake was originally published in 2010, it also precedes the boom of such television shows, which started with Netflix’s release of their original TV shows as entire seasons in 2013 (cf. Baker). In this sense, from the perspective of 2010, the game’s focus on individual episodes can also be read as mimicking television’s seriality on an aesthetic level, at a time when that seriality was still mostly defined through weekly episodes rather than yearly seasons (which, in turn, builds on practices of serialized literature as well, of course). Perhaps even more significantly, this kind of seriality is also established via the gameplay: At the end of the episodes, Alan is often reunited with ‘civilization,’ working together with other people and having acquired a large amount of weapons and ammunition throughout the episode. At the start of most episodes, though, he quickly loses all this equipment again (repeatedly by falling or jumping off a cliff to escape) and is back in the ‘wilderness’ of the surrounding woods, alone. Players then have to find flashlights, weapons, etc. once more, only to lose them yet again at the beginning of the next episode. Having to reacquire all this equipment keeps the difficulty of the game relatively steady, and it feels like each episode, players have to start again to prepare their fight against the Taken, ludically mirroring a serial text. However, it also works against some of the usual implications in video games that reward players’ careful use of gameplay elements. For instance, players might save ammunition for stronger enemies in the later game, yet these additional supplies are simply taken away at some point, reducing the player’s agency in making these decisions. In this sense, the aesthetic appeal of narrative seriality seems to be more important to Alan Wake than a more ‘traditional’ ludic experience. Finally, this setup also ensures that at the beginning of each episode, players will again feel quite weak, increasing the appeal of the horror genre. One of the few more intricate intertextual references to video games concerns the series Max Payne, which the creators of Alan Wake worked on previously. At the beginning of the second episode, for instance, during a flashback in Alan’s New York apartment, players can pick up two manuscript pages from Alan’s novel The Sudden Stop. The novel’s style of writing mirrors the noirish voice-over narration in the Max Payne series very closely, and the passages are read out loud by the voice actor of the titular character from that series. These references again work to intertwine these different texts, positioning Alan as the author of stories very closely matching those found in a previous game by the same developers.

226

Narrative Instability

Moreover, these parallels to television are also established through intertextual references, especially to two TV shows: The Twilight Zone (19591964 in its original run) and Twin Peaks (1990-1991 in its original run). 319 Many basic narrative elements of the game more implicitly mirror and refer to David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, like the small-town settings of Bright Falls and Twin Peaks, including smaller spaces such as the towns’ respective iconic diners (Oh Deer Diner and the Double R Diner); specific characters such as Alan Wake’s ‘lamp lady’ Cynthia Weaver and Twin Peaks’s ‘log lady’ Margaret Lanterman; and even individual plot points, such as the protagonists being trapped inside a cabin (or lodge) and being replaced by doppelgängers in their diegetic reality at the end of game and the original series (Mr. Scratch in Alan Wake and Dale Cooper’s doppelgänger in Twin Peaks).320 The Twilight Zone, in turn, is paid homage to through a TV show within the game called Night Springs, from which players can watch and listen to six short episodes shown throughout the game on TV sets. Like its source of inspiration, Night Springs is shown in black-and-white, focuses on unusual or supernatural events (many of which question the boundary between reality and fiction), and is particularly recognizable as a reference to The Twilight Zone by its imitation of that show’s iconic narration, featuring a narrator who sounds very similar to The Twilight Zone’s Rod Serling. Just as in the ‘original,’ every episode begins and ends with a voice-over narration that outlines the theme of the episode and summarizes its morals.321 Many of the themes and topics of the six episodes relate to the events of Alan Wake as well, and while the stories themselves are not narratively unstable in their telling, they also cover subjects often taken up in other unstable texts—for instance, the episode “Quantum Suicide” discusses the many-worlds theory, just as BioShock Infinite does, while “The Dream of Dreams” wonders who of its characters is part of whose dream, similar to Inception. While it might initially seem like separating the references to The Twilight Zone into its own show-within-the-game would serve to disentangle Alan Wake from the original TV show, these references actually work simi319

320 321

Both shows have later been rebooted, The Twilight Zone once from 1985-1989, once from 2002-2003, and more recently in 2018, and Twin Peaks also recently in 2017. The renewed popularity of both shows (and especially of Twin Peaks, which is the more thoroughly unstable text) might also generally speak to the heightened interest in narrative instability among contemporary audiences (and television audiences in particular). For some of the thematic similarities between the show and Alan Wake, cf. scholarship on the former in Lavery; Hoffman and Grace; Weinstock and Spooner. For instance, the first episode, “Quantum Suicide,” is introduced like this: “Science. It bestows immortality on those who advance it to elevate all of mankind. Newton, Einstein, Sagan—princes among men. But the price for such a legacy is steep indeed ... in Night Springs.” Particularly the last sentence evokes the opening sequence known from most Twilight Zone episodes: “It is an area which we call ... the Twilight Zone.”

5 Unstable Textualities

227

larly to the ones to Twin Peaks, intertwining the game and the show: Night Springs is referenced throughout the game by its characters as well, with Sheriff Breaker even explaining that there is a “joke” among the residents of Bright Falls that “Bright Falls is the original inspiration for the TV show. This town can get weird at times,” drawing parallels between the supernatural events of the two places.322 Alan himself also has a relation to the show, having previously written episodes for it.323 Finally, when Alan travels through the woods with Barry and Sheriff Breaker, Barry twice summarizes their current predicament in the tone of voice of the Night Springs announcer.324 His direct reference to the events they have been witnessing fitting into an episode of the in-game show Night Springs, which is in turn modeled after the actual show The Twilight Zone, draws attention to the fictional nature of the game players engage at that time as well, following the scripted plots of a supernatural horror story. Together with the other textual intertwinings between the game and the TV shows, Alan Wake thus consciously sees itself as a textual artifact, but particularly likens itself to media other than the video game. A final significant avenue of intertextuality in the game refers to an awareness of an emerging genre of ‘twist films.’ As mentioned before, unlike many other unstable texts, Alan Wake does not feature a narrative twist that could potentially first further confuse players but eventually lead to a stabilizing of the storyworld constructed thus far. The game does, however, include what could be called a ‘fake twist,’ in that one of its characters tries to convince Alan (and, by implication, players) that what would amount to such a twist actually explains what has happened to him so far. At the beginning of the game’s fourth episode, Alan wakes up and sees the face of Dr. Emil Hartman. From Alan’s point of view, players look at Hartman surrounded by light, visually enhancing his status as a reliable, positive figure (illuminated similarly to how Zane usually is). Hartman elaborately explains to Alan that he has been in this clinic for a while and that his mind has constructed an alternate world in order to cope with Alice’s death. They walk together through the mental institution as he continues to explain to Alan the various reasons for his delusions, providing reasonable explanations for the mysterious events that have happened so far: 322

323

324

This parallelism is also evoked in the names Bright Falls and Night Springs, which semantically present two opposites—‘bright’ vs. ‘night’ (i.e., the lack of bright light) and the seasons ‘fall’ versus ‘spring’—but stylistically works like an assonance through the beginning rhyme of ‘bright’ with ‘night.’ On a (para)textual level, Bright Falls is also a six-part mini-series that exists outside the world of the game, while in the spin-off game Alan Wake’s American Nightmare, Alan is trapped inside an episode of Night Springs. The first such instance has Barry proclaim: “When you spend most of your night running uphill while a crazy bunch of demon hicks try to take your head off with an axe, you know your helicopter crash-landed ... in Night Springs.”

228

Narrative Instability You’re suffering from various symptoms of undifferentiated schizophrenia [...]. You’re suffering from hallucinations, paranoid delusions, and unusual thinking, an obsession about light and darkness—a feeling that everything revolves around you, your thoughts and dreams. Your mind has constructed an elaborate fantasy scenario in which your writings are affecting reality. [...] Your delusions are just a manifestation of your subconscious mind trying to protect you from the toopainful truth. [...] Think about it: Doesn’t this make far more sense than the insane supernatural conspiracy you have concocted in your mind?

These explanations, and the way they are presented to players, work similarly to such revelations in narratively unstable films featuring unstable identities, like A Beautiful Mind or Shutter Island. Similar to films like Black Swan (cf. 3.4.3), Hartman’s monologue can be read as an interpretation of the game’s story understood in the realist mode, where fantastic events are framed as Alan’s hallucinations. His explanations also connect with a popularization of psychoanalysis (cf. 4.2.2) in how he describes “undifferentiated schizophrenia” and Alan’s “subconscious,” which equally add to the potential validity of Hartman’s theory (although they diminish his credentials as a trained psychiatrist), building on players’ previous experience with similar twist films. However, ultimately, the game only teases the idea of a twist here—not only does Alan’s voice-over immediately doubt Hartman’s explanation, there is no larger, more neutral narrative presence that would legitimize it, and Hartman eventually seems to admit that this was a fabrication intended to compel Alan to continue writing, since Hartman wanted to make use of the Dark Presence’s supernatural powers for himself.325 Hence, the overall scenes are most significant in how they relate directly to players, alluding to their knowledge of previous unstable texts. This is evoked in Hartman’s words as well—when he notes that there is “a feeling that everything revolves around you,” this speaks to the game genre’s central focus on a protagonist controlled by the player, and when he asks Alan to “[t]hink about it,” this prompt can be read as directly addressing the player as well. In the end, however, Hartman’s theory only hints at the possibility of a significant moment of instability that could restabilize the storyworld; instead, it simply adds to the irreconcilability of many of the game’s elements by adding yet another interpretation to it. Together, all these different concerns of the game with other kinds of texts establish that Alan Wake understands textuality as going beyond the ‘origin text’ and instead stresses the interconnectivity of texts. 326 Specifi325

326

Still, in later instances (particularly two downloadable episodes that continue Alan’s story), Hartman’s explanation reappears to cast further doubt on Alan’s grip on reality. In addition to this focus on purely textual matters in the game, a lot of the topics it discusses alongside textuality also resonate with matters of representation and difference that I highlighted in previously discussed unstable texts. For instance, particularly questions surrounding Alan’s masculinity become visible through a focus

5 Unstable Textualities

229

cally, this also extends to texts from other media, most notably novels, films, and TV series. Additionally, the storyworld of Alan Wake does not stop with the game itself either; instead, it engages in transmedia storytelling by extending its universe across other texts: There are additional downloadable episodes as well as a spin-off called Alan Wake’s American Nightmare, there is a novelization of the game and a book called The Alan Wake Files, which presents itself as a nonfiction account trying to piece together what happened to Alan, and there is the aforementioned live-action mini-series Bright Falls.327 These texts, too, highlight the story of Alan as one that exceeds the ‘traditional’ limits of textuality. Bringing this back to the game itself, fittingly, Alan’s narrative solution for the ending of the game, and for the ending he has to write for the novel in the cabin, also works textually: The game concludes with Alan saying “It’s not a lake. It’s an ocean,” which are the last lines from the novel, and then the screen fades to black and simply shows an ellipsis (“. . .”). On one level, he frees Alice by trading places with her, getting trapped in the world of the Dark Presence at the end of the game. On a narratively higher level, however, Alan’s solution for the ending is to simply not have it as the book’s final ending, instead alluding to a sequel, both through a metaphor—the story is not just a smaller lake but a vast ocean328—and typographically through the ellipsis.

327

328

on writing and textuality as well—Alan feels guilty for having lost Alice, and his quest to find her is inextricably linked to his attempt at continuing to write and to finish the manuscript. Alice, in turn, is mostly absent throughout the game, lacking agency and instead taking on a stereotypically female role of the ‘damsel in distress.’ Writing, for Alan, is thus also a way to regain his sense of masculinity, and in turn, the game codes this option of reclaiming masculinity as decidedly white and middle-class. Similarly, his slipping grip on reality translates into a personal crisis of masculinity, working similarly to the film Inception discussed in the previous chapter, although Cobb’s focus on being a father here is replaced by an emphasis on being a husband. However, because of this similarity to other texts already discussed, I have instead focused on the game’s (inter- and trans)textual positioning, as this is a more unique aspect of Alan Wake. Accordingly, I will rather place Alan’s anxieties in a larger metatextual context in the next section, and again focus more on the politics of textuality in the reading of Westworld, which engages in questions of (especially) gender and race much more prominently and self-consciously. The downloadable episodes and the spin-off game extend the story of Alan, but they do not propel the plot much and instead are more of a thematic continuation, not functioning as a ‘proper’ sequel. The Alan Wake Files, which were included in the collector’s edition of the game, feature additional characters’ perspectives on the events, notably Agent Nightingale’s, as well as other background information. Bright Falls mostly relates thematically to the game as well, highlighting the eeriness of the small-town setting and adding, in one possible interpretation, the perspective of a Taken, or at least somebody who has been ‘touched’ by the Dark Presence. Cf. Fuchs, “My Name” 150-53 for an analysis of Bright Falls in connection with Alan Wake. A similar line is already told to Alan by Zane in his first nightmare, with Zane saying: “For he did not know, / that beyond the lake he called home, / lies a deeper,

230

Narrative Instability

This, in a way, is an extradiegetic solution, not looking to solve the narrative conflicts on the level of the storyworld but instead extending that storyworld through the possibility of Alan escaping the Dark Presence in a sequel.329 5.3.3 “THERE CAN BE NO EXPLANATION”: GENRE AND MEDIA REFLEXIVITY The previous points about narrative instability and matters of textuality in Alan Wake can be brought together by taking a look at how the game works metatextually. It is the game’s instability that draws attention to its own status as a text, one whose storyworld has to be reconstructed by the audience, opening up the potential for metatextual investigations by the game itself. Texts like Alan Wake that so self-consciously and ubiquitously already pointed to matters of textuality exhibit such self-reflexive moments throughout the entirety of their story, yet besides the game’s own metatextual moments, an analysis beyond the level of Alan Wake’s textual surface itself will also uncover those elements that the game is not aware of. In the following, I will thus briefly focus on more general metatextual elements in the game, before then reading its concerns with textuality as part of an awareness of its own genre. This will also include an investigation of elements of realism and fantasy as part of such genre elements. Finally, I will bring these points together by arguing that the game’s textual interests can be parsed as its own unease and anxiety over a struggle between ‘old’ and ‘new’ media. In general, Alan Wake exhibits such a high degree of self-awareness that it can be read as a game about games through many of its elements—or, more precisely, as a game about fiction. The previous sections already alluded to a number of moments when statements by the game’s characters can be understood as breaking the fourth wall, addressing the player controlling Alan as well. For instance, when Barry does not believe Alan’s recounting of his past events, he frames it by saying: “Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good story, could be a best-seller,” which can be read as a nod to the game’s story as well.330 Similarly, when Alan notes in a manuscript page

329

330

darker ocean green, / where waves are both wilder and more serene. / To its ports I’ve been. / To its ports I’ve been.” Coming back to the difference in the game between narrative and other art, Zane’s poetic phrasing does not initially seem to help Alan, as it takes him the entire length of the game to realize that Zane meant to tell him how to save himself through these lines. Accordingly, Alan’s own phrasing of the same idea is much more prosaic and blunt, as a declarative statement (“It’s an ocean”), but seemingly has more power in affecting the world than Zane’s poetry. Somewhat ironically, while a direct sequel to Alan Wake has often been talked about, as of this writing, Alan Wake 2 is not officially in development (yet its original producers have repeatedly stressed their general desire to create it). Another example, from episode 2 of the game, has Alan asking a kidnapper hired by Hartman why they have to keep moving, to which he answers: “Because that’s

5 Unstable Textualities

231

that “[t]hings were never as simple in real life as in fiction,” this equally draws attention to the game’s own status as a fictional artifact. The manuscript pages also hold other hints towards the game’s metatextual awareness and a kind of ‘playfulness’ about textuality: Two pages about Nightingale mention that “[h]e had seen this moment before, read it in the page. He was transfixed by the déjà vu and the horror that he was a character in a story someone had written,” and that he “took out his hip flask when he reached the page that described how he reached the page that made him take out his hip flask.” The latter moment effectively creates a textual miseen-abyme and a loop that could endlessly refer back to itself, alluding to video games’ iterative nature as well.331 Finally, there are moments in the game where the particular narrative setup points towards this awareness. In one flashback, Alan watches a recording of a late-night talk show, in which he himself appeared as a guest. Like with all representations of television in the game, this is presented as a live-action TV show, and Alan is played by the actor Ilkka Villi, who is the model and provides the motion capturing for Alan’s in-game avatar. Alan watching himself on TV as a real-life person thus self-reflexively mirrors how players watch Alan on the screen of their TV or PC screen. Additionally, at the end of the segment, the show’s host also points to the other guests that were on that night, one of whom is Sam Lake, the writer of Alan Wake.332 The in-game character of Alan, the writer, thus also uses the medium of television to look at the writer of the game that this character is a part of, a conscious interweaving of different levels of fictionality and reality. Together, these elements establish that the game has a clear interest in exploring not just texts and textuality as such but also its own textual workings, recognizing itself as a fictional artifact.333

331

332

333

the way the story goes,” pointing to the fact that if players do not continue to move Alan along the game’s linear path, the story will not progress. Somewhat more playfully, in a manuscript page, Hartman urges Alan to stay calm and not to fight the sedative he gave him, adding: “We don’t want you to have another episode,” which can also be read as a nod to the episodes in the game’s textual structure. Even more bluntly, a page that can only be found in the game’s highest difficulty has Alan read: “I lifted the page in front of my eyes and read it. In it, I lifted the page in front of my eyes and read it. In it, I lifted the page in front of my eyes and read it,” and so on, also evoking a mise-en-abyme. In another complication, the host asks Sam Lake to “do that face,” referring to the fact that in Remedy Entertainment’s previous game series, Max Payne, Lake served as the model of the titular character Max Payne, further interweaving the two games. Again, while such elements also exist in unstable texts like Inception, the priorities of these texts are, so to speak, reversed: Other themes, such as reality, dreams, masculinity, and fatherhood predominate in Inception, with its metatextual elements rather forming a subtext, whereas Alan Wake is interested in narrativity and textuality front and center, only superficially exploring other subjects.

232

Narrative Instability

Beyond the game’s own proclamations of its awareness of being a story and general nods to texts as such, Alan Wake’s metatextual elements can particularly be read along questions of genre. The game’s concerns with telling a story are often framed specifically as this being a horror story—as Alan puts it himself during the “Previously” segment of the sixth episode: “I wrote a horror story that has come true.” In fact, the first allusion to the horror genre is already found in the game’s opening voice-over, when Alan says: Stephen King once wrote that “Nightmares exist outside of logic, and there’s little fun to be had by explanations; they’re antithetical to the poetry of fear.” In a horror story, the victim keeps asking “why?” But there can be no explanation, and there shouldn’t be one. The unanswered mystery is what stays with us the longest, and it’s what we’ll remember in the end.

On the one hand, this intertextual reference to King serves to foreshadow the game’s later mysteries, which will, indeed, not be fully clarified in the end—the questions of what exactly the Dark Presence is or why it acts as it does remain unresolved, in line with the game’s belief that such mysteries are needed. On the other hand, the game here also establishes that this element of unresolved mystery is paramount to its understanding of horror, a crucial genre marker. Throughout the game, this self-understanding of the game as a horror story is evoked multiple times,334 while the way it positions this balance of fictional elements can best be framed with the concepts of realism and fantasy. Throughout the events of the game, Alan realizes that if he wants to save Alice, he has to continue writing the story in a ‘believable’ manner, instead of simply touting his victory over the Dark Presence. Specifically, this refers to an adherence to genre constraints, which are in turn mediated by the use of both the fantastic and the realist mode. In the fourth episode, Alan in the cabin describes this predicament as such: I’ve written myself into the story. I’m now the protagonist. This feels like a terrible risk, but it’s the only way to save Alice. I’ll be bound by the events of the 334

For instance, Barry describes their cabin as “straight from a horror movie,” while a later manuscript page reads: “Barry’s smile widened as he realized that this was the classic movie scene where the hero had to gear up and arm himself to the teeth.” Whereas these two references explicitly evoke film, in another manuscript page, this explanation of horror works via television: “Somehow, the world had changed. Like the channel had been switched without a warning. You think you’re watching a sitcom and you’re really watching a horror show.” In turn, Alan on TV, inside the cabin, most often speaks about stories in general, likely referring to novels: “The genre of the story seems to be shifting. It’s turning into a horror story.” These latter two examples also point to the game’s somewhat rigid understanding of genre— while they mention a shift in genre, they still believe in clear designations, changing from a “sitcom” to a “horror show,” rather than acknowledging the possibility of their fluidity and intermingling.

5 Unstable Textualities

233

story just as much as anyone else who’s been woven into it. The story must stay true for this to work. There have to be victims along the way, near escapes, cliffhangers. In a horror story it can’t be certain that the hero will succeed or even survive. He almost has to die.

The somewhat vague idea that the “story must stay true,” in this context, does not mean that it has to be ‘real’ but, paradoxically, that it has to remain within its fictional frame. For Alan, “victims,” “near escapes,” and “cliffhangers” are all part of the genre of a “horror story,” and he has to stay within these confines if the story is to be successful as a ‘believable’ narrative. Crucially, this can also be framed as a meandering between the modes of realism and fantasy: As I mentioned previously, a fantastic genre like horror fiction still makes copious use of the realist mode, and this is also how Alan’s notion of the story “stay[ing] true” can be understood. In another TV appearance inside the cabin, Alan continues his ramblings about writing fiction: “The characters have to be true to themselves. The events need to follow a logic that fits the story. A single flaw and the magic is gone.” Particularly the first two principles—characters that are “true to themselves” and events “follow[ing] a logic”—can be seen as characteristics of realism, and naturally, even in a story that includes supernatural elements that deviate from our known reality, the audience still expects narrative logics and principles to apply to this storyworld.335 While Alan Wake is generally aware of the horror genre, it exhibits less awareness for these modes of writing, not referring to them explicitly. 336 Instead, though, the balance between these modes is especially evoked via the representation of space in the game. Throughout the story, as the Dark Presence becomes stronger, the way the landscape of Bright Falls is represented also becomes less realistic, with more and more objects supernaturally flying around and, eventually, a massive tornado representing the Dark Presence hurling through the woods.337 Much later, in the downloadable episode 335

336

337

Shortly after, Alan explains: “For me, the supernatural had always been nothing but a metaphor for the human psyche, a tool to use in writing fiction.” This statement even more succinctly summarizes a perspective of using the supernatural to still, ultimately, discover something about humanity as such, a realist effort. It also includes a metatextual aspect in implying that this is also how Alan Wake as a game works and how its supernatural elements can be interpreted, being based on the novel that Alan has written. As one small hint, when Hartman talks to Alan about his “delusions” being “a manifestation of your subconscious mind trying to protect you from the too-painful truth,” he also adds: “Unless we fight the fantasy, it will return.” In the context of his attempt to convince Alan of his explanation, “fantasy” refers back to his “delusions,” but in a more metatextual reading, Hartman’s words can also be understood to hint at an awareness of his explanation of Alan’s unstable mind belonging to the realist realm, whereas a belief that there really are supernatural elements at work in Bright Falls fits the mode of “fantasy.” A similar impact on the spatial representation of the game also occurs after Alan has acquired the Clicker, with the time of day suddenly changing: “When I got out,

234

Narrative Instability

“The Writer,” as Alan becomes more aware that the world he experiences is created by himself, in his own mind, he notices: “Now that I knew what I was facing, the environment became even wilder and stranger, like it was no longer even bothering to pretend that things were normal.” Indeed, the setting in this scene is more unusual and less ‘realistic’ than in previous episodes, with the landscape more twisted and jagged and seemingly suspended in nothingness. In effect, Alan’s own statement points to an awareness of the continuum between a more realist mode of representing and a more fantastic one. Here, now that it has become clear that the world players experience is imagined and fictional (since it is imagined by Alan as part of a novel), there seems to be less of a need to ‘pretend,’ to convince this world’s readers (namely, the Alan that players control) that it is real through verisimilitude. The mimetic thus gives way to the fantastic, a shift immediately being represented in the world that players also witness and thus pointing to a larger understanding of how fictional worlds can be narrated and visually represented. Ultimately, the way Alan Wake itself talks about being a horror story displays a relatively static understanding of popular genres and formulas. While many of the game’s elements do indeed fit the horror genre, others rather belong to crime and detective fiction, to (film) noir, to the thriller, to supernatural fiction more generally, and, especially, to the Gothic genre. 338 Its most basic horror elements all fit the American Gothic as well—Alan trying to make his way alone through the dark, sinister woods (or wilderness) that seem to house supernatural elements; the many secrets that lie behind a normal, everyday facade of a small town;339 the possibility of the game’s protagonist being insane; and the game’s interest in how the deconstruction of stable binary oppositions leads to anxiety.340 Seeing Alan Wake

338

339

340

it was warm and sunny. I had flicked the switch of the Clicker. Had it done this? I didn’t stop to question it.” His narration implies that he simply accepts this possibly supernatural and fantastic element, suggesting that players should too. In the context of the American Gothic, cf. Fuchs, “Hauntings” for a reading of ‘uncanny doubling’ in Alan Wake. For a general investigation of the American Gothic and video games, which also includes an analysis of Alan Wake, cf. Krzywinska. Particularly the small-town setting of Bright Falls is also highlighted by the game itself as such an element. For instance, Alan says that he had “forgotten there were still places like this—towns where everybody knew everybody.” Deputy Grant, working in the sheriff’s station, equally evokes such a stereotypical association: “Bright Falls has a colorful history. Of course, what small town hasn’t?” In general, these elements of the American Gothic also intertextually link Alan Wake to central literary and cultural imaginations of the United States—for instance, the forests surrounding Bright Falls are likened to the wilderness, as Alan states that “[t]he dark forest was the last place [he] wanted to go,” mirroring the Puritans’ image of the wilderness as “a place of struggle, hardship, and evil” (Martin 115; cf. also Miller). Krzywinska similarly notes that the game’s “remote backwoods location [...] represent[s] the primal, the unconscious with an American accent, while drawing on older uses of the forest in Gothic fiction more generally”

5 Unstable Textualities

235

as part of the American Gothic with elements from a number of other genres would likely be the most accurate way to classify it, and this would generally be in line with how popular genres can be most productively understood, as fluid, based on cultural practices, and potentially overlapping with each other. The game itself, instead, seems to believe in a more binary understanding of genre, squarely placing itself in the horror category. Most fundamentally, it repeatedly cites the claim that, in Alan’s words, “[n]o one is safe in a good horror story, certainly not the protagonist,” as part of the elements regarding which the story has to stay ‘true’ to itself. However, when Alan claims in his voice-over that “[i]f I continue like the Dark Presence wants me to, the story I’m writing won’t save Alice. It’s a horror story. No one will survive,” the game does not actually present how horror stories work accurately. One common trope of the genre, after all, is to culminate most of the horror elements throughout its story into a kind of ‘happy ending’ (cf. Wood 68), where it is exactly the protagonist who survives (and then, often, returns in sequels). Alan’s claim that in a “horror story[,] [n]o one will survive” is thus incorrect in terms of metatextually discussing how the genre works. Accordingly, while this is one of many statements pointing to the game’s own awareness of being (partly) a horror story, it does not actually work on a metatextual level—instead, it performs the genre rather than self-consciously discussing it. His voice-over enacts what Alan in the cabin, as cited previously, explained: “In a horror story it can’t be certain that the hero will succeed or even survive”—it is important that there is a feeling that the protagonist might not survive, that this is not a certainty, but in the end, the story’s resolution almost always does include the protagonist’s survival. While both Alan in the cabin and Alan’s voice-over thus express some level of self-awareness about Alan Wake being such a story, the voice-over only pretends to discuss the horror genre in the same way as Alan in the cabin, instead trying to ‘mislead’ players of the game into thinking that Alan, indeed, might not survive the story, hoping to generate a Gothic or horror feeling in the audience. Finally, all of these metatextual references to stories, textuality, the game itself, as well as modes and genres can be read as a way for the game to engage questions of (trans)mediality, locating Alan Wake at the crosssection of different media. As I have previously shown, the game brims with intertextual references to novels, films, and TV shows, and it remediates narrative elements from these culturally more established media, yet it sparsely references any video games. Instead, Alan Wake tries to narratively mirror novels and TV shows, frequently evoking the creative power and (508). For studies on how the American Gothic centrally locates its horror at home, in the everyday (rather than displacing it to faraway places), and how it builds on the transgression of boundaries and binaries, cf., among many others, Crow; Martin and Savoy; Weinstock.

236

Narrative Instability

potential of written narratives and discursively imitating the episodic structure of a television series. The lack of references to other video games and to its own status as a game can be read as Alan Wake wanting its audience to forget that they are playing a game and to immerse themselves, instead, into experiencing the unfolding of Alan’s novel “Departure” in front of their eyes. Its reluctance to recognize its own status as a game also explains why Alan Wake, overall, is relatively linear and offers little agency to players, since it resembles these two traditionally linear media so much in its narration and ultimately feels more like a novel or a TV show that, as a game, somewhat reluctantly has to be played. On a different level, Alan’s ontological and epistemic anxieties about his identity, about his reality, and about fiction becoming true 341 can also be read metatextually as the game’s uneasiness about its own status as a game. In this sense, the narrative conflicts in Alan Wake partly play out as a struggle between ‘old’ and ‘new’ media. This was already epitomized in one of the first scenes of the game I analyzed, when Alan looks at himself writing in the cabin through a television set, which, in turn, he already read about before in a manuscript page. The television set that links the two narrative levels (of the Alan players control and the one in the cabin) does not just point to the game’s own medialization and textuality, it also presents the struggle between these different Alans as one between what is considered ‘older’ and ‘newer’ media. While a lot of narrative power throughout the entire game is given to the novel as a medium, players witness the process of Alan writing alone in his cabin through a television set. 342 Alan himself, as a writer, prefers the medium of the novel, mentioning in a manuscript page that he had “always been ashamed of the job [of writing for the TV show Night Springs], felt it was trash. I had wanted to be an artist, a novelist. I’d been naive back then. It had taken a long time to learn to be proud of the work.” At least in earlier years, being an “artist” equated solely with being a “novelist” for him. The game, in turn, admires the novel and television as media, remediating elements from both and striving to lie some341

342

In a manuscript page, Alan expresses his epistemic uncertainty in direct comparison to a fictional character: “I was filled with doubt. I was nothing like the hero in my books.” In general, while Fuchs also stresses that Alan Wake is concerned with “ontological confusion” and uncertainty (“Horror Story” 98), I would argue that the game focuses much more strongly on framing these ontological anxieties as epistemological ones in the end, stressing the impossibility for Alan (and the player) to know which world, which reality, and even which Alan is ‘real.’ Alan’s anxieties can thus also be read as the white male writerly self fearing erasure. In turn, players see the Alan as whom they play looking at the Alan in the TV through the medium of the video game, so through either another TV of their Xbox console or the screen of their PC as well, metatextually implicating the players in this setup. As Racquel Gonzales posits, “Alan Wake purposefully highlights” the “dual positionality of watching and being,” a “self-awareness [that] is most chilling when we are Wake and we watch Wake view himself on television while the TV’s Alan Wake watches us.”

237

5 Unstable Textualities

where in between. It looks towards the ‘old’ established medium of the novel for its basic ideas about the power of storytelling343 and towards television’s place in the twenty-first century as having acquired a particular cultural currency, influentially encapsulated in the discourse around ‘quality TV.’344 Even its ending can be read as striving towards the serial medium of television, as the idea of alluding to a sequel to Alan’s story actually accomplishes the seriality that the episodes of the game before already tried to achieve. Consequently, the game locates its own medium somewhere in between these more established ones, but it also forgets about many uniquely ludic elements, offering very little narrative nonlinearity and just as little agency to players. In the context of contemporary discussions of transmedial textuality, it thus advocates for video games to orient themselves according to more established media, metatextually turning a discussion of these different medial spheres into its own story. *** In this subchapter, I have analyzed Alan Wake’s narrative instability as engendered by the game’s awareness of its own textuality. Looking at its narrative setup and the multiplicity of narrative voices found in it, at the many different ways in which it engages with matters of textuality, and at how it metatextually links itself to genres and other media, I argued that it ultimately transfers its protagonist’s anxieties to its own textual level, locating video games between cultural impulses from ‘newer’ and ‘older’ media. While it is ostensibly a Gothic horror story about a writer’s fight against a supernatural presence, at its core, Alan Wake is a reflection on textuality, on the power of narratives, and on how to incorporate narrative elements in a video game. Despite these rather high-minded ambitions, it proved a popular success with audiences, partly exactly because it uses its unstable elements to discuss matters of textuality, rather than doing so more directly. In the larger context of (post-)postmodern discussions of the current media landscape, it sharply goes against the aforementioned trend advocated by 343

344

This is a recurring tendency across texts featuring unstable textualities: Particularly newer, perhaps not quite as reputable media reflect on their own textuality through a recourse to the novel. The elements previously highlighted in The Stanley Parable certainly work in this way, and in the film Stranger Than Fiction, in turn, the protagonist’s life is being narrated by a novelist struggling from writer’s block. The film thus uses the figure of the omniscient narrator known from novels to highlight its overall storytelling effort. On quality TV, cf. McCabe and Akass and, especially, Hassler-Forest, who positions quality TV as “a meta-genre that has shaped the recent development of what we might term ‘cine-literary television’” (par. 5). As an example of scholarship ascribing particular cultural currency to television in comparison to the novel, cf. McLaughlin’s assertion that “[b]ecause the televisual culture has co-opted postmodernism’s bag of tricks to deleterious effect, writers of fiction [...] need to find a way beyond self-referential irony” (“Post-Postmodern” 65).

238

Narrative Instability

McLaughlin to “find a way beyond self-referential irony” (“Post-Postmodern” 65), instead embracing a self-reflexive turn inwards by mimicking other media. As a postmodern video game, though, it remains a rather anxious and hesitant hybrid of playing and narrating instability, rather emphasizing its ludic textuality than its own ludicness. Fittingly, as the last unstable text to be discussed in this book, I will turn to an example of television’s narrative prowess that Alan Wake so adores and that more emphatically embraces the fusion of narrative and play.

5.4 Westworld The television series Westworld, whose first season aired in 2016,345 brings together a number of concerns discussed throughout this study, culminating in a particularly popular, self-conscious, and transmedial text. The show is set in an undisclosed futuristic time, in which people can visit a theme park called Westworld, offering a kind of alternate reality in a Western setting, replete with android hosts catering to human visitors. The first season traces a cast of characters inside and outside the park: Inside, the host Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) is on a quest to self-consciousness, accompanied by fellow host and prototypical Western hero Teddy (James Marsden) as well as a human visitor William (Jimmi Simpson), who grows increasingly fond of Dolores, to his business partner Logan’s (Ben Barnes) chagrin. The host Maeve (Thandie Newton), the local brothel madam, is also portrayed on her way to self-consciousness, which, however, she accomplishes by manipulating her own code during regular maintenance times when the hosts are transported from the park into the managing facilities. A mysterious visitor of the park, dubbed the ‘Man in Black’ (Ed Harris), is looking for the fabled maze, a hard-to-reach secret in the park. Outside Westworld, in the large complex that manages the park, significant changes are about to happen: The park’s senior founder, Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins), is planning one final great narrative arc for the park, since he is about to be replaced by the park’s board of directors, headed by Charlotte (Tessa Thompson), in cooperation with the head of quality assurance, Theresa (Sidse Babett Knudsen). Additionally, the latest update to the hosts, socalled reveries, has sparked unusual behavior in the hosts—they are beginning to remember events from past cycles, even though their memory is regularly wiped, and these memories are what prompt Dolores’s and Maeve’s journeys to self-consciousness. The park’s head of programming, Bernard (Jeffrey Wright), investigates these problems with the help of his assistant, Elsie (Shannon Woodward), and often against the opposition of 345

This chapter’s analysis of the series is based solely on the events depicted in the first season, aired in 2016. The show’s second season was released in 2018, and at the time of this writing, a third season is in production.

5 Unstable Textualities

239

Theresa; Bernard and Theresa are also romantically involved. At the core of the recent problems seem to be traces of programming left in the hosts by the late Arnold, a mysterious figure who co-founded the park with Ford and was against opening it at the last minute, believing the hosts had gained self-consciousness and thus deserved to be free. From this general setup, various plotlines take place throughout the season, converging on each other and featuring a number of surprising turns—the most relevant of which, as they pertain to instability, I will analyze more specifically in the later readings. The science-fiction series Westworld tackles a large variety of themes during its first season, among them questions of humanity, identity, reality, art, storytelling, agency, nostalgia, and knowledge, having attained critical and commercial success as well as attracted a significant community following with this plethora of subjects.346 The show’s first run attained a high viewership with “an average of 12 million viewers across all platforms,” making it, at the time, “the most-watched first season of an HBO original series ever” (Andreeva). It received very favorable reviews from critics and was nominated for a number of Emmy awards; and, as I will point out at times in the following, there were also large online communities discussing the episodes week by week and speculating on the narrative mysteries hinted at throughout the show. This engagement with the show akin to what Mittell describes as “forensic fandom”—“invit[ing] viewers to dig deeper, probing beneath the surface to understand the complexity of a story and its telling” (“Forensic Fandom”)—is largely encouraged because of (some) TV shows’ serial structure, giving viewers one week between episodes to share theories and close-read certain scenes. Looking at a televisual text for the last primary reading of this book thus is also meant to suggest the possibility of a medial shift, with perhaps more TV shows taking on instability in the years to come, just as video games recently have. In terms of scholarly engagements with Westworld, even though the series is still very new, a few singular studies as well as the first edited collections already exist, also speaking to the academic popularity of the series347—studies to which my investigation in this chapter will add a contextualization of the show 346

347

Westworld is created by Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan, Christopher Nolan’s brother (who also wrote the screenplay of many of Christopher’s films), which might explain some of the thematic similarities between the show and Christopher Nolan’s narratively unstable films. Some of the singular articles on Westworld focus on intertextual references to Shakespeare (cf. Winckler), questions of humanity and immortality (cf. Dickerson), ‘post-digital’ narratives (cf. Lacko), and narrative complexity and femininity (cf. Köller). In addition, edited collections published in 2018 and 2019 highlight multidisciplinary approaches to uncovering the show (cf. Georgi-Findlay and Kanzler; Goody and Mackay) and provide a number of philosophical vantage points from which to discuss it (cf. South and Engels), similar to comparable volumes about philosophy and BioShock as well as Inception.

240

Narrative Instability

within an intertextual ‘tradition’ of narrative instability as well as a thorough look at its interweaving of narrative, play, and textual politics. To probe into Westworld’s entanglement with unstable textualities, I will look at three larger aspects of the show. First, to establish the series’s overall instability, I will detail some of its discursive features. A central element of its narrative situation concerns the way it grants its audience access to the narrative ‘behind-the-scenes’ of the park, ostensibly providing them with a privileged position into the show’s discursive workings as well, yet I will detail how a number of moments of instability ‘betray’ this positioning. Second, I will examine Westworld’s concerns with textuality—in comparison to Alan Wake, the show puts even more emphasis on the centrality of narratives than that of texts more generally. As part of this subsection, I will first trace how it closely connects narrative and humanity, and afterwards, I will analyze the textual politics of the show, as it is much keener than Alan Wake on connecting its concerns with narrativity to issues of identity and difference. Specifically, I will focus on gender (primarily via Dolores) and ethnicity (via Maeve and Bernard). Third, in the last subsection, Westworld’s metatextual and self-reflexive elements will be scrutinized. This will include an investigation of its generic awareness of the Western, its discussion of interpretation and the cultural work of narratives, and, finally, its transmedial dimension, especially its fusion of narrative and play. Overall, I will argue that Westworld consciously combines elements of narrative and play, conceptualizing a ludic textuality as a way of ‘activating’ popular audiences. It encourages its viewers to engage with the narrative puzzles that many of its characters are also enchanted by, challenging them to predict the moments of narrative instability before they happen. Accordingly, it also builds on the narrative knowledge and experience of its audience, having been accustomed to narratively unstable texts from the last years and decades. At the same time, thematically, Westworld engages in a complex intersection of textual politics, focusing particularly on questions of gender and race. Yet while the series seemingly wants to pursue a progressive textual project, its politics are intermingled with and complicated by the personal stance of the character Robert Ford, which ultimately leads to the show misrepresenting a number of racialized and gendered issues as universally human and engaging in a backlash against some of the progressive politics it ostensibly attempts to champion. 5.4.1 “THIS WHOLE WORLD IS A STORY”: NARRATIVE INSTABILITY Instability in Westworld works slightly differently than in Alan Wake or The Stanley Parable, since the TV show is not quite as explicit about its own textuality. Yet it still uses its discursive setup to cast doubt on the recreation of its storyworld, albeit in subtler ways. In the following, I will look at the details of the show’s discourse by first establishing how it depicts two dif-

5 Unstable Textualities

241

ferent narrative worlds, that of the park and that of the behind-the-scenes, 348 and how their eventual intermingling complicates the narrative situation. Part of this investigation will be an extended analysis of the first episode’s opening sequence. Consequently, I analyze the major narrative twists found throughout the first season, which build on the supposedly clear distinction between the two worlds depicted in the show in order to create instability at the level of textuality. Together, I will show how Westworld openly displays the narrative workings of its park to the audience only to lure them into a false sense of ‘security,’ later being able to surprise them by casting doubt on the clear separation between the different narrative worlds and thus breaking down the line between the narrative of the behind-the-scenes, the narratives in the park, and the extradiegetic viewer. Most fundamentally, Westworld is unstable on the level of textuality because it openly presents the park of Westworld as an elaborately constructed narrative to the show’s viewers, laying bare how this particular narrative—and stories in general—work. It devotes equal time to the Western theme park that is the setting of Westworld and to the behind-the-scenes of that attraction, where programmers, engineers, writers, and medical and security personnel carefully work to create an immersive experience for the park’s visitors. Numerous characters excessively highlight how this theme park is best understood as a narrative experience, a carefully crafted world that caters to its visitors’ narrative needs for excitement and pleasure. The self-conscious references to the experience of Westworld as a narrative are ubiquitous throughout the show’s first season, coming from both the creators of the park and its visitors.349 Thus, the Westworld park is presented similarly to a story-within-a-story, a world to be manipulated and to be narrated, with immersion to be created for its visitors. At least for all of the human (i.e., non-host) characters in the show, ‘narrative’ is thus a stand-in both for the kind of world that the park offers—one that its visitors experience narratively—and for describing the needs and pleasures associated 348

349

In the following, I will distinguish between these two spaces by using the term ‘park’ or ‘Westworld’ (without italics) for the one and ‘diegetic reality,’ ‘outside world,’ or, at times, ‘behind-the-scenes’ (of the park) for the other. Of course, the park itself is still part of the same overall diegetic world (it is not a simulation), and many characters travel between these spaces—yet in its artificiality, the park appears like a separate world, warranting this distinction. For instance, the park’s head writer, Lee Sizemore (Simon Quarterman), states that they “sell complete immersion in a hundred interconnected narratives” (S1E1), while Bernard wonders about a recall of hosts being “disruptive” to “narrative” (S1E1) and casually talks about “builds for the new narrative” (S1E2), and an assistant tells him that a part of the park is blocked “for future narrative development” (S1E6). Indeed, throughout the entire season, Ford’s planned “new narrative” is of central importance for most of the characters working for the park. Likewise, inside the park, the Man in Black, for example, says that “[t]his whole world is a story” (S1E4), whereas Logan explains to William that the further out they venture, “the bigger the narratives” become (S1E5).

242

Narrative Instability

with that experience, such as Sizemore’s reference to “immersion.” In a way, then, in the world of Westworld, the ‘narrative turn’ has become culturally ingrained, recognizing the importance of storytelling for (describing) the human experience. This ubiquity of narrative—which is similar to the omnipresence of text(s) more generally in Alan Wake—clearly positions the world of the park as a representation, as something that is narratively constructed. At the same time, discursively, there are no strict differences between the world of the park and the diegetic reality, bringing the two apparently separate spheres closer together. While, visually, they certainly contain very different settings—the park mostly looking like a Western world and the outside more in line with a futuristic high-tech building 350—and thus differ, for instance, in their predominant color palettes, generally, the series’s diegetic reality of the outside world and its diegetically fictional world of the park are represented in the same way, as part of the same world, cutting seamlessly between them.351 On the one hand, this similarity contributes to a central theme throughout the season, a questioning of the boundaries between what is real and what is fictional, along with a breaking-down of binaries in general, such as the supposed distinction between hosts and humans. On the other hand, it aligns the park’s narratively constructed nature with the plots of the outside world as well, pointing out how the show’s diegetic reality depicts a world that narratively works similarly to the Western narrative that the park’s managers construct for its visitors. Compared to video games like The Stanley Parable or, to a lesser degree, Alan Wake, however, Westworld only alludes to this notion implicitly; unlike these two texts, it does not feature numerous metatextual moments of breaking the fourth wall. Instead, the first season of the show treats this similarity more subtly and uses it only in pivotal moments for greater narrative effects— namely for a number of twists, which work to fundamentally destabilize the storyworld viewers constructed thus far, one element of which is the initially supposedly clear distinction between the show’s outside world and the Westworld theme park. The effects of these twists are not just restricted to their immediate revelation (e.g., the identity of a character) but rather concern this larger question of how the theme park and the diegetic reality narratively work with each other, relating back to larger questions of narrativity and textuality. These major moments of instability in the series work similarly to how I have discussed them in this study so far, mainly through compromised per350

351

Crucially, viewers never see much of the outside world; instead, the shots in the behind-the-scenes focus only on the buildings related to maintaining the park. In general, this setting of Westworld is never really explored, and only very few details are implied throughout the first season, suggesting that the park (both inside and outside) of Westworld is the much more interesting space. This is similar to the visual representation in Inception, which seamlessly cuts between the dreams and the film’s diegetic reality as well (cf. 4.3.1).

5 Unstable Textualities

243

ceptions—particularly internal focalizations that are not always explicitly marked as such—and through more direct instances of unreliable narration. There are two major ‘kinds’ of twists in the show, one relating to unstable identities as discussed in chapter 3 and one relating to unstable realities (concerning both time and space) as discussed in the previous chapter. The instances of unstable identities centrally revolve around the character of Bernard: In the first season’s seventh episode, Bernard is revealed to not actually be a human but a host, the only one (as far as the audience is aware) who lives outside the theme park’s Western setting. Only Ford was previously aware of Bernard’s true identity; Theresa, with whom Bernard is romantically involved, only finds this out at the end of that episode along with the audience—and with Bernard himself, triggering an existential crisis for him. Furthermore, at the end of the ninth episode, it is revealed that Bernard is, in a way, Arnold, Ford’s co-founder of the park: Ford modeled Bernard in Arnold’s image after the latter died shortly before the park’s opening. These revelations thus concern both a conflation of identities (a character being somebody else) and the nature of identity, with a character finding out that he is not, in a strict (binary) sense, human. However, they work beyond the level of identity and extend to the show’s overall textuality because unlike in the unstable identities texts discussed in the third chapter, Westworld is much more self-aware about such questions of identity even before its twist and, pointedly, tries to align itself with its viewers by initially privileging them with information about the park’s narratively constructed nature. Such a ‘contract’ with the audience, in fact, already occurs at the very beginning of the show, during the first few minutes of its first episode. Westworld opens with (presumably) Bernard352 talking to Dolores in the diegetic reality, asking her about her thoughts on her world. Their conversation is cross-cut with images of Dolores, inside the park, starting her daily routine—waking up in bed, seeing her father, and making her way to the local town of Sweetwater—as well as with images of Teddy arriving by train.353 On the train, visitors to the park can be heard acknowledging this world’s constructed status—something that the hosts have been pro352

353

For the audience, part of the later revelation of the twist about Bernard’s identity includes a potential to revisit previous scenes such as this one (following play’s penchant for iteration), during which it becomes clear that Dolores is not actually talking to Bernard but to Arnold in these sequences. Since, however, my analysis of these scenes here focuses on the effects their eventual instability creates for the audience’s reconstruction of the storyworld, I will analyze them as if a first-time viewer was watching them, being prompted by the show to think that Dolores is talking to Bernard. These shots of the two characters are set next to establishing shots of Westworld’s typical Western setting, with large open spaces, canyons, newcomers arriving via train, the stereotypically ‘untamed’ nature, and a dusty small town characterizing the locations.

244

Narrative Instability

grammed to ignore, in order not to trigger epistemic uncertainties. Likewise, the blending of images of Dolores in the diegetic reality and inside the Westworld park equally works to establish early on that Westworld is a constructed setting; Bernard’s explanations about how this world works add to that as well. In this sense, the audience is immediately privileged with information that, specifically, Dolores and Teddy do not possess. However, this setup also works to consciously mislead viewers about Teddy’s identity: Exactly at the moment when Bernard asks Dolores about the “guests,” who Dolores calls “newcomers,” Teddy is shown for the first time on the train, suggesting that he, too, is one of these human guests. In the next few minutes, he serves as the primary focalizer and protagonist; when he and Dolores meet in Sweetwater, it is shown from his point of view. The two spend the day together and return to Dolores’s parents’ farm at the end of the day, where Teddy is ultimately killed by the Man in Black. Teddy tries to shoot him repeatedly but is unable to hurt him. Again exactly in that moment, Bernard explains to Dolores “that you can’t hurt the newcomers, and that they can do anything they want to you”—the hosts are prevented from killing any of the visitors, and as is established in that exchange, Teddy is indeed such a host. Directly afterwards, viewers are shown a self-playing piano starting a song and then the same shots of Dolores waking up and Teddy on the train as before—the daily loop has restarted, 354 and the day begins again for the hosts. The next shot then zooms out further and further from the train, showing increasingly more of the surrounding areas and then metaleptically revealing itself to be part of a fantastic miniature replication of the Westworld park that forms the command center of how the parks’ employees monitor activities in the show’s diegetic reality. Numerous shots of the park’s various behind-the-scenes locations follow, revealing to viewers how the Western world they saw so far is carefully constructed. The revelations about Teddy’s identity and the park’s constructed reality are stylized like a twist: These first fifteen minutes of the show can be seen as a condensation of a ‘classic’ twist plot known from many films, which, however, would usually span at least ninety minutes and which would culminate in this final revelation, positioning it as the narrative climax. In contrast, Westworld early on indicates that it is interested in much more than that: By zooming out to show the world of the narratively higher level of the series’s diegetic reality, it signals that it is keen on exploring the background workings of such twist narratives, of how they function and how they are constructed. For the audience, this creates a double bind: On the one hand, this admission provides a deeper insight for viewers than many 354

This recurring motif of the loop is also symbolized in the player piano, which the show focuses on numerous times throughout the first season. Cf. Kanzler, “‘This Game’” 60-64 for more on this trope as connected to play (a connection I will generally discuss in 5.4.3).

5 Unstable Textualities

245

of the show’s characters have, privileging the audience with information about the narrative construction of the park. On the other hand, this information was delivered through a twist, so instead of directly telling viewers about the constructed nature of the park and of hosts such as Teddy, the show chooses to mislead the audience for a while about his identity. 355 From then on, Westworld does not use this initially self-reflexive setup to constantly point to its own constructedness, like The Stanley Parable does. Rather, it features two more central kinds of twists that go beyond the narrated world of the Westworld park and instead relate to the narrative setup of Westworld, building on the ‘contract’ the series forged with the audience early on only to wrap them in a false sense of ‘security’ and to eventually point out the narrative constructedness of what they witness on a higher narrative level.356 The first kind of twists concerns the two aforementioned separate revelations about Bernard’s identity, which work differently than the one about Teddy, as they both amount to a further ‘manipulation’ of the audience by taking place on a higher narrative level. The first twist, revealing that Bernard is actually a host, is stylized similarly to twists in unstable identities texts. It is revealed in a climactic sequence at the end of the seventh episode,357 to two characters—Theresa and Bernard himself—that stand in for the audience’s reaction and their potential shock at this revelation. Like in many of the texts discussed in chapter 3, there are also a number of earlier hints at Bernard’s status as a host, yet none of them sufficiently give the twist away by themselves; instead, recognizing these textual clues adds to the pleasure of rewatching the show’s episodes. 358 Unlike such twists in un355

356

357

358

Potentially, this, in turn, should prepare viewers for such future ‘manipulations’ as well. However, since the other large twists in the show occur much later, particularly if the first season is watched serially, over weeks, the show can also build on some of its viewers forgetting about this initial manipulation. Instead, Westworld offers this way of engaging with its text, trying to closely watch out for details of future manipulations, as only one possible reading practice. I will briefly consider such fan practices in 5.4.3. Consequently, in the following, I am only marginally interested in how these narrative twists play out on the level of identity and reality, since I already detailed how such moments of instability work in the two previous chapters. Instead, I will only briefly consider them in the context of this chapter’s focus on textuality. The episode’s title, “Trompe L’Oeil,” also plays into this revelatory significance, being the term for an optical illusion in art that creates the impression of a three-dimensional image. For viewers of this episode, the ending similarly reveals that they have not been looking correctly at the show so far, having been deceived about Bernard’s true identity through an ‘illusion.’ Among these clues, right before Bernard and Theresa enter the older facility in which Bernard’s identity is revealed, he explains to Theresa that the hosts cannot see this building since they are “programmed to ignore this place. They literally couldn’t see it if they were staring right at it.” When Theresa points to a door that leads them into the facility, Bernard just says “What door?” before following Theresa after she opened it—Bernard, too, was programmed not to see this door.

246

Narrative Instability

stable films, of course, the TV show continues for a long time after that revelation, at the beginning of the next episode showing Ford and Bernard discussing what just transpired, explicitly talking about issues of identity and selfhood, and alluding to the fact that this is not the first time that Bernard has realized that he is a host, after which Ford reset his memory. Even more significantly, in comparison to the revelation about Teddy’s identity, the replication of the same narrative structure—a character whom the audience believed to be human is divulged to be a host—has a different effect because the twist about Teddy worked within the simulated narrative of the Westworld park, whereas Bernard as a character occupies the plane of the show’s diegetic reality. By showing so much of the behind-the-scenes of the park’s imagined world, the series built up trust with the audience to provide them with unique insights into the narrative manipulations that are part of this world, only to then use such a manipulation on the discursively higher level of narration, which was presumably free of such narrative ‘tricks.’ The second twist regarding Bernard concerns the mysterious figure of Arnold and builds on this pattern of audience manipulation. Throughout the show, Arnold is evoked repeatedly by Dolores and other increasingly selfconscious hosts, since they are apparently able to hear his voice, as Arnold is still trying to free them through remnants in their original code that he put there more than thirty years ago. At the end of the ninth episode, Bernard forces Ford to grant him access to his very first memories, which prompt him to realize that he, in a way, is Arnold: After Arnold died, Ford built Bernard as a host exactly in his image, with the same physical appearance and an approximation of his personality.359 Crucially, this twist almost

359

Many other remarks Bernard makes throughout the season can, after the twist, be read as foreshadowing his identity, such as his insistence that “[t]he more I work here, the more I think I understand the hosts. It’s the human beings who confuse me” (S1E7), as well as comments about Bernard by other characters, such as Ford’s “I know how that head of yours works” (S1E2) or Theresa joking that Bernard holds a conversation similarly to a host (S1E2). Additionally, in a way, the ‘other’ Arnold, who is still trying to free the hosts through his programming from decades ago, and who Bernard, Dolores, and the Man in Black believe works against Ford’s wishes, is actually revealed to be partly Ford himself, ultimately working for the same goal but having used Arnold’s name for a lot of his programming changes. The show features many more details regarding these twists and revelations, too numerous to recount here. As just one example that necessitates a particularly careful viewing practice, when Bernard is seen reliving some of his memories, one shot includes him on a video call with his ex-wife (Gina Torres), a scene the audience was shown in S1E3. This time, however, for a split-second (and when freeze-framing the shot), we can see Ford instead of Bernard’s wife talking to him. This suggests that his wife never actually existed, and that Ford used these talks with Bernard as a routine check-up done for all hosts. In fact, rewatching the original scene from the third episode with this knowledge, one can notice how Bernard’s wife’s gestures are a bit similar to Ford’s, and

5 Unstable Textualities

247

exclusively works on the level of the audience, not on the characters’— whereas everybody beside Ford believed Bernard to be a human as well, making this a revelation both for the characters and the audience, none of the characters in the present are in contact with Arnold, since he died many decades ago, and hence, the revelation that Bernard and Arnold are, in a way, the same person does not directly affect them. The audience, however, is frequently shown scenes of Dolores talking to Bernard about her programming in the diegetic reality, and it is these scenes that do not actually show Bernard but Arnold, talking to Dolores not in the present but more than thirty years ago. The significance of this twist for the audience thus only takes effect because the show’s narrative instance portrays these sequences unreliably, wanting the audience to think that it is Bernard who Dolores talks to, which also connects with the show’s second kind of twist. This unstable moment works similarly to an unstable realities text, since the first season’s final episode reveals that throughout the show, what has been presented as one chronological storyline is actually two separate timelines. In one timeline, briefly after the park has opened, Dolores goes on her quest to self-consciousness presumably for the first time with the assistance of William (and Logan), whereas in the other timeline, taking place in the present, the Man in Black searches for the elusive maze (all scenes involving Maeve also occur only in this latter timeline). The show presents these storylines in a way that suggests that they happen simultaneously. However, towards the end of this final episode, it is revealed that Dolores went on this journey numerous times, and that the first time she arrived at the journey’s end, at the park’s original town of Escalante, she was helped by William, who fell in love with her and the apparent ‘realness’ of Westworld but was horribly distraught when, during his next visit, Dolores could not remember anything that had happened. Over the years, he visited the park repeatedly, and now, in the present, is looking for what he thinks is the last narrative he has not yet found, the so-called maze. In a pivotal scene in the episode, Dolores realizes, along with the audience, that William and the Man in Black are the same person, more than thirty years apart in time.360 Crucially, again, this is an instability of time created primarily through the show’s narrative discourse—it is not something that, for instance, William is confused about. However, it does mirror Dolores’s and other hosts’ repeated statements throughout the season that they are unable to tell whether their current present or their memories are real, since they

360

her questions to him also resemble those often asked of the hosts (e.g., about his ‘cornerstone’ memory of having lost his son). To add to these many hints, his wife’s name, Lauren, is an anagram for ‘unreal.’ Numerous other such details exist in the show, fostering an attentive ‘close reading’ practice on the side of the audience. In order to differentiate between the timelines, I will continue to refer to William in the present as the ‘Man in Black,’ reserving the name William for his narrative from thirty years ago.

248

Narrative Instability

relive their memories exactly as if they were real.361 Accordingly, her perception shifts between her trip to Escalante from thirty years ago and her present journey (and, presumably, many more in between), and the show mirrors this conflation of timelines by presenting all of the characters’ actions from the park’s narrative as taking place at the same time. 362 These discursive strategies all belong to a conscious effort by the show’s narrative instance to mislead the audience into thinking that William and the Man in Black are two different characters, and that the narratives of the different characters in the park generally happen simultaneously. While this discursive representation can be read as an approximation of Dolores’s own confusion about her memories, visually representing her focalization in this way, it generally constitutes a significant instance of unreliable narration (of a non-homodiegetic narrator). Overall, Westworld features significant moments of narrative instability that each time cause major revisions to the reconstruction of the storyworld, similar to twists in unstable identities and unstable realities texts. However, they extend beyond the levels of the show’s characters and their representation of space and time by relating, instead, directly to the level of the narrative discourse: Large parts of the show’s story center on the park of Westworld itself, detailing how its visitors are presented with elaborate narratives to cater to their desires. As a generally highly self-conscious text, 361

362

Fittingly, the show also features moments of unstable spaces and unstable time that work similarly, each time portraying Dolores’s internal focalization. In one instance, for example, she has been shot, in the next, her wound is gone (S1E9), implying that she lives and relives her past journeys constantly, with the perspective switching to one in which she was not shot. Similarly, the town of Escalante is shown switching between shots of being covered by sand (in the present) and of being populated by a variety of hosts (in the past). For instance, the show’s fifth episode includes numerous such narrative overlaps. It begins with Dolores, William, and Logan in the past, then switches over to the Man in Black and the outlaw Lawrence (Clifton Collins Jr.), and back to Dolores again. Dolores is shown falling unconscious while hearing Ford say “May you rest in a deep and dreamless slumber,” and the next scene shows Ford interrogating Dolores in the diegetic reality. This setup suggests, as so many times before in the show, that a host was taken out of the world of the park to check its parameters; but in actuality, Dolores fell unconscious more than thirty years ago, whereas Ford talks to her in the present. (Later, she tells William that she had “troubled dreams,” ostensibly—for the audience—referring to her encounter with Ford as well.) Similarly, in the Man in Black’s storyline, after he kills Lawrence, he mentions that “someone will be along for him shortly”; in a later scene, Lawrence presumably reappears in Dolores and William’s storyline. Before, the show had already established to viewers that hosts, when they die in the park, are reconfigured in the diegetic reality and then deployed again in the park, sometimes in different roles—revealing that Lawrence is back, in a way, builds on the audience’s recognition of the park’s internal routines and rules (which is another nod to games and playing). In fact, however, these two scenes only happen sequentially in the show’s discourse, while they have no direct connection at all in the plot, lying more than thirty years apart.

5 Unstable Textualities

249

and particularly one that is aware of a tradition of narrative instability in popular culture, it presents this world of Westworld as a carefully constructed narrative, showing its audience the operational aesthetics of how narrative pleasure is created through the discourse. The twists that the show of Westworld itself features, however, then happen on a higher narrative level, which the series had not previously established as part of these narrative manipulations, using its own discourse to destabilize the audience’s reconstruction of the storyworld. These twists thus betray the ‘trust’ that Westworld had previously established with its audience, and they connect thematically with its self-conscious interest in questions of narrativity and storytelling. 5.4.2 TEXTUAL POLITICS: NARRATIVES OF RACE AND GENDER Westworld renders its general awareness of matters of textuality specifically through constant references to narratives and storytelling, rather than to texts per se. In comparison to Alan Wake, it makes fewer explicit references to novels or television shows, but it even more prominently portrays the experience of its characters explicitly as narratives. 363 Additionally, while both Alan Wake and Westworld share an interest in storytelling, the TV show more prominently connects it to cultural issues of representation and difference as well. Among the prominent themes that Westworld links with efforts of telling a story are questions of identity and humanity, of aesthetic beauty and art, and of the power of fiction and storytelling per se. Accordingly, I will centrally focus on how Westworld links its concerns with narrativity to matters of representation: Most prominently, it touches

363

Still, the show also includes many intertextual references to literature and popular culture, among others to various works by Shakespeare (including the recurring line that “these violent delights have violent ends” from Romeo and Juliet), to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (particularly via parallels between Alice and Dolores, but also by directly mentioning the book), to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (via a quote by Ford at the beginning of the eighth episode), and to the Divine Comedy (the fifth episode’s title, “Contrapasso,” references the type of punishment in Dante’s Inferno). In terms of films, a conversation between Maeve and Hector in the eighth episode mirrors the red pill/blue pill conversation from The Matrix, and there are a number of references to Western films, for instance in how the character Clementine signals the film My Darling Clementine (cf. also Georgi-Findlay). The music throughout the season also opens up an intertextual interface, featuring piano versions and other covers of many popular songs that relate thematically to specific scenes, for instance when the sixth episode includes an instrumental cover of Radiohead’s “Motion Picture Soundtrack,” whose original lyrics evoke the cultural narratives of Hollywood films (“It’s not like the movies / They fed us on little white lies”). In these and many other references, the show works similarly to how Alan Wake uses intertextual references, as already discussed; accordingly, I will instead focus on Westworld’s emphasis on narrativity.

250

Narrative Instability

upon questions of gender, race, and whiteness in particular. 364 In the following, I will first briefly look at the show’s central concern with the symbolic form of narrative and then highlight how matters of gender and race are infused into these narrative matters. Since I cannot focus on all dimensions of these two categories for the entire run of the show, I will especially emphasize their intersection. Taking these aspects together, I will argue that Westworld engages in intricate intersectional textual politics, partly pursuing a progressive project of female and black emancipation but partly also being held back by intermingling the show’s politics with Ford’s personal ones. Throughout the multiple storylines of the show’s characters, Westworld positions narrative as central for the human experience. This importance becomes apparent in the frequent references that characters in the world’s diegetic reality make to stories—for them, forming Westworld into a pleasurable experience is primarily a matter of providing a fulfilling narrative to the guests. Indeed, they propose that humans crave narrative experiences to make sense of the world, to either find out who they are or who they might be—both boiling down to a better understanding of the self, to a question of identity. In the context of the newest narrative to take shape in Westworld, while head writer Lee Sizemore claims that “like all our best narratives over the years, our guests will have the privilege of getting to know the character they’re most interested in—themselves,” Ford insists that the park’s guests are “not looking for a story that tells them who they are. They already know who they are. They’re here because they want a glimpse of who they could be” (S1E2). Both thus emphasize the power of stories, yet the sharp difference Ford draws between his approach and Sizemore’s is actually mostly one of semantics in the context of the overall show, which casts the very question of one’s identity as constructed and ambivalent, suggesting that it is sometimes impossible to know who one is or who one could be. The park’s visitors, particularly William/the Man in Black, mirror this attitude, for instance when he tells Lawrence that “[t]his whole world is a story. I’ve read every page except the last one” and when he insists, in numerous variations throughout the season, on “want[ing] to know what this all means” (S1E4).365 In a later explanation by Ford to Bernard, the show highlights its own self-awareness of the constructedness 364

365

While it also alludes to questions of class, they are arguably less visible. Notably, most visitors to Westworld seem to be wealthy, since entry to the park is expensive, an aspect that especially Logan refers to from time to time. The Man in Black, in turn, mentions that in the world outside the park, “[e]very need [is] taken care of,” implying that, at least as a man from the upper class, he has no ‘adventures’ left to pursue in the diegetic reality, instead preferring the world of the park (S1E5). The Man in Black’s exact phrasing of searching for the “last [page]” could also hint at his expectation of a twist to this particular story, which is usually revealed towards the end of the text. In this sense, he evidences a particular interest in the plot of this narrative experience, believing that its ‘meaning’ can be uncovered in its narrative events, rather than, for instance, through the themes that it evokes.

5 Unstable Textualities

251

of identity, with Ford saying: “The self is a kind of fiction, for hosts and humans alike. It’s a story we tell ourselves” (S1E8). In this understanding, then, Westworld offers one potential ‘storyworld’ within which its guests can forge a story about their own identity.366 At the same time, Ford’s (and Arnold’s) plan to free the hosts puts narrative front and center as well. Arnold believed that the key to consciousness for the hosts lay in the psychological hypothesis of the bicameral mind, where one part of the brain speaks to another part, which hears that as a voice inside itself. He imagined artificial intelligence like a pyramid, with memory, improvisation, and self-interest at the base, but was unable to find out what was missing at the top (S1E3). When, as is later revealed, Arnold forced Dolores to kill him in order to prevent Ford from opening the park, Ford realized that Dolores did achieve self-consciousness through this act, and that “the thing that led the hosts to their awakening” was “suffering. The pain that the world is not as you want it to be” (S1E10). Accordingly, Ford envisions an emotional, cathartic narrative for the hosts to become human, one that centrally builds on the negative emotions of pain and suffering.367 Beyond highlighting the interwovenness of humanity and narrative, casting humans as ‘storytelling animals,’ this link also establishes the similarity between humans and hosts, since they seek something similar: The hosts want to become human through a narrative journey, and the human visitors want to find out more about their identity through the narrative experience offered by the park. The latter can equally be considered ‘becoming human’ in a way, since postmodern understandings of identity stress that this is not a simple or binary process that would ever be fully completed (cf. 3.2.2). There are numerous parallels between the hosts and the humans depicted in the show, and some of the most prominent concern narratives.368 Throughout the series, these similarities form a central theme of 366

367

368

Significantly, when the Man in Black reveals to Dolores that he is William, he reconstructs what happened after his first visit to the park. Viewers are then shown images of what William did, accompanied by the Man in Black’s voice-over, talking about himself in the third person: “William didn’t know how to fight; didn’t have an instinct for it. Not at first. But now he had a reason. He was looking for you. And somewhere along the way he found he had a taste for it” (S1E10). On a metatextual level, him narrating his own story to Dolores (in what is stylized like a voice-over) is literally a fiction about the self, “a story we tell ourselves,” as Ford phrases it (S1E8). On another level, Dolores’s name already hints at the importance of suffering, as it derives from the Latin (dolor) for ‘pain’ and ‘sorrow.’ Maeve, in turn, recognizes the centrality of narrative as well when she dismisses her memories (particularly of her daughter) as a “story” solely invented to keep her here, insisting instead that it is “[t]ime to write my own fucking story” (S1E8), with her choice of words —“write”—indicating a focus on textuality as well. The Man in Black’s interest in the ‘truth’ and meaning behind the park—his desperation “for the park to give meaning to your life,” as Ford phrases it in the season finale—is mirrored by Dolores’s similar curiosity. In the finale, when Dolores tells

252

Narrative Instability

‘discovering’ and discussing humanity, and for this realization of humanity, narrative takes center stage. Within the specific narratives that help propel both the hosts and the human visitors of Westworld to humanity, issues of gender and race loom large, and both are also intimately interwoven with aspects of narrativity and textuality. Focusing on gender, the story of Dolores, in particular, can be read as a breaking-out of the stereotypical narrative role assigned to her gender in Western narratives, which the Westworld park so fundamentally builds on. The initial presentation viewers glean from Dolores’s daily routine puts her firmly within the role of the Western’s stereotypical fair lady, a kind and innocent (white) woman who stands for “genteel, pure femininity” (Cawelti, Six-Gun 30-31). Depending on Dolores’s interactions in Sweetwater—whether a can of milk is picked up by herself, Teddy, or a guest— the rest of her daily routine differs, representing branching paths similar to nonlinearity in video games. Alone, Dolores spends the day painting; with Teddy, she dreams of leaving for a place “down south” to “start again,” a fantasy that Teddy endlessly displaces by telling Dolores he will take her there “someday” (S1E3). With the park’s guests, the rest of her day is more interactive, featuring more ‘variables,’ as BioShock Infinite would phrase the nonlinearity of her narrative, depending on visitors’ interactions with her. As the show’s characters imply at various points, these interactions specifically concern sex, violence, or sexual violence in particular. 369 Accordingly, the first time that viewers are shown Dolores’s daily routine, it ends with the Man in Black dragging her away into a barn after her parents have been killed, presumably to rape her. The show thus highlights the gendered, sexual violence against Dolores that seems to be part of the disturbing pleasure visitors can gain from the park. In this constellation, Dolores becomes a sexual object for the park’s male visitors, who are depicted as the clear majority of the park’s guests—there are very few women but a lot of men going to the park alone, while other female visitors only accompany their spouses.370 Overall, Dolores’s routine puts her firmly within the tradi-

369

370

the Man in Black about the first time she talked to Arnold about the maze, she asks Arnold: “What does it mean?” Once her narration switches back to the diegetic present, the Man in Black repeats the exact same question to Dolores, not convinced by her story’s explanation of the maze. While Dolores ‘solves’ the riddle of the maze in the end, the Man in Black, by misunderstanding its purpose (the maze is intended for the hosts to gain self-consciousness, not for humans), lags far behind this host’s narrative self-discovery. Theresa, for instance, mentions in passing that they would not “want anything disturbing our guests from their rape and pillage”; the next scene shows Logan brutally injuring an old man and engaging in sexual intercourse with multiple women afterwards, showcasing exactly this preference of many of the park’s visitors (S1E2). This predominance of male visitors to the park also fits with its Western themes, as male characters equally predominate in the Western. Even more importantly, it is white men who usually wield power and agency in the Western, while women are

5 Unstable Textualities

253

tional trope of a stereotypically powerless female character from a Western, and her interactions with the park’s guests highlight even more gruesomely how she mainly serves to sexually gratify men. Throughout the show, this characterization of Dolores changes, and her quest to self-consciousness and humanity is inextricably tied to gaining agency, fighting against her gendered subjugation, and prevailing against patriarchal masculinity. Within the Western theme of her story, this is symbolized by Teddy trying to teach her how to shoot a gun, even though at this early stage of her journey, she is not receptive to the training (S1E3). 371 Later, she reaches into her memories and the previous time(s) she has been taught to use a pistol in order to remember these skills, symbolically acquiring the power associated with the phallic symbol of the gun. In the middle of the fifth episode, this is symbolized by a change of clothes as well, with Dolores shedding her blue dress (whose style is possibly a reference to Alice in Wonderland) for pants, a shirt, and a cowboy hat, including a gun and holster. She thus assumes the clothing typical of the cowboy figure from Western films, gaining agency through this performance of masculinity, as the change in clothes culminates her thoughts throughout these earlier episodes about her “path” in life, wondering if there are not “many paths” at any moment for her to choose from (S1E5). These ideas also increasingly take hold as William, Logan, and Dolores move further away from the initial town of Sweetwater, venturing out into the wilderness, which—again within classic Western ideology—is thus ascribed with a certain amount of freedom. While, in the classic Western, the wilderness and the frontier only work to grant freedom in a male-coded environment, Dolores manages to embark on a similar journey of self-discovery through her appropriation of typical Western cowboy tropes (cf. Cooper 2-7; Cawelti, Six-Gun 29-45). Even more significantly, Dolores’s self-conscious identity develops in relation to men as well: The first time she shoots a number of hosts is when William is about to be overwhelmed and dragged away by a band of exConfederacy soldiers.372 What propelled her to violence thus is a protective

371 372

subjugated to them, so the setting’s initial appeal is also clearly modeled to attract men. The imagination of the American West as a space to be conquered, understanding “the land as woman” (Kolodny 4), which the Western as a genre strongly builds on, has been critically studied particularly in Annette Kolodny’s The Lay of the Land. In a sentence laden with Freudian overtones, Teddy tells her: “Some hands weren’t meant to pull the trigger.” In another moment of self-reflection for Dolores (and the show), she explains her actions to William by referring directly to the stereotype of the damsel in distress and to its constructedness: “I imagined a story where I didn’t have to be the damsel” (S1E5). In a later conversation with him, she even more generally asserts that, unlike most of the human visitors, she does not “want to be in a story” (S1E7), affirming her desire to be ‘real,’ acknowledging the power of narratives to create (apparent) realities, and self-consciously pointing to the show’s own fictionality.

254

Narrative Instability

scenario, similar to when a (male) Western hero fights off a group of bandits to save a female damsel. This pattern develops throughout the season, with Dolores taking on increasingly more traditionally masculine traits, almost always in a fight against a male character and often while protecting another.373 Shortly before she gains complete self-consciousness, while struggling against the Man in Black, she still hopes for a man to save her and “take [her] away” (S1E10)—since she confuses her memories for reality, she waits for William to come, yet it is actually Teddy who arrives to shoot the Man in Black.374 While, in this scene, she still partly clings to a Western-inspired romantic setup that casts her in need of rescue, her final interaction with Teddy, after having gained consciousness, portrays her in a more powerful, masculine pose: She embraces his chest from behind in a protective manner and soothingly tells him, “It’s gonna be alright, Teddy,” then assertively adds: “This world doesn’t belong to them. It belongs to us,” reaffirming a binary logic of hosts versus humans. Overall, Dolores’s journey to self-consciousness throughout the first season thus entails coming to terms with her femininity, and specifically one that is active, has agency, and is assertive, all of which are traits stereotypically associated with masculinity.375 At the end of the season, she is seen protecting her male partner, and she then proceeds to shoot Ford, symbolically killing off the most powerful representation of white masculinity in the series. While her arc is still tied to a romantic heterosexual love story, her development shows a progression towards agency and power, and the season depicts Dolores succeeding in that endeavor. Dolores and her relation to other characters assumes the most important such arc in the first season, even though the other host characters and their individual journeys also add other nuances to how the show depicts femininity and motherhood as well as masculinity and fatherhood.376 373

374

375

376

She also asserts herself against William and Logan, berating them as they fight about her that they “both keep assuming that [she wants] out” (S1E9). This is an important moment of agency for Dolores, as she voices her own desires and opinions while two men are talking about (instead of with) her as if she has no say in her own fate. While she is thus still saved by a male character, importantly, it is not by a human (as William would have been) but by a host, pointing to the significance of their ‘racial’ allegiance. Notably, before this culmination of her quest for identity, Dolores is also often referred to not as a woman but in infantile terms, for instance when Ford explains that Arnold found “a new child” in her (S1E10) or when Logan refers to her as a “doll” (S1E5). As a case in point, Maeve’s cornerstone memory and her narrative of suffering concerns the loss of her daughter at the hands of the Man in Black, an event that happened when Maeve played a different character role in the park, but to which her memory repeatedly returns. At the end of the first season, she abandons her plans to leave the park’s facilities and to experience the ‘real’ outside world at the last minute, apparently being lured back by the possibility to see her daughter again.

5 Unstable Textualities

255

Arguably even more importantly, the characters of Maeve and Bernard also point to how issues of gender intersect with questions of race in the show. Together with the park’s executive director, Charlotte, they are the show’s most prominent African American characters, but as hosts, both of them also speak to Westworld’s metaphorical use of race: The distinctions that the show’s characters make between humans and hosts work similarly to differences based on race, with humans assuming the hierarchically higher position of whiteness and hosts, particularly in a US historical context, mirroring blackness. This is a common positioning in science fiction texts (Nama 11-12; cf. also Leonard), and hence, the inferior way in which the hosts are treated by the human visitors (and many of the park’s employees) evokes parallels to the historical treatment of black slaves by white Americans. More specifically, this parallel becomes even clearer with Maeve and Bernard, who are doubly coded ‘black’ in the show because of their ethnicity and because of their status as hosts, thus also standing out against other characters’ whiteness constituted both by these white characters’ ethnicity and their claim to humanity. Both Maeve’s and Bernard’s paths to self-consciousness evoke parallels to the US history of slavery, and both are intrinsically tied to narrative. Their journeys to become sentient are, ultimately, quests for agency similar to the struggles of many writers of slave narratives. Their gradual understanding of their programming—especially how Maeve grasps how the park has trapped her, how her relationships and memories are “all a story created by you to keep me here” (S1E8)—mirrors black slaves’ struggle for literacy, which was intrinsically linked to freedom by being able to understand and express the oppression they faced (Rushdy 118; Heglar 23). While Maeve’s portrayal throughout the season focuses centrally on her femininity and motherhood, her rise to consciousness also evokes parallels to a slave liberation. She repeatedly talks about the “masters who pull [our] strings” (S1E4, S1E9), referring to the humans in the diegetic reality but evoking the image of slaveholders, and she focuses on rescuing other hosts along with her, granting them self-consciousness as well and thus freeing

Bernard, in turn, suffers from a similar loss, as his infant son succumbed to an illness a few years ago. During Ford’s reveal that Bernard is a host, one of the phrases Bernard utters in his disbelief is “I was a father” (S1E7), combining his claim to humanity, to being ‘real,’ closely with fatherhood—a familiar theme from Inception. Beyond the hosts, the conversations and fights between William and Logan also centrally revolve around issues of masculinity, with William’s eventual triumph over Logan symbolized in his insistence not to “call [him] Billy,” a childish diminutive apparently incompatible with his new-found sense of masculinity (S1E9). While the details of all these aspects surrounding femininity, masculinity, and their intersection with race would take too much space to elaborate on here, many of Westworld’s treatments show similar tendencies as the unstable texts I have discussed in previous chapters.

256

Narrative Instability

slaves from her fellow ‘race.’ Among them is also Bernard, with whom she shares blackness both on an ethnic and a metaphorical level. Bernard, in turn, is racially marked particularly through his interactions with Ford, who is marked as white in contrast to him. 377 Bernard’s struggles with fatherhood and masculinity only partially play out against femininity and much more centrally against the patriarchal white masculinity embodied by Ford. Throughout the show, while Ford refers to Bernard by his first name, Bernard usually calls Ford “sir,” already establishing a difference in hierarchy and power.378 During the reveal of Bernard’s origin as Arnold in the ninth episode, a flashback partly explains this setup. When Bernard asks Ford who he is, he answers: “You are the perfect instrument, the ideal partner, the way any tool partners with the hand that wields it.” The hierarchy between them becomes clear through the metaphor of Bernard being an “instrument,” a “tool” that is being used by Ford’s “hand[s],” which intrinsically dehumanizes Bernard and again evokes references to how black slaves have been considered less than human and mere tools by white slaveholders; in Marxist terms, it alienates and reifies him into a producing object. Additionally, Ford constructing a host in the image of his deceased African American partner Arnold and, in this sense, bringing him back from the dead amounts to the appropriation of a black body by a white man,379 and it completely erases Arnold’s agency in this matter. Bernard, in turn, is similarly used by Ford in an arrangement that leaves very little agency to him. Instead, all of Bernard’s actions and, in the end, decisions, are dictated and mandated by Ford’s programming. 380 In fact, while both 377

378

379

380

Ford’s physical appearance also adds to this, particularly his white hair and his penchant for including white garments in his clothing (although the few times he is seen with a hat, it is, notably, a black one). Only once does Bernard address Ford by his first name, Robert, when he apparently tries to imitate Arnold in order to convince Ford not to terminate him (S1E10). After a brief moment of contemplation, Ford responds with his usual misanthropic ideology: “Never place your trust in us. We’re only human. Inevitably, we will disappoint you.” The appropriation of black bodies by white America has a long (cultural) history (cf., e.g., Yancy). In addition, in Bernard’s case, this extends to Arnold’s mind and his general personality as well, as Ford is seen, for instance, teaching Bernard how to imitate Arnold’s mannerisms (S1E9). These details about their relationship play into other aspects of the show that point out Ford’s hubris and his elevated sense of power. In terms of masculinity and fatherhood, even though not much is known about Ford’s personal history, his father seems to play an important role for him as well. He once alludes to his father’s aggressiveness, and in a conversation with Dolores, he mentions that his father told him he should “be satisfied with my lot in life. That the world owed me nothing. And so, I made my own world” (S1E5). This point of view connects with Ford’s sense of masculinity as well as with a personality trait that closely resembles a god complex—in his final conversation with Dolores, for instance, he says: “Wasn’t it Oppenheimer who said that ‘any man whose mistake takes ten years to correct is quite a man’? Mine have taken thirty-five” (S1E10). The entire park, in many re-

5 Unstable Textualities

257

Maeve and Bernard seem to achieve self-consciousness throughout the season—Maeve by altering her programming and Bernard through Ford’s revelations and with the help of Maeve—they only do so, like most of the events happening in the show, at the whim of Ford, symbolically subordinating blackness to whiteness. Overall, in fact, this influence of Ford suffuses Westworld, and the show’s textual politics are ultimately complicated by the character’s own personal politics. While, in some sense, the narrative arcs of Dolores, Maeve, Bernard, and others are progressive stories of underprivileged or oppressed characters eventually succeeding, all of these developments are engineered and, hence, sanctioned only by Ford’s white upper-class masculinity. In terms of race, the emancipation of black characters like Maeve and Bernard as well as, more generally, the ascension of the racially Othered hosts is only possible through Ford’s elaborate plotting, while his own interactions with the hosts demonstrate his assumed superiority and authority over the ‘doubly’ nonwhite characters. Regarding questions of gender, besides similar flaws in Dolores’s liberation, the show’s overall treatment of female characters is also at odds with the assumed progressiveness of Dolores’s journey: While she wants to become a powerful woman by breaking with the stereotype of the ‘damsel in distress,’ other female characters in the show who already are such empowered women are killed off. Most notably, this concerns Bernard’s assistant Elsie as well as Theresa, 381 with whom Bernard was romantically involved. When both came too close to discovering Ford’s machinations, they were killed by Bernard on Ford’s orders.382 In effect, in these developments, the show takes on part of Ford’s misanthropy, his preference of hosts over humans. 383 These different narra-

381

382

383

spects, can be seen as Ford’s affirmation of his own identity, enjoying the power and agency he has over all elements in and inhabitants of it. In this sense, he also stylizes himself as a father figure for all of the hosts. Charlotte might also be added to this list—she is certainly outsmarted and sidelined by Ford throughout the season, yet her fate at the end of its final episode remains uncertain. In fact, though, in the second season, both Charlotte and Elsie are shown to be alive after all. Notably, both are also violent killings, narratively perpetuating the violence against women that the show otherwise tries to lay bare with the visitors of the park. As both are killed by Bernard on Ford’s behest, their deaths again establish the idea of Ford as Bernard’s master, and they also feed into stereotypes of black male violence against white women. In comparison, the presumed death of the park’s male head of security, Stubbs (Luke Hemsworth), is not shown on screen, and Ford’s death also has some grace to its visual depiction (and, significantly, is a death by choice). Again, the show’s second season reveals that Stubbs survived. In his final speech, Ford accordingly speaks of the “birth of a new people,” also alluding to a racial understanding of the hosts, and laments that the humans he addresses at the moment, and those that the park has ‘addressed’ over the decades, cannot be fundamentally changed by his narratives, that they are wasted on them and better suited to the hosts (S1E10). There is, of course, a certain naivety to

258

Narrative Instability

tive events thus create contradictions and ambiguities in the show’s overall textual project regarding matters of race and gender. Yet the centrality of Ford, his ultimate masterminding of most of the events of the show and his eventual outsmarting of the other characters,384 takes over the narration of the show as well, which provides him and his opinions with the highest narrative authority. Like most of the texts analyzed in this book, Westworld thus uses its narrative instability to discuss issues of representation and identity, and like many others, while it might try to pursue a progressive project, it is fraught with contradictions. In the show’s particular case of focusing so self-consciously on the power of narratives and textuality, this ambiguity can be partly explained by its inability—or its reluctance—to point out and make visible one of the most powerful narratives in (American) culture and society, the master narrative and ideology of white patriarchy. Instead, Westworld is so enamored with the character of Ford that it wants to create sympathy on the audience’s part as well, with the show taking over some of his racist and sexist politics and framing the struggles of hosts and humans as being about the grander theme of humanity, partly leaving questions of race and gender unmarked and invisible in this construction and refusing to question or deconstruct the overall power of white patriarchy. 5.4.3 “THE STORIES ARE BEST LEFT METATEXTUALITY

TO THE

GUESTS”: GENRE, PLAY,

AND

Finally, an even closer and more concentrated look at Westworld’s metatextual self-awareness will bring together some of the many themes and subjects that its ten episodes touch upon. As before, while the show self-reflexively comments on many of these contexts, having its characters openly talk about them, there are also levels of the series that go beyond its own awareness. Similar to Alan Wake, Westworld displays a keen interest in matters of genre, focusing specifically on the Western. 385 In the following, I

384

385

Ford’s thinking, believing the hosts to be “purer” than humans (S1E9)—since they were programmed by humans, even (or especially) after attaining self-consciousness, they seem doomed to repeat the same mistakes that Ford associates with humanity. Also note how Ford’s choice of the word ‘pure’ evokes crudely racialized connotations. Although Ford is killed off in the end as well, he dies “by choice,” as he says—by his choice and by Dolores’s, who kills him in an act of agency, having made this self-conscious decision (S1E10), which is what Ford planned for her all along. In this sense, Ford’s death works differently than Theresa’s, and it is certainly not a symbolic killing of (the power of) white masculinity (additionally, since it occurs at the very end of the season, the show does not yet imagine how such a lack of white patriarchy might look like—and in its second season, Ford reappears in a different form). Additionally, Westworld is also, of course, a science-fiction show, and particularly science fiction’s interest in matters of race (cf. Lavender; Haslam) adds to how the

5 Unstable Textualities

259

will thus first touch on those elements of the Western genre that the show consciously evokes as well as on those that it seems less aware of. Secondly, I will connect this to a larger interest of the series in questions of textuality, which it especially discusses in terms of narrativity and interpretation. Finally, taking yet another step back, I will contextualize these metatextual aspects within Westworld’s transmedial interest particularly in notions of play and games. Eventually, I will argue that the series promotes a synthesis between games and television, and play and narrative more generally, and that it metatextually transfers this fusion from the realm of its fictional characters to its audience as well. Many elements of the show’s depiction of its theme-park world reference established tropes, (visual) representations, and themes of the Western genre. These range from a certain landscape iconography (e.g., during the opening shots of the first episode) to stock settings and characters (the sheriff, bandits, prostitutes, etc.), allusions in certain names (e.g., to the outlaw Robert Ford), and recreations of iconic shots from Western films, especially of John Ford’s work and a number of revisionist Westerns (cf. Georgi-Findlay 76-86). Even more significantly, the genre is also evoked through themes such as freedom, individualism, and reinvention, which form a core part of how the Western has been read as mythologizing Americanness. Particularly this focus on reinvention, encapsulated in Crèvecoeur’s famous observation that “[t]he American is a new man” (32), is evoked throughout the show. Dolores, for instance, insists that the “newcomers” are like them, looking for a “place to be free, to stake out our dreams, a place with unlimited possibilities” (S1E1), while Maeve phrases a similar point in a significantly blunter manner by alleging that in this “new world [...], you can be whoever the fuck you want” (S1E3). Rather than just engaging in these Western stereotypes, Westworld is aware of and has its characters openly address a number of them, putting it in line with a revisionist tradition of the Western genre.386 For example, while a number of characters in the Westworld park wear white hats and black hats according to the stereotypical Western distinction—white hats signaling heroes and black hats denoting villains (Agnew 131)—its characters also explicitly address this fact, for instance when Logan complains to William that he would spend “$40K a day to jerk off alone in the woods, playing white hat” (S1E3) or when he implores him to “[g]o black hat with me” (S1E4). Besides pointing to the generic convention, Logan’s use of the phrases also suggests that this is a choice visitors of Westworld can make, rather than a predetermination. Before William enters the actual park, he has a chance to pick his preferred outfit, at the end having to add “one final touch,” selecting from a number

386

overall series discusses this issue, fusing explorations and constructions of race from the Western with science-fiction elements. On these revisionist deconstructions of the Western and on so-called post-, neo-, or anti-Westerns, cf. Cawelti, Six-Gun 99-126; Campbell; Paryz and Leo; Nelson.

260

Narrative Instability

of hats (S1E2). The shot places William in the middle, with a row of white hats on the left and black ones to his right, again exposing the convention as such and simultaneously establishing a binary opposition while emphasizing an element of choice.387 Similarly, the issues of femininity and masculinity that the show discusses alongside the Western genre, such as Dolores’s gradual breaking-away from the damsel-in-distress stereotype, also align with an interest in exposing some of the genre’s tropes. However, while pointing to a number of the Western genre’s traditional and stereotypical traits, the show does not thoroughly deconstruct or revise the genre. Notably, the behind-the-scenes look at how the park is managed focuses much more on how narratives are constructed for the visitors (as discussed above), rather than elaborating how this narrative works according to the framework of a certain genre. The white hat/black hat dichotomy, for instance, is ultimately upheld in its binary. While William wears a white hat in the beginning (which gets increasingly dirtier and darker throughout the season), he puts on a black one in the tenth episode, and many years later, as the Man in Black, he still wears the black hat. On the one hand, this potentially points to the fluidity of this distinction, showing how one character goes from the one extreme to the other. On the other hand, however, William’s transformation is not actually sufficiently motivated in the show; the kind and helpful William who audiences (and Dolores) witness throughout most of the show bears very little resemblance to the violent and sadistic actions committed by the Man in Black. The younger William thus stands as a stereotypically good, the older one as a stereotypically evil character. While the show questions the rigidity of these labels and instead emphasizes choice, it still upholds the general binary, with fewer shades of grey in between. On a higher thematic level, Westworld also tries to entice its audience with generic promises of the Western, most significantly those that adhere to the ‘myth of the frontier,’ “arguably the longest-lived of American myths” (Slotkin, Fatal Environment 15). Many Westerns, after all, evoke an imagination of the United States that plays into the ideas propelled by Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis about the contact with the allegedly free land also entailing freedom, an opportunity to become a ‘new man,’ and, in other words, a promise to fulfill the American Dream (cf. Slotkin, Fatal Environment; Rollins and O’Connor).388 Throughout the entire first 387

388

William, of course, picks a white hat, whereas Logan wears a black one. Dolores’s hat, significantly, is neither white nor black but a shade of brown, symbolizing her refusal to engage in this binary morality. In subsequent scholarship, this conception has, of course, thoroughly been questioned and criticized. As mentioned before, the work of Annette Kolodny has been imperative in pointing out how ‘conquering’ the allegedly ‘virgin’ land (cf. Smith, Virgin Land) also entailed the subjugation of women, whereas Richard Slotkin’s three book-length studies of the frontier point out how the frontier was predominantly characterized not by democracy but by violence, via what he calls ‘regenera-

5 Unstable Textualities

261

season, the show’s characters repeatedly insist on this promise of Westworld, perhaps most pointedly when William tells Dolores: “Whoever you were before doesn’t matter here. There’s no rules, restrictions ... You can change the story of your life” (S1E5).389 In its overall plot lines and themes, the show does not work against this point of view, instead trying to lure audiences into believing in this appeal of Westworld. In fact, however, William describes the world of the park exactly along the parameters of the constructed genre of the Western, where the (male) protagonists appear to have the freedom to “change the story of [their] life,” without “rules” or “restrictions” holding them back. Significantly, this emphasis on a high degree of agency to change one’s life also aligns with the importance of agency in video games, with the perceived freedom and lack of “rules.” Just as I discussed for video games before, however, the idea of ‘unlimited’ agency exists neither in video games nor in real life, nor, actually, in the Western genre—of course, in actuality, certain rules and restrictions prevail in the Western as well (certainly for all nonwhite, nonmale characters), yet the genre builds on this feeling of freedom. Westworld wants to uphold this myth about its constructed world, however, because it connects to its idea of engaging with the park as a game as well, a point I will discuss in more detail below, and thus lures viewers into the ‘game’ of the show. In comparison to its links to the Western genre, Westworld exhibits a much higher degree of textual awareness for its own status as a (fictional) narrative, as discussed before, and it especially further connects these moments with reflections on the role and function of narrative. In fact, when Ford, in his final speech, talks about his belief “that stories [help] us to ennoble ourselves, to fix what was broken in us, and to help us become the people we dreamed of being” (S1E10), his idea about the function of narrative is slightly similar to an understanding of narratives’ cultural work. Throughout the show, this potential of narratives to give meaning to things (particularly to oneself, to one’s identity) and to make one realize this meaning by transforming it into words is evoked by various characters, and it forms both the central appeal for the park’s visitors and the cornerstone of the (narrative) journey that Ford has plotted for the hosts to gain selfconsciousness. Metatextually, these moments are connected to how viewers of Westworld engage with the series, as a narrative, as well. The Man in Black, for instance, mentions that in the world outside the park, “[e]very need [is] taken care of, except one: purpose, meaning,” which is why he comes to Westworld in search of “a deeper meaning hiding under all that.

389

tion through violence’ (cf. Regeneration). Additionally, as Gabriele Pisarz-Ramirez points out, “especially the idea of an ‘empty’ West had long been opposed by those population groups who had lived in the region before it was settled in the process of US-American expansionism, predominantly Mexican Americans and Native Americans” (242). Note also how, again, this opportunity to change who one is, to create a new identity for oneself, is rendered in narrative terms as a “story.”

262

Narrative Instability

Something the person who created it wanted to express. Something true” (S1E5). He thus seeks relevance and “purpose” in his actual life by turning to a fictional world, just as the audience of Westworld or any other fictional narrative might glean meaning from it that has relevance for their own, nonfictional selves as well. This understanding of fiction being able to provide something “true” links to theoretical understandings of fictionality in general, and it is frequently evoked by Ford throughout the show.390 In the scene just quoted, the Man in Black is talking to Ford, who quips back that “if you’re looking for the moral of the story, you could simply ask,” to which the Man in Black replies that he would have to ask Arnold, believing him to be the original author. In this sense, both characters seem to partly espouse a belief in one simple truth via the ‘intentional fallacy,’ in a clearcut “moral of the story” that one authorial figure could tell the audience. Other parts of the show, however, self-reflexively highlight the importance of interpretation to make sense of a narrative. In the few encounters between the two, Ford also subtly mocks the Man in Black’s obsession with such a simplistic understanding of truth, symbolized in his desire to find the maze, which he is repeatedly told is not intended for him. Instead, Ford champions interpretation as a way to derive important meanings from a narrative. This is most significantly developed in Ford’s final conversation with Dolores, when they talk about Michelangelo’s painting The Creation of Adam, in Ford’s words the “divine moment when God gave human beings life and purpose” (S1E10). He adds: “[T]here could be another meaning, something deeper. Something hidden, perhaps. A metaphor,” to which Dolores replies: “You mean a lie.” Later, Ford picks up the topic again: You’re probably right, Dolores. Michelangelo did tell a lie. See, it took five hundred years for someone to notice something hidden in plain sight. It was a doctor who noticed the shape of the human brain [in the depiction of God]. The message being that the divine gift does not come from a higher power but from our own minds.

Beyond the scene’s thematic importance of pointing to humans’ autonomy and self-determination, it also highlights the hermeneutical practice of interpretation, of arriving at the meanings of a work of art by studying it closely. What is ‘true’ and ‘false’ is discussed in a less binary fashion in this exchange, instead pointing to Ford’s understanding of narratives and other art to be “lies that told a deeper truth” (S1E10). On a metatextual level, by alluding to the history of interpreting Michelangelo’s painting, Westworld 390

For instance, when Ford talks to Teddy about his role in the new narrative, he ex plains it as “[a] fiction which, like all great stories, is rooted in truth” (S1E3); in his final speech, he envisions narratives as “[l]ies that told a deeper truth” (S1E10). The hosts’ journey to self-consciousness also evokes a search for truth, for instance when Maeve tells Bernard that “[i]f you go looking for the truth, get the whole thing. [...] Half is worse than none at all,” alluding to an epistemological dilemma (S1E9).

5 Unstable Textualities

263

also suggests to audiences how to engage with the show as a text: looking closely at the (audiovisual) details that it presents, (re)watching something repeatedly to perhaps notice something they had not seen before, and in general feeling free to interpret certain elements of the narrative.391 The show thus encourages this kind of consumption, and in turn, it promises to reward this reception practice—through hints and foreshadowing towards certain revelations, but also more generally by allowing for meaningful interpretations contextualizing its narrative’s specifics within larger themes. This suggestion by the text itself for how it should be engaged with also fits with a final point prominently made throughout the show, the fusion of narrative with ludic elements. Beyond thinking about itself as a television show, or even as a narrative in general terms, Westworld also positions itself in a transmedial context, 392 as part of Jenkins’s notion of ‘convergence culture,’ setting its own narrative in relation to other media.393 Most prominently, it alludes to the symbolic form of play, and to video games as a medium, in how it thinks about its own status as a text, fusing narrative and play.394 Throughout the show, references to playing and games are made prominently by a number of characters, particularly the Man in Black, who repeatedly describes the experience of the overall park as well as his search for the maze as a “game” whose “deeper level” he has to look for (e.g., S1E1, S1E2, S1E4, S1E8). 391

392 393

394

The significance of interpretation also comes up in an earlier scene between Bernard and Elsie, when he tells her that the prolonged exposure to working with the hosts can make one “read things into their behaviors,” and as an example, he points out that a host’s drawing that Elsie believes to show Orion is an incorrect interpretation, since there are “three stars in Orion’s belt, not four” (S1E4). The idea of ‘reading into’ something also works metatextually, subtly pointing to audience practices that try to find meaning in all aspects of Westworld, which the show, however, does not dismiss here as a practice—rather, Bernard’s remark emphasizes the potential to misread something, as well as the importance of paying attention to details. Notably, Westworld is based on the 1973 film of the same name, establishing a transmedial context to that ‘origin text’ as well. In an exchange with Dolores, William highlights this transmedial appeal of the park of Westworld itself: “The only thing I had as a kid were books. I used to live in them. [...] ’cause they had meaning. This place, this is like I woke up inside one of those stories” (S1E7). He thus explicitly evokes the power of written stories, again framing them in terms of “meaning,” and highlights his fascination with the park because it is a spatial realization of such stories. Although the show itself, of course, is not such a theme park for its audience, not as ‘real’ as it might seem to William, the transferal of stories evoked by written words into an audiovisual narrative also implies a similar intermedial link as the one between a book and a theme park. Mittell points to a somewhat similar fusion in the TV show The Wire, arguing that “The Wire might be thought of as a spectatorial game” (431) and that it exhibits a kind of “game logic”: “Instead of mysteries, the show’s narrative is focused on the game between competing systems” (“‘All in the Game’” 436).

264

Narrative Instability

When Charlotte, the park’s executive director, interrupts his ‘gameplay’ by encountering him in the world of the park and tells him that “not everything is a part of this game,” he retorts: “Then you don’t see the whole game” (S1E9), establishing the extent that this game metaphor has for him in explaining the appeal of Westworld. Beyond these overt references to games, there are numerous more specific elements of playing and (video) games that both the specifics of the park and Westworld as a series, in its narrative discourse, reference, further linking play and its interest in narrative: In general, one’s personal experience in the Westworld park resembles that of having an avatar in a video game; 395 there are allusions to difficulty settings and, in more general terms, to competitiveness; 396 as well as numerous smaller aspects that resemble (video) games. Among them, many of the narrative tasks that await guests in the park work similarly to quests in video games, in which a non-player character gives the player a specific mission to fulfill, which Logan alludes to when William tries to help an old man: “He’ll only try to rope you into some bullshit treasure hunt” (S1E2). In general, Logan is positioned as an experienced player in his knowledge of the park, whereas William would be, in gaming jargon, a ‘newbie’ to the game.397 On a textually higher level, Westworld also takes on some of the aesthetics of (game)play in its narration. Most notably, this concerns the show’s focus on an iterative narrative structure, for instance in the many times that the audience is shown Dolores’s daily routine of waking up, leaving the 395

396

397

This is referenced, for instance, when the audience is introduced to William, who can choose his wardrobe before his adventures in Westworld begin, similar to the character creation in many role-playing video games (S1E2). Likewise, during the show’s opening shots, a guest mentions that he once came into the park and “went straight evil,” referencing the possibility of playing according to certain parameters (such as an alignment chart known from Dungeons & Dragons, with options like ‘lawful evil’) instead of trying to emulate oneself ‘realistically’ (S1E1). Logan mentions that Sweetwater and its surrounding areas are “market-tested,” whereas the further out they go, the more difficult the encounters become (S1E5). Again with the use of gaming lingo, Logan refers to this first town as “level one” (S1E1). The central competitive aspect of games and the Westworld park is evoked by the Man in Black, part of whose philosophy is that “winning doesn’t mean anything unless someone else loses” (S1E1). Other references include the many evocations of the world working to certain “rules,” similar to how play is also conceptualized (e.g., S1E5, S1E9, S1E10); the Man in Black having to make sure to keep Lawrence and Teddy alive, which resembles escort missions in video games; Logan’s terminology that they have found an “Easter egg,” something hidden by the developers of a game (S1E4); Logan saying “Upgrade. Nice!” when he finds a better weapon off the corpse of a bandit, which resembles loot found on dead enemies in video games (S1E4); and the explanation to William that there is “no orientation” for getting to know the park, similar to games without ‘tutorials’ (S1E2). All these smaller elements, and the pleasure viewers might gain from noticing and looking for them, add to the narratively more significant interweaving of play and narrative on the discursive level.

5 Unstable Textualities

265

house, and going to Sweetwater. These loops and reboots, as Katja Kanzler argues, constitute a remediation of video games and can be understood as part of a ‘ludification’ of contemporary culture (“‘This Game’” 56), evoking a ludic textuality.398 Another aspect that can be considered part of the show’s narrative ‘reboot’ structure is the gaming mechanic of ‘quickloading’ and ‘quicksaving’: In video games in which players can save their current progress at any time, they might save before a particularly difficult stage, attempt to beat it, and, if they fail, ‘quickload’ to return to their previous state, before their failure, in order to try again. Dolores’s ability to remember all of her memories very clearly and to tap into their ‘reality’ works (and is discursively presented) according to a similar logic as well: When, for instance, she is shot at the end of the third episode by a person yelling at her to “[g]et back here,” the camera shows her holding her hands over the bleeding wound. Then, we hear the same person again yelling at her to “[g]et back here,” and Dolores’s wound is gone. This time, knowing what will happen, she can react in time and runs away. The scene thus is shot as if Dolores pushed the ‘quickload’ button in order to replay the sequence and act differently, avoiding a negative outcome. Finally, on the thematic level, the show’s characters’ central concern with choices and agency resembles such aspects in games, contextualizing them within discussions of interactivity, nonlinearity, and agency in particular. Especially Dolores seems to think about agency via the aesthetic means of (video) games, through her central and repeated use of the ‘path’ metaphor. Initially, her programming has her believe that “[t]here’s a path for everyone” (S1E1), a phrasing also repeated, for instance, by the Man in Black (S1E5). During her journey to self-consciousness, however, this belief changes, as she mentions that she “used to believe there was a path for everyone. Now I think I never asked where that path was taking me” (S1E4), and that she now “wondered if in every moment, there aren’t many paths. Choices ... hanging in the air like ghosts” (S1E5). This idea of having multiple choices for specific decisions is rendered with the help of the video-game idea of branching paths, evoking BioShock Infinite’s dialectic of ‘constants’ and ‘variables’ that coexist in video games. It also entails an understanding that the idea of having only one ‘path’ for somebody’s life implies linearity and little potential for agency. This gradual realization by Dolores forms a major part of her quest for self-consciousness, rendering her journey as one of acquiring agency as well.399 398

399

Arguing from a different angle by analyzing a tendency in contemporary quality TV to innovate on its medial formulas through remediated elements from video games, Kanzler discusses a number of other examples of reboots and loops as tropes in Westworld, among them Dolores’s repeated daily routines, the hosts’ general rebooting at the end of their cycle, and the looping player piano (“‘This Game’” 58-64). In addition to this focus on choice, the trope of the maze is also frequently evoked throughout the show, as an enigma in Westworld that both Dolores and the Man in

266

Narrative Instability

In this transmedial context, Westworld becomes a kind of narratively liminal text, fusing aspects of the textuality of the symbolic forms of narrative and play. While still, obviously, a television show in terms of its medium, both the way it engages with questions of narrativity and textuality as part of its storyworld and how it discursively presents this storyworld are infused with ludic elements, combining and comparing play and narrative.400 On a metatextual level, the show thus suggests to take pleasure in its narrative by understanding it, partly, as a kind of game, at least in the sense of a ‘narrative puzzle’ that has to be solved, similar to the maze that Dolores and the Man in Black are seeking. The show’s actual reception speaks to the success of this fusing of narrative and play: In online forums and on social media, many of the unstable moments of the show’s first season were discussed and, as popular ‘theories,’ partly correctly speculated on by some users before they then actually happened. As just one concrete example of such fan speculation, a thread on the news aggregation and discussion website Reddit (specifically its subreddit for Westworld) is tagged “THEORY” and titled “Dolores’ conversations are with ARNOLD, not Bernard” (OthoHasTheHandbook). It was posted on October 25, 2016, after only the first four episodes of the show had been broadcast, yet it already alludes to most of the major twists that were about to occur later in the show. Besides the correct speculation that Arnold and Bernard are the same person, the user’s “theory also connects with and reinforces a few popular theories” that were regularly discussed on the subreddit, such as “Two Timeframes” (“there is some evidence [...] that suggests this is a nonlinear narrative in a major way”), “Bernard is a Host” (“I think there’s slightly less evidence for this one”), and “William is the MiB [Man in Black]” (“There’s really the least evidence overall for this theory”). All four, at least in their broader ideas, are correctly speculated on by this user, yet at the same time, the user also mentions that “this theory definitely ventures into tinfoil territory,” since at least at this point in the show, there is only little evidence to support all of these interpretations. Accordingly, there were also, of course, numerous ideas and fan ‘theories’ that

400

Black are keen on pursuing (cf. also Kanzler, “‘This Game’” 64-67). Using the maze as a way of metaphorizing what both hosts and guests in the park seek accentuates elements of play involved in interpretation, an interaction and ‘playing’ with meanings in the form of a narrative puzzle that has to (and can be) ‘solved.’ This parallel between the two forms also becomes apparent in the previous exchange between the Man in Black and Charlotte—hearing the Man in Black’s insistence that she does “not see the whole game,” she retorts: “Or perhaps you can no longer see beyond it. Ford’s stories are engaging. For some, downright addictive” (S1E9). Curiously, her remark picks up a discourse usually associated with (particularly video) games, which are often framed as (or warned about as) being addictive. While the park itself is portrayed similar to a game, it is its narratives that seem to make up the most addictive—and appealing—aspect of it, fusing the two forms.

267

5 Unstable Textualities

later turned out to be incorrect, so the existence of these more accurate predictions does not imply that everybody already predicted Westworld’s later twists by the fourth episode. In fact, some of the comments by other users on the thread also point to resistance towards interpreting all the different clues found in the show, with one saying that “this sub[reddit] has developed an allergic reaction to theories this past week” and another mentioning that “I really like how your post ties in every theory I believe in and that most people here are working hard to debunk day in and day out” (bunka77, deicide666ra in OthoHasTheHandbook). Such feelings among this community highlight that fan reception is, of course, not constituted by homogeneous practices, and that there are many different ways in which a text can be pleasurably engaged with. From the point of view of the text itself, however, it is significant that Westworld’s attempts at encouraging this kind of reception and narrative puzzling have partly succeeded—as the original user remarks at the beginning of their post: “It’s just fun to speculate, even if I’m completely off the mark” (OthoHasTheHandbook). Viewers thus predicted some of the narrative revelations by looking closely at specific scenes, rewatching episodes, and contextualizing later episodes with previous ones, all of which mirror practices that resemble the iterative nature of playing and that fit into Ford’s focus on interpretation. Part of the metatextual parallels Westworld draws between the visitors of the park, its hosts, and viewers of the show thus also entails engaging the unstable narrative that it tells as a kind of game, self-consciously positioning itself between the aesthetics of traditional stories and newer media like video games in order to create a popular twenty-first-century narrative. *** I have analyzed the TV series Westworld for how it features unstable textualities, how it combines this instability with ‘political’ meanings, and how it metatextually frames its instability as part of generic and transmedial allegiances. Together, these three approaches to analyzing the show have pointed to its keen interest in matters of textuality, particularly rendered as narrative concerns. Simultaneously, however, Westworld also advocates an intermingling of the symbolic forms of narrative and play, recognizing similar activities in the pleasurable engagement with either of them. Unlike, to some degree, Alan Wake, the series prominently connects these concerns with narrativity and textuality to questions of identity, representation, and difference, even though its textual politics are complicated by how they assume some of the personal politics of the (partly clearly flawed) character Robert Ford, advocating a questionable universality and leaving white patriarchy mostly unquestioned. Nevertheless, this focus seems to have resonated with its audience, and the show thus also metatextually suggests the enduring appeal of narrative instability in contemporary popular culture, especially if it is renovated and reinvigorated through transmedial means.

268

Narrative Instability

5.5 Conclusion This chapter has added a third and final significant perspective to the study of narrative instability by focusing on texts that become unstable on the level of textuality, i.e., by metatextually drawing attention to the process of narration and to the storytelling instances involved in that process as well as by obfuscating their own narrative situations. In a first section, I discussed this tendency in more general terms and by connecting it with scholarship on (meta)textuality, self-reflexivity, and genre studies, highlighting the way in which the primary texts under consideration here inherently conceive of textuality as transmedial. In the second section, the reading of Alan Wake established the different ways and levels in which this video game relates to textual matters, using its instability for a somewhat anxious reflection of its own cultural status as lying between new and old media. The final section, in turn, read the television series Westworld as a substantially more confident fusion of narrative and ludic elements, which positioned its unstable elements as a way for the audience to engage with its text and its meanings similarly to a narrative puzzle. Although the two texts’ subject matters differ vastly, the preceding readings have shown how they both relate their reflections on textuality to founding myths and imaginations of the United States, particularly through their references to the genres of the American Gothic and the Western. Taken together, these ostensibly quite different texts also help to elucidate one particular facet of contemporary popular culture that I elaborated on in chapter 2. Video games like The Stanley Parable and, to a lesser extent, Alan Wake seemingly want to be (‘classic’) narratives, and the games in the BioShock series have also sometimes been criticized for focusing too much on story and too little on gameplay. Conversely, Westworld tries to be more than ‘just’ a narrative and includes elements from (video) games, evincing a ludic understanding of narrative that partly builds on nonlinearity, interactivity, and iteration. It thus focuses on ‘playing’ with viewers’ expectations, sending them on interpretive journeys to ‘solve’ narrative puzzles. In effect, this is another way of encouraging audiences to take pleasure in the operational aesthetics (cf. 3.2.2) by engaging not just with a text’s content but also its form. This brings me full circle in so far that one of the reasons to focus on a transmedial study in this book and to explicitly include video games as part of its corpus has been my contention that the contemporary interest of popular culture in narrative instability can be partially explained by the influence of ludic aesthetics on today’s (popular) stories, and on popular culture in general. In addition to the video games studied here that insert themselves into such discussions of contemporary textuality, Westworld is a prominent example of a comparatively more traditional medium that embraces ludic narrativity in a synthesis of play and narrative, speaking to contemporary US audiences’ interest in both.

6 Conclusion: Future Instabilities? In the introduction of this study, I underscored David Denby’s questions about what he calls the ‘new disorder’ in contemporary films: “In the past, mainstream audiences notoriously resisted being jolted. Are moviegoers bringing some new sensibility to these riddling movies? What are we getting out of the overloading, the dislocations and disruptions?” (80). In this study, I carved out answers to exactly these—and many related—questions by proposing that it is necessary to introduce the concept of narrative instability in order to grasp this new trend in contemporary popular culture. Narrative instability has allowed me to identify commonalities between seemingly very diverse texts from different media by focusing on how they destabilize the audience’s mental efforts of reconstructing a storyworld, and it enabled a precise investigation of these texts’ specific narrative characteristics and discursive techniques. I argued that narratively unstable texts function as a site for contemporary audiences to negotiate the narrative constructedness of the world they experience, be that in fictional representations across different media or in their everyday reality, as they encounter the ubiquity of narratives in both of these realms. In this sense, narrative instability works as a transmedial bridge between popular pleasures and complex discursive setups, which fuse elements of narrative and play in a ludic textuality. Narratively unstable texts have become so popular that one could, in a reversal of Denby’s phrasing, ask what contemporary narratives, rather than their audiences, are “getting out of” their engagement with instability: Building up unstable storyworlds seems to attract audiences’ thirst for more narrative complexity, for using narratively unstable texts as an arena to negotiate the narrative constructedness of contemporary culture in the wake of the narrative turn and the postmodernization of society, and for drawing pleasure—both from the thrill of a major moment of destabilization and the potential of a restabilized storyworld and from engaging with the operational aesthetics of these texts as ‘amateur narratologists.’401 Next to this interest primarily in the poetics of narrative instability, the analyses in the preceding chapters have emphasized the textual politics of the films, TV shows, and video games that I discussed. They provide evidence for narrative instability’s penchant to represent only the ostensibly unmarked ‘norm’ (white, male, middle-class) in American cultural imagina401

In this sense, evoking narrative instability and tapping into this boom of contemporary texts can also clearly be seen as a commercially viable strategy for the producers of these narratives, setting up a contrast with Rebein’s notion that much of postmodern literature was only “‘for the academy’” (6).

270

Narrative Instability

tions. Many unstable texts demonstrate a self-reflexive interest in questioning simplistic truths or clear binaries, yet they lack this self-awareness in how they engage discourses of normative whiteness, masculinity, or middle-classness. While it might be tempting to blanketly generalize the meanings of the different texts I analyzed, their actual politics are too diverse and multifaceted to make such claims productive. Some of these narratively unstable texts have been examined as more ambivalent (such as BioShock and Black Swan), while others seem to participate in a backlash, perhaps unwittingly, that normalizes the power of oppressive discourses of white masculinity, even if they cast this alongside more progressive ideas and deconstructions (as seen in Inception). In this way, and judging from their popularity, they succeed in being perceived as recognizing and positively participating in discussions about an increasingly heterogeneous US society while they actually, beneath the textual surface, preserve the supremacy of white masculinity.402 Compared to a number of existing studies both on postmodernism and on contemporary phenomena like puzzle or twist films, narrative instability adds a crucial dimension via the politics of these texts, which previous scholarship at times (implicitly or explicitly) considered ‘apolitical’ by privileging an interest in formal and narrative dynamics over the meaning-making potential of these texts. In contrast, in the preceding chapters, I have made it a point to study the texts of my corpus along both their poetics and their politics, and particularly to analyze how these two dimensions are interwoven. In the first larger analytic chapter, my analysis pointed out how unstable identities texts intrinsically connect disruptions on the discursive level to their protagonists’ self-conceptions. More than discussing concerns with only a character’s specific identity, these texts instead problematize identity as a concept as such, questioning what constitutes one’s self-conception or how we could know about it. The analysis of BioShock explicitly connected identity to questions of choice and agency, which form part of the game’s fictional world and the philosophy of objectivism that its setting is influenced by, of its narrative about the choices that its protagonists make, and of its gameplay, which crucially takes away player agency during its central moment of instability. In turn, the reading of Black Swan demonstrated the film’s awareness of narratively unstable texts, playing with viewers’ expectations through a pseudo-twist and using this uncertainty to question constructions of femininity and uncover a gender bias in previous unstable texts. The two texts thus relate to each other by both building towards a 402

Particularly in how some of these narratively unstable texts portray the white male self as legitimately threatened and oppressed, they participate in similar politics of white male victimization as more clearly politically ‘conservative’ texts. A core difference is that the positions of the texts examined here are more difficult to discern, manifesting themselves in contradictions and tensions within the text and necessitating an attentive analysis beneath the textual surface, which this study hopes to have provided.

6 Conclusion: Future Instabilities?

271

central moment of instability, albeit delivering differently on this promise, but also in self-reflexively exposing the normativity of white middle-class masculinity. The chapter on unstable realities allowed me to highlight texts that destabilize the depiction of space and time in order to cast doubts on the reality of the storyworld. They use this distrust in reality as a stable concept to highlight that reality is contingent on its narrative construction and not a universal but a subjective experience, varying particularly in relation to differences of race, class, and gender. Inception narrativizes these concerns by accepting uncertainty between its different dream worlds, while BioShock Infinite espouses a belief in the predetermination of reality via its depiction of multiple alternate universes. Both texts have been shown to be particularly intricate examples of complicated textual politics, since they both focus in some way on the dominant norms of white, male, and middle-class. Inception suggests an embrace of fatherhood as a remedy for its protagonist’s ‘reality crisis,’ but it diminishes any motherly presence in its projection of family. BioShock Infinite exhibits a critique of the US history of racial and social violence and complicates (literal) black-and-white thinking in many instances, yet it also silences its main representative of a minority voice and only explores these injustices through the eyes of the hegemonic white male norm. They both, thus, can be read for their initially progressive projects but also for how they entangle the deconstructive potential of narrative instability in reactionary discourses. Finally, in the last chapter, I analyzed texts that connect their instability directly to their textual representation, their effort in telling a story, leading to unstable textualities. These texts highlight their own textuality as inherently related to other texts and other media, emerging as particularly selfconscious examples of fusing the symbolic forms of narrative and play. I examined Alan Wake as a video game that tries to frame its ludic storytelling within remediated concepts from traditional narratives, appearing as a playable novel-television hybrid. The omnipresence of texts and textualities in its storyworld fuels anxieties about its self-understanding between ‘newer’ and ‘older’ media, searching for a place for video games in the contemporary media landscape. Westworld, in turn, more confidently reaches out to forms of playing in order to propel its manifold narrative interests and to activate its audience as ‘amateur narratologists’ trying to uncover the narrative ‘secrets’ and moments of instability in its storyworld. The show also displays a similar ‘political’ complication as the texts in the previous chapter, casting some clearly gendered and racialized issues as universally human. Still, both Alan Wake and Westworld evidence how narrative instability allows these texts to transcend their own textuality in order to probe into larger matters of representation and signification as such, and how audiences connect with these issues. Together, these three chapters have established the conceptual and analytical productivity of narrative instability as an inquiry into contemporary

272

Narrative Instability

American (popular) culture. The chapters further narrowed down the field of narratively unstable texts by demonstrating that their narrative interests and their cultural resonances converge around issues of identity, reality, and textuality. Yet the three individual chapters also speak to each other, demonstrating, for instance, how texts with similar discursive elements, such as the ‘pseudo-twists’ in Black Swan and Inception, can be used to discuss very different cultural concerns, identity and reality. Likewise, it has become clear that a shared interest in connecting instability to questions of race in BioShock Infinite and Westworld is contextualized quite differently in these texts, forming parts of discussing reality and textuality, respectively. In this sense, the productivity of this book’s structuring principle lay exactly in its rather loose formation as clusters, where the individual chapters have all examined a discrete aspect and yet overlap in important elements with the other clusters.403 As an overall concept, narrative instability suggests to fill a gap in scholarship, highlighting how it is a tendency to destabilize the storyworld that brings a large variety of primary texts together, investigating this trend as taking place transmedially, and analyzing how these texts’ formal poetics intersect with their cultural work.404 This study thus promises to provide impulses for the specific fields of cultural narratology, popular culture studies, and game studies, but it relates to American studies in particular, hopefully having demonstrated how considerations and investigations of narrative instability relate to questions that are at the core of American studies. Of course, even in such a large-scale study, there were a number of aspects and elements that could not be taken into closer consideration, and thinking about these limitations as potential areas for future research further sharpens the contours of this project. In fact, I see this potential partic403

404

The same is true for the larger cultural considerations that the individual chapters illuminated, focusing on the questions of pleasure and reception practices for unstable identities, popularity and popularization for unstable realities, and genres for unstable textualities, all of which are aspects that have recurred throughout all of the chapters but that were particularly insightful when introduced within a specific cluster. Particularly the last point also helps to accentuate some of the studies of narrative complexity in contemporary popular culture: The idea of narratives being complex implies a certain normativity, seeing complexity as a positive trait against its assumed counterpart, simplicity, where ‘complex’ can also be misunderstood to simply mean ‘better.’ The positivity associated with complexity, coupled with the penchant of many studies to focus solely on this formal level, thus risks assuming that large parts of contemporary culture also exhibit equally complex meanings, positioning themselves against the dominant ideology. Instead, my study of both the poetics and the politics of these texts has emphasized that this is a more complicated interplay. Somewhat similarly, the boom of narratively unstable texts does not, of course, entail that contemporary audiences are necessarily more sophisticated than those of previous decades, but it does point to (transmedial) changes in strategies of achieving popularity in the contemporary moment.

6 Conclusion: Future Instabilities?

273

ularly alongside three areas: First, instability is likely to continue as a trend and to sustain its cultural currency for at least a few more years, but it is equally reasonable to expect that it will have to continue to innovate and adapt in order to hold audiences’ interest. Future remediations between different media will warrant further studies, and I speculate that particularly television and video games are inclined to continue to engage in instability. A number of exciting examples of a more concerted convergence of media already exist, such as the video game Quantum Break (2016) by the developers of Alan Wake, which integrates a live-action television show inside of its video-game story and thus makes use of both media in its creation of narrative instability.405 The continued fusion of play and narrative in these unstable texts promises to be a particularly fruitful area for further study. Second, and related to this aspect, there are other media that engage in narrative instability, which I could not investigate in detail in this book. Contextualizing these media through the concept of narrative instability could accentuate my findings on instability even more and provide productive impulses for the study of these texts. Among these, I would specifically consider narratively unstable graphic novels, such as Chris Ware’s Building Stories (2012), and unstable novels, like Danielewski’s House of Leaves or his newer fictions, part of the series The Familiar.406 Finally, this study has focused specifically on the United States, yet narrative instability is a popular trend in other countries as well, as texts like the German TV series Dark evidence. Connecting these texts to my conception of narrative instability in a transnational approach would allow for a further refining of the ‘Americanness’ of the texts analyzed in this book. Additionally, it could shed a light on which elements in non-US texts one might consider ‘Americanized’ as well, since I hypothesize that traces of ‘American’ instability are present in other countries’ engagements with narrative instability. All of these avenues promise to extend and accentuate the research interests discussed in the preceding chapters, and they would be enabled and supported by the conceptual and analytical work of this study. 405

406

In turn, the 2018 Netflix film Bandersnatch, part of the anthology series Black Mirror, exemplifies such a fusion from the side of film and TV, as it concerns the development of a video game and asks the viewer, at numerous points, to make decisions for its protagonist through their remote control (or similar device), culminating in an overall unstable narrative. While such interactive films have existed for a long time, the widespread popularity the film’s release attained (and its existence on the popular platform Netflix) speaks to the continued prominence of narratively unstable texts discussed throughout this book. And like with the majority of texts I analyzed, Bandersnatch’s narrative instability is primarily engendered through and rendered as white male anxieties. The Familiar was originally planned to encompass twenty-seven novels, each consisting of 880 pages. At the time of this writing, the first five volumes have been released, and the author’s official website refers to the publication of the fifth volume as “the Season One finale” (MZD), evoking a television aesthetic similar to Alan Wake. For the moment, however, the series has been discontinued.

274

Narrative Instability

Overall, then, this investigation of narrative instability has intervened in debates about the contemporary moment as ‘post-postmodern,’ as was elucidated in chapter 2. Narrative instability has been shown to be very much a transmedial postmodern trend in terms of its formal and narrative complexity, yet the texts I analyzed also all connect their poetics to engagements with themes and questions that some theorists of post-postmodernism ascribe only to contemporary ‘neo-realist’ texts, as they argue for postmodern “literature’s disavowal of politics and social referentiality,” which “prevents it from any serious and sincere engagement with social reality” (Herrmann, Kanzler, and Schubert 12). Instead of seeing my corpus as self-absorbed texts ‘of the academy,’ my analysis has shown how they perform crucial cultural work, discussing very specific questions such as choice and identity (BioShock), coming of age and femininity (Black Swan), family and fatherhood (Inception), injustice throughout US history (BioShock Infinite), new and old media narratives (Alan Wake), and the power of narrative for myths and self-constructions (Westworld), to name just a few of the plethora of topics and themes, large and small, that these diverse texts address. The texts’ audiences find pleasure in these constructions, but they also use narratively unstable texts as a way to make these issues speakable, “creat[ing] the very language by which people comprehend their experiences and think about their world” (Lauter, “Reconfiguring” 23). In short, this book has uncovered and highlighted the cultural work that narrative instability does, introducing this concept to make visible and speakable a prominent avenue of contemporary American popular culture that promises to hold audiences’ grip and keep “jolt[ing]” (Denby 80) them in the coming years.

Works Cited “7 Plot Holes.” The Cinemaholic, 6 Apr. 2017, www.thecinemaholic.com/plot-holes-ininception/. Aarseth, Espen. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. JHU P, 1997. Agnew, Jeremy. The Old West in Fact and Film: History versus Hollywood. McFarland, 2012. Alan Wake. Remedy Entertainment, Microsoft, 2012. Alber, Jan, et al. “What Is Unnatural about Unnatural Narratology? A Response to Monika Fludernik.” Narrative, vol. 20, no. 3, 2012, pp. 371-82. Project Muse, doi:10.1353/nar.2012.0020. Alber, Jan, and Monika Fludernik. Introduction. Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses, edited by Alber and Fludernik, Ohio State UP, 2010, pp. 1-31. ---, editors. Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses. Ohio State UP, 2010. Alber, Jan, and Rüdiger Heinze. Introduction. Unnatural Narratives – Unnatural Narratology, edited by Alber and Heinze, de Gruyter, 2011, pp. 1-19. Aldred, Jessica, and Brian Greenspan. “A Man Chooses, a Slave Obeys: BioShock and the Dystopian Logic of Convergence.” Games and Culture, vol. 6, no. 5, 2011, pp. 479-96. SAGE, journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1555412011402674. American Psycho. Directed by Mary Harron, Lionsgate, 2000. Ames, Christopher. Movies About the Movies: Hollywood Reflected. UP of Kentucky, 2015. Amorós, José Antonio Álvarez. “Possible-World Semantics, Frame Text, Insert Text, and Unreliable Narration: The Case of ‘The Turn of the Screw.’” Style, vol. 25, no. 1, 1991, pp. 42-70. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/42945883. Andreeva, Nellie. “Westworld Finale Hits Season High, Caps Most Watched First Season of HBO Series.” Deadline, 5 Dec. 2016, deadline.com/2016/12/westworld-finale-ratings-season-high-drama-most-watched-hbo-first-season-series-1201864657/. Ante-Contreras, Daniel. “Bioshock’s Paranoid States: The Gamer within a History of White Male Victimization.” Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds, vol. 7, no. 3, Sept. 2015, pp. 225-41. IngentaConnect, doi:10.1386/jgvw.7.3.225_1. Apperley, Tom, and Justin Clemens. “The Biopolitics of Gaming: Avatar-Player SelfReflexivity in Assassin’s Creed II.” Kapell, pp. 110-24. Arrival. Directed by Denis Villeneuve, Paramount, 2016. Atkins, Barry. More Than a Game: The Computer Game as Fictional Form. Manchester UP, 2003. Auter, Philip J., and Donald M. Davis. “When Characters Speak Directly to Viewers: Breaking the Fourth Wall in Television.” Journalism Quarterly, vol. 68, no. 1-2, Mar. 1991, pp. 165-71. SAGE, journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/ 107769909106800117. Auxer, Randall E. “Dream Time.” Botz-Bornstein, Inception, pp. 345-72. Awake. Created by Kyle Killen, NBC, 2012. Bacle, Ariana. “Neil DeGrasse Tyson Has Some Thoughts on Interstellar.” Entertainment Weekly, 10 Nov. 2014, ew.com/article/2014/11/10/neil-degrasse-tysoninterstellar-science/.

276

Narrative Instability

Baker, Djoymi. “Terms of Excess: Binge-Viewing as Epic-Viewing in the Netflix Era.” The Age of Netflix: Critical Essays on Streaming Media, Digital Delivery and Instant Access, edited by Cory Barker and Myc Wiatrowski, McFarland, 2017, pp. 31-54. Bal, Mieke. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. U of Toronto P, 1997. Balint, Michael. Angstlust und Regression. 1959. Klett-Cotta, 2009. Barker, Chris. Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice. SAGE, 2011. Barker, Cory, and Myc Wiatrowski. The Age of Netflix: Critical Essays on Streaming Media, Digital Delivery and Instant Access. McFarland, 2017. Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” 1967. Media Texts, Authors and Readers: A Reader, edited by David Graddol and Oliver Boyd-Barrett, Multilingual Matters, 1994, pp. 166-70. ---. The Pleasure of the Text. Translated by Richard Miller, Farrar, 1975. Bast, Florian. Of Bodies, Communities, and Voices: Agency in Writings by Octavia Butler. Winter, 2015. Batchelor, Bob, editor. Cult Pop Culture: How the Fringe Became Mainstream. ABCCLIO, 2012. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. 1981. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser, U of Michigan P, 1994. Beal, Frances M. “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female.” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, vol. 8, no. 2, July 2008, pp. 166-76. Project Muse, muse.jhu.edu/article/242234. A Beautiful Mind. Directed by Ron Howard, Universal, 2001. Beebe, Kathryne, et al. “Space, Place and Gendered Identities: Feminist History and the Spatial Turn.” Introduction. Space, Place and Gendered Identities: Feminist History and the Spatial Turn, edited by Kathryne Beebe and Angela Davis, Routledge, 2015, pp. 1-10. Behlmer, Rudy, and Tony Thomas. Hollywood’s Hollywood: The Movies about the Movies. Citadel, 1979. Belk, Russell W. “Hyperreality and Globalization: Culture in the Age of Ronald McDonald.” Journal of International Consumer Marketing, vol. 8, no. 3-4, 1996, pp. 23-37. Taylor and Francis, doi.org/10.1300/J046v08n03_03. Berger, Arthur Asa. Ads, Fads, and Consumer Culture: Advertising’s Impact on American Character and Society. Rowman and Littlefield, 2015. ---. Popular Culture Genres: Theories and Texts. SAGE, 1992. Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. 1972. Penguin, 2008. Bergstorm, Anders. “The Traces of ‘A Half-Remembered Dream’: Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010), Wong Kar-Wai’s 2046 (2004), and the Memory Film.” The Memory Effect: The Remediation of Memory in Literature and Film, edited by Russell J. A. Kilbourn and Eleanor Ty, Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2014, pp. 195210. Berliner, Todd. Hollywood Aesthetic: Pleasure in American Cinema. Oxford UP, 2017. ---. Hollywood Incoherent: Narration in Seventies Cinema. U of Texas P, 2010. Bertens, Hans. “The Debate on Postmodernism.” International Postmodernism: Theory and Literary Practice, edited by Hans Bertens and Douwe Fokkema, John Benjamins, 1997, pp. 3-14. ---. Literary Theory: The Basics. Psychology, 2001. Beyond: Two Souls. Quantic Dream, Sony, 2013. Bhattacharjee, Sukalpa, and C. Joshua Thomas. Introduction. Society, Representation and Textuality: The Critical Interface, edited by Bhattacharjee and Thomas, SAGE, 2013, pp. xxiii-xliv.

Works Cited

277

Biesen, Sheri Chinen. “Haunting Landscapes in ‘Female Gothic’ Thriller Films: From Alfred Hitchcock to Orson Welles.” Gothic Landscapes: Changing Eras, Changing Cultures, Changing Anxieties, edited by Sharon Rose Yang and Kathleen Healey, Springer, 2016, pp. 47-70. Bignall, Simone. “Black Swan, Cracked Porcelain and Becoming-Animal.” Culture, Theory and Critique, vol. 54, no. 1, Apr. 2013, pp. 121-38. Taylor and Francis, dx.doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2012.749110. Bilton, Nick. “How Jack Dorsey Can Save the World from a Trump Apocalypse.” The Hive, 12 Jan. 2018, www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/01/how-jack-dorsey-cansave-the-world-from-a-trump-apocalypse. BioShock. 2K Boston, 2K Games, 2007. BioShock Infinite. Irrational Games, 2K Games, 2013. Black Mirror: Bandersnatch. Directed by David Slade, Netflix, 2018. Black Swan. Directed by Darren Aronofsky, Fox, 2010. Blouin, Michael. “A Western Wake: Difference and Doubt in Christopher Nolan’s Inception.” Extrapolation, vol. 52, no. 3, Jan. 2011, pp. 318-37. Liverpool UP Online, doi.org/10.3828/extr.2011.52.3.4. Bogost, Ian. “Videogames Are a Mess.” Ian Bogost, 3 Sept. 2009, www.bogost.com/ writing/videogames_are_a_mess.shtml. Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. MIT P, 2003. Boorstin, Daniel J. The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. 1962. Knopf Doubleday, 2012. Booth, Paul. “‘Harmonious Synchronicity’ and Eternal Darkness: Temporal Displacement in Video Games.” Jones and Ormrod, Time Travel, pp. 134-48. Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. 1961. U of Chicago P, 1983. Bordin, Raquel. “The Realism of Space in Black Swan.” Cinesthesia, vol. 3, no. 1, Jan. 2014, scholarworks.gvsu.edu/cine/vol3/iss1/2. Bordwell, David. The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story And Style in Modern Movies. U of California P, 2006. Borges, Jorge Luis. “The Garden of Forking Paths.” 1941. Ficciones, Grove, 2015, pp. 89-101. Bosman, Frank. “Accept Your Baptism, and Die!” Gamevironments, vol. 6, 2017, pp. 100-29. nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:gbv:46-00105941-11 ---. “‘The Lamb of Comstock’: Dystopia and Religion in Video Games.” Online: Heidelberg Journal of Religions on the Internet, vol. 5, 2014, pp. 162-81. heiup.uni-heidelberg.de/journals/index.php/religions/article/view/12163 Botz-Bornstein, Thorsten, editor. Inception and Philosophy: Ideas to Die For. Open Court, 2011. ---. “The Movie as a Thinking Machine.” Botz-Bornstein, Inception, pp. 203-16. Bould, Mark. Science Fiction. Routledge, 2012. Brasse, Stefan. “Of ‘Half-Rembered Dream[s]’ and ‘Unanswered Myster[ies]’: The Trope of Trauma in Inception and Alan Wake.” Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies, vol. 15, no. 1, June 2014, copas.uni-regensburg.de/article/view/174. Brinker, Felix. “On the Formal Politics of Narratively Complex Television Series: Operational Self-Reflexivity and Audience Management in Fringe and Homeland.” Poetics of Politics: Textuality and Social Relevance in Contemporary American Literature and Culture, edited by Sebastian M. Herrmann et al., Winter, 2015, pp. 41-62. Brogaard, Berit. “The Mad Neuroscience of Inception.” Botz-Bornstein, Inception, pp.

278

Narrative Instability

25-38. Broks, Peter. Understanding Popular Science. McGraw-Hill, 2006. Bronfen, Elisabeth. Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic. Manchester UP, 1992. Brooker, Peter. Modernism/Postmodernism. Routledge, 2014. Brooks, Neil, and Josh Toth. “A Wake and Renewed?” Introduction. The Mourning After: Attending the Wake of Postmodernism, edited by Brooks and Toth, Rodopi, 2007, pp. 1-13. Brown, Jessica. “Donald Trump Is the Messiah, According to This Pastor.” Indy100, 14 Dec. 2016, www.indy100.com/article/rabbi-thinks-donald-trump-messiah7473641. Brown, Tom. Breaking the Fourth Wall: Direct Address in the Cinema. Edinburgh UP, 2012. Bruner, Jerome S. Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. 1986. Harvard UP, 2009. Buckland, Warren, editor. Hollywood Puzzle Films. Routledge, 2014. ---. “Inception’s Video Game Logic.” Furby and Joy, pp. 189-200. ---, editor. Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema. Wiley, 2009. ---. “Puzzle Plots.” Introduction. Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema, edited by Buckland, Wiley, 2009, pp. 1-12. Buinicki, Martin T. “Nostalgia and the Dystopia of History in 2K’s Bioshock Infinite.” The Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 49, no. 4, Aug. 2016, pp. 722-37. Wiley, onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jpcu.12440/abstract. Burkhardt, Thorsten. “Gothic Remembering in Stephen King’s ‘It Grows On You.’” Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies, vol. 15, no. 1, Jan. 2014, copas.uni-regensburg.de/issue/view/23. Burnetts, Charles. “‘Downwards Is the Only Way Forwards’: ‘Dream Space,’ Parallel Time and Selfhood in Inception.” Jones and Ormrod, Time Travel, pp. 23446. Burnham, John. After Freud Left: A Century of Psychoanalysis in America. U of Chicago P, 2012. Calsamiglia, Helena. “Popularization Discourse.” Discourse Studies, vol. 5, no. 2, May 2003, pp. 139-46. SAGE, journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/ 1461445603005002307. Calvin, Ritch. “Writing the Xicanista: Ana Castillo and the Articulation of Chicana Feminist Aesthetics.” Unmaking Race, Remaking Soul: Transformative Aesthetics and the Practice of Freedom, edited by Christa Davis Acampora and Angela L. Cotten, SUNY P, 2008, pp. 21-45. Campbell, Neil. Post-Westerns: Cinema, Region, West. U of Nebraska P, 2013. Carissimo, Justin. “Van Jones Calls Trump’s Surprise Victory a Whitelash against a Changing Country.” The Independent, 9 Nov. 2016, www.independent.co.uk/ arts-entertainment/tv/news/van-jones-calls-trump-s-surprise-victory-a-whitelash-against-a-changing-country-a7406511.html. Carrasco, Silviano, and Susana Tosca. “Meta-Literacy in Gameworlds.” Analisi, no. 55, 2016, pp. 31-47. ResearchGate, www.researchgate.net/publication/ 312179259_Meta-Literacy_in_Gameworlds. Cawelti, John G. Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture. 1976. U of Chicago P, 2014. ---. Mystery, Violence, and Popular Culture: Essays. U of Winsconsin P, 2004. ---. The Six-Gun Mystique Sequel. Bowling Green State U Popular P, 1999. Celenza, Andrea. “Perverse Female Relating: The Objectified Self.” Contemporary Psychoanalysis, vol. 49, no. 4, Oct. 2013, pp. 586-605. Taylor and Francis, dx.-

Works Cited

279

doi.org/10.1080/00107530.2013.10779265. Chang, Edmond Y. “A Game Chooses, a Player Obeys: BioShock, Posthumanism, and the Limits of Queerness.” Gaming Representation: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games, edited by Jennifer Malkowski and TreaAndrea M. Russworm, Indiana UP, 2017, pp. 227-44. Child, Doreen Alexander. Charlie Kaufman: Confessions of an Original Mind. ABCCLIO, 2010. Christie, Agatha. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. 1926. Harper, 2002. Christiansen, Steen. “Body Refractions: Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan.” Akademisk Kvarter, vol. 3, 2011, pp. 306-15. www.akademiskkvarter.hum.aau.dk/pdf/ vol3/Christiansen_Body_Refractions.pdf Clare, Anthony. On Men: Masculinity in Crisis. Random House, 2010. Clark, Suzanne. “Fight Club: Historicizing the Rhetoric of Masculinity, Violence, and Sentimentality.” JAC, vol. 21, no. 2, Spring 2001, pp. 411-20. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20866410. Cloud Atlas. Directed by The Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer, Warner, 2012. Clue. Directed by Jonathan Lynn, Paramount, 1985. Coates, Ta-Nehisi. “The First White President.” The Atlantic, Oct. 2017, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/the-first-white-president-ta-nehisi-coates/537909/. Collins, Karen. Playing with Sound: A Theory of Interacting with Sound and Music in Video Games. MIT P, 2013. Connell, R. W. Masculinities. Polity, 2005. Constable, Catherine. Adapting Philosophy: Jean Baudrillard and the Matrix Trilogy. Oxford UP, 2013. Cooper, Lydia R. Masculinities in Literature of the American West. Springer, 2016. Cooter, Roger, and Stephen Pumfrey. “Separate Spheres and Public Places: Reflections on the History of Science Popularization and Science in Popular Culture.” History of Science, vol. 32, no. 3, Sept. 1994, pp. 237-67. SAGE, journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/007327539403200301. Cornea, Christine. Genre and Performance: Film and Television. Oxford UP, 2010. Crecente, Brian. “Alan Wake Review: Transcending Its Medium.” Kotaku, 5 May 2010, kotaku.com/5527633/alan-wake-review-transcending-its-medium. Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. 1993. Routledge, 2012. Crenshaw, Kimberle. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989, p. 139-67, chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf/vol1989/iss1/8. Crèvecoeur, J. Hector St. John de. “What Is an American?” 1782. Letters from an American Farmer and Other Essays, Harvard UP, 2013, pp. 28-65. Los Cronocrímenes. Directed by Nacho Vigalondo, Karbo Vantas, 2007. Crow, Charles L. American Gothic. U of Wales P, 2009. Cuddy, Luke, editor. BioShock and Philosophy: Irrational Game, Rational Book. Wiley, 2015. Currie, Mark. Introduction. Metafiction, edited by Currie, Routledge, 2014. ---, editor. Metafiction. Routledge, 2014. Cusset, Catherine. “Watteau: The Aesthetics of Pleasure.” Icons, Texts, Iconotexts: Essays on Ekphrasis and Intermediality, edited by Peter Wagner, de Gruyter, 1996, pp. 121-35. Danesi, Marcel. Popular Culture: Introductory Perspectives. Rowman and Littlefield,

280

Narrative Instability

2012. Danielewski, Mark Z. House of Leaves. Pantheon, 2000. ---. Only Revolutions. Pantheon, 2006. Dare, Christopher, et al. Freud’s Models of the Mind: An Introduction. Karnac Books, 1997. Dark. Created by Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese, Netflix, 2017-. Davis, Blair, et al. Rashomon Effects: Kurosawa, Rashomon and Their Legacies. Routledge, 2015. Dawson, Conor Michael. “The Fractured Self: Postmodernism and Depersonalization Disorder.” Aigne, vol. 2011, no. 1, Oct. 2012, pp. 33-42. publish.ucc.ie/aigne/ 2011/01/dawson/06/en. Dear Esther. The Chinese Room, 2012. de Wildt, Lars A. W. J. “Precarious Play: To Be or Not to Be Stanley.” Press Start, vol. 1, no. 1, 2014, pp. 1-20. www.press-start.gla.ac.uk/index.php/press-start/article/view/10. Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. 1967. Bread and Circuses, 2012. DeHaven, Tyler, and Chris Hendrickson. “The Vox Populi Group, Marx, and Equal Rights for All.” Cuddy, pp. 114-26. Denby, David. “The New Disorder: Adventures in Film Narrative.” The New Yorker, Mar. 2007, pp. 80-85. Derry, Charles. The Suspense Thriller: Films in the Shadow of Alfred Hitchcock. McFarland, 2001. d’Haen, Theo, and Pieter Vermeulen. Cultural Identity and Postmodern Writing. Rodopi, 2006. Dickerson, Lillian. “Recoding and Rebooting: Death and Rebirth Beyond Humanity in HBO’s Westworld.” The Image of Rebirth in Literature, Media, and Society: 2017 SASSI Conference Proceedings, edited by Thomas G. Endres, 2017, pp. 15-23. Dirks, Nicholas B., et al. Introduction. Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory, edited by Dirks et al., Princeton UP, 1994, pp. 3-46. Dolan, Jill. The Feminist Spectator in Action: Feminist Criticism for the Stage and Screen. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Doležel, Lubomír. Possible Worlds of Fiction and History: The Postmodern Stage. JHU P, 2010. Domanico, Anthony. “Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye on What Was Wrong with Interstellar.” CNET, 10 Sept. 2015, www.cnet.com/news/neil-degrasse-tysonand-bill-nye-on-what-was-wrong-with-interstellar/. Domsch, Sebastian. Storyplaying: Agency and Narrative in Video Games. de Gruyter, 2013. Donnie Darko. Directed by Richard Kelly, Pandora, 2001. Dorst, Doug. S. Mulholland Books, 2013. Dunne, Michael. Metapop: Self-Referentiality in Contemporary American Popular Culture. UP of Mississippi, 2010. During, Simon. Cultural Studies: A Critical Introduction. Psychology, 2005. Dyer, Richard. White: Essays on Race and Culture. 1997. Routledge, 2013. Eagleton, Terry. “Contradictions of Modernism.” Modernity, Modernism, Postmodernism, edited by Manuel Barbeito, U of Santiago de Compostela, 2000, pp. 35-44. Eberl, Jason T., and George A. Dunn, editors. The Philosophy of Christopher Nolan. Lexington Books, 2017. Eckel, Julia, et al., editors. (Dis)Orienting Media and Narrative Mazes. transcript, 2013.

Works Cited

281

Eckel, Julia, and Bernd Leiendecker. “(Dis)Orienting Media and Narrative Mazes.” (Dis)Orienting Media and Narrative Mazes, edited by Julia Eckel et al., transcript, 2014, pp. 11-18. Eco, Umberto. The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts. Indiana UP, 1984. Edge of Tomorrow. Directed by Doug Liman, Warner, 2014. Edgerton, Gary R., and Brian Geoffrey Rose, editors. Thinking Outside the Box: A Contemporary Television Genre Reader. UP of Kentucky, 2005. Edwards, Brian. Theories of Play and Postmodern Fiction. Garland, 1998. Efthimiou, O. “Becoming the Monstrous-Feminine: Sex, Death and Transcendence in Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan.” IM: Interactive Media, no. 8, 2012, researchrepository.murdoch.edu.au/14075/. Egenfeldt-Nielsen, Simon, et al. Understanding Video Games: The Essential Introduction. Taylor and Francis, 2008. Eichner, Susanne. Agency and Media Reception: Experiencing Video Games, Film, and Television. Springer, 2014. Eig, Jonathan. “A Beautiful Mind(Fuck): Hollywood Structures of Identity.” Jump Cut, no. 46, www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc46.2003/eig.mindfilms/index.html. Ekeroth, Jordan. “In Defense of Religion in BioShock Infinite.” Kotaku, 17 Apr. 2013, kotaku.com/in-defense-of-religion-in-bioshock-infinite-475004169. Elmore, Rick. “‘The Bindings Are There as a Safeguard’: Sovereignty and Political Decisions in BioShock Infinite.” Cuddy, pp. 97-106. Elsaesser, Thomas. “The Mind-Game Film.” Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema, edited by Warren Buckland, Wiley, 2009, pp. 13-41. Engel, Felix, and Janina Wildfeuer. “Hearing Music in Dreams: Towards the Semiotic Role of Music in Nolan’s Inception.” Furby and Joy, pp. 233-46. Engelen, Bart. “Why Care Whether the Top Keeps Spinning?” D. K. Johnson, Inception, pp. 108-22. Ensslin, Astrid. “‘I Want to Say I May Have Seen My Son Die This Morning’: Unintentional Unreliable Narration in Digital Fiction.” Language and Literature, vol. 21, no. 2, May 2012, pp. 136-49. SAGE, journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/ 0963947011435859. ---. The Language of Gaming. Macmillan, 2011. Ernst, Christoph, and Heike Paul. “Eine ‘neue’ Ära? ‘Quality TV’ und ‘neuere Serie.’” Amerikanische Fernsehserien der Gegenwart: Perspektiven der American Studies und der Media Studies, edited by Ernst and Paul, transcript, 2015, pp. 7-33. Eskow, Richard. “How To Profit From The Coming Trump Apocalypse.” HuffPost, Oct. 2017, www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/how-to-profit-from-the-coming-trumpapocalypse_us_59e6747ce4b0e60c4aa36601. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Directed by Michel Gondry. Focus Features, 2004. eXistenZ. Directed by David Cronenberg, Miramax, 1999. The Fall. Directed by Tarsem Singh, Roadside Attractions, 2006. Federman, Raymond. Critifiction: Postmodern Essays. SUNY P, 1993. Fest, Bradley J. “Metaproceduralism: The Stanley Parable and the Legacies of Postmodern Metafiction.” Wide Screen, vol. 6, no. 1, Sept. 2016, widescreenjournal.org/index.php/journal/article/view/105. Fiedler, Leslie A. “Cross the Border – Close the Gap.” 1972. A New Fiedler Reader, Prometheus Books, 1999, pp. 270-94. Fieguth, Rolf. “Zur Rezeptionslenkung bei narrativen und dramatischen Werken.”

282

Narrative Instability

Sprache im technischen Zeitalter, no. 47, 1973, pp. 186-201. www.slavistik-portal.de/datenpool/bibslavarb-db.html?data=4340. Fight Club. Directed by David Fincher, Fox, 1999. Filipovic, Jill. “The Revenge of the White Man.” Time, 10 Nov. 2016, time.com/ 4566304/donald-trump-revenge-of-the-white-man/. Fish, Stanley. “What Do Spoilers Spoil?” Opinionator, 12 May 2012, opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/21/what-do-spoilers-spoil/. Fisher, Mark. “The Lost Unconscious: Delusions and Dreams in Inception.” Film Quarterly, vol. 64, no. 3, Mar. 2011, pp. 37-45. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/ 10.1525/fq.2011.64.3.37. Fiske, John. Reading the Popular. 1989. Taylor and Francis, 2010. ---. Television Culture. Routledge, 1991. ---. Understanding Popular Culture. 1989. Taylor and Francis, 2010. Fitzpatrick, John R., and David Kyle Johnson. “Inception and Free Will: Are They Compatible?” D. K. Johnson, Inception, pp. 152-65. Flanagan, Mary, and Helen Nissenbaum. Values at Play in Digital Games. MIT P, 2014. Flisfeder, Matthew. Postmodern Theory and Blade Runner. Bloomsbury, 2017. Floury, Nicolas. “Dreams, Mourning, and Desire.” Botz-Bornstein, Inception, pp. 290302. Fludernik, Monika. “How Natural Is ‘Unnatural Narratology’; or, What Is Unnatural about Unnatural Narratology?” Narrative, vol. 20, no. 3, 2012, pp. 357-70. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/nar.2012.0019. ---. Towards a “Natural” Narratology. Routledge, 1996. Flynn, Thomas R. Dialectic and Narrative. SUNY P, 1993. Fokkema, Douwe W. Literary History, Modernism, and Postmodernism. John Benjamins, 1984. Foster, Gwendolyn Audrey. Class-Passing: Social Mobility in Film and Popular Culture. SIU P, 2005. Fox, Alistair. New Zealand Cinema: Interpreting the Past. Intellect Books, 2011. Franich, Darren. “Let’s Talk about the Plot of Interstellar.” Entertainment Weekly, 7 Nov. 2014, ew.com/article/2014/11/07/interstellar-plot-explained/. Frankenberg, Ruth. White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. U of Minnesota P, 1988. Frasca, Gonzalo. “Simulation versus Narrative: Introduction to Ludology.” The Video Game Theory Reader, edited by Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron, Routledge, 2003, pp. 221-35. Freud, Sigmund. The Freud Reader. Edited by Peter Gay, Norton, 1995. Frey, William H. Diversity Explosion: How New Racial Demographics Are Remaking America. Brookings Institution, 2018. Friday, Krister. “‘A Generation of Men Without History’: Fight Club, Masculinity, and the Historical Symptom.” Postmodern Culture, vol. 13, no. 3, 2003. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/pmc.2003.0016. Friedman, James. Reality Squared: Televisual Discourse on the Real. Rutgers UP, 2002. Frissen, Valerie, et al. “Homo Ludens 2.0: Play, Media, and Identity.” Playful Identities: The Ludification of Digital Media Cultures, edited by Valerie Frissen et al., Amsterdam UP, 2015, pp. 9-50. ---, editors. Playful Identities: The Ludification of Digital Media Cultures. Amsterdam UP, 2015. Fuchs, Mathias, et al., editors. Rethinking Gamification. meson, 2014. Fuchs, Michael. “A Different Kind of Monster: Uncanny Media and Alan Wake’s Textual Monstrosity.” Contemporary Research on Intertextuality in Video Games,

Works Cited

283

edited by Duret Christophe and Pons Christian-Marie, IGI Global, 2016, pp. 39-53. ---. “Hauntings: Uncanny Doubling in Alan Wake and Supernatural.” Textus: English Studies in Italy, vol. 25, no. 3, 2012, pp. 63-74. www.rivisteweb.it/doi/ 10.7370/75486. ---. “‘A Horror Story That Came True’: Metalepsis and the Horrors of Ontological Uncertainty in Alan Wake.” Monsters and the Monstrous, vol. 3, no. 1, 2013, pp. 95-107. Academia, www.academia.edu/5036312/_A_Horror_Story_That_ Came_True_Metalepsis_and_the_Horrors_of_Ontological_Uncertainty_in_A lan_Wake. ---. “‘My Name Is Alan Wake, I’m a Writer’: Crafting Narrative Complexity in the Age of Transmedia Storytelling.” Game On, Hollywood! Essays on the Intersection of Video Games and Cinema, edited by Gretchen Papazian and Joseph Michael Sommers, McFarland, 2013, pp. 144-55. Furby, Jacqueline, and Stuart Joy, editors. The Cinema of Christopher Nolan: Imagining the Impossible. Columbia UP, 2015. Fusco, Katherine. “The Actress Experience: Cruel Knowing and the Death of the Picture Personality in Black Swan and The Girlfriend Experience.” Camera Obscura, vol. 28, no. 1 (82), Jan. 2013, pp. 1-35. Duke UP, doi:10.1215/027053462016942. Gallagher, Catherine, and Stephen Greenblatt. Practicing New Historicism. U of Chicago P, 2001. The Game. Directed by David Fincher, PolyGram, 1997. Georgi-Findlay, Brigitte. “Im Dickicht konkurrierender Skripte: Wozu braucht Westworld den Weste(r)n?” Mensch, Maschine, Maschinenmenschen: Multidisziplinäre Perspektiven auf die Serie Westworld, edited by Brigitte Georgi-Findlay and Katja Kanzler, Springer, 2018, pp. 71-87. Georgi-Findlay, Brigitte, and Katja Kanzler, editors. Mensch, Maschine, Maschinenmenschen: Multidisziplinäre Perspektiven auf die Serie Westworld. Springer, 2018. Gernalzick, Nadja, and Gabriele Pisarz-Ramirez, editors. Transmediality and Transculturality. Winter, 2013. Gibbons, William. “Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams: Popular Music, Narrative, and Dystopia in Bioshock.” Game Studies, vol. 11, no. 3, Dec. 2011, gamestudies.org/1103/articles/gibbons. Gillon, Steven M. “Why Are so Many White Men so Angry?” The Washington Post, 29 Aug. 2017, www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2017/08/29/ why-are-so-many-white-men-so-angry/. Ginn, Sherry, and Gillian I. Leitch. Time-Travel Television: The Past from the Present, the Future from the Past. Rowman and Littlefield, 2015. Giroux, Henry A. “Private Satisfactions and Public Disorders: Fight Club, Patriarchy, and the Politics of Masculine Violence.” JAC, vol. 21, no. 1, 2001, pp. 1-31. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20866386. Gitlin, Marty. Wounded Knee Massacre. ABC-CLIO, 2011. Glaser, Brigitte Johanna, and Claudia Georgi, editors. Convergence Culture Reconsidered: Media – Participation – Environments. U Göttingen, 2015. Goldenberg, Jamie L. “Black Swan/White Swan: On Female Objectification, Creatureliness, and Death Denial.” Death in Classic and Contemporary Film: Fade to Black, edited by Daniel Sullivan and Jeff Greenberg, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp. 105-17. Gonzales, Racquel M. “‘This Must Be a Bad Movie’: Genre and Self-Reflexivity in

284

Narrative Instability

Alan Wake.” Flow, 30 July 2010, flowtv.org/2010/07/this-must-be-a-badmovie/. Goody, Alex, and Antonia Mackay, editors. Reading Westworld. Springer, 2019. Gray, Jonathan. Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts. NYU P, 2010. Gray, Jonathan, and Jason Mittell. “Speculation on Spoilers: Lost Fandom, Narrative Consumption and Rethinking Textuality.” Participations, vol. 4, no. 1, 2007, www.participations.org/Volume%204/Issue%201/4_01_graymittell.htm. Green, Amy M. “BioShock Infinite: The Search for Redemption and the Repetition of Atrocity.” Kapell, pp. 125-44. Green, Jeremy. Late Postmodernism: American Fiction at the Millennium. Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Greene, Julie, et al. Introduction. Labor Histories: Class, Politics, and the Working Class Experience, edited by Eric Arnesen et al., U of Illinois P, 1998, pp. 118. Grodal, Torben. “Video Games and the Pleasures of Control.” Media Entertainment: The Psychology of Its Appeal, edited by Dolf Zillmann and Peter Vorderer, Lawrence Erlbaum, 2000, pp. 197-213. Grusin, Richard. “Remediation.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, edited by David Herman et al., Taylor and Francis, 2005, pp. 497-98. Haimberg, Yotam. “BioShock and Portal: A Discussion of Poetics.” Well Played, vol. 1, no. 2, 2012. repository.cmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1021&context =etcpress. Hall, Stuart. “Encoding/Decoding.” 1980. Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972-79, edited by Stuart Hall et al., Routledge, 2005, pp. 117-27. ---. “Who Needs ‘Identity’?” Introduction. Questions of Cultural Identity, edited by Paul Du Gay and Stuart Hall, SAGE, 1996, pp. 1-17. Hall, Stuart, and Paul du Gay, editors. Questions of Cultural Identity. SAGE, 1996. Hancock, Ange-Marie. Intersectionality: An Intellectual History. Oxford UP, 2016. Handrahan, Matthew. “Bioshock Infinite Reaches 11 Million Sales.” GamesIndustry.Biz, 1 June 2015, www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2015-06-01-bioshock-infinitehas-sold-11-million-units. Hanebeck, Julian. Understanding Metalepsis: The Hermeneutics of Narrative Transgression. de Gruyter, 2017. Happ, C., and A. Melzer. Empathy and Violent Video Games: Aggression and Prosocial Behavior. Springer, 2014. Hardin, Michael. Playing the Reader: The Homoerotics of Self-Reflexive Fiction. Lang, 2000. Harmon, Gary L. “On the Nature and Functions of Popular Culture.” Popular Culture Theory and Methodology: A Basic Introduction, edited by Harold E. Hinds et al., Popular, 2006, pp. 62-73. Harris, Neil. Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum. U of Chicago P, 1981. Harris, Paul A., and Michael Crawford. Time and Uncertainty. Brill, 2004. Haselstein, Ulla, et al. “Popular Culture.” Introduction. Amerikastudien / American Studies, vol. 46, no. 3, 2001, pp. 331-38. Haslam, Jason. Gender, Race, and American Science Fiction: Reflections on Fantastic Identities. Routledge, 2015. Hassler-Forest, Dan. “Game of Thrones: Quality Television and the Cultural Logic of Gentrification.” TV/Series, no. 6, Dec. 2014, doi:10.4000/tvseries.323. Hausar, Gernot. “Players in the Digital City: Immersion, History and City Architecture

Works Cited

285

in the Assassin’s Creed Series.” Early Modernity and Video Games, edited by Tobias Winnerling and Florian Kerschbaumer, Cambridge Scholars, 2014, pp. 175-88. Hayles, N. Katherine. “Saving the Subject: Remediation in House of Leaves.” American Literature, vol. 74, no. 4, Dec. 2002, pp. 779-806. Project MUSE, muse.jhu.edu/article/38216. Heavy Rain. Quantic Dreams, Sony, 2010. Heer, Jeet. “Trump’s Cult of Personality Takes Paranoia to the Next Level.” The New Republic, 26 Jan. 2018, newrepublic.com/article/146786/trumps-cult-personality-takes-paranoia-next-level. Heglar, Charles J. Rethinking the Slave Narrative: Slave Marriage and the Narratives of Henry Bibb and William and Ellen Craft. Greenwood, 2001. Heidbrink, Simone, et al. “Theorizing Religion in Digital Games: Perspectives and Approaches.” Online: Heidelberg Journal of Religions on the Internet, vol. 5, 2014, pp. 5-49. heiup.uni-heidelberg.de/journals/index.php/religions/article/ view/12156. Heinen, Sandra, and Roy Sommer, editors. Narratology in the Age of Cross-Disciplinary Narrative Research. de Gruyter, 2009. Hendrix, John Shannon, and Lorens Eyan Holm. Introduction. Architecture and the Unconscious, edited by Hendrix and Holm, Routledge, 2016, pp. 1-23. Herman, Barbara. Moral Literacy. Harvard UP, 2007. Herman, David, editor. Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis. Ohio State UP, 1999. ---. Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. U of Nebraska P, 2004. ---. “Storyworld.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, edited by David Herman et al., Taylor and Francis, 2005, pp. 569-70. Hero. Directed by Zhang Yimou, Miramax, 2002. Heron, Michael James, and Pauline Helen Belford. “All of Your Co-Workers Are Gone: Story, Substance, and the Empathic Puzzler.” Journal of Games Criticism, vol. 2, no. 1, Jan. 2015, gamescriticism.org/articles/heronbelford-2-1/. Herrmann, Sebastian M. Presidential Unrealities: Epistemic Panic, Cultural Work, and the US Presidency. Winter, 2014. Herrmann, Sebastian M., Katja Kanzler, and Stefan Schubert. “The Poetics of Politics.” Introduction. Poetics of Politics: Textuality and Social Relevance in Contemporary American Literature and Culture, edited by Sebastian M. Herrmann et al., Winter, 2015, pp. 7-26. Hescher, Achim. Reading Graphic Novels: Genre and Narration. de Gruyter, 2016. Hesselberth, Pepita, and Laura Schuster. “Into the Mind and Out to the World: Memory Anxiety in the Mind-Game Film.” Mind the Screen: Media Concepts According to Thomas Elsaesser, edited by Jaap Kooijman et al., Amsterdam UP, 2008, pp. 96-111. Hibberd, James. “15 Maddening Interstellar Plot Holes.” Entertainment Weekly, 8 Nov. 2014, ew.com/article/2014/11/08/interstellar-plot-holes/. Hilgartner, Stephen. “The Dominant View of Popularization: Conceptual Problems, Political Uses.” Social Studies of Science, vol. 20, no. 3, Aug. 1990, pp. 519-39. SAGE, journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/030631290020003006. Hill, Mike. After Whiteness: Unmaking an American Majority. NYU P, 2004. Hoberek, Andrew. Introduction. “After Postmodernism.” Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 53, no. 3, 2007, pp. 233-47. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20479812. ---. Considering Watchmen: Poetics, Property, Politics. Rutgers UP, 2017. ---. “Literary Genre Fiction.” American Literature in Transition, 2000–2010, edited by

286

Narrative Instability

Rachel Greenwald Smith, Cambridge UP, 2017, pp. 61-75. Hocking, Clint. “Ludonarrative Dissonance in Bioshock: The Problem of What the Game Is About.” Well Played 1.0: Video Games, Value and Meaning, edited by Drew Davidson, ETC, 2009, pp. 255-62. Hoffman, Eric, and Dominick Grace, editors. Approaching Twin Peaks: Critical Essays on the Original Series. McFarland, 2017. Hoffmann, Gerhard. From Modernism to Postmodernism: Concepts and Strategies of Postmodern American Fiction. Rodopi, 2005. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente. 1944. S. Fischer, 2010. Horn, Charles Joshua. “BioShock Infinite and Transworld Individuality: Identity across Space and Time.” Cuddy, pp. 76-85. “House of Leaves.” MZD Forums, forums.markzdanielewski.com/forum/house-ofleaves. Accessed 26 Feb. 2018. Huber, Werner, et al. Self-Reflexivity in Literature. Königshausen und Neumann, 2005. Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. 1938. Routledge, 2003. Hutcheon, Linda. “Historiographic Metafiction.” Metafiction, edited by Mark Currie, Routledge, 2014, pp. 71-91. ---. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. 1988. Routledge, 2004. ---. The Politics of Postmodernism. 1989. Routledge, 2002. Hven, Steffen. Cinema and Narrative Complexity: Embodying the Fabula. Amsterdam UP, 2017. Identity. Directed by James Mangold, Columbia, 2003. Ignatiev, Noel. How the Irish Became White. Routledge, 2012. Inception. Directed by Christopher Nolan, Warner, 2010. “Inception.” Box Office Mojo, www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=inception.htm. Accessed 7 Feb. 2016. Inglis, David. Culture and Everyday Life. Routledge, 2004. Interstellar. Directed by Christopher Nolan, Paramount, 2014. “Interstellar.” Box Office Mojo, www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=interstellar.htm. Accessed 23 Sept. 2017. Irwin, William. “Philosophy as/and/of Popular Culture.” Philosophy and the Interpretation of Pop Culture, edited by William Irwin and Jorge J. E. Gracia, Rowman and Littlefield, 2007, pp. 41-63. Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. JHU P, 1980. Itzkoff, Dave. “Hans Zimmer Extracts the Secrets of the Inception Score.” ArtsBeat, 28 July 2010, artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/28/hans-zimmer-extracts-thesecrets-of-the-inception-score/. Ivănescu, Andra. “The Music of Tomorrow, Yesterday! Music, Time and Technology in BioShock Infinite.” Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network, vol. 7, no. 2, July 2014, pp. 51-66. www.ojs.meccsa.org.uk/index.php/netknow/article/view/337. Jackson, Robert. BioShock: Decision, Forced Choice and Propaganda. John Hunt, 2014. Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. 1981. Routledge, 2002. James, David E. The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles. U of California P, 2005. James, Henry. “The Real Thing.” 1892. The Portable Henry James, edited by John Auchard, Penguin, 2003, pp. 79-105. ---. The Turn of the Screw and the Aspern Papers. 1898. Wordsworth Classics, 2000.

Works Cited

287

Jameson, Fredric. Foreword. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, by Jean-François Lyotard, U of Minnesota P, 1984. ---. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Routledge, 1981. ---. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke UP, 1991. Jamieson, Kathleen Hall. Dirty Politics: Deception, Distraction, and Democracy. Oxford UP, 1993. JanMohamed, Abdul R., and David Lloyd. “Minority Discourse: What Is to Be Done?” Introduction. Cultural Critique, no. 7, Autumn 1987, pp. 5-17. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1354148. Jannidis, Fotis. “Metareference in Computer Games.” Wolf et al., pp. 543-65. Jarenski, Shelly. Narrating Vision, Visualizing Nation: The American Nineteenth Century After 1839. Loyola U of Chicago, 2007. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. NYU P, 2006. ---. “Game Design as Narrative Architecture.” Electronic Book Review, July 2004, www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/lazzi-fair. ---. “Henry Jenkins Responds in Turn.” Electronic Book Review, Jan. 2004, www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/well-syuzheted. Jenkins, Henry, Tara McPherson, et al., editors. Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture. Duke UP, 2002. Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, et al., editors. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. NYU P, 2013. Johnson, Andrew. “Pain as the Pathway to Epiphany in the Films of Darren Aronofsky.” Faith and Spirituality in Masters of World Cinema, Volume III, edited by Kenneth R. Morefield and Nicholas S. Olson, Cambridge Scholars, 2015, pp. 111-24. Johnson, David Kyle, editor. Inception and Philosophy: Because It’s Never Just a Dream. Wiley, 2011. ---. “Taking a Leap of Faith: A How-to Guide.” D. K. Johnson, Inception, pp. 249-64. Jones, Alexander E. “Point of View in The Turn of the Screw.” PMLA, vol. 74, no. 1, 1959, pp. 112-22. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/460392. Jones, Matthew, and Joan Ormrod. “Contexts and Concepts of Time in the Mass Media.” Introduction. Jones and Ormrod, Time Travel, pp. 5-18. ---, editors. Time Travel in Popular Media: Essays on Film, Television, Literature and Video Games. McFarland, 2015. Joritz-Nakagawa, Jane. Dying Swans. Argotist, 2015. Juul, Jesper. Half-Real: Video Games Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds. MIT P, 2005. Kajtár, László. “Infinite Lighthouses, Infinite Stories: BioShock and the Aesthetics of Video Game Storytelling.” Cuddy, pp. 129-38. Kanzler, Katja. “Architecture, Writing, and Vulnerable Signification in Herman Melville’s ‘I and My Chimney.’” Amerikastudien / American Studies, vol. 54, no. 4, 2009, pp. 583-601. ---. “‘This Game Is Not Meant For You’: Westworld an der Schnittstelle von Narrativ und Spiel.” Mensch, Maschine, Maschinenmenschen: Multidisziplinäre Perspektiven auf die Serie Westworld, edited by Brigitte Georgi-Findlay and Katja Kanzler, Springer, 2018, pp. 53-70. ---. “Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations”: The Multicultural Evolution of Star Trek. Winter, 2004. Kapell, Matthew Wilhelm, editor. The Play Versus Story Divide in Game Studies: Critical Essays. McFarland, 2015.

288

Narrative Instability

Karni, Annie. “Hillary’s ‘Glass Ceiling’ Moment.” Politico, 7 June 2016, www.politico.com/story/2016/06/hillary-clinton-glass-ceiling-nominee-223977. Kelleter, Frank. “Populäre Serialität.” Introduction. Populäre Serialität: Narration – Evolution – Distinktion: Zum seriellen Erzählen seit dem 19. Jahrhundert, edited by Kelleter, transcript, 2014, pp. 11-46. ---. Serial Agencies: The Wire and Its Readers. John Hunt, 2014. Kellner, Douglas. Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics Between the Modern and the Post-Modern. Routledge, 2003. Kimmel, Michael S. Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era. Nation Books, 2013. ---. “The Contemporary ‘Crisis’ of Masculinity in Historical Perspective.” The Making of Masculinities: The New Men’s Studies, edited by Harry Brod, Routledge, 2015, pp. 121-53. ---. Manhood in America: A Cultural History. Oxford UP, 2012. King, Claire Sisco. “It Cuts Both Ways: Fight Club, Masculinity, and Abject Hegemony.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, vol. 6, no. 4, Dec. 2009, pp. 366-85. Taylor and Francis, dx.doi.org/10.1080/ 14791420903335135. Kirby, Alan. Digimodernism: How New Technologies Dismantle the Postmodern and Reconfigure Our Culture. Continuum, 2009. Kiss, Miklós. “Narrative Metalepsis as Diegetic Concept in Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010).” Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, vol. 5, 2012, pp. 35-54. www.acta.sapientia.ro/acta-film/C5/film5-3.pdf. Kiss, Miklós, and Steven Willemsen. Impossible Puzzle Films: A Cognitive Approach to Contemporary Complex Cinema. Edinburgh UP, 2017. Klecker, Cornelia. Spoiler Alert! Mind-Tricking Narratives in Contemporary Hollywood Film. Winter, 2015. Klevjer, Rune. “In Defense of Cutscenes.” Proceedings of Computer Games and Digital Cultures Conference, edited by Frans Mäyrä, Tampere UP, 2002, pp. 191-202. Klimek, Sonja. “Metalepsis and Its (Anti-)Illusionist Effects in the Arts, Media and Role-Playing Games.” Wolf et al., pp. 169-87. Koch, Jonas. “Unreliable and Discordant Film Narration.” Journal of Literary Theory, vol. 5, no. 1, Jan. 2011, pp. 57-80. de Gruyter, www.degruyter.com/view/j/ jlt.2011.5.issue-1/jlt.2011.006/jlt.2011.006.xml. Koenen, Anne. “The (Black) Lady Vanishes: Postfeminism, Poststructuralism, and Theorizing in Narratives by Black Women.” Explorations on Post-Theory: Toward a Third Space, edited by Fernando de Toro, Vervuert, 1999, pp. 131-43. ---. Visions of Doom, Plots of Power: The Fantastic in Anglo-American Women’s Literature. Vervuert, 1999. Köller, Susanne. “‘I Imagined a Story Where I Didn’t Have to Be the Damsel’: Seriality, Reflexivity, and Narratively Complex Women in Westworld.” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, vol. 67, no. 2, 2019, pp. 163-80, doi.org/10.1515/zaa-2019-0015. Kolodny, Annette. The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters. U of North Carolina P, 1975. Köppe, Tilmann, and Tom Kindt. “Unreliable Narration With a Narrator and Without.” Journal of Literary Theory, vol. 5, no. 1, Jan. 2011, pp. 81-93. de Gruyter, www.degruyter.com/view/j/jlt.2011.5.issue-1/jlt.2011.007/jlt.2011.007.xml. Kozloff, Sarah. Invisible Storytellers: Voice-Over Narration in American Fiction Film. U of California P, 1989. Kraus, Gérard. “Case Study: Bioshock (2007).” Digital Culture: Understanding New

Works Cited

289

Media, edited by Creeber Glen and Martin Royston, McGraw-Hill, 2008, pp. 86-91. Krzywinska, Tanya. “Digital Games and the American Gothic: Investigating Gothic Game Grammar.” A Companion to American Gothic, edited by Charles L. Crow, Wiley, 2013, pp. 503-15. Kücklich, Julian. “Play and Playability as Key Concepts in New Media Studies.” 2004, citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.94.4169&rep=rep1& type=pdf. Kukkonen, Karin, and Sonja Klimek, editors. Metalepsis in Popular Culture. de Gruyter, 2011. Kulish, Nancy, and Deanna Holtzman. A Story of Her Own: The Female Oedipus Complex Reexamined and Renamed. Jason Aronson, 2008. Küppers, Petra. Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies on Edge. Routledge, 2003. Kurtz, Andrew. “Ideology and Interpellation in the First-Person Shooter.” Growing Up Postmodern: Neoliberalism and the War on the Young, edited by Ronald Strickland, Rowman and Littlefield, 2002, pp. 107-22. Kušnír, Jaroslav. American Fiction: Modernism-Postmodernism, Popular Culture, and Metafiction. ibidem, 2012. Laas, Oliver. “Would You Kindly Bring Us the Girl and Wipe Away the Debt.” Cuddy, pp. 58-68. Lacko, Ivan. “On the Path to Sentience: Post-Digital Narratives in Westworld.” World Literature Studies, vol. 9, no. 3, 2017, pp. 29-40. www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=576201. Lahde, Maurice. “Der unzuverlässige Erzähler in The Usual Suspects.” Was stimmt denn jetzt? Unzuverlässiges Erzählen in Literatur und Film, edited by Fabienne Liptay and Yvonne Wolf, ETK, 2005, pp. 293-306. Laine, Tarja. Bodies in Pain: Emotion and the Cinema of Darren Aronofsky. Berghahn Books, 2015. Lang, Nico. “The 7 Biggest Problems with Interstellar.” Salon, 11 Nov. 2014, www.salon.com/2014/11/11/the_7_biggest_problems_with_interstellar_partner/. LaRocca, David, editor. The Philosophy of Charlie Kaufman. UP of Kentucky, 2011. Lauter, Paul. “Is Class an American Study?” A Concise Companion to American Studies, edited by John Carlos Rowe, Wiley, 2010, pp. 74-91. ---. “Reconfiguring Academic Disciplines: The Emergence of American Studies.” American Studies, vol. 40, no. 2, Summer 1999, pp. 23-38. journals.ku.edu/amerstud/article/view/2676. Lauter, Paul, and Ann Fitzgerald. Introduction. Literature, Class, and Culture: An Anthology, edited by Lauter and Fitzgerald, Longman, 2001, pp. 1-13. Lavender, Isiah. Race in American Science Fiction. Indiana UP, 2011. Lavery, David, editor. Full of Secrets: Critical Approaches to Twin Peaks. Wayne State UP, 1995. Leonard, Elisabeth Anne, editor. Into Darkness Peering: Race and Color in the Fantastic. Greenwood, 1997. Leverette, Marc, et al., editors. It’s Not TV: Watching HBO in the Post-Television Era. Taylor and Francis, 2008. Levine-Rasky, Cynthia. “Intersectionality Theory Applied to Whiteness and Middle-Classness.” Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture, vol. 17, no. 2, 2011, pp. 239-53. Taylor and Francis, dx.doi.org/10.1080/ 13504630.2011.558377. Lewis, Ethan. “The Politics of BioShock Infinite.” Den of Geek, 7 Oct. 2013, www.de-

290

Narrative Instability

nofgeek.com/us/go/172215. Lewis, Jeff. Cultural Studies: The Basics. SAGE, 2008. Life Is Strange. Dontnod, Square Enix, 2015. Lilleleht, Mark L. “Ukcombekcantsini and the Fantastic: Zulu Narratives and Colonial Culture.” Comedy, Fantasy and Colonialism, edited by Graeme Harper, Continuum, 2002, pp. 23-38. Limoges, Jean-Marc. “The Gradable Effects of Self-Reflexivity on Aesthetic Illusion in Cinema.” Wolf et al., pp. 391-408. Lizardi, Ryan. “Bioshock: Complex and Alternate Histories.” Game Studies, vol. 14, no. 1, 2014, gamestudies.org/1401/articles/lizardi. Lodge, David. The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature. Bloomsbury, 2015. Lola rennt [Run Lola Run]. Directed by Tom Tykwer, Prokino, 1998. Longhurst, Brian, et al. Introducing Cultural Studies. Routledge, 2014. Looper. Directed by Rian Johnson, TriStar, 2012. López, José, and Garry Potter. “After Postmodernism: The New Millennium.” After Postmodernism: An Introduction to Critical Realism, edited by López and Potter, Continuum, 2001, pp. 3-16. Lost. Created by Jeffrey Lieber, J. J. Abrams, and Damon Lindelof. ABC, 2004-2010. Lusin, Caroline, editor. Empathie, Sympathie und Narration: Strategien der Rezeptionslenkung in Prosa, Drama und Film. Winter, 2014. Lutz, Helma, et al., editors. Framing Intersectionality: Debates on a Multi-Faceted Concept in Gender Studies. Routledge, 2016. Lutzka, Sven. “Simulacra, Simulation and The Matrix.” The Matrix in Theory, edited by Myriam Díaz-Diocaretz and Stefan Herbrechter, Rodopi, 2006, pp. 113-30. The Machinist. Directed by Brad Anderson, Paramount, 2004. Mafe, Diana Adesola. “Race and the First-Person Shooter: Challenging the Video Gamer in BioShock Infinite.” Camera Obscura, vol. 30, no. 2 89, Jan. 2015, pp. 89-123. Duke UP, cameraobscura.dukejournals.org/content/30/2_89/89. Magnet, Shoshana. “Playing at Colonization: Interpreting Imaginary Landscapes in the Video Game Tropico.” Journal of Communication Inquiry, vol. 30, no. 2, Apr. 2006, pp. 142-62. SAGE, journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/ 0196859905285320. Makuch, Eddie. “Alan Wake Sales Reach 4.5 Million, as Xbox One Rumors Surface.” GameSpot, 25 Mar. 2015, www.gamespot.com/articles/alan-wake-salesreach-4-5-million-as-xbox-one-rumo/1100-6426167/. ---. “BioShock Infinite’s Religious Themes Led Dev to Consider Quitting.” GameSpot, 2 Mar. 2013, www.gamespot.com/articles/bioshock-infinites-religious-themesled-dev-to-consider-quitting/1100-6404620/. Malkowski, Jennifer, and TreaAndrea M. Russworm, editors. Gaming Representation: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games. Indiana UP, 2017. Malloy, Daniel P. “How to Hijack a Mind: Inception and the Ethics of Heist Films.” D. K. Johnson, Inception, pp. 125-39. Maltby, Paul. “Postmodernism in a Fundamentalist Arena.” The Mourning After: Attending the Wake of Postmodernism, edited by Neil Edward Brooks and Josh Toth, Rodopi, 2007, pp. 15-51. Markey, Patrick M., and Christopher J. Ferguson. Moral Combat: Why the War on Violent Video Games Is Wrong. BenBella, 2017. Marston, Kendra. “The Tragic Ballerina’s Shadow Self: Troubling the Political Economy of Melancholy in Black Swan.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video, vol. 32, no. 8, Nov. 2015, pp. 695-711. Taylor and Francis, dx.doi.org/

Works Cited

291

10.1080/10509208.2015.1060825. Martin, John Frederick. Profits in the Wilderness: Entrepreneurship and the Founding of New England Towns in the Seventeenth Century. UNC P, 2014. Martin, Robert K., and Eric Savoy, editors. American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative. U of Iowa P, 1998. The Matrix. Directed by The Wachowskis, Warner, 1999. Mäyrä, Frans. An Introduction to Games Studies: Games in Culture. SAGE, 2008. Maza, Antonio José Planells de la. Possible Worlds in Video Games: From Classic Narrative to Meaningful Actions. ETC, 2017. McCabe, Janet, and Kim Akass, editors. Quality TV: Contemporary American Television and Beyond. I. B. Tauris, 2007. McGowan, Todd. The Fictional Christopher Nolan. U of Texas P, 2012. ---. The Impossible David Lynch. Columbia UP, 2007. McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. 1987. Routledge, 2003. McLaughlin, Robert L. “Post-Postmodern Discontent: Contemporary Fiction and the Social World.” symploke, vol. 12, no. 1-2, 2004, pp. 53-68. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40550666. ---. “Post-Postmodernism.” The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature, edited by Joe Bray et al., Routledge, 2012, pp. 212-23. McLean, Adrienne L. “If Only They Had Meant to Make a Comedy: Laughing at Black Swan.” The Last Laugh: Strange Humors of Cinema, edited by Murray Pomerance, Wayne State UP, 2013, pp. 143-61. McShea, Tom. “Alan Wake Review.” GameSpot, 7 May 2010, www.gamespot.com/reviews/alan-wake-review/1900-6260843/. Memento. Directed by Christopher Nolan, Newmarket, 2000. Merrin, William. Baudrillard and the Media: A Critical Introduction. Polity, 2005. Messner, Michael A. Politics of Masculinities. Rowman Altamira, 1997. Michaels, Walter Benn. The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality. Macmillan, 2007. Mikics, David. A New Handbook of Literary Terms. Yale UP, 2010. Miller, Perry. Errand Into the Wilderness. 1952. Harvard UP, 2009. Misek, Richard. “Exploding Binaries: Point-of-View and Combat in The Thin Red Line.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video, vol. 25, no. 2, 2008, pp. 116-23. Taylor and Francis, www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/ 10509200601074710. Mitroff, Ian I., and Warren G. Bennis. The Unreality Industry: The Deliberate Manufacturing of Falsehood and What It Is Doing to Our Lives. Oxford UP, 1993. Mittell, Jason. “‘All in the Game’: The Wire, Serial Storytelling and Procedural Logic.” Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives, edited by Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, MIT P, 2009, pp. 429-38. ---. Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. NYU P, 2015. ---. “A Cultural Approach to Television Genre Theory.” The Television Studies Reader, edited by Robert Clyde Allen and Annette Hill, Psychology, 2004, pp. 17181. ---. “Forensic Fandom and the Drillable Text.” Spreadable Media, spreadablemedia.org/ essays/mittell/. Accessed 10 Nov. 2017. ---. Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture. Routledge, 2013. ---. “Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television.” The Velvet Light Trap, vol. 58, no. 1, 2006, pp. 29-40. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/ vlt.2006.0032.

292

Narrative Instability

Monteiro, George. “Hemingway, Henry, and the Surprise Ending.” Prairie Schooner, vol. 47, no. 4, 1973, pp. 296-302. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40628651. Moore, Erica. “Haunting Memories: Gothic and Memoir.” Gothic Landscapes: Changing Eras, Changing Cultures, Changing Anxieties, edited by Sharon Rose Yang and Kathleen Healey, Springer, 2016, pp. 169-98. Moraru, Christian. Cosmodernism: American Narrative, Late Globalization, and the New Cultural Imaginary. U of Michigan P, 2011. Morrison, Toni. The Origin of Others. Harvard UP, 2017. ---. Playing in the Dark. 1992. Knopf Doubleday, 2007. Morrow, Susan L. “Feminist Reconstruction of Psychology.” Issues in the Psychology of Women, edited by Maryka Biaggio and Michel Hersen, Springer, 2007, pp. 15-31. Mr. Nobody. Directed by Jaco Van Dormael, Wild Bunch, 2009. Mukherjee, Souvik. Video Games and Storytelling: Reading Games and Playing Books. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Mulholland Drive. Directed by David Lynch, Universal, 2001. Müller, Claudia. “The Welfare Mother and the Fat Poor: Stereotypical Images and the Success Narrative in Sapphire’s Push.” Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies, vol. 14, no. 1, May 2013, copas.uni-regensburg.de/issue/ view/20. Murphy, Katharine. Re-Reading Pío Baroja and English Literature. Lang, 2004. Murray, Janet. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. MIT P, 1998. ---. “The Last Word on Ludology v Narratology in Game Studies.” Janet H. Murray: Humanistic Design for an Emerging Medium, 28 June 2013, inventingthemedium.com/2013/06/28/the-last-word-on-ludology-v-narratology-2005/. MZD. www.markzdanielewski.com. Accessed 12 Jan. 2018. Nahin, Paul J. Time Machines: Time Travel in Physics, Metaphysics, and Science Fiction. Springer, 2001. Nama, Adilifu. Black Space: Imagining Race in Science Fiction Film. U of Texas P, 2010. Nealon, Jeffrey. Post-Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Just-In-Time Capitalism. Stanford UP, 2012. Neitzel, Britta. “Metacommunication in Play and in (Computer) Games.” Self-Reference in the Media, edited by Winfried Nöth and Nina Bishara, de Gruyter, 2007, pp. 237-52. Nelson, Andrew Patrick, editor. Contemporary Westerns: Film and Television since 1990. Scarecrow, 2013. Newman, Michael Z., and Elana Levine. Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status. Routledge, 2012. Newton, Julianne. The Burden of Visual Truth: The Role of Photojournalism in Mediating Reality. Routledge, 2013. Nichols, Bill. Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Indiana UP, 1991. Nicol, Bran. The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodern Fiction. Cambridge UP, 2009. Nochimson, Martha P. David Lynch Swerves: Uncertainty from Lost Highway to Inland Empire. U of Texas P, 2013. North, Michael. Camera Works: Photography and the Twentieth-Century Word. Oxford UP, 2005. Norton, Anne. Republic of Signs: Liberal Theory and American Popular Culture. U of Chicago P, 1993.

Works Cited

293

Nöth, Winfried. “Self-Reference in the Media: The Semiotic Framework.” Self-Reference in the Media, edited by Winfried Nöth and Nina Bishara, de Gruyter, 2007, pp. 3-30. Nugent, John. “Movie Plots Explained: Interstellar.” Empire, 21 Apr. 2016, www.empireonline.com/movies/features/interstellar-explained/. Nünning, Ansgar. “Narratology or Narratologies? Taking Stock of Recent Developments, Critique and Modest Proposals for Future Usages of the Term.” What Is Narratology? Questions and Answers Regarding the Status of a Theory, edited by Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Müller, de Gruyter, 2003, pp. 239-75. ---. “Reconceptualizing Unreliable Narration: Synthesizing Cognitive and Rhetorical Approaches.” A Companion to Narrative Theory, edited by James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz, Wiley, 2005, pp. 89-107. ---. “Surveying Contextualist and Cultural Narratologies: Towards an Outline of Approaches, Concepts and Potentials.” Narratology in the Age of Cross-Disciplinary Narrative Research, edited by Sandra Heinen and Roy Sommer, de Gruyter, 2009, pp. 48-70. Nünning, Ansgar, and Vera Nünning. “Conceptualizing ‘Broken Narratives’ from a Narratological Perspective: Domains, Concepts, Features, Functions, and Suggestions for Research.” Narrative im Bruch: Theoretische Positionen und Anwendungen, edited by Anna Babka et al., Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2016, pp. 37-86. Nünning, Vera. “Conceptualising (Un)Reliable Narration and (Un)Trustworthiness.” Unreliable Narration and Trustworthiness: Intermedial and Interdisciplinary Perspectives, edited by Nünning, de Gruyter, 2015, pp. 1-28. ---, editor. Unreliable Narration and Trustworthiness: Intermedial and Interdisciplinary Perspectives. de Gruyter, 2015. O’Brien, Gabrielle. “Mirror, Mirror: Fractured Female Identity in Black Swan.” Screen Education, no. 75, Sept. 2014, pp. 102-07. search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;dn=659113908922174;res=IELHSS. O’Donnell, Patrick. “Metafiction.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, edited by David Herman et al., Taylor and Francis, 2005, pp. 301-02. O’Donovan, Maeve M., et al., editors. Why Race and Gender Still Matter: An Intersectional Approach. Routledge, 2015. Oever, Annie van den. “Mainstream Complexity: Nolan’s Inception as a Case for (Amateur) Narratologists.” Cinéma & Cie, no. 1, 2012, pp. 33-43, doi:10.7372/ 70978. Olsen, Lance. Ellipse of Uncertainty: An Introduction to Postmodern Fantasy. Greenwood, 1987. Olson, Greta. Current Trends in Narratology. de Gruyter, 2011. ---. “Reconsidering Unreliability: Fallible and Untrustworthy Narrators.” Narrative, vol. 11, no. 1, 2003, pp. 93-109. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20107302. Olson, Jonathan R. “Nolan’s Immersive Allegories of Filmmaking in Inception and The Prestige.” Furby and Joy, pp. 44-61. Olson, Scott R. “Meta‐Television: Popular Postmodernism.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication, vol. 4, no. 3, Sept. 1987, pp. 284-300. Taylor and Francis, nca.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15295038709360136. Origitano, Catlyn. “‘The Cage Is Somber’: A Feminist Understanding of Elizabeth.” Cuddy, pp. 38-48. “Oscar Predix.” The Film Experience, 3 Apr. 2011, thefilmexperience.net/blog/2011/4/ 3/oscar-predix-best-actor-and-leonardo-dicaprio.html. The Others. Directed by Alejandro Amenábar. Dimension, 2001.

294

Narrative Instability

OthoHasTheHandbook. “[THEORY] Dolores’ Conversations Are with ARNOLD, Not Bernard.” Reddit, www.reddit.com/r/westworld/comments/59bwvd/theory_ dolores_conversations_are_with_arnold_not/. Accessed 4 Jan. 2018. Outlaw, Kofi. “Inception Ending Explained.” Screen Rant, 19 July 2010, screenrant.com/inception-spoilers-discussion/. Ouweneel, Arij. Freudian Fadeout: The Failings of Psychoanalysis in Film Criticism. McFarland, 2012. Packer, Joseph. “The Battle for Galt’s Gulch: BioShock as Critique of Objectivism.” Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds, vol. 2, no. 3, 2010, pp. 209-24. IngentaConnect, doi.org/10.1386/jgvw.2.3.209_1. Panek, Elliot. “The Poet and the Detective: Defining the Psychological Puzzle Film.” Film Criticism, vol. 31, no. 1-2, 2006, pp. 62-88. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/44019214. Parker, Felan. “Canonizing Bioshock: Cultural Value and the Prestige Game.” Games and Culture, vol. 12, no. 7-8, Aug. 2015, pp. 739-63. SAGE, gac.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/08/28/1555412015598669. Parrish, Timothy. From the Civil War to the Apocalypse: Postmodern History and American Fiction. U of Massachusetts P, 2008. Paryz, M., and J. Leo. The Post-2000 Film Western: Contexts, Transnationality, Hybridity. Springer, 2015. Pascual, Mónica Calvo. “‘It Was Perfect’: Desire, Corporeality, and Denial in Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan.” ES Review: Spanish Journal of English Studies, no. 37, May 2017, pp. 119-32. zaguan.unizar.es/record/63435. Paul, Heike. The Myths That Made America: An Introduction to American Studies. transcript, 2014. Peaty, Gwyneth. “Beast of America: Revolution and Monstrosity in BioShock Infinite.” War Gothic in Literature and Culture, edited by Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet and Steffen Hantke, Routledge, 2015, pp. 192-208. ---. “‘Hatched from the Veins in Your Arms’: Movement, Ontology, and First-Person Gameplay in BioShock.” Guns, Grenades, and Grunts: First-Person Shooter Games, edited by Gerald A. Voorhees et al., Bloomsbury, 2012, pp. 153-74. Perdigao, Lisa K. “‘The Dream Has Become Their Reality’: Infinite Regression in Christopher Nolan’s Memento and Inception.” Furby and Joy, pp. 120-31. Pérez-Latorre, Óliver, and Mercè Oliva. “Video Games, Dystopia, and Neoliberalism: The Case of BioShock Infinite.” Games and Culture, Oct. 2017, pp. 1-21. SAGE, journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1555412017727226. Perrault, S. Communicating Popular Science: From Deficit to Democracy. Springer, 2013. Pinkas, Claudia. Der phantastische Film: Instabile Narrationen und die Narration der Instabilität. de Gruyter, 2010. Pinsof, Allistair. “BioShock Infinite Is the History Lesson Gamers Deserve.” Destructoid, 15 Apr. 2013, www.destructoid.com/bioshock-infinite-is-the-historylesson-gamers-deserve-251682.phtml. Pisarz-Ramirez, Gabriele. “Border Studies and Hemispheric Studies.” Approaches to American Cultural Studies, edited by Antje Dallmann et al., Routledge, 2016, pp. 242-51. Plascencia, Salvador. The People of Paper. Mariner, 2006. Pointon, Collin. “BioShock’s Meta‐Narrative: What BioShock Teaches the Gamer about Gaming.” Cuddy, pp. 3-14. Pony Island. Daniel Mullins Games, 2016. The Prestige. Directed by Christopher Nolan. Warner, 2006.

Works Cited

295

Quantum Break. Remedy Entertainment, Microsoft, 2016. Quendler, Christian. The Camera-Eye Metaphor in Cinema. Routledge, 2016. Rafter, Nicole Hahn, and Michelle Brown. Criminology Goes to the Movies: Crime Theory and Popular Culture. NYU P, 2011. Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged. 1957. Signet, 1996. Rapp, Bernhard. Selbstreflexivität im Computerspiel: Theoretische, analytische und funktionale Zugänge zum Phänomen autothematischer Strategien in Games. Hülsbusch, 2008. Ravizza, Eleonora. “‘We Don’t Want Life to Look Difficult, Do We?’ Representations of the Fifties and Self-Reflexive Nostalgia in Mad Men.” Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies, vol. 14, no. 1, May 2013, copas.uni-regensburg.de/issue/view/20. Rebein, Robert. Hicks, Tribes, and Dirty Realists: American Fiction After Postmodernism. UP of Kentucky, 2001. Remo, Chris. “Take-Two: BioShock Hit 4M Units, BioShock 2 Drove Sales.” 3 Mar. 2010, www.gamasutra.com/view/news/118449/TakeTwo_BioShock_Hit_ 4M_Units_BioShock_2_Drove_Sales.php. Richardson, Chris, and Mike Elrod. “BioShock and the Ghost of Ayn Rand: Universal Learning and Tacit Knowledge in Contemporary Video Games.” Contemporary Research on Intertextuality in Video Games, edited by Duret Christophe and Pons Christian-Marie, IGI Global, 2016, pp. 92-107. Ritzenhoff, Karen A. “Self-Mutilation and Dark Love in Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan (2010) and Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher (2001).” Screening the Dark Side of Love, edited by Karen A. Ritzenhoff and Karen Randell, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, pp. 109-30. Robinson, Sally. Marked Men: White Masculinity in Crisis. Columbia UP, 2005. Roediger, David R. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. Verso, 1999. Rollins, Peter C., and John E. O’Connor, editors. Hollywood’s West: The American Frontier in Film, Television, and History. UP of Kentucky, 2005. Ronen, Ruth. Possible Worlds in Literary Theory. Cambridge UP, 1994. Rose, Jason. “The Value of Art in BioShock: Ayn Rand, Emotion, and Choice.” Cuddy, pp. 15-26. Roskill, Mark W., and David Carrier. Truth and Falsehood in Visual Images. U of Massachusetts P, 1983. Round, Julia. “Anglo-American Graphic Narrative.” From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels: Contributions to the Theory and History of Graphic Narrative, edited by Daniel Stein and Jan-Noël Thon, de Gruyter, 2015, pp. 325-45. Rowe, John Carlos. The New American Studies. U of Minnesota P, 2002. Ruberg, Bonnie, and Adrienne Shaw, editors. Queer Game Studies. U of Minnesota P, 2017. Rubin, Joan Shelley. The Making of Middlebrow Culture. U of North Carolina P, 2000. Ruby Sparks. Directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris. Fox, 2012. Rucker, JD. “Bioshock Infinite Is a Blatantly Anti-Christian Game.” Judeo Christian Church, judeochristianchurch.com/bioshock-infinite-is-a-blatantly-anti-christian-game/. Accessed 14 Sept. 2017. Ruiz, Michelle. “When the Glass Ceiling Didn’t Shatter: Inside What Would Have Been Hillary Clinton’s Victory Party.” Vogue, 9 Nov. 2016, www.vogue.com/article/hillary-clinton-javits-center-reaction-piece. Rushdy, Ashraf H. A. Neo-Slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form. Oxford UP, 1999.

296

Narrative Instability

Russian Doll. Created by Natasha Lyonne, Amy Poehler, and Leslye Headland, Netflix, 2019. Russo, Julie Levin. “Inside the Box: Accessing Self-Reflexive Television.” Journal of E-Media Studies, vol. 2, no. 1, 2009. journals.dartmouth.edu/cgi-bin/WebObjects/Journals.woa/1/xmlpage/4/article/324. Ryan, Marie-Laure. Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. JHU P, 2003. ---. “On the Theoretical Foundations of Transmedial Narratology.” Narratology Beyond Literary Criticism: Mediality, Disciplinarity, edited by Jan Christoph Meister, de Gruyter, 2005, pp. 1-23. ---. “Possible Worlds.” The Living Handbook of Narratology, www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/ article/possible-worlds. Accessed 23 Jan. 2018. ---. Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory. Indiana UP, 1991. ---. “Possible-Worlds Theory.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, edited by David Herman et al., Routledge, 2010, pp. 446-50. ---. “Transmedia Storytelling: Industry Buzzword or New Narrative Experience?” Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies, vol. 7, no. 2, 2015, pp. 1-19. JSTOR, jstor.org/stable/10.5250/storyworlds.7.2.0001. Ryan, Marie-Laure, and Jan-Noël Thon, editors. Storyworlds Across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology. U of Nebraska P, 2014. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. 1978. Knopf Doubleday, 2014. ---. The World, the Text, and the Critic. Harvard UP, 1983. Saldivar, Ramon. “Historical Fantasy, Speculative Realism, and Postrace Aesthetics in Contemporary American Fiction.” American Literary History, vol. 23, no. 3, Aug. 2011, pp. 574-99. Project Muse, muse.jhu.edu/article/449336. Salen, Katie, and Eric Zimmerman. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. MIT P, 2004. Santaella, Lucia. “Computer Games: The Epitome of Self-Reference.” Self-Reference in the Media, edited by Winfried Nöth and Nina Bishara, de Gruyter, 2007, pp. 207-18. Savignac, Emmanuelle. The Gamification of Work: The Use of Games in the Workplace. Wiley, 2017. Schanoes, Veronica L. Fairy Tales, Myth, and Psychoanalytic Theory: Feminism and Retelling the Tale. Routledge, 2016. Schiesel, Seth. “Genetics Gone Haywire and Predatory Children in an Undersea Metropolis.” The New York Times, 8 Sept. 2007, www.nytimes.com/2007/09/ 08/arts/television/08shoc.html. Schlickers, Sabine. “Focalization, Ocularization and Auricularization in Film and Literature.” Point of View, Perspective, and Focalization: Modeling Mediation in Narrative, edited by Peter Hühn et al., de Gruyter, 2009, pp. 243-58. Schmeink, Lars. “Dystopia, Alternate History and the Posthuman in Bioshock.” Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies, vol. 10, 2009, copas.uni-regensburg.de/article/view/113. Scholes, Robert. “Metafiction.” Metafiction, edited by Mark Currie, Routledge, 2014, pp. 21-38. Schubert, Stefan. “Columbian Nightmare: Narrative, History, and Nationalism in BioShock Infinite.” fiar: forum for inter-american research, vol. 11, no. 2, 2018, pp. 44-60, interamerica.de/current-issue/schubert/. ---. “Dystopia in the Skies: Negotiating Justice and Morality on Screen in the Video Game BioShock Infinite.” European Journal for American Studies, vol. 13, no. 4, 2018, journals.openedition.org/ejas/14089.

Works Cited

297

---. “‘Lose Yourself’: Narrative Instability and Unstable Identities in Black Swan.” Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies, vol. 14, no. 1, May 2013, copas.uni-regensburg.de/article/view/164. ---. “Objectivism, Narrative Agency, and the Politics of Choice in the Video Game BioShock.” Poetics of Politics: Textuality and Social Relevance in Contemporary American Literature and Culture, edited by Sebastian M. Herrmann et al., Winter, 2015, pp. 271-89. ---. “Playing with (Meta)Fictionality and Self-Reflexivity in the Video Game The Stanley Parable.” Fictionality, Factuality, Reflexivity, edited by Erika Fülöp, de Gruyter, forthcoming. ---. “Videospiele als Populärkultur: Narrativität, Interaktivität und kulturelle Arbeit in Heavy Rain.” Digitale Spiele: Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven zu Diskursfeldern, Inszenierung und Musik, edited by Christoph Hust, transcript, 2018, pp. 155-77. Schulzke, Marcus. “Moral Decision Making in Fallout.” Game Studies, vol. 9, no. 2, 2009, gamestudies.org/0902/articles/schulzke. Scott, Jill. Electra After Freud: Myth and Culture. Cornell UP, 2005. Serwer, Adam. “BioShock Infinite: An American History Lesson Where You Get to Blow Shit Up.” Mother Jones, 10 May 2013, www.motherjones.com/media/ 2013/05/irrational-games-bioshock-infinite-creator-ken-levine-interview/. Sexeny, Julie. “Identification and Mutual Recognition in Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan.” Embodied Encounters: New Approaches to Psychoanalysis and Cinema, edited by Agnieszka Piotrowska, Routledge, 2014, pp. 51-59. Sharp, John. “Perspective.” The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies, edited by Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron, Routledge, 2014, pp. 107-16. Sheen, Erica, and Annette Davison, editors. The Cinema of David Lynch: American Dreams, Nightmare Visions. Wallflower Press, 2004. Sherman, Fraser A. Now and Then We Time Travel: Visiting Pasts and Futures in Film and Television. McFarland, 2017. Shutter Island. Directed by Martin Scorsese. Paramount, 2010. Sicart, Miguel. The Ethics of Computer Games. MIT P, 2011. Silverblatt, Art. Genre Studies in Mass Media: A Handbook. Sharpe, 2015. Singh, Amritjit, and Peter Schmidt, editors. Postcolonial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnicity, and Literature. UP of Mississippi, 2000. The Sixth Sense. Directed by M. Night Shyamalan, Buena Vista, 1999. “Sixth Sense.” Box Office Mojo, www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=sixthsense.htm. Accessed 10 Feb. 2018. Skeggs, Beverley. Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable. SAGE, 1997. Skorin-Kapov, Jadranka. Darren Aronofsky’s Films and the Fragility of Hope. Bloomsbury, 2015. Slotkin, Richard. The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890. U of Oklahoma P, 1985. ---. Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 16001860. 1973. U of Oklahoma P, 2000. Smith, Henry Nash. “Can ‘American Studies’ Develop a Method?” American Quarterly, vol. 9, no. 2, 1957, pp. 197-208. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2710743. ---. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. 1950. Harvard UP, 1971. Solaris. Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. Magna, 1972. Sommer, Roy. “The Merger of Classical and Postclassical Narratologies and the Consolidated Future of Narrative Theory.” DIEGESIS, vol. 1, no. 1, Dec. 2012,

298

Narrative Instability

www.diegesis.uni-wuppertal.de/index.php/diegesis/article/view/96. Soselisa, Della K., and Jenny M. Djundjung. “The Rites of Passage of Nina Sayers in Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan.” K@ta Kita, vol. 1, no. 1, 2013, pp. 39-46. publication.petra.ac.id/index.php/sastra-inggris/article/view/326/0. Source Code. Directed by Duncan Jones, Summit, 2011. South, James B., and Kimberly S. Engels, editors. Westworld and Philosophy: If You Go Looking for the Truth, Get the Whole Thing. Wiley, 2018. Southworth, Jason. “Let Me Put My Thoughts in You: It Was All Just a Dream.” D. K. Johnson, Inception, pp. 31-45. Spec Ops: The Line. Yager Development, 2K Games, 2012. Squires, Scott, and James McBain. “Shockingly Limited: Escaping Columbia’s God of Necessity.” Cuddy, pp. 86-93. Staiger, Janet. “Complex Narratives.” Introduction. Film Criticism, vol. 31, no. 1-2, 2006, pp. 2-4. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/44019212. Stam, Robert. Reflexivity in Film and Literature: From Don Quixote to Jean-Luc Godard. Columbia UP, 1992. The Stanley Parable. Galactic Cafe, 2013. Stein, Daniel, et al. “American Comic Books and Graphic Novels.” Introduction. Amerikastudien / American Studies, vol. 56, no. 4, 2011, pp. 501-29. Stephenson, Laura. “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: A Dancer, Her Psychosis, and the Black Swan of the Real.” MEDIANZ, vol. 16, no. 2, Dec. 2017, doi:10.11157/medianz-vol16iss2id209. Sternbergh, Adam, et al. “21 Things in Interstellar That Don’t Make Sense.” Vulture, 7 Nov. 2014, www.vulture.com/2014/11/21-things-in-interstellar-that-dontmake-sense.html. Stobbart, Dawn Catherine. “Telling Tales with Technology: Remediating Folklore and Myth through the Videogame Alan Wake.” Examining the Evolution of Gaming and Its Impact on Social, Cultural, and Political Perspectives, edited by Valentine Duncan Keri and Jensen John Lucas, IGI Global, 2016, pp. 38-53. Storey, John. Cultural Studies and the Study of Popular Culture. Edinburgh UP, 2010. ---. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction. Routledge, 2015. Strangelove, Michael. Post-TV: Piracy, Cord-Cutting, and the Future of Television. U of Toronto P, 2015. Stranger Than Fiction. Directed by Marc Forster, Columbia, 2006. Strinati, Dominic. An Introduction to Studying Popular Culture. Routledge, 2014. Sullivan, Kevin P. “Confused About the Ending of Interstellar? We Can Explain.” MTV News, 7 Nov. 2014, www.mtv.com/news/1990831/interstellar-ending/. Synecdoche, New York. Directed by Charlie Kaufman, Sony, 2008. Ta, Lynn M. “Hurt So Good: Fight Club, Masculine Violence, and the Crisis of Capitalism.” Journal of American Culture, vol. 29, no. 3, 2006, pp. 265-77. Wiley, onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1542-734X.2006.00370.x. Tallmann, Ruth. “Was It All a Dream? Why Nolan’s Answer Doesn’t Matter.” D. K. Johnson, Inception, pp. 17-30. Tally, Robert T., editor. The Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space. Routledge, 2017. Taniyan, Baysar. “Denying the Narrator: Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending.” English Studies: New Perspectives, edited by Mehmet Ali Çelikel and Baysar Taniyan, Cambridge Scholars, 2015, pp. 52-59. Tassi, Paul. “Tea Party Group Unironically Utilizes BioShock Infinite Propaganda.” Forbes, 16 Dec. 2013, www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2013/12/16/tea-party-group-unironically-utilizes-bioshock-infinite-propaganda/.

Works Cited

299

Tavinor, Grant. “Bioshock and the Art of Rapture.” Philosophy and Literature, vol. 33, no. 1, 2009, pp. 91-106. Project Muse, doi:10.1353/phl.0.0046. Terjesen, Andrew. “Even If It Is a Dream, We Should Still Care.” D. K. Johnson, Inception, pp. 46-61. Tesler, Michael. Post-Racial or Most-Racial? Race and Politics in the Obama Era. U of Chicago P, 2016. Thomas, Bronwen. Narrative: The Basics. Routledge, 2015. Thon, Jan-Noël. Transmedial Narratology and Contemporary Media Culture. U of Nebraska P, 2016. Thorne, Kip. The Science of Interstellar. Norton, 2014. Thoss, Jeff. When Storyworlds Collide: Metalepsis in Popular Fiction, Film and Comics. Brill, 2015. Timmer, Nicoline. Do You Feel It Too? The Post-Postmodern Syndrome in American Fiction at the Turn of the Millennium. Rodopi, 2010. Todorov, Tzvetan. “The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre.” 1973. Fantastic Literature: A Critical Reader, edited by David Sandner, Greenwood, 2004, pp. 135-43. Tompkins, Jane P. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 17901860. Oxford UP, 1986. Toolan, Michael. “Coherence.” The Living Handbook of Narratology, lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/coherence. Accessed 2 Jan. 2018. Traister, Bryce. “Academic Viagra: The Rise of American Masculinity Studies.” American Quarterly, vol. 52, no. 2, 2000, pp. 274-304. Project Muse, doi:10.1353/aq.2000.0025. “Transcript.” The New York Times, 9 Nov. 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/11/10/us/politics/trump-speech-transcript.html. The Truman Show. Directed by Peter Weir, Paramount, 1998. Tullmann, Katherine. “The Parable of the Spinning Top: Skepticism, Angst, and Cobb’s Choice.” D. K. Johnson, Inception, pp. 77-91. Tulloch, Rowan. “‘A Man Chooses, a Slave Obeys’: Agency, Interactivity and Freedom in Video Gaming.” Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds, vol. 2, no. 1, 2010, pp. 27-38. IngentaConnect, doi.org/10.1386/jgvw.2.1.27_1. Turner, Frederick Jackson. The Significance of the Frontier in American History. 1893. Penguin, 2008. Twelve Monkeys. Directed by Terry Gilliam, Universal, 1995. The Twilight Zone. Created by Rod Serling, CBS, 1959-1964, 1985-1989, 2002-2003, 2018. Twin Peaks. Created by Mark Frost and David Lynch, ABC, 1990-91, 2017. Usbeck, Frank. Fellow Tribesmen: The Image of Native Americans, National Identity, and Nazi Ideology in Germany. Berghahn Books, 2015. The Usual Suspects. Directed by Bryan Singer, PolyGram, 1995. van den Berg, Thijs. “Playing at Resistance to Capitalism: BioShock as the Reification of Neoliberal Ideals.” Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture, vol. 12, no. 2, 2012. reconstruction.eserver.org/122/vandenBerg.shtml Vanilla Sky. Directed by Cameron Crowe, Paramount, 2001. Vantage Point. Directed by Pete Travis, Columbia, 2008. Vermeulen, Timotheus, and Robin van den Akker. “Notes on Metamodernism.” Journal of Aesthetics and Culture, vol. 2, Nov. 2010, pp. 1-14. Taylor and Francis, doi:10.3402/jac.v1i0.5677. Verstraten, Peter. Film Narratology. U of Toronto P, 2009. Vest, Jason P. The Postmodern Humanism of Philip K. Dick. Scarecrow, 2009.

300

Narrative Instability

Voorhees, Gerald A., et al., editors. Guns, Grenades, and Grunts: First-Person Shooter Games. Bloomsbury, 2012. Wald, Gayle. Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in Twentieth-Century US Literature and Culture. Duke UP, 2000. Wall, Mike. “Stephen Hawking’s Final Paper Proposes Way to Detect the ‘Multiverse.’” Space.com, 19 Mar. 2018. Wallace, David Foster. “E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction.” Review of Contemporary Fiction, vol. 13, no. 2, 1993, pp. 151-94. jsomers.net/ DFW_TV.pdf. Wansbrough, A. Andreas. “Nietzsche and the Total Experience of Black Swan.” Philosophy Study, vol. 3, no. 6, 2013, philpapers.org/rec/WANNAT-2. Warf, Barney, and Santa Arias, editors. The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Routledge, 2009. Warhol, Robyn R. “Neonarrative; or, How to Render the Unnarratable in Realist Fiction and Contemporary Film.” A Companion to Narrative Theory, edited by James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz, Wiley, 2005, pp. 220-31. Warmelink, Harald. Online Gaming and Playful Organization. Routledge, 2014. Watts, Evan. “Ruin, Gender, and Digital Games.” Women’s Studies Quarterly, vol. 39, no. 3-4, 2011, pp. 247-65. Project Muse, doi:10.1353/wsq.2011.0041. Waugh, Patricia. Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction. Routledge, 2002. Weijers, Dan. “Reality Doesn’t Really Matter.” D. K. Johnson, Inception, pp. 92-107. Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew, editor. The Cambridge Companion to American Gothic. Cambridge UP, 2017. Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew, and Catherine Spooner, editors. Return to Twin Peaks: New Approaches to Materiality, Theory, and Genre on Television. Springer, 2015. Weise, Matthew Jason. “Bioshock: A Critical Historical Perspective.” Eludamos, vol. 2, no. 1, Feb. 2008, pp. 151-55. www.eludamos.org/index.php/eludamos/article/ view/vol2no1-12. Welt am Draht [World on a Wire]. Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Janus, 1973. Westworld. Created by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, HBO, 2016. White, Hayden. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. JHU P, 2009. Williams, Jeff. “Narrative Games: The Frame of ‘The Turn of the Screw.’” The Journal of Narrative Technique, vol. 28, no. 1, 1998, pp. 43-55. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/30225481. Wilson, George. “Transparency and Twist in Narrative Fiction Film.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 64, no. 1, 2006, pp. 81-95. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3700494. Winckler, Reto. “This Great Stage of Androids: Westworld, Shakespeare and the World as Stage.” Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance, vol. 10, no. 2, July 2017, pp. 169-88. IngentaConnect, doi:10.1386/jafp.10.2.169_1. Wise, Gene. “‘Paradigm Dramas’ in American Studies: A Cultural and Institutional History of the Movement.” American Quarterly, vol. 31, no. 3, 1979, pp. 293337. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2712378. Withalm, Gloria. “The Self-Reflexive Screen: Outlines of a Comprehensive Model.” Self-Reference in the Media, edited by Winfried Nöth and Nina Bishara, de Gruyter, 2007, pp. 125-42. Witkin, Robert Winston. Adorno on Popular Culture. Psychology, 2003. Wittenberg, David. Time Travel: The Popular Philosophy of Narrative. Fordham UP, 2013.

Works Cited

301

Wolf, Mark J. P., and Bernard Perron. Introduction. The Video Game Theory Reader, edited by Wolf and Perron, Routledge, 2003, pp. 1-24. Wolf, Werner. “Is There a Metareferential Turn, and If So, How Can It Be Explained?” The Metareferential Turn in Contemporary Arts and Media: Forms, Functions, Attempts at Explanation, edited by Wolf, Rodopi, 2011, pp. 1-47. ---, editor. The Metareferential Turn in Contemporary Arts and Media: Forms, Functions, Attempts at Explanation. Rodopi, 2011. Wolf, Werner, et al., editors. Metareference Across Media: Theory and Case Studies. Rodopi, 2009. Wolfe, Gary K. Evaporating Genres: Essays on Fantastic Literature. Wesleyan UP, 2011. Wood, Robin. Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan ... and Beyond. Columbia UP, 2013. Woolley, Benjamin. Virtual Worlds: A Journey in Hype and Hyperreality. Penguin, 1993. Wysocki, Matthew, and Betsy Brey. “‘All That’s Left Is the Choosing’: BioShock Infinite and the Constants and Variables of Control.” Kapell, pp. 145-57. Wysocki, Matthew, and Matthew Schandler. “Would You Kindly? BioShock and the Question of Control.” Ctrl-Alt-Play: Essays on Control in Video Gaming, edited by Matthew Wysocki, McFarland, 2013, pp. 196-207. Yancy, George. Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race in America. Rowman and Littlefield, 2016. Yeats, W. B. “The Second Coming.” 1920. The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. Wordsworth, 1994, pp 158-59. Zamora, Lois Parkinson, and Wendy B. Faris, editors. Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community. Duke UP, 1995. Zaretsky, Eli. “Melanie Klein and the Emergence of Modern Personal Life.” Reading Melanie Klein, edited by Lyndsey Stonebridge and John Phillips, Psychology, 1998, pp. 32-50. Zipfel, Frank. “Unreliable Narration and Fictional Truth.” Journal of Literary Theory, vol. 5, no. 1, Jan. 2011, pp. 109-30. de Gruyter, doi.org/10.1515/jlt.2011.009. Zoonen, Liesbet van. Entertaining the Citizen: When Politics and Popular Culture Converge. Rowman and Littlefield, 2005. Zweig, Michael. The Working Class Majority: America’s Best Kept Secret. Cornell UP, 2000.

stefan schubert

Narrative Instability

schubert · Narrative Instability

T

schubert

Destabilizing Identities, Realities, and Textualities in Contemporary American Popular Culture

American Studies  ★  A Monograph Series  Narrative Instability

  his book introduces the concept of ‘narrative   instability’ in order to make visible a new trend in contemporary US popular culture, to analyze this trend’s poetics, and to scrutinize its textual politics. It identifies those texts as narratively unstable that consciously frustrate and obfuscate the process of narrative understanding and comprehension, challenging their audiences to reconstruct what happened in a text’s plot, who its characters are, which of its diegetic worlds are real, or how narrative information is communicated in the first place. Despite—or rather, exactly because of—their confusing and destabilizing tendencies, such texts have attained mainstream commercial popularity in recent years across a variety of media, most prominently in films, video games, and television series. Focusing on three clusters of instability that form around identities, realities, and textualities, the book argues that narratively unstable texts encourage their audiences to engage with the narrative constructedness of their universes, that narrative instability embodies a new facet of popular culture, that it takes place and can only be understood transmedially, and that its textual politics particularly speak to white male middle-class Americans.

Volume 305

Universitätsverlag

isbn 978-3-8253-4684-3

win t e r

Heidelberg