Perturbatory Narration in Film: Narratological Studies on Deception, Paradox and Empuzzlement 9783110566574, 9783110560824

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Perturbatory Narration in Film

Narratologia

Contributions to Narrative Theory Edited by Fotis Jannidis, Matías Martínez, John Pier, Wolf Schmid (executive editor) Editorial Board Catherine Emmott, Monika Fludernik, José Ángel García Landa, Inke Gunia, Peter Hühn, Manfred Jahn, Markus Kuhn, Uri Margolin, Jan Christoph Meister, Ansgar Nünning, Marie-Laure Ryan, Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Michael Scheffel, Sabine Schlickers

Band 59

Perturbatory Narration in Film

Narratological Studies on Deception, Paradox and Empuzzlement Edited by Sabine Schlickers and Vera Toro

Gedruckt mit finanzieller Unterstützung aus Mitteln des Zukunftskonzepts der Universität Bremen im Rahmen der Exzellenzinitiative des Bundes und der Länder.

ISBN 978-3-11-056082-4 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-056657-4 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-056442-6 ISSN 1612-8427 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.dnb.de abrufbar. © 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Druck und Bindung: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Gedruckt auf säurefreiem Papier Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Table of Contents Sabine Schlickers and Vera Toro Introduction 1 Julia Eckel Disturbance and Perturbation in The Tracey Fragments

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Andreas Veits A Tire Driving Crazy: Perturbatory Narration in Quentin Dupieux’s Rubber 37 Vera Toro “I am a complex being”: Filmic Puzzles in Julio Medem’s Vacas and 57 Tierra Stephan Brössel Narrative Empuzzlement in Robert Lepage’s Possible Worlds Inke Gunia The Intrafictional Power of Fiction: Betibú by Miguel Cohan

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Dominik Orth Splitting and Splintering of Reality in Jaco Van Dormael’s Mr. Nobody

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Erwin Feyersinger Sensory Representation, Perceptual Spaces, and Perturbatory Distribution of Information in Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color 121 Matthias Brütsch Complex Narration in Film: Reflections on the Interplay of Deception, Distancing and Empuzzlement 135 Heinz-Peter Preusser “This is still a game, isn’t it?”: On the Confusing Inability to Decide Between 155 the Fictionally Real and Virtual in David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ

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Jeff Thoss Deceptive Continuity: Classical Editing and Nonlinear Narrative in Nicolas 179 Roeg’s Bad Timing Bernd Leiendecker Taking Split Personalities to the Next Level: Perturbatory Narration in Enemy 199 Oliver Schmidt Perturbatory Spaces in David Lynch’s Inland Empire

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Sabine Schlickers Perturbatory Narration in Mexican Film: Juegos nocturnos/Nocturnal Games, El agujero negro del sol/The Black Hole of the Sun, and El incidente/The 225 Incident Jörg Türschmann Perturbatory Revocation: The Subtractive Cinema of Lisandro Alonso, Bruno Dumont and Béla Tarr 241 About the authors Films cited Authors cited

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Introduction

Many modern films produce disturbing effects and disorient the spectator. They transgress or abrogate standard narrative situations and configurations, question premises of causality and coherence, or obscure the distinction between (fictional) reality and fiction. In order to describe ludic devices of this kind systematically we need new narratological concepts. In this volume we present such a concept, ‘perturbatory narration’: a concept designed to describe complex narrative strategies that disrupt immersion in the acquired process of aesthetic reception. Perturbatory narration is a heuristic concept, and as such subject to Mieke Bal’s caveat: “Concepts are sites of debate, awareness of difference, and tentative exchange. Agreeing doesn’t mean agreeing on content, but agreeing on the basic rules of the game: if you use a concept at all, you use it in a particular way so that you can meaningfully disagree on content” (Bal 2002, 25). In this sense, the concept proposed in these pages is applicable to a specific type of irritating narrative for which narratology has not yet found an appropriate classification, enabling typification and systematization of moments of narrative perturbation. As such it takes up and further pursues the concept of paradoxical narration in literary texts developed in the Hamburg research group on narratology (1998 – 2002) by Klaus Meyer-Minnemann and Sabine Schlickers, and later extended by Schlickers in its analytic and typological dimensions to the field of film. Textual work with this larger transmedial corpus repeatedly encountered the combination of perturbatory narrative devices mentioned above ‒ a cluster whose complex interactions had not yet entered the ambit of research. Schlickers (2015a) initially investigated the occurrence of these phenomena in the Argentine film El Aura (2005), which combines features of unreliable and fantastic narrative: “The disruptive impact [of this film] derives from a juxtaposition of unreliability with the ambiguity typical of fantastic narration” (Schlickers 2015a, 13): In the end, these two ‒ at first glance mutually exclusive ‒ readings of the film are both possible, both intended, and both equally convincing. The coexistence in many literary and filmic narrations of what seemed incompatible narrative strategies gave rise to a narratological dilemma. It was with the intention of subsuming and integrating this complex interplay of deception, paradox and/or empuzzlement into the critical consideration of literature and film that we developed the model of combined narrative devices and the framing concept of perturbatory narration. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110566574-001

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Here, the concept is applied exclusively to film, although it is equally valid for literary texts.¹ The effect to which it refers is by no means dysphoric: on the contrary, the disturbance or disorientation in question is received by readers/ viewers positively.². Many areas of the phenomena we describe as perturbatory narration have already been studied and accorded adjectives such as ‘disorienting’, ‘complex’, ‘ludic’, ‘deviant’, ‘extraordinary’, ‘unconventional’, ‘unnatural’, ‘unreliable’ etc.³ Frequently used are also the notions ‘puzzle films’ (Buckland 2009), ‘mind-game movies’ (Elsaesser 2009), ‘mindfuck movies’ (Eig 2008), ‘mind-benders’ (Johnson 2006), etc. However, on closer examination these categories are all in some way problematic, for they are either subjective (e. g. ‘complex’), or psychological (e. g. ‘disorienting’, ‘perturbing’), or they define themselves negatively (‘un’-terms such as ‘unconventional’, ‘unreliable’ or ‘unnatural’). The clear generic agreement that one is dealing with “a film designed specifically to disorient you, to mess with your head” (Johnson 2006, 129), and many other such useful insights, do not conceal the lack of narratological modeling and systematization in such labels. It is for this reason that we have introduced a new technical term⁴ which allows systematization of individual devices and perturbatory strategies in their ludic interplay.

 Sabine Schlickers and Vera Toro have recently been engaged – within the framework of an exploratory project at the University of Bremen (4/2015 – 4/2017) – on a study of perturbatory narration in literature and film (La narración perturbadora: un nuevo concepto narratológico transmedial, Madrid: Iberoamericana, forthcoming) which (re)models the individual strategies of deception, paradox and empuzzlement and illustrates their functioning and interplay in selected hispanophone narratives. Simultaneously with this volume Schlickers has published an article on perturbatory narration in literature and film which will appear soon in a Special Focus edited by Brian Richardson in Frontiers of Narrative Studies (ed. Shang Biwu).  Wolfgang Iser (1984 [1976], 208 – 214) already remarked on the productivity of moments of conflict, discrepancy, disruption, frustration, ambiguity and figural fragmentation for the reader of fiction. However, he did not explicitly connect these receptive processes to narrative strategies, but saw them as inevitable aspects of aesthetic impact, above all in the complexity evoked by their sheer frequency (213).  Cf. e. g. Eckel et al. (2012), Mittell (2006), Kindt (2005), Alber and Heinze (2011), Alber (2016), Leiendecker (2015).  Referring to Niklas Luhmann, Carsten Gansel cites disturbance as a concept of systems theory; before him Maturana had introduced the term to constructivism. Perturbatory narration, however, is not per se compatible with this usage. Systems theory sees the disturbance (and ensuing change) as coming from outside (Gansel 2013, 9); narratology sees it as inherent to the system – as a constituent of the text that in principle subscribes to the doxa (cf. below) but suspends it by employing the narrative techniques presented here.

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1 Narrativity and content As a narrative principle, perturbatory narration is seen as text-related and hence as referring to a combination of narrative strategies whose dislocating impact can be reinforced by dislocating content:⁵ presentations of physicality and violence exciting fear and revulsion, as well as dystopias, horror films, death and accident fantasies and/or scenarios are certainly perturbing, but they only fall within the ambit of perturbatory narration if they reveal its formal procedures. In its present application perturbatory narration is restricted to fictional narratives: our modeling is based on the double speech act situation that marks such texts as more complex than factual ones. But our broad concept of fiction extends to ‘hybrid genres’ like mockumentary or docufiction, even though these may employ some of the authentication strategies of factual discourse.⁶ Following Schmid (2005, 13 and 18 – 19) and Kuhn (2011, 55 – 57), we see the narrativity on which perturbatory narration is premised as involving in the broadest sense a story (histoire) incorporating a change in at least one state (or situation) within a given space of time. This requires the explicit representation of the initial and final states, but not necessarily of the process and conditions of change. In the narrower sense, narrative texts are communicated via a narrator or via another narrational instance: in film the role of the extradiegetic narrator is played by the invariably heterodiegetic “camera” (Schlickers 1997)⁷, which, following Kuhn (2011), can be split into a visual and a verbal narrational instance.

 This clarifies the distinction between our concept and unnatural narratology: the latter is based on cognitive premises (e. g. frame-theory and possible-worlds theory) and the question “whether the represented scenario or event could exist in the real world or not” (Alber 2013). ‘Unnatural’ is understood, then, as ‘impossible’, and ‘natural’ as ‘possible’. But from other points of view ‘unnatural’ may mean ‘anti-‘ or ‘non-mimetic’ (Richardson 2011). ‘Unnatural’ may already be conventionalized in the form of “physical, logical, or epistemic impossibilities”, in which case it may be taken to cover alienation effects understood as formalistic defamiliarization (Alber 2013). Defining the boundary between the natural and unnatural – or the conventionalized and the not-yet-conventionalized – is in any case problematic, not to say arbitrary, for “the only way to respond to narratives of all sorts (including unnatural ones) is through cognitive frames and scripts” (Alber 2013). It may, then, be difficult to say whether or not the ‘possibility’ or ‘impossibility’ of narrative elements is in the concrete instance relevant. The perception of a narrative as factual or fictional, on the other hand, may be taken to possess greater relevance than the referential scope of its elements vis-à-vis the real world.  Schlickers (2015b); for a narratological perspective on authenticity cf. also the excellent article by Weixler (2012).  Cf. Schlickers (1997, 75 – 83) for the contentious discussion of this issue within film narratology. The latest critique comes from Thon (2016, 145), for whom Schlickers “[leaves] open why one

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As “every narrational form [entails] a (re)construction of causal relations between events occurring in time – i. e. events following not only on each other but from each other” (Abel, Blödorn and Scheffel 2009, 1) – texts that bypass such relations have a particularly disruptive impact. The close contextual relation between narrativity and cognition in the creative-receptive process is addressed by David Lynch when, speaking of his film Inland Empire (2006), he says that he intends his viewers to experience, not to understand (cf. Oliver Schmidt’s article in this volume). Despite its extreme incoherence, the film’s narrative skeleton is inherently constitutive of the perturbation it evokes (cf. Jörg Türschmann’s article on ’subtractive cinema’, a mode whose minimal narrativity and virtual absence of events confirms these premises).

2 The narrative doxa The initial task is to indicate what narrative conventions are, in fact, questioned, transgressed, abrogated, or given new life by perturbatory narration. Here we appeal to the doxa – the consistent set of conventions governing the narrative systems of the age. This applies to both aspects: the narrated (histoire/énoncé) and the structure and mode of its narration (discours/énonciation). Perturbatory narration is concerned primarily with the narrational constituents of the doxa; but, given the vital link between narration and narrated, it frequently extends to the narrated. Whatever the case, the regulatory mechanisms only become visible when their transgression or abrogation becomes visible. Hence – reflecting the need for consistency and coherence – precise textual determination of the individual instances, levels and components of the narrative system is central to our conception of perturbatory narration.⁸ Film studies on complex and confusing narrative structures generally describe these as deviating from classical Holly-

would want to use the camera as a metaphor for the ‘source’ of the audiovisual representation as well as how exactly the latter becomes a ‘fictional instance’ without being represented as such”. He proposes a “nonnarratorial audiovisual representation”, which he attributes to a “hypothetical author collective” (171). Despite the terminological differences, these positions are relatively close, as in both models the “camera” and the audiovisual representation belong to the extradiegetic level of filmic narration and are part of neither the story nor the storyworld.  The concept of doxa is not to be confused with Grice’s (1975) maxims of communication, whose application to fictional narratives is in any case disputed. On the one hand these maxims have been used ex negativo in the attempt to define narrative unreliability (Kindt 2008); on the other hand it is precisely their transgression – aka literaricity, polysemy, ambiguity etc. – that underlies the unique fascination of literary and filmic texts.

Introduction

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wood conventions, especially with regard to spatiotemporal causality (Bordwell 1985; 2006). The following description of the doxa is based on the systematization of paradoxical narration in literary texts (cf. Grabe et al. 2006). However, we are concerned here with the logical significance of paradox not only as an irresolvable contradiction but as ’para-doxa’ – ’against the doxa’ – in the senses described above. The first fundamental distinction in this respect is that between the levels of discours/énonciation and histoire/énoncé. We would add that the narrated (and hence the narrator) must belong unambiguously to a specific level of communication and fiction: if the act of narration, for example, is extradiegetic, it cannot later suddenly become intradiegetic without becoming paradoxical. If the narrator is autodiegetic, he/she cannot at the same time and in relation to the same story be heterodiegetic. A second point concerns the ontological difference between fiction and reality: empirical extratextual reality must be clearly distinguishable from the diegetic reality represented in the fiction – as must nested representations of reality within the fiction. Thirdly, it must be possible for the reader/viewer to unambiguously reconstruct the narrated fictional world – or ‘narrative reality’, as Orth (2013) has it. We see this as precluding the existence of parallel worlds. It is the flouting of these rules (or assumptions) of coherence that gives rise to friction and perturbation. Our hypothesis is that the transgression or abrogation of the narrative doxa actively involves not only paradox in the twofold sense indicated above, but also the other two perturbing narrative strategies: deception and empuzzlement. It is the mutual interplay of these strategies that undermines the coherence and plausibility of the doxa. For the sake of simplicity, however, that interplay is not represented in the following diagram, which allocates specific devices to the three core narrative strategies of perturbatory narration.

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3 Typology of perturbatory narration

PERTURBATORY NARRATION Deception

Paradox

Empuzzlement

unreliable narration: twist false leads lies paralipsis paralepsis false focalization, ocularization, auricularization

metalepsis pseudodiegesis meta-morphosis endless loop strange loop Möbius strip mise en abyme aporétique mise en abyme à l’ infini

indefiniteness and/or ambiguity (temporary or permanent) regarding reality, space, time, causality omissions fantastic mode

Fig. 1: Typology of perturbatory narration

1. The narrative strategy of deception initiates a conscious reinterpretation of narrated events or characters whose presentation is revealed as false by e. g. a sudden change of focalization. Based on unreliable narration (cf. Leiendecker 2015), it can be communicated by surprising incursions, false leads, lies, paralipsis/paralepsis, false focalization/ocularization/auricularization etc. All of these procedures bring about a twist that of itself triggers a recursive mechanism, a search for possible clues in a second reading etc. In contrast to the other two strategies of perturbation, deception must be recognized as such if it is to function at all, and a valid solution must in the end be available. 2. Paradox is an unresolved contradiction in which what is (and hence what is possible within the doxa) and what is not (and hence what is impossible within the doxa) are presented in spatio-temporal simultaneity. Narrative procedures of metalepsis (Meyer-Minnemann 2005; Schlickers 2005), pseudodiegesis, metamorphosis,⁹ endless loops, strange loops and Möbius strips, as well as mise en

 ‘Meta-morphosis’ is newly introduced here to narratology. We use the term to designate a paradoxical superimposition of levels of being, time or space. In Alain Robbe-Grillet’s novel Dans le labyrinthe (1959, 22– 26), for example, the intradiegetic description of a soldier waiting in the snow and the hypodiegetic description of a painting in a bar are superimposed in such a way that they can no longer be differentiated. In the short film El agujero negro del sol (The Black Hole of the Sun, Julio Quezada Orozco 2002) the hierarchically ordered levels of communication

Introduction

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abyme aporétique and mise en abyme à l’infini (Meyer-Minnemann and Schlickers 2004) generate contradictions of this kind, which do not allow of resolution. 3. Empuzzlement includes the realm of the fantastic with its inexplicable elements and incompatibilities with physical reality that break into the order of the fictional world and raise questions about the semantic coherence of the text, leading to what is known in reception aesthetics as hésitation. ¹⁰ Empuzzlement arises out of a (temporarily or permanent) ambiguity in the spatio-temporality and causality of the narrated order: in the question what in the fictional world is real (and can be remembered as such) and what is dreamed, imagined, fantasized etc. In the configuration of narrated reality – for that is what is at stake here – focalization plays an important role. Orth’s concept of indeterminate focalization (2013, 240), for example, might readily be applied to the ambiguity and polysemy caused by significant dissonances between picture and soundtrack in forking-path or multiple-draft narratives, where various forms of omission are decisive for producing unclarity.¹¹ Striking stylistic devices like unusual point-of-view shots, split screen, iris diaphragm, slow motion, frame jumps, digital effects, animated sequences, morphing, incongruent music etc. can be considered empuzzling when they hinder the unambiguous reconstruction of the fictional world. With the exception of the fantastic mode, empuzzlement may, however, be resolved within the narrated world, though as a rule such resolution serves to construct further polysemous fictional universes.

are fused in a short-circuited world of fantasy where dreamer and dreamed meet – and where it also becomes evident that the assumed hierarchical order can be reconstituted in reverse (cf. Sabine Schlickers’ article in this volume).  Antonsen (2009, 131– 132) modifies the common definition of the fantastic as indecisiveness about two different, rationally incompatible systems of reality, because “beyond the fact of the fantasm, nothing can be said about that second system. Nor does the simple observation that the fantasm is incompatible with the reality invoked by the text necessarily lead to the conclusion that a second order of reality has been introduced” (131, our translation). Instead, Antonsen posits a radical poetological impossibility (cf. Vera Toro’s article in this volume). Both conceptions of fantastic fiction would seem pertinent: some texts offer two incompatible systems of reality; others work with the contingent incursion of an impossible event.  Dablé (2012) cites in this context indeterminacy, omissions, decontextualizations, interruptions and presentational voids – but these terms refer to very different phenomena. Nevertheless, Dablé’s concept of decontextualization (129) approximates that of empuzzlement: “For the viewer, a simple (re)construction of the events [is] impossible, for they cannot be contextualized. Various strategies can be used to produce this type of void: immanent textual contradictions, acoustic and visual collisions, breaks in the plot etc., all of which prevent reconstruction of per se related narrative elements” (our translation).

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We are acutely aware that every narrative strategy listed above deserves – and in many cases has already enjoyed – detailed individual treatment, and we base a number of our assumptions on prior work in this field.¹² Nevertheless, there is no narratological or terminological consensus about these strategies and devices, nor even about terms such as ’metadiegesis’ or ’hypodiegesis’, which are also frequently used in this volume.¹³ Moreover, specific narrative procedures and parameters can be traced in several of the strategies concerned, even when these are not distinguished a priori. Thus, pseudodiegesis is at the same time a paradoxical and a deceptive technique. Similarly, false focalization leads to deception, indeterminate focalization to empuzzlement.

4. Combinatorial dynamics of perturbatory narration The key to our modeling lies in the interplay of individual devices of the three narrative strategies presented above, which have hitherto been regarded as unrelated. The following diagram illustrates this interplay.

Fig. 2: Combinatorial dynamics of perturbatory narration

Our modeling is to some extent comparable with what Dominik Orth calls ‘multipluralization’: the narrative integration of “various forms of pluralistic narrative reality, combining intentional deception, for instance, with [the] imaginations [of a figure] that deviate from narrative reality” (Orth 2013, 257, our trans On unreliable film cf. Orth (2005) and Leiendecker (2015), on fantastic film Pinkas (2010), on puzzle and mind films cf. above, on paradoxical narrative Grabe et al. (2006), on hybrid spaces in film Schmidt (2013), and on plural realities in literature and film Orth (2013).  We intend to address these deficits in our forthcoming study of perturbatory narration in hispanophone literature and film (cf. footnote 1).

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lation). These two procedures, however, are mutually exclusive – or at least cannot be clearly subsumed into a single category of plural realities. The concept of narrative perturbation, on the other hand, allows narratological mapping of precisely this ‘impossibility’ – i. e. of the occurrence in the text of deceptive and puzzling, deceptive and paradoxical, puzzling and paradoxical or deceptive, paradoxical and puzzling narrative devices. Hence, despite the partial overlap in the phenomena and relationships they examine, Orth’s approach takes a markedly different angle from our own. While he typifies the various pluralities in fictional reality and then inquires about narrative strategies, we determine perturbing strategies up front as violating the doxa – and from this angle the typification of narrative reality only bears on one dimension of the doxa.

5. Case study That perturbatory narration has currently reached the popular TV genre of crime drama is evident from Wer bin ich? (Who am I?) – the final broadcast in the 2015 Tatort (‘Crime Scene’) series, shown on German television on December 27, 2015. Starring Ulrich Tukur as inspector Murot, and set in Wiesbaden (near Frankfurt), this highly self-referential, ironic work, sparkling with metafictional aperçus, combines procedures from all perturbatory strategies. On the intradiegetic level the characters appear as the real actors they are, with their real names, in the middle of a shoot for a Wiesbaden crime film. Tukur, who plays the inspector, finds himself – in his real-life-outside-the-Tatort-in-the-Tatort – suddenly involved in a murder case. After a night on the town he wakes up in his hotel room remembering nothing. He is suspected of having involved a young floor manager, who had in the same night won € 80,000 in the casino, in a fatal accident. Tukur’s blackout does not even lift when he finds the money in his hotel room, but he does wonder at the diabolical expression on his face on a CCTV camera that recorded him leaving the casino – which he also cannot remember. After various developments during which his features are strikingly altered, the unexpected twist (deceptive narrative strategy) finally comes when, in the real-cross-examination-room-of-the-TV-series-police-station, Tukur encounters himself as Tatort inspector Murot, who looks just like him at the beginning of the film. Murot confesses to both the murder and the theft of the money: he did it, he says, because he could no longer tolerate existing only during the shooting of a film and has now swapped his role with Tukur’s – whereupon he goes off to Italy, leaving Tukur to return alone to the semi-deserted film set. From the point of view of narrative strategy, the deception and empuzzlement of a fantasy-doubling complete with role-swap are combined here with the paradox of an ontological metalepsis.

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For the popular crime genre, these narrative strategies are rather extraordinary, but they have innumerable literary predecessors from as far back as the first half of the twentieth century. Ontological metalepsis is a feature of Miguel de Unamuno’s Niebla (Fog), whose character converses with the author – skilfully imitated by Daniel Kehlmann in the “Rosalie Goes Off to Die” episode in Ruhm (Fame). And the fantasy-doubling of a character occurs in Jorge Luis Borges’ “Borges y yo” (“Borges and I”), as well as in “The Way Out” episode (also in Kehlmann’s Fame), which obviously served as hypotext for the Tatort film.¹⁴ Transmigration occurs in a number of Julio Cortázar’s stories, for example in “Lejana” (1951) and “Axolotl” (1956). Combining the narrative strategies of deception, paradox and empuzzlement, the Tatort film stands out as a perturbatory film par excellence; all the more so in its flagrant departure from the conventions and expectations of the genre. Many addicts of the Sunday evening show criticized Wer bin ich? as slow, boring and indigestible, and its surprising resolution made them feel they were being taken for a ride. However unintended by the film-makers, such reactions from the viewing public are also among the effects of perturbatory narration – which is why we incorporate into our model the implied viewer¹⁵ as the inherent correlative to the implied author. Both are historical instances¹⁶, the implied reader/viewer serving as ideal recipient as well as postulated addressee (Schmid 2005, 69). Given the controversy surrounding these constructs (Kindt and Müller 2006 vs. Phelan 2004 and 2008 and Schmid 2005), however, and given, too, that so-called cognitive narratology is (or should be) as germane to its processes as empirical investigation, it may be concluded that the disruptive modalities, functions and effects of perturbatory narration can also be meaningfully studied on real recipients.

 The actor Ralf Tanner presents himself in Fame as the imitator of his own person, but he then actually encounters a Ralf Tanner imitator, talks to him, and watches a film featuring himself, although he can’t remember having acted in it. His contradictory identity remains unresolved – or in Orth’s (2013, 218) words: “Two variant narrative realities are established, one in which Ralf Tanner has, and one in which he has not made a film called ‘With Fire and Sword’”. In contrast to this, the Tatort film offers a resolution of the two contradictory models of reality.  Cf. Wolfgang Iser (1972) and Wolf Schmid (2005, 65 – 67).  Whereas Iser models an ahistorical implied reader.

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6. Film-studies on perturbatory narration in this volume The project, concept and modeling of perturbatory narration were prepared and discussed beforehand in a 3-day conference in Bremen involving all participants. The individual essays in this volume demonstrate the interplay of the different narrative strategies of perturbatory narration in contemporary films from Canada, the USA, Mexico, Argentina, Spain, France and Germany. It will be apparent that contemporary Canadian film is prominently represented in the overall field of vision, with e. g. experimental works like The Tracey Fragments (2007), as well as subtly disturbing films like Enemy (2013), whose complex time-puzzle is only evident on second viewing. A further point is the historically embedded quality of perturbatory narration: it may be assumed that the effect will wear off in the course of conventionalization, although the analyses in this volume demonstrate adequately enough that this level of satiety has not yet been attained. Julia Eckel bases her consideration of perturbation as a narrative strategy on a reflective analysis, with reference to Gansel and Ächtler (2013) and Jäger (2004), of the distinction between disturbance and perturbation. She then applies the concept of perturbatory narration to an analysis of the highly experimental Canadian film The Tracey Fragments, which combines the devices of the three strategies of perturbatory narration with stylistic disturbance created by split screens. Andreas Veits combines a close formal analysis of perturbatory structures in Quentin Dupieux’s Rubber (2010) – an illusion-breaking film featuring a killer automobile tire – with a cognitive narratological perspective that highlights the recipient’s role in the perturbation resulting from incoherent film worlds. On the one hand he links the concepts of storyworld and doxa; on the other his reflections on the actualization of perturbatory potential – especially that of genre-hybrid narratives – emphasize the importance of the recipient’s knowledge of contexts and genres. Vera Toro focuses on empuzzlement as one of the three key strategies of perturbatory narration – and, because it has so far been little researched, the one most in need of systematic modeling. Arguing (like Dominik Orth) from a strict concept of ambiguity – to which she adds the broader concept of indeterminacy – she distinguishes temporary from permanent empuzzlement and illustrates the workings of the strategy in two films by the Spanish director Julio Medem, Vacas (1992) and Tierra (1996). Stephan Brössel, in contrast to Toro, classifies temporary empuzzlement as a strategy of deception. Taking as his example Robert Lepage’s Possible Worlds

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(2002), he also differs from Toro in modeling narrative empuzzlement on a wider concept of polyvalent, ultimately irresolvable ambiguity which produces equally valid interpretations. Inke Gunia analyzes the complex empuzzlement procedures of Miguel Cohan’s Betibú (2014) – a film version of the crime thriller of the same title published in 2011 by the Argentine author Claudia Piñeiro. Charged with historical and political connotations and intertextual references, and narrated with great virtuosity, Cohan’s film keeps audiences on tenterhooks not only with its openended story of a team of investigators headed for ultimate failure, but also with inconsistent and incoherent strategies of plausibility on several levels. Dominik Orth on the one hand examines empuzzlement structures in Jaco Van Dormael’s Film Mr. Nobody (2009) as an example of plural realities, as a non-linear narrative with multilinear time dimensions and as forking-path-narration; on the other hand he shows the capacity of the model of perturbatory narration to explicate the multiple inconsistencies and ambiguities of the film. Finally he proposes three further theses on perturbatory narration to be tested on a larger corpus. Erwin Feyersinger focuses on empuzzlement structures in Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color (2013), where he locates these structures above all on the level of discours, but the film is also disturbing on the story level. The highly puzzling American film further exemplifies the other two basic structures of perturbatory narration: paradox and deception. The ostranenie effect becomes reinforced by genre blend, which functions paradoxically, and by generic cues which mislead the audience. Matthias Brütsch proposes a slightly modified version of Schlickers and Toro’s tripartite model of perturbatory strategies, differentiating between two variants of unreliable filmic narration. He examines and compares various combinations of deception strategies with four further perturbing narrative patterns exemplified in Abre los ojos (1997), Identity (2003), and Dockpojken (Puppet Boy) (2008), and finally advances a number of theses on different degrees of perturbation. Heinz-Peter Preusser reconstructs in detail the complex narrative and fictional levels in David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999), and argues that the perturbation arising from the film’s strategies of deception and paradox derives its unique aesthetic force from a combination of irresolvable ambivalence and latent coherence, exciting active artifact emotion in the recipient. Jeff Thoss illustrates, on the example of two sequences from Nicolas Roeg’s Bad Timing (1980), how unconventional continuity editing can fuse two different strands of time and plot and, together with other strategies of deception and empuzzlement, make an open question of the film’s diegetic events.

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Bernd Leiendecker discusses the highly ambiguous Canadian thriller Enemy (2013) as an example of deceptive, perturbing and paradoxical narration, showing how the (now fairly conventional) strategy of unreliable narration is implemented there in an unconventional way. On the basis of polyvalent cues he reads Denis Villeneuve‘s doppelgänger film as a time-puzzle in which the ambiguous chronological order of central scenes allows both linear and non-linear interpretations. On various levels of reality the recurrent spider metaphor contributes further to the film’s empuzzlement. Oliver Schmidt analyzes the concept of space in David Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006), inquiring into the role of the strategies of deception, paradox and empuzzlement in generating spatial perturbation. He argues that Inland Empire thematizes not only the conditions and limits of perturbatory narration but the limits of filmic narration as such. Sabine Schlickers illustrates the complex dynamic interplay of perturbing – especially paradoxical – narrative procedures. After demonstrating the different modeling possibilities suggested by the fictional worlds of two Mexican short films, Juegos nocturnos (1992) and El agujero negro del sol (2002), she analyzes the feature film El incidente (2014), in which a Möbius strip comprising two strange loops is complemented by elements of the fantastic that further heighten the film’s perturbatory potential. Jörg Türschmann applies the concept of perturbation – in a reception-focused context – to films by Lisandro Alonso, Bruno Dumont, and Béla Tarr which, following Fiant, he terms ‘subtractive’. Although they strictly speaking fall within the doxa, such films nevertheless constitute a limiting case of narrative: their prolonged shots give the impression of stretching time to the point where extratextual and diegetic reality are virtually indistinguishable and the underlying promise of fiction to tell a story is unmasked as a deception. Closely analyzing the films’ frustrating play with viewer expectations, Türschmann shows how this is rooted in the presentation of situations of permanent annunciation, as well as in effets de réel, and in the viewer’s persistent scrutiny of filmic motifs for meaning. Apart from the chapters by Erwin Feyersinger, Bernd Leiendecker and Jeff Thoss, the book has been translated from the German by Joseph Swann.

Filmography Abre los ojos (Open Your Eyes). Directed by Alejandro Amenábar. 1997. Spain/France/Italy: Artisan Home Entertainment, 2001. DVD.

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Bad Timing. Directed by Nicolas Roeg. 1980. UK: The Criterion Collection, 2005. DVD. Betibú. Directed by Miguel Cohan. 2014. Argentina/Spain: Cameo, 2015. DVD. Dockpojken (Puppet Boy). Directed by Johannes Nyholm. 2008. Sweden: Archive of the International Short Film Festival Winterthur, 2009. DVD. El agujero negro del sol. Directed by Julio Quezada Orozco. 2002. Mexico: Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía. Accessed 15 April 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= xV5mX0bVNl0. El Aura. Directed by Fabián Bielinsky. 2005. Argentina: Zima Entertainment, 2006. DVD. El incidente. Directed by Isaac Ezban. 2014. Mexico: Zima Entertainment, 2016. DVD. Enemy. Directed by Denis Villeneuve. 2013. Canada/Spain/France: Capelight, 2014. DVD. ExistenZ. Directed by David Cronenberg. 1999. UK/Canada: Alliance Atlantis [no year indicated]. DVD. Identity. Directed by James Mangold. 2003. USA: Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment, 2003. DVD. Inland Empire. Directed by David Lynch. 2006. France/Poland/USA: Concorde Home Entertainment, 2007. DVD. Juegos nocturnos. Directed by Pablo Gómez Sáenz Ribot. 1992. Mexico. Accessed 25 May 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJGbqH2iMlo. Mr. Nobody. Directed by Jaco Van Dormael. 2009. Belgium/Germany/Canada/France: Concorde Home Entertainment, 2011. DVD. Possible Worlds. Directed by Robert Lepage. 2000. Canada: Momentum Pictures, 2002. DVD. Rubber. Directed by Quentin Dupieux. 2010. France/Angola: Capelight, 2011. DVD. Tatort: Wer bin ich? Directed by Bastian Günther. 2015. Germany: Video Library of the Film Studies Department of the University of Zurich, 2016. DVD. The Tracey Fragments. Directed by Bruce McDonald. 2007. Canada: Koch Media, 2009. DVD. Tierra. Directed by Julio Medem. 1996. Spain: Flax Film, 2006. DVD. Upstream Color. Directed by Shane Carruth. 2013. USA: Metrodome, 2013. DVD. Vacas. Directed by Julio Medem. 1992. Spain: Diario El País, 2004. DVD.

Bibliography Abel, Julia; Blödorn, Andreas, and Scheffel, Michael. 2009. “Narrative Sinnbildung im Spannungsfeld von Ambivalenz und Kohärenz.” In Ambivalenz und Kohärenz. Untersuchungen zur narrativen Sinnbildung, edited by Julia Abel, Andreas Blödorn, and Michael Scheffel, 1 – 11. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier. Alber, Jan, and Heinze, Rüdiger, eds. 2011. Unnatural Narratives – Unnatural Narratology. Berlin: De Gruyter. Alber, Jan. 2013. “Unnatural Narrative.” In The living handbook of narratology, edited by Peter Hühn et al. Accessed 16 June 2017. http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/un natural-narrative#Richardson2011. Alber, Jan. 2016. Unnatural Narrative: Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama. London: University of Nebraska Press. Antonsen, Jan Erik. 2009. “Das Ereignis des Unmöglichen. Narrative Sinnbildung als Problem der Phantastik.” In Ambivalenz und Kohärenz. Untersuchungen zur narrativen

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Sinnbildung, edited by Julia Abel, Andreas Blödorn, and Michael Scheffel, 127 – 139. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier. Bal, Mieke. 2002. Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Bordwell, David. 1985. Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. Bordwell, David. 2006. The Way Hollywood Tells It. Berkeley: University of California Press. Borges, Jorge Luis. 1960. “Borges y yo.” In El hacedor, 61 – 62. Madrid: Alianza. Buckland, Warren. 2009. “Introduction: Puzzle Plots” & “Making Sense of Lost Highway.” In Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema, edited by Warren Buckland, 3 – 12 and 42 – 61. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. Cortázar, Julio. 1951. “Lejana.” In Bestiario. In Obras completas, 1956, I:119 – 125. “Axolotl.” In Final del juego. In Obras completas I: 381 – 385. Dablé, Nadine. 2012. Leerstellen transmedial. Auslassungsphänomene als narrative Strategie in Film und Fernsehen. Bielefeld: Transcript. Eckel, Julia; Leiendecker, Bernd; Olek, Daniela, and Piepiorka, Christine, eds. 2012. (Dis) Orienting Media and Narrative Mazes. Bielefeld: Transcript. Eckel, Julia, and Leiendecker, Bernd. 2012. “(Dis)orienting Media and Narrative Mazes”. In (Dis)Orienting Media and Narrative Mazes, edited by Julia Eckel, Bernd Leiendecker, Daniela Olek, and Christine Piepiorka, 11 – 18. Bielefeld: Transcript. Eig, Jonathan. 2003. “A beautiful mind(fuck). Hollywood structures of identity.” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 46. Accessed 16 June 2017. http://www.ejumpcut.org/ar chive/jc46.2003/eig.mindfilms/index.html Elliot, Panek. 2006. “The Poet and the Detective: Defining the Psychological Puzzle film.” Film criticism 31/1 – 2:62 – 88. Gansel, Carsten, and Ächtler, Norman, eds. 2013. Das ‘Prinzip Störung’ in den Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Grabe, Nina; Lang, Sabine; and Meyer-Minnemann, Klaus. 2006. “De paradojas y paradojas: de un concepto epistemológico a un principio narratológico.” In La narración paradójica. “Normas narrativas” y el principio de la “transgresión”, edited by Nina Grabe, Sabine Lang, and Klaus Meyer-Minnemann, 9 – 17. Madrid and Frankfurt a. M.: Iberoamericana/Vervuert. Grice, Paul. 1975. “Logic and Conversation.” Syntax and Semantics 3:41 – 58. Iser, Wolfgang. 1972. Der implizite Leser. Kommunikationsformen des Romans von Bunyan bis Beckett. München: Fink. Iser, Wolfgang. 1984 [1976]. Der Akt des Lesens. München: Fink. Johnson, Steven. 2006. Everything Bad is Good for You. London: Penguin. Kehlmann, Daniel. 2009. Ruhm, Reinbek: Rowohlt. Kindt, Tom. 2005. “L’art de violer le contrat. Une comparaison entre la métalepse et la non-fiabilité narrative.” In Métalepses. Entorses au pacte de la représentation, edited by John Pier and Jean-Marie Schaeffer, 167 – 178. Paris: Éditions de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Kindt, Tom. 2008. Unzuverlässiges Erzählen und literarische Moderne. Eine Untersuchung der Romane von Ernst Weiß. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Kindt, Tom; Müller, Harry, eds. 2006. The Implied Author: Concept and Controversy. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter.

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Kuhn, Markus. 2011. Filmnarratologie. Ein erzähltheoretisches Analysemodell. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Leiendecker, Bernd. 2015. “They Only See What They Want to See”. Geschichte des unzuverlässigen Erzählens im Film. Marburg: Schüren. Meyer-Minnemann, Klaus. 2005. “Un procédé narratif qui ‘produit un effet de bizarrerie’: la métalepse littéraire.” In Métalepses. Entorses au pacte de la représentation, edited by John Pier and Jean-Marie Schaeffer, 133 – 150. Paris: Éditions de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Meyer-Minnemann, Klaus and Schlickers, Sabine. 2004. “La mise en abyme en narratologie.” Vox poetica.org, and in Narratologies contemporaines: nouveaux paradigmes pour la théorie et l’analyse du récit, edited by John Pier and Phillipp Roussin, 2010:91 – 109. Lyon: Éditions des Archives Contemporains de l’ENS. Mittell, Jason. 2006. “Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television.” The Velvet Light Trap, 58, 2006, 1:29 – 40. Orth, Dominik. 2005. Lost in Lynchworld. Unzuverlässiges Erzählen in David Lynchs Lost Highway und Mulholland Drive. Stuttgart: ibidem. Orth, Dominik. 2013. Narrative Wirklichkeiten. Eine Typologie pluraler Realitäten in Literatur und Film. Marburg: Schüren. Pinkas, Claudia. 2010. Der phantastische Film. Instabile Narrationen und die Narration der Instabilität. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Phelan, James. 2004. Living to Tell about it: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration. Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press. Phelan, James. 2008. “Estranging Unreliabiliy, Bonding Unreliability, and the Ethics of Lolita.” In Narrative Unreliability in the Twentieth-Century First-Person Novel, edited by Elke D’hoker and Gunther Martens, 7 – 28. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Richardson, Brian. 2011. “What is Unnatural Narrative Theory?” In Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural Narratology, edited by J. Alber and R. Heinze, 23 – 40. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Robbe-Grillet, Alain. 1959. Dans le labyrinthe. Paris: Minuit. Schlickers, Sabine. 1997. Verfilmtes Erzählen: Narratologisch-komparative Untersuchung zu El beso de la mujer araña (Manuel Puig/Héctor Babenco) und Crónica de una muerte anunciada (Gabriel García Márquez/Francesco Rosi). Frankfurt a. M.: Vervuert. Schlickers, Sabine. 2005. “Inversions, transgressions, paradoxes et bizarreries: la métalepse dans les littératures espagnole et française.” In Métalepses. Entorses au pacte de la représentation, edited by John Pier and Jean-Marie Schaeffer, 151 – 166. Paris: Éditions de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Schlickers, Sabine. 2015a. “Lüge, Täuschung und Verwirrung. Unzuverlässiges und Verstörendes Erzählen in Literatur und Film.” Diegesis. Interdisziplinäres E-Journal für Erzählforschung / Interdisciplinary E-Journal for Narrative Research 4.1:49 – 67. Accessed 16 June 2017.https://www.diegesis.uni-wuppertal.de/index.php/diegesis/article/down load/190/258 Schlickers, Sabine. 2015b. “Introducción: La autenticidad en literatura y cine: estética, performatividad y narratología.” In Estéticas de autenticidad. Literatura, arte, cine y creación intermedial en Hispanoamérica, edited by Ardila, Gunia and Schlickers, 11 – 29. Medellín: Fondo Editorial Universidad EAFIT. Schmid, Wolf. 2005. Elemente der Narratologie. Berlin: De Gruyter.

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Schmidt, Oliver. 2013. Hybride Räume. Filmwelten im Hollywood-Kino der Jahrtausendwende. Marburg: Schüren (Textualität des Films 2). Tan, Ed S. 1996. Emotion and the Structure of Narrative Film: Film as an Emotion Machine. Mahwah: Erlbaum. Thon, Jan-Noël. 2009. “Mind-Bender. Zur Popularisierung komplexer narrativer Strukturen im amerikanischen Kino der 1990er Jahre.” In Post-Coca-Colanization: Zurück zur Vielfalt?, edited by Sophia Komor and Rebekka Rohleder, 171 – 188. Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang. Thon, Jan-Noël. 2016. Transmedial Narratology and Contemporary Media Culture. London: University of Nebraska Press. Unamuno, Miguel de. 2005. [1914/1935]. Niebla. Madrid: Cátedra (LH 154). Weixler, Antonius. 2012. “Authentisches erzählen – authentisches Erzählen. Über Authentizität als Zuschreibungsphänomen und Pakt.” In Authentisches Erzählen. Produktion, Narration, Rezeption, edited by Antonios Weixler, 1 – 32. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Wolf, Werner. 1993. Ästhetische Illusion und Illusionsdurchbrechung in der Erzählkunst. Theorie und Geschichte mit Schwerpunkt auf englischem illusionsstörenden Erzählen. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Wolf, Werner. 2001. “Formen literarischer Selbstreferenz in der Erzählkunst. Versuch einer Typologie und ein Exkurs zur ’mise en cadre’ und ’mise en reflet/série’.” In Erzählen und Erzähltheorie im 20. Jahrhundert. Festschrift für Wilhelm Füger, edited by Jörg Helbig, 49 – 84. Heidelberg: Winter.

Julia Eckel

Disturbance and Perturbation in The Tracey Fragments With The Tracey Fragments (2007) this article focuses on a film that – if we are to believe the reviews – offers a rich field for analysis as both disturbing and perturbing. A glance through the Internet critiques (cf. IMDb.com; RottenTomatoes.com) garners adjectives ranging from “disturbing” and “confusing”, to “complex” and “exhausting”, from “bizarre” and “scattered”, to “disorganized” and “ambiguous”, and the movie has been described in vivid terms as a “disorienting experience”, an “audacious puzzlement”, and “a really big and scary looking roller coaster”.¹ These judgments do not bear only – or even principally – on the film’s action and main character: they are concerned above all with the way it is made, especially its multiple and varied use of split screens (cf. Fig. 1), whose audiovisual impact one reviewer called “cinematic confetti” (Morris 2008). The story of 15-year-old Tracey Berkowitz (Ellen Page), who – clad only in a shower curtain – rides the bus randomly through the city in search of her little brother Sonny, is presented in a continuous audiovisual flow of split screens that hide or multiply their contents, interrupt the causal chain of action and, as the film-title suggests, create a cinematic experience of impressive fragmentation. The critical attempt to put this into words illustrates a fundamental problem in the accurate description of movies whose make-up is confusing, whose structure is tangled, and whose reception is challenging. How can a film like this be conceptually grasped and lucidly described? In seeking an answer to this question, the present article applies the concept of perturbatory narration advanced by Sabine Schlickers (2015), and further developed in collaboration with Vera Toro (2017),² in order to systematically determine and describe the narrative levels and audiovisual dimensions through which The Tracey Fragments generates its disturbing potential. Rather than beginning immediately with the concept of perturbation, however, I intend first to  Cf. e. g. the following reviews: fabulousmatt (February 29, 2008), htdoerge (March 15, 2008), zuriel (February 9, 2007), TheGOLDENWALRUS (July 12, 2008), Alain English (April 23, 2008), rooprect (February 4, 2014), Joseph Sylvers (June 18, 2008), Imdbidia (May 7, 2011) on IMDb.com (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0801526/reviews retrieved 30.08. 2016); Critics Consensus, and Rex Reed (May 14, 2008) on Rottentomatoes.com (https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/tracey_fragments/reviews/ retrieved 30.08. 2016).  Cf. the Introduction to this volume by Schlickers and Toro. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110566574-002

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Fig. 1: Split screen in The Tracey Fragments

examine the impact of the film under the more general and neutral term ‘disturbance’. ³ A further step will then ask to what extent these disturbances are entangled and congruent with the three narrative strategies established by Schlickers and Toro (cf. the Introduction) as defining qualities of perturbatory narration, namely: deception, empuzzlement and paradox.

1 Disturbances It has been repeatedly observed in the narratological context (cf. e. g. Jäger 2004, Gansel and Ächtler 2013, Gansel 2013, and Schlickers and Toro in the present volume) that the term ‘disturbance’ – all the more so, therefore, ‘perturbation’ – far from having negative connotations, indicates a productive breaking of conventions which in the case of film can, for example, temporarily disrupt narrative structures in order to enhance their interest and/or entertainment value. Disturbance in this sense does not imply a malfunction, or the intrusion of a bug or

 A glance at the etymology of the two key terms used here may well be of some interest. While both derive from the Latin turbare (to disturb or agitate) – itself derived from turba (crowd) – and hence suggest the stirring or splitting up of a multitude (leading to ‘tumult’ and ‘turbulence’), the different prefixes dis- and per- have slightly different connotations. Dis- has a negative nuance of undoing a state or thing, while per- is an intensifier indicating thoroughness. Perturbation, therefore, may be considered a particularly intense form of disturbance – the usage that will be followed in this article.

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defect, but a neutral (or even positive) interference in the form of a creative derangement or disordering of visual and/or auditory perceptions. For Gansel and Ächtler it is important that ‘disturbance’ is not conceived as a medial dysfunction, a glitch or hindrance in the transmission of signs, but as productive of stable meaning. Marking boundaries of meaning, disturbances in this sense underpin the continuous approximation [of a text] to actual conditions of communication (Gansel and Ächtler 2013, 13). Following Niklas Luhmann, the authors highlight the cultural and societal productivity of disturbance in promoting reflection and self-questioning within a system about the conditions of its own genesis and existence, and hence contributing to the change that is necessary for the system to maintain stability and continue to function as such.

Jäger (2004, 42, 60) distinguishes between the destructive and productive tendencies of disturbance, which he denotes respectively as ‘mishap’ (‘disturbancem’) and ‘transcriptive process’ (‘disturbancet’).⁴ The former term can be allied to the concept of ‘noise’ introduced into communication theory by Shannon and Weaver (1963): as an unintended interruption of the communicative flow, this demands repair, whereas the latter type of disturbance can be conceived as an (even intentional) irritation that leads to productive reflection on existing structures (Jäger 2004, 4– 43). Applied to The Tracey Fragments, a defect in the DVD player or a scratch or tear in the celluloid copy of the film would be an example of ‘disturbancem’, but the visual and auditory defects intentionally implanted in the system – e. g. picture noise, video aesthetics, asynchronous picture and sound – would qualify as ‘disturbancest’ which reflect the communicative conditions and contexts of their emergence. Another pair of concepts introduced by Jäger into the discussion of communication processes – ‘disturbance’ vs. ‘transparency’ – might also be useful specifically in the analysis of film: Disturbance refers to […] that communicative condition in which a medium loses its (operative) transparency so that it is perceived in its materiality; transparency is the condition in which communication is not thus ‘disturbed’ – i. e. the medium qua medium is not the primary object of perception […] (Jäger 2004, 62).

Jäger describes these two modalities as “looking through” in the case of transparency and “looking at” in the case of disturbance, where the focus is on the conditions – the inherent mediality – of a message (Jäger 2004, 60). The area between these poles is a site of variance in which the communication process can  Cf. also Gansel (2013, 37– 40).

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flip in either direction; in this respect disturbancet plays a key role in triggering transparency: Disturbance and transparency should be understood as two functional poles of media performance constitutive of the process of transcription; transcription can thus be conceived as the passage of disturbancet to transparency – from de- to re-contextualization of the relevant sign/medium and its conditions of iteration. In this sense disturbancet marks the beginning of the transcriptive process of remediation, placing the focus on the (disturbed) sign/medium, while transparency is the condition in which the sign/medium as such vanishes, becoming wholly transparent to its mediated (or distributed, archived, constituted etc.) content. Disturbancet and transparency are thus two – as a rule mutually exclusive – modes of visibility: that of the medium and that of the mediated. The invisibility (transparency) of the sign/medium effects […] the undisturbed ‘realism’ of what it mediates, whereas the transition to visibility of the medium – brought about by the disturbance of its familiar context of operation – heralds an ontological crisis in mediation in which the content vanishes (Jäger 2004, 60 – 61; original emphasis).

The various (intentional) visual and auditory disturbances in The Tracey Fragments must, therefore, be classified as transcriptive. Momentarily blocking or distorting the ‘look through’ to the narrated action, they break the transparency of the filmic medium. More precisely, their impact lies in their combination and interaction with that transparency. Jäger’s levels of visibility can be readily aligned with the structures of perturbatory narration identified by Schlickers and Toro – especially with their use of the concept of doxa; for disturbance of the stable system of narrative conventions (the doxa) productively ‘threatens’ the transparency of the narrative, shifting the focus from the narrated/mediated content to the process of narration/the medium; but, in that break, the doxa is itself highlighted, its existence is explicitly revealed. Only then is it looked at – and it is precisely this looking that makes disturbingly narrated films so fascinating for narratological analysis. How, then, in the concrete instance – here The Tracey Fragments – should these disturbances in narrative structure be described? It makes sense in this context to refer back to the conceptual distinctions between story, plot, and style developed expressly for filmic narratives by Bordwell (1985) and Bordwell and Thompson (2004).⁵ Not only do these provide appropriate categories for the

 It is interesting to ask whether this threefold distinction really offers more than the longstanding theoretical distinction between discours/sujet and histoire/fabula developed by Todorov, Benveniste, Tomashevsky, Forster et al. However, Genette (2010) himself further distinguishes discours into récit and narration – two categories that do not fit so well in film, where the speaker/narrator function (i. e. narration) is only one case among many. Bordwell and Thompson’s distinction between story, plot and style is more appropriate to the specific (multi‐)mediality of

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visual devices of McDonald’s film: they can also be readily related to the perturbatory structures proposed by Schlickers and Toro. Thus various elements can be identified on the levels of story, plot, and style that disturb the transparency of the filmic narrative as a whole: e. g. by drawing attention to the constructed nature of the story, by providing a plot that hinders the ordering of the fragmented action into a story, or by stylistically distorting and splitting the audiovisual images themselves. A more detailed analysis of The Tracey Fragments will illustrate how such disturbances can be referred either to the doxa of narration (plot and style) or to that of narrative (story) – perception of the latter level of disturbance depending naturally on the audiovisual impact of the former.

1.1 The disturbed and disturbing story The film’s story turns around the figure of Tracey and her teenage life, which falls apart when her little brother Sonny suddenly disappears. She runs away from home and rides the bus wherever it takes her across town trying to trace him. The film shows aspects of her everyday life, generally commented with her voiceover – e. g. when she refers to her father, as if in a courtroom, as “Exhibit A”, or when she is humiliated in school by other students, who call her “it”. Her social environment, then, is already disturbed, and this seems to rub off on her personality, too, for her parents send her to the psychologist Dr. Heker. Ignored by her family, bullied at school, and misunderstood by her shrink, Tracey leads a pretty abnormal life. The only glimmer of light is when a “new boy” at school, Billy Zero, seems to like her: his love promises to lift her out of her misery. That the promise is false and only exists in Tracey’s imagination becomes evident when it transpires that all he wants is a ‘quickie’ in the car, after which he throws her out of the vehicle like trash. Only Lance, a young man from Toronto, involved in some crooked deals, whom she comes across in her wanderings, seems really to like her. But he brings added disturbance into Tracey’s life when he is beaten up in her presence by a shady business partner who then tries to rape her. The

film, where ‘plot’ (as opposed to ‘story’) comprises the structural and causal aspects of the narration, and ‘style’ is concerned with its concrete audiovisual realization. Applied to The Tracey Fragments, these distinctions enable the overall nonlinear structure of the film to be kept analytically separate from its visual style, marked by split-screens and video mode. In this respect, the concept of style is a useful complement to discours – or, alternatively, plot and style can be taken as subdivisions of discours. That all three levels – story, plot and style – are intimately related holds, of course, for all models.

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emotive images of physical and sexual violence accompanying these scenes justify the label of “disturbing” often given the film by critics. Against this personal and social background, the crisis of Sonny’s disappearance can be seen as the occasion for a filmic depiction of a teenage life so deeply troubled that new disasters seem inevitable. And the violence of the depiction and vulgarity of the language transmit that disturbance effectively to the audience. In one scene, for example, Tracey seems to address the viewer directly, when she looks straight into the camera and shouts “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you!” Breaking metaleptically through the ‘fourth wall’ of fiction, this and other moments of direct address of the camera/viewer represent a paradox that threatens the transparency of the story and the integrity of its diegetic world.

1.2 Confused times and spaces – the disturbed and disturbing plot It is clear from what has been said that the plot of The Tracey Fragments also evinces numerous breaks, confusions and distortions. The action switches wildly from one time frame to another, with the result that it is not always clear where in the story one stands. Moments of Tracey’s early childhood are juxtaposed with what seems like the present until it is revealed as a fantasy of the protagonist – and all these levels may occur in a single split-screen image (cf. Fig. 2). Other scenes are linked only loosely (or not at all) with the storyworld – e. g. shots of horses and streetlights, or of Tracey’s visits to Dr. Heker, which are also scattered through the action. Set in a pure white space without horizon or boundary, they lack all reference to time or place (Fig. 4): it is not even clear if they refer to one visit or many. And once when Tracey leaves Dr. Heker’s consulting room she enters an equally undefined black space (Fig. 3). Similarly difficult to situate are the nested metaleptic sequences that belong not to the film’s diegetic reality but to other worlds that probably represent Tracey’s fantasies. Thus some 20 minutes into the film we are confronted with a screenful of opening titles that present Tracey’s life and the people in it (parents, Sonny, Billy Zero etc.) as if they were characters in a film (Figs. 5 – 6). Diegetic reality is in any case interspersed with fantasy, for example when Tracey finds a magazine in a news kiosk featuring herself and Billy Zero on the cover (Fig. 7). This scene is immediately followed by a wild music-and-image sequence including CD covers, news cuttings, press photos (Fig. 8), snippets from interviews and presentations, and what appears to be a music video with Tracey as singer – the whole mounted like a TV collage of Tracey and Billy’s life as pop star celebrities.

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Figs. 2 – 4: Parallelism of different (sometimes indefinite) time levels (2) and spaces (3 – 4)

Many of these plot elements are closely linked to the level of style, especially to the multiple split screens that mediate and underline the nonlinearity of the action. Through the splitting, the plot is not only achronological in its sequential order but also asynchronous in its parallel image segments: elements of plot crisscross in both picture and sound; sequences are repeated in identical shots and order, set in marginally altered perspective, or variously cut and juxtaposed – presentational techniques that lead into the third level of disturbance: that of style.

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Figs. 5 – 8: Fake opening titles (5 – 6) and Tracey’s pop star fantasies (7 – 8)

1.3 Interferences of sight and sound – disturbing styles The most striking feature of The Tracey Fragments is the split screens that break its images – down to the level of the individual frame – and hence, too, its story and plot, into disturbingly disjointed pieces (Fig. 1). The same holds for the soundtrack, whose superimposed and/or staggered individual tracks, frequently dissociated from concomitant images, form an acoustic counterpart to the split screens. And the formal unconventionality of the screen splitting is enhanced by its repetition and varying shapes, so that the viewer is confronted with a mosaic containing triangular as well as rectangular forms, and images that turn, expand and contract, or play with the vertical and horizontal axes of their content (Fig. 9). Even when what seems a single image appears, it may be covered with a network of black lines that evidently serve not only to mark classical screen divisions, but also to undermine the integrity of the individual frame; for neither the splitting of the screen nor the unitary image can in this instance sustain their formal functions: what the screen shows is neither a scene split into different aspects nor an untampered, undivided image (Fig. 10). Moreover, assimilating to the black space outside the screen, the intrusive lines destabilize the entire aspect ratio of the film (Fig. 2).

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Figs. 9 – 10: Split screens in The Tracey Fragments

These are, however, not the only stylistic breaks in The Tracey Fragments. Games are also played with color, picture style, and remediations. The images are often altered with added blue, red-orange, green, or gray tints, and visual effects are taken over from other media – as e. g. when TV ‘snow’ suddenly appears in the background (Fig. 12), or the picture is covered with a fine mesh of lines (Fig. 11) reminiscent of TV or video. On other occasions comic-strip sequences, jottings, print material, black-and-white photos, and street plans appear (Fig. 13), all of which cloud the conventional transparency of cinema and lay bare the artificiality – and with it the subjectivity – of the narrative. Light reflexes and flares point to the technology behind the film, as do the blue shift and wobbly hand-held camera sequences, which suggest video rather than classical/analogue film-making (Figs. 14– 15).⁶ The sound track deserves analysis in its own right. Among its many different effects are distortions, echoes, superimposed sounds, noise, crackling, snapping, whispering, shouting, close and distant sound, and asynchrony of sound and picture, all of which shift the focus from what is said and played to the medium in and through which it is communicated, adding a further dimension to the disturbing confusion of the film. In Jäger’s terms, however, this is not a case of disturbancem, which might be due to a technical fault or director’s error.⁷ These disturbances are intentional and constitutive; they allow room for a depth of associations, enhanced by the multiple split-screen images, that creates what might be called a condition of ‘(dis)turbulence’ eminently revealing the shift from transparency of narrative  As the film is a low budget, independent production, it is likely that The Tracey Fragments was largely filmed on video. Nevertheless, the elaborately staged contrast between smooth, classical, cinema-quality pictures with little noise, and grainy, low-resolution video images that at times look like screenshots, is clearly intentional.  Even if it were, the disturbances in question – far from being mishaps to be repaired as quickly as possible – can also be seen as transcriptive, as they intentionally raise critical questions about rules and conventions: their raison d’être lies in their potential to disturb.

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Figs. 11 – 15: Style and disturbance of images in The Tracey Fragments

to visibility of medium described by Jäger. The look through to Tracey’s troubled life is continually broken by sounds and images so intrusive that they must themselves be listened to and looked at. With their immanent disturbance, the three levels of story, plot and style are so linked as to wrench the viewer/listener out of what might otherwise have become a transparent story about a teenage

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girl. The outcome actually communicated, however, is a far more immediate experience of the mind and emotions of that girl, with all her inherently inaccessible, subjective, fragmentary, potentially unreliable memories and fantasies. This overview has indicated the various disturbed and disturbing techniques of The Tracey Fragments and the levels on which they operate, and it has said something about their interconnection. It has shown above all how they themselves are thematized (story), how they appear as discontinuities in the spatiotemporal continuum (plot) and/or breaks in the audiovisual aesthetics of the film (style). The question to which I will now turn is how these techniques fit the concept of perturbatory narration and its development in terms of deceptive, puzzling and paradoxical narrative phenomena.

2 Perturbations Schlickers and Toro understand perturbatory narration as a combination of narrative procedures that run counter to the production (or existence) of a coherent, causally determined doxa: specifically procedures of deception, paradox and empuzzlement. These strategies allow (or compel) actions and episodes perceived as diegetically factual to be decoded and seen in another light (deception); or they present events and actions that are self-contradictory or spatiotemporally incompatible (paradox); or they project extraordinary or fantastic elements that disrupt the fictional diegesis with an unmarked metafiction (or similar) that renders relevant aspects of story and plot at least temporarily indeterminate (empuzzlement). The question now is, first, whether these patterns are found in The Tracey Fragments; and secondly, if so, how, as perturbing structures, they relate to the disturbing structures described above.

2.1 Deception The prime example of deceptive narration is the unreliable narrator, identified as such by Booth (1961) and developed for the field of literature e. g. by Nünning (1998, 2005) and Martínez and Scheffel (1999); the concept has also been applied explicitly to film by Liptay and Wolf (2005), Helbig (2006) and Leiendecker (2015). The Tracey Fragments reveals structures of unreliability e. g. in the disappearance of Sonny, which is clarified in a final plot twist ten minutes or so before the end of the film. In the same sequence, Billy Zero’s love for Tracey is revealed as a figment of her imagination; however, its unreal, deceptive quality has already been suggested in the exaggerated staging of prior episodes. At the end

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of the film one learns that Tracey lost track of her brother because Billy Zero – who does not even know her name properly – inveigled her into his car for sex. There the intimate action on the back seat is initially overlayed with scenes of a would-be romantic teenage encounter and accompanied by gentle music, but it suddenly converts into realist mode again – for there is nothing romantic about Billy’s quickie or its sequel, when he pushes her abruptly out of the vehicle with her trousers still half down. This plot twist is not, however, the cardinal aspect of the movie. The Tracey Fragments is not the classical unreliable film that stands or falls with its successful deception of the viewer. The precarious nature of Billy’s affections – as Tracey dreams of them – is already apparent in the theatrical poses he adopts when, clad in black slouch hat and leather coat, he picks her up from her classroom on a motorbike (Fig. 16); or when they are shown as famous rock stars (Figs. 8 – 9); or when Billy blows her a heart-shaped smoke ring and whispers “I love you” (Fig. 17). All these scenes function as early warnings of deception; and they also graphically illustrate the interweaving of that strategy with the disturbances of story, plot and style described above. For it is clear to the viewer that the heart-shaped smoke ring is digitally generated (disturbance of style); the re- (or dis‐)ordering of the sequence of events means that we only learn the ‘truth’ at the end (disturbance of plot); and Tracey’s account of Billy – in the bus she reveals herself as an unreliable narrator (Fig. 16) – confirms the earlier indications of deception (disturbance of story). That Tracey is herself deeply perturbed by Billy’s actions in the car – which can be seen as the climax of his deception and her answering self-deception – scarcely needs comment.

Figs. 16 – 17: Early warnings of deception and disappointment: Billy Zero

Moreover, the whole fragmented structure of the film as a stream of consciousness of its 15-year-old protagonist offers ample grounds for doubt about what it shows. Whether Tracey’s parents are really such stereotypes, whether Dr. Heker is really a trans-person etc. – these are all questions with no ascertainable answer, given that so much (if not all) appears to come out of Tracey’s head.

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Deception and unreliable narration are not, then, issues to be demonstrated point by point or scene by scene. Doubt pervades the film, even if its only evident unmasking is in the Billy Zero plot twist. This undertone of uncertainty is also relevant to the second category of perturbatory narration.

2.2 Empuzzlement Unlike the Billy episode, other puzzling aspects of fictional reality in The Tracey Fragments are not so clearly resolved, for example the white and black spaces, combinations of images, and certain details that seem to defy contextual placing. Some have an aura of the mystical or fantastical, which is, however, not further thematized or clarified. Among these phenomena are the recurrent scenes in black spaces showing, for example, dolls or a clown (Fig. 18). These might refer to Tracey’s childhood or earlier adolescence; she appears in the same (split) frame and against the same black background in the shower curtain from the bus episodes. In that sense the black spaces seem not to refer to real events in the narrative world but to an in-between space in Tracey’s mind/memory that cannot be further spatiotemporally situated: its details do not reveal their origin. The same is true of the young newspaper vendor in the kiosk who jolts Tracey out of her pop star daydreams. The horns on his forehead (Fig. 19) remain uncommented, their meaning unresolved. They most likely represent a projection of Tracey’s fantasy (internal ocularization), as he seems to disturb her inwardly. Nevertheless, there is still something fantastical about the scene

Figs. 18 – 19: Indeterminate spaces (18) and events (19)

And Sonny’s disappearance also remains an unresolved puzzle, even if its circumstances are finally clarified. Does he come back? Is he still alive? Does anyone know where he is? Did Tracey catch sight of him somewhere in the city in his light-blue top?

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As with deception, these aspects illustrate the interaction of empuzzlement with the three levels of disturbance noted above: the visual uncertainty caused by the spatial vagueness of the black and white backgrounds (style) is insufficiently contextualized by plot or story; the horns on the young man’s head play no further role in, and are not explained by, the story; and the plot refuses to complete Sonny’s story by revealing what happened to him.

2.3 Paradox The persistent use of split screens in The Tracey Fragments produces simultaneity in the temporally distinct, visual unity in the dissimilar and incompatible, and disjunction in the unitary. Thus a single continuous scene may be split into visually discrete units on different frames that do not resolve into a coherent action. Or a frame may come so early (or late) to its key image that this dissolves into a paradoxical flow of fragments, what is actually a single percept being stylistically so broken that it would be possible realiter only in disparate spatiotemporal universes. Some scenes in Dr. Heker’s consulting rooms, for example, where she is talking with Tracey, show the dialogue differently in different screen segments (Fig. 4). The initial impression is that the same scene is being shown in parallel frames, until one gradually becomes aware of a slight time lag between image sequences: in one frame Dr. Heker is speaking while in another she is not; or her voice is heard although her lips do not move. What look like misalignments of sound and picture are moments of paradox, revealing the incompatibility of parallel impressions. There are many such moments in The Tracey Fragments, some of which achieve a level of playful resolution by creating new, purely visual contextualities out of spatiotemporally paradoxical fragments (Fig. 20).

Figs. 20 – 21: Paradoxical image structures

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Scenes like these can be seen on the one hand as expressions of stylistic economy, compressing the diegesis without disturbing the storyworld in itself – in which case there is no need to speak of paradox. On the other hand, however, they often seem to launch a forking-path narrative with diverse, equally valid levels of reality, some merely imagined, some lacking all objectivity – in which case the diegesis certainly becomes paradoxical. Even if one takes the sequences cited above as isolated stylistic features rather than indications of a paradoxical perspective informing the entire narrative, they still provide impressive evidence of the convergence in The Tracey Fragments of deception, paradox and unreliability. For example, in the scene immediately after Billy pushes Tracey out of his car, she appears in the frame at bottom right lying on the ground. The screen is then successively split into four asymmetrically placed square segments which show her from different perspectives pulling up her jeans and getting onto her feet. The four frames then come into alignment and the viewer assumes he/she is seeing a single unbroken image of the road and woodland, showing Tracey where she has been dumped; the black lines superimposed on the frame would then no longer be structurally relevant as divisions. But when Tracey stands up and her head should, according to conventional logic, emerge from the bottom right frame into the one above, it fails to do so – it only appears with a time-lag and corresponding spatial displacement (Fig. 21). The visual paradox of the missing/misfitting head unmasks as a stylistic deception the promise of integrity implicit in the picture’s genesis, and this in turn spotlights the conscious unreliability of the narrative.

3 Concluding summary Not only, then, do all three parameters of perturbatory narration occur in The Tracey Fragments, but they do so in close conjunction with the mutually conditioning disturbances established on the levels of story, plot and style. The narratological question arising from this conjunction concerns the relation of disturbance to perturbation: Do all disturbances lead to perturbatory narration? Are the two concepts interchangeable? Or might the clarification of their distinction add definition to the contours of perturbatory narration? It should first be noted that the puzzling, deceptive and paradoxical effects of fiction films are categorically (and hence logically) subordinate to the levels of narrative (story) and narration (plot and style) on which they concretely arise and where they are initially perceived. The three classes of perturbatory phenomena can, therefore, be seen as representing conceptually different patterns of disturbance in the relations between these moments. Thus in The Tracey Frag-

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ments the mainly stylistic disturbance created by the split screens impacts the level of plot and gives rise to all three perturbatory phenomena of paradox, empuzzlement and deception. The decisive aspect of perturbatory narration is that it presupposes the incidence of at least two of the three narrative phenomena. Of crucial interest here is the patterns of disturbance these phenomena generate and their distribution among the levels of narrative and narration – the question, therefore, whether (and if so how) individual perturbatory phenomena of empuzzlement, deception and paradox are assignable to specific moments of narrative disturbance in Jäger’s sense. A further question is whether, and to what extent, perturbatory narration is conceivable without such moments – i. e. without the medial interplay of transparency with disturbancet (and perhaps also with disturbancem) – and, conversely, at what point exactly does disturbing (and/or disturbed) narration become perturbatory. An examination of the concept of perturbation in the light of Jäger’s notion of disturbance – as applied to communication processes in general – would open the way to a reconnection of what is at present a purely narratological phenomenon with social and cultural contexts in which it might itself be found disturbing – in this case a definitely non-accidental, fully conscious disturbancet, shedding regenerative light on tired narrative structures. Perturbatory narration might then productively disturb and stimulate the discussion of narrative processes, and doing so foster the creation and discovery of new perturbations.

Filmography The Tracey Fragments. Directed by Bruce McDonald. 2007. Canada: Koch Media, 2009. DVD.

Bibliography Booth, Wayne C. 1961. Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bordwell, David. 1985. Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Bordwell, David, and Thompson, Kristin. 2004. Film Art. An Introduction. 7th edition. Boston: McGraw Hill. Gansel, Carsten, and Ächtler, Norman. 2013. “Das ‘Prinzip Störung’ in den Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften – Einleitung.” In Das ’Prinzip Störung’ in den Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften, edited by Carsten Gansel and Norman Ächtler, 7 – 14. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Gansel, Carsten. 2013. “Zu Aspekten einer Bestimmung der Kategorie ‘Störung’ – Möglichkeiten der Anwendung für Analysen des Handlungs- und Symbolsystems

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Literatur.” In Das ’Prinzip Störung’ in den Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften, edited by Carsten Gansel and Norman Ächtler, 31 – 56. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Genette, Gérard. 2010. Die Erzählung. 3rd edition. München: Fink. Helbig, Jörg, ed. 2006. “Camera doesn’t lie”: Spielarten erzählerischer Unzuverlässigkeit im Film (= Focal point, Band 4). Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier. Jäger, Ludwig. 2004. “Störung und Transparenz. Skizze zur performativen Logik des Medialen.” In Performativität und Medialität, edited by Sybille Krämer, 35 – 74. München: Fink. Leiendecker, Bernd. 2015. “They Only See What They Want to See”. Geschichte des unzuverlässigen Erzählens im Spielfilm (= Marburger Schriften zur Medienforschung, Band 55). Marburg: Schüren. Liptay, Fabienne, and Yvonne Wolf, eds. 2005. Was stimmt denn jetzt? Unzuverlässiges Erzählen in Literatur und Film. München: edition text + kritik. Martínez, Matías, and Michael Scheffel. 2012. Einführung in die Erzähltheorie. 9th enhanced edition (1st edition 1999). München: Beck. Morris, Wesley. 2008. “Picking through the pieces of a teen’s broken life.” In The Boston Globe (online), June 27. Accessed 30 August 2016. http://archive.boston.com/ae/movies/ articles/2008/06/27/picking_through_the_pieces_of_a_teens_broken_life. Nünning, Ansgar, ed. 1998. Unreliable narration: Studien zur Theorie und Praxis unglaubwürdigen Erzählens in der englischsprachigen Erzählliteratur. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier. Nünning, Ansgar. 2005. “Reconceptualizing Unreliable Narration: Synthesizing Cognitive and Rhetorical Approaches.” In A Companion to Narrative Theory. (= Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture, Band 33), edited by James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz, 89 – 107. Oxford: Blackwell. Schlickers, Sabine. 2015. “Lü ge, Täuschung und Verwirrung. Unzuverlässiges und Verstörendes Erzählen in Literatur und Film.” In Diegesis. Interdisziplinäres E-Journal fü r Erzählforschung / Interdisciplinary E-Journal for Narrative Research 4.1:49 – 67. Accessed 30 August 2016. https://www.diegesis.uni-wuppertal.de/index.php/diegesis/article/ download/190/258. Weaver, Warren, and Claude Elwood Shannon. 1963. The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.

Andreas Veits

A Tire Driving Crazy: Perturbatory Narration in Quentin Dupieux’s Rubber 1 Introduction The concept of perturbatory narration implies not only structural analysis of films that may fall under this heading, but also description of the mechanisms through which they de facto achieve their impact. Both aspects are relevant to the concerns of this volume. Accordingly, Schlickers and Toro state in the introduction to this volume: “All these films set high demands on the viewer, and it is for this reason that we speak of ‘perturbation’: a level of inner disturbance, intended by the author/director, ranging from stunned bafflement to mental embarrassment […]”. Focusing on the feature film Rubber ¹ by the French director Quentin Dupieux, the present article will investigate its perturbatory qualities from a primarily cognitive narratological perspective. Dupieux’s film will first be analyzed with regard to its potentially disturbing narrative structures, adding the cognitively weighted concept of storyworld to the categories already posited by Schlickers and Toro. Specific hypotheses will then be developed about the film’s capacitiy to realize its perturbatory effects on the recipient, especially the extent to which viewers may refer to prior knowledge of film genres in their cognitive assimilation of contradictory elements.

2 Preliminary reflections: the relation between perturbatory narration and fictional worlds Schlickers and Toro develop their concept ex negativo against the background of attributes determined as constitutive of a narrative doxa, covering both content (histoire) and (re)presentational strategies (discours), that enable viewers to give unambiguous meaning to conventional cinematic narratives. The films in question here, however, are perturbing precisely in their departure from that doxa: Our hypothesis is that the transgression of the doxa actively involves not only paradox in the twofold sense indicated above, but also the narrative strategies of deception and empuzzlement. It is the mutual interplay of these three  Rubber. Directed by Quentin Dupieux. 2010. Ahrensfelde, Germany. Capelight Pictures, DVD. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110566574-003

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strategies that undermines the coherence and plausibility of the doxa (Introduction). Developed over the past twenty years – principally in the field of cognitive narratology – the concept of storyworld² can be usefully linked to such a hypothesis. Influential narratologists like David Herman understand such fictional worlds as mental constructs formed by a recipient on the basis of information provided by a narrative: Narratives indicate mental models of who did what to and with whom, when, where, why, and in what fashion in the world to which recipients relocate […] as they work to comprehend a narrative. […] In trying to make sense of a narrative, interpreters attempt to reconstruct not just what happened but also the surrounding context or environment embedding storyworld existents, their attributes, and events in which they are involved (Herman 2010, 570). It is commonly assumed that the construction of a coherent storyworld requires the presence of certain narrative elements. Marie-Laure Ryan (2014) summarizes these as follows: a. “Existents: the characters of the story and the objects that have special significance for the plot” (Ryan 2014, 34). This includes all the characters, objects and places occurring in a narrative as meaningful to its plot. A story will only provide limited information about its world, which is, therefore, present or existent only in an incomplete form. Information not contained in a text must be added by the recipient from other contextual sources – e. g. knowledge of genre conventions or of extramedial reality (cf. Doležel 1995, 201– 213; Herman 2002, 66 – 69). As a rule, the facts relevant to its storyworld will be provided within a narrative, while unimportant details will be passed over. Perturbatory narratives may, however, make flagrant use of just such gaps and absences, for example to frustrate the logical reconstruction of a plot. b. “Setting: a space within which the existents are located” (Ryan 2014, 35). This covers geographical and other spatial information about the storyworld, for example the logical relations between its locations, whether in a city, country or region. The less information of this sort is provided in the text, the more may be supplied by the recipient from external sources. c. “Physical laws: principles that determine what kind of events can and cannot happen in a given story” (Ryan 2014, 35). A narrative can give very clear indications of the type of events that can occur under the conditions – spatiotemporal relations, relations between objects etc. – prevailing within a

 Cf. e. g. the seminal work of Ryan (1991), Herman (2009), and Thon (2016).

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represented fictional world. While, for example, time travel is plausible in science fiction, its occurrence in stories with a ‘realistic’ setting may immediately suggest a break with convention. This is particularly relevant for perturbatory narratives, where, for example, fantastical elements may suddenly intrude into a world whose assumed laws do not allow for them. And these laws are determined above all by information provided within the individual work. Thus, any narrative can depart from the conventions of its genre and define independently the rules governing what is possible and impossible within its own storyworld. d. “Social rules and values: principles that determine the obligations of characters” (Ryan 2014, 35). As with the other categories, narratives can draw a detailed picture of the social rules and values of their storyworld, against whose background the behavior of its characters can be explained and evaluated. e. “Events: the causes of the changes of state that happen in the time span framed by the narrative” (Ryan 2014, 36). This largely concerns the temporal ordering of the changes of state that take place in a represented narrative world. Events are conventionally understood as meaningful transformations occurring sequentially in time. In which order these events are presented on the discours level of a narrative can derive from the linear order of happenings in the actual storyworld (i. e. the histoire level): in an extreme case, such temporal disordering prevents the recipient from reconstructing a coherent sequence of causally connected events. This may well be perturbing. f. “Mental events: the character’s reactions to perceived or actual states of affairs” (Ryan 2016, 36). The representation of subjectivity and mental and emotional processes is also central to narrative worlds, for it enables the recipient to understand why inhabitants of a certain fictional world act as they do. In the absence of such information, the recipient of a film has to infer a character’s thoughts and feelings (e. g. from the character’s gestures), and their motivation from their actions. Moreover, representations of a character’s dreams and fantasies can – if they are not explicitly accentuated as mental events (e. g. via audiovisual mental metadiegeses) – be employed with perturbatory intent to disorient the viewer about their ontological status in the storyworld.

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3 Perturbatory narration in Rubber 3.1 Plot overview Written and directed by Quentin Dupieux, Rubber features an anthropomorphic automobile tire called ‘Robert’ (hereafter known as ‘the Tire’), which, awakened to life, turns against its human neighbors and becomes a serial killer. The associatively structured plot offers little in the way of coherency – the central questions are, rather, of a philosophical nature. At the same time the film operates with the aesthetics and conventions of a B horror movie. The opening scene shows an intradiegetic audience seated in a desert arena and viewing through binoculars, which have been distributed by two men dressed respectively in a police uniform and a suit, what appears to be happening in a small town in the middle distance. There the Tire awakens to life and begins, by a sort of telekinesis, to destroy things – first small animals, then people, among them a trucker and a cleaner – by making them explode. Although no film equipment (e. g. screen or projector) is evident, the intradiegetic audience refers to these events as part of a film they are watching. The subsequent action switches continually between frame and inner narratives – i. e. between intradiegetic audience and metadiegetic film-in-film. In the final third of the film, events build toward a climax: in the frame narrative almost the entire audience dies after eating turkey served to them by the person we will here call the ‘Film Presenter’ (the man in the suit). Only one member of the audience, who had steadfastly refused to eat the (probably poisoned) meat, survives and continues to observe events in the town through his binoculars. The Tire continues its murderous progress until the man in police uniform (whom we will here call the ‘Sheriff’) manages to stop it. The last intradiegetic viewer has meanwhile left his position in the diegesis and now enters the embedded narrative, making suggestions to the Sheriff how to make the film more exciting. Irritated by this interference, the Sheriff enters the house where the Tire is hiding, shoots it in two and throws the remains before the feet of the last viewer. The final shots of the film show a tricycle on the porch of a house, moved as if by a hidden hand, coming to life and making off with an army of automobile tires on a highway leading to Hollywood.

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3.2 Narrative paradox Rubber contains numerous metafictional sequences concerned with self-reflexive questions about film as a medium, and related issues of fact and fiction. Most of these metafictional structures have strong perturbatory potential by providing contradictory information about the natural laws, spatial logic, and causal as well as temporal characteristics of the storyworld; in this way key requirements for the recipient’s reconstruction of a coherent fictional world are missing. According to Werner Wolf (1993, 230) such incongruencies subvert effects of the ‘narrative illusion’. Rather than bringing life to a credible fictional world, metafiction forces the recipient to reflect about aspects of the narrative presentation and its artificiality, distracting the reader’s attention from the histoire. One of the central metafictional aspects of Rubber is the unclear relation between its various narrative levels. The opening minutes of the film establish – despite various logically confusing instances to be discussed later – a twolevel narrative structure that can be described as follows: a. Diegetic level. The narrative starts from the events in and around the audience, which in Rubber’s narrative world is presumably watching a movie. Embedded in this diegetic level are the events of the movie. b. Metadiegetic level. Like many multi-level films, Rubber nests different narratives inside each other. The events in and around the Tire can, then, be understood as belonging to a second-order narrative, e. g. as representing a metadiegetic film. The diegesis (a) forms the frame within which the story of the anthropomorphic tire (b) is embedded. In the analysis of metadiegetic narratives it is crucial to determine the structural features that set them apart from the frame, as well as the specific ontological status of the embedded narrative within the fictional world Kuhn (2007, 63) distinguishes in this regard between “[…] dream sequences, visual memories of film characters, film-in-film sequences, and visually presented stories attributed to an intradiegetic narrator, which can as a rule be analyzed as metadiegeses”. As already observed, fiction and metafiction are present in Rubber from the opening moments of the film, which begins with the distribution of binoculars to an intradiegetic audience (00:04:44) who immediately raise them to their eyes (00:05:06). Initially the visual narrative instance (VNI) depicts the members of the audience externally, without internal ocularization.³ Instead,

 On the concept of internal ocularization cf. Kuhn (2011, 128): “Internal ocularization occurs

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the recipient sees and hears them talk and ask questions about what they have just seen through the binoculars – events they surprisingly, in view of the circumstances, including the absence of any cinema equipment, refer to as a film (00:06:04– 00:06:11). A small boy, for instance, remarks as the ‘show’ begins: “It’s already boring! […] I hope it’s not an old-style film!” (00:05:41– 00:05:56); and a young woman asks the Film Presenter “Excuse me, it is [sic] going to be in color or in black and white?” (00:05:14). In a world in which it is apparently normal to watch a film through binoculars in a desert landscape, the social norms with which the recipients are familiar from their experience in extramedial reality seem no longer valid in the diegesis of Rubber. Yet the film makes no effort to render the strangeness of the situation more plausible, so the impression grows that something is out of key with the storyworld of Rubber. The film switches repeatedly back and forth between frame and embedded narrative (00:06:09; 00:13:56; 00:14:56; 00:17:55; 00:19:25; 00:24:52; 00:24:57; 00:26:32; 00:27:25; 00:28:28; 00:31:21; 00:32:26; 00:38:00; 00:39:19; 00:43:09; 00:52:01; 00:54:55; 00:58:29), and further alternations between diegesis and metadiegesis follow the same strategy – one sees the intradiegetic audience discussing some aspect of the metadiegetic film, they then raise their binoculars and begin watching again, and the VNI resumes the metadiegetic plot. This recurrent pattern could be interpreted as an internal ocularization: again and again the film (externally) visualizes the diegetic audience commenting events connected with the Tire, and it becomes obvious that their attention is focused on watching the movie. When the VNI subsequently switches back to the events of the embedded narrative, one could think that this metadiegesis represents the subjective view of (a person in) the audience. However, this interpretation is scarcely convincing, for the film-in-film makes extensive use of camera angles that could not possibly represent a view through binoculars – e. g. shots from inside sealed rooms (e. g. 00:28:25), or semi-subjective views of the Tire that follow its movements and would be impossible from the viewpoint of a static observer (e. g. 00:10:51). Moreover, the film dispenses throughout with subjectivizing stylistic devices like hand-held camera effects or the reduced image size that often signals internally ocularized sequences seen through binoculars.⁴ Finally, the intradiegetic figures can evidently hear all the dialogues and sound effect of the metadiegetic plot as if they were in a conventional cinema (e. g. 00:14:19), al-

[…] when the VNI shows […] what a particular character perceives (view from ‘inside’ the character)”.  On subjectivizing strategies in film cf. Kuhn (2011, 144).

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though what is happening around the Tire is at a considerable distance from them. This speaks strongly against the embedded plot being intended to represent the subjective viewpoint of one (or more) intradiegetic viewer. Again no explanation is given as to how the spatial and physical characteristics of the narrated world are to be understood: the ontological status within the world of events connected with the Tire remains, therefore, ambivalent. And this has a major impact on the whole illusion-building capacity of the narrative, whose logical inconsistencies force the recipient to reflect on issues concerning the construction principles of Rubber instead of focusing on events occurring on the histoire level of its storyworld. And these metafictional aspects become even more dominant when they enter the work as explicit elements of the plot: for, from the beginning of the movie, the intradiegetic audience questions the interpretation of events unfolding around the Tire. For example, when the Tire first mysteriously causes an object to explode, the plot returns to the level of the audience, who are engaged in trying to explain the origin of the supernatural ability they have just witnessed, making comments like “telepathic powers” (00:14:02) or “psycho-kinetic powers” (00:14:07). Interrupted by two girls who are evidently also trying to follow what is happening in the film-in-film, and who admonish the earlier speakers “Have you to comment everything aloud?” (00:14:19), they reply: “We are not commenting. We are just trying to understand!” (00:14:22). The intradiegetic audience’s grasp of the fictional world before them is evidently as deficient as that of the recipients of Rubber, whose position it accurately reflects, for the recipient of Dupieux’s film must inevitably also posit various explanations in the attempt to unravel the illogical plot (or plots) into a semblance of consistency. The already fragile logical structuring of narrative levels in Dupieux’s film is finally and permanently destabilized by a metaleptic step across ontological boundaries, when the sole remaining member of the intradiegetic audience leaves his appointed place and intervenes in the metadiegetic action around the Tire. He makes several suggestions about how its homicidal career could be stopped, and above all how the plot of the metadiegetic film could be enhanced: “Excuse me. I don’t want to bother you, but the way I look at it… The scene doesn’t make sense at all […] It’s totally confusing […] That’s why I took all the trouble to get here” (00:66:00). “Why you not just ice the bloody tire? You get one of your guys with a bloody flamethrower! You got to do something!” (00:66:30). The Sheriff thanks him, but continues with his attempt to lure the Tire into a trap. Here, then, the differentiated structuring of narrative levels begins entirely to dissolve. The intradiegetic viewer can enter the plot of a film he is watching, and interact and communicate with its characters as if this were normal and natural. The extradiegetic recipient watching Rubber may not be too dis-

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turbed by such an occurrence, because the ontological boundaries separating film-in-film and frame narrative have long since started to collapse. Far from being a perturbing departure from a strictly established prior logical structure, these events may be understood as final confirmation that conventional assumptions about the ontological structure of narrative levels in Rubber are inapplicable. In the storyworld of Rubber the events centered on the living tire seem to possess the status of both (diegetic) reality and (metadiegetic) fiction, for that world can be entered by a member of the intradiegetic audience who can then communicate with its characters. Yet, at the same time its fictional quality is evident in the fact that the Last Viewer is not afraid of the rampaging Tire and perceives the murderous plot as fictional entertainment. This final metaleptic step allows the conclusion that the recipient of Rubber has been intentionally deceived not only about the structuring, but also about the ontological status of the represented narrative levels. In conventional movies the ontological status of an embedded story will generally be subordinate to that of the frame story. As Kuhn (2011, 287) observes: In a feature film the diegetic level will normally coincide with the level of fiction it is representing in the fictional world; only in complex cases is further differentiation needed. If a further cinematic narrative is embedded into the plot of a movie, the histoire of the framing narrative can be distinguished from the histoire of the embedded intradiegetic fiction.

Rubber, however, is not in this sense a ‘normal’ case. Its fictional world gives the initial impression that the events unraveling around the Tire belong to a second order narrative; but the concluding scenes make clear that the histoire centered on the people watching the movie cannot be logically separated from what they had thought to be a fictional product, namely the murderous actions of a living everyday object: the two ontological levels finally collapse into one another. Like a Möbius strip, the narrative structure resists all attempts at univocal description: We can imagine this as being like a point moving along a Möbius strip […]. To an external observer […] the point seems at one moment on the inside, at another on the outside of the strip, although there is, of course, no inside and outside but a single continuous unit (Glanville 1988, 155).

It is, then, impossible to tell where in the narrative world of Rubber reality begins and fiction ends: the interpretation presented here leads to the paradoxical conclusion that, in Dupieux’s film, fiction can at the same time be reality and reality can be fiction.

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3.3 Deception The deception of the recipient in Rubber is closely connected on the one hand with defective communication of information by the VNI, and on the other with the lack of any plausible explanation of events on the level of histoire by, for example, the intradiegetic figures. As already observed, Rubber is full of tensions between the behavior of these figures and the presumed logical structuring of the film’s fictional world. The decisive point is that these tensions are not resolved in the course of the film, and yet the impression grows at the plot level that some figures – among them the Film Presenter and the Sheriff are guided by a knowledge of the fictional world that enables them to make sense of the absurd events and actions unfolding there. The present section on ‘deception’ will focus on the Film Presenter; the figure of the Sheriff falls rather under the heading of ‘narrative empuzzlement’. In the narrative world of Rubber the Film Presenter functions largely as a coordinator and manager: he shows the audience to their seats, distributes the binoculars, and supplies refreshments. His administrative function suggests, however, that he may know more than others about the happenings connected with the ‘screening’ and the murderous actions of the Tire. This impression is heightened by a central scene containing a specific narrative mediation. The Film Presenter is shown in a hotel room; a telephone rings (00:29:49); he picks it up with an irritated look, but when he realizes who is on the other end of the line his body language changes drastically. He stands bolt upright and speaks in deferential tones: “Yes, master! Very well, master! […] I understand perfectly. I’m gonna do it tomorrow morning without fail. First thing in the morning, you can count on me. Salutations, master!” (00:29:55). Significantly, the verbal narrative instance (VeNI) establishes no internal auricularization that might have revealed the information transmitted to the Film Presenter by telephone, nor does it give any indication as to the identity of the caller.⁵ The recipient can only gather from the Presenter’s answers and his body gestures that he has received in-

 The sequence can be understood as external auricularization, described by Kuhn (2011, 159) as follows: “[Typical here are for example] telephone calls in which one does not hear what a particular character is hearing, or when something is whispered inaudibly form one character to another. All these techniques are concerned with spoken […] information revealed to the character in question but not passed on to the extradiegetic addressee by the VNI (or a complementary VeNI). External auricularization covers any spoken communication between characters that is not passed on to the audience, who know, therefore, that something has been heard without knowing what it is.”

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structions from a hierarchical superior, and that these relate directly to the film he is showing.⁶ These elliptic sequences may serve as a reason for the recipient to question the trustworthiness of the narrative mediation in general, holding back as it does relevant information about events (and their connections) in the fictional world. Such omissions are a classical strategy for creating temporary suspense in crime movies (cf. Hickethier 2005, 11– 41), where the missing facts are, however, generally provided in the subsequent plot (cf. Kuhn 2011, 160). In Dupieux’s film there is no attempt to solve the mysteries arising from the narrative discourse. Instead, the film uses the recipient’s knowledge of such conventions to trigger expectations about the plot that actually lead nowhere, for the missing information is never given and the mysterious events remain permanently unexplained. Likewise, the role of the Film Presenter remains murky, as does the overall question whether the events of Rubber have any reason or purpose that might place them in a logical light. Other false leads at the micro-level of the narrative concern the absence of discursive markings, which – in combination with confusing editing of the visual material – leads to the recipient’s confusion as to whether the source for auditive elements lies inside or outside the narrated world. An example occurs shortly after the beginning of the film, when the VNI shows the Tire, awoken to life as if by a magic hand, rolling erratically through the desert (00:20:15), while the music of the chorus from Main Ingredient’s Just don’t want to be lonely (1974) can be heard in the background. The music fits the situation perfectly: a swaying melody and a solitary voice tired of being alone – so much so that one might conclude ‘mood music’⁷ was being used to symbolize the inner feelings of the Tire.⁸ However, after about a minute the camera surprisingly turns to a young woman at the wheel of an automobile, while the background music continues. Then the camera cuts to a mid shot of the Tire at the side of

 The interpretation that the telephone call is connected with the ‘screening’ of the embedded film is reinforced by the epidemic of deaths among the film audience on the following morning after they have eaten the (poisoned) turkey given them by the Film Presenter. A further detail is that during the phone call a (living) turkey appears in the hotel room. The relevant sequences – phone call, reaction of Film Presenter, turkey, poisoned audience – are edited in such a way as to suggest a causal relation between them; this remains, however, wholly unexplained.  Cf. Bullerjahn’s (2014, 83 – 86) differentiated analysis of film music: “Mood music conveys […] a static (or at most slightly changing) feeling, or imperceptible sensitivity, of the protagonist” (loc. cit. 84).  This interpretation is supported by the total absence of music up to that point in the film, its appearance in this context, especially with that particular song text, leading recipients to bring musical and visual information into a meaningful coherency.

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a highway, this time without music. Suddenly the woman’s automobile appears and, as it races past, one again hears the song, which grows fainter as the car passes into the distance (00:21:14). The camera then fades to the woman in the car, whose hand and head beat time with the song (00:21:21). It is now obvious that the sound, far from representing the inner feelings of the metadiegetic Tire, comes from an intradiegetic source blasting from the car radio. Again the narrative mediation has (purposely) led the recipient astray, for the sound and image do not belong together but have, in this specific sequence, to be interpreted as both spatially and temporally disjunct. A deception that is so rapidly resolved can at most be classified as a micro-red-herring; the point is rather that, as in the sequence with the Film Presenter, narrative mediation employs filmic conventions to lead the recipient up a blind alley. Built tightly into the plot, Rubber’s deceptions do not, as such, play a crucial role in the interpretation of the film’s fictional worlds. Nevertheless, they have a cumulatively perturbing effect, inasmuch as they not only convey the difficulty of establishing a coherent overall interpretation of the film, but also reveal the unreliability of a VNI that enhances interpretive difficulties by suggesting, and then undermining, filmic ellipses and conventions.

3.4 Narrative empuzzlement The narrative procedures of paradox and deception noted above contribute to the puzzling ambivalence of Dupieux’s fictional world. The events of Rubber defy logical reconstruction, leading to the impression that the plot consists of pieces of a jigsaw that do not fit together. And still further potentially perturbatory elements are established by what Schlickers and Toro describe in the Introduction as “[…] the realm of the fantastic with its inexplicable elements, its incompatibilities with physical reality that break into the order of the fictional world and raise questions about the semantic coherence of the text.” Surprisingly, this type of empuzzlement occurs not so much at the intradiegetic level of the audience as at that of the metadiegetic film they are watching. The world of the frame plot is, as noted above, so different from that of extra-filmic reality that fantastical elements can scarcely disturb it.⁹ The suspension of causality and spatial laws is apparently accepted by the intradiegetic audience as simple fact; nor is there at this level any indication of a conflict between di-

 Despite the ultimate difficulty of separating frame and embedded plots, the terminological distinction between them will be maintained here for ease of critical discourse.

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vergent concepts of reality. With the embedded narrative, however, the matter is different: the events around the Tire seem in many respects to harbor a more realistic model of the world than does the framing plot. The fantastic enters the film-in-film on the one hand in the form of the killer Tire, whose existence is initially questioned by almost everyone in the metadiegesis. The Tire’s second murder, for instance – that of a cleaner – is watched by one of the metadiegetic figures, a small boy, who tells his father about it: Son: I saw a live tire. Father: You got nothing better to do than come over here and start talk rubbish? Son: You don’t believe me. Father: Will you shut up! (00:34:10 – 00:34:38)

When the corpse is discovered, the boy is questioned by the investigators in the presence of his father, from whose response it is clear that the Tire’s behavior represents a break with the laws of his (i. e. the metadiegetic) world: “The tire story again? I’ve heard enough rubbish for the day, all right? Sorry, Lieutenant” (00:41:00 – 00:41:19). The father’s irritation in the face of fantastical – and from his point of view unrealistic – elements is echoed in his own behavior and that of other characters as the investigation proceeds, and it is frequently the figure of the Sheriff that provides the stumbling block. Thus, after some inconsequential questioning of the boy’s father focusing on the murdered cleaning woman’s having possibly had an affair, the Sheriff’s wristwatch rings (00:42:46), whereupon he abruptly breaks off the interrogation with the words “Ah! Very good. It’s been six hours […] The poison has had time to take effect. We can stop. You can go home, Mr. Hughes” (00:42:46 – 00:42: 56). Taken aback, the father, however, remains rooted to the spot, reduced to calling after the police officer: “I don’t understand!” (00:43:02). A further scene toward the middle of the film takes the fantastic contradiction a major step further, by suggesting – or in fact revealing – to the characters of the metadiegesis that they exist only in a fictional world. The Sheriff confronts his colleagues with the fact that their actions have no consequences on (or in) their world, for the simple reason that they are not ‘real’: Sheriff: OK. You can relax. It‘s over, we’re stopping now. […] Thanks and congratulations to all. You can all go home to your families now. Officers: Are out of your mind? Why should we go home? (00:43:52– 00:44:16)

To convince them that the laws of reality are invalid, the Sheriff persuades one of the officers to shoot him. The men are, naturally, perplexed when they see that the bullet has no effect: the Sheriff survives in the best of health: “You see… I

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don’t feel anything, no pain whatsoever. It’s not real! You understand? Everything is fake. […] This situation is not real” (00:45:32). That is, however, not the end of the situation, for just at that moment the Film Presenter enters and whispers in the Sheriff’s ear that a member of the audience has survived and is still watching them. Thereupon the Sheriff immediately revokes his previous statement and resumes his investigations, while the other officers stand transfixed and uncomprehending (00:47:00). Shortly afterward the VNI shows the Tire getting up again to go on with its killing. If the logic of separation between diegetic and metadiegetic levels were systematically maintained, the intrusion of the fantastic into the embedded plot would not necessarily possess any perturbatory potential. The metadiegetic level would have to be interpreted as representing an intrafictional film watched by an intradiegetic audience. This fictional film could employ any number of fantastic elements that would have no effect on the narrative illusion at all, because they would represent an artificial product embedded in its own right within the frame narrative, and as such not to be mistaken for diegetic reality. So long as there are no ontological breaks or vacillations between narrative levels, no semantic inconsistencies need arise. In Rubber, however, no clear differentiation of narrative levels is accomplished, nor are distinct ontological states (e. g. levels of fiction vs. levels of reality) established. In addition to the already noted metaleptic transgressions and other inconsistencies, coherency is radically frustrated by the fact that metadiegetic events involving the Tire are set in a causal relationship with the existence of the diegetic audience. For this is what the Sheriff’s remarks to the boy’s father and to his fellow officers imply. He assumes that the elimination of the intradiegetic audience immediately activates a different mode of reality in the metadiegesis. Convinced that every member of the watching audience has already been killed by the poisoned turkey, the Sheriff sheds his character of law enforcer, telling other metadiegetic characters that there are no murders to be solved because the killings were staged, and thanking the surprised officers for their work, although none of the ‘crimes’ have been cleared up. He explains to them that they are wearing costumes, not real police uniforms, and finally sends his astonished colleagues home as if he were a director closing the film set (00:46:13). However, because one member of the audience has survived, the Sheriff seems to feel the need to take up his role as policeman again and returns to acting as if none of his explanations had had any meaning. No logical explanation is offered later, either, as to how and why the existence of the diegetic audience should exercise a causal influence on metadiegetic reality. What that reality would look like, and what rules it would follow if the audience had been entirely annihilated, is consequently as unanswerable as

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the question whether the fantastical elements of the embedded narrative are not in fact the essential laws and rules of the metadiegesis – temporarily concealed behind the staged ‘effects’ of realism. In this way the perturbatory potential of the film is enriched by the strategies of narrative empuzzlement mentioned above: not only do different modes of reality appear to be simultaneously at work in the metadiegesis, but the realm of the fantastic (murders committed by a living Tire) is evidently connected to the existence of an entity (the diegetic audience) which one would assume to be located on a different ontological level, and as such unable to interfere with the rules of reality at work in the metadiegesis. How these levels are compatible is never explained. Ultimately Rubber remains rationally and logically incomprehensible.

4 Perturbatory elements in Rubber in light of contextual knowledge It has become clear that Rubber’s flouting of the doxa – or, to put it in a more strictly cognitive perspective, its lack of qualities supporting the construction of a coherent fictional world – could be deeply perturbing. A formal analysis of narrative features of the sort undertaken in the previous section yields insights into the general perturbatory potential of a narrative, but whether or not a narrative actually releases such a potential can only be determined through investigation of its reception in light of contextual information, which may be used to naturalize the film’s confusing elements. It is important in this respect to start from a recipient who has a certain level of knowledge of the history, techniques, and conventional narrative patterns of films.¹⁰ In doing so I will follow the methodological approach of Erving Goffman’s frame theory, which has become an integral part of cognitively based narratology.¹¹ ‘Frames’ in this sense are cognitive schemes enabling the appropriate functioning of our perceptions, understanding, emotions, and behavior (cf. Goffman 1974, 24), both in real life and in our reception and use of media. Thus every situation in which a film is viewed is subject in various respects to ‘frame’ knowl-

 The empirical evaluation of interviews would be an appropriate way to determine de facto levels of perturbation among filmgoers. In the absence of any such data, however, I will take whatever is available in the way of reviews. These will provide at least some relevant examples of the reception of Dupieux’s film.  On modeling frame theory for the analysis of media products cf. Werner Wolf (2006, 1– 42) and David Herman (2009).

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edge. The audiovisual information it imparts will be automatically aligned with the recipient’s existing knowledge of filmic conventions (Mikos 2001, 245 – 247), and the incidence of only a few iconic symbols – e. g. horses, revolvers, cowboy hats – will convey the genre of the film and arouse corresponding expectations (cf. Deterding 2013). Not that genre frames are firmly fixed: they can be modified in and by the film itself. A recipient might at first classify a film as a western, but then – if alien creatures and futuristic settings begin to appear – reassess it as a science-fiction western. In other words the process of alignment of the frame with existing knowledge is continuous: “While the narrative environment changes and progresses, new cues are provided and hypotheses are adjusted, confirmed, or denied” (Eichner 2014, 76). It is important to stress here that the recipient’s mental model of the storyworld derives primarily from the specific information provided by the individual narrative he/she is watching. The rule system at work in a storyworld is, then, initially determined by its specific narrative representation, and the adjustment of this information during the course of the movie builds, as an ongoing process of negotiation, on the recipient’s preexistent knowledge, including aspects of narrative genres and conventions. As far as Rubber is concerned, the question of genre is best discussed on the basis of the film’s reviews in various countries where it has been screened. The online publication indieWire describes it as “[…] one of the more bizarre experiments with genre in quite some time” (Kohn 2011). Screen Anarchy judges the film to be “intellectual wankery of the highest order in the sheepskin of a Bfilm of the lowest order” (Halfyard 2010), while Huffington Post writes that Quentin Dupieux “[…] succeeds in creating an entertaining, sometimes even tense horror film with the very same footage he lightly mocks. The result is an uber-cerebral spoof that is at once silly and smart, populist like a mildly trashy B-movie yet highbrow like absurdist theater” (Zaman 2010). Placing Dupieux’s film in a specific genre is evidently difficult, and all three reviews agree that it is a hybrid. For two of them its narrative conventions make it a cross between a B-movie horror film and a meta-referential art film, while one review suggests it could also be seen as a parody.¹² None of these assessments is surprising; for Rubber, as we have seen, offers no coherent plot and can, for that reason alone, hardly be included within the bounds of mainstream narrative cinema Nevertheless, its iconography is reminiscent of established genres, the killer Tire awakening memories of other horror

 Websites like Rotten Tomatoes and Imdb classify the film as drama, horror, and comedy.

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films with murderous items of daily hardware.¹³ The extensive metafictional passages might well qualify as film-philosophical discussions; and, finally, the film exhibits its illogicality and lack of action so exuberantly that the recipient is in the end forced to laugh at its Dadaistic qualities. Rubber’s many ambivalences make definite allocation to any specific genre impossible; nevertheless, empirical investigation and questioning of recipients might shed further light on this issue.¹⁴ In this context, cognitive narratology has established that recipients tend to naturalize any information given by a narrative that induces a break with the narrative illusion. By making use of cognitively stored knowledge structures (including e. g. narrative conventions or specific media genres), contradictions within a storyworld will be neutralized by attributing meaningful functions to such elements: I wish to stress that recipients will generally try to exhaust every possible alternative explanation before attempting to imagine […] uncomfortably paradoxical […] or even just comparatively […] inaccessible storyworlds […]. Recipients will look for alternative external explanations related to authorial intentions or representational conventions before trying to imagine contradictory or otherwise problematic storyworlds based on a rigid insistence on internal explanations (Thon 2015, 27).

Two examples will indicate how paradoxical elements in Rubber might be contextualized in this way by the recipient’s application of genre frames related to comedy and/or horror films. However abstract and all-embracing comedy as a genre may seem, a distinctive feature of comedic narratives is the breaking of norms and rules: “What comedy primarily expresses is contradiction. The comedic has to do with inversion and mistake – with what defies meaningful alignment” (Gotto 2013, 67). Therefore, fictional worlds mapped out by comedic narratives are in no way restricted to mirroring the physical laws of extramedial reality, nor to laying out a coherent fictional world. On the contrary, contradictory elements are frequently used for comedic effect. In this way recipients aware of the comic purposes of a comedy movie may be able to make sense of the narrative paradoxes arising in Rubber. While metalepses are no rarity in this genre (Sarkosh 2011), viewers may interpret

 E.g. John Carpenter’s Christine (1983), or The Car by Elliot Silverstein (1977), which features an automobile possessed by supernatural powers.  An interesting extension of this question, which cannot be further pursued here, concerns the hybridity of genre: As many of the films treated in this volume seem not to fit into classical form of genre-definitions, hybridity itself might be taken into account as another general characteristic of perturbing narratives.

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this as an intentional break with cinematic convention in order to mock its rules and norms more effectively, and may consequently not be that interested in integrating these elements into a mental model of a strictly logical, ‘realistic’ storyworld: The comedian disrupts not just the world we see in the movie […] but the expectations of a conventional movie itself; above all, the unspoken presumptions that a movie’s story will flow forward seamlessly as self-contained fiction that we seem to watch unacknowledged, as if it were real action spied through a peephole (Gotto 2013, 79).

Something similar holds if the genre-frame of a horror movie is applied to the interpretation of the narrative empuzzlement in Rubber. The realm of the fantastic is commonplace in the horror genre, where a paradoxical blending of supernatural elements with realistic storyworld settings is a frequent technique for enhancing a film’s threatening impact: “Horror is a genre of the fantastic in whose fictional worlds, which largely resemble our own, the impossible becomes possible and real, and where human beings who are also like us react with dread to the fragility of their environment” (Bauman 1989, 109).¹⁵ This is in every respect reflected in Rubber, where the existence of a murderous automobile tire in an otherwise ‘realistic’ world can be made plausible by calling on genre-based knowledge, including the assumption that such supernatural events should not be called in question, but considered as an integral part of the horror movie’s storytelling conventions. The effect of the (potentially) perturbatory structures in Rubber elaborated above will, in fact, likely be alleviated, because a recipient familiar with different genre frames may well draw on existing knowledge contexts to come to terms with the paradoxical fictional worlds of the movie. Nevertheless, this does not altogether deprive Rubber of perturbatory potential. In the process of reception the viewer considers many different hypotheses about the possible development of a film and how its various events can be coherently related. This process seems even more relevant to a genre-hybrid like Rubber: a classical horror film, whose plot elicits a powerful sense of bafflement and shock, yet is at the same time both comedic and parodic and, on top of all that, shot through with scurrilously metafictional passages. Such a colorful mix will predictably cause its recipient to try out different, even contradictory genre frames in a trial-and-error attempt to come to terms with the refractory patterns of the narrative. Looking more closely, one could pinpoint as genuinely perturbatory those passages of the film in which confusion reaches the point that  Bauman’s definition holds above all for the modern horror film (cf. Moldenhauer 2013, 197– 203).

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the recipient’s interpretive efforts change direction – the point, in other words, where prior hypotheses finally prove inadequate. This can, in fact, induce temporary confusion and disconcertion, but will also automatically stimulate further attempts to make sense of the film: the failed interpretive frame will be exchanged for a new one. Only very rarely will a recipient be forced to admit defeat and give up the search for an appropriate genre. When that happens, when the disparate hypothetical genres can no longer be blended into any sort of adequate interpretive solution, the perturbatory impact of the film will be fully realized.¹⁶ Hence, at the level of empirical reception, Rubber’s perturbing qualities will likely only be temporary and selective. Moreover, their impact will depend a lot on the individual viewer’s knowledge of the medium. The more familiar a recipient is with the diverse forms of filmic narrative, the easier it will be to find alternative explanatory modes and models with which to (re)frame its confusing structures and give them meaning.

5 Conclusion I have argued that the combination of various illusion-breaking techniques gives Rubber considerable perturbatory potential, making it virtually impossible to reconstruct a coherent fictional world. Concretely, however, this potential will only be realized in a reduced way, due to the availability of a range of genre models with which to explain the film’s confusing aspects. It must be emphasized that this phenomenon applies not only to Rubber, but to the reception of perturbatory narratives in general. Film viewers will generally be able to naturalize potentially perturbing elements in this way by referring to their wider knowledge. De facto perturbation will accordingly depend to a great extent on the level of that knowledge, and will often be only brief and confined to a specific passage of the narrative in question.¹⁷ Considering what has been said, I would again emphasize the usefulness of distinguishing analytically between the theoretically perturbing potential of a narrative and its actual impact

 Bill Goodykoontz’s review in Arizona Republic (2013) sees Dupieux’s film as what might be called ‘perturbatory entertainment’: “Maybe ‘Rubber’ is an homage, maybe it’s a statement on horror films and their audiences, maybe it’s a total goof. It’s probably all of these things; ultimately it’s not a strong-enough film to decide. But above all, if you’re in proper frame of mind – loopy – it’s an over-the-top, brain-teasing good time.”  Nor must the explanations sought by the viewer necessarily relate exclusively to genre: they may just as well be based on hypotheses about the director or author and their intentions – e. g. on an interpretation of contradictory elements as metaphor.

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in the process of reception. Formal textual analysis constitutes an indispensable basis for establishing potentially perturbing narrative structures, but their actual effect can best be determined through a cognitively oriented narratological approach combined with genre theory. The expansion of Schlickers and Toro’s model to embrace empirical reception research would, then, be both appropriate and desirable, for at the end of the day the preliminary hypotheses formulated here with respect to Rubber call for the verification and refinement of experimental investigation.

Filmography Rubber. Directed by Quentin Dupieux. 2010. Ahrensfelde, Germany. Capelight Pictures, DVD.

Bibliography Bullerjahn, Claudia. 2014. Grundlagen und Wirkung der Filmmusik. Augsburg: Wissner. Deterding, Sebastian. 2013. “Mediennutzungsituation als Rahmungen. Ein Theorieangebot.” In Theorieanpassungen in der digitalen Medienwelt, edited by Olaf Jandura, Andreas Fahr and Hans-Bernd Brosius, 47 – 70. Baden-Baden: Nomos. Doležel, Lubomir. 1995. “Fictional Worlds. Density, Gaps and Inference.” Style 29/2:201 – 213. Eichner, Susanne. 2014. Agency and Media Reception. Experiencing Video Games, Film and Television. Berlin and Heidelberg: Springer VS. Glanville, Ranulph. 1988. Objekte. Berlin: Verve. Goffman, Erving. 1974. Frame Analysis. An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Goodykoontz, Bill. 2011. “Rubber.” Azcentral.com, 4 May. Accessed 16 June 2017. http://ar chive.azcentral.com/thingstodo/movies/articles/2011/05/04/20110504rubber-movie-re view-goodykoontz.html#ixzz4IdLuC1rb. Gotto, Lisa. 2013. “Komödie.” In Filmwissenschaftliche Genreanalyse. Eine Einführung, edited by Markus Kuhn, Irina Scheidgen and Nicola Valeska Weber, 67 – 85. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Halfyard, Kurt. 2010. “Rubber Review.” Screenanarchy, 10 July. Accessed 16 June 2017. http:// screenanarchy.com/2010/07/fantasia-2010-rubber-review-1.html. Herman, David. 2002. Story logic. Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press (Frontiers of narrative). Herman, David. 2009. Basic Elements of Narrative. Chichester and Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. Herman, David. 2010. “Storyworld.” In Routledge encyclopedia of narrative theory, edited by David Herman, Manfred Jahn and Marie-Laure Ryan, 569 – 570. London and New York: Routledge. Hickethier, Knut. 2005. “Einleitung.” In Filmgenres. Kriminalfilm, edited by Knut Hickethier, 11 – 41. Stuttgart: Reclam.

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Kohn, Eric. 2010. “Review. Bad Ideas in Close Up. Quentin Dupieux’s “Rubber.” Indiewire, 28 March. Accessed 16 June 2017. http://www.indiewire.com/2011/03/review-bad-ideas-inclose-up-quentin-dupieuxs-rubber-243184/. Kuhn, Markus. 2007. “Narrative Instanzen im Medium Film. Das Spiel mit Ebenen und Erzählern in Pedro Almodóvars La mala educación.” In Mediale Ordnungen. Erzählen, Archivieren, Beschreiben, edited by Corinna Müller and Irina Scheidgen, 56 – 76. Marburg: Schüren. Kuhn, Markus. 2011. Filmnarratologie. Ein erzähltheoretisches Analysemodell. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Mikos, Lothar. 2001. Fern-Sehen. Bausteine zu einer Rezeptionsästhetik des Fernsehens. Berlin: Vistas. Moldenhauer, Benjamin. “Horrorfilm.” 2013. In Filmwissenschaftliche Genreanalyse. Eine Einführung, edited by Markus Kuhn, Irina Scheidgen and Nicola Valeska Weber, 193 – 209. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 1991. “Possible Worlds and Accessibility Relations: A Semantic Typology of Fiction.” Poetics Today 12/3:533 – 576. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2014. “Story/Worlds/Media. Tuning the Instruments of a Media-Conscious Narratology.” In Storyworlds across Media. Toward a media-conscious Narratology, edited by Marie-Laure Ryan and Jan-Noël Thon, 25 – 50. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Sarkosh, Keyvan. 2011. “Metalepsis in Popular Comedy Film.” In Metalepsis in Popular Culture, edited by Karin Kukkonen and Sonja Klimek,171 – 195. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Thon, Jan-Noël. 2015. “Converging Worlds. From Transmedial Storyworlds to Transmedial Universes.” Storyworlds. A Journal of Narrative Studies 7/2:21 – 53. Thon, Jan-Noël. 2016. Transmedial Narratology and Contemporary Media Culture. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Wolf, Werner. 1993. Ästhetische Illusion und Illusionsdurchbrechung in der Erzählkunst. Berlin: De Gruyter. Wolf, Werner. 2006. “Introduction: Frames, Framings and Framing Borders in Literature and other Media.” In Framing Borders in Literature and Other Media, edited by Werner Wolf and Walter Bernhart, 1 – 42. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Zaman, Fariah. 2010. “2010 Fantastic Fest #2: Good Movies, Stupid Plots.” Huffingtonpost.com, 12 October. Accessed 16 June 2017. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ farihah-zaman/2010-fantastic-fest-2-goo_b_759654.html.

Vera Toro

“I am a complex being”: Filmic Puzzles in Julio Medem’s Vacas and Tierra With their intense symbolism, Julio Medem’s films are both oneiric (Strigl 2007) and puzzling. Like the mysteriously split personality of Ángel in Tierra, who is in his own words a “complex being”, their realities are ultimately indefinable. Medem himself says of his work: I usually like to create situations which can incorporate various worlds at the same time. I often like to use a very real, very immediate and recognizable photography, adjusting myself to the rules of reality as it is known and shared by all of us. But I am also interested in contrasting this reality with another one, with another space which looks like this reality but which is not, which has not yet been made and which is somehow connected to it; and sometimes I want to narrate the trajectory from one world to the other (Santaolalla 1999, 313).

1 Forms of empuzzlement Before turning to Vacas and Tierra as examples of the transmedial principle of perturbatory narration (Schlickers 2012, 2015), I will first examine more closely the narrative strategy of empuzzlement. Like deception and paradox, this is an innovative concept (cf. the Introduction) that denotes a certain type of narrative deviation from the doxa of a received, clearly defined, and limited world. In the case of empuzzlement, it is the requirement of non-ambiguity that is more or less flagrantly breached. A puzzle is in its basic sense a test of quick thinking and ingenuity, “a form of question and answer” (Jolles 1974, 126) that may be either solvable ‒ or not. But the answer is never offered on a plate: it is cleverly circumscribed, and may be further hidden beneath coded or misleading clues. Empuzzlement as a literary or filmic narrative technique confronts the recipient with the task of decoding and interpreting those clues.¹ In both media, solvable as well as unsolvable

 Jolles (1930 [1974], 134) notes that “the guesser has to puzzle the riddle out; but this must first be ‘empuzzled’. Empuzzlement, then, is the activity of the one who sets the riddle or puzzle.” The “umbrella term” ‘narrative mazes’ proposed by Julia Eckel and Bernd Leiendecker for narratives with misleading and/or disorienting potential has similar implications, given that the https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110566574-004

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puzzles arise through the retention of key information and/or the production of ambiguity. In film this generally occurs on the level of histoire; empuzzlement on the level of discours would be difficult to determine, at least as far as the visual narrative instance (VNI) is concerned. For while the events of a filmic narrative ‒ i. e. what the viewer sees ‒ and/or the level of reality on which these take place may be at least temporarily ambivalent, the how of the film (the énonciation), according to Pinkas (2010, 52), is invariably concrete: camera angle, frame and shot are per se determinate. The narrative perspective, on the other hand (who is focalizing/ocularizing/auricularizing) may well be deceptive, indeterminate, or ambiguous ‒ as in Julio Medem’s Vacas (cf. below), where the viewer is frequently confronted with shots that seem to come from a subjective camera perspective, although the subject itself remains indefinable. And this parameter always also implies aspects of what is being narrated (the enoncé, cf. n. 10), for these are two sides of the same coin ‒ it is, after all, not without reason that the perspective of what appears on screen is so obscured. The same holds for the sound-track, whose narrative properties of discours and histoire, on analogy with the visual medium (cf. Kuhn 2011, 94), not only govern the orientation of the recipient but can also serve as a counter or empuzzlement to the visual (cf. Brössel 2014, 64).² Especially the dissociation of sound and image can be important in this respect. For the doxa of everyday life comprises a causal relation between what we see and what we hear, embodied in an intermodal integration of relevant sense data. Accordingly, dissonance between these data in film undermines our perceptive system, causing uncertainty and insecurity (cf. Flückiger 2002, 400). The ensuing logical conflict can lead to the empuzzlement of aspects of the enoncé which must then be resolved by appropriate cognitive strategies. The transmedial narrative strategy of empuzzlement comprises both ambiguity and indeterminacy. The two forms can be distinguished in terms of the questions they put to the recipient. Indeterminacy asks: What is happening here? What is the relation between this and that fact, event, character, or narrative reality? Ambiguity, on the other hand, raises half-open questions: Which of these narrative versions holds good? Rimmon (1977, 19) illustrates the distinction with typical examples from gestalt theory: “In terms of drawing, while ambiguity is a

metaphor of the maze can readily encompass other more closely defined concepts (cf. Eckel and Leiendecker 2012, 16).  In film, non-linguistic sound and music depend on the VNI for the evocation of meaning (cf. Flückiger 2002). At the same time their sign systems can only be interpreted within a complex network of musical, music-cultural, film-music and filmic codes. Here, however, is not the place for further discussion of musical semiotics.

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rabbit-or-duck figure, indeterminacy approaches the status of an inkblot used for Rorschach tests”. Accordingly, narrative ambiguity is understood here in the strict sense of a “conjunction of exclusive disjuncts”; or as Rimmon goes on to say (1977, 10): “When the two hypotheses are mutually exclusive, and yet each is equally coherent, equally consistent, equally plenary and convincing, so that we cannot choose between them, we are confronted with narrative ambiguity.” Indeterminacy, on the other hand, is concerned with a lack of key information that prevents gestalt closure; as such it is radically open. Narrative puzzles, whether the result of ambiguity or indeterminacy, can be solvable or unsolvable; the former are essentially temporary, the latter constitute puzzles that remain unsolved within the compass of the (literary or filmic) narrative. The two forms can, of course, combine and inform different aspects of the enoncé. ³

Fig. 1: Forms of narrative empuzzlement

The diagram (Fig. 1) indicates not only the complexity of various empuzzlement strategies in fictional narrative but also their capacity for combination with the other two key procedures of perturbatory narration: deception and paradox. Thus temporary empuzzlements can share the technique of plot twist and/or final twist with deception, and the narrative fantastic arises not infrequently from the paradoxical structuring of either the enoncé or the énonciation.

2 Empuzzlement of narrative realities Empuzzlement can affect various aspects of the enoncé: the temporal or causal sequence of events may be confusing or suggest different, equally probable inter-

 Both ambiguity and indeterminacy, as well as strategies of deception and unreliable narration, are based on the formal potential of omissions and gaps. Dablé (2012) provides a convincing typology of such phenomena that develops and critically refines concepts deriving from Ingarden and Iser, as well as from numerous film and television scholars.

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pretations⁴ (as in forking-path narratives),⁵ or the entire system of narrative realities may be ambiguous, inasmuch as it is unclear whether the narrated world is ‘objective’ reality, dream, death-fantasy, memory, or imagination. In film, the peculiar ability of the medium to depict facets of reality as mental, subjective, or objective makes this particularly relevant: While literary works generally allow considerable space to the thoughts and feelings of their characters, […] film can only do this by means of external factors such as facial expression, speech, and action. […] What goes on in people’s minds can, of course, be presented visually, although its reality status may remain quite indeterminate: film need not indicate whether a scene is real [in terms of its fictional world V.T.] or a purely subjective projection of memories, dreams, fantasies, hallucinations, or delusions (Pinkas 2010, 52– 53).

The various orders of reality of which Pinkas speaks may be nested one inside the other (vertical or hierarchical structuring) or juxtaposed (horizontal or non-hierarchical structuring) (cf. Kuhn: 2011, 151, as well as Orth’s critique: 2013, 124). Another common technique is ambiguous focalization, where the question is whose point of view is being shown (cf. Orth: 2009). Orth’s (2013) distinction between hierarchical and non-hierarchical plurality in the narrative realities of literary and filmic works can be fruitfully applied to the concept of empuzzlement. Hierarchical plurality is a feature of texts that “either explicitly or by indication present […] one level of narrative reality as real” (Orth 2013, 123), which suggests some affinity with the concept of narrative deception,⁶ a form of perturbation (also) based on a revised reading of elements initially taken for ‘real’. While Orth is interested in the mutual relations between narrative realities, the concept of empuzzlement focuses attention on their staging techniques ‒ e. g. on the interplay of hints and clues (or their absence) up to the moment of eventual resolution. Non-hierarchical plurality, on the other hand ‒ where one narrative world is not more real than another ‒ can according to Orth (2013, 197) entail the ‘splitting’, ‘embedding’, or ‘ambivalence’ of narrative realities; this last in cases where “the establishing of an actual narrative reality is prevent-

 Some genres have their own typical form of empuzzlement: e. g. the ‘whodunit’ structure of crime fiction or thrillers, with its tension-stimulating gaps or gradual release of information until the puzzle is finally resolved. Here ambiguity and indeterminacy are as a rule only temporary.  Cf. Schmöller’s detailed study (2012, 15).  Orth (2013, 160) uses the concept of deception for a sub-category in which one character deceives another about reality. Here, however, the term refers to a strategy on the level of the implicit author or director.

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ed by […] the presentation of a number of variants equally open to analysis” (Orth 2013, 215). In such “conjunctions of exclusive disjuncts” the question of validity necessarily remains open; in the terminology outlined above they are, then, cases of permanent ambiguity. Conversely, Orth’s ‘ambivalence’ entails polyvalence with respect to the type of plurality of narrative reality in cases, for example, where it is not even certain whether (or what sort of) ambivalence applies (Orth 2013, 257, cf. also 246, n. 202) ‒ a phenomenon which coincides with the category of ‘empuzzlement by indeterminacy’ proposed above.

3 The fantastic as a specific form of empuzzlement The central role of the fantastic as a strategy of narrative empuzzlement has to do with its implicit formulation of the unsolvable question as to how this or that element or aspect is possible. Articulated via characters and/or narrator, the cognitive problem of the recipient implicit in this question becomes more or less clearly the de facto theme of the narrative. Following Rottensteiner (1987, 12), who sees the fantastic as rooted in “ontological doubt”, this mode will be treated here as a special form of narrative empuzzlement; and with Scheffel (2006, 11) it will be viewed as a “specific narrative structure” independent of epoch or culture. This extends the possibility of its investigation to texts in which it is no longer a central feature, like the two films considered below, or to genres and hybrids not per se typical for its occurrence. Furthermore, following Antonsen (2007; cf. also 2009, 131), the narrative fantastic will be modeled not as an instance of ambiguity ‒ either between two incompatible systems of reality or between two suggested patterns of explanation for a supernatural event in Todorov’s sense ‒ but as rooted in omission: i. e. in what Dablé (2012, 111) calls a significant lack of information. It is this that underlies what Antonsen sees as the impossibility of the narrative element in question, a radically poetological impossibility inasmuch as the very premises of the fantastic bar it from explanation.⁷ Lying beyond the narrative order of logic and reality,

 Within the fiction, narrative reality, too, is based on extratextual empirical reality. Where this is not the case, the narrative is not so much fantastic as make-believe. How its characters and/or narrator react to the impossible is secondary. Implicitly, nevertheless, this is always an inherent issue of the narrative.

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the impossible is what it is because of the gap in its own explicability⁸ ‒ what Antonsen (2009, 133) calls “the basic event […] that the text cannot tell […] within the available poetological perspective”. Rooted in an ontological gap, its intrafictional origins necessarily remain enigmatic and defy consistent explanation. Conversely, the fantastic can be fruitfully understood as a way of questioning the nature and/or status of a particular narrative reality. One and the same narrative may involve several different modes, including the fantastic; but the fantastic need not pervade the entire text or embrace all its narrative levels; these may feature a number of different perturbatory procedures. One can, then, still classify a filmic narration as fantastic even if a final plot twist reverses such an ascription. In Pedro Almodóvar’s Volver, for instance, the protagonist’s dead mother suddenly reappears as a ghost, and it only transpires later that she has been in hiding for years. Or again, the fantastic may be only one pole of an ambiguity, as in the short story “Chac Mool” by the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes (1954), whose open ending can be understood either (a) as the coming to life of a pre-Columbian stone figure (hence the title), or (b) as a harmless encounter with a quirky neighbor. Nor is the fantastic the only strategy available for naturalizing the impossible. For Todorov, the fantastic was characterized by a vacillation between the rational and the supra-rational, but this is not a mandatory feature. One need only think of the paradoxical spatiotemporal dimensions of Isaac Ezban’s El Incidente (2014)⁹, which closely echo the imaginaries of Julio Cortázar and Jorge Luis Borges. Pinkas (2010, 2) points out that the narrative fantastic, in fact, generally employs a range of discursive procedures to fuel doubts about the naturalization of the impossible: these include (in implicit combination with narrative deception)¹⁰ “unreliable narrative instances, multiple perspectives, breaking through and/or entirely revoking spatiotemporal continuity, and the nesting of narrative levels”. In light of these various considerations, and in harmony with Antonsen, the fantastic can, therefore, be defined in a minimal sense as the narrative staging of an impossible element as intrafictional reality. As such it can be legitimately assumed into the wider category of empuzzlement, and at the same time distinguished from other forms of that strategy, whether ambiguity or indeterminacy, whether resolvable or irresolvable. The following sections illustrate both temporary and permanent empuzzlement processes rooted in a variety of visual and  Antonsen (2009, 132) speaks of a “gap in meaning […] that remains open and hence undermines the coherency of the text”.  Cf. Schlickers’ essay in this volume.  Cf. also Lang (2014) on the relation between unreliable narration and the fantastic.

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auditory dissonances, as well as in the narrative fantastic, in two early films by the Basque director Julio Medem (bn. 1958, San Sebastián).

4. Vacas (Cows, 1992) Set in a Basque village in the period between the third Carlist War (1872– 1876) and the Spanish Civil War (1936 – 1939), Julio Medem’s first feature film, Vacas, tells the entangled story of two rival families across three generations. That several (but not all) characters through these generations are played by the same actors¹¹ is, despite the broadly chronological plot, very confusing. It has possible precedents in Carlos Saura’s La prima Angélica (Cousin Angelica, 1974), which also uses double-role casting and plays on two time levels (Civil War and late Francoism), and Elisa, vida mía (Elisa, My Life, Saura, 1977). Medem’s films frequently turn on the topic of identity, and he often uses not only the same actors but also the same name for different characters, suggesting a mysterious lifecycle connection between them. Central to the considerations of this essay is the final scene from Vacas. The adult Peru, returned from the USA as a war photographer, re-encounters his first love, Cristina. Together they are caught in an exchange of fire between Carlist (Francoist) and Republican forces. Peru falls into the hands of the Carlists and is sentenced to execution. Among the Carlists he recognizes his uncle Juan, a former neighbor and his father’s rival; Juan seeks half-heartedly to save him from the firing squad, but the command is given and the prisoners fall. Peru, however, then stands up and leaves. Shortly before this, he had found Cristina in a thicket, where she had for unexplained reasons (exhaustion, a wound?) collapsed, and sought to determine whether she was still breathing. From the length of the scene and the way she lies it is not clear whether she is alive or dead. The question that then arises is whether the scene after the execution, which has Cristina and Peru riding off on horseback toward the French frontier, is (in terms of the fiction) real, or a fantasy of one or both characters in the moment of death. The scene contains the following dreamlike dialogue: Peru: Cristina, I’d give my life for you. Cristina: How wonderful! There’s some food on this horse, and I’m so hungry… Peru?

 Carmelo Gómez stars in La ardilla roja (The Red Squirrel) and Tierra as well as in Vacas, where he plays characters from three different generations. Emma Suárez plays main roles in all three films. In La ardilla roja she plays a woman who pretends to have forgotten her own identity and invents a new one.

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Peru: What? Cristina: Hold me tighter. Now whisper in my ear… Peru: I love you more than anything in the world. Cristina: I’ve waited for you, to love you for ever. Peru: I’ll never let you go. Cristina: That’s very important. Peru: It’s incredibly important! Cristina: We’ll soon be there (01:29:40 – 01:30:42).

The question is whether to believe the sound from the ‘off’ of the horses hoofs galloping into the distance, or the auditory deixis from the ‘on’ of the lovers’ voices, whose changing echo timbres¹² seem to follow the slow panning, unevenly tilting images of a wobbly, subjectivizing, hand-held-camera into a hollow tree trunk. The two sets of signs, from ‘on’ and ‘off’, suggest two different readings. Theoretically, the decision could go either way, for as Flückiger (2002, 395 – 396) observes: “Either the aural or the visual signal is more realistic, and as such is selected as the line of reference for the other, distorted code; or both codes are taken to be distorted.” The matter is further complicated by the gradual separation of the voices from their visible diegetic source: before the viewer’s eyes they become acousmatic.¹³ And the final sentence, “We’ll soon be there”, could refer either to the French border or to the frontier between life and death, the ‘journey into the underworld’ that recurs as a filmic motif in Vacas. Together with some significant gaps in earlier scenes, these contradictions between aural and visual signs suggest a permanent, enigmatic indeterminacy in the final stages of the story. In fact the ending of Vacas offers three different interpretations, each enacting different filmic realities: a. Emphasis on visual information: Peru and Cristina have survived and are riding off to France. They will “soon be there”. The tree trunk is insignificant.

 Echo effects have been used since the 1940s like voices resonating in the head to indicate a subjective viewpoint (Flückiger 2002, 399). In Vacas the question is: whose head? or is it a head at all? Used here, the technique symbolically questions the spatiotemporal logic of the entire story.  ‘Acousmatic’ is a concept first applied to contemporary electro-acoustic music created in a studio and used in concert, where its source is no longer visible. In that sense radio, telephone and sound recorders are acousmatic. The composer Pierre Schaeffer (1966, 91– 98), an initiator of musique concrète, worked with acousmatic sound and wrote on the subject from historical and reception-theory perspectives. Michel Chion (1999), a pupil of Schaeffer’s, transferred the concept to film studies, where it is commonly applied to the wide area of offscreen sound.

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b. Emphasis on aural information: The pan-and-tilt into the tree trunk is significant. Neither Peru nor Cristina has survived the war-scene in the wood; the film’s closing scene reproduces the fantasy of their death agony, as their souls, in communication with each other, fade into the realm of the dead symbolized by the hollow tree trunk. For this interpretation speaks the fact that, shortly before this dialogue, they both say they have seen their dead grandfather, although the VNI did not show this encounter ‒ by no means the first time that the ‘camera’ crosses an ontological border between different levels of ‘reality’. Other illusion-breaking elements are POV shots from the perspective of animals¹⁴ and ‘impossible’ dissolves between iris diaphragm and moon: techniques that immediately focus the artificiality of the medium, from camera-work to editing. Further indications of the lovers’ deaths are Peru’s action in putting his ear to Cristina’s mouth to see if she is alive, and his own muffled cry when he falls with his companions before the firing squad. Nor, when he gets up again, does anyone appear to notice anything.¹⁵ And another leitmotif of death in Vacas is the buzzing of blowflies around a dead person or animal. In Cristina’s case they are invisible; flies are only shown in a later close-up of a cow’s eye, as the animal wanders through the wood and is by chance discovered by the protagonists. c. Emphasis on incompatibility of visual and aural information: In the blowfly scene just mentioned, the only sound is from a cowbell fastened by the grandfather onto a trap for wild boar. But instead of being violently shaken, the bell hangs still and cannot, therefore, produce any sound. Paradoxically, however, it does so repeatedly. As the grandfather had always claimed to be able to see into a cow through its eye ‒ and hence to transcend the common world and enter another reality ‒ it is arguable that the ocularization and focalization is that of the dead grandfather. In other words the VNI takes his perspective and follows the scene from inside the cow (which would make sense in terms of the film’s title). The soundtrack would then be seen as breaking metaleptically and paradoxically through the ontological border between the diegetically real and the imaginary fantastic of a

 “Breaking POV conventions is one way of highlighting problems of perception” (Brössel 2014, 57).  Peru does not seem to be wounded after the execution scene. Nevertheless, in line with the film’s circular lifecycle logic, he may have taken the opposite course to his grandfather, who survived the Carlist War of 1875 but looked seriously wounded. Nor can one exclude a further alternative: that he was shot after all, because his uncle’s objections to his execution were not taken seriously. The diegetic gap (cf. above and Dablé 2012) allows such a reading: that Peru is actually dead although he looks alive.

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dying person. And the changing quality of the echo as the voices move toward and into the hollow tree would enact the incompatibility of ocularization and auricularization, for the cow cannot see so far into the tree. Irrespective of the final scene, the tree trunk could also be described as a McGuffin. An integral aspect of the (seemingly) crazy grandfather’s surreal rituals (into which Cristina and Peru have been initiated), it is a central motif in the film, serving as the final resting place of every living creature, including the eponymous cows. Acoustically it is furnished throughout with a deep burbling acousmatic drone ‒ for it is unclear whether anyone at all in the narrated world (and if so who) can hear it. For such phenomena Flückiger (2002, 129) coined the term ‘unidentifiable sound object’ (USO), a concept that has become indispensable for the analysis of filmic empuzzlement. Flückiger understands the term as referring to an open, indeterminate sign whose vagueness excites both vulnerable uncertainty and tense curiosity. Creating a gap in the text, it is a screen onto which the viewer can project individual, subjective meanings. As a non-univocal sound-source it asks a question, sets a puzzle for the viewer to solve. This openness, with its correlative information deficit, generates emotions that become more powerful the longer the USO lasts (Emphasis V.T.).

The emotions in question include the insecurity caused by a perceived loss of mental control. From the point of view of the audience, the USO is, then, an instrument of intentional intellectual frustration. That according to Flückiger (2002, 129) it is found most frequently in science-fiction, horror, and catastrophy films, can be no surprise. In lyrical, abstract narratives like Medem’s it is symptomatic of a severance from the norms of conceptual meaning, a liberation from the need to ‘make sense’, and a corresponding openness to associations on the purely abstract level of sound. Vacas fills its woods with the strangest noises when the camera dives beneath the ferns¹⁶ with a watery gurgling and droning that is at once threatening, dreamlike and unreal. Recurring throughout the film, these become key sounds with their own symbolic force (to be distinguished from that of symbols or leitmotifs in the strict sense as derived from the extrafilmic tradition). For Flückiger (2002, 125 – 126) a key sound can be described as a sensory superfluity superimposed on the purely referential function of communication. […] Its source is neither visible on screen nor can it be inferred from the context. The recipient cannot even recognize it in its recurrence, with the re-

 An illusion-breaking technique which, like the internal ocularization of small animals, is a typical Medem trait.

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sult that there can be no lessening of its ambiguity. On the contrary, the sustaining of ambiguity seems to be the unspoken aim of USOs in their conscious distribution.¹⁷ Their symbolic force in Vacas remains vague, serving rather to mark the semantic space of the wood in Lotman’s sense, inscribing on it the qualities associated with an alien element (water) and the emotions this instills, from security to threat, lightness to pressure, power to perceptual distortion.

5 Tierra (Earth, 1996) Medem’s third film, Tierra (1996), is also difficult to classify. Oscillating between (anti‐)mystery romance, comedy about death and schizophrenia, and adult fairytale with gender-critical, ecological, and sociopolitical strands, it turns explicitly on a dimension of improbable chance and ‘mystery’¹⁸, for ‒ in contrast to Vacas ‒ the supernatural is here a central issue. The protagonist Ángel is (or at least initially seems) half angel, half human. He travels to a desolate wine-growing region of Spain as a pest controller to eradicate a mysterious woodlouse that is infesting the soil there and giving the wine an earthy taste. No one seems to mind the taste, and the woodlice resist extermination, so the whole undertaking is fairly pointless from the start. Ángel witnesses the death of a shepherd and his sheep when they are struck by lightning, but the dead man wakes in his presence and speaks with him about the ‘other world’, from which Ángel believes he himself also comes¹⁹. Falling in love with two women, he finally splits, the human Ángel traveling with the femme fatale Mari to the sea and the second (invisible?) Ángel remaining in the village with the (equally angelic) smallholder Ángela. The film begins with the camera panning from a black starlit void through a clouded sky to Earth, while in the ‘off’ a homodiegetic male voice speaks: “Death is nothing terrible. If you were quite dead, you would not hear me.” And then: “I am another mystery. I am the part of you that has died and I am speaking to you from the cosmos. I work in you like the pill-bug on the wine.” The voice has no visible source, nor is Ángel visible. In the sense explained above (cf. n. 13) the

 USOs were seldom used before the 1960s. Exceptions are Modern Times (Charlie Chaplin, USA 1939) and Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, USA 1941).  A surfeit of metaphor and some kitschy dialogue complement unusual comparisons between human and non-human nature. The term ‘mystery’ occurs in the spoken text, and the concept plays a key role in the film.  Cf. the film’s opening titles.

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voice is, therefore ‘acousmatic’, and its source, following Chion, is, an acousmêtre: “When the acousmatic presence is a voice, and especially when this voice has not yet been visualized – that is, when we cannot yet connect it to a face – we get a special being, a kind of talking and acting shadow to which we attach the name acousmêtre” (Chion 1999, 21). Here begins the puzzling play with realities that pervades Tierra almost from beginning to end. Whose voice is this? Is it ‘real’? The (implied) viewer may initially consider it supernatural. Chion (1999, 24) points out that the acousmêtre is all too readily assigned magical powers: “the acousmêtre is everywhere; the acousmêtre is all-seeing; […] the acousmêtre’s omnipotence” (27) is impressive. Thus the slow-moving camera of the opening scene seems to imitate a line of vision, but not a human one. Later it transpires that the cosmic pan is a POV shot from the perspective of the supernatural ‘angel’ that is Ángel’s constant companion; but the initial empuzzlement is there, and as Chion further observes, what is so disconcerting is “not when we attribute unlimited knowledge to the acousmêtre, but rather when its vision and knowledge have limits whose dimensions we do not know” (Chion 1999, 26). Medem plays precisely with these limits, not only in the opening scene, but also later in the film, when the supposedly magical qualities of the acousmêtre break down into elements ranging from a cosmic-angelic voice – which is, in fact, Ángel’s voice – through a visible human doppelgänger, to the purely imaginary doppelgänger of the schizophrenic Ángel. For, three minutes into the film, a man in a delivery van appears without speaking, and the viewer automatically asks what relation he might have to the prior acousmatic voice. Chion’s (1999, 23) note on silence seems relevant here: “The counterpart to the not-yet-seen voice is the body that has not yet spoken – the silent character (not to be confused with the character in the silent movie). These two characters, the acousmêtre and the mute, are similar in some striking ways”. In this instance, however, they seem more than similar for, when he does finally speak, the delivery man has the same voice as the acousmêtre (hence initiating a partial désacousmatisation ²⁰). Conversing with the acousmêtre, he alternately speaks and listens, and it is his ‘own’ voice that responds. The original disembodied voice has split into a visible speaker and an initially invisible doppelgänger who answers (with the same voice) “I am

 “Embodying the voice is a sort of symbolic act, dooming the acousmêtre to the fate of ordinary mortals. […] As long as the face and mouth have not yet been completely revealed, and as long as the spectator’s eyes have not ‘verified’ the co-incidence of the voice within the mouth, desacousmatization is incomplete, and the voice retains an aura of invulnerability and magical power” (Chion 1999, 27– 28).

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half human, half angel. I am half alive, half dead. I am this spontaneous voice issuing from your head. I cannot stop it.” But the reality puzzle goes still further: Does the narrated world ‘really’ contain angels? Do they communicate in this way with humans? Is Ángel visualized (for the viewer) as a doppelgänger, while his fellow characters are not aware of his second self? This would amount to an internal focalization and ocularization of Ángel staged via indeterminate eyelines. The unmarked superimposition of differing focalizations, ocularizations, and auricularizations fuses two narrative realities²¹; for the viewer simultaneously sees and hears – without at first being aware of it – not just the valid intrafictional world, but also aspects of Ángel’s imaginary that are incompatible with that world. The resolution follows somewhat later in the form of a fairly predictable twist: Ángel, visiting the town hall, encounters a man who had worked in the psychiatric clinic where he was a patient. This man regrets, he says, having hit Ángel on the head. But it is not the blow to the head, it is the heightened fantasy of the mentally sick that solves the puzzle of the acousmatic voice (as Ángel himself admits toward the end of the film). Up to the point of this encounter, narrative reality has been presented as containing a dimension of the fantastic (Ángel’s doppelgänger), which now, in light of the rational explanation, is revealed as a deception. Accordingly, following Leiendecker’s use of the term, the narrative has been up to this point unreliable; for the viewer has experienced Ángel’s unstable vision without being informed of his condition – a condition in which he sees and hears things no one else sees or hears. But this resolution is again not definitive, for other figures suffer blows to the head or are struck on the head by lightning. Moreover, Ángel’s subjective version of reality quantitatively outweighs the benchmark intrafictional world to such an extent that the viewer tends in any case to give it more credence than is accorded some of the other characters’ comments about that world – a tendency enhanced by the film’s recurrent placing of counter-hints to the ‘twist’ resolution. Thus the process of désacousmatisation – and with it the demystification of Ángel’s “complex being” – is peppered with details that undermine it. In lifethreatening situations Ángel shows himself immune to fear and pain, and even physically invulnerable. Nor, in a world that apparently allows for revenants and communication with the dead, can his ability to talk (in the presence  Just as in Vacas the VNI panned over into the tree trunk, so also here it can evidently “pass across distinct ontological levels which the characters cannot transgress, creating points of transition between diegetic levels” (Brössel 2014, 54– 55). Brössel (2014, 54– 55, n.65) cites examples like Fight Club, Lost Highway, Abre los ojos, etc., where “an (unmarked) character perspective results in a veil of unreliability being cast upon the entire film”.

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of other characters) to a person struck dead by lightning be unambiguously ascribed to his imagination. The outcome of the irresolute ‘twist’ resolution is an indeterminacy that affects the narrative reality of the whole film. The film’s central question – What happens to us after death? – remains, therefore, unanswered. The mysterious woodlice ineluctably return. Nevertheless, there are elements that can be ascribed both to Ángel’s untrammeled fantasy (or schizophrenia) and to the ‘real’ intrafictional world of the film: among them the paranormal abilities, evident to all, of other characters than Ángel – like the ability of a Gitano boy to hit a target with a stone from an extraordinary distance.

6 Conclusion The concept of perturbatory narration, together with the systematic exposition of puzzling narrative procedures, provides a framework that facilitates a differentiated analysis of filmic communication structures in the construction and deconstruction of logical coherency. The films investigated here evidence not only a profound lyrical symbolism but also distinct traits of the fantastic; only gradually, however, do they reveal their concern with plural realities over and above the per se unstable world of the fantastic. Their structural ambiguity gives rise to a multi-faceted semantic indeterminacy that opens into divergent interpretations. At the same time Medem’s films harbor irresolvable puzzles in the form of metaphysical questions that can be answered with certainty neither within nor outside the filmic world: Do the souls of the dead return? Can there be any communication with, or among them? While in Vacas indefinite focalization, ocularization and auricularization, based on a dissociation of picture and sound, produce a threefold ambiguity about the ending of the film qua fantastic, in Tierra the successive play with the acousmêtre and internal focalization effects a complex perturbatory combination of what at first seems a clear example of the narrative fantastic but is subsequently revealed as a deception. A ramifying empuzzlement structure, together with multiple ambiguous clues, creates an atmosphere of indeterminacy that precludes any clear distinction between valid and invalid intrafictional realities (cf. Orth’s hierarchical differentiation), conversely allowing a combination of both across all the reality levels of the film.

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Filmography El incidente. Directed by Isaac Ezban. 2014. Mexico: Zima Entertainment, 2016: DVD. Elisa, vida mía. Directed by Carlos Saura. 1977. Spain: Manga Films, 2004. DVD. La prima Angélica [Cousin Angelica]. Directed by Carlos Saura. 1974. Spain: Manga Films, 2004. DVD. Tierra. Directed by Julio Medem. 1996. Spain: Flax Film, 2006. DVD. Vacas. Directed by Julio Medem. 1992. Spain: Diario El País, 2004. DVD. Volver [To return]. Directed by Pedro Almodóvar. 2006. Spain: Universum Film, 2007. DVD.

Bibliography Antonsen, Jan Erik. 2007. Poetik des Unmöglichen. Narratologische Untersuchungen zu Phantastik, Märchen und mythischer Erzählung. Paderborn: Mentis. Antonsen, Jan Erik. 2009. “Das Ereignis des Unmöglichen. Narrative Sinnbildung als Problem der Phantastik.” In Ambivalenz und Kohärenz. Untersuchungen zur narrativen Sinnbildung, edited by Julia Abel, Andreas Blödorn and Michael Scheffel, 127 – 139. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier. Brössel, Stephan. 2014. Filmisches Erzählen. Typologie und Geschichte. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Chion, Michel. 1999. The Voice in Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press. Dablé, Nadine. 2012. Leerstellen transmedial. Auslassungsphänomene als narrative Strategie in Film und Fernsehen. Bielefeld: Transcript. Eckel, Julia, and Leiendecker, Bernd. 2012. “(Dis)orienting Media and Narrative Mazes.” In (Dis)Orienting Media and Narrative Mazes, edited by Julia Eckel, Bernd Leiendecker, Daniela Olek and Christine Piepiorka, 11 – 18. Bielefeld: Transkript. Fuentes, Carlos ([1954] 1990): “Chac Mool.” In Los días enmascarados, 9 – 27. México, D.F.: Era. Flückiger, Barbara. 2002. Sound Design. Die virtuelle Klangwelt des Films. Marburg: Schüren. Jolles, André. 1930 [1974]. Einfache Formen. Legende, Sage, Mythe, Rätsel, Spruch, Kasus, Memorabile, Märchen, Witz. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Lang, Simone Elisabeth. 2014. “Fantastische Unzuverlässigkeit – unzuverlässige Fantastik. Ein Beitrag zur Diskussion um die Rolle des Erzählers in der literarischen Fantastik.” In Weltentwürfe des Fantastischen. Erzählen – Schreiben – Spielen, edited by Laura Muth and Annette Simonis, 17 – 29. Berlin: Bachmann. Leiendecker, Bernd. 2015. “They only see what they want to see”. Geschichte des unzuverlä ssigen Erzä hlens im Spielfilm. Marburg: Schüren. Kuhn, Markus. 2011. Filmnarratologie. Ein erzähltheoretisches Analysemodell. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Orth, Dominik. 2013. Narrative Wirklichkeiten. Eine Typologie pluraler Realitäten in Literatur und Film. Marburg: Schüren. Orth, Dominik. 2009. “Eine Frage der Perspektive. Greg Marcks’ ‘11:14’, polyfokalisiertes Erzählen und das Problem der Fokalisierung im Film.” In Probleme filmischen Erzählens, edited by Hannah Birr, Maike Sarah Reinerth and Jan-Noël Thon, 111 – 130. Münster: Lit.

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Pinkas, Claudia. 2010. Der phantastische Film. Instabile Narrationen und die Narration der Instabilität. Berlin und New York: De Gruyter. Rimmon, Shlomith. 1977. The Concept of Ambiguity – the Example of James. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Rottensteiner, Franz. 1987. “Zweifel und Gewißheit: Zu Traditionen, Definitionen und einigen notwendigen Abgrenzungen in der phantastischen Literatur.” In Die dunkle Seite der Wirklichkeit: Aufsätze zur Phantastik, edited by Franz Rottensteiner, 7 – 20. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Santaolalla, Isabel. 1999. “Julio Medem’s Vacas (1991). Historicizing the Forest.” In Spanish Cinema. The Auteurist Tradition, edited by Peter Williams Evans, 310 – 324. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schaeffer, Pierre. 1966. Traité des objets musicaux. Paris: Seuil. Scheffel, Michael. 2006. “Was ist Phantastik? Überlegungen zur Bestimmung eines literarischen Genres.” In Fremde Wirklichkeiten. Literarische Phantastik und antike Literatur, edited by Nicola Hömke and Manuel Baumbach, 1 – 18. Heidelberg: Winter. Schlickers, Sabine. 2015. “Lüge, Täuschung und Verwirrung. Unzuverlässiges und Verstörendes Erzählen in Literatur und Film.” In Diegesis. Interdisziplinäres E-Journal für Erzählforschung / Interdisciplinary E-Journal for Narrative Research 4.1:49 – 67. Accessed 16 June 2017. https://www.diegesis.uni-wuppertal.de/index.php/diegesis/article/download/190/258. Schlickers, Sabine. 2012. “La narración perturbadora en el cine argentino del siglo XXI.” In Prismas del cine latinoamericano, edited by Wolfgang Bongers, 277 – 302. Santiago de Chile: Cuarto Propio. Schmöller, Verena. 2012. Was wäre, wenn… im Film. Spielfilme mit alternativen Handlungsverläufen. Marburg: Schüren. Strigl, Sandra. 2007. Traumreisende. Eine narratologische Studie der Filme von Ingmar Bergman, Andre´ Te´chine´ und Julio Medem. Bielfeld: Transkript.

Stephan Brössel

Narrative Empuzzlement in Robert Lepage’s Possible Worlds 1 Lepage’s Possible Worlds − a soluble mystery? One of Lepage’s most impressive feats is the way he almost begs us to solve the mystery, leaking clues in every conversation, but also in the set design, associative editing and sound mixing. It culminates in a fine twist, one which is fair enough to be worked out by the viewer […], without hinging the film’s satisfaction on the revelation. It’s the type of thing that needs to be seen twice, if only to catch all the hints, connections and misdirections (Film Walrus Review 2008).

The reviewer’s enthusiasm for Robert Lepage’s film should be treated with some care, for Possible Worlds (CDN 2000) is one of those works whose fascination lies in the confusion it causes for the viewer, as well as in the challenge it issues to weld its seemingly incompatible parts into some sort of togetherness. However, in contrast to films which, in a final twist, define one (and only one) reading as correct, and hence cast a strongly retrospective light on all that has gone before (e. g. Fight Club USA/GER 1999; Lucky Number Slevin, GER/USA 2006), as well as to those whose logical structure is overtly contradictory (e. g. Inland Empire, F/PL 2006), Possible Worlds – like e. g. Triangle (AUS/UK 2009), Shutter Island (USA 2010) and Predestination (AUS 2014) − is infused with narrative empuzzlement. Its events cannot be fully explained (at times they seem strange even for its fictional character); its mysteries remain hidden; its world, in other words, defies reconstruction. Structurally, Possible Worlds remains thoroughly ambiguous. To investigate the nature of its ‘empuzzlement’ requires a closer structural and semiotic analysis of the film’s narrative procedures that takes into account both surface and deep structures (discours and histoire – cf. Decker and Krah 2008, 226). The film’s title already explores the possibilities of histoire, more precisely, it suggests a possible model of plural yet coequal worlds.¹ Special attention will therefore be paid to the film’s complex system of diegetic levels which is at the heart of Possible Worlds’ meaning making mechanisms.  Here the film reveals its debt to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (Bradley and Swartz 1979, xv) and to the theoreticians of possible worlds (e. g. Allén 1989; Doležel 1976; Eco 1979, 1990; Maitre 1983; Pavel 1986; Ronen 1994; Ryan 1991; Semino 1997). However, the present article is concerned with the analysis of the film’s actual narrative structure, not with the application to it of any readymade concept. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110566574-005

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2 Puzzle film − riddle film − narrative empuzzlement Analysis of the film’s narrative structure immediately faces the problem of revising and differentiating the category of empuzzlement within the conceptual framework of perturbatory narration. In principle, films of this type belong to the micro-genre of what Steven Johnson has called the ‘mind-bender’ (an equivalent concept to that of perturbatory narration) that has established itself since the 1990s²: “film[s] designed specifically to disorient you, to mess with your head” (Johnson 2005, 129). His list includes such well known examples as Being John Malkovich, Pulp Fiction, L.A. Confidential, The Usual Suspects, Memento, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Lola rennt (Run, Lola, Run), Twelve Monkeys, Adaptation, Magnolia, and Big Fish. Common to all these films, he notes, are their heterogeneous network of plotlines, their reluctance to divulge essential information, their combination of disparate time dimensions³, and their blurring of boundaries between fact and fiction. Despite their generic similarities on a theoretical level – ascribable in film-historical terms to the ‘disorienting narrative procedures’ these films all share – the differentiation suggested by the authors of the concept of perturbatory narration seems appropriate, for the films achieve their effects in different ways. Researchers have come up with a whole range of concepts to express the impact of these films (cf. Leiendecker 2015, 41−49): mind-bender, mindfuck (Eig, Geimer), mindgame (Elsaesser), twist (Hartmann, Lavik, Wilson), red herring (Blaser et al., Wulff), postmodern narration (Steinke). Elliot Panek defines the “psychological puzzle film” as a “non-traditional narrative” (Panek 2006, 66) in which diegetic reality is not immediately visible, and which jolts its viewers

 A BBC questionnaire confirms the current popularity of these ‘perturbing’ films: “But today you’ll find greater diversity in the kinds of films being made, if not in the people who are making them. That’s why we, the editors of BBC Culture, decided to commission a poll of critics to determine the 100 greatest films of the 21st Century. […] For our poll to determine the 100 greatest American films, we surveyed 62 film critics from around the world. This time, we received responses from 177 – from every continent except Antarctica. Some are newspaper or magazine reviewers, others write primarily for websites; academics and cinema curators are well-represented too. For the purposes of this poll we have decided that a list of the greatest films of the 21st century should include the year 2000, even though we recognise that there was no ‘Year Zero’ and that 2001 is mathematically the start of the century.” (BBC 2016). High on the list of ‘greatest films’ are Mulholland Drive (1st place), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (6th place), and Memento (25th place).  For an analysis of time and its functionality in Memento cf. Brössel 2015, 189−202.

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into revision of their habitual concepts of figure, story and reality. Among the means used to achieve this end are unusual story structure, violations of causal logic, or flaunted, unresolved gaps in the causal chain of the story. […] The explanation for the unusual characteristics is generally delayed within these films and is answered with varying degrees of definitiveness (Panek 2006, 65).

Panek distinguishes between (1) resolved and (2) unresolved deception, (3) ambiguity, and (4) “martyred protagonists” – in which context he singles out (5) the “unique narration in Memento” for special mention (Panek 2006, 67−68). As examples of (1) he names Videodrome and Twelve Monkeys, for (2) The Matrix and Fight Club, for (3) Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, for (4) Donnie Darko and The Butterfly Effect. Warren Buckland, on the other hand, understands the puzzle film as “a postclassical mode of filmic representation and experience” (Buckland 2009, 5) which – in contrast to the classical Hollywood film – is “made up of non-classical characters who perform non-classical actions and events” (Buckland 2009, 5): [P]uzzle films embrace non-linearity, 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). In the end, 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) (Buckland 2009, 6; italics orig.).

Miklós Kiss criticizes the heterogeneity of Buckland’s categories and proposes a distinction between puzzle and riddle films: These re-selected films’ narrative strategies, such as their ambiguities, mutual exclusivities, and paradoxes, are not compensated by any “trade-off between innovation and norm” (Bordwell […]) that normally ensures cognitively manageable experience […], but keep the viewer in a perplexed state ceaselessly. From this definition, films like Lynch’s Lost Highway […], or loop-narratives, for example Christopher Smith’s Triangle […], could form that distinct category, better called riddle plots, which, providing riddles without solution, would go beyond some of the puzzle film’s ‘simple complexity’ (Kiss 2013, 248).

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With its final twist, the puzzle film, for all its complexity, is open to unambiguous interpretation; the riddle film, impervious to such a solution, maintains its ambiguity to the end.⁴ It is a matter, then, of structural features and their classification on the level of discours as well as histoire. These suggest something approaching riddle and empuzzlement, in contrast to both deception (cf. Matthias Brütsch in this volume) and paradox (cf. Oliver Schmidt and Sabine Schlickers). Neither the use of the German word Verrätselung, nor its translation into English as ‘empuzzlement’ is, however, entirely straightforward. The German describes the result of the sort of encryption found in riddles (Rätsel being cognate with ‘riddle’), where a solution is always available if one can decipher the text; the English word, derived from ‘puzzle’ − ‘poser’ or ‘enigma’ (OED) − describes the result of putting a question that has no immediate answer. Applied to film narratives, empuzzlement then means the posing of an enigma, a riddle without a solution, a problem that cannot be readily solved − or indeed solved at all. Hence, allowing for the metaphorical shift in the usage of ‘riddle’ and the metonymical shift inherent in the neologism ‘empuzzlement’, these contemporary research terms can, I would agree, be effectively applied to the formation of filmic categories. I understand narrative empuzzlement in film, therefore, as a disposition of discours and histoire (surface and deep structure) in the text that prevents a clear reconstruction of its meaning. This can occur in the dissolution of borders between levels of reality (Buckland), the suppression or omission of key information (Johnson)⁵, unmarked perspectivization⁶ and possibly pathological figures (Buckland), time loops (Buckland), the suppression or obscuring of causal links between events or instances (Panek), unchronological permutations (Buckland), unclarity about the reality status of the filmic world, the abrogation of a consistent spatiotemporal framework (Buckland), or the introduction of the mode of the fantastic (Buckland). Narrative empuzzlement covers the type of complex narration that presents the world semiotically as a riddle, its eminent structural characteristic being a more or less foregrounded and unresolved am-

 Arguing from a cognitional psychology perspective, Kiss states that: “Riddle films’ diegetic paradoxes, through destabilising our vital, embodied, real-life experienced sense of the diegetic centre (of inertia), make the viewer’s narrative navigations, that is his/her cognitive plot-mapping, practically impossible” (Kiss 2013, 249).  On omission, its theoretical place in literary criticism, and its application to filmic narration cf. Dablé (2012, 16 – 30, 122 – 129).  In Dominik Orth’s sense of “indefinite focalization” (Orth 2013, 240).

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biguity.⁷ Here I agree with Kiss that complex-narrative films equipped with a solution are only temporarily puzzling; or to put it another way, they trick the viewer into puzzling about their content, but their meaning is generally revealed in the end. In this sense they fall into the category of narrative deception. The films in question here, however, are characterized by worlds whose reconstruction is essentially ambivalent.⁸ Puzzling worlds of this kind may – it should also be noted − be presented as markedly complex on the discours level, but an (overly) complex narrative structure does not in itself necessarily entail narrative empuzzlement.⁹ It would seem appropriate, therefore, to define the phenomenon in the following terms: narrative empuzzlement occurs when the coherent and nonambiguous reconstruction of the meaning of a film is prevented either by the constitution of the world presented there or by the additional heightening of ambivalence, incoherence or inconsistency through specific narrative strategies on the level of discours. ¹⁰

3 Diegetic levels Possible Worlds follows two plotlines in alternating sequence: on the one hand a criminal case centered on the death of George Barber, whose brain has been removed, and in which the investigators, Chief Berkley and Officer Williams, contact three other characters, the neurologist Dr. Kleber, the caretaker who found the corpse, and finally Barber’s wife Joyce. On the other hand the film tells  I understand filmic ambiguity, in analogy with its literary counterpart, as “the ambivalence of a textual element or aspect […], or of an entire text” (Bode 2007, 67). This will be illustrated below in my treatment of Lepage’s film.  On the literary phenomenon of breaks in reality, which seems applicable here, cf. Brössel 2013, 173 – 177.  Kiss also distinguishes these two levels, but accepts both – in the case of the riddle film − as given: “The analytical trouble of segmenting these films’ unnatural plots is related by the difficulty of one’s navigational immersion not only within the uncanny story-worlds, but also in the tricky narrative designs” (Kiss 2013, 248).  At this point the proximity of ambiguity to paradox – the latter defined as an insoluble narrative contradiction – becomes clear. The boundaries between the two seem in any case fluid, although the basic feature of ambiguity is the presence of a number of disparate meanings which, unlike paradox, do not exclude each other. The need for theoretical refinement of the distinction is evident from Kiss’s description of riddle films, where he links both terms: “Riddle films’ paradoxical diegetic worlds and perplexing narratives evoke ambiguity as they uphold and violate classical narrative ingredients, such as coherency, spatio-temporal unity, linearity, chronology, etc., at the same time” (Kiss 2013, 250; italics mine). Vera Toro addresses this problem in the present volume by connecting ambiguity with indeterminacy.

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the story of the relationship between George and Joyce, covering the (multiple and varied) situations of their (presumed) first meeting, and other events of their life. The dominant paradigm here is ‘love’, from the first encounter, through mutual conversations and experiences, to their separation. The individual elements of the plot, however, fail to generate a coherent context. Eventually the film reveals that Kleber is responsible for both the death of George Barber and the removal of his brain, which he intended to use in order to extract information for the use of some dubious company. Joyce is shattered. She speaks of their love for each other and their future plans, and at the end of the film she is faced with the decision whether to switch off the life-support system for George’s brain. While the first plotline (the criminal investigation) is narrated in a chronologically linear fashion, interspersed with brief ellipses and segments of the second plot, this latter plotline has a distinctly ‘perturbatory’ impact. Here the film plays with spatiotemporal elements and diegetic-ontological contexts, as well as with its characters, presenting similar events in parallel, with minimal alterations that suggest the possibility of alternative lives and worlds. The (verbal) articulation of this theme by almost every character provides the two plotlines with an overarching signifier. In order to address this central constitutive aspect of the film’s meaning, it is necessary to determine the structure of the world presented there. To start with, there are two hierarchically organized diegetic levels recognizable as the diegesis (Level 1) and mental metadiegesis (Level 2). Level 1 – at first sight presented as fictional reality − comprises the criminal investigation, the arguments between Berkley and Williams, and their conversations with Dr. Kleber, the caretaker, and Joyce. The mental metadiegesis of Level 2 seems (again at first sight) to be a world of subjectively motivated thoughts projected by George Barber’s mind. George exists in what might be called a rudimentary state of consciousness, for his brain is kept artificially alive in a water-filled glass container – a state that itself motivates the reproduction of the thoughts emanating from that brain, into which the film provides certain insights.¹¹ The ontological status of the two levels is not without problems, for both intersubjective and subjective reality are eventually subverted. Initially it is only the metadiegesis, with its dreamlike jumps, repetitions, and paradoxes, its dissolution of recognizable spatiotemporal structures, and its undermining of the concept of person, that seems unstable and incoherent – so much so that it obscures the differentiation between individual subworlds. That such a differentiation

 Dominik Orth sees this system as a hierarchical plurality of narrated realities, and the mental metadiegesis as “imagination” (Orth 2013, 124).

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can, however, be taken as relevant to Level 2 is implied by George himself in the following dialogue: George: Do you believe in … er … other lives? Joyce: Past lives? George: No. I mean lives going right now. Joyce: Like being in two places at once? George: More than two. A lot more. I’m talking about possible worlds. Each of us exists in an infinite number of possible worlds. I mean, in one world I’m talking to you right now, but er … your arm is a little to the left. And in another world you’re interested in that man over there with the glasses. And in another … you stood me up two days ago. And … that’s how I know your name (00:19:42−00:20:40.)

The mental diegesis of Level 2 comprises, then, a kaleidoscope of hierarchically equal and to some extent interconnected subworlds. Conceived by George and modeled by the film, this has two basic features: (a) the protagonist George Barber, its architect and creator; and (b) its division into discrete segments of discours, framed by other narrative passages, each of which represents either its own metadiegetic subworld or the continuation of an already established subworld – the latter being indicated through conversations between the characters. Allowing for various permutations, these segments can be described – on the basis of spatial context and external appearance of the characters – as follows: Sequence Ia situates the events in a canteen, where George and Joyce meet – as their conversation indicates – for the first time since they were at school together; his clumsy behavior leads her to leave the canteen. Ib continues – and initially seems to exactly repeat – Ia; but the characters now react positively to each other. Joyce is a neurologist occupied with experiments on rats’ brains that are ultimately aimed at boosting human intelligence. By modifying the neuronal system, undesirable memories could, for instance, be deleted. Joyce does not remember George or their shared background at school and in the small town they hail from. They plan to meet again. Sections of Segment II take place largely in Joyce’s apartment – which in Level 1 is George’s apartment or their home as a couple. Sequence IIa presents a chance meeting in a bar, where George (in the exchange quoted above) reveals details he could not normally know and speaks of possible worlds as if they were common knowledge. He remembers the idea of two alternative worlds he once had during a math test in seventh grade. Asked how many love affairs he has had, he answers “Billions” (00:22:12). After a night together (IIb) they talk about Joyce’s job as a broker at Kaufman Brothers (!), about George’s wife, who died three years previously, and the possibility of starting a relationship. For Joyce this is unthinkable, as she regards herself as restless and unreliable.

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Joyce wears her hair short in this segment (unlike I and IIc). Sequence IIc on the other hand presents her with long hair and shows the two characters get closer to each other; in contrast to IIb this promises to hold, as is indicated by their talk of their shared common interests, love, and past relationships. The sequence ends with George suggesting they drive down to the beach, to a secluded spot he knows, where he says she might be able to understand him. They go there, sit in a beach hut, and walk down to the shore. Joyce’s inconsistency is again underlined by one of their exchanges: Joyce: “I wasn’t cut out to be a stockbroker.” George: “What? What did you say?” Joyce: “I said I wasn’t cut out to be a scientist” (00:56:31−00:56:45). George finds Joyce’s varying outward appearance and professions confusing, and the pair separate after a party in Sequence IId. Again Joyce has short hair, and again George’s knowledge seems remarkable: he calls Joyce his only love “in every world” (01:03:40) and, referring to a conversation he had with Kleber (IVb), asserts “He is trying to kill me” (01:03:46). Yet despite its varying manifestations, the character, in its subtle (albeit discontinuous) development, pursues a single cognitive-emotional line, as George topples from a sense of abandonment among these worlds, through acceptance of a plurality of worlds, to the conviction that there is only one world: “I know where I am now. There’s only one world. I have been dreaming” (01:16:20). Segment III gathers together the events on the beach, with IIIa showing another meeting between George and Joyce (who now has piercing blue eyes and blonde hair). Again George reveals inexplicable knowledge: “We used to live together. We were married once” (01:09:59). Joyce does not share this memory and finds his attentions irritating. They tussle, she calls out for help, and he runs away. In contrast to this, IIIb has them as a loving couple again in continuation (to judge by the clothes he is wearing) of IIc; Joyce, on the other hand, wears different clothes. She notices a flashing red light out at sea, which then goes out: Joyce: “It’s stopped.” George: “Thank God” (01:24:30). Segment IV is a set of bridge passages comprising interfaces or overlaps between Levels 1 and 2. More clearly than in other segments of the metadiegesis, its contents can be characterized as on the one hand eventful (IVa) and on the other as (ontologically speaking) impossible (IVb, IVc). George continually meets Dr. Kleber, who finally gets through to him in his lab. Sequence IVa presents an aptitude test George takes in a conference room (probably in the context of a job interview) in the course of which he amazes (and convinces) his interviewers with his cognitive abilities. The panel consists of a chairperson, who sets George some math tasks, and various men and women in business attire, among them Dr. Kleber, who takes notes. Already anticipated in IIa, Sequence IVb presents the beach hut on a rainy night. George is let in by a man – probably Kleber.

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What follows is a doubly coded sequence of absurd events including the cackling of hens on the sound track combined with blurred images of a figure in disguise gesticulating wildly to gospel music. Kleber indicates that George should descend a ladder and the two leave the building − evidently a lighthouse − together and walk out onto the bare strand, where they talk about the surreal creatures going about their occupations there. Fade-out to IIc. Red light in black space. Kleber: “Some biologists believe that mental processes create a field of information.” George: “I don’t understand”. Kleber: “I’m going to kill you in every world.” George: “But I haven’t done anything.” Kleber: “You will” (00:49:19−00:49:47). Sequence IVc then presents a conversation between George and Kleber in a psychiatric institution; temporally and logically this links up with IIIa. Completing this system with the hierarchically higher level of the diegesis reveals the following scheme (Fig. 1):¹²

Fig. 1: Narrative segments on diegetic level 1 (black) and diegetic level 2 (gray)

The diegesis is hierarchically superior inasmuch as its events (George’s murder) and situations (his love relationship with Joyce, the conservation of his brain in a water jar) are constitutive of and motivate the metadiegesis. They explain why the events of the metadiegesis focus on aspects of George and Joyce’s relationship: this is what concerned George most intensely at the time when he was reduced to an artificially sustained brain. This explains, too, why water functions as a leitmotif in each sequence (sea, rain, water jar, coffee machine etc.), or as a topic of conversation, or even plays a part in the formal structure of the film (fades, coloring etc.).

 The diagram (Fig. 1) illustrates the syntagmatic disposition of narrative segments differentiated into those that belong to the diegesis (black) and those that belong to the metadiegesis (gray). Diegetic segments are narrated chronologically and are therefore shown in simple alphabetical order, irrespective of which character is focalized. Segments I-L claim a special position here, as they present a coherent action which – linked alternately with the metadiegesis – weaves the threads of I, J, K and IVc together in K. The relation between narration and story can only be briefly mentioned here: Level 1 contains references to unselected but relevant events (Segment B, 00:12:17) and to a prior past, as does also Level 2, which, like the narrative present, consists of a number of possibilities. The segments of the metadiegesis are sequentially numbered here in accordance with their order on the level of discours.

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All this, however, only partially holds true. The relations between the levels of the film, the determination of the metadiegesis through the diegesis, the ontological status of both these levels (diegesis = reality v. metadiegesis = imagined reality) – all this is maintained, but at the same time undermined. The world of the film as a whole is an enigma; the attribute ‘puzzling’ is well deserved.

4 Narrative empuzzlement: the fantastic, diegetic inconsistency, metadiegetic infiltration Three scenes from the film, whose interrelations I would like to examine more closely, will make this clear. They all present events in, and statements about the diegesis, which – given its realistic façade and its functioning in accordance with familiar physical, logical and ontological laws, as well as accepted norms and values – can be taken as the internal standard of fictional reality. On closer inspection, however, this superficially ‘normal’ world reveals itself as multi-layered, subtly fantastic, and inconsistent. We are faced with a case of strict narrative empuzzlement. The death of the caretaker – who had earlier found George dead – is interesting in this respect. When Chief Berkley comes to inspect the body, the pathologist tells him the cause of death was hypothermia. All indications point to this conclusion; and the caretaker was, in fact, found dead in the cooling plant room. The only problem is that the system was out of service at the time, which makes his death by hypothermia in those circumstances impossible.¹³ The reason for, and cause of death remain inexplicable. All we can say is that the death and the reaction of the other characters to it indicate that we are not dealing with a consistent reality. The film-world obviously harbors laws and possibilities that are unknown to its inhabitants, that generate enigmatic events and situations, and that are not explained at the narratorial level. Confronted with such indications, film characters react either with incomprehension – like the police officers and the pathologist – or they attempt to explain them. The caretaker, significantly before his own death, offers the following solution:

 Given this impossibility, the film might be convincingly classified as fantastic. Jan Erik Antonsen takes this type of conjunction as the springboard for his reflections on that genre (2009, 127– 131).

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Williams: You have a plenty of leads. Berkley: We don’t even know how the skulls were cut. Two of the apartments were locked from the inside. There’s a murderer in this city who seems able to walk through walls. Caretaker: Inspector Berkley? Berkley: Yes. Caretaker: I’m a friend of George Barber. That is … I was a friend. Berkley: A friend? Caretaker: Well, not a friend exactly, more of an acquaintance. We used to talk in the halls about my ideas. I’m the caretaker in his building. Berkley: You’re the one who found the body. Williams: You gave a statement. Berkley: Is there anything else that you’d like to tell us? Williams: You don’t have to be afraid. Caretaker: The night before the murder I was up on the roof … I saw a light. […] Berkley: What sort of light? Caretaker: In the sky. As it came closer I saw it was five lights in a row, each about ten feet across. Berkley: Are you telling us that you saw a flying saucer? Caretaker: Yes. Berkley: Well … Caretaker: If the Nazis had won World War II we’d have been ready. Genetic engineering would’ve given us an advantage. Now they’re stealing our brains. […] Caretaker: They’re gonna kill me (00:42:11−00:43:42.)

Two things stand out here: (a) what the caretaker observed and commented on¹⁴; (b) Berkley’s statement that the murderer cannot be found. It seems important, therefore, to distinguish between the perception of a factual event (or its indications) internal to the fiction and the subjective interpretation of that event by one of the fictional characters. This may well be a key to the model of reality here. The characters cannot explain what they see; they cannot solve the puzzle of their world. Rather than taking at face value their attempts at doing so, one should note the ontological gap between film-world and perception: the ‘world’ is in many ways a closed book to them, experientially available but inexplicable. The second relevant scene links up with (b): Berkley, slightly drunk, muses about the imaginative power of rats and the evanescense of (his own) life. He is roused from an increasing lethargy by Williams, who swats a loudly buzzing fly with a folded newspaper:  Dr. Kleber, to distract from his own involvement, also points to the possibility of extraterrestrial intrusion (00:26:40 – 00:26:49).

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Berkley: Suppose a rat had an enemy. Williams: What kind of enemy, chief? Another rat? Berkley: No. I guess a rat could not foresee what its enemy was going to do because it couldn’t possibly imagine it. It’s limited by the structure of its brain. It can’t even form those kind of thoughts. And we’re facing the same sort of … enemy. Williams: Uh-huh. Berkley: I have one here. Got a few more cases to solve. And then I’m going to retire and … die. What kind of life is that? Williams: The pension’s not bad. Berkley: I remember something the scientist said. He said: ‘Do you think the number two didn’t exist before we humans found it?’ Every thought that you can think, Officer, existed before you did. And those thoughts … they affect us. Possibilities … swarm about us (01:04:56−01:06:49.)

The homology is unmistakable: RAT : ENEMY :: POLICE : MURDERER – the rat stands to its enemy, which it cannot imaginatively (let alone really) grasp as the police officers do to the murderer, who is equally unimaginable. The crime (brain theft) is strictly incredible; the murderer’s capabilities (walking through walls, opening skulls) transcend the restrictions of the diegesis to which other figures are subject. Berkley takes the homology further, projecting the imaginative lack onto life as a whole: RAT : BRAIN :: HUMAN BEING : BRAIN − the limited imaginative vision of rat and man derives from their limited brains. And this goes still further, for limited vision entails a limited visualized − i. e. a limited world: HUMAN BEINGX → THOUGHT correl. WORLDX.¹⁵ Berkley takes this to mean there must be a superordinate level of reality that influences human affairs and possesses the power to create other self-contained worlds. Diegetic systems 1 and 2 are mutually opposed: On one hand one could suggest diegetic system 1 (containing Levels 1 and 2) being the only manifestation of the film’s histoire but on the other hand it is obvious that this world system is merely one concretization amongst other possible worlds. In his self-reflection Chief Berkley questions Reality Level 1 (his own level), placing it in the context of other hierarchically equal levels which contain further possible realities, and complementing it with a superordinate level − without, however, getting any further than the designation of this level as temporally “before”, and the assumption that it influences and determines subordinate levels: “And those thoughts … they affect us.” Williams had already entertained similar notions on the super The film clearly adopts a constructivist position here; on the whole it correlates characteristics of that approach with what Ihab Hassan sees as features of many other postmodern modes of presentation: technologism, dehumanization, eroticism, fragmentation, open-endedness, heterogeneity, and hybridization (Hassan 1978, 73). Cf. also Brössel (2013, 184) in this context with reference to Benjamin Stein’s novel Replay (2012).

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Fig. 2: Diegetic systems in Possible Worlds

ordinated diegetic level: “What if we were in a tank like that? You’d never know”; and “Maybe someone’s making us think whatever they want us to. Maybe that’s why all those brains are being stolen. Maybe somebody’s already stolen ours” (00:28:07). Berkley again dismisses this as, in Williams’ case, irrelevant: “Why would anyone steal your brain to make you think of hockey all the time? What’s the motivation?” The one metadiegesis is characterized, then by the abrogation of physical and biological laws through a supervening power, by the plurality of options it thereby offers for individual actions and lives, and by the fact that − for most of the film’s characters − it is inaccessible both conceptually and ontologically. The inconsistency (or stratification) of the diegesis must, of course, be seen in relation to the metadiegesis constituted by George’s mind. Sequence IIIa begins with a watery fade-in. It shows George emerging from the sea onto the beach, where his tussle with Joyce takes place. The protagonist-centered narrative mode marks it as metadiegetic; yet it is immediately related to the superordinate diegetic level and to Dr. Kleber. After George’s flight into a cave the film cuts (via match cut and fade) to Kleber lying in his water tank (or “sensory deprivation chamber”); the celestial music playing through this sequence reveals itself as diegetic when Kleber switches it off.

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Figs. a–c: Misleading connections between diegesis and metadiegesis

The scene is followed by Kleber’s conversation with George (IVc), when he asks him what made him act like that on the beach, and then by the solving of the case, when Williams surprises Kleber while he is performing an experiment with George’s brain (Segment K). Kleber can evidently contact George in two ways: on the one hand in face-to-face communication, sitting next to the glass container that holds his brain, and on the other by infiltration of George’s thought-world, which he achieves via the water tank. The first eventuality is covered in the sequences of Segment IV, the diegetic bridge passages that mix and mingle realities within the framework of a mental metadiegesis. Subjectively bound up with the character of George, they nevertheless assume a special status in relation to the other metadiegetic sequences. This may be reducible to the issue of Kleber’s experiments, which would in that case represent an attempt to traverse the gap between diegesis and metadiegesis. In this context Sequence IIIa calls for second thoughts. Triggered by the second contact between George and Joyce, it has so far been seen as purely metadiegetic − a judgment that must, however, be revised on account not only of the celestially meditative music (now established as diegetic), but also of the syntagmatic correlation between the two reality levels via fade and match cut. Both factors suggest that Kleber is here logging in to George’s thought-world and participating in his experiences without himself making a metadiegetic appearance. In the final analysis this can only be registered as an ultimately unverifiable possibility, alongside the other possibility of IIIa being purely metadiegtic – although the manipulation hypothesis finds support in Kleber’s explicit intention of killing George “in every world” on account of some unspecified future misdemeanor. What we gather from all this is the inconsistency of the – in this case metadiegetic – world it generates. It becomes clear that even the subjective world is

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malleable by outside influences such as contact with an external reality in general and the infiltration by a manipulative agent in particular.¹⁶

5 Deinstalling a world-system But the destabilizing of the film-world and its diegesis/metadiegesis relation goes beyond the characters’ doubts about their own situation. Thus Segment D belongs to Level 1 but the syntagmatically contiguous Sequence IIb to Level 2 – with its questionable narrative status as George’s mental metadiegesis. In D Williams can be seen in his automobile in a car wash listening to an audio-cassette course on optimizing the imagination: he is told to envisage cold wind, rain, and loved ones, in order to hear their voices. The auditory level of Segment D is superimposed here on the visual level of IIb – a window lashed by rain, short reverse to George sitting on a sofa – but strikingly the final taped instruction is followed by Joyce speaking (IIb). According to narrative convention this would suggest a mental metadiegesis, allocated this time not to George but to Williams. With this change in focalization the film contravenes its own structure, temporarily annulling the clear allocation George → metadiegesis. Although this carries less weight than Kleber’s infiltration of the metadiegesis, it has the same effect of deinstalling the established structure. A blurring of the boundaries between levels can also be detected between Sequence IVa and the ensuing Sequence IIa, where Joyce – referring to “Carson’s office” and asking “Are you jumping ship?” (00:18:05) – brings up the question of George’s career change and the job interview (with Carson?). Sequence IVa offers two possible interpretations: it could be a narratorial analepsis in which Kleber, meeting the highly gifted George in the job interview, decides to kill him and remove his brain. It could, on the other hand, be a reconstruction by Kleber, in the course of his log-in to George’s mind, of a past event in George’s memory. The presence of metadiegetic markers (water fade-ins on table top, and from water jar to beer glass) certainly challenges the first reading, although it does not subvert it entirely. Allocating this sequence to the diegesis however, would make George’s behavior toward Joyce, and the knowledge he shows in

 In this respect the film as a whole eludes the typology proposed by Orth. On the one hand it constructs a hierarchically pluralist model of reality but leaves open the question of the relation/ separation between imagination and manipulation; on the other hand it hints (at least subtly) at the possibility of a hierarchically equal plurality – namely if Level 1 is also taken to be a mental metadiegesis (i. e. product of imagination). The film may justifiably be taken to suggest this on the narratorial as well as figural level.

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the diegetic world, strange in the extreme – with statements ranging from the astonishing to the impossible. He may be exaggerating or lying, but his evident conviction makes this also seem unlikely, especially as he provides at least inchoate reasons for his knowledge. So far, then, the second reading has been chosen here – albeit relativized with the predicate ‘bridge passage’. This entails the adoption/adaptation of diegetic elements by the metadiegesis (which is plausible enough), and the partial connection of the metadiegetic segments (equally plausible); but it also entails an interrelation of diegetic levels that would severely disturb the ontological constitution, above all of the diegesis. The confusingly complex structuring of the film is undoubtedly a salient feature. The erection of a structure of diegesis and metadiegesis which is at the same time deconstructed, its core distinctions blurred, elevates the concept of narrative empuzzlement in Possible Worlds to the status of deinstallation of a world-system. For it is quite thinkable that reality is the construct of a hegemonic agent – as, indeed, the red pinpoint of light suggests, which, accompanying the life-support system of the water jar, establishes itself as a marker of the metadiegesis, yet also plays a role in the diegesis, where it opens the possibility of a further upward nesting of diegetic levels. See also the remark of the caretaker, who observes flashing lights – possibly the same lights that signal the life of the brain in the water jar, and that Joyce and George see on the beach. The abrogation of a realistic world-system is also evident in the death of the caretaker (cf. above), viewed by the other characters in the drama as inexplicable and hence impossible, but which must nevertheless be possible, as it de facto happens. The same holds true for the scientific achievement, revealed at the end of the film, of conserving a fully functioning human brain outside its body – and thereby establishing contact with the inner life of the person whose brain it was/is. Berkley and Williams as well as Kleber and George go into the possibility of other, superordinate worlds; moreover, concepts of ‘world’, ‘reality’, ‘perception’, ‘thought’, ‘imagination’, ‘memory’ and ‘parallel lives’ recur as leitmotifs throughout the film, matched on the level of discours by its latent mode of the fantastic. The more obvious line of interpretation with which this paper began has, then, definite shortcomings. In fact the film operates with a combination of two techniques, deception and empuzzlement, making it a classic of perturbatory narration. On the one hand its final twist reveals that its eponymous possibilities, options and alternatives apply only on the secondary, metadiegetic level proper to George’s semi-consciousness. What they offer, however, is not a diegetic muddle but a clearly ordered world-system, albeit one recognizable as such only at the end. On the other hand – and this is the real clue – the deception, once revealed, can be seen to mask the very principle of empuzzlement and

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its unresolved structure of equally valid but different meanings producing different but equally valid interpretations.

Filmography Possible Worlds. Directed by Robert Lepage. 2000. Ontario: Momentum Pictures, 2002. DVD.

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Elsaesser, Thomas. 2009. “The Mind-Game Film.” In Puzzle Films. Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema, edited by Warren Buckland, 13−41. Malden: Blackwell. Film Walrus Reviews. 2008. “Review of Possible Worlds.” Film Walrus Reviews, last modified 24 July. http://www.filmwalrus.com/2008/07/review-of-possible-worlds.html. Geimer, Alexander. “Der mindfuck als postmodernes Spielfilm-Genre. Ästhetisches Irritationspotential und dessen Aneignung untersucht anhand des Films The Others.” Jump Cut Magazin. Kritiken und Analysen zum Film. Accessed 13 August 2016. http:// www.jump-cut.de/mindfuck1.html. Hartmann, Britta 2007. “Von roten Heringen und blinden Motiven. Spielarten Falscher Fährten im Film.” In Falsche Fährten in Film und Fernsehen, edited by Patric Blaser, Andrea B. Braidt, Anton Fuxjäger and Brigitte Mayr, 33−52. Wien, Köln and Weimar: Böhlau. Hassan, Ihab. 1978. “Culture, Inderterminacy, and Immanence. Margins of the (Postmodern) Age.” In The Postmodern Turn. Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture, 46 – 83. Columbus: Ohio State University. Johnson, Steven. 2005. Everything Bad Is Good For You. How Popular Culture Is Making Us Smarter. London: Penguin. Kiss, Miklós. 2013. “Navigation in Complex Films. Real-life Embodied Experiences Underlying Narrative Categorisation.” In (Dis)Orienting Media and Narrative Mazes, edited by Julia Eckel, Bernd Leiendecker, Daniela Olek, and Christine Piepiorka, 237−255. Bielefeld: Transcript. Lavik, Erlend. 2006. “Narrative Structure in The Sixth Sense: A New Twist in ‘Twist Movies’?” The Velvet Light Trap 58:55−64. Leiendecker, Bernd. 2015. “They only see what they want to see.” Geschichte des unzuverlässigen Erzählens im Spielfilm. Marburg: Schüren. Maitre, Doreen. 1983. Literature and Possible Worlds. London: Middlesex Polytechnic Press. Orth, Dominik. 2013. Narrative Wirklichkeiten. Eine Typologie pluraler Realitäten in Literatur und Film. Marburg: Schüren. Panek, Elliot. 2006. “The Poet and the Detective: Defining the Psychological Puzzle Film.” Film Criticism 31, 1−2:62−88. Pavel, Thomas G. 1986. Fictional Worlds. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. Ronen, Ruth. 1994. Possible Worlds in Literary Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 1991. Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence and Narrative Theory. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Semino, Elena. 1997. Language and World Creation in Poems and Other Texts. London: Longman. Wilson, George M. 2006. “Transparency and Twist in Narrative Fiction Film.” In Thinking Through Cinema. Film as Philosophy, edited by Murray Smith and Thomas E. Wartenberg, 81−95, Malden and Oxford: Blackwell. Wulff, Hans J. 2007. “Mehrfachidentitäten, Maskierungen und Verkleidungen als emphatisches Spiel.” In Falsche Fährten in Film und Fernsehen, edited by Patric Blaser e, Andrea B. Braidt, Anton Fuxjäger and Brigitte Mayr, 149−161. Wien, Köln and Weimar: Böhlau.

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The Intrafictional Power of Fiction: Betibú by Miguel Cohan 1 Introduction Betibú (2014), by the Argentine director Miguel Cohan, is based on the 2011 novel of the same title by the successful Argentine crime fiction author Claudia Piñeiro (b. 1960). Numerous visual references indicate Buenos Aires as the setting of the film: the streets, the Palace of Justice, and even the taxis.¹ Lorenzo Rinaldi, editor of the high-circulation daily El Tribuno ² sets two journalists ‒ the widely experienced Brena, and Mariano, a young man fresh from university ‒ to investigate the death of Pedro Chazarreta, an influential businessman. The famous Argen-

 Their design is regulated by law no. 3622 of March 1, 2011. http://www.buenosaires.gob.ar/ sites/gcaba/ files/ley _3622.pdf.  Founded in 1949 in the provincial capital of Salta, the Argentine daily paper of that name has enjoyed an unrestricted monopoly on the sale of news items since 1981. Until its sale in 1957 to a company led by the lawyer and entrepreneur Roberto Romero, whose family maintained vast business interests in Salta, El Tribuno was Peronist in orientation. In 1983, when he was appointed provincial governor, Roberto Romero stood down from the editorship, which was held from 1986 – 2007 by his son Roberto Eduardo (Tito) Romero. The latter was allegedly relieved of his post by his uncle Juan Carlos Romero (provincial governor 1995 – 2007). Among the scandals in which the paper was involved was the accusation of favoritism in the allocation of public funds brought against its publishers, Horizontes S.A., in 2000, in connection with a bribery scandal uncovered in the Argentine Senate (upper house of Congress). The newspaper suppressed the details; after all, one of the politicians concerned had been a member of Roberto Romero’s provincial cabinet. In 2003 El Tribuno launched a campaign against Greenpeace in connection with the announced sale by the provincial governor (at the time still Juan Carlos Romero) of ecologically protected land to a private investor for agricultural purposes. When the presidential candidate, Menem, and Juan Carlos Romero (his running mate) lost the elections, El Tribuno suppressed the results. Likewise, when the provincial government under Juan Carlos Romero used violence against striking demonstrators during a teachers’ strike in 2005, the paper only reported this scantily. El Tribuno was also reputed not to stop short at inventing news items; and the Romero family was said to be involved in the drug trade. (Sources: http://www.sal taentrelineas.com/tito-romero-le-dijo-mal-tipo-mala-persona-y-lobbista-familiar-a-juan-carlosromero/ and http://www.elintransigente.com/salta/2014/1/21/otra-mentira-mas-tribuno-que-rev ela-mujer-que-hervia-las-piedras-era-mexicana-saltena-227324.html; http://www.saltaen trelineas.com/la-familia-romero-nuevamente-sesgada-por-su-relacion-con-el-narcotrafico/; http://periodicotribuna.com.ar/2612-encubriendo-drogas-en-salta.html). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110566574-006

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tine crime fiction author Nurit Iscar completes the team: nicknamed ‘Betibú’³, Nurit will follow the police and journalistic investigation in her newspaper column. Focusing on the level of the énoncé, the present article will first address the issues ‒ both answered and unanswered ‒ taken up in the criminal investigation. Cohan’s film (classifiable as a crime movie: Brunner 2016) foregrounds the crime and its solution (Hickethier 2012). However, the withholding of information from the detective team suggests the use of a strategy of empuzzlement as a form of perturbatory narration.

2 The crime story Part I How and why did Pedro Chazarreta die? El Gato, a whistleblower who earns his living by selling non-publicized information breaks the news to Brena that Chazarreta’s throat was cut. Brena, using his many contacts, goes straight to the forensic pathologist and learns that the body bears no signs of a struggle. But El Tribuno’s competitor daily, represented solely by a telephone voice called Lidijover, runs the headline on May 10, 2013: “Chazaretta Case: New signs point to violent robbery” ‒ in light of the pathologist’s statement a line the journalists and Nurit can safely ignore. When the three visit the scene of the crime, Nurit notices an empty picture frame that might have held a photo, a hunch the maid Gladys confirms: the photo in question was of the young Chazarreta with some friends. He had discovered its loss on September 21 (the first day of southern hemisphere spring), and had furiously sought it everywhere. Chazaretta, Gladys says, had a brother whom he had not seen for a long time; his closest friend was the lawyer Luis Collazo, who defended him when he was accused of murdering his wife, Gloria Echagüe. Questioned about Chazarreta, his brother asserts that he was an unpleasant character who enjoyed humiliating others, a case in point being the sale of the La Chacrita estate to Arturo Gandolfini rather than to a member of the family: after all he (the brother) had always wanted it for himself. And the investigators  Betty Boop (pronounced ‘Betibú’ in Spanish) was a comic figure of the early thirties (1932– 1934). With her bobbed curls, painted lips, and slim figure – including big bust (hence ‘Boop’/ ‘boobs’ vg. for breasts), long legs, short skirt, pumps and garters – she impersonated the flapper girls of the 1920s. (Source: https://archive.org/details/BettyBoop Cartoons; and cf. Danghelly Giovanna Zúñiga Reyes (June 2013, 72– 80).

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learn that at university Pedro Chazarreta was a member of a sort of “vigilante group with moral and ethical pretensions […] Sadists with imagination” who called themselves “the Furies”. Visiting Roberto Gandolfini, Arturo’s younger brother, in his office, Mariano and Brena learn that Arturo committed suicide the previous year. Roberto does not know why his brother bought La Chacrita from Pedro Chazarreta. In the archives of El Tribuno Brena finds photographs of Pedro Chazarreta taken with various people, among them Marcos Miranda, who in an article of March 7, 2013 (two months before the beginning of the plot) was reported to have died in a hunting accident. At the same time a current report ‒ presented to the film audience from Nurit’s perspective in the form of a television news item she sees while covertly observing the lawyer Collazo through his livingroom window ‒ speaks of a shooting in the USA in which an Argentine citizen has been killed. Nurit, and with her the viewer, wonders what, if anything, this might have to do with the Chazarreta case. In El Gato’s archives the journalists find evidence of the dark dealings of a group El Gato calls simply ‘la Organización’, on which he possesses a complete database. Among other things they fixed the relegation of three football clubs to the B league, and their business interests also include real estate. All of this greatly agitates El Gato, but leaves the journalists cold. What they are looking for is a full copy of the interview about Gloria Echagüe’s murder conducted by Brena in Chazarreta’s house before the businessman’s death. Brena wants to know who was on the photo in the empty frame. Opening the morning paper at home, Nurit learns that the man murdered in the USA was a friend of Chazarreta’s called Bengoechea. Searching Chazarreta’s house at night, she finds a fencing trophy and, next to it, a photograph of Pedro as a young man with a friend, both in fencing attire. The trophy bears the name of a military academy: ‘Liceo Militar General Urquiza’. Surprised by Collazo, who takes a pistol from a drawer, Nurit wonders why the lawyer immediately disappears, although he has obviously seen her. What was he doing in his dead friend’s house? A visit to the liceo militar brings her new information: Bengoechea, Chazarreta, Collazo, Miranda and Gandolfini graduated in the same class. Chazarreta, Collazo and Miranda later founded the Furies. Now, having been shown some of the liceo’s annual graduation group portraits, she knows who is on the lost photograph: Chazarreta, Collazo, Miranda and Bengoechea are carrying Arturo Gandolfini; in the background is a shed. At El Gato’s insistence, Brena visits him, accompanied by Nurit and Mariano. The whistleblower sells Brena another photo, showing Chazarreta in the River Club stadium. This, El Gato asserts, proves Chazarreta’s contacts to la Organización. Brena will have none of it and interrupts him just at the point when he is

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giving the photo’s date. El Gato does, however, say not only that Chazarreta was mad at the way la Organización had manipulated River’s relegation, but also that he (Chazarreta) was being watched and his life was in danger. The viewer, like the investigators, asks what all this has to do with Chazarreta’s murder. But the team has already moved on to the next question: What is it that still links the young men in that photograph? Visiting him in his office, Brena, Mariano and Nurit show Roberto Gandolfini the photo they have found, and confront him with their thesis that Collazo is the murderer of Chazarreta, Miranda and Bengoechea: he is, after all, the only survivor of the group. But Gandolfini refuses to believe his brother Arturo was murdered; he is convinced he committed suicide. He adds that between leaving school and the purchase of La Chacrita neither he nor his brother had had any contact with the figures on the photo. His elder brother had been their classmate, but he himself was a good deal younger. And although he knew of the Furies, he hadn’t heard any more of them for years. Arturo had had nothing to do with that particular club: “they weren’t normal boys”. And when he himself heard of the murder of Chazarreta’s wife, he hadn’t been surprised: “He and Collazo were the worst” (01:05:24). Gandolfini declares that he doesn’t know who took the photo or where: he might have taken it himself, as he and his brother were often together at the time. Collazo has a fatal road accident. Visiting La Chacrita, Arturo Gandolfini’s widow states that the photo was taken there. Her husband had bought the property the day before his suicide, and he was found dead in the shed that forms the background to the group portrait. She has never seen the photograph before (01:12:41). Arrived at a point where they can no longer see their way forward, the investigators decide to publish their version of events, although it is not in every detail backed by firm evidence. Nurit will place it in her column in El Tribuno as a fictional account ‒ her farewell contribution to that paper: “This will be my last column. I won’t be writing anymore about the Chazarreta case or the mystery surrounding his death. Sometimes reality generates questions with answers we can only find in our imagination. That’s why I’m going back to fiction” (01:14:24– 01:14:40).

Nurit’s fiction Nurit’s fictional account of the case contains the following elements: 1. Gloria Echagüe, Pedro Chazarreta’s wife, is found dead in their house. 2. The police decide it was an accident.

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3.

Chazarreta is interviewed at home by Brena, the El Tribuno journalist, for TV channel CN 23. 4. Arturo Gandolfini, Roberto’s elder brother, sees the interview on television. He notices the photograph from the time of the Furies hanging on the wall like a trophy and is traumatized by his recollection of past sufferings: he had been tormented and raped by the Furies and had never spoken about it. 5. Arturo steals the photo from Chazarreta’s house and buys La Chacrita from him, allegedly for his wife. 6. The following day, September 22, he sets fire to the shed where the Furies maltreated him, and hangs himself there. 7. He leaves both his wife and his younger brother Roberto envelopes containing copies of the ‘Furies’ photo, but with no further explanation. 8. Roberto Gandolfini immediately understands why his brother chose to die in this way. He vows revenge and commissions an organization to murder Pedro Chazarreta, Marcos Miranda, Luis Miguel Bengoechea, and Luis Collazo. Nurit: “Someone put him in touch with an organization that would handle everything” (01:18:26, italics mine.)

Part 2 Nurit, Brena and Mariano confront Roberto Gandolfini with Nurit’s fictional account. Gandolfini praises her powers of observation but comments that the end of the story is overly moralistic: Roberto Gandolfini: But the question you raised there isn’t bad. Nurit: What question? Roberto Gandolfini: What’s the point of an act of justice with no witnesses? (01:20:01– 01:20:07) Out of a drawer he takes the photo they have been looking for all along: it looks like the original. Some further remarks of his suggest that Nurit is on the right lines, and that ‒ at least as far as the photo is concerned ‒ he had lied to them: Roberto Gandolfini: I was going to burn it, but you changed my mind. Some day I’ll have to tell my son who these sons of bitches I had to kill were. And you… They’ll come after you with everything they’ve got. Nurit: Who are they? Roberto Gandolfini: Don’t play dumb. You called them the Organization. (01:20:17– 01:20:42)

The team ‒ and with them the viewer ‒ ask themselves if Gandolfini’s words mean that Nurit’s story is also true on this point. Nurit, however, did not speak of ‘la Organización’ /‘the Organization’ but of ‘una organización’/‘an organization’, which raises the question whether she had more or less by chance

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hit upon the ominous, all-powerful source of the criminal machinations the team were pursuing. They had ignored El Gato’s remarks on this score. Could it be this, Nurit’s story continues, that continues to bug Roberto Gandolfini even after his successful, all-embracing revenge: that he had involved an organization that would under no circumstances tolerate anyone prying into its affairs? Nurit put it like this: “But something still troubles him. He still doesn’t know what it is. He might never know” (01:19:23 – 01:19:32). Roberto Gandolfini doubts that Nurit’s story can ever be published: “Yes, for people to know what my brother had to go through. But I won’t get my hopes up. What’s above us is untouchable”⁴ (01:21:18 – 01:21:27). When Mariano tells him the story is going into next morning’s paper, Gandolfini replies: “Of course, you still don’t understand what you’re up against. It makes sense. It’s too much for one chat” (01:21:35 – 01:21:38). Brena adds that it’s too late to take any notice of this sort of threat, whereupon Gandolfini invents a headline for the following day: I can already imagine tomorrow’s headlines: EXPERIENCED CRIME REPORTER DIES IN HIS BED OF CARDIAC ARREST. […] ARGENTINEAN LITERATURE’S DARK LADY SUFFERS A TRAGIC ACCIDENT. A compulsive reader, she opens the elevator door distracted…and falls to her death. […] Car accidents, absurd deaths in violent robberies… This city generously provides different ways to die that nobody will suspect. (01:21:47– 01:22:27)

Brena’s visit to Comisario Venturini also fails to bring anything new. The police investigator denies all knowledge of Roberto Gandolfini and considers the Chazarreta case solved ‒ in proof of which he presents the journalist with three youths in the police cells who have confessed everything. Brena cannot say whether or not the three have anything to do with that particular murder. So Nurit, Brena and Mariano go ahead with their plan ‒ initially supported by the editor ‒ to publish their version of the case on the front page of El Tribuno.

The Chazarreta case – solved and unsolved questions It would be appropriate here to summarize the questions the journalist team have solved and those that still remain open: – How Chazarreta died is solved. From Roberto Gandolfini’s reactions it is clear that it was not a case of armed robbery: Gandolfini had himself  The concept has occurred in an earlier context, when Chazarreta was telling Brena about his wife’s death: “I’m an ordinary man. Do I have to explain the difference between a successful man and a powerful one? Powerful men are untouchable. Nothing reaches them. Nothing touches them. I’m a successful man” (00:11:23 – 00:11:39.)

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hired a killer to get rid of the man who had maltreated his brother and induced his later suicide. This also fits Nurit’s account. The meaning of the empty picture frame is only partly solved: it held the photograph of Chazarreta, Collazo and Miranda (the Furies) with Bengoechea and Arturo Gandolfini. Roberto Gandolfini had this photo (possibly the original) in his desk drawer. Arturo’s widow denied any knowledge of the photo. Here Nurit’s fictional version differs: she has Arturo removing the picture after his purchase of La Chacrita in order to overcome his personal trauma, and leaving a copy each to his brother and his wife. The connection between the USA shooting and the Chazarreta case is solved: the victim, Bengoechea, was in the same class as Chazarreta in the liceo militar. Again, Roberto Gandolfini’s reactions suggest he was also responsible for this death, to avenge his brother’s humiliation. Nurit’s story agrees on this score, too. Why Collazo paid a nocturnal visit to his friend Chazarreta’s house after the latter’s murder remains unanswered. As does the question of Chazarreta’s presence in the River Club stadium. The connection between the young men on the photo and their recent activities is to some extent clarified: Arturo Gandolfini bought La Chacrita from Chazarreta; Roberto Gandolfini has the photo; Collazo was Chazarreta’s lawyer and took care of everything after his wife’s death; Miranda appears on newspaper cuttings with Chazarreta, but in what circumstances is unclear. The role of Comisario Venturini remains shrouded in mystery. Did he attempt to cover up after Chazarreta’s death? The question is only partly answered. Venturini is immediately present at all three crime scenes, his black limousine acting as a sort of leitmotif throughout the film. And while his subordinates are scrupulously careful not to disturb anything, he casually takes a book from the shelf and asks Nurit to sign it for him: he is a “great admirer” of her work, yet mispronounces her name (0:23:38). Asked by Brena whether anything is missing in Chazarreta’s house, he confirms that some items have gone, adding, however, that the information must remain confidential. And, contrary to the pathologist’s statement, he asserts publicly that Chazarreta was attacked by three youths, so the case is one of robbery with homicide. When Brena, at the scene of Collazo’s fatal road ‘accident’, seeks to question him, Venturini does not reply. And on a later occasion he denies all knowledge of Roberto Gandolfini.

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3 Perturbatory structures As key information is withheld from the team of journalists (and hence, too, from the film audience), numerous aspects of the crime remain permanently unsolved ‒ a case of what Vera Toro calls enigma or empuzzlement.⁵ The gradual assembly of details in the course of the investigation has, in fact, something of the jigsaw puzzle about it. Moreover, the questions of Collazo’s nocturnal visit to Chazarreta’s house, and Chazarreta’s visit to the stadium, are undecidable, and the Comisario’s behavior is ambiguous. Both ambiguity and undecidability are classified by Toro as empuzzlement. Another striking feature of the filmic structure is the different levels of truth with which it plays. First there are data within the narrative reality of the film that can be verified by the rules of the viewers’ empirical world and can, therefore, be called factual. Then there are data marked in the filmic reality as fictional (Nurit’s final column in El Tribuno), but which are nevertheless presented as approximating the first level of factuality. Finally there are alleged ‘facts’ proposed purely to deceive their recipients ‒ the initial press reports on Chazarreta’s and Bengoechea’s deaths, Venturini’s statements to the press. Putting this in narratological terms, as well as the extradiegetic level (level 3) with its exclusively visual narrative instance (VNI 1), the following levels can be distinguished in Betibú: first an intradiegetic level (level 4), in which Comisario Venturini as verbal narrative instance (VeNI) gives his version of the murder in ‘on’ (level 4a); and Nurit, also as VeNI (level 4b), but in a voice-over and accompanied by VNI 2 (mindscreen) renders part of what she has written in her column (level 5b). When Mariano, Nurit and Brena read a two-month old news item about the death of Marcos Miranda (level 4c), in which aspects of the Chazarreta case which they are trying to reconstruct are presented ‒ partly in voiceover and partly by VNI 2 – a further hypodiegetic level (level 5c, 00:43:11– 00:44:03) opens, parallel to level 5b. There are, then, a number of different narrators on the same diegetic level whose statements (Comisario, Nurit’s column, newspaper cutting) partly differ, but without comment or explanation (Fig. 1 illustrates this structure of nested fictions). This fulfills the definition of empuzzlement, the third category of perturbatory narration advanced by Schlickers and Toro. Within the fictional reality of the film, all Nurit’s columns in El Tribuno except the last have a factual status. Her final column, explicitly fictional, functions as a dis-empuzzlement, a strategy of plausibility in which each missing  Cf. her essay in this volume.

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Fig. 1: Diegetic nesting I. Abbreviations: N = Nurit, C = Comisario, M = Mariano, B = Brena

bit of the puzzle is replaced with an invented bit, albeit a highly plausible one. The newspaper report of Marcos Miranda’s death, and the article and broadcast about Bengoechea’s death in the USA, are also considered by the journalist team to be factual. So far as the newspaper report of Miranda’s death is concerned, the intradiegetic VeNIs (Mariano, Nurit and Brena) that cite the article (and hence generate the story it narrates) are accompanied by VNI 2, which shows Miranda’s death (level 5). This opens, however, into two further narratives: (a) a pseudo-factual (i. e. intentionally deceptive) newspaper account (VNI 2a), in which Miranda dies from an accidental shot from his own rifle that penetrates his left buttock ‒ in other words a ‘hunting accident’ (00:43:43) in which Miranda, who was hunting alone, was not found for eleven hours; (b) Nurit’s final (fictional) column (VNI 2b), a mindscreen of Miranda’s murder, in which he is shot in the right groin and then given a lethal injection below his left ear (01:18:49). Both (a) and (b) are analepses of the extradiegetic VNI, and it is clear from the foregoing analysis of levels of truth and fictionality that the latter version casts doubt on the former. Schlickers and Toro’s model of perturbatory narration would classify this as deception. Fig. 2 illustrates the relevant structure:

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Fig. 2: Diegetic nesting II

The fictional presentation of the investigation in Nurit’s account is, however, a good deal more complex than Fig. 2 suggests. VNI 1 shows her typing her final column for El Tribuno on her laptop with her voice-over as VeNI accompanied by a mindscreen (VNI 2a: cf. Figs. 1 and 2), whose opening shots show Roberto Gandolfini standing in front of the burnt-out shed (level 5) where his brother Arturo hanged himself. Roberto holds a photograph in his hand (01:14:43 – 01:15:08). In VNI 2a the camera circles Roberto, whose close-up then moves to the outer left of the frame, while on the right the viewer sees a teenage boy (later identified as Bengoechea) running through the grass toward the shed (01:15:09). A further diegetic level (level 6) then opens as VNI 3: Roberto’s mindscreen, which shows the boys carrying Arturo by his arms and legs to the shed. In that moment one of them calls out to someone outside the frame to take a picture (01:15:16), and the frame freezes to the black-and-white photo (01:15:18) captured by the television camera (VNI 4) on the side-table in Chazarreta’s house during the interview with Brena about his wife’s death (level 7, 01:15:20). Arturo Gandolfini, now an old man, watches that interview, and the following shots – interrupted by Nurit working on her laptop (VNI 1) – show the signing of the contract of purchase for La Chacrita, the removal of the photo from its frame, Arturo arriving at the estate, and his suicide. The sequence ends with Roberto Gandolfini, again in front of the burnt-out shed, with the sealed envelope in his hand (01:16:57). He opens the envelope, takes out the photo and looks at it; a mindscreen (VNI 3) now makes it clear that the photographer was the boy Roberto himself, who ‒ after taking the picture ‒ watched his elder brother’s torment through a crack in the shed door (01:17:20). The scene fades to VNI 2a (Nurit’s mindscreen) showing Roberto in his office (01:18:01). Interrupted once again with a sequence of Nurit writing on her laptop (generated by VNI 1), the film nar-

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rates Roberto’s hiring of the killers (VNI 2a), ending with a shot showing him standing in front of his office window before cutting to him reading Nurit’s (fictional) final column with the investigative team in the background (generated by VNI 1, 01:19:37).

Fig. 3: Diegetic nesting III. Abbreviation: A = Arturo Gandolfini, R = Roberto Gandolfini

4 Intertextuality and metalepsis That the film plays at the level of both énoncé and énonciation with the levels and boundaries of its narrative realities is evident from the recurrence of a specific intertextual reference: a verbal and visual quotation⁸ from two stories by the

 When Nurit invites Brena and Mariano into the rented house where her son, his friends, a dog and two of Nurit’s women friends are living, she comments “Casa tomada” (‘house taken over’; 00:21:24). Chazarreta’s body is found in a green armchair facing a window (00:02:01). When Brena asks the Comisario what Chazarreta had been doing, apart from drinking whisky, Mariano answers “Maybe he was reading ‘Continuity of Parks’”; Brena’s riposte, “You don’t read crime novels, but you do read Cortázar” (00:24:31– 00:24:36), refers to Mariano’s reading habits. Chazarreta’s love of jazz, instanced in the endless loop playing when the body was found, may be seen as a further homage to Julio Cortázar, himself a jazz fan, who cited jazz in several of his stories. Betibú begins with Louis Prima’s “Sing, Sing, Sing” (1936) in an interpretation by Benny Goodman, and ends with Ella Fitzgerald singing “Undecided”.

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Argentine writer Julio Cortázar: “Casa tomada” (1946, republished 1961 in Bestiario) and “Continuidad de los parques” (1964 in Final del juego). Both stories have been filmed⁹; both present worlds of puzzlement and instability.¹⁰ Even more clearly than “Casa tomada”, Betibú cites “Continuidad de los parques”, where an extradiegetic narrator tells the story of a man sitting in a green armchair facing a window onto parkland and reading a novel whose protagonist proceeds to murder him (the murder itself is not described). This classically paradoxical text involves a vertical (bottom-up) metalepsis on the level of the histoire (in corpore). A figure from the lower diegetic level (the lover of the unfaithful woman in the novel read by the man in the green armchair) appears physically on the higher diegetic level of the novel’s reader¹¹ in order to kill him. This intended murder is also part of the novel, giving Cortázar’s short story the structure of a mise en abyme aporétique (or aporistique). Cohan’s film at least suggests a similar structure: a vertical epanalepsis of the plot (cf. Grabe, Lang and Meyer-Minnemann 2006) – or what Dällenbach (1977) calls mise en abyme par mimétisme ‒ set in train by the linguistic blurring in Nurit’s account of the case. Taken up by Roberto Gandolfini (as part of the diegetic world generated by extradiegetic VNI 1) when he reads her final column (“Don’t play dumb. You called them the Organization”, 01:20:45), this crystallizes into a possible, albeit never explicitly confirmed, play on components of truth. The viewer’s tendency to share Roberto’s assumption that Nurit is actually referring to la Organización is reinforced by the disappearance both of El Gato, who constantly felt himself under observation, and of his archive on la Organización after the three investigators have spoken to Gandolfini – something Mariano discovers. Moreover, Venturini’s behavior, parallel to Brena’s visit, heightens the viewer’s impression that the Comisario is intent on concealing the truth about the Chazarreta case. Another sequence shows a white-haired man stealing Nurit’s laptop from her apartment – an event that remains hidden from the investigating team but is clearly intended to undo their work. At the same time, and equally unknown to the team, an anonymous telephone call is made to Rinaldi in El Tribuno’s editorial office:

 “Casa tomada” in Bébé (Claude Chabrol, France 1974), in Sinfín: la muerte no es ninguna solución (Cristian Pauls, Argentina 1988), and in House taken over (Liz Hughes, Australia 1997); “Continuidad de los parques” in e. g. Intimidad de los parques (Manuel Antín, Argentina/Peru 1965).  Cf. José Miguel Oviedo (2001, 164) and César Eduardo Ambriz Aguilar (July–October 2009, n.p.).  Cf. K. Meyer-Minnemann’s analysis (2006).

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Voice: Rinaldi. Do you know who this is? Rinaldi: Yes. Voice: We need the favor you owe us. Rinaldi: I’m listening (01:29:21– 01:29:35.)

This brief dialogue is followed by the stopping of the printing press in order to replace Nurit’s front-page column with a report about Turkey, which leads one to suspect that Rinaldi is in the power of what El Gato called ‘la Organización’. When Nurit concludes her story with the words “The younger brother thinks that everything is finally over. He’d like to talk to his brother, tell him what he did for him, for both of them. But something still troubles him. He still doesn’t know what it is. He might never know” (01:19:13 – 01:19:30), she seems to sense an ominous turn in the life of Roberto Gandolfini, and one that is soon realized, when (in the diegetic world generated by extradiegetic VNI 1) he is shot close to the dance bar where Brena and Nurit are talking. Again the Comisario’s black limousine passes, stopping in front of a taxi that diagonally blocks the street. Venturini gets out; a policeman tells him Gandolfini has been robbed and shot by some youths; he receives a call, again anonymous – the film’s final dialogue: Voice: Well? Venturini: It went fine. He won’t be talking anymore. (01:33:46 – 01:33:53)

The call, which suggests that the Comisario is also part of la Organización, resembles a twist ending¹², for Strank (2014, 121– 122) a subcategory of surprise ending, inasmuch as it does not just provide “new information” but reveals “constitutive aspects of the diegesis as false”. The Comisario’s behavior, however, had already been subjected to some scrutiny by the team, with the result that ‘true’ and ‘false’ elements of the diegesis were putatively separating before the end of the film. A final twist is given to this twist when the fate Roberto Gandolfini predicts for Nurit and her companions seems – albeit only seems – to play out before the viewer’s eyes. For when she goes from Gandolfini’s office to look for Lorenzo Rinaldi, Nurit is told he is not in the editorial office but down in the cellar at the printing presses. To get there she has to take the elevator, which already has another passenger: a mechanic. The elevator suddenly stops and the lights go out. Is this the exit Roberto Gandolfini had thought up for Nurit? As the scene ends here, we never find out. A similarly suggestive motif, reminiscent of Gandolfini’s fate, is the black motorcycle with black-appareled riders that appears on two oc-

 Strank distinguishes four types of twist ending, of which Betibú’s diegesis (at most) resembles type (a): “it’s all a conspiracy staged by others”.

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casions – whether by chance, threat, or execution remains open, for again the scene ends here.

5 Conclusion Chazarreta, Collazo and Miranda – the Furies – were possibly members of la Organización. Did this body fear the breaking of their pacto de silencio ¹³ after forty years, and as a consequence further revelations of their activities? Was this why they killed Roberto Gandolfini and possibly planned to eliminate the three investigators as well? Did the Comisario and the ambitious newspaper editor Lorenzo Rinaldi also work for la Organización? In the interviews conducted for the ‘making of’, Miguel Cohan and his cast carefully avoid answering any of these questions. Betibú’s combination of empuzzlement and deception reinforces the perturbing impact of its mysterium. Cohan’s film depicts a world in disorder, whereas the central concern of crime fiction as a genre, according to Hickethier (2012), is “to secure [the established] order […]. Clarification of the criminal process and arrest of the criminal [serve as] a tranquilizer that tells us it’s not worth breaking the social code”. The Betibú team, too, are motivated by the desire to reinforce social values, but they fail to attain their goal, not only because the investigative puzzle remains incomplete but also because they themselves are – or appear to be – under threat from the secret and secretive Organización. This lends a sense of tragedy to the film’s “call for thought”.¹⁴ But Betibú has another aspect, too: while it is focused on their detective work, it does not reduce Nurit, Brena and Mariano to the level of ‘thinking machines’: their task retains a moral dimension (Hügel 1978, 38). What they are fighting against is not just a crime: it is a form of corruption consistently presented as intangible. The Argentine setting of Cohan’s film, and in particular the fact that the Furies – Chazarreta, Collazo and Miranda – attended a military academy, and that El Gato, the vanished whistleblower, must therefore be counted among the desaparecidos, creates a connotative reference to the historical reality of Argentina, especially during the proceso – the dictatorship of 1976 – 1983.

 Nurit’s final (fictional) newspaper column speaks of the “pact of silence” the Gandolfini brothers made after Arturo’s abusive and humiliating treatment by his classmates (from 01:14:26).  Cf. Toro’s definition of puzzle in this volume.

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Filmography Betibú. Directed by Miguel Cohan. 2014. Argentina/Spain: Cameo, 2015. DVD.

Bibliography Ambriz Aguilar, César Eduardo. 2009. “Texto tomado. Análisis narratológico de ‘Casa tomada’ de Julio Cortázar.” Espéculo 42. Accessed 3 March 2016. http://www.ucm.es/info/especu lo/numero42/casatoma.html. Brunner, Philipp. 2016. “Kriminalfilm.” Lexikon der Filmbegriffe, edited by Hans Jürgen Wulff. Accessed 1 September 2016. http://filmlexikon.uni-kiel.de/index.php?action=lex ikon&tag=det&id=8146. Dällenbach, Lucien. 1977. Le récit spéculaire. Essai sur la mise en abyme. Paris: Seuil. Hickethier, Knut. 2012. “Einleitung.” Knuth Hickethier. Kriminalfilm, n.p. Stuttgart: Reclam. Hügel, Hans-Otto. 1978. Untersuchungsrichter, Diebsfänger, Detektive. Theorie und Geschichte der deutschen Detektiverzählung im 19. Jahrhundert. Stuttgart: Metzler. “Ley 3622”. Accessed 1 September 2016. http://www.buenosaires.gob.ar/sites/gcaba/files/ ley_3622.pdf. Meyer–Minnemann, Klaus. 2006. “Narración paradójica y ficción.” In La narración paradójica. “Normas narrativas” y el principio de la “transgresión”, edited by Nina Grabe, Sabine Lang and Klaus Meyer-Minnemann, 49 – 71. Madrid and Frankfurt a. M.: Iberoamericana/Vervuert. Oviedo, José Miguel. 2001. Historia de la literatura hispanoamericana. vol. 4: De Borges al presente. Madrid: Alianza. Strank, Willem. 2014. “Das überraschende Ende.” Cinema 59, 120 – 126. Also Willem Strank. Twist Endings. Umdeutende Film-Enden. Marburg: Schüren. Zúñiga Reyes, Danghelly Giovanna. June 2013. “La representación de la transformación femenina en los dibujos animados. El caso de Betty Boop.” Revista de Comunicación Vivat Academia 123:72 – 80.

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Splitting and Splintering of Reality in Jaco Van Dormael’s Mr. Nobody 1 “Every path is the right path” Who is Mr. Nobody? Even after a number of viewings of Jaco Van Dormael’s 2009 film, the question eludes an answer. Mr. Nobody is on the one hand a small boy called Nemo, who has to decide between his parents but still lives – in two different lives – with both his father and his mother. Then Nemo is a teenager linked to three different girls in three different worlds, then an adult married to each of these women in several different lives. Finally, in 2092, he is Nemo Nobody – at the age of 118, the last remaining mortal on Earth. This ancient man tells a doctor and a journalist about his many lives as boy, teenager and adult, and the journalist – standing, probably, for the equally perplexed viewer – asks him “Of all those lives, which one… which one is the right one?” But, far from helping, the answer compounds the questioner’s confusion: “Each of these lives is the right one. Every path is the right path.” Nor is that all: many other statements of the protagonist in his various lives, as well as the strategies and procedures of the film’s narrative instance¹ seem calculated to frustrate the reconstruction of a consistent or credible story when the credits roll. Mr. Nobody can on the one hand be seen as an example of plural realities (cf. Orth 2013), of non-linear narrations with multilinear time dimensions (cf. Eckel 2012, 36 – 42), or of so-called forking-path narratives (cf. e. g. Bordwell 2002; Schmöller 2012) like Przypadek, Sliding Doors or Lola rennt (Run Lola Run!). On the other hand it lends itself, with its inconsistencies and incoherencies, to analysis along the lines of Sabine Schlickers and Vera Toro’s concept of ’perturbatory narration’,² and at the same time to the testing of this concept for its analytic usefulness. The present essay pursues these tasks. The film is particularly suited to this approach inasmuch as it contravenes the constituents of the doxa specified by Schlickers and Toro. Its narrative levels are as confused as its levels

 Like Schlickers (1997), Schweinitz (2007) and Kuhn (2011), I work on the assumption, in the context of the communication situation of fictional narratives, of a narrative instance in fictional feature films (cf. Orth 2013, 52– 59) that functions as a theoretical communicative construct to which narrative strategies and procedures can be ascribed.  Cf. Schlickers (2015), and the Introduction to the present book. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110566574-007

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of reality, and no narrative reality is, in fact, achieved that is not self-contradictory. It will be shown that the most striking narrative strategies used by Jaco Van Dormael in this work correspond to the three basic structures of perturbatory narration: empuzzlement, deception, and paradox. Conversely, this indicates the relevance of these new narratological categories for the analysis of appropriate texts. Certain refinements and concretizations of the underlying concept will arise in the course of its application to Mr. Nobody: emphasis will be laid, for example, on the significance of narrative reality for perturbatory narration; and it will be argued that ambiguity is not only a central component of the narrations in question, but can be considered as the source from which the perturbing aspects of this narrative form derive.

2 Empuzzlement The most striking narrative strategy in Mr. Nobody is the splintering of narrative reality, leading to multiple levels of reality, none of which is privileged over the others. As no model of reality³ is unmistakably marked as the reality within the fiction, we can speak here of plural realities⁴ – a condition that flouts all the tenets of the doxa and results in extensive empuzzlement. Altogether, the filmic narrative contains two main and several subordinate forkings of the action. The central divisions take place at crucial moments of the protagonist’s development. The first of these is when Nemo as a 9-year-old boy must decide which parent he wants to live with after their separation: whether, standing in the station of their small town, he will now get on the train with his mother or stay behind with his father.⁵ The choice of future partner causes the second central forking of the plot: as an adult, marrying either Anna, Elise or Jean, Nemo leads at least three different lives. And these two moments are intimately connected, for the 15-year-old boy’s relationship with Anna is the fruit of his decision to get on the train with his mother. Staying with his father, he is at the same age brought together with either Elise or Jean. In both his teenage and adult lives

 ‘Model’ here means a concrete variant of the narrative – i. e. fictional – reality. On plural narrative realities in more general terms cf. Orth 2013.  On plural narrative realities in more general terms cf. Orth 2013.  The scene quotes the oft-cited forking-path narratives of Przypadek and Sliding Doors, where the future is decided (among other things) by whether or not the main characters catch a train or subway. Cf. Schmöller (2012, 194– 233) for an extended analysis of these texts as archetypal examples of full-length films with alternative plots.

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his relationships with Anna and Elise again split into a number of variants, exponentially increasing the range of real and possible actions presented in the film. Nemo’s teenage feelings for Elise, for example, are narrated in three different forms. In variant a) seeing her leave the house with another boy, he decides impulsively not to give her a love letter he has written. Driving home, frustrated and angry, on his moped, he has a serious accident, after which it is unclear throughout the film whether or not he comes out of coma. In variant b) he gives her the letter, but she does not accept his feelings, as she loves the other boy, Stefano. This leads Nemo, out of sheer frustration, to take up with Jean and later, as an adult, to marry her. In variant c) his love letter convinces Elise and they come together and eventually marry. But this again leads to variant, mutually contradictory models of reality; for in variant c1) Elise is killed in an accident soon after the wedding, and in variant c2) she suffers from severe depressions, because she really still loves Stefano and does not want to live with Nemo. Much narrative time and many variants are also devoted to Nemo’s relations with Anna, although here the different versions of the story cannot in the full sense be thought of as forkings. For most of the models of reality in which Anna and Nemo would like to – or actually do – come together contradict each other in the course of the narrative without the presentation of any specific triggering event. In a briefly narrated episode they are happily married; in another variant they lose track of each other as teenagers only to meet again by chance later on; and then they either fall in love again (and again lose track of each other), or they don’t. The coexistence of these disparate, mutually relativizing realities within their stories gives rise to irresolvable ambivalences regarding the narrative reality.⁶ The plural realities in Mr. Nobody lead to numerous ambiguities⁷ about the facts in the fiction. This generates profound empuzzlement. Because of the contradictory models of reality it is unclear whether the 9 year old Nemo stays with his father or goes away with his mother, and which woman he will chose to live with. In the variants with Elise and Anna it remains uncertain how the relationships will proceed, because different versions of the love stories are narrated.

 For plural realities of this type cf. also Orth (2013, 215 – 228).  Rather than referring to the general ambiguity of art, my use of the term ‘ambiguity’ in the context of an individual work derives from what Pinkas (2010, 40), referring to Rimmon (1977), describes as “ein Kippspiel mit gleichwertigen, einander gegenseitig ausschließenden Deutungsalternativen […], ohne dieses jedoch auf die Frage nach der Existenz des Übernatürlichen zu beziehen” (“a game with mutually exclusive interpretive possibilities of equal rank […], which does not, however, appeal to a supernatural order.”).

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The cutting of the film contributes much to this confusion, for the numerous models of reality are not presented in individually coherent narratives but in what seem random sequences, repeatedly interrupted not only by various framing devices (cf. the section on deception below), but also by an (audiovisual) fiction about an expedition to Mars composed on a typewriter by one of the 15-yearold Nemos. There are, too, a number of other surreal, dreamlike scenes. Despite the characteristic markers given to the adult Nemo – different hairstyles, glasses, physical scars, occupations etc. – the incidence of similarities and contradictions within these features undermines any attempt to relate a specific protagonist to a specific model. Moreover, some versions of Nemo’s life lead to a dead end, for instance when he has a serious accident as a 15-year-old; or the ’Jean reality’, in which, after assuming a false identity, he accidentally becomes a crime victim and is shot in a bathtub.

3 Deception As well as these many contradictory models of reality, the film reveals various forms of narrative unreliability and potential deception. On two separate occasions – in conversation with a physician and in an interview with a journalist – Nemo functions as an aged diegetic narrator, but in both of these examples of explicit narration⁸ linked to a specific character doubt occurs as to the credibility and reliability of the narrator.⁹ The first occasion is when the 118-year-old Nemo (the ’last mortal’) is hypnotized so that he can remember his identity: the beginning and end of the trance are stylized to suggest a dream. An airplane tows a banner bearing the word “Sleep………” across the sky, and then after a longish interval a banner saying “Wake up……”. Everything bracketed by these banners might be due to the hypnosis – although it is questionable whether narrative facts could be conveyed in such circumstances. Other details, too, suggest that this very old Nemo may no longer be fully credible. At the beginning of his conversation with the physician

 For this and other forms of unreliable narration in film cf. the differentiated concept of Laass (2008 – here especially 51– 59).  There are also some scenes where Nemo awakens from what appears to be a dream, marking the specific narrative reality as a possible dream. But such markings are only briefly relevant, as the events in question are taken up again. An example is the ‘Jean’ model of reality: Nemo wakes as a teenager next to Anna but addresses her as Jean and after a moment of confusion realizes that he has been dreaming. The suggestion immediately arises that the entire Jean model might be a dream. However, this model is later pursued without any reference to its being a dream.

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he is convinced, for example, that he is living in 2009, not 2092. This casts doubt on everything he says under hypnosis. Moreover, the purpose of the hypnosis is to help him remember who he is, and memories as such are unreliable. These memories in any case begin with a voiceover of Nemo as a child telling, among other things, that he already knew before his birth everything that would happen in his life. At the ’time’ (i. e. before his birth), he lived in a sort of fantasy heaven populated by unicorns and angels where he could choose his own parents; and he does, in fact, have several couples come for a sort of job interview. However, both the embedded child narrator (for whom fantasy and reality are apparently indistinguishable) and the content of what he tells (which is strictly incredible in its level of knowledge of the world) send out strong signals of narrative unreliability – assuming that one views the film as following the conventions of realism rather than fantasy.¹⁰ The interview with the journalist puts an altogether more radical spin on the narrative, for Nemo asserts here – in the style of a twist ending¹¹ – that neither he nor the journalist are real: they exist only in the fantasy of a 9-year-old child faced with an impossible decision between his parents. The assertion is immediately followed by a third variant of this particular choice: Nemo neither gets on the train with his mother nor stays with his father, but runs off along a track across the fields into an uncertain future. This surprising turn of events is again, however, subject to doubt; for a child whose fantasy can create all the models of reality depicted in this film must possess a very unchildlike knowledge of the world, including the possible course of love relationships. Moreover, the statement “You don’t exist. Neither do I. We only live in the imagination of a nine-year-old child. We are imagined by a nine-year-old child, faced with an impossible choice” contradicts Nemo’s answer to the question which of these many lives and many paths is the right one: “Every path is the right path.” Nor would it be consistent with this logic to show Nemo’s death and reassumption of life as an extremely old man. Neither of these supposedly unreliable narrative inserts fulfills the central criterion of that narrative strategy: that there should be a level of reliable and non-contradictory fact in the narrated world against which to match and measure them. In their classical form such ’factually unreliable narrations’¹² entail a hierarchy of narrative levels, one of which is marked as real within the overall fictional frame. However, despite all its narrative strategies and all its signals,  Helbig (2005, 137, 140) sees both these aspects as typical signs of narrative unreliability in film.  Cf. Strank 2014 on the history, and corresponding typology, of twist endings in film.  For detailed analysis of this narrative type cf. Laass 2008, 136 – 195.

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Mr. Nobody offers no such solution as regards either the events told under hypnosis or the circumstances of Nemo’s childhood and youth and of his decision against one or other or both his parents – or, therefore, whether only one path is actually the right one. The numerous markers of narrative unreliability are all either contradictory or otherwise incredible. They point, in fact, to nothing. Take simply the two variants of narrative unreliability under consideration at the moment: given the absence of any explicit contextual relation, they are mutually incompatible; the narrator must be either a patient under hypnosis or a child endowed with a highly developed fantasy. No connection between these options is suggested. In what relation, one might ask, do Nemo’s utterances under hypnosis stand to his interview with the journalist? Is one of these narratives embedded in the other; is the fantasizing child a product of the hypnosis? This might be a plausible solution, but it is certainly not explicitly narrated. All the less so as the interview continues after the hypnosis has ended. Many avenues of interpretation are offered, but these are often self-contradictory or reveal inherently incompatible details. And any connection with the many narrative paths can only be speculated upon. Is the lack of clarity as to their narrative reality connected with the unreliability of a 118-year-old narrator? Can the aged Nemo no longer distinguish between fantasy, wishful thinking and reality? And what role, in each case, does the other explicit narrative situation play? Which of the two explicitly unreliable narrators is actually unreliable? Mr. Nobody hints at many cases of deception but proves none.

4 Paradox As well as its plural realities and its unreliable narrator characters, the film contains a number of paradoxical scenes that enhance its complexity still further. Unlike the strategies of empuzzlement and deception, these metafictional and metaleptic elements are introduced in a fairly low key; nevertheless, they contribute decisively to the narrative perturbation of the film. A very short scene, for instance, depicts the street where Nemo and his family live as unequivocally fictional. A cyclist and a few pedestrians can be seen, and then a hand suddenly plunges down from outside the frame and places an automobile on the street: a clear signal to the viewer that this is a miniature film set into which characters and other items can be inserted at will, as in a trick film – and as such an explicit comment within the fiction as to its fictional status. Another metafictional scene has the 9-year-old Nemo alone in a theater (or movie house) watching a theatrical performance and a film, and in that sense

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reflecting the situation of the real viewers of Mr. Nobody. The performance relates to Elise’s depressive behavior: it shows her at work in a beauty salon looking longingly at a photo of Stefano, the love of her youth. When he actually comes into the shop, however, she fails to recognize him, so much has he changed with age: the man whose hair she is cutting no longer meets her ideal of beauty, which has remained fixed in the past of her teenage emotion. The scene explains why she is unhappy with Nemo and has turned depressive. Although plausible enough in its diegetic staging within the narrative, it is marked by its montage as a metafictional insertion into a performance Nemo is watching as a child. For this originates in, and is controlled by, a text he composes on a typewriter after Elise has left him: the performance within the film stops and starts in unison with the sound of the typewriter. Also connected with Elise, a further scene in the theater shows the same 9year-old Nemo watching a film of his own wedding with her, suggesting that the entire Elise episode might be the product of his imagination. Against this, however, stands the unlikelihood of a child being able to imagine all the details of that episode, in which case the wedding film must be deemed metafictional. The Jean episode, on the other hand, is marked by metaleptic structures that seem to dissolve its boundaries with the Elise plot,¹³ for Nemo sometimes thinks he is married to Elise when – in the reality of the current narrative model – he is married to Jean and vice versa. This is a case of internal metalepses,¹⁴ in which a film character at least makes as if to break out of the reality frame in which it is situated within the narrative. The scene in question has Nemo, married to Elise, receive a photo in the post showing him with Jean and their two children. This disturbs him so profoundly that he calls his (and Jean’s) son Noah ’Paul’ – the name of his son with Jean, whom, moreover, in the reality of his life with Elise, he cannot know. In the following scene, waking up by a swimming pool, he calls Jean ’Elise’, which disturbs her, too. This Nemo variant seems able to move – at least at the level of knowledge – between two narrative realities whose details, however, he confuses.¹⁵ This, in turn, may be due to the chain of circumstances that lies behind these two realities – which in terms of the narrative are mutually exclusive (cf. the section on empuzzlement above) –

 The scene mentioned in Footnote 9, when Nemo seems to dream of Jean while in an Anna episode, has a similar metaleptic tendency. But this is not connected with Elise.  On internal metalepses in film cf. Kuhn (2011, 359 – 363).  That Nemo may be leading a double life, however obvious an interpretation, seems implausible in the context of the narrative as a whole, given the many (and contradictory) levels of reality it contains. Moreover the Nemo in the photograph has a different haircut and does not wear glasses.

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for his relationship with Jean springs from his rejection by Elise. It seems almost as if he wants to break out of his marriage to Jean; and this leads to the suggestion that the Elise episode may be wholly or partly the product of his wish to be with her rather than with Jean, whom he does not love. Further hints of an overlap between the Jean and Elise realities seem to support this thesis, which is, however, at no point explicitly confirmed by the narrative instance, and hence remains one of many possible interpretations. The two women occasionally use identical phrases – for instance “The sun hurts my eyes” – albeit in different contexts. And in another scene, in which Nemo and Jean are lying on a bed together, a television set in the background shows the accident Nemo had after his wedding with Elise, in which she was killed. The same report was running on TV when Nemo woke up by the swimming pool. The accident marked the end of his possible life with Elise, but the question remains whether Nemo as an adult imagines the Elise episode as an alternative to his life with Jean – an alternative whose impossibility is possibly expressed in her death immediately after the wedding. The filmic continuation of the Elise variant renders its narrative status ambiguous; and it is the ambiguity of these paradoxical elements that heightens the film’s perturbing impact.

5 Perturbatory narration in Mr. Nobody The explanation of central narrative strategies and important narrative elements¹⁶ has demonstrated the aptness of Schlickers and Toro’s concept of perturbatory narration for the elucidation of narrative procedures in Mr. Nobody. What is even more decisive here, however, is the interrelations between the perturbing elements within the film, for it is in their interactions that their impact is most forcibly expressed. In the film the three narrative strategies of deception, empuzzlement and paradox give rise to four specific interrelations: a) Deception generating empuzzlement. The most conspicuous narrative strategies, deception and empuzzlement, are connected in a complex manner. The unreliable narrations of the various Nemo characters (old man with doctor and journalist, child in hypnosis scenes) generate puzzling contradictions. As none of the supposedly unreliable narrations are cleared up finally and without  Due to the complexity of the film it is not possible to mention all relevant aspects. As well as the numerous surreal, dreamlike sequences already mentioned, there are visual peculiarities like crossing the lines or scenes that run backwards. These cinematic – but not necessarily narrative – procedures confirm the overall impression of the film’s presentational procedures and underline its perturbing narrative qualities.

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contradiction, they contradict each other. The film could in large part simply represent the confused utterances of a very old man under hypnosis, or the overwrought fantasy of a 9-year-old child that must choose between its parents. In overt contravention of the doxa, these diegetic inconsistencies are not resolved by the intervention of any superior extradiegetic narrative instance that might establish a hierarchical order between the narrative realities. The result is profound ambiguity about these realities. b) Deception contradicting empuzzlement. Even if one unreliable narrative variant is acknowledged as valid, it contradicts the other realities. Either it is a deception, implying that there is a hierarchy of reality models, one version being real and the other unreal. Or the plural realities are hierarchically equal, resulting in empuzzlement – as in the reality models in which Nemo lives as a child with his mother and with his father, and as an adult with Anna, Elise or Jean. Either alternative –understanding the events either as deception or as empuzzlement – seems at first sight possible, but the possibilities are mutually exclusive, not only in detail,¹⁷ but also in principle. For deception extends to, and hence undermines, the very concept of empuzzlement. The effect is similar to the perturbation posited by Schlickers with respect to Fabián Bielinsky’s film El Aura, resulting from “[einer Verstörung, die] sich aus dem Nebeneinander der Unzuverlässigkeit mit einer Unentscheidbarkeit [ergibt]” (“the juxtaposition of unreliability with undecidability”, Schlickers 2015, 61). Like that Argentine film, Mr. Nobody puts “[mehrere] Lesarten gleichberechtigt nebeneinander” ([several possible readings] “on an equal footing next to each other”, Schlickers 2015, 60). c) Paradox generating empuzzlement. Reinforcing the ambiguity of its narrative realities, the metafictional and metaleptic elements in Jaco Van Dormael’s film contribute considerably to its puzzling impact. When it is unclear which levels of diegetic reality are real and which fictional, and when characters can switch between models of reality and themselves lose their sense of which level they actually belong to, the narrative reality within the work is permanently destabilized. d) Empuzzlement generating paradox. Flouting the requirement of the doxa for consistent narrative reality, the numerous contradictory models of reality pre-

 As already observed, the plural realities could, formally speaking, all stem from the fantasy of a child on a train station, were they not, in their knowledge of the world and its human inhabitants, vastly beyond the scope of any child’s imagination. This reading would also ignore many other ambiguities within the film – e. g. that plural realities arise even before the onset of hypnosis. On these and other ambivalent forms of plural reality cf. Orth 2013, 255 – 258.

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sented in the section on empuzzlement (cf. above) are themselves paradoxical aspects of the narrative. In the case of Mr. Nobody, the combinatorial dynamics of the three strategies of perturbatory narration highlighted by Schlickers and Toro in the Introduction to this volume can be expressed schematically as follows:

Fig. 1: Perturbatory Narration in Mr. Nobody

6 Scope and limits of the concept of perturbatory narration Simply to affirm narrative complexity is one thing; to analyze it in its particularity is another, especially when a clear interpretive line is unattainable. Narratological approaches can show why simplified readings do not do justice to the narrative structure of specific films, not by achieving any final clarity about their story, but rather by showing why such clarity is impossible.¹⁸ Analysis can, in this sense, elucidate how narrative strategies generate ambiguity, and the model of perturbatory narration has proven adequately structured and differentiated for this task. In conclusion, however, I will, on the basis of my analysis of Mr. Nobody, propose three theses that relate to specific aspects of the model. Their validity can be checked in further narratological analyses:

 Cf. e. g. my analyses of David Lynch’s Lost Highway und Mulholland Drive in Orth 2005.

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1. The combinatorial dynamics of perturbatory narration are text-specific. Specific to Jaco Van Dormael’s film, for instance, is the dynamic relation between deception and empuzzlement on the one hand, and paradox and empuzzlement on the other. Other narratives may possess different dynamics. The perturbing strategies themselves appear to allow any number of combinations, which suggests that the diagram of combinatorial dynamics presented in the Introduction to this book does not possess universal validity. It has already been adapted in the present essay, for instance, to Mr. Nobody. However, that is arguably an advantage of Schlickers and Toro’s model, for it allows the forms of perturbatory narration to be differentiated according to the combinatorial dynamics of a specific work. 2. All perturbatory narrative procedures destabilize the narrative reality. The goal of these narrative procedures is uncertainty regarding the narrative reality as an integral part of the histoire of a narration. Deception may present a reliable version of (fictive) reality, but the presentation of alternative realities – especially when these are based on the unconscious imaginings of narrated characters – open the way to subjectively deviant models of reality. Empuzzlement strategies based on hierarchically equal plural realities undermine the very concept of an objectively accessible reality; and narrative paradoxes destabilize narrated reality by introducing uncertainty as to what is and is not fictive, or – to put it differently – by erasing the boundaries between the various levels of narration and of reality. Frustrating the quest for an objective, experiential reality, the dynamic combination of these strategies raises their perturbing impact exponentially. Radically ambiguous about the narrative reality¹⁹, films of this type can be seen as implicitly relativizing reality or even negating it altogether.²⁰ 3. The perturbing element of perturbatory narration is a function of its ambiguity with regard to the narrative reality. In itself, ambiguity does not necessarily disturb the recipient of a (filmic) narrative. Many forking-path narratives are ambiguous in the sense that each path represents a plausible version of the narrative reality: each is inherently consistent, but none is marked as the real path. The specific quality of perturbatory narration is its ambiguity in this respect, for it creates no plausible variant of (fictional) reality at all. On the contrary, its mutually intensifying strategies of destabilization consistently vitiate the at-

 The author/director’s intention, derived from interviews and other paratexts, may – critically reflected upon – be cited in confirmation of the sort of ambiguity posited here. Jaco Van Dormael, for example, in the ‘making of Mr. Nobody’ (on the DVD) states that the film was intended to pose more questions than it answered. Hence the text used for the present article was the ‘director’s cut’.  On implicit conceptions of reality in narratives with plural realities cf. Orth 2013, 249 – 258.

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tempt to establish any such model. This can have a thoroughly perturbing effect on viewers, because narrative reality and lived reality are closely related: the construction of a world only shown in extracts necessarily involves the experiential knowledge of the viewer; but this can be undermined by the deconstruction of reality practiced in those extracts. With its explicit reference to the recipient,²¹ the concept of perturbatory narration can explain why a film can radically disturb its viewers; or, to put it in other terms, perturbatory narration perturbs because it playfully revokes or relativizes received certainties about what reality really is. The defining adjective ’perturbatory’ in Schlickers and Toro’s critical concept indicates its explicit reference to the recipient – an unusual quality in conventionally structuralist narratology. The model offers the opportunity to inquire beyond the strict textual boundaries frequently maintained in narratological theory, and to apply the analytic methods of narratology in more contextually oriented approaches. This does not in itself, however, answer all the remaining questions of a specific narration. The concept of perturbatory narration can elucidate the complexity of individual texts in a differentiated manner, but it has its own cognitive limitations as an analytic tool. Nevertheless, its application to Mr. Nobody demonstrates with some accuracy why the central question raised in this film cannot be answered: Who is Mr. Nobody?

Filmography El Aura. Directed by Fabián Bielinsky. 2005. Argentina: Zima Entertainment, 2006. DVD. Lola rennt. Directed by Tom Tykwer. 1998. Germany: Warner Home Video, 2011. DVD. Mr. Nobody. Directed by Jaco Van Dormael. 2009. Belgium, Germany, Canada, France: Concorde Home Entertainment, 2011. DVD. Przypadek. Directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski. 1981. Poland: absolut Medien, 2009. DVD. Sliding Doors. Directed by Peter Howitt. 1998. UK, USA: Paramount Pictures. DVD.

 Cf. Schlickers 2015, 50: “Alle diese Erzählverfahren dienen dazu, die Rezipienten zu verwirren, zu täuschen und zu desorientieren” (“All these narrative strategies serve to confuse, deceive and disorient the recipient”); or again, as Schlickers and Toro put it in the Introduction: “the disturbance or disorientation in question is received by reader/viewers positively”; and “[a]ll these films set high demands on the viewer, and it is for this reason that we speak of ‘perturbation’: a level of inner disturbance, intended by the author/director, ranging from stunned bafflement to mental embarrassment […]”).

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Bibliography Bordwell, David. 2002. “Film Futures.” SubStance 97, 31.1:88 – 104. Eckel, Julia. 2012. Zeitenwende(n) des Films. Temporale Nonlinearität im zeitgenössischen Erzählkino. Marburg: Schüren. Helbig, Jörg. 2005. “’Follow the White Rabbit’. Signale erzählerischer Unzuverlässigkeit im zeitgenössischen Spielfilm.” In Was stimmt denn jetzt? Unzuverlässiges Erzählen in Literatur und Film, edited by Fabienne Liptay and Yvonne Wolf, 131 – 146. München: edition text + kritik. Kuhn, Markus. 2011. Filmnarratologie. Ein erzähltheoretisches Analysemodell. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Laass, Eva. 2008. Broken Taboos, Subjective Truths. Forms and Functions of Unreliable Narration in Contemporary American Cinema. A Contribution to Film Narratology. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier. Orth, Dominik. 2005. Lost in Lynchworld. Unzuverlässiges Erzählen in David Lynchs Lost Highway und Mulholland Drive. Stuttgart: ibidem. Orth, Dominik. 2013. Narrative Wirklichkeiten. Eine Typologie pluraler Realitäten in Literatur und Film. Marburg: Schüren. Pinkas, Claudia. 2010. Der phantastische Film. Instabile Narrationen und die Narration der Instabilität. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Rimmon, Shlomith. 1977. The Concept of Ambiguity – the Example of James. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Schlickers, Sabine. 1997. Verfilmtes Erzählen. Narratologisch-komparative Untersuchung zu El beso de la mujer araña (Manuel Puig/Héctor Babenco) und Crónica de una muerte anunciada (Gabriel García Márquez/Francesco Rosi). Frankfurt a. M.: Vervuert. Schlickers, Sabine. 2015. “Lüge, Täuschung und Verwirrung. Unzuverlässiges und Verstörendes Erzählen in Literatur und Film.” Diegesis. Interdisziplinäres E-Journal für Erzählforschung / Interdisciplinary E-Journal for Narrative Research 4.1:49 – 67. Accessed 15 August 2016. https://www.diegesis.uni-wuppertal.de/index.php/diegesis/article/down load/190/258. Schmöller, Verena. 2012. Was wäre, wenn… im Film. Spielfilme mit alternativen Handlungsverläufen. Marburg: Schüren. Schweinitz, Jörg. 2007. “Multiple Logik filmischer Perspektivierung. Fokalisierung, narrative Instanz und wahnsinnige Liebe.” montage/AV 16.1:83 – 100. Strank, Willem. 2014. Twist Endings. Umdeutende Film-Enden. Marburg: Schüren.

Erwin Feyersinger

Sensory Representation, Perceptual Spaces, and Perturbatory Distribution of Information in Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color 1 Introduction

Like his first film Primer (2004), Shane Carruth’s sophomore feature Upstream Color (2013) left its viewers both fascinated and puzzled. Film critic Lynden Barber calls the film “mystifyingly cryptic yet oddly hypnotic” (2013). Film blogger MaryAnn Johanson speaks of a “confounding intellectual mystery, an enigmatic philosophical science fantasy that’s like a cinematic Moebius strip” (2013). Anton Bitel notes in his review for Film4 that “Carruth’s mindmelt of mesmerism, metempsychosis and micro-organisms will leave some a little cold, most bemused if not utterly baffled, and near all needing to see it a second time.” Many reviews of Upstream Color, as collected on rottentomatoes.com, show similar reactions: the film is perceived as elegant, mysterious, and perturbatory. While the film is certainly both intriguing and disturbing on the story level – it follows the fate of a couple and its connection to an odd parasitic organism – it is the way this story is represented, i. e. the filmic discourse, that is mainly responsible for its specific perturbatory appeal. Carruth resorts to established conventions of indie filmmaking – bright, desaturated images, shallow focus, fragmentary editing, atmospheric soundtrack – but he employs them creatively and unconventionally in order to puzzle the viewer. Crucial to this ostranenie effect is an elaborate sound collage combined with an associative form of cross cutting, both of them connecting various locations and actions into a multidimensional perceptual space. While the film can be seen as part of the tradition of art-cinema narration (Bordwell 1985, 205 – 233), it blends elements from a variety of genres (mystery, science fiction, horror, love story, metaphysical arthouse drama) in an atypical way, which adds to the feeling that something is odd. The genre blend leads to an unusual three-part structure that frustrates conventional expectations of dramatic arcs. The genre blend, however, also helps to reinforce certain effects of the film. The horrifying events, for example, become credible and nauseating because they are presented in a non-generic, sensual manner. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110566574-008

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With its specific way of distributing and withholding information, the film confuses the viewer not only in terms of generic expectations on a macrolevel, but also on a meso- and micro-level. While Upstream Color tells its story almost straightforwardly – a lot of necessary information is explicitly presented – viewers still have a hard time (re‐)constructing the story, because quite often it is not clear which pieces of information are significant and how they relate to the rest of the film. As information is also presented non-redundantly, viewers have to pay close attention to what happens and how it might be relevant, which is further complicated by the slow, dream-like nature of the film and its atmospheric images, sounds, and music. According to the model proposed in Schlickers 2015 and in this volume, the filmic discourse of Upstream Color combines various narrative devices to create perturbatory effects: a) It is highly puzzling because it presents fantastical events in a naturalistic and sensual fashion, because it conflates space ambiguously, and because it omits or de-emphasizes relevant information. b) Its conflation of space is at points paradoxical. c) It can be seen as slightly deceptive because its generic cues are misleading and because it facilitates miscomprehension by providing both too much and too little information. Therefore, the following analysis will focus on the sensual nature of the film, its ambiguous audiovisual representation of space, and its confusing distribution of information.

2 Parasites and telepathy In order to discuss Upstream Color, a short summary of its strange story is called for, even if a verbal description cannot come close to the audiovisual representation – a good indication of how important the filmic discourse is in this case. Despite being a perturbatory film on several levels, its main plot can, however, be reconstructed with some confidence (cf. Wickman 2013 and Roan 2013 for similar interpretations). Upstream Color is concerned with the life cycle of a weird worm-like parasite that uses human beings, pigs, and orchids as hosts. Several people play an active role in perpetuating its life cycle while opportunistically exploiting some of its potent effects. The Thief robs people by hypnotizing them with the help of the parasite. The Sampler records music based on a telepathic connection between humans and pigs, which he establishes by transferring the parasite from a human victim to a pig. The Orchid Mother and the Orchid

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Daughter, two minor roles, sell flowers colored blue by dead piglets. One of their customers is the Thief. However, the Thief, the Sampler, and the Orchid women do not, as the end of the film suggests, cooperate on a larger scale. The organism itself does not seem to be a unique sentient entity. It is neither directly in control of the stages of its life cycle nor does it seem to influence human beings in order to enable these stages. Unlike horror film monsters that utilize human bodies as hosts, for example in Alien (1979) or in The Thing (1982), it is not presented as an antagonistic being, but rather as a living McGuffin whose mystery is not solved and not even essential for the actual story that is told. The film follows a woman called Kris (Amy Seimetz), who becomes one of the hosts of the parasite. In the first part of the film, which is mainly a supernatural body horror thriller, the Thief (Thiago Martins) forces Kris to ingest an early worm stage of the parasite. He uses the hypnotic powers of the organism to gain control over her. He lives with her for some time while she empties her bank accounts for him. To keep Kris busy, the Thief makes her transcribe Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854) on sheets of paper, which she then folds into interlocking rings. After the Thief has left, the worm inside Kris starts to grow rapidly. In a gruesome scene, Kris tries to cut the worm out of her body. The Sampler (Andrew Sensenig), a pig farmer and sound collector, uses low frequencies to draw Kris to him. In a clinical operation, he extracts the worm from her body and implants it into a pig. Kris is free of the hypnotic spell without remembering what has happened to her, but she is now supernaturally bound to the pig, their fates closely intertwined. This becomes clear in the second part of the film, a sound-driven psychological collage, when her pig meets a boar in the pigsty while she meets a stranger called Jeff (the director Shane Carruth) on the subway. Jeff is also a victim of the parasite, and apparently the male pig contains his worm. The Sampler uses the connection between the pigs and the so-called Sampled, a larger group of victims, to spy on that group and to perceive glimpses of their fates, which he uses to record sounds and music. Together, Kris and Jeff try to figure out what has happened to them. The plot gets dramatic in the third part of the film, a self-empowering love story and at the same time a weird, poetic whodunit. While Kris thinks that she is pregnant, her pig actually is. When the pig gives birth to her litter and both sow and boar are separated from the piglets, both Kris and Jeff are traumatized. The Sampler dumps the piglets into a river, where they emanate a blue cloud that in turn colors white orchids on the riverbank blue. Thus, the next stage of the parasitic cycle starts.

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Just before the climax, Kris’s precise recollection of Walden serves as a key for unlocking their mystery, but how this works is not explicitly clarified. The quotes from Thoreau’s text reflect motifs from Upstream Color (sounds, the color blue, a stream, drinking and eating, memories, nature, etc.) and are the last spoken words of the film. The climax proceeds without dialogue. Kris and Jeff are able to confront the Sampler in an abstract perceptual space. Thinking that the Sampler was the one who hypnotized and robbed her, Kris kills him. She, Jeff, and the other Sampled then take the pigs into their care, thus interrupting the life cycle of the parasite.

3 A sensual horror film

Fig. : Beautiful, revolting maggot-shaped worms

In Upstream Color, story and discourse are strongly interdependent, and in combination they are both responsible for the films perturbatory nature. The filmic discourse is chosen in order to effectively convey the story, but at the same time certain story elements are chosen because they work well in the audiovisual medium of film. The maggot-shaped worms, for example, offer distinct cinematic qualities (Fig. 1). The film uses actual animals instead of special effects or visual effects, which creates a naturalistic feeling of revulsion in the viewer. While horror film monstrosities are often a source of humor and disbelief, here the naturalism, the similarity to our actual world, leads to an alienating sense of discomfort. Maggots may look revolting, but at the same time they look good through the camera’s eye, allowing a high contrast image of light bodies crawling in brown flower soil. Furthermore, their lack of anthropomorphic features and their apparent lack of agency add to the perception that the parasite is an adverse circumstance in the background rather than a villainous antagonist at the center of the story.

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The film is very visceral and strongly evokes sensory perception. As with the maggots, it contains many scenes that create bodily discomfort: worms growing and moving under the skin, a woman trying to remove these worms with a knife, a pig being anesthetized, a human to pig operation, dead piglets under water, etc. But not all the film’s scenes are discomforting. The audiovisual representation appeals to the human senses in various ways. The visual style can be described as poetically observational and is similar to other contemporary arthouse films. The camera lingers on surfaces, visually interesting details, and ambiguous actions. Shallow focus and a limited, desaturated color scheme (earthy and yellowish shades of brown, light gray, white, and, sparingly, blue for the parasite, red for intracorporeal shots, and yellow for a new beginning at the end of the film) add to the elegance noted by several critics. While the film is visually pleasing for the viewers, the main sensory stimuli for the characters are haptic, acoustic, and extrasensory, and these in turn trigger similar sensations in the viewers. Many images create a feeling of touch, especially by emphasizing different materials and tactile textures (human skin, pig skin, soil, maggots, water, stones, paper) and by showing hands that touch surfaces, usually in closer shots. Equally important are sound and hearing. In a similar way to the use of hands, the film shows ears, headphones, and audio equipment in close shots to emphasize the importance of hearing and sound production. Not only is sound a major plot element pertaining to one the Sampler’s main activities – field recordings – but it is also used to get closer to that character’s perception in general. The film features perceptions that transcend human senses, such as a telepathic connection between Kris and her pig, which is also accessible to a third party, the Sampler. Not only sound, but also a specific form of parallel editing, the characters’ copresence in several locations, and the characters’ reactions are used to convey this extrasensory perception. Often, characters stare into space, either deep in thought or, more often, perceiving something that seems to be imperceptible to them (cf. the discussion of François Jost’s concepts of internal ocularization and auricularization in Schlickers 2009 and Kuhn 2011, 119 – 194). Other senses play minor roles. However, taste is foregrounded when the Thief tells Kris, while she is under hypnosis: “The water before you is somehow special. When you drink it you feel revived and full of energy. It is better than anything you’ve ever tasted. Take a drink now.” Gustatory delights are thus created by mere suggestion, not only for Kris, but also for the viewer. While Carruth has claimed that Upstream Color does not intentionally refer to filmmaking (Lanthier 2013), the film can be read as a metaphor for the hypnotic powers of cinema. Moreover, because it shows the process of sound recording and sound

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design – an integral part of filmmaking – it can justifiably be seen as a case of implicit, extracompositional metareference (Wolf 2009, 37– 41). However, this type of metareferentiality is only slightly illusion-breaking. More important for the discussion of perturbatory narration are the puzzling effects created by the film’s sensuality. Evoking a sensory experience in the viewer that resembles a real-world experience contrasts strongly with the supernatural events represented here. It also contrasts with the multidimensional space created by editing and sound montage. Effects only possible in film are thus combined with familiar experiences in an uncanny, alienating way.

4 Perceptual presence and complex spaces The representation of extrasensory perception results in the complex spatiality of Upstream Color, which is perceived as puzzling. The film creates hybrid spaces marked by what Oliver Schmidt calls an (un)likeness of appearance (2010, 50; cf. Schmidt 2013). These audiovisual spaces are both similar and dissimilar to our experience of actual space. When the Sampler observes the Sampled, he is shown as physically located at the farm, approaching pigs with his outstretched hand, which seems to function as a sensor. The film then cuts to his victims, involved in mundane or unpleasant situations in various places. The Sampler appears together with these minor characters in the same shots, sometimes continuing his movement or pose from the preceding shot in the pigsty. The film indicates that his presence in the different locations is not physical, but extrasensory. He is an invisible, ghost-like observer. The Sampled do not react to his presence, however close to them. The places he observes sometimes also affect the location where he actually is – the farm – in an impossible way. When emergency lights appear on his face and a siren is heard, the first impression is that the police are paying him a visit. However, the following shots reveal that the emergency lights belong to an ambulance transporting one of his victims. Thus, the lights and sounds at the farm can be naturalized as an externalization of his perception of a second location. Even though it becomes clear how this conflation of space and time is used as a specific stylistic device, it still remains paradoxical, therefore meeting yet another condition of perturbatory narration. The ambulance scene starts a short subplot about a couple with a troubled relationship. How this story is significant for the rest of the film is not necessarily apparent for a first-time viewer. However, it shows in detail how the Sampler spies on others. And it also reflects the fate of the main protagonists, because immediately afterwards Jeff talks about his own failed marriage, which is the

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point when Kris overcomes her initial reserve toward him. Still, this subplot is a good example of how the film deviates from traditional forms of storytelling. Since the subplot marks the end of a long, atmospheric sequence, it can be quite disorienting for viewers that a new couple is suddenly at the center of attention.

Figs. 2 and 3: Confronting the Sampler in two locations

More generally, showing that the Sampler can be co-present in several locations prepares for the climax, which also uses a complex spatial arrangement. While Kris and Jeff are actually in their apartment, they trick the Sampler into being present at a non-actual location, an empty office building, where they reveal that they can also perceive him. One of the strongest moments of the film shows Kris gazing directly at him. Confronting him in the non-actual building allows her to actually shoot him at his farm. Match-cuts show their presence at multiple locations (Figs. 2 and 3). The spatial complexity of the film is not only used to disorient and puzzle viewers and to represent extrasensory perception and telepathic connections; it is also used as an important storytelling device at the point of narrative resolution.

5 Too little, too much One of the main reasons why Upstream Color is described as puzzling and even deceptive is its specific audiovisual and linguistic distribution of information. The film underreports and overreports at the same time. It is not unusual for films to do this, as David Bordwell observes in his influential Narration in the Fiction Film: “At any given point an ordinary narrative may give us more or less information than the hypostatized ideal” (1985, 54). However, Upstream Color does this to a degree that makes understanding considerably more complicated. In general, the film provides highly fragmentary information, requiring viewers to complete and elaborate on missing information. While narrative gaps are a usual feature of films, they can in most cases be filled unambiguously. In Up-

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stream Color, this is often not possible because the information is too fragmentary or obscure, and accordingly gaps are not supplied – either by one schema alone or by any schema at all. For example, the film starts with a shot of a man throwing away a chain of interlocking paper rings. Whether this object is the result of children playing, an after-party clear-up, not significant at all, or an important prop of a hypnotic ritual, cannot be determined by a first-time viewer. The film uses fragmentary information on all levels. The shots are usually short, allowing only brief glimpses of the events. Many of these shots are close-ups with shallow focus. Both cinematic devices strongly direct the attention to specific details, but they also omit contextual information. The editing provides some context, but it does so elliptically and with minimum redundancy. The editing is often discontinuous and nonlinear, which creates many narrative gaps and thus adds to the ambivalence of the shots and scenes. Similar things can be said about acoustic information and sound design. The film is full of highly evocative sounds and music. Some of the sounds are diegetic and denote what can be heard in a specific shot, but they are usually emphasized to create specific visceral reactions. Many scenes feature almost no or highly muffled diegetic sounds, foregrounding the brooding, atmospheric music. Danijela Kulezic-Wilson (2014) notes that the “conventional soundtrack hierarchy” is reversed in Upstream Color. Music and sounds are privileged over dialogue, which is used quite sparsely. In the scenes with dialogue, shots of the character speaking are interspersed with shots of actions that happen before or after, or at an entirely different place. The dialogue itself is usually elliptical, too, condensing one or more conversations. Thus, it contains a lot of information, but very little essential information. It requires a lot of attention to follow both the fragmentary dialogue and the simultaneous fragmentary action.

Figs. 4 and 5: A cracked windshield is not relevant … while a logo is referred to much later

While the film usually provides too little information, there are points where it provides too much. More precisely, it does not make clear what fragmentary information is essential and should be kept in mind and what can be disregard-

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ed. In one of the earliest shots of the Thief he is seen over the shoulder and out of focus in his car (Fig. 4). The shot mainly offers the information that a man is driving. But, only a few seconds into the film, the viewer is not yet used to its narrative strategies, and will not look more closely at details. However, a viewer who knows that the film often shows relevant information in an elliptical and inconspicuous way, might notice the crack in the windshield, which is almost in focus and framed with relative salience. Only a minute later, a shot of flower pots in a similar manner reveals that the Thief is a customer of the Orchid women. This is done by including the women’s company logo (Fig. 5). This information can be understood only at a point much later in the film, when the logo has most likely already been forgotten. Usually, only a second or third viewing clarifies the relevance of the inconspicuous logo. The shot of the car is different, though. Here, the extraordinary element, the cracked windshield, is not mentioned again. While it seems to imply a backstory, the crack is not relevant to the film’s story. How the film distributes information both on a micro- and macro-level can be shown in one of the central storylines, the supernatural connection between Kris and her pig. The film explicitly shows that the worm is transferred from Kris to the pig. Both are introduced as subjects of the operation. Cuts and a few shared shots show them in the same space and situation. One shot shows them connected by the worm, which looks like a weird umbilical cord (Fig. 6). While the events themselves are strange and the specifics of the operation are vague, the scene itself is easy to follow, despite the fragmentary editing and the use of shallow focus.

Fig. 6: Kris and her pig connected by the worm during the operation

Further representations of their connection are less clear, though. Considering that many viewers will at first have a hard time distinguishing one pig from another, the connection is made even more explicit in the next scene. The pig gets an ear tag that is marked “Kris.” The tagging, however, is a telling example

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Fig. 7: Too much and too little information on an ear tag

of how the film works, because it only lasts for about seven seconds and five quick shots that are easy to miss. In addition to the main information – it is important that this pig is connected with Kris and is recognized as such – the shots also feature the actions of the Sampler (writing, tagging, handling the pig) and the reactions of the pig to the tagging itself. While a still image (Fig. 7) makes it easy to recognize the woman’s name both on the list and on the ear tag, the moving image makes this much harder: the shot itself lasts only for two seconds and cuts right after the letter “S” is started. Furthermore, Kris’s name has only been mentioned twice before. The shot emphasizes the name by showing it as the center of the action (only the hand and pen move while the letters appear), but at the same time the shot contains many similar letters and numbers. The written name is presented with slight redundancy. Written in a similar fashion in the preceding shot as part of the list, it is shown in several subsequent shots being tagged onto the pig. While this repetition helps, extracting vital information still demands close attention. Fig. 7 is a good example of one of the film’s strategies: it makes information explicit and to some degree salient, but at the same time obscures it by the sheer speed and incompleteness of the presentation (only three letters of the name are shown) as well as by a superabundance of detail (too many other letters and numbers are shown). Even with the name tag in its ear, it is not always clear which pig is being shown. Sometimes the film shows many pigs; sometimes it singles out one or two. In many scenes it is Kris’s pig, often together with Jeff’s, but the film also shows animals connected with other Sampled. The interconnected fate of the pigs and the main couple is shown via parallel editing and (sometimes) match-cuts. Certain similarities in their actions (Kris feels pregnant while the pig is pregnant) or in the reactions of the humans to what is happening to the pigs are further cues for their supernatural relation.

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While these cues and parallelisms are not unambiguous and allow several possible interpretations, a close look reveals that one interpretation is more probable than others.

Figs. 8 and 9: Similar colors as unobtrusive markers of a connection between humans and pigs

Very perceptive viewers will realize that the two main pigs look quite distinct, especially in combination: the pig connected with Kris is pinkish, the one connected with Jeff brown, and their litter a mix of both. This is reflected in the costume: in the scene where both pigs are removed from their litter and Kris and Jeff hide in the bathtub, Jeff wears a brown pullover and Kris a much lighter beige one (Figs. 8 and 9). Again, the film explicitly presents this information, but not in a salient way. The film hides information in plain sight without marking it as relevant. While the elliptical discourse of Upstream Color uses both gaps and indeterminacies of relevance to puzzle its viewers, it is actually possible to almost unambiguously reconstruct the fate of Kris and Jeff. In this sense, the film can be seen as what Cornelia Klecker (2015) calls a mind-tricking narrative, in that it takes repeated viewings – or an unusually perceptive viewer – to correctly interpret vital information that seems unobtrusive or has been left out. However, mind-tricking narratives that feature unreliable characters, such as The Sixth Sense (1999) or Fight Club (1999), surprise viewers by explicitly revealing in the end what has happened, inducing the audience to watch the film a second time to figure out what they have missed. Upstream Color has no such concluding twist: its audience either understands the story right away despite the gaps or watches it a second time. Even if the main plot is pieced together after a second viewing, the background of the story and, more importantly, its meaning still remain highly mysterious. The synergy of a strange world and its perturbatory representation provokes various metaphysical readings. Viewers want to know what the film symbolizes. The odd, but very distinctive choice of story elements appears to hint at a deeper, non-literal meaning: a pig farmer recording sounds, a disturbed woman quoting Walden while picking up stones from a swimming pool, a drug dealer trying to

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sell living worms from an orchid, an empty office building as an otherworldly space. Because of these strange choices the film has sometimes been called pretentious. However, Upstream Color is a film that does not necessarily need to be understood. Its main strength is the unique experience it offers to viewers, an experience similar to that of the two protagonists. As film critic Eddie Harrison remarks: “Like Kris and Jeff, the audience are taken in, beguilingly befuddled, and then spat back out, left to ponder on what makes us who we are, and the fragile notions of self-actualisation and identity” (Boyle et al. 2013).

6 Conclusion Upstream Color employs a variety of perturbatory strategies. It emphatically puzzles viewers, but it is also slightly paradoxical and seems also to be deceptive. It leads viewers astray by deviating from conventional schemata of filmic storytelling. It uses a highly visceral form of representation to convey a supernatural story. A complex spatial arrangement, created by parallel editing and an associative sound collage, signifies extrasensory perception and serves as a puzzling storytelling device. On all levels, the film distributes both too little and too much information without marking its importance or unimportance. Therefore, the film allows for a variety of interpretations, especially for metaphorical readings. Together, these techniques create a highly perturbatory representation of a perturbing story.

Filmography Alien. Directed by Ridley Scott. 1979. Los Angeles: Twentieth Century Fox, 2014. Blu-ray. Fight Club. Directed by David Fincher. 1999. Frankfurt a. M.: Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2013. DVD. Primer. Directed by Shane Carruth. 2004. Brighton: Moviolla, 2014. DVD. The Sixth Sense. Directed by M. Night Shyamalan. 1999. Mü nchen: Constantin Film, 2008. DVD. The Thing. Directed by John Carpenter. 1982. Hamburg: Universal Pictures Germany, 2010. Blu-ray. Upstream Color. Directed by Shane Carruth. 2013. London: Metrodome Distribution, 2013. DVD.

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Bibliography Barber, Lynden. 2013. “Upstream Color Review.” SBS, 3 June. Accessed 28 August 2016. http://www.sbs.com.au/movies/review/upstream-color-review. Bitel, Anton. 2013. “Upstream Color.” Film4, 27 August. Accessed 28 August 2016. http:// www.film4.com/reviews/2013/upstream-color. Bordwell, David. 1985. Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Boyle, Niki, Eddie Harrison, and Gail Tolley. 2013. “Upstream Colour: What on Earth Does It Mean?” The List, 28 August. Accessed 28 August 2016. https://film.list.co.uk/article/ 54079-upstream-colour-what-on-earth-does-it-mean. Johanson, MaryAnn. 2013. “Upstream Color Review: Higher Dimensions of Storytelling.” flickfilosopher, 29 August. Accessed 28 August 2016. http://www.flickfilosopher.com/ 2013/08/upsteam-color-review-higher-dimensions-of-storytelling.html. Klecker, Cornelia. 2015. Spoiler Alert! Mind-Tricking Narratives in Contemporary Hollywood Film. Heidelberg: Winter. Kuhn, Markus. 2011. Filmnarratologie. Ein erzähltheoretisches Analysemodell. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Kulezic-Wilson, Danijela. 2014. “The Musical Flow of Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color.” Sounding Out!, 24 July. Accessed 28 August 2016. https://soundstudiesblog.com/2014/ 07/24/the-musical-flow-of-shane-carruths-upstream-color. Lanthier, Joseph Jon. 2013. “Interview: Shane Carruth.” Slant Magazine, 4 April. http://www. slantmagazine.com/features/article/interview-shane-carruth. Roan, Brian. 2013. “Untangling and Understanding the Narrative of Upstream Color.” The Film Stage, 22 April. Accessed 28 August 2016. https://thefilmstage.com/features/untanglingand-understanding-the-narrative-of-upstream-color. Schlickers, Sabine. 2009. “Focalisation, Ocularisation and Auricularisation in Film and Literature.” In Point of View, Perspective, and Focalization, edited by Peter Hühn, Wolf Schmid, and Jörg Schönert, 243 – 258. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Schlickers, Sabine. 2015. “Lüge, Täuschung und Verwirrung: Unzuverlässiges und Verstörendes Erzählen in Literatur und Film.” Diegesis. Interdisciplinary E-Journal for Narrative Research 4,1:49 – 67. Accessed 16 June 2017. https://www.diegesis.uni-wupper tal.de/index.php/diegesis/article/view/190. Schmidt, Oliver. 2010. “Die räumliche Wahrnehmung von Wirklichkeit: Drei Anmerkungen zum Verhältnis von filmischer Repräsentation und Zuschauer.” Rabbit Eye – Zeitschrift für Filmforschung 2:38 – 54. Accessed 16 June 2017. http://www.rabbiteye.de/2010/2/ schmidt_raeumliche-wahrnehmung.pdf. Schmidt, Oliver. 2013. Hybride Räume: Filmwelten im Hollywood-Kino der Jahrtausendwende. Marburg: Schü ren. Thoreau, Henry David. 2004 [1854]. Walden. New Haven: Yale University Press. Wickman, Forrest. 2013. “FAQ: Upstream Color.” Slate, 9 April. Accessed 28 August 2016. http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/04/09/upstream_color_faq_analysis_and_ the_meaning_of_shane_carruth_s_film.html. Wolf, Werner. 2009. “Metareference across Media: The Concept, Its Transmedial Potentials and Problems, Main Forms and Functions.” In Metareference across Media: Theory and Case Studies, edited by Werner Wolf, Katharina Bantleon and Jeff Thoss, 1 – 85. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Matthias Brütsch

Complex Narration in Film: Reflections on the Interplay of Deception, Distancing and Empuzzlement 1 Introduction Complex narrative structures are not new to the history of film, but they have particularly flourished during the past twenty-five years, in independent and mainstream productions alike. That various labels have been found to describe the trend away from unambiguous, linear narrative and reliable, predictable narration – among them ‘mind benders’ (Johnson 2005), ‘offbeat storytelling’ (Bordwell 2006), ‘puzzle films’ (Panek 2006, Buckland 2009), ‘the new disorder’ (Denby 2007), ‘modular narratives’ (Cameron 2008), ‘mind-game films’ (Elsaesser 2009), ‘narrative mazes’ (Eckel et al. 2013) – should not be allowed to obscure the heterogeneity of the works concerned. The scheme presented by Sabine Schlickers and Vera Toro in the introduction to this volume brings home the diversity of the narrative procedures used to generate such complexity. My intention here is to bring a modicum of order to this ‘new disorder’. I work on the assumption that – because of mutual conditioning and potential incompatibility – not all the strategies listed by Schlickers and Toro will be equally open to combination. As an examination of every possible permutation would exceed the scope of this essay, I shall concentrate on the question how various forms of audience deception interact with other procedures. The following scheme – adapted from Schlickers and Toro – will serve as a starting point: 1) deception with surprise twist / resolution 2) distancing (metafiction / narrative paradox) 3) empuzzlement a) confusion (incoherency / contradiction) b) destabilization (ambiguity / the fantastic) c) challenge (inverse / multilinear / multiperspective / circular / fragmentary narrative). While my first heading is unchanged from Schlickers and Toro, the second is ‘distancing’ rather than ‘paradox’; for, as I see it, all narrative paradoxes are

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self-reflexive, but not all metafictions are paradoxical.¹ For this reason I have positioned paradox on a hierarchically lower plane. It should also be noted that the distinctions between my three sub-categories of empuzzlement – confusion, destabilization and challenge – are no more clear-cut than the labels attached to them suggest; for incoherency is both confusing and challenging, and fragmentary narration may also confuse. I hope, however, that the logic of these divisions will become apparent in the course of my analysis. There are, then, four possible combinations involving strategies of deception; these will be taken here in slightly altered sequence: 1. Deception and confusion; 2. Deception and destabilization; 3. Deception and distancing; 4. Deception and challenge. The analysis will be followed by a consideration of the levels of perturbation generated by these combinations, and of the correlative issue of the relationship between complexity and perturbation. However, before I start on my first point, I would like to make a brief observation on unreliable narration and deception. It is often forgotten in film studies that the concept of unreliable narrator was originally developed by Wayne Booth (1983 [1961], 155 – 165) for a narrative situation entailing self-deception on the part of the narrator rather than deception of the reader. What the concept highlighted was the latter’s position of distant, ironic complicity with the (implied) author. In works like Mark Twain’s novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) or Ian McEwan’s short story “Dead as they Come” (1978) it is not the reader but the narrator who reveals himself as deceived. The case has been quite different in film studies for the past twenty years or so, when examples commonly bracketed by the concept of ‘unreliable narration’ – movies like The Sixth Sense (USA 1999) or Fight Club (USA 1999) – have foregrounded the deception of the viewer. It is this narrative strategy I am referring to when I speak of unreliable narration in this article, with all the false leads and unexpected twists such films exhibit.²

 A film-in-film, for example, is only paradoxical when the boundary between the two levels is transgressed (cf. Brütsch 2008).  For a more detailed discussion of this distinction cf. Brütsch (2014). For large-scale deceptions, usually called ‘falsche Fährte’ in German-language publications on unreliable narration, I use the term ‘false lead’ here instead of ‘red herring’, since the latter is sometimes reserved for purely short-term distractions from the actual storyline, such as the money theft in Psycho (USA 1960).

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2 Deception and confusion Alejandro Amenábar’s Abre los ojos (Spain/France/Italy 1997) is a prime example of the interplay of deception and confusion. It is the story of a well-off, attractive young man, César, who falls in love with Sofía, the girl who accompanies his best friend to his birthday party. He spends the night with her, but next morning his jealous ex-girlfriend Nuria is lying in wait, and she persuades him to go with her for a final sexual fling at her place. On their way there she drives intentionally into a wall. César survives the ‘accident’, but his face is so badly maimed that the surgeons can’t and Sofía won’t do anything more for him. His misery is complete when, on a club evening with his friend and Sofía, he sees them making out, and they finally leave him there alone. Next morning, however, Sofía suddenly stands before him, apologizes and kisses him. Shortly afterward, new surgical techniques restore his face to its pristine beauty and the world seems whole again. But not for long; strange things happen. One night César finds Nuria instead of Sofía next to him in bed, and both his friend and the police confirm that the woman he thinks is Nuria is in fact his girlfriend and the woman who died in the car crash was Sofía. Yet only a little later Sofía turns up at his apartment. César embraces her blissfully and they make love, but in the very act of doing so he realizes that the woman beneath him is Nuria. In despair, he grabs a pillow and presses it over her face until she stops breathing. Hurriedly leaving Sofía’s apartment, he catches sight of his face in the mirror and realizes with horror that the disfigurement has returned. After this, César lands in a secure psychiatric institution, where – after some initial reluctance – he confides in a psychologist. These sessions evoke vague memories and dream images of a firm called Life Extension whose business, it turns out, is to freeze its clients after death until technology has reached a point where they can be reanimated. Tailored to individual wishes, their posthumous second life in virtual reality will knit seamlessly onto the first. It is on entering a branch of this company that César finally realizes he is himself a customer of Life Extension. From the point of Sofía’s return onward, all his experiences have been virtual and imaginary. The film then, works with a special form of ‘wake-up’ twist that in Bernd Leiendecker’s system (2015) has a category of its own: that of ‘retroactively marked virtual reality’. Further examples of this type can be found in Total Recall (USA 1990), The Matrix (USA 1999), The Thirteenth Floor (USA/Germany 1999), eXistenZ (UK/Canada 1999) and Vanilla Sky (USA 2001, a remake of Abre los ojos). The most striking feature of Abre los ojos is undoubtedly the clever audience-deception maintained throughout most of the film. What interests me in

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particular, however, is the specific modes of destabilization and confusion practiced upon the viewer, and their relations to the overall strategy of deception. First of all, I must correct the impression I have given in my summary account that César’s story is told in linear fashion. That is not so. The account is retrospective: the psychotherapy sessions appear as present reality, and César himself is the homodiegetic narrator of all prior events. Established film-narrative technique is used here, with an initial voiceover giving way to conventional audiovisual presentation. Accordingly, the basic flashback structure has two narrative as well as time levels, and two levels of reality are also introduced from the start: César relates not only his waking (or supposed waking) experiences, but also those of his dreams. It is here that an initial strategy of destabilization appears, for repeatedly (and from the beginning of the film) scenes first taken to be real turn out to be dream sequences. That in itself is nothing new, but the game Abre los ojos plays with the viewer is particularly subtle, for the film opens with a special form of retroactively marked dream, the ‘false awakening’, and it is only when this opening scene returns in exactly the same form that a ‘true awakening’ follows.³ In the car-crash sequence the insecurity about the status of reality is enhanced by a series of inversions that present the events within the space of a few minutes first as real, then as dreamed, and finally again as real. In the second half of the film unmarked dream sequences are no longer just isolated effects: they are part of a far wider strategy of confusion to be described below. In a certain sense these individual deceptions anticipate the overriding deception, without, however, derogating from its effect, for as soon as the action returns to the ostensibly safe ground of waking life they are consigned to the realm of the unreal. This changes from the moment when the sea-change in César’s life brings inexplicable happenings: Sofía’s replacement by Nuria, the reversion of his face to its injured state, the word-perfect repetition by others of sentences he once spoke himself, or the strange event in a crowded bar when his scarcely audible wish for quiet brings immediate silence and everyone stares at him. At this point in the film the viewer is not just momentarily disturbed by the unstable ‘reality status’ of individual events, but profoundly confused by mounting incoherencies, contradictions, uncanny repetitions and the inexplicable behavior of entire groups. Unlike such films as L’Année dernière à Marienbad (France/Italy 1960), Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie, (France 1972) or Eraserhead (USA 1978), Abre

 On the retroactive marking of dream sequences cf. Brütsch (2011, 182– 211).

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los ojos is not so constructed that after a while we simply accept such abnormalities without looking for a plausible explanation within their fictional world. With a murder trial pending, César’s conversations with the psychologist and the ensuing flashbacks, the film assumes the structure of a detective story and the viewer adopts the perspective of its characters in their quest to unravel the mystery (cf. Ardid 2004, 133). Several solutions current in the practice of unreliable narration present themselves as equally possible (cf. Strank 2014, 173): César, for instance, has quarreled with his business partners, who may have entered into a conspiracy with his jealous ex-lover, potentially leading to a socalled ‘set-up twist’; or the crash has left psychological as well as physical scars and César is under strong medication which, along with the drugs the psychologist suspects him of taking, could cause delusions and hallucinations – a solution with a ‘perceptual twist’; or, given that several supposedly ‘real’ events turned out to be dream-products, and the psychologist explicitly tells him that phenomena like Sofía’s transformation into Nuria are typical of dreams, César may have dreamed everything – a typical ‘wake-up twist’. Finally, in view of the unexpected second round of surgery – implemented with futuristic looking apparatus – and César’s remark that it ‘felt like being in a science fiction film’, the film might simply end with a turn to the fantastic. The feverish search for a solution underlines the fact that we, as viewers of Abre los ojos, are not entirely unprepared: we realize that something is strange and that we lack important information. It is not, then, the moment of resolution itself that comes as a surprise, but the form it takes: neither conspiracy, delusion nor dream in the strict sense, it consists rather of conscious self-deception brought about through the medium of neurally induced virtual reality. The twist reveals a yet more complex structure behind the already complex dual levels of narrative, time, and reality; for we are now confronted with a further time level (the actual present of 2045) and two more levels of reality (virtual reality and the dreams experienced in that dimension). The multiple levels are carefully interwoven inasmuch as actual dreams anticipate virtual reality, while their virtual counterparts refer back to real but forgotten events. The interplay of deception, destabilization and confusion in Abre los ojos looks, then, something like in Fig. 1: Beginning

Middle

End

destabilization

confusion / puzzle

resolution

(deception)

(deception)

deception revealed

Fig. 1: Deception, destabilization and confusion in Abre los ojos

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3 Puzzle with surprising solution versus apparent coherence as false lead Similar examples of films combining deception and confusion are Angel Heart (USA 1987), The Matrix (USA 1999), Identity (USA 2003), El maquinista (Spain 2004) and Stay (USA 2005). These do not, however, represent the filmic norm of unreliable narration, as is evident from the far larger number of works in which the resolution is not to the same extent anticipated by prior confusion. Among these are: The Avenging Conscience (USA 1914) Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (Germany 1919) Dans la nuit (France 1929) The Woman in the Window (USA 1944) The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry (USA 1945) Strange Impersonation (USA 1946) La rivière du hibou (France 1962) The Usual Suspects (USA 1995) Fight Club (USA 1999) The Sixth Sense (USA 1999) A Beautiful Mind (USA 2001) Anger Management (USA 2002) Swimming Pool (France/UK 2003) Shutter Island (USA 2010) The ostensibly coherent world of these films lulls the audience into a false sense of security from which the awakening is all the ruder: a twist without forewarning is, after all, more disturbing than one for which the ground has been prepared, however confusingly. In the categories of unreliable narration in film proposed so far (notably by Strank 2014 and Leiendecker 2015), this distinction is not mentioned, and the following table (Fig. 2) shows that it cuts across those already established divisions:

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Perceptual twist / split personality / imaginary friends

Wake-up twist / retroacDeathbed fantasy / tively marked virtual reality unconscious death

With prior confusion

Angel Heart, Identity, El maquinista

Abre los ojos, The Matrix

Without prior confusion

Fight Club, A Beautiful Mind, The Thirteenth Floor Shutter Island

Stay La rivière du hibou, The Sixth Sense

Fig. 2: Categories of unreliable narration

In his book about joke punch-lines and short story resolutions, Peter Wenzel (1989) proposes a similar distinction. Differentiating between the making and breaking of a frame of reference, he observes how in the first instance a few (contradictory) hints are given of the resolution, so recipients are confused, and when the punch-line comes it takes an unexpected form. In the second instance, expectations of a certain kind are consistently built up and recipients – who are not in this case confused – are taken all the more aback by the divergent resolution. Looking at deceptions that span a whole film, they generally represent either one or the other of these two variants. There are, however, a few films – like Identity by James Mangold (USA 2003) – that combine both forms. Identity sets up two plotlines: on the one hand a judicial hearing for a stay of execution in which a condemned man’s psychiatrist seeks to convince the judge that his patient is not capable of criminal responsibility; on the other the involuntary gathering in an isolated motel during a storm of a group of people seeking shelter, including a prisoner accompanied by a police officer. The relation between these two plotlines is initially unclear: apart from the geographical and temporal proximity suggested by the storm they seem entirely unconnected. But this part of the puzzle soon fades into the background, when events in the motel become chaotic: a body is found, the prisoner is missing, more deaths follow, among them the prisoner’s, and the plot develops into a whodunit in the style of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. ⁴ Nor is that all, for events soon take an unreal turn. First, on each corpse – not only the murder victims but also those who apparently died accidental deaths – a numbered room-key is found. Secondly, it seems impossible to leave the neighborhood of the motel: moving in a straight line away from it, the prisoner soon comes face to face with it again. Thirdly,

 First published as Ten Little Niggers (1939).

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the motel survivors discover that they were all born on the same day, which appears equally improbable. As in Abre los ojos, these confusing facts lead to wild speculation among film characters and viewers alike. Here, too, there is a surprising twist, for the characters in the motel, it transpires, are all projections of Malcolm’s psyche. He – the murderer in the other plotline – suffers from dissociative identity disorder, and the serial elimination of the people in the motel marks successive therapeutic steps in the re-establishment of his fragmented personality. It becomes clear during the judicial hearing that the death sentence can only be commuted if he succeeds in eliminating the persona that was responsible for the killings. Meanwhile, back in the motel plot, it is now clear that we are witnessing the symbolic expression of an inner struggle whose outcome will decide Malcolm’s fate. In this second part of the movie the source of tension has accordingly shifted. Nevertheless, at the (residual) ‘whodunit’ level it soon appears that the supposed police officer is the culprit, for he is also a jailbird, and the question now turns on whether the others will be able to eliminate him. The concluding showdown stages their success, the skies clear and Paris, the ‘final girl’, leaves the motel. The frame plot steers toward a similar happy ending when Malcolm’s death sentence is quashed in favor of further therapy. At this point, however, with no forewarning, the second twist occurs: Paris suddenly finds herself face-to-face with a small boy who was part of the group all along, but – given his minor, passive role – an entirely unnoticed part. A flashback tutorial tells us, however, that it was he who committed the murders and arranged the accidents – a sort of ‘dog-as-mastermind’ touch. The happy ending is finally reversed when the boy kills Paris – which means that evil once again gains the upper hand in Malcolm’s psyche and he strangles his psychologist. What Identity offers us, then, is first a deception with prior warning, then one without: a conclusion that catches the viewer entirely unawares. The concept of the ‘false lead’, often used indiscriminately for all forms of unreliable narration, only seems properly applicable to this second kind of deception.

4 Deception and ambiguity The second complex narrative structure to be examined here is the combination of deception with ambiguity.⁵ So far as the second of these concepts is con-

 On the relation of ambiguity to unreliable narration in Booth’s sense cf. Brütsch 2015.

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cerned, the sort of ambiguity that corresponds with Todorov’s concept of the fantastic is particularly interesting. Todorov refers here to works that offer both a natural and a supernatural explanation for the unusual events they portray, but delay any decision about which it is to be – or, in the case of the ‘pure fantastic’, block such a decision altogether (cf. Todorov 1970). In her study of the fantastic in film, Claudia Pinkas classifies Abre los ojos as “an essentially ambiguous and fantastical film” (2010, 271) on the grounds that, alongside rational explanations, the possibility of a supernatural solution gradually gains prominence. I am not, however, wholly convinced by this argument, for although the science-fiction dimension is already present under the surface quite early in the film, it remains largely hidden and is only mentioned en passant. But to meet Todorov’s criterion of vacillation, both options, natural and supernatural, must be equally and convincingly present throughout most of the work. This is the case – including literary as well as filmic texts – in La Vénus d’Ille (Prosper Merimée 1837); The Turn of the Screw (Henry James 1898); Rosemary’s Baby (Ira Levin 1967 / Roman Polanski, USA 1968); The Green Man (Kingsley Amis 1969); El laberinto del fauno (Spain/Mexico 2006); and The Blair Witch Project (USA 1999). In Abre los ojos and Identity, on the other hand, we are left for a long time in the dark, and instead of two equally convincing solutions we are offered a series of not-very-convincing ones. The question here is not: Is it A or B? The question is: Is it A, or B, or C, or D or what? If, as is generally the case with the fantastic, the range of possible explanations is firmly restricted and clear from early on, there is no room for either deception or twist; for neither coming down for one or the other variant, nor remaining undecided, involves any element of surprise. Nevertheless, that Todorov’s fantastic is not entirely incompatible with deception is evident from my third example, Carnival of Souls (Herk Harvey, USA 1962)⁶, whose protagonist, Mary, is repeatedly haunted by ghostly apparitions. Whether these are figments of her imagination or really exist in the fictional world of the film remains open until almost the end. For the first possibility speaks the fact that Mary is suffering psychologically from the aftermath of a serious road accident; for the second, that the apparitions are also visible outside Mary’s perceptual frame. The ostensible climax of the film has her pursued, and eventually caught, by a whole horde of the undead; and when she is missing next morning and the police find marks of the pursuit in the sand, we tend to the conclusion that these happenings are really supernatural. But the next moment returns us abruptly to the scene of the accident, and the retrieval of the wrecked automobile with her body

 I am grateful to Matías Martínez for pointing this film out to me.

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confirms that not only the ghosts but the whole series of events after the accident stem from Mary’s dying vision. This is an instance of Strank’s final twist category of ‘deathbed fantasy’ (2014, 177), which counts among its illustrious forebears Ambrose Bierce’s short story An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (1890) and Robert Enrico’s 1962 film of the same name. Carnival of Souls, then, has the typical either-or structure of fantastic narrative, and seems to choose one of these alternatives; but right at the end it rejects both in favor of a third. This can be presented schematically as follows in Fig. 3: Beginning and middle

Apparent ending

Actual ending

A or B?

B

C

ambivalence

apparent decision

surprise

(deception)

(deception)

deception revealed

Fig. 3: The dynamics of ambivalence and deception in Carnival of Souls

The Argentine caper movie Nueve reinas (Argentina 2000) follows a similar model, albeit without any supernatural elements. Here, too, a central question remains unanswered until almost the end: Does Marcos really intend to involve Juan in the job with the fake postage stamps, or is he only interested in relieving him of money? Each answer is equally probable and, as with the fantastic, we tend to swing from one to the other, until first the latter and then the former variant seems to be confirmed. Then, in a final twist, a third version appears that we had at no point considered: right from the beginning it was Juan who hoodwinked Marcos, and the entire action centering on the fake stamps was staged by him and his gang. Both Carnival of Souls and Nueve reinas show that undecidability between two variant interpretations can only be combined with sustained, film-long deception if it plays a subordinate role and the binary structure is resolved in a final twist.

5 Deception and distancing The third combination strategy of interest here is that between deception and metafiction. Films that take the audience on a false trail, or – like Abre los ojos and Identity – fascinate them with a game of mysterious confusion, generally rely on narrative techniques that foster immersion in the events on screen, whereas self-reflexive narratives that highlight the artificial quality of fiction generally function by creating distance. Metafiction and deception, therefore, are in

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principle poor bedfellows. Conversely, however, the post factum laying bare of a feint through a surprise twist evokes not only what Ed Tan (1996) has called ‘fiction emotion’ but also, and necessarily, ‘artefact emotion’. The reconstruction of an alternative plotline – let alone a different world-picture – triggered by a final revelation, inevitably contains a self-reflexive moment. Moreover, films that play with levels of reality often reveal a special form of metafictionality after the twist. Abre los ojos and Identity are good examples of this: the concluding scene on the roof of the building in the former and the showdown with the supposed killer in the latter eminently reflect the underlying cinema situation. Both films have just demonstrated that all the figures with which the protagonist interacts are purely imaginary. Nevertheless, the plot marches bravely on, tension and audience response included, graphically illustrating the power of fiction and with it the relation of audience to film characters. While every twist incorporates a metafictional dimension, some twists underline even more strongly the quality of the work-as-artefact: consider for a moment the false leads and strange happenings resolved by narrative paradox. A well-known example is Julio Cortázar’s short story Continuidad de los parques (1964), in which the protagonist is assaulted by a figure from the novel he is reading. The TV crime movie Wer bin ich? (Germany 2015, cf. Schlickers and Toro’s introduction to this volume) resolves its main plot with a similar – and no less surprising – metalepsis in which not the actor (Ulrich Tukur) but the fictional Inspector Murot whom he plays (i. e. a character from the film-within-thefilm) is responsible for the death of the unit manager, which occurs under mysterious circumstances during the shoot. Tex Avery’s animation film Who killed who? (USA 1943) stages a transgression in the opposite direction when it finally reveals that the director – who introduces the film – is himself the wanted murderer in its diegetic world. Again, the seemingly inexplicable happenings of the Norwegian film Sofies Verden (Sophie’s World, Norway/Sweden 1999) are resolved when the main character is revealed as a figure from a novel. Paradoxical turns of this sort are relatively rare, but they indicate that metalepsis and unexpected twists are a better match than metalepsis and preceding deception strategies. There is, however, yet another case in which the twist does not arise from but itself resolves a narrative paradox, and in doing so naturalizes it. This brings me to my fourth and final example, the Swedish short film Dockpojken (Puppet Boy, 2008). Presented as the portrait of an artist – an animation film-maker – it initially plays with the typical pseudo-documentary ambivalence between fact and fiction. This soon gives way, however, to the conviction that we are watching a fictional parody of the exaggerated identification some artists cultivate with their creations. For a TV documentary, the protagonist Johannes dons a man-size costume modeled on his own animation puppet. After a disagree-

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ment with the film crew about a broken camera lens, they go off with Johannes’ computer, leaving him behind in his puppet costume, which he can only shed with outside help. Hoping a passer-by might help, he runs out onto the street, but when a young man does try to assist, it turns out that the costume has no zip fastener. When the helper then pulls on the ears in the attempt to free Johannes’ head, he yells out in pain. Here, at the climax of the parody, it turns out that the film-maker has himself become the puppet: identification has turned into transformation. The paradoxical – and at the same time fantastical – transgression is, however, reversed when the man-sized figure throws himself in a tantrum on the ground and the scene cuts to the small modeling-clay figure from the animation film that just at that moment wakes, bathed in sweat, from a nightmare. Puppet Boy thus ends in the metafictional world without returning to the level of the framing plot – a parody of the wake-up twist, which turns the established hierarchy of realities upside down. In a certain sense, these are all now reduced to the same level, for the shooting, the TV documentary, and Johannes’ paradoxical metamorphosis are all revealed as dreams of a figure from the puzzle’s inner core: the diegetic world of the animation film-within-the-film.

6 Deception and challenge Contradictions and ambiguities are not alone in confronting the viewer with puzzles and cognitive challenges: procedures like inverse, multilinear, multiperspective, circular and fragmentary narration also do this, but space allows here only a brief consideration of the relation of some of these to deception. Deception itself, I would argue, presupposes a certain goal-orientation: meandering narratives like that of Two for the Road (UK 1967) or Je t’aime, je t’aime (France 1968), with their fragmented, achronological technique, are not ideal for establishing false leads. That deception cannot be entirely precluded is evident, however – at least in germ – from a film like Bad Timing (UK 1980), which is no less fragmented and achronological than the two just mentioned. But here the fragments are so arranged that the question as to what happened in the fateful night of Milena’s attempted suicide moves increasingly to center stage;⁷ and although deception of the viewer is not in this case the film’s main concern – the final resolution is not entirely surprising and is not presented as assured knowledge – the focus on a single dramatic issue and its putative solution indicate that strat-

 Cf. Jeff Thoss’s analysis of Bad Timing in this volume.

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egies of deception are also in principle possible in highly fragmented, achronologically narrated films. Multilinear and/or multiperspective narratives can also surprise the viewer, often by the unexpected convergence of plotlines, for example through gradual clarification of their chronology – as in 11:14 (USA/Canada 2003), Before the Rain, (UK/France/Macedonia 1994), or Babel (USA/Mexico/France 2006). However, deception as the focal point of the narrative is something of an exception in multiperspective films: as a rule, false leads require straight-line structures that provide a sense of interpretive security, while the presentation of events in multiple variants and/or perspectives – as in Rashômon (Japan 1950) or Mr. Nobody (Belgium/Germany/Canada/France 2009)⁸ undermines their credibility early on. À la folie, pas du tout (France 2002), a film that unmasks its protagonist’s love affair the second time round as a delusion, is an exception to this rule. Significantly, however, it has only two perspectives and the deception is already revealed at the changeover from one to the other in the middle of the film. Goal orientation is also present in reverse-chronology films, the only difference being that it runs backward⁹ – a technique that foregrounds the chain of events and the interplay of cause and effect and automatically lays special emphasis on the ending. In order not to overly strain the reconstruction of events, films of this kind often have only one spatiotemporal universe, one plotline and one main character (or couple). In principle, this opens the way for wide-scale deception maneuvers, and Christopher Nolan’s Memento (USA 2000), for example, is paradigmatic not only for inverse but also for unreliable narration. In one particularly interesting respect Memento approximates the structure of Carnival of Souls and Nueve reinas, for here, too, the real twist – that Leonard willfully deceives himself all along – comes only after the apparent climax of Jimmy’s murder. The special appeal of the combination between inverse and unreliable narration is that the moment of truth at the beginning of the story lies at the end of the film; hence neither a flashback tutorial nor a mental rerun is necessary.

7 Degrees of perturbation We have seen that strategies of deception can be combined in various ways with confusion, ambiguity, narrative paradox and other forms of unconventional nar-

 Cf. also the article by Dominik Orth in this volume.  On inverse narration cf. Brütsch (2013).

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ration. Before I come to the question how perturbing these various combinations are, I should like to comment briefly on the classification of complex (i. e. more complex than classical Hollywood) film narratives advanced by various authors. Ramírez Berg (2006), for example, proposes twelve categories: ensemble / parallel / multiple personality / daisy chain / backwards / repeated action / repeated event / hub and spoke / jumbled / subjective / existential / metanarrative plot.¹⁰ Typologies of this kind are based on distinctions in the discursive structure of the narrative – i. e. they are concerned with the relation between narration and story. My own distinction between forms of deception, confusion, destabilization, distancing, and challenge¹¹ seeks, on the other hand, to distinguish between narrative strategies that have a particular impact on the viewer and trigger specific processes of reception – i. e. strategies concerned more directly with the relation between narration and viewer.¹² The concept of perturbatory narration, which implies both cognitive and psychological aspects – disturbance of the process of understanding / emotional disturbance of the viewer – is also concerned with this relation. The degree of perturbation evoked by a narration can, therefore, be more readily measured on the basis of the categories I have suggested than on that of narrative categories, such as those proposed by Ramírez Berg, that may all be more or less disturbing. If one takes as the criterion of perturbation a (temporary or permanent) lack of cognitive control on the part of the viewer (due to incoherency and reconstructive impenetrability of the narrative), it follows that perturbation arising from a deception that is eventually resolved can only ever be temporary. If confusion is sown before the twist, the perturbatory phase may be quite long; false leads established without such confusion, on the other hand, only perturb at the moment of resolution, but do so all the more violently. The effect is, nevertheless, only genuinely sustained if the apparent resolution is followed by further twists or incoherencies that again undermine the viewer’s grasp of the situation – as in eXistenZ (UK/Canada 1999), Audition (Japan/South Korea 1999) or American Psycho (USA/Canada 2000) – or if a potential reinterpretation is seen to be only one

 Similar typologies can be found e. g. in Bildhauer (2007), Krützen (2010) and Eckel (2012).  As a generic term for remaining forms of disturbing impact not covered by the other terms, ‘challenge’ is not always clearly distinguishable from parallel categories (cf. the introduction to this article).  Miklós Kiss has with justification observed that traditional classifications like that of Ramirez “all fail to scrutinise the recognised complexity in its core function within the viewing experience. Narrative complexity’s essence is not an abstract structure mapped by narratologists’ descriptive methods, but a sensed confusion explained by cognitive poetics” (2013, 241, original emphasis).

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of several possibilities, none of which takes account of every aspect, as in the dream resolution of Mulholland Drive (USA/France 2001). Films like Abre los ojos or Identity are structurally complex and contain perturbing elements, but they stop short of preventing a coherent reconstruction of the story beyond the end of the film.¹³ This seems to me typical of the vast majority of so-called ‘mind-bender’, ‘mind-game’ or ‘puzzle’ films of the past few decades – and is probably the reason why they have been able to make it out of the independent and arthouse niche into the mainstream. Films whose incoherencies and contradictions remain utterly insoluble are relatively rare. Here, too, I would make a distinction: in variants like L’Année dernière à Marienbad or Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie (France 1972) we quickly learn to accept the strange events as a game that cannot be decoded conventionally but must be interpreted allegorically. But in others, like Lost Highway (France/USA 1996), Mulholland Drive, Chasing Sleep (Canada/USA/France 2000) or Triangle (GB/Australia 2005), the contradictions are so calculated as to tease the viewer inexorably and beyond the end of the film into trying to make sense of its events along rational lines.¹⁴ These ‘riddle films’ (Kiss) are a good deal more perturbing than any of those analyzed above: they succeed in challenging, frustrating and at the same time fascinating the viewer without offering either a satisfactory solution or an allegorical escape route.¹⁵ So far as the large-scale forms of deception are concerned on which this article has focused, the fact remains that they do not find fertile ground in riddle films. Deception works better with a plot that only temporarily appears incoherent – or other than it actually is.

Filmography 11:14. Directed by Greg Marcks. 2003. USA/Canada: Phoenix Media, 2011. DVD. Abre los ojos (Open Your Eyes). Directed by Alejandro Amenábar. 1997. Spain/France/Italy: Artisan Home Entertainment, 2001. DVD.

 Abre los ojos does leave some room for interpretation at the end, since the final awakening refers back to the first two scenes, thus implying the possibility of a time loop or an even more extensive dream structure (cf. Strank 2014, 173 – 174). A coherent and conclusive reading, as I have suggested, is nevertheless possible and, in my opinion, more satisfactory.  Cf. Kiss (2013, 250 – 251).  Kiss justifiably observes of Buckland’s anthology that it is problematic to put riddle films in the same category as works that only tentatively or temporarily stage confusing incoherencies and contradictions.

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A Beautiful Mind. Directed by Ron Howard. 2001. USA: DreamWorks Home Entertainment, 2006. DVD. À la folie, pas du tout. Directed by Laetitia Colombani. 2002. France: Optimum Releasing, 2002. DVD. American Psycho. Directed by Mary Harron. 2000. USA/Canada: Concorde Home Entertainment, 2002. DVD. Angel Heart. Directed by Alan Parker. 1987. USA: Live Entertainment, 1998. DVD. Anger Management. Directed by Peter Segal. 2002. USA: Video Library of the Film Studies Department of the University of Zurich, 2007. DVD. Audition. Directed by Takashi Miike. 1999. Japan/South Korea: Xenix Film [year not indicated]. DVD Babel. Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu. 2006: USA/Mexico/France: Paramount Pictures, 2007. DVD. Bad Timing. Directed by Nicolas Roeg. 1980. UK: The Criterion Collection, 2005. DVD. Before the Rain. Directed by Milcho Manchevski. 1994. UK/France/Macedonia: The Criterion Collection, 2008. DVD. Carnival of Souls. Directed by Herk Harvey. 1962. USA: The Criterion Collection, 2000. DVD. Chasing Sleep. Directed by Michael Walker. 2000. Canada/USA/France: Kinowelt Home Entertainment, 2010. DVD. Dans la nuit. Directed by Charles Vanel. 1929. France: Video Library of the Film Studies Department of the University of Zurich, 2001. VHS. Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari. Directed by Robert Wiene. 1919. Germany: Universum Film, 2014. DVD. Dockpojken (Puppet Boy). Directed by Johannes Nyholm. 2008. Sweden: Archive of the International Short Film Festival Winterthur, 2009. DVD. El laberinto del fauno. Directed by Guillermo del Toro. 2006. Spain/Mexico: Senator Home Entertainment, 2007. DVD. El maquinista. Directed by Brad Anderson. 2004. Spain: Tartan Video, 2005. DVD. Eraserhead. Directed by David Lynch. 1978. USA: The Criterion Collection, 2014. DVD. eXistenZ. Directed by David Cronenberg. 1999. UK/Canada: Alliance Atlantis [no year indicated]. DVD. Fight Club. Directed by David Fincher. 1999. USA: Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2000. DVD. Identity. Directed by James Mangold. 2003. USA: Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment, 2003. DVD. Je t’aime, je t’aime. Directed by Alain Resnais. 1968. France: Kino Lorber, 2015. DVD. L’Année dernière à Marienbad. Directed by Alain Resnais. 1960: France/Italy. Kinowelt Home Entertainment, 2008. DVD. La rivière du hibou (aka An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge). Directed by Robert Enrico. 1962. France: Monterey Media, 2004. DVD. Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie. Directed by Luis Buñuel. 1972. France: The Criterion Collection, 2000. DVD. Lost Highway. Directed by David Lynch. 1996. France/USA: Universum Film, 2002. DVD. Memento. Directed by Christopher Nolan. 2000. USA: Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment, 2002. DVD.

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Mr. Nobody. Directed by Jaco Van Dormael. 2009. Belgium/Germany/Canada/France: Concorde Home Entertainment, 2011. DVD. Mulholland Drive. Directed by David Lynch. 2001. USA/France: The Criterion Collection, 2015. DVD. Nueve reinas. Directed by Fabián Bielinsky. 2000. Argentina: Kinowelt Home Entertainment, 2003. DVD. Psycho. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. 1960. USA: Universal Pictures, 2007. DVD. Rashômon. Directed by Akira Kurosawa. 1950. Japan: The Criterion Collection, 2002. DVD. Rosemary’s Baby. Directed by Roman Polanski. 1968. USA: The Criterion Collection, 2012. DVD. Shutter Island. Directed by Martin Scorsese. 2010. USA: Concorde Home Entertainment, 2010. DVD Sofies Verden (Sophie’s World). Directed by Erik Gustavson. 1999. Norway/Sweden: SF Norge [no year indicated]. DVD. Strange Impersonation. Directed by Anthony Mann. 1946. USA: Kino International, 2000. DVD. Swimming Pool. Directed by François Ozon. 2003. France/UK: Universal Studios, 2003. DVD. Tatort: Wer bin ich? Directed by Bastian Günther. 2015. Germany: Video Library of the Film Studies Department of the University of Zurich, 2016. DVD. The Avenging Conscience or “Thou Shalt Not Kill”. Directed by David Wark Griffith. 1914. USA: Kino International, 2008. DVD. The Blair Witch Project. Directed by Daniel Myrick/Eduardo Sanchez. 1999. USA: Artisan Home Entertainment, 1999. DVD. The Matrix. Directed by Andy Wachowski/Lana Wachowski. 1999. USA: Warner Home Video, 1999. DVD. The Sixth Sense. Directed by M. Night Shyamalan. 1999: USA: Buena Vista Home Entertainment [no year indicated]. DVD. The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry. Directed by Robert Siodmak. 1945. USA: Suevia Films [no year indicated]. DVD. The Thirteenth Floor. Directed by Josef Rusnak. 1999. USA/Germany: Columbia TriStar Home Video, 1999. DVD. The Usual Suspects. Directed by Bryan Singer. 1995. USA: MGM Home Entertainment, 1999. DVD. The Woman in the Window. Directed by Fritz Lang. 1944. USA: Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2007. DVD. Total Recall. Directed by Paul Verhoeven. 1990. USA: Artisan Entertainment, 1998. DVD. Triangle. Directed by Christopher Smith. 2005. GB/Australia: Elite Film, 2012. DVD. Two for the Road. Directed by Stanley Donen. 1967. UK: Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2005. DVD. Vanilla Sky. Directed by Cameron Crowe. 2001. USA: Paramount Pictures, 2002. DVD. Who killed who? Directed by Tex Avery. 1943. USA: Turner Entertainment, Warner Bros. Entertainment, 2010. DVD.

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Bibliography Amis, Kingsley. 1969. The Green Man. San Diego: Harcourt Brace & World. Ardid Peña, Carmen. 2004. “Zeit und Identität: Die Postrealistische Ästhetik von Alejandro Amenábar.” In Zeitsprünge: Wie Filme Geschichte(n) erzählen, edited by Christine Rüffert, Irmbert Schenk, Karl-Heinz Schmid, and Alfred Tews, 126 – 140. Berlin: Bertz. Bildhauer, Katharina. 2007. Drehbuch reloaded: Erzählen im Kino des 21. Jahrhunderts. Konstanz: UVK. Booth, Wayne C. 1983. The Rhetoric of Fiction [1961], 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bordwell, David. 2006. The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies. Berkeley: University of California Press. Brütsch, Matthias. 2008. “Leinwand mit Schlupflöchern: Zur Wirkung einer innerfilmischen Grenzüberschreitung der besonderen Art.” Filmbulletin, 289, 37 – 47. Brütsch, Matthias. 2011. Traumbühne Kino: Der Traum als filmtheoretische Metapher und narratives Motiv. Marburg: Schüren. Brütsch, Matthias. 2013. “When the Past Lies Ahead and the Future Lags Behind: Backward Narration in Film, Television, and Literature.” In (Dis)Orienting Media and Narrative Mazes, edited by Julia Eckel, Bernd Leiendecker, Daniela Olek, and Christine Piepiorka, 293 – 312. Bielefeld: Transcript. Brütsch, Matthias. 2014. “From Ironic Distance to Unexpected Plot Twists: Unreliable Narration in Literature and Film.” In Beyond Classical Narration: Unnatural and Transmedial Narrative and Narratology, edited by Jan Alber and Per Krogh Hansen, 57 – 80. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Brütsch, Matthias. 2015. “Irony, Retroactivity, and Ambiguity: Three Kinds of ‹Unreliable Narration› in Literature and Film.” In Unreliable Narration and Trustworthiness: Intermedial and Interdisciplinary Perspectives, edited by Vera Nünning, 221 – 245. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Buckland, Warren, ed. 2009. Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. Cameron, Allan. 2008. Modular Narratives in Contemporary Cinema. London: Palgrave. Denby, David. 2007. “The New Disorder: Adventures in Film Narrative.” The New Yorker, March 5. Accessed 12 August 2016. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/03/05/ the-new-disorder. Eckel, Julia, Bernd Leiendecker, Daniela Olek, and Christine Piepiorka, eds. 2013. (Dis)orienting Media and Narrative Mazes. Bielefeld: Transcript. Eckel, Julia. 2012. Zeitenwende(n) des Films: Temporale Nonlinearität im zeitgenössischen Erzählkino. Marburg: Schüren. Elsaesser, Thomas. 2009. “The Mind-Game Film.” In Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema, edited by Warren Buckland, 13 – 41. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. James, Henry. 1898. The Turn of the Screw. New York: Macmillan. Johnson, Steven. 2005. Everything Good is Bad for You. New York: Penguin. Kiss, Miklós. 2013. “Navigation in Complex Films: Real-life Embodied Experiences Underlying Narrative Categorisation.” In (Dis)Orienting Media and Narrative Mazes, edited by Julia Eckel, Bernd Leiendecker, Daniela Olek, and Christine Piepiorka, 237 – 255. Bielefeld: Transcript.

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Krützen, Michaela. 2010. Dramaturgien des Films: Das etwas andere Hollywood. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer. Leiendecker, Bernd. 2015. “They Only See What They Want to See”. Geschichte des unzuverlässigen Erzählens im Film. Marburg: Schüren. Levin, Ira. 1967. Rosemary’s Baby. New York: Random House. McEwan, Ian. 2006. [1978] “Dead as They Come.” In In Between the Sheets and Other Stories, 59 – 77. London: Jonathan Cape. Merimée, Prosper. 1837. “La Vénus d’Ille.” Revue des Deux Mondes, Mai 1837 (deuxième quinzaine), 425 – 452. Panek, Elliot. 2006. “The Poet and the Detective: Defining the Psychological Puzzle Film.” Film Criticism, 31/1 – 2:62 – 88. Pinkas, Claudia. 2010. Der Phantastische Film: Instabile Narrationen und die Narration der Instabilität. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Ramírez Berg, Charles. 2006. “A Taxonomy of Alternative Plots in Recent Films: Classifying the ‘Tarantino Effect’.” Film Criticism, 31/1 – 2:5 – 61. Strank, Willem. 2014. Twist Endings: Umdeutende Film-Enden. Marburg: Schüren. Tan, Ed S. 1996. Emotion and the Structure of Narrative Film: Film as an Emotion Machine. Translated from Dutch by Barbara Fasting. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1970. Introduction à la littérature fantastique. Paris:Seuil. Twain, Mark. 1884. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. London: Chatto & Windus. Wenzel, Peter. 1989. Von der Struktur des Witzes zum Witz der Struktur: Untersuchungen zur Pointierung in Witz und Kurzgeschichte. Heidelberg: Carl Winter.

Heinz-Peter Preusser

“This is still a game, isn’t it?”: On the Confusing Inability to Decide Between the Fictionally Real and Virtual in David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ 1 Metalepsis as artefact emotion A (filmic) text can be perturbing in many ways. Unreliable narration is only one of the multiple modes through which a narrative can confuse. And these modes are all the more powerful in their aesthetic appeal when they are on the one hand ambivalent to the point of undecidability and, on the other, provide enough material to tempt the construction of coherence. The recipient is then at permanent pains to decide between the levels of the real and virtual within the fiction. Which is it to be? It is unsatisfactory to agree simply on ambivalence, as Dominik Orth (2013, 227) does in his typology of ‘reality’ in fictional narrative. Nor, however, is orientation entirely absent. The fun of the game – somewhat inadequately rendered by the term ‘mindfuck’ – tends clearly toward artefact emotion (cf. Tan 1996). And artefact emotion is often – indeed centrally – elicited by metalepsis (cf. Kuhn 2011, Thon 2009). That Cronenberg intends to deceive is evident both in his narrative unreliability (via focalization, ocularization, auricularization – cf. Schlickers 2009), and in the final dramaturgical twist, which proceeds to unmask itself as a red herring. And that he constructs deception as narrative paradox is apparent in his numerous metalepses and Möbius strips, as well as in the mise en abyme of mirrored fictional levels. So far as his figures and their awareness are concerned, Thomas Weber (2008, 278 – 279) justifiably speaks of a “dramaturgy of suspicion”. Finally, empuzzlement is aroused by the multitude of abstruse, fantastical, emotionally bewildering events of the plot, including nested layers of monstrously peopled dreams that serve to reinforce the ambiguity of the game levels. We are faced here not just with the transcendental question of the verifiability of sense impressions, but at the same time with a maelstrom of drastic, repugnant, but fascinating images with erotic and/or violent connotations from which (on two levels) no escape seems possible. For, as viewers, we are caught in the

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game of eXistenZ, ¹ a product of the software enterprise Antenna Research and its developer, the protagonist Allegra Geller; but like Ted Pikul, her ostensible protector, we are simultaneously the victims of our own projections – the fears and desires that the film stages as a psychoanalytic metadiscourse. These contrasting positions typify the mastery with which David Cronenberg constructs the singularly confusing undecidability between virtuality and reality that marks his fictional world. The film can be read psychoanalytically – with Manfred Riepe (2002) and Oliver Decker (2013) – or with Simon Pühler (2007, 11, 40 – 41, 109, 116 and passim) as a Lacanian exposition of the real and imaginary (cf. objet petit a – “object little a”). But it can also be read as a semiotic and/or narratological description of the intersecting premises of coherence. In the following pages I will take this latter course, following – and hopefully shedding new light on – a narrative theorem suggested by Sabine Schlickers (2015). The main focus will be on mapping the various levels revealed in eXistenZ – for it is clear that the film’s perturbation derives primarily from its interplay of levels conceived as ontologically different – whether or not this represents a mise en abyme in the strict sense. If we as viewers do not know whether we are in narrative reality or a virtual game-world, it is hard to follow or morally situate the actions of the figures, or to find meaningful coherences. Identities fragment and multiply; actants are both self and other. Or perhaps the game forces them to take on different roles and act against their convictions.

2 eXistenZ, from Antenna Research The scene is a product presentation before a selected public. Game designer Allegra Geller from Antenna Research is unveiling her latest brainchild, eXistenZ. The setting: a former church, small, with pews, stained glass windows, and a low daïs where once the altar stood (cf. Pühler 2007, 103). Now a new god rules, the god of gaming; its horizon the secularization implicit in game titles like ArtGod (eX, 69) and transCendenZ ² (eX, 226).³ What transcends reality is no longer faith, but immersion in the game. This already determines the players as the successors of believing Christians. Cries of enthusiasm greet the developer as a female redeemer, the bearer of holy (or holistic) healing. Later Gas will fall at her feet because she has changed his  Novak and Cronenberg (1999, 234) rendered here as eX (pagination in text).  The name in the film is both written and spoken about as spelt with this unconventional capitalization.  In the book we alternatively read “TranscendenZ” (eX, 226).

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life (even if this scene, as appears still later, is mere pretense). Only in the game could Gas escape the grim reality of his life – the loneliness of his shabby gas station out in the sticks: a clear allegory both of gaming and of cinema as an illusion machine. As the incarnate allegory, Allegra is a figure of light – although she is at the same time a shy nerd, devoid of social skills and contacts. She animates the congregation and calls up a chosen few to test her game. She plugs them in and eXistenZ begins. But the game’s user-interface is different from anything else. The gamepods look like the familiar consoles of today, but they are made of organic material. They are alive (Fig. 1), their skin-colored tissue pulsing with light and emitting squeaky champing noises. Their connection with their players – and of the players among themselves – is via organic cables that resemble umbilical cords (cf. Papenburg 2011a, 125) whose ends (we later see in detail) are implanted in the players’ spines. During the game the players enter a state of trance, communicating with the gamepods through neural links, their subconscious selves spawning fantasies that remain at a purely mental level: no reality is presented outside or beyond the players.

Fig. 1: Consoles of today are made of organic material. They are alive

What the game is about remains for the time being hidden: we see the actors from the outside, in the third person, not their inner lives. We lack their knowledge (on focalization cf. Kuhn 2011, 137, 140) and even their perceptions – which here remain merely ideal (Schlickers 2009; Kuhn 2011, 128). For this reason, too, we take what we see, including the setting, as reality ‘R’. But then a young man appears, draws a gun, shouts “Death to the vile demoness, Allegra Geller!” (eX,

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28), and fells her with a shot. Ted Pikul, the caretaker, who had been unable to detect the organic pistol with his scanner, throws himself protectively across her body and brings her in a jeep to safety (eX, 35). Even at this level, however, we are not sure that we are (still) in narrative reality. Couldn’t this shooting, too, be part of the imagination game? Have we changed focalization and mode of perception from external (zero‐)focalization (Kuhn 2011, 133) to internal focalization and ocularization (Kuhn 2011, 149, 140 – 141) – and if so from which figure’s point of view? Would the autodiegetic position – if there were one – be Geller’s or Pikul’s? Even though the ‘camera’ makes pictures and, as such, plays a narrative role (Schlickers 1997, 77, 79 – 81), the medial quality of the narrative remains less than clear (cf. Schlickers 1997, 83) – the “I-here-now of the narrator remains unmarked” (Schlickers 1997, 75). With its weapon of bone, and bullets (it later transpires) of human teeth, the scene is certainly surreal enough to be read as a dream or game sequence. What is so confusing here is not so much the tooth Pikul extracts from Allegra’s shoulder, but that she wonders what’s happening to her. Can a (third person) avatar (Beil 2010, 53 – 54, 91, 97 and passim) be fazed by what happens in the game? Or is this a case of the condensation and displacement of which Freud speaks in The Interpretation of Dreams (1968)? The fear of violation of the body’s boundaries, and with it of loss of selfhood, instantiates the phylogenetic anxiety of being rent by a superior being – a fear the process of acculturation has slowly banished to the unconscious, where it lies in wait, diffuse, hidden, and as such invulnerable, but at the same time universal (cf. Kittsteiner 1993, 55; Preusser 2013, 257– 258).

3 Are Cronenberg’s narrative realities hierarchically organized? However, we – or more precisely the implicit viewer – do not yet know enough to gauge the situation adequately: it is insufficiently marked for this. We do not even know if there has already been a break in narrative levels – and if so how such levels are related. Is there a hierarchy of realities here, or are the narrative levels on an equal plane (Orth 2013, 196, 231)? Can one even ask Orth’s question of this film? Pikul – Allegra Geller always addresses him by his surname – drives the injured game designer to a hotel and cares for her. They share a room. They are on the run from someone – Antenna Research, perhaps, Allegra’s company. Every hypothesis is speculation, posited but not pursued, let alone verified. This is an-

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other strategy of confusion in a work full of double agents and changes of tack. Geller must continue her game, played now with Pikul; otherwise (at least ostensibly) eXistenZ itself – after the abrupt break caused by the attack on its mastermind – might be jeopardized. It must be tested, and tested with a friend, “someone I trust” (eX, 63), “somebody friendly” (TC⁴ 00:17:15). “You’re my friend, Pikul” Allegra states, and immediately adds, “Are you friendly?” (00:17:21); the statement and question are repeated in the same terms later in the film (eX, 100: “to play eXistenZ with somebody friendly”; 00:37:19; cf. also 00:37:22, 00:37:34). The repetition is the first hint at the avatar-like nature of the fictional character; later this is underlined when figures seem to wait in an endless loop (or Möbius strip) to be addressed with such a formula, which must be correctly enounced. This is very clear with D’Arcy Nader (00:42:12 – 00:42:41; eX, 112) and Hugo Carlaw (01:08:37– 01:08:58; eX 166) – although the prolepsis will probably only be noticed on a second viewing. Hidden markers or “cues” (Bordwell 2008, 29, 33, 37, 52– 53, 113 – 114 and passim) of this kind are additional evidence of the film’s autopoiesis and its correlative insistence on aesthetic autonomy, and on artefact emotion as the appropriate recipient attitude. What the viewer is meant to enjoy is the game of decoding. But Ted has no bioport – a direct connection blasted with a massive pistol into the central nervous system via spinal cord and bone marrow – onto which the metaflesh gamepod can dock. Pikul, in any case one of life’s innocents, turns out to be a “digital virgin” (Riepe 2002, 185) – a nicely chosen phrase apropos a film that plays with and subverts gender crossing and clichés, Ted being here the effeminate and Allegra the dominant figure. On the level of histoire (what the tale is about – cf. Kuhn 2011, 18, 31; Orth 2013, 26), Cronenberg is equally perturbing, inasmuch as he constantly emphasizes his characters’ (especially Pikul’s) “phobia” (eX, 60; 00:15:47) – fears which then readily transfer to the recipient. After all, the implantation of the bioport is a form of rape, against which Ted initially seeks to defend himself, until Allegra persuades him that he will then be able to escape reality altogether and be united with her in the game – so confusing is the erotic subtext of liberation through submission in this film (eX, 62). As we shall see, however, the perturbation on the level of histoire cannot properly be separated from that of the how of discours, for this (if anywhere) is where narrative transgressions are marked – even if the marking itself leads

 The time code (TC) is based on the German DVD eXistenZ. Du bist das Spiel, with Jude Law, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Willem Dafoe and others. Written and directed by David Cronenberg. Leipzig: Kinowelt Home Entertainment 2005.

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astray. Ted Pikul suggests ironically that they should seek out an isolated gas station around midnight and ask if they could get an illegal bioport fixed there. The next cut takes us there; but the shift of narrative levels is in this instance above all auditory – Kuhn’s ‘linguistic narrative instance’ (cf. Kuhn 2011, 95 – 98) – rather than visual, as in later scene shifts. Visually the cut is prepared only by Ted’s action in standing up and looking through the window into the world they are about to enter. The cut that immediately follows is hard and elliptical. The country gas station looks as in Edward Hopper’s painting Gas [1940], but decades on and appropriately desolate (Fig. 2). The pump operator bears a sign on his breast announcing “Gas” (00:18:03) – apparently his name, which is odd enough, even if it’s only short for ‘Gaston’ or ‘Gaspard’.⁵ None of this, however, seems to disturb the figures (or avatars?) in this scene. Allegra feels her way into this new world as an infant would, haptically, tenderly stroking the rusted pumps as if they were living skin – we have seen them already in the title sequence, where they were quasi organic. Now we witness the first appearance of a twin-headed amphibious creature – another proleptic marker of a possible game-world. The place itself seems ‘other’, a ludic dream environment, but the markers remain inconclusive. Most films that present a hierarchic plurality of experiential levels later resolve these enigmatic signs, so that in the end one knows where one stands (cf. Orth 2013, 123): one level is declared real, another imaginary (Orth 2013, 124), or it is categorized as an ‘intentional deception’ (Orth 2013, 160) or ‘manipulation of narrative reality’ (Orth 2013, 184; and cf. 196). With Cronenberg, however, this does not happen: eXistenZ suggests a hierarchical ordering of narrative levels, but in the next breath subverts that order, re-establishing its default mode of ambivalence (cf. Orth 2013, 228 – 231).

4 Janus as god of a new age Reality levels are further veiled (or skipped) by various motif chains that run through the entire narrative, unconsciously synthesizing the diegesis of gameworld and fictional reality, even when this ostensibly counters all logic. That strange two-headed creature, for example – “a sign of the times”, as Allegra calls it (00:31:58; Fig. 3; eX, 89) – reappears, after Pikul has seen it and become her co-player, only in sequences unambiguously marked as games. Well chosen, it refers back to the Roman god Janus (aka Geminus, the twin), the god of begin-

 In the German translation of the novelization the character is called “Sprit” (eX Germ., 62), meaning “petrol” in colloquial language.

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Fig. 2: The country gas station looks as in Edward Hopper’s painting Gas, but desolate

nings and ends, of gateways, thresholds, exits and entrances; the god of transitions that still presides over the New Year month of January; the god of begetting and conception (cf. Wissowa 1902, 91– 100, esp. 96 – 97) that expresses the principle of duality underlying our (western) thought, and with it the dichotomous coding of our world. From good and evil, light and darkness, through woman and man, creation and destruction, life and death, to eXistenZ and transCendenZ, the opposites belong inalienably to each other, as a door connects outside and within, both enabling and forbidding passage. Embodying polarity, Janus symbolizes and enacts its resolution – an incarnate unity both marking and effecting the film’s transitions between virtuality and reality. A formally recurrent “sign of the times”, looking both east and west, to sunrise and to sunset, the symbol becomes realiter a strange loop whose paradoxical instantiation accomplishes the change of sides without ever needing to, for it is both at once.

Fig. 3: That strange two-headed creature is “a sign of the times”

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Arrived at a (summer) ski resort, they notice – Pikul for the first time – their amphibious bicephalic companion. Here Allegra is acquainted with Kiri Vinokur, a bioengineer who builds and repairs gamepods from nerve tissue and organ parts. He takes them to an empty chalet – at this season there are no skiers around – repairs the gamepod, and exchanges the infected bioport Gas had implanted for a new, healthy one. The earlier transition scene on the bed is now repeated, almost identically, except that they are now playing, so we know a transition has occurred. Allegra starts up eXistenZ; Ted rises again. The camera follows him with a vertical pan shot and, glancing up left into the frame, he sees in the countercut another figure descend the spiral stairs, which are the same as those in the chalet, yet not the same, as they lead into a different room: into D’Arcy Nader’s game shop, with the manufacturer’s name across it, “Cortical Systematics” (eX, 108; 00:40:03), the virtual counterpart to Antenna Research – a match cut, this, along eye lines that have the figures moving toward each other as if they were about to meet. Pikul seems to react to a sound (00:38:14). Someone is coming down the metal staircase, albeit from the other room – another confusing moment of internal auricularization (cf. Schlickers 2009, Kuhn 2011, 129). We see Ted now in a different situation, an avatar in the game, but one endowed with a figure’s reasoning power. His direct gaze into the camera already amounts to a metaleptic shift (cf. Kuhn 2011, 359, 364), and the dialogue between the two players is definitively so, breaking the fictive space of illusion and revoking the diegesis in an act that can truly be called metadiegetic (Kuhn 2011, 366). The narrative is now on another plane – a plane to which the opening situation stands as extradiegetic frame (the ‘narrative instance’ generating the diegesis) to first-order narrative. As a rule narratology speaks here (with Genette) of an intradiegetic level (cf. Kuhn 2011, 85), but for the sake of simplicity we will call it (fictional) reality ‘R’ – for it can for the time being be regarded as real by figures, visual and linguistic narrative instance, and viewers alike.⁶ If D’Arcy Nader’s gamestore is to be taken as belonging to metadiegetic narrative ‘MD1’, we are now about to enter the second order ‘MD2’ – Kuhn (2011, 104), following Genette, calls this the metametadiegetic plane, for here the players (including the game designer) find games they have never seen and accordingly want to test. They fix each other up with micropods that crawl into their spines (Fig. 4), docking autonomously into the central nervous system. Pikul is clearly aroused by this form of penetration, and feels with his tongue-tip around and into Allegra’s gameport orifice (Fig. 5). Accordingly, his assurance that his

 Cf. also Figs. 13, 14 and 15 and Table 1, at chapter 7 of the article.

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real self would never have permitted so bold an action seems metaleptic: “That wasn’t me. It was my game character” (00:46:19; eX, 118). And fear for what his real body is now enduring breaks the fictive advance, which Allegra openly pursues. It is precisely here, in this situation of distancing and defense against immersion, that the step occurs to level ‘MD2’. Pikul takes Geller’s left breast in his right hand as she sits on his lap, and her pleasured moaning segues into a different scene.

Fig. : Micropods crawl into their spines, docking in autonomously into the central nervous system

Fig. : Pikul is clearly aroused by this form of penetration

We are in a so-called trout farm, where mutant amphibians are bred for tissue and organs for the gamepods. Pikul, working at the conveyor belt, looks straight into the camera and holds in his hand, no longer a breast, but a huge mutant toad (Fig. 6) which he prepares to open with a practiced cut. The discontinuity of the scenes is primarily bridged by the squelching soundtrack, which assumes a “narrative function” (Mikos 2008, 236; Flückiger 2001, 298 – 299, cf. 281, 131), bonding the two sides of the cut into some sort of a match as his hand struggles to grip the organic material. This narrative shift, Ted realizes, entails a new identity, and he is (again a rational motif) equipped with a practical name tab: he is now Larry Ashen, and in this role he is introduced to the farm by Yevgeny Nourish. But does Allegra, too, perhaps have a new identity and name here? When Ted/Larry finally discovers her – now named Barb Brecken (eX, 135) – she reacts mechanically, absently (Fig. 7), her eyes seeking a connection, her ears a keyword she fails to find (00:53:59). Her statement and question are virtually identical: “I saw you make contact, Larry Ashen” (00:54:11) […] What’d the guy on the line say?” (00:54:14). When the right reaction and right answer come: “He told me we’re to have lunch” (00:54:21; eX, 135 – 136), her tense features relax into a broad grin and they all go off to a Chinese restaurant – the next venue of the

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‘plot’. Here Pikul alone is active and self-directed. Geller, like the farm’s other avatars, moves without feeling or response, for she is now one of them.

Fig. : Pikul holds in his hand, no longer a breast, but a huge mutant toad

Fig. : Does Allegra have a new identity? She reacts mechanically, absently

5 Game-break and hybrid space Once inside the restaurant, roles switch again. The focalization changes from zero via internal to external, where a figure (here Allegra) knows more than the ‘narrator’ (Kuhn 2011, 123). No longer the strictly functional, restricted avatar, she is again in charge, again the consciously manipulative, knowing game developer, who seeks to control Ted. When he complains “I’m feeling a little disconnected from my real life. I’m kinda losing touch with the texture of it” (00:56:39 – 42), and diagnoses this as a “psychosis” (00:56:47), she replies enthusiastically: that’s marvelous, because his nervous system has adapted to the game (00:56:54). But now it’s Pikul that takes over, interrupting play with the utterance “eXistenZ is pausing” (00:56:59) – the clearest marker of a metalepsis in the entire film (eX, 141– 142). Again his eye line meets the camera frontally before his head drops to the table as if all energy had drained from his body. But instead of hitting the hard round wood of the table, Pikul’s head falls onto the soft rectangle of the mattress, the one segueing into the other (Fig. 8) until only the bedspread is visible, along with the armchair, lamps and towels from the chalet. This is (once more) the world of second order metadiegesis (‘MD2’ or metametadiegesis), whose objects should derive from the fictional reality ‘R’ of intradiegesis and will, in fact, be found there again as the scene proceeds. What we have before us is evidently a hybrid space that dissolves clear lines of orientation – a motif common enough in cinema since the 1990s (especially at the turn of the millennium), as Oliver Schmidt has shown (2013, 14; 261– 272; 327– 329). Cognitive psychology experiments have shown that changes of this sort, especially with moving images, are as a rule not detected by our selec-

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tive vision (Smith 2013). If they are, they will almost certainly be considered an autopoietic stimulus – another spur to artefact emotion. Cues of this sort are in any case meant rather for the film text’s implied reader. Nevertheless, they have consequences for the figures, which take part of their protective private sphere with them into virtuality. Reality now seems unreal to Ted, and for Allegra it is above all flat and boring. They both want to get back into the game-world as soon as possible, and this now switches from ‘R’ to ‘MD2’ without more ado. For now it is time to be cabled up to the big gamepods (Fig. 9), no longer to the micropods with which they gained access to the trout farm and restaurant. The break is staged in many ways; it puts an end to any coherence the discours may once have had, and enhances yet again the recipient’s perturbation: “‘Reality’ is a function of the game as medium. The issue here, then, is not of an ‘actual reality’, however that might be defined, but of constructed realities on various levels of the game” (Weber 2008, 273).

Fig. : Instead of hitting the hard wood of the table, Pikul’s head falls onto the soft mattress

Fig.: Now it is time to be cabled up to the big gamepods

Despite the clear marking of this break, and the correlative shift in levels (which should, but does not actually happen), we are faced here again with a blurred transition back to ‘MD2’ – which should really be ‘MD1’. The interruption of the game – the metalepsis to ‘R’ – severs the sequence of diegetic levels, and the next move is again cut along the eye line: Ted looks to the left (i. e. right in the frame) toward the door, which opens accordingly. This time, however, it leads not into the chalet, but into the Chinese restaurant. What comes next is the first murder the gamesters have on their conscience: Pikul shoots the waiter (Fig. 10), although he can give no reason for the deed – in contrast to Gas, who wanted to kill Allegra, and who Ted deals with as a matter of self-defense. The game seems to evoke violence, another case being when Pikul forces himself to eat the revolting speciality that hides the weapon destined for him – the bone pistol already used for the attempt on Allegra’s life at the beginning of the film. But again this object-continuity (the pistol recurs

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at the end of the film) confuses any effort to find order in the sequence of levels. And again elements of discours slip into the histoire. Rather than describe these shifting aspects in detail, however, I will highlight the supposed coherences that trigger the film’s perturbatory impact and the continuum of constructive breakdowns that emerges from them. What does it mean, for example, that the twoheaded mutant amphibian (the Janus symbol) is now served up as a speciality of the house, or that Pikul commits a murder? Could this be a step toward the incursion of reality (Slavoj Žižek; Pühler 2007, 139, 179, 182) into Cronenberg’s game-world?

Fig. 10: The first murder the gamesters have on their conscience: Pikul shoots the waiter

6 Incursion of reality into the game-world, or mise en abyme? Finding an infected gamepod in a hay-loft while on the run, Allegra cannot resist connecting herself to it. She seems fascinated, aroused by the idea, and by the thought – given the lethal nature of the virus – of passing the infection on, as she puts it, even at the cost of her own wellbeing. The infection at level ‘MD2’ evidently now jumps across to level ‘R’ in the chalet, where the gamepod is also affected. Yevgeny Nourish and Hugo Carlaw present themselves as members of an underground army determined to defend reality against the games. They are double agents (Sternenborg 2011, 224), but whose side are they really on: that of Cortical Systematics or of reality – and really in reality or in the game? For all the viewer knows, that is the problem. The film is approaching its climax, which is dramaturgically utterly simple, but circumstantially complex and confusing. It will engulf first the farm, then the chalet in an apocalyptic scenario.

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Many will die (cf. Decker 2013, 282): first Nourish, stabbed by Geller; then Carlaw, shot by Vinokur with the bone pistol – “My dog brought me this” (01:21:19; eX, 211); then Kiri Vinokur, a spy for Cortical Systematics (01:21:45 – 01:21:52), is cut down by Geller with Carlaw’s submachine gun; and finally Ted Pikul, the no-longer-so-hidden hero, is killed personally by Geller with a time charge set in his bioport, because he, too, is counted among the “friends of reality” (01:22:59; eX, 216 – 217; cf. Decker 2013, 275 – 276). Now Allegra thinks she may have won the game, and while she asks just that, “Have I won?” (01:23:32; Fig. 11; eX, 217), the pews of the church migrate to the lawn in front of the burning chalet (cf. Weber 2008, 280), while all around is wild shooting and explosion following explosion.

Fig. 11: While Allegra thinks she may have won the game, the pews of the church migrate to the lawn in front of the burning chalet

“Allegra, what, if we’re not in the game anymore?” Ted had asked before he was murdered (01:22:35; eX, 214). The metaleptic pews mark another change of level, again logically incoherent to the point of impossibility. Hugo Carlaw, former game-shop cashier and current partisan/terrorist, has just destroyed Geller’s gamepod – and done so in the reality established by virtue of an explosion that bursts the windows, dissolving the dichotomy of inside and out. But now the figure of Geller also changes, its organic game devices yielding to a data glove and headset that seem to cause her some surprise. Unsteadily she totters down the short slope to the church pews until a cut to the two gamesters, Geller and Pikul, now both with headsets, takes us back into the different reality level of the church, where it all began. Is that now real reality? The reality in which transCendenZ played (Riepe 2002, 189 – 190)? Is this the final twist? Is it a red herring? Is it a mise en abyme?

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A pattern from the first level of reality at the beginning of the film seems to repeat itself and must find its place in the structure of metadiegeses; for Pikul and Geller congratulate Nourish, the game designer of transCendenZ, and want to talk to him on his own. But then they pull two (conventional) pistols out of the shaggy coat of the dog whose presence has in the course of the film been repeatedly connected – on various levels – with the bone pistol. They shoot Nourish and his assistant, Merle, while the other players, like the guests in the Chinese restaurant, look more or less indifferently on. The figure of the Chinese waiter now sits at the door, as Pikul did in the film’s opening images. The pair threaten him, too, with their weapons, their eyes again looking direct – i. e. metaleptically – into the camera (Fig. 12). The Chinese waiter has the film’s last words: “Hey, tell me the truth. Are we still in the game?” (01:29:30; cf. Riepe 2002, 190).⁷ The screen blacks out until the credits roll.

Fig. 12: The pair threatens the Chinese waiter, their eyes looking metaleptically into the camera

7 Construction and deconstruction of diegetic levels and generation of meaning Together with the three diagrams, the table below presents the structures and diegetic levels of Cronenberg’s film in summary form. Fig. 13 shows the structures as perceived in a first viewing, the graph indicating (read downward) what is included from one level to the next. ‘R1’ is here the (sole) level of fictional reality: narratologically speaking the intradiegetic level (Kuhn 2011, 85, 103); for, as an abstract narrative instance, the extradiegetic level responsible for  Cf. the alternative phrase of the novelization: “This is still a game, isn’t it?” (eX, 234).

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the entire diegesis is not involved. The first level of the game functions, therefore, as metadiegesis 1, ‘MD1’; the second, the game within the game, as metadiegesis 2, ‘MD2’ – narratologically the metametadiegetic level. At the third level of metadiegesis the model capsizes, and the question arises whether this is not the level of reality again, and if so, whether it is different from ‘R1’. For this reason we will call it ‘R2’. But is this at the same time a third level of metadiegesis – a metametametadiegetis? Or does ‘R2’, qua intradiegetic, include all other levels? What is the logic behind such an inclusion (of putative ‘MD3’ in ‘MD2’ in ‘MD1’)? Is this perhaps a pseudodiegesis?

Fig. 13: Levels of metadiegesis: Bottom up. Structures as perceived in a first viewing

Fig. 14: Levels of metadiegesis: Top down. We are still in the game

Fig. 14 therefore turns the model round, revoking level ‘R’. We are still in the game; no previous diegetic level is perceptible. In this model, the gamepod game eXistenZ by Antenna Research is the first metadiegesis, followed by ‘MD2’ (with the micropod) from Cortical Systematics (still eXistenZ), followed by transCendenZ from PilgrImage as ‘MD3’. All previous modalities, it can now be seen, are included in this level. Conceivably everything that went before was part of the game of transCendenZ. But then Geller yells “Death to the

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demon Yevgeny Nourish”; and Pikul: “Death to PilgrImage. […] Death to transCendenZ” (eX, 233).⁸ Could we now be in ‘R2’ – but for the repetition (with exchanged roles) of the opening scene, the attack on Allegra Geller; but for the indifferent onlookers in the church and Chinese restaurant? “Are we still in the game?” Have we entered a permanent strange loop? The following table, showing the sequence of diegetic levels, may clarify the issue: Table 1. Sequence of diegetic levels .

Start of eXistenZ (Antenna Research): ‘R’

.

On the run, motel, country gas station (Gas): ‘R’

.

Ski-club chalet  (Kiri Vinokur): ‘R’

.

Restart game,  players: ‘R’ – ‘MD’

.

Cortical Systematics  (D’Arcy Nader): ‘MD’

.

Game in game, micropods: ‘MD’

.

Change of location, trout farm (Yevgeny Nourish): ‘MD’

.

Change of location, Chinese restaurant: ‘MD’

.

Interruption of the game: metalepsis: ‘ML’ – ‘R’

.

Continuation in Chinese restaurant: ‘MD’ (or ‘MD’)

.

Amphibian breeding tank (Nourish): ‘MD’

.

Cortical Systematics  (Hugo Carlaw): ‘MD’

.

Ski-club chalet , restart: ‘R’

.

Trout farm, infected gamepod (Nourish): ‘MD’

.

Fire at farm and chalet, Carlaw attack: ‘MD’ = ‘R’

.

Geller kills Pikul and others, game ends: ‘R’ = ‘R’

.

Shift to transCendenZ (PilgrImage): ‘R’ – ‘R’

.

Ted and Allegra shoot Nourish: ‘R’ = ‘MD’

The table shows a balanced structure rising from the putative level of reality ‘R’ through two levels of metadiegesis ‘MD1’, ‘MD2’ to the central metalepsis ‘ML’, which breaks the continuity and causes initial confusion. For, with the beginning of the return movement in the Chinese restaurant, we can no longer be sure

 Again in the book (eX, 233), we read the ‘wrongly written’ word “TranscendenZ”.

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whether we are in ‘MD2’ (the ostensible answer) or ‘MD1’. From here the return movement continues via ‘MD2’ and ‘MD1’ to ‘R’, where the game restarts, returning us to ‘MD2’, which must serve as a reality level, because Carlaw fights here for reality against the game. Then Geller, the supreme gamester, seems to mark reality as ‘R1’; but it transpires later that the game is now transCendenZ (from PilgrImage), in which the hitherto assumed reality is mere pretense (hence ‘R2’). The concluding question, then, is whether this new level of reality is not a third-order metadiegesis: ‘MD3’. Fig. 15 graphically confirms the impression of the diegetic sequence as a structural development that retains its clarity despite the multiple breaks and diversions of its second phase. The comments made above on the film’s narratological and dramaturgical markers will, perhaps, help map the sources and limits of this perturbation. The question throughout was to determine when and how apparently meaningful structures tipped into opacity, and where the boundary between sense and its opposite lay. This meant distinguishing between the various levels that seemed to claim reality, and evaluating that claim – with the result that, although a final ascription of reality is impossible, the impossibility itself can be accurately reconstructed and visually presented. At least on a second reading the markers of discontinuity are clear enough.

7 Excursus: classical Modernist literature eXistenZ is not alone: an analysis of other films by David Cronenberg, and some by David Lynch, might have similar results. The category of perturbatory narration could even qualify as a sub-genre – especially in film since the 1990s, but not only there. The literary aestheticism of the late nineteenth century offers similar structures to the researcher. The polyvalence of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s “A Tale of the Cavalry”, for instance, has many purposes, one of which is manipulation of the reader through denotations and attributions, as well as narratological procedures. These send signals that hinge the tale on sequences and substitutions – to the benefit of readings that seek to solve hermeneutic riddles or psychoanalyze the actors. The reason for such ascriptions, however, is less than complex: every prolongation of time, every moment of introspection or direct speech by the participants signifies a meaning for which a motive is assumed. The shift from the many to the few, from landscape to architectonic space, from authorial to personal narration functions as an interpretive sign, while the ambivalences of beautiful and ugly, military and private represent ironic gestures, rhetorical oxymora generating meaning and simultaneously subverting the principle of contradiction. Hofmannsthal’s text is ultimately indecisive

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Fig. 15: The diegetic sequences as a structural development that retains its clarity despite the multiple breaks

with regard to structural opposition or the dissemination of meaning through intersecting series that prove open to metaanalytic presentation (cf. Preusser 2015, 241– 274). An example from theater would be Gerhart Hauptmann’s The Rats. The last Naturalist drama, this is a downright modern, self-reflexive, autopoietic artwork which for that very reason seems plucked direct from life. It models the social strata of language and of its figures in radical constructs which it simultaneously deconstructs, just as its symbolism of upper and lower, light and dark, tragedy and comedy constantly runs counter to, and even revokes itself, with the result that the presentation of reality segues into myth. Here, too, it is a matter of grasping the process, the waxing and waning of meaning, apparently devoid of teleology. It is this that conveys the palpable truth-to-life of Naturalism. What we are faced with, then, is not a photo-cum-phonographic imprint of reality but the implementation of its constructed, non-realistic, even mythical and idealized features (cf. Preusser 2017). These two examples indicate that the type of filmic narration dominant for a decade had its roots in classical Modernism, whose ambitious narrative and pre-

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sentational techniques also sought sense in simultaneous construction and deconstruction. Far from simply resolving into Postmodernism, Modernism, then, retains its identity – or to put it differently, the history of Postmodernism is longer than one thinks, reaching back to the fin de siècle (Preusser 2015, 9, 14, 30, 38, 69, 148, 212). Wilhelm Emrich (1964) once called the “continuum of unending reflection” the benchmark of an artefact’s aesthetic worth. In this sense the mise en abyme à l′infini, which on the level of discours entails not only endless mirroring but also the autonomous aesthetics of autopoiesis and self-reflexive narration (cf. Sterneborg 2011, 227), would serve as an admirable pattern with which to generate an interminable undecidability between the fictionally virtual and real. That, too, is a characteristic of Modernism. Cronenberg’s film text – or, rather, his “implied author” (Kindt and Müller 2006, 152– 153) – lays down the exact lines along which the “authorial reader” should in this sense react (Jannidis 2004, 252; 30 – 31, 244). Whether the procedure is successful is a question that must be referred to what Kant (1974, 51, 54, 79 – 80) called the “judgment of aesthetic value”, which for him was purely ‘subjective’, ‘reflex’, and ‘non-conceptual’. This need not, then, be anticipated here.

8 Perturbation: narratological or psychological? The overlap between narratological structural model – the Barthian (1966) “simulacrum” of this essay – on the one hand and symbolic connotations on the other opens the door to quite different perturbatory readings. For Cronenberg’s images of revulsion, penetration, gender crossing, sex, and violence contribute essentially to his film’s potential for confusion – indeed they may perturb some viewers even more than do his narratological procedures. Although they lie beyond the scope of the present book, I will touch on them here – not least with an eye to the secondary literature. Both as real figures and as game-world avatars, Pikul and Geller permanently express a status of subjection. Ted, more than anyone else, is concerned for his body, which he feels to be cut off from his self, while Allegra plays lustfully with her other self, seducing her ‘friend’ (00:07:15; eX, 63, 100) to diverse transgressions of their mutual borders. She is the active one, penetrating Ted with the plug of a gamepod cable shaped like a glans penis. And to start the game she rubs a protrusion on her gamepod which, set in a crease of its material, resembles a clitoris. The oral stimulation enacted with the insertion of the micropods into the players’ spinal marrow has already been commented upon. The film also contains at least a prologue to real sex scenes (cf. Sterneborg 2011, 223).

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All this – and there is more – confirms eXistenZ as a symbolically coded work to be read psychologically in terms of bodily as well as mental transgression (Pühler 2007, 99, 178), beginning with the ‘metaflesh’ of the gamepod (Pühler 2007, 123), Allegra’s “baby”, whose “surface structure seamlessly combines diminutive breasts, uterus and diverse orifices and protuberances” (Pühler 2007, 126). The organic game console is thus itself an erotic symbol redolent of Bachtin’s ‘bodily grotesque’ (cf. Papenburg 2011a, 123; and Papenburg 2011a, 10 – 11, 23 – 24, 116 – 118), and the newly created opening in Pikul’s body (cf. Riepe 2002, 175, 187– 189; Pühler 2007, 130) that enables penetration with the connecting cable also has clear sexual connotations (cf. Papenburg 2011a, 125 – 127, 130) – although the physicality celebrated by Bachtin is in this case not so clearly marked as subversive (cf. also Papenburg 2011a, 141; 2011b, 94– 95, 108 – 109). The “blurring of the boundary between human and machine” is not as unconditionally affirmed as Papenburg believes (2011a, 145). On the contrary, it is itself articulated as the problem – not as “a general questioning of [our] binary ontology and epistemology” (Papenburg 2011a, 145), but as the (narratological) exposition of the relative status of fiction and reality for which it has been taken in the reading presented here (Riepe 2002, 174). Far from being a plea for the ‘bodily grotesque’, eXistenZ expounds the perturbing potential of the ‘new flesh’. What is presented here is not “the delusional side of the self” (Pühler 2007, 153); paranoia (Pühler 2007, 130 – 143) and schizophrenia (Pühler 2007, 144– 152) do not open a Lacanian door to the resolution of the real and imaginary. The film stands firmly in the tradition of Cyberspace and Cyberpunk (cf. Riepe 2002, 176 – 179), but (pace Hantke 2011, 55) rather than celebrating (or, as in Matrix, unmasking) this brave new world, it reveals the crossings – rather than the “blurring” (Höltgen 2011, 82; Papenburg 2011a, 145, and cf. above) – of narrative realities, enabling us to participate in their simultaneous construction and deconstruction. The acute observer will notice how the apparel and hair style (cf. Sterneborg 2011, 224) of the protagonists (above all Allegra’s) mark the different levels of narrative. eXistenZ is not “on the borders of the expressible”: it maps those borders with precision, enabling us to consciously detect differences in the “spatial metaphor” (Höltgen 2011, 82) – or, as Stiglegger (2011, 36 – 37) observes, Cronenberg “completes the corporeal discourse of his earlier work with a metamedial interrogation of the meaning of reality, at the same time commenting man’s ‘Promethean’ drive to make and mold new worlds”. We may, then, finally add that while virtuality and reality cannot be ontologically ascribed with any certainty, their points of transition can. And that is all we need to know in order to grasp perturbatory narration as the teasing chal-

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lenge it is, and to embark ever and again on the attempt to resolve the undecidable. In other films (like Lynch’s Inland Empire) this no longer works: the film wants to perturb (cf. Orth 2013, 222– 227, 246, 258), without actually doing so. It undermines itself by failing to offer enough moments of coherence to shore up against its perturbation.

Filmography eXistenZ. Director and Writer: David Cronenberg. 1999. Canada/USA. Leipzig: Kinowelt Home Entertainment 2005. DVD. Inland Empire. Directed by David Lynch. 2006. France/Poland/USA: Concorde Home Entertainment, 2007. DVD. The Matrix. USA 1999; The Matrix Reloaded. USA 2003; The Matrix Revolutions. USA 2003, Director and Writer for Matrix 1 – 3: Andy Wachowski and Larry Wachowski. Warner Home Video, 1999. DVD.

Bibliography Barthes, Roland. 1966 [1964]. “Die strukturalistische Tätigkeit.” Kursbuch 5:190 – 196. Beil, Benjamin. 2010. First Person Perspectives. Point of View und figurenzentrierte Erzählformen im Film und im Computerspiel. Berlin: Lit. Bordwell, David. 2008 [1985]. Narration in the Fiction Film. London: Routledge. Decker, Oliver. 2013. “eXistenZ und transCendenZ: Kommodifizierung des Körpers.” In Blade Runner, Matrix und Avatare. Psychoanalytische Betrachtungen virtueller Wesen und Welten im Film, edited by Parfen Laszig, 267 – 284. doi 10.1007/978-3-642-25625-7_19. Berlin and Heidelberg: Springer. Emrich, Wilhelm. 1964. “Wertung und Rangordnung literarischer Werke.” Sprache im technischen Zeitalter 4,12:974 – 991. Flückiger, Barbara. 2001. Sound Design: Die virtuelle Klangwelt des Films. Marburg: Schüren. Freud, Sigmund. 1968 [1900, 1901, 1935]. Die Traumdeutung / Über den Traum. In Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2 and 3. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer. Hantke, Steffen. 2011. “Autorenkino und Verschwörungstopos. Selbstreflexion in Videodrome und eXistenZ.” In David Cronenberg, edited by Marcus Stiglegger, 45 – 56. Berlin: Bertz + Fischer. Höltgen, Stefan. 2011. “Über die filmischen Räume David Cronenbergs.” In David Cronenberg, edited by Marcus Stiglegger, 74 – 88. Berlin: Bertz + Fischer. Jannidis, Fotis. 2004. Figur und Person. Beitrag zu einer historischen Narratologie. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Kant, Immanuel. 1974 [1790]. Kritik der Urteilskraft, edited by Karl Vorländer. Hamburg: Meiner. Kindt, Tom, and Müller, Hans-Harald. 2006. The Implied Author. Concept and Controversy. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter.

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Kittsteiner, Heinz Dieter. 1993. “Die Abschaffung des Teufels im 18. Jahrhundert. Ein kulturhistorisches Ereignis und seine Folgen.” In Die andere Kraft. Zur Renaissance des Bösen, edited by Alexander Schuller and Wolfert von Rahden, 55 – 92. Berlin: Akademie. Kuhn, Markus. 2011. Filmnarratologie. Ein erzähltheoretisches Analysemodell. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Mikos, Lothar. 2008. Film- und Fernsehanalyse. Konstanz: UKV. Novak, John Luther [= Christopher Priest], and Cronenberg, David. 1999. eXistenZ. Thriller. Translated from English by Almuth Heuner. Berlin: Ullstein. Novak, John Luther [= Christopher Priest]. 1999. David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ. A Novelisation. London: Simon & Schuster. Orth, Dominik. 2013. Narrative Wirklichkeiten. Eine Typologie pluraler Realitäten in Literatur und Film. Marburg: Schüren. Papenburg, Bettina. 2011a. Das neue Fleisch: Der groteske Körper im Kino David Cronenbergs. Bielefeld: Transcript. Papenburg, Bettina. 2011b. “Der offene Leib. Zu David Cronenbergs Köperbild.” In David Cronenberg, edited by Marcus Stiglegger, 89 – 110. Berlin: Bertz + Fischer. Preusser, Heinz-Peter. 2013. Transmediale Texturen. Lektüren zum Film und angrenzenden Künsten. Marburg: Schüren. Preusser, Heinz-Peter. 2015. Pathische Ästhetik. Ludwig Klages und die Urgeschichte der Postmoderne. Heidelberg: Winter. Preusser, Heinz-Peter. 2017. “Mosaikstruktur und soziale Schichtungen der Sprache in Gerhart Hauptmanns Die Ratten.” In Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur, IASL, edited by Walter Erhart, Norbert Bachleitner, Christian Begemann and Gangolf Hübinger. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Pühler, Simon. 2007. Metaflesh. Cronenberg mit Lacan. Körpertechnologien in Shivers und eXistenZ. Berlin: Avinus. Riepe, Manfred. 2002. Bildgeschwüre. Körper und Fremdkörper im Kino David Cronenbergs. Psychoanalytische Filmlektüren nach Freud und Lacan. Bielefeld: Transcript. Schlickers, Sabine. 1997. Verfilmtes Erzählen. Narratologisch-komparative Untersuchung zu El beso de la mujer araña (Manuel Puig/Héctor Babenco) und Crónica de una muerte anunciada (Gabriel García Márquez/Franceso Rosi). Frankfurt a. M.: Vervuert. Schlickers, Sabine. 2009. “Focalization, Ocularization and Auricularization in Film and Literature.” In Point of View, Perspective, and Focalization, edited by Peter Hühn, Wolf Schmid and Jörg Schönert, 243 – 258. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Schlickers, Sabine. 2015. “Lüge, Täuschung und Verwirrung. Unzuverlässiges und ‘verstörendes Erzählen’ in Literatur und Film.” Diegesis. Interdisziplinäres E-Journal für Erzählforschung / Interdisciplinary E-Journal for Narrative Research 4,1:49 – 67. Accessed 16 June 2017. https://www.diegesis.uni-wuppertal.de/index.php/diegesis/article/down load/190/258. Schmidt, Oliver. 2013. Hybride Räume. Filmwelten im Hollywood-Kino der Jahrtausendwende. Marburg: Schüren. Smith, Tim. 2013. “Watching You Watch Movies: Using Eye Tracking to Inform Film Theory.” In Psychocinematics: Exploring Cognition at the Movies, edited by Arthur P. Shimamura, 165 – 192. New York: Oxford University Press. Sternenborg, Anke. 2011. “eXistenZ”. In David Cronenberg, edited by Marcus Stiglegger, 222 – 227. Berlin: Bertz + Fischer.

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Stiglegger, Marcus. 2011. “Fleisch und Geist. Einführung in das Werk von David Cronenberg.” In David Cronenberg, edited by Marcus Stiglegger, 12 – 44. Berlin: Bertz + Fischer. Tan, Ed S. 1996. Emotion and the Structure of Narrative Film: Film as an Emotion Machine. Translated from Dutch by Barbara Fasting. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Thon, Jan-Noël. 2009. “Zur Metalepse im Film.” In Probleme filmischen Erzählens, edited by Hannah Birr, Maike Reinerth and Jan-Noël Thon, 85 – 110. Münster: LIT. Weber, Thomas. 2008. Medialität als Grenzerfahrung. Futurische Medien im Kino der 80er und 90er Jahre. Bielefeld. Transcript. Wissowa, Georg. 1902. Religion und Kultus der Römer. München: Beck. Also: https://www.ar chive.org/stream/religionundkult00wissgoog#page/n109/mode/1up.

Jeff Thoss

Deceptive Continuity: Classical Editing and Nonlinear Narrative in Nicolas Roeg’s Bad Timing Bad Timing: A Sensual Obsession (1980) is a detective film. As such, it displays the reduplication of narrative, the superimposition of two stories characteristic of this genre: there is the story of the crime, and there is the story of its investigation (Todorov 1977, 44). The story of the crime could be summed up as follows: In Vienna, American psychoanalyst Alex Linden starts a turbulent affair with fellow expatriate Milena Flaherty, during which he grows increasingly possessive of the free-spirited (albeit married) young woman. After their relationship flounders, Milena swallows an overdose of sleeping pills and phones Alex, who drives to her flat and rapes her while unconscious before calling an ambulance. The story of the investigation, in turn, might be described like this: Upon arrival at the hospital, eccentric Inspektor Netusil questions Alex, who not only claims to be a mere friend of Milena’s but also purports to have immediately rushed her to the casualty ward after receiving her call around midnight. Suspicious of the analyst’s statements, Netusil begins to reconstruct the precise chronology of the evening as well as the nature of Alex and Milena’s relationship, a process which culminates in the inspector escorting Alex to Milena’s apartment in the early hours of the morning to extract his confession. Up to this point, Bad Timing neatly conforms to genre conventions. Up to this point, however, I have presented the film’s fabula in a manner in which its syuzhet does not necessarily yield it.¹ Nicolas Roeg’s film realizes the superimposition of the two narrative strands contained in each detective story by continuously cutting back and forth between both timelines, each of which is presented in (roughly) chronological order. This creates a kind of double linearity on the syuzhet level. While the beginning switches between Alex and Milena’s first meeting and Alex’s ride with Milena in the ambulance, the ending switches between Alex’s rape of Milena and his final interrogation by Netusil. If one labels the story of the crime as timeline A and that of the investigation as timeline B, Bad Timing’s syuzhet structure could be schematized as follows: A1, B1, A2, B2, A3, B3, … An, Bn. This might still be regarded as part and parcel of detective fic-

 The terms fabula (story), syuzhet (plot) and – later – style (cinematic devices) are used according to David Bordwell’s classic account of filmic narration (1985). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110566574-011

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tion’s puzzle structure, which places recipients in a similar position to the investigator, tasked with piecing together information revealed about past events to finally, and definitely, convict the criminal. However, the film cuts between timelines A and B with such a high frequency and for such short durations of time (sometimes just a few seconds) that narrative comprehension and the construction of a chronology are rendered difficult. Moreover, transitions, although sometimes marked by conventional means (dissolves, zooms, …), are often abrupt, and at least some of the segments belonging to the story of the crime can be rearranged more or less at will, thus turning the film’s anachronological syuzhet into a partly achronological one.² Likewise, Bad Timing refuses to establish a clear temporal reference point, a diegetic present, so that one can neither consider it an analeptic narrative (the norm for detective fiction) nor a proleptic one. In sum, constructing a fabula “A1, A2, A3, … An, B1, B2, B3, … Bn” out of the given sequence of events appears as a daunting if not illusory task, and the plot summary with which I began must be regarded as but an approximation, and – in its very conventionality – a somewhat dubious one at that.³ For these reasons, Bad Timing has typically been seen as a critique of common-sense Newtonian notions of time and causality and the Hollywood cinema that is built upon them (Cunningham 1982, de Lauretis 1983, Olivier 1984, Sarkhosh 2014). The film’s title has been read as programmatic for a work of art that, instead of striving for narrative intelligibility and closure, disorients spectators, frustrates their expectations and disrupts any sense of linear progression, forcing them to face and ultimately abandon their habitual ways of sense-making in order to explore alternative ones. In light of the emergence of a distinct type of mainstream “puzzle film” in the 1990s often featuring nonlinear narrative (Panek 2006; Buckland 2009; Eckel 2012), Bad Timing has also been pinpointed as a film that might link European art cinema’s experiments with time around the 1960s to these more recent efforts (Cameron 2008, 34), the British production connecting, in a way, Alain Resnais’s L’Année dernière à Marienbad (1961) to Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000).⁴ In this essay, I would like to build upon these critics’ insights into Bad Timing’s nonlinear structure yet also propose to

 In Gérard Genette’s classic terminology (1983, 33 – 85). For a systematic mapping of Genette’s “order” category onto film, cf. Kuhn (2011, 195 – 212).  For a concise discussion of these aspects, cf. Keyvan Sarkhosh’s analysis of Bad Timing’s opening sequence and the multitude of temporal permutations it allows for (2014, 304– 306).  On Resnais’s exploration of nonlinear narrative, cf. von Keitz (2004). Memento is discussed in all four referenced publications.

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shift attention onto an aspect of Roeg’s film that has not been given due attention in this context: the film’s style (sensu Bordwell). While the manner in which it relates syuzhet and fabula to one another might in itself be sufficient to consider the film an instance of perturbatory narration (cf. the Introduction), it is in those instances where this is combined with the classical Hollywood style and specifically with continuity editing (Bordwell/ Staiger/Thompson 1985, 55 – 59) that it is most perturbatory. As already mentioned, Bad Timing employs a range of techniques to implement its shifts between the story of the crime and the story of the investigation, from marked devices such as dissolves to unmarked, abrupt transitions. In two pivotal sequences, however, the film resorts to continuity editing to link and, in a sense, mask its cuts between the two timelines. In this way it misleads viewers about the connection between different shots and even confounds their ocularization (in Jost’s sense, 1987), which ultimately adds ontological on top of the genre-typical epistemological uncertainties. Needless to say, continuity editing is the very key to creating spatial and temporal linearity in film. Its neutrality and invisibility serve to efface the cinematic apparatus and provide spectators with mimetic immersion into a storyworld where time and space behave as expected. What one encounters in Nicolas Roeg’s film might be termed a deliberate misapplication of continuity editing principles: techniques such as match-on-action, eyeline matching⁵ and sound bridges are used to join shots that are temporally disparate, when these techniques should, of course, effect the seamless transition from one shot to the other. In a way, they still do effect a seamless transition, still do indicate continuity, but this has become a deceptive continuity for it exists merely on the level of style and does not translate to the film’s syuzhet (and much less its fabula); in fact, it hides the discontinuities present in its arrangement of plot elements.⁶ Consider, for instance, this two-shot sequence: A long shot showing Alex approaching the drugged Milena in her flat is followed by another long shot of the flat, the camera now being placed on the opposite side of the room so that it reveals Netusil entering behind Alex (cf. Figs. 1a and 1b). This seems like an ordinary, inconspicuous continuity cut in which the second shot simply reverses the perspective of the first one to reveal new information. The film here suggests a straightforward temporal linearity between the two shots, makes it look as if Alex is joined by Netusil seconds after he has entered Milena’s apart Roeg’s unorthodox use of eyeline matching has occasionally been highlighted by critics (Miller 2004, 327; Sarkhosh 2014, 336).  This can be considered be a facet of what Keyvan Sarkhosh has described as Roeg’s aesthetics of cohesion without coherence (2014, 16).

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ment on the night of her suicide attempt. However, the smooth cut glosses over the fact that, while the first shot belongs to the story of the crime, the second one actually belongs to the story of the investigation. Netusil does not feature in timeline A, hence the detective’s appearance in the second shot must mean that Bad Timing has switched back to timeline B, even when the appearance of the flat and also Alex’s position and posture have not visibly changed from the previous shot, which supports the expectation of temporal continuity created by the montage. Viewers are thus confused as to the actual relationship between the two shots and may only belatedly realizing that the editing, while superficially conforming to long-established conventions, has led them astray.

Fig. 1a.

Fig. 1b.

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In the two sequences under consideration, Bad Timing repeatedly cross-cuts between scenes from the story of the crime and the story of the investigation taking place in Milena’s flat, exploiting spatial continuity to suggest temporal linearity. Time and again, viewers are momentarily deceived when a cut that appears to link two temporally contiguous shots turns out to conceal a jump back or forth in time. If the film effects a critique of Hollywood cinema, it thus notably subverts it from within, turns the means of conventional filmmaking against themselves. Bad Timing makes the invisible cuts of continuity editing visible and puts the inherent logic of filmic (spatio)temporality and montage on display. As much as it has the potential to perturb audiences, then, Roeg’s film also has the potential to offer them a demonstration of these quasi-latent mechanisms at work. “It is,” as Stuart Cunningham puts it, “the structures of meaning of realist narrative cinema, after all, that the film is ‘about’” (1982, 107). I have labelled the two sequences in question as pivotal because they both reveal crucial information about – or rather, put into question – the exact nature of Alex and Milena’s relationship and the crime committed. At around the midpoint of the film Netusil visits Milena’s apartment to gather evidence, which is cross-cut with a visit Alex pays to Milena, a visit that notably turns sour and ends in the psychoanalyst violating his girlfriend. This would appear to foreshadow Bad Timing’s finale, the already mentioned sequence that cuts between Alex’s rape of the comatose Milena and Netusil’s decisive interrogation of Alex. Both times continuity editing is used to fuse the two timelines and to complicate instead of clarify what actually happens (or happened). Notably, the film’s style creates ontological in addition to chronological ambiguities as it renders it unclear whether certain shots show what really occurred in the story of the crime or what Netusil thinks occurred.⁷ In fact, a reading of the continuity cuts – specifically the eyeline matches – “in good faith” suggests that a number of crucial shots are internally ocularized by the inspector. Bad Timing here offers a means of naturalizing at least some of its bewildering editing choices as part of a kind of psychological realism in which viewers do not switch between different timelines but between the detective’s investigation and mental reconstruction of the crime. Yet, as the audience is given no means of verifying Netusil’s version of the events, this reading ultimately questions the very existence of the crime and

 Some might term this unreliable narration. As the theoretical framework underlying this collection considers twist endings to be a necessary feature of unreliable narratives (cf. introduction) and Bad Timing has no such ending, I am (thankfully) spared further consideration of what seems to me an infelicitous transfer of a term from literary into film studies. (For an analysis of this transfer and an attempt to reconcile the two disciplines’ takes on the concept, cf. Brütsch 2011.)

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with it the film’s generic status. Moreover, the narrative never ratifies this naturalization. It is such aspects, in addition to the a(na)chronological syuzhet arrangement, that make up Bad Timing’s perturbatory qualities. Roeg’s film may be placed productively within the context of postmodernism’s revision (or subversion) of classic detective fiction, the anti-detective or metaphysical detective story (Holquist 1971; Tani 1984; Merivale/Sweeny 1999), whose “formal purpose […] is to evoke the impulse to ‘detect’ and/or to psychoanalyze in order to violently frustrate it by refusing to solve the crime” (Spanos 1972, 154). The film’s editing, in conflating the two timelines, blurs the line between the crime and its investigation as well as that between the criminal (a psychoanalyst nonetheless) and the detective, leaving it open whether the crime is fact or fantasy, thus favouring – in typical postmodernist fashion (McHale 1987) – ontological over epistemological questions. Here too, Bad Timing shows itself to be a self-reflexive film, one that makes spectators aware of the hermeneutical procedures of (detective) film viewing; it tasks them with thinking about what is at stake in making connections and drawing conclusions based upon the audio-visual material it presents and the way it is presented.⁸ A detailed analysis of the two critical sequences will demonstrate this. The first sequence, which cross-cuts Inspektor Netusil’s examination of Milena’s flat with the earlier visit by Alex to Milena, occurs roughly at the film’s 50minute mark and lasts about 9 minutes. One might be tempted to describe this whole segment as a prolonged parallel montage with switched-around categories. Instead of showing the audience what happens at the same time in different places, Bad Timing here represents what happens at different times in the same place. The paradoxical combination of continuity and non-linearity can already be found in the following five-shot segment at its beginning: First, there is a medium shot of Netusil entering the antechamber of Milena’s home, the camera being positioned outside in the staircase. This is followed by a long shot of the interior of the apartment – in very disorderly condition – showing roughly what one could see from the antechamber. One might now expect an eyeline match cut back to Netusil examining the room, yet what follows is a 180-degree whip pan and a cut to a medium close-up of Alex stepping from the antechamber into the flat proper and looking off-screen. A succession of conventional eyeline matches ensues as Bad Timing quickly cuts back to a long shot of Milena’s apartment – which now, however, looks tidy – and back again to a medium close-up of Alex as he is escorted into the room by Milena who explains to her visibly im-

 The high demand on active reception processes in view of the maze-like structure of Nicolas Roeg’s films is a common tenor of the literature on this director (e. g. Izod 1992, 15).

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pressed lover that she has cleaned up. Beginning in the first shot and ending in the last, a phone can be heard ringing. Evidently, the whip pan constitutes a marked device to indicate a jump in time, a switch from the story of the investigation to the story of the crime. Yet, in all other respects, the editing suggests continuity: when the film cuts to Alex, it appears as if he is taking up and completing the action begun by Netusil in the earlier shot. On the level of style, Bad Timing thus seems to merge Alex’s and Netusil’s visit, an uncanny state of affairs considering that the criminal’s actions leading up to the crime and the inspector’s investigation of it should be kept separate not only for the sake of narrative clarity but also for that of the ethics of detective stories. Moreover, when the film employs eyeline matches to string together the two long shots of Milena’s flat as well as the shot in which she touts its clean state, it invites a “before and after” comparison that suggests that she has tidied her room because it was in the condition previously shown. Yet, spectators are distracted here as causality and chronology are actually reversed: the shots showing the apartment in neat condition belong to the (earlier) timeline A, the shot that shows it in messy condition to the (later) timeline B, so Milena cannot have acted in the manner indicated by the montage. Already, then, Bad Timing appears to display the power of continuity editing to set up connections but also to guard viewers from making such connections and jumping to any post hoc ergo proper hoc-type conclusions. However, its most remarkable means of foregrounding editing conventions in this segment might just be the sound bridge that joins all five shots: the phone that starts ringing when Netusil enters the flat and becomes silent when Milena leads Alex into the room. It is impossible to locate this phone chronologically. Does it ring in timeline B, in Milena’s empty apartment that Netusil enters? Or does it ring in timeline A, during Alex’s visit (where its ringing is ignored)? The undecidability of this question may lay bare the sound bridge as such, as a purely formal copula meant to conjure up a sense of continuity and linearity even when these clearly do not exist. Over the next few minutes, Bad Timing focuses on the story of the crime, occasionally cutting back to the story of the investigation with shots that show Netusil inspecting the flat. These cuts are rather deceitful as they prominently make use of eyeline matches that make it look as if the detective is not examining the apartment in its current state, but rather witnessing the events that occurred in it during Alex’s visit. The first such cut occurs when a long shot shows Alex embracing Milena from behind as she bends over, a shot whose perspective, yet again, roughly coincides with what one could see from the antechamber. It is at this point that the film cuts to a brief medium close-up of Netusil standing in the doorframe and looking off-screen (cf. Figs. 2a and 2b). The impression

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one gets from this eyeline match is that Netusil observes the sexually charged position he finds Alex and Milena in and collects a piece of evidence as to the nature of their relationship. But obviously, this is but sleight of hand on behalf of the film’s editing, for the medium close-up of Netusil belongs to timeline B. Chrono-logically, the inspector can only see the flat in its present condition, after the crime has been committed and without Alex and Milena in it.

Fig. 2a.

Fig. 2b.

Bad Timing repeats this type of cut two times as the events in timeline A unfold: Alex and Milena get into an argument as Milena does not wish to sleep with him that night. Alex leaves and Milena runs after him into the staircase taunting him to have sex with her right there on the spot, which he proceeds to do. During this quasi-rape scene, there are two eyeline match cuts to close-ups of Netusil.

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While both shots are rather brief (about a second), the principles of continuity editing are nevertheless obeyed: a high-angle shot of Alex and Milena on the stairs (positioned on the right-hand side of the frame) is followed by a lowangle shot of Netusil (positioned on the left-hand side of the frame) peeking out of the antechamber and directing his gaze off-screen to the lower right. Once again, the detective is thus styled as an observer to what happens in the story of the crime, and once again this cannot actually be since he is located in the story of the investigation. The spatiotemporal constellation created by the montage does not really exist, or rather it exists purely on the level of editing but has no counterpart in the diegesis. Bad Timing teases spectators into making “natural” assumptions about shot sequences without corroborating them, instead pointing to the medium of film that enables these kinds of juxtapositions in the first place. After Alex leaves and Milena returns to her flat and collapses on her bed, there is yet another eyeline match cut that joins a long shot of her room to a medium close-up of Netusil in the doorframe looking and walking into the apartment. There follows a 180-degree whip pan that ends in a long shot of the flat similar to the one seen at the beginning of the five-shot segment discussed above. Bad Timing now returns its focus to the story of the investigation, so that it appears as if the initial cut from Netusil to Milena’s flat and the cut back from the flat to the inspector – plus the two whip pans, the second of which reverses the first one’s motion – frame the episode from the story of the crime represented in-between. The shot of Netusil entering the room is precisely the one that was to be expected after the first long shot of the apartment, so its advent now seems to neatly bracket the intermediate segment and separate the two timelines. But, of course, the eyeline matches (in addition to Alex’s match-on-action entry in lieu of the detective) tell a different story. They frame Alex’s visit and violation of Milena also as one that is observed by Netusil, that is internally ocularized through him. However, if Netusil truly perceives the events represented by the film, one could begin to doubt their ontological status. If, as per the principles of eyeline matching, the camera shows us what the detective sees, then it can only show us – in a mindscreen sequence (Kawin 1978) – what he believes happened in the story of the crime as he clearly was not actually present as a witness (barring a supernatural interpretation, which the film, however, does not warrant otherwise). The shots depicting Alex’s visit might then represent Netusil’s reconstruction of particular events rather than any events that actually oc-

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curred, a subjective hypodiegesis rather than an objective analepsis.⁹ Yet, as has been rightly remarked (Miller 2004, 327; Sarkhosh 2014, 225), this creates a fundamental uncertainty as making sense of the film’s narrative no longer simply involves determining when something happened but determining whether it happened at all. Thus, the film’s narrative is empuzzled to an additional degree. As we shall see, Bad Timing refuses to confirm whether or not Netusil is correct in his assumptions or whether he is, in fact, not rather creating the (evidence of a) crime in his mind. The following sequence of shots certainly raises further doubts about this as two more eyeline matches are used to join past and present (or reality and fantasy). This time, continuity suggests a veritable interaction between the two timelines − Alex and Netusil seem to react to one another. As the inspector walks up to Milena’s bed, we first see a high-angle shot of the empty bed and then a lowangle medium close-up of Netusil licking his lips and looking off-screen to the bottom left. This is followed by a high-angle medium shot of Alex and Milena having sex in said bed and a cut back to a close-up of Netusil still looking offscreen and licking his lips a second time, followed by another medium shot of the couple in bed, with Alex turning around and directing his gaze to the top right-hand corner of the frame. As before, shots representing the story of the crime and shots representing the story of investigation are edited into a seamless whole. The exact nature of shots, however, becomes ever more questionable. When the detective licks his lips, it appears as if he were aroused by the image of Milena and Alex having sex. Yet viewers know that the only thing he can actually see is the empty bed. The shot of them having sex must belong to timeline A, unless, of course, it represents Netusil’s fantasy as part of another mindscreen. Once more, spectators are faced with the tricky choice as to whether they should categorize certain shots as analeptic or hypodiegetic, as authorial narration of figural imagination. And while the latter option appears as a plausible way of naturalizing the eyeline matches, it only ever remains a carrot that Bad Timing dangles in front of its spectators’ eyes. What is perhaps even more troubling, though, is the fact that in the subsequent shot Alex seems to become aware of the detective’s “spying”. When he turns around and looks off-screen, he appears to be looking directly at where Netusil stood in the previous shot. Yet, as the next cut reveals, the inspector has already wandered off to another part of the room. Now, just as much as Netusil

 I am labelling the shots representing the story of the crime as analeptic purely out of convenience. As mentioned earlier on, Bad Timing does its best to avoid establish a temporal frame of reference.

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cannot see Alex and Milena across time, so Alex cannot see the detective. Nevertheless, the editing in more than one way blurs the lines here, presents Netusil as a voyeur who is (almost) caught by his subject, undermining his credibility as a detective, as a neutral agent of the law, and bringing him, in fact, closer to the morally dubious Alex. In its application of the continuity system, Bad Timing thus creates connections that seem to undermine the type of narrative it is telling, turning a crime scene analysis into a voyeuristic excursion (which may, of course, also lay bare the epistemological desire that informs the genre and mirror the audience’s own voyeurism in the cinema). These connections are also supported on the level of the story, where Alex and Netusil are frequently characterised as doubles, notably in their voyeuristic traits¹⁰: the psychoanalyst lectures on voyeurism at university, considers himself an “observer” and spies on Milena, while the detective near the end engages in a rambling monologue during which he stares into the distance and explains absent-mindedly: “the law doesn’t interest me, but… when I see … when I see … when I … when I see ….” All in all, then, there are ample reasons to question the ontological status of certain shots as well as the precise relation between the crime and its investigation. As we shall see at present, these issues are only exacerbated in the film’s finale. The second sequence I would like to analyse in detail begins at the one-hour thirty-two mark and lasts about twenty minutes, thus covering more or less the final quarter of the two-hour long film. It consists of extensive cross-cutting between Alex driving to Milena after receiving her distress call and raping her in her comatose state, in timeline A, and, in timeline B, Netusil and Alex driving together to Milena’s flat several hours later and concluding the interrogation in said location. As before, this could be described as parallel montage where time and space have switched places. Also as before, continuity editing is used to merge the story of the crime and the story of the investigation into one, creating the perplexing impression that these may share more similarities than one would want. Where this was previously mainly achieved via eyeline matches, the film, now, however resorts more heavily to match-on-action cuts in order to deftly join shots belonging to the two timelines. This is particularly evident in the part that shows both journeys to Milena’s apartment, a part that switches back and forth in the chronology nine times over four minutes of screen-time without making these breaks at all apparent on the level of style. Thus − to pick but one paradigmatic example − one can find the

 On Roeg’s general use of doubles, cf. Stiglegger (2006) and Sarkhosh (2014, 172– 203). For a discussion of Bad Timing’s take on voyeurism and narrative pleasure, de Lauretis (1983).

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following three-shot segment: a medium close-up of Alex sitting in his car which cuts to a long shot of the car taking off, followed by another close-up of Alex in a travelling car. About one second into this last shot, the blurry figure of Netusil emerges behind Alex in the rear of the car as the detective leans forward to ask a question (cf. Figs. 3a to 3c). Evidently, this is no longer a shot of Alex in his car on his way to Milena in the story of the crime, but one showing him on the front passenger seat of the police car that takes him and Netusil to the flat in the story of the investigation. Yet before Netusil becomes visible, this is not at all clear. Viewers are temporarily deceived about the chronological position of the third shot as, per the principles of continuity editing, it follows on from the other two in a temporally and causally linear fashion: Alex is sitting in the car, the car starts moving, Alex is sitting in the moving car. The action appears continuous across all three shots. (The temporal proximity of both timelines at this point obviously facilitates this delusion; Alex, for instance, wears the same set of clothes and it is night-time.) While continuity editing should facilitate immediate temporal and spatial orientation to the degree where edits become unnoticeable, here it is only in retrospect, only once the inspector has appeared in the frame, that one knows where or when events take place. But, of course, this also leads to viewers becoming aware of this type of editing; if they continually have to readjust their sense-making strategies in light of a quasi-inverted use of conventions, the conventions themselves are put on display.

Fig. 3a.

What the editing achieves is to give spectators the impression that they are watching only one car ride to Milena’s flat. This is nowhere more obvious than in Alex’s respectively Netusil and Alex’s arrival in front of the apartment building,

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Fig. 3b.

Fig. 3c.

which are smoothly conflated by the film: A very long shot shows the police car coming to a halt behind Alex’s car as there is a cut to a high-angle medium shot of Netusil in the car looking upwards off-screen. What follows is a low-angle shot of the building during which we can hear car doors being opened and a medium close-up of Alex getting out of his car. As the camera follows Alex walking up to the front door, he looks up and off-screen, and Bad Timing briefly cuts to a lowangle shot of the building, virtually indistinguishable from the previous one. Once Alex has reached the door, the film cuts to a close-up of his car’s dashboard and zooms onto the radio, which is still switched on. The next shot shows one of the policemen looking into the interior of the police car (off-screen) and calling after Netusil who is being hailed on the radio. A long shot reveals

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that he was just about to enter Milena’s building together with Alex but now returns to the car to respond to the call. We thus move from the story of the investigation to that of the crime and back again, but, stylistically, this is hardly noticeable. The police car stopping and the sound of doors opening in timeline B cues us for a shot of people exiting the car, except that this action is then seemingly completed by Alex in timeline A. Alex looks upwards just as Netusil looks upwards, and the two corresponding subjective shots are so similar in terms of their framing that one may even wonder if the first one did not already show us what Alex sees or if the second does not still show us what Netusil sees. Although the eyeline matches here seem inconspicuous, they nevertheless lead to an ambivalent ocularization. Seconds later, the cut back to the story of the investigation is then also achieved very fluidly: there is not only a perfect eyeline match as the close-up of the dashboard is followed by the shot of the police officer looking into the car, Alex’s car and radio also appear to have been simply “replaced” by their police counterparts. As the camera reveals Netusil and Alex in front of the building’s entrance, Alex in addition appears exactly in the location where he was last seen in timeline A. This type of superimposition and blending of the two timelines seems eerie as it obscures the fact that we should be seeing two diametrically opposed things: the criminal about to commit the crime, and the detective about to solve it. Viewers have to wonder where the difference between them lies when their actions time and again appear to coincide due to the film’s stylistic choices – a most perturbatory state of affairs. With this in mind, it should be obvious that Netusil’s concluding interrogation of Alex will not lead to a clarification of matters. Rather, Bad Timing resumes the method already employed in the representation of Netusil’s first visit to the apartment and questions the ontological status of what appear to be analepses. The film switches three times between the interrogation and the rape, the first cut that leads from the story of the investigation to that of the crime being the most important one as it more or less keys how the whole depiction of the violation is to be viewed. Here, both men are positioned on opposite sides of Milena’s bed. A medium shot of Alex is followed by a medium close-up of Netusil saying: “Now, please, Dr Linden, be kind enough to tell me what exactly did occur when you received her call.” The inspector throws his coat down onto the bed as the camera cuts to a medium shot of the bed and then to a closeup of Alex. Alex looks downwards off-screen and there is a cut to a close-up of Netusil doing the same. Then, the film cuts to a high-angle medium shot of Milena who has collapsed next to her bed (cf. Figs. 4a to 4c for these last three shots). This is yet another case of devious eyeline matching and ocularization. If Bad Timing had cut from the close-up of Alex looking off-screen to the shot of

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Fig. 4a.

Fig. 4b.

Milena, we could easily view the subsequent shots as his memory of what happened (though not as the film taking over his narration of the events as Alex refuses to tell exactly what happened). However, the film first cuts back, interposes the shot of Netusil looking off-screen. Does this mean that, as with the sequence representing Alex’s earlier visit, the eyeline match could be naturalized as an indication that what follows might just be another mindscreen, the detective’s reconstruction or imagination? From a formal point of view, the close-up of Alex first and foremost establishes an eyeline match with the previous shot of the bed, hence his looking off-screen might not even be directly related to the shot of Milena. And one could also disregard the close-ups of both characters altogether and see what follows as a zero-ocularized representation of the rape, even though this would also mean ignoring how continuity editing has

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Fig. 4c.

taught us to watch films. It is impossible to determine a correct reading here. Bad Timing toys with eyeline matching, reduplicates it and opens up various possibilities of linking the shots. The film thus again forces its audience into the role of a detective anew, prompting them to examine suspicious connections and test alternative ones, without, however, holding out the prospect of a correct solution. The journey, the probing of cinematic conventions, is its own reward here. In this sequence, too, the ambiguities created by the film’s editing – the irresolvable question: analepsis or hypodiegesis? – are supported on the level of story and characterization. While Alex is presented as suspicious throughout the film, Netusil appears as more and more untrustworthy as the investigation progresses. During the interrogation, he explains that the evidence against Alex is insufficient and that only a confession will do, a confession he notably wishes Alex to make as a “personal favour” to him. When the inspector accuses the psychoanalyst of ravishment, the latter replies: “I have the feeling we are talking about you and not me.” Netusil responds: “We are not unalike” and proceeds to explain that he could understand Alex’s rape of Milena, whom he labels a “dangerous creature”. One could, of course, dismiss all this as a ploy on behalf of the inspector to gain his suspect’s trust, yet it accords too well with the doppelgänger motive at work elsewhere. The detective may be as deranged as the (potential) criminal, the “sensual obsession” of the film’s subtitle applying just as well to Alex’s obsession with Milena as it applies to Netusil’s obsession

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with her and/or the case, an obsession that could possible lead him to fabricate the case in his mind.¹¹ We are thus left with (at least) two contradictory interpretations of Bad Timing’s narrative:¹² In one, the analepses are true analepses, Alex both violates Milena on the staircase and rapes her while unconscious, yet gets away with it due to sheer luck and/or a flawed investigation. In the other interpretation, the staircase scene and the final rape scene constitute a hypodiegesis (disguised as an analepsis); Alex may well have abused Milena, yet the crime he is charged with is ultimately the product of the dysfunctional Netusil’s fantasy. In the scholarly literature on Roeg’s film, the first option is usually favoured and the second one rarely considered. In fact, only Miller (2004, 237) and Sarkhosh (2014, 218 and 225) explicitly discuss it and posit a fundamental unknowability with regard to the status of Bad Timing’s central events. On its own, either reading, I would suggest, provides a form of narrative closure, even if this closure may not be the one expected from detective stories. If Alex really “did it”, then, for all the confusion of chronology and causality that the film orchestrates, it would still be clear that a crime did occur. One would not be able to tell exactly when or why an event took place, but at least one would know it did take place. And the crime, even though it would not be solved in the diegesis, would still be solved for the audience, who would witness what really happened at the end. If Netusil imagined the rape, this would likely constitute a more open subversion of the genre as it would reveal that the criminal mind ultimately belongs to the detective. As in a regular detective story, recipients would track the inspector’s suspicion and progressive reconstruction of a series of events, except that, unlike in a regular detective story, these would never be validated by the narrative itself, thus throwing into doubt their reliability as well as the detective’s personality. Still, this option would provide an equally viable and coherent resolution. However, it is the fact that Bad Timing turns the epistemological mystery of detective fiction into an ontological one, refusing to solve the riddle and clarify  This could also be seen as laying bare the gender politics of much detective fiction, Netusil creating a narrative representation of Milena’s rape “over her dead body” (Bronfen 1992). For a reading of Bad Timing that argues that the film itself refuses to treat Milena’s body as a source of aesthetic pleasure, cf. de Lauretis (1983). For a reading of the triangular relationship between Alex, Netusil and Milena in terms of Girardian mimetic desire that turns the two men into rivals over the woman, cf. Miller (2004).  At the end of the interrogation, Milena’s husband enters and declares that Milena has survived her suicide attempt (Netusil already knew this). Upon this, Alex states: “Everything you need you can get from her” and leaves. An epilogue shows him running into Milena in New York, yet she refuses to talk to him. These final revelations do not change anything about the film’s fundamental ambiguity, however.

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which version of the events is true (if any), that makes it a much more challenging viewing experience. This ontological dimension is, as I have tried to point out, fundamentally tied to the film’s unorthodox use of continuity editing. If it were not for the slick cuts that repeatedly fuse and empuzzle timelines A and B in such a way that it becomes difficult to tell apart the real from the imagined, the past from the present, the crime from its investigation as well as the criminal from the detective, Roeg’s film would lack a crucial factor of complexity. The film’s perturbatory quality ultimately stems from its linking of this type of editing with nonlinear narrative, from employing continuity cuts to realise and yet veil flashbacks or flashforwards. It is this particular combination of style on the one hand and the syuzhet/fabula relation one the other that enables Bad Timing to play with and expose the very mechanisms of conventional filmmaking. The film espouses a deliberately “bad” timing, an intentional misuse of continuity editing, so as to make audiences aware of their willingness to cooperate in creating linearity and continuity as well to foreground the perturbatory effect that emerges when precisely this willingness is exploited and undercut.

Filmography L’Année dernière à Marienbad. Directed by Alain Resnais, 1961. France, Italy: Cocinor. STUDIOCANAL, 2008. DVD. Bad Timing. Directed by Nicolas Roeg. 1980. UK: The Criterion Collection, 2005. DVD. Memento. Directed by Christopher Nolan. 2000. USA: Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment, 2002. DVD.

Bibliography Bordwell, David. 1985. Narration in the Fiction Film. London: Methuen. Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson. 1985. The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960. New York: Columbia University Press. Bronfen, Elisabeth. 1992. Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Brütsch, Matthias. 2011. “Von der ironischen Distanz zur überraschenden Wendung: Wie sich das unzuverlässige Erzählen von der Literatur- in die Filmwissenschaft verschob.” Kunsttexte.de 2011.1. Accessed 9 August 2016. http://edoc.hu-berlin.de/kunsttexte/ 2011 – 1/bruetsch-matthias-8/PDF/bruetsch.pdf. Buckland, Warren, ed. 2009. Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. Cameron, Allan. 2008. Modular Narratives in Contemporary Cinema. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Cunningham, Stuart. 1982. “Good Timing: Bad Timing.” The Australian Journal of Screen Theory 15/16:101 – 112. Eckel Julia. 2012. Zeitenwende(n) des Films: Temporale Nonlinearität im zeitgenössischen Erzählkino. Marburg: Schüren. Genette, Gérard. 1980. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Translated by Jane Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Holquist, Michael. 1971. “Whodunit and Other Questions: Metaphysical Detective Stories in Post-War Fiction.” New Literary History 3:135 – 156. Izod, John. 1992. The Films of Nicolas Roeg: Myth and Mind. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Jost, François. “The Look: From Film to Novel – An Essay in Comparative Narratology.” In A Companion to Literature and Film, edited by Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo, 71 – 80. Malden: Blackwell. Kawin, Bruce F. Mindscreen: Bergman, Godard and First-Person Film. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Keitz, Ursula von. 2004. “Das Zeitverlies: Zur Desorientierung filmischer Chronologie in Alain Resnais’ L’Année dernière à Marienbad.” In Zeitsprünge: Wie Filme Geschichte(n) erzählen, edited by Christine Rüffert, Irmbert Schenk, Karl-Heinz Schmid and Alfred Tews, 151 – 161. Berlin: Beitz. Kuhn, Markus. 2011. Filmnarratologie. Ein erzähltheoretisches Analysemodell. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Lauretis, Teresa de. 1983. “Now and Nowhere: Roeg’s Bad Timing.” Discourse 5:21 – 40. McHale, Brian. 1987. Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Methuen. Merivale, Patricia, and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, eds. 1999. Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Miller, Toby. 2004. “Psycho’s Bad Timing: The Sensual Obsessions of Film Theory.” In A Companion to Film Theory, edited by Toby Miller and Robert Stam, 323 – 332. Oxford: Blackwell. Olivier, Gerrit. 1984. “Identity and Difference in Nicolas Roeg’s Bad Timing.” Standpunkte 172.4:26 – 33. Panel, Elliot. 2006. “The Poet and the Detective: Defining the Psychological Puzzle Film.” Film Criticism 31:62 – 88. Sarkhosh, Keyvan. 2014. Kino der Unordnung: Filmische Narration und Weltkonstitution bei Nicolas Roeg. Bielefeld: Transcript. Spanos, William V. 1972. “The Detective and the Boundary: Some Notes on the Postmodern Literary Imagination.” Boundary 2 1:147 – 168. Stiglegger, Marcus. 2006. “‘Vice. And Versa’: Letale Doubles in den Filmen von Nicolas Roeg.” In Nicolas Roeg, edited by Marcus Stiglegger and Carsten Begemann, 33 – 42. München: edition text + kritik. Tani, Stefano. 1984. The Doomed Detective: The Contribution of the Detective Novel to Postmodern American and Italian Fiction. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1977. The Poetics of Prose. Translated by Richard Howard. Ithaca: Cornell UP.

Bernd Leiendecker

Taking Split Personalities to the Next Level: Perturbatory Narration in Enemy There was a time when unreliable narration was booming – some would argue that this time has not even ended yet.¹ The 1990s are usually identified as the start of this boom and the reasons given vary from the ever-increasing importance of storage media like VHS cassettes and DVDs (e. g. Lavik 2006, 60 and Leiendecker 2015, 177– 179) to the developments in American society during this period (Laass 2008, 211– 212). In 1999, unreliable narration reached a new peak, especially due to the success of two films. The Sixth Sense (1999) was the second biggest box-office hit of the year after Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (1999), and Fight Club (1999) also did reasonably well, subsequently becoming a cult favorite. One might argue that those two movies put unreliable narration on the map of mainstream cinema. They sparked a lot of copycatting by less successful films: The Sixth Sense led to a similar mode of unreliability being used in films like The Others (2001), Soul Survivors (2001), Hellraiser: Hellseeker (2002), and Dead End (2003), all of which were made within five years of the release of The Sixth Sense. After Fight Club, there were films like Dédales (2003), Haute tension (2003), The Machinist (2004), Secret Window (2004), or Hide and Seek (2005), which followed the plot twist established by Fight Club more or less closely. It is quite possible that some or even all those films would have been made without the success of their predecessors, but Fight Club and The Sixth Sense each established a kind of blueprint for handling specific kinds of unreliability. Both films had predecessors of their own², but those were few and far between and they were usually neither successful nor particularly well-known. The more films followed a successful blueprint of unreliable narration, the more this blueprint became the conventional mode for presenting a specific kind of unreliability. However, for a mode of narration that is supposed to lead to a surprising plot twist, convention equals predictability. Predictability, in turn, threatens the continued success of a particular kind of deception, and

 For example, a call for papers for issue 2/2016 of the scientific journal Alman Dili ve Edebiyatı Dergisi appears to assume that unreliable narration is still as common as it has ever been. There is no quantitative data to prove or disprove this hypothesis.  For example, the connection between The Sixth Sense and Carnival of Souls (1962), the film discussed in the article by Matthias Brütsch, is obvious. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110566574-012

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thus the very core of unreliable narration itself: if you can predict the plot twist, you will not be surprised anymore. In order to successfully employ a type of deception that has already been conventionalized, the convention must be modified or even ignored altogether. The aim of this article is to show how the fairly recent Canadian film Enemy (2003) modifies the convention established for unreliable narration by a split personality by resorting to perturbatory narration. In order to demonstrate how this is done, one first has to look at the conventional blueprint for this kind of narration as established in Fight Club. The interpretation of Enemy underlying my argument will then be presented, before considering the three cornerstones of perturbatory narration – deception, empuzzlement and paradox – and how they contribute to the narration of Enemy.

1 The blueprint: Fight Club Fight Club may well be the example of unreliable narration that scholars have analyzed most (e. g. Helbig 2005, Steinke 2006, Ganser 2007, Ferenz 2008, 104– 132, Laass 2008, 150 – 165). Thus, a brief summary of the way Fight Club handles the split personality of its protagonist will suffice. The homodiegetic narrator of Fight Club is a man whose name we never learn and who suffers from insomnia and a general feeling of aimlessness. One day he meets Tyler Durden, and together they start a club where like-minded men can fight each other with their bare hands. This kind of fighting gives them a sense of purpose. When similar fight clubs start appearing all over the country, the narrator is shocked to discover that Tyler has turned them into cells of anarchistic terror called Project Mayhem. While trying to stop these cells, the protagonist finds out that he suffers from a split personality and that he himself is Tyler Durden. This revelation occurs about four-fifths of the way through the film. Before this, we have little reason to believe that Tyler and the narrator are not separate people. Katharina Ganser (2007) identifies three strategies Fight Club uses to affirm Tyler’s presence as a real person: first, in many shots marked as objective Tyler and the narrator appear at the same time. Their simultaneous but distinct presence suggests that they are separate individuals. Secondly, several other characters seem to witness their separate existence. However, a closer look reveals that their simultaneous presence is never actually acknowledged by anyone in a definite way. And thirdly, both characters seem to physically interact with their environment, for example by hitting other people. But, as it turns

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out, only one of them acts in a way that can be noticed by other people, while the other is always a silent bystander. At the same time, there are subtle hints throughout the film which allude to the plot twist before it actually occurs (Helbig 2005). Most viewers only understand those hints when they see the film a second time, but theoretically a viewer might piece together the film’s resolution beforehand, if she paid enough attention. In reality, the hints will at best alert the average viewer that something is not right without his realizing what that is, but during the first viewing they can pass by completely unnoticed. Just as there are established guidelines for hiding unreliable narration or hinting at a later plot twist, the twist itself is highly conventionalized: While the portentous music, close-ups of the slowly comprehending character, and brief flashbacks that put earlier information in a new context, fill in gaps or just indicate critical scenes for a second viewing, are recurring elements, the twist is presented in a dialogue scene between the two personalities of the protagonist that clears up the most important questions. It is noteworthy that the flashbacks also provide new information: several scenes are shown, in which the protagonist is seen doing things that were attributed to the imaginary character before – either because the imaginary character was actually shown doing these things in the first version of the events or because he was simply identified as responsible through the inferences of the audience (Leiendecker 2012, 268).

A plot twist of this kind leaves no doubt as to what has really happened. The explanation presented during the twist supersedes all the contradictory information presented earlier. The rest of the film is straightforward and leads to a definitive conclusion. Over the years, this tried-and-true blueprint has been repeated with little or no change. The repetitions have helped establish rules that the audience will recognize – for example, the rule that both halves of the split personality cannot be acknowledged by others at the same time. But if viewers remember this rule, they might notice its application early on in the film, which will make the plot twist obvious. Fourteen years after the first release of Fight Club, this is the challenge Enemy has to face.

2 Two of a kind: the plot and the story of Enemy In the first long scene of Enemy we witness a strange show in a nightclub. At the conclusion of the scene, a naked woman squashes a large spider with her foot. One of the nightclub’s guests seems to be the history teacher Adam Bell, who leads a rather joyless life in his sparsely furnished apartment. He has a relation-

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ship with Mary that seems to focus mostly on sex and does not appear to be going too well. His life changes when Adam watches the movie Where There is a Will, There is a Way and realizes that one of the extras is his exact doppelgänger. Adam finds out that the extra’s real name is Anthony Claire and that, like Adam, he lives in Toronto. Intrigued, he goes to Anthony’s agency, where he is mistaken for the actor and receives an envelope marked as confidential. He calls Anthony and suggests a meeting, but Anthony refuses. Anthony’s wife Helen thinks that he is cheating on her again. Anthony finally changes his mind and agrees to meet Adam in a run-down hotel outside Toronto. As it turns out, the two really are each other’s mirror image, including a scar on their chests. Adam loses his nerve and drives off, but now Anthony becomes obsessed with his doppelgänger. He starts stalking Adam and Mary and finally makes Adam an offer: if they switch roles for a day and Anthony is allowed to pass the day with Mary, he will disappear from Adam’s life forever. Adam reluctantly agrees and Anthony and Mary drive to a hotel together. While they are having sex, Mary notices that Anthony usually wears a wedding ring and wants to go home. On the way back, they have a bad car accident while arguing. Meanwhile, Adam breaks his promise to stay in his apartment and visits Helen. He treats her with more respect than Anthony usually does and they end up in bed together. Next morning, Adam is seen gazing at a key that probably belongs to the nightclub from the opening scene. He has found the key in the confidential envelope left for Anthony at his agency. It is obvious that he wants to go to the nightclub, and he invents an excuse about why he will be back late that evening, but Helen does not answer. He goes into her room and sees a gigantic spider, which recoils from him in fear. The movie ends. Although the spider is a recurrent symbol, its presence in the final scene is rather disturbing. At the end of Enemy, the viewer seems to be left alone with many questions. The meaning of the spider is one of them, but the question how Anthony and Adam can look so alike without being biological twins is just as important. At first glance, Enemy does not seem to answer those questions. A closer analytic look at the film, however, reveals how it might be understood³ (cfr. shot on 00:35:20): Adam and Anthony are not two separate persons, but two aspects of the same split personality. This personality belongs to the un Director Denis Villeneuve has confirmed in several interviews that this is the correct interpretation of Enemy in several interviews. While a statement by the director about the meaning of a film does not always have to be taken at face value, it adds credibility to the interpretation in this case.

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successful actor Anthony Claire, who makes a living as a history teacher. His wife Helen is pregnant, but Anthony is driven by a terrible fear of commitment. He cheats on Helen, visits seedy nightclubs and creates the personality of Adam Bell. This personality allows him to lead the careless life he thinks he desires. Nevertheless, the affair with Mary does not make Anthony happy either, and he is torn between the two women. In the final scene, he has just committed himself to staying with Helen. However, he is tempted by the key to the nightclub and immediately changes his decision to stay true to Helen. The metaphor of the spider symbolizes Anthony’s sense of being threatened by women in general and Helen in particular. When he visits the nightclub, the spider gets squashed – his bond with Helen weakens because of his actions. In the scenes that follow, the spider always appears when Anthony feels cornered or held back by Helen or another woman. This culminates in the final scene: Anthony wants to visit the nightclub, but he knows that he should stay with Helen. Thus, he sees Helen as a spider – she stands between him and his desires. With this ending in mind, it is easy to see, why Enemy has to be seen interpreted as a case of unreliable narration. However, the unreliability is taken a lot further than the blueprint established by Fight Club would suggest. Additionally, Enemy uses (or at least potentially uses) two other techniques related to perturbatory narration, empuzzlement and paradox, and creates an experience for the viewer that is experience far more challenging than classical unreliability. The following remarks will show how this effect is achieved.

3 Unreliability: modifying the blueprint of unreliable narration It has already been said that the blueprint for unreliable narration in the context of a split personality disorder features a plot twist that that provides expository information through dialogue and repeats key scenes. It might even point out which scenes require special attention on a second viewing. In contrast to this, Enemy does not have a plot twist, nor does it direct special attention to any particular scene. Instead, the fact that Anthony and Adam are actually the same person can be pieced together by observing a number of small details shared by both characters. Both Adam and Anthony find it difficult to stay with one woman. Anthony’s infidelity is one of the first traits the audience gets to know about him, and Adam’s mother points out that he, too, seems unable to stay with one woman. Adam’s mother also claims that Adam likes blueberries – just like Anthony – al-

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though Adam contradicts her on this point. However, a more important clue is the existence of a torn photo in Adam’s possession. He uses it to compare himself to a picture of Anthony that he has found on the website of Anthony’s agency. Later on, the exactly the same photo can be spotted in Helen’s apartment. Here, it is not torn and it shows Helen and Anthony as a happy couple. The only logical way that in which Adam can possess have this photo before meeting Helen is if he is actually Anthony. The same holds for a pair of sunglasses Adam buys as a disguise before going to Anthony’s agency. These sunglasses lie around in Anthony’s apartment, even though Adam has never been there. At the agency itself, Adam says he wants to pick something up, and, as it turns out, there actually is something to pick up. This can be seen as a coincidence, but it is also possible that Adam actually knew something had been left for him there. And finally, both Adam and Anthony share the same nightmare about a woman with a spider’s head. These scenes are not really meant as hints, but they are handled in a similar manner. Watching Enemy for the first time, the viewer may notice some of these scenes, while others may pass unnoticed. But where a classic plot twist would repeat these scenes in order to point them out more cogently, Enemy does no such thing. The moment of understanding is placed outside the film’s initial viewing. It may occur during a later viewing, or in the course of Internet research into the film’s meaning. This is risky, however, because Enemy does not flaunt the fact that there is more to discover if you look again. Some viewers may never understand the unreliable narration at all because they do not bother to think any further about the film after watching it once. On the other hand, Enemy avoids the problem of predictability inherent to conventionalized unreliability.

4 Empuzzlement: hiding a temporal puzzle As with unreliable narration, Enemy does not flaunt its use of empuzzlement – another cornerstone of perturbatory narration – as a narrative strategy. Taken by itself, the story about a man and his perfect doppelgänger is already quite puzzling. However, the the empuzzlement is arguably heightened here by the possible use of non-linear temporal structures. Although not inevitable, this interpretation of Enemy is legitimate. It is fueled by two factors: the torn photo in Adam’s possession and the scar Adam and Anthony share. As already mentioned, Adam owns a torn photo of himself. At the end of the film, he sees a complete version of the same photo, showing Anthony and Helen

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as a happy couple, in Helen’s apartment. Of course, it is not a problem nowadays to have several prints of the same picture. But is it credible that Adam possesses an identical copy of the photo in Helen’s apartment? At the end of the film, Anthony/Adam is ready to go to the nightclub again. His marriage with Helen will probably not survive this new act of infidelity. Thus, it is plausible that they start to fight and that the picture was is torn in their quarrel. After a (possible) separation, Anthony would not live with Helen anymore, but in an apartment of his own. And Adam’s apartment actually seems incompletely furnished, as if he had just moved in. All of this would support the theory that the final scene of the movie takes place earlier than the scene with the torn picture. This interpretation would see the car accident not as a metaphorical and temporary elimination of Anthony’s cheating personality, but as an actual accident. The crash would have happened during Anthony’s first affair with Mary, which took place before the main story of the film. After all, Helen asks Anthony in one scene: “Are you seeing her again?” Anthony has cheated on her before – possibly with Mary – and been caught. The car accident during this first phase of cheating would have caused the scar on Anthony’s chest. Understanding Enemy as a temporal puzzle following the terminology of Julia Eckel (2012, 65 – 72) is an option rather than a necessity. This already distinguishes the film from other non-linear narrations. If you actually follow this interpretation, there are further differences between Enemy and a ’classical’ use of non-linear narration. Eckel (2012, 74– 83) describes several devices that facilitate orientation, including the characters and their outward appearance, locations connected to a particular temporal layer, text inserts, and diegetic media. Conventions have gradually evolved that ensure the viewer’s confusion does not become impossible to handle, and Enemy’s lack of such aids to orientation guarantees maximum confusion. However, this argument seems to have a weakness; for if Enemy is understood as completely linear, the lack of conventional aids to orientation can be easily explained: a linear film does not need them. Yet a movie as carefully constructed movie as Enemy would not carelessly allow for an interpretation as that sees it as non-linear. Instead, it can be assumed that the option of non-linearity has been carefully and intentionally established. Every viewer can decide for herself if this option is worth following.

5 Paradox: creating a Moebius strip The final cornerstone of perturbatory narration is paradoxical narration, a technique to which Enemy has recourse by hinting at the existence of an underlying

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Moebius strip structure. The actual events do not repeat themselves, but Anthony’s dominant emotions and attitudes do. In his relationship with Helen he seems to go through ever-repeating phases of being together, fearing the commitment, cheating, feeling regret, making up, and being together again. A history lesson he teaches as Adam drives this point home: “It was Hegel who said that all the greatest world events happen twice. And then Karl Marx added, the first time is a tragedy and the second time is a farce.” Rather than talking about historic events, Anthony/Adam might just as well be talking about himself. Anthony has already been through two cycles: Helen’s question shows that he has already cheated on her. During the film he cheats again and, after making up with her, he is tempted to visit the nightclub again. If one assumes temporal non-linearity, there are also two cycles of infidelity – one with Mary in the hotel and another after making up with Helen and splitting up again. Neither variation leaves room for Anthony to improve and remain true to his wife. Further repetitions, or a final break-up, are to be expected. It is worth noting that other films that take the Moebius strip technique to a far higher level than Enemy. In the realm of arthouse cinema, David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997) is an example, while in mainstream cinema time travel narratives like Twelve Monkeys (1995) or Predestination (2014) employ time loops that concern not only the attitude of the main character, but the entire plot. Nevertheless, the mere hint of a cyclical structure in Enemy heightens the confusion and contributes to the perturbatory effect.

6 Conclusion: back to the arthouse roots If the observations made about Enemy are in any way indicative of a general movement, both perturbatory and unreliable narration are headed back toward arthouse cinema. It is important for mainstream films not to alienate their viewers by overly confusing them, and in this sense perturbatory narration is threatened by conventions and mainstream rules. This can be countered by innovative tactics, but the window set for those tactics by mainstream cinema is very small. Consequently, perturbatory narration is left with the option to go back to where it came from: arthouse and independent cinema. The example of Enemy has showed, how radical ideas can be realized there: breaches of conventions, unreliability without a plot twist overt hints or warning signs. The arthouse audience is more open to these tactics, just as it is more likely to thoroughly reflect on a film more intensely after watching it. Mainstream cinema will, of course, come up with innovative examples of perturbatory narration as well, or will borrow promising ideas from arthouse cinema. But film history shows has shown that

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this leads to rather short boom phases at best.⁴ A permanent place in mainstream cinema does not seem to be on the cards for either unreliability or perturbatory narration.

Filmography Carnival of Souls. Directed by Herk Harvey. 1962. USA: The Criterion Collection, 2000. DVD. Dead End. Directed by Jean-Baptiste Andrea, Fabrice Canepa. 2003. France, USA: Twentieth Century Fox, 2004. DVD. Dédales. Directed by René Manzor. 2003. France: TF1 Vidéo, 2004. DVD. Enemy. Directed by Denis Villeneuve. 2013. Canada/Spain/France: Capelight, 2014. DVD. Fight Club. Directed by David Fincher. 1999. USA: Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2000. DVD. Haute tension. Directed by Alexandre Aja. 2003. France: Ascot Elite Home Entertainment, 2007. DVD. Hellraiser: Hellseeker. Directed by Rick Bota. 2002. USA: Universum, 2004. DVD. Hide and Seek. Directed by John Polson. 2005. USA: Twentieth Century Fox, 2005. DVD. Lost Highway. Directed by David Lynch. 1997. USA: Universum, 2000. DVD. Predestination. Directed by The Spierig Brothers. 2014. Australia: Signature Entertainment, 2014. DVD. Secret Window. Directed by David Koepp. 2004. USA: Sony, 2004. DVD. Soul Survivors. Directed by Steve Carpenter. 2001. USA: Lions Gate, 2002. DVD. Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace. Directed by George Lucas. 1999. USA: Twentieh Century Fox, 2005. DVD. The Machinist. Directed by Brad Anderson. 2004. Spain: 3 L, 2005. DVD. The Others. Directed by Alejandro Amenábar. 2001. Spain, France, Italy, USA: Universal, Polygram, 2003. DVD. The Sixth Sense. Directed by M. Night Shyamalan. 1999. USA: Vcl, 2002. DVD. Twelve Monkeys. Directed by Terry Gilliam. 1995. USA: Concorde, 1997. DVD.

Bibliography Eckel, Julia. 2012. Zeitenwende(n) des Films – Temporale Nonlinearität im zeitgenössischen Erzählkino. Marburg: Schüren. Ferenz, Volker. 2008. Don’t believe his lies: The unreliable narrator in contemporary American cinema. (Focal Point 9). Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier. Ganser, Katharina. 2007. “Dramaturgie der Irreführung in Fight Club (1999).” In Falsche Fährten in Film und Fernsehen (Maske und Kothurn 53/2 – 3), edited by Patric Blaser,

 Unreliable narration already experienced a smaller boom phase during the 1940s. (Leiendecker 2015, 174– 175).

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Andrea B. Braidt, Anton Fuxjäger and Brigitte Mayr, 111−120. Wien, Köln and Weimar: Böhlau. Helbig, Jörg. 2005. “‘Follow the White Rabbit!’ Signale erzählerischer Unzuverlässigkeit im zeitgenössischen Spielfilm.” In Was stimmt denn jetzt? Unzuverlässiges Erzählen in Literatur und Film, edited by Fabienne Liptay and Yvonne Wolf, 131 – 146. München: edition text + kritik. Laass, Eva. 2008. Broken Taboos, Subjective Truths. Forms and Functions of Unreliable Narration in Contemporary American Cinema. A Contribution to Film Narratology. (Handbücher und Studien zur Medienwissenschaft 3). Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier. Lavik, Erlend. 2006. “Narrative Structure in The Sixth Sense. A New Twist in ’Twist Movies’?” In The Velvet Light Trap 58:55 – 64. Leiendecker, Bernd. 2012. “Leaving the Narrative Maze: The Plot Twist as a Device of Re-orientation.” In (Dis)Orienting Media and Narrative Mazes, edited by Julia Eckel, Bernd Leiendecker, Daniela Olek, and Christine Piepiorka, 257 – 272. Bielefeld: Transcript. Leiendecker, Bernd. 2015. “They Only See What They want to See.” Geschichte des unzuverlässigen Erzählens im Spielfilm. Marburg: Schüren. Shot on 35. 2014. “Enemy In-depth Movie Analysis.” Shot on 35, last modified 5 June. Accessed 16 June 2017. https://shoton35.com/2014/06/05/Enemy-in-depth-analysis. Steinke, Anthrin. 2006. “‘It is called the change-over: The movie goes on and nobody in the audience has any idea.’ Filmische Irrwege und Unwahrheiten in David Finchers Fight Club.” In Camera doesn’t lie: Spielarten erzählerischer Unzuverlässigkeit im Film, edited by Jörg Helbig, 149 – 165. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier.

Oliver Schmidt

Perturbatory Spaces in David Lynch’s Inland Empire 1 Introduction “Something is happening” – this phrase, spoken several times in David Lynch’s Inland Empire, seems to neatly sum up the puzzle of the film’s plot. Something is happening, but it is not clear what. Speaking rather more theoretically, one could say that Inland Empire uses narrative procedures but its story largely defies retelling. For about a third of its length the film has a frame plot: the filming of a slushy love-story, On High in Blue Tomorrows. Nikki Grace, an actress currently on the shelf (played by Laura Dern), is set to take the main role, which she hopes will launch her comeback. What she doesn’t know is that the film is a remake of a Polish project, called simply ‘47’, which was never completed – both principal actors were apparently murdered. Based on an old Polish fairytale, the film seemed somehow to be cursed. Nikki’s interest in her part soon shifts to an interest in her co-star, Devon – a fall from grace that may have released the curse anew, for the reality of Nikki’s world begins to crumble. She melds into her film persona, Sue Blue, and transgresses on set the boundary between reality and fiction.¹ An Odyssey begins – a tour de force through space, time and identity that propels both Nikki and the cinema audience to the limits of the cognitively decipherable. Metaleptic border crossings of this kind are familiar from films like Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), Last Action Hero (1993) or Pleasantville (1998). But, after an hour or so, Inland Empire leaves the terrain of classical narrative cinema altogether, dissolving into a performative mélange of places, scenes, roles and motifs held together on the one hand by Lynch’s subliminal aura of ‘mystery’ (cf. e. g. Rodley 1997, 227), and on the other by the motif of a cursed screenplay em-

 The transition to another level of reality takes place the moment Nikki/Sue enters Sue’s (studio) house, paralleling the typical arrival at the haunted house of horror film – also a place set apart, a borderland between this and another world, with an ontology of its own that is often experienced by the protagonists as perturbing. Inland Empire represents a variation on the haunted house motif, inasmuch as it foregrounds the passage from reality to fiction, and stages the aesthetics of its fictional space as a nightmarish anteroom to hell, a genuine netherworld, where the allegedly murdered Polish actors are incarcerated. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110566574-013

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bodied primarily in the figure of the phantom, which is evidently caught up in the same nightmarish labyrinth of filmic ‘reality’ as Nikki Grace. A particularly interesting aspect of the perturbation staged by Inland Empire is its reflex character: immersing herself in a film-world that becomes increasingly confusing – and hence, too, disturbing – and whose rules she no longer understands, Nikki resembles in her situation the persona of the cinemagoer confronted with a work that largely defies the conventions of filmic narration. For during the almost three hours of this film there are repeated moments when the viewer feels lost and alone; it is often unclear where and when the scenes are set, what level of reality they represent, and by what spatiotemporal laws their events and actions are governed. Nor is it always clear who the actress Laura Dern is actually playing: the protagonist of the frame plot, Nikki Grace, or her film character Sue Blue – or perhaps some other character from a past or future film project? These characters – among them a rape victim who hires a private detective – seem to have their own biographies, fates, and memories, which do not necessarily have anything to do with the frame plot of Inland Empire. They may simply represent an associative collage on the motif of ‘a woman in trouble’, which is the film’s tagline. In this respect Inland Empire lies somewhere on the border between standard narrative film and associative experimental project, and the vacillation between these modes of reception contributes decisively to its perturbatory impact. The critic Daniel Kothenschulte has observed that the film’s “connection with conventional cinema is that it has a beginning and an end. Between the two lies masterly chaos: film-in-film and filmic reality, dream and daydream, blend seamlessly into each other” (Kothenschulte 2006). With reference to the concept of perturbatory narration proposed by Schlickers and Toro², I intend here to pursue the following issues: (1) Does the concept of space contribute to that of perturbatory narration, and if so how? (2) Do the perturbatory spaces of Inland Empire reflect the key strategies of perturbatory narration? (3) Does Inland Empire thematize the conditions and limits of perturbatory narration, and hence those of filmic narration as such? For perturbatory narration represents an intentional strategy of departure from successful narrative procedures. To what extent, therefore, can the narrative mode – both in production and reception – be contravened before the construct of a fictional reality has to be given up in favor of associative perception?

 Cf. the Introduction to this volume, and also Schlickers 2015.

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My thesis here is that Lynch’s films – and in particular Inland Empire – introduce his trademark ‘mystery’³ into the narrative procedure in such a way as to fuse the structures of histoire and discours, and that this convergence contributes vitally to the films’ perturbatory impact. I would also argue that the extreme spatial distortion in many scenes of Inland Empire constitutes a further category of perturbatory narration – alongside deception, paradox and empuzzlement – which (as a working concept) can be termed ‘narrative dissolution’ or ‘modal shift’. This includes phenomena that relate to the breaking of the conventional contract between text (or implicit author⁴) and recipient, and consequently to partial revocation of the narrative mode.

2 Perturbatory space I will approach the disturbing filmic experience of Inland Empire through the concept of perturbatory space: specifically through the triple disunity of place, time and action (the cornerstones of Aristotelian drama theory) that characterizes the narrative technique of this film. In Lynch’s films, especially Inland Empire, the three categories can be complemented with a fourth: the incoherent identity of his characters.⁵ ‘Space’ in this context does not simply denote the spatiotemporal narrative background of an action; it is perceived as the fundamental ontological presupposition – a sort of formatting – of the narrative world, conditioning its very being and becoming, and hence determining what is possible and impossible within that world and its discrete parts.⁶ There are two senses in which the concept is especially useful for the analysis of the aesthetics of disruption. First: space is a synthetic concept that links the narrative aspects of topology, temporality, causality and identity in a continuum in which all the events of a narration can be situated in relation to dichotomous parameters such as ‘here/there’, ‘before/after’, ‘this world/other world’. As such, space is a central premise of fic-

 It should be noted that Lynch strictly distinguishes between mystery and confusion. Asked by Chris Rodley if he sought to confuse the public in Lost Highway, he replied: “No. It needs to be a certain way, and it’s not to confound, it’s to feel the mystery. Mystery is good, confusion is bad, and there’s a big difference between the two” (Lynch, quoted in Rodley 1997, 227).  Schlickers (1997, 77) suggests the term ‘implicit director’ for the film.  Coherency of character is rooted in the premise of one-to-one correspondence: there is only one David Lynch and this person is not multiple – i. e. it is David Lynch and no one else. The principle is known in mathematics as that of bijective (i. e. mutual) matching between two sets.  For a more detailed ontology of filmic space cf. Schmidt (2013).

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tion – or, to put it more accurately, of the fiction-contract between text (or implicit author) and recipient; and this contractual premise can be intentionally revoked or annulled by perturbatory narrative procedures. Second: space – as opposed to the holistic concept of ‘world’ – takes account of the moment of fragmentation that is central to such procedures. Doing so, it evokes the possibility of a plurality of partial spaces whose disparate levels of reality can host different plots, and whose ontological phenomenology, narrative mediation, and audiovisual realization can be informed by different aesthetics of disruption. Conversely, different levels of reality may comprise different spaces, whose perturbatory aspects can be examined both individually and in their interplay. Against this theoretical background, perturbatory narrative procedures can be understood as (perceived) discontinuities in the spatiotemporal structure of a narrative text: dislocations whose impact is sustained through several readings or viewings.⁷ And that spatiotemporal structure is not confined to the film’s plot or ‘world’. That is only part of the story: from a cognitive point of view the telling itself, the narrative sequentiality of places and events is, as Rudolf Arnheim (1974, 374) has pointed out, an actively space-engendering process. Arnheim compares the act of narration with entering a cave that offers a new perspective at every step, and in doing so establishes from beginning to end a secondary spatial structure. As well as the diegetic space of the action, one can, therefore, posit a narrative space of mediation/perception/reception generated by the camera (or editing process) as audiovisual narrative instance within the individual scene, and by the passage of one scene into the next.⁸ The distinction between the diegetic and narrational dimensions can be illustrated with a comparison between David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997) and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel (2006). Both films employ a spatiotemporal loop, which in the case of Lost Highway has often been described in terms of the geometrically paradoxical Möbius strip (cf. e. g. Jerslev 2004, 156; Warner 1997, 6; Corliss 1997): the plot arrives toward the end of the film at a point it had already reached at the beginning. While in Lost Highway the spatiotemporal diegetic dimension seems to take both characters and audience into a past where the protagonist can encounter himself, in Babel it is the arrangement of narrative

 Discontinuity is meant here both in a structural sense (as a property of the text) and in a cognitive sense (as the continuously unsuccessful effort to achieve coherency of interpretation).  As a mental model of textual understanding, Edward Branigan’s concept of ‘master space’ underlines the difference between the diegetic and narrational dimensions. ‘Master space’ can assume different forms and even lead to ‘impossible spaces’: “that is, to space which cannot be justified as existing wholly within the diegesis” (Branigan 1992, 56).

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spaces that suggests the simultaneous enactment – finally revealed as an illusion – of various plotlines in different countries. Here, too, the audience arrives imperceptibly at a point in the past, although a satisfactory reconstruction of the temporal relation between the different plotlines remains impossible even after several viewings, given the frustratingly multiple spatiotemporal relations between persons and events.⁹ Babel, too, could be metaphorically described as a Möbius strip, but in this case with reference to its perturbatory narrative space rather than the perturbatory diegetic space of Lost Highway. ¹⁰ In this respect the concept of narrative space approximates Michail Bakhtin’s notion of chronotope, which also binds together the fictive world of narrative and its aesthetic shaping as an artificial/artistic mold placed on the world of action (Bakhtin 1981). Like the chronotope, narrative space can be thought of, therefore, as a form-content category. In film, narrative space is audiovisual. Given that filmic communication is not simply discursive but twofold (Chatman 1990; Schlickers 1997; Kuhn 2011), the way in which space is portrayed in a specific shot can be scrutinized for perturbatory strategy. A good example of this is the vertigo-effect, which simultaneously shows and denies a change of condition, verifying Kuhn’s minimal definition of narrativity (Kuhn 2011, 62). Here one seems to be both moving in space and stationary – an effect often used to convey to the viewer in an immediately experiential way the subjective spatial perception of a character caught in a moment of confusion, disorientation, and perturbation.

3 Perturbatory (audio)visual spaces Inland Empire presents numerous spaces that are both aesthetically distorted and, as expressions of a visual narrative instance, also disturbing. The opening scene, for example, of a prostitute and her punter is striking for the blurring of its central figures, as if the most important thing, their facial identity, should be eradicated from sight. If one (still) posits the intention of narrating a coherent story, a construction of this sort is clearly so artificial as to be dysfunctional, especially as the dialogue (in Polish, without subtitles) is evidently not meant to be understood. The viewer is already confronted in this opening scene with a loss of information on two levels: auditory as well as visual.

 Pulp Fiction (1994) employs a similar narrative strategy.  This could be succinctly put as follows: Babel tells in a puzzling way of a world of consistent characters; Lost Highway tells in a consistent way of a world of puzzling characters.

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There is a similar instance toward the end of the film when Nikki encounters the ‘phantom’, whom she shoots and whose face is overlaid with an image of a clown-mask; the scene is then permeated with her grotesque, optically distorted laughter. The excision of a central visual element and superimposition of an alien visual level is executed in a dilettantish, Photoshop manner. But in the context of the whole film this demonstrates that the visual narrative instance is not content to remain a conventionally invisible mediator: it is itself foregrounded in a moment of radical distortion, when its three-dimensional space, reduced to two dimensions, is demolished by having a hole cut in it – as if the filmic medium itself, along with its audiovisual realization, had been touched by the curse of Nikki’s On High in Blue Tomorrows. Or, to put it in more narratological terms, the programmatic blending of story and narrative discourse is already staged here on a visual-spatial level.

3.1 Perturbatory levels of reality Turning now to levels of reality, one can distinguish in Inland Empire at least six ontologically different spaces in which parts of the action occur or specific figures have their origin: 1) present: Nikki Grace and the film project On High in Blue Tomorrows 2) film world of On High in Blue Tomorrows 3) film world of ‘47’ 4) past: Polish actors and the ‘47’ project 5) world of a mysterious rabbit family on a stage 6) end credits: documentary-symbolic borderland between fiction and reality. However, the very attempt to distinguish between levels of reality is problematic in this film, for there are a number of scenes that qualify the preceding or following action as paradoxical metadiegeses, for example when the Lost Girl (possibly the Polish actress) sees part of the frame plot – i. e. the ostensible narrative reality – on a television screen in a hotel room while she herself seems (from the most probable perspective) to be situated in the metadiegetic reality of the cursed film world, which is in turn situated in (apparent) narrative reality. In this case we are presented with a space that contains itself – a sort of topological mise en abyme aporétique. This paradoxical game with spatial structures and logic is highlighted when Nikki frees the Lost Girl from her hotel room while at the same time the scene plays on the television set there, although there is no visible camera to logically ground such an endlessly imaged image.

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The further question arises whether the film action – and hence too the apparent narrative reality – stems largely from Nikki’s imagination. A conversation between her and her new (evidently Eastern European) neighbor at the beginning of the film suggests this, and the passage recurs with a different turn at the end. The neighbor, who is oracle and witch at once, seems to be aware of Nikki’s fate. What she says about the functioning of space, time and identity in this film-world sounds almost like a threat: “Yes. Me, I… I can’t seem to remember if it’s today, two days from now, or yesterday. I suppose if it was 9:45, I’d think it was after midnight! […] If it was tomorrow, you would be sitting over there. [The neighbor points to Nikki’s couch across the room] Do you see?” While at the beginning of the film Nikki sees herself (astonishingly) sitting on the couch where the following day she is told that she is getting the new role, in the same scene at the end of the film she sees herself on the same couch, now as a woman reborn. The scene, then, functions as a narrative bracket; but it remains unclear whether the entire action within this bracket is real or imagined. The scene therefore represents a further potential level of reality, a platform from which the action of the entire film can be interpreted as taking place in Nikki’s metadiegetic imagination. In that case the list of ontologically different spaces would have to be completed with: 0) Nikki’s conversation with her neighbor. The scene is a sort of space tutorial, where the protagonist is initiated into the ontology of a particular space, learns its laws, and hears of possible lines of action. Scenes of this kind generally occur when a protagonist enters a different diegetic space, as when Neo in The Matrix (1999) is introduced by Morpheus into the ontology of virtual space and the scope it offers for manipulation; or Sam in Ghost (1990) is shown by another of the dead how he can influence the affairs of the real world as an invisible specter; or Chris in What Dreams May Come (1998) learns as a newly dead how to shape the afterworld spatially and aesthetically by the force of his imagination until it becomes a sort of walk-in picture. Space tutorials also serve to enlighten the viewer in a story-immanent way about the laws that govern alien dimensions. Inland Empire provides a rudimentary introduction of this kind, but without explaining its paradoxical phenomena. In fact the tutorial only teaches Nikki and the film audience to accept that they cannot understand these things. As such the scene stands programmatically for the narrative style of the whole film, for it establishes that perturbation operates here not only at the level of the story-as-told (empuzzlement via narrative procedures) but also at the level of its telling (empuzzlement of narrative procedures). Is it just an ellipse when Nikki looks at the couch and time jumps to the following day? Is it the result of unreliable narration (deception) – i. e. is the following action merely imag-

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ined? Is it a matter of phenomenological contradiction (paradox) when ‘Nikkitoday’ and ‘Nikki-tomorrow’ momentarily meet? Or is it being suggested here that the entire film-world of Inland Empire, like that of the incompleted ‘47’ and On High in Blue Tomorrows ¹¹ is cursed and hence fantastical (empuzzlement)? The narrative procedures of Inland Empire are singular not just in their application and combination of perturbatory techniques, but more specifically in the frequent impossibility of deciding what techniques a specific scene is using at all. Incomprehension is thereby raised to a meta-level, for not only what is being narrated is unclear, but also how it is being narrated. And this makes it difficult even to speak about this film – whether with regard to form or content. One could say that Inland Empire consciously converges narrative world and narration, playing with a poetological mise en abyme in which the one mirrors the other, using perturbatory procedures to tell the story of a perturbing (because haunted) film. Given this inherent structural instability, it is not always possible to tell whether the perturbatory phenomena belong to the level of discours or histoire. ¹² Perturbatory narrative procedures do not in this case simply undermine the illusion – they are not just (implicitly) metafictional.¹³ They do more than break the coherent development of the diegesis; for in Inland Empire they not only lay bare the way in which the narrative is constructed but also (paradoxically) contribute to its coherency. For these are not just stylistic ‘excesses’ that obscure (rather than altogether prevent) the reconstruction of an underlying diegesis: the spatiotemporal and figural ontology of Inland Empire is actually created via its fragmentary and paradoxical narrative mode, and in this sense the told and the telling, histoire and discours, converge. And the effect on the viewer is not only reflexive but also immersive: the narration reinforces the experience of a world in which things happen that could scarcely be narrated with conventional filmic means.

 Note in this context the plural form ‘Tomorrows’.  The uncertainty about an essential quality of coherent narrative is, as Schlickers and Toro observe in the Introduction to this volume, inevitably perturbing. A film like Inland Empire, which tells of a mysterious force governing the ontology of its narrative reality, and in doing so employs a language incomprehensible to its audience, suggests, however, that the mysterious force has taken over filmic means and narrative procedures as well. A power from the narrative world (histoire) seems here to have gained control of the narration itself (discours) – a frightening thought.  Here I differ from Schlickers and Toro (cf. the Introduction to this volume, and also Wolf 1993).

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The concept of perturbatory narration is not primarily concerned with content,¹⁴ yet the convergence of narrative procedures and narrated world – in other words a sort of story-dependence – must in particular instances be taken into account, at least when it affects fundamental categories of narrative such as time, place, identity and existence. In Inland Empire the story itself potentially determines the degree of perturbation of specific narrative procedures, and is itself influenced by that (procedural) perturbation. This leads to a more general distinction that might be made in the concept of perturbatory narration, namely between narrative procedures that impact the diegesis (the film characters notice that something mysterious is happening) and those that are only observed by the audience. Babel is in this sense story-independent, whereas Lost Highway is extremely story-dependent. The dynamics of perturbatory narration proposed by Schlickers and Toro might accordingly be extended to include the (qualitative) aspect of story-dependence (cf. Fig. 1):

Fig. 1: Story-(in)dependence of perturbatory narrative strategies

The converse is equally true: that the convergence of disparate realities and multiplication of identities in a single scene need by no means be either puzzling or perturbing. The best example for this is Peter Howitt’s Sliding Doors (1998), where the love-story involving the protagonist, Helen, is narrated in two versions, often in the same scene and sometimes even in the same shot. And in Woody Allen’s Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) the metalepsis of the hero’s descent from the screen is narratively defused by the ensuing discussion among the main characters of their new situation and varying ontological status – a typical Woody Allen twist.

 A distinction should be made here between affectively disturbing scenes (body horror, violence, (in)human depths etc.) and the story itself: these are two different forms (or levels) of content. The story can be largely accounted for without reference to the isolated occurrence of affective elements.

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3.2 Perturbatory spatial ontology If the determination of Inland Empire’s levels of reality is difficult, the allocation of the film’s individual audiovisual spaces to one or other of these levels is equally so. Thus the viewer may well wonder whether the reality into which Nikki steps through the studio wings is actually the fictive world of her film project or something else. Parts of that world seem to be given, e. g. the house of her film character, but the reality of that world is present only in a highly fragmented and distorted way, split into discrete spaces that can no longer be formed into a credible spatiotemporal sequence, and in which the principle of cause and effect that underlies any intelligible plot appears to have been suspended. Characters appear unexpectedly and disappear again in jump cuts¹⁵; in one scene Nikki seems to bilocate and then teleports (accompanied by lightning flashes) to other places, including Hollywood Boulevard and a snow-covered street in 1940s Poland. Here one should really speak of a plurality of diegetic spaces that continually offer characters from the frame plot a passage into other realities, times, and biographies. In this vein the fragmented reality of Inland Empire led the film critic James Lewis Hoberman to ask: “Do the characters travel through wormholes from Los Angeles to Lodz and the sad, shabby rooms of the On High in Blue Tomorrows set? Are these memories or alternative worlds? Is Lynch looking for some sort of movie beneath the movie?” (Hoberman 2006). Many of the spaces through which Nikki travels reveal a distorted ontology with paradoxical phenomena and enigmatic places, times and identities. In the scene mentioned above, in which she enters the set through a back door, Nikki glimpses herself in an audition – a setting the viewer already knows from another perspective,¹⁶ and in which there are other factors that additionally complicate the viewer’s understanding of place, time and identity. Thus when Nikki sees herself next to her partner on the set, her former self suddenly disappears without anyone noticing (paradox); she runs into the darkness of the wings calling out for Billy, and the viewer sees not Nikki but her film character Sue (unreliable narration) against the narrative reality of the film-set (metalepsis). And again, when

 Lynch also uses these in Blue Velvet, when the protagonist Frank, laughing diabolically in the direction of the camera, shouts: “Let’s fuck! I fuck anything that moves!” and immediately vanishes in a jump cut. Here, too, the viewer cannot decide whether this is an avant-garde narrative technique or the expression of a fantastical reality in which the villain is able to perform such actions.  This scene exemplifies in miniature the Möbius strip procedure often cited with reference to Lost Highway. Similarly, Roman Polanski’s The Tenant (1976) also has the protagonist encounter himself as he was at an earlier point in the story.

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she runs through the wings into ‘her’ house, lightning flashes through the studio – a phenomenon familiar from other Lynch films, suggesting the approach of mysterious events (fantastic mode). Narrative and film reality are now superimposed through the window on the film set to create an ontologically fluctuating space that segues into the complete disappearance of the studio (metalepsis). All that remains is a deeply disturbed protagonist who does not know what has happened to her; and the viewer is equally in the dark as to whom she actually represents. Is she Nikki, is she Sue, or is she a hybrid of both? If this scene still plays within the framework of a highly complex, perturbed and perturbing narration, then what follows seems, at least at times, to transcend the limits of narration altogether. We see the actress Laura Dern as a white-trash housewife doing the washing, cooking, and eating in the evening with her husband. She tells him she is pregnant and a discussion breaks out. The striking factor here is that the woman seems to have no recollection whatever of prior plot elements. Neither place, time, action, or identity provide any clear continuity with what has gone before; only the aspect of mystery, and the continuing extra-fictional identity of the actress Laura Dern through all these twists and turns of the plot, create a rudimentary narrative bracket around it. Narrative disconnection also characterizes many of the following scenes; it reaches its illogical conclusion when Nikki finally meets the Lost Girl in the hotel room, kisses her, and immediately vanishes, while the girl goes on in her stead to enjoy the ‘happy end’ of a family reunion of sorts, complete with elegiac music. While the geometrical metaphor of the Möbius strip has often been used to describe the contradictory spatiotemporal structure of Lost Highway, Inland Empire might well be thought of as a Möbius tangle: a highly self-contradictory weft of discrete diegetic spaces that connect and disconnect, and in which identities change and are exchanged, with the result that, like Nikki, the viewer of the film is scarcely able to construct a semblance of narrative continuity or semantic coherency in the screen events.

4 Narrative dissolution – modal shift A key factor in many mind-game movies is the moment of spatiotemporal and causal disorientation with which protagonists are confronted and which appears

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to motivate their actions.¹⁷ The audience, as a rule, shares the perspective of the protagonist, whose search for a thread of meaning and reality in a world of ambiguities, contradictions and phenomenological paradoxes provides the narrative cement holding the mixture together. But if, as in Inland Empire, the very identity of the protagonist is questioned, the cement threatens to dissolve, and the underlying contract between text (or implicit author) and movie audience seems to be at least partially revoked. Individual scenes can no longer be unequivocally attributed to the diegesis as a coherent whole, and drift into a collage-like mode, and this in turn alters the aesthetics of reception from standard movie mode to a mindset more appropriate to associative, avant-garde, experimental, or essay-type films. The switchback of narrative disconnection and reconnection that relates individual scenes and identities to the framing plot situates large tracts of Inland Empire in a borderland between these filmic genres. However, as the modal shift to another genre is never entirely completed, the question arises whether narrative dissolution of this kind does not constitute a further – albeit rare – subcategory of perturbatory narration over and above (simple) plot-empuzzlement. Mixed (and pseudo-mixed) forms hovering between fictional and real discursive universes, inserting documentary and other non-diegetic material – for example shots of the film-set or other aspect of the production world – in an otherwise fictional movie, might also be placed in this category, for they, too, play with the strategy of temporary modal shift as a form of narrative perturbation. Interestingly enough, Inland Empire employs both these strategies. Lynch integrates sequences from his Web series Rabbits (2002) – a sort of sitcom about a mysterious rabbit family – into the film, using material autotextually that belongs to another fictional diegesis from the same author/director. The insertion of such material, when recognized, triggers a moment of cognitive dissonance, for a film-historical sequence is suddenly posited as an authentic diegetic element of Inland Empire. Another moment of narrative dissolution, also involving connection with external diegeses, occurs at the end of the film, when Nikki sees herself sitting on the couch in a blue wrap-around dress remarkably like that worn by her alter ego, Sandy – also played by Laura Dern – in Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986). The sense of modal shift is reinforced when the end credits roll against a background of characters from earlier Lynch films, assembled as if for a get-together in Nikki Grace’s villa: Rita from Mulholland Drive (2001: Laura Hering), Alice from Lost Highway (played by a double), and the lumberjack

 Cf. e. g. Memento (2000), Identity (2003), The Butterfly Effect (2004), The Machinist (2004), The I Inside (2004), Stay (2005) etc.

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from the TV series Twin Peaks, as well as Sandy from Blue Velvet (Laura Dern). The shift from narrative to purely symbolic¹⁸ reality, or to seeming documentary, is perturbing here precisely in its seamlessness: it places the viewer in a hybrid borderland without any indication that a modal change has occurred.

5 Conclusion Spaces and their interrelations in Inland Empire seem no longer to coalesce into a geography of the filmic world that supports the viewer’s construction of a coherent narration and consistent hypothetical reality. “The spaces in ‘Inland Empire’ function as way stations, holding pens, states of minds […]. They are cinematic spaces in which images flower and fester […]” (Dargis 2006). If the spaces in which actions and events take place can no longer be unambiguously related to each other in a causal chain, and no consistent alternative patterns are offered that would support their classification as dream-worlds, symbolic visualizations, or narrative tools (flashbacks, fantasies etc.), and hence enable their distinction from the narrative reality of the film, then Inland Empire can only with considerable reservations be classified as a feature film in the traditional sense at all. Even if the many scenes of Nikki’s odyssey might in themselves constitute a narrative plot, the lack of discursive connections between the links of that chain prevents them from doing so. We may justifiably conclude, then, that Inland Empire can, at least in substantial measure, be aptly described as a pseudo-narrative or narrative-in-dissolution. To express this still more clearly: it is not that one cannot tell here what is reality and what is dream (or film-in-film). The point is that these categories have simply lost their meaning: they can no longer be applied to the film as narrative categories at all. Meaning is generated here not on the level of narration but on that of association – or aesthetic experience. “Something is happening”, even if we don’t know what. It is understandable, then, that many reviewers have linked Inland Empire to avant-garde and experimental film, and to video art. What is so perturbing about the narrative structure of Inland Empire is that the audience is left largely in the dark as to where they are – in a cinema movie or in some other filmic genre – and how they should understand what they are  The status of the end credits is itself uncertain. If one sees them as integral to the diegesis, Nikki’s appearance there is metaleptic and they represent a further level of reality, wherever that might be situated. They could, however, also be seen as a documentary space disconnected from the diegesis of Inland Empire, showing not film-characters but film-actors clad in costumes from earlier films – a sort of ‘Lynch-family’ show as art-performance.

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seeing on screen. Asked in an interview what Inland Empire is about, David Lynch pointed out that he did not just tell stories, he worked with abstractions. Cinema could, he said, take its audience into worlds beyond the mind, where the question was not one of understanding but of experiencing (cf. Beier and Borcholte 2007).

Filmography Babel. Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu. 2006. Warner Bros. 2007. DVD. Blue Velvet. Directed by David Lynch. 1986. MGM (Video and DVD). 2006. Ghost. Directed by Jerry Zucker. 1990. Warner Bros. 2009. Identity. Directed by James Mangold. 2003. Sony Pictures Home Entertainment. 2003. Inland Empire. Directed by David Lynch. 2006. Absurda/Rhino. 2007. Last Action Hero. Directed by John McTiernan. 1993. Mill Creek Entertainment. 2014. Lost Highway. Directed by David Lynch. 1997. Universal Studios Home Entertainment. 2008. Memento. Directed by Christopher Nolan. 2000. Sony Pictures Home Entertainment. 2002. Mulholland Drive. Directed by David Lynch. 2001. Universal Studios Home Entertainment. 2002. Pleasantville. Directed by Gary Ross. 1998. New Line Home Video. 2011. Pulp Fiction. Directed by Quentin Tarantino. 1994. Lionsgate. 2011. Purple Rose of Cairo. Directed by Woody Allen. 1985. MGM (Video and DVD). 2001. Rabbits. Web series. Directed by David Lynch. 2002. www.davidlynch.com. Sliding Doors. Directed by Peter Howitt. 1998. Warner Bros. 1998. Stay. Directed by Marc Forster. 2005. 20th Century Fox. 2006. The Butterfly Effect. Directed by Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber. 2004. New Line Home Entertainment. 2006. The I Inside. Directed by Roland Suso Richter. 2004. Echo Bridge Home Entertainment. 2011. The Machinist. Directed by Brad Anderson. 2004. Paramount. 2005. The Matrix. Directed by Lana and Lilly Wachowski. 1999. Warner Home Video. 1999. The Tenant. Directed by Roman Polanski. 1976. Paramount. 2003. Twin Peaks. TV series. Directed by David Lynch et al. 1990 – 1991. Paramount. 2014. What Dreams May Come. Directed by Vincent Ward. 1998. Universal Studios Home Entertainment. 2003.

Bibliography Arnheim, Rudolf. 1974. Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye: The New Version. Berkley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Bakhtin, Michail M. 1981. “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel.” In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, 84 – 258. Austin: University of Texas Press.

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Beier, Lars-Olaf, and Andreas Borcholte. 2007.: “In Hollywood herrscht die Wut.” Spiegel Online. Accessed 2 September 2016. http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/kino/us-regisseurdavid-lynch-in-hollywood-herrscht-die-wut-a-477649 - 2.html. Branigan, Edward. 1992. Narrative Comprehension and Film. London and New York: Routledge. Chatman, Seymour. 1990. Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Corliss, Richard. 1997. “Mild at Heart.” Time 149.9:77. Dargis, Manhohla. 2006. “The Trippy Dream factory of David Lynch.” NYTimes.com. Accessed 2 September 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/06/movies/06empi.html. Hoberman, James Lewis. 2006. “Wild at Heart” [review of Inland Empire]. villagevoice.com. Accessed 2 September 2016. http://www.villagevoice.com/film/wild-at-heart-6426469. Jerslev, Anne. 2004. “Beyond Boundaries. David Lynch’s Lost Highway.” In The Cinema of David Lynch. American Dreams, nightmare visions, edited by Erica Sheen and Annette Davidson, 151 – 164. London: Wallflower Press. Kothenschulte, Daniel. 2006. “Das Hexenhaus am Rande der Straße.” FR-online.de, Accessed 9. 9. 2006. [Article no longer available]. Kuhn, Markus. 2011. Filmnarratologie. Ein erzähltheoretisches Analysemodell. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Rodley, Chris. 1997. Lynch on Lynch. London: Faber & Faber. Schlickers, Sabine. 1997. Verfilmtes Erzählen: Narratologisch-komparative Untersuchung zu El beso de la mujer araña (Manuel Puig/Héctor Babenco) und Crónica de una muerte anunciada (Gabriel García Márquez/Francesco Rosi). Frankfurt a. M.: Vervuert. Schlickers, Sabine. 2015. “Lüge, Täuschung und Verwirrung. Unzuverlässiges und verstörendes Erzählen in Literatur und Film.” Diegesis. Interdisciplinary E-Journal for Narrative Research 4.1:49 – 67. Accessed 2 September 2016. https://www.diegesis.uniwuppertal.de/index.php/diegesis/article/view/190. Schmidt, Oliver. 2008. Leben in gestörten Welten. Der Filmische Raum in David Lynchs Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Lost Highway und Inland Empire. Stuttgart: ibidem. Schmidt, Oliver. 2013. Hybride Räume. Filmwelten im Hollywood-Kino der Jahrtausendwende. Marburg: Schüren. Warner, Marina. 1997. “Voodoo Road.” Sight & Sound 8:6 – 10. Wolf, Werner. 1993. Ästhetische Illusion und Illusionsdurchbrechung in der Erzählkunst: Theorie und Geschichte mit Schwerpunkt auf englischem illusionsstörenden Erzählen. Tübingen: Niemeyer.

Sabine Schlickers

Perturbatory Narration in Mexican Film: Juegos nocturnos/Nocturnal Games, El agujero negro del sol/The Black Hole of the Sun, and El incidente/The Incident The two Mexican short films Juegos nocturnos and El agujero negro del sol combine the three narrative strategies of perturbatory narration in an exemplary fashion and, doing so, model their fictional worlds in very different ways. Also from Mexico, the bizarre feature film El incidente, described by its author as psychological science fiction¹, employs for the most part extremely paradoxical narrative procedures and on closer analysis reveals markedly perturbatory qualities.

1. Juegos nocturnos (Nocturnal Games) In the opening shots of Juegos nocturnos an old computer starts up, with a child’s fingers tapping on the keyboard. Against a dark blue background a title appears, “Juegos nocturnos / Nocturnal Games”, and with it a moment of empuzzlement, for it is not clear whether this title is on the diegetic computer or the extradiegetic screen. The next, relatively long scene shows a group of young men drawing lots to decide who is to break into a certain house during the night to steal a statue of Christ. But before the person in question leaves, the viewer sees a young boy playing a computer video game featuring a motor-cyclist (00:02:11– 13):

Figs. a and b: Nocturnal Games

 http://www.imcine.gob.mx/comunicacion-social/comunicados-y-noticias/el-incidente-deisaac-ezban-es-una-pelicula-de-ciencia-ficcion-psicologica (17.08. 2016). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110566574-014

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From this point on, the video game plotline (B) coincides in a puzzling way with that of the break-in (A). Plotline A

Plotline B

Figs. a and b: Noctural Games, plotlines A and B

Plotline B can be divided into the actions of the boy (Ba) playing on the computer and the fragmentarily presented audio-visual game itself (Bb). The interplay between the virtual world of the game (provisionally here ‘hypodiegetic’ level) and the fictionally real world of the break-in and the boy with his computer (provisionally ‘intradiegetic’ level) functions according to the principle of communicating vessels: the alternating presentation creates a sense of simultaneity. The two plotlines are additionally defined by being tinted respectively red (Ba) and blue (A). The continuous switching between the two (with A quantitatively dominant) focuses attention on an increasing convergence, initially in the form of an acoustic metalepsis, when video-game sounds from B infiltrate into A (00:04:10 – 00:04:12).² This is followed in A by the old house-owner suddenly appearing before the burglar, echoing a threatening scene from the video game. In both plotlines this gives way to a fight in which the burglar involuntarily kills the old man with a stray shot from his pistol, followed by flight scenes, where the burglar runs in panic into a house, climbs onto an upper patio, jumps across to the neighboring house and taps on the window of the boy playing on his computer ‒ a narrative short-circuit between the plotlines whose meaning can be interpreted in three different ways:

 The paradoxical device of metalepsis refers to the (vertical or horizontal) transgression of spatial, temporal or ontological narrative orders (metalepsis of the énoncé) or communicative situations (metalepsis of the énonciation) (cf. Schlickers 2005).

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1) Model I The boy and the burglar are intradiegetic, the video game scenes hypodiegetic. In this case the coincidence of the video game scenes in both timing and content with those of the break-in is either pure chance – a highly unsatisfactory solution that precludes metalepsis, for although the boy and the burglar inhabit spatially dfferent worlds, their meeting (however surprising) is not impossible. Or alternatively, the (hypodiegetic) video game scenes exercise a fantastical influence on the (intradiegetic) scenes of plotline A, qualifying the figure as an ascending metalepsis of the énoncé, or inversely plotline A intervenes in the video game scenes (descending metalepsis). 2) Model II The video game scenes and the burglary are hypodiegetic, the boy diegetic. This case posits the same coincidence in timing and content as the first model, but the meeting between the boy and the burglar constitutes a vertical metalepsis of énoncé in which the burglar moves up from the hypodiegetic level to the intradiegetic boy, like the character in Cortázar’s “Continuidad de los parques” (“Continuity of the Parks”, 1964), which performs the same transition and proceeds to kill its own reader. 3) Model III The third model introduces the fascinating idea that the video game played by the intradiegetic boy itself creates the burglary, which is therefore at a deeper level. Here the virtual world of the game can and does generate a ‘real’ world of its own.³ The final meeting between the boy and the burglar can only be satisfactorily explained in terms of the vertical metalepsis of Models II and III, which resembles this paradoxical device in Miguel de Unamuno’s novel Niebla (Mist), where a character goes in search of its author. Here, however, the boy-creator, hearing his character at the window, gets up and, without a word, closes it. Ignoring the cries for help, he returns to his game and coolly presses the ‘enter’ button that disposes of both his characters – the cyclist as well as the man at the window. He is rewarded with the top score. Asked by the program if he would like to play again, he smiles with contented malice.

 One could, of course, also argue that the burglary is a simple fantasy of the boy. But this is narratologically as banal as the ‘chance’ solution of Model 1.

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Model III – the solution I personally prefer – allows Juegos nocturnos to be classified as a pseudodiegesis⁴, for although, quantitatively speaking, plotline A dominates at the hypo-hypodiegetic level, the intradiegetic plotline Ba actually constitutes the main narrative thread. True to its title, Juegos nocturnos features a boy playing ominous night-games – a reading that is reinforced by some of the objects he has around him in his room. Towards the middle of the film one sees a skull on his desk, and looming behind him on the wall is a poster of Dracula, as if he were himself the acolyte of that evil genius. Through the medium of a normally harmless video game, Draculean evil invokes a world of corruption and criminal violence, which in turn impacts the “real” intradiegetic world, where a new game is impending, suggesting that it can all begin again in an endless loop. The surprising twist of this ending is constitutive for the genre of unreliable, deceptive narrative. In its combination of elements of paradoxical narration (metalepsis, narrative short-circuit, pseudodiegesis and endless loop) with the multiple puzzles of its threefold modeling possibilities, its fantasy dimension, and the deceptive narrative strategy of its final twist, Juegos nocturnos is a genuine example of perturbatory narration.

2 El agujero negro del sol (The Black Hole of the Sun) The same is true of the more complex short film El agujero negro del sol (The Black Hole of the Sun). Its opening sequence shows a ragged old man who walks down the sidewalk under a ladder (Fig. 3a) and stops at a red crossing light.

Fig. 3a: The Black Hole of the Sun, opening sequence

 Cf. Genette (1972 and 2004, 14– 15) and McHale (1987, 115), who see pseudodiegesis as both deceptive and paradoxical. They compare it with trompe-l′œil as “deliberately misleading the reader into regarding an embedded, secondary world as the primary, diegetic world” (McHale).

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When the light changes to green he steps onto the street; from off, a shrill sound is heard (00:00:30 – 00:00:32). The scene, which turns out to be a nightmare, ends with a hard cut (hypodiegetic level):

Fig. 3b: The Black Hole of the Sun

A man wakes suddenly from sleep (intradiegetic level, Fig. 3b), turns off the alarm clock (6 a.m.) and goes back to sleep. The dream continues, segueing acoustically via a recognizable dream-sound to the old man, who is watching a mobile with a black sun motif swing gently to and fro. The sleeper wakes again and looks at the clock. After a mere ten seconds of projection time it is already an hour later – a time-leap indicative of the fact that the ‘camera’ does not show everything. The implied viewer must pay attention. The next scene contains a spatiotemporal shift. Now fully awake, the man sits in an automobile and sees in the mirror, on the wing of a green truck, the motif of the black sun of which he had just dreamed. This first fantasy intrusion of dream into his ‘real life’ represents either an ascending metalepsis of the énoncé, or alternatively a simple (but once again strange) coincidence between reality and dream, a mise en abyme of the énoncé. ⁵ The man drives on, and the next hard cut shows him on campus, where he is addressed by a student carrying a book containing Krapp’s Last Tape and Act Without Words. The student finds “Beckett’s idea of existentialism” interesting, especially the imperative he sees in these works “to withdraw from the culture that’s weakening you […], to give it all up […], in favor of an anti-contemplative life […], to think of becoming someone else, to stop seeking, inquiring […], to allow death to show you the truth about this empty, bureaucratically repetitive existence” (00:01:30 – 00:02:14, my italics).⁶ The key to the film lies in the mise en abyme of poetics that this scene enacts, for the student holds in his very hands a prime example of the culture he would reject.

 Cf. Meyer-Minnemann and Schlickers (2004, 2007).  “el hombre debe alejarse de la cultura que le enferma […]…, dejarlo todo. Por una vida anticontemplativa […]… pensar en ser otra persona … dejar de investigar […] dejar que la muerte le enseñe la verdad de toda esta vida tan burocráticamente repetitiva y vacía”.

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Similarly in the next scene, where the professor is explaining Jung’s theory of dreams and archetypes: here the mise en abyme – again at the level of poetics – concerns the sun as an archetype pointing to “change … to a new life” (00:03:15). And with these words an extradiegetic musical theme segues across to the plotline of the old man, who awakens suddenly in a bus on his way to town. This is the first indication of ambiguity or empuzzlement in the hierarchy of dreamer and dreamed; for it is equally possible that the old man has dreamed the scenes with the professor (cf. below). In the following scene we see him washing cars at the roadside, after which he takes a nap with his eyes closed. The extradiegetic music continues into the next scene, in which the professor draws a sun in his notebook that looks just like the one he dreamed and saw on the wing of the truck. The music stops, and a cut leads to the old man, who is woken by a loud hooting of car horns and starts working again. The markers for the old man’s dream are clearer here, but are easily overlooked, especially in view of the onset of a conventional recoding according to which the opening nightmare is ascribed to the professor, whose plotline is in any case quantitatively dominant. A cut leads into a lecture hall where the professor is telling his students about his childhood dreams of another world beyond the walls of his respectable, paternalistic home, a world peopled by thieves, maniacs and ghosts – the world of the old man, in fact, to which he still feels drawn, triggered by memory and synthesized in a mise en abyme of the énoncé. After the lecture, the professor cannot start his car, so he gets out and walks down the sidewalk from which he had dreamed in the initial sequence. The ladder is still there – another intrusion of dream into fictional reality – but he walks round it, not under it as the old man did: he is still at this point a ‘respectable man’. Again we hear the extradiegetic music (00:05:49), and the professor stands before the same crossing light about which he had also dreamed. This changes with the same loud metallic sound, and the same shrill tone sounds as he sets his foot on the street. He stands still in shock, and then walks slowly on, followed now at a few paces by the old man, who again walks under the ladder – the cut this time has no acoustic marker, nor is there a dream marker. On the contrary, the two men are now on the same diegetic level – a clear narrative short-circuit and another strictly fantastic moment. The old man stops at the crossing light and the professor, looking at him in shocked incredulity (00:06:34), stands petrified in the middle of the street. Faintly psychedelic extradiegetic music is heard, as three semi-low-angle shots zoom in first on the old man, then on the professor. The old man glances at the green light for vehicles,

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which changes to yellow; the ‘camera’ shows the professor in zero ocularization⁷, still standing on the street, before cutting back to the old man, who is attentively watching the other character. The pedestrian lights change from green to red, and in the background one sees the black sun on an awning (internal ocularization of the old man, 00:06:54).⁸ The vehicle lights change to green, but the professor still does not move. A green truck approaches and the screen turns black; tires screech, and the next shot shows the professor lying on the street, his face covered in blood. Dying, he sees the black sun on the wing of the truck, spattered with his own blood (00:07:09). This marks the end of the professor’s life-cycle. Cut (with music) to the old man, who wakes up, startled: he is, then, after all, the main dreamer. And the fact that he dreams not only the professor’s death, but also his own role in it, indicates the pseudodiegetic structure of the film – an interpretation reinforced by the presence in his ramshackle hut of the volume of Beckett’s plays. Evidently it was he that dreamed of the student carrying this same book; and the student’s words about withdrawing from culture and becoming someone else referred to his own life. He looks thoughtfully at the book and seems to remember those words, to remember his former life as an intellectual, a professor in a respectable world, and the dreams he had of ‘another’ world – even, perhaps, the dream of the archetypal sun that promised a new life. Perhaps he survived a road accident and changed his life for that of the poor man on the margins of society. Perhaps that is why he smiles now, as he leaves his hut, the morning sun shining on his face. The perturbatory narrative strategies of El agujero negro del sol can also be modeled in a number of possible ways: 1) The surprising final twist that reveals the professor’s dream of the old man to be the old man’s dream of the professor can be classified as both a deceptive narrative procedure and a pseudodiegesis.⁹ But the narrative structure is more complex; for the one set of dreams – the old man’s dreams of the pro-

 Zero ocularization is the non-marked or ‘nobody’s’ shot, cf. Schlickers (2009).  The first shot of the red pedestrian crossing light has no black sun (internal ocularization of the professor, 00:06:03), but it is there in the second shot (old man’s view). This might be read as a hint at another narrative level or loop in the Möbius strip (cf. below). After all, the black sun on the awning had already appeared in the professor’s opening dream (00:00:28).  Julio Cortázar’s short story “La noche boca arriba” (“The Night Face-Up”) contains a similar pseudodiegesis: After a bad motor-cycle accident the protagonist dreams in hospital of a Motec, persecuted by the Aztecs in the War of Flowers, who lands on the sacrificial altar, where his heart will be cut out. But at the end of the story it transpires that the reverse is the case: the Motec dreams of the man lying in hospital after an accident.

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fessor (hypodiegetic level) – contains the other set – the professor’s dreams of the old man (hypo-hypodiegetic level) – embedded within it.

Figs. a + b: The Black Hole of the Sun: The hypodiegesis (Fig. a) dominates quantitatively about the intradiegesis (Fig. b)

2) The fantastical intrusions of the professor’s dream into the world of fictional reality are, then, twists of a Möbius strip. 3) The impossibility of establishing a clear hierarchy between the dreamers resembles Rubin’s vase, with its two incompatible interpretations (Mahler 2011, 393 – 394). 4) The fantastical narrative short-circuit of the last third of the film entails a meta-morphosis through fusion of the two subordinate narrative levels, when the old man and the professor, dreamer and dreamed, meet on the same diegetic level, at the same time and in the same place. 5) This short circuit in turn suggests a horizontal modeling according to which the old man and the professor are one and the same person: two different egos embodying diametrically opposed lives. This can be related to the concept of otredad (otherness) of the well-known Mexican author Octavio Paz. The dark side – “the black hole of the sun” – triumphs over the gray world of the professor’s clear rational principles. Hence the old man’s laugh as the sun shines illuminates his face in the final scene.

Fig. 5: The Black Hole of the Sun: final scene

3 El incidente (The Incident) Produced in 2014, Isaac Ezban’s El incidente (The Incident) is described on the cover of the DVD as “a beautiful mindfuck”. It consists of two strange loops

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linked to each other in the second third of the film by means of a double Möbius strip. The film begins with an intradiegetic framing sequence of a very old woman lying on an escalator, who remembers a (or her) wedding – a visualized hypodiegetic motif that is taken up again later.

Fig. 6: The Incident: intradiegetic framing sequence

In her hand she holds a red notebook that also appears in the two stories that follow. These are conveyed in successive blocks clearly divided by black frames and distinct plotlines. Both stories feature people imprisoned in paradoxical spatial structures that function like Penrose stairs¹⁰ and are known in narratology as ‘strange loops’.

Fig. 7: Penrose stairs

Each story is subdivided into a sequence a) comprising the first third of the film and a sequence b) that continues the story with a time-leap of 35 years:

Fig. 8: Table of sequences in The Incident

1a) The first story is about two brothers, one of whom is shot by a police officer in a stairwell, where he bleeds to death. The surviving brother and the po-

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose_stairs (15.08. 2016).

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liceman are caught in this endlessly circular stairwell for 35 years¹¹, a state of affairs made marginally possible by a fantasy refrigerator that refills itself with drinks and moldy sandwiches. A number of other objects the men have brought with them inexplicably reappear every day, and there are further evocations of the fantastic in the multiple references to Philip Dick’s dystopian novel Time Out Of Joint, which serves as an explicit intertext.

Fig. 9: The Incident: sequence 1a

The two men react to the situation differently. The younger man looks after himself, trains his body, and arranges the objects around him in bizarre systems, while the policeman vegetates in dirt and trash and ages rapidly, but at the same time works on a wall-painting covering several floors, in which he reconstructs episodes from his own life. 2a) The second story, which begins with the symbolic image of a hamster in a wheel, tells of a mother with two children and her lover on a country road, where they enter a strange loop: their car always stops at the same sign, near the same lonely gas station, where the food also replenishes itself over 35 years. Another similarity with the first story is that a character dies, in this case the young girl, felled by an asthma attack. We learn later that the deaths of innocent people constitute the ‘incident’ of the film’s title. A short scene with the old woman on the escalator (01:01:31– 1:01:57) represents a flip of the Möbius strip interweaving the two until now separate plotlines. The sound-track bridges metaleptically across to the stairwell narrative, where the two men have now held out for 35 years. The elder of the two repeats to himself, litanywise, the phrase “remember, Marco Antonio Molina”, which the sound-track faintly echoes, while the ‘camera’ moves from the escalator to the old woman recumbent upon it. While the Möbius strip of the two stories calls

 A stairwell in which the figures run from the ninth to the first floor only to find themselves on the ninth again; and where the law of gravity does not apply, as we see when a bunch of keys thrown down the well hurtles past them from above.

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Fig. 10: The Incident: sequence 2a

for horizontal modeling, the escalator is a vertical structure moving in an endless loop. Only partially shown, a boy takes a hamster from the hands of the old lady, linking the frame motif with the story of the family on the country road, which is now taken up again (01:01:58). This, however, breaks the logic of the narrative levels, because at this point, two-thirds of the way through the film, the hierarchical narrative structure dissolves, and the two plotlines, which up to this point have been kept separate, converge in a dizzying mix. Because of the Möbius strip structure, it is still not clear, however, whether they run parallel to the frame story or are hierarchically subordinate to it.¹² 2b) Here, too, 35 years have passed and the mother and her partner are now old. They drive around and have sex in their car, otherwise living – or, rather, vegetating – in a vile mess of trash and dirt. The boy (Daniel) had left them after the death of his sister. Now in his mid 40s, rather like the younger brother in the stairwell story, he has made an orderly life for himself along the road: he looks after himself and his surroundings and structures his activities. It is in this state that he meets his mother’s aging partner.

Fig. 11: The Incident: sequence 2b

He no longer remembers his mother, nor, the old man tells him, does she remember him – but the old lover has forgotten what he wants to tell Daniel. “That’s what we old ones are like, Daniel” (01:13:24). The theme of forgetting links this phase of the story to that of the stairwell, as does the classical

 The stories are also color-marked: 1a in gray, notable in the white walls of the stairwell, the gray steel stairs, and the neon lighting; 2a in lively tones, especially the vermilion of the automobile, the man’s shirt, and the woman’s nail varnish.

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music first heard from off in the frame story, then intradiegetically at the beginning of the first, and later also in the second story.¹³ 1b) The old man in the stairwell repeats – but now speaking to himself – the words of his confrere on the country road: “That’s what we old ones are like, Daniel” (01:13:25). In other words the Möbius strip has flipped again. But he suddenly remembers something, and realizes that he will die if he tells the young man what it is. The latter asks him who Daniel is, and the old man answers: “Don’t become me!” Then he strikes through the drawings of his family on the wall, saying they no longer exist, that Marco Antonio Molina (the police officer from 1a / old man from 1b) no longer exists, and that he himself is Daniel.¹⁴

Fig. 12: The Incident: sequence 1b

Cut to the ‘real’ 45-year-old Daniel (2b), followed first by an intercut of Old Man I (1b), and then the 10-year-old Daniel (2a) (01:14:20 – 01:14:26). Cut back to the stairwell (1b), where the old man in a moment of anagnorisis realizes that he has killed the brother of the man with whom he has lived for 35 years – something the addressee already knows. But he killed him under a false identity, that of the non-existent police officer Marco Antonio Molina. The result is paradoxical: the old man in the stairwell (1b) is at the same time the young man on the country road (2b) – i. e. 1b = 2b – which means Old Man I must have been young Daniel (2a). At this point, however, the question remains as to the status of the ‘non-existent’ character of Molina in 1a. Does it also mean 1a/1b = 2a/2b? The film continues with the second story: the old woman is dead and the old man (2b) dies slowly, at the same time as Old Man I. The two plotlines fuse para-

 The boy Daniel plays a piano version of motifs from the first movement – marked “lebhaft” (lively) – of Schumann’s 4th symphony, a piece whose motifs are also interwoven in circular fashion. (I am indebted to Vera Toro for this observation.)  I shall distinguish the figures in the two plotlines as follows: 1a = the police officer Molina from the first stairwell story 1b = the police officer Molina from the initial stairwell story 35 years later = Old Man I 2a = the boy Daniel from the first country road story (with his mother and Roberto) 2b = the c. 45-year-old Daniel of the second country road story with Roberto = Old Man II.

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doxically in the character of Daniel, who is both Old Man I and the 45-year-old on the country-road (1b = 2b). He, like the protagonist in Philip Dick’s intertext (cf. above), exists simultaneously in two spatiotemporally and ontologically different dimensions.¹⁵ The two old men ask their younger companions to write down their stories, lest they forget them, as they have forgotten themselves. The old man of the second story confesses that he, too, has another name and remembers another incident that is now visualized (01:19:21– 01:20:31) as Plotline III – a mise en abyme of Plotlines I and II. In this story, he too was 10 years old when he witnessed an accident involving his teacher, in which a child bled to death, whereupon he spent 35 years drifting on a raft together with his teacher, without ever reaching land. At the end of this time, the teacher tells him that he himself had earlier traveled for 35 years in a train that never stopped (Plotline IV) – stories begin to multiply in endless inter-reflection. Summing them up, the two old men realize that for 70 years they were trapped in two incidents. Old Man I (1b) repeats that he spent 35 years as ‘young’ Daniel with Roberto on the country road – i. e. with the old man of the second story (2a) – which confirms Daniel’s identity with Old Man I (2a = 1b).¹⁶ The second incident refers to the 35 years the two (now) old men spent with the younger men – information with which the double Möbius strip can now be decoded. “You and I are unreal”, Old Man II says to the middle-aged Daniel; and Old Man I adds “The real you and the real me, we are somewhere else […], we are in endless hells”¹⁷ (01:21:26): hells, it transpires, that run parallel to the ‘real’ world, that are spawned in each case by an ‘incident’ (cf. ‘forking path’ below), and that constitute the ‘other side’ of the double Möbius strip. Men and women, Old Man II explains, must endure these hells in order to gain energy for their real selves; bodily movement is not enough for them; their emotions must also be brought into play. And this is where human sacrifice comes in – hence the deaths, in the various stories, of the young man, the girl and the

 The simultaneity is enhanced by the parallel montage of the two stories.  When Old Man I realizes that Molina does not exist and that he is himself is Daniel (cf. above), the implied reader concludes that he is referring to the older Daniel of the country road story (2b); but in fact he is referring to the young Daniel of 2a – a clear case of narrative deception. By the same token the country road story (2a) reveals itself as temporally preceding the introductory stairwell story (1a) – or would do so if chronological reconstruction of the stories were not defeated by the fantastical coexistence of the film’s various spatiotemporal and ontological dimensions.  An explanation that retrospectively confirms the foregoing reconstruction of the stories’ fantasy elements, which appear now as genuine components of unreal incident-hells.

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boy. After this revelation, the two old men give their younger companions a red booklet (cf. above) and in the same moment die. Despite being warned not to use the elevator, the young man of Plotline I does so and finds a red uniform there (1b); likewise, Daniel gets into the police car he has been warned to avoid (2b) and finds there a small valise containing not only Molina’s apparel (1a) but also the pistol with which he had shot at the other man’s brother in the stairwell. In the red booklet he finds a photograph of the two brothers of Plotline I (1a), while the other young man finds a wedding photo that refers to the memories of the old lady in the frame story. Both men change their clothes; Daniel shaves his hair and beard off and is henceforth identical with the policeman of the first story (2b = 1a); the other man (Karl) dons the uniform. In hindsight it becomes clear that the transformations the two young men undergo take them back to hell they had been through once. For they, like the others, are caught in a narrative loop whose scenes are arranged in a forkingpath structure where the police car and elevator are the entrance portals to each one’s particular hell. Had they chosen a different path, they might have remained in a real world. A further twist of the Möbius strip sketches the positive and negative versions of this eventuality (01:29:47– 01:31:36). First single images separated by black frames, and presented like film negatives from left to right, seem to indicate what the aged Daniel in the stairwell described as the ‘real you’ and ‘real me’. They begin where Plotline II starts, on the country road (2a) and focus on the boy Daniel, now growing up, graduating from school, falling in love, joining the police force (1a), and living happily with his family (2a ¦1a). This is followed by a shot of his mother quarreling with her lover (2a), and a sequence presented in reverse order, from right to left, showing the lover’s decadence and final bloody suicide in a bathtub. After two shots of the young men in the police car and elevator (1b/2b), the alternative version of the story (alternative both stylistically and plotwise) is taken up again: the mortally injured brother of Plotline I (1a) survives, his brother undergoes therapy, studies at university, falls in love, and marries. An intercut shows the police officer again (1a), then pans from right to left, signaling again the negative version of the story. The officer reappears with the two brothers, who are just leaving the police station; he surprises his wife with a lover, whom he kills, and is consequently sent to prison; cut to him as the old man of the first story at the same place, on his release (1a ¦1b, 01:32:52); cut to the young man of Plotline I in the elevator (1b); cut to the police officer in the car (2b). The epilogue (01:33:29 – 01:36:29) takes up the wedding sequence from the frame story. The young man is now a lift-boy taking a newlywed couple up to their room in the hotel. When they arrive at the floor where they are staying,

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he releases a wasp that stings the bridegroom: yet another incident launching the Möbius strip into infinity. Cut to a rail track along which a train travels, visualizing the verbal memories of the old man on the country road (2b); cut to the water of the lagoon (on which the raft drifted for 35 years); cut to the country road, and – completing this series of intradiegetic résumés – to the stairwell. This is followed by a reprise of the sequence in the hotel and finally of the old lady on the escalator, who holds the red booklet in her uplifted hand. The film ends in this way with an aporetic mise en abyme, for everything it shows is already contained in that red book and the end points back to the beginning. The stories can begin again, their multiple dimensions extending into eternity. All three films discussed here combine the three strategies of perturbatory narration outlined in the Introduction. The films themselves may not be well known, but they demonstrate the innovative, experimental qualities of contemporary Mexican cinema. Their complex structures and dynamics can be described and analyzed with the narratological tools we have developed¹⁸ – which does not, of course, preclude the advent of new filmic structures that may call for modifications to our perturbatory narrative principle.

Filmography El agujero negro del sol. Directed by Julio Quezada Orozco. 2002. Mexico: Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía. Accessed 15 April 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= xV5mX0bVNl0. El incidente. Directed by Isaac Ezban. 2014. Mexico: Zima Entertainment, 2016. DVD. Juegos nocturnos. Directed by Pablo Gómez Sáenz Ribot. 1992. Mexico. Accessed 25 May 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJGbqH2iMlo.

Bibliography Cortázar, Julio. 1994. “La noche boca arriba” and “Continuidad de los parques”. In Cuentos completos, vol I, 386 – 392 and 291 – 292. Madrid: Alfaguara. Genette, Gérard. 1972. “Discours du récit.” In Figures III, 67 – 282. Paris: Seuil. Genette, Gérard. 2004. Métalepse. De la figure à la fiction. Paris: Seuil. Mahler, Andreas. 2011. “Narrative Vexiertexte. Paradigmatisches Erzählen als Schreiben ohne Ende”. DVjs 85/3:393 – 410. McHale, Brian. 1987. Postmodernist Fiction. New York and London: Methuen.

 The many damning critiques of Isaac Ezban’s film demonstrate a profound ignorance of narratology: cf. e. g. http://cinescopia.com/el-incidente-una-insufrible-y-surrealista-mentira-mex icana/2015/09/ (17.08. 2016)

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Meyer-Minnemann, Klaus, and Schlickers, Sabine. 2007. “Les procédés de mise en abyme et de pseudo-diégèse: Beatus Ille d’Antonio Muñoz Molina.” In Théorie du récit. L′apport de la recherche allemande, edited by John Pier, 303 – 316. Paris: Septentrion. Meyer-Minnemann, Klaus, and Schlickers, Sabine. 2010. “La mise en abyme en narratologie.” In Narratologies contemporaines: nouveaux paradigmes pour la théorie et l′analyse du récit, edited by John Pier and Phillipp Roussin, 91 – 109. Lyon: Éditions des Archives Contemporains de l′ENS. Schlickers, Sabine. 2005. “Inversions, transgressions, paradoxes et bizarreries: la métalepse dans les littératures espagnole et française.” In Métalepses. Entorses au pacte de la représentation, edited by John Pier and Jean-Marie Schaeffer, 151 – 166. Paris: Éditions de l′École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Schlickers, Sabine. 2009. “Focalization, Ocularization and Auricularization in Film and Literature.” In Point of View, Perspective, and Focalization, edited by Peter Hühn, Wolf Schmid and Jörg Schönert, vol. 17:243 – 258. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Unamuno, Miguel de. 2005 [1914/1935]. Niebla. Madrid: Cátedra (LH 154).

Jörg Türschmann

Perturbatory Revocation: The Subtractive Cinema of Lisandro Alonso, Bruno Dumont and Béla Tarr 1 Medium-specific wordlessness Antony Fiant prefaces his book Pour un cinéma soustractif (2014) with a quotation from Georg Lukács’ early essay “Thoughts on an Aesthetic of the Cinema”: The revocation of the word and, with it, of memory, of duty and of faithfulness to oneself and to the idea of one’s own selfhood, makes everything, if the non-verbal develops into a totality, light, sprightly and quickened, frivolous and terpsichorean. That which is of importance to the portrayed events is and must be expressed exclusively through occurrences and gestures; any appeal to the word is a downfall out of this world, a demolishing of its essential value. […] in the ‘cinema’ the ‘how’ of events has a power that dominates everything else (Lukács 2004, 14; emphasis original).¹

Lukács uses the German term Entziehung (revocation), and explains this as meaning that the ‘non-verbal’ cinematic art of the time was one of gestures and deeds alone, without words. The ‘revocation of the word’ was the distinctive feature of this new artistic world, where how events were presented ‒ rather than what was presented ‒ was all-important. More than a century separates Lukács’ “Thoughts” from Fiant’s application of them to a cinema that must, therefore, have something timeless about it ‒ at the very least in its independence from the technical history of the moving picture. For if Lukács sees the ‘wordlessness’ of silent films as no deficit, other advances in cinematographic technology might also be accidental to the core values of cinema. Far from touching its essence, they may merely distract from it.

 Fiant gives the French translation, on which the English version quoted here is based, as being from the first edition of Lukács’ essay (1911), but it is in fact from the 1913 version. The original German reads: “Die Entziehung des Wortes und mit ihm die des Gedächtnisses, der Pflicht und der Treue gegen sich selbst und gegen die Idee der eigenen Selbstheit macht, wenn das Wortlose sich zur Totalität rundet, alles leicht, beschwingt und beflügelt, frivol und tänzerisch. Was an den dargestellten Ereignissen von Belang ist, muss durch Geschehnisse und Gebärden ausgedrückt werden: jedes Appellieren an das Wort ist ein Herausfallen aus dieser Welt, ein Zertrümmern ihres wesentlichen Wertes. […] im Kino hat das ‘Wie’ eine alles andere beherrschende Kraft” (Lukács, 1988, 237, 240). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110566574-015

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The post-2000 cinema that Fiant calls ‘subtractive’ differs vastly in quality of image resolution, format, color and sound from the silent movies of the 1910s; but the underlying power of the medium to reproduce the visual appearance of pre-filmic physical and bodily activity remains unquestionably its key characteristic. Wordless cinema, in this sense, reminds one of the way ‘movies’ were initially perceived; a frame of mind, however, that cannot be taken for granted today. To relate to the experiences of early cinemagoers, modern audiences must make them their own. A historical approach might play intellectually with the fascination of movement and visual surfaces, but it would contradict the core phenomenon. Which leaves us with the question whether today’s audiences can discover subtractive cinema as a new experience ‒ after all, the films that fall under this label run counter to all conventional expectations. However, the viewer who remains unperturbed by initial frustrations and keeps alive a spark of hope in the incursion of meaning may be rewarded by the knowledge that the quest for sense is endless. The ongoing withdrawal of meaning-bearing elements amounts to a tantalizing play of promises on the brink of never realized fulfillment ‒ in Schlickers and Toro’s terminology a perturbing deception, but one of a specific kind. For in the strict spatiotemporal continuity of its narrative it accords with the doxa; but its long-drawn-out shots, for example, stretch time in such a way as to confound the distinction between the extratextual reality of documentary and the diegetic reality of fiction. The storyteller’s promise is unmasked as a deception and the events of the story as banalities. Disappointment is inevitable. Overladen with images and deprived of words, the presentation is repeatedly interrupted with sudden outbursts of violence ‒ somatic shocks that for Schlickers and Toro intensify its perturbing impact without qualifying as a distinctive form of perturbatory narration. This differentiated perspective is applicable to the specific deception of subtractive cinema; for, renewing the promise of a turn in the story, the unexpected outbursts of violence renew the disappointment of that promise’s non-fulfillment. But at the same time these moments of violence associate naturally with motifs such as overly clear images of landscape, objects and fantastical, mythical figures whose metaphysical aura constitutes a puzzling play on everyday phenomena ‒ albeit without generating empuzzlement in Schlickers and Toro’s sense of a block to narrative resolution, but rather as representing an aesthetic end, a reward in itself. For, to a patient cinema audience, the alternating images of violence and banality offer moments of aesthetic contemplation all the more intense for their unexpected usurpation of the drama of conflict and resolution.

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In every violent image the thesis of teleological energy enacts its own antithesis of aesthetic entropy.

2 Narrating the pretext Formal impact and its counterpart in narrative subordination derive from revocation of the word. Far from the temporal dimension of the moving picture serving here to facilitate a causal linking of narrative moments, these serve as a pretext for changing the (purely external) line of encounter with the filmic motifs. Rather than being structured by the narration, space and time take on a force and function of their own ‒ not as immediately experiential in their own right, for they are, of course, defined in the work of framing and editing. Strictly speaking, in subtractive cinema space is a frame, time the duration between two cuts. This does not, however, achieve a division between extratextual and diegetic reality. On the contrary, the very exposure of the medium separates it from what is mediated (and vice versa), foregrounding the raw objectivity of pre-filmic visual and auditory motifs. Their fictive deficiency must inevitably disappoint the viewer who ‒ in a movie not billed as a documentary ‒ looks persistently for a story. To say that subtractive cinema is all about the shot, the timed image or image-time is enough to reveal the philosophical pedigree of the concept in Gilles Deleuze’s (1989) philosophy of image and film. Not that this implies an experimental or abstract approach that prescinds from plot or character. On the contrary, Lukács already emphasized the physicality of the silent film in his early essay: “The ‘cinema’ only depicts action, but not souls, and what happens to them, is merely event, but not fate [sic]” (Lukács 2004, 14). To speak of a story, then, is to speak of events; action is event, its origin not raison d’être but appearance, flow, experientiality. Concretely: although a film like Jauja depicts broad landscapes, Lisandro Alonso chose 35 mm film and Academy ratio ‒ a format dating from around 1930 that narrows down the picture. All this supports the thesis that the images remain in a realm of their own without wanting to tell a story. Or as the director, speaking to the Standard at the 2014 Viennale, said: “My feelings tell me that the more panoramic you go, the more narrative you’ll become.” The experience of purely filmic appearances is enhanced by the subordination of causal argument to slow contemplation derived from stretched images and unusual angles ‒ the film’s semiotic hallmark. Attention shifts, for form is here absence of form ‒ its familiar transparency perceptible only through de-au-

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tomatization. The deprivation mode of subtractive cinema is, then, an answer to conventions of editing and narration. The immanence and coherence of style, plot and character typical of narrative film give way to a direct visual appeal that dispenses with the metaleptic look into the camera or commentary for the viewer that are the most common means of breaking the illusion. Sound is reduced to ancillary noise, the uncoded acoustic of the visual motif. The duration of a visual event is that of the shot; hence many shots have their own theme, however marginal. Sound, on the other hand, goes its own way. A diegetic sound-source off-camera is audible until it fades, whether visible or not, whether in the diegetic on or off, its beginning and end determined by its underlying nature irrespective of frame or angle of shot. But where audibility is located within the frame, sound off-camera will cease to be audible ‒ and hence to exist. What Lukács called “the ‘how’ of events” is an implicit reference to the recording apparatus. Everything else, from ordering and connections to conditions and publicity is subservient to the immediate presence of moving picture and sound. Character motivation, the objectives of action, the tension of final rescue may all go by the board; psychology, emotion and explanation, though not entirely annulled, may be unrelated to the filmic composition. An audience with a conventional background will be disoriented and seek confusedly for sense in the long, juxtaposed images of people, animals and things. Virtually unsustained by reason or intradiegetic reference, these composite images are purely cognitive. That success does not depend solely on the story, but on its presentation and ending, is evident from Jauja. Viggo Mortensen, the main actor (who himself lived as a child in Argentina), plays a Danish land surveyor in the lonely south of that country in 1882, whose daughter has run off with one of the soldiers whose task is to protect him from the native tribespeople. In Captain Fantastic Mortensen again plays a father ‒ this time in the North American outback ‒ who is on his way with his children to bury his wife in New Mexico. Playing possibly on Jauja, as well as on his own biography, in the final scene Mortensen-alias-Ben drinks mate tea. Hence the story is similar, but unlike Jauja its conciliatory end elicited a strong public echo. Presentation and ending, one sees, are decisive. Explicitly cited in the title of the second film, the fantastic is the “wondrous mistake”, as the protagonist puts it toward the end of the film, of wanting to live in the wilderness ‒ a failed Utopia, the project of an unsustainable future. Not despite its failure but because of its ending a biography so freed from the pressures of success provides a satisfactory narrative conclusion. In this sense Captain Fantastic’s fantasies find an adequate answer in the anecdotes, moral and emotional fabric, and outcome of the plot. The fantastical aspect of subtractive

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cinema, on the other hand, is a matter of presentational style, perturbing for the audience because it grants neither answer nor remission of the deceptive process; for, embodied in the recurrent images of violence and concomitant myths and riddles is a promise of narrative that invariably dissolves into self-sufficient poetry.

3 The potential of diegesis The poetic reduction to the image, the visual motif, expresses a narrative process that dispenses with the common construction of a model world in apparent analogy to reality, and exploits the auto-reflexive potential of that withdrawal. Yet the theoretical concept of diegesis applies, astonishingly enough, more intimately than usual to such subtraction, which – albeit otherwise than in the stylistic patterns of the 1920s avant-garde, 1960s nouveau cinéma, or Bressonesque asceticism – invites the viewer to medial auto-reflection. The world of film is generally understood, with Etienne Souriau, as a per se infinite universe reduced to a segment by its particular fiction. In this context Souriau defines diegesis as “everything conceived as truly happening in the filmic fiction, and all that it implies” (Souriau 1951, 240). The concept of diegesis, in other words, views the imaginary screen-world as a sort of mental reconstruction. As such it bears a certain resemblance to the Formalist/Neoformalist notion of fabula, while being more comprehensive, inasmuch as it takes account not only of plot as a “chronological, cause-and-effect chain of events occurring within a given duration and a spatial field” (Bordwell 1985, 49), but also of the possible qualities of the narrated world (Kessler 1997, 137). That the diegesis can unfold its boundless potential is closely linked to the capacity of visual motifs to develop in apparent autonomy from the act of their creation. Not even the possibilities of subtractive cinema, however, are in this respect endless: it, too, must conform to the spatiotemporal limits of frame and shot. This is what Lisandro Alonso meant when he defined the limits of the fictional diegesis as the edges of the frame. Explaining his first full-length film, La Libertad, he observed that although the main character, a lumberjack, was portrayed by a lay actor going about his real-life daily tasks, the film was not a documentary, because rather than the camera following the movements of the actor, the actor’s movements played to the camera frame. The film’s documentary quality, however, is undeniable, its long-drawn-out images providing nothing new in terms of either story or information. The specific property of film as a medium is its diegetic potential, and subtractive cinema comes in this respect close to fulfilling Souriau’s definition. For

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what are the possible qualities of the narrated world of which Kessler speaks (cf. above)? Christian Metz’s formulation of the cinematic illusion, “l’impression de réalité” (Metz 1977, 123), aims to distance film from naïve mimetic realism on the one hand and the untrammeled imagination of the viewer on the other. And it is precisely in this intermediate sense that Lukács defines film as fantastic, because it shows “a life without presence”: ‘Everything is possible’: that is the world view of the ‘cinema’, and because its technique in every individual moment expresses the absolute (if only empirical) of this moment [sic], the validity of ‘possibility’ as a category juxtaposed to ‘reality’ is nullified; both categories are equated, they become an identity (Lukács 2004, 13).

Lukács’ observation on the poetic quality of cinema as the would-be ideal medium of early nineteenth Romanticism suggests its affinity to the concept of the symbolic, defined by Goethe as the movement from the particular to the general: the “vital, revelatory moment of inexplorability, […] the nature of poetry” (Goethe 1982, 471). In this metaphysical sense, every filmic moment and motif is symbolic. Thus Bordwell writes: I take narration to be the process by which the film prompts the viewer to construct the ongoing fabula on the basis of syuzhet organization and stylistic patterning. This is, we might say, the experiential logic of understanding a film’s narrative, the equivalent of the tourist’s guided path through a building (Bordwell 2007, 14).

The metaphor of the tourist’s path is appropriate, given the way so many of Alonso’s principal characters travel wide landscapes (Liverpool) or cross buildings (Fantasma). But the path seems frequently unmapped: it must be sought, or it becomes, once embarked upon, an experience without prognosis. The “experiential logic of understanding a film’s narrative” is in this sense already inscribed in the protagonist’s quest and/or pathway itself. And it is this inscription that harbors the viewer’s perturbation, for it is an expression of diegetic potential. The “elemental form of communication” is the poetic symbolism of the film “in a single step”. This is not just a matter of the contrast between word and image, literature and film, but also of the difference between art and non-art. All art strives stylistically to show (Wuss 1993, 79 – 82); subtractive cinema, as a form of arthouse cinema, follows the strategy of art cinema narration summarized by Bordwell (1985) on the basis of Neoformalism as follows (Harvard University n. d.):

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Classical narration

Art cinema narration

Single protagonist

Single and multiple protagonists

Driven by desire

Goal bereft

Built on conflict

Boundary situation stories

Linear chain of cause and effect

Episodic and elliptical

Clear and complete motivation

Ambiguous or unclear motivation

Omniscient narration

Restricted narration

Strong sense of closure

Open endings

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In two respects especially, subtractive cinema follows the pattern of art cinema narration: “Stylistic system creates patterns distinct from the demands of the syuzhet system. And: Representational meaning is subordinated to the profiling of a sheer perceptual order” (Harvard University n. d.). Screen sequences seem left to their own devices; only the decision to let the camera record them without interruption establishes the “sheer perceptual order” as perturbing. The camera seems to have a life of its own; but what Panofsky (1920) called its Kunstwollen (will-to-art) is not overtly perceptible. Perturbing is rather the nagging uncertainty as to whether the protracted images are a stroke of artistic genius or of artless naivety; for there is no contextual mise en scène here to speak of. To show is not only to make perceptible, it is to “make perceive” (Wuss 1993, 80): it is an ‘I want you to see’, the force of whose authorial will, however, remains insecure. Many ‘subtractive’ films use a static camera, which – in contrast to Karl Freund’s camera technique of the 1920s – seems not so much autonomous as rooted to the spot. Subtractive cinema is counter-anecdotal; style is everything; the static camera embodies unbroken fascination for all it records, be it people, landscape, or things – which is why style immediately invokes the potential of diegesis (in the sense of the universe of possible stories) without dallying with any particular storyline or story. The protagonists of subtractive cinema are never in a hurry to arrive, not only because art cinema narration knows no dramaturgical closure – for initially even films like Liverpool and Jauja have an ostensible plot and goal; but these are a mere pretext for the reversal from the promise of event logic to diegesis. The recourse to the potential of diegesis takes place in the narratio through the stylistic patterns of long-drawn-out shots and static camera mentioned above. In the purest of zero ocularizations these neither go in heteronomous pursuit of the moving object nor autonomously pursue objectives of their own.

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4 Patterns of action Subtractive cinema foregrounds the immediate quality of the moving picture. A shot lasts as long as it needs in order to adequately show an action – which occurs when internal logic makes the action into an event by the very act of showing it, of “making perceive” (Wuss 1993, 80). For an event need not always be over before the camera moves on: style may dictate that an action be shown for just as long as it needs to be understood on its own – a form of intrinsic explanation that ends again and again in the ineffable fascination and poetry of ‘reality’ in its outward, bodily manifestation. In this way the actions remain intact, sheltered by the limits of the camera, whether frame or duration of shot. The diegesis unfolds its full potential in the unfathomable depth of that frame, banishing the threat of fabula. This appropriately suggests an affinity to the early cinema of monstration (Gaudreault 1987). But the difference here is the perturbing unpredictability of the change from one clearly bounded image to another; for the seeming randomness of the image sequences condemns the viewer to an enervating circling around hypotheses, helplessly exposed to the impact of unpredicted change. What makes this cinema worthwhile is what Roland Barthes, speaking of literature, called l’effet de réel (Barthes 1968). Siegfried Kracauer dwelt similarly on what he called “small random moments”, especially of topography and the everyday physiognomy of the local: In feature films these small units are elements of plots free to range over all orbits imaginable. […] Street and faces, then, open up a dimension much wider than that of the plots they sustain. […] Note that Auerbach’s casual reference to ‘daily life’ offers an important clue. The small random moments which concern things common to you and me and the rest of mankind can indeed be said to constitute the dimension of everyday life, this matrix of all other modes of reality (Kracauer 1960, 303 – 304).

Again this is a matter of the particular which, in a single unmediated step, evokes the general. Lukács, who has already been quoted on the poetry of the recorded instant, explicitly affirms the singular authenticity to life of the cinematic medium, with its radical indifference and lack of discrimination toward the phenomena it shows: The world of ‘cinema’ is a life without background and perspective, without difference of weights and qualities. For only presence gives things fate and gravity, light and levity: it is a life without measure and order, without essence and value, a life without soul, of pure superficiality (Lukács 2004, 13).

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Whether through effet de réel, ‘small random moments’ or ‘life without background’, many films are here accorded an intentional lack of intent. When a bird flies across the screen or the leaves of a tree flutter in the wind, there is poetic potential in play. The ultimate explanation is metaphysical, for behind the phenomena an unknown underlying force may be divined, be it God, fate, chance or predestination. Simultaneously evoking and revoking meaning, such situations and moments serve in the narrative context as pre-significant stimuli.

5 Body language With Fiant, the contingency of subtractive cinema can, however, be seen not as chance but as possibility. L’effet de réel adequately explains the mesmeric effect of the camera on landscapes, persons, and animals. What counts is not the chance incidence of details; the motifs are central and of great weight. An empty landscape, a lonely figure, wind – all protagonists are on an equal footing. Full of promise they embody – without immediately enacting it – the potential of diegesis, elevating the instantaneous changeability of frame and shot to a principle of hope or threat. The situation of permanent annunciation holds its audience in a state of frustration or high alarm – both conditions conducive to shock, yet shock seldom comes. In the rare cases when violence dominates the scene, the audience, initially unprepared and unprotected, is subjected to it, as to the many other extended images of everyday affairs, until it becomes an unendurable impression de réalité whose very persistence questions the credibility of what it shows. In its unyielding immobility, the static camera endows trivial moment and spectacular event with equal weight. Repeated intrusions into the contemplation of an otherwise indifferent scenery exacerbate the forlorn hope (and with it the perturbing deception) of an audience for a story whose logic might justify the creative energy invested in it as an artwork, to say nothing of their own patience. Such insistent images of violence, however, presented with remorseless indifference among all the other images, enhance the sense that this is a poetic end in itself. Béla Tarr’s seven-and-a-half-hour film Sátántangó exemplifies this state of affairs. Abstractly structured like a tango, its twelve parts each reveal a chronological movement back and forth. Focusing on the part that tells the tale of the girl Estike, and specifically on the few prolonged shots in which she torments a cat to death, one can confidently state that – at least on a first viewing and without drawing on extra-filmic information – the outcome of the event is by no means certain. The viewer does not even know whether the commonplace images of a girl in need of protection and a sweet little cat will not find their pre-

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dictably therapeutic end in a ‘child with soft toy’ cliché. Admittedly, the blackand-white pictures of a desolate setting have a dystopic flavor, but this does not per se preclude moments of happiness. The disturbing factor is the quasi-mechanical ineluctability of the proceedings, their sense of a task the girl is must fulfill. Morally she is a psychopath, yet she systematically probes – diegetically rather than narratively – the potential of her world, leaving no room for flight into psychological or social platitudes. Sátántangó can readily be interpreted as an allegory of post-Communist Hungary, an eloquent example of Deleuze’s paradoxical historical siting of an ahistorical snapshot in the post-WW2 era, with its abandonment of certainties, ideals and moral principles. In place of history, Fiant sees time pure and simple: “le temps substitue l’histoire” (Fiant 2014, 15). Here the unadulterated image expresses the poetry of the mundane moment, or as Alonso has it: “Time dictates how you see the moment” (Matheou 2010, 293). Similarly, for Lukács, “Temporality and flow [sic] of the ‘cinema’ is movement in itself, the [sic] eternal transience, the never-resting change of things” (Lukács 2004, 13). Finally, Fiant stresses with Deleuze that metaphor has no role to play in a world of “pure images”, whose figures do not react to situations. Nevertheless, Fiant also mentions the extra-filmic references of subtractive cinema: the poverty and social marginalization of its characters, the hopelessness of their situation, and the violence to which they tend. Paradoxically, history also enters the ahistorical picture. Chantal Akermann portrays the Shoah, Béla Tarr and Wang Bing Communism in Hungary and China respectively, Pedro Costa Salazar’s dictatorship in Portugal, and Tariq Teguia the fraught situation in Algeria. One might be tempted to see subtractive cinema as a rerun of the French poetic realism of the 1930s, were it not for the baleful premonition of war that the films of Marcel Carné, Julien Duvivier, Jean Renoir and others contained – an aspect, however, that can only be read metaphorically from those precisely staged stories with their not infrequent sweetly melancholic endings, in contrast to which the dystopias of subtractive cinema leave a rough and unsettling impression of the encounter between cinematic apparatus and pre-filmic motif. To this the cast in these latter films – often lay actors – makes a not inconsiderable contribution. In their unhurried way, they raise the value of every detail, however marginal, to the rank of equal player, and remain, too, in every situation unclear as to their aims and orientation. Zero-ocularization combines here with zero-focalization, for even when an actor holds center picture the camera is equally interested in the periphery. Subtractive cinema even at times allows its protagonists to make fun of it in their body language, as one of the opening sequences of Alonso’s Jauja shows, where the land surveyor gazes out to sea while in the foreground a soldier sitting

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in the water masturbates. The sheer duration of the image, with its combination of motifs, has a comic effect. Or in Bruno Dumont’s highly successful TV crime series P’tit Quinquin (2014), where the director of La vie de Jésus (1997) uses the flatlands between land and sea, the Boulonnais, as the setting for a homicide investigation. The headless corpse of a woman is found inside the cadaver of a cow, in another cow the remains of a second corpse, her lover. This Mannerist narrative serves merely as a pretext for the entrance of a number of strangely deformed figures, lay actors to a man: first and foremost P’tit Quinquin himself, with his hare-lip, and Commandant van der Weyden, who in babbling tones and local brogue gives a running commentary on the negligible progress of his investigation. Here too, in a different sense, the physical presence of the actors is crucial: the gawky movements, the nervous blink that turns the Commandant’s appearances into the absurd dance of a divine simpleton against the incestuous backdrop of his companions – all this is essential to the impact of Dumont’s grotesque. In this metaphysical space the audience is rewarded for its patience in waiting for a story. The question is whether the grotesque proffered in its stead does not itself revoke the perturbation. To subsume subtractive cinema into the category of perturbatory narration only makes sense if its profound “inner disturbance” (cf. the Introduction) is maintained. Conversely, it is inappropriate to assume enduring disturbance in something that cannot be delimited from the “doxa of narration” or from the poetic grotesque. The perturbation of disappointment in the promise of fictional coherence can only be meaningful in subtractive cinema as part of an inherently filmic dialectic.

6 Seeking a motif Underlying the affinities between the films of subtractive cinema is the promise of a story, a narrative substrate. In the apocalyptic work Sátántangó the villagers wait for the return of a charismatic foreman whom they believe dead; in Jauja a father goes in quest of his eloped daughter; in the TV series P’tit Quinquin a serial killer is sought. Always it is a matter of waiting or seeking: it is this that holds the image sequences together and the audience in their seats. But waiting and seeking are also meant metafictionally, for the moment of arrival is often projected into a distant future, or film characters and viewers seek together for some meaning in what they are about. The widespread self-referentiality of the narrative structures is succinctly revealed in the concept of the McGuffin, explicated by Alfred Hitchcock (for François Truffaut’s benefit) in the famous railcar scene:

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It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men in a train. One man says “What’s that package up there in the baggage rack?”, and the other answers “Oh, that’s a McGuffin”. The first one asks “What’s a McGuffin?”. “Well”, the other man says, “It’s an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands”. The first man says “But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands”, and the other one answers “Well, then that’s no McGuffin!”. So you see, a McGuffin is nothing at all (Truffaut 1984, 138).

A McGuffin is, then, a pursuit of clues whose pointlessness becomes apparent (Tröhler 2012, 39), a paradox – albeit not in the insoluble sense of perturbing paradoxical narration. For to function, the McGuffin must remain unrecognized; once discovered, it is no longer a McGuffin. The moment of insight that it is a McGuffin and the moment in which the McGuffin works are by definition separate. To introduce awareness into this process is to destroy the process; but that destruction is its redemption, for the awareness is that one has fallen for an illusion. Many examples of subtractive cinema, however, ignore this paradox, as if the McGuffin could be revealed as such and yet still work as if nothing had happened. In fact, however, the prolonged images retard the flow of events until the goal is virtually forgotten. Even if the protagonist’s quest and purpose remains at the back of one’s mind, it is no longer important in view of the cascade of details, with its remorseless effet de reel filling the foreground and absorbing every fiber of attention. Subtractive cinema continuously plays the two sides of cinema – picture and sound, poetic end-in-itself and subservient narrative – off against each other. Far from being paradoxical, this is a play with the conventions of film’s major forms, documentary and fiction. What the audience experiences is the genesis of a motif – that of the quest for meaning on every level the cinema can offer, from a tale told by the players to a cognitive principle governing the viewer. As the halting progress of the tale, instead of entertaining, draws attention to itself, so it transmutes into a governing principle, raising the quest for meaning to the rank of a leitmotif. Or as Tröhler puts it: This pursuit of clues supports a narratively and structurally effective heuristic principle (whether syntagmatic or paradigmatic) manifest on the surface as an aesthetic-sensual complex. As well as the “pointed perceptions” (Krämer) demanded of all trackers […], this requires for its transformation into a motif not only the scent itself as the iterated points of a line, but a specific level of ostensibility and noticeability that arises from perturbation of the norm, be this by deviation, transgression, wild-goose chase, or intentional deception, or at least by unfamiliar encounter: a perturbation that questions the existing order – whether of the world, of knowledge, of the genre, or of aesthetics […] (Tröhler 2012, 34– 35; original emphasis).

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The process of motif formation is both filmic and meta-filmic. In the case of the pursuit of clues it coincides with the pre-filmic motifs, for when a film overtly foregrounds that chase it at the same time shows how the audience should read the clues. And although the quarry remains somewhere in play, the hunt itself, along with the self-oblivion of the trackers, assumes a perturbingly idiosyncratic predominance. For where the clues do not lead to a solution of the puzzle, the principle of their pursuit and interpretation (whether intuitive or rational) is highlighted. […] Its very prominence as disturbance or transgression constitutes it as a motif – but as one whose mise en abîme [sic] points up the underlying heuristic activities of recognizing and deciphering motifs (Tröhler 2012, 35 – 36; original emphasis).

The prominence of the motif in subtractive cinema also derives ex negativo on the one hand from the revocation of the bestowal of meaning and on the other from the avoidance of the plethora of information that commonly sets the audience off on their tracking pursuits. The statement made earlier that the shots amalgamate into an elliptic image-like series indicates the existence of what in the broadest sense is a syntactic principle: the repetitive pre-filmic motif of reading the clues: Repetition and variation imply a moment of recognition and a concomitant shift in the figuration of thought, the formulation of thing, image, sound. A basic condition is the creation of a chain at whose every link – every reappearance of the motif – the formula undergoes a new activation, a new and disturbing enactment, as it emerges from the audiovisual flow […] (Tröhler 2012, 37– 38).

However, apart from the images of violence and death (both a form of closure), all others seem equally important. The order of their concatenation, in Lukács’ sense, is indifferent, as is the way in which it is effected. Thus in Alonso’s films, for example, the deciphering of clues is not only an ongoing motif, it is embodied to such an extent in the figures, in monstrously banal details and context-free images, that it threatens to become meaningless, and the audience colludes in the practice as the only available refuge from nothingness. For Trentini the overriding motif of subtractive cinema is its enduring promise of sense and context, aesthetically linked to the technique of the static camera:

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While for lack of mediation the ellipsis² precludes unification, it at the same time renders it probable by structuring the discrete parts of the work. Faced with an ellipsis, the viewer has a sense of sublimity combined with the desire to re-embark on the task of unification – a desire rewarded by the sublimity of failure and the pleasure of a new beginning (Trentini 2007, 51; from the German of JT).

The violent images of animal and human death establish their own prominence. They are miniatures, a mise en abyme of the quest of protagonist and audience for sense, and they raise that quest into a pre-filmic motif. For in subtractive cinema physicality, corporeality is the ne plus ultra of the filmic image; via the motif of reading the clues and its echo in the viewer, it underlies the sequences dedicated to the opening and dismemberment of human and animal corpses. When in Alonso’s Los muertos a goat is disemboweled, or in Dumont’s series little Quinquin’s clique peruse the human remnants enshrined in the cows’ cadavers, or when the girl Estike in Sátántangó slaughters her cat, the presentation of violence is an innocent, wholly indifferent act. It is as if these beings were gods, sublimely childlike in the creativity with which they dismember their toys: They destroy to discover what these things look like inside, how they function. “To find out how it works”, Freud taught, is a post factum explanation of the exploratory drive. Technical fascination is not the source. What, then, is? Sadism pure and simple, the scandalous sadism of the child, an open secret; and the angst of finding something ominous in the search (Hartwig 1986, 54– 55).

The closure of violence is destruction: a destruction that immediately opens into the possibility of new violence – the threat of the next shot that could displace the frame into the off-camera and unveil the next monstrous act. The staring bovine cavities pre-filmically anticipate the closing cut – if, indeed, it comes; for the cut is generally delayed, yielding only promise and expectation of further insights destined to remain superficial. The entrails of the slaughtered goat in Los Muertos, the fantastic auguries associated with the inexplicable appearance of an Irish wolfhound and an elderly sibyl accompanying Jauja in his search for his daughter through the myth-riddled land of Patagonia – these provide clues, not oracles, not solutions. The pursuit of a trail whose pointlessness is accepted gives the off-camera far greater impact and promise than it would have in an editing style whose shot transitions were based on the demands of spatial continuity.

 “L’ellipse est une absence de liaison entre deux interprétations d’une même œuvre” (Trentini, n.p.).

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With its strategy of deprivation and clue-tracking, subtractive cinema is a box-office killer. It might seem like the irony of the enterprise that its empty images should demonstrate their efficacy in vacant rows of seats; for the very fact that scarcely anyone wants to expose themselves to it proves the artistic value and success of this undertaking, where the loneliness of the protagonist on the windswept plains finds its brilliant counterpart in the lonesome viewer in the empty theater. On the other hand this can hardly be a sign of public acclaim; moreover, in the absence of anyone to be perturbed, the concept of perturbatory narration is redundant. Yet, when all is said and done, artistic communication cannot seek to repel its recipients. If it aspires to public space, subtractive cinema must attract its public, however sparse. Conversely, every viewer that takes up the challenge, searches motifs for clues, and willingly rides the switchback of deception and disillusionment, raises perturbatory narration to a mode of filmic communication and its narratological concept to a meaningful descriptive tool for subtractive cinema.

Filmography Captain Fantastic. Directed by Matt Ross. 2016. USA: Universum, 2016. DVD. Fantasma. Directed by Lisandro Alonso. 2006. Argentine: Coffret Lisandro Alonso. Arcades Vidéo, 2010. DVD. Jauja. Directed by Lisandro Alonso. 2014. Argentine: Blaq Out, 2015. DVD. La libertad. Directed by Lisandro Alonso. 2001. Argentine: Coffret Lisandro Alonso. Arcades Vidéo, 2010. DVD. La vie de Jésus. Directed by Bruno Dumont. 1997. France: Eureka, 2008. Liverpool. Directed by Lisandro Alonso. 2008. Argentine: Coffret Lisandro Alonso. Arcades Vidéo, 2010. DVD. Los muertos. Directed by Lisandro Alonso. 2004. Argentine: Coffret Lisandro Alonso. Arcades Vidéo, 2010. DVD. P’tit Quinquin. Directed by Bruno Dumont. 2014. France: Blaq Out, 2014. DVD. Sátántangó. Directed by Béla Tarr. 1994. Hungary, Germany, Switzerland: Curzon Artificial Eye, 2006. DVD.

Bibliography Barthes, Roland. 1968. “L’effet de réel.” In Communications 11,1:84 – 89. Also: http://www. persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/comm_0588 - 8018_1968_num_11_1_1158. Bordwell, David. 1985. Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Bordwell, David. 2007. Poetics of Cinema. New York: Routledge. Deleuze, Gilles. 1989. Cinema 2. The Time-Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Fiant, Antony. 2014. Pour un cinéma soustractif contemporain. Saint-Denis: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes. Gaudreault, André. 1987. “Narration and Monstration in the Cinema.” Journal of Film and Video 39,2:29 – 36. Also: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20687768. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. 1982. Werke 12. München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag. Hartwig, Hartmut. 1986. Die Grausamkeit der Bilder. Horror und Faszination in alten und neuen Medien. Weinheim and Berlin: Quadriga. Harvard University. n.d. “Narration in the Fiction Film by David Bordwell.” Accessed 16 June 2017. http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic520549.files/BordwellNarration.pdf. Kessler, Frank. 1997. “Etienne Souriau und das Vokabular der filmologischen Schule.” Montage/av 6,2:132 – 139. Kracauer, Siegfried. 1960. Theory of Film. The Redemption of Physical Reality. New York: Oxford University Press. Also: http://archive.org/details/theoryoffilmrede00krac. Lukács, Georg. 1988. “Gedanken zu einer Ästhetik des Kinos.” Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft für Filmtheorie 3:233 – 241. Lukács, Georg. 2004. “Thoughts on an Aesthetics of Cinema.” Translated by Lance W. Garmer. In German Essays on Film, edited by Robert W. McCormick and Alison Guenther-Pal, 2004, 11 – 16. New York and London: Continuum. Matheou, Demetrios. 2010. New South American Cinema. London: Faber & Faber. Metz, Christian. 1977. Le Signifiant imaginaire. Psychanalyse et cinéma. Paris: Union Générale d’Editions. Panofsky, Erwin. 1920. “Der Begriff des Kunstwollens.” Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 14:321 – 339. Accessed 16 June 2017. http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/ diglit/zaak1920/0325. Souriau, Etienne. 1951. “La structure de l’univers filmique et le vocabulaire de la filmologie.” Revue Internationale de Filmologie 2,7 – 8:231 – 240. Trentini, Bruno. 2007. Une estétique de l’ellipse. Un art sans espace ni temps. Paris: L’Harmattan. Tröhler, Margrit. 2012. “Wenn das Spurenlesen auffällig wird oder Dem Motiv auf der Spur.” In Motive des Films: ein kasuistischer Fischzug, edited by Christine Brinckmann, Britta Hartmann, and Ludger Kaczmarek, 33 – 42. Marburg: Schüren. Truffaut, François. 1984. Hitchcock. New York: Simon & Schuster. Wuss, Peter. 1993. Filmanalyse und Psychologie. Strukturen des Films im Wahrnehmungsprozeß. Berlin: Edition Sigma.

About the authors Stephan Brössel, PhD, research associate at the Institute for German Studies, University of Münster, and co-head of the German Research Foundation’s network Echtzeit im Film. Research interests: narratology, semiotics of film and literature, anthropology of literature. Recent Publications: Filmisches Erzählen. Typologie und Geschichte (2014); “‘Nacht’ im Horrorfilm”, in: Rabbit Eye 7 (2015); “Mediale Wirkung” (with Andreas Blödorn), in: Thomas MannHandbuch, edited by Andreas Blödorn and Friedhelm Marx (2015); “‘Auf der Schwelle’. Short Cuts in erzählenden Texten der 1910er und 1920er Jahre”, in: Short Cuts. Fragmentierte Ordnungen – vernetzte Welten in Literatur, Film & TV-Serien, edited by Moritz Baßler and Martin Nies (forthcoming). Matthias Brütsch, Senior Lecturer at the Department of Film Studies of the University of Zurich. Research interests: Film narratology and dramaturgy. Recent Publications: “Irony, Retroactivity, and Ambiguity: Three Kinds of ‘Unreliable Narration’ in Literature and Film”, in: Unreliable Narration and Trustworthiness, edited by Vera Nünning (2015); “When the Past Lies Ahead and the Future Lags Behind: Backward Narration in Film, Television, and Literature”, in: (Dis)Orienting Media and Narrative Mazes, edited by Julia Eckel et al. (2013). Julia Eckel, research associate at the department of Media Studies at the University of Marburg and scientific coordinator of the graduate school “Das Dokumentarische” at the University of Bochum. Research interests: nonlinear and complex narration, anthropomorphic motifs in audiovisual media, selfies and technologies of the self, animation. Recent publications: Zeitenwende(n) des Films – Temporale Nonlinearität im zeitgenössischen Erzählkino (2012); “Twisted Times: Non-linearity and Temporal Disorientation in Contemporary Cinema”, in: (Dis) Orienting Media and Narrative Mazes, edited by Julia Eckel, Bernd Leiendecker, Daniela Olek, and Christine Piepiorka (2013). Erwin Feyersinger, research associate in the Department of Media Studies, University of Tübingen. Research interests: film, visualizations, animation, narratology. Recent publications: Metalepsis in Animation (2016); In Bewegung setzen … Beiträge zur deutschsprachigen Animationsforschung, ed. with Franziska Bruckner, Markus Kuhn, and Maike Sarah Reinerth (2017); Im Wandel … Metamorphosen der Animation, ed. with Julia Eckel and Meike Uhrig (2017). Inke Gunia, Professor of Romance Philology/ Spanish and Hispanoamerican Literatures at the University of Hamburg. Research interests: the relationship between fact and fiction, applications of Bourdieu’s concept of the literary field (in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Spain), the Hispano-American Vanguardia. Recent publications: “De neuróticos urbanos modernos. Radiografías de Buenos Aires en La expectativa (2006) y Autobiografía médica (2007) de Damián Tabarovsky” (2013), in: Amerika. Mémoires, idéntités, territoires 9; La revista de vanguardia poesía buenos aires (1950 – 1960): “Sintetizar la aldea y el universo” (2014); Estéticas de autenticidad. Literatura, arte, cine y creación intermedial en Hispanoamérica, ed. with Clemencia Ardila J. and Sabine Schlickers (2015).

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About the authors

Bernd Leiendecker, PhD, online copywriter, research interests: film narratology, media events, selfie culture. Recent publications: “They Only See What They Want to See.” Geschichte des unzuverlässigen Erzählens im Film (2015); (Dis)Orienting Media and Narrative Mazes, ed. with Julia Eckel, Daniela Olek, and Christine Piepiorka (2012). Dominik Orth, PhD, Lecturer in Modern German Literature at the University of Wuppertal. Research interests: transmedial narratology, German literature since 1800, film, genre theory, dystopia. Recent publications: Rabbit Eye – Zeitschrift für Filmforschung (since 2010; ed. with Simon Frisch and Oliver Schmidt); Narrative Wirklichkeiten. Eine Typologie pluraler Realitäten in Literatur und Film (2013); Einführung in die Literatur der Wiener Moderne (with Ingo Irsigler, 2015). Heinz-Peter Preusser, Professor of German Literature and Media Studies at Bielefeld University. Research interests: media aesthetics, theory of film, and contemporary literature. Recent publications: Transmediale Texturen. Lektüren zum Film und angrenzenden Künsten (2013). Pathische Ästhetik. Ludwig Klages und die Urgeschichte der Postmoderne (2015). Sinnlichkeit und Sinn im Kino. Zur Interdependenz von Körperlichkeit und Textualität in der Filmrezeption (2015, ed.). Forthcoming: Gender/Mythos. Antike und Gegenwart der Geschlechterverhältnisse (2017). Sabine Schlickers, Professor for Hispanic Literature at Bremen University. Research interests: narratology, Spanish literature of the Golden Age, actual Hispanoamerican literature and film. Forthcoming: La narración perturbadora en literatura y cine (2017, in colaboration with Vera Toro). Recent publications: La Conquista imaginaria de América: Crónicas, literatura y cine (2015); Estéticas de autenticidad. Literatura, arte, cine y creación intermedial en Hispanoamérica (2015, ed. with Alba Clemencia Ardila J. and Inke Gunia); Villes américaines du XXIème siècle: réalités et représentations sociales, culturelles et linguistiques (2013, ed. with Néstor Ponce and Victoria Torres). Oliver Schmidt, PhD, researcher at Institute for Media and Communication, Hamburg University. Research interests: theory of space in audiovisual media, genre theory, media culture. Recent publications: Leben in gestörten Welten: Der filmische Raum in David Lynchs Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Lost Highway und Inland Empire (2008); Hybride Räume: Filmwelten im Hollywood-Kino der Jahrtausendwende (2013); Hollywood Reloaded: Genrewandel und Medienerfahrung nach der Jahrtausendwende, ed. with Benjamin Moldenhauer et al. (2013). Jeff Thoss, Lecturer in English at Freie Universität Berlin. Research interests: intermediality, narrative theory. Recent publications: When Storyworlds Collide: Metalepsis in Popular Fiction, Film and Comics (2015); “Cartographic Ekphrasis: Map Descriptions in the Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop and Eavan Boland”, in: Word & Image 32 (2016). Vera Toro, PhD, research associate for Spanish and Latin-American Literature at the University of Bremen. Research interests: narratology, autofiction, self-reflexivity, counterfactual and dystopic narratives. Forthcoming: La narración perturbadora en literatura y cine (2017, by Sabine Schlickers, in colaboration with Vera Toro). Recent publications: “Soy simultáneo”: El concepto poetológico de la autoficción en la narrative hispánica (2017) and “Narraciones auténticas. El caso de la docuficción literaria”, in: Alba Clemencia Ardila J., Sabine Schlickers

About the authors

259

and Inke Gunia (eds.) (2015): Estéticas de autenticidad: literatura, arte, cine y creación intermedial en Hispanoamérica, Medellín: Fondo Editorial EAFIT. Jörg Türschmann, Professor of French and Spanish Literature and Media at the Department of Romance Studies, University of Vienna. Research interests: serial narratives, transnationality in cinema and television, semiotics of audiovisual media. Recent and forthcoming publications: Transnational cinema in Europe, ed. with Manuel Palacio (2013), La literatura argentina y el cine – El cine argentino y la literatura, ed. with Matthias Hausmann (2016). Andreas Veits, research assistant in the research project “The Aesthetics of Interactive and Pseudo-Authentic Web Series” at the University of Hamburg. His PhD project “Visual Storytelling” deals with the analysis of narrative structures in still pictures. His master thesis on focalization and representation of subjectivity in comics and graphic novels was awarded the Roland Faelske-Preis in 2012. Co-organizer of the “Interdisciplinary Colloquium for Narrative Studies” and the “Colloquium for Comic Studies” at the University of Hamburg. Further research interests include: serial storytelling, narration and interactivity, transmedial narratology.

Films cited 11:14

147

A Beautiful Mind 140 f. Abre los ojos 12, 69, 137 – 139, 141 – 145, 149 À la folie, pas du tout 147 Alien 123 American Psycho 148 Angel Heart 140 f. Anger Management 140 Audition 148 Babel 147, 212 f., 217 Bad Timing 12, 146, 179 – 196 Before the Rain 147 Betibú 12, 91 – 104 Blue Velvet 218, 220 f. Captain Fantastic 244 Carnival of Souls 143 f., 147, 199 Chasing Sleep 149 Dans la nuit 140 Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari 140 Dead End 199 Dédales 199 Dockpojken (Puppet Boy) 12, 145 f. El agujero negro del sol 6, 13, 225, 228 – 232 El Aura 1, 115 El incidente 13, 62, 225, 232 – 239 Elisa, vida mía 63 El laberinto del fauno 143 El maquinista 140 f. Enemy 10, 12, 199 – 206 Eraserhead 138 eXistenZ 12, 137, 148, 155 – 175 Fantasma 246 Fight Club 69, 73, 75, 131, 136, 140 f., 199 – 201, 203 Ghost

215

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110566574-016

Haute tension 199 Hellraiser: Hellseeker Hide and Seek 199

199

Identity 12, 140 – 145, 149, 220, Inland Empire 4, 12, 73, 175, 209 – 211, 213 – 222 Jauja 243 f., 247, 250 f., 254 Je t’aime, je t’aime 146 Juegos nocturnos 13, 225 – 228 La libertad 245 L‘Année dernière à Marienbad 138, 149, 180 La prima Angélica 63 La rivière du hibou 140 f. Last Action Hero 209 La vie de Jésus 251 Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie 138, 149 Liverpool 246 f. Lola rennt 74, 107 Los muertos 254 Lost Highway 69, 75, 116, 149, 206, 211 – 213, 217 – 220 Memento 74 f., 147, 180, 220 Mr. Nobody 12, 107 – 109, 112 – 118, 147 Mulholland Drive 74 f., 116, 149, 220 Nueve reinas

144, 147

Pleasantville 209 Possible Worlds 11, 73, 77 – 88 Predestination 73, 206 Primer 121 Przypadek 107 f. Psycho 136 P’tit Quinquin 251 Pulp Fiction 74, 213 Purple Rose of Cairo 209, 217

262

Films cited

Rabbits 220 Rashȏmon 147 Rosemary’s Baby 143 Rubber 11, 37, 40 – – 55 Sátántangó 249 – 251, 254 Secret Window 199 Shutter Island 73, 140 f. Sliding Doors 107 f., 217 Sofies Verden 145 Soul Survivors 199 Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace 199 Stay 140 f., 220 Strange Impersonation 140 Swimming Pool 140 Tatort: Wer bin ich? 9 f., 145 The Avenging Conscience or “Thou Shalt Not Kill” 140 The Blair Witch Project 143 The Butterfly Effect 75, 220 The I Inside 220 The Machinist 199, 220

The Matrix 75, 137, 140 f., 215 The Others 199 The Sixth Sense 131, 136, 140 f., 199 The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry 140 The Tenant 218 The Thing 123 The Thirteenth Floor 137, 141 The Tracey Fragments 11, 19 – 34 The Usual Suspects 74, 140 The Woman in the Window 140 Tierra 11, 57, 63, 67 – 70 Total Recall 137 Triangle 73, 75, 149 Twelve Monkeys 74 f., 206 Twin Peaks 221 Two for the Road 146 Upstream Color

12, 121 – 132

Vacas 11, 57 f., 63 – 67, 69 f. Vanilla Sky 137 What Dreams May Come Who killed who? 145

215

Authors cited Abel, Julia 4 Ächtler, Norman 11, 20 f. Alber, Jan 2 f. Allén, Sture 73 Ambriz Aguilar, César Eduardo 102 Amis, Kingsley 143 Antonsen, Jan Erik 7, 61 f., 82 Ardid, Peña Carmen 139 Arnheim, Rudolf 212 Bakhtin, Michail M. 213 Bal, Mieke 1 Barber, Lynden 121 Barthes, Roland 248 Beier, Lars-Olaf 222 Beil, Benjamin 158 Bildhauer, Katharina 148 Bitel, Anton 121 Blaser, Patric 74 Blödorn, Andreas 4 Bode, Christoph 77 Booth, Wayne C. 29, 136, 142 Borcholte, Andreas 222 Bordwell, David 5, 22, 75, 107, 121, 127, 135, 159, 179, 181, 245 f. Borges, Jorge Luis 10, 62 Boyle, Niki 132 Bradley, Raymond 73 Branigan, Edward 212 Bronfen, Elisabeth 195 Brössel, Stephan 58, 65, 69, 74 77, 84 Brunner, Philipp 92 Brütsch, Matthias 76, 136, 138, 142, 147, 183 Buckland, Warren 2, 75 f., 135, 149, 180 Bullerjahn, Claudia 46 Cameron, Allan 135, 180 Chatman, Seymour 213 Chion, Michel 64, 67 f. Corliss, Richard 212 Cortázar, Julio 10, 62, 101 f., 145, 227, 231 Cunningham, Stuart 180, 183

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110566574-017

Dablé, Nadine 7, 59, 61, 65, 76 Dällenbach, Lucien 102 Dargis, Manhohla 221 Decker, Oliver 73, 156, 167 Deleuze, Gilles 243, 250 Denby, David 135 Deterding, Sebastian 51 Doležel, Lubomir 38, 73 Eckel, Julia 2, 57 f., 107, 135, 148, 180, 205 Eco, Umberto 73 Eichner, Susanne 51 Eig, Jonathan 2, 74 Elliot, Panek 52 Elsaesser, Thomas 2, 74, 135 Emrich, Wilhelm 173 Ferenz, Volker 200 Fiant, Antony 13, 241 f., 249 f. Flückiger, Barbara 58, 64, 66, 163 Freud, Sigmund 158, 254 Fuentes, Carlos 62 Gansel, Carsten 2, 11, 20 f. Ganser, Katharina 200 Gaudreault, André 248 Geimer, Alexander 74 Genette, Gérard 22, 162, 180, 228 Glanville, Ranulph 44 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 246 Goffman, Erving 50 Goodykoontz, Bill 54 Gotto, Lisa 52 f. Grabe, Nina 5, 8, 102 Grice, Paul 4 Halfyard, Kurt 51 Hantke, Steffen 174 Hartmann, Britta 74 Hartwig, Hartmut 254 Hassan, Ihab 84 Heinze, Rüdiger 2 Helbig, Jörg 29, 111, 200 f. Herman, David 38, 50

264

Authors cited

Hickethier, Knut 46, 92, 104 Hoberman, James Lewis 218 Holquist, Michael 184 Höltgen, Stefan 174 Hügel, Hans-Otto 104 Iser, Wolfgang 2, 10, 59 Izod, John 184 Jäger, Ludwig 11, 20 – 22, 27 f., 34 James, Henry 141, 143 Jannidis, Fotis 173 Jerslev, Anne 212 Johanson, MaryAnn 121 Johnson, Steven 2, 74, 76, 135 Jolles, André 57 Jost, François 125, 181 Kant, Immanuel 173 Kawin, Bruce F. 187 Kehlmann, Daniel 10 Keitz, Ursula von 180 Kessler, Frank 245 f. Kindt, Tom 2, 4, 10, 173 Kiss, Miklós 75 – 77, 148 f. Kittsteiner, Heinz Dieter 158 Klecker, Cornelia 131 Kohn, Eric 51 Kothenschulte, Daniel 210 Kracauer, Siegfried 248 Krah, Hans 73 Krützen, Michaela 148 Kuhn, Markus 3, 41 f., 44 – 46, 58, 60, 107, 113, 125, 155, 157 – 160, 162, 164, 168, 180, 213 Kulezic-Wilson, Danijela 128 Laass, Eva 110 f., 199 f. Lang, Sabine 62 Lang, Simone Elisabeth 102 Lanthier, Joseph Jon 125 Lauretis, Teresa de 180, 189, 195 Lavik, Erlend 74, 199 Leiendecker, Bernd 2, 6, 8, 29, 57 f., 69, 74, 137, 140, 199, 201, 207 Levin, Ira 143

Liptay, Fabienne 29 Lukács, Georg 241, 243 f., 246, 248, 250, 253 Mahler, Andreas 232 Maitre, Doreen 73 Martínez, Matías 29, 76, 143 Matheou, Demetrios 250 McEwan, Ian 136 McHale, Brian 184, 228 Merimée, Prosper 143 Merivale, Patricia 184 Metz, Christian 246 Meyer-Minnemann, Klaus 1, 6 f., 102, 229 Mikos, Lothar 51, 163 Miller, Toby 181, 188, 195 Mittell, Jason 2 Moldenhauer, Benjamin 53 Morris, Wesley 19 Müller, Harry 10, 173 Novak, John Luther 156 Nünning, Ansgar 29 Olivier, Gerrit 180 Orth, Dominik 5, 7 – 11, 60 f., 70, 76, 78, 87, 107 – 109, 115 – 117, 147, 155, 158 – 160, 175 Oviedo, José Miguel 102 Panek, Elliot 74 – 76, 135, 180 Panofsky, Erwin 247 Papenburg, Bettina 157, 174 Pavel, Thomas G. 73 Phelan, James 10 Pinkas, Claudia 8, 58, 60, 62, 109, 143 Preusser, Heinz-Peter 158, 172 f. Pühler, Simon 156, 166, 174 Ramírez Berg, Charles 148 Richardson, Brian 2 f. Riepe, Manfred 156, 159, 167 f., 174 Rimmon, Shlomith 58 f., 109 Roan, Brian 122 Robbe-Grillet, Alain 6 Rodley, Chris 209, 211 Ronen, Ruth 73

265

Authors cited

Rottensteiner, Franz 61 Ryan, Marie-Laure 38 f., 73 Santaolalla, Isabel 57 Sarkosh, Keyvan 52 Schaeffer, Pierre 64 Scheffel, Michael 4, 29, 61 Schlickers, Sabine 1 – 3, 6 f., 19, 57, 62, 76, 107, 115, 118, 122, 125, 155 – 158, 162, 210 f., 213, 225 f., 229, 231 Schlickers, Sabine and Toro, Vera 1 f., 12, 19 f., 22 f., 29, 37, 47, 55, 98 f., 107, 114, 116 – 118, 135, 145, 210, 216 f., 242 Schmid, Wolf 3, 10 Schmidt, Oliver 4, 8, 126, 164, 211 Schmöller, Verena 60, 107 f. Schweinitz, Jörg 107 Semino, Elena 73 Shannon, Claude Elwood 21 Smith, Tim 75, 165 Souriau, Etienne 245 Spanos, William V. 184 Steinke, Anthrin 74, 200 Sternenborg, Anke 166 Stiglegger, Marcus 174, 189 Strank, Willem 103, 111, 139 f., 144, 149 Strigl, Sandra 57 Swartz, Norman 73

Tan, Ed S. 145, 155 Tani, Stefano 184 Thon, Jan-Noël 3, 38, 52, 155 Thoreau, Henry David 123 f. Todorov, Tzvetan 22, 61 f., 143, 179 Toro, Vera 7, 19, 57, 77, 98, 104, 236 Trentini, Bruno 253 f. Tröhler, Margrit 252 f. Truffaut, François 251 f. Twain, Mark 136 Unamuno, Miguel de

10, 227

Warner, Marina 212 Weaver, Warren 21 Weber, Thomas 155, 165, 167 Weixler, Antonius 3 Wenzel, Peter 141 Wickman, Forrest 122 Wilson, George M. 74 Wissowa, Georg 161 Wolf, Werner 41, 50, 126, 216 Wolf, Yvonne 29 Wulff, Hans J. 74 Wuss, Peter 246 – 248 Zaman, Fariah 51 Zúñiga Reyes, Danghelly Giovanna

92